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Send in the Nasal Rangers
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."
Catch a cold and you're out of job!
No thanks, I need more stability, I think I will apply for that VB programmer job.
The ACFA has been doing this for over 2 years
"Their findings will be part of a two-year study to help lawmakers decide if the state "... doesn't use money wisely?
Why couldn't they just test for the presence of chemicals without the nosegun?
Farts contain a significant amount of hydrogen sulfide... it's only a matter of time for the price to come down low enough that novelty shops will be able to sell $29.95 items that genuinely detect actual farts and sound off with "Major Fart Alert!"
Technology is so wonderful... maybe we won't have manned space travel to Mars, but at least we'll have fart detectors!
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
- Is the nasal ranger patch a scratch and sniff?
- Do nasal rangers get a specially shaped vehicle?
- Do nasal rangers have to brown nose?
- Can a nasal ranger certify potent bodily functions?
- Do nasal rangers get to write stink tickets?
It hurts...US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
If I had a job like that, I would sign a Do Not Recessitate agreement as well.
FLR
Uh, those articles ARE all real, they're just put in the "strange news" section. Yahoo news has a similar section.
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
I grew up in a small hick town in Ohio, where the major agricultural industry was livestock (pigs, turkeys & chickens). My house was about 1 half mile downwind from a small (100,000 bird) chicken farm. Probably twice a week we would be almost knocked over when stepping outside. Chicken manure reeks for miles if proper precautions aren't taken. The owner of this farm was routinely being visited by the EPA, but he never did clean up his act.
What does the 2B ton plasma sun fart headed here smell like?
I'm an agricultural economist (IAAAE?) at a Big-10 university, and I can attest that not only is the story real, but the issues are actually quite important.
/.ers are pretty libertarian, and agree that one's right to swing his/her own fist ends at another's face. But what happens when what is being 'swung' is subjective in both intensity and offensiveness? At that point, it becomes very difficult to arbitrate property rights.
Most
As the story points out, the individuals involved are being trained for the evaluation of CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations). In determining the impact of a CAFO on another's property rights, the strength of the odor emitted by the CAFO is key. But how do you measure 'strength' and offensiveness? Do you just take the property-owner's word for it? In order to be able to assess the actual impact of these operations, there must be some quantifiable measure of their effects on the surrounding property owners, hence the Nasal Rangers.
This is Dr. Farnsworth's Smell-o-scope!
;)
Oh! And bite my shiny metal ass...
I work in the meat and poultry industry. To us, animal waste is not only a nuisance, but a major problem that has to be dealt with on a constant basis. Smell from a slaughter plant isn't just a sensory complaint from neighbors, it's also a health hazard for a number of reasons (ammonia vapors, flies, etc.). All of that waste has to be reprocessed and treated, quickly and effectively, in order for problems to not develop in the first place.
Olfactory testing is a valid, important, and cheap way to determine if problems are happening or will be developing. For you goofs to laugh at it just shows your complete ignorance of the world outside of your little milleu. So how about if you put down your precious code for a few seconds and think about where that burger or chicken sandwich you're stuffing down your face came from in the first place? It didn't appear by magic. It requires a lot of work, and a good portion of that work is messy, smelly, and potentially dangerous.
Hope that you all enjoy your cases of cholera, just to name one of a dozen different diseases that can be caused by improper monitoring and treatment of waste.
If using Linux is about choice, how come people complain when I choose to use Windows?
I go to college in Des Moines and saw the article a couple days ago. Is it really hard to imagine people in Iowa smelling things for a living? What the hell else are you going to do in this state?
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.
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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