Anders Wilhelmson has created a biodegradable bag called the Peepoo, which sounds like a great idea, if only people would buy it. Basically, it’s a bag you take a dump in, then, after tying it off and burying it, the bag decomposes and turns the fecal matter into fertilizer.
This makes several assumptions, however. The first is that you’ve got the science and engineering right and won’t spread disease when using human feces as fertilizer. That’s a big one. The second is that people will use it as instructed. I mean, think of it this way: sure, you have a bag to pee in but no toilet paper to wipe your ass with. That creates all kinds of problems, namely, infectious bloody diarrhea. That said, this product wasn’t meant to address that anyway. The poorest of all these assumptions is that people will actually buy it. Think about this one: who buys bags to poo in? No one, normally, except for avid backpackers…
And that, actually, is the right market for this: sell it to backpackers and hippies; hope that USAID and other aid groups buy a bunch as a result. Trying to sell this outright to aid groups is a crappy idea (no pun intended). It’s too much of a gamble and requires too much sensitization — and that’s only acceptable in an emergency (e.g., Haiti or Chile).
This is exactly the kind of thing that would play well in Park Slope (or Williamsburg, or Boston — or anywhere else liberal white American culture grows).
It’s all part of a home experiment he is conducting in a form of year-round, sustainable agriculture called aquaponics — a neologism that combines hydroponics (or water-based planting) and aquaculture (fish cultivation) — which has recently attracted a zealous following of kitchen gardeners, futurists, tinkerers and practical environmentalists.
A couple quick video explanations makes it more clear:
In interviews, the 32-year-old Mr. Mayer comes across as somewhere between boyish and immature—self-absorbed, a little goofy and every now and then overly earnest. (Perhaps in answer to Rolling Stone’s question, his handlers declined to make him available to the Journal.) On stage, as he was here earlier this month, in the formal kickoff of a tour of the U.S. and Canada that runs into mid-April before he travels to Europe, Mr. Mayer has the opportunity to get down to business. Anyone who doubts he can do it hasn’t been listening.
That’s what I’ve been saying of Mayer for years. Here’s a guy with a great set of skills and artistic ambition but puerile and weak in mind — he has absolutely no idea how to mine his potential.
Genetic engineers have looked at nature as a set of finished products to tweak and improve — a tomato that could be made into a slightly better tomato. But synthetic biologists imagine nature as a manufacturing platform: all living things are just crates of genetic cogs; we should be able to spill all those cogs out on the floor and rig them into whatever new machinery we want. It’s a jarring shift, making the ways humankind has changed nature until now seem superficial. If you want to build a bookcase, you can find a nice tree, chop it down, mill it, sand the wood and hammer in some nails. “Or,” says Drew Endy, an iGEM founder and one of synthetic biology’s foremost visionaries, “you could program the DNA in the tree so that it grows into a bookshelf.”
Advertising on Chatroulette is kept to a minimum, because there are a lot of sites full of advertisements, which distract you from what you want to do on those sites. I also love minimalism. That’s why I have put only four links on the bottom as advertisements. And what is interesting, is that these advertisements almost cover all expenses, just those four links on the bottom!
The Huntsville Times has identified the likely shooter in the University of Alabama shootings: Amy Bishop, a Harvard-trained neuroscientist.
At Harvard, we learned quickly that all female graduates are cursed: too smart to keep good men, too in-their-own-heads to get out of their own way. Assuming Bishop is the shooter, we can surmise that she felt she was doing the University of Alabama a favor by teaching there — “Deny me tenure? You looking to die today?”
Hey, did you one better today: got some lyrics (and a retro MTV intro).
When I was young it seemed that life was so wonderful, a miracle; oh it was beautiful, magical…
And all the birds in the trees well they’d be singing so happily; oh joyfully, oh playfully, watching me…
But then they sent me away to teach me how to be sensible, logical, oh responsible, practical…
And then they showed me a world where I could be so dependable, oh clinical, oh intellectual, cynical.
There are times when all the world’s asleep… the questions run too deep… for such a simple man.
Won’t you please, please tell me what we’ve learned. I know it sounds absurd. Please tell me who I am…
(I say) now watch what you say or they’ll be calling you a radical, a liberal, oh fanatical, criminal.
Oh won’t you sign up your name, we’d like to feel you’re acceptable, respectable, oh presentable, a vegetable…
Whoa (tick, tick, ticka, yeah)
But at night, when all the world’s asleep… the questions run so deep… for such a simple man.
Won’t you please, please tell me what we’ve learned. I know it sounds absurd.
But please tell me who I am — who I am — who I am — who I am
Record companies keep an (unfortunate) stranglehold on music (see: yesterday’s post). Which is sad to me, because it reflects poorly on our society as a whole. (However: Zac Efron reflects poorly upon our society as a whole.)
The correspondence reveals an enduring fascination with pop culture and politics that is at odds with the popular mythology of the past half-century of Mr. Salinger as an odd recluse. His letters are peppered with sharp references — sometimes a bit too sharp — to household names like John Wayne, Nancy Reagan and even Eddie Murphy.
Everyone in the NY real estate game knows it’s controlled by a handful of powerful families. The NY Times takes a look inside, and lets us know how they’re doing in the recession.
What distinguishes the families from other real estate players is that they buy property but rarely sell. They usually have relatively low levels of debt on their buildings, and they do a couple of projects every economic cycle rather than go on a binge, a practice adopted after bitter experiences with a deep recession in the 1970s. The families’ supremacy was challenged in the 1990s by the rise of publicly traded real estate companies and private equity firms. Land and construction prices began to soar, raising stakes for anyone undertaking a big residential or commercial project.
The authorities do not know exactly how many people have been killed warbling “My Way” in karaoke bars over the years in the Philippines, or how many fatal fights it has fueled. But the news media have recorded at least half a dozen victims in the past decade and includes them in a subcategory of crime dubbed the “My Way Killings.“
