I am fortunate to live in a city with an excellent recycling program. Our city has managed to build up a single-stream recycling system, which means that residents are issued single bins into which all of their plastic, metal and glass recyclables can be loaded at once. The service runs once every other week, and here’s the best part: it’s free. The big plastic bins are Continue reading
I was born and grew up in the United States, and I’ve lived in suburban contexts my whole life. One of the things I never noticed until I traveled outside of North America was how many of the amenities that I’ve become accustomed to – running water, access to home heating fuels, electricity – seem to just be there. They’re available as if out of nowhere. Gas supply pipes are usually buried, electrical lines are visible but so ordinary that they’re easy to ignore and water is always ready to Continue reading
Imagine the following situation. Suppose you have in front of you a large, burning candle and an empty martini shaker. Suppose that there is enough melted wax in the burning candle that it would fill about an eighth of the volume of the martini shaker. Imagine now that you’ve poured the melted wax into the bottom of the martini shaker. If you were to swirl the melted wax around a little, you’d notice that Continue reading