JJ Nitro

2008-05-13, 16:19

My fiancee's company, SaafWater, got a nice write-up by Xconomy, a website focusing on technology and business around the Boston area.

Attention entrepreneurs: it isn’t always about the technology. Often the real innovation lies in the distribution or business model. Take the problem of providing clean drinking water in developing countries. The technology needed to make individual water supplies safe isn’t rocket science—it ranges from purifier packets of chlorine to special containers that use sunlight to kill microbes.

Yet, across the globe some 2 million people die every year from drinking contaminated water, the vast majority of them children under 5. What’s more, every year there are 4 billion episodes of water-induced diarrheal disease, which causes malnutrition and makes kids miss school, with serious economic consequences and systemic effects on quality of life. In poor areas, boiling and refrigerating water often falls by the wayside because it consumes too much energy and time, and there are few, if any, alternatives.

Enter Sarah Bird, a graduate student in MIT’s Technology and Policy Program and founder of SaafWater (pronounced “Soff”-water—saaf is the Hindi and Urdu word for “clean”). Her company is creating a distribution model for getting safe, clean drinking water to urban areas in developing nations. Her first stop: Karachi, Pakistan’s bustling capital city of 15 million....

Click here to the rest of the piece on the Xconomy site.

2008-04-19, 12:11:14

Nicholson Baker's new book, Human Smoke, has gotten positive reviews, and his varied and unusual books seem intriguing, although I've never gotten around to reading one. So I was lucky to happen to be a in a Cambridge, MA, bookshop just before he was going to read from his new book, about the build-up before WWII.

His approach to writing his book was intriguing. He said he wanted to consider ideas about the war that might seem naive—such as what pacifists said about avoiding conflict and helping displaced and oppressed people. Above all, he wanted to understand what it felt like for people to go through that time. Also, he said that all of his books, until now, have been arguments, in one way or another, that life is fundamentally worth living. This new book, however, is about how people descended into collective insanity (to paraphrase what he said).

Much of Baker's research for the book involved reading front pages of old newspapers, since he and his wife wound up in possession of a huge archive of old newspapers. He would flip through them and look for odd stories, or facts that seemed to make sense at the time but sound crazy now. He gave as one example a straightforward story about how the Allies were planning to drop incendiary bombs on German forests to burn them down. (So when journalists like me are putting down the "first draft of history," we better watch what we write, huh?)

As Baker read from the book, I thought it sounds like a collection of disparate facts and stories that had jumped out at him as he was reading through all this stuff. He put the things in the book that, he said, "I couldn't forget."

But I'm not sure that all these snippets would add up to an understanding of the war unless you already know a fair amount about it. I'm sure the people who reviewed the book for places like the New Yorker and the NY Times alright knew a lot about the war, and that's why they were asked—or asked themselves—to write a review of the book.

Also, it was disappointing that, it turns out, Baker didn't want to use what he'd learned to gain any kind of broader understanding. Since his book was about the build-up to WWII, I asked him if he gained ingith into what it takes to motivate people. A lot of people say it will take a mass mobilization of resources, and also individual sacrifices by people in developed countries, to deal with global warming and avoid a climate catastrophe, I pointed out, and people say that the world acheived this in WWII, so we can do it again now. But then they were motivated by fear of imminent death and by nationalism. Is there any hope of people being motivated to tackle longer-term, more abstract, and global problems like climate change, I asked him.

Baker's answer was indirect, and I didn't understand what he was saying at first. He said that when you're researching a history like the one he wrote, it's so hard to wrap the lobes of your brain (he used that phrase) around all the material, that you can't start to think about parallels today or how to take lessons from that history and apply them to today. But once you're done with the history, you can begin to do that—but (if I understood correctly) he's not ready to do that yet. He wrote the book because he think people have a moral obligation to learn about what happened in WWII and to understand it, just for itself and not because we are going to apply what we learned to today.

I know my question was kind of off-topic, but I thought his answer was lame. What about that old saying, "Those who fail to learn from the past are doomed to repeat it." He wants to learn about the past, but not from it, apparently. If we're not trying to learn from the past, why focus on WWII? Why don't we have an equal moral obligation to learn about the Peloponnesian war?

I'm glad I heard his reading, though, because now I can strike his book off the list of things I want to read. 

*Note: The "area man" in the title is me; if you read The Onion, you'll get it.

2008-04-11, 23:47:30

I really wanted to like the movie "The Half Life of Timofey Berezin," aka PU-239. I had read an article in the April issue of The Atlantic, "A Smuggler's Story," and was curious to see a dramatized version of this kind of work.

The article talks about a few men who have been caught in Georgia, the former Soviet republic, trying to smuggle out highly enriched uranium. One of them was Oleg Vladimirovich Khintsagov:

For 15 years, Khintsagov had eked out a living, like so many Russians after the Soviet collapse, mostly as a small-time trader. Cheap Turkish chandeliers, dried fish, sausages—Khintsagov would peddle just about anything he could get his hands on, and the returns were usually meager. But now his luck looked about to change. In fact, if everything went according to plan, he would end the day very much richer. No truck would be needed to ferry today’s goods. The 100 grams of highly enriched uranium in his tattered leather coat was tucked into a plastic bag—the type a day laborer might use to wrap a sandwich.

He wasn't anything like the character Timofey Berezin in the movie, who was a technician of some kind at a nuclear weapons center, and who stole plutonium to sell on the black market. Khintsagov and the other real-life smugglers knew little about what they were doing.

Also, it's a bit strange to me that the movie takes place in post-Soviet Russia, rather than in one of the former Soviet republics. In my understanding, it's in these former republics that became independent where warheads and nuclear materials are only loosely protected, and where the majority of the smuggling takes place.

I was disappointed with the movie, since it got caught up too much in the human drama around this man's quixotic attempt to sell stolen plutonium. ***Warning: plot spoller!***  If he had been successful, or made connectios with some other people who were interested in the plutonium and actually knew what they could do with it, that would have been far more fascinating. But it would have made the story less tidy, and taken the focus away from the one man, his family, and his conflict with the place that he worked.

Also, I wonder how many people might get the idea that the movie is meant to be a condemnation of nuclear power. For one thing, it shows Timofey hanging out around and inside the iconic cooling towers of a nuclear power plant. But the character actually works in a secret nuclear weapons center that is not included on a map—a very different situation from nuclear power plant, and a place that probably wouldn't have cooling towers.

The movie is well acted, but for a good story about nuclear smuggling, I'd spend your precious time reading The Atlantic's article instead.

2008-03-11, 13:25:58

Poisonous arsenic, common in well water in Bangladesh, doesn't get passed on much through breast milk, a new study finds.

This is good news for Bangladeshi babies, since it means that they're getting less exposure to the chemical than they otherwise might. And there's mounting evidence that such exposure at a tender age can stunt growth and raise infant mortality, the study notes.

The study: "Breast Feeding Protects from Arsenic Exposure in Bangladeshi Infants", Environmental Health Perspectives (in press)