There’s a post I keep meaning to track down from gordonzola, about the cheese foundry whose workers used some of the big cheesemaking vats as hot tubs after hours. I think listeria would be the least of your worries after one of those…
Archive for the ‘agricultural’ Category
cheese
Sunday, April 26th, 2009One of the things I remembered
Saturday, March 1st, 2008Originally, I’d meant to post more African & African-American content during the month of February, when by law and by custom we in English-speaking North America bother to pay attention to the accomplishments and struggles of the African Diaspora. The conspiracy-minded might point out that February is the shortest month of the year.
Anyway, I kinda screwed that up, which is embarassing, because I ran across a lot of great content that I just kept forgetting to put up. Situation remedied, starting now.
self-trained repairmen of Nigeria. I was reading something a while ago, about how cheap low-end electronics, or even much of a resale market, are a phenomenon that you just don’t see in most of Africa. People buy the best they can, so that it can last long enough to be run into the ground, rebuilt, and run into the ground again. Of course, what this means is that to capture the low-cost end of the market, a lot of people end up handicrafting their own devices, many of them to fit needs that there are no factory-made tools for. Welcome to the world of afrigadget.
Notable tinkerers of recent history include young Mr. William Kamkwamba, electrifying rural Malawi one handcrafted windmill at a time, and Dr. Cedrick Ngalande, creator of a fermentation-powered generator. Mmm, beer (but probably not).
save the atmosphere by burning stuff
Tuesday, October 16th, 2007in a small town in Argentina
Monday, October 8th, 2007Aicuña (Aicunya if your browser is anglophone) is a sweet little timelocked town in eastern Argentina, far away from any other sizeable population centers. Everyone knows everyone else. Almost everyone is a blood relative of everyone else. As near as I can glean from this article, the principal products of Aicuña are walnuts, isolation, and albino children.
today’s surreal moment in black history
Sunday, February 25th, 2007One of Strom Thurmond’s ancestors owned one of Al Sharpton’s. More detail, sensationalism here.
Monday, December 18th, 2006
I thought the Kiwanis had won this one a while ago: despite the ease and low cost of salt iodization, over two billion people don’t receive enough iodine, causing mental retardation, goiters, and worse.
In a stunning triumph for democracy, one of the few poor countries with no iodine deficiency is autocratic Turkmenistan, where “President Saparmurat Niyazov…solved the problem by simply declaring plain salt illegal in 1996 and ordering shops to give each citizen 11 pounds of iodized salt a year at state expense.”
Saturday, November 25th, 2006
make cocaine, with tools you may already have around the house!
Note: I would NOT be touching this shit with my bare hands. yeccch.
Tuesday, November 14th, 2006
though I am failing admirably this week: In Praise of Idleness
…It is difficult to see how the authorities can aim at a paradise in which there will be much leisure and little work. It seems more likely that they will find continually fresh schemes, by which present leisure is to be sacrificed to future productivity…This sort of thing, if it happens, will be the result of regarding the virtue of hard work as an end in itself, rather than as a means to a state of affairs in which it is no longer needed.
link roundup
Saturday, August 26th, 2006how not to fix a liquid nitrogen tank
Kiwi geneticist Rod Lea claims that the Maori people have a “warrior” gene which makes them more prone to violent and criminal behaviour - specifically, an elevated amount of monoamine oxidase There is some dissent to this hypothesis…
Google proposes that soon the cost of running a server will mostly be electric bills, and that’s not a good thing
Grauniad review of Harry Potter academic conference
The most religiously conservative part of Turkey is the most successfully entrepreneurial
American Idol Kelly Clarkson rocks out old-school with Metal Skool
patriotic condiments
Thursday, August 10th, 2006Minuteman Salsa, protecting our borders with the power of “a Native Texan product containing no fat, low sodium, and 100% American pride.”
“W Ketchup comes in one flavor: American.” It is also OU-certified as kosher, and an organic version is soon to be available.
see also: halal soft drinks
behold, the power of randomness
Wednesday, July 26th, 2006chicken sexing is unexpectedly fascinating: In the 1950s, several machines were invented that illuminated and magnified the cloacas of newborn chicks, and chicks could be sexed by inspecting them with this machine.
Break it Up, the hit song by Carl Lewis and the Electric Storm. If only all athletes were this skilled in the musical arts.
The Shock of the New World, with respect to the flora and fauna of Australia. Bit of a hodgepodge, but I liked it. Try to get as far as the useful flammability of eucalyptus forests, and the inverted culinary social priorities of the class structure:
Convicts traditionally ate salted meat - which signified lack of property, for only the landed could enjoy fresh beef or lamb - and fresh fish. The ceremonial food of the free must therefore be fresh meat and salt fish.
unusual photographic perspective
Tuesday, June 27th, 2006In the same genre as how not to photograph a horse (but it works anyway) (see also: goat, I present pregnancy, a collection of abstract forms (pretty hard to peg unless you know what you’re looking at, but I’d still class it as not work-safe).
brown cubicle rot
Sunday, April 2nd, 2006[Brown cubicle rot] causes extensive butt rot in infected trees.
I can laugh at this because I, of course, do not have a cubicle, but rather a wide spot in a hallway in the basement.
water waste mini-rant
Sunday, March 19th, 2006most of the world’s wasted water is agricultural. This isn’t exactly surprising. Too much of agriculture seems to be based on the concept that water is effectively free. Even in areas where water is damned expensive to get to, grossly outmoded methods of irrigation are used, whether out of indifference, ignorance, or (more often) indigence. It takes effort and a certain amount of capital investment to really wring the most use out of irrigation, and a subsistence farmer has neither.
high velocity potato
Friday, January 6th, 2006100 mph potato hits lettuce, cantaloupe
more on the futility of first-run biodiesel
Sunday, January 1st, 2006Northwest farmers going broke trying to farm crops for biodiesel
(see earlier worries on this topic)