Had to leave the month with image of boxer. Toots has become a constant attachment - too bad the urban world doesn't empathize with dogs - they have a lot of insight about how to handle tempremental humans in painful situations. Rowf. Wag.
October 31, 2006
Dog
Had to leave the month with image of boxer. Toots has become a constant attachment - too bad the urban world doesn't empathize with dogs - they have a lot of insight about how to handle tempremental humans in painful situations. Rowf. Wag.
Science Trivia Quest
Lemme convinced me to start collecting enough trivia about science and math to make a game show of things. I plan to have students competing in tests to demonstrate ability in a competition for these internships. The skill sets all revolve around measurement.
Suggestions of good definitions for matching, short answer questions about who, what and where, true false that use sensible logic for a contradictory answer, or thought provoking essay questions would be greatly appreciated. The activities will include hands on demonstration of field technique.
If you have the skills to be an online natural resources science/math instructor, drop me a line. Redile will attempt to run some land stewardship programs continuing into the future - we hope to have interested students returning during college summers to apply their knowledge with the resident high school youth.
October 29, 2006
why social protest no longer works
October 26, 2006
True or False?
Where would you look for information to substantiate this type of media scare? I mean, how would you go about checking the science and the facts of the matter, given that the NOAA has apparently endorsed this line of thinking. Is there a 'rest of the story'? Where is there actual data for looking at the substance of the claim? Or is this just another model system? Anyone who was there for the conference care to chime in?
October 25, 2006
Something for Nothing?
Whoever dies with the most toys still dies, and keeping that person alive is not the name of the game. The economic form expressed through pure barter seems better than one where price is set by middle players in a game where their connectivity is their profitability, not their work. Application of interest to a popular niche washes out the ability to score big. Work could be optional, but what is responsibility worth? How do people who have so little ability end up with high paying jobs where they get to boss other people around? Oh - they all work for government? or corporations? Maybe i'm just experiencing a jambed pipeline or something, but when it breaks it will immediately hit the fan. Cause you can't get something for nothing.
October 24, 2006
fitting in
has become
end-all aspiration
fair is never fair
some fare less well
due two knot
fitting in
(c) 2006 lemme howdt
a round tewitt
common values are not as common as they seem, because everybody has gotten good at repeating the mantra to hide their own thoughts - that they feel alone in holding and wish not to share as to bring others down. but down and up are relative scales on the accordian of life and scale can change by several orders of magnitude to make huge seem trivial, or minute gargantuan. frame of reference is locked and any non-linear approach except merikanocentric is met with kafka, orwell and gulag images, either glorifying or demonifying - choose the audience participation angle to meet the mood. until things get set right, people will be troubled.
carole king, joni mitchell, sometimes stevie nicks or annie haslem can get me going, or joan armitrading. let the girls sing and thoughts drift away from the challenges - but only temporariliy because there is consciousness that raises the ante. once you recognize a situation well enough to observe and define it, it exists and will not disappear by wishing it away. when you avoid notice and be oblivious, knowing the challenge will be solved technically by others working on their interest within the group, it seems that the pieces fall in place when you need them and the goal is achieved without the sweat cause by the worry. Do it: if it can't be done, you'll find out soon enough. Taking someone else's word that it can't be done is self-defeating. prepare, so that when opportunity appears, you are ready to ride the surf and langish in the suds.
Enjoy a sunni day.
October 23, 2006
Rural Populations
Such a foreign concept - michael and jubal explored them once - in a strange land. We now see natural gas pipelines running amok in our quest for energy insanity. Give it up - we will have to anyway. Unless ...
October 22, 2006
Deep thoughts
So as i wander the property, which i call mine because i have a mortgage that supports a deed that somebody else issued to somebody else and i bought from my capital savings, i note how the symbiosis of me and my trees will create a slightly more comfortable habitat for some nebulous future owner that i likely will have never met. The likelyhood that this property will be held by my family for a great period of time is based on too many coincidences of relationships and economies - will the kids wish to stay in the area after they have seen the world from an adult point of view - will the economy allow me to remain in the area as the means to provide sustinance in rural areas is slowly strangled by mass production agriculture. will the larger scale economy remain as dollars are printed and shuffled around without solid backing. Or will war, pestulence and famine greet out shores, as people have lost grounding.
i wish i had my crystal ball that would tell me what the world will look like at the end of ownership society. working for wages should be ancillary to working for common values; peace, love, respect, truth, wisdom. But how does one find the common, when we feel in ourselves that we are uncommon and wish to stand away from the sheeople, the masses, the teeming throng. going back to Hair, the 60s, peace love and the song lyrics - how can people be so heartless ... easy to be hard... : it just demonstrates how a right idea in a wrong time can lead to a mismatch of form and function.
now it seems we are back at the 60s mentalitywise, but with the pendulum swinging in the opposite direction. rather than liberation, we have conservation : but they are two sides of a political coin. The call is to depoliticize governance and to restore the power of the people to the people. From Godspell lyric - when whilst God save the people ... our work will never end. But who are we - when society breeds isolation into a lonely cubicle, a hop in the car to the drive through, and a evening spent staring at motion and nonsense courtesy of the mind-control box. Belief has become what somebody tells you, not a rational synthesis of ideas based on knowledge gathered by self and others that have developed the capacity to reproduce phenomenon.
Science and religion are not antagonists at all - it has just been played off that way to create an opposition evil for each other, as a distraction from having to pay attention to the details of support for the other's beliefs.
October 21, 2006
Windshield Philosophy
Who is doing? All the training appears to direct people to become worker cogs in a machine whose only purpose is to drive worker cogs, rather than a system that allows people the freedom to accomplish. But accomplish what? Putting food on the table and entertainment into the brain - not for the purpose of bettering anything, but instead for mindlessly passing time. Rules are set to maintain order, so the 'manager' can keep people in line for the ease of the rest of management. Chaos breed knowledge, whereas order breeds complacency.
October 19, 2006
Power
As a director of the Partnership for the Umpqua Rivers, Dr. Lenny got to tour the facility as part of a schedule meeting - with people one level closer to the action from last weeks Province Advisory Committee, but highly important in their own stead. My friend Richard Grost gave led the tour - he is a superb fish photographer who doubles as a biologist for Pacificorp. So we got to see spawning fish, large reserviors and narrow roads, on a school bus loaned to us by the Wolf Creek Job Corps. Thank you everyone for a good time.
October 16, 2006
War on Rural Lifestyle
The industry insists that all regulations be “scale neutral,” so if the U.S.D.A. demands that huge plants have, say, a bathroom, a shower and an office for the exclusive use of its inspectors, then a small processing plant that slaughters local farmers’ livestock will have to install these facilities, too.
This is one of the principal reasons that meat at the farmers’ market is more expensive than meat at the supermarket: farmers are seldom allowed to process their own meat, and small processing plants have become very expensive to operate, when the U.S.D.A. is willing to let them operate at all.
from THE VEGETABLE-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX By Michael Pollan New York Times
October 15. 2006
tip from THE AGRIBUSINESS EXAMINER
"Monitoring corporate agribusiness from a public interest perspective"
October 16, 2006 Issue #462
Editor\Publisher: A.V. Krebs
E-Mail Address: avkrebs@comcast.net
To receive: Send name and e-mail address to avkrebs@comcast.net
Uh-oh - Time for a Novel Approach
Given the fiscal volume involved - perhaps a Hari Seldon approach is called for - looking forward a thousand years and working our way back to here. I wonder how Isaac Asimov got time to write fiction, when his fact was much more appropriate (yet rarely read)? Much simpler times. Much fewer facts to deal with. Most people would actually read for entertainment. Novel approach. Build a new foundation to base the structure of function where the scaffolding supports the work and life of the people, not the people supporting the scaffolding. now is when Atlas shruggs.
October 14, 2006
like slightly pregnant
The Pentagon asserts that DU "is only mildly radioactive"
DU is depleted uranium - Uranium - element number 94 - heavy enough in compact projectile units to pierce armor. Half-life: 4.5 billion years. Radioactivity emitter - starts a decay cycle that ends generally up in lead.
Upon impact, DU munitions burn at 3000 to 6000 degrees Centigrade and combust into a radioactive gas of fine particles of uranium oxide dust, which remain suspended in the air and, once inhaled, become a chronic source of uranium heavy metal and contact radiation poisoning. Estimates vary on the total tonnage of DU used by the US and include: during the US bombing of Yugoslavia, 34 tons of DU; in Gulf War I, up to 375 tons; in Afghanistan in 2001, 1,000 tons; and in Gulf War II in 2003, up to 2,200 tons.
The release of radioactive and chemically toxic dust and uranium fragments causes serious medical problems. According to Leuren Moret, an independent scientist and international radiation specialist, depleted uranium is considered a factor in Gulf War syndrome.Just another chemical element, presented in shades of grey.
October 12, 2006
Been Watching
The first day of the meeting included tours of the Boulder Dumont Wilderness Stewardship Demonstration and the Roseburg Forest Products Dillard Sawmill. The second day was a biomass forum - for the SW Oregon PAC members to understand the biomass situation in SW Oregon and hear about options for improving the situation.
So we heard about case studies and ethanol production - and found that the forest products industry uses pretty much all the value it can glean from the above ground portion of the viable harvest trees. The Oregon State University contingent talked about new composites and routes to ethanol, along with the need for sponsored softwood research. And the local Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Indians reminded everybody that this was home turf of their nation and that they were not going anywhere. In the works is a centrally located facility for handling materials. Our bio-alternatives cooperative also presented a status report on local resources and interest.
My thoughts are that as much material handling as can be done onsite where the wood is harvested, the better. We really do not wish to create a scenario where it takes more energy to bring to market the energy that is produced. But reducing the fuel load on federal forests, especially in areas where pre-commercial thins are ecologically overdue is as important as building a stable local workforce and a viable local economy. I doubt it can be done by central planning, but the investment capital for a financially unwieldy, noneconomic infrastructure maintenance project is not available locally. Hence the PAC. So now i have lots to mull over on a busy weekend.
Odd Calls
I've also had people tell me that they could hear a conversation when they rang the phone and nobody here picked up. Apparently, wireless transmitters can keep the phone-line open, and if your phone ringer is turned off for some reason, insta-broadcast. Hmmm.
The phone companies are a regulate public utility business, so we pay with our taxes on top of what we pay for the current mess - which seems as much a monopoly as ma bell prior to break-up. i have little choice over my land-line, and i just am not going to put a cell phone that close to my brain. Now a maxwell smart shoe phone ...
October 09, 2006
Models
Growing up we all built models - the cars or rocket or other things that were a kit that included all the pre-fitted parts for a '69 Chevy or Saturn booster. We knew that we were not building an actual functional '69 Chevy - but we got most of the pieces to fit where they belonged and tossed out the ones that didn't fit cosmetically. Nobody pretended that the model could work under real world conditions.
We also developed the image of a super-model, a stunning woman that jane every-girl could grow up to be. The barbie doll mentality developed, an oddunderstanding of what it took to be feminine: it was a marketized picture of shopping and house-keeping that feminists correctly identified and then blew the solution. It set back women being taken seriously in the work-place and never really touched the glass ceiling, unless the gals played dirty like at H-P.
Dr. Lenny grew up in a laboratory building model systems for protein and enzyme metabolism. The idea was to eliminate all the non-essentials from the chemical structure package, and still have the system produce the 'natural' chemistry in a laboratory. This involved removing oxygen from the system and setting things up so that the addition of oxygen resulted in unique chemisty - different from the normal products carried out under laboratory conditions. The two pieces of graduate work that composed Dr. Lenny's doctoral thesis were to build model systems that encourged the organic oxidation of sulfur to non-sulfate products and to stabilized iron in two distinct oxidation states within the same chemical compound. So the model could function chemically under pre-arranged conditions that were not duplicated in nature was a readily understood given.
Now, with the proliferation of science based on model system, everybody seems to forget that the assumptions with-in the model are not validated and often false. This is not because anybody is trying to hide anything - it is because unless we define the parameter and control it out of the model by demonstrating a known effect. We cannot tease information out of the model to have it become a better replication of the system that is, unless we reduce the number of variables. In other words - we falsely hold some parameters constant in the experiment, so that we can see the effects of other parameters.
By taking models on topics like global climate change to be absolute statements of truth and falsehood is complete nonsense. Scientists are guilty of providing information that support the point of view of their employer throughout history. That bad science generally gets culled by non-replication, while the fundamental truths reenforce themselves across the fields of discovery is part of the process. But when the profit motive takes promising science off the table, and does not allow for proper vetting and testing of the models, by making the costs and logistics of that replication unattainable, we lose the value of science and have a system that is better called applied engineering.
The question is where the science got jobbed - so that mistruths and non-truths became taught as gospel and how that developed into a system that has fundamentally ground science to a halt. We no longer wonder about how things work - we wonder how we can make a buck exploiting how things work. So our models developed in past ages are too simplistic for actually describing the phenomena that we are witnessing. But we believe in our models as reality without ascribing the diligence to compare the theory with the reality - to test the assumptions and relieve the system of the artificial restraints imposed by controlling most of the variables.
So how do we start to learn good science? When we start to question the assumption and make the comparisons. When we observe reality and make models that represent systems - not models that are systems in themselves, that are flawed from the start.
Thanks for staying with this rant - it was not an easy concept to swallow. It took many model systems to understand how model systems work. I have a model for models, but too often i talk to myself. Does this make any sense?
October 07, 2006
Ode to Pluto
Twinkle, twinkle, planetoid
Out so far in the icy void
Rocky core with ice encloaked
Your planethood has been revoked.
Despite the fact you have a moon
Your reputation they impugn.
But take some comfort in their crime --
They'll all be dead in one year's time.*
________________________________________
*One year on Pluto is 248 Earth years.
thanks scott
neighbor
sub-dude chow yuk
wandering aimlessly
cross value wanton
merica holding only
mixed meta fours
(c) 2006 lemme howdt
Theory of Life : Form Over Substance
So in order to determine how to achieve different stable states of chemicals that can store potential energy for incremental use, Dr. Lenny planning to get back into the inorganic synthesis and analysis game. We have now achieved reproducible technique in lab distillation - now the trick is to become observant and propose minor change to the way things are done to promote less used energy and more time efficiency in the process. The idea is taking things apart in such a way that the resting state becomes one of ready availablility of the form necessary for the next step of process. Because equipment is currently sparse, non standard solutions are the current vogue. In coarse terms rather than fine, we shall see whether the game starts well or foamy thus without needing to pursue subtlety until after we have bulk results. This approach only works when you have prior trustworthy data that indicates course path is of course applicable. But molecules like people do funny things when you change their local environment.
October 06, 2006
Spending Time
If i have never taken apart an engine, how do i know if the time spent waiting for parts is time that could have been saved if the situation had been assessed properly initially. If you can't answer - you trust your mechanic. If i can answer - it is because i have had the experience of not having any wrench to fix the gas chromatograph because the unit was neither metric nor english. Hold the pickles, hold the lettuce, special orders don't upset us, especially when said wrench can only be ordered from said foreign manufacturer. However, i also know my mechanical limitations and would never again attempt to fix an instrument or a car, when other people with more talent could spend their time more profitably.
Thanks for putting up with the morning ramble - gotta run.
October 05, 2006
Manure talk
Dr. Lenny prefers composting - but it is labor intensive for the value of product. It does make a good solvent for the transformation of chemicals - which may lead to remediative strategies and value added 'natural' fertilizers. In fact - Dr. Lenny almost marketed a compost concentrate as part of zoo doo, before he left the exotic pooh for the world of education and the types of shit that hit youth fans. My guess is that some govt. engineer will design a wildlife porta-potty so that a govt. biologist can spend years trying to study how to trick animals into using them.
October 04, 2006
Another Blog
Chemistry Prize
Well - Dr. Lenny missed howdt again. But the Nobel Prize demonstrates the importance of research work. You have to first search, then build a mental image and then look for ways to support or knock down your hypothesis. Dr. Lenny's current reasearch is focused in two areas - micronutrient stabilization and non-degradative material extraction from natural resources. There is much to be done in focusing down to manageable - i have several years of data to verify and work into a form that is publishable - which is the first criteria for scientific dissemination. Er - for getting the word out.
October 03, 2006
Uncommon Perspectives
Dr. Lenny is seeking good science process. The numbers that we use to measure can be readily manipulated by numerous factors, but the accuracy and precision of the measurement are generally provided as error - the funny bars on graphs. Today - we know things for certain that have been presented without data or error, yet we decide on the edge of life without understanding the ramifications of collective decisions made without input of reason. Makes you wonder.
Redile is not a school - it is a school enrichment process. This has nothing to do with school - i need help doing projects to get economy growing and i cannot rely on the products of the current education system, with its 48 minute attention span. So i am looking for people who share my interests to try things involving measurement of process chemistry. I could use a few people that would like to apprentice in IT technology or bench chemistry or half a dozen other areas to take a small energy generation system and apply research into making things happen. In addition, I'm willing to share my interest in chemistry with average people, but for a fee in a virtual classroom. But that does not make Redile a school - anybody can offer a class on any topic and charge any price - as long as Redile gets a cut. It is a non-profit business - so let's not forget the business portion.
The system is set up so that if you want to teach a course in auto mechanics of '57 Chevy's, you could get the word out and have a communication system at your disposal. That system,currently at http://www.yourclassroom.com/ , is functional for working with busy mentors in a small group relationship, using asynchronous learning tools. It is an enhancement designed for school teachers to manage their own classroom, but is functional for anybody bringing a team together without driving cars. This society likes to watch things happen to others - preferably far away. We focus on building people, not institutions, so Redile is a system to empower information exchange.
They say that luck is when preparation meets opportunity. Well - it's time to do something lucky - networking people that have knowledge to share the means of networking networks. I watch what the johnny come latelys have been doing at myspace and i wish to stay several jumps ahead of the game. So, luck comes into play as we compete together and share information about who what information and get people together to generate good information - by doing things and measuring things. Sports Networking for average athletes - you play, we'll keep score.
I'll be enjoying what's howdt there in nature (my field is out in a field, or forest, or stream). So, if you have an area that you might be able to mentor in the application of measurement, let me know and we'll redile the training system to bring you a qualified pair of hands that shares your interest. If we mix and match with many other networks - then some geometries can come into play that are quite unique. And if you have a different area to share, i'll connect you with Prof G., who can help get the prophet and profit mechanisms balanced. With enough numbers, maybe we can get a handle on the way things really are, from uncommon perspectives.
Redile the future, spread the net while the freedom of speech still allows free flow of knowledge. Broaden your cult of likeminded individualists. Or just laugh with us as they worry about what we're gonna do next. We'll just monitor and measure - Redile. You play and let us keep score.
Blogogram
Given the numbers, what ghandi did is incredible and drastically needs to be repeated in this day and age. But the carnival game of life is moving at snail's pace, as always and events unfold before us that have strings tethered in remarkable places. I find it interesting that sacred geometry hides keys that science has ignored (willfully?) in recent times.
If you wanted to teach a class to people that could learn from your knowledge, where would you go? I have tried to investigate mechanisms for knowledge delivery and they place too much control into the hands of 'the editors'. Now, with the creation of all our messaging programs, we have immediate transfer of ideas, yet we have lost the process of being able to vette the information that we provide. The party line is the party line in either political party. But the politics of life is divided into too many parties, pitted against each other for diminished spoils. We have to do something, but, how do we know truth when we find it, except by comparing it in context to what we already know? But if the structure is built on a house of cards - what key piece of information lets us know that what we know is true - or at least consistent with what we know.