Author Archives: Hue White

A picture which is evocative of barren waste, loneliness, and desolation.

Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

Fossil fuels run into some more headwinds, reports Sami Grover @ TreeHugger.com:

The latest to join the club is ANZ, one of Australia’s big four banks, which The Guardian reports is making a bold commitment to stop funding any new conventional coal-fired power plants that don’t deploy Carbon Capture and Storage and/or similar technologies that significantly reduce carbon emissions.

Additionally, ANZ is pledging $10 billion over the next 5 years to fund renewable energy, reforestation, energy efficiency and other low emission technologies.

This is a promising sign indeed. And it may be driven as much by economics as it is ethics. Indeed, ANZ acknowledged in a statement that its exposure to carbon intensive industries was considered by many to be an increasingly significant financial risk, and that the bank needed to play its part in helping to manage an “orderly transition” from fossil fuels: …

Banks are, supposedly, experts at evaluating risk.  When the business evaluation of the situation calls for moving away from fossil fuels, I think we can expect faster and faster movement towards the renewable sources of energy.

Sami’s source is this the guardian article.  It includes this statement:

But ANZ said it was committed to the internationally agreed target of limiting global warming to 2C above pre-industrial times. The bank said it would transparently report its progress on climate and set targets to reduce its own emissions.

Australia three other largest banks – Westpac, Commonwealth Bank and NAB – are all signed up to sustainability commitments for their lending. But environmental groups have pressed them to do more by ruling out investment in coal projects, as overseas banks have done with Adani’s huge Carmichael mine in Queensland.

I’ll be interested in knowing how ANZ defines “transparently.”  Done properly and it can become an excellent example for other companies to follow, or not, depending on outcomes.

I wonder if the accession of Mr. Turnbull to the Prime Ministership pressured ANZ into making this commitment.  the guardian article also notes this about Australia’s situation:

According to University College London, 90% of Australia’s known coal reserves must be left unburned to keep the world on track to avoid warming above 2C. Analysis released by AGL last year showed that 75% of Australia’s ageing coal-fired power stations were operating beyond their “useful life” but that it was too expensive to shut them down.

No clarification of “too expensive”.  To replace?  To make cleaner?

A reader shares his feelings about honey:

I like all kinds of honey. Never met one I didn’t enjoy, although I like some better than others. The problem with commercial, refined honeys is you may not even be getting 100% honey. There was a big scandal a year or so ago where China was exporting contaminated honey mixed with random sugar syrups, colorings, etc. Once it was caught in the USA, they simply transshipped it through 3rd party countries and it ended up back in the USA again. Some of it was contaminated with lead and animal antibiotics. It was banned in the EU, as well. Since, examination of other commercial, refined honeys presumably produced “here” as found them to be not all honey, either.

And I suppose we can expect that trend to continue so long as honey bee populations are seen as threatened, although some disagree with that view.  I do hope you have the approved honey spoon:

For those curious about the campaign against ivory poaching, news from the Elephant Action League indicates some progress in the problematic nation of Tanzania:

“The Queen of Ivory”, a Chinese national, arrested by a specialized Task Force in Tanzania. To date, she is the most important ivory trafficker ever arrested in the country.

Dar-es-Salaam, 8 October 2015 – A specialized wildlife trafficking unit under Tanzania’s National and Transnational Serious Crimes Investigation Unit (NTSCIU) arrested a number of high-level Chinese ivory traffickers led by a woman who is now thought to be the most notorious ivory trafficker brought to task so far in the war against elephant poaching. She is believed to be behind the trafficking of a huge quantity of ivory over the last several years.

The woman, now dubbed the “Queen of Ivory”, is a Chinese national named Yang Feng Glan, 66, and has been followed by the Task Force for over a year. She recently disappeared from Tanzania, moving to Uganda, but returned one week ago, when the Task Force swiftly moved and arrested her. After confessing to many of her crimes she has been taken to the high court of Dar es Salaam facing a maximum sentence of 20-30 years imprisonment.

(h/t Change.org)

Katherine Martinko @ TreeHugger.com reviews some information on raw honey vs refined honey, and, loving honey, I had to read it.  This caught my eye:

1. Raw unfiltered honey contains bee pollen, which has long been considered one of nature’s most nourishing foods. Bee pollen is packed with protein, and has been used in Chinese medicine to improve unbalanced nutrition, vitality, longevity, and energy. It is also used for weight control, beauty, anti-aging, allergies, and overall health.

Any time I see a reference to Chinese medicine, holistic medicine, etc, my ears prick up.  So I checked on bee pollen on WebMD.  It doesn’t address the topic directly, but rather simply says,

You may also hear recommendations for using bee pollen for alcoholism, asthma, allergies, health maintenance, or stomach problems, but there is no proof that it helps with these conditions. Before you take any natural product for a health condition, check with your doctor.

Bee pollen is also recommended by some herbalists to enhance athletic performance, reduce side effects of chemotherapy, and improve allergies and asthma.

At this point, medical research has not shown that bee pollen is effective for any of these health concerns.

Or anything at all, really.  On the other hand, it’s not considered dangerous except to pregnant women.  Another case of greener grass in other pastures, I suppose.  The nitty-gritty of the local variety of medicine can’t compare to the unverified claims for the one in the next valley over.

But I still like most honey.  (Didn’t care for buckwheat-derived honey so much, though.)

With regard to the fiasco currently underway in the American House of Representatives, in which the front-runner to replace Representative Boehner as Speaker of the House abruptly dropped out after some of his remarks were widely interpreted to indicate a House Committee was actually being used to interfere with the political fortunes of one of the Democratic candidates, Steve Benen @ MaddowBlog has come up with an interesting rumor:

In case you’re a Trump supporter because you like small, unintrusive government, Ilya Somin @ The Volokh Conspiracy takes apart Trump’s view of the government capability of takings.

In a recent interview with Fox News, Donald Trump, who has a history of abusing eminent domain for his own benefit, claims that the condemnation of property for transfer to private developers is “a wonderful thing” and “is not taking property”:

So eminent domain, when it comes to jobs, roads, the public good, I think it’s a wonderful thing, I’ll be honest with you. And remember, you’re not taking property, you know, the way you asked the question, the way other people—you’re paying a fortune for that property. Those people can move two blocks away into a much nicer house.

When the government forces you to give up your land against your will, that is pretty obviously a “taking” of property. That’s true as a legal matter, and it is also true as a matter of simple common sense.

It is true that victims of eminent domain get compensated by the government. But Trump’s claim that they get “a fortune” and can then “go buy a house now that’s five times bigger, in a better location” is, in the vast majority of cases, simply false. If it were true, people would be happy to have their homes condemned. It also isn’t true that victims of takings can usually just “move two blocks away into a much nicer house.” Since World War II, urban renewal takings and other condemnations for private development have forcibly displaced hundreds of thousands of people, most of whom were left far worse off than they were before.

I see takings as simply a weapon for those who’ve achieved elective office to use against those who are out of power – and often unable to defend themselves against the deprivations of the politically privileged class.  I know the Founding Fathers didn’t have that in mind – but that’s how it’s turned out.

BloombergBusiness‘ Tom Randall points out that renewables may now be unstoppable:

To appreciate what’s going on [in the USA], you need to understand the capacity factor. That’s the percentage of a power plant’s maximum potential that’s actually achieved over time.

Consider a solar project. The sun doesn’t shine at night and, even during the day, varies in brightness with the weather and the seasons. So a project that can crank out 100 megawatt hours of electricity during the sunniest part of the day might produce just 20 percent of that when averaged out over a year. That gives it a 20 percent capacity factor.

One of the major strengths of fossil fuel power plants is that they can command very high and predictable capacity factors. The average U.S. natural gas plant, for example, might produce about 70 percent of its potential (falling short of 100 percent because of seasonal demand and maintenance). But that’s what’s changing, and it’s a big deal.

For the first time, widespread adoption of renewables is effectively lowering the capacity factor for fossil fuels. That’s because once a solar or wind project is built, the marginal cost of the electricity it produces is pretty much zero—free electricity—while coal and gas plants require more fuel for every new watt produced. If you’re a power company with a choice, you choose the free stuff every time.

It’s a self-reinforcing cycle. As more renewables are installed, coal and natural gas plants are used less. As coal and gas are used less, the cost of using them to generate electricity goes up. As the cost of coal and gas power rises, more renewables will be installed.

The important business question?

Historically, a high capacity factor has been a fixed input in the cost calculation. But now anyone contemplating a billion-dollar power plant with an anticipated lifespan of decades must consider the possibility that as time goes on, the plant will be used less than when its doors first open.

This may be an important riposte to the argument from Michael LePage that the downtrend in fossil fuel usage was only a blip:

Coal is the key to all our futures. Rich countries have made some progress in cutting carbon dioxide emissions, largely by shifting away from coal to less-polluting fuels. But the result has been a glut of cheap coal, leading to a coal renaissance that could consign us to a world more than 4 °C warmer.

And the nation hosting the December 2015 UN summit on climate change, also in Paris, is helping fund this renaissance. It’s hardly surprising then that no one at last week’s conference thought the summit would deliver a deal to stop global temperatures rising more than 2 °C – generally considered to be the threshold above which catastrophic consequences are inevitable.

However, in those countries where energy is a nationalized industry, or the industry has a deep influence on the government, the retort may be less effective.  Regardless, the price of fossil fuels, especially if we begin to see the producers of fossil fuels ramping production downwards, in comparison to renewables should even force the recalcitrants out of their castles of denial.  We may actually be on our way.

In a related note, Michael Graham Richards @ TreeHugger.com, in reaction to the BloombergBusiness article, mentions this:

The next big argument is intermittency. This article isn’t about that, so I won’t go into detail, but let’s just say that there are many ways to mitigate the problem: Grid-scale storage is coming down in price (from the Tesla Energy batteries to grid-scale liquid metal batteries), someday we’ll have millions of electric cars with vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology that act as a kind of giant distributed battery (people will get paid to rent out a few percents of their batteries to absorb grid variations), interconnected smart grids will be able to shift energy from regions where there’s a surplus of sun and wind to those where there’s a deficit, dynamic pricing will help demand stay closer to supply, etc

Right now I believe the national grids are not terribly well interconnected themselves, but it does seem to me that finding a way to interconnect them (which would be an interesting technical challenge) would obviate the sunlight/darkness argument against solar – because it’s always sunny somewhere.  A completely integrated power grid would make that truism important.

Jim Dowd @ The Gloucester Claim claims otherwise there’s a pattern:

The most recent attacker, Christopher Harper-Mercer, follows the strict pattern of highly-aggrieved men trapped in a cultural paradox from which they cannot escape. His and the other attacks like it, congruent down to sporting military-style clothing, are an attempt to call “society” to task for leaving them behind. To these men, who perceive they are not receiving the level of respect to which they feel deeply entitled, it’s nothing less than a revolution. When you read their posts online they discuss previous attackers like the Dylan Klebold of the Columbine massacre and James Holmes of the Aurora theatre shooting and now Harper-Mercer as a martyr, a hero and most disturbingly, a “warrior” for the cause.

Dowd goes on to note that the Internet has allowed this subgroup to begin to link up and begin defining a rationalizing doctrine involving White Supremacy (my comments on supremacies of any color here), men’s rights movements, etc.  Jim continues:

So why is this happening in the United States? For similar reasons it happens anywhere else in the world. These young men feel humiliated and powerless. They find themselves incapable of achieving the status they perceive necessary to secure what they want most, typically access to sexual partners (and let’s not forget that suicide attackers in the Islamic tradition are awarded 72 virgins in paradise). They then attack the people who they think are responsible for their standing, typically at a school or a workplace where their daily perceived humiliations are carried out.

Is this so hard to understand? Just like in other countries where there is extreme change and social tension, the formerly empowered group being pushed “out” is fighting back with violence. We continue to perceive these mass shootings to be individual, isolated incidents. They are not. They are like car bombings and transit attacks overseas, individual incidents but linked to a greater struggle.

Yes, it is for those of us who didn’t fall into violence of this sort.  Most folks are not aware of subtle societal trends over time; it’s hard enough just to consume everything we’re expected to consume.

“Humiliation” is the word you see again and again. That’s the engine driving this, the never-ending loss of face of volatile young men.

Today a growing segment of young adult males will not achieve the material and social success necessary to be attractive mates and form households. By way of comparison, a generation ago in his mid-20s my father had a house, a wife, two kids and a stable job things I was unable to achieve until my ’30s (he would go on to fuck all this up later, but that’s another story). Today Increased economic opportunity and higher educational attainment for women has removed the economic need to be tied down to undesirable dudes. This is a good thing for almost everyone. But for those on the outside, however, it turns social awkwardness and the tail end of the achievement bell curve into a prison planet of isolation. And that generates rage.

I would not confuse this with blaming society, since that implies a deliberate attempt to humiliate the young men in general.  It would be interesting to decompose this a bit more.  For example, they are proud, yet humiliated.  OK, what achievements generate pride for them?  Or are they being raised to be proud without reason?  (Yeah, the whole pride thing could be usefully examined, as people take way too much pride in the silliest of things – and then kill each other over it.)  But as manufacturing moved overseas, it’s certainly true that there are fewer jobs available to young guys.  Another trend is the zero-risk society, which removes many jobs or replaces the workers with robots.  I had a reaction to that a few months ago:

My reaction when reading about AI is mixed: an interest in the technique, but a real feeling of WHY?  This planet positively crawls with nearly 8 billion people, most of them fairly smart and capable of doing the same work asked of an AI based program, in most cases much better.

It’s a grim, even repulsive thought, but also undeniable: young guys put themselves at risk.  Period.  In prior generations they were sent off to war, the coal mines, the farm fields, where they worked off their energy while their brains caught up with their bodies.

It’s an interesting blog post by Mr. Dowd, especially the bit where he quotes some of the fairly horrific posts by those who appreciate the Oregon slaughter.

(Updated 10/9/2015 to fix inadvertent reversal of what I mean to write.  If, indeed, I’m not just a random writing machine.  That does militate against predestination, though.)

… at least according to the Rosetta Probe:

The Rosetta space probe has spotted a square-kilometre field of solid ice in the neck region of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The comet’s day-night cycle drives its small weather system using the ice field, sublimating the ice into vapour when the sun rises.

The ice was spotted in data gathered last August using Rosetta’s VIRTIS instrument – a spectrometer designed to map the comet’s chemical composition. The water signal was stronger when the neck was in shadow and weaker during the comet’s day.

(NewScientist 26 September 2015, paywall)

kos @ The Daily Kos goes all kaiju on those folks who get the hiccups about electric cars.

But for now, we have a billionaire entrepreneur CEO making muscular, American-engineered and made cars for the richest Americans. You’d think the right-wing would be ecstatic! But, there’s one thing conservatives hate more than successful American businessmen, and that’s anything that smacks of helping save the environment. It offends them so deeply, in fact, that they’ve turned Tesla into their latest boogeyman, driving them irrationally insane.

Some of the remarks he tromples over were awfully idiotic.  Maybe he was cherry picking?  Or perhaps the anti-environmentalists are really that bad at research and, well, thinking.

When someone tells you a cemetery had to be relocated before they built your house, don’t bank on it:

[Dr. Patricia] Richards is the associate director of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Cultural Resource Management (UWM-CRM) program, the contractual branch of the university’s Department of Anthropology, which helps clients maintain compliance with the state’s archeological standards and provides interpretation services. And she’s seen plenty of “relocated” cemeteries resurface before. “In my career as an urban archeologist, if I had a dollar for every time remains were supposed to be moved and they weren’t,” she says, her voice trailing off meaningfully. Often, only headstones were relocated; following through with transferring the bodies themselves was dependent on whether there was family in the area to “steward the remains.” If an immigrant had come to America alone, or if his or her family had moved out of the area or died themselves, chances were no one would make sure gravesites were tended.

Or, when necessary, dug up and moved.

In this case, the director of the Guest House was hopeful that the graves had been relocated, since she knew late-19^th century housing had stood on the lot. In fact, Richards points out where the foundation of a rather shallow basement had to be removed in advance of her team’s excavation. But, she says, when they lifted it out, clear stains from the disintegrating wood coffins marked the bottom of the cement – the 19^th century homebuilders must’ve known exactly what they were building on top of.

From the Field Notes blog at Discover.com.

Reading through the entry, it strikes me that archaeologists may be even more detail-oriented than software engineers:

In addition to the remains themselves, the dirt removed from each grave is saved to be sifted or floated to search for small bones or other items; buckets of soil are constantly being ferried back and forth from the graves as Richards and Jones stand and talk with me. In particular, floating the dirt from the pelvic region can uncover fetal bones, if the deceased was a pregnant woman, which can help establish sex and age range. Dirt from the abdomen and pelvic area will also be sent to a researcher for parasitological analysis; information about what was in these earlier settlers’ guts can yield information about migration, cultural changes, and dietary habits.

And this also caught my eye.

One thing the analysis likely won’t yield: Identification of the remains. The Second Ward Cemetery is also referred to as the “German Protestant Cemetery” in 19^th-century newspapers, but it was not affiliated with any one parish or congregation. The mortgage on the land was held by early Milwaukee businessman and Pomeranian immigrant John Grunhagen and likely got its name as a nod to the ethnicity of the surrounding neighborhood. Because of the lack of parish affiliation, there are no known burial records, and the lack of records makes identification extremely unlikely.

I’ve read archaeology magazines for years, so I was aware of this activity, but keeping in mind there’s 8 billion of us on this globe now, somehow I just can’t get excited about identifying their remains, by which I mean putting names to the remains.  I can get excited at amassing analyses and coming to statistical conclusions about these people, such as this:

Richards and Jones note the individuals’ dental health as well. Adults, they say, had overwhelmingly good teeth. The juveniles, however… “Massive cavities,” Jones says.

That’s an initial impression, but you take my point – the statistics tell us far more about what’s happening in the environment than whether this woman was Joan or Joanne.  Certainly some most folks find this important.  But as someone who’s in favor of green burial (I often tell my wife to just toss me in a ditch so I may rejoin the ecological system immediately), I guess I’m a little baffled.

An update on this project: I’ve switched from writing code with a little testing, to a lot of testing and coding to fix problems (rare) or support requirements I had not yet addressed (common).  As part of this switch I officially note that using the BNF directly from the spec (mostly) is a success, at least with the limited sample set.

Need to build a bridge?  Got a couple of drones?  Here’s how.

The final episode of CSI aired this week, and last night we sat down and watched it.  I was reminded, once again, of the excellence of the production, from the writing to the acting to the staging and special effects; but, more importantly, that it was a beacon of reason and science in a country frequently roused by irrationality, superstition, and anger.  The setting of Las Vegas itself, a monument to human pride and avarice, lent the show a wonderful and required contrast, as the use of science, the study of reality, to detect the means of sometimes horrific crimes, contributed to the basic human need of a mythology of right vs wrong.

But the idea of mythology, that some things are shrouded in mystery and should just be believed, was not extended to science, to its great benefit.  Instead, a treatment of the science and technology behind the processes of analyzing a crime scene permits the alert to learn somewhat of the science & technology relevant to the show, even if, at times, the depictions were not entirely accurate.  By revealing the nitty-gritty of the science, its comprehensibility, the show is set apart from other fields of study which sometimes claim a type of equality.  For those who claim science is just another way of looking at the universe, or is just another religion, the show must stick in their craw as it the quantitative differences are desperately highlighted: all of the critical words are hit – what, why, how.  Too often, competing paradigms for the universe lack in one or another: God wants it that way, it’s homeopathy, this potion will balance your queezle-gop, don’t ask how, it’s all patented.  Science is painted as eminently comprehensible, and if the struggle to understand reality is, sometimes, not completely depicted, the adult learner will know nothing worth learning is easy to learn.  The grind of science can be exhausting; but then, so can pushing a shovel.

I mentioned that sometimes the show was not completely accurate in its science, and this is important, but for a reason not expected.  It is, after all, theatre: the arena of stories, of teaching, of learning the lessons of human society.  One such lesson, perhaps intended, perhaps not, is this: that technology improvements will improve human lives.  In this particular instance, the story of a particular crime being solved by an imagined technology is a lesson to the technology community that an improvement in order to transition that technology from imagination to reality would have tangible, positive results.  A well-thought out story does not toss around random elements, but comes up with internally logical responses to situations, and even if an imagined technology is only mentioned in order to increase the tension in a story, that does not invalidate its potential usefulness in our reality.  From Dr. McCoy’s Star Trek medical tricorder to the impossibly speedy DNA analysis of CSI, these imaginations are more than meaningless artifacts of a story, but guideposts to what the future should hold.

But the show was equally about the humanity, in its glorious, furious, and incomprehensible irrationality which we suffer and wear with an inevitable grim grin: a sentence I write in tribute to its infamous opening jokes.  The last two seasons had seen a slackening of that element, but the final episode opened with a return to the highest form: a self-parody, a gentle jab, as the returning Gil Grissom answers an arresting officer by mentioning the jumping of the shark, a phrase dating back to the venerable Happy Days, which was considered to have spent its dramatic capital when one of the lead characters attempted to jump his bike over a body of water containing a shark.  CSI did not hesitate to depict humanity in its grim, dark forms, as blood splashed and man betrayed woman betrayed woman betrayed man betrayed themselves.  But more glorious forms come to mind: the Furries; conventions dedicated to forensic technology; people playing at being superheroes.  Whatever the human tic, it was examined with quiet compassion, and if not precisely honored, at least given an acknowledgement of existence.  Through the bystanders, the victims, and the perpetrators, we learned about human motivations, excesses, and imbalances, and hopefully a few learned enough to avoid committing some horrific crime of their own: such is the essence and purpose of drama.

Even the everyday characters stood out, perhaps most vividly Gil Grissom, someone who must surely be out of the ordinary, if not autistic.  His personal growth during the series, the revelation of his romantic linkage to one of his CSIs, and his eventual movement out of the profession informed us that even scientists grow, change, and are just like us.  Other characters pursued their interests; a couple tragically perished in the line of duty.  Science does not save us from the dust of the final end.

The cessation of CSI is not to say science lacks a dramatic champion, as Bones continues, and Cosmos resumes with a new, charismatic host.  The show may have exhausted this particular field of drama, which is to say, learning for the audience.  Our thirst for novelty is the challenge for drama, in how to bring the lessons of life to yet another field.  Or perhaps Bones ate away at the core audience.  I will simply end by saying that I am glad for CSI: Las Vegas‘ existence, and, through it, have hope that the forces of irrationality may be pushed back by the light of science.

If you’re reading this (and, hey, you haven’t stopped yet, but don’t look at that squirrel in the corner of your room) (you looked), then you’ve (add jelly to the grocery list) experienced (get that driver’s license soon) the horrors (did you feed the cat, the ferret, the badger, and [where’s the husband <push interrupt onto stack>] the baby? <pop!>) of distracted (wait, whose baby is this, anyways?!) reading.  Where was I going with that, and in which tense?  Pluperfect?

(Just as an example from true reality, by which I mean something that happened to me, since I started this post I washed about three days worth of dishes, watched a bit of CSI Las Vegas) (and took a shower).

Anyways.  For those of us who used to not be on the Internet, because the damn thing only existed in University-land, we may remember reading long-form literary forms: essays, stories, novels, even textbooks.  Sit.  Down.  And.  Read.  Finish it in one sitting.   Remember the pleasures, bookworms?  Maybe they’re more devoted than I, but nowadays I have about twenty books in process, because I skip from book to book – one (by Burke) is now at about the 20 year mark.  Something about defining the sublime.  Anyways.  Back to the point.  Then there’s the magazines, all the online stuff [place big freakin’ rock right HERE], the glares of my blog-widow, and, oh yeah, work.

OK, OK.  Katherine Martinko @ TreeHugger.com points (rather frenziedly) at recent research from the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). An excerpt from the summary of their book:

But while PISA [Programme for International Student Assessment] results suggest that limited use of computers at school may be better than not using computers at all, using them more intensively than the current OECD average tends to be associated with significantly poorer student performance.  ICT [Information and Computer Technology] is linked to better student performance only in certain contexts, such as when computer software and Internet connections help to increase study time and practice.

Katherine found this lovely bit:

Is it any surprise that kids have difficulty staying focused on schoolwork when there are so many other things to do online? Even I, as an adult who works online, feel the same temptation on a regular basis!

That’s me, in a big way.  And I find it frustrating to sit down and read a book – there’s always some sort of distraction.  So that leads to my thesis: along with learning how to think, and learning all those facts, comes the problem of learning how to focus.  Certainly, we’ve tried to medicate our way to a good focus (here is a comparison of ADD/ADHD diagnoses in the USA and France), but given how my formerly good focus has gone to pot because I’ve allowed the distractions to get to me.  I know how it used to be; how much harder must it be for kids who’ve never learned what it’s like to be properly focused?

MPR reports on a new way to gather the fruit for your wine:

St. Paul couple Jeff and Gita Zeitler are starting their own winery and cider house, but they’re taking a particularly creative approach to sourcing ingredients — they want to forage as many of them as possible.

That means their ingredients will change with the seasons.

“We’ll start making rhubarb wine, and if we can source enough dandelion flowers and lilacs, we’re gonna make dandelion-lilac wine,” Jeff said. “And in the fall, we’ll be harvesting apples and pears and whatever fruit … carrots make a great wine believe it or not.”

For now, the Zeitlers are getting most of their fruit from peoples’ yards all over the cities.

They’ve been leaving fliers at houses with fruit trees, and have been surprised by how many invitations they’ve gotten to come back and harvest.

“Over time, we hope to establish sort of an urban orchard,” Jeff said. “It’s dispersed throughout the city … fruit trees hiding in plain sight. If you think about it, in Minnesota, we are sitting on some of the best farmland on Earth. We have good soil. Even in the city, we have our little 1/8th-acre lots that you can grow some pretty nice fruit trees on.”

We have a bumper crop of apples.  We donate them to the food shelf and the University of Minnesota Equine Center – and make apple pies, of course.

(h/t my lovely sister)

A random comment by myself:

Sometimes I think Nature is indifferent to the concepts of Good & Bad.

One reader remarked,

Well, duh. Red in tooth and claw. The birds aren’t singing–they are screaming in pain.

http://youtu.be/jjjnZvtwtqA

There’s a different interpretation!  The YouTube link is to a Werner Herzog video.

Another reader responded,

The harmony of overwhelming and connected murder. Oy vey.

Werner did seem to be on a down day, perhaps.  Or observing that survival doesn’t connote joy.  Yet another reader goes with logic:

Absolutely. Good & Bad (good & evil) are totally human constructs. The closest nature comes to that kind of moral judgement is a consideration of desireable vs. undesireable. No shades of morality attached.

Hard to assail that fortress.

For all of Supreme Leader Khamenei’s harsh statements towards the United States during and following the Iran Deal‘s negotiation phase, it’s becoming clear that the hard liners are not preeminent in Iran.  AL Monitor reports on the divergence between Kayhan, a hard line publication previously linked to Khamenei, its editor in chief, Hossein Shariatmadari, and the Supreme Leader:

On Sept. 1, the Office of the Supreme Leader published a statement on Khamenei’s position on Iran’s nuclear negotiations with six world powers. It said the latter was “openly and clearly” communicated in Khamenei’s meeting with students of Imam Hussein University on April 9 and further repeated in meetings with top officials during the holy month of Ramadan and subsequently on Eid al-Fitr. At the end of the statement, it was again emphasized that “anything else attributed to the supreme leader is false.”

As far as the media and public opinion in Iran are concerned, this statement was a direct answer to Shariatmadari’s Aug. 14 editorial, “The Only Option on the Table.” Shariatmadari had made references to Khamenei’s Eid al-Fitr speech in this piece and claimed, “We can confidently say that he is not at all satisfied with the text of the agreement.” Since Khamenei had not yet expressed any opinion on the July 14 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) at that time, Shariatmadari’s editorial was widely interpreted as the supreme leader’s unofficial stance. …

Referring to the Sept. 1 statement, the journalist added, “This was the first time that the Office of the Supreme Leader published a statement officially rejecting the claims made by Shariatmadari. I think this was a serious blow to the position of Shariatmadari and Kayhan, and was a sign of a divergence between the positions of the supreme leader and Kayhan.”

The maneuvering against Shariatmadari appears to have first begun Aug. 17, when Hamid Reza Moghadam Far, cultural-media adviser to the top commander of the IRGC, published an open letter addressed to Kayhan’s editor-in-chief in Tasnim News, which has close ties to the IRGC. In the letter, Moghadam Far explicitly stated, “I am amazed that a veteran revolutionary such as yourself is asserting and trying to convince his readership that ‘the supreme leader thinks as I do, analyzes as I do and understands as I do’!”

So it appears the Supreme Leader is not siding with the hard-liners who wish to reject the agreement.  Shariatmadari, reputedly an ideologue, retains his position, but his influence will now be somewhat questionable.  And the deal will continue forward.

Soon to be available from the good docs at Washington University in St. Louis:

Many thousands of viruses are known to cause illness in people and animals, and making a diagnosis can be an exhaustive exercise, at times requiring a battery of different tests. That’s because current tests aren’t sensitive enough to detect low levels of viral bugs or are limited to detecting only those viruses suspected of being responsible for a patient’s illness.

“With this test, you don’t have to know what you’re looking for,” said the study’s senior author, Gregory Storch, MD, the Ruth L. Siteman Professor of Pediatrics. “It casts a broad net and can efficiently detect viruses that are present at very low levels. We think the test will be especially useful in situations where a diagnosis remains elusive after standard testing or in situations in which the cause of a disease outbreak is unknown.”

Results published online in September in the journal Genome Research demonstrate that in patient samples the new test – called ViroCap – can detect viruses not found by standard testing based on genome sequencing. The test could be used to detect outbreaks of deadly viruses such as Ebola, Marburg and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), as well as more routine viruses, including rotavirus and norovirus, both of which cause severe gastrointestinal infections.

Developed in collaboration with the university’s McDonnell Genome Institute, the test sequences and detects viruses in patient samples and is just as sensitive as the gold-standard polymerase chain reaction (PCR) assays, which are used widely in clinical laboratories. However, even the most expansive PCR assays can only screen for up to about 20 similar viruses at the same time.

How does it do it?

To develop the test, the researchers targeted unique stretches of DNA or RNA from every known group of viruses that infects humans and animals. In all, the research team included 2 million unique stretches of genetic material from viruses in the test. These stretches of material are used as probes to pluck out viruses in patient samples that are a genetic match. The matched viral material then is analyzed using high-throughput genetic sequencing. As completely novel viruses are discovered, their genetic material could easily be added to the test, Storch said.

I had been thinking someone would figure out how to do a differential analysis, by which I mean the signal of a ‘clean’ blood sample would be known, and then the difference between that signal and the signal of the current sample could be analyzed and decoded.  Yes, that’s very much an arm wave.  These folks seem to have taken the standard approach and put it on steroids, so far as I can tell.  Very effective, so far, but it’s rather like detecting computer viruses – looking for known sequences of bits in order to detect a virus.  That new one is the one that may slip by….

(h/t Melissa Breyer @ TreeHugger.com)

Stanford News reports on the dining habits of the mealworm:

Enter the mighty mealworm. The tiny worm, which is the larvae form of the darkling beetle, can subsist on a diet of Styrofoam and other forms of polystyrene, according to two companion studies co-authored by Wei-Min Wu, a senior research engineer in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford. Microorganisms in the worms’ guts biodegrade the plastic in the process – a surprising and hopeful finding. …

In the lab, 100 mealworms ate between 34 and 39 milligrams of Styrofoam – about the weight of a small pill  – per day. The worms converted about half of the Styrofoam into carbon dioxide, as they would with any food source.

An interesting mealworm indeed!  Somehow, I don’t see giant farms devoted to the critters, but I do wonder if it’ll be possible to isolate the unique bacteria responsible for the digestion, and use them in moderate sized facilities devoted to degrading the plastics we produce into something more …. palatable.  Ahem.  Or is the digestive system of the mealworm a required context for the digestion to work?  Of course, 50% converted to CO2 isn’t the best news in the world, but perhaps some careful collection of the greenhouse gas will be possible.

So, if we suppose we were to attempt to use mealworms to reduce polystyrene on a commercial basis, what would be the risks?  Mealworms do feed on grain and can invade storage facilities.  On the other hand, they are also used as pet food, as they have high protein content.  They do not seem to be of especial danger, and are widespread.  Human even eat them … so use them to dispose of the waste polystyrene, and then have a meal ourselves?

(h/t Margaret Badore @ TreeHuggers.com)

Steve Benen @ MaddowBlog , Kevin Drum, and Jen Hayden @ The Daily Kos have expressed astonishment at Rush Limbaugh’s reaction to the announcement of the discovery of flowing water on the surface of Mars.  Jen provides the transcript, from which I borrow:

RUSH LIMBAUGH: There’s so much fraud. Snerdly came in today ‘what’s this NASA news, this NASA news is all exciting.’ I said yeah they found flowing water up there. ‘No kidding! Wow! Wow!’ Snerdly said ‘flowing water!?’ I said ‘why does that excite you? What, are you going there next week? What’s the big deal about flowing water on Mars?’ ‘I don’t know man but it’s just it’s just wow!’ I said ‘you know what, when they start selling iPhones on Mars, that’s when it’ll matter to me.’ I said ‘what do you think they’re gonna do with this news?’ I said ‘look at the temperature data, that has been reported by NASA, has been made up, it’s fraudulent for however many years, there isn’t any warming, there hasn’t been for 18.5 years. And yet, they’re lying about it. They’re just making up the amount of ice in the North and South Poles, they’re making up the temperatures, they’re lying and making up false charts and so forth. So what’s to stop them from making up something that happened on Mars that will help advance their left-wing agenda on this planet?’ And Snerdly paused ‘oh oh yeah you’re right.’ You know, when I play golf with excellent golfers, I ask them ‘does it ever get boring playing well? Does it ever get boring hitting shot after shot where you want to hit it?’ And they all look at me and smile and say ‘never.’ Well folks, it never gets boring being right either. Like I am. But it doesn’t mean it is any less frustrating. Being right and being alone is a challenging existence. OK so there’s flowing water on Mars. Yip yip yip yahoo. You know me, I’m science 101, big time guy, tech advance it, you know it, I’m all in. But, NASA has been corrupted by the current regime. I want to find out what they’re going to tell us. OK, flowing water on Mars. If we’re even to believe that, what are they going to tell us that means? That’s what I’m going to wait for. Because I guarantee, let’s just wait and see, this is September 28, let’s just wait and see. Don’t know how long it’s going to take, but this news that there is flowing water on Mars is somehow going to find its way into a technique to advance the leftist agenda. I don’t know what it is, I would assume it would be something to do with global warming and you can — maybe there was once an advanced civilization. If they say they found flowing water, next they’re going to find a graveyard.

[Emphasis Jen’s.]

Now, we could go with Rush’s admission that he simply says anything that will make him money.  He knows his audience, he knows that to stir them up he has to connect the Obama Administration’s salient achievement of the day with climate change.

But he is really going further.  He’s suggested that because some scientists have, in climate change deniers’ mythology, collectively lied through their teeth on a variety of matters, he spreads the blame to all scientists with any connection to the government.  Given that science has recently stepped on the toes of the hard line conservatives, this is to be expected – never mind how they benefit from science (where would Rush be without radio?).  Cherished myths as well as economic positions have been trampled by science, and this cannot be abided.

And, in the sense that logic compels activity, the false narrative propagated by Rush and others also compels them into odder and odder statements – as in the above.  If a large and easily visible sunspot were to appear on the Sun’s surface and were reported by NASA, would that also be blamed on the Obama Administration and the liberal media?  There’s a good chance.  They HAVE to make sure to find something wrong with the achievements of science – because science is becoming the enemy.

Think about that – the study of reality is the enemy.  Hard to believe the party that used to promote itself as the hard-nosed, reality-based party now rejects science in favor of conspiracy theories about group lies by the essence of truth seekers, poor logical thinking, and letting itself be led around by anyone with a comforting manner or a loud, silly voice.  They should be heartily ashamed.

But they won’t be.  The group has been captured by the fringe; the moderates who’d supply the ruddy blush have been expelled or have left.  Those who are left are too busy assuring themselves of their omniscience.

A reader continues his remarks on our general treatment of our food supply:

I wish I could find the time to write down (on the web) the litany of mankind’s offenses against itself that leads me to believe that at foreseeable technology levels, 3 or 4 or 7 billion people is just too much. Maybe if we had clean, compact, portable fusion devices or something, we’d be ok.

Just to give you an idea of the kinds of things I mean to write about is this recent research. Virtually every manufactured food item (e.g. most bakery goods) that needs to have liquid or powder ingredients mix well and stay mixed use an emulsifier like polysorbate 80. Turns out, it’s likely very bad for you in the long run. http://www.nih.gov/resear…/march2015/03162015additives.htm

And http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3667473/.

The vast majority of the corn, soybeans and sugar beats grown in the US are GMO in order to allow the use of glyphosate (RoundUp) as an herbicide directly on the crops. It kills everything except the GMO crop which is modified to withstand it. The mechanism involved uses a metabolic pathway that does not exist in mammals, so the residue left on food produced from those kinds of crops is considered safe for humans. Except that the gut microbiota, being bacteria, not mammals, do have that metabolic pathway. There’s evidence that glyphosate residues on foods are damaging, killing and/or unbalancing the gut microbiota. The more we learn about those microbiota, the more we are learning they have an even larger and larger part in our health. You’ve perhaps heard of fecal transplants?

Oh, yes, I have.  I had not heard of the glyphosate connection, however.

This is all rather far afield of drought problems, of course. But what we’re doing to our food supplies is just one avenue in which we’re shooting ourselves in our collective feet.

I was rather morbidly ruminating on the demise of the vast herds of American Bison at the hands of European settlers, and wondering how, in the long run, the human species will compare in terms of sheer numbers at the height, and the following population crash I anticipate in my darker moments.  The Wikipedia article has a lovely, unembeddable chart illustrating the bison population crash; and while it’s easy to argue that it’s an artificial crash, I like to remember that the “Balance of Nature” is a false notion; non-zero populations are constantly changing as predators and prey populations rise and fall, to cite the two most coarse variables.  I suspect the Bison was a local dominant life form that was gradually wrecking its own habitat, and given a few more hundred years, they, too, might have found a way to extinction, or marginalization, much like any number of other creatures we now find only rock-bound.

Of course, the notion that we stand apart from Nature is also arguable.  Every year another distinguishing feature of humanity is found in another creature (perhaps it’s just how we aggregate all these features … oh, wait: we have religion).  So perhaps the near extinction event for the bison is not artificial, just the clearance of one species from its habitat in order for it to be replaced by hairless critters with hats on their heads.  Perhaps 150 years ago the planet was mostly empty, but today it does seem awfully darn full.

Must be in a gloomy mood today.

Tall wood buildings are not just dreams, but reality: the USDA, conjunction with the Softwood Lumber Board and the Binational Softwood Lumber Council, announced winners in the 2015 Tall Wood Building competition.  From the USDA website:

At a press conference hosted in New York this morning, Secretary Vilsack congratulated the competition winners. “The U.S. wood products industry is vitally important as it employs more than 547,000 people in manufacturing and forestry, with another 2.4 million jobs supported by U.S. private-forest owners,” said Vilsack. “By embracing the benefits of wood as a sustainable building material, these demonstration projects have the ability to help change the face of our communities, mitigate climate change and support jobs in rural America. I look forward to seeing how these two buildings help lead the way in furthering the industry.” …

The two winning proposals – Framework and 475 West 18th – were selected by a panel of distinguished jurors in the architecture and engineering fields who are familiar with innovative wood building systems. While each took a unique approach, both projects met the Competition’s criteria to showcase the safe application, practicality and sustainability of a minimum 80-foot structure that uses mass timber, composite wood technologies and innovative building techniques.

Note that these are proposals, without a tree cut down as yet.  TreeHugger.com‘s Lloyd Alter reports on the prize:

Although a hundred years ago building taller buildings in wood was relatively common, particularly on the west coast, It fell out of favor as the big trees became scarce, and as building codes changed to promote noncombustible steel and concrete. The prize money is being used to catch up, for “the exploratory phase of their projects, including the research and development necessary to utilize engineered wood products in high-rise construction in the U.S”. And while the steel, concrete and masonry people are apoplectic about this and keep running ads screaming about burning buildings, the heavy timber buildings like these are have been shown to be pretty safe.

The home of the U. S. Tall Wood Building Prize Competition is here.  From the East Coast winner:

130-134 Holdings LLC, in partnership with Spiritos Properties, SHoP Architects, Arup, Icor Associates, and environmental consultancy Atelier Ten, proposed 475 West 18^th, a residential condominium building, as a transformative and sustainable prototype for the design and construction industry, demonstrating an innovative approach to going beyond a limited palette of materials and systems for high-rise construction. Expanding the palette with wood, a locally sourced and renewable material, provides a low-carbon, more economically sound building solution.

475 West 18th’s extensive use of wood structural elements and other wood products allows the team to set ambitious sustainability targets in the building’s design, construction, and operation. By combining aggressive load reduction with energy efficient systems, the project team anticipates reducing overall energy consumption by at least 50 percent relative to current energy codes. It will also target LEED Platinum certification, as well as pursue higher levels of sustainability not captured in the LEED system.

And the West Coast winner:

Framework: An Urban + Rural Ecology

Given its prominent location and public visibility, a key element of the building design led by Thomas Robinson, principal of LEVER Architecture, is to communicate at street level the project’s innovative use of wood and engineering technology in the development of a high rise structure, along with its relationship to the rural economy. Integrating lessons learned from tall timber structures in Canada and Europe, Robinson and his team are expected to incorporate new structural and architectural technologies that include an engineered wood core and lateral system for seismic integrity and CLT floor panels fabricated up to 50’ in length.

Should we start expecting gargoyles carved of wood next?  This does sound fascinating.  CLT, cross laminated timber, has several manufacturers.  This one, APA, I picked at random, neither endorsing nor impugning:

Cross-laminated timber (CLT) is a large-scale, prefabricated, solid engineered wood panel. Lightweight yet very strong, with superior acoustic, fire, seismic, and thermal performance, CLT is also fast and easy to install, generating almost no waste onsite. CLT also offers design flexibility and low environmental impacts. For these reasons, cross-laminated timber is proving to be a highly advantageous alternative to conventional materials like concrete, masonry, or steel, especially in multi-family and commercial construction.

And this great picture: