Tag Archives: Nature

Philosophy by Limerick – The Engineer

Posted on August 4, 2012 by | 4 comments

Devoted his life to the noise
Of civilization with poise.
Applied science, he called it.
Obstruction?  He mauled it
With money and tinker toys.

Old Jules

4 Comments

Posted in 2012, limericks, Science

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Philosophy by Limerick – The ‘Environmental Scientist’

Posted on August 2, 2012 by | 1 comment

http://spaceweather.com/

Build an arrogance fortress and man it.
Pretend you can save this old planet
You trivial beast
An infection of yeast
On the surface, too tiny to plan it.

Old Jules

1 Comment

Posted in 2012, limericks, Nature

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The Fervent Hope of Climate Change Enthusiasts

Posted on August 2, 2012 by | 9 comments

Extent of surface melt over Greenland’s ice sheet on July 8 (left) and July 12 (right). Measurements from three satellites showed that on July 8, about 40 percent of the ice sheet had undergone thawing at or near the surface. In just a few days, the melting had dramatically accelerated and an estimated 97 percent of the ice sheet surface had thawed by July 12. In the image, the areas classified as “probable melt” (light pink) correspond to those sites where at least one satellite detected surface melting. The areas classified as “melt” (dark pink) correspond to sites where two or three satellites detected surface melting. The satellites are measuring different physical properties at different scales and are passing over Greenland at different times. As a whole, they provide a picture of an extreme melt event about which scientists are very confident. Credit: Nicolo E. DiGirolamo, SSAI/NASA GSFC, and Jesse Allen, NASA Earth Observatory
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/greenland-melt.html

Good morning readers. Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

The people for whom climate change is central to their countless grant and research applications, and the people for whom NO climate change is central to their business models are probably both grinding their teeth in frustration.

Sooooo. All the academians, school kids being trained to believe they can do something to ‘save the planet’, other people who just enjoy the feel of shrill proclamations, jeremiads and threats of doom briefly danced in the streets.  Whoopteedoo!  Everybody’s going to die!

And the people with business models demanding they fervently deny climate change looked around for buildings high enough to jump from.

However, core sampling of the Greenland ice soon revealed this happens occasionally, last time maybe 150 years ago at a time when nobody claims human beings were causing climate change.

Damn Damn Damn Damn Damn.  Cry the people desparately wanting the ice caps to melt, sea levels to rise and all the coastal cities of the world to drown.

Ohboyohboyohboy! Applaud the folks with the business models requiring a continuation of the kinds of behaviors the other folks think cause man made climate change.

Changing horses in mid-stream isn’t easy, but sometimes it’s necessary.  Fact is, whether climate change is happening, is man made, is going to result in a disaster is just too large an object of comprehension to convincingly argue.  Suggesting academians and school kids can do anything to influence it one way or another is too patently absurd to convince anyone besides a grant review committee from the US Department of Environment.

Besides, there’s Genetic Engineered corn out there growing hair inside the mouths of test hamsters.  The same corn those school kids and academians are having for lunch.  http://aaemonline.org/gmopost.html

There’s a middling potential for glow-in-the-dark halibut, salmon and whales swimming up out of the north Pacific with butcher knives clinched in their teeth doing a mutant invasion of Alaska to California coastlines.  Time will argue a lot more convincingly and rapidly whether those happen, and if they do they’ll render questions about man made climate change more-or-less moot.

As for business models, there’s a lot of new potential for speculation and investment in new inventions.  An inside-the-mouth electric shaver, for instance, might represent the wave of the future.  Live flashlights made from mullets caught off the Oregon coast, not requiring batteries.  No need to stamp them, MADE IN JAPAN.  That will be obvious enough.

[Insert, “It’s an ill wind that blows no good”, “It’s time to look on the bright side of things,” and other appropriate quotes here.]

Old Jules

9 Comments

Posted in 2012, Creative Writing, Current Issues, Education, Government, Grants, Human Behavior, Outdoors, Survival

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Earth in Upheaval – Immanuel Velikovsky – Book Review

Posted on July 23, 2012 by | 10 comments

During the last 18 months of Albert Einstein’s life, November 1953 until April, 1955. he sat around with Immanuel Velikovsky on numerous occasions mulling over the implications of the historical/geological evidence described here.  Largely ignored, met with a shrug by the scientific community because no explanation within accepted scientific theory could account for the massive physical evidence, the two men examined other possibilities, no matter how unconventional.

Mountain ranges yanked from their roots and moved laterally, sometimes as much as 100 miles during a short passage of time.  Megafauna stacked like cordwood in cracks from southern Asia to the Arctic Circle by the millions, perhaps hundreds of millions.  Countless among them quick-frozen rapidly enough to leave them relatively undecayed for examination by modern man thousands of years later. 

Entire tropical forests uprooted, moved by massive waves and left to petrify when the water receded.   When Bad Things Happen to Good Megafauna

If Einstein had lived to see the publication of Velikovsky’s book his interest, prestige and comments might have provided the momentum to carry the discussion into the overall scientific community and more widespread recognition.  Might have forced the unpalatable conclusions to which examination of the evidence leads without leaving many alternatives.

Instead, Planet in Upheaval was published quietly, largely ignored by science, Velikovsky vilified and often denounced by his peers.

But the book’s still out there, used.  Probably available from Amazon for pennies.  I bought my copy in a thrift store in Kerrville for $.25.  I couldn’t have afforded it, wouldn’t have bought it had it cost a buck.

But I bought it for quarter and have now read it enough times to make up for a lot of the people who never did.  Pick up a copy somewhere and you can make up for a few others.  I suspect you won’t be satisfied with a single reading.

If you do read it you’ll be forced to conclude, Stuff Happens.  Sometimes it happens fast and big.  And it doesn’t need man to push it along, make it happen.  Doesn’t even pause to explain itself and why it happens for the benefit of the best minds of humanity to carefully ignore.

Old Jules

Afterthought – Edited in to avoid confusion:

The book referred to here is not Chariots of the Gods.  The author is not Erich von Daniken, of whom you probably have a vague recollection as a discredited ‘scientist’, author of half-truths, incomplete truths, and fig-newtons of the imagination. 

Erich von Daniken.  Immanuel Velikovsky.  Two entirely different individuals.  They even spell their names differently.  Admittedly both foreigners by heritage, but they had little else in common.  Von Daniken actually had a following and readership.  Velikovsky, on the other hand, was a scientist.

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Posted in 1950's, 2012, Astronomy, Nature, Science, Thrift Stores

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Striped Pangasius, Calcium Pills, and Taurine

Posted on July 14, 2012 by | 9 comments

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

Just playing catchup here.  Posting a few items I’ve intended to mention for a while, but kept forgetting.

First, a while back I mentioned a kind of farm-fed Vietnamese frozen fish filets I got on one of those drama sales at HEB.  Told you it was great fish, cheap, none of that on-the-brink fishy taste a person is liable to get buying fish.

Bought several packages since and what I said remains true.  Striped Pangasius.

Secondly, if you’re troubled with awakening nights because of hand-grenades going off in your joints you might give this a try.  I usually have to be troubled with it a dozen or so times before I remember to do it, but it might be months before it starts again.  Usually when this Texas humidity goes ballistic.

I discovered sometime a long while back that when I eventually remember to do it, two grams of calcium pills per day for a week or two will cause it to stop.  Mightn’t work for you, but it does for me.  I just wish I could remember it sooner when the joints catch fire nights.

Thirdly, that taurine I told you about a while back I was taking to try to get off blood pressure medications didn’t succeed getting free of it.  But the stuff’s so good in other ways I’m going to keep taking it when I can afford it.

Not much else going on here besides the sky full of humidity and hazy sunlight.  I’m wondering whether there’s enough hot weather left to take the sheep shears to the long haired cats again.  Wondering whether they’ll have time to grow a good coat back before the weather cools enough to make them wish they’d kept the fur.

Old Jules

9 Comments

Posted in 2012, America, Animals, Outdoors, Senior Citizens

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Trot-lining for Skunks

Posted on July 12, 2012 by | 4 comments

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.  I appreciate you.

We’ve been blessed with some moisture the past couple of days and the ground’s soft enough I might be obliged to cancel my trip to Kerrville for groceries and cat food.  Not at all sure that car will make it up the hill until things dry enough to give the tires some purchase.

When I went out to turn the chickens loose this morning I found I’d offended a skunk who’d been trying to take advantage of things by digging under the wall of the chicken-house several places.  Because it happens occasionally, and a skunk, or coon will kill every chicken it can corner, I’d laid out chains along the bottoms of the walls with treble-hooks attached.  Evidently this was a new skunk, or [if an old one] it had forgotten the last time it tried this.

Underneath that wall is limestone, most places, but there are a few places were a determined predator could get underneath if it got past the treble-hooks.  This one didn’t.  Left a tuft of hair, a bit of paw-hide and a stink enough to have the chickens overly anxious to get the hell out of Dodge in a hurry. 

Maybe some things are worse than having your life saved.

Incidently, all that erosion control stuff I was doing for a while’s performing a lot better than I expected.  Lots of that cedar’s now buried in silt.  This place must have been losing tons of soil every time it rained for longer than anyone alive has any business remembering.

Damned cattle were eating their seed corn without a thought.  Same as the rest of us.

Old Jules

4 Comments

Posted in 2012, Animals, Country Life, Free-ranging-chickens, Solitude, Transportation

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Hurling Off Splinters and Chunks of our Lives Into the Parker Spiral

Posted on July 9, 2012 by | 2 comments

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.  Old Sol jumped when I said “Frog!” a little while ago, so you can rest easy knowing I’ve got him headed for the horizon, rate of climb indicator showing him right on schedule.  I’m figuring his ETA’s going to be about what you’re expecting.

Back when I was a wealthy man [measured in how much time I figured was left between me and exiting the vehicle] I used to spend a lot more time and energy begging and cajoling Old Sol to behave himself.  I put up with all his yawning and complaining, because I had a lot of life I was needing to get rid of and that seemed as good a way to slough it off as anything else.

Not just that way, either.  I was fat with life, spent it like a drunken sailor hurling chunks and splinters of it off every which way, losing weight gradually until I was more comfortable carrying what was left of it around in earth gravity.  I’ve got a lot more of my life spinning around in the Parker Spiral not knowing whether it’s Abel or Mable or which way’s up than I have left around here to tip my hat to.

What’s left is comparable to trying to squeeze groceries, gasoline, cat food and necessaries into a monthly Social Security pension check, so I tend to be more conscious about what I spend it on than I used to do.  It ain’t as though there’s any of it I can afford to run off downstream without me having had a look at it.

So, once I’ve reminded Old Sol he’s got important people waiting on him, I try to get on with my other business and let him tend his own affairs.  Lately he’s been grumpy about that, running the thermometer up over a hundred degrees F, but he’s going to have to get used to it. 

I ain’t got time for Old Sol’s games, not like I thought I did back when I was fat and wealthy.

Old Jules

2 Comments

Posted in 2012, Adventure, Astronomy, Senior Citizens, Texas

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Opposing Thumbs, Tools and the 21st Century

Posted on July 8, 2012 by | 8 comments

Hi readers.  You 21st Century people probably see this sort of thing every day, take it for granted.

If a person has a piece of land with too many trees on it the 21st Century’s figured out a way to get them off in a hurry.

All that old fashioned 20th Century stuff with chainsaws, backhoes, bulldozers and such seemed futuristic when compared to a double-blade axe and a span of oxen.  But opposing thumbs don’t sit still for inefficiency.

Enter:  The Tree Terminator.

He’ll run spang out of trees before he runs out of machine, I’m thinking.  But he’s got a rock rake he can put on it to pile up all the rocks exposed by the overgrazing cows, cutting out trees and general devilments of geology.  And once that’s done there’s probably an attachment to castrate goats and another to balance the check book.

The 21st Century don’t need no stinking badges.

Old Jules

8 Comments

Posted in 2012, Country Life, Homesteading, Human Behavior, Nature, Relationships, Science, Texas

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US Citizenry Herding the Future Into New Chutes

Posted on July 6, 2012 by | 5 comments

Climate change no longer tops US environment worries

The people who get on the telephone and pester other people to tell them what’s important and what isn’t have made a disturbing discovery.  Whereas the US public used to think global climate change was the daddy longlegs to fret about, they’ve switched horses.  Now they’re worrying about whether they’re going to have enough water to drink, along with a few other things.

Considering how well informed, literate, intelligent and prone the US public is to worry about what celebrity is fooling around on a spouse, or what dress some celebrity wore to some function, this represents a surprisingly practical and unlikely issue for the citizenry to choose for concern.

Not to say it’s timely.  Timely might have been better defined as back before the fish in all those major rivers downstream from cities discharging treated sewage into them developed worrisome ulcers on their skins.  And became scary to eat in other ways.

Timely would have been back when there weren’t houses over all the major aquifers built to demand future water until the mortgages were paid off in four decades.  Timely would certainly have included a population asking itself,

“Am I going to be able to eat [or even smoke] the grass I’m irrigating by robbing water from an aquifer with a 100,000 year recharge cycle?  Any chance this golf course would grow grain crops as a better use of non-renewable and as-yet uncontaminated water?”

But the telephone pesterers didn’t go a step further and ask the well-informed pestered what, precisely, they’re each doing to better the situation.  Maybe the next p0ll will do that.  The answers will involve writing letters to politicians and signing petitions, almost certainly.  Not flushing the commode once a day and keeping the showers short. 

Sure as hell not letting the lawn die and the golf clubs rust.

Old Jules

5 Comments

Posted in 2012, America, Country Life, Current Issues, Nature, Science, Survival

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Magnetic Fingers et al Preliminary Hypothesis

Posted on July 6, 2012 by | 2 comments

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

Flux Transfer Event Topology,

Old Sol – Fondling Mother Earth With Magnetic Fingers

I doubt anyone’s going to be edified by this, understand what I’m saying, or assign anything serious to it.  But I’m going to say it anyway. 

Those flux transfer events between earth and Old Sol and their 8 minute dayside intervals are manifesting themselves in a number of indirect, measurable ways a person in his right mind wouldn’t be inclined to attribute to them.   The 8 minute gap isn’t actually an 8 minute gap, but is filled in with flux transfer events targeted somehow to other solar system bodies.  Those show up as reflected energy detectable and measurable on darkside earth, distinguishable by the magnitudes and distances of the objects doing the reflecting.

The hypothesis, weak enough to begin, weakens further relative to the ‘active’ and ‘passive’ events sunside, spinward and anti-spinword, and the ‘hidden’ events the guy at University of Iowa detected.  But there’s a body of indications the passive events are actually the boundary zone where the reflective energy merges and influences the weakening dayside events.

It’s not my intention to persuade anyone to the accuracy of what I’ve said here.  The limited testing I’ve done to form the hypothesis has been almost entirely on darkside and twilight-zone data.  However, the data I’m using is probably only one of the ways these events are manifesting themselves and being recorded as unrelated phenomena.  Anyone with an interest and a smidgen of imagination can probably find other datasets equally measurable and testable.

And anyone not interested enough to do it probably is better qualified to judge whether there’s any validity to it.

Old Jules

2 Comments

Posted in 2012, Astronomy, Human Behavior, Relationships, Science

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