We’ve blogged a few times about the plight of the Zabballeen — Cairo’s Coptic garbage collectors and pig-keepers — in the wake of the pig cull which was the Egyptian governments main response to swine flu. Now, via Treehugger, comes news of a movie about this embattled community: Marina of the Zabballeen. It seems to have done quite well on the festival circuit. If you caught it, let us know.
(New) things to do with pears
A little something silly for the weekend.
This bizarre story made it to Boing Boing and the Daily Mail, but the earliest I can find for it, and indeed where I first saw it (Thanks, Matt), was a website in Portuguese. Now, through the miracle of Google Translate, we bring you, How to make pear shaped Buddha!
I think this is the “How to” Strange as I posted here, after all, who is going to try this at home? Well, then, for purposes of curiosity, if you ever heard of pear-shaped Buddha or even the famous square watermelons in Japan knows that the process is simple, just put a cast on fruit when they are starting to rise because the fruit tends to take the shape of the mold as it unfolds.
I’m afraid of what marketers can do with it …
I’m more afraid of what the Mail did to it, but no matter. More to the point, even the square watermelon is not as new as all that. From Popular Science, January 1938:
Farmer Grows Pumpkins with Human Faces
Pumpkins with human faces have been produced by John M. Czeski, Ohio farmer, after four years of experimenting. To grow the novel fruit, Czeski fashions an aluminum mold of the head he wants to reproduce, and places it around a growing pumpkin approximately the size of a small grapefruit. After the pumpkin has expanded enough to fill the inside contours, the mold is removed. The print of the features remains as the pumpkin continues to grow, and the final result is a lifelike full-size image in the ripened fruit.
Nothing new etc.
Featured: Soybean
Cary explains realpolitik:
[S]oybean is not included in Annex I of the Treaty. In the negotiations, the Chinese objected to its inclusion and thus blocked consensus, and without consensus it dropped off the list.
Is it important that soybean is not on the list? We await enlightenment.
Reporting threats to agrobiodiversity: A modest proposal
Yesterday Hannes, à propos of something else, reminded me of a post I did a few months back about ProMED which asked the question “Why do we still not have an early warning system for genetic erosion?” Today I read about pestMapper — “[an] internet-based software tool for reporting and mapping biological invasions and other geographical and temporal events.” Whose objectives is basically to make a more participatory, Web 2.0-like ProMED. Coincidence? Maybe. Anyway, this is exactly the kind of thing we’ve been thinking here a “global genetic erosion threat reporting and monitoring portal” might look like. Any thoughts? An idea worth pursuing?
War of the roses
The oldest written testimony of the use of roses by humans originates from Mesopotamia. In the royal graves of Uruk, the cultural centre of the Sumerians (now ruins called Warka, in southern Iraq), Sir Leonard Wolley found cuneiform-script texts reporting on warfare by Sargon of Akkad (24th century BC) whose empire reached from western Persia to Asia Minor. Akkad crossed the Taurus mountains and brought back grapevines, figs, and roses…