Vinegar has been mentioned on here before, but it’s always good to remind ourselves about the natural powers of vinegar. Today I bring you 30 uses for vinegar around the house.

In the garden/around the house

Kill grass and weeds: Pour or spray full-strength vinegar on grass or weeds poking through your driveway or rearing their heads in other unsavory places.

In the car

Frost-free windows: If you know a chilly night is on the way, you can ensure that your windows will be frost-free when you wake up in the morning. Simply mix three parts vinegar to one part water, and coat your windows with the mixture the night before.a

Change the world by changing your underwear!

PACT blends social and environmental values throughout its materials, supply chain, packaging and more. The company offers a range of men’s and women’s underwear styles in three designs. Each design is aligned with a nonprofit organization, with 10 percent of each design’s sales — yes, sales, not profits — going toward its associated organization. The underwear ranges in price from $22 for a thong to $28 for boxers.

Behar made the initial three designs for the underwear, creating images to sync up with the first three nonprofits with whom PACT is working: 826 National, ForestEthics and Oceana. PACT plans to add more nonprofits with new designs from other artists and designers, topping off at about eight, Kibbey said.

The underwear is made of 95 percent organic cotton, and 5 percent elastane (a.k.a spandex). They could have gone with 100 percent cotton, which would have made it easy to settle on an end-of-life solution, Kibbey said at a roundtable discussion at Fuseproject’s San Francisco offices today. But they added the elastane in order to give the underwear some stretch, keep it from getting baggy too quickly, and to extend each pair’s life.

This good news is mixed. When hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans it was announced over the media that people were raping, looting, and causing chaos – this behaviour was grossly exaggerated. Today people tend to assume that New Orleans became a chaotic post-apocalyptic wasteland, those people are wrong – people were in reality very nice to one another.

Except for the police and other people of privilege. That’s the mixed part of today’s good news: people in positions of authority began roaming the city like gangs while other people – average people – helped each other through the disaster.

Read about here.

The story that few can wrap their minds around is that ordinary people mostly behaved well – there were six bodies in the Superdome, including four natural deaths and a suicide, not the hundreds that the federal government expected when it sent massive refrigerator trucks to collect the corpses. On the other hand, people in power behaved appallingly, panicking, spreading rumours, and themselves showing an eagerness to kill and a pathological lack of empathy.
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Most people behave beautifully in disasters (and most Americans, incidentally, believe Obama was born in this country). The majority in Katrina took care of each other, went to great lengths to rescue each other – including the “cajun navy” of white guys with boats who entered the flooded city the day after the levees broke – and were generally humane and resourceful. A minority that included the most powerful believed they were preventing barbarism while they embodied it.

Here’s a neat TED Talk that examines how western culture treats the idea of success by Alain de Bolton. He ultimately believes that we need to look into ourselves to figure out what we want and define our success from there; this is contrary to the dominant idea of success based on material wealth.

People will use less energy if told that their neighbours are more efficient energy consumers. That’s just one way to get people past their psychological barriers to acting more environmentally friendly according to new research out of the University of Victoria in British Columbia. New Scientist has the story.

This month, an American Psychological Association (APA) task force released a report highlighting these and other psychological barriers standing in the way of action. But don’t despair. The report also points to strategies that could be used to convince us to play our part. Sourced from psychological experiments, we review tricks that could be deployed by companies or organisations to encourage climate-friendly behaviour. Also, on page 40 of this issue, psychologist Mark van Vugt of the Free University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands describes the elements of human nature that push us to act altruistically.

The affluent young, for instance, tend to be diet conscious, and this could be used to steer them away from foods like cheeseburgers – one of the most climate-unfriendly meals around because of the energy it takes to raise cattle. So when trying to convince them to forgo that carbon-intensive beef pattie, better to stress health benefits than harp on about the global climate.

Though conservative pundits have been known to attack such efforts, characterising them as psychological manipulation or “mind control”, experiments indicate that people are willing to be persuaded. “From participants in our experiments, we’ve never heard a negative backlash,” says Wesley Schultz of California State University in San Marcos. In fact, according to John Petersen of Oberlin College, Ohio, we are used to far worse. “Compared to the barrage of advertising, it seems milder than anything I experience in my daily life,” he says.