One of the joys of social networking is the serendipitous juxtapositions that it regularly throws up. Case in point. This morning a piece from ILRI turned up in my Facebook newsfeed:
Climate change may be combated by changing the diet of livestock, whose farting and manure, along with the feed crops produced, contribute to 18 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, according to a new study.
Nothing strange about that. ILRI blog posts get automatically sucked up into Facebook via NetworkedBlogs. But how weird is it that just below that item there was one of a photo by the wonderful Claude Renault featuring cow dung? You can also see it on Claude’s Flickr site, along with a number of others on the same topic. Any of which would have been a much more interesting accompaniment to ILRI’s otherwise perfectly fine piece than the rather boring picture of a cow they actually used. I’m not sure even Claude Renault could have managed to produce a compelling illustration of cows farting, mind, though people have tried.
LATER: Not that social networking doesn’t have its problems. Facebook didn’t allow me to post this note as a comment to either of the posts mentioned above, claiming that some of the content was found offensive by some users.
Not farting, burping. It’s the belch that carries almost all the methane. Burping probably isn’t as offensive to Facebook, either.