Cash for Poop

A city in Taiwan is trying to keep the streets clean by offering cash for collected dog poo.

City officials in Taichung, which has a population of one million, said on Wednesday the environmental protection bureau would give vouchers worth 100 Taiwan dollars ($3) for every kilo of dog poo collected. In areas of the city especially affected, the reward will be for every half-kilo.

In related news, Taichung is witnessing a sudden surge in demand for high-fiber dog food which is now being sold in convenient single-serving sizes priced at 99 Taiwan dollars.

A Sordid Link

“Tell the guys on Death Row that I’m not wearing a diaper.”

Recycling Puzzle

In my neighborhood trash and recycling are collected separately, on different days, by different entities.  On Tuesdays the trash collector drives his little trash shuttle all the way to my garage to empty the trash cans.  On Wednesdays, I am required to wheel the recycle bin out to the curb to be collected by the recycling truck.

At first glance the economics would suggest the opposite.  The recycling is valuable to the collector, the trash is not, so when bargaining over who has to carry the goods down the driveway, the recycling collector would seem to be in a worse bairgaining position.

But on second thought, it makes perfect sense.  Can you see why?  For a (admittedly obscure) hint, here is a related fact:  another difference between the trash and recycling is that the recycling bin is too small to contain a typical week’s worth of recycling and most households usually have recycling overflowing and stacked next to the bin.

If you are following me on Twitter (and have I suggested recently that you should be following me on Twitter?) you will know the answer.  For the rest, follow the jump.

Blogging Something I Know Nothing About

Something I watched recently made me want to write on a topic that I have no interest in and only passing experience with, but which is intriguing once you think about it for a moment.  I decided I would blog about the first such thing I could come up with.  After thinking for more than a few moments the first thing I came up with fitting this description was:

Barbicide. It’s that blue liquid that every barber/hair salon uses to store combs and scissors, presumably to disinfect it in some way.  Before reading that Wikipedia article, some obvious questions about Barbicide come to mind:

1. Is there really no competition for Barbicide?  How do they maintain their monopoly?  There doesn’t seem to be a monopoly on the combs or the scissors, just the blue liquid that cleans them.
2. Why always blue?  Presumably it is some kind of branding.  Does Barbicide have a patent/copyright on that particular shade of blue?
3. The name suggests that it is a special chemical agent for killing some kind of mythical organism whose name has the root Barbi-.  But I don’t believe that.  In fact, I believe that Barbicide is just de-natured alcohol colored blue.  But I must be wrong right?
4. How often do you have to change a jar of Barbicide?

The wikipedia article didn’t answer many of these questions but it did say something about 3.  In fact barbicide

… is a United States Environmental Protection Agency-approved hospital disinfectant. It is a germicide, pseudomonacide, fungicide, and viricide. In addition, it kills the HIV-1 virus (AIDS virus), Hepatitis B, and Hepatitis C.

And it raised new questions.  Like, is it true as “Barbicide techinicians claim” that

it is the only disinfectant of its kind which holds its power and color over time; all of its competitors’ products eventually turn green or brown.

?  That at least tells me that there are indeed competitors and presumably they are all blue (at first.)  I checked the Barbicide Material Safety Data Sheet, a document prepared by OSHA and confirmed that alcohol is the primary active ingredient, although it also contains Dimethyl Benzyl Ammonium Chloride (DBAC), and Sodium Nitrite.  I checked the Wikipedia page for DBAC and found some uninteresting (to me) facts like that it is a

nitrogenous cationic surface-acting agent belonging to the quaternary ammonium group

and some interesting facts like that it is toxic to fish.  Apparently it is not patented.  So Barbicide must be a patented formula combining these chemicals in some specific proportions with other, presumably blue, chemicals.

I went to the homepage for Barbicide.  Did you know that a jar of Barbicide is in the permanent collection at the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution?  Now you do.  King Research, which produces Barbicide also makes other products, for example a drain cleaner that apparently excels at breaking down hair clogs. Natch.

I found this discussion forum where exactly my question 4 was raised and after many forum members professed ignorance, a call was placed directly to King Research who suggest replacing it every day, or when it gets cloudy.  This surprised me because when you factor in the claims of the Barbicide technicians, it seems to suggest that the competitor’s product turns brown or green in less than a day.  Well, no wonder they can’t compete.

Finally, I assumed that somewhere there must be a dark side to all of this, so I googled “Against Barbicide” and “Barbicide Controversies” and after many such attempts I finally came across the following transcript of a case from the Third Circuit Court of Appeal in which Barbicide was allegedly improperly used to sanitize a tub used in a pedicure:

Ms. Detraz demonstrated that Virgin Nails did not follow proper sanitization procedures when cleaning its equipment, specifically the pedicure tub in which Ms. Detraz immersed her feet and lower legs during the pedicure.  Virgin Nails used Barbicide, a disinfectant, to clean the whirlpool tubs attached to the pedicure chairs.

So, I learned a lot and it is not all for naught.  I think that I might actually have an interesting topic of conversation the next time I get my haircut.

I am a Vampire

I have disturbing condition that needs a bill of rights and a support group, at the very least it needs medical terminology.  You know those “motion activated” faucets and towel dispensers that are now ubiquitous in public facilities?   They don’t work for me.  Well, at least 30% of the time they act as if I do not exist.  I wave my hands in front of the fixture and nothing happens.  I show it my palms, my wrists, my fingernails.  I clap, jump up and down, step out of and then jump back into its line of sight and nothing happens.

Sometimes  showing the right body part does the trick, other times a shoe or my phone has to be pressed into service.  It gets really embarrassing when I am standing there dripping and I have to ask a total stranger to repeatedly trigger the air-drying device on my behalf.  This is not an option at the hand-washing stage when all of the faucets are activated by infrared sensor.

The engineers who designed these devices must be aware from pre-market testing that there is a small segment of the population that is deficient in motion-activating-aura.  You would think that they would equip the devices with some fallback analog instrumentation, but no, we the unreflective, the hypo-present, the less-than-solid,  we are subjected to the tyranny of digital sanitation and the mockery of little infrared panels that stare back at us like HAL9000 saying “I wouldn’t do that if I were you Dave” as we sneak back into the stall to dry our hands with toilet paper.

The worst part of being a member of the infra-undead is that its a condition that seems to ebb and flow.  And that is a disaster when you are sitting on a toilet that is flushed by motion-activation.  If you think about it for a moment you will understand what I mean.