And now, a word from the porta-potty industry

Porta-potties are being put in place for Saturday’s rally in DC:

Saturday’s rally is a pretty small-ish job for USS, which services 24 states. To give you an idea, the company provides the roaming restrooms for the Rose Bowl Parade and the Rose Bowl in Pasadena — including servicing all those tailgate party, and VIP tent needs.

But the company does a lot of business on The Mall — it was one of the porta-potty suppliers for the Obama inauguration.

“We supplied a good chunk for the Obama inauguration,” Barton said. “We did about 1,200 toilets and dozens of restroom trailers.”

The Obama inauguration, he said “cleaned out every portable toilet in the D.C. market to cover that one.”

“As far as we know, it was the single largest portable-toilet event that has ever happened in this country.”

  10:54pm  •  Business & Finance  •  Tweet This  •  Comments (1)  • 

Rally in DC

The Guardian has an article on the upcoming Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear. It’s a rally that’s proven difficult to characterize, other than it’s an attempt draw attention away from the vocal extremists and towards the more reasonable (relative) centrists.

“Glenn Beck is doing something completely different. He doesn’t just do partisan anti-Democratic talking points in the traditional sense. He’s really grabbed on to something much more paranoid and much more dangerous, warning people against the government. It’s not that Obama is too liberal or that his tax cuts are too small or it’s not that he should be more hawkish overseas. It’s really that he’s trying to destroy America and that the reason he ran to be president is that he wanted to destroy the constitution, he wants to take away all your liberties and he wants the government to take over all aspects of daily life.”

You would think this sort of talk would be relegated to the loony fringe conspiracy-type crowd, but in America, this guy has an audience of literally millions.

I’ll be at the Rally on Saturday – it’ll be an interesting experience.

  11:30pm  •  Culture  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

$15 trillion treasure

Fast Company has an article about Russia’s oil & gas exploits in the Arctic, with a mention of how it is affecting indigenous tribes in the area.

Years ago, geologists and engineers verified the existence of rich natural-gas deposits at Bovanenkovo through three-dimensional seismic imaging and exploratory drilling into the permafrost. Then, beginning in 2008, Gazprom brought in building supplies and constructed a 684-mile-long pipeline under the frigid Kara. With an estimated 4.9 trillion cubic meters of gas buried under the permafrost, Bovanenkovo has been described by company officials as one of the largest natural-gas finds in Gazprom history, although not as big as the Urengoy field, which is also in Siberia. “If Gazprom closed all its other gas fields and was pumping just from here,” I am told by my escort, Andrei Teplyakov, the youthful press officer for Gazprom’s Siberian operations, “the company could survive for more than a decade.”

The writing isn’t all that great, but the subject matter is definitely interesting.

  2:30pm  •  Business & Finance  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

Facebook Feed Optimization

Your Facebook newsfeed is heavily curated… by Facebook. Daily Beast ran an experiment to better understand how your status updates and posts are pushed out to others (or not), and the results are interesting.

After weeks of testing and trying everything from having Phil post videos to getting some of his friends to flood him with comments, by the end of our experiment, a few of our volunteers had still literally never seen Phil appear in their feeds, either Top News or Most Recent. These were the “popular kids”—users of Facebook with 600 or more friends. (Conversely, those with only 100 to 200 friends were among the first to spot Phil.) So the key, as you build your coterie of friends, is making sure to include some without huge networks. They’ll see more of your feeds, interact in Facebook-approved ways, and up your visibility with all.

Will we see FFOs as SEOs for social networks?

  9:50pm  •  Internet  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

Big mother shucker

Lobster processors shuck lobsters whole and (mostly) unbroken from their carapaces by immersing them in high-pressure water. Like, really high pressure. The pressure separates the meat from the shell cleanly. The lobsters are then dunked again, in even higher pressure – 87,000 pounds per square inch – to kill all the germs on them. (By comparison, the pressure at the bottom of the Marianas Trench is about 16,000 psi.)

According to Maine Lobster Promotion Council executive director Kristin Millar, John Hathaway is the only processor in the United States using this high-pressure water-immersion method for processing raw, fresh Gulf of Maine lobster. In fact, because other lobster processors freeze their processed product or cook it first, and because Hathaway puts his processed lobster through the high pressure process a second time, bringing the pressure up to 87,000 psi, which removes any lingering pathogens and bacteria after it’s been shucked, washed, weighed, and sealed, and, without using heat, extends its shelf life to an astonishing 30 days. Millar said, “To my knowledge, he’s the only processor of raw, fresh lobster meat in the world.”

Bonus link: David Foster Wallace’s highly readable article on the Maine Lobster Festival.

  9:08pm  •  Food  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  •