A friend of mine, Walter Bradley, who I credit for introducing me to the idea of appropriate technologies for developing countries, has spun off a new company with two of his graduate students. They recently have been getting a lot of press like this story on MSNBC.
What is appropriate technology? It is the idea of using technologies that are culturally, environmentally, and financially appropriate for the cultures in which they are used. They are often low tech, or medium tech by US standards. They must be locally repairable, locally affordable, and sensitive to other aspects of the culture.
I would give an example but I am too tired... maybe more tomorrow, maybe not.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
A Cell Phone is a Cow
How is a cell phone a cow? You will have to watch this fantastic TED talk to find out. Here's a hint: both can be a "production tool" for the poor.
Saturday, January 3, 2009
Squire, for my next joust I need an ambu-lance
The fainting happened again. I woke up with bad cramps and felt light headed and faint. Being wary from last time, I woke up The M and told her I felt dizzy. I thought I was going to be sick out of both ends (pardon the mental images here) so she got me a bucket and propped me on the pot. Then I fainted for about 20 seconds.
I woke up for a bit but fainted again, this time for a minute or so. She had trouble keeping me from falling (on account of my girth and stature) but managed to keep me from doing a face plant like last time. But as I was not showing signs of improvement, she called 911. I didn't faint anymore, but they took me out on a gurney to an ambulance in the street. I was still kinda fuzzy headed, but I can remember The M throwing a shirt over my legs since I was only wearing a tee shirt and underwear. (Thanks babe, you're like Moses's good son, what's his name.) I can remember The M was nervous looking and worried. It was my first ambulance ride.
Seven and a half hours in the ER later, they checked me into a room for overnight observation. They did several EKGs, lots of blood work, a CT scan (my first), and stuck me with many, many needles. They also decided I was too hairy and so pulled a few thousand hairs off my chest, legs, and arms, one piece of tape at a time. No extra cost.
In the end, they ruled out bowel obstruction, heart problems, alien abduction, and kidney stones. Looks like it's just good old vesovegal syncope, which means I fainted with nausea and intestinal cramps.
This runs in the family. My mother, grandmother, and two uncles all did this too. Perhaps I am becoming more susceptible to it with age. I'm not worried.
I woke up for a bit but fainted again, this time for a minute or so. She had trouble keeping me from falling (on account of my girth and stature) but managed to keep me from doing a face plant like last time. But as I was not showing signs of improvement, she called 911. I didn't faint anymore, but they took me out on a gurney to an ambulance in the street. I was still kinda fuzzy headed, but I can remember The M throwing a shirt over my legs since I was only wearing a tee shirt and underwear. (Thanks babe, you're like Moses's good son, what's his name.) I can remember The M was nervous looking and worried. It was my first ambulance ride.
Seven and a half hours in the ER later, they checked me into a room for overnight observation. They did several EKGs, lots of blood work, a CT scan (my first), and stuck me with many, many needles. They also decided I was too hairy and so pulled a few thousand hairs off my chest, legs, and arms, one piece of tape at a time. No extra cost.
In the end, they ruled out bowel obstruction, heart problems, alien abduction, and kidney stones. Looks like it's just good old vesovegal syncope, which means I fainted with nausea and intestinal cramps.
This runs in the family. My mother, grandmother, and two uncles all did this too. Perhaps I am becoming more susceptible to it with age. I'm not worried.
Backyard Biodigester, Batch 2
You know you have a tolerant wife when she lets you bring in a 55 gallon barrel into the kitchen. What's more, she let Jono and I fill it with food scraps as part of an experiment. I'm testing my backyard biodigester again.
A biodigester is a simple device: just a sealed chamber full of just about anything that was once alive (such as meat, vegetables, flour, leaves, or poop) and water. These ingredients are consumed by bacteria with a byproduct of methane gas (CH4).
Methane, of course, is combustible, and can be used for cooking, burned for light, or fed into an engine to produce electricity, pump water, or other useful purposes. The only hitch is the digestion process only works in an oxygen-free environment. And in case you haven't noticed, Earth has got oxygen, like, all over the place.
We were cleaning out the refrigerator, so I says to myself, self let's make some gas. The first thing to go in was a jar of pickle juice with a few bits of pickle afloat and seemingly unaware of their immanent sacrifice in the name of science. Then I put in some old raisins that were all stuck together, and some nuts. I chopped them all up in a blender first to liquefy the "feedstock" as much as possible. This is because bacteria don't have teeth.
Next to go were some stale hamburger buns, old baked potatoes, and a few hot dogs of questionable age.
Some muffin mix, cake mix, and cornbread mixes went in easily. A little baking soda helps reduce the acidity which makes the bacteria happy so that they smile little toothless smiles.
I poured in some crushed potato chips and old V8 juice that we bought out of nutritional guilt, a guilt that proved insufficient to actually make us drink it.
The blender made a good paste out of a bag of old peanuts.
Jono helped me with this project. He told me to take a picture of him pretending to eat it. All jocularity, that one.
The food scraps filled the barrel to about 5 gallons. I added equal parts of water for a total volume of 10 gallons. Ready to rot. The 40 gallons of air will not be a problem, as it will be consumed by the first stage of digestion. As long as no new oxygen source is available, we should be growing bacteria like no body's business.
A biodigester is a simple device: just a sealed chamber full of just about anything that was once alive (such as meat, vegetables, flour, leaves, or poop) and water. These ingredients are consumed by bacteria with a byproduct of methane gas (CH4).
Methane, of course, is combustible, and can be used for cooking, burned for light, or fed into an engine to produce electricity, pump water, or other useful purposes. The only hitch is the digestion process only works in an oxygen-free environment. And in case you haven't noticed, Earth has got oxygen, like, all over the place.
We were cleaning out the refrigerator, so I says to myself, self let's make some gas. The first thing to go in was a jar of pickle juice with a few bits of pickle afloat and seemingly unaware of their immanent sacrifice in the name of science. Then I put in some old raisins that were all stuck together, and some nuts. I chopped them all up in a blender first to liquefy the "feedstock" as much as possible. This is because bacteria don't have teeth.
Next to go were some stale hamburger buns, old baked potatoes, and a few hot dogs of questionable age.
Some muffin mix, cake mix, and cornbread mixes went in easily. A little baking soda helps reduce the acidity which makes the bacteria happy so that they smile little toothless smiles.
I poured in some crushed potato chips and old V8 juice that we bought out of nutritional guilt, a guilt that proved insufficient to actually make us drink it.
The blender made a good paste out of a bag of old peanuts.
Jono helped me with this project. He told me to take a picture of him pretending to eat it. All jocularity, that one.
The food scraps filled the barrel to about 5 gallons. I added equal parts of water for a total volume of 10 gallons. Ready to rot. The 40 gallons of air will not be a problem, as it will be consumed by the first stage of digestion. As long as no new oxygen source is available, we should be growing bacteria like no body's business. Then I put on the air tight cap and lugged it out into the back yard. It would probably work better in the house because it is winter. The bacteria thrive best between 45-108 F, and lately it has been getting colder than that at night. But you really can't ask your wife to keep a thing like this in the house, no matter how tolerant she is.
More gas news as it passes...
Thursday, January 1, 2009
Jalapeño Chicken with Shredded Broccoli
José Cordoba Martinez Gutierez grew up illiterate in the mountains of Ecuador. Until age 23, he made a living raising Jalapeño peppers on three acres of hill top that his father carved out of virgin jungle with a machete. His hands were a continual shade of pink from the years of labor and chemical burns from the peppers. He smelled mildly of loamy earth.
One day José visited the city where he met a beautiful woman from Laos who was there buying spices at a convention for Asian restauranteers. The moment their eyes met, José knew he would marry her or die alone. He said in Spanish, "My name is José. I grow peppers."
She could only respond in Laotian that sounded, to him, like a prolonged pre-sneeze, but her voice was pleasant, and she smiled at him with her beautiful teeth.
José and Poa indeed married and, eventually, opened a restaurant in a small town near José's pepper farm. Years passed. His sons worked the farm and had some excellent success expanding their repertoire of vegetation to include broccoli and sesame (and some abysmal failures like rhubarb and microwave popcorn). The restaurant's only dish was a curious fusion of South American and Laotian flavors known simply as "the recipe".
Passed on with love an reverence for two generations, the recipe continued to delight many an Ecuadorian truck driver and itinerant school teacher. It was kept by the family with great secrecy, as all their livelihoods depended on it.
That is, until José's grandson Zack fell into an unfortunate gambling habit and, in with the desperation of a junkie, sold me the recipe for $37 and a points card from H-E-B passed off as a stolen Visa. What can I say?
Here is the recipe as both dictated and heard by a man: Pour some sesame oil in a pan and put some chicken tenders in it. Stir them around until they get all white with just a few brown places.
Pour in a bottle of red jalapeño dressing and a few splashes of soy sauce. Get out some butter and put it on the counter. Take a picture of it, but don't use it in the recipe.
Cook it all up until it looks like this. Note to men, don't use "high" heat on account of it burning everything.
It's OK to pretend the boiling broth is molten lava. Just don't tell anyone.
Then pour in a bag of broccoli cole slaw with carrots and purple cabbage. Personally, the words "cole slaw" make me mildly nauseous, but that's just some unresolved psychological baggage of my own, and shouldn't be an issue for most people. I prefer to call it shredded broccoli.
One day José visited the city where he met a beautiful woman from Laos who was there buying spices at a convention for Asian restauranteers. The moment their eyes met, José knew he would marry her or die alone. He said in Spanish, "My name is José. I grow peppers."
She could only respond in Laotian that sounded, to him, like a prolonged pre-sneeze, but her voice was pleasant, and she smiled at him with her beautiful teeth.
José and Poa indeed married and, eventually, opened a restaurant in a small town near José's pepper farm. Years passed. His sons worked the farm and had some excellent success expanding their repertoire of vegetation to include broccoli and sesame (and some abysmal failures like rhubarb and microwave popcorn). The restaurant's only dish was a curious fusion of South American and Laotian flavors known simply as "the recipe".
Passed on with love an reverence for two generations, the recipe continued to delight many an Ecuadorian truck driver and itinerant school teacher. It was kept by the family with great secrecy, as all their livelihoods depended on it.
That is, until José's grandson Zack fell into an unfortunate gambling habit and, in with the desperation of a junkie, sold me the recipe for $37 and a points card from H-E-B passed off as a stolen Visa. What can I say?
Here is the recipe as both dictated and heard by a man: Pour some sesame oil in a pan and put some chicken tenders in it. Stir them around until they get all white with just a few brown places.
Pour in a bottle of red jalapeño dressing and a few splashes of soy sauce. Get out some butter and put it on the counter. Take a picture of it, but don't use it in the recipe.
Cook it all up until it looks like this. Note to men, don't use "high" heat on account of it burning everything.
It's OK to pretend the boiling broth is molten lava. Just don't tell anyone.
Then pour in a bag of broccoli cole slaw with carrots and purple cabbage. Personally, the words "cole slaw" make me mildly nauseous, but that's just some unresolved psychological baggage of my own, and shouldn't be an issue for most people. I prefer to call it shredded broccoli.
Then you stir it all up until it looks like this. Serve it under heat lamps with egg rolls and banana pudding with nilla waffers (just like at the Golden Palace Chinese buffet). It smells good and makes your wife really happy. I highly recommend it.
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