How to tell if you are a ghost

There is a school of thought that contends that the afterlife will appear as a seamless continuation of their corporeal life to the deceased.

The theory holds that if you life is littered with people who act like garbage, it is probably because you are a POS and you deserve them. What would be more fitting than to have to spend eternity with them.

If you are blessed to be going through life with people like MRS ERJ then you are probably doing some things right and you deserve to spend eternity with great people.

You can immediately see the attraction of this hypothesis.

But is it testable?

I think so. Weigh yourself immediately upon "waking up" tomorrow morning.

Defecate.

Immediately weigh yourself again after cleaning up from defecating.

If your weight did not change, then you pooped a ghost-poop. The only beings that poop ghost-poops are ghosts.

QED

Note: All images were deleted out of a sense of decorum. Even ghosts have standards.

Paranoid? Who, me?

XYZ Plasma Company has informed me that it has adopted this Acknowledgement of Biometric Policy and Consent Form to address how it may use biometric equipment (“Equipment”) for identity verification. I understand that the Equipment may scan my finger, hand, face, retina, iris or voice (“Biometric Identifier”) to obtain an encrypted mathematical algorithm or code (“Biometric Information”) which will be used to confirm my identity. The policy set forth below explains how XYZ Plasma and/or its biometric equipment vendors (“Vendors”) may collect, use, store, disclose and destroy this Biometric Information.

I understand that: (1) the Equipment will scan my finger (or other Biometric Identifier) to create an encrypted Biometric Information; (2) thereafter, each time I use the Equipment, my finger (or other Biometric Identifier) will be scanned and compared to the Biometric Information created by the initial scan; (3) my Biometric Identifier is not stored by XYZ Plasma or its Vendors; and (4) my Biometric Information is collected, used and stored in the Equipment, but it is encrypted and cannot be reverse engineered to return it to its original form.

I understand that my Biometric Information will be used for identity verification purposes and will be destroyed no later than one (1) year after the date that I have ceased to attempt to donate my plasma at XYZ Plasma for six (6) consecutive months. I also understand that XYZ Plasma and its Vendors will use a reasonable standard of care if they store or transmit my Biometric Information as they do with other confidential information and my Biometric Information may be accessible by XYZ Plasma and its Vendors only.

 

CPU-FORM-000186595 V1.0

I investigated the possibility of "donating" (more accurately "selling") my plasma to a large, commercial collector of such.

As I was in-processed, I was baffled by the effort that was put into taking my "identification picture" which I assumed was for the file or for a card. The woman taking the picture really went into contortions making sure the doorknob was not in the picture which seemed very strange at the time.

Unlike most of the new donors, I actually read the seven documents they gave me to read AFTER she took my picture.

The terms of the "release of responsibility" for Biometric Data was a non-starter for me.

The language about "we do not store your data...it is in the equipment..." is the same as saying "we do not collect your personal data...we put in a file..." Total bullshit intended to mislead people as is the meaningless term "reasonable standard of care..." with regard to data security.

And what is with the bullshit word "...may..." in the context they store or transmit my Biometric Information as they do with other confidential information and my Biometric Information may be accessible by XYZ Plasma and its Vendors only. Given rudimentary knowledge of English grammar, it also means they are informing me that my "confidential information" might be available to other-than XYZ and Venders ONLY. "...may..." is a very different word than "...shall..." and every lawyer knows it.

Another red-flag for me was "Vendors" which can be a very flexible term. "I dub thee Sir Vendor, now pay me $9999 and take the thumb-drive". The text is silent on "third party" vendors, that is, parties that the main vendor subcontracts work to. The fact that the document is silent about them probably means they can be considered extensions of the original vendor and thus are identical to the Vendor.

A third red-flag was that I was prohibited from taking a hard-copy of the document home with me. A "Release" is a contract and it is customary for both parties who agree to a contract get a copy of it. I was not born yesterday. I looked the documents over and there were no Copyright notices on any of them...and I took a picture. I did not sign it. I walked out without donating.

I think I am hosed on the photo.

2000 Calories: Part Two (Limiting Factors)

Short story

Farmer Eugene Verde (also known as Farmer Green Jeans) was dismayed to find himself agreeing to let his nephew (actually his wife's nephew) work around the farm.

Eric Cephalus was not the clearest thinking of individuals, in fact, he was down-right fuzzy-headed on his very best days.

So Farmer Verde put his mind in gear and finally came up with a task that Eric could not screw up. He simply needed to hitch up the trailer and drive down to the elevator and buy some soybeans (on credit) and haul them back to the farm. Once back to the farm, he needed to unload them into the bin.

Calling the eager-but-inept young man over to the trailer, Farmer Verde pointed at the flat-bed trailer and then at a pile of tongue-and-groove lumber.

"That trailer is 10' long by 5' across. Those boards are six inches across and there are 8, 10' long boards there."

"I need to have you make some sides for the trailer out of those boards, go to the elevator and buy some beans. Then bring them back here and unload them into that bin right there" Verde said, pointing to the bin.

No way Eric could screw it up.

"Here is a tool-box. Keys are in the ignition of the truck and a box of nails in in the bed of the truck."

***Six hours later***

Farmer Verde looked in the bin and there were only five bushels of beans in it. He had expected more than that.

Then, looking at his on-line account at the elevator, he saw that Fuzzyhead had put 200 bushels of beans on his account that morning.

Something wasn't adding up!

Catching up with Fuzzyhead, who was chatting with his girlfriend on his phone, Verde asked "What happened?"

Fuzzyhead was more than happy to give an account for himself. He had done himself proud!

"I know gas is expensive, so I knew that I had to build the sides of the trailer up really high."

Verde nodded.

"So I made the first side five feet high..."

Verde frowned. This was not going the way he expected.

"...and I seen that I might be a bit short of lumber, so I built the other side two feet high..."

Verde's frown deepened. He was doing the math in his head.

"...and I seen that the pile of lumber was shrinking mighty fast so I made the front end 12" high..."

Five times ten plus two times ten is seventy, leaving one, ten foot length. Cut in half and run across the front of the trailer that left....eighty minus seventy minus 10...

"Lemme guess" Farmer Verde interjected "you didn't have any left for the back."

Soybeans are shaped like ball-bearings

"Dang, Aunt Winifred said you were good with numbers. You see what happened in your head without me having to tell you" Fuzzy said with admiration in his voice.

Farmer Verde felt a headache coming on.

"So tell me why you ordered 200 bushels at the elevator" Farmer Verde commanded. He was afraid that he knew what he was going to hear.

"Well, I done some math. The bed of the trailer is 5' by 10' so that is fifty square feet. Fifty square feet by five feet deep is 250 cubic feet. A bushel is 1.25 cubic feet so that means the trailer can hold two-hunnert bushel" Fuzzy said with pride in his voice.

"Lemme guess, your girlfriend helped you figure that out" Verde said, the slightest bits of sarcasm seeping through his words.

"She mighta helped a little bit" Fuzzy admitted.

Oddly enough, Fuzzy does not work for Farmer Verde any more.

End of story

***

For the sake of convenience, I am going to sort potential limiting factors on the basis of time. Specifically, I will call one group Hours, another group Weeks and the third group Decades.

Hours time-horizon

Fruit growers have a saying, "Sunlight makes sugar".

That six hours of shade from the tree on the perimeter of your growing area can never be regained. That six hours is gone forever.

Exposure to moving air dries the morning dew and during the night the mixing effect reduces the risk of a killing frost. Moving air reduces disease pressure.

Weeks time-horizon

A lack of water does not happen in the blink of an eye. It develops over days or weeks. Lack of water can be exacerbated by sandy soil, or shallow soil above rock or pavement. Lack of water is also exacerbated by high planting density and weeds.

Urine patches on a perennial ryegrass pasture three weeks after cows were removed

Lack of fixed nitrogen impacts growth in the "weeks" time horizon.

One limiting factor that rarely gets talked about is "management". Think back to the last time you passed a work crew repairing pavement. It is likely that only half of the crew was actually working effectively. As Chief Executive Officer of your enterprise you will be juggling running chainsaws and many of your decisions will be suboptimal.

Decades time horizon

Soil nutrients other than nitrogen fall into the decades category. In most cases, the nutrients will not be leaving the farm quickly enough to be much of an issue unless you live on the side of a hill where soil erosion can happen quickly. The only other case I can think of is selling hay. Shipping 10 tons of dry matter off-farm every year leaves a mark.

Summary

The potential limiting factors that fall into the Hours category are usually easy to remedy. It might take a chainsaw or pruning snips or relocating your primary growing area but then the problem is fixed.

The potential limiting factors that I list in the Decades will not sneak up on you very quickly. Once you have them under control you can safely ignore them for a while.

The huge leverage involves the three items listed in the Weeks category: Water, Nitrogen and Management. Full-court-press those items every moment your team is on the court and you will be on your way to a good harvest every year.

2000 Calories: Water

2000 Calories per day per person: Part One

This is my current thinking on the subject.

It is not perfect. It is likely to change over time. Some parts of it will be very specific to my "Place": 900 feet elevation, 30' above property to the east, wet and south, exposed to the prevailing wind, Eaton County, Michigan, 15 miles from the Lansing thermal-bubble, 90 miles from Lake Michigan.

Starting with the goal in mind

It is OK to be off-course as long as you have a crisp sight-picture of the goal and a means of moving in that direction.

The primary goal is to be able to supply 2000 Calories every day of the year to each person to whom you have extended an offer of hospitality.

Secondary goals are to provide enough protein and vitamins and minerals to keep each person healthy.

Realistically, due to storage losses, that means you need to harvest 3000-to-4000 Calories per person. The additional calories will be useful in working. 2000 Calories a day might keep you alive but you will need substantially more than that to cut and haul firewood, for instance.

***"small-c" calories" and "Large-C Calories"***

The small-c calorie is a metric unit of work or energy. Work and energy are interchangeable terms. Work and power are not. Power is a rate, that is, how much work-or-energy can be done in a specific amount of time. A trickle of water can level a mountain given enough time.

The Large-C Calorie is a dietary unit and is 1000 times more energy than the small-c calorie which is a thermo-dynamic term.

This distinction occasionally messes people up. Vegetable oil in the context of a food has 9000 Calories per kilogram but has 9,000,000 calories used in a lamp as a heat source. It is the same amount of energy but you might be deluded into thinking it is more efficient to burn the oil in a lamp than to consume it as food.

***End aside on Calories vs calories***

Foods that are resistant to spoiling

One of the excellent things about carrying a few pounds of body-fat is that it does not spoil. You can carry it from year-to-year and it will not "go bad".

Potatoes and apples spoil.

Grain is vulnerable to bugs and rodents and mold.

The fat you carry on your body is not subject to those loses. It has other issues, but storage losses are not one of those problems.

Bottom line, in a situation where famine is likely, eat it if you have it!

(Another rambling aside is that people from famine-prone regions seem to lack impulse control. There might be some sound, Darwinian reasons for that. It is probably a good thing under some contexts. Just don't eat the seed-corn)

What to plant?

Plant what is easy to store.

Plant what is easy to harvest.

Plant what has a very long harvest window.

Plant what produces the maximum number of calories per area unit of land in your area WITHOUT exotic inputs.

2000 Calories: Part Two, Limiting Factors

Outmaneuvered

 

"Joe, how much would a nice a display cabinet for your fishing rods cost?" Mrs ERJ asked, her voice dripping with sugar bon-bons and honey.

Me, dinking around on my laptop. "I dunno. Maybe $300 to a $1000 depending on the features."

"You have more than one or two fishing rods. Would you need two of them?" she asked.

Scratching my head over Mrs ERJ's sudden interest in my hobby of collecting and using fishing rods, I admitted "It would be pretty handy to have at least two of them. I could put the spinning rods in one cabinet and the rimfires in the other."

But then, we do have a little bit more discretionary budget now that all four kids are fully out of the house. Not $20k to redo the kitchen but a little bit here and there to protect the assets we already have.

"So you think $2000 would be a good investment to protect those fishing rods you have spent all of these years collecting?" Mrs ERJ asked.

"Well, when you put it that way, I think it would be a darned excellent idea" I said. When God gives you an enthusiastic spouse a man is a fool to quench that energy.

"Well, I found some bookshelves for a lot less money than that..." she said, her voice sparkling with joy.

"I have been collecting books for much longer than you have been collecting fishing rods" she informed me.

Check-mate!

January 20 training run

Still on track to attempt a 5k in February.

I have fallen into the pattern of running on the days I visit mom. Maybe it is the stress of watching her decline slightly, week-by-week.

I followed the by-now usual format of running one mile and then the remaining mile in 1/2 mile splits with a 100 yard walking recovery at the one and 1.5 mile mark. I still run the full two miles.

As before, the slowest 1/2 mile split was my first one at 7:34

The fastest split was 5:45 and that was the last half-mile.

Overall, the training run was done at a 40:40 5k pace.

A short story

My fastest 5k was about 24 minutes and it was when I was about fifty.

I weighed an honest 165 pounds and was running about twenty miles a week.

I remember being passed by two different people.

One was a high-school aged girl wearing cherry-red, satin shorts. She was showing off her new finger-nails to her posse as they passed me and conversing. She was obviously not breathing very hard. Literally nothing more than a brisk walk in the park for her. She did not LOOK like a runner...no muscle definition in her legs. A healthy amount of adipose tissue deposited in all of the feminine places.

The other memorable person who passed me looked like he was seventy. I assumed he was recovering from a stroke as he had a very asymmetrical stride.

His stride had him crabbing with his left-side forward. The other thing that was notable was that he was "sliding" his feet with the soles of his feet never more than 3/4" above the pavement.

Running differs from walking in that twice during each full stride neither foot is in contact with the ground. A walking stride involves at least one of your feet (alternating, of course) in contact with the ground at all times and usually involves a locked knee on the contact leg.

So Slider had a very fast stride-rate since the time-of-flight is closely related to the height your C-of-G rises with each stride. And he crabbed.

By now, all of the readers who are runners are snickering. Key word "...passed...". The old dude recovering from a stroke with the goofy stride passed me and never looked back.

They were both running faster than I was.

Of the two, I spent more time thinking about Slider. Most of my running was on dirt trails and on dirt roads with potholes. Floating high above the running surface makes a ton of sense when the surface is rough and there are features that will trip you.

Clearly, Slider ran on very smooth surfaces and his stride was optimized for that. The race was held on a blacktopped pedestrian trail.

---End short story---

The last 1/2 mile of my training run is fairly flat and the road surface is less cratered than the other parts.

I made a conscious effort to do three things in that last 1/2 mile:

• Raise my feet no higher than necessary
• Make up the difference by picking up my pace-rate
• Throw back my shoulders and lift my head and BREATH: Full inhale, full exhale, no lolly-gagging while doing it

A 5:45/half-mile pace would be a 35:40 5k, not that I think I could sustain that pace for that long...but it is fun to think about!

 

Devil's Advocate

Today I am interviewing Eaton Rapids Klaus, Michigan's only member of the World Economic Forum's inner circle.

I plied him with vast amounts of the finest French-Canadian red wine, cheap el-Ropo cigars hand-rolled by five-year-old virgins in the barrios of Van Buren County, Michigan and hours of classical Country-Western music to lubricate him and reduce his inhibitions about telling the truth. These questions were submitted by mental telemetry and by decoding the marks left by the gas-station squeegie on our windshield.

Q: Mr ERK, what can you tell us about the "big die-off"?

A: Eh, gonna happen any-way. We ran multiple Monte-Carlo economic simulations and we predict that a huge die-off has a 10-to-99% chance of happening in the next 100 years whether we intervene or not.

Q: But, by what moral right do you precipitate that die-off?

A: Well, us guys in Switzerland or Sweden...hell, I never can remember. I just tell Fritz, the pilot, to take me there...weeze decided that when you see a curve up ahead in the road ya don't take yer hands offen the wheel. That is "steering wheel" to the non-drivers.

Q: It sounds like you are going to steer the car off the road on purpose. What is with that?

A: The farther we get around the curve, the steeper the cliff is. Why wouldn't you pick a place where the side of the road is a pleasant place to have a picnic?

Q: What can you tell me about Greta?

A: Yaknow, I had my doubts about her. She always looks like she is trying to pass a peach-pit. But she has been useful.

Q: How so?

A: She convinced everybody under 30, half the world's population by-the-way, that they among the elite. Half the population cannot be "elite". That is not what the word means (throaty chuckle).

Q: Do you care to elaborate?

A: Elite does not mean 4 billion people who are in-the-know. Elite means twenty, fifty at most.

Elites will not live in Munger Hall at 220,000 people per square mile and be cooking raman noodles seasoned with Taco Bell packets on an electric hot-plate.

Q: You say "twenty, fifty at most". It seems like far more people attend WEF events than twenty or fifty.

A: Most of them are "Soldiers receiving their orders". It is cheaper to let them think they are elite than to disabuse them of the notion (Klaus waving his cigar in the air for emphasis).

Q: Are you the only true-elite in the United States?

A: Nope. There is a guy in Alberta and another in Orange County plus a few more sprinkled around here-and-there.

Q: Alberta is not in the United States.

A: Says who?

Q: Those two guys, aren't they always fighting?

A: Circus for the unwashed.

Q: You sound just like an old Jewish guy, the way you answer questions.

A: I read the Bible. It is a great instruction manual. Especially those bits about providing hospitality to men of virtue who walk by your tent and building arks. That could be important in the near future.

Q: Oil?

A: Great stuff, oil.

Q: No, I mean can you provide any insight on the war against oil?

A: Can't fight a war without it. Can't fit a nuclear reactor into an A-10, can-ya now?

The country that pumps itself dry first becomes their neighbor's vassal.

Q: Epidemics?

A: One of the four horsemen, no?

Space and sunshine are your friend. You know that Munger Hall I mentioned earlier? Eleven-thousand people funneling through only two doors to outside. All of them rubbing elbow-to-elbow and touching the same crash-bars to get out of the building. One person sneezes and 5000 people are exposed. I am pretty sure the architect was named Dee Conn.

Q: Drones and AI

A: Hiding in plain sight.

That fella in Albert is designing a drone and posting pictures on the internet. Alls he has to do is scale it up and install a Bombardier engines. Says he is going to make um by the millions and load them with packs of Newport smokes, lottery tickets and weed and start bombing Shanghai.

Q: How are they going to navigate?

A: Self-teaching PLCs. Common as cockroaches in industry. AI is already here.

Q: China and Russia?

A: Clearly, they haven't bought into the one-world-government thing. We gotta keep our eye on them.

Q: Is there anything you want to tell people who wish to join the elites?

A: Pay your dues. Do what you are told without asking questions. Consider subscribing to one of the religions that originated in East India. They believe in reincarnation. That will prove a comfort as you will never be one of the elite in this lifetime, not even if your name is Turd-oe or Biding-my-time.

And always remember, you can save the earth by dying in a location where your remains can be composted-in-place or rendered for hydrocarbon and protein powder. The lilac bushes will appreciate it.