Link day
The year’s almost over!
Today I spent a little time getting ready for an ice storm that’s on its way. Hopefully it won’t be too bad. The last two meant a couple days stuck inside but we didn’t lose power or anything like some here did.
Here’s some links for the weekend:
It doesn’t get madder than this. Swaziland is in the grip of a famine and receiving emergency food aid. Forty per cent of its people are facing acute food shortages. So what has the government decided to export? Biofuel made from one of its staple crops, cassava.
Drinking water from the toilet: not only for dogs
About the middle of next month, a $480 million treatment system will begin converting sewer water to ultra-pure drinking water by the tens of millions of gallons per day.
Called the Groundwater Replenishment System, it is said to be the largest system of its kind in the world, and has attracted worldwide attention.
Its creators, the Orange County Water District and the Orange County Sanitation District, have managed to overcome public squeamishness, concerns about high costs, and the technical challenges that accompany any effort to remove or destroy virtually anything harmful from water piped into the system from a nearby sewage treatment plant.
“The only other place in the world where they have a comparable plant is in Singapore,” Denis Bilodeau, a member of the Water District’s board of directors, said Wednesday. “It’s maybe a third of the size. And they just built it. They built it emulating ours.”
Lake Mead, from which Las Vegas sips, has a bathtub ring 100 feet tall where the water once lapped.
Georgia is cracked-red-clay dry and doesn’t give a wrinkled peach what happens to Florida’s Apalachicola Bay oysters.
On Nov. 19, Durham, N.C., calculated 64 days of water remaining. Earlier, it had banned lawn sprinkling altogether.
The carrot dangled in front of 1.3 billion people was simple: come, work and be rewarded. That was then, this is now. The dream is dying on the vine.
Online quote of the week:
…do not underestimate the power of Wal-Mart, et al to viciously alter the time/space continuum for their own benefit…
It’s a silly quote but it made me laugh.
Well, that’s it for today. Hope you have a restful weekend.
