Recovery

It is now 11 days since I had my tonsils removed, and while my throat hasn't healed completely quite yet, it's getting to be quite decent. I can eat more or less normal food, though not very spicy or salty stuff and I still avoid really coarse stuff that would scratch my throat too much. It doesn't hurt very much anymore either. The first day or two after the surgery were quite bad, but it was OK with the painkillers and only liquid food. Then after about 4 days it got a lot worse again.
Normally, if you cut yourself, the wound closes up and you get this brown scab on it that falls off after a while when the wound has healed enough under it. That doesn't happen inside your mouth. Instead of a brown, hard scab, you get this white layer of soft stuff that looks more like a thick layer of mold than anything else. It falls off after a while, but the tissue under it is still more or less an open wound and it can start bleeding again. After about 4 days, this white stuff gradually started to fall off, revealing the wounds from the surgery. To tell you the truth, that's when it started to hurt like a motherfucker. Anything I ate made my throat burn like it was being stabbed by a thousand needles. The painkillers took away most of the ache, but it did virtually nothing for the pain of swallowing something. For a day or two, I ate pretty much nothing more than popsicles. The ice made my throat a bit numb so I was able to swallow. Now, most of the white stuff is gone, so I'm guessing my throat will be all good and ready for anything in about a week.

I've taken a bigger interest in ecology and the environment lately. I saw this show on the Discovery channel, Discovery Project Earth, where scientists and clever people build various prototypes for things that might help clean up the atmosphere and the planet. Some of the ideas, even though they work, seem incredibly far fetched and not very practical, but some ideas actually seem quite cool. One of the episodes had this big contraption invented by a guy named David Keith. It filters carbon dioxide out of the air by using a sodium hydroxide solution. Seems good, but where are you going to put the CO2 after it's been captured? Filtering CO2 is not a bad idea, but wouldn't it be better to make factories and other sources stop putting so much out in the first place? There have been so-called rules imposed against large companies, etc. but they are ridiculously full of loopholes and most large initiatives seem kinda inefficient. Take the Kyoto protocol, for example. A country can just decide to not sign it and keep doing things the way they want. Then what? Norwegian gas platforms in the sea off the coast of Norway have hefty fines to pay if their output of CO2 is over a certain limit. So they invented clever ways to filter the CO2 out of the gas they are pumping up, and put it back where it came from so that their emissions are within limits. Seems to me that that's the way to go. Necessity is the mother of all invention, so why not impose a 5 year time limit, and then apply fines of such a ludicrous magnitude that it would be financial suicide for a company to not abide by the limits. They would simply HAVE to come up with similar ways of decreasing their emissions. Companies try to make money. That's what they do. So if they have to invent stuff in order to save money, they will come up with the necessary stuff in no time at all. They are plenty enough of smart people in the world to make it happen. The only thing missing is a good enough reason, and to keep repeating the same stuff about CO2 being bad for the environment and that it causes global warming that will make ice caps melt and cause loads of trouble in about 50 years or so is just not good enough. Stock holders are making money now. They don't care about trouble in 50 years from now, especially if it means paying money to change something now.

Making things environmentally friendly can be tricky on a large scale. Even wind power has its problems. Imagine replacing all the power plants in your country with nothing but big wind turbines. It's a renewable source of power, sure, but energy doesn't come from nothing. The turbines simply convert the energy in the wind into electric energy. And any energy that is turned into electricity is reduced from the energy in the wind. So if you have enough wind turbines, they will inevitably slow down the wind. What does that lead to? I have no clue, but there is bound to be some kind of meteorological consequence. Still, it's a whole lot better than coal power plants if you ask me.

But not everything about being environmentally friendly is problematic. There are plenty of ways you and any one person can help the planet. Recycle if you can, use low-energy light bulbs, re-use things instead of throwing them away, take the bike instead of driving your car, get an electric or hydrogen car instead of a gas guzzler (if you have the money for a new car) and many other things. I do all of the above, (except for buying the new car, I don't have a drivers license). It doesn't take any extra effort, so why not? I also like building things, so I'm going to build a small but simple CO2 scrubber myself. All I need is a small airpump from an aquarium, an empty 2 liter soda bottle, some water and some green, sludgy algae from the nearest creek or pond. It doesn't cost much, and it will convert CO2 into oxygen in a perfectly natural way. Algae are the most efficient organisms in the world for this kind of stuff. They convert CO2 into oxygen by the loads, way more than trees do. Only problem is that there isn't enough of it to keep up with all the coal power plants and cars in the world. Did you know that in the USA alone, there are about 600 coal plants? Each one burns about 1,4 million tons of coal and pumps out about 3,7 million tons of CO2 every single year. It would take quite a bit of algae to keep up with that.