linuskendall

Questions of conservation vs livelihoods are incredibly complex, not least in the Sundarbans area (have worked with farmers in this region) - complex in a way you don't see with human-animal conflict in other parts of the world. We are not talking about a few hundred french farmers and wolves here, but rather livelihood of hundreds of thousands.

It is probably one of the most densely populated areas lying so close to a tiger reserve. The population around the reserve are some of the most climate stressed farmers in the world (facing soil salinity and monsoon variability due to climate change) and areas inside the forest reserve have traditionally been an important source for additional livelihood (honey collection, fishing, etc.). Farmers settled in these areas were also in part displaced during the colonial era from Bihar and other parts of West Bengal, in essence forced to live in the delta - now of course these are their villages and home towns.

To add to the challenge there is an incredible scarcity of food sources for tigers in the Sundarban reserve, with few other large animals, which is put forward as part of the reason they have (unlike tigers elsewhere) have made it a practice to treat humans as food sources. They are adept swimmers and do attack people in boats meaning that even fishing can be a risky endeavour for farmers.

All in all, the conflict between people and the tigers living in Sundarban is pretty complex and in no small part caused by people outside of the delta (including the British, the increased urban population of Kolkata and surrounding districts, etc.).

Apparently above 1500 individuals (out of some 2200) have been photographed using automated cameras and the rest extrapolated from there. Extrapolation methods were one of the reasons for wildly fluctuating numbers in some reserves previously.

If you're in India you probably could get access to the actual photos via a request to the right department (Ministry of Forest and Environment for a start) or in a pinch RTI.

No, you were being racist.

Bananas and eggs could solve world hunger - and in fact are available and affordable to many people who you might classify as hunger. Sure, some kind of protein shake in liue of peanut butter might be a good handout in periods of starvation - but hunger is a way more complex issue than lack of physical access to calories or nutrients and there is certainly no powder or "technical fix" for the issues involved wit hhunger.

Yes, you're absolutely right and most Indians seem far more literate in converting between the two than I ever would be. My generalization was way too broad and wrong - thanks for pointing out the specific cases.

It seems like, as with the examples you give, that certain systems are used for certain purposes which was always fascinating to me come from outside. In construction, in rural areas I've found it varying between different parts of the country whether metric or imperial is preferred.

Unfortunately in India it's generally Fahrenheit as well, independence from the British didn't remove that piece of the imperial system (in length it's even more confusing where shorter measures feet and inches are preferred while for longer once m and km...).

Beyond energy use, allergies seem also to be a by-product of growing up sanitised & sealed glass-and-steel boxes. Not that it helps people like you and me who already have them, but in the long-run saner construction might help avoid even that.

Yes, I agree that the long-term solution lies somewhere in the middle. Certainly it would be unwise for mass-adoption of mud buildings (not least because they're a LOT of work to maintain), but if architects and builders would become more open to mixing and exploring with traditional techniques and materials (which, lets face it, has been honed over a long period to deal with humidity, heat and uncomfortable climate before electricity) we could probably get much more comfortable and energy efficient buildings and also cities.

An acquaintance of mine, Laurent, works on this in eastern India [1].

1. http://vimeo.com/68119509

I've lived in India for years, generally my experience has been that fans work much better in humid air than dry air. So 29 degrees with 90% humidity and fan would be much more comfortable than 29 degrees with 30% humidity and fan.

In Delhi (45 degrees in summer) we would manage with desert coolers + fan, which specifically work by increasing the humidity of the air and then using a fan.

I believe though that, AC vs. coolers vs. fans vs. any combination of them is really not at all as important as the way cities and the buildings within them are built. In Delhi it is estimated that 3-5 degrees local heating is caused by bad urban design. As an anecdote, I've been in mud-huts where despite 45 degree temperatures outside, insides felt like they were AC. Sure, mud-huts do have problems with mould and require a lot of maintenance, but it's illustrative that we've dug ourselves into a hole where AC is required because we build buildings of inappropriate materials.

The code is MIT licensed, so your contributions would be too. Sure they can make money off it, but so can anybody else who feels like forking (or even just pulling) the code.

If you find it a good base to work on, submit pull requests. If it's not for you, just move along.

Yes, getting "Sorry, something went wrong" pretty consistently (in India), however connecting via VPN in Germany it seems to load fine.