Busy, busy.

I will have a full post up within the next few days. I've been busy with a device I've been constructing for my 3D design class. The solution for the project deals specifically with centripetal force, and this has me thinking my next post is going to search for questions pertaining to basic physics...

Hauling Trash

Alright, so waste management doesn't sound too exciting? Well, you're right and wrong. While the trash itself proves as appealing as attempting to spit on flies, the development and distribution of said waste is more important than most understand. To us regular Johns and Janes, the thought-process associated with "trash" is reduced to either the crap we see on daytime television or to a big black bag filled with disgusting "stuff" that we toss into some receptacle hiding out somewhere on our lawn or driveway.

After that, we forget about it. Just remember: it does continue to exist. Those garbage trucks aren't feeding the trash to black holes or blasting it off to the sun, it is being transported to your city's backyard. And that requires land. A lot of land.

Also, we can consider waste management, in many ways, an issue that humans chose to tackle within the past hundred years. The Resource Conservation and Recovery Act passed in 1976, to give you a sense of how recent we considered laws to govern our trash!

What if this was your front yard?

Prior to these laws and discussions, our society had limitations on where it placed its trash. Without a place to store it all, such as landfills, the trash always accumulated in the same place anyone without a sliver humanity left in them would suggest: in the working class slums. They simply "pushed" all the trash towards the outer circumference of the city, where the lower classes lived (the higher social tiers lived nearer to the factories, the city centers, due to a closer commute). This caused innumerable deaths due to disease and infection from exposure to growing bacteria, dead carcasses of horses, dogs and pigs, and discarded chemicals.

Suddenly, the three R's (Reduce Reuse Recycle) coded into our brains in childhood comes to make sense, it haunts us, even. By investigating the past, we witness the consequences of the logic that runs contrary to this set of  moral and cultural assignations. 

Check out this site.

Trash is important. And even more important, where we put it and how we dispose or recycle it.

Yeah, we've come a long way.

The Mystery of Fat Free Cheese

Alright, so this week's blog consists primarily of...a rant. I never thought myself to stoop to the level of taking shots at dairy products, but seriously, this stuff is gross. It looks like plastic. It doesn't melt. And it tastes as though it came out of a Lego's factory.

I am writing about Fat Free cheese.

What's in it? Primarily cheese, one would think, but no. It contains over 15 different ingredients, half of which are starches of some form. Two notable ingredients, which are not included in regular cheese, are sodium citrate and modified corn starch. These ingredients must do something to the cheese to make the texture equivalent to chewing on tires. Actually, after tonights casserole, I'd prefer nibbling on tires to the alkaline aftertaste this crap leaves behind. It doesn't go away either, it settles in the recesses of the mouth, only to resurface every few minutes reminding you of what you shouldn't have eaten. Its like a culinary Montezuma's Revenge, packaged and pristine on the grocery isle shelf.

Does diet food have to taste so bad?