I respect your oatmeal respect and expertise but I think parts of your post are close-minded about certain things. "True roots" is nothing - if you're thinking really old tradition, why is a different new world fruit (blueberries) in there at all? Even if you're not restricting yourself to that, why should coconut in oatmeal be fine but not guava? That makes me think it's just about what tastes good and not really about tradition. 

(I haven't tried guava in oatmeal either, but guavas are great, a really unique flavor, I recommend trying it if you ever get the chance!)

I think it's odd and overgeneralizing to assert that people don't like oatmeal because of rationalizations about their diet. In my experience, people often innately dislike widely-popular sensations or experiences for no particular reason - sensory sensitivities or just unusual preferences or etc. 

On that front I also dislike the texture of normally-cooked oatmeal - I think I never especially liked it but then I did long trail crews as a teenager where oatmeal was the only breakfast for weeks straight, and I really haven't wanted to eat it since - but overnight oats (oats mixed with liquid and sat in the fridge overnight, not cooked - you could warm it up til it's hot but not to the boiling point) or those packets of instant oats mixed with boiling water (but not otherwise cooked/microwaved after that) both have a soft but much-less-glorpy consistency, so I'll happily eat them for breakfast sometimes. Recommend them to anyone looking for an oatmeal experience but wishing the texture were a little different.

As opposed to other species of bear, which are safe for children to engage with?

Source?

I happened to get to play Optimal Weave today and really liked it. I don't normally go for... well, board games at all, let alone strategy-type ones, but I had a lot of fun. The variable degree to which cooperation was a helpful strategy between goalsets (only sometimes) was neat. Good work!

I'm glad your symptoms went away! Sudden onset seizures sound terrifying. 

What made you think in the first place that the problem might be worms? Do you have any risk / exposure factors like the paper mentions?

Ah! I forget about a compass, honestly. He definitely came in with maps (and once he was out there for, like, over eight hours, he would have had cues from the sun.) A lot of the mystery / thing to explain is indeed "why despite being a reasonably competent hiker and map user, Ewasko would have traveled so far in the opposite direction from his car"; defs recommend Adam's videos because he lays out what seems like a very plausible story there.

(EDIT: was rewatching Adam's video, yes Bill absolutely had a compass and had probably used it not long before passing, they found one with his backpack near the top. Forgot that.)

Helicopters were used as part of the initial S&R efforts! Also tracking dogs. They just also didn't find him. There's a little about it in Tom's stuff. I don't know if Tom got the flight path / was able to map where it searched, I think there's some more info buried in this FOIA'd doc about the initial search that Tom Mahood got ahold of. 

(One thing I saw - can't remember who mentioned this, if it was Mahood or Adam Marsland - is that the FOIA'D doc mentions S&R requesting a helicopter with thermal imaging equipment to come search too, but that doesn't seem to have actually ever happened. Which is a shame, because at that point Ewasko was alive and presumably closer to/within the main search areas, so that could have actually found him.)

Oh whoa, thanks for commenting! I really appreciate your videos and your work on the search.

Check out Marsland's post-coroner's-report video for all the details, but tentatively it looks like Ewasko:

• Hiked alone
• Didn't tell someone the exact trailhead/route he'd be hiking (later costing time, while he was still alive, while rescuers searched other parts of the park)
• Didn't have a GPS unit / PLB, just a regular (non-smart) cellphone (I don't actually know to what degree a regular smartphone works as a dedicated GPS unit - like, when you're at the edges of regular coverage, is it doing location stuff from phone + data coverage, or does it have a GPS chip? - but either way, he didn't have a smartphone)
• Had an unclear number of the ten essentials - it seems like a fair number? But (as someone in the youtube comments pointed out) if he had lit a fire, rescuers could have found him from the smoke, so either he didn't think of that or he just didn't have a firestarter.

Though I want to point out that doing all of these things - well, it's not an insane amount of preparation, but it's above bare minimum common sense / "anyone going out into the woods who thinks at all about safety is already doing this." I've had training in wilderness/outdoor safety type stuff and I've definitely done day hikes while less prepared than Ewasko was. 

Yeah, if anyone reading this liked this, I also really recommend Mahood's search for the Death Valley Germans. It's another kind of brilliant investigation.

Thanks for the link, I hadn't read that before! Hah, so that guy, KarmaFrog, is the same guy as Adam who posted the videos I recommended. He makes fun of himself in the video about the U-haul thing, which he has now, er, moved away from as a hypothesis.