Good Fact

Mariners Know How to Cook – and Clean!

- Adam Clare

When out at sea one must make the most of what one has, so chefs are put into a situation in which they need to ensure all their cooking gear and serving gear survives rough seas. It’s lucky for us that they have shared their tips for keeping equipment clean and in ship-shape! These tips are good for anyone who uses a kitchen!

Dishes or Plates:

Cracked: For hairline cracks, put the plate in a pan of milk and boil for 45 minutes. The crack should disappear: if not, it was probably worse than you originally thought.

Greasy: Soak in hot water with baking soda. Chemically, baking soda plus grease equals soap, not soap to wash the baby mind you, but soap just the same.

Smelly: Wash them in salty water, or use a little ammonia in hot soapy water. You can also add a little ground mustard to the water.

Stained: Soak overnight in a mixture of hot water and soda. Then rub in a vinegar moisten cloth dipped in salt. This works very well with tea stains.

Read more tips at Marine Catering – Best Practices

Mobile Tech Makes Donating Insanely Easy

- Fono 3 Comments

It’s the giving time of year, and MobHappy has a short writeup on new technology that allows people to donate to charities, simply by sending a text. This is a great advancement, because it shortens the gap between intention and action where a lot of charitable dollars are lost.

Today, mGive works with over 200 charities, enabling mobile users to donate money quickly and easily via shortcode. And it’s been successful: one campaign, featuring Alicia Keys and conducted during the American Idol TV show saw 90,000 donors raise $450,000 in just minutes. Donors have given about $1.5 million via mobile so far in the US; this exceeds the first year of online donations, and those now amount to some $18 billion per year.

Unfortunately the service is currently only available to our US friends.

Read the rest of the article

Gross National Happiness Redux

- Fono

We’ve written about Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness before, but now that the new policy has been in place in a while, it’s a good time to revisit the topic.

First, Bhutan has very nicely posted all their research online.

Second, the good news is that Bhutan’s research is being applied elsewhere, within the rubric of the burgeoning happiness studies.

Studies of life satisfaction around the world are now enhanced by regular polling in many countries using a broad range of questions, and have led to consistent findings in recent years that the highest levels of satisfaction are found in such northern European countries as Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands and Sweden—countries with a strong sense of social solidarity and attention to work-life balance, small income gaps, and—contrary to the thinking of American conservatives—high taxation rates.

These studies find that many relatively income-poor nations, such as Costa Rica and Colombia, also have high rates of life satisfaction, leading one group of British researchers to establish a “Happy Planet Index,” dividing life satisfaction scores by ecological footprints. They find that many so-called developing countries actually rank at the top of their index.

Read more at Worldchanging

The Dark Side of Hope

- Adam Clare

You’ve probably heard people say that we should have reasonable goals and, you know what, they’re right. If you have reasonable expectations about the world around you, you can have a happier life – some new research backs this idea up by studying happiness in people after a major surgery.

GIVING up hope can actually make some people living with a serious illness happier, according to US researchers who have found a “dark side of hope”.

A study by the University of Michigan Health Center for Behavioral and Decision Sciences in Medicine involved a group of adults who had their colons removed.

In total 41 people were told their colostomy was reversible and they could undergo a second operation to reconnect their bowels after several months and get rid of their colostomy bag.

Another 30 individuals were told that the colostomy was permanent.

The study, published in the latest issue of Health Psychology, found the second group, the one without hope, reported being happier over the next six months than those with reversible colostomies.

“We think they were happier because they got on with their lives,” researcher Peter Ubel said.

Read the rest of the article.

Tokyo Film Festival Rolls Out Green Carpet

- Adam Clare

The Tokyo International Film Festival has rolled out a green carpet made of recycled plastic bottles to show their support for the environment. You can read about their Green Carpet Club here and the Globe and Mail has a short article on the festival, which is also showing The Cove (trailer below).

The theme of the nine-day festival, which started Saturday and will feature more than 100 movies, is ecology. Films include The Cove , a documentary that depicts an annual hunt of dolphins in Japan. Festival organizers added it at the last minute in part because of pressure from overseas.

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