CARBON sources
Sunday, 9 December 2007
Doh!
I can hardly believe it took me until today to realize that burning candles, fireplaces, and campfires add to the carbon footprint!
Musings
Declines/resurgence
Saturday, 8 December 2007
The share of the population possessing college degrees in the 1970s is the best predictor of which northeastern and midwestern cities have done well since then.
That is, northeastern and midwestern cities in the US of A….
Edward L. Glaeser says this in an article about Buffalo’s potential for “coming back” from the decline of this once-important manufacturing and transshipment hub.
Glaeser makes the point that however much tax/government money flows into the community, and however wise and effective are the projects that money is used for, what really makes the difference are citizen-originated entrepreneurial undertakings that effectively use human capital. Glaeser cites Boston and Minneapolis as examples of that kind of turn-around.
What Glaeser doesn’t mention, at least in this article, is that both those cities also have important, prominent, and vibrant university and medical communities that maintained their eminence throughout the second half of the last century. I keep thinking both have to have been important components of the mix of factors that allowed the reinvention/survival of those cities—factors that aren’t prominent in dear old Buffalo….
You will not be surprised to know that I read Glaeser’s article while thinking about Detroit and other cities in my home state. Same huge population and economic declines as Buffalo. Same elevated percentages of poor(ish) and generally poorly educated people. And the educational and medical training and treatment nexuses of the state are not in Detroit. Not good odds….
I also wonder if there are parallels among European cities, once prominent in transportation networks webbed among ports along coasts or rivers….
Sole ard
Friday, 7 December 2007
Mexican field turned over with moldboard plow (rather 16th C in design), probably pulled by an ox.
The Byzantine plow was, technically, not a plow at all, but a sole ard.
Boy, there’s a term you don’t see every day. “Sole ard.” Kinda makes your knees weak, doesn’t it?
FYI, apparently a sole ard scratches the surface rather than turning it over like the plows we see today. The tool is suitable for shallow tilling, as in arid areas, and requires less effort to use than moldboard plows (less force is needed than to overturn the soil).
Bryer, Anthony. 2002. “The Means of Agricultural Production: Muscle and Tools,” in The Economic History of Byzantium: From the Seventh through the Fifteenth Century, vol. 1, Studies, vol. 39. Edited by Angeliki E. Laiou, pp. 101–13. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. Page 107.
Prunted goblet
Saturday, 17 November 2007
We learned many new vocabulary words at the Corning Museum of Glass, which I should have expected but didn’t.
Some words describe the glass objects, or parts of them. Others derive from the manufacturing process. All of them are not in the vocabularies of most of us. Take these two words: goblet and prunt. You are most likely familiar with the first and probably not with the second.
Technically, a goblet is a bowl on a stem supported by a foot.
Prunts are dabs or blobs of glass attached to the stem. They are both decorative, and sometimes embellished with a stamp, and can help improve the drinker’s grip.
This goblet (sorry, I didn’t photo the identification tag, but I suspect, hmm, maybe German?) has green prunts that have been stamped with a knobbly texture.
These goblets are fairly large, would have been relatively costly for most households, held alcoholic beverages, and may have been passed among diners—all the more reason for increasing the likelihood of safe passage by enhancing the grip.
Snow (again)
Monday, 12 November 2007
The other day in western PA we were surprised by a smallish yet chubby black bear that scrambled across a guardrail and zipped across the road in front of us (no photo, sorry) in a mad dash for the woods on the other side (add your own riff on the old chicken-crossed-the-road joke here), but this snow we found in PA? in NY? is more evocative of winter for me. In our part of Atlanta, we see snow on the ground maybe every two or three years, although I guess with global warming that frequency may decrease. On the other hand, during the Little Ice Age, there was more snow across the Southeast, so that DeSoto and his bunch suffered a cold and unpleasant winter in 1539 and 1540 (I think) in southeastern North America. Can you tell I’m thinking about cycling and fluctuations (actually, both in nature/climate, and in societies)?
Trimborn Farm
Saturday, 3 November 2007
On a late-afternoon walk exploration in the neighborhood of friends, a place unfamiliar to us in any detail, we discovered a lovely county park, sheltering historic Trimborn Farm.
As we wandered among the outbuildings clustered around the house, they all seemed to be related to farming until I spotted this one long stone structure that seemed quite industrial. Of course, we’d wandered onto the property through a side field, completely bypassing the hysterical marker, so we had no cues from the written word.
The Guru, determined to utilize all powers bestowed by the iPhone, quickly googled and discovered we were looking at the remains of a lime operation.
Diversification in farm country, I thought….
Water, water…
Thursday, 27 September 2007
Seems like our future, maybe the future of life “as we know it” on this planet, is wrapped up in water. Gotta have water.
Gotta have air, too, but it seems that we can survive long enough to reproduce when we live with polluted air. For example, consider smokers, who deliberately inhale highly polluted air (although other airborne contaminants are more dangerous than the typical modern US ciggy), and modern urban China. No lack of reproductive success with either of those populations.
Food, well, yup, that’s a necessity. But we get our food primarily from agribusiness. And agriculture is without a doubt dependent on water, so our food sources depend on water. too.
By water, I don’t mean simply potable water, or rainfall, or even groundwater. But the big, capital W water: that is, water from anywhere.
If I decided to go into the legal profession, I’d specialize in legal issues associated with water. It ties into human rights, civil rights, group vs individual rights, ownership, distribution control, the whole shebang.
I’m thinking, in fact, that the folks who are specialists in other resources (petroleum products, scarce metals and minerals) are already working to corner markets and build in legal loopholes to give Them advantages in the economics of water. I also figure that The Angler and his ilk have been getting laws changed to help those folks, and that we’ll only find that out sometime in the mist-free future….
At first glance, I was mystified today when I examined our water/sewer bill and discovered we pay over twice as much for sewage (based on how much water we consume, so the volumes are—assumed to be—the same) than for water. But then I figured, I suppose it costs more to make sure sewage doesn’t contaminate, tada!, water, than it does simply to deliver clean water to my house.
Next topic to ponder: how better to use graywater (more on this in the southwest than these parts: examples from Arizona and New Mexico), a practice promoted in a leaflet included with our water/sewer bill. Someone who goes to the trouble of toting their shower water out to plants was lauded. We use our dish water on outdoor plants, but the shower water goes down the drain (for now). As I understood it (maybe this is now incorrect: note to self, check on this), we couldn’t directly pipe our graywater into the yard, but we can carry it out there. Some people use graywater (sometimes greywater) for flushing, and I guess that may not be a violation.
Rather twisted logic there, no?
So, would the agribusiness water demand drop if we consumed significantly less grain (takes lots of water to grow and process) replacing it with non-starchy vegetables (as diet specialists recommend would improve our health)?—veggies sold only minimally processed?
Horselads
Friday, 21 September 2007
Yeah, I know; this is not a horse. But it’s the closest I had….
While browsing tables of contents for issues of the International Journal of Historical Archaeology, I ran into this term: horselads.
The term harks back to the days of horse-farming in rural Britain, and to the social hierarchy on rural farms (those Brits!). Horselads were at the bottom, while still valued for their knowledge of work horses, although they were assigned other menial field labor. The horselads received room and board as part of their compensation, in part because the farms were relatively isolated, or at least by keeping horselads resident on the farms their labor was assured.
Horselads could be recognized by their by their distinctive dress at the hiring fairs where they looked for their next position—they moved each year—while striving to move up the hierarchy.
Because of their low status, annually fluid employment situation, and the way written history (even modern history) is generated, little directly from horselads has made it into records. Giles and Giles opted to examine the graffiti in barns where horselads lived and worked to obtain insights into their lives.
Conclusions: horselads wrote about sex and the ladies, they glamorized themselves, they recorded song lyrics, they wrote about hardships (extreme weather, boredom), and they drew pictures (mostly line drawings) on the same subjects (especially the first).
I wondered if the horselads are in the direct social ancestry of North America’s western cowboys, but these British researchers do not address this point.
Show time!
Tuesday, 10 July 2007
Today we hosted a day-long biz meeting here at the house, where we talked about sims and 3-D of archaeological sites and topics. Exciting!
Tree of life
Tuesday, 26 June 2007
Today’s NYT science section takes evo-devo as its topic. I had to look up the term, and only felt mild relief to find it’d been around less than ten years. (I think.) Still…. Evo-devo evolutionary development biologists look at how molecular and genetic changes put in motion a whole set of possibilities and take away another whole set.
- Nicholas Wade: recent human genetic evolution
- John Noble Wilford: human paleontology
- Carol Kaesuk Yoon: evo-devo, the concept
- Carl Zimmer (MSU researcher prominent!): microbial evolution
- and more (does it mean anything that the authors’ names are at the very end of the alphabet?)….
So, here’s my contribution. Two thoughts….
Here’s an article on the bushy tree of life, and its many branches, a more technical explanation than what the venerable NYT offers. I provide it, not merely for the content, but also for the final subhead. My response: let me count the ways….
Second is the photo above, of a mature tree next to Lake Clara Meer. Its neighbor, disfigured by a streak of rot and a blob of uncontrolled growth (virus?), I noticed, has an orange dot at eye level. I’m guessing it’s slated for removal. So this oak will survive a little longer, offering its leaves to the sun-gods and its shade to the squirrels…and me. Another tree of life….