sastyk | May 18, 2010
Ok, part of this is just that I really like the word "Glyptodon" and am trying to find more uses for it ;-). But there is a point here, I'm pretty sure.
A while back I was teaching a class, and the gentleman teaching before me, an Algonquin Native Descendent, who was talking about the history of the ways that waterways in the Northern US had impacted patterns of settlement and development, became quite passionate at the sight of Eric's t-shirt, which had an mastodon on it. The gentleman launched into a staunch defense of his ancestors, who for a long time were typically considered to be…
sastyk | May 17, 2010We still don't have the faintest idea how much oil is spewing out of the well in the Gulf. Nor do we have the faintest idea what the full environmental consequence of what may well be the biggest single-event human-caused. ecological disaster of all time (the very fact that I have to add the word "single-event" to that statement should tell you something). We know that it is almost certainly more than all the low estimates to date, and we know that the ecological consequences will be huge, lasting and we do not understand them.
That is, we know some of the potential effects, we know they…
sastyk | May 14, 2010From occasional partner-in-crime Keith Farnish (and author of _Times Up_) comes a scathing but accurate indictment of superficial youth environmentalism.
(our heroine in her pricey electric car, cruising the streets of Beverly Hills)
Farnish writes:
I have met some incredible young people with vision, passion and the willingness to stick two fingers up at the system in order to create some kind of change. I have learnt from some young people what it feels like to be a concerned person in a society that values shopping, celebrity and vacations above the fundamental need to have a functioning…
sastyk | May 14, 2010A couple of administrative notes before I head off to a weekend involving friends, arboretum plant sales, weeding the asparagus patch, planting an alphabet garden and trying to decide if we really do need a pet sheep.
First, as some of you may remember I'm running an on-site family workshop at my house in rural upstate New York over Memorial Day weekend. Families are coming with their kids (if any) to spend time learning about goat care, dairying, herbs, gardening, poultry, wild foods, soil building, reducing your energy usage and adapting in place. I've got one spot left for a family…
sastyk | May 13, 2010I was out of town when Zuska posted this piece about trying to feed a family on a food stamp budget, and I've been meaning to respond to her suggestion that I might have something to add for a while. The article she builds on is one in which chefs try and come up with food stamp budget menus that are also healthy and appealing. Zuska comments on the difficulty of this, and challenges me to come up with something too:
A few problems with any of these solutions: as noted in the article, cooking from fresh ingredients takes more time than buying processed food, so although you get more, and…
sastyk | May 12, 2010From My Favorite News Source, which manages always to put its finger on the problem:
"I think everybody is getting a little fed-up with the hurricanes, earthquakes, and tsunamis," EPA engineer Thomas Bergman said. "Not to mention UV rays and acid rain. And, not to be petty, but shark attacks? Mankind doesn't have enough on its plate already without having to worry about getting eaten alive by killer sharks? I'm sorry, but that is just unacceptable."
Added Bergman, "The environment may be in peril, but it has no right to treat us like animals."
In an impassioned final warning, Administrator…
ejohnson | May 11, 2010Do you have a burning question to put to the ScienceBlogs bloggers?
Perhaps it's ethical - should companies be able to patent specific genes? Should primates have the same rights in laboratory settings as humans?
Maybe it's silly - would you rather pet a dinosaur, or shake hands with a Neanderthal?
Or maybe you're just looking for simple facts - what is the Higgs Boson and why do physicists want to find it? How much salt is in your fast food order?
Whatever you've wondered, now is your chance to ask. ScienceBlogs is reinstating our former Ask a ScienceBlogger series, in which (you guessed…
sastyk | May 11, 2010I plant weeds sometimes. I just feel I should admit this upfront, and come out with it and accept your outrage. You see, my property isn't exactly untouched - it was a sod farm at one point (although most of the actual sod harvesting was done across the road on a field that is not mine), which means that for about decade from the mid-70s to the mid-80s, people poured incredibly toxic chemicals on the ground to keep the grass uniform and then dug up the topsoil and sold it rich people who couldn't wait long enough for grass to grow.
Before that it was a dairy farm, cleared as far as the eye…
sastyk | May 10, 2010Just a note to let you all know that we're having weird weather (inch sized hail, temperature shifts of 60 degrees in under an hour, thunderstoms, high winds, hot, freezing.,..) and weird power outages and weird server problems and the formal diagnosis is that the ordinary weirdness that is this blog will continue as soon as my local power company, them that control the weather and ISP providers deem it worthy of their attention.
Sharon
sastyk | May 7, 2010Again, Stuart Staniford runs the numbers and clarifies the analysis, and comes up with some really hideously bad possibilities. In his "Odds of Cooking the Grandchildren" Staniford shows us the implications of a PNAS paper that I'd missed:
There is a horrible paper in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (hat-tip Desdemona Despair), which looks at how the limits of human physiology interact with upper-range global warming scenarios. The bottom line conclusion is that there is a small - of order 5% - risk of global warming creating a situation in which a large fraction…
sastyk | May 6, 2010Note: This is the first kind of canning you should try, and the most basic, and IMHO, most useful kind. It is definitely worth experimenting with when you've got an excess of produce, which many people do this time of year. If you don't have your own overproductive garden, perhaps you can offer to preserve some for a friend with a garden, in exchange for some food - and most farmers offer bulk prices if you can buy in quantity. Try shopping at the end of the day, when farmers don't really want to take the food home anyway!
It is starting to be time to think about preserving food. Why…
sastyk | May 6, 2010Note: This is part of a two-part piece on the basics of canning (the whole thing in more refined form is contained in _Independence Days_ as well). In a previous post, I wrote about putting canning in perspective - it is not all of food preservation, nor is it essential. That said, however, I get more questions how how to can than all other forms of food preservation put together, so since my food storage class is doing Pressure Canning this week, I thought I'd re-run essays I've written about how to can. I should note, I ask that anyone who has never canned before (or not for decades -…
sastyk | May 6, 2010I've got a class and Eric's got a final today, plus kid stuff, so I won't have time to read through the President's Cancer Panel Report today, but I do think it is worth noting that the recommendation that we start thinking more seriously about environmental factors and the health consequences they have has reached the mainstream. We know appallingly little about the chemical experiments we are enacting upon ourselves - we know very little, for example, about how they affect develping fetuses, despite the heavy prenatal exposure all our kids get. We know very little about the aggregate…
sastyk | May 5, 2010"It is funny, but not that funny."
Eric's comment does not stop my uncontrollable giggling. My step-mother comes over to see why I'm hysterical. She agrees with Eric - it is funny, but not funny enough to explain why tears of laughter are literally coming out of my eyes.
I'm reading a passage in Michael Perry's excellent book _Coop: A Year of Poultry, Pigs and Parenting_. I gave the book to my step-mother for her birthday, and during a family visit (note blog silence) from which we returned last night, I finally read it.
Now I read a lot of the "How We Done Moved to a Farm and Made Fools…
sastyk | April 30, 2010I can't think when I've heard something as disingenuous as Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein's claim that he was "humbled" by his questioning by Congress. Oh, wait, I can...in the musical Chicago, when Billy Flynn, the star attorney points out to Roxy Hart that because people are idiots, we can only sell one idea at a time.
Blankfein's message is that Goldman is good for the economy, that ultimately, Goldman and its ilk are here to serve us and make our lives better. His presentation is reasonable, calm, and sleazy - but he's definitely hoping you'll believe it - that the problem is a…
sastyk | April 29, 2010
If you are anywhere near the Massachusetts North Shore, you could come on up on Saturday between 10 and 2 to Beverly. Say howdy, hang out, talk poultry, see the fanciest and newly expanded chicken coop in town and enjoy what is supposed to be a stunningly beautiful spring day near the seashore. My Moms are holding their second annual "Chicken Open House" to encourage new poultry keepers, and we'll be visiting. Last year they expected 20 people and more than a hundred showed up - it was a blast.
The address is 10 Harrison Ave, Beverly, MA 01915.
Here's more info! Hope to see some of you…
sastyk | April 29, 2010The news from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill is not good. If the NOAA estimates are right about the size of the spill it could dwarf Exxon Valdez:
Over the last few days, estimates had held that the Gulf of Mexico oil spilling was leaking about 1,000 barrels, or 42,000 gallons, into the water each day--bad, but still not historically bad on a scale like the spill caused by the Exxon Valdez. Except now, after closer investigation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says that oil company BP's estimate might in fact be five times too low.
Rear Adm. Mary Landry, the Coast Guard's…
sastyk | April 28, 2010From the wonderful Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog (a favorite of mine) over at Research Blogging, is a fascinating summary of paper that describes the ways that most modern seed varieties, selected to be used under commercial conditions, don't do as well under organic conditions, because we haven't selected for the qualities that would enable success:
To perform well under organic conditions, varieties need to get a fast start, to outcompete weeds, and they need to be good at getting nitrogen from the soil early on in their growth. Organic farmers tend to use older varieties, in part…
sastyk | April 26, 2010I'm just now finishing wading through the Earth Day e-waste/propaganda/inspiring educational bullshit in my in-box. After a certain point, I stopped reading. Which means I almost missed my new favorite use of Earth Day, which was sent to me by FAIR, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, the largest of our anti-immigrant groups here in the US. It turns out that FAIR is deeply, deeply concerned with the ecological impact of Brown folk, and they really want us, on Earth Day, to think hard about the impact of people who are not white (and thus, of course, are not like us real…
sastyk | April 26, 2010I wrote Independence Days: A Guide to Sustainable Food Preservation and Storage because when it came time for me to take the next steps in eating locally and homegrown - to holding some of summer's bounty for the long winter, there wasn't any book that really covered what all I needed to know. After writing A Nation of Farmers about the "Why" of growing your own and eating locally, I ran into hundreds of people who had the same problem. They wanted to keep eating the same great food after the CSA boxes stopped coming or the farmer's market closed down, but they didn't know how.
One of the…