The report focused on poor urban areas, where farms in or near cities supply relatively inexpensive food. Most of these operations draw irrigation water from local rivers or lakes. Unlike developed cities, however, these areas lack advanced water-treatment facilities, and rivers effectively become sewers. When this water is used for agricultural irrigation, farmers risk absorbing disease-causing bacteria, as do consumers who eat the produce raw and unwashed. Nearly 2.2 million people die each year because of diarrhea-related diseases, including cholera, according to WHO statistics. More than 80 percent of those cases can be attributed to contact with contaminated water and a lack of proper sanitation. But Pay Drechsel, an IWMI environmental scientist, argues that the social and economic benefits of using untreated human waste to grow food outweigh the health risks....Human Waste Used By 200 Million Farmers (National Geographic)
In most cases, the excrement is used on cereal or grain crops, which are eventually cooked, minimizing the risk of transmitting water-borne pathogens and diseases, IWMI's Drechsel noted.
Sculptress Jennifer Maestre makes colorful abstract and plant-like pieces using colored pencils. She turns each colored pencil into beads by cutting them into inch-long sections and then drilling a hole in the base, then sharpens and sews hundreds of them together using the peyote stitch. She loves prickly things like sea urchins—they're what inspired her to work in this unusual medium in the first place.
( Lisa Katayama is a guest blogger.)
Jack Parsons (1914-1952) was a pioneering rocket scientist and co-founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). He was also a deep devotee of Aleister Crowley and worked some heavy duty occult rituals with none-other than L. Run Hubbard. Parsons had an amazingly strange life that writer Richard Carbonneau and artist Robin Simon are now translating into comic form. "The Marvel: A Biography of Jack Parsons" is now online as a serialized Web comic. I hope it eventually gets published as a graphic novel! The Marvel: A Biography of Jack Parsons (Webcomics Nation via Damn Data)
Previously on BB:
• Book review: Strange Angel, a Jack Parsons biography
Guitar Praise is an, er, Christian knock-off of Guitar Hero. "Grab the guitar and play along with top Christian bands! Shred those riffs or blast the bass…you add a unique sound to the solid Christian rock." Seriously. Brownlee has more over at Boing Boing Gadgets. Guitar Praise: Guitar Hero for Christians (BB Gadgets)
The Boing Boing tv crew is taking this end-of-summer week off from production, so we're revisiting some of our favorite episodes from the last couple of months -- fun stuff you may have missed.
Today: John Behrens and "Omega Recoil" build giant Tesla Coils. Their work explores how electronic fields can be excited in the environment, and their creations become the centerpieces of interactive public art performances.
Some of the tinkerers and performers in this SF Bay Area-based collective were previously associated with Dr. Megavolt, an electrical art project which...
[featured] a person in a metal mesh suit interacting with artificially generated lighting. The Doctor sets objects on fire with electricity originating from large Tesla coils, spars with the electric arcs and exhorts the audience to worship the elemental force of electricity.
The monetary density of things
People have been saying that the new industrial grade swimsuits like the LZR Racer are worth their weight in gold. As you can see, this is clearly inaccurate. But such a suit is worth its weight in marijuana or industrial diamonds.At the high end of this graph is gold (the only thing worth exactly its own weight in gold!), right next to the cost of launching a pound of stuff to low earth orbit on the ISS. Putting that into perspective here: You might as well build your whole spaceship out of $20 bills-- it still would cost less than putting it up there. It could almost be made of solid gold for that price.
Here's a funny short video of Chinese people being exposed to fortune cookies (an American invention) for the first time:
Americans find high emotional attachment to the slips inside their cookies, looking to them for winning lottery numbers and becoming upset when the fortunes inside are unfortunate. The Chinese, on the other hand, would often tell me after trying the curved vanilla-flavored wafers, “Americans are so strange, why are they putting pieces of paper in their cookies?”Introducing Fortune Cookies to China (Thanks, Tim!)
Graphic Evidence Against Steroid AbuseHe was a constant user of anabolic-androgenic steroids, of which acne is a side effect -- as is damaged sperm and shrunken testicles, both of which he also possessed.
Doctors ordered the patient to quit steroids and start taking antibiotics. Two months later, the acne was gone. So was the muscle. Only gruesome scarring remained -- and as his doctors wrote last week in the Lancet, that "is likely to remain with the young man for the rest of his life."
The Teddy Bear USB drive does a really nice job of switching from sickly sweet to just sickening -- just rip its head off and plug its neck into your computer and it looks like you've crushed a little anthropomorphic bear's noggin and forced it into a tiny, little USB port. Teddy Bear USB Drive (via Oh Gizmo)
The Web on Your TV: Why it Makes Sense
If you're like me, your first reaction to hearing that the web is available on your TV is "why?" The answer is quite a bit different than you might think. The answer is not that you want you want your TV to go out to the web to browse content, which is by and large not the most inspiring concept. The answer is that you want web content brought to your TV. In other words, the Web and all the interactive web 2.0 tools are tools that are well suited to bring rich content to your TV.
See also: Neuros OSD: a set-top box that treats you like an owner
