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sjsoko writes "Is this for real? I see a future in alternatives to conventional Chili cook-off judging (from a distance, of course). Or perhaps that person in the cubicle across the hall can be provided undisputable evidence that the cafeteria lunches should be avoided."
The ACFA has been doing this for over 2 years
Who cares? I mean who really cares anymore? We got Darth Ashcroft and his stromtroopers marching all over the constitution, RFID tags being plugged into everything, Microsoft trying to stop you from using your own computer, the RIAA trying to stop you from listening to anything without you paying them, and the industry monopolizing ideas. When you look at all that, who really cares if a bunch of staties want to go around smelling other peoples farts with mega phones?
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
New York City has fined a COFFEE ROASTER for the smell of... umm... ROASTED COFFEE. See also here,
Not some diluted ratio of it. No, an inspector responded to a complaint, walked around outside, and found that yes, he could smell roasted coffee. "During the hearing it was learned that the City inspector on the job 18-months, with no formal training in the detection or measuring of odors smelled coffee in the complainants apartment." (Usenet post) Since ONE person found it objectionable enough to complain over, the company gets fined.
Note: NOT a problem with the roasting chamber exhausts, which were correctly installed and functioning to specification. The smell came from coffee being stored after being roasted - you know, the smell you get in a COFFEE SHOP.
As of the most recent update, the coffee roaster is $40k in the hole for legal fees trying to get this joke of an administrative decision overturned.
Farts contain a significant amount of hydrogen sulfide...
Actually, they don't.. It's just that our noses are especially keen at smelling it.. we can even detect the stuff at 10 parts per billion!
I used to work in a lab where H2S was used as a reagent. Whenever they were using it, the whole place stunk, even though it was done in a separate room, under a fume hood.
This is likely, IMO, a much more economically viable investment than olfactory testing (which is a relatively impractical and elitist technology, at best). With the implimentation of the devices in the link above, people won't have to worry about the odors, anyway - or electricity.
As far as the intense nature of ranching and animal biproducts, I can personally attest to their vile nature. Cattle waste is by far a lesser offender than swine biproducts, however. Even human waste pales in comparrision to the foulness of swine biproducts.
Out here, in South Dakota, there are large hog barns spotted across the state. Many of them belong to Hutterite colonies (somewhat like a modern-agriculture, German version of the Amish people). Some are commercially run. All of them are the foulest thing you could imagine. They stink up the country for tens of miles in the direction of the wind - which, of course, varies in direction. People hate the things. Even in my old town, where there was a hog processing plant on the outskirts of town, and maybe 150 hogs a day passed through (just guessing, but I seem to recall such a statistic), there was massive stench - and these facilities were scoured daily, and had no perminant storage for the swine, so there wsan't any sort of waste storage concerns.
Your typical hog barn consists of a very sturdy, sterile barn stretching a couple hundred feet. Intense regulation is done to make sure nobody brings in any viruses or sicknesses, because pigs are incredibly sensitive to such things. Pens are washed out several times a day, etc. And yet the inside still stinks (done a little work for my dad, who as an engineer out here, has dealings with these folks from time to time for design purposes).
Then, there is a large pit in the ground several hundred feet away. In this pit, there is usually something that looks like bubbling mud. However, it's not. It's pig shit. Lots, and lots of it. There is enough methane and other such gasses coming from this pool to power a smallish town (a couple thousand?) I've heard, if it were to be harnessed in a fermentor. However, it isn't. They switch between two pools of shit over time, fill one up, go to the next, and let the first one rot off - let all the toxins essentially biodegrade and ferment out (IIRC, there is usually a very thick liner underneath these pools to prevent toxic waste leakage - seriously). Then, once one of hte pools has reached a certain PH, it can be sold for fertilizer, where it is deluted with water and spread on fields (being as it's still too toxic for straight application). I might also add that the toxins in an unfermented batch of this soup are strong enough to kill a man in a matter of minutes, if he were to fall in. There's be no hope in even trying to save them.
The actual strength of the odor is kind of hard to describe, since the odor is actually physically painful, even at a relative distance (half a mile or so?). It will burn your nostrils, all the moreso if you have sensitive skin or other such traits as a strong sense of smell. The whole process that occurs in the shit pools is mostly anoxidous. If any of you are familiar with with composting your own garbage, you've likely run into situations where you didn't turn the compost soon enough, and you ended up with obscenely foul white, yellow, or blue fungus growing between the layers - possibly a bad thing, because that's where things like anthrax like to breed. At any rate, the odor is similar to that, except that in this case, it's not things like rotting leaves, grass, eggshells, bannana peels, or apple rinds - it's pig shit. Pigs stink, and pig shit stinks, innordinately, even before fermentation. That's as close as I can get to describing it.
Needless to say, soething needs to be done about the stench of such facilities (as well as the feeble odor of cattle facilities). Harvesting the methane and other things to power local small communities would, in my opinion, be a very
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