Fatberg follies

There's a great fat story going viral across the blogosphere today about a 15 ton 'fatberg' that almost completely filled a sewer in Kingston in suburban West London. I get my feeds from Metafilter where it was claimed that 15 tons of lard was the size of a double-decker bus.  They probably read the Daily Mirror who are likely to big up a silly-season story like this, so I turned to the broadsheet The Independent, whence I gleaned that the mass of 'lard' and wet-wipes a) weighed 15 tons b) was the size of a bus c) was found in a sewer 70cm x 48cm in section, that was reduced to 5% of its capacity.

Does this make sense?  Wolfram alpha reports the density of lard as 0.87g/ml or about 90% that of water.  But why keep a dog when you can bark youself?: The 454g=1lb block of butter in our fridge is 13cm x 6cm x 6cm = 468ml which says that butter is almost the same (97%) density as water.  Maybe it's the added salt that ups the density?  We'll call it 0.9g/ml.

Metafilter's "double-decker" bus is 10m x 4.4m x 2.4m = 105cu.m.  The Indo's "regular" bus is not so tall: 10m x 2.4m x 2.4m = 58cu.m.  Whereas the volume of the fatberg (if lard) is only 16cu.m.  Say a 4m x 2m x 2m minibus?  Doesn't sound as exciting as a double-decker does it?  And as sewers are by definition long (must put distance between ourselves and our waste) and relatively thin, any sort of bus is a rather crap metaphor, isn't it? 70cm x 48cm is as near as dammit 1/3 sq.m.  So I surmise that the ribbon of lard was about 50m long.

Has anything useful come out of this "analysis"?  Sure.  If you filled a double decker bus with beer and could get it on board it would satisfy the liquid refreshment requirements of the crew of the Golden Hind for the first year of her round the world voyage in 1577.

Oh yes, and don't pour hot fat down the kitchen sink.  And "flushable" wet-wipes are not biodegradable in any practical sense.

Tweetin' the Marmalade

As I've been writing The Blob for more than a year, there are more than 400 posts to read.  Some of them deathless prose, others a bit slap-dash and shamefully rich in typos.  I must say I am bemused at those which attract over-the-average attention. The current top hitter (25% more interest that any other post) is a perfectly quotidian, not to say boring, reflection on making marmalade.  Someone must have tweeted it, but I can't discover who.  At least that appears to be quite genuine interest; the second "most interesting" post was written a year ago about Milk of Magnesia.  That's a lot more interesting than the marmalade piece but the page-views went through the roof because some imbecile set a robot to advertise in the comments.  It was a while before I worked out how to knock this intrusive nonsense out of the ball-park. Here's another lament about the practice from the often wonderful Tywkiwdbi.

I'll pretend that there is a widespread demand for more marmaladocentric copy.  I made my fourth and final batch of marmalade over this last weekend.  The other batches worked out rather well: all different but all edible.  Marmalade as any fule kno usually has what we, as kids, used to call "fishes" - the little pieces of cooked orange peel.  In the old days you'd make these by slicing the reamed-out orange peel into slivers with a very sharp knife.  I have done this but it takes a long time, so nowadays I put them through the coarsest grind of my old Spong mincer and get klontjes of peel rather than thin slices.  My Mum used to have a Spong mincer and we kids used to fight for the privilege of cutting the remains of the Sunday meat-slab into Spong-sized chunks and mincing it all up for the Tuesday shepherd's pie.

One of the joys of living isolated in the country is that you can fire foodie things out of the door and expect them to be biodegraded. Yard = midden here!  I'm a little precious about our septic system because the settlement tank is about 40m from the house and goes through two right angled turns.  I really don't want to have to rod out a blockage, so I'm really careful about what goes down the kitchen sink lest we get a fatberg.  After marmalade batch three I scrubbed up all the utensils and then got frightie about the orange fibres.  So I seized the washing-up bowl (of course we don't have a dish-washing machine) and fired it out of the door into the yard.  The next morning, I missed the little wing-nut of the Spong which you can see on the left of the picture.  After a good hunt through the kitchen, I realised that it must have been unnoticed at the bottom of the jettisoned washing-up from the night before.  It was also Monday morning and I wasn't going to be on-site in daylight until Saturday at the earliest.  Luckily I had a spare nut, but I don't like to lose things.  Accordingly, the following Sunday I went out scanning the grass within a 5m half-circle centred on the front door for a piece of metal 2cm in diameter.  Lucky I still have my eyes because random pokes would have a 1:100,000 chance of successfully hitting such target in such a field.  It only took about ten minutes but I was immensely pleased with myself - probably happier than if I'd never lost the danged thing. 

The last batch of marmalade was rather a disappointment, both lumpy and rather difficult to set.  I had to resort to spooning the glop into the hot jam-jars because pouring from the jam-pan put as much down the sides of the jars as inside.  I'll have to use it in a helluva lot of marmalade puddings over the next couple of years.  Note added in press: I've just noticed 2kg of sugar on the shelf in the kitchen where there were four, earmarked for marmalade. Duh! So now I have an explanation of why the marmalade was wonk and a lesson in what matters in the process of jam-making.

Landmark Numbers

 When The Blob was very young, I wrote skeptically about a sewer-clogging fatberg being the size of a double-decker bus. My calcs suggested it was much smaller. I'd didn't object to the metaphor, however, because, for Brits and their neighbours a double-decker is a) familiar to all but the most rural folk b) bigger than a bread-box but smaller than a building and so a convenient unit of measurement. Matt Parker and Tim Harford agree:

They are discussing, physically distanced, Landmark Numbers which aspire to being the Linnaean binomers of guesstimation and journalism . . . to facilitate communication between two people with different backgrounds by appealling to the common experiences. Being international quants, they provide conversion units for foreigners [1 bus = 30 feet]. Of course in science we have the metric system, and pretty much the whole world has some idea of what a kilo[gram], a litre, a metre, and 100km/h is. Actually, probably not: the majority of my students only know their height in feet & inches. And I guess most people would have to be reminded that a standard bag-of-sugar is 1 kg & so is a litre of milk.

Matt Parker holds that human days per year is a good divisor for, say money or work: it's about 1.7billion for Ireland; about 15x more for the UK and about 70x more for the USA. But it's definitely important to know how many people live in the same country as you. If the Minister of Quangos is talking large that s/he's allocated €5 million to some project it sounds big, like a lotto win . . . but it's only €1 for each of us in Ireland. Landmark numbers help us map the real world. Islamabad and Dehli are only about an inch apart on the map but in reality it's 670km - much further than Cork to Belfast. It's also important to know how big your country is in kilometres or hours sp you can realistically plan your staycation in The West

Here's Tim Hartford having a go at Darrel Huff author or How to Lie with Statistics [and fake news]; because Huff took his glib accessible book literally and started lying for big business. And

here's an engineer's example of trying to get make Landmarks for the world's biggest dams.

Dishtub? WTF?

 It's a washing-up bowl! Where I "do the wup". People have been washing dishes since we moved on from dobbing out portions onto banana leaves. If you don't clean the dishes, the dog will; and absent a dog the plates will get crufty, crusty and thicker than they need to be. I grew up in a three sib home so the tasks were: Alice to clear; Bob to wash; Cecil to dry; Alice to put away. If my Sailor Dad was present andif it was Sunday, he would wash the dishes. We, his minions would pass the obvious dish-wash failures behind his back for another go-thtough; so as not to hurt his feelings. You will notice that there was no Derek to rinse so that didn't get done. Not rinsing the dishes was/is really common in England and it's kinda gross to my present sensibilities. I didn't learn about rinsing until I went to the USA as a 20-something.
flatware = silverware = cutlery
china = crockery = delft = dishes 

Ten years later, we were back in Ireland. The Beloved secured a training gig in Birmingham which required regular overnights in a Brummy B&B. She got pally with the owners, who shared that they had no tea towels. Because the Tourist Board decided that tea-towels were a potential fomite, to get their seal of approval, you had to show the inspector a dish-draining rack. Shortly thereafter I bought a robust triple decker plastic-dipped wire dish rack which screwed onto the wall over the draining board - feckin' bri'nt! You can see half the drip-tray of this machine behind the tap in the picture of Dau.I learning her craft in the last century [R].

One of the agreements nailed down very shortly after my parents married in 1950 was that the wup would never be left until the morning. I suspect that was a rather one-sided contract . . . except on Sundays, like.

Recently on Metafilter, someone tapped into the hive-mind to ask "What is the right way to hand wash dishes?"  This is my jam! It's like the answer to
Q Do you have a dishwasher?
A Yes, his name is Bob
Dishwashing machines are by no means universal in Ireland!  Anyway, here is my answer:

We live remote with a septic tank and drain field. Moi le plongeur is scrupulous about minimising fats and oils going down there. A neighbour had to dig up his drive and the pipework to deal with their fatberg. Two sheets of TP will absorb a lot and make good firelighters after. We have a double sink.

1. I start running hot water into a plastic wup bowl containing a squirt of dish-soap; glasses get washed first because they deserve a hot-water rinse in the hot tap water.
2. Cutlery gets dumped in next to soak
3. Cups & side-plates get dumped on top and washed with a brush and fingers
4. They get rinsed in cold water in the other sink 
5. Left to dry on a double-decker wire drainer
6. Cutlery next
7. Dinner & dessert plates next
8. Pans last.
9. Wup basin water, esp if potentially fatty, tends to get fired out the kitchen door in a satisfyingly medieval way.

If we have company, and more dishes, I stop when the drainer is full and have another session later.

Never, no matter how drunk, leave the dishes till morning

There is no way I use 20 gallons / 90 lt of water.

On dit que handwashing dishes consumes that amount of water while a dishwashing machine uses only 5 gallons = 20 lt. According to the MeFi discussion there are people who rinse dishes under a tap running cleaned drinking water straight to the septic system. For them favelas / townships / barrios are something you see on the National Geographic channel.

Blockage

It's not obvious to all thinking people but it's obvious to me: chewing-gum is not water soluble. Maybe it's not obvious to thoughtless people. If you spit chewing-gum into a urinal, it stays there until somebody else takes it away. It's a galling indictment of the quality of the education that is being taken on board at The Institute, if chewing gum is routinely, regularly found in the urinal basins of the toilets nearest to the Science Faculty office. Weirdly, the company that cleans the toilets seem to be largely chewing-gum blind, so it is up to me to find a rubber glove and de-gob the bowls myself. Simple solution: takes 120 seconds. Lots of people I know seem to think that lard, butter and bacon fat are water-soluble. So they pop a greasy plate and a frying pan in the dishwasher and press the GO button. The dish-washer is the bane of kitchen thrift and mindfulness far more matériel gets used if you know the robot will wash it for you. Washing up is widely seen as a chore/ burden/ task/ horrible/t ime-wasting, but that is only in the mind, for me it's restful and great for warming the hands in a cold house. If you add some detergent and water and heat the stew of claggy pans and unfinished plates up to 80^oC then the fat leaves the plate and goes  . . . somewhere. It goes about halfway along the sewer pipe until it gets cold enough to precipitate out in a clot like a coronary artery plaque. The next weekend's breakfast fat gets deposited in more or less the same place and soon the 100mm diameter foul-water pipe is almost blocked.  If it gets really blocked, the toilets back-up and you have to spend a fortune getting the drains reamed out by Dynarod Drane-Klene Inc. I was visiting a pal o'mino a tuthree years ago and found that the neighbours had rented a mini-digger and were digging up 20m of  foul-water pipe because the drain-rods weren't long enough to get things flowing again. They have been more careful of the fat burden since.

Having a self-contained water supply/treatment system is a) good because we don't have to pay Irish Water for the utility b) not-so-good because I have to clear any blockage. I don't mind getting my hands dirty but if possible I'd rather not spend Saturday up to my elbows in shite.  Sooooo, we clean the fat off the dishes and pans before we plunge them into the sink to wash them.  Newspaper will usually serve or a bit of toilet paper; we long ago stopped buying paper kitchen towel.  If the washing up has been really greasy, I tend to carry the bowl outside and fire the contents into the ditch rather than risk atherosclerosis of the drains.

There are, it seems, stupider things to send down the sewer system than a bit of fat, like a product called a flushable wet-wipe which is flushable but about as soluble as chewing gum. Young scientist Kian Hennessy did a research project on the things a tuthree years ago.  He put a selection of these plastiwipe things in water and shook it daily for many months and found that the wipes still had structural integrity . . . were still capable of snagging on a small protrusion in a pipe and serving as fat catcher. At about the same time, I wrote (somewhat skeptically about the maths) about the West London Fatberg "the size of a double-decker bus" that blocked the main sewer. Sewer-clogging wet-wipe worms [L from Australia] were in the news (and widely on the blogosphere) again recently.  The cost of cleaning this un-shit from the system should be laid at the doors [which are also likely to be designed for dysfunction] of the product engineers who create them - you have to own the consequences of your actions.

Sporting life

For several years in the 90s I taught courses in Finland. It is about the only time I went to a sauna; as a sort of hats off (and kit off, of course) to the host country. Far too hot to be comfortable, really. I found the Finns had a very sharp laconic sense of humor, often quite dark. One chap referred to another as "about as useful as wet toilet-paper": with the accent and delivery it took me a while to twig this phrase as a synonym for utterly useless. Here's a pretty and peculiar [both] aspect of Finnish culture - keppihevonen - in which girls gallop over jumps astride a hobbyhorse and perform a fair imitation of dressage.

• I've mentioned wife-carrying, another Finnish sport, before.
• But maybe not [English] shin-kicking.
• Worm-charming is another English all-the-family sport
• Quintessentially British at this time of year: conkers.
• Mountain unicycling, anyone? You've got to have a cotter-pin loose for that sort of thing
• Paragliding.  It boggles my mind that I was in 2002 able to master the task of getting my canopy airborne above me and then launch into space.
• Previous coverage for out-there passtimes.

Here's a another form of fun: playing a power-hose on a 130 tonne fatberg [2013 prev] under ground in East London. Metafilter used a come-on-and-click title Congestion backs up London Tube for a quarter of a kilometer to a predictably witty rich seam of comments.

Where there's muck, there's brass

Have I told you about fatbergs? I have, begodde! We were down for lunch on the Wexford Coast on Sunday and very nice it was too. It was sharp and sunny outside with the Kerragh Islands on the horizon black beyond a greeny sea. I was glad we could sit beside a roaring log-fire rather than garnering virtue [and yet more plastic buoys, rope and fish-boxes that I really have a use for] with a walk along the beach. As householders myne hoste and I were comparing notes about storm damage and house-keeping. It seems that a few months ago, their foul-water pipe backed-up from a sclerotic clot of congealed fat. They hadn't been as obsessively careful as us about washing greasy plates and pans in the kitchen sink and the residue had come back to bite them. For a variety of reasons, he elected to clear the pipe chemically rather than mechanically and dumped a load of hot sodium hydroxide / caustic soda / lye / NaOH down the kitchen sink and left the room. It was okay in this sense - that the water started to flow again. But he hasn't done a colonoscopy yet to estimate when he should buy the next packet of NaOH. Basically what's happening down there is that the Na⁺ and the fat are making soap which, as you know is water soluble. If you could get a really good marketing team in place, you could do this on an industrial scale with matter from fta-clogged pipes and sell the soap under a brand-name like Flush!. Well it's a better name than Enema - the soap that cleans the darkest places.

The after-lunch chat shifted slightly from cleaning out fatbergs to monetizing them - but not as soap but rather as bio-diesel. Argent Energy from the English Midlands is actively scavenging fat-bergs, and heating them in a huge vat - remember that these slug-like tangles can weigh in at 10 tonnes or more. The wet-wipes, sanitary towels, hair, dental-floss and nappies (who would throw a diaper down the t'ilet? What were they thinking?) all sink to the bottom or float to the top and the now liquid grease can be run out of a spigot at the base of the vat. Like pressing olives, you could have first run extra virgin diesel and them squeeeeze the mass until it yields the last drop of discoloured goop.  When the hot liquid cools, I'm guessing that like chicken stock, the fat floats to the top and the water-soluble proteinaceous soup sinks. I was making soupe aux choux over the weekend, for example, and the liquid cooked out from the belly of pork cooled into a rich brown gelatinous stock covered by a layer of pure pork fat.

The Argent plant in Ellesmere Port near Liverpool can recover 25%-40% by weight of oil from fatberg and has a production capacity of nearly 100,000 tonnes of the good stuff each year. Previous to their enterprise, fatbergs were a hazardous, noxious waste product that was burned or land-filled. Now it's getting a second lease of life in a repurposed form before it goes up to make carbon footprint in the sky.  Argent has a regular order of 30 tonnes a week from one [large] sewage treatment plant in Birmingham. There are 9,000 such places in Britain.  I hope it works out for all parties.

Misc March Six

March is here.

• Rather a good vlog-biog of Ernest Rutherford 16m
• A sort of justification for the habitually late
• Seatbelt rule of judgement 
• First they came for this home for hydro-power 24m
  
• Then they came for the grandchilder's gaff for a windfarm 
• Gaff? canalside with dock 12m [R by drone]
  
• Fatberg update Covid == more wet-wipes 
• Martin Carthy on Bob Dylan 5m
  
• Optimizing /tolerating the loss of shipping containers: too long at 22m!
  
• Engineering in water treatment. 11m 
• Engineering is ship [in]stability 9m
  

Mudlarking, the book

I am having a pandemic that couldn't be beat w.r.t. the impact it's having on my life. In the Before Times, when I was alone on the farm at weekends, with the Little Red Yaris waiting for my whims in the yard, I'd often find an excuse not to go off-site and spend the whole Friday-to-Monday pottering about with shovel and saw. But it is getting wearing that I cannot go beach-combing; a pastime which involves solitary, outside, physical exercise . . . and cleans up the foreshore. So many tasks on the farm would be more difficult without an inexhaustible, every-sized, supply of rope and cordage scavenged from the tide-line.

When Borrowbox, the free audio-book gizmo provide by the Irish Library Service, suggested Mudlarking by Lara Maiklem [reviewed], I was all over it like a rash. Obviously there is overlap between the two professions, but I go big on brightly coloured buoys which are rare on the tidal reaches of the Thames. Over the last 30 years, I have gotten to know the nooks and headlands of Costa na Déise aka The Copper Coast. Over a similar time-frame Maiklem has developed an intimate knowledge of the 40m x 40km strip of mud-and-rubbish which is exposed between high tide and low from Erith to Teddington. Like a gambler who wins big on a teenage plunge on the Grand National, Maiklem was hooked by pulling an evocative chunk of history from the grey mud while walking beside the river. She has gone back to that well countless times over the last 20 years.

The second chapter uncovers the lost type of Doves printers and font-founders which I riffed on six years ago. She has a , which manifest itself as she scanned across the foreshore surface in a zen-like state looking-not-looking for something that was out of place and so perhaps interesting. What a coup! A physical link to William Morris, and the pre-Raphaelites . . . if that's what floats your wherry.

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Kitchen stuff

I was born in 1954 and was a first adopter of all sorts of goods and services.

• One of the very first kids in UK to have Lego to play with
• Early experience of TV dinners: a part-cooked meal loaded into separate indentations on an aluminum tray, frozen, and made edible by putting in a hot oven. Synchronizing the doneness of each ingredient required months of experimentation by Swanson's food engineers.
• Me, I preferred frozen chicken pies: aged 12, I could easily put away a 'family sized' pie and thought an "individual" pie no more than a snack
• I could also knock off a dozen fish-fingers at a setting
• It's a wonder I didn't become the Michelin Man of Plymstock
• Remember instant tea, the complement of instant coffee? We had that briefly at home before the whole idea died.

All that convenience, especially when the bins were taken away for free every week by the municipality. Then, say 15 years ago, we all suddenly discovered that our normal, convenient life-style was consuming the planet in all kinds of unconsidered ways. From being innocent in our ignorance, we were being hectored to consider our carbon footprint and air-miles; to feel guilty about packaging, especially plastic; on the ethics of eating meat . . . and then fish. It could get passive-aggressive competitive among friends "oh, are you still using cling-film / saranwrap?" . . . "we never eat strawberries in Winter, they don't taste right having been air-freighted from Chile".

That was all brought home to me when The Beloved sent me a link from The Zero-waste chef about 9 items I banned from my kitchen and how I replaced them. I thought her list might include some of the single use kitchen gadgets which we've bought over the years:

• a stand alone deep-fat fryer, with a little rubber penis for draining the used oil
• an electric waffle-iron
• a toasted cheese-sandwich maker
• a nut-chopper
• a juicer
• a homogenising wand
• an electric egg-beater
• a half dozen different things to make coffee with/in
• at least we drew the line at footless drinking glasses

Such much stuff such little utility; luckily we have 7 hectares of space to store it all.  And I haven't started on the blokey hardware inventory: the average life-time usage for an electric drill is 12 minutes. Here's Zero-Waste Chef's list, with Bob's commentary.

1. Nespresso gadgets and the mountain of single use cartridges
• This is the only variety of coffee-maker that we haven't (yet) embraced.
2. Plastic wrap
• Gave this up years ago, although we still have aluminium foil and greaseproof paper ( a square really helps cornbread out of the pan)
3. Plastic baggies
• What? Why would you buy plastic bags when so much food comes in plastic bags? I slip my lunchtime cheese sandwich into the wax-paper bag the cheese comes in.
4. Bottled water
• This is such A Thing now - about half my students at The Institute are chugging away during class. Our water at home is completely untreated, only lightly coliformed, but it's our coliforms so we're used to it. [kidding about the coliform]
5. Other bottled bevvies
• Why would you pay a premium for water with a 1% whiff of colour and patchouli?
6. Tea bags
• hmmmm, ZWC recommends loose tea and one of those perforated infusers. I'll do some research on that as to cost; my current feeling is that the 'sweepings' [a technical term for small fragments of tea that go into teabags so it brews quicker; nothing to do with sweeping up from the tea-factory floor] are cheaper than the chunks of leaf that make up loose tea. For 2 pins, I'd give up on the tea-bags and do unadulterated hot water instead
7. Paper towels
• It's true we used to have a roll of these on the go in the kitchen, but we stopped buying them years ago. I'm really twitchy about putting grease down the kitchen sink because of fear of fatberg; so we tend to degloop the frying pan with a tissue or two sheets of toilet paper. These later make reasonably effective firelighters. Mopping up spills is done with washable cloths. ZWC has an infinite supply of small cotton rags ripped from her children's worn out clothing: kept in a glass jar and thrown in the wash when they smell.
8. Paper napkins
• Are you joking? why would I use a napkin when I have a sleeve?
9. Processed food
• Sure we have some of this go through out kitchen - mainly so I can do research on The Blob's channel on Food Engineering and edible Tables of Contents.
• Q. How difficult is it to make a 5 ingredient fresh pizza: bread dough; tomato passata; salami; mushrooms; cheese ? A. Not so very difficult that I would consider buying a 20 ingredient frozen pizza. I do miss a shop-bought chicken pot pie - engineered to be delicious 

There we go. I bet some of you now feel guilty about last week's grocery cart.

On another note entirely. It is World TB Day today: I have nothing new to say [2015 report]