Category Archives: Wildlife

White Christmas?

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Today in Kalamazoo Michigan we have a high of 43 and a low of 28. There is no snowpack on the ground, the ground is bare. Again we have a no-snow Christmas. We’ve had these for a few years now, and looking at the forecast, by Sunday we’ll have a high of 57 degrees and it’ll rain.

Things that used to be aren’t any longer, the seasons are shifting around, and even our USDA zone is changing and has over the past few years. More than that, you can feel that something is terribly wrong with the world. You can see it in the people, you can see it in the sky, the weather, the birds, and the remarkable and tragic lack of any sort of insect out there.

This is the season of hope and wonder, so I won’t harsh it, but we all know deep down what I would write if it wasn’t the holiday season.

The Future of Power?

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The California PG&E outage is a clear note about what happens when you ignore your infrastructure and you don’t have a regular preventative maintenance schedule. PM can cost a lot, but as we see in California, does it really?

I started wondering about alternatives to high tension power lines in California. You couldn’t really bury any of it, with so many quakes, maybe. So what else? Microwave transmission? Maybe make it auto-aiming so if there is a quake and the tower moves a little, it can reacquire the source faster? Or perhaps spread out the generation stations, like solar reflector installations, to distribute the load and increase the production rate…

But then these ideas lead me to truly knackers ideas. If you are going to go this far, why not just also install immense Tesla coils and then outfit cars with wireless AC receivers and then the entire automobile fleet can be electric and not need charging, since you can skip batteries, it’s much easier and cheaper.

But if we did — then we might be able to use addressable frequencies per vehicle or overlay a data stream on top of the power itself, so a car that did a hit and run or is involved in an OJ chase could be remotely turned off. But man, with enough coils dotting the landscape, powered by solar reflector stations you could drive from coast to coast with ease. We could possibly make covered tunneled roadways and then increase the speed, then automate the entire thing so after you get past human reaction limits, your car can accelerate to a comfy cruising speed of 350mph or higher.

I want to trade an immense battery bank for honeycombed graphene and kevlar car bodies so I’m traveling safely even if I impact at ridiculously high speeds. Or I want a car that automatically fills with a gassy rubber filler and ejects the passenger compartment upon a catastrophic impact event, like we have with fighter jet ejection systems. And an adorable theme-able packed parachute, maybe Hello Kitty? šŸ˜‰

But an entire truck fleet that is automated and powered by solar reflector stations and tesla coils. Zero emissions. Poof, just like that. I suppose I like solar reflectors more because they mean business. Plus you could put the parabolic mirrors on gantries say twenty feet up, and then have open pasture underneath for cows, chickens, and sheep. Or grow shade-happy crops?

These power stations might, if there are enough of them, raise the albedo of the local area and then you nip greenhouse effect at the beginning of the cycle. You’re channeling the incoming solar radiation elsewhere. It isn’t heating up water or pavement or farmland. It’s being soaked up by hungry devices like trucks and cars and trains.

I sort of wonder what an airplane with a wireless AC box would look like? Different jet technology, based on electrics not on jet fuel. And the tons of carbon saved. You could replace the jet fuel with new safety equipment, like foam bursters and ejection systems in case of some sort of failure in the air. The plane just falls apart, the cabin fills with sticky goop, and it parachutes to earth safely.

We would be free of oil completely. It would rewrite the entire narrative.

Invention

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I may or may not have just invented something new! I’ve been pondering for a while how to feed all my apple trees. Specifically this came about when I looked at my Weather Underground app and noticed a rather beautiful but dry week ahead for us here in southwest Michigan. The problem is, how do I water the trees where I don’t overdo it, where I don’t spend a while outside being a buffet for mosquitoes, and where I can water my trees on days that won’t have any rain without having to fuss any.

As I was walking home from taking the bus today it struck me as I was looking at all the lawns and gardens that I pass on my way home from the bus stop on East Main Street. Why not repurpose gallon-sized water bottles? I buy pure water for my cats drinking and food-additive water when I go to the market anyways and after I scrounged around the house I found three exhausted one-gallon jugs of purified water. Usually I just crumple them up and throw them in the single stream recycling bin where they go to be recycled, but as I was walking it struck me, why not poke very tiny holes in the water jugs and then I could put them out by the trees base and let the jugs drip-water my trees. It works wonderfully well! I keep the plastic from the recycling stream and I can fill them up in the morning with exactly one gallon of clean water and then cap them. One teeny hole at the top lets in air while there are two teeny little holes at the bottom that slowly let the water drip into the tree’s base. I don’t have to screw around holding the hose, wondering how much water I’m delivering and exposing myself to those nasty little bloodsuckers, at least not any more than I have to in order to water my trees. The only trick was figuring out what to make the holes with. The perfect tool is a thumbtack but I don’t have any at home, no application for them, so I tried the next best thing – flair-button pins! We’ve got a decorative glass bowl full of flair buttons. I grabbed a worthless one that nobody would care about and pulled it’s pin out, turning it into a kind of funny looking thumbtack. It did the job perfectly. Poked a next-to-invisible hole at the top, then two or three in the base and that’s that, all done! I went outside, filled the jugs with water and walked them over to the trees. Over the span of maybe half an hour the jugs will lose all their water. I know I have delivered one gallon of very slow drip-drip-drip water to my trees, not flooding them and not having to worry about how much or exposure. In the mornings when it won’t rain I can go outside and with the hose fill up each jug lickety split. Cap them and walk away.

It’s free, easy, and I think at least a fair bit clever. I think this could also work really well for our garden once we get it going. No more having to worry about how much water, how frequently, or any of that. And no more buying stupid “watering hoses” that disintegrate or don’t work properly when you get them home. This way it’s free, active recycling, and for four apple trees, that’s four gallons of water. Bam. I could even sneak some fertilizer in there and shake the devil out of them and dissolve the fertilizer or food and walk away.

If you find this useful, please comment here, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, or Google+ as I link-dump on all those other services as well.

Time To Die

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Jolly RogerI’ve refined how I kill weeds around the house. I recently got a small jug of 25x RoundUp and I was wearing blue nitrile gloves and using a paint brush to paint leaves with the RoundUp. I was in the middle of killing some nasty ā€œOrnamental Grassā€ which is actually a weed and it struck me that I have these gloves on and all I have to do is just stick my finger in the RoundUp solution and then I could reach out and touch the plants I want to die.

That sped things up immensely. I wandered through my property and anything that I evaluated ā€œThis has to dieā€ got a loving RoundUp soaked stroke of death on its leaves. There is a nasty weed, amongst many other species on my property. It grows very tall and has slender long leaves and there’s a central cluster that always looks like it’s on the verge of blossoming but never does. This week chokes out all the other plants and so I selected it to die. There is also a nasty vine-weed running throughout the back yard in my garden and it’s wrapped itself up around all the trees and it’s again, choking out all the other plants. It has smallish maple-tree-shaped bronze leaves and it has as well, been selected for death. Finally, there is our enemy, cypress spurge. I have found clumps of it all over the property and I have caressed it to death where I was sure I wouldn’t touch any other plants.

When my mosey of death is finished I cap the RoundUp and peel off the nitrile gloves. Then I go inside and wash my hands vigorously in hot soapy water just to make sure that there isn’t any RoundUp on my hands that somehow made it through the nitrile.

In a few days to a month we should see systemic shutdown of growth and subsequent death in all the selected-to-die plants that are trying to grow on my property. It kind of made me feel like a grim reaper. Walking along, just tousling the tops of noxious plants with my hands and softly whispering ā€œtime to dieā€ as I moved along.

It certainly beats stooping, trying to pull the damn things up and not getting the whole plant or watching it just pop up somewhere else because a runner or rhizome decided it would try life as a pioneer. This way the entire plant, it’s leaves, stalk, and root systems all die.

photo by: Timothy Tolle

PAD 4/10/2013 – Imperfection

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PAD 4/10/2013

Daily Prompt: Imperfection
by michelle w.
Imperfections — in things, in people, in places — add character to life. Tell us about an imperfection that you cherish.

Imperfections abound. I can’t help but wax philosophical as it was the first thing to come to mind when I saw this particular prompt. Which imperfection do I find the most valuable? Our imperfect understanding of the Universe. Yes, as I said, it’s huge and bold and monumental. If we knew exactly how the Wizard did what he did behind the curtain would life be as rich as is it for us now? Not knowing everything keeps room for the mysteries alive. There are so many little mysteries that would wither and die if we had the keys to the Grand Unified Theory. If we could explain everything then there would be no room for fancy and imagination. Sometimes I think that there really isn’t a Grand Unified Theory, because the Universe loathes certainty. If there is no room for gnomes, dwarves, manitou, brownies, or fairies then there is no room for beauty and who would want to live in a world like that? I suppose it’s the romantic part of me that rejects the notion of the Universe as a marvelously complicated clockwork. If we could pin down a Grand Unified Theory then we could exorcise randomness from everything. How agonizingly banal would it be when we had a rule that fit every single observation perfectly? Sometimes I think that if there is a God, he’s spending his time keeping us guessing because that’s how he expresses his love for us. Keeping us on our toes, always guessing, always learning, always marveling at the mysteries that lay before us, in a way, our imperfect understanding is the fertile soil of the true beauty we are seeking. A wild and wonderful world where the rules are just beyond our grasp constantly challenges and enjoins us to engage with it. That striving for the Grand Unified Theory is actually our goal, not actually attaining it, but pursuing it. Endlessly.

It’s important for it to be this way, where else could the fairies go if it wasn’t?

Bandinage in Robin Hood’s Barn

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HexedWow, what a long strange trip that was! I’ve got a lot of my amateur photography and I’ve been kicking around the notion of placing it all on my host and sharing it through my blog somehow. I started this sad trip with Pixelpost, then looked around for other LAMP scripts that could work after Pixelpost belly-flopped and died on impact. The issue I had with Pixelpost was trying to mass-import 218 pictures of my two cats. The software just couldn’t cope. So after a while trying to hammer a square peg in a round hole I just gave up altogether.

Then it struck me that I could use my WordPress blog maybe. I had a dim memory about something about Galleries. I can store as much as I like on my host and there’s no bandwidth issues so why not? So I did some reading in the Codex and well, there you go! Create a new Page, add Media, create a new Gallery and it’s EXACTLY WHAT I WANTED. Then I happened to notice JetPack and looked in there and it has Carousel feature which improves the standard Gallery control for WordPress. WOW! It was everything I wanted and it ate all 218 files without blinking and making new pages is a snap! Adding and removing pictures from the Galleries is just as easy.

So all that way and all that time blown out trying to get a weak system to behave itself and the answer was just under the covers in WordPress all along! I am exceptionally pleased. šŸ™‚ Thanks all you wonderful ladies and gentlemen at Automattic! Thankee-sai!

You can find these galleries on the main menu of my Blog, under the title of Photo Galleries. I hope you enjoy them!

photo by: Nicholas_T

Louisiana, USA: GOP Rep Wants to Legalize Employment Discrimination Against Gays

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Louisiana, USA: GOP Rep Wants to Legalize Employment Discrimination Against Gays.

I’ve been to Louisiana. What value does it have? There is some economic concern there, as the Mississippi River empties there, it’s where a lot of gasoline is refined and shipped across the country. I doubt that would attract many people to that state, let alone gay people. What else does Louisiana have?

  • Deep South – Conservative Christian charm right up to their collective necks. What a delight!
  • Fire Ants – Their bites tickle.
  • Killer Bees – Their stings are simply nuzzles of love, with venom.
  • Hurricanes, oppressively hot weather, intense rain – Oh lordy! Hold me back! I gotta get me some of that action!
  • Delightful Inequality – I’m not really a person in that state, so hey, what does anything matter to a nobody like me?
  • Overwhelming Obesity in local population – Loving men is easier when they can’t leave the house because they can’t fit through the doorways. Need flour and a while to find wet spots.

All in all, I can see why everyone is beating a path to Louisiana to bask in their delightful wonderfulness.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Unique

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2012-08-20 17.30.42 Last August I was walking out of where I work and I just happened to glance down and saw this flower growing all by itself in a crack that had developed in the concrete stairway leading out of my building down to the sidewalk. It struck me that something so evocative would grow without encouragement in a place that really is unlikely for any flower to thrive. It didn’t really last very long as someone from landscape services (I assume) came along and plucked it. Now all that is there is a crack in the concrete stairway. A little bit of special was there only for a brief time.

Unique.

No Forgiveness for BP

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I just saw a BP commercial play on CBS, as part of the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. I DVR the show and watch it when I like, time shifting it to a more pleasant hour than when itā€™s on, so itā€™s always an old program, which Iā€™m fine with. But the BP commercial does irritate me. In it, a talking head for BP explains, almost plaintively, that they have spent 23 billion dollars in cleanup efforts in the Gulf of Mexico. He then talks up all the wonderful opportunities and great tourism of the area and then segues into how many Americans BP employs.

How dare you! How dare your company! Your greed and ignorance are only met with your petulant arrogance. You think there is any forgiveness for you? There is no forgiveness possible for an amoral company such as BP. Companies are not people. You cannot possibly expect people to treat you like you are asking them to. You poisoned the Gulf of Mexico with your greedy incompetence!

I still maintain that the right and proper punishment for what BP did in the Gulf of Mexico was to have all their American property seized, liquidated and be banned from doing any commerce in the United States. Thatā€™s a fitting punishment, not 23 billion dollars. Itā€™s chump change to what you did in the Gulf of Mexico. The fact that BP wasnā€™t eliminated from the United States is clear proof that there is still quite a lot wrong with our world and how we manage it.

Shame on you BP. Shame on you forever.