shit and alcohol eq energy

Yesterday i wrote about garbage and “secondary raw materials”. Today i stumbled over another strange way of generating energy. In the Swedish cities Laholm and Båstad they extract heat and electricity from, hold your breath! Shit and fine spirits…

Basically they collect manure (that’s a nicer word for shit), leftovers from schools and restaurants and other organic waste and mix this with spirits confiscated from smugglers. Now they ferment this slurry for about 25 days and in the process a lot of methane is generated. Enough to cover 20-25% of the heating in the area and 21 million kilowatt hours of electricity. When they are done they return the dry remnants of the slurry to the farmers to use as fertilizer.

A translation by google translate can be found here.

Swedish scare about cancerogenous substances in wine

Today in the Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet there is an article about cancerogenous remnants from pesticides in wine.  The Swedish Society for Nature Conservation (SSNC) have tested 40 different types of wines sold in “systembolaget”. (“Systembolaget” is the only off license shop in Sweden, strange country it is…)  and found remenants of pesticides in all 34 conventional wines and in 1 of the 6 tested biological grown wines.

Well that doesn’t sound good does it? Well when an organisation with a stake in the outcome of a test publishes results i normally get very suspicious… This time i didn’t have to dig very deep, Aftonbladet actually had a companion article with some comments from the national food administration. It turns out that the levels of pesticide is a lot less than the allowed amount. For example the level of pyrimethanil is a thousand times less then the level allowed and considered safe…

In my humble opinion not much to be scared about. And if you are scared, be very scared! I would bet that you could find this level of substances in just about everything you eat. But then i prefer beer so i’m not really in the danger zone.

By the way you might ask why i even read the tabloid in the first place?  Well i have been testing out running Minefield (the next developers generation of firefox) under FreeBSD and wine. But more about that later.

Water cheaper than beer!

I’m in a state of chock!

The Prague rule that beer is always the cheapest drink on the menu dosn’t apply any longer!

I have found that the sky bar at hilton prague called cloude 9 is selling water for less than their beer. Their price for a 33cl. bottle of mattoni mineral water is 60 CZK and the equal amount of beer would cost you 90 CZK. And their soft drinks cost about the same as the beer.

So watch out, ordering the cheapest on the drink list could result in you getting served water

Btw. 90 CZK is really expensive for a beer in this country but i guess it’s the normal price at an international hotel.