The Upside Is Really Great Surf.

Polka Dot Gallows today, from the LA Times, forsooth.

So.  El Niño is here- and on track to be the most intense on record, actually.  Which means?

Floods, mudslides, drought and crop failure in Africa and other places;

11 million children in immediate need of food.

But hey!  Really great surf in California!

Oh, and beach communities battered into oblivion.

Always look on the bright side!

And in that vein; isn't it great how our ability to focus on the utterly trivial is being honed into perfection by our need to ignore reality - at any cost?

Progress!

You've got to tell them... Soylent is made from... FOOD!!

Hi everybody.  Still here; still intending to blog more; but reality is against us.  Our part of Minnesota is officially a "disaster area", because of the stuck jet streams; 20 inches of rain in May and June, much of it torrential.  We have secondary bridges and roads out in many places- and no idea when, or even if, they'll be repaired.  We're doing better than many of our neighbors, though.  If they took the risks and planted their crops very early, they may be ok; if they decided to wait- they may get no crop at all; too wet to work the fields for too long.

Besides being overwhelmed with regular work, which is always late and difficult, blogging requires some kind of enthusiasm on my part.  And it's not that there's a lack of things to talk about- it's that there are too many.  And too often, discussion of things like the situation in Egypt just seems futile.  Nothing we say here will have any useful point to it.  It seems.

What finally got me off my figurative fanny today was this stunning bit of insanity.  Watch the video first; and beware of the Golem-Sucks advertising:

Ok, got that?  The 24 year old software engineer has figured out a way to rid the food system of waste, and help out with hunger in the impoverished regions of the world.  It's easy!  Just put it all into powder with a 20 year shelf life!  Why didn't we think of this before??

The stunningly insane part is- how easily he has the entire world press going right along with him.  Not surprisingly, they have a nice, logical set of arguments in favor of powdered food; take a look at them here on their crowdfunding site (the project has ended- alas you can no longer contribute here; but they did raise just under $800,000...)  An end to waste!  No more shopping, or cooking, or washing dishes!  Cool- has to save tons of energy, right?

Well, no.  How did we get to a place were NONE of the journalists covering this (so far as I can see) are familiar with the concept of "embodied energy"?  You have powdered protein here?  Um- where did it come from?  The store, obviously!

This is typical of the "answers" to global problems offered by "young software engineers".  The mind boggles.  It's the kind of analysis any systems thinker - um - thinks about, instantly.  Doing some digging, it did not really take me too long to find a reliable list of Soylent ingredients.  (Incidentally- many of us already know the name, "soylent"- hm; is there a trademark/copyright/IP conflict here?  Already contentious.  You never know what the courts will say, but personally- I would bet that name is "occupied".)

Ok; the list of ingredients:


Maltodextrin (carbs) (made from - corn, or wheat!)
Oat Powder (carbs, fiber, protein, fat) (made from- oats!)
Whey Isolate (protein) (made from - milk!)
Grapeseed Oil (fat)  (made from - grapes!)
Potassium Gluconate  (made from - sugar!)
Salt (sodium)
Magnesium Gluconate  (made from - sugar!)
Monosodium Phosphate
Calcium Carbonate  (limestone!)
Methylsulfonylmethane (Sulfur)  (actually; sulfur added to - natural gas?)
Creatine  (made from - meat!)
Powdered Soy Lecithin  (made from - soybeans!)
Choline Bitartrate (made from - something like sugar!)
Ferrous Gluconate (Iron)  (made from - sugar!)
Various vitamin and mineral supplements


Do you begin to understand?  Leaving aside the glaring suppositions that a) we truly know all our nutritional requirements, and b) this is all of them; exactly where are the energy savings; if instead of humans directly consuming corn, wheat, oats, milk, meat, etc, etc, etc, - we still have to grow all those crops; then reduce the simple components to powder?  Powdering, I assure you, requires a great deal of energy input; as do all separation/ purification processes.  And- are we going to now grow grapes for their seed oils?  What do we do with the rest of the grape?  I'll bet they start using palm oil soon; much more available.

The kid is able to buy the powdered ingredients for cheap right now- because they are indeed all manufactured as part of industrial food processes, and "by products" of animal feed or brewing or cheese making.  So- ask yourself; how does it scale up?  Way, way, up: in order to make any difference to anything, according to their own arguments.  Demand for the powdered components would skyrocket- and so would the prices.

Soon - just as is the case right now with quinoa, the farmers growing the crops would be selling them to the wealthy for their powders, and be unable to afford, once again, to feed themselves from their own crops.

I have to say; this is obvious; and we know this.  And yet- the Polka Dot Gallows paths we're on continue to thrive.

Polka Dot Feet.

Crazy year.  Like you weren't aware.  This is just to add to your list of how crazy.

Mom And Son Accused Of Stealing Gopher Feet.

Well.  Ok, nearly $5,000.00 worth of frozen gopher feet.  Pocket gophers, to be exact; if you ever wondered where the pockets are; they're right there in the photo- and they use them to carry seeds and roots back to the tunnels; seriously destructive.

This, incidentally, is right in my backyard; no, I don't know these folks (whew!) but it would easily be possible; Preston is a town we are in and out of all the time.

And, I have to sympathize with the victim- we have gopher wars here constantly; they're tree killers.  The bounty on their front claws is a slight remuneration for the trouble of catching them.

On the other hand, I've got personal experience with professional gopher trappers; we tried to get some to help us out.  But.  They like to leave a few untrapped; for seed.  Gophers are their crop- no, they don't want them wiped out.  The bounty can help when it pays the local kids a few extra bucks for going after them- but the pros just give the illusion of control.  And cost money.

Still here; in between downpours; the work year on the farm is goofed up by the late, late winter, followed immediately by summer; spring lasted about 3 days, I think.  Overworked.

Oh, and- are you aware- they year is half over, this Friday?  Summer solstice.  Yep, we'll have the bonfire/picnic, and I'd love it if you join us on your own places around the world.  But it's all kind of last minute/out of breath/ on the fly this year.

I'll be back!

Crazy as a bedbug.

I've been stymied for days for an acceptable non-review topic here- most of the world is simply too utterly derailed to bear closer scrutiny.  I doubt any of us need more depressing information.

So I was delighted today when the NYT published a bedbug story- complete with deranged scientists.

Some of it is actually good news you can use.  Turns out, an ancient "folk" remedy for bedbugs (which have been exploding in US cities- and motels-) not only works; it works extremely well.  The leaves of some bean plants (list not included) have microscopic hooks on the underside that happen to be just the right size, shape, and strength - to capture and immobilize bed bugs.


   "Generations of Eastern European housewives doing battle against bedbugs spread bean leaves around the floor of an infested room at night. In the morning, the leaves would be covered with bedbugs that had somehow been trapped there. The leaves, and the pests, were collected and burned — by the pound, in extreme infestations."

Sounds good to me!  

The "deranged" scientists crack is from me- because the piece reports their "surprise" that a piece of traditional wisdom - works : pah; only a "folk remedy!" - you know; like aspirin, digitalis, quinine...

Scoffing at ancient wisdom is in fact a proven piece of idiocy.  Isn't it time we stop being surprised that our ancestors were smarter than mud?

Then; their first thought is "cool, we'll make an improved version of these micro hooks!" - only to discover that- (after ONE iteration) their hooks don't work as well as the bean leaf hooks; which, duh; are the result of probably 20,000,000 iterations via annual evolutionary processes.

Good polka dot gallows stuff.  If you're in the mood.

Though I have to admit- I find this a little depressing...   : -)

Rats! AND - Fukushima.

Boy, I tell ya, the blogging just doesn't get any better than when two of your topics suddenly merge.

The BBC news feed today is carrying this story; about rats and Fukushima; simultaneously.

Did you know?  That the power was cut to the crippled nuclear power plants at Fukushima a couple of days ago?  It barely hit the news- but, yes; it was a problem; the power loss meant all the old nuclear fuel waste in the "storage pools" - wasn't getting any cooling.  Yes, if that continues long enough, the water will evaporate, and the rods melt- eventually with the potential for going "critical."  It's really not a good thing.  But why clutter up the news?

   You didn't hear about the fish they caught in the bay off the Fukusima plant a couple days ago either- the one more than 7,000 times more radioactive than the limits for consumption.  A record, in fact, for radio-cesium contamination.  Which biologically- could only happen if the nukes are still very actively leaking extreme radioactivity into the bay, every day.  Which TEPCO denies, and no one else is inspecting.  We'd rather not know.

   Cesium from the original disaster could not be that hot, two years out.  The real puzzle, to me- your friendly local Physics professors - KNOW this- and remain silent.  I don't like that fact very much.

  The rat?  Chewed through some electrical connections, and got fried- and shut down the power.

 Murphy's Laws are the reason why nuclear power cannot be made safe enough.  And here we are.  I will bet you the farm- if any engineer ever included specs on rat-proofing nuclear power plants- it was long ago, and long forgotten- and nobody in Japan was worrying about rats in the wires.  And they should have been.

   Happy Spring!  We hit -1°F last night here; with about 10 inches of hard packed frozen snow to fight through.  Keep it in mind- "global warming" does not mean "uniform"- it means bigger storms and weather excursions.  There's still nothing between us here on the Iowa-Minnesota border and - the North Pole.  Nothing to stop polar air from wandering down here, when it's in the mood.

Polka Dot Gallows for Valentines Day...

You guys may recall my periodic posts "from the Polka Dot Gallows" - referring to bits of current news that are particularly bizarre - if viewed from any sane standpoint.  (Description of concept in this post.)

I have one for you today.

From one of my favorite news sources; the Japanese Public Television newsfeed, NHK.  I love them.  They just blurt out all this... truth.

But then, as truth is wont to do- it disappears.  Their links vanish in a few hours.  If you hurry; this one will get you to their video of this event; but here, in any case, is the story:

"Sheep form heart shape in Valentines Day event"

  "Japanese tourists have watched a flock of sheep make a heart shape in a Valentines' Day event at a ranch near Tokyo.

 "The event took place on Thursday at Mother Farm in Chiba Prefecture. The farm has about 600 sheep.

  "Ranchers had placed feed in a heart shape on a pasture in preparation for the event.

  "Sheep were released on a hillside and rushed to the food, forming a heart around a man and woman chosen from among the visitors.

  "The woman said she was overwhelmed to see so many sheep, but that she felt reassured and amused because she was with her boyfriend."

Feb. 14, 2013 - Updated 11:10 UTC (20:10 JST)
------------------------------------------

  Hard to get more romantic than that.  : - )

  Spice, my dear- we've got seven sheep- a little thin, but I could probably manage...  for you.


 ( If you-all really want some nice mush, for Valentines, I'll have to send you to Sharon.)

A New Effect Of Global Warming...

Yeah, yeah, climate change, what the hey.  This comes under the category of Global Weirding, a phrase I first heard at least 15 years ago, but which has recently started to gain steam.  Or my own choice to describe where we are; Climate Collapse.

We just went through this new effect, one I have not seen really described elsewhere.  We're among the many suffering from the drought here, so we're amazingly sensitive to the hope of rain.

This got my hopes up-

And yeah, we're kind of in the middle of all that.  But?

SQUAT FOR RAIN - out of all that lovely dark green radar (usually heavy) and yellow-orange (usually toad-strangler downpour).  Seriously, the deck is barely damp.

What we have here is an Insincere Thunderstorm.  

Or perhaps, for the poetically and vulgarly inclined: a Pissant Thunderstorm.

'Cause that's how much water we got; about as much as an ant could piss.

(actually, it's still dark as hell, and I'm hoping if I insult it enough, it'll eventually RAIN on us...)

Actually, later- no, it never did.  So-

Or.  Dunderstorm.

Ok, or, just Understorm.

Yet another horror awaiting us all as the climate goes over the edge.  Big promises- but it was only teasing.  The grass - is outraged, I assure you; and my neighbors who were hoping this would save their corn may be opening their arteries as we speak.

And I would like to talk to the radar people.   What's up with this!!???  Seriously- I sweat more water than this big blockbuster official "Severe Thunderstorm Warning" produced.

sigh.  Back to sweating.

:-/

You guys should, like, vote.  I'm currently liking Dunderstorm, myself.  Noisy, but totally incompetent.

Grab this one quick!

The rumors today that the US Justice Dept. is preparing CRIMINAL! charges for some folks over the Libor fixing scandal - has got the folks on Wall Street seriously spooked!  (What!  Golly!!  You mean- you were expecting us to follow the rules!??  We had no idea!!)  And we've got the proof right here!

Bloomberg News feed is currently (but not, I bet, for long) running THIS headline:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-15/libor-probe-may-yield-u-s-charges-by-sepetmeber.html

Yep, that's right.  There may be charges- in Sepetmeber!

LOL!!!  For a news service that certainly strives for cool and correct- Sepetmeber is just a really huge whoopsie.  Only accountable as- oh, some nerves, maybe?  Or, maybe that's how you spell it, in Amercia?
------------------------------
UPDATE; next day, the URL is still working, to my amazement- but they DID change the resulting headline, to something quite different, and spelled correctly.  Tres amusant.

In case you were worried...

You can now relax.

We have some mildly amusing, and wholly bemusing evidence today that there's nothing all that urgent, and the world has such an incredible abundance of resources we can, and should, just fritter them. I'll present two examples.

In Japan, which, as we know has a problem or two, really on the serious side; one of their most prominent corporations, Panasonic, announced today that it is in the final stages of commercializing a new robot, and is going to start selling it. Since this is NKH feed, I'll include some of the text:

------------------------------------

"Japanese electronics maker Panasonic will start testing a shampooing robot with the aim of putting it on the market within a year. Panasonic announced on Monday that it will start the tests this week at a barber shop in Nishinomiya, western Japan.

"Sensors in the robot's hands scan the shape of a customer's head. The robot then wets and washes the hair with 24 'robo-fingers,' which Panasonic says recreates the feel of human fingers.

"Panasonic official Yukio Honda says the robot will help improve the quality of life for people receiving nursing care or those with disabilities. He adds that the company intends to install the robot in hair salons across Japan and put it on the nursing care market as soon as possible."

-----------------------------------

I confess, my mind boggles a bit. Japan is struggling with huge youth unemployment, is trying to import health care workers from the Philippines and Malaysia- so... yeah, this seems like a great idea. Chop human contact further for the aging and disabled, and just run them through the new car-wash machine. I suppose it's possibly that it could actually take 3 people to run and maintain the machine now; instead of the one shampoo-girl it used to... that would improve the jobs situation, right?

The second example is from the good ol' USA college community.

"A team of engineers at Purdue University has set the world record for "Largest functional Rube Goldberg machine" with a mind-boggling contraption that takes 300 steps to inflate and pop a balloon. In doing so, they bested themselves, as they had the previous record, with 244 steps. "

But wait; it gets better. "14 members worked on this project over a span of six months -- for a total of 5,000 hours."

Ok, so call me a cranky-pants. I realize, engineers just want to have fun; but really- couldn't they have had 5,000 hours worth of creative fun working on something that actually had a chance of being useful, somewhere, somehow? It seems a bit excessive to work so hard on something where the entire point of the work- is that it is useless.

Or, go to YouTube if Blogger is cranky.

Grump grump. Oh, look; I like Rube-Goldberg gimmicks too. Yes, their uselessness and pointlessness is useful and educational. But. Maybe it can be overdone? I mean- they could have built a robot that can trim toenails in assisted living homes. The Japanese are way, way, ahead of us.

And, they might have asked for a little help from some student with experience in video making...

Political dialogue!

In the Polka Dot Gallows category. Today's cartoon strip from Brewster Rockit is the most intelligent commentary on current political processes I've seen; reaffirming my contention that our comedians and humorists are in fact today's actual great philosophers.

True, true, true, and yes, it hurts.

The Tooth Fairy- a Growth Industry!

Now that we all know economic "growth" is dead- the realization is spreading, and turning up in non-intuitive places.

I tripped over this one (on BBC), and laughed so hard I had to share it with you.

Really perfect Polka Dot Gallows material- you don't know whether to laugh or cry; you just kind of sit there, jaw dropped, and boggle.

It's the only remnant of The Capitalist Dream! Enough money to bury you. Obtained, you hope, by a gambling proposition (insurance: I bet I'll pay less in than they'll pay out)- which you believe you'll win. Although all the calculations of the insurance company say- you won't. Their profits depend on that. Do insurance companies make profits? Do fish have sex in the water?

And if you can zoom your screen a little, and get a good look at the fairy's face- it strikes me as skeptical, with a little secret smirk. Right up front.

That's what they're selling, to a herd never weaned from Disney.

I would like to know, scientifically, how many are buying.

sigh.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Update:

Ok, can't help it, it's raining today so I'm inside reading too much.

And just boggling all over the place at the substitution of polysyllabic incompetence for "thinking".

Started off with a diatribe on the NYT "GreenInc" blog. Not posted yet, so who knows; but I'll repeat it here:

All the critics here are correct; but you’ve fallen into the trap set by the scheme instigators.

You’re fighting fire with logic. Doesn’t actually work, in terms of putting any fires out; it just generates committees.

The real problem is professors. (don’t you just love it when people say ‘the real problem is…’ )

Professors- not known for their broadscale thinking, repeatedly find they have a hammer in their possession. And they get enthusiastic about it.

“Look at this huge beautiful hammer!” they cry- attracting many who got Cs in science in high school, and assume professors know what they’re talking about.

“We have to use this hammer! And your problem looks to me like the perfect nail!”

Except is isn’t a nail, at all. This problem right here is an Allen head bolt, and the hammer is not useful.

But the hammer is big and shiny- and expensive, so there’s loads of money to be made studying it all, and building prototypes.

“Hey, technology is huge these days! We’ll figure out fixes for the problems later!:”

Just like they did for corn ethanol- a direction now abandoned by all not brain dead or deeply invested.

CEOs of power companies; and legislators, really need to ask for a full-scale, long term (500 year) plan and extrapolation. If the process proposers don’t have one- that’s really really good evidence they haven’t thought beyond their big shiny hammer, at all.

Do we have time to waste, and money- on Allen head bolts flattened and mashed beyond extraction by big shiny hammers?

That’s supposed to be rhetorical.

— Greenpa

Used to be only ninnys didn't think problems all the way through- but it seems to be a pathway now being taught to PhDs.

The next example, which pushed me over the edge, is from BBC Science.

This professor guy (and not a minor professor, but "the director of the scientific aquaculture programme at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts") is spending huge amount of money working on training aquaculture fish to come back when called, in the ocean; by a specific sound.

Then, see, they could go find some of their own food, and wouldn't always be pooping in the same toilet, but would come back when you wanted to feed- or kill them.

First try didn't work. Predators ate them, as soon as they were allowed to escape from the cage. I'll be darned.

Besides which- gosh, if you've got your fish trained to come and be fed, and the signal is a sound... exactly how long do you think it will take the predators to learn that the sound means- time to come and get fed? Right here?

I think any signal, in any medium, you can use to train your fish will emphatically be intercepted by the predators, immediately.

At first, the fish began to forage outside of the aquadome, moving in and out at the prompt of the sound, just as the researchers had hoped.

"But then we start seeing these bluefish circling our cage. And these are notorious for being ravenous and ruthless hunters," he says.

"Very frustratingly, we went back day after day to find these fish still showing up at the cage, and we couldn't for the life of us call the black sea bass back.

The tags helped the researchers to identify their bass

"They were scared to death - we went diving, and we could see them amongst the rocks, but nothing was going to make them run that gauntlet between the rocks and the cage when it would put their lives at risk."

And the fish had good reason to be scared.

When the team caught one of the bluefish and slit open its belly, they discovered 12 tiny tags - the fish that they had been attached to had already been digested.

But. Big, hopeful, news coverage on the BBC!! Hey, the funders will love it.

And his answer? Gonna build robotic sheep-dog sharks to keep the little predators away.

What a good idea.

sigh.

Ok, so the hammer is not working on this machine screw. Maybe if I hit it from the side, with more money...

The Polka-Dot Gallows

What the hay, we might as well get a chuckle or two as the Alpaca lips nibble on us.

The video ends in that fashion, I'm sure, because the camera person was overwhelmed and eaten by the alpacas at that point.

Our friends in the UK have the right idea.  They're abandoning the British pound (which is in trouble) and printing their own money.  By golly if the gummint can do it, so can we.

And, by way of improvement- whose face are they going to put on the money?

How about - Benny Hill?