Author Archives: linuskendall

When shit hits the fan – the Bill & Melinda folly

Caltech’s solar-powered toilet won the $100,000 Reinventing the Toilet Challenge issued by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The UK’s Loughborough University picked up the $60,000 second prize.

Last summer, Hoffmann, the James Irvine Professor of Environmental Science at Caltech, and his team were awarded a $400,000 grant to create a toilet that can safely dispose of human waste for just five cents per user per day. The lavatory can’t use a septic system or an outside water source, or produce pollutants.

Hoffmann’s proposal, which won one of the eight grants, was to build a toilet that uses the sun to power an electrochemical reactor. The reactor breaks down water and human waste into fertilizer and hydrogen, which can be stored in hydrogen fuel cells as energy. The treated water can then be reused to flush the toilet or for irrigation.

The challenge is part of a $40 million program initiated by the Gates Foundation to tackle the problems of water, sanitation, and hygiene throughout the developing world. According to the World Health Organization, 2.5 billion people around the globe are without access to sanitary toilets, which results in the spread of deadly diseases. Every year, 1.5 million people—mostly those under the age of five—die from diarrhea.

via dpaonthenet.net

So, you’re one of those 2.5 billion who lack toilets in the world. You live in 5 sqm in a slum in Delhi. You’re getting ill because your water is full of coliform bacteria. What do you do?

You sit back and relax, because your knights in shining armor are here. Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation recently (some X months ago) published a request for a toilet that took no inputs and produced no output (laws of physics be damned). It seems that they didn’t quite get that (bummer, I never liked that Newton guy anyway, too many apples) .

Instead they got toilets that cost less than 3 Rs per flush (oh man, wow!) with amazing, gleaming technical contraptions that will fit perfectly well in the muddy monsoon soaked streets of your neighborhood basti.

Of course, these toilets will work great and the service and distribution network that will allow them to work for 365 days a year will be amazing, and each flush being worth a daily meal will no doubt be appreciated by its users.

Go B&MG.

Abducted children from Delhi sold to slavery

MAHENDRA WAS taken to Karnal, in Punjab, by a Sikh man. “From Karnal we were taken to Sandgaon, where he lived. At Sandgaon, he took us first to his sugarcane fields, and then later to the buffalo shed and told me that I have to wake up at four in the morning, clean the shed and prepare fodder for the buffaloes before sunrise. I was then supposed to work in the fields all day,” he recounts.

“It was only after the morning chores that I was given the morning chai and two rotis for the day. I then had to work in the fields.” Mahendra worked in the fields with Shehnewaz, another abducted boy. “He was the one who told me that the sardar had bought me for Rs 4,000 from a local agent.”

When pressed for the sardar’s name, Mahendra mumbles, “His name was Gijja Singh, and his sister was called Preeti. His son’s name was Dilbagh Singh. They have a big house in Sandgaon surrounded by high walls on all sides, so I could never run away. They abused and beat me whenever I talked about going home. We weren’t even given enough food to eat. The sardar used to say that food would make us lazy.”

DATA ON MISSING CHILDREN IN DELHI*

YEAR

2011

2012

REPORTED MISSING

5,111

1,146

TRACED

3752

617

STILL MISSING

1,359

529

*Till 15 April 2012, Source: Ministry of Home Affairs

In the meantime, Mahendra’s parents left no stone unturned in their efforts to trace their son. They travelled from Delhi to Haridwar pasting ‘missing child’ posters in every nook and corner along the way, as the police in Delhi refused to register and FIR. “I ran to Jahangirpuri police station the same day my son was abducted. But the lady-in-charge asked me for mithai in return for registering the FIR. I gave her the Rs 200 I had in my pocket then, but she only made a diary entry. I was asked to look for my child myself. After making numerous rounds of the station, an FIR was finally registered, but I wasn’t given a copy,” says Ram Ratan, Mahendra’s father, who works as a daily wage labourer in a tobacco factory.

via tehelka.com

Amazingly, an NGO working in these regions have commented in the article : “ACCORDING TO Kailash Satyarthi, head of Bachpan Bachao Andolan “such events are examples of the shortsightedness of schemes like the MNREGA, which led a big chunk of agricultural labour to shift towards welfare schemes, resulting in acute shortage. Keeping local children is always riskier as their parents can come searching so sugarcane farmers have started bringing children from Delhi.”

So… the conclusion is that if agricultural labour goes short because of a government scheme, it’s quite natural that land owners abduct and buy children as bonded labour?

As seen in a small town in Kerala

2012-06-27_14

And no, as far as I know Falcon is not sold in India. This brings to mind the time an ICA bag bicycled by me in a small town in China. Sadly that time I didn’t manage to snap a shot.

Your Google Carbon Footprint

Two search requests on the internet website Google produce “as much carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle”, according to a Harvard University academic.

US physicist Alex Wissner-Gross claims that a typical Google search on a desktop computer produces about 7g CO2.

However, these figures were disputed by Google, who say a typical search produced only 0.2g of carbon dioxide.

A recent study by American research firm Gartner suggested that IT now causes two percent of global emissions.

Dr Wissner-Gross’s study claims that two Google searches on a desktop computer produces 14g of CO2, which is the roughly the equivalent of boiling an electric kettle.

via news.bbc.co.uk

Design Challenge

via ted.com

Design something that makes oxygen, sequesters carbon dioxide, fixes nitrogen, distills water, accrues solar energy as fuel, makes complex sugars and foods, creates microclimates, changes colors with the seasons and self-replicates….

The internet patriarchy: Don’t touch my toys

Here is a very small sample of the harassment I deal with for daring to criticize sexism in video games. Keep in mind that all this is in response to my Kickstarter project for a video series called Tropes vs. Women in Video Games (which I have not even made yet). These are the types of silencing tactics often used against women on the internet who dare to speak up. But don’t worry it won’t stop me!

[MAJOR TRIGGER WARNING]

NOTE: These 100+ comments were left over the course of a two hour period on YouTube. They represent only a tiny fraction of the hundreds and hundreds now thousands of similar comments left on my video. The screen capture is unedited.

In addition to the torrent of misogyny and hate left on my YouTube video (see below) the intimidation effort has also included repeated vandalizing of the Wikipedia page about me (with porn), organized efforts to flag my YouTube videos as “terrorism”, as well as many threatening messages sent through Twitter, Facebook, Kickstarter, email and my own website.  These messages and comments have included everything from the typical sandwich and kitchen “jokes” to threats of violence, death, sexual assault and rape.  All that plus an organized attempt to report this project to Kickstarter and get it banned or defunded.  Thankfully, Kickstarter has been very supportive in helping me deal with the harassment on their service. All my backers have also been amazingly encouraging over on the project page too!

via feministfrequency.com

Lara Croft had a key code where you could play her in the nude. Now, whether or not you believe in games potential impact on the way people think (when it comes to violence, it seems clearly untrue that they are a major driver – the brain is good at separating fact from fiction) – the kind of response, organized, violent response, that the mere idea of the production of a research into the obvious misogyny of video games elicits is striking.

The fear and threat that these people feel and project on Youtube and Wikipedia is fascinating, and scary.

In fact, I think this is even a more important result than the study of the video games itself. Yes, there needs to be a complete overhaul in the representations of women in all kinds of media. Yes, it’s great somebody is doing public education materials (using Youtube for its very best purposes!) crowd funding it (again Internet at its best). It’s all clear evidence of the most beautiful and important uses of the Internet.

In the end though, it’s the comments that really highlight how far we still have to go and how violent (speech like this, esp. on Internet, is certainly violence) the fight against the domination of patriarchal paradigms still are.

Who is a Dilliwala?

For millennia people have come from outside Delhi from within and outside India and made Delhi their home. It is the same for any urban settlement. Any city and any culture that closes itself to mixing of new elements ceases to grow, any attempt to privilege the claims of one set of arrivals over those of the others can only lead to strife and disaffection that may not remain confined within the city. Delhi will continue to be Delhi as long as it keeps its doors open, welcoming all comers, ‘if you live here you are a Dilliwalla’.

http://kafila.org/2011/01/07/who-is-a-dilliwala-delhi-new-100-years-migration-history/

Sent from Pocket – Get it free!

Sent from my iPhone

Rotten Tomato Science

taste

The successful sequencing of the tomato genome will lead to tastier varieties within five years say scientists.

They believe that the elusive flavour of home grown tomatoes will by then be widely available in supermarkets.

Writing in the journal Nature, the researchers say the genetic information could reduce the need for pesticides.

via bbc.co.uk

Nice, tasty, tomatoes. Two methods.

Method 1

Step 1.1: Get some seed

Step 1.2: Get some compost (or make some)

Step 1.3: Plant seed in said compost

Step 1.4: Wait (water occasionally)

Step 1.5: Pick tomato. Eat.

Method 2

Step 2.1: Sequence tomato genome

Step 2.2: Develop genetic hybrid

Step 2.3: Develop complimentary chemical fertilizer mix and pesticide mix

Step 2.4: Patent said hybrid, genome, fertilizer and pesticides

Step 2.5: Develop marketing materials, sell new gmo tomato to farmers (it’s all new it actually tastes like tomatoes!)

Step 2.6: Get farmer and greenhouse, get oil to run it, grow tomato

Step 2.7: Harvest tomato

Step 2.8: Make deal with supermarket to sell tomato

Step 2.9: Transport tomato to supermarket (spray it some more for good measure)

Step 2.10: Have supermarket sell tomato to customer

Step 2.11: Bring tomato home. Eat.

Anybody think that what we might be missing is not a genome (though that’s all cool to have tomato genome sequenced) but rather a radical rethink?