Beer & Ice

Beer... that wonderful drink many cannot do without. It's said to be one of the greatest inventions of all times. These days, many eateries serve the canned beer immersed in buckets of ice-cubes. Nothing like a few well-chilled beers to compliment some tasty, hot and spicy food after a long hard day at work, especially if you are with good company.

Think about it. Some things need not be wasted. They may actually still serve a purpose. Some leftover ice-cubes in the bucket? Wait a minute, don't discard them yet. My friend with whom I was dining told me they could serve a good purpose.

They are handy for washing your hands after you are done with your food. Save you a trip to the washroom. And you save water, too. That's thoughtfulness... helping the environment.

Lazy & Wasteful

Satay is one Malaysian food which is irresistible to many people. Recently, I had dinner with a friend at a food court in Jalan Song, Kuching. My friend side-ordered a serving of beef and chicken satay. I for one am not a fan of satay. I fail to understand why some folks go gaga over it. It's expensive to pay for a real meal of satay and only good for either pampering or spoiling your taste buds. It's barbequed stuff and you all know too much of that is bad ain't good for health.

And if you happen to sit next to a satay stall, be prepared to end up smelling like a big walking piece of satay yourself. Smoky !!

The satay and the smoke don't bother me, though. What really comes to me is this... these days,the laziness and wasteful habits of people are astounding and hard to accept. Styrofoam packs meant for takeaway food are being used to serve the satay to sit-in customers. It it was me, I would have second thoughts about ordering food from that satay seller, cos I'll also be guilty of environmental abuse.

Mind you, you as the customer are paying for it as the cost of the disposable and environmentally unfriendly thing is passed on to you. We all know that these non-biodegradable junk end up in the landfills and remain there for eternity.

Enjoy food responsibly. But please, don't be lazy and Wasteful.

Quote of the Day:
An argument is the longest distance between two points of view.
--Dan Bennett

Some tips on getting more out of every litre of petrol

Only fill up your vehicle in the early morning when the ground temperature is cold. Remember, service stations have buried storage tanks. The colder the ground, the more dense the fuel. When it gets warmer, petrol expands. Thus, buying in the afternoon will give you a litre which is not exactly a litre. A one-degree temperature rise is a big deal for business. But service stations do not have temperature compensation at the pumps.

Squeeze the nozzle's trigger at a low speed, thereby minimising vapours created while pumping. Fast pumping will cause liquid petrol to vaporise and get sucked back through the hose's vapour return mechanism. You are getting less for your money.

Another tip was to refuel when your tank is half full. The more fuel in your tank means less air occupying its empty space. Petrol evaporates faster than you can imagine. Petroleum storage tanks have an internal floating roof. This roof serves as zero clearance between the petrol and the atmosphere, so it minimises the evaporation.

Don't refuel when a fuel truck is pumping into the underground storage tank as it could stir up sediment.

Is there life after oil ?

Some good news. With oil prices now at USD135 a barrel and expected to hit USD2000 by end 2008, this is certainly worth reading on....

I discovered something amazing recently and I tried to tell a bunch of friends about it. A guy in Illinois has, it seems, invented a device that can turn almost anything into oil, plus a few byproducts (all useful).

I, for example, could be transformed into 40 pounds of light sweet crude, 7 pounds of flammable gas, 8 pounds of high-quality mineral fertilizer, and 125 pounds of slightly cloudy water, give or take. Individual results may vary.

Inventor Paul Buskis is not planning to process people, of course. He's going after trash. His thermo-depolymerization process works on any carbon-based substance--chicken entrails, tires, plastic milk jugs, you name it. Garbage in, oil out--that's the promise.

My friends scoffed. "Sounds too good to be true," was their consensus. "It'll never work."

Ah, but it's already working. A company called Changing World Technologies has built a plant in Carthage, Missouri, based on Buskis's process. It's producing 400 barrels of oil a day right now, extruded from the wastes of nearby turkey processing plants. The company is building another plant in Philadelphia to process sewage into black gold.

My friends would have none of this. They assured me the invention will emit toxic pollution. (It doesn't.) It will use more energy than it produces. (Quite the opposite.) It's voodoo science: "How can oil be created?"

Well, it's been done before. The earth created oil by heating, cooling, and squeezing the rotted remains of plants and animals. Buskis replicates that process mechanically. What took millions of years in nature, his process achieves in a day.

Inconceivable? Not really. Even in nature, Buskis says, the transformation occurred rapidly. What took millions of years was for the right conditions to line up by chance.

A monkey banging on a typewriter might take millions of years to come up with a great sonnet. That doesn't make us doubt that Shakespeare could do it in a day. But if this thing is real, my friends countered, why aren't people stampeding to buy the stock?

Because there is no stock. This technology is closely held by a small group of private investors including James Woolsey, a former director of the CIA, and Howard Buffet, son of the legendary investing genius Warren Buffet.

Ah. Now the skepticism faded away.

"I knew it," one of my friends uttered bitterly.

"And it's still oil," another scolded. "Burning it still creates pollution...." Everyone leaned back, relieved. They had no trouble believing my news as long as it wasn't that thing with feathers. You know. Hope.

Tamim Ansary

Worth a click:

Changing World Technologies home page
Discover magazine on the science of trash-to-oil technologies
Fortune magazine on the financials of trash-to-oil technologies