The following is a guest blog by Kelsey Timmerman of Travelin Light | Blog

During my research for my book Where am I Wearing: A Global Tour to the Countries, Factories, and People that Make Our Clothes I met a lot of garment workers. Allow me to introduce you to a few of them:

Arifa holding her daughter Sadia

Arifa
Dhaka, Bangladesh
Quote: “Their father was a crook, and the government doesn’t take care of my children. It’s not like the USA or the UK.”

Arifa is a single mother. She lives on the sixth floor of a crumbling apartment building in Dhaka with her daughter Sadia, 4, and her son Abir, 11. She has another son, Arman, 18, who went to Saudi Arabia to work. He sends half of his money home to help his mom and siblings Arifa works at a nearby garment factory where she earns $24/month. A trip through the market is enough to show that Arifa is well respected by all and feared by merchants, who don’t dare bargain with her.

Nari (left) with roommates

Nari
Phnom Penh, Cambodia
Quote: “The workers at beauty salons make less than garment workers, but I will be an owner and make more.”

Nari works at a factory that makes blue jeans. She shares an 8’ X 12’ apartment with seven other girls. Four of the girls sleep on a bamboo bed and the other four sleep on the concrete floor. Nari irons jeans. It’s a job that she had to pay a $50 bribe – a month’s wage – to get. Fifty dollars is probably enough for one person in Cambodia to live on, but Nari, like many of the garment workers in Cambodia, supports her family of six. She is attending beauty school and hopes to open her own salon someday. She doesn’t like bowling.

Ai
Phnom Penh, Cambodia
Quote: “I miss working and talking in the rice fields. At the factory, we aren’t allowed to talk. The bosses want us to work as quickly as possible.”

Ai shares an apartment with Nari and works at the same factory. She is a checker, looking for flaws. Eighty-five people have a hand in sewing together a single pair of blue jeans, and Ai makes sure that no one screwed up. Like many garment workers, she lives far from her home village and rarely visits; a six-day workweek won’t allow it. Ai doesn’t have a contract with the factory, which means she doesn’t have the same rights as other workers. She can be fired for absolutely no reason. She supports six people on her wage of $55/month. She owns a Tweety Bird shirt, but has no idea who Tweety Bird is.

Zhu Chun (left), Dewan (right)

Dewan and Zhu Chun
Guangzhou, China
Quote by Zhu Chun: “One thing is for sure. I don’t want (my son) to come here to work in the factory. I just want him to study, because people like us who don’t have knowledge have to work very hard.”

Dewan and Zhu Chun moved from their village 600-miles away to Guangzhou to get a job at a factory making shoes. They haven’t seen their 13 year-old-son in three years. The original plan was to work a few years to pay off the home they built in their village, but Dewan’s mother got sick and died. Now they have a house and expensive medical bills to pay off. A few years have become a few more. The law limits their workweek to 44 hours, but they often work more than a hundred. Neither one of them has eaten cheese.

Debbie holding the author's favorite shorts

Debbie
Perry, New York
Quote: “They would have to push me out the door to get me to leave.”

Debbie’s job working for Champion was supposed to be a filler between college and whatever she decided to do next. Twenty-eight years later she is still working at the factory, which is no longer owned by Champion. In 2002 Champion moved the factory’s work and hundreds of jobs to Mexico. Lucky for Debbie the community of Perry pulled together and a new company, American Classic Outfitters, was born from the ashes of Champion. You’ve seen Debbie’s and ACO’s work. They make uniforms for 16 of the 30 NBA teams, all of the WNBA, 73 colleges, and 3 NFL teams.

Kelsey Timmerman is the author of Where am I Wearing. From the inside flap:

Ninety-seven percent of our clothes are made overseas. Yet globalization makes it difficult to know much about the origin of the products we buy—beyond the standard "Made in" label. So journalist and blogger Kelsey Timmerman decided to visit each of the countries and factories where his five favorite items of clothing were made and meet the workers. He knew the basics of globalized labor—the forces, processes, economics, and politics at work. But what was lost among all those facts and numbers was an understanding of the lives, personalities, hopes, and dreams of the people who made his clothes.

In Bangladesh, he went undercover as an under-wear buyer, witnessed the child labor industry in action, and spent the day with a single mother who was forced to send her eldest son to Saudi Arabia to help support her family. In Cambodia, he learned the difference between those who wear Levi's and those who make them. In China, he saw the costs of globalization and the dark side of the Chinese economic miracle.

Kelsey's blog is full of neat tidbits from the book. Don't miss the Underwear Wall of Fame and his informal survey of where people's T-shirts were made.

Oh, one more thing: his wife Annie just gave birth to the couple's first child, Harper Willow Timmerman, on January 6, 2009. She's very cute! (Congrats Kelsey!)

Are you an author and would like your books promoted on Neatorama? Let's talk about a possible guest blog post just like this one!

VideoSift, one of our favorite-est websites on the Net, dug up this gem of a video clip: a young Yehudi Menuhin playing Habanera by Spanish composer Pablo de Sarasate on the violin, with Adolph Baller at the piano.

Link [embedded YouTube clip]

Previously on Neatorama: 10 Operas You Didn't Know You Already Like (yes, there's a Habanera there, but it's an aria by Georges Bizet)

Wow - Neatorama made it to the TV show Who Wants to be a Millionaire ... wait a minute ... HEY! Actually, it's a rather clever generator by Remixito, where you can generate your own set of question and answers: Link - via MRod

How much CO₂ does a google search produce if a google search produces CO₂? Well, Harvard physicist Alex Wissner-Gross did the math:

... a typical search generates about 7g of CO₂ Boiling a kettle generates about 15g. “Google operates huge data centres around the world that consume a great deal of power,” said Alex Wissner-Gross, a Harvard University physicist whose research on the environmental impact of computing is due out soon. “A Google search has a definite environmental impact.”

Google is secretive about its energy consumption and carbon footprint. It also refuses to divulge the locations of its data centres. However, with more than 200m internet searches estimated globally daily, the electricity consumption and greenhouse gas emissions caused by computers and the internet is provoking concern. A recent report by Gartner, the industry analysts, said the global IT industry generated as much greenhouse gas as the world’s airlines - about 2% of global CO₂ emissions. “Data centres are among the most energy-intensive facilities imaginable,” said Evan Mills, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. Banks of servers storing billions of web pages require power.

Link - via BuzzFeed

Robert Lount of Ohio State University's Fisher College of Business found out why first impressions are so important: people are more forgiving of a
breach of trust later in the relationship as opposed as early on.

Here's the experiment:

Lount and his colleagues had college students play a computer game in which their partners (actually a computer, unbeknownst to the participants) betrayed their trust either right off the bat or somewhere in the middle of the game.

A betrayal of trust occurred when a player defected rather than cooperated in a round of the game. A cooperative play resulted in more money rewarded to both players, while a defector would get a lot more money than the partner.

After the computer partner made two defector moves, it would follow with 30 rounds of pure cooperation. Turned out that cooperation wasn't enough to gain back a participant's trust. Those who experienced a breach of trust at the game's start were the least likely to cooperate at the end of the game, cooperating less than 70 percent of the final 10 rounds.

Meanwhile, participants who experienced a betrayal later in the game, after 10 rounds of cooperation, showed the most cooperation at the end of the game, choosing to cooperate more than 90 percent of the time.

And in fact, those who were betrayed in rounds 11 and 12 were, on average, nearly 40 percent more cooperative in the last 10 rounds compared with participants who experienced an immediate betrayal.

When asked to evaluate their partners, participants gave more negative assessments of those early betrayers compared with the late ones.

"When the partner started off by defecting, and they were taken advantage of, they really formed these negative impressions — 'That person is immoral,' 'They're a jerk,' 'That's not the type of person I would like,'" Lount said.

Jeanna Bryner of LiveScience has the story: Link | Photo from Fisher College of Business

From the awesomeness that is Japanese television, here is Freddie Mercury singing I Was Born to Love You (complete with chest hair!) It's part of Monomane Battle, a show where Japanese celebrities impersonate other celebrities ...

Watch and cry: Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] - via Weird Asia News (who has more)

Julian Partridge of Bristol University found something peculiar about the brownsnout spookfish: they have mirrors for eyes!

Tests confirmed the fish is the first vertebrate known to have developed mirrors to focus light into its eyes, the team reports in Current Biology.

"In nearly 500 million years of vertebrate evolution, and many thousands of vertebrate species living and dead, this is the only one known to have solved the fundamental optical problem faced by all eyes - how to make an image - using a mirror," said Professor Julian Partridge, of Bristol University, who conducted the tests.

Link

You've got to admire Graham Parker's persistence: after 26 year's worth of attempts, he has finally solved his Rubik's cube:

Delighted Graham, 45, from Portchester, Hants, has been tirelessly trying to solve the riddle of the Cube since he bought the toy in 1983.

Married dad-of-one Graham has endured endless sleepless nights and after more than 27,400 hours he finally managed to conquer his personal Everest.

Builder Graham said: "I cannot tell you what a relief it was to finally solve it. It has driven me mad over the years - it felt like it had taken over my life. I have missed important events to stay in and solve it and I would lay awake at night thinking about it. Friends have offered to solve it for me and I know that you can find solutions on the web but I just had to do it myself. I have had wrist and back problems from spending hours on it but it was all worth it. When I clicked that last bit into place and each face was a solid colour I wept."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/4217732/Rubiks-Cube-finally-solved-after-26-years-by-avid-fan.html

Someone dubbed the "Byker Romeo" turned a 15-foot letter on top of a carpet factory into a romantic message for a sweetheart:

Staff at Storey’s Carpets in Cut Bank, Byker, Newcastle, were surprised to find that the giant white ‘CARPETS’ lettering which has been on top of their red roof for years had been replaced with ‘I LOVE U’.

The 15ft letters have been manipulated to send out a city-wide message to a sweetheart. The enormous love message is visible for miles and is causing a stir with motorists passing over Byker Bridge and has even been spotted by low flying aircraft.

Now Storey’s staff are desperate for the person to come forward, and the old romantics have promised not to take police action. Natalie Raine, marketing manager for Storey’s Carpets in the North East, said: “We’re all really curious as to who the Byker Romeo is. They must have spent hours painting out the existing sign. Some of our staff who drive into work across Byker Bridge couldn’t believe their eyes when they saw it. We all think it’s wonderful and there’s no way we want to take any action against the person who did it.

Link - via Arbroath

O.M.G. A Texas death row inmate with a history of mental problem pulled his eyeball and then ate it!

Before his trial (of which he was convicted and sentenced to death), he had pulled out an eyeball (but didn't eat it). The judge had declared him mentally fit for trial:

A death-row officer at the Polunsky Unit of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice found Thomas in his cell with blood on his face and took him to the infirmary.

"Thomas said he pulled out his eye and subsequently ingested it," agency spokesman Jason Clark said Friday.

Thomas was treated at East Texas Medical Center in Tyler after the Dec. 9 incident. Then he was transferred and remains at the Jester Unit, a prison psychiatric facility near Richmond southwest of Houston.

"He will finally be able to receive the mental health care that we had wanted and begged for from day 1," Bobbie Peterson-Cate, Thomas' trial attorney, told the Sherman Herald Democrat. "He is insane and mentally ill. It is exactly the same reason he pulled out the last one."

Link

Here's where men end up when they mess up and get their wives or girlfriends angry: the dog house. Yes, it's an advertisement, but it's funny because it's true (what man hasn't been in the dog house?)

Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] - via SixPackTech

Betcha didn't know that "ha-ha" is an actual word meaning a trench, basically a sunken fence to keep livestocks from coming into your backyard while preserving the uncluttered look of the landscape:

... the name is derived from the response of ordinary folk on encountering them and that they were, "...then deemed so astonishing, that the common people called them Ha! Ha's! to express their surprise at finding a sudden and unperceived check to their walk."

More on Ha-ha at Wikipedia - via Fancy Notion's Word of the Day

Soon to be an ex-racist

Are you a racist? While most people don't view themselves as prejudiced, a surprising new study revealed that many unknowingly have racist views:

The authors divided 120 non-black participants into the roles of "experiencers" and "forecasters." The "experiencers" were placed in a room with a white person and a black person, who played out pre-arranged scenarios for the experiment. The scenarios began when the black role-player bumped the white role-player's knee when leaving the room.

In the first scenario, the white person did not comment afterwards. In the "moderate" case, the white person said, "Typical, I hate it when black people do that," after the black person left the room. In the "extreme" case, the white person remarked, "Clumsy n****r."

The "forecasters," meanwhile, predicted how they would feel in these situations.

The magnitude of the results surprised even the authors, Kawakami said. Experiencers reported little distress in all three scenarios, much less than the forecasters did in the moderate and severe situations.

"Even using that most extreme comment didn't lead people to be particularly upset," said co-author Elizabeth Dunn, assistant professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

Link

Previously on Neatorama: How Racist Are You? Take the test!

How do mosquitoes find love? Turns out, they serenade their mates! Scientists at Cornell University found out by supergluing mosquitoes on to a tiny tether and then suspending them in the air:

The male mosquito's buzz, or flight tone, is normally about 600 cycles per second, or 600-Hz. The female's tone is about 400-Hz. In music, he's roughly a D, and she's about a G. So the male brings his tone into phase with the female's to create a near-perfect duet. Together, the two tones create what musicians call an overtone — a third, fainter tone at 1200-Hz. Only then will the mosquitoes mate.

Christopher Joyce of NPR has the story: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99133147 (with video clip)

Ah, art. Behold the Eco Brolly by Shiu Yuk Yuen. It's an "environmentally friendly" umbrella that turns whatever happens to be convenient at the time of rain (like a newspaper or plastic bag) into an umbrella:

it can re-use whatever the consumer thinks of reusing. It is a supporting devise when it rains, all the user has to do is unscrew the top lid, poke the lid onto the middle of a reuseable object, quick screw to secure it & open it out like an umbrella!

This is for short distances, but it can last longer, by clipping the clips at each end of the umbrella onto the newspaper to stabalise it. It is pocket size, lightweight aluminium, suitable for Britan, where its hard to predict the weather, espeically for Central Londoners, where free newspaper is avaliable.

This, of course, begs, the question: if you want to carry something, why not carry a regular umbrella in the first place?

Link - via OhGizmo!