SuperSmoker

Okay, this one's a little odd...

I gave up smoking years ago, but I was invited to last night's UK press launch of a product called SuperSmoker. This is an 'electronic cigarette', one that uses no tobacco and doesn't even burn. It produces no carcinogens and it can be used even where you can't smoke the real things any more: bars, clubs, buses, planes - although it looks so much like the real thing that you'll be constantly having to explain or just weather evil looks. Check out the amusing video at http://www.supersmoker.co.uk/

Yep, it looks pretty much like a regular cig, it produces what looks just like smoke, the tip lights up when you take a drag, it even tastes just like the better part of how (meaning how I remember) a cigarette tastes. But it won't kill you or anyone near you.

Depending on which disposable filter you use, you can get varying hits of nicotine or even none at all, although all have a tobacco taste. It uses a rechargeable battery, a couple of micro-processors, an LED, a heating element, and a disposable filter that contains the tobacco-flavoured liquid that makes the pseudo-smoke. This is a little bit of science fiction, surely?

The event was held in a casino in central London, and all the invited journalists were given a SuperSmoker to try. Because the 'smoke' is really vaporised liquid, not carbon particles and everything else, the space didn't go hazy like an old-time bookie's. What was a little odd was how nobody at any of the card tables near the group that were puffing away even raised an eyebrow. Too busy watching the cards, I guess.

I went there as much out of curiosity as anything. I left with my curiosity satisfied, a SuperSmoker kit of my own to play with... and the thought that this might actually be the future of smoking! At around £80 the thing itself isn't cheap - but that's only a dozen or so packs of 20 real ones here in the UK. And the disposable filters last longer and cost a lot less than cigarettes from then on.

Nope, I'm not now a SuperSmoker - not really. But I'd be delighted if real smokers started to switch to this. It isn't unhealthy, the 'smoke' dissipates quickly, your clothes/fingers/breath/clothes don't stink - and there won't be piles of stubbed-out butts kicking around the doorways of buildings. Got to be a good thing, huh? What do you think?

By gum!

I read recently about a 'new' invention that should help keep city streets looking at least a little better than their measle-spotted state at the moment.

Biodegradable chewing gum, that breaks down naturally fairly quickly when exposed to the elements, doesn't appear to be available in the corner shop just yet, but it has been picked up by newspapers as the new solution for cleaner streets. Of course, like so many things in our papers, 'new' is a relative term - the invention happened in 2005 as a byproduct in biofuel developments. But hey, it ain't here yet, so that's close enough to new for most of us.

I knew used gum stuck around (sorry) for a long time on pavements, not to mention the underneath of seats and so on. But I didn't realise that the gum people chew today is largely a synthetic rubber compound. It is composed of a man-made polymer base that makes it stretchy and chewable, and resistant to being broken down by natural biological actions.

This base also happens to bind very happily with the polymers in asphalt, which is why it sticks with such tenacity when spat/thrown/dropped on the ground. This new degradable gum base - one of the first significant developments in chewing gum technology for over 110 years, by the way - is said to harden rather than sticking when spat out, and it is supposed to decompose biologically in just a few weeks.

That's all very well, a triumph of engineering and all that - but...
Wouldn't it be nice if people didn't spit the damn stuff out wherever they happen to be in the first place?

The Talk of Trash blog goes live!

Okay, now that I can control how I want this to look I'm going to kick off the new, reborn, all-powerful Talk of Trash blog! Anything goes here, as long as it is about trash, rubbish, junk, garbage... the stuff that gets thrown out on the street, and more importantly the people that do the throwing. Do you litter without due care and attention? Do you dump broken appliances on the street? Stick gum on bus seats? Drop wrappers on the ground when you're two feet from a bin? Prepare to be outed in words and graphic photos!