Grab-bag

Life was better when she had to dial each number on a rotary phone and could only talk to one person at a time.

The days of "cheap junk" might be numbered

Major issues often "telegraph" in advance. The toxic gas spill in Bhopal followed over one-hundred incidents when maintenance/cleaning crews left various processing valves in the wrong position. One fateful night, they left five of them open and gas spilled to the outside environment and rolled downhill into the city of Bhopal, India.

Major earthquakes often telegraph with an increasing frequency of shocks as the interlocking rock that "zippers" the fault together start crumbling under the strain and thereby transfer more of the load to neighboring interlocks which in time also crumble.

In the fatal stage of Wilson's Syndrome, a liver cell dies of copper toxicity and ruptures. Surrounding cells, already heavily loaded with copper, absorb the released copper ions and die. They rupture and a cascading chain-reaction occurs as death ripples outward from the original dead cell.

The United States benefited hugely from the US Dollar's status as the world's reserve currency. We conjure up dollars out of nothing and trade them for manufactured goods. The smartest people in the world leave India, China and Eastern Europe and immigrate to Boston, Austin and San Jose where they write software that renders reality into a simplified, comfortable 2-D rendition and numbs the minds of the users.

BRICS is gaining momentum. World-wide, resentment of the USD hegemony is growing. Those are advance tremors that should be informing us that the days of dirt-cheap Chinesium "cargo" are numbered.

Trump's threats of tariffs MIGHT have a silver lining if it creates an environment that is an incubator that leads to reindustrialization. At a minimum we need to be able to domestically manufacture pipes and ducts and cold-drawn metal products and castings and electric motors and fans and pumps and nozzles and meters and motor-controls and nuts-and-bolts and basic medicines and pesticides and tools.

A random conversation

Mrs ERJ and I were having a conversation with another couple when the man, who retired from his job as a Robotics and Industrial Drafting instructor around 2015 said something curious.

He said "Kids today only know how to think in 2-D"

I asked him to clarify. 

He said "When I started teaching, my students who walked into my classroom for the first time already had a mental, 3-D model of an exhaust pipe or how to assemble a piston in their heads and I taught them how to render it as a series of 2-D drawings. Near the end of my time teaching, the kids coming through the door had never seen throttle linkages or the guts of a door-lock or looked at a bumper hitch. How do you teach somebody how to communicate something they don't understand?

I wonder if those skills are like language acquisition. Do our minds become less plastic as we age. Are those kids doomed to always navigate the physical worlds as if they are speaking a second language acquired late-in-life?

Seeds (in response to a request from a friend)

A link to the Beal Seed Viability Experiment.

...In 1879, Dr. William Beal buried 20 glass bottles filled with seeds and sand at a single site at Michigan State University. The goal of the experiment was to understand seed longevity in the soil—a topic of general importance in ecology, restoration, conservation, and agriculture—by periodically assaying germinability of these seeds over a 100-year period. “The interval between germination assays has been extended and the experiment will now end after 221 years, in 2100.

... twenty seeds germinated!” Fleming says, “They were 141 years old! 

Rice Pudding

Rice pudding is a very economical and filling treat. It pairs well with working outside.

The proportions are approximate and flexible.

Two cups of uncooked white rice. Cook the rice (3 cups water) until the water is completely absorbed.

Approximately one cup of your favorite dried fruits and chopped nuts in whatever proportion you desire (I am using 4 parts raisins, and 1 part chopped dried cherries and 1 part chopped pecans).

Put the cooked rice and chopped fruit/nuts in a greased 9" by 13" glass cake-pan.

Add enough milk to cover the rice. Keep track of the number of cups you use.

Add one egg and 1/3 of a cup of sugar for each cup of milk. Season generously with nutmeg and vanilla extract. Stir to ensure the eggs are broken and all of the ingredients are reasonably well blended.

Bake at 350F until the center of the "pudding" is well set (approximately 30 minutes)

Cool. Cut into bars. Refrigerate. Serve as you will.

Firmer bars are easier to pack. I used less milk (2 cups) than the recipe calls for ---note, I should have used 3 4 ---. If you like lots of custard in your bars, adding more eggs will also firm them up.

You can use less sugar if they seem too sweet. "Fancy" involves soaking the fruit in rum flavoring (or actual rum or bourbon) over-night before using and/or toasting the nuts before adding to the pudding.

Picture of the finished product will be posted later today.

Marking out the ground

I am scheduled to meet with the guy who will put in the drain-tile at The Property.

I have worked with him before. He is a very easy-going guy.

Drain-tile is counter-intuitive in that it dries up the ground DOWN SLOPE from where it is laid.

At this point, it looks like 200' of 4" diameter perf-drain tile in a sock and 50' of unperf to carry what it collects to a ditch.

The dilemma is that I want to dry-up the access road into the property and I want to cut the Black Walnut roots invading the new orchard. If we optimize for the access then we will be cutting the roots on the edge of the orchard and they will re-colonize more quickly. If we cut the roots farther away from the edge of the orchard then it narrows the access.

My guess is that Black Walnut roots might invade about 2' a year. Cutting them 15' from the edge should kill all of the BW roots in the orchard and delay the first new ones from infiltrating by 5 or 10 years.

I intend to ask the excavator how much it would be to rip a second trench parallel to the one for the drain-tile but another 30 feet farther from the orchard. I don't know how his equipment will handle tree roots but I doubt that he will run into anything more than 3" or 4" in diameter. That would delay the Black Walnut issue for a solid 20 years and it won't be my problem.