How I Got A Free Coolroom That Runs For Free

You wanted a way to keep some of your food in a coolroom to preserve it better and save energy?  But can't afford a coolroom and want one for practically free and practically free of running costs?  You know what?  I just may be able to help you...

Let me stress that this isn't for everyone.  You may have concerns, or perhaps you don't have the space for a coolroom such as the one I'm about to describe.  So let me lay out what you need:

• You need an old chest freezer in which the compressor has died, but which still has an intact evaporator.  (If the chest freezer was trashed for leaks in the coils, forget it.  It will have to hold water...)
• You need either an evaporative cooler that you use daily during summer, or a buried low pressure drip irrigation system on a timer (or that you use for an hour or two every day,) and preferably, one that runs on recycled grey water and rainwater, not on your town water mains supply.
• You need a spot outside which is conveniently handy to the kitchen, has day-round shade, and big enough to put your chest freezer.

If you pass those requirements, then carry on...

I got a local friendly refrigeration technician to donate me a chest freezer that he was only going to have to take to the recyclers anyway, and asked him to de-gas it and identify the copper lines that went to the evaporator coil. (That's the one which is around the actual icebox and is the bit that cools the interior.)  He not only identified it for me, he also kindly took out the compressor and neatly cut the copper tubes for me.  That cost me a carton of the local brewery's finest, but hey! - I got a soon-to-be-very-useful coolroom out of it!  (In fact, I got *two* for this price, I just haven't set up the second one yet.)

Now find the place where the feed to your buried drip irrigation system passes closest to your chosen location.  (In my case, the front veranda fulfills all of these requirements.)  Because I wanted to to be as environmentally conscious as possible (and where I am gets hellaciously hot in summer and is on bottomless sand where the water just seeps away to China within minutes of watering) I've made a load of compost and dug that into my vegetable garden beds, then added a low-pressure drip irrigation system and topped that off with leftover hay and straw from the rabbit cages. I feed this system from a grey-water recovery system that settles the grey water in a small tank on the ground and then pumps it up a few meters to the head tank.  That gives enough flow for my garden, and it's all pretty much free water.

Anyhow - that water in the head tank stays fairly cool due to its large volume (200 liters) and location in the shade of some mature trees.  And if you use a similar system (or perhaps a water bore with pressure reducer) or your irrigation system has a pressure reducer on it, then that's what you use.  Find the line after the timer, solenoid, and pressure reducer, and cut the line.  Put two right angle connectors on, and run two new hoses (preferably buried so it will stay cool) to your freezer.

Attach them to the copper tubes your technician pointed out, and then run your irrigation system and check for leaks around your new connections (and also under the freezer in case there *was* some leak in the evaporator coil) and check that running the water for an hour or so does indeed cool the inside of the freezer significantly.

That's it.  There's not much to say about this.  It may develop a leak due to corrosion one day - but old unloved chest freezers are a dime a dozen, and I'll have extended its lifespan by however many years it lasts.  It works extremely well, because the cooling arrangements in a freezer are designed to transfer as much heat out of the icebox as possible.  Be that into a refrigerant gas or water, doesn't matter.

So that is it - I've left the side panel off so you can see that the compressor is gone, and one of the hoses is attached to the copper down there.  Unfortunately for me, the leak in this freezer was on the other copper pipe and I had to open up some of the lagging to get to it.

Adapting from the thinnish copper tubing to your reticulation system is up to each individual situation.  That's why there isn't a huge instructable, just all these vague holistic suggestions...  I got clear tubing and adaptors at my local hardware, and just fitted it as best I could. It's important that you make sure there are no leaks!

Also of course, using that clear tubing ensures I'll never be tempted to put full water mains pressure on the system.  It was a deliberate choice, because once you attach something like this to water mains, there's every possibility that you'll cost yourself a fortune in water, and of course also there's a huge environmental cost to town water, so why not use whatever you can recycle locally?


You'll also see that there is a second set of condenser tubes in there which I've just left - they don't go anywhere near the icebox itself and aren't needed.  Also you'll see how I had to open up a section of the back of this freezer to get above the leaking section of copper tubing for one side of my water circuit, normally this would also come out in the compressor compartment.  


It keeps a remarkably cool temperature inside, provided you run your water during the heat of the day.  That's why I suggested a drip irrigation system, because these are best run around the hottest time - being buried, it doesn't damage the plants and in fact provides them with the water at the time they need it most - when the sun is driving their sap around at maximum rate.  And that's also the time your coolroom will need the most help resisting the outside heat.  It's a win/win situation...

My next project will involve my evaporative cooler and the second freezer.  See, the water in an evaporative cooler gets quite cooled by going around the cooling pads, and then sits there doing nothing else except go around again.  So instead of pumping it to the cooling pads direct, I intend to redirect it through the second freezer first.  I should get almost refrigerator-like cooling inside it, and since I'm running the evap cooler daily anyway, it will again be essentially for free.  In winter, one will need only run the water pump, and cold air and breeze will supply what little cooling this second coolroom will need.  And those small pumps cost less than a lightbulb to run...   In fact, this project may well involve some 12V pumps and my lighting solar panel...

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How To Save Hundreds A Year On Refrigeration.

If you're like me, you care about your carbon and pollution footprint.  And you find articles like this one I found, which deals with using your freezer to do more, a Godsend.  One little-known thing is to be found at the bottom of that article - by using an external thermostat which you plug into the wall and then plug your freezer into, you can have refrigerator temperatures at about 1/10th of the cost of running a refrigerator.  It's a simple trick, but there are two gotchas with it which that article doesn't point out explicitly:

One - the external thermostat will cycle the freezer more often, in shorter bursts.  I'm not sure if it will hurt, but it may reduce the life of the freezer from ten years to six or seven - someone with more fridgie tech knowledge than myself might care to comment and correct me.

Two - if you use a vertical freezer, all those bets are off.  This 10% figure is for top-opening chest freezers only.  The reason it won't help with a vertical is the same reason your fridge is so inefficient - when you open the door, ALL the cold air falls out.  In a chest freezer on the other hand, the cold air can't fall out and you generally only disturb the top few inches of cold air.

Now to a more vexing question in refrigeration and food - I have a fridge that has "temperature zones" designed into it to provide me space for vegetables, pickles, and so forth.  But each zone is small, and I like a lot of fresh vegetables.  No help here, they are confined to the crisper section, and subject to temperature fluctuations every time I open the door.

The chest freezer with the external thermostat is the answer here - you can be sure the temperatures will stay very stable at the bottom, and fluctuate a lot less than any zone in a refrigerator near the top layers.  It's inconvenient, of course, to lift things out of the way when using a "freezerator", and there still aren't many areas of distinct temperature for vegetables.

So I've come up with a solution.  This will not work for you if you don't have a shaded area outside, and at least a drip or buried irrigation system.  And I'll explain how you can have a "mini-coolroom" that is effectively free, and operates for free.  Stay tuned to the following few articles!

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A Cup Of Water, Bunch Of Coral, And A Few Mistakes

It's not just bad maths, it's terrible maths. It's how to make a genuinely important message seem suss and slightly wacky.

I'm talking about the report that this story is about. I picked up the discrepancy right away - maybe I've got some warped sense of logic and economics but it stood out right away. Even more so, the headline is pure bullshit, too.

What am I talking about? Well, money is like energy, matter, and the ecology. There's a certain amount to go around, no matter how you try and stretch and squeeze it, there's a certain amount of value and that's it. So the report that's at the heart of the story is kind of wrong. Some of the value of reefs is in tourist dollars, that will be gone from the reef tourism scene but it doesn't mean the money will vanish in a puff of smoke - it will just be spent elsewhere.

And some of the value of the reefs is in fish that will have to be replaced by food from another source. But again, either you go out and catch fish at whatever that costs in materials and energy and so forth, or you pay money for someone else to spend that kind of materials energy and etc, in some other place.

Protecting coastlines? Yes, that will mean that coastlines will erode in places, but in other places there will be deposition of material, too. It's a loss to humankind and many animals and fish that depend on it, but to the Earth it's just a change.

And as for the headline, that is just a reporter who didn't work things out before reaching for the keyboard - $172bn will not be "sucked out of the economy" - it will only move from reefs and businesses surrounding the reefs to other areas and businesses.

Think of wealth (==money) as water. Now think of the Earth as a big closed bucket full of water. Now take "$172bn" worth of water from one edge of the bucket to another spot. Did the water magically get "sucked out of the economy?" Of course not. There's so much water before, and the same amount afterwards.

Boo Treehugger for making such an erroneous headline, too.

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Some Very Good News - So Why Isn't There Any Good News?

WTF is *really* going on with global warming/weather?  It just doesn't add up anymore.  I think it's kind of important for us to find out the real, whole, complete story.

When we're being told that GW is proceeding faster/more than expected and accelerating more than predicted, that says to me that someone, somewhere, isn't pulling their weight in carbon reduction.  So when I read that the USA has pulled nitrous oxide emissions back by 62% in the last ten years and carbon emissions from all fossil fuels by 9% in the last two years, and yet, despite that, GW is still accelerating and icecaps are visibly melting, I expect that there's an untold story somewhere.

In this case, I think we'll find the rest of the story in a whole slew of mistakes of judgement such as suppressed results of earlier studies and tests (a favourite technique through our entire history, it seems) and in such things as underestimating what effect clear-felling and hill-topping and growing huge monolithic areas of single crops can have on the ecosystem, and no-one ever thinking to add up the cumulative effects from the whole range of climate and eco system damaging activities, and lastly (probably) the industrialisation and exploitation of China and India by companies that still don't think globally and that think that by offloading dirty processes to those countries, somehow climate change will just stay over those countries and no-one will care...

But perhaps I'm being unfair.  Perhaps in a system that took our industrialisation for two hundred years before swinging as it has, will take a bit longer than two years to show the effect of our "undustrialisation" efforts.  And perhaps every big multinational company really *does* have an altruistic paternal earth-loving figure at its helm.  And I'm betting on only one of those being true, by the way...

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Gadgetocalypse

You know what really causes global warming?  This does.  This is that face of consumerism gone mad, the one that makes product managers rub their hands in glee, their factories burn through gigawatts of energy every year, and produces millions of tons of waste each year.

It's not surprising, given that if you have your gadget fixed, you pay money to have the same thing while your neighbour is enjoying the Latest Big Thing version of the gadget...  I wonder if I'll ever need a 1080P camcorder, for example.  I have a Samsung S860 pocket camera that takes juddery videos and blurry macro shots.  When it developed a fault, I had it fixed - and finally replaced with one of the same when the warranty repairer couldn't fix the problem.

Had I jumped up and down a bit more, I could have probably gotten the equivalent of that magic camcorder.  But I figured that if I hang onto the S860 for another year or two, something HUGELY better will come along, and when it finally goes to that great gadget shop in the sky, I'll upgrade then.

And therein lies the crunch.  If you have the choice of getting the same gadget back, with your scratches and dents and all, or a shiny new killer version of the gadget, the choice seems to be all but a foregone conclusion.  And it causes such a pile of e-waste every year, that you ought to be very ashamed...

It goes right along with the idealistic vision of OLPC and the e-cars explosion we're seeing.  Manufacturers are still wanting a profit, they still want turnover, and do-gooders have a utopian vision of the future where everyone drives an electric car using solar energy, and has energy-efficient access to all the energy-efficient gadgetry our hearts could desire.

IT ISN'T SO.

At the moment, not everyone has a car, nor, in fact, do the majority of the world's population have even a bicycle.  You will never reduce our impact by buying a newer gadget or making sure everyone in your family has a personal EV to drive around in.  Our way to save ourselves is to accept a slightly reduced standard of living right now, or an extremely reduced set of circumstances in a few years' time.  That's all the choice we have...

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Fords to Ploughshares

Sustainable food for the billions. It's an aim, isn't it?  I don't know, it seems to me that perhaps it isn't.  We in the Western world are busy "raising living standards" to bring the rest of the population up towards our standard.  Is it working?  Ask anyone whose people have received foreign aid and disaster relief in the latest round of disasters, and they'll probably tell you it's working.

But really - weren't they victims of the higher living standards in the developed world?  Because many of these disasters can be traced these days to climate change, caused by the technological changes needed to raise the living standards for that lucky percentage of the population of the world...

Well, what about locavore living?  You know, where you eat only local food, or as practically as possible, local food only?  (I think if you're living inland and want to make a one-time Lobster Bisque then getting the lobster from the coast is okay - our ancestors would have made a trip to the coast and made the dish there, either way the same amount of miles are involved, but a lot less energy is involved in bringing the lobster to Mohammed...)

It's a quandary.  Here's the next logical step of the local living phenomenon:  Buy locally made goods.  Again, there are a few problems with this.  Like - I'd really like a marble pestle and mortar.  Fine, except that there's no local marble anywhere around here.  So how about I ship in the marble and make it locally?  Well, there will have to be a much larger chunk of marble shipped to make the p&m out of.  Then too since there are not likely to be skills locally in marble working, there will be wastage of marble, and energy.  In this case, is it ecologically acceptable to buy an imported marble p&m?

Your mileage may vary...  (Pun totally intended...)  I can't imagine buying a totally locally made car, for example.  And when I do, will this car be the best in terms of manufacturing costs and footprint?  Are our local craftsmen "reinventing the wheel" needlessly and inefficiently?  Considering there are large automotive manufacturers out there who have already mastered more efficient manufacturing processes?  Will a car with Wood and leather seats and trim (because we have no local source for making vinyl and plastics) really be more environment-friendly than a mass-produced one?  And since I mentioned mileage - what will be the environmental footprint of me using that locally-made vehicle instead of a mass-produced and quite possibly much more efficient one?

See, the problem isn't bringing everyone's living standards up - it's that in order to bring 3/4 of the world's population up to a marginally better living standard, you have to take down 1/4 of the world population's living standards quite a bit more...   And while it sounds good in theory, it's going to be a very tough thing to sell.

There is a limit to how much material we can use to raise living standards - it's almost precisely one planetful of resources and materials.  No matter how you try and slice and dice it, if there are 10,000,000 gallons of fresh water in your region, that's only 10 gallons per person if you have a million people.  And in actual fact, 700,000 people will be subsisting on 2 - 3 gallons, 200,000 will be using about 6 gallons, and the rest (all 100,000 of them) will be using a staggering 70 gallons each.  And please don't think that this is a wild exaggeration - it is in fact around the ratio that has been established by almost every body that has researched world affluence and world poverty.  If you're reading this, there's a better than 75% chance that you're one of the 70 gallon users.

So the trick will be for *YOU* to make the decision to reduce your living standard.  How far are you willing to go?  Give up using a car, or at the least, make sure you don't replace your existing car for its entire lifespan, and drive it only for absolutely necessary trips?  It's a start.  Better yet is to replace your car with a bicycle, right?  Yet even that had to be manufactured, and by just owning a bike you're still far better off than the majority who have to walk.

Perhaps the best thing you can do is make a list right now, open a text page and type down what you're personally prepared to do in order to use less of the planet's resources.  For each thing, if it's something you're already doing, note down approximately when you started doing it.  Now save the list for a month and then come back to it.  See how many more of the things you can tick and add a commencement date to.  I'm betting the ticks won't exactly be piling on thick and fast, and that's precisely the problem - we in effect need people *right now* to have lists like that with 90% of the items already checked off...

The biblical admonition to "beat swords into ploughshares" illustrates the problem perfectly - there is only so much iron in the world.  By turning 90% of it into personal transport, that leaves only 10% to be turned into ploughs and harvesters and tractors and farm equipment.  But which one produces more food to raise the living standards?  And yet to you, imagine the effect of losing your vehicle.  Your job, your shopping, your leisure - they will all be affected greatly.  And the temptation is to think that "this is only going to save one panel on a large tractor, I may as well not bother."  And that's the problem in a nutshell...

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Where's The Liter Meter?

What would it take to really get you to save water? Maybe it could be something as simple as a waterproof note taped to the shower wall, but I'm betting that everyone would be a lot more sparing of one of our most important resources if they could see it trickling away...

The electricity authorities are starting to get it right with smart meters, and now websites that allow you to monitor your smart meter and keep tabs on how much electricity your house is chewing through.  Apparently just being able to observe power use has resulted in savings of 25% in houses where monitored smart metering is in use.

So why is the water authority lagging, where are the smart water meters?  Such a meter would either communicate back to the water authority as do smart meters, and customers access their meters on the internet, or else they could send a data stream back to the household.

And I reckon a display in the bathroom, of liters/minute, and a mounting toll of cents' worth of water used, would probably encourage people to shower smarter and use less water. Similarly, another display in the kitchen and/or laundry would go a long way towards reducing water wasting in those areas.

So roll on the Liter Meter!

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The "Less Carbon Than Umm Some Other Guy. Maybe." Bike Ride

This is just plain daft.  WTF is a "zero carbon bike ride" anyway?

Did he mean the "zero carbon" that was used to make the bike?  Cos it sure as hell isn't zero.  Or were the pannier and saddle bags "zero carbon?"  No, didn't think so.  The clothes he's wearing, including specialised cycling suits?  Nup.

Oh! Oh! I get it!  Zero carbon in fuel!  Yeah! That's what he meant.  Except.  That he has to eat, and food has a fecking huge carbon footprint of its own.

I think what he's trying to say is that he's going to (for unfathomable reasons, as everything you could want is right at hand in your neighbourhood in this modern world) ride around for his own amusement, and feel a little bit better in himself for only releasing fart methane while on the ride.

Except possibly for the bits where he has to ferry or fly himself and the bike across oceans he can't actually ride through....  Even sailboats had to be made you know - like bikes and bags and clothes and foods.  

The only way to have NO carbon footprint is to die and evaporate.

And this is what's wrong with so many green efforts - they want to make you a greener person, as long as you buy their product, buy into their scheme, keep that money going around.  And when you come down to it, money has the worst carbon footprint of anything on this world.

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When Is It Unethical?

Was Swine Flu released rather than just happening?  Maybe it's just me, but I get a tad restless in the brain when I see news like this article on USN.  The article is all gee-whiz-gosh-wow about how good it is that H1N1 has not mutated into something that's immune to the flu drugs currently being made.  How wonderful, now we know it will definitely be effective against H1N1. Gosh golly gee whiz wow - aren't we the luckiest people?

But then you have to face the facts - H1N1 found itself a phenotype that it liked.  H1N1 properties worked for it.  H1N1 settled down for a comfortable long wait.  In other words, in 1918, one version of the flu settled down to a more or less stable form which was very successful for it, allowing it to wreak havoc in the early 1900's.  There was no need for it to mutate to a further form.  And then it committed the cardinal mistake that pathogens can commit, it started killing off susceptible hosts faster than they could regrow.  It burned itself out, all except for some samples thoughtfully kept by scientific and medical staff at that time.

And now, we suddenly have a recurrence of a stable and (in virus lifespans) many generations extinct virus.  Since it's a stable form, we know it didn't just "spontaneously evolve again" from existing viruses.  That's like having specially bred domestic chickens, something comes along and kills all domestic chickens - and then suddenly, spontaneously, the wild chickens in India and Asia start producing domestic fowl mutations.  Evolution doesn't retrace steps.

There's evidence to indicate that once an evolutionary step is made, the organism burns the bridges behind it, making it much harder to regress to an earlier form.  And while there are some quirks of evolution, we're begininng to see more and more that organism don't just retrogress.   So you can forget saying that H1N1 just threw back from newer strains of the flu virus.

Furthermore - whether deliberately or unintentionally, there have been several releases of biohazards from laboratories around the world.  Most immediate to me is the 1995 release of rabbit calici virus (RCV) from an island facility (Wardang Island) off the South Australian shore.  There was some discussion whether or not this was actually a deliberate and clandestine release to help farmers hard hit by drought and rabbits denuding their fields, or a genuine accident.  It doesn't matter either way - it perfectly demonstrates that inadvertent and/or deliberate releases are not only possible, but can and do happen. 

So we're in the unfortunate position of deciding, not between whether it was an act of nature or an act of man, but instead that we have to decide if this act of man was an accident, or a cold calculating and deliberate release.  Welcome to Human nature...

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Bastard Marketing Inc #2723

"Releases regular bursts, keeping your home insect-free the natural way"...

The quote above is from a TV ad I just heard.  it may not be word perfect.

'Scuse me if I admit to being totally flabberghasted.  I'm still trying to figure out, Louie, how pesticides sprayed into the air is natural in any way shape or form, even less convinced that spraying it in "regular bursts" is actually gonna be any friendlier to the environment or me and my friends.

And i'm not even going to touch the matter of manufacturing a timer sprayer, all the electronics, and the energy needed to keep the thing going.  And the waste when it gets forgotten once the first lot of batteries leak inside the case, rendering it useless after the first can of "natural" poison.  Because very few people ever actually buy more than the refill that comes with the first pack.

Oh well, it's not a clean world and that's not a clean advertising tactic.


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The Big Green

You've probably gathered by now that I'm not exactly a fan of big bucks companies. Every company that has gone chasing global billion dollar incomes has created global trillion dollar footprints which are now killing entire species, regions, and soon, populations of people.

A brief few weeks ago, I found an article on Yahoo and took a link to it, which lays out one of the trillion dollar problems we will face in coming years, the fact that all this change is accelerating and predicted to be much worse than initially thought.

So no, I'm not a fan.

Here's some info on organic farming that's interesting to me.  Why?  Because I've started a facebook group to try and keep a lot of that sort of thing local, where it costs less.  Why?  Because the new "orgwashing" and "localwashing" advertising is yet another example of the Big Bucks Companies trying to squeeze another billion dollars out of the world without being willing to foot the resulting bill.

One of the aims of that group (and others like it - please feel free to start one for your region) is to share gardening tips, to let other people know that I have a few spare buckets of tomatoes so they don't go to *insert supermarket chain name here* and buy tomatoes that were grown in some place where entire crops of tomatoes that "aren't quite red looking enough" are just dumped to rot on the ground...  Look over that slideshow, because it's sobering news.

Add up the cost of dumping that entire crop of tomatoes, go on, I dare you.

• Ploughing under an entire local ecosystem for the fields in the first place, that's one loss.  Okay you can amortise that over the life of the farm so this crop is probably 1/100th of the total cost to the ecosystem - but it's permanent, so really the cost is uncountable.  All that local flora and fauna are irrevocably and finally gone...
• Oh yes - the fossil fuel and waste used to create the field.  Again, that is amortised over the life of the field, but then there's also 
• The cost of preparing and ploughing the ground.  That's seasonal, one lot per crop.
• Seeding.  Takes another trip around with the tractor.
• Watering that crop.  Most vegetable crops, in order to be commercially viable, involve  pumping water to them at some stage during their growth.  that takes energy, and uses up groundwater.
• Fertilisers.  Always, they use fertilisers to speed the growth, induce larger heavier bigger better faster more crops. See the next item for problems inherent in this, they are the same for fertilisers as for pesticides.
• And Pesticides.  Aside from the obvious cost to the local environment of using chemicals to kill off pests that are only there because you've got acres upon acres of tomato plants and the pests are seeing Tomato Pest Good Life City, besides the cost of that chemical material running off and getting into the water table and poisoning other animals down the line either directly or indirectly, there's another cost.  
• All those chemicals had to be shipped to the farm.  Fuel was burned.
• Oh yeah, and they had to be manufactured. Raw materials shipped to a factory, toxic byproducts dumped somewhere else, and more fuel used to process it.
• Then it has to be dug back into the ground.  Because of some perceived flaw or blemish...  More fuel, more pollution.  

And if the crop passes muster, then it has to be transported to *insert supermarket chain name here* warehouses, then from those to the stores.  Sometimes, that can mean flying from Argentina to Australia. 

So to my mind growing it locally and swapping it, selling it at the Farmer's Market, and making sure I use natural pest control and fertilisers is important.  I'm hoping that more groups such as mine are formed, everywhere, and that they each take a sizeable percentage of the business away from *insert supermarket chain name here* and others like it, so that those factory farms become a thing of the past, fertiliser and pesticide sales dry up, and people realise that there is going to be the odd tomato with a bite blemish on it, tough tits, harden the heck up...

Oh - while I'm at fussy eaters - you can't afford to be fussy.  I was talking to a colleague a few years back, and we were discussing another colleague, specifically, his eating habits.  He didn't like most vegetables, so he avoided them, tolerated bread and cheese but didn't like the taste of milk so only had the odd drop of milk in his coffees, and doted on sugar-laced fizzy drinks.  The guy didn't drink aside from the odd social drink, yet he was perpetually broke.  I guess having to live on bacon - oh yeah, eggs - chops, steaks, sausages, the internal organs, (he loved lambs fry) and burgers does take its toll on your pocketbook, and definitely this guy had a foodprint the size of a small island nation.

"OMG" my friend said of this bloke, "how the heck has he survived on a diet of almost exclusively meat?  I mean, it lacks dozens of essential enzymes, there are whole groups of nutrients he's missing out on, how can that kind of a diet be healthy?"  I couldn't help but be amused though, at how very blind a vegan could be to the complementary "lacks and missings" in his own diet...  

There's energy levels, too.  If your diet is lacking in nutrients, then you will not have as good an energy level as someone with a balanced diet.  I don't care which side of the carnivore/vegetarian divide you favour, if you're not eating right your body isn't working right.  There's a reason why the percentage of omnivores is higher among high-energy-requirement jobs than among the more sedentary office workers.

Again, it boils down to hardening the heck up, realising that the world can't afford to indulge your distaste of broccoli, and getting on with it.  So please do it, start a victory garden, start a local group, and put some of your time and effort daily into fixing the crisis rather than leaving it up to "them" to come along and fix it.

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Ted And The Arctic Slushie Machine

If you don't think the Earth is warming, then you might use this article to argue that it's all about small cycles causing panic, because the glaciers are slowing down again.  You'd use that article to claim that for every warming/panic-inducing cycle that the panic merchants are using to stop you making a healthy billion dollars from exploiting freely available resources.

I'm all in favour of perhaps not being quite so hasty.  I'm all in favour of panicking - right now - because of a few things I observed as a child, as a student, and as an adult.  That is, that things happen in cycles, yes - but those cycles are often self-reinforcing and accelerating.

Ice is a strange material, and if it weren't for the decidedly strange properties of water and ice, life on Earth would have been much more difficult, if not impossible.  Quick recap of basic school science:  All materials on Earth have properties that go a bit like this:

• Solid state is the coldest state of the material, it is at its most dense (atoms packed closest together) and the particles are generally locked together and do not move much relative to one another.
• Liquid state is reached as the material is warmed up, and the particles have limited movement relative to one another, allowing the material to flow.
• Gaseous state is reached if the material is heated even further, and at this point the particles move freely about.

Water doesn't quite work like that.  In its solid state it is less dense than in its liquid state, which is why icebergs float. And that property is one of the freaks of nature that we can blame life on...

Imagine a world where water behaved like all the other materials.  During the night, in a cold spot, the ice would form - and then sink to the bottom of the water, where the sun can't warm it up again.  Normal thermal circulation would ensure that the warmer water would stay on top, and cold liquid water would sink to lite above the ice.  The following night, a bit more water freezes and plunges to the depths, never to be seen again...  You can see that in a very short time, only about an inch of liquid water would be accessible and all else would be ice.

That's in part why life as we know it (and as we're stuck with, it's worth noting) was able to evolve.

Now we come to some observations made as a kid, when defrosting the fridge was one of my duties.  I sometimes used pans of warm water to heat up the freezer box, and one of the things I saw was that water and ice do behave cyclically.  The heat would create a film of water between the ice and the freezer floor, and the ice would start to flow.  Then, as the ice moved and melted, cold water ran down into the gap between ice and freezer, it would slow down a bit, then the heat would build up and there would be another flow, followed by another slowdown.

That cycle would repeat, but the bottom line was that eventually, every time, the ice layer would break up and fall out like a sheet of slushie...  I know this model doesn't take into account that I've turned the source of cold off, but it's still very close to what is observed.  We're turning the fridge to a defrost cycle and letting the slowly warming ocean currents and warmer air slush the polar ice.

In that article, the researchers say that warmer water flows upstream between the glaciers and the ground at times.  If the water is warmer than normal, I would imagine that initially there would be a much faster movement of the glacier ice, until enough cold ice and water had been brought down to counter the effects of the warmer water.  Then the process would obviously slow down again, until the warmer water flows back up under the ice sheets and the temperature of the water layer starts to rise again.

To me the thing isn't that the glaciers are slowing down a bit, because I'd expect that.  To me, the question is - how soon will the warmer layer win again? - And is this the time that the ice drops off in one big line of Arctic slushie? - Or are there a few oscillations left in the system?

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Aluminium Heap, What A Waste.

I have to concur with so many commenters - this is an ugly car, inside, out, and in concept.

Inside: I expect the checkerplates to be smeared with diesel oil, mud, and the odd bit of pig poo - I have honestly seen tractor cockpits that are nicer, that overstuffed armchair notwithstanding.

Outside: Are those - retrojets? 'Nuff said.

Concept: In a time when we're all trying to curb fuel use and lower emissions, I don't give a rat's ass how nice an engine it is - using a V8 to move one person around is not on, no matter how rich that person is in coin, and poor in taste.  Find some other way to augment yer manhood.

General: It is UGLY. It is WASTEFUL. It is made of a material softer than any other car it will be sharing the road with, unless you know someone with a car made of butter.  It has a 4.2liter engine.  

In my opinion this would have to be the world's greatest contemporary automotive fail.

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Incandescent Imbecility

May I suggest that the people who are stockpiling incandescent bulbs might just be flaming idiots?  Just a thought...  I've used CFLs since they first came out and cost $25 apiece, and while the light was a lot "fluorescent office lighting" back then, they have now gotten to the point where I and my guests can't tell which fixture has the incandescent, which has the halogen, and which has the CFL bulb.

To explain that - I have a reading lamp with a 60W incandescent in it, a second reading lamp with a halogen, a bathroom with a halogen, and everything else is CFL.  Almost invariably, they say the halogen reading light is too "cold" while the halogen in the bathroom is fine, and no-one has ever suggested that the light bulbs in the lounge or kitchen are wrong or give poor light.

For all you people who are going to mutter about "newfangled mumbletty mutter crap not like the good ole days" well guess what the good ole days are gone, behind us, and there's a new reality to contend with and it doesn't include your concerns that your light bulbs are messing with your sense of interior decorating.  If you really DO have such extreme colour acuity that you can tell the difference, change your effing precious decor to match the new lights.  

Do you know how many rooms had to be refurbished when the "good old oil and gas lights" gave way to those same electric incandescent lights that you're now clutching to your bosoms?  Get used to change cos there's gonna be a helluvva lot of change in the next few years, much of it down to your love of those incandescent bulbs and flawless decor...

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We're About To Find Out

. . . what "knife-edge" means . . .

UPDATE: Still more bad news . . .

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See If This Amuses

.

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Four Year Anniversary

I just realised - four years and a day ago:

Anniversary poor biopsy results 2005

2009-08-22

That's how long ago I had my biopsy results back, with their bleak outlook of almost 70% dysplasic cells in the samples.

I might bother to have another PSA sometime soon, but in all truth, I am still following my diet and don't feel that I have a single worry.

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The Real Solution For Global Warming

... is simple.  Don't expect quite so much convenience, expect to have to do a bit more for the daily bread.

Some friendly things you can do right now to do your part:

• Buy a lot more unprocessed raw food locally, and prepare and cook it yourself. It isn't going to be as much of a range of foods as you're used to, but it will definitely make a difference.
  Also, many people who buy processed food buy the same thing over and over anyway.  Why not swap it for something local, homegrown, and homecooked? There's definitely a time problem if you have long workdays, but those long workdays are generally NOT helping the ecosystem, whereas looking after yourself does help.  Paradox, huh?
• Plan shorter single-car mileages per week.  The train/bus commute may not be as comfortable, but it IS better than doing all those miles in a car by yourself or carpooling with two other people instead of with (as in a bus) 90 people.
  I'm all in favour of inner-city and high traffic density areas becoming Electric-Vehicle-Only areas, with petrol and diesel fuelled vehicle drivers having to pay a daily fee in order to drive in such zones.  Fossil fuelled vehicles are not an option in densely trafficked areas.
• Try to grow some of your food yourself, using minimal processed fertilisers or soil conditioners.
  That way you know what is in that food, beyond a doubt. Secondly, if you stick to natural soil fertilising and conditioning, you avoid much of the fertiliser pollution which plagues agricultural areas.  Monoculture (growing large areas of the same variety) is the single biggest cause of outbreaks of pests that feed on that variety, and that in turn is the single biggest reason factory farms have to use so much pesticide.
• Try bringing up a few rabbits or chickens for the table.
  Our diets require a certain amount of meat, but nowhere near as much as we do eat.  And nothing - no amount of photos of piles of shrink-wrapped packages of the meat you consume every year - nothing at all, brings home the message of what meat really costs to produce in the way that raising, feeding, slaughtering, and then preparing your own meat animals does...  I don't want to turn people vegetarian, but I do want to point out that farming many animals in a monoculture creates the same problems as with food crops, of needing strong chemical means to get rid of the pests that converge and become a plague.

Those are four things you could start doing right now.  They won't alleviate the food crisis, but they will mitigate the effects of overfarming.  They won't remove vehicle emissions from the equation, but they will make a difference.  Taken individually, each one seems like a tiny drop in a huge ocean - but that's how the ill effects have all crept in, one tiny insignificant seeming drop at a time...

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The Real Reason For Global Warming

I can see how perhaps young people can't quite see what grunt work has to do with conservation. And I can also see that yes, they are worried by the Global Warming phenomenon because they will be the ones most affected by it.  Now comes the bit where I'm so so so sorry to have to say...

But right now, convenience, laziness, and shortcuts are what is causing all that ecosystem change.  Our desire for everyone to "have it easy" is what drives factory farming, deforestation, "convenience" stores (that name says it all really) and mountain ranges' worth of garbage and pollution.  It's everyone all over the world trying to dump personal responsibility in exchange for a mysterious shadowy vague "them" to blame it on and who will do the hard work.

And sorry to say, it's not going to go away if that's the attitude people are going to have.  Unless you're prepared to forego that "eco-friendly holiday" that's so conveniently mentioned online for you and which you'll only spend a few hundred tons of carbon and emissions on just from going to and coming back from, you aren't really doing the planet any favours.  Are you conveniently getting all your grocery needs at a giant supermarket chain?  Then if you are, no amount of "ecofriendly!" and "healthy!" signage made from rapidly shrinking supplies of natural resources are actually going to make any of what you buy eco-friendly.

No amount of telling yourself that "X-Mart is just going to have to do a cleaner job" will reduce the impact of that nice clean packaging made from 1000 year half-life plastics, nor will it take back one gram of the pollution spewed into the air to produce that food and ship it halfway around the world from a place where it's cheap, and it won't take away one milligram of the pesticides used to grow that food and which is now in some waterway killing local animals.

And why are those supermarkets still doing that?  Because YOU are letting them, and you're giving them a mandate to keep doing it by continuing to give them your money.  If YOU could be arsed to find local farmer's markets and prepare meals instead of defrosting them, if YOU had a shred of responsibility instead of blaming the supermarket chain, this wouldn't be happening.  Think about that when you're next asked to volunteer to clean up roadside trash or participate in a tree planting and make some weak excuse and go on an eco-holiday instead... 

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This Will Be Their Testament?

How sad. It's because of dickheads like these that we'll finish up with more heatwaves, more bushfires, more extinctions, less fresh water, and ultimately worse living conditions.  Who voted for these morons?  More importantly, who's going to vote for them next time?

If these people are doing this out of some misguided sense that they are saving us money, well guess what senators and parliamentarians and other halfwits, I can't eat our crap plastic money, but I will be really really really pissed off when food costs me all of my scrimped and saved plastic money that you worked so studiously to save for me...

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Cash For Clunkers Ripped Off

UPDATE: at least there's one other person thinking like me.  and a good high profile one, at that.

While Cash For Clunkers is at its heart seemingly a good program, it does have some drawbacks.  As in this little gem of a scheme in Germany, where the cars are just sold again later.  NOT the best outcome.  It would be good if the car dealers there grew a conscience and just injected those engines as well, but my bet is that half of them ARE the element that's turning a profit by reselling those old shit-heaps.

It's not a well-thought-out scheme to begin with, because it brings as many problems as it solves.  And the one problem it does solve best isn't pollution but a kickstart to the economy that was guttering and dying in the USA.  For that, the CfC scheme has been a Godsend, because it gets money out there and circulating again.

Problems it didn't solve:

• Pollution.  As in the example of Germany, where it just moves the heaps around to spew somewhere else, in the States it just gets people to buy another pollution-spewer.  
• Transport.  The people who can afford to upgrade their car, whether by trading in, CfC, or whatever else, already have a car.  People who don't have the wherewithal to afford a car, are still just as screwed as before.

Much better would have been to have two wrinkles on the scheme:

• CfC only available for anyone purchasing an electric, hydrogen, or hybrid car with the rebate.  That would have solved the problem of pollution, and put incentive dollars in the pockets of those that most need them, the clean vehicle industry.
• Clunkers that are in roadworthy condition to have the engine removed and killed, and a new more efficient and clean engine fitted and then allowed to be resold - but only to individual customers, and at a price no more than the rebate plus the market cost of the engine and fitting.  That would provide cheap cars for those who need them but can't afford them, be they in the States or elsewhere in the world.

Used together those two steps would have solved a lot of hassles and also pulled the sting of the scam being perpetrated in Germany.

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Fetchez La Fishing Rod!

Isn't it amazing how the world comes back if you only let it?

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Just A Quick Observation On Weight Loss

I don't know how many TV news articles start with "Losing the weight is only half the story, here's the part that no-one else tells you."

The day one TV station headed an article with that tag, wasn't that the end of it?  Cos after that, everyone is telling you the part that "no-one else tells you" and in fact they need to change the tag to "... here's the part that everyone else has already told you."  Uh, yeah sure it lacks zing, but it's the truth... 

And the only bit I'm sure of is that losing weight IS the battle, just that you have to keep doing it.  %)  The word "diet" means "what you eat" and so to me a "weight loss diet" is equivalent to "what you eat to lose weight."  And there's no time limit on that.  You eat to lose weight, and you keep doing it.

That's the secret to losing the weight, I think.  Once you've found your way to lose weight, make sure it's something you'll be comfortable with for the rest of your life, and then keep doing it.

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Permaculture Tips

As you know, I like doing things that are closer to nature, things like gardening with less fertiliser and less soil preparation - stuff that reads a lot like permaculture, in fact.  I've been experimenting with my vegetable garden here, and in previous places I've lived, and come up with a few thoughts:

Huegelkultur:  Translates from German as "moundculture" and as you can see from this article it's pretty much just that - pile up biomass and pile a mound of soil over it.  I'm Austrian, like the guy Sepp mentioned in that article, and I'm an admirer of doing things in a low-impact low-footprint way.  But I'm not so sure.

• One: raised beds are anathema to permaculture.  They are a way of taking the land's natural lay - and then altering it.  But I do agree that raised beds are better, just please don't call them permaculture.  
• Two: It's a bit ironic to use a tractor to do all this while burning a shitload of fossil fuel and causing pollution.  
• Three: Where did the dirt for the mound come from?  You probably need more than comes out of the ditch, and in fact all the pics I've seen show the logs piled on the ground, and then some "dirt ex machina" appears to cover the logs up.  
• Four: The claim is that the rotting trees cause "natural tillage" by leaving air pockets that you'd otherwise have to plough.  But maybe the superior tillage also has to do with the fact that you dug up a mound of dirt, stuck some logs down, then piled the soil on.  In that process, you've given the soil a "superploughing" to considerable depth. 

Personally, I'd dig a trench, put the biomass in, and then pile the soil back on top, for the same effect.  Oh guess what? I already do that.  I take stuff that's too big to compost or feed to the worms, and dig holes in the garden and bury it.  My grandfather did that, and so did my parents. It's nothing new Sepperl, it's what we've been doing for generations.  

My method uses up all sorts of waste that would otherwise just rot in some midden somewhere.  And I don['t know either why it doesn't create a nitrogen deficient area of soil, but that perhaps comes from the other bits I do which aren't mentioned in the article and perhaps aren't being done.

Another problem in Australia is that summers get too hot to allow plants to be without a source of water, or you lose in one record heat day what took you three months to grow.  Just not worth it to have such deeply-held permaculture convictions.  And the same heat kills off worm farms unless you keep them under a wet blanket (there goes your brownie points for not wasting water) and turns what might have been promising compost into dry water-repelling dust.

Here's the things I've always done in my gardens and which improve any soil.

• DO dig your beds from time to time.  As I said, kitchen scraps, branches, leaves, feathers and bones and skins, all go to the garbage pit under garden bed "F" or wherever I'm currently burying.
• DO fertilise and condition the topsoil and subsoil layers.  Just not with chemicals.  I have compost that I wrap in old carpet pieces in the winter to keep them a bit warm, I have straw and hay and poo from the rabbits and the chickens, and I have worm tea and the leftover worm castings from worm farming.  These need to be dug into the garden bed and that tends to raise the bed enough, and probably encourages nitrogen fixation, water retention, and filters down decay bacteria to the stuff buried lower down.
• While I'm at it.  My excrement is no good in that particular situation, although rabbit chicken goat sheep cow horse and pig poop are okay.  We humans tend to concentrate too many toxins and bacteria that will just turn around and bite us, so our excrement needs to go lay in a trench somewhere dark for a year to decompose further, and then you can dig it under.  
• Urine?  Yes please!  Nothing more satisfying than going out and getting that wee among the veges.  Our urine is sterile, generally, and contains great trace nutrients including some that help in the fixing of nitrogen, thus solving the nitrogen-consuming decomposition problem.
• Hair. I've taken to sweeping up at hairdressers and bringing that to the garden.  Hair contains even more material that breaks down and provides growth factors.  You can dig it into the top/subsoil layers along with the upper material, in among the biomass lower down, or feed it to the worms, in particular, who will find it very filling and tasty.

I also have my garden beds laid out to a width that's the same as the rabbit hutches and chicken runs.  And those have wheels...  I can wheel a hutch full of rabbits over a garden bed and their wastes drop directly onto the topsoil, their urine contains more calcium than an application of lime, the scraps of oaten and lucerne hay form a mulch on the surface to keep moisture in and insulate the soils from the heat.  Two or three initial hand waterings washes the organic waste down into the soil where you want it, and if you were smart you ran poly drip tube in rows so you can now have the advantage of buried drip irrigation.

That 's how I started here last year, but I had to use bought potting mix.  This year, I've gathered all the composted and compostable materials, have a worm farm in production, and got a long job ahead of me digging over a few dozen meters of garden...  But it will produce a top crop this summer.

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Organic Food Is Crap

There has to be something to be taken from this article.  What exactly that something is, though, I couldn't tell you.  It seems to be what one famous surgeon delights in calling "woo," though.  It's a study commissioned to establish some results about organic food.

The result is that "organic food is no better than factory-farm-grown."  The British Food Standards Agency has made a "ruling" to that effect, based on this research.  That is heavy-handed and smacks of bulldozing.  A little.  But let's check a bit deeper, there might be something in this after all.

The study is of course conducted by the very best organisation to do it, a body whose skills in nutritional studies, knowledge of industrial toxins, and skill with biochemistry is unrivalled in the world today, it's the...  hold on, what the hell?  - the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.   What. The. Fuck.

Horses for courses people, and if scientists were horses and the field of nutrition was the trots, that school would be the one circling the glue factory with sleds made of house bricks.  Scientists are the ones always insisting on the right qualifications, and a school of hygiene is not a school of nutrition specialists no matter how you try and spin doctor it.

So what resources are they drawing on?  Oh good, they have the "analysis of 50 years of research into organic food" to draw on.  Which were apparently done at a rate of a thousand studies a year, because the article states that number a bit further on, 50,000 studies were analysed according to the reporter.  Uh, hang on.  BBBZZZZZZZTTTTTT!!!!  Nope, sorry.  Scratch that. Bad reporter, writing things the wrong way and creating a false impression. 

The unqualified researchers didn't actually analyse 50,000 study results, they carefully selected 55 - yes, a whole 55 - of those study results.  The rest apparently "didn't meet the researchers' criteria" whatever that means.  Oh yes, that's a way of saying "the rest didn't demonstrate what we were setting out to demonstrate..."

So.  A body that is not really all that qualified to conduct a nutrition study, carefully selects 0.1% of results out of 50 years of nutritional research, and presents its "findings" to the FSA on the basis of those.

I find it soooo helpful to turn this around, because it will help you to focus on what's relevant here - it's not that they carefully researched 0.1% of all the food studies done in the UK in 50 years, it's more a case of that their findings aren't fully supported by 99.9% of the studies done over fifty years...

And okay - I know that it's not actually unsupported by 99.9% of studies, but even if the study results were completely random, you'd expect that 50% would be favourable and 50% unfavourable.  To only find one tenth of one percent of study results to be suitable for your research indicates a very narrow focus of the research, and possibly a very specific guideline to preselect for the results you want to have come out of it.

Look.  I'm not going to research the researchers, or how they researched, or what their criteria were.  I can only say that it not only appears to be a carefully crafted study and result, but also that it flies in the face of everything that we know as commonsense.  A food produced naturally is natural, and is nutritively what our bodies have evolved to digest.  A food produced with the aid of chemical and physical processes will not be natural, and who knows - especially not a school of hygienists - how well tolerated it will be by our bodies?  There are thousands of ways to hook together carbon hydrogen and oxygen atoms, and just counting them as "nutrients" is not good enough.  After all, hook them together one way and you get oil, another way and you get alcohol.  VERY different effects on our bodies...

Our scientists are always asking us to beware of bullshit, and keep in mind that if it seems too good to be true, then it probably is too good to be true.  Unless it's their bullshit, and they're the ones saying that you can take their shortcuts and still come out with a miraculously indistinguishable product at the end of it.

And let me ask you, if it came down to it, does it change your buying habits?  Not mine.  I will always prefer food I've grown myself or food I've seen grown locally and without much processing, to what's on the shelves in the local supermarkets.  I'll always prefer free range and barn eggs and chickens to chicken factory product, and in fact I prefer my own chickens and their eggs to either of those.

Having just finished watching several nights of news articles about food processors cheating and defrauding us by adding water and bulking agents, cosmetically altering foods with various chemicals to make them more appealing when they're past their storage date, ripping off growers by storing foods for sometimes years, and underweighing, overpricing, and price fixing, I can safely say that I feel better about giving double the money to an organic grower and receiving honest produce than I would if I was saving half that amount but getting months-old food from a multinational giant corporation that's probably about 5% responsible for the global weather crisis due to their disregard for anything except profit.

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Proved Right Again, By Research.

UPDATE:
Here's another article pointing to inflammation as a cause of illness, but this time mental illness. And I don't mean in a roundabout namby-pamby indirect way, either.  This is BAM! direct.  Read the article.

I am always so goddam proud when science backs up my hypotheses.  I mentioned briefly in The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook that I figured that a lot of the damage to our bodies is caused by cellular inflammatory disorders of one kind or another, and here's one that's now being laid right on that very doorstep.

I've had this inkling you see, from reading lots online, that oxidants and other irritants cause inflammation at the cellular level.  These irritants include many of the food additives that are put into our processed foods.  makes sense doesn't it?  An ingredient meant to irritate minced beef into retaining its red colour has got to also irritate your body when you ingest it.  We're made of damn meat...

When the cells are inflamed, there's an increase in "noise" which makes the signals the cells are supposed to react to, harder for the cells to detect.  You can drown out a quite sensible and loud conversation with around half the sound power of white noise, very effectively.  And cells are much simpler things than we are, they can't adapt their sensing to a noisier environment.  So they start no longer seeing the signals that are meant to regulate them.

One of the signals that gets drowned out is the sugar/insulin signal.  Imagine dabbing peroxide bleach on a spot over and over, several times a day, for several years.  Do you reckon you might have a rew raw patch in that spot?  Hell yeah!  Would you do that to yourself/  Probably not.  Yet millions of people every day consume white sugar that has been bleached white with far unfriendlier substances than peroxide...

Here's the real kicker, as far as I'm concerned - when your body gets a free source of carbs such as white sugar, guess where that goes?  Yep, right to storage in your body fat...

I know that the "respected medical and scientific comunity" out there will holler about woo, they'll decline to study something so wild and unfounded, because dammit there's a way to do things and having idea from the laiety is not the way!  Which is a great pity because in the meanwhile people will in increasing numbers die of diabetes, of cancers, and immune diseases while someone somewhere one day decides to put in process the 'porper way" to "do science" and by then it'll be too late for several million souls.

I'm going to bold this.  If you take home one lesson from this article, let it be this:


Food from large food manufacturers, even and especially the "healthy alternative" ones, are pumped out in more kilotons than fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and produced as cheaply as possible, and they aren't formulated to be 100% safe, they are formulated not to spoil and thus cost the manufacturer returns.  

Lastly, remember what I said about the inflammation in cells causing mis-signalling, and then you have to realise that we're actually built around a very complex feedback network of very small signals.  If you want a demonstration of that, just mess your microscopic signals up with a really good getting drunk and subsequent hangover, then imagine if the drunk and the hangover was to last a lifetime...

Cancer cells are similarly miscommunicating about where growth ought to stop...

And we should be communicatiing VERY clearly with food manufacturers who put into their foods additives which are banned across whole continents just so they can stretch a product to make a few tenths of a cent per gram, or to last longer on the shelves so they can ship it farther and cover more markets with it.

In the meantime I'm just going to say to you to avoid white sugar, white bread, overly white salt, the additives that start with an E on most foodstuff in supermarkets, and too much animal fat, because just like us, they concentrate their poisons and irritants that are in their foods, in the fat and organs first.

That happens with us too, of course.  Fatty liver from eating too much inflamed fat which then has to be gall-dissolved and filtered, leaving all the adulterated fat nodules behind to form the liver-kiling specks.  Kidneys failing from trying to pass poisons that are designed to irritate meat, which the kidney is made out of.  And bowels and colons that spend most of their lives in contact with a colour / irritant made from a crushed insect that uses that irritant as a weapon, suddenly developing the cancer that the weapon grade irritant was supposed to cause...

The second take-home from this article is - your body has a remarkable amount of capacity to recover.  If you give it a chance.  Stop eating production line white bread, switch your white sugar for raw sugar, avoid any processed item that has more numerical ingredients than real ones, eat clean fresh vegetables that are in season (but there are exceptions, see my book) and remember that if you remove the irritation source, that will make a huge difference.  If you also learn how to deal with ALL the natural foods our bodies have evolved to, then your body is right in its comfort zone and will function at its most efficient - and you'll get that in health and energy.  

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The Final Solution Could Be...

Almost everyone who stops to think about it knows of at least one environmental impact that they, their lifestyle choices, or their life requirements, make on the Earth.  Go on, ask yourself, ask anyone.  "Yeah I know I shouldn't drive to the shop when I could cycle or walk but..."  or "I know I should walk and save the waste of resources on a 10-speed titanium framed bike but..." and so forth.

It's pretty obvious that just by being alive, we have an impact on the earth.  "If I hadn't just eaten that animal, the last breeding pair of the species might have been saved" or "Damn, if I hadn't just eaten that plant, the last breeding pair of the species that lives exclusively on this plant might have been saved"

I can also see that nuclear waste seems to be providing one of the last refuges for "natural" life on Earth.  There's this Russian woman, see, who's gone back to the Chernobyl region and taken photos of a place which has reverted back to nature, with slightly glowing animals. Check her site here.  And I'm kidding, the animals don't glow or anything, and also, we won't know how long the animals manage to live and breed in the hot zones.  But the hot zones do keep humans out, to a great extent.

So I can see the attraction of solving the problems of disposing of nuclear waste and maintaining natural forests in one solution.  And yep, it would seem that this does neatly solve both problems, although I also say that probably just putting up radioactivity warning signs would have the same effect... %)

But I can also see radical, "fundamentalist' activists thinking along the lines of my first few paragraphs, and stealing material used to safeguard a forest, and spreading that among the ecosystem at large... In fact, I predict that before 2020, some misguided group of eco warriors somewhere is going to do precisely that, seed a large chunk of prime farmland or something like that with nuclear material or some other highly toxic material.

Ironically, the greatest effect on reducing human impact might be one of our more toxic byproducts, and the best of human intentions may result in the best of human extinctions...

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HUGE Plug For Livelocal!

Here's a site that deserves promotion promotion promotion...  LiveLocal is in beta but already showing the things it can do to make a difference.  As a bonus, it's developed and operated right here in Australia but will be useful no matter where in the world you are.  And it's hopefully going to be a bit better than some DIY sites...  The idea of Livelocal is to try stuff that makes a difference and share it, hopefully leading others to also try doing similar things.  Hopefully those things are clever and ecologically sound...

The concept is very useful and will allow you to take advantage of other people's experiences and techniques for sustainable living, and deserves everyone's support.  Everyone has something to contribute on a site like this, and definitely everyone will find something they can learn from it, too.

I'm thinking that if one of the experiments was to be a home gardening information and trading post, we could do away with a lot of supermarket product and the pollution and carbon costs involved in their shipping food all over the world.  There!  An idea already!

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SmogSmart?

It seems that pollution affects intelligence in a negative manner.  But I wonder if all the possible interpretations for these data have been drawn.  The result seems significant enough, but as with every study I've seen, in an effort to be specific enough to prove a hypothesis, it's too narrow in scope to eliminate all the other variables.

My hypothesis is that parents with slightly higher potential and actual intelligence would be more aware of the ill effects of pollution in general, and would tend to avoid those areas of higher pollution.  They would be earning slightly more and thus more able to afford to avoid such areas.  They would also be slightly more aware of the need for proper and balanced nutrition, so if I was running the study I'd also be checking the parents' incomes and the health levels of the children and seeing if the more intelligent children show signs of better nutrition. (As opposed to the signs of less pollution exposure.)

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Caffeine Improves Alzheimer's .. Um .. Something ..

Growing up for some of my youth in Arabia, I'm now very glad I learned to enjoy the odd cup of coffee a day... I seem to remember a few decades ago that people were saying they reckoned coffee improved their memory.

It seems that caffeine may finish up as a treatment for people with memory problems and/or dementia issues.  Something that people obviously realised a long time ago, since coffee has always been a high valued luxury food.

The article states that caffeine improved memory in mice which have been bred to be prone to Alzheimer's, and that it reduced amyloids in the brain and blood by almost one half in both human patients and the mice.

What seems strange to me is that a percentage of people already do drink the required number of cups of coffee (five, if you're wondering, is the dose mentioned in the article) and a percentage of people get Alzheimer's.  Maybe there's already survey/research results out there that can be used to support or disprove the efficacy of caffeine?

Me, I can't wait until coffee is covered by a PBS subsidy...  %)

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Drowning In Flies? There May Be A Reason...

If you only take home one thing from this article, let it be this quote I pulled:

""Ten years ago, we would have said, 'No way. Managed relocation is a stupid idea.' And that's because the best strategy is to reduce greenhouse gases. But we are not reducing greenhouse gases fast enough.""

Insects are one of those things we take for granted, or curse, or occasionally squish.  They are also a large and important part of the whole ecosystem, and the term "Butterfly Effect" was a reference to that.  I'm more inclined to say "Honeybee Effect" because I enjoy growing vegetables and I've been following the beehive extinctions with a bit of a shudder.  Luckily there are plenty of bees around here, and show no signs of dying off.

But if you want to try just one example of the weather changes really messing with life on the planet, try and imagine a world without bees.  It's the most obvious example, but by far not the only one - and some can be a bit unexpected...

On a recent holiday to a rainforest area just north of Albany, T. and I found ourselves enveloped in absolute clouds of bushflies.  Everywhere we went, over a huge segment of the lower southwest, it seemed there'd been a population explosion of flies.  I know a fair portion of Australia, and I knew that clouds of flies like that were unusual.  So I asked a local working at one of the forestry projects.

Turns out, those fly populations had been that high before.  Around the time that people began to introduce sheep and goats and cattle, apparently...  The flies found cowpats and other excrement to be an ideal place to lay eggs, and lived the high life enjoying crapaccinos and other muscine delights.  I am not kidding!  

The pioneer farmers started the explosion, and modern more intensive farming with more animals just kind of put the crap on the cake so to speak.  That particular region is genuine humid rainforest, so the conditions for flies are ideal.

So why were there such record numbers of flies that particular year?  (As I said, I've experienced the region in other years and that particular year was orders of magnitude type worse.)  Well, a shortage of dung beetles apparently.  Yep, the local Lands and Environment departments would buy tens of thousands of dung beetles and airdrop them over the region, the beetles would roll up the poop and their larva eat the fly larva as part of their birthday celebrations.  And that year, either there was a shortage of dung beetles and therefore a higher price for them, or the local authorities didn't have pockets as deep as usual...

Now I'm trying to imagine what the region would be like if dung beetles died off worldwide due to the changing weather, and then imagine a belt of rainforest climate sweeping up Western Australia towards Perth...

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Looking After You, Or Looking The Other Way?

You take a big bite of your corn cob, and life's pretty good. Sweet juice dribbles down. Sounds like heaven? It sure is - as long as you grew the corn yourself and didn't use pesticide around it...

It seems - surprise surprise - that some big chemical companies aren't quite as scrupulous in their processes of establishing how harmful their pesticides are. Are you as surprised as I was? Uh-huh...  The devil's in the details, as usual.

"Inert" material refers to any material that's not directly involved in the pesticidal action, from what I can glean from that article.  So if I needed to suspend my pesticide ingredients in carbon tetrachloride, that becomes the "inert" material in the pesticide.  Can you see where that leads to?   Okay - maybe my example wouldn't pass muster, since carbon tet has been well and truly vilified and exposed as a nasty chemical and even a large pesticide manufacturer might have trouble slipping that in.  But when you're dealing in quantities where a difference of cost to produce of a few cents a litre results in a profit of several million dollars a year, you can see the temptation they must be under...

If you read my last article about vitamins and supplements that are less than 10% of what they claim to be, and the other 90% possibly composed of lead or other poisons, then you see the pattern.  And once again, you aren't going to change that big company's method of doing business by standing there shaking a fist at them.  You'll be much better served by avoiding their product, directly and indirectly.

I suppose I imagine this scenario, as idealistic and misguided as I am:

1. PesticideCo makes nasty pesticideX that makes people's fingernails drop off.  
2. Farmer Harry uses that pesticideX, sells his corn to SupermarketCo.
3. People (hey, that's you and me and everyone!) notice that their friends' fingernails are rolling around and
4. Start buying their corn from local farmers that don't use pesticides, and are local as well.
5. Supermarkets no longer see a demand for Farmer Harry's corn.
6. Farmer Harry gets the buzz and stops using pesticideX.
7. PesticideCo sees sales slump and decides not to make PesticideX any more.
8. They now make PesticideY, or perhaps they close up shop.

But whether PesticideCo goes broke or not, the important thing to come out of this is that you still have your fingernails because you were proactive in your own health.  And enough people just doing that will make the rest of the effects from 5 onwards.

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Supplements "Supplemented" With More Than Just "Natural Goodness"

Interesting little article here, about supplements.  The claim is that some supplements and remedies are contaminated with heavy metals and other poisons.  It's also claimed in that article that there is ten times more hoodia sold in the USA than is grown in the whole world, so yeah, there must be a lot of "hoodia" tablets out there that are less than 10% the plant and 90% fillers.  Similarly, every few months we get another article about various tablets - sold by online presences that purport to be pharmacies - which are mostly filler and/or other components, and often have serious ill effects.

Note that the following excerpt from the article:

"I believe that the problem is narrow, that the well-established and reputable brands deserve their reputations," said Michael McGuffin, president of the American Herbal Products Association.

A warning sign is that this is a spokesperson for a herbal products conglomerate, that kind of indicates a big conflict of interest in making the statement, but then it's also a pretty good general guide to life in general.  Remember that even the well-established brands have been caught out, but in general, reputations are deserved, one way or the other.  

The answer is as always - if it seems too good to be true, then it is too good to be true.  All throughout my blog I've urged people to take personal responsibility, and keep the bastards honest.  It's as true with vitamins and supplements - ask yourself why you're taking them, then ask yourself if they're really what your body needs, and if you really trust the manufacturer / supplier not to cut corners to snip themselves another percent of profit? 

Your body is pretty capable of getting its own vitamins from your daily diet - do you really need to spend that money on a product that may or may not be harmful to you without providing any benefit, or would you be better served spending it on some locally grown fresh fruit?  

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Just Disrespectful.

Here's one kind of science I despise, the smug up-its-own-ass kind that thinks all you have to do is go around being a smart-arse and everyone will realise what idiots they've been and come and sit at your feet with rapt attention...

I have to say here that I'm not a person who's impressed by reiki or homeopathy but I'm pretty sure most of us consider chiropractors to be a useful therapy.  And some would even go so far as to include the above-mentioned and add acupuncturists as well.  After all, it's what works for you, right?  That's why I can't stand the tone of this guy's article and am pushing this article out.  If the Catholic church had its way, we'd still be curing our ills by holding prayer sessions and subsisting on bread and water to toughen us up...  Similarly, if this guy has his way, we'll just stick with Big Pharma using us as guinea pigs for newer drugs with ever more "interesting" side effects...

I was going to leave this as a comment to Mr Insolence but instead I've decided to put it here and post a link in his comments:

"I live in Australia. We don't have a Sn Harkin to contend with, although we do have people who practice alternative medicine, just like everywhere else on earth. We too shudder at "therapeutic reiki" and all the other alternative therapies and snake oils and ill-advised advice. I'm afraid that one day I'll be referred to a homeopath and diluted out of existence, for sure.

But something I'm even more afraid of than someone like Sn Harkin, though, is the kind of person who sneers and thinks just calling something "woo" means that's it, the end of the matter, everyone has to agree with me now, thank you all very much you poor misguided shills you.

Your attitude of (dis)respectful insolence does nothing at all. Harkin's lumping alternative therapists in with the "legitimate" medical workforce? Awww diddums. Not so many centuries ago, Greek and Roman senators were sneaking in all those "alternative" therapists along with the perfectly good astrologers and soothsayers and shamanic herbalists, too. And it's only a distinct lack of public voice in the form of blogs back then that's saved us from the BC version of your ranting...

What I'm saying is - where does your "respectful insolence" stop? My grandma prescribed camomile tea for certain ailments, other herbs for others. Her knowledge was not learned in a University, it was passed down from one generation to the next - generations that had little better to do than exist, work, and observe the effects of certain herbs on certain illnesses and pass that knowledge on to their offspring. It's how all our advances were made at one stage. It's how pharmacology came to exist.

Is that "woo?"

Because if it is, then monkeys, horses, elephants, and scores of other animals do "woo" every day when they select what foods to eat and what to eat along with that food to counteract the toxins present in that food.

What about we say that "proper" pharmaceutical companies are the only thing that doesn't constitute "woo." Oh dear, they actually have a worse record than the animals and my granny. Because my granny never prescribed anything to me that caused severe side effects or death. And yet, every year, we hear about another drug from big pharma that has caused a spate of deaths or injuries or disablements...

Are surgeons the only medical people that aren't "pitching woo?" In my experience and reading, their success rates are not all that crash hot either. They kill more people by direct action than all the faith healers kill by "wooing" someone into ignoring symptoms. Oh yeah - and they come from a long line of bloodletters, "animal magnetists," and people who thought leeches and maggots would cure blood problems and infections. Oh wait, they're bringing those back in mainstream medicine, aren't they?

What I'm saying to you is to stop being a smart-ass insolent pup and start using your brain for what our ancestors used it for - to observe and record and remember and make discoveries instead of knocking other people down."

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