Garden & Solar Oven

Having $70 in home depot gift cards really helped here (Thanks Megan! she redeemed them from online surveys)
I finally got a raised garden built, using 4″x4″x8′ posts. Looking at it now I wish I could build a larger one! We definitely will once we get the money, 4′x8′ ? that would be awesome.

This is more than enough to deal with for now, I have to go and get some fill dirt from behind the house, then mix in the mulch and some potting soil. I plan to grow some more seedlings and also plant most of the tomato plants I’ve already grown, they need to get out of their pots and stretch their roots

Vegetable garden or toy fort, you decide.

I also got a chance to work on a satellite dish solar oven. I covered the dish a while back and I burnt a few things with it (works REALLY well) and even boiled a small amount of water in a cat food tin (not a great idea… smelt like fish )
This is definitely version 0.1, the pot holder is adjustable up to a point, enough to fine tune. The dish mount can be adjusted to a desired angle (in conjunction with the pot holder so it stays level) depending on if the sun is high or low (usually best cooking times are between 10am and 3pm) I haven’t tested it yet with the camping kettle, but I will do soon. Hopefully it boils in under 10 mins

Cook things (hopefully) or just set stuff on fire

One more crazy invention:
Using an old TV projection lens and some simple electronics, I created an LED pumpkin face projector. Pics of the projection soon… should have included those

Photos of the projected image soon ! It worked out pretty well

Greenery update

Some photos of the yard and plants. I finally got around to putting a seed-grown citrus tree in the ground, here you can see it surrounded by its anti-dog armor.

Rebar, plastic fencing and some sort of steel tube pot keep this tree from becoming sick-dog salad.

My 2 surviving cucumber plants (the other 3 became dog toys a while back when I carelessly left them at dog level.) are doing ok, but heading into November/December I will most likely have to move them inside somewhere, I started them at the wrong time
I sill have a bunch of seeds which I need to plant before I get too far into next year.

A Cucumber Blossum ! a solitary blossum... but still.

Table 1 awaiting a raised garden....

Table 2 awaiting a raised garden ....

I finally purchased a rainwater tank to experiment with, it hasn’t rained since I installed it but I expect some winter showers soon so I can water plants with it.

Yard view.

Solar Oven Fun

Parabolic Solar Oven. Cardboard, tape, glue, wood, wire and chrome vinyl.

Last sunday we had some fun with my father in law’s solar oven project. He built it for his math class, he will challenge his students to create as close to perfect parabolic dishes as possible surface them with something reflective (in this case outdoor chromed vinyl) and see what tempreature the focus gets too.

In this case we estimated that the tempreature of the foil pan got to about 190 degrees using an oven thermometer. We had hot dogs and also tried an egg, which took considerably longer to cook, but it cooked. And we ate it

Thermometer, inserted into a hot-dog, most likely touching the bottom cooking surface of the suspended pan.

Sizzling could distinctly be heard as these cooked in the sun.

Cooking on a wire

Aiming at the sun by getting an equalateral shadow around the dish onto the backboard.

Another rescued life.

I drive the frontage road home most of the time, it probably doesn’t save me much time or gas, but its more interesting than taking the freeway. Megan and I where carpooling last Thursday and getting pretty close to the end of the road where we turn to get to our neighborhood 5 minutes away. “Dog!”
I hit the brakes, I wasn’t going that fast. Looking over to the side of the road there was a small black dog right there where grass meets asphalt. We pulled over and long story short, we earned ourself another microchipless, tagless dog, smelling of roadkill and a walking zoo for ticks, to ad to our herd.

We rescued another one. He could have ended up under a cement truck or car, starved to death or been coyote lunch or he could have met someone who would have simply dropped him at Animal Control, where he may have been adopted, but was as equally likely to contract kennal cough or distemper and die a miserable death.

When I looked at him playing with our other dogs last night it hit me pretty hard; all of thier futures could have been very different, all of them where taken from or found escaping from places, things or circumstances that would have killed them given enough time.

District 9

This film is a a violent, shattering and horrifying look into a mirror reflecting our past human rights abuses and projecting them into a future where we are no different and treat moribund alien voyagers with the same illegal and repressive actions.
Neil Blomkamp & Peter Jackson’s District 9 assumes a spliced feel of documentary and action thriller that works very well on its mission to keep you gasping and reeling with horror and conflicted feelings for many of its well depicted characters.

I love this movie because its a sci-fi movie that brings reality and mind bending fiction very close together. (It also felt a little like half life 2 who’s story was not that dissimilar, except humans are getting the raw end of the deal)

Obviously being a South African movie it is heavy with perceptions and memories of aparthide by design, but the other main theme apart from segregation is the “military industrial complex” and its savage pursuit of new alien weaponry and the ability to use it effectively.
The way this is horrifyingly portrayed with no regard for life, alien or human, in my opinion is pretty close to reality if this scenario actually played out.

Technological and monetary gain over morals and rights is a running theme in our current reality and this film takes a logical progression and applies it to alien visitors rather blithely weaving in references, tactics & similar images to current real life scenarios.

The cycle of discreditation of a “fugitive”, lying to the public and key figures is all too familiar, the old addage knowledge is power holds very true in District 9’s universe and the aliens are either too nieve or on a completely different plain of being to recognize evil human motives

I highly recommend you see District 9, it is the first film I’ve seen in theaters in probably 3 months and I only heard of it 2 weeks before I saw it. All I needed was Peter Jackson+Sci-Fi that was enough for me. The Weta guys really worked up some fantastic imagery for this movie.

See a trailer here.

We truely are making a big damn mess.

The Pacific Trash Gyre

Please watch this video

Isn’t the internet a wonderful system for disseminating knowledge ? Yes it is, but what you do with that knowledge is beyond the control of anybody. I learned about this and I was instantly concerned, many people will find it horrifying but it will have little effect on their lives.

News to me like this, adds again and again to my utter disgust for us as a race. Displaying our ignorance, decadence, arrogance, stupidity and greed for all of the Earth to see. Earth and beyond even. What would an advanced Alien species think of us if they saw this ? We truly are an infant species, we have a lot of learning and repairing to do; they would pity us and may not even waste their time with us. (Read up on the Fermi-Paradox)

Anyway, enough conjecture. In the same email I learned of this immense problem (7 million tons of plastics covering an area twice the size of Texas) I also learned of this project.
It is ultimately aimed at cleaning up the mess, but also studying what can be done with the waste; recycling and processing into a form of diesel fuel.

This is a pretty shocking time in our history. We have created a very unnatural “resource” right in our own ocean that we are now looking at turning to our advantage. (just like extracting methane from landfills) And this problem has built up over a very short time, since the late 70’s ? (it was discovered in 1988)

It is truly an incredible time to be alive and to be conscious of our problems. Educate yourself !

Here is a good article that states more than I did here.
Heck why not just include a google news search link for “pacific trash”

Further to arguments on climate change, if all the IPCC data and scientist testimonies are not enough for some people, and they still rail about how we’re not having any impact on our planet, this right here is proof we can have a sickening effect on a planet’s system within 2-3 decades.

I’m also seeing a lot of folks saying that we can fix this problem if we (the US) avoid plastics in our daily lives. Are you insane ?
It isn’t the plastics that are the problem its what people do with them after they are deemed “unusable”.
EDUCATION is the problem, in our country and in the many developing and poor nations that have no recycling centers to turn to at all, no government programs and no officials that care that their municipalities dump waste directly into the ocean.
China, India and many pacific rim nations are all contributors to the problem, if you think not buying water bottles will have any effect on the trash in the pacific you don’t have the full picture.

World wide education and awareness is the solution. The US has a huge recycling industry to turn to USE IT.
(all the while, reducing your use of plastics IS a good idea, in conjunction with recycling, and heavy reuse.)

Plasma Arc Gassification

I first learnt about this interesting new technology via a Disclosure Project document. Yeah, that’s right, I’m a bit of a UFO nut.
The document was about suppressed technologies, a lot of it was kinda conspiracy theorist like, especially the fact that some of the technologies listed (like this one) are far from classified.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_arc_waste_disposal

I’ve always thought that one day landfills would be mined for their resources, but its happening now. Factories are extracting methane as fuel to support their plants, and now there are plans to convert this waste directly into useful gasses as fuel and to generate electricity.
I read through the list of current and planned facilities and got a slight feeling of pride when I learned one such plant is planned for Swindon, Wiltshire. The closest city to where I lived in the UK.
It shows you just how much we’re progressing and that if you don’t look into some of these things you’ll never know just how much.

Written with current sunlight.

Just got finished changing the oil in my car. Drving 60 miles a day for 2 months (roughly 3750 miles, my service interval) adds up quick my last 2 tanks of gas also varied widely, 35.7 and 26.4 mpg respectively. Ouch. Talk about a pendulum. (something odd going on, but it averages out.)

So, last night I watched a very good movie, suprisingly so also. I didn’t have high expecations of it, but its on a subject I am pretty obsessed with; climate change. “The 11th Hour” is Leonardo Dicaprio’s take on the subject and I was highly impressed. It is a very human movie; it differs from Inconvenient Truth somewhat because it is not filled with a slideshow presentation with graphs and animations (which is also very good and packs punch) but it is a continual interview style film running through many many scientists, professors and concerned academia who really lend a great personal touch to the message they are conveying.

This really let the film collect momentum through various educated perspectives, one of which I liked a lot, mostly because of its unbelievable simplicity and the fact it stressed that climate change is not the planets problem, it is ours.

It went something like this: Way back when the human race appeared our population flatlined at about just under a billion people, this continued for many centuries, farmers, craftsmen, builders and laborers all worked from “Current Sunlight”. All the energy used to grow food and resources used in day to day life was energy directly from the sun; current sunlight. Therefore there was only enough energy to support a certain amount of people.
As human life progressed we developed tools, we progressed to eventually become chemists, miners & engineers, very good chemists infact, we developed a way to extract energy (hydrocarbons) from something that had captured sunlight from a long time ago; dead plants and animals in many forms.
The fossil fuel age had begun, and our population balooned from something like 2 billion in the 30’s to 3 billion in the 1960’s (just 49 years ago !) and slowly it has risen to the 6.5 billion today.

This sized population can exist because we are harnessing ancient energy, which as it happens is not being replenished. Now, I’m not saying all the progress the human race has made is bad, today we have some mind boggling technologies that have helped us as a race survive, and some have made the Earth a better place. But, the current trend cannot continue.

I’m not going to get into all the peak oil stuff and when thats going to happen (some say the peak was already reached a few years ago) But all our ways of going about life on this planet currently rely on something that could dissapear and is not going to reappear for another few million years.
Take oil away, and we’re in a nasty situation.

We have to, and will most likely be forced to go back to living off of current sunlight as our primary energy source. When I heard this is was an absolute shot in the arm. It makes so much sense !
In today’s world, we have many solar technologies to generate energy directly from our current sunlight, and this energy: Electricity.

We just have to convince everyone on the planet. That, there is the problem.
We could reduce humanities carbon footprint considerably if every house that gets sun year round (like in Arizona, California, Utah, New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Mexico, Florida, Texas, Bermuda, the Phillipines, Hawaii, Many pacific islands, Spain, France, Portugal, China etc.. etc..) had some way of getting thier energy directly from the sun.

Now, I mentioned that this is our problem. It is, if we don’t want to see our population drastically & violently drop to sub 2 billion person levels when we run out of carbon based fossil fuels (remember, in 1960, only 49 years ago, the population was only 3 billion, the reverse could happen just as quickly, if not, faster.)
If we want to survive as a species and not become some post-apocolyptic warlike race scavenging for energy, then we have to adapt NOW.
And as climate change happens, keep in mind that things on this planet will make life here very difficult.
The planet will school us pretty well in inhospitible environment survival.

My favorite quote from the movie “The 11th Hour” was definately this:

The planet will survive this, the planet has all the time in the world; literally. We as a species, do not.

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Written with current sunlight; a very literal blog post title. My laptop is currently plugged into my “solar battery box” as it’s midday and the battery is charging; this is more efficient as more energy is being pushed to the battery, I can use this and still have the battery almost fully charged. Well, thats my opinion anyway but it was formed from empirical evidence; my battery is dying a bit and lasts a lot longer if I do most task that are required of it, while its charging. If I wait till the sun goes down and the battery starts to hover around 12.7 volts and below (used to be it would hold 13v for a fair amount of time) then the work that can be done by it drastically deminishes.

Nissan unveils the Leaf

I was highly impressed when I learned of Nissan’s EV-02 concept test electric car. Well the smokescreen has been blown away, it was the test car for the Nissan Leaf.
I’d like to seriously go and consider buying one when the time is right.

Aiming for compact and sub-compact markets with a range of 100 miles. Its finally almost here folks, the EV for EVeryone.

Why doesn’t Google News have an Environment tab ?

I learned yesterday that the government has declassified satellite images dating back to 2001, and all the way up to as recent as 2007, of Artic sea ice off the coast of Alaska among others.
Apparently these where kept secret under the Bush administration which factors into a point I’ll make in a minute.

Meanwhile, please take a look at the USGS Global Fiduciary Library photos of parts of the Arctic Sea. There are many many photos actually dating from 1999 to 2008 in this library, but the most striking are the side by side comparisons labeled with the years they where taken.
Yes folks. Global warming is real and I don’t actually care what causes it, even though I try to live as green as I can; because it makes sense ! sustainability and lowering carbon emissions makes sense !
It doesn’t matter WHAT caused global warming, the only way we can actually slow it is by lowering our carbon emissions, as we are speeding it UP, and one thing we don’t have is time. Its called the carbon cycle folks, and we screwed it up.

Ok, so onto my other point. The news tabs on Google are as follows:
Top Stories, World, Business, U.S., Sci/Tech, Elections, Sports, Health, Entertainment, Most Popular.
Now immediately to me 3-4 of those are utterly useless. I’ll let you decide

We have a Health tab, not useless but it is an issue that is currently of great concern to everyone, has been for a long time, and its a human issue, with a human face, its our problem.

Entertainment, again has a human face and 90% of the news in this tab is useless barely reportable crap.

Sports, unless there’s driving involved its going to be fairly boring for me. Again, its something humans do.

Elections, fairly useful but its not going to hold my attention unless its a local issue or its time to change presidents. (remember that, its not going to get clicked on unless it directly affects >me<)

Sci/Tech, now this, along with the World tab is probably where most climate related news articles get listed right now. Sci/Tech is probably my tab of choice if I actually ever want to click on a tab (I’ll admit I usually just click on the stories that are featured, I don’t go looking for news with that much effort; that’s bad. But that’s why we need …..)

An ENVIRONMENT TAB, so people don’t HAVE to search for news on the environment, I saw the story about these photos listed on the top three stories, by chance and the link took me to this site

Now, why don’t we have an Environment tab yet ? (which we should, Google is young and the problem with how we treat the environment is VERY old)
Because it doesn’t have a human face!

Terrorists = human face.
Murderers = human face.
Politicians = human face.
President Bush and his idiotocracy = human face. (yes folks, he was a distraction from what was really going on.)
TV personalities = human face.
Iran/Iraq = human faces.
Local elections, school boards, hospital staff, fires, robberies etc etc etc = human faces with exciting stories to tell.

Environment/Climate change = oh, a bunch of boring scientists telling us we’re all doing it wrong and we’re all going to kill the planet, and ourselves in the short term future.
Hmmm. Not a very fun message to report on is it ?

Thats why we don’t have an environment tab. It doesn’t make good news. Its too large to fit into peoples minds because it spans past more than 2 years ago and involves the planet as one large entity.
It doesn’t have a human face, its an indirect human threat; if it does have a human face, its ALL OF US. That’s too big of a focus to have for a concise, neat and tidy news piece or soundbite.
And even some news is too bad to report. Terrorists don’t seem like a big deal compared to the killing of the only planet we have.

Why we should have an environment tab on all news outlets: Not just climate change could be reported there, but all the technology now being sold to us that is going “green” should be featured there too.
Scientists blogs, university studies, USGS satellite photos, (now that they’re apparently not a threat to national security, THANKS MR. BUSH, I FEEL A LOT SAFER NOW!)
All this stuff needs to be pushed into the public sphere just as aggressively as who is now dating Britany Spears, Who just bombed who in which middle eastern country and for what perceived reason, What tax payers are now footing the bill for, How angry this guy is about his 401k etc etc…….. ad infinitum.

In my opinion which isn’t that valid, because I don’t run my own news site or million dollar internet company the Environment tab should actually be at the top. But it shouldn’t be the only tab. It must prominently co-habit the space other news is featured if it is ever to become a mainstream concern.

In 50 years when all the terrorists are dead, the financial markets are gone, the sea has risen and we no longer have the resources to go and fight questionable wars, what will you report then ?