Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader@ (19 page)
Read Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader@ Online
Authors: Bathroom Readers’ Institute
•
JAROMÍR JÁGR,
veteran Czech-born hockey star, wears #68 to commemorate 1968, the year of the Prague Spring, a brief period of liberal reform in then-Communist Czechoslovakia.
Sammy Sosa had his swimming pool built in the shape of his jersey number: 21.
And a few other jobs that are out of the mainstream workforce—but someone has do them
.
E
GG ADDLER
If you have too many Canada geese in your yard, or in your pond, or on the roof of your building, or for any goose overpopulation problem in general, you might want to call a “goose egg addler” to help control further growth. Here’s how they do it: First, the addler approaches a nest (when the geese aren’t around) and places the eggs in a bucket of water. If an egg sinks, he coats it with vegetable oil, which prevents oxygen from entering and gases from escaping. That stops the embryo from developing further. The eggs are then placed back into the nest, which fools the mother into thinking she’s nesting on live eggs—otherwise she’ll lay more eggs. If the eggs float, it means an air sac has developed in the egg, and the embryo has developed beyond the point where it can be killed humanely, so those eggs are replaced in the nest and allowed to develop into goslings. Egg addling is regulated by wildlife services in Canada and most of the United States, and you must have a permit to do it.
PAJAMA POLICE
Authorities in Shanghai, China, spent billions of dollars preparing to host World Expo 2010, a cultural and trade fair designed to show off the “new” Shanghai as one of the most modern, forward-looking cities in the world. But the fact that a lot of Shanghainese like to wear their PJs on the street didn’t quite jibe with that image. How did pajama-wear become the fashion of choice in Shanghai? For years, people lived in
shikumen
—cramped communal houses with shared toilets and kitchens. The concept of personal space grew to include first the courtyard, then the street, and finally shops beyond. In the 1970s, that led to people young and old wearing their pajamas wherever they went. It wasn’t uncommon to see middle-aged couples in matching sleepwear strolling in the evening, or young housewives in Pretty Kitty prints buying produce at the market. So, in late 2009, the government began a campaign to make people get dressed. Bright red signs were posted in neighborhoods with the message, “Pajamas don’t go out the door; be a civilized resident for the Expo.” Pop stars appeared in TV ads warning that wearing PJs to the mall was a fashion no-no. Finally, teams of “pajama police” were dispatched to patrol the city for outlaw pajama wearers, although enforcement leaned more on shaming the scofflaw into compliance rather than with actual arrests. Did it work? Not really. There may have been fewer people in pajamas during the Expo, but there were still plenty…and the cherished Shanghai pajama tradition lives on.
Brine shrimp can survive in water that is six times as salty as seawater.
AIRPLANE REPOSSESSOR
When private jet owners fall behind on their payments, somebody has to repossess their flying machines. Enter the airplane “repo” men. These people have to be certified pilots capable of flying many different types of aircraft. They also have to be courageous: Nick Popovich, president of an airplane repossession company based in Indiana, was once called to repossesses a Gulfstream jet from an airport in South Carolina. When he arrived, he was met by a group of neo-nazis, armed with shotguns, who had been hired to guard the plane. One held a pistol to Popovich’s temple and told him to leave or he’d “blow his f***ing head off.” Popovich told him to go ahead. Then he boarded the plane and flew it away. Pay: Popovich says he makes as much as $900,000 per job. And he’s one of only a few airplane repossessors in the world.
MORE WEIRD JOBS
Monument crack filler:
These workers use gallons of silicone caulk to plug the cracks in massive stone monuments like Mt. Rushmore.
Diener:
In the undertaking world, a
diener
is someone who cleans and prepares a dead body for autopsy at the morgue. It comes from the German
leichendiener,
which means “corpse servant.”
Hot walker:
If this conjures up an image of someone tippy-toeing across a bed of hot coals, think again. A hot walker is the stable hand who cools off a horse after a race by walking it up and down the paddock. This job can be a matter of life—thoroughbreds can suffer kidney failure if they aren’t “hot-walked.”
World’s largest democracy: India, with more than half a billion voters.
We wrote a paragraph about this in
Uncle John’s Unsinkable Bathroom Reader
and it fascinated us so much that we wanted to share more details. It’s real science…and it could be coming to an automobile near you soon
.
B
ACKGROUND
Dr. Gerardine Botte is an Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering at Ohio University. She’s also the founder and director of the school’s Electrochemical Engineering Research Laboratory (EERL). Among its many projects, the EERL develops technology for devices known as fuel cells.
Fuel cells are devices that convert a fuel of some kind (Botte’s group was working on hydrogen) into electricity. They’ve been around for a long time—NASA used them for the
Apollo
moon landings in the late 1960s and early ’70s. But they’ve never been commercially viable, thanks in large part to the high costs associated with obtaining and storing the hydrogen.
STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS
One way to obtain hydrogen is to pass an electric current through water to separate the hydrogen atoms—the “H”s in
H2O
—from the oxygen atoms—the “O”s—using a process called
electrolysis
. Because the hydrogen and oxygen atoms are bound together very tightly, it takes a great deal of electricity to break these bonds.
Another problem with this technique is that fresh water works best for the fuel-cell conversion…and it’s scarce. Only three percent of the water on Earth is fresh; the rest is salt water. And very little of that three percent is available to humans for drinking, crop irrigation, and other uses. So it’s doubtful that hydrogen will ever be extracted from clean, fresh water on a large scale.
But what about
dirty
fresh water? That’s the idea that came to Dr. Botte several years ago when she was driving home from a conference on fuel cell technology: Why not extract hydrogen from wastewater, which is widely available, virtually free, and not in great demand? Botte soon narrowed her focus to one waste stream in particular: urine.
World’s largest bowling alley: the Nagoya Grand Bowl in Japan. It has 156 lanes.
PEE 101
Urine in wastewater contains ammonia (NH
3
), a compound consisting of one atom of nitrogen and three atoms of hydrogen. And as Dr. Botte confirmed when she subjected urine to electrolysis, it’s a good candidate for hydrogen production because the hydrogen and nitrogen atoms in ammonia are not bound together as tightly as the hydrogen and oxygen atoms in water are.
Only five percent as much energy is needed to break the ammonia molecules apart, and because each molecule contains
three
hydrogen atoms, not two as in H
2
O, more hydrogen is freed each time a molecule is split up. Less energy spent and more atoms freed makes extracting hydrogen from urine much cheaper than extracting it from fresh water—90¢ for the energy equivalent of a gallon of gas vs. $7.10 for hydrogen electrolyzed from water, Botte says. And best of all, fuel cells provide clean energy, because when hydrogen and oxygen are combined to generate electricity, the only “exhaust” created by the process is water (which could be drunk to aid in the production of more urine). No greenhouse gases are released at all.
With an estimated five million tons of ammonia entering the United States waste stream as human and animal urine each year—enough to provide electricity to 900,000 homes—the supply of “raw materials” for hydrogen production is enormous and almost completely untapped. But not for long: Botte sees a day when hydrogen extraction will be a standard function of wastewater treatment plants. “Ammonia,” she says, “is our future fuel.”
COMING SOON
As of the fall of 2009, Botte’s pee-powered “electrolyzer” prototype was about the size of a paperback book and produced less than one watt of power, not even enough to light an incandescent light-bulb. But Botte says the technology is ready to be scaled up to car size. “With the right partnership, I believe we could have pee-powered cars capable of 60 miles per gallon on the road within a year,” she told
Wired
magazine.
And if her predictions are accurate, cars powered by fuel cells will have pee tanks, just as cars today have gas tanks, because hydrogen is much easier to store as a component of wastewater than in its pure form. Pure hydrogen is a gas; it must be kept extremely cold and stored in pressure tanks to be useful as a fuel. Botte’s design calls for the urine to be converted into hydrogen right inside the automobile, and only as needed, eliminating the cost and difficulty of storing hydrogen in its pure form.
Longest month: October. (Daylight Saving Time makes it 31 days, 1 hr. long.)
But you still won’t be able to pee your way to work, unless you have a medical condition or work really close to home. A healthy adult produces only 1½ quarts of urine a day, not enough to get very far. “I wish we humans produced enough urine to run a whole car,” Botte says. “Maybe we could run some minor applications, like the car stereo or something like that.”
URINE GOOD COMPANY
Here are a few more waste products with the real potential to become the fuels of the future:
• Animal dung.
Professor Botte isn’t the only person pondering the power of pee: Scientists at Japan’s Obihiro University have developed a method of obtaining ammonia from animal urine and dung by fermenting it in an oxygen-free environment. As with Botte’s technique, the ammonia is electrolyzed to separate out the hydrogen, which is then fed into fuel cells to produce electricity. The scientists estimate that one day’s “output” of animal waste from a typical Japanese farm will produce enough energy to power a home for three days.
• Disposable diapers.
In 2007 the British engineering firm AMEC announced it was building a plant in Quebec, Canada, that will use a heating process called
pyrolysis
to convert the diapers (and their contents) into a mix of synthetic diesel fuel, methane gas, and “carbon-rich char.” When the plant is up and running it is expected to convert 30,000 tons of dirty diapers—about a quarter of all the diapers used each year in Quebec—into diesel fuel annually.
• “Turkey waste.”
For several years a company called Changing World Technologies operated a plant in Carthage, Missouri, that converted the waste from a Butterball Turkey slaughterhouse (beaks, bones, feathers, guts, etc.) into biodiesel. Capacity: 1,200 tons of turkey parts a week. But neighbors complained about the smell (“just like burning meat”), and in 2009 the company closed the plant and filed for bankruptcy.
Arnold Schwarzenegger was directly responsible for getting the Hummer released as a civilian vehicle.
Who says you can’t eat bottles, boats, or shoe cream?
B
ILLBOARD!
On Easter Day 2007, British candy retailer Thorntons unveiled an unusual billboard in the Covent Garden district of London. The 14-by-9-foot advertisement was made entirely out of chocolate—10 large chocolate bunnies, 72 giant chocolate eggs, and 128 chocolate panels, for a total of 860 pounds of chocolate. It was eaten by passersby in less than three hours.
SHOE CREAM!
If you’re ever stranded in the desert with nothing but a jar of shoe cream, pray it’s this kind. In 2009 London-based Po-Zu, a retailer specializing in environmentally friendly products, introduced PO-ZU Shoe Cream. It’s made from organic coconut oil, and, if your shoes don’t need shining, you can use it as lip balm, hair conditioner—or even cooking oil. “You can even spread it on your toast,” Po-Zu says on its website.
MONA LISA!
In October 2008, to mark the 100th anniversary of Tavr, a meat processing company headquartered in the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, Russian artists completed reproductions of six classic paintings using only frames, canvas…and sausage. The works exhibited included Leonardo da Vinci’s
Mona Lisa,
Vincent Van Gogh’s
Sunflowers,
and Picasso’s
Girl on a Ball
. And they really looked like the originals. “The biggest trouble,” said artist Aleksandr Solomko, “was getting the sausages to stick to the canvas.” (They used flavorless gelatin for glue.) Visitors were encouraged to use toothpicks to pick pieces of the “paintings” off the canvases and eat them, which they happily did.
QR CODE!
QR codes are similar to the bar codes used to digitally encode prices on store products, but look like random patterns of square dots and blank spots. They’re very popular in Japan, where advertisements using QR codes can be found in magazines, on billboards, even on buses. The codes can be read by most Japanese cell-phone cameras, which then provide links to websites where consumers can get more information about the products. In 2010 Montreal-based Clever Cupcakes decided to make the technology
tastier—and began offering cupcakes topped with QR codes made of sugar. And they work: If you hold your cell phone to the cupcake, you’re directed to the website of the Montreal Science Center, which helped promote the digitally enhanced cakes. Then…enjoy the cupcake!