January 31, 2007

At least there is thinking going on

The liberal solution to any problem - let's throw more money at it. In this case, the case against the public skulz is laid howdt well, the solution demonstrates groupthink.

Sunni's fun

In response to the Which Science Fiction novelist are you?, i got Cordwainer Smith. Never read him. I guess that i had better go digging deep to find a Cordwainer Smith novel, though i find that i am in my own world most of the time. If current scortched earth policies keep up, we may find we need a fictional reality to keep us enlightened.

On other notes, the days are getting longer. We started breeding rabbits again. Three hundred ponderosa pines were embedded into scalped ground by Days Creek Middle School and Wolf Creek Job Corps students, plus Daniel and Tootsie. January disappeared rapidly. We miss making odd comments at sunni's site (but happily sprinkle other comments all over the net).

January 30, 2007

Bill Nye - Call here

Breakfast conversation was on building our own media to get the messages of science application passed along over a wider channel. The project at YC.C is coming along at a slower pace than expected, but that's the way expectation works. It takes seven years to establish a career and ONRRI, the Oregon Natural Resources Research Institute, was founded on Jan 2, 2001. That still leaves a bit more time before i can say we are established.

So i turned to catching up on my science reading and the January 15 issue of Chem and Engineering News had an interview with BIll Nye, a nerd on a mission. Here is somebody who has an established audience in science and he can't get proper funding to convey the principles to the principals of the next generation. Edjutainment is not cool on Wall Street.

January 29, 2007

Keys

I misplaced my keys for a bit this morning, and it got me to thinking about how many things i can get into with the keys on my keychain. That set me off on where i got so many keys and why i have them and what they are used for. I once lost a set of keys in the trunk of my car for about four years, and when i found them, most of the keys were moot. I had replaced the important ones and forgotten about why i even carried the unimportant ones. Some were from a past job, one was to a padlock that had long since been clipped. I wonder how many fewer keys i can carry with me now - and whether to label the ones that i have to think about for the use. It's too bad we have to have so many locks to protect ourselves - it just generates an overabundance of keys.

In another sense - keys are the most important functions in the system. The key concept is the one that is the focus of the lecture. The key issue is the one who's resolution will have bearing on the resolution of other issues, so that the dominoes fall in line once the toughest task has been engaged and settled. The keystone state, pennsylvania was right in the middle of the new nation, just as the keystone is at the top of the arch. When we whittle down the all to the net, the key concepts are the ones that we keep coming back to.

Is consistency a key issue? Is material the key? Form and function, chaos and order, black and white - how do you know where to focus attention to have it be useful at a key location? It all depends on the goals - so are the goals the key? Or is motivation a key? Reward? Penalty? Who can say what is key any longer - especially since there is very little common that we share in common - including vision. Who has the vision of the future that we wish to grasp? Is that a key? A key for what? To unlock a door to imagination? Or to accomplish work? Is what is key for you, also key for me? Can somebody key me in? I'm howdt standing in the queue - wondering whether rational is practical? I guess that i have only so much time, so i had better key in on the point.

Words have many meanings - lewis carroll had many different characters putting Alice through her paces as she faced a skewed world. Perhaps we dwell too much on keys and not enough on the experience itself, rather than the outcome. Sure, we like good outcomes, but the journey is most of the game.

I found my keys, it's time to go.

January 27, 2007

Pay me for my time

y'know how if you have an alternate energy source, the power company pays you for putting electricity into the grid. Would it solve the problem of telemarketing if the phone lines were turned around and the folks on the other end had to pay us phone owners a wage for clogging our lines? 50 cents a minute would pay thirty bucks an hour - it might be worth most people's time to listen at that rate. You could lower your personal rate if you wanted calls, raise it if you didn't want the such calls. No good reason that these folks should be allowed to waste my time without paying for it. Now maybe the same thing with MD waiting rooms and appointment times ...

What's in a game?

Sports with its competitive nature is an all-consuming backdrop on american life for a vast majority of people. Not all-consuming in that we spend all our time on the sport that we love, just that when we spend our time with that sport it has our undivided attention. Or our divided attention in categories pertaining to the sport. You always talk baseball at the baseball game.

Through many baseball games at all levels from little league to major league, i find that i can communicate with people that share a common interest in a specific history, a means of sharing numbers and statistics of accumulation and performance, and a means of judging performance by a criteria that is not always fair, but strives to meet the standards set forth in the rules. We don't have to agree on the dimensions of the field - both teams have the same number of opportunities with the home team having last bats. The competition is strenuous, the performers have fun, and afterwards, win or lose there is another game tomorrow where the score stands at null.

Society here has taken to mixing its metaphors too much, and life has become a win or else game that is brutalizing competition everywhere. The idea that the game ends and the score resets to null is not a part of american life, but you wouldn't know that by following the way that the media keeps score. In baseball we get daily standings, in life, the dow jones market average must suffice. But the fairness and equity of the stadium game, especially in the junior leagues shines as a current beacon to yesterday, when life was not nearly as expensive, on personal energy, just to keep up. I think the current game of life has to end here really really fast.

The cooperation that happens between people when they interact in personal life depends on being able to work together for the benefit of all those working together - not for the benefit of all. Both socialism and capitalism as portrayed by the major parties and major media has led to this hybrid muddle in the middle, where all of us are tired of the extra innings that we are forced to maintain, just to break even monetarily. Having money generation as the only measure of value is like measuring all of baseball based on triples per team. If information were shared in research areas say like energy, instead of being taken out of play by a patent system that rewards innovation with personal wealth - then the advances of young fertle minds might make something happen, come up with new ways of addressing the problems.

So perhaps looking at science as a team sport and evolving science leagues is the direction to go with the learning. Remove science from the public school curricula entirely, because it doesn't belong competing in a world where generation of income is the only measure. Catchers would not exist in baseball if triples were the only performance measure for winning and losing. Set the rules of scientific endeavor down, get a team of umpire scientists that know what they are doing and differentiate performance measures and let people attack energy problems the way a batter might attack an 83 mph slider down the middle of the plate.


January 26, 2007

Kanipe Ranch Planning Day

I expect that most people would want public lands to be managed in way similar to how they manage their home property. If things are broken, fix them, and if their not broken, ignore them. We may want our managers to keep the grounds up a little better than we ourselves do at home, although my neighbors do intensive land management on their place, while i'm a hands off type of guy. One of the century farms in the Oakland area is now a county park, with a mandate to pay for itself with proceeds from low scale timeber harvest. This was a homestead, now it will hopefully turn into a working turn of the 20th century agriculture museum and learning center. There is a one-room schoolhouse about a mile away from the main activity center and equestrian trails that lead about the property. One of the plans is to set up a geocache. So if you need a summer project in rural oregon, tap in and we can put you to work (and play).

dilemma

how do you say
i need your help
when rejection is
immensely hurtful
strive in isolation
rather than accept abuse
must leave, must leave
seems no 'where' to go

(c) 2007 lemme howdt

January 25, 2007

Bull-shit

Say what you will about the flaws and shortcomings of the two-party system. After six years of the Bush presidency, at least we know it’s a lot better than the one-party system. New York Times Editorial Conclusion 1/24/07

Try again. The two-party system is business as usual that works better if you are the editor of the new york times or another major media mogul. If you live in this county, it still seems like a protection racket where nobody's been minding the store. How about being independent, thinking things through for yourself and calling foo on both of the two parties in the two-party system. After all, they are partying at our collective expense.


Edification for Life

Interesting article at LRC on why young people should consider not going to college. The article is well thought out and makes a sound case for gaining relevant experience on your own. But - big caveat letters - the author assumes that everybody wants a job in the statist world making lots of money and continuing on the same old, same old. Internships are very valuable for young people as a way of testing the waters to see if that may be what you want to do for a living, but to give away your time and effort at no pay to get an inroad to a low-paying statist job is an absurd reason to do something.

Building skills in the focus area of what you wish to know, do and learn is the reason to take the internship - putting things together in different ways from how they have been put together for you - getting a feel for the pieces that you have to work with and integrating new ideas into the old so that all ideas work well together, in the frame of thinking. Do what you want to do well, and you will have a productive fulfilling career - and be who you are to have a productive fulfilling life. There are some serious things that need to be addressed that will provide enough valid work for everyone to partake their fill, withhowdt the herding.

January 24, 2007

Carbon Musings

Ramp up the choir, the environmentalists and statists are going to try to convince us again that the only way to save our souls is with a carbon tax - as if we didn't already have enough taxes. But the idea of planting trees to sequester carbon at a higher rate than current tree species does seem to make sense in terms of taking the pressure off of native forests to provide pulp and paper. Tree farming is a staple of southern economics and there is no good reason why non-native bias and the War on Invasive Plant species should scare everybody away from fast growing Pawlonia Empress and other non-native potentially genetically engineered trees.

Big mouthful, that last clause. Genetic engineering on a low tech level has been going on since Gregor Mendel was counting peas. If the products of genetic engineering have been allowed into our food supply - why is there an urgent resistance to the concept for our energy and material needs? The cat got howdt of the bag years ago - the time for this debate was in the 70's abd 80's. It's here, now and not to use it is just an advantage for the higher moral ethics crowd to lose market share to the monsantos of the world. remember - trees are not food yet.

As to carbon sequestration of carbon dioxide for coal burning plants as a future technology that will be there when we need it - but let's legislate as if it were here, now - is talk leading to disaster. We need less regulation and more innovation. Regulation enforcement should not be a leading growth industry. The world has become an overripe peach. Too much syrup and not enough juice.

January 23, 2007

The War on Cancer

Energy flow in biological systems involves intricate cycles with cofactors and by-products that are useful for multiple metabolic processes. In fact, a trigger will often be set so that the cascade of energy descends into barren molecules awaiting their lunch, which sets those molecules back into primed position, for when the body requires them. Food storage generally takes place by building up carbohydrates, with lipids providing secondary energy, while proteins and enzymes being generally non-metabolic. As the interior cell conditions change in osmotic pressure, or pH or some other parameter, tertiary structure changes in the molecules send most into dormancy until the flush of energy obtained from the trigger comes back into play. This happens billions of times each day in our individual bodies, so the collective energy of metabolism is quite huge - especially when you consider that it is cyclic.

This morning, Sardi discusses dichloroacetate a 'relatively non-toxic' small molecule than can replace the highly toxic tamoxifen in the fight against cancer. Anything with chlorine not in the chloride form is really, really toxic to biological systems, because the chlorine has to scavenge electrons that remain out of the flux. Depending on how high the initial oxidation state of chlorine is - this may be more than a pair. Of course it scavenges from the immediate location of where the chlorine atom is and it is up to the electron supply chain to replace those electrons, or do without them. Do without them usually occurs by creating a new bond in the carbon scaffolding, which would not have existed otherwise. Since this is an irreversible reaction - the cyclic system are impaired and cannot be efficient until the broken molecule is removed and replaced. All the cofactors and other molecules in the area have to make their shift to another system, or sit back and rest unemployed until somebody else comes and sets up the works again.

So it really pays to not introduce chlorine laden molecules that are going to lose their chlorine. Halogens are noted as grand leaving groups in organic chemistry - they are used for creating new carbon-carbon bonds in organic synthesis. Biology is a chemistry numbers game - the flux occurs in the tertiary region where carbon structures build through hetero-atom bonds - oxygen and nitrogen have more capacity for shuttling electrons through their roller coasters. The scaffolding structure of carbon-carbon bonds, and their arrangement in chains is a primary structure feature - when it is messed with, systems do not operate.

So natural products are much more healthful than synthetic products - especially if they already have a reactivity base in the quarternary and more advanced cell systems. Science is a measure of scale. And the battle against cancer is a rigged chase for profit.

January 22, 2007

Global Hot Air?

I am preparing a talk for a high school science class tomorrow morning. The topic that has everybody in awe is alternative energy. As a chemist, i have some different opinions on climate science and global warming - especially concerning the IPCC proclamations of science by political committee. Here is a different reactionary viewpoint. Somewhere between is a likely scenario. As a disclaimer - i work with folks from the Umpqua Bio-Alternative Cooperative looking into biomass to oil issues, so i am not a totally disinterested information source. Mebbe not so reactionary, eh?

Chemical bonds store energy, whereas human bonding requires energy for storage for later use, when the going gets hard. I am interested in the feedback that i will get by allowing the students to explain their ideas before we start dissecting the reading material. This is like - Forensics 101 - who heated the earth. Not really - this talk will be more about the methods we use to know the information, and how we might attempt to collect data. Just gotta make sure the audience is interested and on the same general page.

a walk on the slippery rocks

a little bit each day, with something to further each task. a philosophy is to a person, as a rudder is to a boat. live every day and be done with it - it may have been the best of times, or the worst of times, but it was time in the past, so appreciate the learning experience and move on. when you need help, sometime you have to ask for it - it doesn't magically appear on it's own. the toughest words to say are i'm sorry and i messed up - but we all need to learn to say them more, along with thank you and i love you. you can never tell the people you love how much you love them, but keep trying anyway. share responsibility and contain blame. groucho once claimed to have shot an elephant in his pajama's, but he couldn't explain how the elephant got his pajama's on in the first place. take notice how we have two eyes and two ears, but only one mouth? share an extra hug today.

January 21, 2007

staying the course

wherefore why
nevertheless love
despite confliction
stubborn faith
character judgment
not of issue while
scales remain clouded
amidst other concerns

(c) 2007 lemme howdt

January 20, 2007

sports pix

football tomorrow features the two best teams on the sidelines looking in. i think that payton manning and the colts had better do it this year, if their going to get a ring at all. tom brady has three of them and should end up with four if the pats win. i like da bears in the other conference, although the media feelgood ride on new orleans should make every syrup hater in the world a bear fan. swami lemme whispers colts 28 pats 27 and da bears 15 saints 10. remember when they were called the aints and fans used to wear paper bags over their heads?

January 19, 2007

To be is to be, not not to be

How do i do when i don't know what to do - role development requires knowing, yet knowledge sharing is seen as a means of giving up value and requires value in return. Inviting other people into the knowledge domain brings competition, so protectionist me had replaced industrious me as a means of keeping my status in the status quo. But who is really to benefit by status quo? Is my responsibility weighted to minimize or maximize the effort involved, or to get to the final result and move on? Less engineering will result in more work, more jobs, especially manual labor if we don't raise the heavy working equipment.

But isn't this just busy work, if i can design better systems? But justification to the paper pushers and the bean counters, accountability and transparency, is a one way street where information flows only in a single direction. This aspect of carrying bureaucracies along for the ride, to see that we can justify our own existance, now has become half the economy in itself - which requires all of us to play and pay. To be is to be, not not to be. And not to have to report to be.

Silence the Citizen's Act

Gary North is one of those columnists in economics that speaks truth to power. When he talks about things that we know of from other areas, he tends to provide good analytical content. Read his article here. Them, decide whether anything congress does is in the best interests of the people of this country. Then find a way to keep in touch with what is going on, both locally and universally. As things come down, we can part of the solution or part of the precipitate. I prefer solving solvents, rather than dissolving.

Notes added : According to truthout.org - The Senate, on a 55-43 vote, approved an amendment pushed by Sen. Robert Bennett R-Utah, to strip a provision requiring reporting of "grass-roots" lobbying. The conference committee will have to bash it out on this particular provision.

Also - see this. Ramifications ad absurdio. One more.

January 18, 2007

Sunni inspiration :-)

'I would add that the best credential is obvious skill, typically acquired via hands-on experience under the tutelage of an expert, rather than the largely-scammy path of taking courses and tests and getting licenses to do certain kinds of work. If you can do something well, and people are willing to pay you for your time and effort, the free market can be your oyster.'

Since the comment board is down at sunni's web
villa, i will have to comment on her latest post here. i sometimes think that i like to make theories based on dynamics of things that i get from a unique perspective, but y'know somethings up when you find the same words and ideas in play with people that would have no way of knowing the theory context without coming up with it themself. It edifies my thought process and makes me wonder about gaia, connectivity and quantum mechanics. Howdtsite is my chocolate business, so to speak.

So when sunni's comment about pedigree and vocation schools appeared on my screen, it was an almost verbatim rehash of a concept i explained to a colleague at noon yesterday - that locally the community college was serving as a bad vocational technical institute and that we might as well graduate high school sophomores locally for all the good that publik skul does juniors and seniors. It sets them back. If the local community college courses were offered to high school juniors as an apprenticeship, they would be much more economically viable than the service they provide now, which is a sheepskin rubber stamp that says i can show up to class or a cheap means of getting college classes out of the way. The students that really are motivated to learn about something find ways to gain that knowledge, with or despite schools.

But what really floored me was reading Sunni describe her journey through the process of life, and onserving the parellels that we share in career path and motivation. And then i thought about my people grid of sixty-four - the magic number for group self-similarity that will cover the entire field grid in an area domain with double coverage and no overlap. we have enough people in the world, to where nobody can have unique experience that somebody somewhere else hasn't had the same experience, but it still is spooky when the parellels and conclusions reenforce the beliefs.


Life throws curveballs - i need to think some more, but the light flashed and something is there. Something to build with. We are not just neurotic, erotic beings flashing between materials possessions and secret intentions. There seems to be more energy wave uses that we currently have in our grasp, but symmetry simplifies recurrent elements and rotations give similar looking different fields to work with.

Science learning takes place in small number groups best, when the focus is directed by motivation to understand the material. Four is better than three, with one mentor sharing information with one student while two other students do an action item - a hands-on with something that requires attention. Rewards come from getting concepts from theory to practice, with attention to detail being more important with depth. Grasping universal concepts comes when the same concept appears a second time in a different form. It wasn't until i saw fingerprint designs in the sands on a beach after a storm, that i grasped the overlap of fractal geometry and group theory - even though i had taken courses in each independently.

The concept broken in society seems to be in bonding. Chemistry functions in bonding pairs and non-bonding pairs of electrons in a valence shell and other sets of electrons operating under the surface to enact the traits that manifest themselves as physical properties. Ions separate charges by enabling electron transfers to occurs such that stability in the outmost orbital is set in four pairs of two (very light elements excepted). People bonding requires trust in the common concepts of how society should run itself, but whirled affairs have made us question our reality while still holding invalid fundamental assumptions in our belief system. As we move more into non-natural forms (those that have no model in nature) of behaviors, the psychological shock to the system gets excessive and people melt down.

Anyhow - i have not been mentally all-together for a bit and i thought it was just me and my unique approach to life, the universe and everything. Having sunni and several other folks in the world who relate to how i see things, motivates me to get it together to accomplish the goals i set for myself again, in terms of how i wish to accomplish them. Of course i'm not certain we have a free market, but i sure like oysters. Fnord.


today's sunrise

January 17, 2007

Relevant to Theory not Practice

Thinking will produce advances in the state of the theory, but as long as thinking is isolated from doing, thinking will stagnate with respect to actual accomplishment. To advance the state-of-the-art requires implementing an approach that changes the result by taking action. Current 'analysis paralysis' implies a need to understand action prior to implementation, with restrictions made for potential 'very bad' effects, even though the real significant effects cannot be seen nor judged until the results of the action have been returned and interpreted within the evaluation matrix.

Thus, to generate action contrary to the current 'accepted means of discourse' is not only shot down immediately by imaginary theoretical constructs (i.e. don't even try to change what seemingly works), but also prohibited by the regs and mores established by a priori acceptance of the existing system. Thus, only inside the box theory can produce any action, with the expectation of results reenforcing said system.

When reality and theory no longer coincide, it is generally assumed that theory is wrong. Perhaps the current paradigms in politics and economics have spent their course and elder theory is really correct - that reality is unworkable. How do we change our fundamental assumptions when howdtside da baax is discouraged at best and prohibited in many cases?

My guess is that we don't - this civilization collapses under the weight of war and debt and we, who be left to pick up the pieces, in chaos can watch as we morph into a new 'more comforting' social order. The magnitude of the change will depend on the degree of chaos - we may need to change our frames of reference to be able to see through all the obfuscation that will accompany the last grasps at perceived value that come with institutional attempts to retain power. But remember that while order breeds chaos and chaos breeds order - the extent of change concerns the scale of the miasma, where the uncertainty principle governs.

January 16, 2007

fiat shuffle

wealth of nations crumble
irresponsibly plundered
paper worth less than air
whilst metal commodity
formed of shape and style
now irreversibly valuable
as coin of the realms become
become coins of the realm.

(c) 2007 lemme howdt

Snowed Howdt

Spent my morning commuting to non-existant meetings in a snowstorm. I made the mistake of taking the freeway for the ten mile commute in the snow, and ended up having this view for an hour plus.

But afterward, i fishtailed my way home. Having grown up on the east coast, this is typical winter weather - but not at all regular for southern oregon. I'm glad that the 50 F days last week didn't coax the fruit buds out. I'll take regular photo points around and about the homestead.

And i suppose this is evidence of global warming.

January 15, 2007

Orwell or not, here they come

sometimes, it just takes a bit of extra effort to overcome circumstance. Einstein said that problems could not be solved in the frame of mind that they were created in. groupthink does not allow any type of contrary thought, and people keep bringing up Orwell. i like Orwell. but not for real. peaceful non-violence requires outlets for the violence - it cannot be bottled up inside withhowdt unduly causing a rise in blood pressure, making one susceptible to strokes. most people like being stoked, but in a completely different sense of the word. by George ...

but really - wouldn't you think that sports like boxing were a legitimate means for relieving the urge to flatten somebody bearing a contrary opinion? today football takes that role, altho basketball can be more brutal, as one might artest. civil discourse may result if we allowed brawling in the halls of congress. it wouldn't make life any different, but it would give us another reason to consider when electing politicians to office.

January 14, 2007

Snakes Alive




Houdini here has an escape clause in his contract. He and his girlfriend Jasmine move in - a pair of ball pythons. We hope to have litlle whirl squirlies sometime this spring. That is as long as houdini stays in the house while on his disappearing act. It was ten days before we tricked him with a hot rock.

January 13, 2007

No End?

Log from Blammo is all talk and no action--or at least no action that you will ever know about. By day, he works as an insignificant cog in a corporate machine, and his nights are none of your business.

Log is enough action to write and edit thoughts and place them howdt there for us to read. This diatribe on the End is both true and false, depending on how you take it. I prefer to believe, with tongue in cheek, but these days i no longer know. I myself am faced with the quandry of taking action to enhance a system that doesn't work, while building a sytem with a different approach that could work, if the fundamental assumptions were changed or the previous asumptions are discarded. But if there is never an end, then the means needs to start regardless of the necessity to wait for the current status to end. So i dunno.

i do know that i need to know both systems inside and howdt to get there from here. So in the state of not knowing, i choose to assume that ends do occur, and once observed can no longer be denied. But until something ends, it still goes on, and saying it ended doesn't necessarily mean that it did in fact end. Smouldering fire burns when oxygen becomes more readily available, energy is produced by the interaction, and the water produced is not enough to quench the flame.

January 12, 2007

Redile Working Groups within a chemical model

Guidance depends on building trust levels between generations. The mistakes of the past are repeated by those that have not kept on on their history. Yet, we all know that history is written and rewritten to suit the needs of the authors and their masters. Activism stays around because activists get their way, eventually, just like a squeaky wheel gets greased.

Fear of the unknown keeps most people from exploring their comfort zone. Learning something new requires having somebody to bounce ideas off, to have a compatriot working with you that knows different things so that you partner into a relationship where the mental elder help guide the novice into the game of life.

In kulchas where grandparents watch the babies and were valued for their connections to heritage, the conduit function was very well-defined, though not elaborated. In our nukluar age, generational warfare is a highly developed game of letting people in on the secret before somebody hoses them down or takes them to the cleaners. Old folks voted back when it mattered and the seniors several generations back set up the ponzi scheme to eventually meet 2008 - the first wave of the bye-bye boomers who remember what great things the system did before their own eyes, without having the visual effect of the real horrors of WWII.

Intergenerational tug-of-war has to stop. There is no trust fund, no bank account and all the fiat cash in the world can not produce anything of real value, if people don't know the basics of how to. We're all in this together, so lets look at chemistry and see what we can learn about social structure.

Electrons mobility makes the world go round and electrons like to group in pairs. The larger the size of the element, the more electrons have to be accommodated in pairs. For most elements - not the very big or the very small - the magic number of electrons is eight, grouped in four pairs of two.

Thus, for each of four themed Envirothon interest areas, a senior conduit will be paired with a youthful coach to guide a team of students in forestry, aquatics, soils and wildlife. Each component will look at the energy dynamics of their area, both in terms of input/output and supply/demand. What serves as food, what is generated as waste and what types of values are involved in the ecology - habitat. Our framework will be in watersheds, our structure in conjunction with soil and water districts and our expertise areas pendant on our volunteer base.


The pilot this year will take place physically in Douglas County and by duplication through the net. This is a test of a learning system using natural resource science and a sports scoring system based on performance metrics. sorta like Rotisserie Baseball. As more people play the games and take part in events, the events will generate a score by a criteria that include both objective and subjective metrics. How it works in this go-round will be testing several hypothesis that i have on biochemphysetics - the integration of hard science with reality. Like sports, it will take practice, but we first need to generate a sustainable energy level and see which element it corresponds to. Different elements have different organizational structures and the proper electron pattern should fit both the mathematics and the group dynamics.

This year's Redile event theme will be to establish reference collections in the field of interest. For forestry and soils - these are self evident. For fish and wildlife, prints, pelts and keys, while in aquatics - chemistry equipment and macro-invertebrates. Redile has equipment available for physical measurment in forestry and water chemistry. Hands on use of the tools is necessary to understand the system - the monitoring should have little impact on the measured system.

Metrix - coaches and conduits will need to provide a checklist of information about each event that they attend - including number counts of people, with timeline, summary and photos of the event. The on-line time clock will be running for students this year, but eventually there will be no distinction between classifications - there will be much clearer definition of roles and criteria of order and chaos. So if you end up in Dr. Lenny's classroom at www.yourclassroom.com - leave a note on the chalkboard. Otherwise, i wouldn't know you were there.

January 11, 2007

trying hard to understand, but

Volumes speak volumes. There is an awful lot of curricula howdt there and very little time to relate the concepts through the information. The party line is good at justifying itself as people who sit at desks and generate paper for a living have a lot more time to express their nonsense in written form. The art of discovery is beyond their ken, so they never attempt to go beyond the bounds of the simplified pablum that they were taught to regurgitate.

Working folks who spend their time stressing in the cycle wash out, so that the twin pressures to perform and stay well depend on the level of social interaction networking and nose to the grindstone work; to pay off the never-ending debt cycle of post-modern urbana while keeping people that might otherwise object in line via payoff or plunder. The spoils of the system get extracted by players in the game that survive the concrete jungle long enough to rigg themselves to the nest egg. The straight scoop is never straight and always poop, except for the thread that binds it into the scheme of acceptibility.

just have to stop thinking in this mindset, as only the economic untouchable or the very brave can even hope to stay enlightened for very long - there is no free lunch. economics is not what it used to be, nor what it will become - it is what it is and whether or not we have the wherewithal to achieve our goals is dependent upon us, not anyone else. learn to understand, to apply to what interest is, and spend time doing things that you choose to do. You still must do the things you have to do - everybody must - but what those things are is not under control right now. So sit back, dont stress too much right now and invest your time wisely, in what you do when you do what you do.

Chemistry of Energy and Global Warming

Before i get on topic - today is a snow day - there is an inch on the ground here, rare for southern oregon for snow to stick. On Tuesday, we were talking about the mid 50 degree weather and fooling the buds and flowers into appearing a bit early.

Climate change is a strange euphemism for messing with kulcha. The blatant harvest of energy from raw materials with a total disregard for final form is a root problems that gets handwaving from the people that do it because it is not profitable to change the form into something useful. Coal to electricity takes carbon from elemental form (0) to carbon dioxide (+4) output - a change from a very useful, energy storing middle of the range to the dead end outlying oxidized state. The government solution (which really does not want a solution, but have to do something because enuf people are worried) is to promote alternative energy via corn based ethanol. This
takes carbon from useful partially reduced (-2) form to carbon dioxide (+4) output - a change from a very useful, energy storing middle of the range to the dead end outlying oxidized state. Methane carbon (-4) is the other end of the range from carbon dioxide.

The rate of environmental respiration on earth is really governed by the net of the activities of all living and breathing things. These have to be balanced of the photsynthetic energy harvest of organic scaffolding and the anaerobic activity of internal metabolism. I hypothesize that we are missing something in our accounting of energy through the forces of physics and logic that is fundamental to the explanation of what governs life on earth. Chemistry as a tool has been commonly accepted due to the predictive abilities of synthetic organic chemists - who have created a very direct pattern of building bonds and correllating the products with nature. Tools for illucidating chemical structure, spectroscopy and chromatography, have been developed to the point where we could begin the search for better understanding - but it wouldn't generate any immediate business profit. Cept for big pharma and big ag and y'know how scary that is.

Anyhow - the linking of oxidation with reduction in chemistry is like the linking of two sides of a coin. But each transfer of electrons comes with the change of other electrons in their energy wells. The ground state is most stable for each atom - but energy changes are handled by the rearrangement of orbitals and electron sharing to allow more energetic stable states - wells in the climb up the energy hill. There is really no crisis in energy generation, it's a storage problem. The solutions is not in organic fuel sources but in inorganic fuel storage capacity. That is why the hydrogen car has more potential than ethanol, IMHO.

January 09, 2007

Post-modernism (and education)

None of these manifestations would be possible (in any significant frequency) without the coercive interference of the state. In the process, post-modernism has taken over the functions of organic society and operated like a "cultural agent orange," defoliating everything in its path and leaving nothing but charred ruins in its wake.

Steven LaTulippe goes into some interesting depth in as he defines his course for culture. I can see that manifested her in rural amerika in many of the inactions of the people. As social creatures, we always wish to help on a personal basis, but compelled assistance is self-defeatism - and people aren't willing to help themselves, because if they do, they get cut off from their unearned rewards. hmmm. work is seen as the opposite of fun, whereas work should be a fulfilling portion of a healty balance lifestyle.

The bonus is that i posted before i finished reading, so i didn't get to solution four - abolish public skulz. Knowledge can only flow to people who have an interest in the material substance they are studying. Energy directed toward interest increases the matter retained in useful form, but application is necessary to synthesize the concepts, for practical use. Environments should be adapted to learning styles, not learning adapted to concrete environments. more deep thought. 42


January 08, 2007

Renewable Personal Energy

Had a fine time this weekend away from the normality of home. Good food, old friends and new friends - people enjoying times together regardless of the situations behind the curtains. The exchange of stories and gifts between diverse people allows you to see a different side of yourself - portraying a role of life of how you might wish people would see you, rather than how you perceive they see you at home. Outcome based education has yielded outcome based life - too many people miss the genuine pleasure of the travel along the path of time. thank you granma treetoad and friends.

I return to my space with a new respect for me in my role and will work in time to change impression. Being malleable, we can allow people to see exactly what they wish to see and so they not notice the anything more than the smile of the cheshire cat and the wink of a nod, as we restructure the scaffolding of our personal learning environments. The time for reflection will come when it comes, getting the pieces of the structures aligned to their time frames is the course of action for the year. Hang onto your surf board, bring a towel and prepare for a wild ride through the changing environment of 2007. Or is it -0005. These annual math equations are too regular for a chaotic neutral.

to deal with old

morning has broken
brings today today
swimming futile
against waves of force
gotta do, gotta due
stacks never alight
hardly all right
buffered medications
ease some pain as
mourning is broken

2007 lemme howdt

January 06, 2007

Isn't light cool?


Mercury Blues

Is this the real life, or is it fantasy
Caught in a landslide, no escape from reality

Freddie Mercury - Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody

When the going gets wierd and the wierd turn pro. HST

Surfing the net this morning to get my infusion of errata, i found url directions to BBC and Wired and Slate and all sorts of media blogger wannabees. BBC's 200 million dead blog factoid - well sure, if every blog ever posted is dead when the last comment runs its course. But the ideas, the themes of the blogging community are under insidious attack by the powers that be. They want to steal our voices, by putting out hard-sell bad immitations and having the lemmings think it is us. This maybe a good thing, if it takes us off the target radar - they think they have bigger fish to fry.

Then i read about the turn-out in upstate new york for the nine-one-one call about a mercury spill - a broken rectal thermometer drew a huge force (~100) of police, fire and emergency rescue teams for a small puddle of dispersed beads. I wonder what they would do with the DME that we used in physical chemistry lab? DME - dropping mercury electrode - a device uses mercury's ability to gain surface area rapidly to provide a clean surface for continuous chemical measurement.

Back in the 90's, i knew a rancher from Baker County OR that had a natural mercury deposit on his land. The DEQ supposedly showed up to inspect and then wanted him to clean it up or face an environmental citation. Two years in court finally got them off his back. He should have laughed and asked them where they would move the mine too - and if we had that capablility, doncha think the mining industry would have used it?

Mercury has three major forms that it can be found in and many others lesser forms that it has available. The puddles from the thermometer are the elemental form - as a chemist it is a fun substance to play with. Respect it in keeping reactive chemicals away and mercury is really no problem. The second form is Hg(II) - a salt forming cation that is the higher stable oxidation state. If the last sentence means nothing to you, i can invite you to visit the Electron Hotel - where i can explain these concepts by analogy. (If we add the Proton/Neutron Bar and Grill, we can explain nuclear chemisty too.) (Coming soon to a net-space near you).

The third form is the real baddie - Hg(I). Hg(I) really doesn't exist - it is two Hg sharing a pair of electrons with each other. I can't paste the proper symbol into blogger - but look at the mercury as if it were a pair of binary suns that want a divorce and each needs the other to stabilize until they can ditch the common pair. This is like having a tazer that goes off at random and pops some poor living thing with a jolt of instant electric reduction. The organic system, which lives by oxidation, then shuffles off the damage to whatever can tangle with it. This big bad dimer form - two mercury atoms together reacting to two individual mercury atoms apart is the cancer causing agent that has the government freaked.

Mercury is normally found in the Hg(II) form, which will never ever become the dimer form, unless climate change problems invert the atmosphere into a reducing environment. The elemental mercury of the thermometer type is a lot more stable than the dimer and infact the dimer would much prefer to rejoin the silver ball rather than react. But the Hg(I) dimer is such a bad actor, that death is a very likely outcome from indescent exposure. So don't go smashing old thermometers for fun, but if you do break-one, shrug and dump a bit of sulfur powder on the area, then sweep it up. The sulfur and mercury will react readily to form HgS, where Hg(II) is the chemical form.

January 05, 2007

is this really real

"day-long day care for 5-year-olds receives its real electoral support because parents want some relief from the expense of child day care for 5-year-olds, which has been made necessary by the fact that both mom and dad now have to work outside the home to fund day-long government day care for 6-to-18-year-olds"

Vin Suprynowicz
has a distict spin on gummint skools. If you consider the opinion against the supported fact, you might find that Vin's hypothesis carries a little more weight. If we have the opportunity to make predictions on the value that we can achieve without skuls to use as a case study, perhaps we can tease a few more supports to end the monopoly on education.

Industry is worried that the youth do not have employable skills - but skuls demonize critical thinking and creative thinking both. If a child is thinking through a thought, he is not paying attention to the teacher babbling in front of the room. In order to teach effectively, you have to discuss things with your audience to see that they are tracking and then continue on to the bundled concepts. To understand bundled concepts, you first must be able to apply simple concepts, and then grasp their implications enough to put them to proper use. Everyone can learn something well and build from that base. All things considered is really not all things - it just are the things you know and rarely includes the realm of all things that we don't know. Everyone knows more about something than somebody else, but being able to communicate that knowledge is not the same as having the knowledge. Most people are scared sh*tless of teaching, because they know what they don't know and don't want the responsibility of getting it wrong. But interpersonal learning is what we do with our family, our own. And how you know is by understanding within the frame of reference that you built as applicable.

Books contain information, and ways of putting information to good use. Ghandi's satyagraha and Rand's galt's gulch illustrate concepts that the literates of my grandparents generation were aware of endemic concepts in the system and were attempting to warn us in the future of what has come to pass - to stave off the life of Kafka's K, which became to pass as Solzhenitsyn's reality. Or was Heinlein's Starship Troopers the ticket. All the same. Depends what you apply yourself to. My spell checker says : brain quit this line now.

Vin's book the Black Arrow is a good read. Having conceptualized a similar novel, i decided that that was not how i wanted to cover time in my space. Non-fiction is much more important to make it to the readers of tomorrow and Carroll discussed the meaning of words quite well in Alice's adventures. 'Here's lookin at you, kid.'

January 04, 2007

Rear Window - '07 Project

One of the Redile Projects for this summer and beyond is to take a County Park that has historic significance and turn it into a learning portal. Dr. Lenny joined with Lois, Karen, Daniel and Clint of the Friends of Mildred Kanipe Ranch to take measurements on several historic buildings at the site. We measured the school house and then moved over to the main park to measure some of the out buildings. The cold weather forced the group to continue the project two weeks later to finish measuring the sheep and dairy barns.

Two weeks later back at Kanipe; the mystery question is what order were the portions of the ranch house attached. A roof blocking a front window is one of the hints. The first order of business of the Friends of Kanipe project is to get renovation by historical designation as a Century Farm and Ranch site, while turning the one room school house into a school/museum for demonstrating turn of the 20th century agriculture techniques.

Douglas Soil and Water Conservation District is responsible for site management on the Douglas County owned property, the Douglas County Museum of History and Natural History is also a partner. The original photo was taken from inside the house, next to the blocked front window looking back. The steps were creaky, our conjecture was that the steps were an outdoor addition originally that got framed and placed inside when the kitchen area was added. Redile will help train people on-line to help with the deconstruction and reconstruction of the buildings as volunteers and help gather grant support to pick up the material tab.







January 03, 2007

Voluntary Public Control

When it comes to working in the public interest, it doesn't matter what color or size hat you wear. The act of observing that something needs to be done, obliges me to decide whether it is worth my time and effort to do the task myself, to assign it to another person to do later or to shine it off as not worth the effort. when i represent a group interest in a common project, i feel that i have the responsibilty to bring the competence level of the participants to a maximum achievable level. part of that is earned by my seniority of role within the group, part of that is earned by the skills base that i bring to the group from past experience and part is delegated by agreement in the terms of my service contract with granting agencies and funders. dr. lenny is a science enabler - who can work with people to understand conceptually what they are trying to do physically.

The forerunners in this art of bardian science are Linus Pauling, Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan, Bassam Shakhashiri and maybe even Bill Nye, the Science Guy. The goal here is to build an effective team of knowledgible people that can volunteer to do the physical governance of public lands - learning the techniques of forestry, aquatics, wildlife, soils and land use for enabling the biochemical mechanism of the habitat. By volunteering to work with the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, local Soil and Water Conservation Districts, watershed councils, state agencies to share interest in the function, we will be able to influence the decision making process by non- arbitrary means.

If you are interested in working on-line and hands-on with people that share this interest - contacts are forming in a world of Envirothon - an outdoor competition for five high school students to compete with their knowledge of science. This year's contest in Oregon is at the Oregon Garden in May, the national contest is in upstate New York in June. Redile will sponsor up to five teams - but will allow anyone to apply our system. I'll know more one week from today. Coaches do not have to be experts on the topics - just be willing to help get the information that the kids want to learn accessible without wasting the time of people working in the area. When a volunteer's time is worth the cost of bringing him along, the work interest has been developed and said middle or high school student has a career path. There are opportunites to be involved, and the better we act, the closer we can watch. Learn by doing, and the skills will be there when you need them.

January 02, 2007

Utopia 13-57 - Volume One

Utopia is code name for my artifact collector in a Starweb game. Starweb features 15 players of 6 character types conquering 256 worlds in a finite, but unknown, number of turns. It has been years since i have played in a standard full communication game, preferring to play anonymous. But in the spirit of getting more people interested in thinking howdtside the box - i will play this game open - which means a monthly update to this blogsite.

Everyone starts with their home world. I conquered three worlds that i could see, and found six more world connects to go to next turn. I started with five fleets and captured two more, giving me seven, so the extra one can load with metal and fly home instead of exploring and conquest. I found one art, so i have a grand score of 15. The score is not terribly germane at this time - each player type has a different way of scoring.

Dilution and Concentration

Chemistry has a way of being everything about everything. The old slogan, that dilution is the solution to pollution was an alliteration of words that corrupted the mind of an entire generation - the phrase is not correct. The concepts of concentration and dilution in chemistry are the opposites of each other - to place more or less solute (stuff) into a solution (liquid).

However - let's focus on concentration - an absolute necessity if you want to get something done. To concentrate and blot out the surroundings allows us to focus on ghetting done what has to be done - often with the goods on hand. But to build something requires concentration of effort, and concentrating the raw materials and workman skills onto a single site, in the proper order to finish aspects of a job that must be done in a tiered array. In other words - you can't roof a house before you've poured a foundation and built an structure. The cast of characters needs to be matched to the tasks at hand - though unskilled labor is also very necessary. So concentration requires work, at some level.

Dilution, on the other hand is the natural state for entropy - divide and conquer - scattered disarray and all that. But i suggest that we remember the value of an individual is one and there is no subdivision of that individual that makes it zero, yet keeps it as a full functioning entity. The curve is asymptotic for a reason - it never ever can reach zero on the basis of dilution, because everybody has got to be somewhere when they are left alone. We need to be left alone sometimes to do our work and be able to get it done - especially when our cymbols clang and contrast to others following their flutes. The melting pot concept of society - homogenous amerikanization, just like homogenated milk, leaves us gasping at the disenlightenment of groups enforcing hive activity. We are an orchestra.

Focus is balancing competing forces of dilution and concentration. The quest for knowledge requires application before a topic is learned well enough to move on. In buying into mutualism - thanks Kevin - i would like to build a support network of people willing to coach other people in the pursuit of knowledge - truth. Since truth is relative until observed and absolute thereafter, the quest for truth does not always bring the expected outcome. But in a world where our elite rely on myth to govern reality, seeking illumination and light by searching into voluntary application of learned technique seems to be a better means of bringing people together. Call it apprenticeship, mentoring, coaching or just plain communicating, if we take interest in sharing interest, perhaps we can get a collective effort to fixing a framework that allows us to adjust gears and deal with the collective crush of system overload.

This has been your chemistry lesson of the day. dr. lenny - howdt



My Old School

Steely Dan put howdt a song on one of their earlier albums (Can't Buy a Thrill, after Reelin in the Years) called My Old School, where Becker and Fagan ranted about never going back. This Steve Olsen article goes into great detail on what hasn't change. As a mixed mongrel parent - one kid enjoying public school, the other enjoying home school - i have been tempted to test the home schooler and put him back into the social rat-race. Frayed Knot! Thank Ali for the reference.

January 01, 2007

All men are create equal

Wish i has made this observation, but I didn't - Bill Bonner did.

"Education, too, takes on a new look. It is not enough to learn things; in any case, the busybodies are incapable of organizing real, individual learning. What they can organize is education... with the learning removed or standardized to fit into some new larger national standard. "Educators" can’t be bothered with individual students as they actually are, nor even with local curricula. Everyone has to learn the same thing. And they have to learn it the same way. The world may be infinitely complex and detailed but in the national educational program, the details have to be knocked off...like the fine detailed trim work from an old house...so that all that is left is measurable, standardized space, which can be quantified and allocated by bureaucrats, who may have never met a single student in their entire lives. Are educational standards falling short? Spend more money to increase the space!"

caught: sunrise on digicam


Some people might speculate that this picture doesn't tell it's story properly. Yet somehow i believe that this picture tells so many stories, that each and every one of us can imagine a story behind this setting.

Seems and is have big differences and now is unlike any now i've been through before. The strange, the bizarre, the macabre - fare for rod serling once - is now commonplace, and served up by those in charge. To Serve Man turned howdt to be a cookbook. Blink and it changes, but value is being consumed so fast that the plumbing can't deliver at the pace we expect. Sunrise on day one of aught seven is minutes away. mottled purple and pink hues, with wispy grey clouds.



collected a series of shots that show the metamorphosis of this first sunrise of 07 - here is a preview of the color coda. btw - i'll get back to the story of the first picture another time.