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).

Here’s an article in the NY Times.

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:

Here’s some great engineering:

Faith and Sustainable Technologies offers free plans.

If you know of bigger or more easily scalable systems, let me know: jsong@jamessong.com

Where is it?

In the East Village:

349 East 12th Street
Sunday-Thursday    11AM-12AM
Friday and Saturday 11AM-1AM
Delivery: 212-777-2644

In Brooklyn:

319 Graham Avenue
Sunday-Thursday 11AM-12AM
Friday and Saturday 11AM-1AM
Delivery: 718-599-8899

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!

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?”