{"id":3129,"date":"2005-09-12T13:50:08","date_gmt":"2005-09-12T17:50:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2005\/09\/12\/3129.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:53:05","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:53:05","slug":"id-walk-mile-for-a-straw","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2005\/09\/12\/id-walk-mile-for-a-straw\/","title":{"rendered":"I’d walk a mile for a straw"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Once again going from Collision Detection<\/a>, here’s a bit of good news. Vestergaard Frandsen has prototyped (Can I verb that?) the LifeStraw™<\/a>, a “straw” that contains a water purification filter. It’s 25 cm long and 29 mm in diameter—about an inch thick, in other words, which makes it less of a straw and more of a tube, but that’s scarcely the point). It appears to work (according to the manufacturers), and it looks like once they get manufacturing it would cost you a couple of hundred bucks to buy a carton which would keep a small village sipping for a year. My, my.\n

Let’s be clear. I’m not suggesting that the end of cholera is near, nor that this means that there will be no dysentery in Africa. That would be nice, but I don’t think it will happen in this generation. The existence of this thing doesn’t solve the distribution problems, the education problems, or the more basic clean water problems that are really causing the disease. But even if—and I will sound like an evil racist imperialist here, but—even if it’s just part of the Peace Corps kit, the Médecins Sans Frontières kit, the UNICEF kit that goes along with all of our affluent western do-gooders as they bring western relief to non-western folk, that would be an amazing thing. And, you know, what if, say, FEMA had a few hundred cartons of those things in a warehouse in Florida, just in case? I mean, if it wouldn’t interfere with anybody’s tax cut or anything. And look! A gratuitous internal capitalization! It makes me proud to be an American.\n

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Once again going from Collision Detection, here\u2019s a bit of good news. Vestergaard Frandsen has prototyped (Can I verb that?) the LifeStraw\u0099, a \u201cstraw\u201d that contains a water purification filter. It\u2019s 25 cm long and 29 mm in diameter\u2014about an…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3129"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3129\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17520,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3129\/revisions\/17520"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}