Uncanny Valley

A pretty wide net cast on the topic of commodes. There are some choice exhibits in the small museum, but it is by no means complete, and it was only established in 1994. It is on the grounds of a sanitation company, Sulabh, and seems to be a consolidation of all the random things one would acquire in the industry. They have all sorts of commodes, from chairs with hidden chamberpots to jewel-encrusted ‘thrones.’ (Is ‘encrusted’ really an appropriate term in this case?).

However, don’t just visit the Sulabh campus for the museum. When I visited I was shown many interesting things with much of that Indian hospitality. There are display models of the composting outhouses the company makes, some that even produce usable methane bio-gas. There is a large public lavatory facing the street which provides gas power for the kitchen and some lighting. The loos also provide water and compost for a lush garden, which in a Delhi summer was pretty striking. I also saw the laboratory, public health clinic (wash your hands, people!), and library.

Our guide summed it up nicely: “If people adopted what is here, the water would be much cleaner.” With water becoming more and more scarce, this is something all people are going to have to think about more and more.

I am really impressed with the thoroughness of Indian industry. They look at all aspects of a product and its byproducts. Any wastes need to be accounted for, and if possible used as resources. Instead of just providing sanitation services, they provide cheap power, water, and fertilizer to villages. It shows that industry being green is hardly contradictory to profitabilty, and it almost seems that without such thoroughness a business is oly holding itself back.

Bloomed in the second week of June 2003 as the biggest bloom on record. Course it’s not technically one flower, but thousands of teeny tiny ones. Too bad they only have steaming video and not streaming olfactro or whatever you’d call it. The unopened bloom is more than 7′ tall already. Looks like it’s the season for Amorphophallus titanium, or corpse flowers to bloom.

The plant is in Botany Greenhouse #8 on Birge hall’s lower level at UWM. Picture of 2001 bloom of Big Bucky courtesy of Michael Rothbart/University of Wisconsin-Madison.

A corpse flower (Amorphophallus titanium) was in bloom in the Conservatory of Flowers in Golden Gate Park. I don’t know why noone informed me of this in time. I got there when the bloom was nearly closed, but still large and sturdy. There was no real smell when I got there. There was more the lack of a smell when you left the room. I guess it reminded me of this classroom I had a class in in university. The room was in an animal science building and built like an abattoir, with rails on the ceiling to cart in carcasses. The place was clean, but you could tell that there was a smell there before that had permeated the place. That’s what the flower smelled like at the point I caught it, just a heaviness.

They did show Ted’s two ’siblings’ whose alliterative names i neglected to remember. One had bloomed a few years ago, and was merely a tuber. The other had some green and was set for a grand opening in a few years hence. Hopefully I’ll know about this one before I have to try to replicate the smell again.