Brilliant!

From the latest New Scientist ...

Nokia has this guy named Jan Chipchase who travels around the world studying how people use mobile devices, to help Nokia design new generations of devices that better meet the needs of the things people are trying to use them for.  He's come up with some interesting little tidbits, including that if you live in a place where there are no street signs because your street is off the map or not officially acknowledged, what a lot of people do for identity or for their address is they write their mobile phone number above the front door.

But this one is brilliant.  People in Uganda, who don't have access to, say, PayPal or Revolution, are using prepaid phone airtime as a medium of exchange.

It works like this:  You buy prepaid airtime in the city.  Then you call the phone kiosk operator in your home village, and you give the operator the number of the airtime card.  The kiosk operator loads that airtime onto a phone, and passes the value on in cash to, say, your sister.

There's nothing particularly special about money.  It's just a standardized medium of exchange, a standardized means of transferring value.  And anything else that you can make work, for the purpose you want to use it for, can be interchanged with it.  In Uganda, airtime effectively equals money, because they've found a way, for some purposes, to use airtime like money to transfer value ... except that unlike cash, it can be instantly transmitted across the country with a simple phone call.

Handy projects

In the continuing fixing up of stuff around the new house (well, new-ish; we've been here seven months now), the blue bathroom gets the handyman love this week.  There's three bathrooms in this house, one on each floor.  The blue bathroom is the one on the middle floor.  The towel rail pulled off the wall — or, more exactly, off its mounting brackets — on Monday.

You've all seen these things before — flimsy bits of bent sheetmetal (but it's chrome-plated sheetmetal!) on ill-fitting brackets.  This being the 21st century, no less than three methods are used to mount this advanced, high-tech, shiny, chrome-plated piece of junk to each of its mounting brackets:  a set-screw, a wish, and a prayer.  The setscrews failed because they won't align correctly to get a decent purchase on the edge of the bracket, and the other two plus ninety-nine cents will get you a cup of MacDonalds coffee.  Just to make things more interesting, as is common with such junk, the brackets were only screwed into drywall¹ — and with overly-soft slotted-head wood screws that deform from the screwdriver blade, at that.  Nor should it come as a surprise that not one screw was put in straight.

Here's the replacement, at right.  It's screwed directly into the studs in the wall with four-inch deck screws, is wide enough to hold two bath towels without folding them, has three coats of polyurethane to keep moisture out of the wood — INCLUDING the cut ends against the wall — and best of all, is made entirely of materials left over from other jobs.  The last coat of polyurethane went on yesterday evening, and I just fitted it this morning.²

At left, a different view with detail of the end brackets.  Full-size images are, as usual, behind the thumbnails.

The last project before this was removing and completely remounting the toilet in the yellow bathroom, on the bottom level, which was leaking badly at the wax ring; and, on the same weekend, sanely rewiring all the outlets in our bedroom on the third floor.  Not only were three of the four pairs of electrical outlets in the room switched, they were all connected to the same set of two-way switches.  To make matters worse, the two-way switches had been wired incorrectly so that they were in effect acting as two single-pole switches in series.  Just to add surrealism, all the original outlets were worn out to the point they wouldn't hold a plug in; instead of simply replacing the outlets, an additional outlet had been wired onto the end of the chain in a junction box just screwed to the wall on top of the panelling.

After rewiring, that outlet box (which the headboard lights plug very conveniently into) is properly flush-fitted, and it's the only switched one now; all the other outlets are now unswitched, so that we can plug things like, oh, say, alarm clocks into them.  And naturally, yes, I replaced the worn-out outlets.  I'm progressively replacing almost every outlet in the house.

[1]  Well, OK ... two of the four screws probably went almost half an inch into the stud behind.  Color me impressed.  Not.

[2]  Yes, I've subsequently moved the TP holder.

Talking (and burning) trash in the Army

They call it Tiger — TGER, the Tactical Garbage-to-Energy Refinery — and it's being tested at Victory Base Camp in Baghdad.

The Army already incinerates its trash anyway.  Using Tiger, the trash is instead separated by the machine into wet and dry components.  The dry material — cardboard, plastic, etc — is crushed, pelletized, and heated to produce syngas.  The wet slop is enzyme-treated, then fermented into a mixture of about 85% ethanol and 15% water.  The water-ethanol mixture and the syngas are then blended and fed into the generator, where the water helps prevent overheating.

Garbage in; 55 kilowatts out.

The system takes about six hours to start up, but once operating, consumes only about a gallon of diesel per hour, a 95% reduction in diesel consumption.

It's about time we started realizing that garbage is too valuable a resource to just throw it away.  This is another step in the right direction.