Annoying, well-meaning viral articles…
There was one going around a few years back about the Moser Lamp, invented by Aldredo Moser which is a drink bottle filled with water and a little bleach, stuck through the ceiling. The piece said that it produced the equivalent of a 50 W bulb and switched itself off at midnight.
Obv, the most astounding piece of information here is that it switched itself off “at midnight” (ie it was still producing light after the sun went down) and that’s why it got a zillion shares. But it is not true. This is of course just a diffuse light tube. I mean it is a nice simple idea and apparently has helped thousands of poor people so that’s good, so I kind of feel like an arsehole when I tell people who share the article because of this revolutionary idea. They seem so excited.
The one I keep seeing now is about an urban farm in Milwaukee that takes up only 3 acres but feeds 10000 people. The headline is “How to feed 10,000 people on 3 urban acres” and it is this outstanding claim that got the article so many shares. Americans eat around 900 kg in food per day, so this would mean this 3 acre block is producing some 9000 tonnes of food per annum.
Once you look up the details it turns out that this 3 acre block is producing 40 tonnes of food per annum, enough to feed 44 Americans.
I’m not really sure what the authors meant. At first I thought they meant they provided 10000 meals per year (enough to keep 9 people fed), but that doesn’t really add up either. Going by the above, the average meal in America (assuming they are getting three squares) is about 0.8 kg, so this would represent more like 50000 meals per year.
So I don’t know what they mean, really.
When I run through this maths with the supporters they think I’m just knocking but I’m not: this really is a great project, and producing 40 tonnes of food per year on an urban 3 acre block with no artificial lighting is amazing. But something went wrong with the maths.
