In an effort to keep my home as free of harsh chemicals as possible, for the last year or so I’ve been making my own cleaning products. I’ve found them to be just as effective as commercial cleaners, but a whole lot cheaper. They’re also much healthier, and avoid releasing chemicals like Phosphates into the environment. Some of them are dead-easy, and some need a bit of work to make.

As I experienced success with certain cleaners, I’ve slowly branched out and added more to my repertoire. This is a round-up of my experiences, which have been almost universally positive.

Note: Everyone may not get the same results. Test on a small section first. Tweak recipes as necessary. These should be safe, but could damage some surfaces so be very careful.

Spray Cleaner

Ingredients:
- 1 PartWhite Vinegar
- 1 Part Water
- A Pinch of Dish Soap
- Lemon Juice (Optional)
- Essential Oils (Optional)

Cost: About 25 to 50 cents a bottle

Uses: Counters, Appliances, Outside of Toilet, Tabletops (be sure to test in a small area first), as daily shower spray.

This is probably the easiest one to make. The smell took a little getting used-to, but dissipates very quickly. It can also be nicely covered by a few drops of essential oils of your desired scent. Lemon juice works well too, and helps cut grease.

Pure white vinegar also does a great job cleaning toilets. Pour a cup or two into the water and let it sit for 15 to 20 minutes. Come back and stains will come right off.

Pure vinegar can also work as a glass cleaner, though doesn’t do quite as good a job as ammonia-based cleaners on heavy jobs.

Tub, Sink & Stove Cleaner

Ingredients:
- Baking Soda. That’s usually it.
- Table Salt, if needed.

Uses: Ceramics, Vinyl Floors, Stovetops, Fridges.

Cost: About $3-$4 for 2 KG of Baking Soda

This was a resounding success. Turns out that it does a pretty great job cleaning anything that needs a bit of scouring. I put mine into a jar and poked holes in the lid with a hammer and nail, so I can shake it onto cleaning surfaces. I then scrub with a damp cloth before wiping the Baking Soda away with a damp cloth.

This also did an absolutely fantastic job on our ceramic stovetop. We had tried several other cleaners, and found that this was better than some dedicated ceramic stovetop cleaners.

Drain Cleaner

Pour some Baking Soda down the drain, then pour in some vinegar. Wait a few minutes and then pour in boiling water.

Doesn’t unblock all drains, but can help some slower ones move a little faster.

Toothpaste (Experimental)

Ingredients:
- Baking Soda
- Table Salt
- Food-safe Vegetable Glycerine
- Peppermint Essential Oil

View the Full Recipe.

Cost: About $1 to $2 for 100ml

I was very skeptical of this one, but it worked-out better than I expected. I’m too chicken to use it exclusively, but I hedge my bets by using this one at night, and a more conventional toothpaste in the morning.

It’s really refreshing, and leaves my mouth feeling very clean.

I’m still putting this one in the “experimental” category. I am not a dentist, and so can’t guarantee 100% that this is safe long term. I do know that my mouth feels just as clean after brushing with this as it does with normal toothpaste.

I put mine in a reusable toothpaste bottle, though I assume this might be harder to find for some people. I suspect a chef’s style squeeze bottle would work well too.

Demolishing a Building One Story at a Time

Here’s an amazing video of a building being demolished by slowly lowering it to the ground and dismantling it one floor at a time.

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Do Gas Taxes Cover the Costs of Roads?

This article just barely scratches the surface of something I’d like to see a whole lot more about. They discus information released in Texas that reveals that gas taxes are not actually high enough to cover Texas’ expensive road system. I had the hunch that driving was subsidized by general taxes, but hadn’t seen any numbers. I’d love to see more on this.

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Lord of the Memes

David Brooks at the New York Times captures the changing state of intellectualism and taste: “prestige has shifted from the producer of art to the aggregator and the appraiser. Inventors, artists and writers come and go, but buzz is forever.” Nothing remotely groundbreaking, but this tongue-in-cheek article describes exactly what most prominent blogs have become.

Note: This is the first post in what might become a regular series of posts from guest writers. Our first writer is Montréal-based Sylvan Lanken, who has been deeply concerned with environmental and social issues for as long as I can remember. His pieces, as currently planned, will center around information culled from the Canadian Census.

The table below was constructed using data from the 2001 Census of Canada. I chose to include the largest city in each of the ten provinces, and arranged these cities in alphabetical order. In each category, I highlighted the “best” and “worst” values, according to my own views on the environment and society. The exception to this was in the last column, the percentage of commuters traveling by car as passengers. While a higher value is arguably better than a lower one, the fact remains that these commuters are traveling by car as opposed to more sustainable methods.

Commuting Methods in Ten Canadian Cities

Source: 2001 Census of Canada

Statistics used are for the cities proper, as opposed to those for greater metropolitan areas

Inadequate public transit is a chronic problem in Canada, and there’s no single reason why this is the case. A lack of transportation planning and vision at all levels of government, unchecked suburban growth, and an entrenched car culture, among other factors, are to blame. Even so, I was surprised to find that, except for Montréal and Toronto, less than a fifth of commuters in these cities use public transit. And, alarmingly, more than half of all commuters drive to and from their place of work in all cities except Montréal.

I love posting about ideas on the blog, but sometimes they’re too small to really say anything much about them. Even the littlest ideas can be interesting though, and so I’m tentatively going to launch a somewhat-regular series on good ideas. Most will be rather ordinary, everyday things - the sort of things we often take for granted but are, in the end, important because we use them so much. They might not be perfect, but they’re hopefully interesting or useful for some situations.

Where I’m from, a large portion of bottles and cans can be returned for a deposit. It’s common to see people rummaging through the trash to retrieve them for the small amount of money they garner.

For a negligible cost, we can make sure that a larger percentage of our waste gets properly disposed of, while providing a small income for our most vulnerable citizens.

These cans are nearly ubiquitous in San Francisco, where I saw them. They also come in a variety of designs.

Last weekend my girlfriend and I went picking wild strawberries from the forest to make jam. It was a long process - wild strawberries are probably 10% of the size of domesticated varieties, so we had to pick ten times as many. Seeing the frugality of nature made me realize that the majority of the plants in my garden would probably not last a month in nature. They put all of their resources into creating fruit which only serves to endear them to people like me, which in turn does ensure we help them reproduce. It has become obvious to me that most domesticated varieties need too much water, sun and fertilizer to keep healthy without human help.

Which brings me to the subject of evolution. A pro-intelligent design video (starring Kirk Cameron, no less) has been passing around YouTube showing how the banana is so perfectly suited to humans that only an intelligent designer could have made something so perfectly-matched (thusly, they imply god created humans and bananas at the same time). I’m setting up a straw-man here, as the argument is so vapid and ignorant that shooting it down is almost not worth the fraction of a calorie I’ll consume in typing this up. It is, of course, that if god did create the banana, he created something altogether different than what we consider a banana to be. There was an intelligent designer at work - us humans. It was through centuries of careful breeding that the human-friendly varieties of both bananas and strawberries were created. .

Resilience Theory attempts to analyze what makes ecological systems resilient, and use that as guidelines for applying it to a huge variety of other fields. The goal is to make systems resilient to unknown future shocks which might disrupt the system. One of the central tenets of the idea is that we won’t necessarily know what those disruptions will be, but we know that certain conditions will be more resilient to shocks than others. It is an extremely cross-disciplinary approach that attempts to explain phenomena in a wide variety of areas.

For example, ecological systems are generally most resilient when they exhibit large amounts of biodiversity. If the environment changes suddenly, chances are higher in a widely diverse system that at least some members of that system will be able to adapt into new niches.

Monocultures can be extremely effective for a time, but failures in the system can often be catastrophic. The Irish, for example, thrived for a time almost exclusively on potatoes, until the potato blight destroyed a huge portion of the crop and led to the starvation of millions. Many businesses thrive doing one thing extremely well, only to suffer when the market changed (think Polaroid, for example, which is slowly collapsing because of their reliance on the instant film market, which is itself in rapid decline).

This concept could also apply to many other facets of society. Our utter reliance on oil might soon prove to be an excellent example, as our supply looks ever more depleted, and rising costs look to make oil and its byproducts more expensive. We are utterly dependent on cheap oil for transportation, heating, and agriculture, but we aren’t working as hard as we could to create viable alternatives. Resilience theory posits that moving away from our dependance on oil would be good not just for the environment, it would also make our society more resilient to unknown shocks. We should have known better than to be so utterly reliant on something as unstable as oil.

This is just the very tip of the iceberg - the field looks at different states of equilibrium and attempts to show how and why systems balance themselves in different states, and how systems can often tip very quickly from one self-organized state to another. If global warming increases temperatures much more than 2 degrees centigrade, it’s worried that a bevy of further events - evaporating methane reserves under the arctic, desertification of the Amazon rainforest, and changes in reflective albedo could usher in a sort of quick flip to an even hotter state of equilibrium in a very short time. By all accounts it is extremely important to avoid hitting that point. The closer we move to it, the greater our risk.

A diagram showing two hypothetical steady states as balls lying on a curved surface. If the ball is pushed beyond a certain point, it might be pushed past a peak, at which point it could fall into a different trough.

An important aspect of Resilience theory is to study how and why these sudden shifts, or regime changes, take place. A standard maximization approach on a system (let’s say fisheries) may, in an attempt to get the highest possible yields, come closer to a threshold of regime change than they otherwise should. Resilience theory makes a point of studying how this works, and urges caution in such areas.

“Our focus should not be on constancy,” says father of resilience study Buzz Holling, “but on variability. Not on single equilibrium, but on events far from equilibria at the stability boundaries. That’s where the action was, that’s where evolution took place. That’s where the turbulence of nature occured upon which adaptive changes created new species, or new policies . . . these systems have multi-stable states, and they can flip from one to another. And if you don’t attend to the boundaries of stability, you’re losing the game. Variability is extremely important . . .”

Holling also cites a somewhat predictable cycle of boom, bust, and renewal which can be applied to everything from businesses, to forests, to ocean fisheries, to politics. Holling describes a business becoming very effective at one thing, specializing, becoming dependent on than one thing, becoming too rigid and resistant to change, going bust and then rebuilding itself with a new board and new direction as being rather similar to a forest maturing from a diverse polycultural grassland, into an old growth forest before being gutted by a forest fire and reverting back to small and diverse growth.

Fez’s Phil Fish on the Indie Games Industry

His comments on the “boiling ocean of shit” that is the mainstream games industry, given at the recent Interfaces Montréal summit. The designer of Indie-game Fez compares the cookie-cutter first-person shooters with great lower-fi fare like Rez, Katamari Damacy, and Ico. Via JiPé.

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6 Retarded Gas Saving Schemes

This is more for comedy than anything else. It’s amazing to see what people are actually trying to sell, and the lies they are willing to spout in order to do so.

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Seven Things You Need to Know About Ed Tufte

Anyone not familiar with Tufte’s work, and need a quick introduction, can read this to start. If you are interested in design you need to read his books, period.

World Changing on Worldwide Energy Policies

A report on renewable energy. Not for everyone, but has some information on Germany’s renewable energy program, one of the most extensive in the world:

Germany generates 14% of its energy needs–a total of 31,000 MW–from renewable energy. This share has increased 1 percent each year for the past decade.

In Germany the typical consumer pays $1.97 USD/month (1.25 Euros/month) to invest in the renewable energy infrastructure.

Just goes to show how renewable energy doesn’t have to be as expensive as some people think.

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Martha Cooper’s Vintage Hip Hop, Graffiti, and B-Boy Photos

The Current has a piece on the great photography work done by Martha in the 70’s and 80’s, before Hip Hop had gone mainstream.

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OE Cake Physics Engine Toy

It’s a simple drawing/physics program that lets you build whatever you want from the ingredients they give you (springs, elastics, water, gas, fire, etc. Shown at left is a kettle boiling water and turning a small windmill.

If you’re anything like me you will be able to spend hours at this.

I have long been intrigued by the idea of growing my own food, but wasn’t sure how to go about it in the city. I had grown herbs in a window box, but nothing substantial.

This summer I decided to plant a small balcony-based container garden. I’m going to post again later in the summer when I start being able to cultivate the fruits of my labours, but I do have to say that the results so far have been incredibly positive. A dozen or so zucchinis are growing, a good thirty tomatoes, a half dozen hot peppers (enough for making a bottle or two of hot sauce), and more than enough herbs to easily meet my needs. All of this in three relatively small plastic bins and a few stray pots.

There are still a couple more months to go in the growing season, and I haven’t eaten much aside from some herbs and some zucchini flowers, but the results are pretty encouraging. Tending to the plants and watching them grow has been a great experience by itself.

I Met the Walrus

In 1969, a 14-year old boy named Jerry Levitan arranged an interview with his hero John Lennon. As an adult he took the audio tape of the interview and produced an animation to go along with it.

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Dual-Flush Retrofit Kit Review

My friend JP has a review of a conversion kit to turn a regular old Thomas Crapper into a euro-style water-saving dual-flush toilet. I really find this sort of stuff fascinating.

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The Miles Per Gallon Illusion

Here’s an interesting “illusion” (really a false assumption), where improving the efficiency of inefficient cars a small amount can be more beneficial that improving already-efficient cars a lot.

You have the choice of replacing one of these two cars, which each drive 10,000 miles per year:

• Replace the 34 MPG car with a 50 MPG car — a 16 MPG improvement
• Replace the 18 MPG car with a 28 MPG car — a 10 MPG improvement

Which car replacement would save you the most gas?

Shockingly, it pays to replace the relatively gas-thirsty 18 MPG car, even though the improvement is much lower.