# Interesting stuff.



## Olly Buckle (Sep 9, 2017)

I guess eveyone knows some sort of interesting stuff, for example,


From my ex boss at the building firm where I worked as the driver came  this.
One of the main symbols of hope and renewal after the fire was Wren’s new St. Paul’s Cathedral, and it was politically expedient for it to progress quickly. It only took ten years to produce a design that allowed such speed of construction it was all over in another forty. That may seem slow to us, but the great medieval cathedrals had taken hundreds of years to build.   
One of the things Wren did was base the building on four supports for the main dome. This meant that four different builders could be employed, one on each. Plans in those days were not so precise in their specification, with the result that each builder achieved his objective differently, and the building is not quite symmetrical. 


This information came from I know not where, but although the source is not memorable, the information certainly is. Another building put up after the fire was The Monument. A collaboration between Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke it was erected close to the start of the fire, it is a column with a viewing platform and bronze flame at the top. This, however, was the beginning of the Age of Enlightenment, and the time of the founding of the Royal Society, of which both Wren and Hooke were members. The building reflects this. It is not simply a monument to the fire, it is also a scientific instrument. The steps in the spiral staircase to the top are all exactly six inches tall, to make barometric pressure experiments easy, and the centre of the staircase was left free to allow pendulum experiments; it is also a fixed telescope.


Scientific experimentation was beginning, and Hooke had produced some of the best lenses made to date. The distances of the planets had been worked out by triangulation; taking sightings from different points on the Earth and measuring their angle, but the stars are so far away that the difference in angle, even from observation points hundreds of miles apart, was too slight to measure. The solution? There is one star almost directly overhead, and by building a fixed telescope pointing at it it was possible to take readings at opposite ends of the Earth’s orbit, giving the triangle a base of just under three hundred million kilometres; and for the first time it was possible to work out the distance to a star. Impressive.

Interesting stuff is often just something you know, we don't require references.

So, anyone know any stuff, and it had better be interesting


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## sas (Sep 9, 2017)

In the U.S. more cows kill people than the combined number of deaths from attacks by sharks, alligators, and bears.

Sorry, that's all I got.


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## Bloggsworth (Sep 9, 2017)

It'll be at least 40 years till they decide about the third runway at London Airport, not to mention complete the lunatic HS2, which will immediately be closed for signalling updates and all passengers shovelled off onto a replacement bus service...


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## Kevin (Sep 9, 2017)

One of the JPL founders ( space race, NASA) hung out for a time with Aleister Crowley, considered himself an alchemist, a-aaand ... accidentally blew himself up.


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## Terry D (Sep 9, 2017)

40,000 tons of dust from space falls onto planet Earth every year. Much of the dust you clean off your furniture came directly from outer space.


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## bobo (Sep 9, 2017)

Kevin said:


> One of the JPL founders ( space race, NASA) hung out for a time with Aleister Crowley, considered himself an alchemist, a-aaand ... accidentally blew himself up.


That's called ascending


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## Olly Buckle (Sep 9, 2017)

Bloggsworth said:


> It'll be at least 40 years till they decide about the third runway at London Airport, not to mention complete the lunatic HS2, which will immediately be closed for signalling updates and all passengers shovelled off onto a replacement bus service...



I said it had better be interesting, surely this is boringly predictable?


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## Firemajic (Sep 9, 2017)

Did you know that unless food is mixed with saliva ...you cant taste it.... Ooo..!!
Did you know that an Ostrich's eye, is BIGGER than its BRAIN???? .... huh?
Did you know that each time you see the full moon, you always see the SAME SIDE!!!... reallllly..


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## Pluralized (Sep 9, 2017)

In the manufacture of float glass, a continuous ribbon-like sheet of hot glass floats along a bath of molten tin, which is then sliced off in prescribed lengths and sent out to various fabricators and end users around the world. The production cycles are planned in large part to meet current demand, with little surplus actually built into the picture. These plants run all day, every day, for years, glass just flowing and flowing and never stopping. Every couple of years they must shut the whole works down and clean it out, re-tool, fix everything, since it's such a destructive process. The heat cools, glass hardens, and for weeks they chip and hammer at the solidified mess so they can actually clean it out. When I have a bad day at work, I imagine for a moment that I am one of the glass-chippers and things generally improve in my realm.


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## LeeC (Sep 10, 2017)

When Mormon crickets (actually shieldbacked katydids that US westerners are familiar with) enter a swarming stage because of population density, the outer circle moves constantly forward to avoid being eaten by those behind them. The inner circle needs the critical nutrients  protein and salt, which the outer circle is rich in.

These are large insects, reaching three inches in length, and were a food source of Native Americans. A pound of grasshoppers is three times more nutritious than a pound of beef, and I imagine Mormon crickets are similarly as nutritious. In the world we're leaving for our grand children they may be a necessary mainstay, and being they are a serious agricultural pest may be the source of more conflict between the haves and have-nots. [now there's a premise for a dystopian story]

We've plowed up and built on so much of the western prairie that they aren't the agricultural problem they used to be, but they can still be a traffic hazard if encountered swarming across a road.

They come to mind every so often when I think of them as an metaphor for another weedy species.


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## Kevin (Sep 10, 2017)

Crickets as traffic hazard...h'hh. Brings to mind zombies as traffic hazards. 
Naturally, right?  
You see a crowd, a 'herd' , and you think _plow_ _through them_, but the writers of T.W.D. have it that they don't do that because they get stuck if they're..mm..deep enough, tires spinning on top of a pile and such. 

I wonder how accurate that is? I've seen the cops plow through protesters on horseback, sheriffs plow through in motor vehicles. How many people deep does it take to stop a car? Could a car just keep on going? How about a horse and rider? I bet they would know that back in the old days...Agincourt or something like that... Does the figure change if there are multiple horses charging together? Is there a ratio of horse to pedestrian...a maximum penetration per horse and rider that varies according to...?
  I don't suppose any of this would serve to be _know'd,
_now, except in a story. Naturally, zombies are just 'proxy' ( better word?) for people, for any crowd, human weight and density being more or less equal.  I mean, they can't ride on each other's shoulders, can they ( 'Z' was junk in my opinion). Anyway, I think it's  a legitimate question, historically, numerically, considering Attila, Ghengis Khan, Charge of the Light Briggade, the L.A. riots...


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## LeeC (Sep 10, 2017)

Ocean acidification is sometimes referred to as global warming’s “equally evil twin,” and has been referred to as “the big nasty one coming down.”   The irony is intentional and fair enough as far as it goes, which may not be far enough. No single mechanism explains all the mass extinctions in the record, and yet changes in ocean chemistry seem to be a pretty good predictor. Ocean acidification played a significant role in at least two of the Big Five extinctions (the end-Permian and the end-Triassic) and quite possibly it was a major factor in a third (the end-Cretaceous). There’s also strong evidence of ocean acidification playing a significant role during an extinction event that occurred 183 million years ago, and another 55 million years ago. 

Since the start of the industrial revolution, humans have burned through enough fossil fuels— coal, oil, and natural gas— to add some 365 billion metric tons of carbon to the atmosphere. Deforestation has contributed another 180 billion tons. Each year, we throw up another nine billion tons or so, an amount that’s been increasing by as much as six percent annually. As a result of all this, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air today— a little over four hundred parts per million— is higher than at any other point in the last eight hundred thousand years. Quite probably it is higher than at any point in the last several million years. If current trends continue, CO2 concentrations will top five hundred parts per million, roughly double the levels they were in preindustrial days, by 2050. 

In addition to accelerating global warming, the chemistry of the oceans is being altered. Gases from the atmosphere get absorbed by the ocean and gases dissolved in the ocean are released into the atmosphere. When the two are in equilibrium, roughly the same quantities are being dissolved as are being released. Change the atmosphere’s composition, as we have done, and the exchange becomes lopsided: more carbon dioxide enters the water than comes back out.

All this extra CO2 is increasing the acidity of the oceans in decreasing pH. Like the Richter scale, the pH scale is logarithmic, so even a small numerical difference represents a very large real-world change.  The decline of .1 means that the oceans are now thirty percent more acidic than they were in 1800. Under what’s known as a “business as usual” emissions scenario, surface ocean pH will fall to 8.0 by the middle of this century, and it will drop to 7.8 by the century’s end. At that point, the oceans will be 150 percent more acidic than they were at the start of the industrial revolution. The tipping point expected by 2100 is where ocean ecosystems start to crash. 

Why ocean acidification is so dangerous is tough to answer only because the list of reasons is so long. Of the myriad possible impacts, probably the most significant involves the group of creatures known as calcifiers. From a human perspective, calcification looks a bit like construction work and also a bit like alchemy. To build their shells or exoskeletons or calcitic plates, calcifiers must join calcium ions (Ca2 +) and carbonate ions (CO32 −) to form calcium carbonate (CaCO3). Ocean acidification increases the cost of calcification by reducing the number of carbonate ions available to begin with. To extend the construction metaphor, imagine trying to build a house while someone keeps stealing your bricks. The more acidified the water, the greater the energy that’s required to complete the necessary steps. At a certain point, the water becomes positively corrosive and solid calcium carbonate begins to dissolve.

One example of vulnerable species is Emiliania huxleyi which is a single-celled phytoplankton— a coccolithophore— that surrounds itself with tiny calcite plates, and is the base of many marine food chains. Another is Limacina helicina, a species of pteropod, or “sea butterfly,” resembling a winged snail. It lives in the Arctic and is an important food source for many much larger animals, including herring, salmon, and whales.

ROUGHLY one-third of the CO2 that humans have so far pumped into the air has been absorbed by the oceans. This comes to a stunning 150 billion metric tons. As with most aspects of the Anthropocene, though, it’s not only the scale of the transfer but also the speed that’s significant. A comparison might be made to alcohol. Just as it makes a big difference to your blood chemistry whether you take a month to go through a six-pack or an hour, it makes a big difference to marine chemistry whether carbon dioxide is added over the course of a million years or a hundred. To the oceans, as to the human liver, rate matters.

By burning through coal and oil deposits, humans are putting carbon back into the air that has been sequestered for tens— in most cases hundreds— of millions of years. In the process, we are running geologic history not only in reverse but at warp speed. Continuing along this path for much longer, scientists note, is likely to leave a legacy of the Anthropocene as one of the most notable, if not cataclysmic events in the history of our planet.”


[Sources include the book “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History” by Elizabeth Kolbert, and numerous scientific studies.]


This is our grand children’s quality of life we’re talking about, and why it saddens me so deeply that apparently so many obsess over which way the toilet paper should unroll. Is the meaning of life really 42 (as per Douglas Adams), or god forbid is it 45?


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## sas (Sep 10, 2017)

Lee,  

No doubt our renown, self-identified, scientific, Mensa brained politicians will call this "fake news". Gosh it must be nice to have & accept one answer for everything. (simple answers for the simple minded)


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## LeeC (Sep 10, 2017)

sas said:


> Lee,
> 
> No doubt our renown, self-identified, scientific, Mensa brained politicians will call this "fake news". Gosh it must be nice to have & accept one answer for everything. (simple answers for the simple minded)


I wouldn't necessarily call them simple minded, although a BIL of mine is, but they do evidence strong self-indulgence with avarice, blatantly demonstrating how little they care about anyone other than themselves.


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## Olly Buckle (Sep 10, 2017)

sas said:


> Gosh it must be nice to have & accept one answer for everything. (simple answers for the simple minded)


You should try religion 

Lee, you missed out the sulphur in all that fuel, it won't contribute as much volume as the carbonic acid, but the sulphuric acid it creates will be more acidic. There is also a bigger problem with cutting down the trees, trees atch a huge volume of water in the canopy and it re-evaporates into the air. Along with all the moisture transpired by the trees and the living things in the humus below them this puts enough water back in the air for it to rain again a bit further on. Without the trees it would not  get past the first 150 miles or so  of landfall, ie. the center of the continents would become deserts. I suppose it would get rid of the problemof the flyover conservative republicans, but a ot  of the world's food gets grown there. Of course when  the Yellowstone supervolcano blows again it will cover the midwest in about two feet of ash and create a three year winter with the ash cloud, so it won't really matter anyway.


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## bazz cargo (Sep 10, 2017)

Hinkley Point Nuclear power station will cost 29.5 billion GPB stick price, will last for 60 years and produce  7% of the current electricity we are using in the UK. 10,000 years of clean up afterwards. Great value for money.


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## Olly Buckle (Sep 10, 2017)

The place in Britain with the highest concentration of different species is Thurrock Lagoons. This is a twenty acre site next door to the old Thurrock coal  fired power station and was used as a dumping ground for the coal ash. When the power station closed it was declared Toxic, an iron fence erected around it, and it was left for twenty years before someone decided to see what had happened to it. A number of the species there are imports, such as ragwort or buddlia, but there are also some rare natives there. It is slightly encouraging to know that if we leave what we have destroyed alone it recovers, discouraging to know that this is now regarded as a brownfield sight suitable  for development by some. Conservationists have fought off Post office plans to build a monster warehouse, but part of it has gone already.


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## LeeC (Sep 10, 2017)

Yes Olly, I left out a lot. It was intentional because I figured I'd given readers enough to chew on in one sitting. Even so, your succinct additions should help others better appreciate that the problems we are creating will sink us sooner rather than later, so thank you. And yes, as I've said before, my one consolation is that Nature will roll back in like the tide, happily going on without us. It deeply saddens me though, that so many innocents will parish at our hand.


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## Olly Buckle (Sep 10, 2017)

LeeC said:


> It deeply saddens me though, that so many innocents will parish at our hand.



"Will"? I thought it was already a daily occurence, who supplies the aircraft and weapons then? The Russians can't  make them all, they wouldn't be as poor as they are, and we wouldn't  be as rich. I suppose that is not directly at our hand though, we only sell the stuff, you can't blame  us if others then misuse it ... can you?


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## Kevin (Sep 10, 2017)

Mmm... The 'Russians' were never big on spreading the wealth. I don't think they ever had defense contractors. We sure did, and yes, the pay was good. It certainly spread the wealth, here, until strangely enough...Reagan. The Soviets named all their stuff after designers, not companies. No Krupps over there. 
France is big in weapons sales as well.


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## LeeC (Sep 11, 2017)

Olly Buckle said:


> "Will"? I thought it was already a daily occurence, who supplies the aircraft and weapons then? The Russians can't  make them all, they wouldn't be as poor as they are, and we wouldn't  be as rich. I suppose that is not directly at our hand though, we only sell the stuff, you can't blame  us if others then misuse it ... can you?


My perspective goes beyond our stupid conflicts. Our cultural behavior is seriously threatening our grandchildren and many other life forms. We're all connected.

“_Progress is measured by the speed at which we destroy the conditions that sustain life._”  ~  George Monbiot

When you read that quote, take it a bit further in your mind. Our culture is based on progress, but infinite progress is not possible in our closed loop habitat. At what point does it all come crashing down. Only the greedy blind refuse to see, and unfortunately there's a real rat's nest of them. 

What do we look for in our leaders? Economic progress is a rallying cry. 

"_We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them_." ~ Albert Einstein

With all the cultural and religious inculcation we're formed with though, can we change a majority of thinking? I was lucky enough to be reared in a culture that by comparison was more realistic. Yes, there were conflicts between tribes, but in dealing with our life sustaining environment there was much more realistic understanding.


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## JustRob (Sep 11, 2017)

LeeC said:


> Our cultural behavior is seriously threatening our grand children and many other life forms.



A point of order there. Was that "grand children" or "grandchildren"?



> “_Progress is measured by the speed at which we destroy the conditions that sustain life._”  ~  George Monbiot



A good quotation. Many people claim progress in itself as a justification for action on the presupposition that all progress is good and accelerated progress even better.



> "_We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them_." ~ Albert Einstein



Another good quotation, consistent with my own tenet that if you can't find the solution to a problem you are looking in the wrong place or even at the wrong problem. During my working life I frequently eradicated apparently insoluble minor problems by changing the solutions to larger problems that had created them. That's the old joke about "How do I get from A to B?", to which the answer given is, "Don't start at A."


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## Olly Buckle (Sep 11, 2017)

Trees in old forest are connected by a network of fungus. It penetrates the roots of the trees and carries chemical and electrical messages between them. Young trees, not tall enough to compete for the light are fed by their parents through this network, and old, fallen trees may be kept alive by it for hundreds of years when they no longer have branches with leaves to photosynthesise food for themselves.


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## bdcharles (Sep 11, 2017)

Olly Buckle said:


> Trees in old forest are connected by a network of fungus. It penetrates the roots of the trees and carries chemical and electrical messages between them. Young trees, not tall enough to compete for the light are fed by their parents through this network, and old, fallen trees may be kept alive by it for hundreds of years when they no longer have branches with leaves to photosynthesise food for themselves.



That is the best bit of info I have received for months! A network of fungal connections. Mmm. Story idea alert: _what if people could tap into this network?

_I find the cordyceps fungus pretty freaky. It is a parasitic mind-control fungus that makes its host do more and more bizarre things in the service of the mushroom, as the fungus demands, eventually consuming its host _from the inside out_. I mean - come on! If I was an agent I would totally #MSWL all this. "Folk-Tales of the Fungus; Stories from the 'Shrooms"  And that's before we even get onto the mind-altering properties of some species. But as a writer and lowly jobbing mycophile, I'll just have to shoehorn it into a monthly comp...


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## LeeC (Sep 11, 2017)

Olly Buckle said:


> Trees in old forest are connected by a network of fungus. It penetrates the roots of the trees and carries chemical and electrical messages between them. Young trees, not tall enough to compete for the light are fed by their parents through this network, and old, fallen trees may be kept alive by it for hundreds of years when they no longer have branches with leaves to photosynthesise food for themselves.


An excellent example of the connectedness of life, but the continuum of life also necessitates decomposition to release the elements necessary for new life. Fungus plays an important role here also.

From an essay I've previously posted:
An example of this intricate dance of life is the seasonal rainforest on the west coast of Canada. Some of the pivotal niche roles are salmon returning to their spawning grounds; large predators such as Grizzly Bears feasting on the salmon; a dizzying array of scavengers, down to fly larvae, feeding on what the larger predators leave in their gluttonous haste; banana slugs decomposing and distributing the waste, and distributing fungi; flying squirrels, fond of truffles, distributing fungi; and fungi together with microorganisms finishing the decomposition to enrich the soil. This renews primary production which includes grasses and berries the Grizzly Bears feed on between salmon runs, and the cycle is completed with rain washing nutrients back out to sea where in the ocean food chain the salmon thrive and once again return to their spawning grounds. The balancing process for continuity of life here is primarily achieved with biodiversity, augmented by evolution's adaptive versatility.​
Another component of the cycle is lightening. The electricity breaks apart molecules of nitrogen contained in the air, which for the most part reconnect with oxygen creating a vital nutrient called nitrate. Nitrates are of course absorbed by plants, and when the plants are eaten the nitrates are available to other life forms like ourselves. Lightning also benefits life in starting forest and grass fires. Fire is a decomposer that unlocks nutrients needed for new life — nutrients that would otherwise be locked up for decades. 

Of course all life forms alter their habitat, and thus Nature's change agent evolution comes into play. Evolution is change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. Evolutionary processes give rise to necessary biodiversity at every level of biological organization, including the levels of species, individual organisms, and molecules. Repeated formation of new species (speciation), change within species (anagenesis), and loss of species (extinction) throughout the evolutionary history of life on Earth are demonstrated by shared sets of morphological and biochemical traits, including shared DNA sequences.

All this might explain why I say, we are seriously accelerating extinction and evolution [pedal to the metal as it were] of new life forms better adapted to the habitat destruction we've wrought. It's Nature's way of dealing with life forms that get too big for their pants. 


So you see bdcharles, fungus performs important roles in the Tree of Life. How it fits in might be illustrated by sequenced genomes. Eukaryotes are colored red, archaea green and bacteria blue. Oh, and manipulation is an aspect employed by many life forms. Look at how we are using it against our own ;-)


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## Jack of all trades (Sep 11, 2017)

Olly Buckle said:


> Trees in old forest are connected by a network of fungus. It penetrates the roots of the trees and carries chemical and electrical messages between them. Young trees, not tall enough to compete for the light are fed by their parents through this network, and old, fallen trees may be kept alive by it for hundreds of years when they no longer have branches with leaves to photosynthesise food for themselves.



Can you provide a link to the source? Thanks!


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## Olly Buckle (Sep 11, 2017)

bdcharles said:


> That is the best bit of info I have received for months! A network of fungal connections. Mmm. Story idea alert: _what if people could tap into this network?
> 
> _I find the cordyceps fungus pretty freaky. It is a parasitic mind-control fungus that makes its host do more and more bizarre things in the service of the mushroom, as the fungus demands, eventually consuming its host _from the inside out_. I mean - come on! If I was an agent I would totally #MSWL all this. "Folk-Tales of the Fungus; Stories from the 'Shrooms"  And that's before we even get onto the mind-altering properties of some species. But as a writer and lowly jobbing mycophile, I'll just have to shoehorn it into a monthly comp...



My thought was that if one made the comparison of trees as nerve cells and the fungus as the transmitter substance allowing signals to jump  the synapse perhaps a very large forest could resemble a brain and develop a conciousness. There ought to be a story in that.

Eaten from the inside? Check out ichnumen flies, they lay their eggs in caterpillars and the larva eat the caterpillar from the inside. All the non essential bits first to keep it alive and fresh as long as possible, then they pupate inside the skin.
There are some parasitic wasps that behave similarly..


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## LeeC (Sep 11, 2017)

Jack of all trades said:


> Can you provide a link to the source? Thanks!


What Olly is touching on is mycorrhiza, a basic subject of both biology and ecology with untold references. Mycorrhizal fungi form a mutualistic relationship with the roots of most plant species. In such a relationship, both the plants themselves and those parts of the roots that host the fungi, are said to be mycorrhizal. Over 90% of plant families investigated are predominantly mycorrhizal either in the sense that most of their species associate beneficially with mycorrhizae, or are absolutely dependent on mycorrhizae. 

The mycorrhizal mutualistic association provides the fungus with relatively constant and direct access to carbohydrates, such as glucose and sucrose. The carbohydrates are translocated from their source (usually leaves) to root tissue and on to the plant's fungal partners. In return, the plant gains the benefits of the mycelium's higher absorptive capacity for water and mineral nutrients, partly because of the large surface area of fungal hyphae, which are much longer and finer than plant root hairs, and partly because some such fungi can mobilize soil minerals unavailable to the plants' roots.

The mechanisms by which mycorrhizae increase absorption include some that are physical and some that are chemical. Physically, most mycorrhizal mycelia are much smaller in diameter than the smallest root or root hair, and thus can explore soil material that roots and root hairs cannot reach, and provide a larger surface area for absorption. Chemically, the cell membrane chemistry of fungi differs from that of plants. For example, they may secrete organic acid that dissolve or chelate many ions, or release them from minerals by ion exchange. Mycorrhizae are especially beneficial for the plant partner in nutrient-poor soils.

Mycorrhizal plants are often more resistant to diseases, to salt stress, to toxicity, and to the effects of drought. Mycorrhizal fungi may also produce and receive warning signals relative to harmful insects and herbivores. 

-----

And to all others, this is but one more example of how all life is connected, both at the DNA level and working together or paradoxily to create more productive ecosystems. The fact that we're destroying so much of what is beneficial and essential to our existence should bring into question our ballyhooed intelligence ;-) At a minimum it evidences diminished compassion for the quality of life our progeny will experience.


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## JustRob (Sep 12, 2017)

Jack of all trades said:


> Can you provide a link to the source? Thanks!



Yes, that concept was in the film _Avatar,_ wasn't it?

No seriously, this was found to be the case with orchids rooted on the ground, as opposed to in trees. When collectors dug them up they no longer flourished because they had been cut off from the mycorrhizae. Special soil additives containing these are available to orchid growers nowadays.


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## Olly Buckle (Sep 12, 2017)

available here;

https://www.rhs.org.uk/shop/licensed-products/for-the-garden/Licensees/plantworks


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## LeeC (Sep 12, 2017)

Olly Buckle said:


> available here;
> 
> https://www.rhs.org.uk/shop/licensed-products/for-the-garden/Licensees/plantworks



Looking through the site, I was relieved not to notice them offering mankind's artificial -cides.

Americans spend so much money and time on their lawns, you'd think we either eat or sell grass. More land in the United States is planted in turf—32 million acres—than in corn. The typical American lawn sucks up 10,000 gallons of supplemental water (non-rainwater) annually. Perhaps worse, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that about 80 million U.S. households dump nearly 90 million pounds of herbicides and pesticides on lawns in a year. In fact, lawn care is as much of a danger to our health and the environment as conventional agriculture is. There's no outside entity to blame for poisoning ourselves, our children. our neighbors, our pets, our water, and the myriad of biodiversity essential to our existence. 

In addition we Americans apply synthetic fertilizers to our lawns every time we see a little brown spot. As with conventional agriculture, the excess washes into the watershed. An example of the problems from such is a dead area in the Gulf of Mexico roughly the size of Connecticut that is choked with vast algae and phytoplankton blooms. As the algae dies and decomposes, it uses up the available oxygen, making the area uninhabitable for sea life. 


Red circles show the location and size of many dead zones. Black dots show dead zones of unknown size. The size and number of marine dead zones—areas where the deep water is so low in dissolved oxygen that sea creatures can't survive—have grown explosively in the past half-century. – NASA Earth Observatory 2008. This of course pales in relation to increasing ocean acidity I explained earlier. 

If we concentrated more on fostering natural gardens than trying to impose our skewed view of Nature, we'd have much more productive ecosystems and better quality of life, not to mention passing on a more sustainable future to our children. I find it ironic that we talk so much about caring for our children.


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## sas (Sep 12, 2017)

Amen, Lee.  That's as close as I get to anything religious. I worship the earth.


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## Olly Buckle (Sep 12, 2017)

Tar is slippery stuff, there is a bit of road near us that is brand new tarmacadam. It has a forty limit on it, but as it is a brand new dual carriageway most people seem to ignore it, they are taking a chance, not just of getting stopped for speeding. Tar really is slippery, and the road is made of small stones covered in tar, then rollered together flat. After a bit of use the tar will wear off the top layer, exposing the stone which gives an excellent grip, until then the road is slippery!

The other places to look out for slippery tar are overbanding, where tar is poured over the joints between sections of road, and road markings, which are done in white tar. Centre markings and the stripes on zebra crossings are big enough to start a really good (or bad) skid in the right (or wrong) circumstances.


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## Thaumiel (Sep 12, 2017)

Olly Buckle said:


> Tar is slippery stuff, there is a bit of road near us that is brand new tarmacadam. It has a forty limit on it, but as it is a brand new dual carriageway most people seem to ignore it, they are taking a chance, not just of getting stopped for speeding. Tar really is slippery, and the road is made of small stones covered in tar, then rollered together flat. After a bit of use the tar will wear off the top layer, exposing the stone which gives an excellent grip, until then the road is slippery!
> 
> The other places to look out for slippery tar are overbanding, where tar is poured over the joints between sections of road, and road markings, which are done in white tar. Centre markings and the stripes on zebra crossings are big enough to start a really good (or bad) skid in the right (or wrong) circumstances.



I drove down to Glastonbury for my first long distance trip recently. Got to drive on some fun (see winding, surrounded by potential rockslides) roads going to Cheddar and other nearby places. One big thing was long, single file country roads that are technically national speed limit, however, recently resurfaced with loose stone and temporary signs for 20mph max speed limit. 

Pulled over in passing places a few times to let cars overtake me. I don't whether it was that they had complete confidence in their driving, the signs weren't in use anymore or just that they were ignoring it, but if someone puts up _that__ many_ signs along a road and leaves them there, there must be a reason. Is it really worth being a few minutes early somewhere if the risk is skidding your car into a ditch?


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## Olly Buckle (Sep 13, 2017)

James 剣 斧 血 said:


> I drove down to Glastonbury for my first long distance trip recently. Got to drive on some fun (see winding, surrounded by potential rockslides) roads going to Cheddar and other nearby places. One big thing was long, single file country roads that are technically national speed limit, however, recently resurfaced with loose stone and temporary signs for 20mph max speed limit.
> 
> Pulled over in passing places a few times to let cars overtake me. I don't whether it was that they had complete confidence in their driving, the signs weren't in use anymore or just that they were ignoring it, but if someone puts up _that__ many_ signs along a road and leaves them there, there must be a reason. Is it really worth being a few minutes early somewhere if the risk is skidding your car into a ditch?



When there is loose stone the surface stone is not usually tarred, but rollered down hard onto the tar underneath. Some will come loose though, which means some risk of skidding, and an even greater risk of stone being thrown up and chipping windscreens and paintwork, but you are so right about 'what is the point'. Even a minor accident will take up time what with swapping numbers and informing insurers etc. and policemen always make the point of being slow and deliberate with people they stop for speeding, even if they don't charge them they are going to make them late  It is well over twentyfive years since I was last stopped for having a headlight out that I hadn't known about, most of my friends have been stopped at least half a dozen times in that period, they tell me I am lucky, I don't think so.

Well done, stick to the rules, it will pay you back handsomly in the long run, and re-read your highway code once every five years or so, you don't just forget things, they change them too from time to time, but the majority of drivers pass their test and never look again


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## JustRob (Sep 13, 2017)

Well done Olly. I think you may have earned a mention in my Idiotic Idioms thread. You did just advise sticking to the rules when driving on newly tarred surfaces, didn't you? What we stick to can be very much on our minds in such circumstances, I would think. 

Perhaps I should have made the title of that thread "Unfortunate Usage" instead to avoid any personal implications though. You don't live that far away from me after all.


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## LeeC (Sep 14, 2017)

In my previous post on increasing ocean acidity, I mainly concentrated on all the carbon we are releasing into the atmosphere. That’s only part of the problem though, as the global warming we’re accelerating will cause the release of even more. An example follows. Nobody wants to hear it, but this is a runaway train, while we sit on hands in our comfortable kitchens and allow incompetent, avaricious leaders to seal our children’s doom. Boy are they gonna love us ;-)


New study results in the scientific journal Nature. 

Methane won’t be the only problem as Arctic permafrost thaws in the coming decades. A new study shows that, as frozen permafrost areas warm and dry out, they will also release more CO2. The study was led by Northern Arizona University assistant research professor Christina Schädel and published in the journal Nature Climate Change.

The findings show that a 10 degree Celsius increase in soil temperature released twice as much carbon into the atmosphere, and drier, aerobic soil conditions released more than three times more carbon than wetter, anaerobic soil conditions.

The study was part of an ongoing effort to quantify greenhouse gas releases from thawing permafrost, a critical part of the global warming equation because so much carbon is currently locked up in frozen organic soils in the Arctic. 

Scientists want to understand the ratio of carbon dioxide to methane gas released by this process because it affects the strength of the permafrost carbon feedback loop: greenhouse gases released due to thawing permafrost cause temperatures to rise, leading to even more thawing and carbon release. Furthermore, the Arctic permafrost is like a vast underground storage tank of carbon, holding almost twice as much as the atmosphere. At that scale, small changes in how the carbon is released will have big effects.


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## Firemajic (Sep 14, 2017)

I was watching a NatGeo documentary about how animals adapt to their environment . Well, there is this tiny island that broke off a big island, and some wild boars were stranded there, [ this island is uninhabited ] and there is not much for them to eat, so over time these wild boars diminished in size, so they would  need less food to survive... cool huh? well, hang on because this get way cooler...   while watching these wild pigs, I noticed these huge black ravens, well THEY rode around on the PIGS BACK!! seriously! They knew that the pigs could dig up the ground and expose food that they could not get on their own, plus, they had a free piggy back ride all around the island... what I found strange is that the ravens were not mentioned in the documentary....


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## LeeC (Sep 14, 2017)

Firemajic said:


> I was watching a NatGeo documentary about how animals adapt to their environment . Well, there is this tiny island that broke off a big island, and some wild boars were stranded there, [ this island is uninhabited ] and there is not much for them to eat, so over time these wild boars diminished in size, so they would  need less food to survive... cool huh? well, hang on because this get way cooler...   while watching these wild pigs, I noticed these huge black ravens, well THEY rode around on the PIGS BACK!! seriously! They knew that the pigs could dig up the ground and expose food that they could not get on their own, plus, they had a free piggy back ride all around the island... what I found strange is that the ravens were not mentioned in the documentary....


Another good subject in understanding how the natural world really works. A couple books on such I remember are "Island Ecology" by Gorman and Martyn, and the more recent "Island Biogeography: Ecology, Evolution, and Conservation 2nd Edition" by Whittaker and Fernández-Palacios.


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## sas (Sep 14, 2017)

It seems that people have become the only "unnatural" inhabitants of our planet.  Hmmm.


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## Firemajic (Sep 14, 2017)

:love_heart: Thank you, Lee... I will try to check them out... I was enthralled by those Ravens... incredibly smart... I have the huge crows at my house and they nest on my property, every morning, they harass the red tail hawks... EVERY morning... what a ruckus ....


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## Firemajic (Sep 14, 2017)

sas said:


> It seems that people have become the only "unnatural" inhabitants of our planet.  Hmmm.



:disturbed: yeah... One amazon rain forest has been destroyed down to 7%....


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## LeeC (Sep 14, 2017)

sas said:


> It seems that people have become the only "unnatural" inhabitants of our planet.  Hmmm.


Actually, all life forms are "programed" (i.e. inherent) with the same basic behavioral proclivities. We are a lot more natural than we want to understand in our comfortable little human bubbles defying Nature. The problem is in being so weedy, and not employing our potential reasoning facilities, we've grown too big for our pants. We've forsaken much of the knowledge our ancestors learned. My foster family's ancestors lived in the northern Rockies for at least ten thousand years without upsetting the habitat and ecology. Then the covetous culture arrived on the scene, and look what we've decimated in only a few hundred years. 

So, more accurately I'd say, by and large we're no where near as intelligent as we believe 

What deeply saddens and angers me is how our culture is selling our children's future for a dime on the dollar. If their widespread belief in a heaven is true, boy are they gonna be surprised looking at it from below. :highly_amused:


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## Olly Buckle (Sep 14, 2017)

Firemajic said:


> :disturbed: yeah... One amazon rain forest has been destroyed down to 7%....



Did you see my post about how tree canopies put water back in the air, and without them rain would not penetrate more than 150miles into the continents? Well when people arrived on the coast and saw the Amazon forest, guess which was the first 150 miles of them they cut down. That's right, the rest of it is starting to die from drought.


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## Firemajic (Sep 14, 2017)

No, I guess I missed that one, Olly....


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## Olly Buckle (Sep 14, 2017)

Post 15  https://www.writingforums.com/threa...-stuff/page2?p=2105868&viewfull=1#post2105868


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## LeeC (Sep 26, 2017)

When it rains it pours. You'd think that plants would thrive in the increasing CO2 we're putting in the atmosphere, but there's nothing linear about Nature. A newly released study by Harvard et al found that nutrients decrease in staple crops like grains and legumes as CO2 concentrations increase. 

A real garbage dump we're leaving our grandchildren. Is it only humans that believe they can get out of hole by digging deeper?


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## Olly Buckle (Oct 2, 2017)

LeeC said:


> When it rains it pours. You'd think that plants would thrive in the increasing CO2 we're putting in the atmosphere, but there's nothing linear about Nature. A newly released study by Harvard et al found that nutrients decrease in staple crops like grains and legumes as CO2 concentrations increase.



That may not mean the plants are not thriving, only that they are not doing it in the way we might wish, after all, left to themselves to evolve naturally they would 'only' produce tiny seeds, hardly useful for anything but reproduction.


Where words come from is interesting sometimes, in a medieval manor a person would be in charge of a certain area. Each year he would come and tell someone who listened to him what had been going down, all spoken, very few literate people about, the one who gave the account was the accountant, the one who listened was the auditor.


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## LeeC (Oct 2, 2017)

Olly Buckle said:


> That may not mean the plants are not thriving, only that they are not doing it in the way we might wish, ...


Good point Olly. Thank you. I didn't intend to note that plant life overall is diminishing, but rather evolving in a manner that is increasingly less useful to us.
The phrase "out with the old and in with the new" is applicable here, in life forms evolving to meet changing conditions. The sad aspect is that we're not allowing our species to even reach maturity, let alone get to the point of being considered old ;-)


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## Olly Buckle (Oct 2, 2017)

I doubt they have evolved that way, Lee. Evolution takes a heck of a long time, more likely that we have selected for pre-existing genes that were either rare or recessive. 

Rabbits are a good example. Mediteranean animals unused to the cold they had to be kept in warrens to manage overwintering, but some carry a recessive that gets them through the cold, eventually a couple of the recessives escaped, mated, and lo, bloody rabbits everywhere


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## Olly Buckle (Oct 4, 2017)

I used to keep bees before varroa came along and madeit not worth it, it is a mite that infests the bee's breathing tubes that was introduced when someone tried to cross apis dorsarta, an Asian bee, with European bumble bees, but there is some fascinating stuff about bees.

Think you can tell someone where something is? 
Someone did an experiment where they set up a feeding station next to a beehive and a large building. Then they moved the feeding station, a saucer of sugar solution, a little further from the beehive each day, around the corner, and eventually to the other side of the building.

Now bees when they hatch out as adults spend a couple of weeks working in the hive before they go out foraging, and as I expect you know they dance on the face of the comb to direct other bees to a good food source. With the feeding station on the far side of the building the bees that had followed it there flew to it regularly, following the same route around the building, however the newly hatched bees that they danced for, making their first trip outside the hive, didn't bother going round, they flew straight over the top of the building.

Think about it, they didn't tell the other bees how to get there, which is how we say where something is, they actually told them where it was, like giving a global positioning reference. That wow-w-wed me totally.


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## LeeC (Oct 4, 2017)

Guns are good for the economy ;-)

According to a Washington Post article by Christopher Ingraham, and the studies referenced, the U.S. spends 2.8 billion dollars a year (on average over the last eight years) on gunshot wounds. This not only keeps money flowing, but keeps it flowing upwards which makes big money happy. The victims are overwhelmingly male (89%), young (61% under30), and poor (more than half are from the lowest income quartile). 49.5% of gunshot injuries are the result of an assault by another individual. These statistics don't include individuals found dead, which are not typically taken to the hospital, nor those that die before reaching the hospital. Oh, and fewer than 7% had diagnosed mental health disorders.

Economically it's relevant that more than 40% of the victims lack insurance or other means to pay for their care. But one of the reasons why the rest of us are charged over $70 dollars for a box of Kleenex in the hospital, and our medical insurance premiums are so high. 

Why do I say this keeps big money happy? One need only look at the actions (or lack thereof) of their lackey policymakers in severely restricting gun research, and failing to implement proven violence-reduction policies such as universal background checks. 

This is also an aspect of the controversy over single payer medical insurance. Big money wants their gains from for-profit insurers and medical providers, and doesn't want any "commies" messing with such. I guess countries like Portugal, Spain, Germany, Iceland, Italy, Norway, Sweden, and many others are "commie" countries. Yes, we Americans are being led by the nose as usual. One example is, if you look at the facts behind large for-profit insurance companies like Anthem supporting repeal of Obamacare, you'd find that the repeal bill included significant tax breaks for their top executives. Seems appropriate given the increased profits they'd enjoy. 


"Just the facts ma'am" [actually not said in Dragnet, but rather in Stan Freberg's parody of Dragnet]


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## Plasticweld (Oct 4, 2017)

If the pen is mightier than the sword how come so many idiots have key boards?   There aught be a law!


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## LeeC (Oct 4, 2017)

♫Mama told me there'd be people like you♪


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## JustRob (Oct 5, 2017)

LeeC said:


> �� Mama told me there'd be people like you �� **
> 
> 
> ** musical note emojis don't print here



♪ ♫ There are characters in the standard character set for these though ♫ ♪ 
 The simplest thing is to copy and paste them when you need them.


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## LeeC (Oct 8, 2017)

​Over the years, I’ve wondered why the self-serving notions of all life forms are so prevalent in the natural world — that is in excess of the paradoxical interactions necessary to maintain balance in insuring the perpetuation of physical life. One evidenced aspect is that such also serves to diminish any species whose excesses threaten the perpetuation of physical life overall. Nature's delicate balancing act is like a scimitar pendulum swinging both ways. 

There’s also hopeful evidence that humankind has the reasoning potential to overcome the shackles of excessive covetousness and base animal reactions that ensue. This evidence in writings by many, varying in insightfulness. One whose writings I’ve found particularly insightful, when pursued in depth, is Thoreau. 


That’s Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), the American philosopher, poet, and environmental scientist. Not a horse-blinkered reactionist, he was well versed in classical Greek and Roman philosophy, ranging from pre-Socratics through Hellenistic schools, was an avid student of ancient scriptures and wisdom literature of various Asian traditions, studied Native American religion and culture, and was familiar with modern philosophy ranging from Descartes, Locke and the Cambridge Platonists through Emerson, Coleridge, and the German Idealists. All this had an influence on his book “Walden,” but to better understand what he was trying to convey, one should also read his works on natural science that weren’t even published until the late twentieth century. 


He viewed the universe as an organic whole in which mind and matter are inseparable. Focusing in on our world, he viewed it as rich with value that is not of our making, and “whatever we have perceived to be in the slightest degree beautiful is of infinitely more value to us than what we have only as yet discovered to be useful and to serve our purpose” (Faith in a Seed, 144). That is, when we are not guilty of imposing our own purposes onto the world, we are able to view it on its own terms. One of the things he believed we would discover is that we are involved in a pluralistic universe, containing many different points of view other than our own. And when we begin to realize “the infinite extent of our relations” (Walden, VIII), we can see that even what does not at first seem to be good for us may have some positive value when considered from a broader perspective. Rather than dismissing squirrels as rodents, for instance, we should see them as ‘planters of forests,’ and be grateful for the role they play in the distribution of seeds (Journal, 10/22/60). Another example is “gentle rain which waters my beans and keeps me in the house today is not drear and melancholy, but good for me too. Though it prevents my hoeing them, it is of far more worth than my hoeing. If it should continue so long as to cause the seeds to rot in the ground and destroy the potatoes in the low lands, it would still be good for the grass on the uplands, and, being good for the grass, it would be good for me” (Walden, V).


An underlying assertion here is that in nature we have access to real value, which can be used as a standard against which to measure our conventional evaluations. An example being “the value that is ‘arbitrarily attached’ to gold, which has nothing to do with its ‘intrinsic beauty or value’” (Journal, 10/13/60). He further asserts in clarification that “In the economy of nature, a seed is more precious than a diamond, for it contains ‘the principle of growth, or life,’ and has the ability to become a specific plant or tree (Journal, 3/22/61). The seed not only provides evidence that nature is filled with ‘creative genius’ (Journal, 1/5/56), but it also reminds us that a spark of divinity is present in each human being as well.” One of Thoreau’s favorite analogies is that between the ripening of a seed and the development of human potential. “The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling” (Walden, I).


He had nothing but scorn for “the sort of materialism that fails to penetrate the inner mystery of things, discovering ‘nothing but surface’ in its mechanistic observations” (Journal, 3/7/59). Instead, he argues that “we must approach the world as ‘nature looking into nature,’ aware of the relation between the form of our own perception and what we are able to perceive” (Correspondence, 7/21/41). 


His works being classics in finding new meaning with each rereading, I could go on and on, but I fear I’ve already tried too many.






[Beyond Thoreau’s works, credits for interpretation, and helping me find remembered passages in Thoreau’s works, are also due The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.]


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## Olly Buckle (Oct 10, 2017)

Before I worked for a builder brickwork was simply brickwork, though some looked better than others for reasons I hadn't really thought about.

If you are building an old fashioned brick wall, two bricks thick, it is necessary to bond the two layers together. This is done by laying some bricks the other way round so the length of the bricks go across the wall, brickies call them 'headers' and those laid so the long side shows 'stretchers'. Start looking at walls and you will see they are laid in different patterns, with every third brick a header they are known as 'Flemish bonding' with every other brick as 'English bonding' and you will start noticing other things. Some brickies are better than others than fitting everything so it matches, leaving no half bricks or places with four or five stretchers to make it fit, that is often why some brickwork looks more attractive. Different bondings are used in different places, English bonding gives strength, you will see it used on things like railway embankments where it is holding back a mass of earth, and there are various Garden bondings that put designs into garden walls, often, but not always, picked out by using different coloured bricks. There is even one sort of bonding that Victorian apprentices were expected to learn that is named after a place in Afghanistan, it is very strong and incorporates voids to absorb explosive impacts and is used in things like pillboxes, we have been fighting that war a long time. A lot of modern buildings have an inner wall of blockwork, a different size from the bricks that face it, and the two are joined by wire 'brick ties' embedded in the mortar, that leads to a wall outside that is all stretchers, which some think unattractive, so sometimes they incorporate specially made half bricks to imitate bonding. There are also many different bricks, stocks, flettons, devons, etc. 
Brick walls definitely bear looking at.


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## JustRob (Oct 10, 2017)

Olly Buckle said:


> Before I worked for a builder brickwork was simply brickwork, though some looked better than others for reasons I hadn't really thought about.
> ...
> Brick walls definitely bear looking at.



The extension that we had built onto our house has five sides with 45 degree turns at the corners instead of 90 degrees. This involved using specially shaped "squint bricks" at the corners. The building work was delayed because these bricks were not available from the supplier even though their computer claimed that they were in stock. Building materials do tend to wander out of stock yards on their own apparently. During each firing of a particular brand of brick a proportionate number of squint bricks are included in the batch to meet probable needs, so we had to wait for the manufacturers to fire another batch before building work on our extension could begin. Bricklayers tend to work inwards from corners, so not having the corner bricks made it impossible to do anything. Sometimes 45 degree corners are made with plain rectangular bricks to produce a toothed appearance, but we wanted smooth walls, so had to wait for the right bricks. As you say, we don't think about such details until they directly affect us.

SQUINT BRICKS​ 
​ The relationship between bricklayers and architects is important. Our brickie was a very experienced worker and he would complain that a badly thought out design wouldn't "go bricks" as he put it, making it necessary to cut odd sizes. He also had the problem that he had to match courses of modern metric bricks to our existing courses of imperial ones, which are slightly higher. When brickies get this problem they can change the number of courses on either side of an opening such as a doorway to go from using thicker mortar to match the height of the imperial bricks back to standard metric mortar thickness. Again it is something to look out for on houses that have been extended during the 20th century. We just assume that the number of courses on each side of an opening is the same as the difference is difficult to spot without counting them.

I suppose the whole art of bricklaying isn't so evident in regions where clay isn't so common, like wide regions of the USA. In much of southern England we just take this building material for granted. In the north stone is the more traditional material. When we went on holiday in Iceland the connection between available materials and architecture became particularly obvious to us. As Iceland is entirely volcanic it has no clay and bricks are bulky to import. Cement is a more practical bulk material to import but another more compact building material is corrugated iron, so the Icelanders have developed skills in working that, producing what are to us remarkable designs that we wouldn't think of creating using it. Also because it needs to be painted their towns tend to be more colourful than our predominant earth colours. When we walked out of the airport at the beginning of our holiday there many decades ago we saw a sight that summed up Iceland in many ways, a man painting the roof of his house at midnight, it always being light at that time of year and latitude. That said, we do have near us here in Kent a small church faced with corrugated iron, known locally as "The Tin Chapel", but it is very basic with none of the artistic flourishes that the Icelanders would have given it. When it comes to brickwork the English are definitely in their element though. 

Looking at a geological map of our locality there are many layers of different types of clay, some several hundred feet thick and some well over a thousand. It's no surprise that fired earth has been a common construction material throughout our history. In contrast much of the timber went to build ships of course. It was the obvious strategy for people living on a big muddy island. The Vikings who populated Iceland soon cut down the very slow growing trees there though, so now they have no local timber left.


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## LeeC (Oct 10, 2017)

Nice to see others awareness of what all goes into masonry. Some years back I built a two flue chimney, cinder block with tile lining and brick facing. My father-in-law came up to help as a tender, but left after a week saying the work was too hard 

It extends from bed rock in the dugout basement below, up through the kitchen, and outside to above the second story portion of the old farm house so I wouldn't create a backdraft. 

In the kitchen it looks like this:



and outside it looks like this:


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## LeeC (Oct 10, 2017)

Also liked your thoughts about bees Olly, as the more than 30,000 bee species around the world are the most important group of pollinators for farming and wild plants. What it’s missing though, is the major reasons for their die off, beyond our hybridizing tinkering. Several possible causes have been examined, beyond the distractions spun, but there is considerable agreement that our use of neonicotinoid pesticides is the predominate link in declining bee populations. As history repeats itself because we can’t seem to learn from such, this reminds me of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. 

In the six years leading up to 2013, more than ten million beehives were lost, most often linked to pesticides, which is roughly twice the normal rate of loss. In a bad year, a bee colony might lose 15-20 percent of its bees. In the U.S., winter losses have commonly reached 30-50 percent, in some cases more. In 2006, David Hackenberg — a bee keeper for 42 years — reported a 90 percent die-off among his 3,000 hives.

On May 9, 2014, the Harvard School of Public Health released a chilling new study suggesting that even small amounts of neonics can significantly harm honeybee colonies and cause mass wintertime die offs. In the study, the Harvard scientists found that hives of bees exposed to two forms of neonics were much more vulnerable to Colony Collapse Disorder than unexposed hives. “We demonstrated again in this study that neonicotinoids are highly likely to be responsible for triggering CCD in honey bee hives that were healthy prior to the arrival of winter,” said lead study author Chensheng (Alex) Lu of Harvard in a statement.

“In the last four years, the chemical industry has spent $11.2 million on a PR initiative to say it’s not their fault, so we know whose fault it is.” ~ Jon Cooksey, writer, director, How to Boil a Frog.

The prohibition on use of neonics in the EU is a manifestation of what’s known as the Precautionary Principle, a fancy way of saying “Look before you leap.” In the United States we do it backwards: Chemicals are deemed innocent until proven guilty, sometimes with disastrous results.

Pesticides, of course, aren’t the only cause as a Smithsonian article points out. Other reasons include human development, and global warming which we’re accelerating. 

Perhaps you’ve heard some of this related to other problems we face. No wonder as each effect has broader implications.  Why do we persist in defiling (at best) the very world that sustains us? Perhaps the answers have already been examined, and we either aren’t widely read enough, or refuse to face inconvenient truths? Some good sources to learn more are:

“Capital in the Twenty-First Century” by Thomas Piketty. An economics book that explains how the US is becoming an oligarchy - the very system our founders revolted against. Gives a whole new meaning to make America great again. 

“The Sixth Extinction, an Unnatural History” by Elizabeth Kolbert. Our grandchildren are really going to love us for not taking this book seriously, and trying to stem the tide ;-) Dismantling the EPA and our allowing it is going to seriously impact their quality of life.

“Democracy In Chains” by Nancy MacLean. The deep history of the radical right’s stealth plan for America

“Heart Of A Lion, A Lone Cat’s Walk Across America” by William Stolzenburg. Insights into our thinking re wild predators. 

“Animal Farm” by George Orwell. As insightful today as it was sixty years ago.


~~~~~~~~~


“Don't be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value.” ~ Arthur Miller

Or for the Christian folks, “For what shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his soul?” ~ Jesus Christ

Or from a naturalist perspective, “Man is the most insane species. He worships an invisible God and destroys a visible Nature, unaware that this Nature he’s destroying is this God he’s worshipping.” ~ Hubert Reeves


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## SueC (Oct 10, 2017)

There are more pigs in the state of Iowa than people in the state of Iowa.


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## Olly Buckle (Oct 10, 2017)

> the more than 30,000 bee species around the world are the most important group of pollinators for farming and wild plants.



Apis melifera, the honey bee is only one of those, a lot of them are solitary bees and bumble bees. bumble bees are especially important because they will work over a bigger range of  temperatures and have a long reach for deeper flowers  on the whole. Unfortunately there are 'factories' in Belgium that are producing and exporting colonies of European bumble bees for tomatoe pollination who are exporting bumble bee diseases with them that are wiping out the localbumble  bee populations,  much as bubonic plague destroyed the population of Europe when it was introduced from Asia, and yellow fever in South America from Africa. The hope is that a small core of  resistant bees will emerge, but things don't look good. One of the species under threat is the Chilean great yellow, the world's largest bumble bee. A queen is apparently the size of a large mouse, hairy and yellow striped, imagine  that flying past!

There are someof the solitary bees that are especially useful  for pollination, some flowers have developed a trick of snapping  shut on a visiting bee, it has to fight to free itself, and gets covered in pollen in the process. The trouble  is most bees learn about this very quickly, and after the second or third entrapment start looking for other, easier, flowers. The solitary bees are thick though, they fall for the same trick time after time.

People get a bit over dramatic about what will happen without bees sometimes, an awfullot of pollination is done by flies and other insects, farmers pay good money to have bee hives put in apple orchards, but bees are not the main pollinators  of open flowers like that with dilute nectar, you will quite often see themonly on the south side of the tree where the nectar is more concentrated.


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## LeeC (Oct 10, 2017)

Thank you for the additional info Olly, and I appreciate that bees are a rallying symbol. The real point beyond all the hype about bees is that we're decimating all pollinators, all insects in fact. People don't care much about pollinators like flies, ants, beetles and such (nor apparently for the birds, bats, and other creatures that eat them) , but at our present rate of shortsighted profit-mongering we're chopping off whole branches of evolution. It's "Silent Spring" all over again in spades, because we didn't fully understand the first time around.  

The whole thing is another (ecologically expanded) version of the song, "Where have all the flowers gone," and the refrain therein, "When will they ever learn," is haunting the well-being of our children's lives. Just listening to much of what occupies our concerns, counters the perception that we're an intelligent species. 

"_If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos._"  ~  E. O. Wilson


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## sas (Oct 11, 2017)

I just want to thank those here who contribute so much to fill my vast void of knowledge. You are truly a remarkable group. Best. Sas


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## Kevin (Oct 11, 2017)

Maybe it's because I live at the edge of where there's no development, but I'm seeing a lot of bugs. There's two beehives along the trail I take that have been there for years. Butterflies are everywhere. Tarantula wasps were plentiful(come out every season-once a year). I have no data to back up anything and it could just be a localized thing. The frog that came to live in one of my pots from last years ( crop, bloom, breeding?) is still there, not a peep until next year's breeding season ( I'm guessing). It is very dry out there ( as per 4/5's of the year, here). The last of the rains were in March ( though we did get one day of summer monsoon in July, I think). If I had to call it a year-of, I'm not sure what- not the squirrels, as that was last year; not the frogs, or toads, as that has been over 15. Maybe the Dove, because we have more morning doves out there than I can ever remember. They're everywhere, not as thick as pigeons in the city (but then these are wild and you never see pigeons in the wild, here). And it's the first time I've ever noticed them actually sheltering under the dove-weed, which along with the tumbleweed, is doing very well right now (at the edge of the wild and 'mixed-in' out there- the tumbleweed is nonnative)


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## Kevin (Oct 11, 2017)

Vast void of knowledge-- sounds like a band.  Or a news outlet. Lol. Thank you for that...


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## LeeC (Oct 11, 2017)

Kevin said:


> Maybe it's because I live at the edge of where there's no development, but I'm seeing a lot of bugs. There's two beehives along the trail I take that have been there for years. Butterflies are everywhere. Tarantula wasps were plentiful(come out every season-once a year). I have no data to back up anything and it could just be a localized thing. The frog that came to live in one of my pots from last years ( crop, bloom, breeding?) is still there, not a peep until next year's breeding season ( I'm guessing). It is very dry out there ( as per 4/5's of the year, here). The last of the rains were in March ( though we did get one day of summer monsoon in July, I think). If I had to call it a year-of, I'm not sure what- not the squirrels, as that was last year; not the frogs, or toads, as that has been over 15. Maybe the Dove, because we have more morning doves out there than I can ever remember. They're everywhere, not as thick as pigeons in the city (but then these are wild and you never see pigeons in the wild, here). And it's the first time I've ever noticed them actually sheltering under the dove-weed, which along with the tumbleweed, is doing very well right now (at the edge of the wild and 'mixed-in' out there- the tumbleweed is nonnative)


I hope that our grandchildren can appreciate what you are, and have the quality of life that goes with respected biodiversity and habitat. You having read The Sixth Extinction, no doubt you understand you're seeing a fleeting version of life. 80.7% of the 320 some million Americans now live in urban areas, and I doubt anywhere near a majority have truly experienced real wilderness, much less appreciate it as sustaining our being. We have such short lives in relation to the evolutionary cycles of the natural world, we look around and see nothing much changed from day to day. Look a bit farther afield though, and you see how our profit-grubbing behavior is altering the environment and biodiversity that sustains our species. It's not what one person does, but what's repeated millions of times over that becomes cultural inculcation. We're pedal to the medal, accelerating down hill to the brick wall. Only a shift in our thinking overall will cause us to reach for the hand break. Sadly at present there's an aspect of human nature that's rearing its ugly head again, distracting and dividing the masses, so their cupidity can advance unabated. I say "at present" because such has occurred over and over throughout our history. As I noted earlier, the song refrain "When will we ever learn" is haunting our grandchildren's well-being. 

"A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and ...to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty." - Albert Einstein


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## Kevin (Oct 12, 2017)

Lee... The hidden destruction is a constant. Current distractions aside, profit goes on unabated during all administrations, every single piece of land is contemplated, measured and calculated with a business eye, even by satellite.  Someone is looking at it trying to come up with how to extract value. Out of sight, out of mind is such a truth and We may not see,  but believe me, someone does, and they are a constant. We don't see, can't see it all, as it happens, and we can't see it over time to imagine how it( our 'wild') was before to compare it to now and how degraded it has become. What we do see ( or could if we bother) is the second or third growth, the stunted descendants growing in whatever condition/depleted soil is left. 

I recently was at Lake Tahoe/Truckee area. Between 1854 and 1898 every single piece of usable, salable lumber in every cove or canyon, right up to the tree line of the Sierras was cut and removed before the land was then sold, and the Carson and Tahoe Lumber and Fluming Co. was folded. Sometimes they would sell the land first, before removing the lumber, but retain the lumber rights, and then continue their efforts while the 'new' owners ran cattle on other parts of the property (they were interested in the natural meadows).

So virtually every tree was cut and hauled except the ones not considered worth it, which were those at the edge; the ones that were too small and the majority of those were chopped because they were in the pathway of removing the rest; clear cutting. The new owners grazed cattle until the meadows gave out. And then they sold and moved on. 

And where did all that lumber go? Most of it went underground, as supports to hold up ceilings in the mines; and the rest went to make the railroad to haul away whatever came out of those. That was 120 years ago. The mines are closed, the railroads rebuilt ( or abandoned). All that lumber is gone, rotted... 

The area is only beautiful now because it was quickly abandoned (after stripping)by lumber interests who then sold to other, different ( usually smaller) business interests ( ranchers) who eventually sold it to real estate interests and developers who sold to private individuals that 'like how it looks'.


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## LeeC (Oct 12, 2017)

Thank you Kevin, a good example of our profit-grubbing and how nature rolled back in like the tide. A similar thing occurred in the White Mountains here in New Hampshire. The only old growth left being in inaccessible areas — they didn't have the equipment in the 1880s they have today. I don't know how differently this played out in the Tahoe area, but here some of the land became National and State parks, and National Forests where the logging is controlled. 

What I'm getting at is that our overall rate of decimating natural areas (that in essence sustain us) is surpassing that of Nature rolling back in. Also, in the process the ecology is being altered and the biodiversity is being diminished. These are aspects of our behavior that too many put out of mind in our profit-grubbing. Look at the push today to shift Federally protected wilderness areas to state, then private, control. Or, at least to have Federal controls lessened to allow more profit-grubbing activity like extraction of fossil fuels (including fracking), mining, ranching, and what-have-you. All activities, like your example, that play out, and are abandoned leaving denuded land. As I've said elsewhere, we have a garbage dump mentality. The fossil fuels extraction as an example is a fools game, given that renewable energy could replace fossil fuels if it weren't for profit-grubbing. All one need do is look at Europe's progress with renewable energy to see the validity of the point. 

I also agree with you that profit-grubbing to varying degrees goes on regardless of the political party in power. The excesses are overly evident and unapologetic in the current administration, but look more carefully at the previous administration. While the last administration did much to protect the environment, they also put into effect the Monsanto Protection Act. It defies reason how we could protect some of the worst defilers by exempting them from legitimate legal challenges. So regardless of the political party, it's obvious that we're fast becoming an oligarchy - the very system our founders revolted against. [More proof of that can be seen in the book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” by Thomas Piketty.]

Of course Nature will win out in the end, though much changed from what it is now, and likely the environment won't be suitable for our existence. That's what saddens me deeply, relative to our progeny's well being, and our refusal to acknowledge our responsibility to future generations. Having read the book, you'll recognize the following:

Paraphrased from “The Sixth Extinction An Unnatural History” by Elizabeth Kolbert.

The ongoing Sixth Extinction will continue to determine the course of life long after everything our weedy species have written and painted and built has been ground into dust and giant rats — or whatever— have inherited the earth.


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## sas (Oct 12, 2017)

I am not the brightest bulb, in this interesting discussion, but would it be fair to say The States are an oligarchy, not because the elite few grabbed power, but because the many let them; know it; and, don't care. Is this different, historically speaking, than other oligarchs? I really am ignorant, on this.


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## Olly Buckle (Oct 12, 2017)

sas said:


> I am not the brightest bulb, in this interesting discussion, but would it be fair to say The States are an oligarchy, not because the elite few grabbed power, but because the many let them; know it; and, don't care. Is this different, historically speaking, than other oligarchs? I really am ignorant, on this.


Ever read 'The ragged trousered philanthropists'? The many let them, again and again.


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## LeeC (Oct 12, 2017)

sas said:


> I am not the brightest bulb, in this interesting discussion, but would it be fair to say The States are an oligarchy, not because the elite few grabbed power, but because the many let them; know it; and, don't care. Is this different, historically speaking, than other oligarchs? I really am ignorant, on this.



Actually sas, oligarchies come in many forms, wherein a ruling power structure rests in the hands of a small number of people. These people might be distinguished by nobility, wealth, family ties, education or corporate leadership, religious or military control. Throughout history, oligarchies have often been tyrannical, relying on public obedience or oppression to exist. Aristotle pioneered the use of the term as a synonym for rule by the rich, for which another term commonly used today is plutocracy.

Our founders rebelled against the English oligarchy at the time, and tried to establish a democracy where all the citizens were on an equal footing. The two dominate factors behind the emergence of an oligarchy in America are the capitol consolidation (the top 400 wealthiest Americans have more wealth than half of all Americans combined), and a radical right that wants to fundamentally alter the rules of democratic governance. 

How these two camps came together is best explained in the description of the nonfiction book “Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America” by Nancy MacLean:
Behind today’s headlines of billionaires taking over our government is a secretive political establishment with long, deep, and troubling roots. The capitalist radical right has been working not simply to change who rules, but to fundamentally alter the rules of democratic governance. But billionaires did not launch this movement; a white intellectual in the embattled Jim Crow South did. Democracy in Chains names its true architect—the Nobel Prize-winning political economist James McGill Buchanan—and dissects the operation he and his colleagues designed over six decades to alter every branch of government to disempower the majority.​​
In a brilliant and engrossing narrative, Nancy MacLean shows how Buchanan forged his ideas about government in a last gasp attempt to preserve the white elite’s power in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. In response to the widening of American democracy, he developed a brilliant, if diabolical, plan to undermine the ability of the majority to use its numbers to level the playing field between the rich and powerful and the rest of us.​​
Corporate donors and their right-wing foundations were only too eager to support Buchanan’s work in teaching others how to divide America into “makers” and “takers.” And when a multibillionaire on a messianic mission to rewrite the social contract of the modern world, Charles Koch, discovered Buchanan, he created a vast, relentless, and multi-armed machine to carry out Buchanan’s strategy.​​
Without Buchanan's ideas and Koch's money, the libertarian right would not have succeeded in its stealth takeover of the Republican Party as a delivery mechanism. Now, with Mike Pence as Vice President, the cause has a longtime loyalist in the White House, not to mention a phalanx of Republicans in the House, the Senate, a majority of state governments, and the courts, all carrying out the plan. That plan includes harsher laws to undermine unions, privatizing everything from schools to health care and Social Security, and keeping as many of us as possible from voting. Based on ten years of unique research, Democracy in Chains tells a chilling story of right-wing academics and big money run amok. This revelatory work of scholarship is also a call to arms to protect the achievements of twentieth-century American self-government.​

To get a truer idea of what’s really going on, you should read this book, along with another nonfiction book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” by Thomas Piketty:
What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy. But satisfactory answers have been hard to find for lack of adequate data and clear guiding theories. In Capital in the Twenty-First Century , Thomas Piketty analyzes a unique collection of data from twenty countries, ranging as far back as the eighteenth century, to uncover key economic and social patterns. His findings will transform debate and set the agenda for the next generation of thought about wealth and inequality. Piketty shows that modern economic growth and the diffusion of knowledge have allowed us to avoid inequalities on the apocalyptic scale predicted by Karl Marx. But we have not modified the deep structures of capital and inequality as much as we thought in the optimistic decades following World War II. The main driver of inequality is the tendency of returns on capital to exceed the rate of economic growth , which today threatens to generate extreme inequalities that stir discontent and undermine democratic values. But economic trends are not acts of God. Political action has curbed dangerous inequalities in the past, Piketty says, and may do so again. A work of extraordinary ambition, originality, and rigor, Capital in the Twenty-First Century reorients our understanding of economic history and confronts us with sobering lessons for today.​

You don’t have to be an academic historian, or an economist, to understand these two books, and see what’s behind all the chaos these days. Understand, it's not strictly a right wing thing, as many left wing politicians have been "bought in." Personally I see all this as a deficiency in human reasoning that's occurred over and over in human history. My thrust is get people to use their reasoning potential to go beyond this distracting human bubble, to understand how true quality of life for our progeny might be achieved if we better understood the natural world and lived in respectful coexistence with all all life, rather than coveted material gain in excess. It's not that humans are necessarily too dense, as most life forms act as we do, but they haven't outgrown their pants to the point of hastening their species extinction. My hope, for our children's sake, is that somehow a critical mass learns to use our potential reasoning.


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## sas (Oct 13, 2017)

Lee, I've read every word, appreciate your input. 

It appears we, here, in the States, would be better described as oligarchy-plutocracy. If I had to designate only one, it would be the latter. I didn't know about Charles Koch, but I believe it was Fred Koch who threw his money and muscle into The John Birch Society. I remember that damn group,well. In my younger years, I thought myself clever when I'd say, "Let's defoliate a Birch." Some think he was influential in getting Eisenhower to take e pluribus unum (from many one) off our money and put on In God We Trust, in order to worship the almighty dollar.  A Capitalist goal. Not kidding. Of course, I find collusion between Koch and Eisenhower hard to imagine, as Koch called Ike a commie. That's how I remember it, anyway. Then The Birchers became the Libertarians. Then, they smartly did not form another separate party, but brilliantly snuck into a traditional party, The GOP, as a sub-group, The Tea Party. The  GOP left their black door open, thinking they would take a corner seat, and be grateful. Then kapow! They are The GOP.

I am typing with one finger on iPad, so difficult. I plan to re-read your comments, and buy book. I read, a couple of years ago, Coming Apart in America. The author, whose name eludes me, is called, by some ,a conservative racist. As a liberal (I refuse to go undercover...progressive....as if liberal is a bad name), even I found his analysis had some merit. It was an interesting read. 

Love this thread. Thanks. Sas 
.


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## JustRob (Oct 13, 2017)

On that subject of oligarchies with reference to the USA, by one of my usual coincidences I was recently reading about the Motion Picture Production Code, also known as the Hays Code, which was introduced in 1930 to regulate the content of American films. One of its requirements was that there could be no celebration of acts against the established law and that such events had to be portrayed as morally wrong. Film producers pointed out that this ruling would prevent any films about the history of America being made as the USA itself was founded on insurrection against the law of the time, as established by Britain. There was apparently no provision in the code for the possibility that the established law itself could be considered immoral or wrong in any way, not _American_ law anyway. 

The Hays Code was originally voluntary, but at the height of the depression desperate film producers were ignoring it and including anything that sold more tickets in their films, so it was made compulsory in 1934. If democracy is giving the people what they want, for example as measured by ticket sales, then it isn't clear who was being more democratic at that time, the government or the film producers.

The Hays Code was eventually replaced by the modern age-related film classification system, which at least accepts in principle that mature people should be entitled to make their own decisions about such things. The modern view recognises that many of the people who buy theatre tickets also vote, so government actions to regulate them could ultimately be counterproductive. This conflict was around even in Will Shakespeare's time, so there is evidently no simple resolution to it. The same problems arise with literature of course.


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## LeeC (Oct 13, 2017)

Ah yes sas, ♫ I remember it well. ♪

Of course it isn’t hard to take over a political party when money-grubbing is the life blood of a political society. That and the complacency of voters. While many continue to mourn, celebrate, and dissect this last election, it’s not all that surprising considering less than half of eligible voters didn’t bother to vote, even less among eligible youth. That despite an overall rising trend relative to total population. The US ranks about fortieth in voter turnout [some countries with much higher turnout have compulsory voting (like Australia?), but most do not], which is ironic given we’re a modern day experiment in democracy. 

We fall a bit short though, considering  Larry Diamond’s definition of democracy:
"Democracy consists of four key elements: (a) A political system for choosing and replacing the government through free and fair elections; (b) The active participation of the people, as citizens, in politics and civic life; (c) Protection of the human rights of all citizens, and (d) A rule of law, in which the laws and procedures apply equally to all citizens."

When many voters are complacent (comfortable in their well appointed homes), the radical fringes gains increase because they’ve got a perceived ax to grind.

All this to me suggests even greater, and increasing, complacency re the natural world that sustains our very being. Many sit idly by thinking someone else will straighten out the mess, if they even allow themselves to acknowledge that we’re craping in our kitchen. Relative to humanity, what they’re actually doing is flushing their children’s future. And again the refrain, “When will they ever learn,” echos in my mind. 

Got to get back to my artwork and writing, trying to subtly increase understanding amid all the alternate reality. Not accomplishing much, but I keep trying for my grandson’s sake.

Oh yes, and I vote in each and every election, despite the increasing "lesser of two evils" choices.


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## JustRob (Oct 13, 2017)

LeeC said:


> Ah yes sas, ♫ I remember it well. ♪



Your use of musical symbols is noted.


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## sas (Oct 13, 2017)

For whatever it's worth, my 12 year old granddaughter accompanied me on The Women's March. She made signs, too (and, grabbed those she could, after it was over...bsm't is loaded with them). She asked to walk behind the Rainbow Flag. Met one of the primary speakers, a school friend of her mother's (my daughter), the attorney who took her gay plaintiffs' case to Supreme Court, to be able to marry. It was quite an empowering day for my granddaughter. And, that is exactly why I took her. To know she does have power, *if *she uses it. I have donated more political money this past year, than in the the last 20 combined; to put my money where my mouth is. My daughter's friend is now running for Michigan Attorney General. I am "on the muscle" to beat the morons who have taken over the GOP. Shameful they let that happen. We should all take a penny, and roll Lincoln across the Rotunda floor...he's surely rolling in his crypt.


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## Olly Buckle (Oct 13, 2017)

I was reading recently that the cost of moving goods world wide is almost 80% taken up by fuel. There was a wave machine I described in one of my stories,  'A family buisness':-

“I have been watching the waves hit the beach all summer, they
change when there is no longer still water under them. That made me
think. At sea something floating on the surface of the water will go up
and down, but the water below the wave does not.”
He demonstrated with his hands. The man with the withered hand
signalled him to continue.
“If there was a float on the surface attached to something heavy, deep
below the surface, the heavy thing would be lifted and dropped in still
water „With the power of the lift and drop of the weight‟ I thought, `I
could change that to a forward motion‟. I joined two large plastic drink
bottles with string, front and back, their torpedo shape would move
through water and help keep a straight course. The top bottle had its
cap screwed on for a float. I heated three bicycle spokes at one end
and pushed them through the bottom bottle, one in the centre, near the
neck, and two at the base, one each side. Then I filled the lower bottle
with small stones to make it sink.” He paused briefly to be sure he was
understood.
“I made wings, from two pieces of zinc, cut from the roof of the shed
Alphonse knocked down, and wrapped them round the front spoke, the
one in the neck of the bottle. They moved up and down between the
back spokes, the ones in the bottom of the bottle.
As it lifted the water forced the wings down, as it dropped they were
pushed up. The forward spoke acted as a pivot and the others, in the
base, stopped the wings going too far. The water pushed against the
wings, and it all moved forward. It really worked"

Basically that was bang on, I took it down th Winchelsea beach and launched it, it headed straight out to sea directly against wind and tide, make the float an oil container and link them in groups you could maintain a steady flow.It will never happen of course, too much vested interest in marine diesels, but interesting stuff.


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## Kevin (Oct 13, 2017)

The thing I have noted (in the past) were the pre-Hayes and post-Hayes females' costumes. Revealing and then not. Some of the pre were Wow!!


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## LeeC (Oct 13, 2017)

From that last paragraph, I seem to remember you posting such a story here. Did you?

Actually that principle has been in use since around 2000. It's employed in the buoy grids that produce renewable energy. One of the grids is off Scotland, and another is off Spain, if I remember correctly. Of course, here in the US the fossil fuel industry fights such practical thinking tooth and nail, and with politicians so easily bought have been mostly successful.


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## Olly Buckle (Oct 13, 2017)

Radio carbon testing on a root sample from a spruce growing in Norway gave it an age of 9,950 years. I am not sure how long ago that was done, but it can't be long 'til its ten thousand birthday! It must be at least one of the oldest living things.


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## Olly Buckle (Oct 14, 2017)

LeeC said:


> From that last paragraph, I seem to remember you posting such a story here. Did you?
> 
> Actually that principle has been in use since around 2000. It's employed in the buoy grids that produce renewable energy. One of the grids is off Scotland, and another is off Spain, if I remember correctly. Of course, here in the US the fossil fuel industry fights such practical thinking tooth and nail, and with politicians so easily bought have been mostly successful.


Probably, though it was a long time ago. No-one wanted to take up his idea except the mafia who use it for smuggling, thus the criminal  world gain credence over politicians with ordinary people, they bother to listen and involve them.

Wind power is more important , though more variable.  I was listening to a programe on the radio the other day, Orkney produce 120% of their electricity needs from wind power. They have trouble exporting it, the cable to the mainland is not heavy enough. The chap they were talking to  had bought himself an electric car to soak up a bit of surplus.


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## JustRob (Oct 20, 2017)

Normally we think of muscles as being directly controlled by signals from nerves, but there are also asynchronous muscles which function without such direct control, which only needs to tell them whether or not to "do their thing". The best examples are the muscles that insects use to fly. An insect's wings can beat a thousand times a second because its nervous system doesn't need to operate each wingbeat but just turn the process on and off. In order to manoeuvre insects flex other normally controlled muscles to modify the behaviour of the asynchronous muscles. Apart from faster operation this mechanism is more fuel efficient than synchronous muscles. To some extent the heart muscles of mammals, including humans presumably, employ such techniques. 

At last I may have an explanation for my disco dancing feet then, which only appear to need to be told to "do their thing" and seem remarkably fuel efficient, even at my age. 

I just read this in Wikipedia while looking for something else. Not the bit about disco dancing obviously. That's a relatively recent stage in evolution.


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## Olly Buckle (Oct 21, 2017)

I had a friend who was an archeologist. His specialinterest was the bit when we were still hunters, towards the end of the last ice age. He said when you found a new site of habitation the first thing you came across was a large hearth where there was a full on fire burning all the time, but as you spread out away from it you would find smaller hearths. In that climate people took the fire with them when they worked at something. Sometimes you would find something like a broken bone needle which gave a clue what they were up to, but best were the flint knappers. They would make a piece shaped a bit like a pineapple with a thick end, and then strike pieces off it by hitting the edge of the thick end. According to what came off it might be left, or it might be turned into a knife, an arrow head, or a spear point. What the archeologist is left with are all the left over bits, but by putting them together like a three D jigsaw you can see the shape of the bits the knapper kept and used. That seemed pretty good to me, 'a guy sat here knapping stone by a fire and made bits this shape', after all it happened a  bit over 11,000 years ago, but then he blew my mind. "You can tell whether they were left or right handed by the way the stone chips are distributed." 

By the way, the distribution of right and left handedness was about the same as for modern man, some at least of the other great apes are handed, but they distribute 50/50 left and right.


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## LeeC (Oct 21, 2017)

I suppose the upside is that supporting the fossil fuel industry helps with population control ;-) But that increases global warming, … hmmm … is there anything that isn’t a catch-22?


From The Lancet:


Pollution is the largest environmental cause of disease and premature death in the world today. Diseases caused by pollution were responsible for an estimated 9 million premature deaths in 2015—16% of all deaths worldwide—three times more deaths than from AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria combined and 15 times more than from all wars and other forms of violence. In the most severely affected countries, pollution-related disease is responsible for more than one death in four.


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## sas (Oct 22, 2017)

Question about knowing handed-ness by stone distribution. How do they know which way they were facing? Seems that would need to be known. Hmmm. My partner brought this up.


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## Kevin (Oct 22, 2017)

Left handed scissors... There is a difference no matter which way you flip them.
So I'm going to say that the outter edge of the strike-off has a pattern different from the inner edge.


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## JustRob (Oct 22, 2017)

Kevin said:


> Left handed scissors... There is a difference no matter which way you flip them.
> So I'm going to say that the outter edge of the strike-off has a pattern different from the inner edge.



When a right-hander uses right-handed scissors their fingers press the two blades tightly together, which is necessary to achieve the shearing action of the scissors. There is always a degree of sideways movement in the joint of scissors to allow the blades to move freely. When a left-hander uses the same scissors their fingers press the blades slightly apart, enough to prevent the shearing action from occurring. Hence left-handers need scissors with the blades the opposite way around from right-handers or must apply reverse sideways pressure on the handles, which is unnatural.


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## LeeC (Oct 23, 2017)

I mentioned the other day how the money-grubing pharmaceutical corporations and their major stock holders were bleeding Joe Schmoe to death. If you’ve seen 60 Minutes lately, then you might realize the scope and truth of that statement. 

We hear and see a lot about Mexican drug cartels, but strangely hear very little about the larger problem with quasi-legal American drug cartels. That is, the pharmaceutical corporations and their major stock holders, the corrupt majority of politicians in federal and state government, the drug distributors, and facilitating doctors. 

But one example of industry’s facilitation is a pharmacy in Kermit, WV (pop 392) that ordered nine million hydrocodone pills over two years. The law looks for a good-faith effort in reporting/stoping suspicious orders, but greed “trumps” compliance most of the time. 

If one is a reasoned person, this and much more is documented by reliable sources. If one is not, they can blindly follow Fox News distractions, and wait to get stung.

What can we do about it? Short of a French Revolution, we can keep voting out of office anyone that doesn’t honestly work towards removing big money from campaign financing, stoping attempts to limit majority rule, putting fairness back into taxation, moving congress to the same medical coverage available to Joe Schmoe, and improving our environmental effort for the sake of our children’s quality of life. Sitting back, hoping someone else will act, won’t get the job done.

Both major political parties are corrupt to the core, so intervention has to start at the potential candidate stage. This last election was was only a lesser-of-two-evils choice. If you want to live in a true democracy, you have to pull your share of the load. Those that are overly greedy by nature work hard at getting their way.


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## yfc54 (Oct 23, 2017)

Potato crisps were invented in 1853 by an American Indian who went by the name of George Crumb. They were originally known as Saratoga Specials.


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## LeeC (Oct 23, 2017)

yfc54 said:


> Potato crisps were invented in 1853 by an American Indian who went by the name of George Crumb. They were originally known as Saratoga Specials.


Actually, that's only a local legend in upstate NY. Recipes for potato chips/crisps were published in several cookbooks decades prior to the 1850s. 

Speaking of alternate facts, since 60 Minutes exposed all those complicit in the opioid epidemic (a duh exposé), including our corrupt government, the Koch hit squad has been hammering the airwaves with all kinds of disinformation to distract and manipulate the public. Of course the Dems play the game also. Speaks to the nature of our political culture, and the gullibility of the general populace.

Sad, because reliable facts are easy to come by. For example, to better understand the chaos today, read the book “Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America” by Nancy MacLean, a history chair at Duke University. For the mindsets involved, one might also read "Animal Farm" by George Orwell, as pertinent today as it was over sixty years ago when it was written. We don't change much do we 

Being extensive reading is necessary to improving one's writing, one would think authors might be a bit more knowledgeable. 

-----

In my previous post I forgot to mention that health insurers are also part of the drug problem. Which, in turn, leads to another fact more should be aware of. Have you ever wondered, here in the US, why paying cash for a prescription instead of getting it through your health plan may be cheeper? The explanation is a bit lengthy, so I'll direct you to: http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/23/health/prescription-drug-prices-pbm/index.html


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## LeeC (Oct 24, 2017)

You've likely seen the quote: "If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos."  ~  E. O. Wilson. Too many though, pay scant attention, perhaps thinking it crazy naturalist talk by an old fool.

Actually, it's a much more pressing issue than you might imagine. Kevin made me aware of a recent article in The Guardian that might help you understand the problem better. That is if you have any interest in our children's quality of life. We're creating an ecological Armageddon, and I don't see many writers getting their head around that. Instead, insects are usually the bogeyman. 

I keep thinking of doing an illustration of humans blindly pursuing oblivion, more technically advanced, but not any more intelligent than the primates we evolved from. Those who need to reflect on it though, wouldn't pay attention. Duane Pesice (moderan) once noted something to the effect that the hardest thing one can do is to honestly examine their thinking and behavior. Seems on the whole we're not up to such a task ;-)

No high horse here, as I've made more than my share of mistakes, but I learned that the real world is all life connected, and helping each other is how we actually help ourselves and our children.


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## Olly Buckle (Nov 4, 2017)

There is a writing discussion thread that has got onto whether a blank space can be poetic, esoteric 

It reminded me of the blank spaces between words, they were not always there. One would think it might be difficult to read a text with allthe words  run together, but early readers were not reading in the sense we understand. They read aloud to their fellow monks during meal times, and they were reading a text that, mostly, they knew by heart, the written text was just a prompting tool.

Spaces between words start appearing on stone monuments where the message is not  already known, and at first they appear as a dot between the words, later they leave the dot out but leave it's place empty, all except at the end of the sentence where it still appears.


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## LeeC (Nov 4, 2017)

Sorry if this offends anyone, but I think knowing what affects you and your children's well being should be interesting. 
click to enlarge


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## Theglasshouse (Nov 4, 2017)

Somehow I kind of wish the political system was kind of like the scientific method. Instead, it is a bunch of wishing and isn't precise like science or as close as math. They need to revolutionize it with good thinkers. Too bad all the great thinkers are flocking elsewhere. Political strategies don't help shape the future. It is like the united nations need this as well. And people need to influence it more or participate more in politics. Like the old days, but I could be off. Truth in politics is ephemeral.


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## bobo (Nov 5, 2017)

LeeC said:


> Sorry if this offends anyone, but I think knowing what affects you and your children's well being should be interesting.
> click to enlarge
> 
> View attachment 20028



Haven't been thoughtless enough to grow children


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## Olly Buckle (Nov 5, 2017)

LeeC said:


> Sorry if this offends anyone, but I think knowing what affects you and your children's well being should be interesting.
> click to enlarge



It is not offensive, except possibly to a few chemical company executives, but I do feel that constant repetition can dull the message. Instead of lamenting our children and grandchildren's lot perhaps it might be useful to explore possibilities for positive action. For  example, I once wrote a piece about getting rid of the tumble drier and drying washing naturally when my missus decided it was a waste of electricity and went about it, pieces about the alternative possibilities to using chemicals would be good. Farmers in the central Californian valley have discovered that leaving a wild strip in the centre of fields increases the presence of pollinators and predators to such a degree that the increase in crop more than pays for the loss of land, without taking into account the money spent on chemicals to replace predators. The farmers may not be the primary readers, but if there are enough such pieces the message will filter through. Negative stuff just gets ignored in the end.


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## LeeC (Nov 5, 2017)

Good point Olly. I have tried to point out the source of our environmental and societal issues as being ourselves as facilitators. Further, maybe on FB, I noted that a good way to begin to correct the situation is to rid ourselves of the corrupt materialist politicians that promote the alternate reality manipulation, such as global warming being a hoax, and our not being in and advancing a sixth great extinction. That is, by churning their ranks until we begin to see some improvement, such as congress reverting to the same health coverage as the average Joe. I also noted that as recently as the 1960s we still had some backbone, as evidenced by recognizing how the affected corporations were trying to destroy Rachel Carson because of her book Silent Spring. 

Their are those that aren't reasoned enough to see the corporate manipulation, but there are also many that know something very serious is wrong, but that politely wait for someone else to do something. Complacency and cultural inculcation are what got us to this stage, and it's our children that will suffer the greatest consequences. Yes, we make some small positive steps, but for each we have also taken two or more steps backward. 

At some point of realization, one throws up their hands and weeps for all the innocents that are hurt by our cupidity excesses. Actually, it's a mechanism of Nature that species that become problems do themselves in, by the very act of altering their environment until it's no longer sustaining. 

Take for instance my latest post. I'm not arguing the safety or not of GMOs specifically, but that the drive is to own and control the world's food for profit, using our tax dollars to achieve such which in itself is an insult, and in the process increase profits even more in necessitating the use of scientifically proven environment damaging agrochemicals like glyphosate. There's no real shortage of food in the world yet, other than the shortages created by for-profit distribution. There will be real shortages, and drastic changes in diet, due to how we're altering the sustaining environment. We're creating an ecological apocalypse. Thus my point is that we seem to be no more intelligent than sheep, which is abundantly demonstrated in how we back off from serious problems. We have the pedal to the metal, hell bent for the brick wall. 

"_We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them._" ~ Albert Einstein


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## Kevin (Nov 5, 2017)

It seems that only saving a buck is a good enough incentive. Human nature. But then paying more for luxury is common. If we think we can afford it. We pay more for luxury. The thing about air-drying is it takes longer,  takes a dry space, and the clothes come out stiff as a board. We pay more to mitigate those. I can't remember the last time I saw a clothesline.


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## ppsage (Nov 5, 2017)

The scientific method is only precise and mathematical in response to a clearly defined and limited theorem. In the selection and development of theorems, it's as messy, haphazard, and irrational as any political process.


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## LeeC (Nov 5, 2017)

“_Success, like war and like charity in religion, covers a multitude of sins.”_  ~  Sir Charles Napier

And, success in our materialistic culture is accomplishing our covetous goals.

In the pursuit of greater profits, one of our tools is insecticides to increase production of food goods. While the short term results increase profits though, the longer term effects are that we're decimating exponentially more "beneficial" [in our perspective] biodiversity than what is targeted. We are even seeing negative effects in the shorter term, such as the neonicotinoid class of insecticides significantly contributing to the die off of pollinators. It's the same old story as our previous clumsy use of DDTs that was highlighted in Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring. That right down to the agrochemical corporations trying to distract the populace from the facts. 

I was going go on about some of the ways such corporations manipulate the public, and about our perspective of "beneficial" biodiversity, but it's time for more medications. You lucked out


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## Olly Buckle (Nov 5, 2017)

LeeC said:


> “_ That right down to the agrochemical corporations trying to distract the populace from the facts.
> I was going go on about some of the ways such corporations manipulate the public,_


_

I had this wicked thought, I hardly ever see people smoking cigaretts, there must be a whole bunch of tobacco company men, well practiced at that sort of deception, looking for a job. Then I thought 'Nah, they all smoked like chimneys, they will be dead'.  Strange how nobody believes it is actually them who will die, always someone else, mind you there was a time when the USSR was putting missiles on Cuba...

I agree with you that many insecticides, maybe all, are pretty harmful, naturaljungle is being plowed under to grow the chrysanthemum varieties for pyrethrum, there is harm somewhere along the way in any commercial venture, even if it was simply making a container and sending it to you. 
The agricultural industry has been slow to change, there are varied reasons for that in this country, starting with farmers tend to be conservative and stick with what worked in the past and all  stages inbetween to the hard nosed deliberate deceptions and lies of some sorts of commerce. 

What is more productive , and interesting, is what is now making for change at the farm level? One thing is that better profits and a more rapid flow of goods are made from less intensively farmed products because consumers are aware and demanding, they don't want to poison their children. In big organisations people cut corners, and we are probably lucky that there are still a fair number of small independent farms, but even in the big companies they are starting to actually implement some of the standards they espouse, at least in animal farming. There is a long way to go in practical  terms, but attitudes are starting to change as people realise there are commercial alternatives which are not destructive to the land, their basic resource.

I would also give some  credit to the agricultural world; there has been a fairly rapid, and continuous, rise in the world's population for some time without there being a major famine. They used to be quite common, but things like new varieties of wheat and rice have saved billions of lives, of course they will now all have children. The population has always risen when there has been an advance in agriculture, the only societies where the population decreases are those which use electricity, though nobody has ever demonstrated a cause for the relationship it seems to be pretty consistent._


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## LeeC (Nov 5, 2017)

I hope you're right Olly, that more people are realizing the adverse consequences of the "green revolution." Still that differs from the decreasing number of small independent farms in America. Our major agribusiness corporations are very powerful, and their tentacles are long. As an example, Monsanto even pressured Obama into signing a law that protects them from any legal action resulting from the effects of their products on the environment. Otherwise, Obama had a respectable record in furthering environmental issues. 

I hope the Old World can withstand the pressures of our money lords.


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## Olly Buckle (Nov 6, 2017)

LeeC said:


> Monsanto even pressured Obama into signing a law that protects them from any [/COLOR]legal action resulting from the effects of their products on the environment. Otherwise, Obama had a respectable record in furthering environmental issues.



That speaks volumes about their confidence in their product.


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## LeeC (Nov 6, 2017)

Olly Buckle said:


> That speaks volumes about their confidence in their product.


and their utter lack of caring for anyone or anything other than their immediate selves, hell bent on dominating the world's food supply at any cost to our sustaining environment.

All this brings to mind the book "And the Salesman Came To Town"  by Ian Campbell
Blurb:
The devil has come to town - but this time he is the CEO of a multinational corporation. This multinational advertises a soul back guarantee for all potential customers - of course for the purchase of their very own dream life.

I suppose things get this way because us average Joes are wrapped up in day to day getting by. For instance, at the moment, with all the medications I'm happy to have a bowel movement  :highly_amused:


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## ppsage (Nov 6, 2017)

Not sure how much crossover there is with forum posts -- and the source for this is Wait Wait Don't Tell Me -- but a study of text messages purports to show that the longer a reply is, the more likely it is to be a lie.


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## LeeC (Nov 11, 2017)

I would think that the mountain of evidence about our poisoning the food chain that sustains us would be of interest.

Which way toilet paper should unroll, and other similarly important issues, are what many occupy their minds with. Too many avoid thinking about the truly serious issues facing our very existence, averting their eyes from undeniable evidence of the adverse effects of our excesses, or in a state of deniability retreating into conjured up alternate realities. Obviously there isn't a critical mass of reasoned humans, or there would be more progress in a positive direction. Are a majority of humans intimidated by those hoisting detrimental choices upon us, or are they actually too dense in their pursuit of being the criminal instead of the victim?

There's overwhelming evidence of our rapacious nature, appearing often in our media that isn't completely under the thumb of manipulating interests. More so in media not based in America. Take for example a recent article in The Guardian, about honey tests revealing global contamination by bee-harming pesticides. The tests found that 75% of the world's honey contains neonicotinoid insecticides, half of which were present in a cocktail of similar chemicals. Contamination rates were highest in North America with 86% of samples containing one or more neonicotinoid, followed by Asia (80%) and Europe (79%). It was lowest in South America at 57%. Whatever we introduce into the food chain will ultimately affect us. The article can be accessed at:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/oct/05/honey-tests-reveal-global-contamination-by-bee-harming-pesticides

The actual study "Nerve agents in honey" can be accessed at:
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/358/6359/38

The new analysis joins a growing number of highly critical reports on pesticides, including research showing most farmers could slash their pesticide use without losses, a UN report that denounced the “myth” that pesticides are necessary to feed the world, and a UK chief government scientist stating that the assumption by regulators it is safe to use pesticides at industrial scales across landscapes is false.

Prof Dave Goulson at the University of Sussex, UK, and not involved in the new work, said: “Entire landscapes all over the world are now permeated with highly potent neurotoxins, undoubtedly contributing to the global collapse of biodiversity. It is hard not to feel a sense of deja vu: Rachel Carson was saying the same things more than 50 years ago, but we seem not to have learned any lessons. 

“_It is, of course, one of the miracles of science that the germs that used to be in our food have been replaced by poisons._” ~ Wendell Berry

To an old naturalist like myself, it's mind boggling that a critical mass, at least, hasn't risen up in against the power hungry, money-grubbing corporations that are leading us to accelerated extinction. One would think that at least the young would rebel at our trashing their world. Maybe being insecure about how the young might react, is why we focus so much on filling their heads with alternate reality BS, and distract them with evolving technology to dumb down their reasoning potential. 

At least I got my life in while there was still something sustainable in our little blue canoe, but the thought of all the innocents that will suffer at our hands pains me. 

I wish you all only the best, but you are going to have to fight for it.


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## LeeC (Nov 13, 2017)

*Dirty Thirties*

The Dirty Thirties refers to the 1930’s Dust Bowl days in American history, which was centered around the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma, and damaged the ecology of American and Canadian prairies. 

Waves of new settlers migrated to the Great Plains in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with government encouragement and inducements such as the Homestead Act of 1862, which was expanded under the  Kinkaid Act (1904)  and Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909. Initial agricultural endeavors were primarily cattle ranching, but the adverse effect of harsh winters on the cattle, beginning in 1886, a short drought in 1890, and general overgrazing, led many landowners to increase the amount of land under cultivation. During this period, the settlers were also encouraged by unusually wet weather (normally a semiarid region), and technological improvements such as mechanized plowing and harvesting. 

With insufficient understanding of the ecology of the plains, farmers conducted extensive deep plowing of the virgin topsoil of the Great Plains, which displaced the native, deep-rooted grasses that normally trapped soil and moisture even during periods of drought and high winds. Then came the drouths (three waves) of the 1930’s and the unanchored soil turned to dust, which the prevailing winds blew away in huge clouds thousands of feet high, blackening the sky.

Wind is pretty much a constant on the Great Plains. Amarillo and the Texas Panhandle's geographic location contributes to the windiness of the plains, because the North American prairie region lies in the center of the continent where major weather systems collide. The area experiences some of the most violent weather on Earth. For example, Amarillo is the fourth-windiest city in the contiguous United States, with an average wind speed  of 13.5 mph. [The Windy City, Chicago, is 55 places below Amarillo.]

With the topsoil reduced to a powdery consistency due to farming practices and drouth, and prevailing winds, dust clouds turned day into night. One dust storm  blew all the way to Chicago, depositing 12 million tons of dust, and continued on to the East Cast. Even when the wind seemed calm, which seldom occurs, there was enough air movement for the fine dust to permeate shelters, making living conditions nothing short of adverse.


The reason I posted this is first to help readers better understand SueC’s piece “Honey” at: 
https://www.writingforums.com/threads/174318-Honey?p=2117640&viewfull=1#post2117640

And second to show that having gotten a handle on erosion, we’ve moved on to even more serious destructive practices in decimating biodiversity with our artificial agrochemicals, as I discussed at:
https://www.writingforums.com/threads/173392-Interesting-stuff/page11?p=2118322#post2118322


It’s sad that we’re blindsided by our own ignorance, but we seem to insist on our course of accelerating extinction, without thinking of our children's future. 


"_We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them._" ~ Albert Einstein

"_Don't be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value._" Arthur Miller


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## Olly Buckle (Nov 13, 2017)

Starlings are under-rated birds to my mind, in north America I am told that they are regarded as an invasive alien.
Several species of birds have particular collective nouns, a murder of crows, a charm  of goldfinches for example, with starlings it is a murmuration, nice word. It does not mean simply a number of starlings together, it describes a very large flock in flight. During Spring and summer starlings split up into small groups, but in autumn they flock hugely, in thousands, sometimes tens or even hundreds of thousands, and it is not a haphazard flock, they fly in dense formation, wheeling across the sky closer than formation fighter planes, confusing predator hawks and falcons. It is an amazing sight, and if you get the chance see if you can get close to a starling in sunlight, that is another amazing sight. From a distance they look black, but get close in good light and they have all the rainbow colours of an oil slick.

Their own song is very varied, but they are also wonderful mimics; I have listened to a 'blackbird' praising the sunset and been totaly fooled up to the moment the starling finished off with a series of clicks and whistles. I have heard a recording of starlings that lived in a remote scottish croft and nested above a decaying two stroke engine. The engine had been dead for many years, but it's sound lives on incorporated into the starling's song and passed down the generations, yes. at least some birdsong is taught rather than genetically inherited. Mozart had a pet starling, the story goes that he bought it because it had learned one of his melodies. Amazing, under-rated birds.

PS, they also eat the leatherjackets that live on grass roots in my lawn. Leatherjackets are the larva of cranefly, or daddy longlegs; or ollylongdads as my daughter called them when she was small


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## Terry D (Nov 13, 2017)

A murmuration of starlings.

[video=youtube;iRNqhi2ka9k]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRNqhi2ka9k[/video]


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## LeeC (Nov 16, 2017)

The Dunning-Kruger Effect is a 1999 study of cognitive bias, that in 2000 they were awarded an Ig Nobel Prize for. Historical antecedents include observations by Confucius, Socrates, Shakespeare, Darwin, Bertrand Russell, and W. B. Yeats. 

The effect put forward by Darwin for example is succinctly, “ignorance begets confidence.” The study described their findings as, “The less a person knows, the more likely they are to perceive themselves as an expert. Conversely, the more a person knows, the more likely they are to doubt their competence.” 

Related observations have also been made, such as Mark Twain saying, "It's easier to fool people than it is to convince them they have been fooled." Fooling someone, being commonly based on playing to perceived wants, is one of the many tangents. 

Such seemingly is inherent in all life forms, as to my understanding all alter their environment in exploiting their ecological niches for perceived wants. Where it becomes a more immediate and serious issue though, is where a life form becomes too big for their pants, and alters their sustaining environment to the point of accelerating extinction. Nature, of course, doesn’t blink an eye, easily showing its superiority in handling change. 

All this makes me wonder about human reasoning being a two edged sword.


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## escorial (Nov 16, 2017)

The easiest person to fool is yourself....my inspiration title for a self help book I plan on writing after my political career begins an the rock star lifestyle starts up.


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## ppsage (Nov 16, 2017)

it's long been my contention that human reasoning (which some, Jung for example, prefer to call the power of rationalization) is a sort of neural buffer on an overdeveloped nervous system which absorbs extraneous signals which might otherwise cause the whole system to malfunction. S ort of like there's no real difference in function between dreaming and thinking.


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## Olly Buckle (Nov 17, 2017)

Terry D said:


> A murmuration of starlings.
> 
> [video=youtube;iRNqhi2ka9k]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRNqhi2ka9k[/video]


Someone did a close up video study, they reckoned each bird  was super sensitive to the reactions of the seven birds around it.


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## Olly Buckle (Nov 17, 2017)

escorial said:


> The easiest person to fool is yourself....my inspiration title for a self help book I plan on writing after my political career begins an the rock star lifestyle starts up.


The political career should be no impediment, seems you can be an M.P.and do all sorts of other things as well, but the rock star lifestyle might get in the way of writing.  Sve it as something to do in the re-hab clinic maybe?


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## escorial (Nov 17, 2017)

Olly Buckle said:


> The political career should be no impediment, seems you can be an M.P.and do all sorts of other things as well, but the rock star lifestyle might get in the way of writing.  Sve it as something to do in the re-hab clinic maybe?



Once we get away from I'm a lawyer an now I want to serve the community I've  profited from an  give summit back...middle,working..  caught in the middle..we will provail through them an us


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## escorial (Nov 17, 2017)

I always thought the snobs screwed the poor through out history an when the poor took control they would sort it all out...an here is were I stand..suicidal lincon said if you want to test a man's character give I'm power


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## Olly Buckle (Nov 18, 2017)

Talking of trees...

I am beginning to appreciate trees in a different way. The bit you can see always made them one of my favourite forms of life, but I had not thought much about the bit underneath. I knew that rootstocks control the form of the tree above ground, allthose dwarfapple  and cherry trees are grown on dwarfing rootstocks, and that different types of tree have different forms of root. Ash, which is a pioneer tree, its seeds 'helicopter' long distances to open ground, grows a deep 'tap' root which gives it hold in exposed conditions. Beech, which drops its beech mast around it, is a forest tree with its vulnerable top getting support as part of the canopy; it has a shallow, spreading, root system. Birch trees, which are also pioneer types, also have a shallow, spreading root system, adapted to graveley, rocky places where the soil is thin. They can not get lots of support from it, but they are small trees, their timber is light and flexible, and their foliage is delicate and does not catch the wind as much.

Coppicing is when a tree is cut off close to ground level and allowed  to develop a number of new growths, these will be harvested at between seven and twelve years, depending on the use, and the process repeats. This also happens naturally, the above ground part of the tree can suffer all sorts of mis-haps that leave those vital roots intact. This means that some trees are among the oldest living things on the planet. Not the bit we see, that is just a sprout put out in the last few hundred years, but the roots of some will carbon date to  thousands of years old.

Trees in natural forests link to their children that surround them through their root systems, they pass them food and water and chemical and electrical messages. The offspring of a tree that had fallen hundreds of years ago and rotted completely away were found to be still supporting its root system.

Nowadays when I look at trees I still see them as beautiful, but really those are the working bits, to do with producing food and offspring, the 'brain' is underground.

PS. A little  subscript  to  cheer up Lee.
Years back I had a book called 'The gentle art of monkeywrenching'. The author described people who were protecting virgin forest, they started by driving very long nails into the trees so it ruined chain saws and the expensive saw mill blades and made  it un-economical  to harvest them. The company responded by running a metal detector over the logs, so  they made long ceramic rods which they glued into holes drilled in the tree, the comany gave up logging that area. There are some people who will go to considerable lengths for a tree


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## Olly Buckle (Nov 19, 2017)

In the middle ages there was Gregorian chant, and the church, being about systems and order, wanted everybody chanting to the same tune. The Pope set up a music college in the Vatican which trained instructors who travelled all over the Christian world teaching people the ‘right’ tunes, but, people being people, the tune gradually strayed again, they needed some sort of permanent reminder.
Guido of Arrezo, a monk, finally devised a written code for music so the tunes would not get lost, very similar to our present day one it had six, rather than seven, notes, and he named them for the syllables of the first verse of a prayer in which each was sung starting one note higher.
Ut queant laxis 
resonare fibris
Mira gestorum 
famuli tuorum,
Solve polluti 
labii reatum,
It is a hymn to St John the Baptist and translates as “So that Your servants may sing at the top of their voices the wonders of Your acts, and absolve the fault from their stained lips." I don’t know what they had been eating.
Ti was added later, and Ut changed to doh at some point.


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## bobo (Nov 19, 2017)

Do-re-mi ....
Do, a deer .............
Re, ...........
(the sound of music, likewise


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## dither (Nov 19, 2017)

ppsage said:


> it's long been my contention that human reasoning (which some, Jung for example, prefer to call the power of rationalization) is a sort of neural buffer on an overdeveloped nervous system which absorbs extraneous signals which might otherwise cause the whole system to malfunction. S ort of like there's no real difference in function between dreaming and thinking.



Have always been fascinated by the workings of the mind. Often fancied dipping the proverbial toe in psychology, if only to try to figure my own mind out, but never did.


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## sas (Nov 19, 2017)

dither said:


> Have always been fascinated by the workings of the mind. Often fancied dipping the proverbial toe in psychology, if only to try to figure my own mind out, but never did.




dither,

I tell my grandgirls (I am the lecturing grandmother) that at the end of their life, I hope they have little need to say,

"shouda, coulda, woulda"

Three horrible words.
.


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## Plasticweld (Nov 19, 2017)

sas said:


> dither,
> 
> I tell my grandgirls (I am the lecturing grandmother) that at the end of their life, I hope they have little need to say,
> 
> ...



No truer words spoken. 

I have always been involved in dangerous occupations and hobbies.  I have lived life with the motto if you can't die doing it, what is the point. 

The flip side of that, is that there are no guarantees of tomorrow and second chances to fix what should have been done today, should have been said. 

I have failed at many things in life, succeed in far more.  Of all of the failures that haunt me, it is the ones where I said "Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda."  
Regret is a terrible thing, far worse than any failure, far worse than the consequences.  I have no problem dealing with failure. I give everything all that I have, I can still hold my head high even when things go wrong because I gave it my best shot. 

I expect to fail and struggle with every aspect of life, so work at things with twice the effort.  I am an optimist because I know that hard work and effort solve most problems. 

What I don't understand is how someone who is a pessimist, is the opposite of me.  They expect things to go well and when they don't, they are discouraged and disappointed.  I expect things to go wrong and elated when they don't.  Happy when there are only some problems and can always just say when things go horribly wrong..."Well it happens."  The failures don't take a toll on me mentally. 

Dither you wondered how the brain works, add me to the list. It makes no sense why one person sees things one way and the other sees the other side of the very same coin.  

I am just thankful... I have the coin in my hand and have both sides. All it takes is the effort to turn it over, and look to see life from a different angle. 

A lecturing grandfather :}


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## Kevin (Nov 19, 2017)

Mm... I wonder , how P.W.  , did you manage when your time was taken up by unprofitable enterprises? I for instance, have been hindered ( at least in my thinking, apparently..) by fear that if I didn't cover my monthly 'nut' I would ...eh.., lose it all ( most probably , eventually my marriage as well). For instance, I've had certain ideas, a desire to pursue other business ventures, start new ones, but I find that my time is limited during the day (by making a living) and that my income is budgeted to the point of there  not being much-to-any leftover. I find it a difficult to idea gamble a significant amount on a probable failure, money wise , considering it un-wise for the... consequences. I mean isn't the whole point to make money ( yes, of course there are all the side effects- learning etc.)? 

I would consider it a drastic letdown if I were to say...take out a mortgage to 'float' some venture only to have it  belly-up. I mean, uh... there goes the house, and twenty-years of payments- poof. 

Now, being a male, I could live on a cot with or without a tent if I felt the payoff great enough, but my family does not share that whateveryoucallit- outlook. They would reject that and eject me. All of them.  Just curious..


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## Plasticweld (Nov 19, 2017)

It's called mixing business with pleasure.  For 12 years a ran a company called EmpireGP which repaired and sold race body work for race bikes.  On the average weekend at the track I would bring home 3 to 4 thousand dollars worth of work or sales.  

The Spartan and ultra marathon runs are all done with the idea that in order for me to be successful I have to be in top physical shape.   I get paid for what I produce. I also use the time running to think about business and how to either get more work or cut my working costs.  I would bet I spend most of my time thinking about business or selling or buying something, so it is not all peaches and cream, just good use of my time.

The other real difference that I have over a lot of other people is I don't need very much sleep.  I do own three companies and I am a silent partner in two others.  I don't always have to be there to be making money but have spent most of my life working 70 plus hours a week.  

There are 168 hours in a week. Minus 42 for sleep leaves me 126 hours  minus 80 plus for work still leaves me 46 hours a week to do what I want and the money to do it. 


I make way more than I spend... I think that is the real trick :}


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## ppsage (Nov 19, 2017)

I'm always surprised when people voluntarily name things Spartan.


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## dither (Nov 19, 2017)

sas said:


> dither,
> 
> I tell my grandgirls (I am the lecturing grandmother) that at the end of their life, I hope they have little need to say,
> 
> ...



I shouldn't complain.
I've come through. A relatively boring but ultimately safe and secure life. Yeah sure, I have regrets but if I HAD to live again I'd do it all again. With a few dos and dont's. What few chances I took went totally bumps-up so I learned some I suppose but I HAVE to be satisfied with my lot.


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## Plasticweld (Nov 19, 2017)

ppsage said:


> I'm always surprised when people voluntarily name things Spartan.



You would have to expand on that for me to understand.


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## ppsage (Nov 19, 2017)

Sparta was the most thorough-going police state pretty much ever. Made the Bolsheviks look like pikers. Cradle to grave gov't control. To be a good Spartan means giving up everything for the glory of the state.


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## sas (Nov 19, 2017)

ppsage said:


> Sparta was the most thorough-going police state pretty much ever. Made the Bolsheviks look like pikers. Cradle to grave gov't control. To be a good Spartan means giving up everything for the glory of the state.



No doubt, Sparta was the ultimate Nazi model....giving up one's humanity for the state. Seems to be much of that going around. I never thought I'd see its resurrection. I was born when the world thought Naziism was being put to death. It has risen from those ashes, along with the KKK. We needed only another sociopathic leader to lift the rock. They were waiting. 

.


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## Kevin (Nov 19, 2017)

Yes, but they could kick-ass, man. And for some of us, being able to, no...being willing to put ourselves through a rigorous, difficult, uncomfortable physical ordeal without quitting is something to be admired. It's like Vikings, man. Bad reputation for sure, but they were some kick-ass...


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## Plasticweld (Nov 19, 2017)

The Spartan Creed, which all runners recite before the start of the race 

_“We are honored by your courage and commitment to Excellence, but know this through your mind, body and spirit: we will all be put to the ultimate test ... for you chase glory on this day! Who am I? I am Spartan!_[FONT=&Verdana]”



What Kevin says is true regarding the mindset, it is all about pushing yourself further than you ever thought possible. It is addictive when you learn how hard you can be pushed and what you are capable of. 

The races always involve some head game to convince you of this. 

The last race I was in, a 14mile run up the mountain with a half mile swim with 32 obstacles.  They had what they called the death march, which is the third trip up the mountain at that point and 3/4 of the way into the race.  In the pre race instructions we were told that there would be water at the top of the mountain.  There was none.  At this point everyone was dehydrated, for the most their water long gone.  You ended up sharing what little water you did have, with complete strangers whose only connection is sheer misery.  Those who needed help got it.  It was an important part of what the organizers had wanted to teach and share.  Sometimes when you are exhausted and feel there is no hope, nothing left to draw on.  You find that your fellow man can help you out and you can do things you never dreamed possible. 

The other half of the speech goes something like this.
_
"Look at the Spartans  to your left, look to your right. You will draw strength from them as they will draw strength from you. You will not let them fail._"

That is the part of Spartan I identify with, as do many others.  You are correct historically with what it represents. I wonder at what point do we let the word evolve


[/FONT]


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## ppsage (Nov 19, 2017)

No families. Helots. Forced child homosexuality for training. A warrior class of brainwashed automatons. And nice slogans.


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## Kevin (Nov 19, 2017)

Theres a mountain bike group I've ridden with off and on for years. You have to be on a certain level to ride their weekend events. It's not so much a competition ( it's not one)though there is some competitiveness on occasion between individuals, but the thing is all us know ( except for one guy we call the Martian, cuzz he's like not human) and that is at any moment we may run into distress, physically. We had this one ride and there was this one guy who absolutely did not save anything, powered the whole way, and was somewhat unprepared. At the base of the last climb I gave him everything, all my sugar stores. I knew he needed it, about to bonk, and that I did not. I got to hand it to him, his style of going for it, whereas I feel the need to be really prepared physically ( trained , by many repetitions), he just went for it, suffered, and made it; on his back afterward, stretched and beat, absolutely ( I know that feeling) and yet he did it.


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## LeeC (Nov 19, 2017)

sas said:


> No doubt, Sparta was the ultimate Nazi model....giving up one's humanity for the state. Seems to be much of that going around. I never thought I'd see its resurrection. I was born when the world thought Naziism was being put to death. It has risen from those ashes, along with the KKK. We needed only another sociopathic leader to lift the rock. They were waiting.
> 
> .


I saw your post at the same time I was leafing through George Orwell’s Animal Farm again, and was thinking how alike the extreme right and extreme left are basically. Orwell had the ability to not only recognize the variances in human behavior, but to also articulate such in his characters (animals in this case). Weather one is referring to wannabe fascists (I won’t name those bankrolling the effort), or Stalin as Orwell was, the term narcissist apply fits both types of key instigators. Both even cary around their fasces, at least figuratively. Of course, more than a few sociopaths are among the ranks of both. 


We’ve always had the extremes in our societies, as per example ppsage’s mention of Sparta. As then, there are always people that having gained material wealth are essentially insecure (not that they’ll admit it). In working to achieve their goals (greater wealth, more security, what-have-you), they employ manipulation techniques. There being a good number of sheep among us, they become a force to be reckoned. 


I mentioned a while back that I had recommended the book “Democracy In Chains” by Nancy K. MacLean on Twitter. Within minutes, several that don’t even follow me responded with disparaging remarks about the book. The extreme right must follow everything closely to cast doubts when something reflects on them. Anyway, I was thankful to see that thousands retweeted my recommendation and still are,  likely in part because of the antagonists. 


So, you see their are still a good many reasoned people among us. Obviously they’ve been complacent of late, but I think the current events are waking them up. I hope they wake up enough to churn the worst of the politicians out of office, to get back to the America that was intended in its formation. As far as I’m concerned, they can keep on churning until we see some real reform in government, like maybe congress having the same health coverage as Joe Schmoe  ;-)


You see the same insecurity, at least in part, in the gun debates. I’m not against such as hunting — we’ve killed off the natural predators — but having seen my share of real combat don’t believe that Joe Schmoe needs an assault rifle, let alone have one without rigorous background checks. The way things are going, we’ll all need one to fight off the crazies 


So keep talking sas, we need people that will stand up for reason. There will always be antagonists spreading their manipulation, such as I encounter in wanting to leave more than a garbage dump for our children to get by in.


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## Kevin (Nov 19, 2017)

I once came upon a larger snake biting a lizard biting upon a lizard (itself). Can you guess why?


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## Plasticweld (Nov 20, 2017)

LeeC said:


> You see the same insecurity, at least in part, in the gun debates. I’m not against such as hunting — we’ve killed off the natural predators — but having seen my share of real combat don’t believe that Joe Schmoe needs an assault rifle, let alone have one without rigorous background checks. The way things are going, we’ll all need one to fight off the crazies



Given your affinity for the native Americans I am surprised you hold that view.  The Indians I have had personal contact with were all vehemently opposed to any gun control given their past history.  They didn't pass the background check back then either, and someone was just looking for their safety. 


 A final, related viewpoint contemplates the history of Indians and guns as an account of racial hierarchy and social control, deeply pronounced at the point of contact and through the early years of the republic but tenaciously embedded in much of American law. This narrative reveals that the relationship of Indians and guns developed in parallel to African-Americans and guns, with both groups situated at the bottom of a racial hierarchy that facilitated oppression, noncitizen status, and subjugation. Here, as a means of extracting wealth—with African slaves, their labor; with Indians, their lands—the gun served as a tool of white privilege, forever linked to a history of violence and oppression.​There are many historical accounts that would support the legitimacy of the pro-gun argument made on the Greeley billboards, wherein Native Americans were systematically disarmed and murdered by white settlers with the backing of the American government.
Perhaps the most famous example occurred in 1890 — decades before the 1924 guarantee of Constitutional rights for Native Americans — when Federal agents murdered 297 Sioux Indians at Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Before the Native Americans were killed by the agents of the state, they were notified that the 7th Cavalry had come to confiscate their firearms “for their own safety and protection.”



There is no provision in the Second Amendment for hunting.


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## LeeC (Nov 20, 2017)

Plasticweld said:


> Given your affinity for the native Americans I am surprised you hold that view.  The Indians I have had personal contact with were all vehemently opposed to any gun control given their past history.  They didn't pass the background check back then either, and someone was just looking for their safety. A final, related viewpoint contemplates the history of Indians and guns as an account of racial hierarchy and social control, deeply pronounced at the point of contact and through the early years of the republic but tenaciously embedded in much of American law. This narrative reveals that the relationship of Indians and guns developed in parallel to African-Americans and guns, with both groups situated at the bottom of a racial hierarchy that facilitated oppression, noncitizen status, and subjugation. Here, as a means of extracting wealth—with African slaves, their labor; with Indians, their lands—the gun served as a tool of white privilege, forever linked to a history of violence and oppression.​There are many historical accounts that would support the legitimacy of the pro-gun argument made on the Greeley billboards, wherein Native Americans were systematically disarmed and murdered by white settlers with the backing of the American government.
> Perhaps the most famous example occurred in 1890 — decades before the 1924 guarantee of Constitutional rights for Native Americans — when Federal agents murdered 297 Sioux Indians at Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Before the Native Americans were killed by the agents of the state, they were notified that the 7th Cavalry had come to confiscate their firearms “for their own safety and protection.”
> 
> 
> ...



Behne PW  


I’m sorry I touched on a sore point to you, but there’s a lot more at stake for the safety of the majority of people in our country. I’m talking about here and now, learning from our mistakes of the past, rather than using them to distract the issue. 

Basing an argument on the sins of white privilege in the past has little to do with what we’re doing to each other in the here and now. We are all the same species, and other countries play the same video games, have the same mental health problems, and so on, as the US, but some manage to avoid the high incidence of gun murder rates and frequent public shooting massacres as seen in the US.

For example, In the UK in 2011 there were 0.07 gun homicides per 100,000 people, while there were 3 per 100,000 people in the US, a difference of 43 times as many. A major contributing factor is the UK’s strict gun laws. 

Contrasting and closer to home, Canada also has a much lower gun homicide rate, even though gun ownership is comparatively high — there are 23.8 firearms per 100 people in the country. The difference is due in good part to there being  no legal right to possess arms in Canada. It takes sixty days to buy a gun there, and there is mandatory licensing for gun owners. Gun owners pursuing a license must have third-party references, take a safety training course and pass a background check with a focus on mental, criminal and addiction histories.

Moving on to Japan, in 2008 there were only 11 gun homicides in the whole population of 122,800,000 people. That’s not an anomaly, as was the 22 in 2007 that caused a national scandal. Hunting rifles and shotguns are legal, but can only be obtained after an exhaustive application process. They even go so far as requiring gun owners to retake classes and exams every three years.

A final contrasting example (to keep this brief) is Australia, where there were only 30 gun homicides in 2010, despite there being a considerable gun ownership of 3 to 3.5 million guns, a rate of 15 guns per 100 people. Australia is a rare nation that has had a significant shift toward additional gun control in recent years. Following a 1996 shooting spree that left 35 Australians dead at the Port Arthur tourist location in Tasmania, the government launched a major overhaul of gun laws. In the decade before Port Arthur, Australia saw 11 mass shootings; since then, there has not been a single mass shooting and the gun murder rate has continued its steady decline. Australia doesn’t have full bans on such as full semi-automatic handguns, instead taking the approach that Australians must demonstrate a justifiable need to have a gun, such as being a farmer or sport shooter.

One thing common here is considering the intended use of a gun, and the mental stability of owners. There is no need for most people to own such as an assault rifle. There are terrorists at large to be sure, but a gun isn’t going to help one if a bomb is placed under their chair 

One thing I found curious was your noting my “affinity for the native Americans.” I suppose that has different connotations to different people, but in the here and now (where we might be able to improve going forward) I do see examples of affinity for humanity. That being the idea of leaving a livable world for all our children. But one example is the Dakota oil pipeline incident recently. Where Native Americans were peacefully protesting the very real threat of further polluting our waters, they were met with rubber bullets. If you want to talk about here and now atrocities, what was being “defended” with the rubber bullets was profits, not lives, and those for oil which we need to diminish the use of if we’re to leave a livable environment for our children. While other countries are making progress, we’re going backwards, slaves to big profits. 

“_Plans to protect air and water, wilderness and wildlife are in fact plans to protect man._” ~ Stewart Udall

The greatest issue facing humans is our destroying the environment that sustains us. It stymies me that more don’t or won’t understand. The lack of realistic gun control in the US is to me but another way that innocents are maimed and killed. 

“_Progress is measured by the speed at which we destroy the conditions that sustain life._”  ~  George Monbiot


My best to you and yours
Lee


[statistics herein are the latest I could find]


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## Plasticweld (Nov 20, 2017)

Not a sore spot with me, I  just have a very different position on the subject than you.  

I brought it up because I have employees in the past who were Onondaga's and they were very vocal concerning any new gun laws.  

I doubt there is a post here where you don't mention Indians so it caught my eye.


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## LeeC (Nov 20, 2017)

Plasticweld said:


> I brought it up because I have employees in the past who were Onondaga's and they were very vocal concerning any new gun laws.


Furthers my point that we're all cut from the same cloth, with differing perspectives resulting in good part from experiences, regardless of ethnicity. Maybe the political divide and conquer tactic would be less effective if more could see themselves in each other 

Thanks


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## Kevin (Nov 20, 2017)

Blah, blah blah blah... Anyway, the reason the lizard bit himself is because of the nature of the snake. You see the snake is not a biter and chewer; he's a whole-swallower. By biting himself, the lizard made himself into a sort of donut shape- circular- which the snake could then not figure out how find an end to- especial a head , because the snake likes to swallow things one end first, especially by the head-end. How do I know this? Well, I've been around snakes and watched them swallow things. And, I was there, this time, watching a snake try and fail to swallow this self-bitten lizard. The snake gave up. The lizard had several hickies, but survived.


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## LeeC (Nov 26, 2017)

Interesting to some, and prioritizing information would surely bring this to the forefront. 

While we fiddle away our time on inconsequential matters, and allow those that care about nothing but their immediate selves and materialistic profit to run rampant, we’re accelerating destruction of the biosphere that sustains us. 

In 1992, 1,700 independent scientists signed the "World Scientists' Warning to Humanity." The letter warned that "human beings and the natural world are on a collision course" and if environmental damage was not stopped, our future was at risk. 

Being on the whole the not overly bright humans we are, few took it as seriously as their immediate issues, if at all. 

True to the scientific forecast, those problems are coming home to roost, and again more than 16,000 scientists from 184 countries have published a second warning to humanity advising that we need to change our wicked ways to help the planet.

A well balanced article is located at:
http://www.cnn.com/2017/11/14/health/scientists-warn-humanity/index.html

We can keep on fiddling and go extinct faster than the dodo bird, and by the same hand. Maybe that’s what we deserve, but anyone of conscience might be saddened by all the innocents we take with us.


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## LeeC (Dec 17, 2017)

I know our esteemed leaders would like everyone to believe this isn't true. I wonder why that is.

In actuality though, climate change just broke another NOAA algorithm.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/12/14/weather/arctic-temperatures-break-noaa-algorithm-trnd/index.html

Keep the pedal to the metal my fellow beings, the brick wall ain't far ahead.


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## Olly Buckle (Dec 20, 2017)

Tomorrow, the 21st of December is the shortest day in the northern hemisphere.

There is a place called Newgrange in Ireland where there is a large artificial hill surrounded by massive, inscribed, stones and built around five thousand years ago. There was a young man who came from the locality and was training as an archaeologist in England. He was exploring it during his breaks when he went home, and was home one Christmas. As his time was limited he got up very early one morning and went to explore a tunnel which is lined with huge upright stones and leads to a room right in the centre of the hill. At the entrance is what looks like a doorway, with a fanlight above it, and a few feet in front of it a huge, inscribed stone.

The young man was inside the chamber at dawn when the sun came up, and shone through the ‘fanlight’, down the passage, and illuminated the chamber; that was when he realised it was the shortest day.

The Irish government allows a small number of people picked by drawing lots to  witness this each year, but you should be able to see it streamed live at sunrise tomorrow.

https://www.irelandsancienteast.com/

Beware, it gets light here about 7.30am, so Ireland is not on GMT I am thinking.

Pictures:-  https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=n...KcBMBM&biw=1280&bih=647#imgrc=9RgU4aHjb1UuTM:


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## Olly Buckle (Dec 20, 2017)

My error, I have just checked, sunrise there is 8.45 am and they do use the same time as us. I guess it is because they are further west. Sunset must be later too, handy for getting the kids home from school.


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## Olly Buckle (Dec 27, 2017)

Inspired by firemajic’s daily dose of inspiration
https://www.writingforums.com/threa...tion/page162?p=2127649&highlight=#post2127649

Fox Lane

Early morning, at the junction, 
I stood under a field maple
Alive with buzzing bees
Working in the morning sun.

That afternoon, at the hive
Replete with sunshine,
There was no protest
As I inspected frames.

In one stood tiny eggs,
In another larva were fed,
One held sealed, brood
Ready to hatch as bees.

And then movement,
A hole appeared, eaten
From within came the bee,
New born, covered in fur.
A magical moment stood
In the bright sunshine.



Maybe not as poetical as it might be, but these two moments have stayed with me, for maybe thirty years. Different flowers produce nectar at different times of day, for example you will  never see a bee on a dandelion before eleven in the morning at the earliest. Field  maple, a small and delicately formed tree must produce it’s nectar first thing, the entire tree was a-buzz, and knowing the local bee keepers I was pretty sure these were ‘my’ bees from the hives half a mile up the lane.

The workers we see on flowers are the older bees, for the first weeks of their life bees stay inside the hive, cleaning, building, feeding young, before graduating to other jobs; guarding the entrance, transporting detritus away from the hive, and so on. All that fluffy, teddy bear fur gets worn away before they finally graduate to visiting flowers. Only if you keep bees, or know a beekeeper, will you see them like that, that bee should not have seen sunshine for a couple of weeks at least.

Bees are at their most content when they are full and the sun is shining, a bit like us, that is why a swarm of bees is usually reasonably safe to approach, they will only leave the hive on a good day, and they gorge themselves before they go. It is only if they have been out for a day or two, unable to find a new home, that they get touchy.

The queen lays her eggs in empty honeycomb cells, up to two thousand a day, and when they are first laid they stand up on end, glued to the bottom of the cell, then, before they hatch, they lay down on their side. The young bees produce a ‘milk’ from glands on their heads that they feed the larva with. To produce a Queen they join several cells and flood the larva with huge amounts of food, this is the ‘Royal jelly’, actually no different from the food of ordinary bee larvae, just in much larger quantities which makes it possible to collect. When a beekeeper inspects hive one of the things he is looking for is these Queen cells, if they are allowed to hatch the old Queen will leave the hive to the new youngsters, taking the older workers with her. This is a swarm, they make a ball of bees and ‘explorers’ go out from it, and then come back and dance for places they have found to set up a new hive.


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## TuesdayEve (Dec 27, 2017)

That is very interesting. It’s given me a more personal insight to the life of a 
bee and the hive. I hope most people are aware of the disappearance and bee
 shortage worldwide; it’s mysteries as well as the many theories, microwaves, 
pesticides etc. In my opinion, bees are more contributing and vital to the planet 
than we are. And a nice poem too.


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## Olly Buckle (Dec 27, 2017)

TuesdayEve said:


> I hope most people are aware of the disappearance and bee
> shortage worldwide; it’s mysteries as well as the many theories, microwaves,
> pesticides etc.



I have a suspicion that some of the mystery and varied theories are generated by those who profit from a certain class of inseticide manufacture, much as the unhealthy aspects of smoking were disputed for so long by the tobacco industry. Of course I might just have a suspicious mind ...


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## LeeC (Feb 13, 2018)

A coincidence? I ran across an article about Bristol, UK. It went on about the wealthy there having strands of spikes on tree limbs so that birds couldn't roost and crap on their property. It certainly piqued my sadness at how we humans can have so much potential, and yet on the whole remain utterly stupid and self-destructive.

As with insects, if birds were to vanish, our sustaining environment would collapse into chaos. Or as E. O. Wilson noted, "If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago."

On the other hand, some among us are trying desperately to slow the tide of self-destruction. I also noticed this uplifting effort in National Geographic:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/01/why-birds-matter/

You can go back to debating which way the toilet paper should unroll now ;-)


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## bdcharles (Feb 16, 2018)

Thomas Pynchon is still alive!

Why did I not know this?!

So is Dick Van Dyke! And Jerry Lee Lewis! 

sychicdetonator:


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## LeeC (Jun 5, 2018)

What makes Owls so stealthy?
https://youtu.be/a68fIQzaDBY


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## Olly Buckle (Jun 6, 2018)

We have an owl looks just like that, difficult to tell from pictures if it is a Bengalese, like our Kali, or a European like our friend's, Odin. Europeans are much bigger. Someone discovered some Europeans in Sweden that were hunting foxes! Kali gets very worked up over ginger cats. Odin's favourite was hedgehogs, he seemed to get one almost every time he went out at one time..


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## LeeC (Jun 11, 2018)

I don 't know how many are paying attention across the pond, but I see more about the environment in the British press than I do here. 

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jun/11/chris-packham-springwatch-warns-of-ecological-apocalypse-britain

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/may/31/herbicides-insecticides-save-british-countryside-meaows


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## DeClarke (Jun 11, 2018)

GABA (Gamma AminoButyric Acid) and Serotonin are the two 'brake' neurotransmitters for the brain. When they are in high abundance, your body calms down and endorphins and other anti-aging chemicals are released. (HGH, DHEA, melatonin which is converted from serotonin, which helps you fall asleep)


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## LeeC (Jul 31, 2018)

*How are forests, drought, and America’s bread belt interlinked?*

*How are forests, drought, and America’s bread belt interlinked?*​
Forests absorb more solar energy than grasslands, counteracting global warming, and release vast amounts of water vapor that counteract drought. A fully grown tree can on average release 1,000 liters (264 gallons) of water vapor a day into the atmosphere: The entire Amazon rain forest sends up 20 billion tons a day.

The water vapor clouds, seeded with volatile gases like terpenes and isoprene also emitted by trees, form flying rivers that travel long, wind driven distances. The sky-borne river over the Amazon carries more water than the Amazon River itself. 

One off the areas prevailing winds have benefited with rain is America’s bread belt, but that’s noticeably changing with increasing droughts. The vicious cycle of deforestation and global warming has the potential to desiccate crops in America’s bread belt. It’s a vicious cycle in that it also contributes to deforestation worldwide. 

We’ve lost a third of our forests worldwide since pre-industrial times, and currently are cutting down nearly 60,000 trees a minute. Rainforests alone have decreased by more than half, and could be consumed in less than forty years. 

Deforestation, agrochemicals, and fossil fuels are major contributors to global warming. Continuing on our path of trashing the environment that sustains our very being, is a sad legacy we leave our children. 


Sashaying along the streets of Pompeii,
believing ourselves superior to natural sway.
Oil and water seething at every crossway.

Nature is oblivious to right or wrong,
simply adaptive changes in moving on.

Oil and water.

​


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## NeoKukulza (Aug 1, 2018)

Did you know that the reason coke and pepsi taste different is that coke was first made before refrigeration was wide-spread, so it was meant to be consumed warm, whereas pepsi was made AFTER refrigeration, so was meant to be drunk cold.  

There.  That is a thing you know now


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## Olly Buckle (Aug 4, 2018)

Forests act as water pumps, as much as 80% of the water that falls on a forest goes straight back into the atmosphere and carried on by the prevailing wind. In general terms if there is not a forest within 150 miles of the coast the rainfall will not be passed on and the centre of the continent will become desert.

When people cut forests like the Amazon basin where access is by water they began at the edge and cut the coastal 150 miles first, the rest will soon dry out and die.


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## Olly Buckle (Aug 4, 2018)

LeeC said:


> I don 't know how many are paying attention across the pond, but I see more about the environment in the British press than I do here.
> 
> https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jun/11/chris-packham-springwatch-warns-of-ecological-apocalypse-britain
> 
> https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/may/31/herbicides-insecticides-save-british-countryside-meaows


A dense population with a very controlled countryside, almost no wild places here, so the results of human activity are much more obvious. Wild places may not seem that relevant, but some experiments leaving wild strips in fields in the California valley gave remarkable results in terms of insect diversity and crop improvement.
There are people trying though, there is a large estate the other side of Brighton in West Sussex where they were growing corn 'to the doorstep' and not making a profit. They have gone for 're-wilding', not conservation, simply letting nature take its course. They have introduced deer, cattle and pigs, which would have been there naturally, and they have to cull them as there is no top predator (wolves). People thought it would become forest, but there are considerable open areas, turned over by the pigs and kept clear by deer eating young shoots.
They had complaints from neighbours at one point about birds keeping them awake at night, strange! When they investigated they discovered it was nightingales, this single estate has about 2% of all the UK's nightingales, and, strangely, when they found out what they were the neighbours stopped objecting


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## JustRob (Aug 4, 2018)

Olly Buckle said:


> Forests act as water pumps, as much as 80% of the water that falls on a forest goes straight back into the atmosphere and carried on by the prevailing wind. In general terms if there is not a forest within 150 miles of the coast the rainfall will not be passed on and the centre of the continent will become desert.
> 
> When people cut forests like the Amazon basin where access is by water they began at the edge and cut the coastal 150 miles first, the rest will soon dry out and die.



A yes, the ubiquitous water cycles. What I don't understand is, if water cycles are so ubiquitous then why don't fish have legs? Put enough pollution in the seas and they might need them to get out eventually though. Despite mankind's best efforts to screw it up, it's truly fascinating how nature keeps on working.

Erm ... hastily moving on ...

P.S.
Actually now that I've had time to think about it, which itself shows just what a full life I lead, if the water cycles have disappeared by the time that they develop legs then they'll have to walk out. What a bummer! It's the same all over though. By the time that today's babies are old enough to drive a hot rod there'll only be eco-electric cars, so they say. Time I went to bed, I think.


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## Olly Buckle (Aug 5, 2018)

JustRob said:


> A yes, the ubiquitous water cycles. What I don't understand is, if water cycles are so ubiquitous then why don't fish have legs? Put enough pollution in the seas and they might need them to get out eventually though. Despite mankind's best efforts to screw it up, it's truly fascinating how nature keeps on working.
> 
> Erm ... hastily moving on ...
> 
> ...



Fish got legs long ago, that is how we got here rather than being in the sea; it's just that not all fish got legs, nature always tries all possible combinations, if it doesn't happen it isn't possible.


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## LeeC (Aug 6, 2018)

Olly Buckle said:


> Forests act as water pumps, as much as 80% of the water that falls on a forest goes straight back into the atmosphere and carried on by the prevailing wind. In general terms if there is not a forest within 150 miles of the coast the rainfall will not be passed on and the centre of the continent will become desert.
> 
> When people cut forests like the Amazon basin where access is by water they began at the edge and cut the coastal 150 miles first, the rest will soon dry out and die.


Thanks for the additional info Olly. Imagine what we could do if humanity was, by and large, an intelligent species


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## Dark Dragon (Aug 6, 2018)

I don't know if humans have it in ourselves to be an intelligentspecies. We're not only clearing out the Amazon, but championing people who doso. 

You'd think there'd be a more fuel efficient way to purifysalt water. That would probbly help solve a lot of the world's water crisisissues. Or we could just adapt to living in the oceans again.


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## LeeC (Aug 7, 2018)

Do you understand the term “tipping point?”

There's a new scientific study on PNAS that explores the risk that self-reinforcing feedbacks could push the Earth System toward a planetary threshold that, if crossed, could prevent stabilization of the climate at intermediate temperature rises and cause continued warming on a “Hothouse Earth” pathway even as human emissions are reduced. Crossing the threshold would lead to a much higher global average temperature than any interglacial in the past 1.2 million years and to sea levels significantly higher than at any time in the Holocene. 

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/07/31/1810141115
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And Business Insider’s take on the study:

https://www.businessinsider.com/hothouse-earth-climate-change-tipping-point-2018-8


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## Olly Buckle (Aug 8, 2018)

Dark Dragon said:


> ]You'd think there'd be a more fuel efficient way to purifysalt water. That would probbly help solve a lot of the world's water crisisissues. Or we could just adapt to living in the oceans again.


Imagine something like corrugated iron with alternate light and dark channels and a transparent version inverted over the top of it with channels twice the width descending over the light channels. Placed in bright sunlight salt water is run down the dark channels, evaporates, condenses on the transparent cover and drips into the light channels.


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## Dark Dragon (Aug 8, 2018)

That sounds like a good idea, the only issue I can see is that I doubt many governments would bother or would be paid off by big oil or water bottle companies to shut something like that down. I think they have some salt water purifiers on the western United States, but not many and they aren't fuel efficient. 

Honestly, I think the biggest issues is that a lot of pepole don't care or it gets in the way of their convenience. Many would rather have the earth die around them than have to go out of the way or waste a few more seconds or dollars to get something, even if it will benefit them in the long run.


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## LeeC (Aug 9, 2018)

Dark Dragon said:


> . . .
> 
> Honestly, I think the biggest issues is that a lot of pepole don't care or it gets in the way of their convenience. Many would rather have the earth die around them than have to go out of the way or waste a few more seconds or dollars to get something, even if it will benefit them in the long run.


I don't believe such people actually think in terms of the world dying (more accurately not sustaining our type of life form). It's blatantly obvious though, that they don't care about the consequences, even to the extent of not caring about their children's future.


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## ParadoxBrother (Aug 12, 2018)

I sought to know the truth, so I journeyed to find it. As I was searching, I was always on the trail just behind the truth, barely out of reach. It came to be that the truth was, in turn, looking for me as well. When our paths crossed on a fateful day, we were revealed to each other. I saw what I was meant to know, what it wanted to show to me. We sat there and spoke, to be frank, I'm sure we talked for hours in discussion. The truth taught me what I wanted to know, and I gave it what I could. On that day I learned the veracity of those words, the undeniable and irrefutable. It took me a few hours to process after the truth had departed, and I was left in my own silence as the world carried on without me. I was granted the knowledge I sought after for so long, and now I wasn't sure what I was meant to do with it. So, I suppose I should impart what I know on you all today.








Velociraptors actually had feathers.


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## Dark Dragon (Aug 14, 2018)

The problem is a lot of pepole don't care about the truth, and that's hard to change. A lot of people prefer what is easier for them or what they find more atractive than true. Or more correclty probably, what is easier for them.


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## Olly Buckle (Aug 14, 2018)

Others may require sources and proofs.


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## Dark Dragon (Aug 14, 2018)

I wish more people would. A lot of pepole I interact with simply don't care about the proof or say it's bias, lies, or fake news. Some will look at the proof, but a lot of pepole I've come across, especially on the internet, refuse to look at the evidence or even otehr arguments if it goes against their worldviews.


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## Underd0g (Aug 28, 2018)

Just an interesting thing about what the the letters F, J, Q, R, V, and Y have in common... none of them have words in which they are silent.
In England however, the R is silent if followed by a consonant.

I found a loophole, however, double letters. Is the first F in effort silent or the second?


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## Olly Buckle (Aug 28, 2018)

It's true, my other half is a J, and never silent.


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## Olly Buckle (Oct 30, 2018)

Sheffield police helicopter unit is based in Letsby Avenue.


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## Olly Buckle (Nov 6, 2018)

There are a group of bungalows down Dungeness way that were taken over during the war to be used as pumping stations for PLUTO (Pipeline under the ocean} which supplied fuel for the invasion force. The insides were stripped out and the bungalows reinforced, they have two foot thick steel and concrete walls, steel girders every thirty inches in the roof, and concrete arches above them. After the war they returned to civilian use, but they must be just about the solidest built bungalows on the planet.


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## Winston (Nov 6, 2018)

To covert Feet Per Second to Miles Per Hour, multiply FPS by 0.6818181...


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