Squatting With A Cell Phone

A reader points to new census data from India comparing toilet use to cell phone ownership:

Cell phones in a landslide. I'd bet the same holds in much of the developing world – the astonishing pace and penetration of cellular communications over the last decade. The developed world had 150 years of telegraph/telephone poles; the developing world just skipped that step. The savings that represents (just imagine the infrastructure costs they avoided!) are available for other projects. In 50 years, I bet wireless communications will be seen as the "break" that helped kickstart many of these countries out of the cycle of perpetual poverty. Anyway, they are startling stats.

On an unrelated note, our reader digs up a gem on physics:

Your post on the myth of the deadly penny made me remember the famous essay "On Being the Right Size" by the remarkable J.B.S. Haldane. Money quote:

You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft; and, on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away, provided that the ground is fairly soft. A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes.