Reusing PET(E) Water Bottles

My friend Tim Anderson reuses plastic bottles made of polyethylene terephthalate (PET(E)) to carry his drinking water stored in his truck or boat for longish periods. I told him it wasn't great to drink old water from those bottles, but I couldn't give a good reason why besides the funny taste. I figured since I work at a water science center this is something I should learn about.

After searching on Google Scholar, antimony (Sb) seems to be the main threat of leaching chemicals from the plastic, especially over periods of time and exposure to heat. Sb2O3 is used as the catalyst in the manufacture of polyethylene terephthalate and is probably carcinogenic but there is not good proof according to the WHO ("Although there is some evidence for the carcinogenicity of certain antimony compounds by inhalation, there are no data to indicate carcinogenicity by the oral route.")

Westerhoff et al. (2008) found antimony concentrations in nine brands of commercial bottled water ranged from 0.095 to 0.521 ppb, well below the US Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) maximum contaminant level (MCL) for Sb of 6 ppb. The average concentration was 0.195+/-0.116 ppb at the beginning of the study and 0.226+/-0.160 ppb 3 months later, with no statistical differences; samples were stored at 22 degrees C. For exposure temperatures of 60, 65, 70, 75, 80, and 85 degrees C, the exposure durations necessary to exceed the 6 ppb MCL are 176, 38, 12, 4.7, 2.3, and 1.3 days, respectively.

Holy cow, does it get to be 140°F in our cars (that's 60°C)? If so, don't leave any bottles of water in there for 176 days. There are 3 or so of these bottles full of refill water in Tim's boat that I think he's planning to drink on his trip back to the mainland that have been stored since October 1. Temps on the island have probably been around 80°, so maybe it gets up to 100 in the hull of the boat... it's sort of in the shade and it's white, reflecting lots of heat.

I made a quick Sb release-curve; if you follow the curve up to the left, I think Tim would have to wait til next summer to have more antimony than the EPA likes in his water.

But there is great variability in Sb release of these bottles depending on who made the bottle! A group of geochemists at the University of Heidelberg headed by William Shotyk (2006) reported antimony in 15 brands of bottled water from Canada and 48 from Europe. They found that waters from a commercial bottling plant in Germany had 0.008 ppb Sb before being bottled. That same brand, when purchased in the store in the PET bottles, had 0.359 ppb (2 orders of mangitude!). After an additional 3 months of storage, the same brand had 0.626 ppb. (I converted reported unit of ng/L assuming it's = 1 ppt.) In 14 brands of bottled water from Canada, Sb concentrations increased on average 19% during 6 months storage at room temperature, but 48 brands of water from 11 European countries increased on average 90% under identical conditions.

We don't know who made Tim's bottles that are sitting in the hull of cuba canoe so we can't guess how much antimony is in them.

Tangent: I'm really curious to find out if these 4 guys made their 11,000 mile voyage on a sailboat made of PET bottles. Their boat is called Plastiki! (Kon Tiki is a wonderful book, I love it.) Oops, just saw their webpage; looks like they are still glueing stuff onto the boat!

Naturalization

Went to the naturalization ceremony today in US District Court. My friend Manohardeep had to renounce India, and I cried a lot. India is so beautiful, he is such an Indian person, he loves India and his parents, and he is so part of Punjabi culture, it sounded so terribly awful:

“I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen…”

There were plenty of people from other nice countries too.

The judge was in love with Kate Smith, a singer from the 40s and 50s, so showed two still shots on the overhead of her with the flag as God Bless America played (and some folks sang along), and again she popped up on the screen with flag singing America the Beautiful. He also showed a movie about Ellis Island so they could see how difficult immigration used to be.

Then a speaker from Egypt, who had naturalized in 1996, told funny stories of silly things he did when he first immmigrated (like paying full price for a car). Then he told the folks to "adopt the American values." He said it 2 or 3 times. That was his message (though he never described these values).

Then the judge told them that their kids would not have the accents they have today; their kids would be fully integrated Americans in the future.

The Daughters of the American Revolution, the Sons of the American Revolution, the Board of Elections, Altrusa and other groups had representatives that got to stand up to welcome them as citizens and tell about their group's civic activities that they could get involved in.

Then everyone recited the Pledge of Allegiance, recieved signed certificates and got to get pics with family members in front of the flag and US Seal.

Things opened and closed with a prayer/benediction, Amen.

Everyone went to another room to eat piles of homemade cookies made by older ladies from the aforementioned organizations. One lady tried to recruit me to be a member of Daughters of the Revolution (DAR) because I had told Sylvia that my great grandfather probably descened from a revolutionary family so she wanted me to get involved.

Cell phones were not allowed in the building; you were supposed to "leave them in your car," so I had to bury mine under the mulch behind a building for a few hours.

It was wierd and interesting, let me tell you.

Soils Art

I stumbled upon this art as I perused a digital elevation model layered over a soil drainage map around the Santa Fe River and Suwannee River confluence.

It made my heart jump.

Radio Button Biking

I live in Gainesville, known to be a very bike-able town by some standards. Compared to Cambridge, Boston and St. Louis I agree! But it is an exercise in decision making. Is there a town in the USA where you can always be a cyclist in your commute? From start to finish, I have not found a route to my office where I don’t have to decide to be a car or a pedestrian at times. Take a look at this photo; as I am going along, happy on my bike, approaching NE 16th Ave, I must decide to bail out to the sidewalk in my friend Crystal’s driveway (yellow line to the right of the red car merging into the would-be bike lane), or become part of the car-going crowd (2 choices). Here you can see the decision is being made at dusk when drivers get confused about what they are seeing, so if I choose the car radio button, I could be car-sandwich guts!

On my fair street (see photo) – and on many that I have carefully chosen through the historic tree-lined mossy Pleasant Street and 5th Ave neighborhoods to get to work – I must drive in the main car-driving space, but because of low car volume and speed, it feels like I get to be a bike. About 90 percent of my work route is made of streets like this but there are 3 intersections where I must decide to play in traffic, or ride on a sidewalk.

Last year our wise city chose to alter the smooth straight shot of SW 2nd Ave that had become a popular bicycle highway out of it’s biking lane siphoning 100s of bicycling commuters to UF every day. They added pretty landscaped roundabouts that Gainesvillians are still at a loss over how to maneuver. In this photo you can see there is no driveway-to-sidewalk bailout option, but one is forced to enter the circling tumbler of 19-year-old car drivers on cell phones discussing the evening’s greek swamp-swap party who wouldn’t know how to yield at these funny rotaries if they WERE paying attention. I don't bike SW 2nd Ave often anyway, just too many cars.

Here you can see my friend Stacie walking Casey across 16th Ave which allows a bicyclist to remain a bicyclist through the intersection. A rare street indeed.

I’ve been lucky and careful, assuming always that I am invisible (but I admit trying to beat cars to cross a street when in a hurry) and wearing my helmet (most of the time). I know too many friends that have been maimed or killed by mindless drivers and this attitude of “oh we’ll put in a bike lane when it fits here and there” isn’t helping any. Our city council is always planning how to reduce traffic by changing bus routes and exit ramps. If they could safen up and continualize our bike lanes, and provide secure dry bike parking (goto the Netherlands!), we might get more people out of their cars.

(And don’t get me started about the useless bike lanes on campus that are occupied by UPS, Fisher Scientific, hotel shuttle buses and maintenance vehicles every morning. I asked a bike cop why this was allowed, he said it wasn’t allowed, I said yes it is allowed, it happens every morning right in this block where you give tickets to cyclists not making full stops at the stop sign, and he said they aren’t supposed to… I just bike in the road on campus instead of weaving in and out of the bike lane around trucks.)

Check out this nice video on biking culture in Amsterdam. When the bikes get mashed up they get dumped into canals! See here how they recover dumped bikes with a barge! See this site for more serious bike safety/death/injury numbers.

First Date FaceBook

Cheat sheet, sneak-in.
Not discovering or
deliciously unpeeling the onion
as I’d be in coffee shops and baseball stands with him.

FB chops it open
I can see some blurry version
inside suddenly, no context.
I’m spying.

(no fun for this voyeur)

written April 2009

Strangers in Awe

This past year I experienced strangers hugging and kissing me; one held my upper arms in their clutch with eyes of amazement and awe transfixed on mine. It was a look of disbelief or of having discovered a big secret.

Last weekend we performed our “Carp Diem” shadow puppet show for the 4th time in public. This time it was really public, in one of the louder more crowded bars of Gainesville, Durty Nelly’s, with about 180 people that night. It’s an Irish Pub (as Irish as they get in SE USA) and we were part of a lineup for a CD release party which included 3 other bands, a belly dancer and a comedy act. Our refrigerator box – haphazardly painted black, with a semi-square opening papered over in white – couldn’t have looked very promising sitting on stage in the din of the semi-drunk crowd that had recently booed the comedy act off the stage. But oh, what an accordion can do to get folks’ attention. It announces that the show is beginning, then stops.

The fishmonger-lady shadow puppet appears, and things get quiet. Her clogs, stripey ragged outfit, poochy tummy and sagging breasts in bright colors of red, marine blue and rusty orange show her nebbish nature brightly on the screen (see below). I begin my slow, alto, a cappella “I’ve been a fishmonger all my life... because no man will take me as his wife…” The crowd is still hushed. The dancing-man shadow puppet pulling on his beard comes out with fish and buxom silhouettes of ladies and mermaids following him around. The goddess of the sea (we use the deus ex machina quite literally) Indonesian rod puppet supplies the magic flying sturgeon that strikes him in the head and wakes him up to his love of our fish-throwing heroine.

All ends in frenetic love with good amounts of spluge and ecstasy. Big applause and cheering climaxed with our puppets. I’m a bit nervous to show myself after being safely hidden in my box with Kathy Sohar, my puppet partner. Rob tells me to bow; the audience is standing, clapping and cheering, so I semi-curtsey, bow off the stage.

I am again surprised by the intense amazed reaction and love of our little show. Their was no electronica, lights, explosions or fast fast anything, just paper, lights and lyrics. I guess we made them feel something they didn’t know they were going to feel when they first saw that ramshackle refrigerator box.

Note: our show has still not been loaded to YouTube, but it will be coming soon.

Mediterranean (or Aegean) Shadow Puppets

I've always been interested in puppetry arts and I must have voiced this enough such that a friend who went to Thessoliniki to work on his PhD research on greek religious iconography 10 years ago returned with 2 articulated colorful shadow puppets made of plastic with very unique styles and personalities that made me think these were particular characters from a certain Greek tradition of story telling. Another clue was the packaging listing their names: XATZLABATHS (below) and ΑΓΝΑΪΑ (right). Both labels had greek words:

ΚΑΡΑΓΚΙΟΖΙΔЄЅ
ΤŏΜΟΛΛΑ

I've been trying to find the origins of these quiet storytellers and I believed they may be characters in the stories of Haridimos Karaghiozi, the well-known Greek shadow puppet tradition which was being kept alive and well by puppeteer story teller Evgenios Spatharis who sadly died after falling down stairs this past May on his way to a performance. He recorded 18 Karaghiozi stories on 78 records long ago. Luckily, another puppet artist Sotiris Haridimos keeps the tradition going in Athens with his Karagiozis Theater on Tripodon Street.

I found this photo of a record on UK's ebay and translation is provided showing same greek word that is on my puppet label with translation "To Miralogi Tou Karagiozi." So my puppets must be the characters of Karagiozi plays, yay, I solved the mystery!

Today I stumbled on the Cegniz Turkish shadow puppets; look how similar they look to the greek ones! It makes sense, Turkey and Greece are close neighbors.

Not sure about their language commonalities. On the webpage for the Cegniz shadow puppets they mention a play about environmental stewardship based on the shamanistic sources of Karagöz! Wow, these 2 traditions are more closely related than I thought, this is getting more interesting!

For the Greeks, Karagiozi is a representation of the struggles of the Greek peoples, especially in reference to Turkish occupation. Wow... . The main character has a hunchback and one arm 3 times longer than the other. He schemes to get things by acting roles of socially important people to gain small things, and the stories are full of historical and societal references that make Greek audiences laugh, purportedly.

In Turkey, Karagöz is the name of the traditional shadow puppetry tradition as well as the name of one of two characters portrayed in the traditional shadow puppet plays. He represents childlike, uneducated morality and common sense; a tactless little man (whereas the other main character Hacivat represents the ideals of the ruling classes during the Ottoman empire and gets irritated at Karagoz for ruining their fun).
In both traditions, this Karagiozi/Karagöz character is an underdog opposed to authority and sultanic powers. And so it seems that a long tradition in Turkey preceded the tradition in Greece for these shadow puppets. It makes sense because the Turkish tradition supposedly started at a contstruction site in 1396 by two guys sick of seeing corruption of ruling classes over the working man... and the Ottoman's began to rule Greece in the 15th Century. When did Karagiozi begin in Greece? This blogger's posting tells that it was in the 19th century (along with a lot of other neat shadow puppet history).

Darn! In May 2009 they had a shadow puppet festival in Istanbul with all the Cegniz puppets, and I missed it!

Djangofest on Whidbey Island

A few weeks ago I took the ferry with Marisa, Jack, Sian and Max to Whidbey island, WA,the location of annual Northwest Djangofests. I expected some ‘festival,’ replete with vendors selling cds, black berets, gypsy guitars, old Django Reinhardt vinyls aligned in a dusty fairground sprinkled with snocone and cupcake carts. Instead, it was a series of little concerts played each day of the week in the small community’s middle school theatre by mostly men playing to each other. I think 50% of the audience was itself gypsy jazz musician folk. My personal discovery of Django Reinhart dawned in 1998 walking through Amsterdam with my friend Jana when we encountered a most lovely group playing a music that stopped me in my tracks and infused total joy into my til-then-gypsy-jazz-empty brain. They were the Robin Nolan trio who all cheerfully signed a CD I bought.

We all enjoyed watching baby Max absorb his first concert on a Saturday afternoon (Mark Atkinson trio and Stephane Wrembel - The Django Experiment). I think our averaged ages made us the youngest group in the room, but we were Django-ites nonetheless. Back at the B&B, we made vodka drinks and watched Jack manipulate all species of electronic dvd vhs cable satellite display devices and move furniture to setup some evening babysitting couchside entertainment.

After watching the first part of the Matrix on VHS with Jack and Sian, Marisa and I got ourselves into some black-accented clothing to cruise the town for jazz-jam happenings that we had heard were not to be missed. We cruised through the rufous-hued town, so cute and lively in the daytime with family diners and coffee bakeries, but that night hanging with with crickets sounds and industrial street light. We went around a sleepy block (some cars are here!) to see a large white light with a central orange glory hole pouring out of a big garage. We had the feeling we might be finding the whole point of the evening. It was a retired firehouse, now a glassblowing art-display space. One side displayed sidesitting wavy nested bowl sets and other glass vessels. The other side was the activity side. A guy who might've just stepped out of the City of Lost Children wearing little metal round black-lensed glasses and a long stiff leather coat peered cheerily at us from his barber’s chair below a gypsy-naked-girl painting with his feet on the electric foot massager. Two gypsy jazz guitarists were chatting with the skinny lizard-energy glassblower. After Marisa got her own feet massaged, we wandered around the art objects as Callahan McVay began to circle in on us. We got to chatting about his glass-making and paintings around the place (is Madrid by the ocean?). Then he asked if we liked graphing. We happily reported that we liked plotting data and could help him out, we're scientists! Peering at his guestbook, he analyzed his last signatory’s message and explained an obvious lack of family and friends, and sexual frustration (because she crossed parts of letters?!). No! Her note was so nice, happy and friendly! Finally after he told us about his mother’s personal priorities as indicated by her capitalization habits in email, we were invited to the old hose tower (a stark, steep, diabolical vertical space). We gracefully made our way out past the 2 happy jamming gypsy guitarists leaving Callahan with his wine and foundry.

We drove the 3 blocks to the Cliffside tavern that had a circle of chairs waiting for the 8pm concertgoers to come jam together (see this 2008 Cliffside video of such a scene) and hang out with their co-gypsy devotees. We took posession of a primo spot at the bar and saw the guitarplayers at the glass blowing place. Mark called to Pat, “Hey, it’s the Glassblowing Girls!” We mingled... Here you can see Marisa enjoying her time in the jam circle. Marisa is one of the most comfortable-around-anyone-anyplace people you’ll ever want to meet who really enjoys people-nuances and can really laugh (at me, her or them). We checked out a second jam session outside with the black/grey-clad crowd of middle-aged guys with fingernails, rattling pockets and euro-hats. We spoke to a woman about her purse made from her favorite Prince vinyl (expensive, but the website let’s you pick the record). We strolled away from the lights, leather jackets and cigarettes to the cliff and the water. It seemed natural to ask, “Hey, do you want to make out?” but we decided to just get in the car and drive back to our yellow B&B with plums and apples in the backyard.

P.S. In the airport I ran into Pat Ciliberto, the guitarplayer at the glass firehouse. He is a gypsy guitarist in an L.A. jazz band called Noto D (as in ‘notorious Django’). Later I found out that Noto Swing is this cool song by Lulu Reinhardt.