31.3.09

Three essential houseplants for clean indoor air. [ Kamal Meattle on TED video,]

kamal meattle TED

Love is all you need? If you live in New Delhi—or any polluted city—love is not enough. But these three houseplants are…all you need for a clean, fresh air that provides a measurably healthier environment for your body, and its brain.

Three-minute Video detailing how many plants, how high, per person, with cleaning instructions. Via TED.

With thanks for the tip to GreenUpgrader, one of my favorite green sites:

Seventeen years ago Kamal Meattle found out that the air in his home city of Dehli was killing him. He had grown allergic to the pollutants in the air and his lung capacity started declined to 70%. He began researching and found that these three plants can provide a human with all the fresh air they need indoors to be healthy. The three plants are the Areca Palm, the Mother-in-law’s Tongue , and the Money Plant….

  • The Areca Palm (or Chrysalidocarpus lutescens) is does great air cleansing work during the day. About 4 shoulder height plants per person should do the trick.
  • The Mother-in-law’s Tongue (or Sansevieria trifasciata) takes over by converting CO2 to O2 at night. You want about 6 to 8 of these waist high plants per person.
  • The Money Plant (or Epipremnum aureum) does the job of filtering out removing Formaldehyde and other VOC’s (Volatile Organic Compounds).
  • …According to Meattle if you have sufficient quantities of these plants you could live in an air tight bubble and as long as the plants are living you’d have enough fresh air to live. Now this isn’t just some half-baked theory he had one morning over coffee, he has been testing this theory out for the last 15 years at the at Paharpur Business Centre, a 20 year old, 50,000 sq ft building by filling it with over 1,200 plants for 300 building occupants.

    The Indian Government has rated the building the healthiest buidling in Delhi, and studies have shown that after spending 10 hours in the building your body will be working better than before.

    Aside from being a natural and beatiful source of fresh air, this method also helps reduce energy consumption, because you don’t need to filter or bring fresh air in.

    Now Meattle, has big plans. …

    Paul Hawken, Blessed Unrest and WiserEarth

    Hawken describes a convergence of the environmental and social justice movements as the largest social movement in history, and the fastest growing movement, comprising over 1 million organizations in every country in the world. He also talks extensively about his new project Wiser Earth, which is a wiki-based social network surrounding organizations in the environmental and social justice fields.

    30.3.09

    Neil Gershenfeld: The beckoning promise of personal fabrication

    Se viene un futuro (loco) para todos...

    About this talk

    MIT professor Neil Gershenfeld talks about his Fab Lab -- a low-cost lab that lets people build things they need using digital and analog tools. It's a simple idea with powerful results.

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    aca pueden ver las diapositivas de la presentación y la clase del personaje

    Also:
    Social Singularity
    Biological Altruism
    Pay it Forward

    23.3.09

    Vanuatu Land Divers - Naghol / N'Gol

    Before bungee jumping, there was ....

    .... this bizarre spectacle, which is called Naghol or N'Gol.

    It began on Pentecost Island in Vanuatu (New Hebrides) many centuries, perhaps millennia ago, when a beaten woman ran away from her husband, Tamale. He found her hiding in a tall tree and called to her that if she came down he might beat her - but only a little. However if he had to get her she would be sorry. She refused. He climbed the tree and as he made his final grab, she leaped. In anguish at her death (or anger that he had missed her) Tamale jumped after her, not realising his wife had tied liana vines around her ankles and survived the fall.

    Tamale perished. The ritual evolved over the years, to stripping a tall tree of it's surrounding branches and building a tower of sticks to support the trunk. The platform is made of wood and covered with leaves purposely to protect the platform from the sun drying it out before the ceremony. The leaves are removed by the jumpers before the jump. The liana vines which are tied to the ankel and slightly elastic following the wet season, are shredded and the other end tied to the tower. Men and boys, some as young as seven years, climb the tower and leap from the platforms in a show of strength, and a statement to women that they can never be tricked again....

    It is also a fertility rite. Every year in April, when the first yam crop is ready, the islanders on the south of the island start building a huge tower for the land diving. It will take about 5 weeks to build, all materials come from the forest: lianas, branches, trunks. Eventually a wooden tower between 30 to 40 meters high is erected. Each diver must select his own vine. Its size is of utmost importance and if it is only 10 cm too long, the diver will hit the ground and break his neck. As the vines stretch at the end of the dive, the land diver's heads curl under and their shoulders touch the earth, making it fertile for the following year's yam crop.

    The ritual is followed with a celebration of Kava, Tuluk, and Laplap. Yum Yum !!

    17.3.09

    Closed Zone

    Un Viaje hacia la Obsesión

    "MythBusters co-host Adam Savage presents a glimpse into the mind of the obsessed and the motivation that drives their obsessions."

    16.3.09

    Viral Education 2.0

    [Salud!] Gesundheit Institute y la Dra. Rita Levi-Montalcini

    Porfavor lean esta vision del verdadero Patch Adams de un modelo de salud, basada en la Diversión y la Amistad

    Vision for a Free Hospital Based on Fun and Friendship (Y el mejor traductor que encontré al Español--jaja "Remiendo" Adams)

    by Patch Adams

    [800px-Patch_Adams_at_Sarvodaya.jpg]

    Excerpt

    "In spending this amount of time with patients, we found that the vast majority of our adult population does not have a day to day vitality for life (which we would define as good health). The idea that a person was healthy because of normal lab values and clear x-rays had no relationship to who the person was. Good health was much more deeply related to close friendships, meaningful work, a lived spirituality of any kind, an opportunity for loving service and an engaging relationship to nature, the arts, wonder, curiosity, passion and hope. All of these are time-consuming, impractical needs. When we don't meet these needs, the business of high-tech medicine diagnoses mental illness and treats with pills.

    What the majority need is an engagement with life. This is why we fully integrated medicine with performing arts, arts and crafts, agriculture, nature, education, recreation and social service, as essential parts of health care delivery. We knew that the best medical thing we could do for the patients was to help them have grand friendship skills and find meaning in their lives. This is a major reason that the staff's home was the hospital. We insisted on friendships with our patients (made easy by not charging, and giving them our lives). A patient ideally would bring their whole family while they were healthy, and stay a few days as friends, becoming familiar with the hospital (home, sanctuary), so that just being there was relaxing, even healing." Full text


    Entrevista en Español

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    http://www.unescoeh.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/rita-levi-montalcini-maki-galimberti.jpg
    Tambien, me gustaría que vean ESTA hermosa entrevista de la Dra. Rita Levi-Montalcini (acá su autobiografía). Ella es premio Nobel de Medicina, pionera en neuroembriología, alumna de Giuseppe Levi--maestro de sus otros dos compañeros Salvador Luria and Renato Dulbecco ambos también premios Nobel--A PUNTO de cumplir sus 100 años y explica que el cerebro no se arruga/deteriora: "Mantén tu cerebro ilusionado, activo, hazlo funcionar, y nunca se degenerará."

    para los interesados, aqui hay otra linda entrevista mas extensa

    3.3.09

    Rethink Afghanistan

    With 17,000 more troops headed for Afghanistan, this mini-documentary by Robert Greenwald's Brave New Foundation calls the Afghanistan "surge" into question.

    For full story, see this page.