Image Science and Analysis Laboratory, NASA-Johnson Space Center. "The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth." (03/20/2010 13:00:07) http://earth.jsc.nasa.gov/sseop/efs/images.pl?photo=AS17-148-22727
One of the first impressions astronauts get with their initial view of the Earth from orbit is just how small it really is. Below them they see the entirety of civilization, the whole of our home in a single gaze. They see just how limited it all is. We live on a rock surviving within a very thin sheath of moisture and air. Take a basket-ball and dip it in some water and shake off the excess moisture and you have our oceans being represented. It’s hard for us Earth-bound folks to conceptualize it. We look out our windows and see… what? A few miles around us. Which seems vast to us. The sky look endless because there’s no reference point for size comparison. The clouds, are they just a few hundred feet up or thousands? It all seems so big to us and it is so easy to get lulled into believing that we cannot possibly have any affect on the world around us. However, a change in perspective is all that’s needed to make us realize that what we have is so very rare and so very precious and so very little compared to the cosmos around us. And most importantly, so very limited. We are effectively on a space-ship.
It’s been a long time in coming tho – this demise of the incandescent light bulb. But, it seems that it’s inevitable. So little energy is converted to light in these bulbs and so much to heat that it’s a wonder it’s still so popular. Only 2.6% of the energy put into the average 100 watt bulb is converted into light! Think you’re saving money with a 60 watt? Only 2.1%! How about a 40 watt? 1.9% of the energy put into it becomes light! It’s like putting the pedal to the floor in your car then with the throttle wide open riding the brakes to obey that school zone speed-limit. Worse even.
This is one of those “Oh it’s possible and it’s neat” type things that remained pretty much at the vaporware stage, if even that. However, recent developments indicate that it just might migrate from “What if” to, “There it is.” Harvesting energy from waves has long been discussed and dreamed of. It’s not a complicated thing. Waves and tides go up and down – all we gotta do is harness that energy. In most cases it’s a LOT of energy potential. From the article:
“Ten sites on the seabed off the north coast of Scotland have been leased out to power companies in an effort to generate wave and tidal energy.”
It seems to be slow in coming tho, in spite of the tremendous potential for less costly energy production. Let’s hope it doesn’t fall to the wayside like Picken’s Texas windfarms.
“Urban beekeepers in New York City no longer have to keep the honey of their labors a secret. The city’s health board voted Tuesday to overturn a longtime ban on beekeeping within city limits…”
This is absolutely AWESOME! The house of cards is surely going to come down. First the White House gets their own bees. And now this highly visible event, none other than the Big Apple taking honeybees off the banned list. May this provide more ammunition for the rest of the beekeepers to hopefully convince their local politics to overturn similar prohibitions. We need more beekeepers and this will help enormously.
…that is a dream I have fostered since I was a young child. I grew up daydreaming about undersea life ever since I first as a six year old child watched 2000 Leagues Under the Sea -- a masterpiece of cinema of its day:
Once you have roasted your own, you will have embarked on the path few leave. After getting in the driver’s seat of your coffee experience, after having control over every aspect of the coffee, after experiencing just how good coffee can be, nothing on the store shelf can remotely compare, no matter how many artificial flavors they stuff in there. In short, you are transformed into a coffee snob. My journey began about ten years ago. And thanks to the internet. In my research – an act of self-improvement that my wife calls playing – I came across the home-roasting coffee possibility. And I came across Sweet Maria’s – a company owned and run by Tom that imports coffee after meticulously cupping each lot and determining it was of the quality he demanded. I was amazed at how easy roasting is – his website opened a whole new world of culinary possibilities. Each coffee from each region is distinctively different – I was essentially able to tour the world in my cup.
Up until last year, I had no need for an extractor. Top-bar hives only require a knife, a bucket and a strainer. I still have tubs of honey-comb in the freezer that I take out once and a while to chew on some for a snack. I could probably leave the comb out now – I put it in the freezer to ensure that any wax-moth eggs are killed. However, for serious honey production, especially for a side-line honey business, an extractor is an essential tool for the job.
This is the lava stone from which a poi pounder will be carved.
A poi pounder is a stone shaped somewhat like a half an hour-glass with a rounded bottom. It’s usually carved out of a gray lava with tight pores. In those days, these stones were pecked at with a hammer stone to shape it – a process that took many many patient hours. Once the shape was finished then another stone would be used to polish the pounder. I opted to use a diamond-bladed grinder instead.
Toasted nanner trees. Guess I'm not getting bananas this summer.
My greenhouse is largely toast right now thanks to the Arctic blast that dropped temps way below normal. No other winter has affected the plants like this one – the earth-mass has performed marvelously in all the winters without extra heating. This time around, the earth-mass still performed well – I would have lost everything otherwise – but it wasn’t quite enough. Normally, the worst that happens is a few browned banana leaves on really cold nights. This time around is another story altogether – that Arctic blast was severe for this part of the country. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen it so devastated. I have had less damage in top-side greenhouses with failed heaters. I’ll only know what survived come Spring. It’ll be painful, tho, to haul out all the dead pots and try to catalog the losses. Many of these plants I’ve had for years and some are from seed.
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