The BioBus Daily News

Often people ask me – is it difficult to find grease to put into the BioBus fuel tanks? Well, Sunday I spent the day wandering around Columbus. Started out downtown, where I confirmed the rumors of good breakfast at First Watch, a nice relaxed joint in German Village. I then headed North to the Buckeye Hall of Fame, meeting Donovan and his girlfriend’s father to watch the Browns lose to the Steelers – the football waas bad, but the conversation was good. Next I headed to the COSI ScienceCcenter, a science museum in downtown Columbus, which was on my itinerary last year but was skipped because I was busy working on the grease system.

COSI is great, and busy too! One of the coolest exhibits was where you get to play with a real time digital effects processor – someone else stands on stage and you get to make them look grainy, gigantically big, and walking through a snowstorm. Big foot! Not sure if Werner Herzog would approve, but it was fun. Stopped by the museum shop to pick up a mineral set to look at under the microscopes on the BioBus, and talked to some of the staff about possible collaboration the next time the BioBus is in town. They were very excited about the idea.

Columbus is in the process of building a river walk, and they are making very nice progress. A neat new pedestrian bridge, nice paths, parks, and sculpture are coming together to bring folks to the water – something I love and that I admire a lot in a city. I hope that NYC continues its public redevelopment of water-front. It is bizarre that in much of NYC you can easily forget you live on a small island surrounded by water. I watched another nice sunset while sitting on the side of the river – Columbus seems to have an inordinate number of beautiful sunsets.

The only negative side of the river-front development in Columbus is that it adjoins the business section of downtown Columbus, which is, as expected, totally lifeless on a Sunday evening. So I hopped back in the van lent to me by the Farber’s and drove further north on High Street to a neighborhood adjacent to Ohio State. Seeing a cool looking Thai restaurant, I stepped in, and being alone, sat at the bar. I quickly entered into a conversation with what turned out to be two local business owners, including Chor, the owner of the restaurant.

The food was great, and Chor is very excited for me to come back for the 80 gallons of clean vegetable oil behind her restaurant. Score! I replaced a seal in the grease pump head, so that’s working again, and 80 gallons of veg should get me all the way back to NYC.

Can’t wait to see what progress Farber makes tomorrow, I’ll be sure to post the pics as they come in.

Check out Channel 1’s super cool piece on the BioBus that came out today. Channel 1 is a high school news network that reaches millions of high school students and their teachers every day. We’ve been getting lots of nice messages from folks across the country who saw the piece, from Debra in Texas to Scott in Arizona to Nancy in Tennessee. We might have to make the next tour national! Also, you can vote for the BioBus as your favorite eco-ride – but don’t worry, $10,000 is not at stake this time.

Ric and I were in Akron today for the final day of teaching on this tour at Coventry High School. It was a really nice day, especially because the students are on a block schedule, which means I had extra time with relatively small groups of students. Ms. Phillips, our host teacher at the school, made sure everything went smoothly, and even lent us her car to go grab some lunch! We also discovered that the eggs of the pregnant cyclops picture in an earlier post has hatched into about a dozen babies. I am so proud. Also, I’m looking forward to reading the article about the BioBus that should appear soon in the Akron Beacon Journal.

Some bad news – while we found a really great dumpster full of waste grease behind the Chinese Buffet across from the high school, after a few minutes of pumping the motor on our grease sucking rig started to malfunction. So we currently don’t have enough grease to make it back to NYC. However, I have 6 days in Columbus while the Farber Specialty Coach folks work on remodeling the BioBus interior, perhaps I’ll be able to get things patched up and find some local grease for the ride home.

Finally, sadly, the fellowship is broken – Ric rode back to NYC today. He had originally planned to return with the BioBus, but since I extended the trip by a week to stay at the Farber shop, that turned out to be impossible. We made a great team on this tour and accomplished everything we hoped for and more. We’re already looking forward to the next adventure, but seeing that the snow is already starting to move in, that won’t likely happen until the Spring.

Dr. Ben and I had a wonderful time in Champaign and Urbana, Illinois!  On Monday, Ben was interviewed live on morning television for the local news channel.  Today we taught eight classes at Leal Elementary school, where Ben’s brother Alex attended classes as a kid!  After that, we headed over to Countryside School in Champaign where we saw almost 60 kids.  We spent all day looking at Daphnia and talking about the energy cycle / food chain.  We had some really nice sun and made a lot of electricity in our solar panels!

Now we are headed back East, where we will make a stop at the Indianapolis Museum of Art and again at Farber Custom Coach in Columbus, OH before heading to a school in Akron on Thursday.  We are looking forward to getting some new equipment for interior improvements to the bus from the generous folks at Farber.  For now, though, it’s the open roads of Southern Indiana, and travelling always makes me wax poetic..

The highway stretches before us like an artery in this great organism called America, trucks and cells passing silently in the night.  The nation – the world, even – is like some living, breathing beast; each person within is but a single piece of the creature.  Each cell has its job to do.  Liver cells, kidney cells – these remain stationary, performing their function time and time again.  But blood cells, lymph cells, and other types of motile cells take to the road, moving through the highways of the organ systems, transmitting goods, food, supplies, nutrients.  The neural pathways connect us almost instantaneously over great distances, keeping us in touch with friends and family and allowing business to occur despite spacial differences.  The lack of a centralized ” brain” does not prevent our world from functioning – indeed, it gives us strength.  We are many brains and we are one; with redundancy upon systemic redundancy, our survival is ensured.

The study of life always amazes me.  The parallels that can be drawn, from inorganic molecules all the way up to the most complex animals, seem infinite in either direction.  Just as you and I have organs in our bodies, every single cell within those organs has organelles of its own.  Those organelles, in turn, are made up of different types of specialized molecular structures, each of which is made up of unique atomic structures.  Consider a city as a living thing – each factory, each home, each school and office building and grocery store is an organ.  Those organs are made up of living cells.  And just as the cells within our bodies create extracellular materials with which to work, we create the buildings and tools that allow us to function as a society.  There are so many levels of life.

When one paints a picture of life with this broad view in mind, it is difficult not to love and respect all living things.  As I said today to the students at Leal, all living things depend on the other.  Your kidneys can’t function when your liver fails, and your heart can’t pump if your lungs aren’t working.  When the deserts flood the rainforests dry up, and even the insects wouldn’t be happy without the spiders that eat them.  We are all part of a whole; mutual respect is necessary.

R.

About to head back to the Orpheum for our second day there, but I wanted to share this cool picture. Virginia, one of the Visiting Scientists helping us on the BioBus in Urbana, took it yesterday. It is a crustacean that we found in our container of lake water. Can any one identify this whiskery wanderer? Those are eggs on its back. (Hint – it only has one, like the creature Odysseus fought on his way home.)