Save water, piss in the garden

The environment is on everyone's mind these days with the LIVE earth concerts. And this groundbreaking study in Greenland showing that in warmer times, a forest once stood where we now have 2km of ice. One of the worries of melting glaciers has to do with the availability of water, and the numbers are ugly:

"According to data collected from NASA and the World Health Organization, 4 billion people will face water shortages by 2050. Already in China, water levels in the Yellow River -- a source that supplies more than 150 million people -- are down 33 percent from the average. In China's cities, wastewater pollution and inadequate treatment facilities have contaminated the water consumed by more than half the population. Of its 669 major cities, 440 face moderate to severe water shortages. "

On the local city buses there are advertisements saying a can of tuna of water per week is enough for your lawn. I'm not sure why they chose a tuna can, but, for your information, that's 2.5cm of precipitation. Even more impressive I found an organization which promotes peeing on your lawn instead of watering it. You save water twice, since you don't need to flush or water your lawn:

"So take a piss in the garden, and while you are doing that, look out at your garden and think about how lucky you are, to be surrounded with all of what nature provides. Surely, there is something we can all do to help water conservation."

So far almost 4000L have been saved. I know I'll do my part...

Diluting your alcohol

Real nerds know that global warming is for sissies, the real ultimate, unavoidable death to all things in the universe is the ever increasing entropy. Real nerds might also know that when you combine water and alcohol they seem to mix in an exothermic reaction, and the overall volume of the solution is less than the combined volumes of the water and the alcohol because of hydrogen bonding. However according to this reasearch, they never truly mix: "Nobody has ever tasted a microscopically perfect mix of alcohol and water," says ALS scientist Jinghua Guo, one of the leaders of this research. We found that the mixing of alcohol and water on the microscopic level is incomplete no matter how long you wait."
So what does this mean for entropy. Well when mixing two perfect pure liquids, you would expect entropy to increase substantially as the mollecules randomly distribute in the solution. However because water and alcohol don't mix, alcohol mollecules create ordered cages of water, thus decreasing the entropy... "The rings formed when alcohol and water are mixed are stable structures because the hydrogen bonds are saturated," says Guo. "One would expect to see even further reductions in the entropy of the system if there were more methanol and water molecules forming highly ordered structures."
So there you go, save the world one drink at a time.