Commune, survivalist, same diff in the end.
I'm not sure Lifestraws cost $3 per straw to produce. They used to sell, IIRC, for $2. But really cool. And why in gawd's name would think I'm against potable water. I am wildly pro-potable water.
They cost $3 to buy, as I understand it. And I figured you'd make fun of my instinct to throw some HTI packs in my trunk.
My boy scout troop had a Katadyn (I think) water filter that weighed 15 pounds and had a foot pedal that you had to stand on to get leverage and steady it while you pumped the water. But it worked on both the up- and the downstroke and, once you got started, worked better than some low-pressure water fountains. The information booklet that came with it claimed that it filtered out something like 97% of radioactive fallout; it was rumored to be the same type of filter that the military used.
Yeah, I figured that's what you meant. I just mentioned the price movement because I believe the company that produces LifeStraw is a for-profit company and I think it's funny (in a "I'm sure nobody's really dying over this" way) that (a) it always gets mentioned in ways that give it a do-gooder patina, and (b) the price jumped 50% in the last few years.
My vat uses HTI technology to efficiently process...stuff. I'm not in much of a position to make fun.
What I'm taking away from this is, we're one step closer to peeing into our mouths.
6: Saving the environment takes sacrifices.
I choose to read 6 as being full of hope.
I thought giarda was a Food Network star.
Y'know, people, when armageddon comes we'll still know how to start fires and boil water.
There's a whole exhibit of stuff like this at the Cooper-Hewitt (in NY) right now that's kind of cool. It's "kind of" instead of "hella" cool because it's terribly curated; they show you the cool thingy, and then don't tell you anything about how it works. But the Life Straw was there.
The problem with excess sugar might be managed by going all the way and producing a filter + carbonation thingie that makes Coca Cola out of urine.
There's a reason they keep the ingredients secret, John.
So what are you saying, SB, Coke is already urine?
SB's saying SBself peed in your Coke, Ben.
It's funny how many stories some people can relate about drinking water.
Hiking in the desert, I had to drink water that was unappealing at best, stinking of the cows that had tromped through it at worst, but the water that was hardest to drink was the highly alkaline, bitter water of the narrow creeks. The cottonwood shade was very picturesque, but it could take half an hour to drink a liter of that stuff.
The best water that I have ever drunk -- it was like the water where the waves grow sweet for Reepicheep in that book by that guy that everybody on the Internet hates -- was in Iceland. It's one of the few remaining places where one can drink from a stream, a pool, a river without fear.
The people don't want to be scared, Flippanter. Don't scare them.
I drank from streams in Oregon for years without fear and never had cause to regret it. I do know someone who got giardia -- it's a treatable but incurable nuisance. I may be an asymptomatic carrier, in which case you should avoid my feces to the extent possible.
1:"Commune, survivalist, same diff in the end." ...b
Relocalization A strategic response to peak oil and global warming, via the oil drum.
"Here are a few of my predictions: Many trends of the last century or more, made possible by cheap and abundant energy sources, are going to be reversed. These trends include population growth, centralization of political and economic power, vastly increased quantity of global trade, and mass tourism." ...Jason Bradford, Phd
Is this on topic? Has that ever stopped me before?
Here's another one: Localism & Social Change
avoid my feces
Oh NOW he tells me. Thanks, John. Thanks a lot.
22: I just find it hard to believe that an important strategy for localization involves buying high-tech equipment that'll allow you to drink sea water. Call me crazy.
Anyway, if things get that bad, someone will just knock you in the head to steal your high-tech equipment, so why bother?
Google is aware of only one instance of the phrase "filthy fjord."
I drank from streams in Oregon for years without fear and never had cause to regret it.
We still do it in the area near Chester, CA. Domingo Creek is a natural spring, and I've drank from the Feather River there as well.
I've drunk from many, many streams in my life. For years I'd drink from any flowing water that looked clear and clean whenever I was out hiking. I'd heard it was a bad idea but figured "what the hell". To my knowledge I never suffered any ill as a result. Even so, I've since come to appreciate that, no, really, it's a bad idea, and have stopped.
Urine is addressed in the HTI faq.
You need a filter? Pussy.
I didn't get a badge for it in scouts, but somewhere I heard that a parched person can drink their own urine six times consecutively, and live. The seventh is pure poison.
How come there are plenty of words for "dying of hunger", but there's no word for "dying of thirst"?
27: Holy crap, you live in Chester?! God, I would love to live in the northern Ca boonies.
Heh. No, I live in Utah. My dad's side are all from the bay area. After WWII for a while you could get leases for cabins on National Forest land. There's a few sites several miles outside of Chester along the Feather River and Domingo creek, just a little ways downstream from Domingo Springs. My grandfather got one of those leases and built a cabin. My aunt still maintains it. We went there a lot as kids, and I still try to get out there every couple years.
I recommend everyone go back in time and have a relative build a cabin.
No such thing as an asymptomatic carrier of giardia - the parasite has to build a cyst in order to reproduce and survive. So if John has no symptoms, I have no hesitation in pronouncing his faeces fit for public consumption.
I have to admit that upon reading the product claims I wanted to see somebody else use it to drink from the East River.
If after a year that guinea pig was doing fine, I'd up and buy the Prophet-Mandated Year's Supply.
Symptoms include loss of appetite, lethargy, fever, explosive diarrhea, loose or watery stool, stomach cramps, upset stomach, bloating, and flatulence. Symptoms typically begin 1-2 weeks after infection and may wane and reappear cyclically. Symptoms are caused largely by the thick coating of Giardia organisms coating the inside of the small intestine and blocking nutrient absorption. Most people are asymptomatic; only about a third of infected people exhibit symptoms.
D^2's contrarianism reaches even so far as the giardiasis Wiki entry. The man is mad, I tell you.
I've drunk water from Scottish mountain streams. Well, streams coming off mountains, anyway, since I am too lazy to go climbing the actual mountains themselves.
I didn't get a badge for it in scouts, but somewhere I heard that a parched person can drink their own urine six times consecutively, and live. The seventh is pure poison.
How come there are plenty of words for "dying of hunger", but there's no word for "dying of thirst"?
Really bad advice from teh interwebs, part 30002...
Of course people die of thirst, you sodding imbecile. Drinking your own piss will get you nowhere - piss is water+(all kinds of other toxic stuff your body wants rid of), so putting it back in your system means that you get no more water and even more (toxic stuff you want rid of) accumulating in your body.
good God, I'm wrong it appears. It's a novel feeling and I think I rather like it. Let's try it again.
Surely if you drank a huge amount of water, so that you were basically pissing fresh water, then went to the desert where you no longer had any water, but still had a full bladder, then it would be a better idea to collect your piss and drink it at least once, rather than just pissing on the sand?
re: 39
Sure, before you get dehydrated, and when you are peeing what is essentially just water, it would make sense.
Later on, when the level of byproducts increases, no so much.
Remember that it's salty, so you'll be thirstier...the answer is essentially "this is almost always a really stupid thing to do and is no solution to your problem, so internalise the idea that it's stupid now and you won't be tempted".
If you're going anywhere you're likely not to have water, take enough water with you, and/or means of getting it. And if you have water, drink it* - WILL is just as bad an approach to exercise biochemistry as it is to strategy, nuclear physics, politics..
*The British army used to teach squaddies to exercise "water discipline", which meant not drinking water if you could help it at all. Later, someone pointed out that the Israelis didn't bother with this and seemed much happier, despite it being a lot hotter and drier in the Negev than Salisbury Plain. It was abandoned.
I don't think that anyone should plan to rely on urine for drinking water as a routine thing, but in unexpected emergency situations 39 and 40 look about right.
the trouble would be that you would want to have some other drink nearby, to wash away the taste of the urine.
You debvelop a taste for it, DD.
Survivors of the Sprinhill Mine disaster stayed alive by drinking urine.
This has been today's Canadian fact.
Today's Canadian fact enlightens me: I always thought that disaster was called "Spring Hill".
Hm, Wikipaedia wants to split the difference.
Also, IDP, did you realize the Springhill Mining Disaster is a trinity, possessed of the same mystical plural unity as the Christian Father, Son, and Holy Ghost?
Of course people die of thirst, you sodding imbecile.
I believe that wasn't the issue; it's that there's no word for dying of thirst.
Jackmormon:
Do you keep a year's worth of supplies?
In case of horrible natural disaster, I am immediately going to my LDS friends's houses to hang out/survive.
Included in their supplies is an arsenal intended to repel moochers, Will. Don't try to take advantage of the magic underwear people. They know your kind.
I love the part about Ruddick being black. My dad's from Cumberland County, and grew up in the black section of Amherst. When we moved to the states in '64, he amazed me with his ease around blacks. The black population of Sydney, Pictou, Amherst and New Glascow are descendants of Underground Railway escapees, by and large.
Underground Railway
So the path to coal mining would have been pretty clear.
What are these "plenty of" words for dying of hunger? One can starve, and one can starve to death. I must be overlooking something.
For thirsting to death, how about "to exsiccate". It doesn't come with "to death" baked in, but it's so rarely used we could probably commandeer it.
What I meant to say is
"One is plenty", not "'One' is plenty."
Or rather, "be famished" -- different from starving in that it implies a malefactor.
51:
My best friend is LDS. I'll let me in the bunker.
One can "famish".
Flumming in Flancaster is fraught. One can, but one ought not.
Flumming is a major activity in Sweden.
59: So you think, Will. The magic underwear people are ruthless and cunning, and have subtle ways of getting in your good graces.
Are you willing to convert, marry a 16-year old, and produce babies? You may have a gighting chance.
All over Sweden, gights are breaking out in the flums.
This is so right, and we obviously need a word or phrase that means "to die of thirst." I'm not very creative, so someone else needs to step up. If no one offers anything I will start spreading the word that "to die of thirst"="to wizard cocksuck", and thereby set the movement back several decades. Consider yourselves warned.
"Exsiccate", O Broque Landres.
Unslake my thirst, say you'll parch me again.
"exsiccate" is, like "famish", a transitive verb.
"Exsiccate" would work well for one of those mummified dried frogs you see from time to time, but wouldn't accurately describe the nice fresh still somewhat hydrated cadaver of someone who had just died of thirst.
I don't see how this word "exsiccate" is any different from the widely known "desiccate".
It's less widely known, and so easier to hang a new meaning on it.
But Emerson's critique is not without merit. Maybe we should go all out with the neologism.
If I don't have some water soon, I'm totally going to prurg.
If Standpipe doesn't get some water soon, he'll wizard cocksuck.
We could say of one who has been restored to life from death-by-thirst (by a passing Jesus, e.g.) that s/he was exprurgated. Some of these nominally lucky folks still won't have access to water, and will become unexprugated.
If Standpipe doesn't get some water soon, he'll wizard cocksuck.
That wizards ejaculate crisp, clear, springwater is well-known.
Australians use the word "perish".
Cool! -- To mean specifically "die of thirst"? In my dialect the word has a broader meaning.
75: If you can't spell your own neologism, what hope does it have?
Pioneers always go through a testing stage.
Lo and behold:
In the book of John, for example, an early draft had translated into Kriol the words "Whoever believes in me will not perish." But when asked the meaning of perish, Aboriginal people said that to them the word meant thirsty.
Ms Mickan said: "Out in the desert, they'd think 'oh, I am perishing for water', or 'I am really thirsty'. That was their understanding." So the phrase was replaced with "Whoever believes in me will not die".
