A few pictures

 

A Szego hybrid chestnut tree. It is time to start knocking the chestnuts down so I can beat the deer to them.

Schlarbaum hybrid chestnut

The bees that are squatting in my trap hive

Forest floor degraded by extreme deer pressure. The trees along the right side of the frame are apple trees and the one in the background, slightly left-of-center is an oak.

I am tempted to install a deer-exclusion fence for a bit of this area just to see how much change happens. I saw some deer exclusion enclosures at the Crockery Creek Nature Area in Ottawa County and the differences were striking. The enclosed areas were not very large, maybe 15' by 30'.

This image is from Cuyahoga County, Ohio. The area was fenced for 4 years and growth is from the native seed-bank or from plants that were smoldering-in-place being released from deer pressure.

Martial Law: Not "IF", but when, where and why

With the escalating passions over the up-coming elections, both sides are envisioning circumstances where "the other side" would be likely to declare Martial Law.

Examples:

The progressives envision Trump starting to deport illegal aliens and the aliens resist, killing ICE deputies. Trump declares Martial Law on a city-by-city basis and the hot-spots get cleared out.

The conservatives envision Harris going house-to-house confiscating weapons and the owners of the weapons resist....

What both of these scenarios share is that the declarations will be local and will be shifting. There are not enough resources to administer and enforce Martial Law nationwide.

How to prepare?

Here is a fairly comprehensive but lopsided article. In my opinion, vigorously advocating for "your rights" will make you a lightning rod. Another issue is that their Gold-Standard news sources lean left.

Lock-downs and curfews are likely. Communication black-outs are almost a certainty.

Note to self: Work on alternative comms plan including nodes outside of likely Martial Law foot-prints. That plan MIGHT be as simple as riding a bicycle ten miles in a given direction with an SD card in my shoe.

It is a little bit dry out there

We have had 0.6" of rain in the last month vs. 3.3" of evaporation potential. The top layers of soil are getting pretty dry.

We are sitting at 2850 Growing Degree Days b50 vs a median value of about 2700 GDDb50 for this date.

Our median growing season (assuming net photosynthesis stops on October 15) is about 2900 GDDb50. 2021 was the outlier at 3300 GDDb50 on October 15 but the rest of the data is fairly tightly clustered.

Is "Morality" subjective

It is popular to contend that morality is subjective and that in an absolute sense that all moral-systems are equal. It is unpopular to argue that some moral-systems are inherently superior to others.

I guess today is the day I am meant to disappoint others and to be unpopular.

When morality does depend on circumstances

It is always possible to find extreme situations around the edges of the "map" where the margins read "Thar be Dragons".

For example, the Donner Party or UAF Flight 571 where survivors resorted to cannibalized deceased members of the party.

Finding an exception in Thar be Dragons does not invalidate a general statement.

The case that some moral systems are superior to others

Consider two moral systems that self-extinguished: Jim Jones's cult and the Shakers. Both are now extinct. Can anybody make a credible case that either of those cults are the equal of moral-codes that still exist? How can they be equal when they don't exist in any measurable way and can no longer provide guidance on day-to-day issues?

I suppose the contrary will argue that they were BETTER than existing moral-codes. An environmental zealot might make that argument, for instance. That is fine, but you just proved my point; that some moral-systems are "better" than others.

How to rank them?

In the dry language of engineers, "extinction" is a high entropy event. "Irreversibility" is another way to describe entropy. If you put an ice cube into a hot cup of coffee and stir it for five minutes it is almost impossible to recover the undiluted, hot coffee and the ice cube without increasing entropy (irreversibility or disorder) outside the system.

From a practical standpoint, systems that are pathologically high-entropy almost always lose wars when they wage them against systems that are significantly lower-entropy. That is due to lower-entropy systems generally having more population and higher technology.

Sparta, who murdered their weakest sons lost to Athens. The American-Indians who were bedeviled by enormous infant and child mortality lost to Europeans.

A moral system that encourage rape of the landscape is a high-entropy system. A moral system that fosters stewardship of the landscape is a low-entropy system.

As a side-note, here are two verses from Deut Chapter 20:

When you are at war with a city and have to lay siege to it for a long time before you capture it, you shall not destroy its trees by putting an ax to them. You may eat of them, but you must not cut them down. Are the trees of the field human beings, that they should be included in your siege?

However, those trees which you know are not fruit trees you may destroy. You may cut them down to build siegeworks against the city that is waging war with you, until it falls.

Viewed through the lens of entropy, that language looks like a very strong commitment to stewardship and long-term viability for humans.

Did the spread of Islam create the Sahara Desert?

Some blamed the growth of the Sahara Desert on the growth of Islam. The contention was "The Arabs were not the sons of the desert, but the fathers of it."

The style of warfare preferred by Jihadist during its rapid assent favored open plains and was hampered by trees and cover. The argument is that Islam destroyed trees on principle.

Even though the Quran (Surah Hashr Ayat 5) has language prohibits the cutting of date-palms it has been accepted as "OK" during Jihad since Jihad is Allah's will. All other trees could be cut at at-will.

It seems doubtful that cutting all of those trees CAUSED the Sahara Desert but it probably accelerated its spread.

Also on the topic of stewardship

Communism is the abolition of private property. In general, most people take much better care of their own property than they do of "community" property.

"Beat it like a rented mule" is a saying that comes to mind.

"Tragedy of the Commons" is another saying that comes to mind.

Ipso facto, Communism is an inferior moral system than a system that favors private property.

For the same reasons, the hook-up culture is inferior to dating and marriage.

The idea of mixing

Entropy is often introduced as "mixing". A spoonful of sugar mixed with a glass of water cannot be recovered without applying outside energy to evaporate the water. One key point is high-entropy requiring outside resources to return to its starting state.

Consider a classroom with two pupils. John is a whiz at math and shop. Sebastian is a dreamy poet who likes to draw pictures.

A high-entropy system would demand equal outcomes and pour enormous amounts of energy teaching John to write poetry and to draw pictures as well as Sebastian while pouring equally large amounts of resources trying to pound math and shop into Sebastian's brain. Because outcomes are most important, John is starved for math and shop instruction and Sebastian is starved for poetry and art instruction.

A low-entropy system would give John MORE math and shop classes and fewer poetry and art classes while giving Sebastian MORE poetry and art classes and fewer math and shop. The NET learning would be much higher for the low-entropy system. If the concept was extended across the society, there would be higher net-carrying capacity and greater capacity to fight wars.

Suppose, on the other hand, a moral system randomly decided that half of the population could receive absolutely zero formal instruction. Random in the sense that it was totally disconnected from the (potential) student's ability to learn. That would be a failure of stewardship and is a special case of the high-entropy moral system. There are some moral systems in the world today that forbid educating women and "unbelievers".

IS THERE ANYBODY I HAVEN'T PISSED OFF TODAY. LEMME KNOW. I AM ON A ROLL!!!

Moral reasoning and accountability

For whatever reason, it is easier to behave in a morally proper way when you know that there is a chance that you will be held accountable for your actions.

Cotton and civilization

In an unexpected and quirky way, cotton was a keystone resource in the development of "civilization" as we know it.

In the medieval and early-Renaissance period, a book cost about the equivalent of one day's un-skilled labor  per-page. Since hand-written script was much less compact than the mechanical typeset pages we are used to today, a five-hundred page book (like Fifty Shades of Grey) might be 1500 pages of vellum. And, if the vellum was particularly fine, it was almost transparent and was only marked on one side. So the 1500 page book was printed on 1500 separate sheets of vellum and would cost the equivalent of three year's wages for the average Joe. I suspect Fifty Shades would not have sold as many copies, had it cost that much today.

Even into the middle of the Renaissance, paper was made from beaten linen rags. Linen is not very productive and the paper-makers were competing with other trades like candle-wick makers and the like. Also, because fabric was so precious, clothing was worn to mere tatters and there wasn't that much substance when they were sold to the rag-pickers. Despite all of that, a "University" textbook on cheaper paper might sell for the equivalent of $200 or $300 and a third of that was the cost of the paper it was printed on. It was a bargain compared to the meticulously tanned and scraped hides that became vellum and parchment.

But something incredible happened between 1500 and 1800 AD. Cotton started being grown in the American deep-South and India became a major exporter of cotton. The price of paper dropped from the equivalent of $0.30 a page to the equivalent of $2.50 for a ream of 500 sheets. That is 1/60th the price. The daily wage of an unskilled laborer in 1800 was about $0.70, enough to purchase 140 sheets of paper. That was a huge leap from the single page in a book that a day's labor could purchase in the late-Medieval times**.

Paper was cheap enough to publish newspapers which were passed from one person to the next and were then recycled. That was absolutely unheard of when a single sheet of material to write upon was a working man's daily pay*. Broad-sheets could be printed and tacked to trees and fence-posts. Political tracts that expressed radical, political ideas were written, published and tacked up on trees, fence posts and the sides of buildings (and to church doors). Hymns were written. Plays were captured for eternity. Laws were codified and became accessible to a broad swath of humanity.

Key to that was the nature of cotton. Linen fibers are trapped in the stem and bundles of stems must be submerged in water for the stems to partially decay. Then the stems are beaten to dislodge the semi-rotten flesh and leave the fibers, which are then combed, dried, bleached in the sun. The yield of usable fiber per acre of ground is not very impressive. 

Bundles of flax in a "retting" pond.

That limits linen production to places like Holland and Belgium and certain areas in France and Britain, places where many shallow ponds dot the landscape where bundles of flax can be submerged.

In modern times, an acre of flax yields about 400 pounds of processed linen. Before fertilizer, insecticides and improved varieties were developed, one third of that was probably an outstanding yield.

Cotton, on the other hand, yields about 800 pounds per acre. 

Cotton which is not trapped in stems and the lack of shallow ponds and autumn springs are not a limiting factor in the production of cotton. Even the "waste", the dust from the outsides of the seed (the linters) can be used for paper.

The explosive embrace in the growing cotton resulted in a quantum leap in the affordability of "paper", which in turn resulted in a quantum leap in the quality and amount of thinking and the ability to share ideas and to integrate other people's insights into one's own thinking.

I appreciate African-American's visceral reaction to "cotton" and the plantation system. But that cultural empathy should not totally obscure the fact that if cotton did not exist, it is likely that we would still be living in a pre-scientific world...say, the equivalent of 1550 AD technology.

*Comparing the cost of an object to the price of a day's labor from an unskilled worker is misleading. The nature of the economy was such that a day's pay was only sufficient to keep the worker and his family alive for one-more-day. In fact, it was less than that because his wife and kids were out there hustling for calories and barterable goods. An unskilled worker NEVER had excess money to pay for anything beyond the barest of necessities.

The only point of referring to an unskilled person's daily wage is that it is one of the few commodities that seems ageless. The point is that if a wealthy person wanted to buy a book then he had to be willing to forego the kilometer of irrigation ditch he could have paid to have dug with the same amount of money

** I am guilty of conflating blank pages of paper with pages in books covered with hand-written script. So sue me.

---A huge note of thanks to Alma Boykin and Lucas Machias, both of whom cheerfully sent me reference materials. All errors are mine.---

Pictures from the projects

 

64 square-feet of shelving space.

The shelves are level. The stringers in the pole barn are not. They slope about 2" in 8 feet.

The platform without decking.

With decking it weighs 140 pounds. That might drop a bit as the treated lumber dries out. Removing 12 bolts breaks it into the top, two side panels and four diagonal braces to make it easier to move around. You know, for when I get old.

This is a fairly typical tree in the orchard. The circled area of the branch is about 9' above ground. The circled area is also 8' away from the center of the tree. Everything extending past that (another 8' or so)  is outside the tree's allotted space.

In a nutshell, deer eat tender, young shoots that are less than 6' above the ground. If the highest apples that can be hand picked are (8' (step ladder) +7' (reach) - 2' (not standing on two top steps)) then all of the apples must be carried between 6' and 13' of height. Since horizontal limbs generally slope upward as they grow away from the trunk, it is hard to create a "cone" shaped tree that ensures even light distribution throughout the tree's crown. More typically, one ends up with a mushroom shaped tree or a "flat-topped" tree.

It isn't just the deer pushing the growth higher. If the orchard floor is maintained by mowing, then any limbs that extend beyond the mulched-or-herbicide rows must be high enough to not injure people operating mowing equipment.

Commercial orchards are mostly tall-spindles. Basically, a wall or a comb with the teeth pointing upward. That comes at a price of 1000 trees per acre vs. 115 for trees planted 15' by 25'. At $20 a tree, that is a very stiff toll. Additionally, small trees have smaller roots and cannot access moisture stored in the subsoil nearly as efficiently as larger trees. Those tall-spindle hedges require irrigation.

Another "typical" tree. Too much wood carried too far away from the trunk and too high in the air.

The "plan" is to ATTEMPT squatty cones (modified, central-leaders or Christmas-tree shape) with a maximum height of 10' on the central leader and a maximum crown diameter of 16'. Why 10'? because apples will be carried on the new growth that will be ABOVE the 10' heading cut to the central-leader.

A secondary factor pushing me into aggressive pruning is the young trees that will be plugged into the holes left by culled or dead trees. Those young trees will fail if they do not get sunshine. That means that the survivors must be pruned back into their allotted space.