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The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments, written by Robert Brent and illustrated by Harry Lazarus, is a children's book that was published in the 1960s. Its intention was to show children how to set up a home chemistry lab and conduct simple experiments. The US government had the book removed from libraries and banned for sale on the grounds that the projects were too dangerous for its intended audience. Many of the experiments it contains would be excluded from modern chemistry books. It is beautifully illustrated and packed with information. According to the Online Computer Library Center (oclc.org) there are only 126 copies of the book in libraries worldwide. Purchasing a copy could set you back around R5000. Fortunately, you can download a pdf of The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments from Anne Marie's Chemistry Blog on the about.com website.

Condomise and save the planet
The Center for Biological Diversity is distributing 100,000 free Endangered Species Condoms across the United States to highlight how unsustainable human population growth is driving species extinct at an alarming rate. See the whole range of condom packets at endangeredspeciescondoms.com.

 

 

Obscura Day
On March 20, people in cities and towns across the globe will be celebrating Obscura Day by visiting "wondrous, curious, and esoteric places". The event is coordinated by Atlas Obscura (atlasobscura.com) a project that aims to catalogue all the "singular, eccentric, bizarre, fantastical, and strange out-of-the-way places that get left out of traditional travel guidebooks and are ignored by the average tourist."
According to a recent report on Time.com: "Atlas Obscura is really the type of site that should be labeled as not safe for work. Not because there's anything offensive about it – don't worry, you can click safely – but because the posts make you really, really want to get out of the office." (Time.com 7/7/09)

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Claire is part of the international logistics team at the Red Cross. When a big disaster happens somewhere in the world she is charged with getting life saving items to where they are needed. On January 18, six days after the earthquake struck Haiti she posted on the Red Cross Blog: "Let me debunk a couple of myths, starting with the principle that 'anything is better than nothing'. Trust me, it's not. Relieving suffering should be guided solely by need and not what people have to donate."
She makes a good case for donating money rather than goods ot relief organisations. According to her, aid can sometimes harm the relief effort; food donations can often not be expedited fast enough and are left to rot at airports. "Unwanted donations create chaos, waste and confusion for an already stricken country. The risks are spiralling costs or actual threats to its people, environment and industry."

This week James Fallows of the Atlantic spotted the board in the photo above asking people to donate their old yoga mats. Lisa Katayama remarks on BoingBoing site: "reminds me of that scene in Clueless where Alicia Silverstone donates her skis to the Pismo Beach Disaster."

If you are feeling philanthropic, rather do what an Ohio strip club did and use your resources to get cold, hard cash to give to organisations that know what to do with it. Under a "lap dances for Haiti" fundraising initiative, they raised $1,000  in donations (all in dollar bills?)





Street View attack
Europeans it seems do not take kindly to Google's Street View mobiles roaming their cities taking pictures of their streets and inhabitants.

Last Summer, in Bergen, Norway, Borre Erstad and Paul Åge Olsen ambushed Google’s Street View camera car last summer wearing wetsuits and wielding fishing spears. The stills taken by Street View have been doing the rounds on the internet this week.

In an unrelated incident, Berliners stalked a Street View vehicle and took footage of its driver taking a leak in public.

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"Kylebaker" tweeted on Thursday morning: "Die Antwoord has been sweeping the net as of late. They came out of nowhere." "Sweeping" is an understatement. The Cape Town based "zef rap-rave crew", true to their website (dieantwoord.com, a big, flashy fullscreen one) byline which claims that they are "taking over the interweb", bashed and cursed their way into the ether this week with a brand of (un)pop(ular music) that is at once dystopic and celebratory. If you are South African it will make you feel both proud and faintly nauseous. As you puff yourself up while feeling deflated (on Facebook, Kevin Krawez says: "There is something about this group. It is like watching a train wreck, you cannot turn away."), the rest of the world is applauding Die Antwoord. One witness to Die Antwoord's Enter the Ninja video (which features Jack Parow aka Leon Botha, a DJ with progeria) on the BoingBoing website says: " So good I wanna learn Afrikaans, to better enjoy those crazy lyrics." Another comment reads: " I am both terrified and highly pleased by this. It's utterly confusing to my sensibilities, yet I cannot say that I am not entertained by it."
Go to their Facebook page and it becomes clear that Die Antwoord is infinitely desirable: more than 5000 fans in two days and an invitation to visit Minneapolis (and Kiev, Prague, Springfield, Milan, Ottawa ...).

If we were talking art in the language of the critic, Die Antwoord would be called "important" because they are different and new. Taxijam, an outfit that films bands performing in taxis defines them as "a lovable, mongrel-like entity made in South Africa, the love-child of many diverse cultures, black, white, coloured and alien, all pumped into one wild and crazy journey down the crooked path to enlightenment."

Die Antwoord crew is Ninja, Yo-landi Vi$$er and DJ Hi-Tek. They are hard to miss.

Evoke it
The World Bank Institute, the learning and knowledge arm of the World Bank Group, and alternate reality game master Jane McGonigal have created Evoke, a project designed to connect young people in Africa to their counterparts in the the developed world. They aim to "empower young people all over the world, and especially in Africa, to start tackling the world's toughest problems: poverty, hunger, sustainable energy, water security, conflict, disaster relief, health care, education, human rights" using online gaming as a tool. The motto of the game is "If you have a problem, and you can't solve it alone, EVOKE it" an action which the project defines as  a call to "look for creative solutions ... use whatever resources we have ... get as many people involved as possible ... take risks ... come up with ideas that have never been tried before." The game launches on March 3. Visit urgentevoke.com to reserve a spot.

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There seems to be no end to the ills that the nation of Haiti has suffered at the hands of other nations, its own leaders and, according to evangelist Pat Robertson, God disguised as an earthquake. Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez, says Haiti's recent seismic event was not natural was caused by an American science experiment that is part of a plot to overthrow the island nation. (Why not? The US has been trying its luck with Haiti since the 18th century.)Haitians have endured centuries of political violence to which not even its pigs enjoy immunity.

In Haiti, owning a pig is like having a savings account. A pig can be traded for goods or for services like schooling. Haitian pigs are called Cochon Plances and are hardier than the farmyard ones that we are familiar with. In the late 70's an outbreak of African Swine Fever spread from Spain to the Dominican Republic (which occupies the other half of Hispaniola) and made its way to Haiti. 100 000 pigs near the Dominican Republic border were slaughtered as a preventive measure, but this did not stop the epidemic. By 1982 one-third of Haiti's pig population was infected. Concerned about the spread of the disease into the US and its potential effects on agriculture, the US put political pressure on the Haitian government to slaughter all the pigs in their country and spent $15 million and 13 monthskilling 400,000 pigs. The rest (around 500,000)died from the fever.

The loss of this valuable resource had hugely negative implications for the rural population. Children had to stop their schooling, properties were mortgaged and trees were cut down to make charcoal as a form of income, which hastened desertification of the already heavily- populated countryside. The US claimed that the plan was two-pronged: to protect the US gainst the disease and to set up a pig-farming industry on the island, using new pigs. Unfortunately, the American pigs, which were meant to be better breeders that the creole pigs, had different needs – like clean water and special food – that the islanders simply could not provide. The finicky porkers were called "prince à quatre pieds", four-footed princes, for their fussy habits and the repopulation programme collapsed.

Since then, efforts have been made by Haitian and French agronomists to reintroduce a new form of the  creole pig.

Grassroots International (grassrootsonline.org) provides Pig Party Packets, which include Grassroots' documentary "Haiti's Piggy Bank" and various downloadable games and activities so that you can host Pig Party in your home and raise funds to purchase new creole pigs.

The UK-based Global Giving (globalgiving.co.uk) also offers an opportunity to donate towards the cost of 27 pigs that will be used to fund a self-sufficient pig breeding enterprise in Kasis, Haiti.