Center of the World

During the visit we made to Kampala last weekend we made stops at three locations for our various projects. First we stopped by a pottery workshop, where they used white clay to make pots that are very difficult to break. Apparently something about the iron oxide that makes the clay red also detracts from its strength. Unfortunately, they didn't have any clay pot water filters in production, so we're still going to have to figure that out from a few documents we have from companies that mass-produce clay pot water filters.
The next stop was the biomass briquette factory, which took sawdust and husks and turned them into neat little briquettes by applying about 250 atmospheres of pressure to the dust. Finally we dropped by the company headquarters of this place that sells solar cooking devices. They have three models: a little cardboard one the folds out, a wooden box one that also folds out, and a big metal parabolic one that is shown here. The models shown were more or less what I had in mind, and using the aluminum foil I picked up in the city I'm starting to make more prototypes.



After all the business was taken care of, we made a trip to the Equator on Sunday. About an hour trip found us at a pair of small white monuments that indicated we had reached the exact middle of the globe. Here we were standing on that little imaginary line that separates north from south, summer from winter, clockwise-flushing toilets from counterclockwise-flushing toilets.
This last feature was, of course, the most exciting, and to further the excitement a man had set up three basins: one north of the equator, one south of the equator, and one exactly on the equator. I didn't believe that only several yards of space could alter the Coriolis effect enough to make the water of one basin spin one way and the basin in another spin the opposite direction. To prove to me that he hadn't rigged this experiment, the man used the same basin each time, moving it north, south, and finally exactly on the equator. Sure enough, the water went counterclockwise in the north, clockwise in the south, and straight down on the equator. I've read that something the size of a toilet is too small to be subject to the Coriolis effect, but this experiment seems like it would be difficult to rig the way I saw it done. I'm studying in Australia next semester, so I'll get an answer to this great question.