Tag: culture

Cambodian iron fish hack

interventions like these are crucial to make the world smarter.

In 2008, Christopher Charles was thinking about anemia. Anemia is often caused by an iron deficiency. It makes you tired and weak. It makes you have trouble thinking clearly. Almost 50% of Cambodia’s population suffers from this disease! Over 3.5b people on our planet have anemia, a $50b drain on global GDP. You can cure anemia with iron supplements – but they taste bad, and they often cause stomach pains, constipation, and even more disgusting problems. So Charles had another idea: give villagers little blocks of iron to drop into their cooking pots. The iron gets released slowly as the water boils. But at first, people hated them. They thought the iron blocks where ugly. They thought the iron blocks would scratch their pots. So they turned them into doorstops. He kept trying. Eventually he came up with a second idea, that could make the first idea work.

He realized that in rural Cambodia almost everything revolves around fish. People earn money fishing, they’re a big part of the Khmer diet and their folklore. So, he made iron into “lucky fish”. And people are now happy to put one into the pot when cooking.

1 of those who has been using the fish is Sot Mot, a 60-year-old grandmother who lives just outside Phnom Penh. She drops the fish into boiling water as she chops up garlic, ginger and lemongrass for Khmer chicken soup. “Before, I felt tired and lazy and my chest shook when I was tired. But after I use the fish, I have strength and energy to work and I sleep well, too.”

1 of her granddaughters seems to be improving, too. “Before, when I went to school I felt tired, and I didn’t do well at math, maybe the 6th in the class. Now, I’m No. 1.”

2023-09-13: And sometimes you have to take something out, like lead

Last year in Get the Lead Out of Turmeric! I reported that adulteration of turmeric was a major source of lead exposure among residents of rural Bangladesh. Well there is good news: the lead is gone! Wudan Yan at UnDark reports the remarkable story of academic research quickly being translated into political action that improves lives.

An End to Down Syndrome?

things are going to get very complicated, soon.

Diana Bianchi is now trying to fix the developmental abnormalities, often triggered by the non-wild type karyotype, of individuals with Down Syndrome. But the reporting in this piece suggests many in the Down Syndrome community are ambivalent about a cure, though some are supportive. After all, a “fix” implies a problem, which many will not admit. My own question is why pro-life organizations and individuals don’t fund Bianchi’s research to the hilt?

On Apple Picking

“I have never met or heard of someone coming to our Eastern Washington apple-growing region to pick apples for leisure. It must be an East Coast or urban thing.” Pheasant Orchards found the idea of picking for fun “hilarious and sad,” a reflection of just how estranged from nature modern Americans must feel. “We don’t try to build our own furniture, or cars. We don’t feel the need to go to the forest ourselves to cut a tree down when we need lumber. Our economy has raised people’s quality of life by becoming more efficient and productive. I don’t understand why we want to go backwards when it comes to agriculture.”

Superstition in Africa

Children born with albinism in Tanzania live in constant danger of being attacked by people looking to profit from superstitious beliefs. ~0.005% of people are born with albinism, lacking pigment in their hair, skin, and eyes. In Tanzania, albino body parts are highly valued in witchcraft and can fetch a high price.

superstition and savagery are still far too common in africa.

Hit Charade

Millions of Swifties and KatyCats—as well as Beliebers, Barbz, and Selenators, and the Rihanna Navy—would be stunned by the revelation that a handful of people, a crazily high % of them middle-aged Scandinavian men, write most of America’s pop hits

Against Sex Robots

The Campaign rejects the argument that the development of sex robots could actually improve the plight of sex workers around the globe, or that there are plenty of lonely people—of any gender—interested in a robot companion for a variety of reasons. Richardson is also against Amnesty International’s call to decriminalize human sex work. While I do not want to dismiss the ethicists’ concerns or claims entirely—sex bots should be a topic for spirited debate—it seems to me that the Campaign should be focusing more on helping to establish reasonable guidelines moving forward, rather than an outright ban. That ban isn’t going to happen, nor should it. Prohibition is seldom a fix.

Against showers

Dave Witlock is a practical man. “I have not taken a shower in over 12 years. No one did clinical trials on people taking showers every day. So what’s the basis for assuming that that is a healthy practice?”

Twice a day, Mr. Witlock applies a live bacteria solution of his own design to his skin. To spread the bacteria to everyone else, he has founded a company called AOBiome and is selling a spray that contains live ammonia oxidizing bacteria (AOB), called Mother Dirt.

After Aramaic

Aramaic is in a splintered and tenuous state. Yet it was the English of its time—a language that united a large number of distinct peoples across a vast region, a key to accessing life beyond one’s village, and a mark of sophistication to many. The Aramaeans themselves were in Babylon only temporarily: The Assyrians, who spoke a language called Akkadian, ousted them. But the Assyrians unwittingly helped the Aramaeans’ language extinguish their own. Namely, the Assyrians deported Aramaic-speakers far and wide, to Egypt and elsewhere. The Assyrians may have thought they were clearing their new territory, but this was like blowing on a fluffy milkweed and thinking of it as destruction rather than dissemination: The little seeds take root elsewhere. At this point, I am supposed to write that English’s preeminence could end as easily as Aramaic’s. Actually, however, I doubt it: I suspect that English will hold on harder and longer than any language in history. It happened to rise to its current position at a time when 3 things had happened, profoundly transformative enough to stop the music, as it were: print, widespread literacy, and an omnipresent media. Together, these things can drill a language into international consciousness in a historically unprecedented way, creating a sense of what is normal, cosmopolitan, cool even—arbitrary but possibly impregnable. If the Chinese, for example, rule the world someday, I suspect they will do it in English, just as King Darius ruled in Aramaic and Kublai Khan, despite speaking Mongolian, ruled China through Chinese translators 0.7 ka BP. Aramaic held sway at a time when a lingua franca was more fragile than it is today.