Gnolls in space!

Are we really sure excluding cattle from the Barmah Forest is a good idea?

2010-12-31T18:27:00.000-08:00

Are we really sure excluding cattle from the Barmah Forest is a good idea?

I would argue we can't be sure, and that the exclusion was done so fast & unilaterally that it likely to have a number of unforeseen affects.

Earlier this month I saw "Out of the Scientist's Garden" by Richard Stirzaker, CSIRO Land & Water Australia Senior Research Fellow at Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) for Irrigation Futures, in a local bookshop. Did a quiet skim in the bookshop and borough it.

Got I home and after a few more minutes browsing, I realised I'ld seen him speak & been to his then home in the early '90 to see his back yards 'Clever Clover' plot. There are photos of that back yard in the book.

On further reading I found the following passage on pages 171 & 172, in Chapter 20: Simplicity.

A couple of notes first. Roan are a large antelope that can get to over 250 kgs. The park being talked about is the Kurger National Park in South Africa.

Roan tend to favour area growing taller, less palatable grasses. They wander over large areas of savannah, picking the few tender young leaves from the grassy tussocks. Zebras and wildebeest are more like lawn mowers. They concentrate in huge numbers on the more fertile soils which more palatable grasses, and by grazing patches of the savannah heavily, they ensure a continuous supply of nutritious young leaves.

Roan must cover large distances to select their diet, but they are also very dependent on water. There are large area of park with grazing suitable for roan, but without rivers for the roan to drink. So park managers put in windmills to pump ground water into troughs. The plan worked spectacularly well. The roan spread out over a much larger area around the new sources of water. The still occurred at low densities because the grasses in the region tended to be of lower quality, but their numbers steadily increased.

Over the years, the new water attracted other grazers, particularly zebra and wildebeest. Although the dominant grass was not ideal for these species, they changed some areas with their constant heavy grazing, producing lawn-like areas of young, more palatable grass. In doing so, the density of herbivores increased, and this did not escape the attention of the loins.

Since zebra and wildebeest are the favoured prey of loins, they get a lot of practice spotting predictors and running to safety. Not so the roan. Hunting had been an unprofitable business for loins in the area prior to the new watering points, because of the low densities of prey. Now the loins switched their attention from the ever vigilant zebras to the unsuspecting roan. Roan numbers started to go down alarmingly.

The solution of adding new watering points was put into reverse. The bores were closed and, as predicted, the zebras drifted back to more favourable areas. As always the loins followed them, but not all the loins. A few prides took up residence in the roan areas. They changed their hunting habits. No longer could they hang around the plentiful herds and ambush them at waterholes on the short-grass plains. They started wandering widely, and met up frequently enough with the meandering roan to virtually wipe them out.

It all begs the question of is this being done just to satisfy political needs in Melbourne. The Kruger reversal was done after a few year. The Barmah reversal is being done after well over a century. The lesson of Kruger is that it should be done using a phased approach with control area to compare with. I don't mean little 10 by 10 metre experiments. That scale of research is just preliminary for the real experiment of introducing a new system to the forest.

Is removing the cattle a diversion for not getting water right? My understanding is that the Red Gums aren't getting inundated often enough and that particularly the higher areas are missing out. That cattle are only grazing pressure after the fact?

Cattle grazing would be removing fire fuel load too. Sound like swing-and-round-a-bouts to me.

Given the about story I would think the safest way to proceed is to divide the forest into many zones and spell zones from any grazing for 10 or 20 years after inundation in a long term rotation. Keep the fuel loads low while allowing long periods from germination & establishment after inundations.

What do you think?

Rainy days: curling up with Christopher Alexander's 'The Process of Creating Life'.

2010-12-19T00:47:00.000-08:00

Rainy day here, good day to curl up reading! So I've been skimming my newly acquired Christopher Alexander books, starting with 'The Process of Creating Life' (The Nature of Order, Bk 2). The Appendix by itself is a beautiful document. Start page 571.

Appendix title: A Small Example of A Living Process.
1/ A Radical New Process.
2/ Finding A Site.
3/ First Analysis of the Site with Rough Twisted Paper and Balsa Models.
4/ Full-Size Tests of Volume and Position on the Site.
5/ A First Sketch.
6/ Checking The Neighbors' Views.
7/ First Emergence of an Internal Plan.
8/ Extension of the Lot: The Little Plum Tree.
9/ Deeper Questions About The Feeling of The Plan.
10/ A Deeper Conception of the Living Room.
11/ Laying the House Out on the Land.
12/ Starting to Get a General Idea of Construction.
13/ Establishing Rooms.
14/ Upstairs Rooms.
15/ Analysis of Cost.
16/ Concrete Wall Details.
17/ Plasterwork Experiments.
18/ Starting Construction.
19/ The Retaining Wall.
20/ Management Agreement That Feeling Must Guide Even the Most Technical Aspects of Construction.
21/ Setting The Main-Floor Level.
22/ Excavation.
23/ Fine-Tuning the Plan as We Fixed Forms for the Foundation Walls.
24/ The Lily Tiles.
25/ Placing and Fine-Tuning First-Floor Rooms. (What in Australia we would call ground-floor.)
26/ Making and Placing the First-Floor Walls.
27/ Fixing the Living Room: Its Door and Fireplace and Windows.
28/ Remaking Other First-Floor Rooms.
29/ Completing the First-Floor Structure.
30/ Pouring and Forming the Garage.
31/ Getting the Entrance Path Just Right.
32/ Remaking the Upstairs Rooms.
33/ The Master Bed Alcove.
34/ The Kitchen Fireplace Shape.
35/ The Kitchen Floor.
36/ Plasterwork.
37/ Window Openings and Windows.
38/ Balustrades of the Upstairs Balconies and the Concrete Frieze.
39/ Front Door Steps.
40/ Planting Windows and Exterior Woodwork.
41/ Flowers in the Garden.
42/ Use of the Fundamental Process.
43/ Common Sense: An Overview of the Process.
44/ End of the Appendix on the Upham House.
Notes (Pg 632)

I do love how in the notes Christopher observes that "the San Francisco City Hall, a rather large building, was built around 1900 from five sheets of drawings - something almost unimaginable today.".

Definitely not today's red-tape, legalistic nightmare of building. I learn yesterday, that if you want to build a new house on an existing site, the regional council (no local govt. here any more, thank you Anna) requires you to demolish the old house first. That would mean living in a farm shed or off site for a year. Renting a house off site sure does a lot for housing affordability.

Is the #NBN bad for global warming?

2010-11-18T17:48:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I asked a leading question on Twitter about the #NBN and it's negative impact on #globalwarming.

I got a response. There is only so much you can say in 140 characters on the run.

Here is the stream and some notes I've added.

gnoll110 Given that high speed comms is one of the two drivers of globalisation. Is the #NBN, a bad move from a fighting global warming perspective.
djackmanson @gnoll110Absolutely not. The research into new energy production required to reduce global warming can only benefit from faster info tfr.
gnoll110 @djackmanson Miss my point. Localisation is a big factor in reducing fossil fuel use. High speed comm hinders localization.
gnoll110 @djackmanson #NBN is only a tool. Really depends how we use it. Helps R&D but also enabler for distributed manufacturing & outsourcing.
djackmanson @gnoll110 Not so much miss your point as disagree with its underlying philosophy. Don't think localism is the answer. Globalism...
djackmanson @gnoll110 ...with clean energy is what I prefer.
gnoll110 @djackmanson Think you're being techno-utopian. Costs of clean energy will drive re-localisation in part. Solution will have many parents.
gnoll110 @djackmanson In part, high speed comms got us from where we were in 1950 to here. Two edged sword, that one.
djackmanson @gnoll110 No good reason why cheap clean energy won't be distributed over wide-energy grids.
djackmanson @gnoll110 er, wide-*area* grids.
gnoll110 @djackmanson Clean energy will always be dearer. Fossil fuels are a once off free kick. Collecting/concentrating renewable means it's more $
gnoll110 @djackmanson It's a good place to go. But it can never be yesterday, just cleaned up.

I think the improvement to research from the #NBN would be marginal at best. Is this an opertunity cost question? You could do a lot with $40+ billion dollar if applied directly to the problem.

It isn't a philosophical question (localisation vs clean smart grids) for me. It's a question of available energy and what we choose to maintain. It's a continuum, we are replacing cheap energy with more expense energy. Some things won't be viable any more. This has hidden consequences. As something become unviable, other activities to produced inputs for it lose their economies of scale too (increasing unit cost), thus becoming less viable too. A downward spiral to a new status quo. How much we can reduce the reduction in energy yield per energy invested (money is only an easily handled proxy), the less we will have to give up in any new status quo.

I will retract my use of 'techno-utopian', that infers finding new tech that enables grow to go on regardless. It's not where Jack is really coming from. I do think changing the energy base of our society while maintaining the basically unchanged status quo where it is, is unrealistic.

Basically we differ on where we think the new status quo is likely to be. Preferences don't come into it. I would like to be wrong, I like my weekend trips interstate to #railscamp.

Update:
A link to futurescenarios.org. One major influence on my thinking.

LOTR set? No greenland!

2010-09-30T16:32:00.000-07:00

Yesterday day in the twitter stream I found a great NatGeo photo, worth sharing.

Looks like a Lord of the Rings set, somewhere in the Riddermark. It's a replica of a church Eric the Red built for his wife, at their farm in Qassiarsuk, Greenland.

Here is what Google Image has to say on the topic 'Qassiarsuk church'

Water: Cities vs Environment.

2010-08-31T19:28:00.000-07:00

On twitter a while back, comments where raised about legal dams in the Upper Darling part of the Murray Darling Basin. There where some city tweeters who thought this would fix their water problems.

They have a mind set that farming isn't part of the environment and takes water away from it and them. This forgets a couple of factors. On a lot of land, farming is the environment. The water that gets to the cities come from three places. The high wet areas of the land, where that is always an excess of water for part of the year, especially the melt in early spring. Big rain events. The last is degraded lands in the rest of the basin.

It's these degraded lands I want to comment on. These lands are degraded due to imported practices and over use. As farmers improve practices and adopt more natural methods, like native perennial pastures, the water yield will continue to fall (even assuming no global warning reductions) back to natural levels. So farming isn't a source of water for the cities, if it's allowed to evolve and improve it will reduce water availability.

Maintaining water yields for cities means retarding the improvement of the farming environment. Better that cities learn to not over tax their local environments too. Rain water tanks all-round!

Coalless steel

2010-06-29T18:36:00.000-07:00

Over on ABC's Unleashed there is a article called 'A renewable reality: don't let politics get in the way'.

http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stories/s2932909.htm

In it I got onto the energy needed to make steel. I said steel could be made and was challenged on that point. I knew that steel had been made with charcoal pre early 18th century. What I didn't realise is that do to its total lack of coal, Sweden currently has at least some charcoal based production! ;)

Is commercial Aquaponic effectively illegal on most Australian farms?

2010-03-31T18:29:00.000-07:00

Is commercial Aquaponic effectively illegal on most Australian farms?

Unless you've got a water licence, yes. It falls outside the 'stock & domestic' clauses as they now apply in most farms. Stock & domestic applies to both surface run off and bores unless there a specific irrigation licences. Affectivly it's classed as irrigation.

The only way you could do it is if you can establish and run the system on only the roof collection of the fish sheds & green houses? Is that possible?

Food for thought.

Cheers,

Gnoll110

Fee & Dividend and the trees.

2010-01-31T16:15:00.000-08:00

Australia economist John Quiggin recently added a post dealing with the political machination of the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS).

A LOT of debate ensued. In including some denialist noise making and some discussions on the merits of Cap & Trade vs Fee & Divided (F&D). It's part of that Fee & dividend stream I want to preserve here, as it has some of my 'back of the envelope' calculations on how F&D triggers more integrated farming practices.

Carbonsink's initial post.

How about we tax carbon at $20/tonne and repay the proceeds every quarter, split equally between all citizens?

Its simple. Its progressive. It compensates the poor, the old and the unemployed.

James Hansen is a smart cookie.

My first reply.

James Hansen doesn’t support a general carbon tax. He speciality supports a fossil fuel specific Fee & dividend system.
A fee-and-dividend system imposes a fee on the initial sale of a fossil fuel which is then redistributed to the public; the rising cost of carbon-intensive products would, it is hoped, encourage families to keep their carbon footprints low.

‘James Hansen rails against cap-and-trade plan in open letter‘ from the Guardian’s environment blog on 12 Jan ‘10

Carbonsink:

James Hansen doesn’t support a general carbon tax. He speciality supports a fossil fuel specific Fee & dividend system.

I know. That’s why he’s a smart cookie.

Wouldn’t it be funny if a non-economist came up with the best way to price carbon? I’d like to hear ProfQ’s thoughts on Hansen’s fee-and-dividend idea?
Governments must place a uniform rising price on carbon, collected at the fossil fuel source – the mine or port of entry. The fee should be given to the public in toto, as a uniform dividend, payroll tax deduction or both. Such a tax is progressive – the dividend exceeds added energy costs for 60% of the public.

Fee and dividend stimulates the economy, providing the public with the means to adjust lifestyles and energy infrastructure.

If global emissions trading is DOA, how about we give something else a try?

Me:

It’s not about taxing carbon, it’s about fossil fuels specially. ETSs miss the point in that carbon is not all the same. The natural carbon cycle is vast, it’s the relativity small ongoing injection of geologic carbon that’s throwing the whole biosphere/carbon cycle out of whack.

Back when the CPRS was being argured over in the press. A prosal was floated that becuase agriculture was too complex to figure out and that the ‘best approach’ was to simply include it by levying farmers on a per head (for livestock) or per acre (for crops) basis. Figures like $100/head for cattle were being banded about. That struck me as fundimentally ineffective as well as unfair, as it made no distinction between lot fed and grass fed cattle. It also had no way to take changes in farming method at the property level into account.

As a thought exercise I compare how you should treat a car, a lot fed animal & a grass fed animal to try to figure out a better way to include them. That when I realise that an ETS on carbon generally wouldn’t just work poorly, it won’t work at all!

Generally people will try to play with and bend the large natural flows of carbon to get the atmosphere CO2e figure down. Any thing but tackle the actual use of energy/fossil fuels & the problematic ‘new’ geologic carbon flows. Pushing carbon around in the biosphere is like pushing piss up hill. It ain’t going to stay where we put it long term.

The easy, knee jerk reaction is to try to ‘win’ by diverting big natural flows, rather than stopping the small problematic ones. An ETS in quantitative, a Fee & dividend is qualitative. Here is on example of how being quantitative gets it wrong. The cheap ETS reaction is to plant trees, lots of them, in large cheap monoculture forests. The qualitative and resilient approach is mixed forestry in a mosaic with other systems. An ETS here works away from a sustainable lower energy farming ecosystem that better suits local conditions.

Disclosure: I have family members involved in agriculture, including grass fed cattle production.

Carbonsink:

So how will fee-and-dividend discourage land clearing and encourage “mixed forestry in a mosaic with other systems” ?

Me:

Raising energy cost (Fee & Dividend) increases forestry & more diverse land use by a combination of product substitution and return on investment question/harvest frequency changes.

Cheap energy allows lots of product substitution. Steel and concrete for timber of every thing from houses to ships. Petrol & diesel fueled cars, trucks and trains for horses powered by hay. Synthetics for natural fibre. What this has done is remove a lot of demand to use our land surface for things other that food. In each case new fossil fuels replaced old solar based systems.

Cheap energy has also meant we’ve been able to substitute artificial fertility for natural fertility.

When the cost of energy is low, low return annual harvest systems make sense. When you dramatically raise the cost of energy, high return long rotation systems make more sense. We’ll always need a fair amount of annual harvest systems, our staple carbohydrate food stuffs are generally produced from them. If you harvest a system annually, the return is typically between 6% & 10%[1]. Plantation systems can return from 34% (over 6 years) to 310% (over 90 years). Harvest a natural system and you can get 1100% (over 300 years). If you have a cheap energy to drive an annual harvest, you can get more out of given area, over time. But the law of diminishing returns apply to the energy inputs.

Raise energy costs and some of these reverse. In construction I can easy see a time when steel and concrete are only used extensively in public building, where the engineering demands require them. Hoping we don’t have to go all the way down to riding and working horses, and building ships from oak again.

I’ve done some ‘back of the envelope’ calculations. They are based on EMERGY figures; Corn yielding at a 1.10 ratio and Radiate pine yielding at a 2.10 ratio, over 24 years. The figures also assume no cost to moving energy use between years and no yield from unused land.

Say it taken 1000 unit of energy to grow and harvest corn. The harvested corn yields 1100 units of energy. Over 24 years that’s a net gain of 2400 units of energy, for 24000 units in.

Now double the cost on energy. The farmer can now only afford 500 unit/year or 12000 in total.

If the farmer just plants corn, he can only use half the land. That 500 units of energy in and yields 550 units of energy. Over 24 years that’s a net gain of 1200 units of energy, for 12000 units in.

But if the farmer plants 47% to corn each year and plants 53% to Radiate pine in the first year, here’s what the farmer gets. 530 units are used to plant & harvest the pines plus 24 times 470 units to grow the corn each year. Total energy in is 11810 units (11280 units for corn + 530 unit for pines). The net gain over 24 years is 1711 unit (1128 from corn, 583 from pine).

By using a corn pine mix, the drop in production expected with a halving in energy usage can be reduced from a 50% drop to a 29% drop.

[1] David Holmgren, Permaculture Principles & Pathways Beyond Sustainability, p 65-7

Ultimately what my 'back of the envelope' calculation show is the when you start taking energy out of a farming system, the Law of Diminishing Returns can be used to work with you.

As energy prices go up and usage falls, the more land goes to trees, all thing being equal. Don't you love that last phrase.

In the developed world, that 'all things being equal' included only 3% (or less) of the population being involved on Agriculture, Horticulture, Forestry & Fishing.

So in a really low energy system you could end up with 1ha of market garden & orchards, 9ha of grain & 490ha of mixed trees! How to boost the system? Add labour. Go to ten families, 10ha of market garden & orchards, 90ha of grain & 400ha of mixed trees.

Ten families farming 10ha of gardens & 90ha of grains. What does that tell us? It tells us that food as a percentage of earnings is not going to stay cheap. It's that standard of living thing again. If you can't have standard of living, you gotta work on quality of life. Be happy!

Global Warming: Why 'Go Veg' and cattle miss the point!

2009-12-14T19:30:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, Cameron Reilly (@cameronreilly) posted a 'Go Veg' link on twitter. John Johnston (@jjprojects) and I commented on it. This is a topic where 140 character just isn't enough. Here are the relevant parts of the Twitter stream and me considered ramblings about the topic.

The stream

@cameronreilly: "Eat less meat and dairy: official recipe to help health of consumers – and the planet" ( http://bit.ly/68BdWt )

Me: @cameronreilly "Eat less meat" http://bit.ly/68BdWt still misses the point. Use no fossil fuel, end of cheap fuel will fix any meat problems

@jjprojects: @cameronreilly In Tim Flannery's latest essay, Now or Never, he calls for farming practices to change dramatically, rather than going veg...

@jjprojects: @cameronreilly There seems to be a bit of a debate about what is sustainable in terms of eating meat or veg and how it's grown.

@jjprojects: @cameronreilly Great essay btw, if you haven't read. He got my attention, that's for sure.

@jjprojects: @cameronreilly That would be good. There's also a great chapter about his vision for Oz cleantech, including a new, sustainable city.

@jjprojects: @cameronreilly ...for Oz to lead cleantech on R&D and innovation and export the results. Bold vision. Well worth reading.

Me: @cameronreilly re cattle. The real issues is the source of the flow. 'Cattle carbon' is part of C cycle, in one end out the other.

Me: @cameronreilly natural flows of carbon dwarf the added fossil fuel flows, in size. But the 'new' carbon throws the whole system out of wack

Me: @cameronreilly Cattle don't eat fossil fuel and are natural. But cheap fossil fuel has lead to greatly increase number.

Me: @cameronreilly So cutting cattle numbers is treating a symptom of cheap fossil fuels, not the cause.

@cameronreilly: @gnoll110 so you're saying if we make transport more expensive, people will eat less meat?

Me: @cameronreilly There are lots of fossil fuel input in beef. Transport is one, think about input to grain used in lot feeding...

Me: @cameronreilly ... and in supermarkets, in the home. Increased energy cost ripple across the whole economy...

Me: @cameronreilly ...everyone changes their ways, that how carbon taxes work too. Expect dearer beef that grass fed and produced closer to home

My ramblings

There are so many angle to this. Think I'll try a top down one.

People are talking about 'what the atmosphere sees' in regard to greenhouse gases. I think this is way to simplistic, where a holistic system view is what is really required.

Why is this too simplistic?

Firstly, the interchange between the atmosphere and the other major components (the oceans, soil and biomass) of the bioshere is both dynamic and large, to just measure and pay attention to the atmosphere alone. Of the extra carbon added to the atmosphere by fossil fuel burning each year, about half has moved to other components within a year.

Secondly, all the carbon is being treated the same regardless of whether it's part of a natural or artificial flows.

How can we view it more holistically?

I'm going for borrow an analogue from peak-oiler Richard Heinberg: a bottle of wine. How do you make wine. You put yeast in sugary water (grape juice) and let them do what come naturally. Reproduce, consuming their wonderful abundant source of easy energy. In the process, they produce a toxic pollutant, alcohol. What you end up with is water with most of the sugar gone, lots of alcohol and the detritus of the yeast population collapse at the bottom.

Lets do some substitution.
yeast = humans
sugary water = fossil fuels (both coal & oil)
alcohol = greenhouse gases

Now lets generalise in terms of the universal ecological dilemma.
Humans are population pressure
Fossil fuels use is resource depletion
Greenhouse gases are habitat destruction

We, as a species, have used the last 250 years of fossil fuel to grow our population, both in shear size and in consumption per capita. It looks like habitat destruction is going to be an issue before resource depletion, just.

How do we undo this habitat destruction,

Remove the input of 'new' fossil fuel carbon! That by itself is likely to be enough. Just hope we haven't triggered for run away feedback in the mean time.

Why is cutting cattle number just fiddling? There is an annual photosynthesis cycle. In the spring & summer plants remove net CO2 from the atmosphere and in the autumn & winter it's released back to the atmosphere in net term. Because most land is in the northern hemisphere, this annual cycle clearly shows up in atmospheric CO2 graphs. In the graph, note how the annual peak to trough movement is considerably larger that the annual peak to peak change of the underlying trend. This shows that the natural seasonal carbon flows are larger that the 'new' artificial flow that is the result of fossil fuel burning, as I noted in my twitter update above. Cattle carbon is part of this flow of carbon from biomass back to the atmosphere.

Cut cattle number and what happens? The vegetation will be eaten by other domestic animals (and back to the atmosphere), lamb anyone? In places where there is no domestic animal, a combination of two things can happen. It will be eaten be native and feral animal or it won't be. If it's eaten, back to the atmosphere. What happens to uneaten vegetation? In temperate climate it rots in a year or two, releasing the carbon back to the atmosphere. In dry climate, in a health ecology, its gets eaten (and back to the atmosphere). If the ecology is unhealthy (near death) and thus lacks the grazers, is just sits there. Occasionally fire might burn it (again releasing carbon back to the atmosphere), but without the stomach of the grazers to fore fill the role played be temperate rains, the ecology remains near death. Imagine the great savannahs of Africa without their great herds.

So in any healthy ecology, the grazers do their thing. Remove cattle and the carbon just flows back to the atmosphere via other species (or maybe fire).

Cattle are problematic for two reasons. Their emit a higher ratio of their carbon as methane, a shorter livid, but a 'hotter' gas. Modern cattle production has become fossil fuel intense, by maximising cheap inputs (fossil fuel) & minimising expensive inputs, especially labour. I haven't read Tim Flannery's latest essay, Now or Never. I suspect his call for farming practices to change dramatically will match mine.

I'm sure big oil & coal are delighted be this simplistic push to 'go veg'. Like simplistic carbon accounting, it's a distraction from the underlying fossil fuel cause.

I've already said the real solution is cutting fossil fuel use, preferably to only non energy uses like plastics. That means the end of cheap energy, that's a fundamental change to the whole economy. Doing it would create an inflationary period like that of the 1970's. That inflationary period was partly caused by the first oil shock. This inflation would not be constant across the economy, high energy application would be worst hit. This inflation would change how business is done and what people consume.

How to cause this inflation? An emission trading system (ETS) is just shifting deck chairs. A carbon tax would have an effect, but doesn't target fossil fuel specifically. I would incrementally raise petroleum fuel (liquid & gas) excises and coal royalties based on carbon content. That is what helps bank rolls the required restructuring both domestic & internationally.

Cattle production would move back to traditional grass feed systems and shirk as people cut their consumption to meet their reduced buying power. Transport & refrigeration costs would change the way beef is consumed. More local, less big box, more eat-the-day-you-buy for most of our food stuffs. Not just 'make transport more expensive, people will eat less meat?'. A fundamental change to business as usual.

Gnoll110

Why Co Gen is not just distraction

2009-11-08T05:40:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I tweeted about an Insider Business story on Co Generation (Co Gen). Co Gen is where in a power generation process, you also harvest heat as stream or hot water. @Olga_Galacho and I had a bit a a dialogue about it. This is a topic where 140 character just isn't enough.

The conversation:

Me: #insidebusiness Looking at BlueGen co gen box. Still trying to think of ways to get cattle to shit in the one spot! http://bit.ly/3gNWIl

Me: @Olga_Galacho did you see #insidebusiness today. Had story about co gen box & it's Aussie manufacturer. http://bit.ly/3gNWIl

@Olga_Galacho RT @gnoll110 did you see #insidebusiness today. Had story about co gen box & it's Aussie manufacturer. http://bit.ly/3gNWIl

@Olga_Galacho @gnoll110 co gen is a distraction from the main game. it helps a little, but we should be putting our energies/money into pure renewables

Me: @Olga_Galacho I was looking at using methane, not petroleum gas. Co gen as part of a integrated distributed power grid http://bit.ly/1SeIPS

Me: @Olga_Galacho Always take systems apart. CoGen is abt combustion to generate power, while harvesting useful heat. Then question what to burn

Me: @Olga_Galacho the point is that the methane in cow shit was in the atmosphere a year ago, it's bioshere carbon, not fossil #carbonaudit

@Olga_Galacho @gnoll110 either way, you burn something, you produce GHG- all cogen does is partly filter the crap - still get crap, just less

@Olga_Galacho @gnoll110 cogen really just serves to justify continuing to validate ff sector - a stepping stone to avoid methinks

Me: @Olga_Galacho If you think co gen is to be avoided then you need to understand the carbon cycle. My view on Algae http://bit.ly/1WDcJq

Me: @Olga_Galacho correct to 2 tweets back 'the methane in cow shit' should bave read 'the carbon in methane in cow shit'

Expanding of my tweets (aka why 140 character is never enough)

In the Inside Business story they talked about burning petroleum gas. I'll agree with Olga here. It's just burning fossil fuel more efficiently. This isn't an affective global warming strategy.

But to use gas powered Co Gen to simple dismiss Co Gen misses the full implications of the technology, particularly in a distributed electricity grid context.

It really does come down to what you burn and where's it comes from.

What you burn? I would think you could burn methane with little modification in the BlueGen box. The Americans, British and Europeans have a tradition of heating using domestic furnaces. I've only seen this kind of heating used in a small number of schools in Australia. Co gen is one step up from this, generation high grade electricity from the combustion, before it is dispersed as low grade heat. The Austrians are using wood pallet powered co gen in some their apartment block sized heating systems. Clearly, wood pallet isn't a fossil fuel. Therefore, if the production is done correctly, it is a sustainable fuel.

Where's it from? I've said before that "Carbon accounting strike me as simplistic, quantitative (at the expense of qualitative) and proven to creative accounting. Very spinable". Accounting methane is an good example of where you need to be qualitative. Methane can come from any number of sources. For simplicity, I'm just going to use two in this accounting. Coal seam methane and cow shed methane.

Coal seam methane is clearly a fossil fuel, even if the Federal Govt. has included it in the Renewable Energy Target. *poke*

Cow shed methane is part of the ongoing carbon cycle. The carbon in methane came from the grass the cow eat. That grass photosynthesised that carbon out of the air over that last year. A year ago it was most likely in the atmosphere. Don't count this carbon!

Cattle methane has subtle complex. Remember we have far more cattle now than we did 250 years ago, at the start of the Industrial Revolution. The reason we have so many cattle is that we used that wealth of energy from coal and oil to improve production and lifestyle, including increases in meat and milk consumption. Even the quantity of cattle methane is fossil fuel related.

I don't think it should be accounted in Carbon budgets. Why. Because the number of cattle is tied to fossil fuel, as we wean ourselves off fossil fuels, the increased cost of meat and milks production will reduce the numbers of cattle. For example, in Australia, is means that the least viable farm lands with go back to scrub and forest. This both improves local rainfall and increases timber yield. What happens to total yields. How knows? Improved rainfall, changes in technology and practices, and more people involved in agriculture due to less fossil fuel; all effect yield in unforeseeable ways.

The carbon in cattle shit is part of the back ground 250ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere. Part of the seasonal ebb and flow in the atmospheric carbon level.

Stop introducing fossil fuels into the biosphere and the carbon cycle will rebalance itself if we let it.

Harvesting an in balance local system means taking yield where ever one can. Be it vegetable, meat or fibre.

Going veg is a poor substitute for the hard job of going cold turkey on fossil fuels and living locally.

Update:
After I posted this post, the conversation re-continued on twitter. I've added some notes in italics.

@Olga_Galacho @gnoll110 have to fess i didnt read the link...will do and revisit my tweets @gnoll Had story about co gen box & it's Aussie manufacturer

Me: Yesterday, @Olga_Galacho & I tweeted abt Co Generation (Co gen). One of us thinks it's a distraction, the other doesn't http://bit.ly/1cMMwJ

@Olga_Galacho @gnoll110 You want to harvest cow shed methane? Like battery cows as opposed to free range cows? #Co-Generation

Me: @Olga_Galacho lol No. People harvest methane from dairies at milking time. Cattle shit any where. Imagine if toilet trained like cats!

Me: @Olga_Galacho by the way, they do have battery cattle, it's called feed lotting.

@Olga_Galacho RT @gnoll110 Cattle shit any where. Imagine if toilet trained like cats!

@Olga_Galacho @gnoll110 we cld train em to tweet too, so we learn what they think of this http://www.animalaid.org.uk...

Just great, feed lotting in the dark!

Me: @Olga_Galacho Feed lotting is not a sustainable practice. To much oil needed and don't like the practice from welfare point of view.

@Olga_Galacho @gnoll110 Im sticking to my guns...u cant right a wrong with another wrong ...#co generation doesnt impress me enough

@Olga_Galacho @gnoll110 dont be selective & forget to add ALL my tweets in this #co gen dialog with u to your blog http://bit.ly/1cMMwJ :)

Done, too much cut & paste :P

Me: @Olga_Galacho Yer, will add the new tweets. Complete when I started writing. I still say co gen has place in an integrated local environment

Me: @Olga_Galacho "cant right a wrong with another wrong" What are the two wrong? Just see co gen as tech. Pick what you need for your situation

@Olga_Galacho @gnoll110 Ok, we'll have to agree to disagree. When I get my blog started, I'll tell u why in more than 140 characters :)

Me: @Olga_Galacho Just a high tech pot belly stove. You choose where to put it and what to fuel it with.

Me: @Olga_Galacho Real problem is that we've become addicted to the vast amounts of energy that fossil fuel produces. Need to cut the habit!

@Olga_Galacho @gnoll110 wrong 1. methane. wrong 2. burning methane. & yes i know methane is more wicked than co2

@Olga_Galacho @gnoll110 it follows that if u encourage All #co-gen then u encourage greater harvesting of fossil fuels for combustion.

Missed this post in the stream. The key word in All. I'm talking about using biomass. Carbon that's already in the carbon cycle.

@Olga_Galacho @gnoll110 including methane in RET was immoral

That depends on the methane's source, coal seam is a big no. Cow shed/Dariy methane is fine for RET.

Me: @Olga_Galacho Fine, ignore methane. Use wood pallet from forestry by cuts & coppicing. It's small scale, ideal for integrated local economy.

Me: @Olga_Galacho as long as the ash ends up back in the forest/wood lot, system is still sustainable. Sun light in > electricity out.

@Olga_Galacho nope - fewer cows, fewer felled trees. Like I said, dont feed a bad habit RT @gnoll110 @Olga_Galacho Fine, ignore methane. Use wood pallet

Think we well end up with fewer cattle, as meat & milk become more of a luxury. Without fossil fuels, the landscape need to be work again for energy as well as food. See more tree felling, Ben Law style, not less in a post fossil fuel world.

Me: @Olga_Galacho If you drop fossil fuels then you're back to solar, wind, hyrdo, bio mass etc. Like we did before 1750AD, but with more tech.

Me: @Olga_Galacho For me its not weather a particular substance is good or bad. Its the system that produced it.

@Olga_Galacho @gnoll110 Now you're talkin my lingo RT @gnoll110 @Olga_Galacho If you drop fossil fuels then you're back to solar, wind, hyrdo, bio mass

Me: @Olga_Galacho Coal seam methane = bad. Open grazed dairy = good. Remember that scale of these things will reduce greatly if no fossil fuels.

Me: @Olga_Galacho I think you'll find these co gen systems are efficient in the bio mass to energy stakes.

Think our main source of difference is our different professional backgrounds. Olga as the story telling Journo versus my take it apart and flog the useful bits Analyst/Programmer outlook.

Update, the second

@Olga_Galacho RT @gnoll110 http://bit.ly/1cMMwJ Olga as the story telling Journo versus my take it apart and flog useful bits Analyst/Programmer outlook.

@Olga_Galacho @gnoll110 Im going to take offence at being called a story teller ... where do you get off, Mr Analyst/Programmer

@Olga_Galacho @gnoll110 analyse this: Im not telling a story. Im telling the facts. Facts are too much energy time money being spent on distractions

@Olga_Galacho @gnoll110 Cut the middle man (technology) out and go straight to main game (centralised & distributed renewables) then cows can fart away

@Olga_Galacho @gnoll110 I object to your last word on http://bit.ly/1cMMwJ I challenge you to add my tweets from this evening

Me: @Olga_Galacho Story teller is good, it a skill I wish I had. Look at #4corners this week.

Me: @Olga_Galacho Facts are generally boring, pgs & pgs of boring. It taking all that facts & building story for the street that's media's job

Me: @Olga_Galacho If you read again, I said we use to much energy now, that's what 'scaling down' is all about.

I'm serous Olga, from my point of view, media's main job is collecting facts and sub stories, then analysing them and building new interesting holistic stories that the street can understand and be educated by. Given how tabloid media uses its story telling skill, I can understand why the term 'story telling' is one you don't want used. If you don't tell a story at all, then your article would be dry proses with lists of references to relevant books, papers and other sources. The stuff of scientific & industry journals. Something that would be read be others already interested in the topic, but not by the street.

Your holistic story (top down) and my reductionist pulling it apart (bottom up) are both of use here. I was just saying we started looking at this from different angles.

I apology for any hurt using the term 'story telling' may have caused, none was intended.

I do understand that we need to use far less energy to fit back into the Earth's 'annual solar energy budget'. That is why I said we need to harvest all renewable sources. It's a rather large turkey we need to go cold on.

Cattle methane is a renewable. They don't eat coal & petroleum. They eat grass that is partly carbon photosynthesised out of the air over the last year, generally. By definition this makes it a renewable too. I'm serous here too. I said it's all about analysing the cycles of nature, particularly energy and carbon. Nitrogen is an interesting cycle to follow too, but that's another story. To not include cattle methane as a bio mass renewable show this analysis of the carbon cycle wasn't done. You may think it too small scale to be useful, but it is still a renewable.

True, the main game for big cities is likely to be is centralised long distance renewables (note I use 'long distance' instead of 'distributed'). I think for towns, rural & remote, the future is many distributed small local energy sources.

Personally I think 'private wire' systems (local unconnected wire systems owned by local co-ops) are a good thing for rebuilding local economies. Exactly because they cut out the middlemen. I'm also sure big business will fight to keep them illegal and unviable using lobbyists, the law, red tape and all the games (near) monopolies play.

System leakage in moving food and power over distance when combined with the steeply increasing value of the energy being lost has implication. I think that ultimately this factor will halt to the growth and then shrink large cities in the long term.

Olga, I'm sticking to me gun here. I do think it's our difference professional outlooks that is the difference. I think you see it as a distraction because you're looking at the short term, big picture story of big fossil fuel using co gen as a stop gap, that in turns delays renewables take up. I see it as a useful bit of new tech in a small package that can harvest energy from environmental energy/carbon flows in well managed post fossil fuel farming & forestry. If me view of your objections to co gen is difference, please say.

Update, the third

@Olga_Galacho As a matter of FACT, I don't disagree with everything you write, truly I dont. 8) @gnoll110 @Olga_Galacho If you read again, I said ...

Me: @Olga_Galacho ok, tweets and extra comments added http://bit.ly/1cMMwJ RT @Olga_Galacho: I object to your last word... I challenge you...

@Olga_Galacho the distributed energy generation u talk of is chicken shit. I dont want to take my eye off main game. RT @gnoll110 http://bit.ly/1cMMwJ

@Olga_Galacho @gnoll110 Repeating I don't disagree with all you say-just don't want to be distracted from, dare I say the dirty word, BASELOAD, renewables

Methane and wood pallet are both baseload renewables. Both can be stored and then burnt when the energy is needed. I understand Austrian companies routinely remote monitor and control apartment size co gen systems across Europe.

There are many battery systems that can be used for storing energy from wind and photo voltaic solar.

As you may have guessed, my favourite technology is the Molten salt thermal system. Like the idea of using for a material that's common and some times a problem.

It this point I'll remind people that there are Solar thermal systems that like methane and wood pallet, include storage/battery function in their design.

I don't think baseload wind and photo voltaic solar is a technical question. It's primaryly a political question.

While Renewable Energy Targets (RET) are low and can include fossil fuel sources like coal seam methane & petroleum gas, there is not reason to add batteries to grid connected wind and photo voltaic solar systems. Why add the expense of batteries while coal and petroleum gas can still be used. You only need to start adding batteried wind and photo voltaic solar when the peak output from these systems gets to a size that it matches total demand in the lowest demand periods. Until this happen there is no reason to 'time shift' energy using batteries.

The refinement of these battery technologies won't happen until governments raise their RET targets to a point where batteried systems must be used. I don't see that happening until a working global agreement on global warming is reached. China & India ain't ready to deal, so I see battery improvement research remaining in limbo with only token green wash money being spent.

Olga, I agree, these methane & wood pallet are generally not applicable in metro area. That's a problem for metro areas, not these systems. Because these systems use trees or grasses and animals to concentrate sunlight as bio mass, they have a natural head start on wind and photo voltaic solar. It remains to be seen if vested interests and economies of scale will produce an energy economy with one or two 'main games'. Pre 1750AD, the landscape was a mosaic of overlapping small systems. The mix determined by the geography, climate, biology and tech at that place and time. Both 'main game' & mosaic are possible, time will tell.

Gnoll110

The corruption of research in Agriculture.

2009-10-31T19:35:00.000-07:00

This week Cubbie Station was placed in voluntary administration. The news story blamed drought, but I say it's simply too much debt.

Below is a thread that developed in the comments.

Robert2:
30 Oct 2009 9:42:26am

Yes, I think the governments of the eastern states, south Australia, and federal government should combine financial resources and buy the property, then set in motion a plan to dismantle the disgusting symbol of damn you Jack, I'm alright.

Cubbie is described as an icon of farming, it is nothing more than an icon of gluttony and greed.

Irrigators, not only at the top end of the Murray Darling system, but further south in areas linked to and a part of the Liverpool Plains are continuing with the old farmers attitude of "what is yours is mine, and what is mine is my own", to the detriment of Australias long term welfare. The disadvantage of long term destruction of our river systems can never be outweighed by short term profits and serf type employment for unskilled locals.

Australia needs to adopt a cultural revolution, with regard to its long term farming practices, and the attitudes of the delusionary agrarian socialists benefitting from the rape of our country.

Gnoll110:
30 Oct 2009 10:32:46am

So are you saying all water should be reserved to the cities and none to the land (& people) on which the rain actually falls.

There is a sensible mild ground here some where. I suggest you read the Queensland water reg and see if the sound reasonable for farmers. I've read & done the calculations for one property. As they stand they are still draconian (but less draconian the the last version).

At one stage the law assumed droughts only lasted one year. One failed summer monsoon meant new dams were dry for February to November of the second year of a drought!

It needs to be remembered that Cubbie is one of a kind (in Queensland). These cowboys found a loop hole is the old laws. The law was immediately replaced and after 20 years still hasn't found a workable middle ground.

Robert2:
30 Oct 2009 11:04:57am

Not by a long shot Gnoll, the city dwellers need to realise water harvesting is an advantage too.

Cubbie as an example of gross misuse, for short term financial gain, should be utilised as an education tool on not what to do, with regard to farming practices in the fragile inland.

Organisations around my locality are advertising regularly of schools for farmers and irrigators to attend educational courses on land care, to become long term carers of their holdings, not rapacious floggers of the land, as has been past practice. The very fact these government sponsored advertisements solicit the farming community to attend indicates the failure of their past practices.

Like everything, it, our land and natural water resource, will evolve, revolve or dissolve. The attitude and past practices will only hasten our fertile fragile inland resources to the point of decimation.

I think Cubbie itself is a bad thing. Too much water taken out in one place.

But I will take exception to the general outlook about farmer as backward & the latest science is the answer. Sounds a little like Moa's re-education camps.

For starter you have just got to look at past advice to farmers to know that at least some of it is wrong. Some advice just plan contradicts other or past advice. As the Scientific American once said “today's scientific truth is tomorrow's earlier scientific dogma". Often research get applied way outside situations that the research is relevant to.

A problem with agricultural science in Australia is that it's become captive to vested interests.

General publicly funded bodies have had their funding largely diverted to global warming research. A good cause, but shouldn't it be additional research funding that doesn't steal from other environment and industry specific efforts.

In grower funded research, vested interest appear to have gained a controlling 'influence' on research budgets. Research that isn't in their interests doesn't get done. It appears that fertiliser companies are blocking research in non chemical approaches to maintaining and improving soils, for example.

Basically, at least some of the research that farmers want done, isn't getting done!

At the state level, governments have pulling resources out of real research and are selling asset like research station land & intellectual property rights as they can.

Farmers have to live with the real results of changes in technology and practice. It's an evolution process. There are many changes/mutations that could take place. Farmer have to select the ones to go with. Make a poor selection and the environment kills you, natural selection at work. People get cautious when real or economic death is involved. To openly accept advice from players who don't have skin in the game is to increase risk. Research needs to build a track record before it will be widely accepted.

Update:
I want to sight this ABC story about interference in scientific publishing as a example of vested interest (political or business) influence and the impact it can have on the quality of govt advice.

Gnoll110

Why Kyoto mean nothing, personally what to do next?

2009-09-30T20:35:00.000-07:00

During the Internet chatter about the recent Eastern Australia Dust Storm. Some overseas people quipped about Australia not being a signatory to the Kyoto Protocol. Others returned fire, saying that Australia had (two years ago). Some even then went on to figure point at the US.

Here is my thoughts about why Kyoto was always irrelevant.

Most countries that 'signed up' don't have any commitments (that was the only way to get them to sign). Most (All?) of those that did sign with commitments look like they won't meet their commitments.

The nature of the problem class (Tragedy of the Commons) means that everyone need to sign up to an agreed system of determining commitments. So they know what level of development will trigger commitments and what those commitments will be. The nature of the problem also meaning any action now (before global agreement) is only political manoeuvring and tokenism, and has no effect on the actual atmospheric carbon levels & climate. For every 'cow' you take off the commons, someone else will putting another 'cow' on (in China and India most likely).

As I've always said, there is no chance of global agreement until China & India fear civil unrest due to global warming (famine etc) more that they fear civil unrest due to poverty (staving because you're jobless). Don't think they are there yet, so I don't think anything will come from Copenhagen. Mind you the rhetoric from India in New York this last week in encouraging.

How best to spend your limited resources?

Building low carbon systems and building for resilience. What kinda low carbon systems to build now?

Resilience simply mean to do things to lessen the effect of global warning on you. Learn to grow you own food, add a rain water tank, renovate your house to be more solar passive, that kinda thing.

By all means build low carbon power sources, but remember what is important is only emissions during operations. You can emit all the carbon you want building it, you're only replacing coal fired power station carbon, in the race to get to China & India's climate pain threshold. Who know where the actual thresholds are? Guess we'll only know after we get there and everyone comes to a meaningful agreement!

Gnoll110

Algae Farming and it's Carbon

2009-08-18T18:27:00.000-07:00

A few days ago, David Rush, @EcoEngineering over at Twitter, tweeted about Aquentium buying a New Mexico site for an Algae farm.

I responded with a comment about one line in the press release that looked funny to me. Here our conversation.

@EcoEngineering: Aquentium Announces 475 Acre Algae BioFuel Production Project - World Stock Wire (press release) http://bit.ly/mQWf1

Me: @EcoEngineering "Aquentium’s algae-based fuels will emit approximately two-thirds less CO2..." ??? shouldn't an algae system be GHG neutral?

Me: @EcoEngineering CO2 in at pond = CO2 out when it's burnt to product power/motion?

@EcoEngineering: Thx @gnoll110 So your saying more efficient algea system=more fuels to burn=more GHG. Good point!

Me: @EcoEngineering No, that if they don't feed the algae with coal/oil & make the setup using algae fuel, how can it not be GHG neutral?

Me: @EcoEngineering that is, as long as the setup is made using algae fuel, how could if be GHG positive? (all C from the air to start with)

Me: @EcoEngineering isn't the Atlantic Conveyor sinking and depositing huge amount of C (dead algae) of ocean floor how bioshere get ride of C?

Me: Carbon accounting strike me as simplistic, quantitative (at the expense of qualitative) and proven to creative accounting. Very spinable.

@EcoEngineering: Sorry @gnoll110 I think we're on different pages.

@EcoEngineering: @gnoll110 Send me a little more info so I can formulate a response please.

The above comments where made in reference to on-going operations. In a reply I've included the 'build' carbon too. I think a working Algae farm should be greenhouse gas (GHG) negative to start with and over time become slightly GHG positive once all fossils fuel usage (as a fuel) is replaced.

My reply to David and anyone who's interested.

Second attempt at a response. First one was turning into Ben-Hur.

Here is how I see it.

All the carbon in algae come from the atmosphere in the first place, so any burning process no matter how efficient or inefficient should be neutral at worst. Indeed an inefficient burn that produced an algae-char replacement for bio-char (charcoal) could make the process helpfully GHG negative.

Now lets switch to the energy front.

I going to assume that the total energy production over the life of the algae farm & associated processing chain is greater than the total energy consumption involved in building and operation said algae farm & processing chain. (if this is not true what we really got is most likely a coal to oil plant, and a different ball game).

Given the algae farm is a net energy producer, I'm going to assume these guys eat their own dog food and this means:
* they built the farm & chain using energy from the last one they built and
* that operational energy will be drawn from the farm & chain's previous operations

If the above is true, the carbon footprint is the physical carbon embedded in making the steel and other manufactures (ie coking coal needed to make the steel).

In reality this is likely not to be true. I.e. the bio-mass oil produced is likely to be used for transport, while the chain is operated by gas fired electricity (or some other non transport grade energy source). I'm not including this in my logic because this factor is highly situational.

Back to the carbon front.

Assuming that the net energy produced is going to replace the 'worst carbon energy source'. Isn't this what emission trading systems (ETSs) do? Act as a pricing mechanism to transfer resources between players. (I'm not including net changes to total human energy demand, that shouldn't effect the carbon & energy budget of individual artefacts).

Shouldn't any carbon cost of building and operating the farm & chain be far less than the carbon cost of building/continued operation of the low cost 'worst carbon energy source' that it replaces.

Granted the shut down of the low cost 'worst carbon energy source' won't happen on the day the algae farm & processing chain go operational. But the low cost high carbon alternative won't start either. Over time (and assuming governments don't corrupt the working of an international ETS system that includes an escalating carbon cost) the 'worst carbon energy source' will get replaced.

*** A working International Climate Change Agreement that a working International ETS system would be based on is a PRE-CONDITION to successfully fighting Global Warming (what the Australian Labor Party (ALP) is pushing atm does not meet these conditions and thus is a waste of current effort and may have big opportunity costs) ***

If the above happens, isn't an algae farm going to be GHG negative. The better the gross energy production:gross energy cost ratio (for the total life cycle), the more GHG negative the algae farm should be.

At some future date.

Repeating the no build/closures of 'worst carbon energy source' cycle over time would get you to the situation where the next algae farm itself becomes a 'worst carbon energy source'. One would hope that the base carbon cost is building an algae farm without the 'worst carbon energy source' offsets (offset = 0), is low enough that at that mythical future date when the human world as run by algae farm, the carbon load will be well within the Earth's ability to absorb (on an annual basis).

Update: If you get metal recycle percentages increasing, the net energy production would drop. but fossil fuel usage (as a feed stock, not a fuel) would drop too. This would close the introduction of fossil fuel (new) carbon into the carbon cycle down even more. More new carbon now (before the peak carbon), less new carbon later (at and after peak carbon): a good thing.

The end.

David, peer review to you hearts content. This in just a thought experiment on my part. Hope people find it helpful.

Gnoll110

World's Greenest Homes: just a Coffee Table Book

2009-07-31T10:45:00.000-07:00

Over the last two Thursday, first two episodes of World's Greenest Homes has gone to air on ABC1.

It does not stand up well against Grand Designs.

This tweet about sums it up: #worldsgreenesthomes is a glossy coffee table to #granddesigns DIY manual, comparatively. Good for a few ideas, no detail.

Im going to tweet the good points of each hone as I watch each program. You can search for them with this Twitter Search.

Gnoll110

Doing a toaster from scratch

2009-06-30T21:04:00.000-07:00

Found this hand made toaster url in my twitter stream. Love New Scientist, had to have a look.

An £5 manufactured artifact cost £1200 to put together from scratch. How far we have come in 250 years. Glad I don't have to be a Shepard because we hadn't got around to inventing fencing wire!

Now to figure out what I can do without to fit back into a 'Annual Solar Input' budget. You know the amount of energy get without burning fossil fuels!

Gnoll110

Batteries and Oil to Solar

2009-05-01T00:11:00.000-07:00

Talk on twitter last night got on to the topic 'oil to solar'. I think the topic needs a post about batteries just to make things more informed and complex.

The are 3 battery types I wish to expend on. What I call electrochemical, potential energy and thermal.

Electrochemical

These are what we normally think of as batteries. It covers many chemical reaction the produce electrical current. They are all example of Galvanic cells. The two most common are the Lead-acid battery used in cars and the ubiquitous Alkaline battery of screaming children on Christmas day fame. Some are rechargeable, some aren't.

In some application, like electric cars, where size and weight is an issue there a many exotic reactions under consideration. Being exotic, cost and rarity become an issue for wide spread application becomes.

At the other end of the scale is the Nickel-iron battery. An old, bulky and relatively benign chemistry that uses cheaper common materials.

Potential Energy

This type of battery system is not common, but where the situation is right, it can be very large store of energy. It involves two bodies of water at different heights (the bigger the difference, the better). Water is pumped from the low storage to the high storage when excess power of available. When power is needed the water is allowed to return to the lower storage, generating hydroelectric power in the process.

Thermal

These are systems where energy is store at heat. The simplest example is a well design fireplace. A single evenings fire can stores enough heat is the mass of the fire place to keep a well insulated rooms temperate elevated for 48 hours.

I divide these systems into Low temperature differential (LTD) and High temperature differential (HTD). LTD is where the store's temperature is less than 100C above ambient and HTD is where it's greater than 100C above.

A example of a LTD system is a Solar pond. An idea battery for providing heat to industrial processes like desalination. Electricity can also be generated using LTD heat engines.

A example of a HTD system is a Molten salt thermal system (not to be confused with Molten salt electrochemical batteries). There are many salts and these many temperature ranges to play with here. Right up to like 1600C, which start to made designs trickier/more expense, since common materials like iron & steel also melt at these higher temperatures.

Hope this gives people an idea of the range and have exotic battery systems can get.

Gnoll110

Does Queensland Government planning suck?

2009-03-31T13:17:00.000-07:00

Yesterday on ABC radio there was an interview with a town planner. He was talking about the Draft South East Queensland plan.

Sounds like they want an Urban & empty green space plan. All high and medium density urban or empty green (forest and farmland) space for urbanites to look at on their Sunday arvo drive in the country.

He seemed to think it was a good idea. As someone who would raised on the land and is not a farmer, but wants some room this move sucks.

New development is all small blocks or high raise (urban consolidation etc). Access to larger block (say an ½ hectare to 100 hectares) seems a thing of the past, specifically locking out sea and tree changers. The country looks to be becoming a patch of larger commercial (family & company) farms and small blocks that can't support a family full time. These smaller blocks are effectively frozen, too big to be subdivided unlocking value for the seller, too big for new smallholder to acquire for niche operations.

It leaves the small towns in a limbo of slow death. As the broadacre operations consolidate, towns and districts loose their population base. This lead to the lose of services (teachers, nurses etc to begin with, then schools, hospitals, banks, post offices etc), the start of a downward spiral if left unchecked. The only way to stop this decline is to allow population increase and that is locked out by these new planning trends. People who want to live in country towns don't move there to live like sardines. They want bigger blocks, either serviced town blocks or unserviced smallholding.

Gnoll110

A Place of My Own

2009-01-31T05:32:00.000-08:00

Several months ago I went to order 'A Place of my Own', by Micheal Pollan.

I found that it was Out of Print. I was due to be republished in January O9. I preordered it then.

On the 12, the first week day after getting back from Queensland, I went into Smith Bookshop to check. It was there, They said it arrived just before the weekend, Happiness!

Found there was no wikipedia page for the book, that is now rectified.

Gnoll110

Beyond the Brink

2008-12-30T17:38:00.000-08:00

Got Beyond the Brink by Peter Andrews for Christmas.

Only done a quick skim and read the first two chapters.

One point I've already pick up and agree with is the amount of climate change that is human induced but not due to greenhouse gases. Deforestation, particularly where the amount of tree cover drops below 10% is having a large affect on the local and regional scale that few city people understand and many farmers underestimate.

I think a lot of the lose of rainfall in the Eastern coast and internal of Australia is due to over clearing at the farm and shire level. The most stable rainfall is inevitably east of areas that are protected for some reason or where the country was so 'poor' that agriculture never got established.

Gnoll110

Australia's move to draconian law

2008-11-30T17:46:00.000-08:00

I'm in the process of reading Volumes I and II of Brad Lancaster's 'Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond'. Volume I is Guiding Principles and Volume II is Water-Harvesting Earthworks. The yet to be published Volume III will covers roof catchments and cistern systems.

There is a very timely comment in the Introduction to Volume I, I want to share. The last two pages of the Introduction, pages 20 and 21, is a FAQ. What follows is one of the questions and the first paragraph of Brad's response.

Are there rainwater-harvesting building codes.

Surface water laws vary around the country (Brad is based in Arizona), so it's wise to check in with local authorities. In my area folks can harvest all the water that falls directly on their site, but there are restriction on harvesting runoff within established waterways that pass through their site. Some arid countries have draconian laws prohibiting the harvesting of rainwater runoff generated on site. In such instances, harvest the rain before it becomes runoff.

Over the last 30 years, the laws in Australia have gone from reasonably fair to draconian. Up until about 1980 water was tied to land title, it management and use was integrated into the landholders management practices for each individual farm. Due to changes in technology (bigger pumped and earth moving gear), some law reform was needed in the 80s. The states governments used these reforms to not tweak, but to grabbed water and make it a tradeable profit centre for their budgets.

Gnoll110

Senator Wong: incompetent, uncaring or both

2008-10-31T20:24:00.000-07:00

Watched '4 Corners' last week. Even though its been over 10 days since it screened, I still feel strongly enough to comment about it.

Basically it shows Senator Penny Wong (the Minister for Climate Change & Water?) in both an uncaring and incompetent light at the same time. That's a combination you don't often see together!

One of her statement basically summed up the feel of the story. In plan English, she effectively said, 'My job isn't to fix the Murray/Darling, it to buy water'. A telling comment. A typical pollies comment and it show a major and chronic source of political problems. The partial quiet fixed. Fix a problem to get by for now, but level a system with at least one fundamental flaw that will be lead to crisis somewhere in the future (hopefully more the 3 or 4 years in the future).

Gnoll110

Can Capitalism save the Rain forests?

2008-09-30T05:18:00.000-07:00

Tonight, ABC’s Foreign Correspondent is showing a programs entitled 'Amazon Rainforest - Can Money Grow on Trees?'. Without see the program, I going to say yes.

Why? For me it’s a matter of first principles of economics and ecology. The very words themselves point to the way forward. Both are derived from the Greek ‘eco’ (oikos), meaning 'house'.

I will argue the economics is the ecology of human societies. Money is a token measure of energy and materiel. Ecology is a study of the measure and flows of energy and materiel in the wider biosphere. Classical economics is the study competition between individual and organisation. There is cooperation and other behaviors that are seen in ecology. Lots of strategies and tactics are displayed by organisms. Taking these and applying them to economics problems and situation should be the main source for developing viable global warning measures.

Gnoll110

DNC, Biden and The Oil Drum on Trains and Peak Oil

2008-08-27T22:29:00.000-07:00

It Democratic Nation Convention time in the US at the moment. I'm going to pull a few thread together and point at some goodness that could follow.

The Democratic VP candidate Joe Biden is a well know rail champion. He could be a major factor in taking some major peak oil/global warming action in the US (if elected).

Last year I blog on what we should be doing in Queensland and Australia generally.

Last month, TheOilDrum a peak oil site, ran a great article about railway electrification in the US. Lots of debate and chatter persued, all good value :)

Here are wikipedia's notes on railway electrification (root page), and pages related to the UK and the US.

If Joe Biden does choose to pursue this and succeeds, it will likely be his greatest contribution to his country. It would be what he's remembered for, short of getting himself enpeached. So Joe, no late night expedition to the Republican Party Nation Headquarters!

Gnoll110

The Guerrilla Solar manifesto

2008-08-25T01:54:00.000-07:00

Been reading Alternative Technology Association's (ATA) ReNew magazine. The current edition (#104, July-Sept 2008).

It has a great article entitle Guerrilla solar in the Aussie 'burbs. It's sub headed Installing grid-connect solar can be a frustrating process. Some people just give up and do it their own way, writes Avery 'Sonny' Daze and Jenny Rait.

It talks about putting a small system together. The dirty games that utilities play and getting a systems connected.

It ends this manifesto

The Guerrilla Solar manifesto

We hold these truths to be self-evident that all energy is freely and democratically provided by Nature, that utilities both public & private have no monopoly on the production and distribution of energy, that this century's monopolisation of energy by utilities threatens the health of our environment and the very life of our planet.
I. We, the Solar Guerrillas of this planet, therefore resolve to place energy made from sunshine, wind, and falling water on this planet's utility grids with or without permission from utilities or governments.
II. We resolve to share this energy with our neighbours without regard for financial compensation.
III. We further resolve that our renewable energy systems will be safe and will not harm utility workers, our neighbours, or our environment.
Signed: Solar Guerrillas of Planet Earth

What a great call to arms!

Gnoll110

Queensland floodwater and where it went

2008-07-10T22:59:00.000-07:00

Back in January it rain in southern Queensland. Four days after this post it rain at home. The heaviest falls in a short period in over 30 years. 770 points (192.5mm) overnight followed by enough in storms & showers to get over 1000 points/10 inches (250mm) in four days. Can't believe I didn't post about this then!

Anyway, I got home for a week in May. Talked to my father about what happened to the water, between the grapevine & news/current affairs (ABC generally), we worked out it all went to two places.

A majority of it end up in irrigation (public & private) storages in the Western Division of NSW. Bleed out of the Darling River both legally and illegally.

What got past the mouth of the Darling at Wentworth disappeared by/at Lock 1. That happens to be the point where Adelaide draw its water.

Nothing got to the lower lakes, the crisis there continues! The first thing to do is to stop transferring water out of the basin. That mean Adelaide and Melbourne!

Gnoll110

Tale of Three Cities

2008-06-25T18:35:00.000-07:00

Last week a bit of publicly funded propaganda arrived in my mail box.

The one thing struck me in the ‘Budget Highlights 2008-2009’ was that the ACT Labor government is fond of trees. Indeed is seems to be the only tool in their climate change toolbox.

Here are the climate change dot points by town area.

Belconnen:
Additional tree plantings – Lake Ginninderra.

Canberra Central:
$0.267 million for Tree Replacement Program – Inner South and Inner North.
$0.250 million for Additional Tree Plantings at Lake Burley Griffin.

Gungahlin:
Additional tree plantings at Gungahlin.

Tuggeranong:
Additional tree plantings at Lake Tuggeranong.

Woden, Weston Creek and Molonglo:
$10.6 million for One Million Trees Initiative – Canberra International Arboretum and Gardens.

I’ve always said that renewable energy programs are a far better investment, than the knee jerk ‘plant trees’ response, for building a sustainable climate future.

Given the twists and turns in the Tuggeranong Power Station project, maybe it’s time for another approach.

Canberra hosts the Australian Federal Parliament. Lets look at the city that hosts the mother parliament; London.

The last Lord Mayor of London, Ken Livingston, set in motion a plan to make the city far most sustainable. The new Lord Mayor has undertaken to continue this drive.

What was the first thing that London did, it poached the guy that had the most foresight and experience with this kind of infrastructure redevelopment. They made Allan Jones, the energy services manager for Woking, an offer he couldn’t refuse. Over the last 20 years, he has nudged and lead the development and integration of Combined Heat and Power (CHP) systems and other efficient decentralized developments into the infrastructure of the English city.

Stuff about Woking and London.

Woking is a city of 60,000, a good match for the basic units of Canberra’s development, the towns.

This work doesn’t come cheap. Anyone who says fixing climate change will cost a household $200 a years in extra costs is dreaming, deluded or a con man.

Gnoll110

Quarantine, the balls in your court.

2008-06-04T17:29:00.000-07:00

There are plans to bring the dead human body into Australia, as part of World Youth Day 08.

The said body belongs to the Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati, an Italian Catholic activist, who died of polio at age 24, in 1925.

Have done searches at both Customs's & Quarantine's web sites and come up blank.

I want to know how is this cadaver being treated and handled. Is the cadaver being treated and sealed by Customs/Quarantine before is leaves for Australia. Where is it traveling to and how is it being held, while here.

I’m sure there is a camp that will simple say “It’s a blessed body, therefore there is no risk”. I’m afraid that not enough for me. God gave me a mind and I'm going to use it!

How can people in Australia’s farming, grazing, forestry and fisheries sectors, as well as the general public, be assured the nothing unwanted is being brought in during this visit?

Maybe we should cremate the cadaver. If it survives the flames, it’s blessed and they can bring it in. If not, then they can bring the ashes to World Youth Day instead.

Gnoll110

Cycle, it's all cycles!

2008-05-31T04:46:00.000-07:00

We’ve all seen the Atmospherics CO2 graph for the last few decades. It’s an upward trending line with an annual fluctuation. The uptrend is largely the result of the burning of coal & petroleum over the last 250 years. The annual fluctuation is caused by the photosynthesis/respiration/decay cycle of vegetation, the bulk of which is in the northern hemisphere.

Mauna Loa Carbon Dioxide

Ok, to stop the up trend, it pretty obvious what we need to do. Stop burn coal & petroleum! We need to shoehorn ourselves back into the annuals solar/geothermal energy budgets of the planet.

For some reason that’s beyond me, the knee jerk reaction seem to be to try to ‘freeze’ carbon out of the atmosphere using whatever mean is available. To shoehorn ourselves back into the annuals energy budgets of the planet we need to work with the carbom cycle, even accelerate it, not freeze within parts of it. This topic will be an assay in its own right, for the future. Stay tuned.

Gnoll110

1 billion less for the Murray/Darling?

2008-04-29T17:25:00.000-07:00

I'm on Twitter, also as Gnoll110

Someone commented about the polish of Sen. Penny Wong, on the Lateline interview last night. I saw that and jotted down the figures and programs that the money was to be spent on. Here is my twitter updates.

Did you notice that Tony had to correct her on the total combined cost of all of the programs.

... and that she omitted stating the cost of one of the programs, thus you couldn't cross check the maths.

... I went back to the papers (the Age in March) to get the missing figure.

If you add them up, they come to $100 million more that the total figure Tony used. 'Rounding' error? 12.9 billion vs 13 billion.

Personally I'm a substance over style person.

If you count up what is specifically eartagged for the Murray/Darling, it comes to 9 Billion (1 b. less than the old 10 b.)

I'm not saying any of the extra money (1 b., the Victorian sweetener, or the new 2.9/3.0 b.) won't be spent in the Murray/Darling, just that the detail is missing. 1.5 billion is ear-tagged for desal, so that defiantly won't be spent in the basin.

Personal I'm of the option that water brought off farmers shouldn't be used outside the basin. If you've got a better use for the water, you should be setting up in the basin and using it here. If you don't, you're just transferring more wealth and economic activity to the big state capitals. Repeating the mistakes of the last 200 years.

Gnoll110

Carbon & its history

2008-03-31T18:37:00.000-07:00

You didn't realise how basic peoples understanding of a well known problem can be at times.

Yes, not all carbon was created equal. History counts!

Here is part of a thread on the subject.

My initial post, part of a wider thread.

> One issue is how much GH gases you release, but more important is where the carbon (including embody energy) came from in the first place. Is a fire better that an electric light? Would the depend of if the electricity is solar or gas or oil or coal fired. Is the fire a wood fire or brickettes?
>
> I always ask, "where was that energy a year ago, 10 years ago, a hundred years and a thousand years ago?" Ultimately you're going to end up in one of four places. The sun, heat in the crust or below, the moon (tidal) or in a since mined crust deposit (I use this wording to cover exhaustible fossil fuels & radioactives).
>
> I'll leave you to work out witch 3 are exceptable and witch one isn't!

The initial response.

Hi there I'm still a newbie with lots to learn. So correct me if I am wrong you are saying condensed burning a 10 year old tree is more acceptable than condensed burning a 10 million year old tree and of the same ammount ?

I think the question was is the release greater at the power station than if every household was burning ?. There is simply no space on standard household blocks to have a huge array to produce their own solar energy to meet the same loads, that would also be the argument that appliances not just lights are just as inefficient as current solar technology :)

My reply, on why I think carbon is not all equal. History (source) counts.

The carbon in the tree is carbon that is in the carbon cycle. It moves through different parts of the biosphere over time. Moving between plants, animals, the atmosphere, the oceans and soils. Each of these five can be though of as a 'pool'. This carbon is constantly on the move. Part of the ongoing cycle of the biosphere and life. This carbon has fuelled human societies since we could rub two sticks together and this movement is generally fuelled by the sun.

Fossil carbon has been out of the above pools for ten if not hundreds of millions of years. When you burn fossil fuel you’re releasing 'new' carbon on the biosphere, and it usually ends up in the atmospheric or oceanic pools.

So when you burn carbon to make light (or movement or heat etc), it’s the history of that carbon that is important.

When it comes to removing carbon, it don't matter which carbon you remove.

How we farm, graze, forest and fish is important, but to a lesser degree. These processes determine how carbon is distributed between the five 'pools'. We need to move carbon to the plants, animals and the soils 'pools' from the atmospheric and oceanic 'pools'. The atmosphere and the oceans are so closely coupled in some ways they are just one 'pool'.

When I use the term solar, I'm referring to all sun powered systems, photovoltaic, thermal (dish & rheostat systems), biomass, wind and waves. Remember waves are driven by the wind. Wind in turn is driven by differential heating of the earth by the sun. You’re right, photovoltaic are still so poor on a system lifetime basis, that they are still effectively at the research & prototype stage. We got to start somewhere. Edison is said to have tested 10,000 configurations to get an appreciable one.

The reply about my thoughts

Thanks knoll. I never saw it that way, but oil has been referred to as

ancient sun energy or something like that. I would see it worse off
though if everyone started mass polluting from their homes don't you
think ? Thats why incinerators were banned, wasn't it. If incinerators

were banned that is a double standard for the industries then heh :)

Sorry i send this offlist so I don't bore the list with my ranting so
people don't get the wrong idea of me as i'm new :\

My second reply. Here I try to tease carbon out of other pollution issues. This case local ones.

Yep, oil has been referred to as ancient sun energy (coal too), the operative word is ancient. What this means is that the carbon is not in one of the biospheric carbon ‘pools’, but is in the geologic carbon ‘pool’.

There is normally very little movement between the biospheric carbon ‘pools’ and the geologic carbon ‘pool’. Some oil tars seeps to the surface here, some dead vegetation and animals sink to the bottom of a swamp, lake or sea and is buried there. The last 250 years ain’t normal.

The bans on incinerators, leaf burning etc are spot bans to stop local pollution hot spots. As with any activity, there are likely to be GH effects. There are two ways to look at leaf burning. You’re just releasing back to the air, carbon that was taken out last spring & summer. The other was is that you’re diverting carbon. You’re releasing carbon back to the air via near instant combustion instead of via slow decay, absorption into plants etc. You’re changing the distribution between the ‘pools’, at least in the short term.

I posted the comment, hoping they help people understand the cycle of life (particularly carbon) better.

Gnoll110

Rammed earth.

2008-02-29T16:31:00.000-08:00

During the month I got hold of The Rammed Earth House by David Easton. Been a great read.

It shows the range of difference even in a single building method. It's got example for the US, Australia and other place. Also been reading able Chinese methods too. More on that later.

Gnolls 2020 Summit dream team

2008-02-04T14:40:00.001-08:00

On Sunday the new PM Kevin Rudd, the Kruddster, announced plans for the 2020 summit on the weekend of the 19 & 20 April.

The summit will deal with 10 critical areas:

Future directions for the Australian economy – including education, skills, training, science and innovation as part of the nation’s productivity agenda
Economic infrastructure, the digital economy and the future of our cities
Population, sustainability, climate change, and water
Future directions for rural industries and rural communities
A long-term national health strategy – including the challenges of preventative health, workforce planning and the ageing population
Strengthening communities, supporting families and social inclusion
Options for the future of indigenous Australia
Towards a creative Australia: the future of the arts, film and design
The future of Australian governance: renewed democracy, more open government (including the role of the media), the structure of the Federation and the rights and responsibilities of citizens
Australia’s future security and prosperity in a rapidly changing region and world.

The summits has the following objectives:

To harness the best ideas across the nation
To apply those ideas to the 10 core challenges that the Government has identified for Australia – to secure our long-term future through to 2020
To provide a forum for free and open public debate in which there are no predetermined right or wrong answers
For each of the Summit’s 10 areas to produce following the Summit options for consideration by government
For the Government to produce a public response to these options papers by the end of 2008 with a view to shaping the nation’s long-term direction from 2009 and beyond.

Over the last day I've come up with the following names. Initially I was going to pull one or two names for each area. But I found many being included in two or three areas. I also had a few generalists too.

A few names that came to mind are either recently deceased or internationals who have returned home.

Anyway here is my list.

Mike Cannon-Brookes (Co-founder and CEO of Atlassian)
Stephen Collins (Government 2.0, social networking)
Reverend Tim Costello (CEO of World Vision Australia)
Harry Evans (Clerk of the Senate)
Frank Fenner (Scientist)
Ross Gittins (Political and economic journalist and author)
David Holmgren (Permaculture co-originator)
Father Bob Maguire (Co-founded Open Family)
Joel Malcolm (Aquaponics originator)
Warwick McKibbin (Economist, RBA board member)
Laurel Papworth (Social Networks Strategist, Lecturer at University of Sydney)
Mark Pesce (Inventor)
Andrew Peters (Natural Sequence Farming originator)
Cameron Reilly (CEO of The Podcast Network)
Rory Robertson (Economist, Interest rate strategist at Macquarie Bank)

I'll be adding more manes as they come to mind.

Here are two places worth keeping an eye on.
2020Summit.org
bloggerati

I would love to go, but I'm too much of a generalist. Not outstanding in any one area.

Lets get this show on the road!

Gnoll110

Gnolls 2020 Summit dream team

2008-02-04T14:40:00.000-08:00

On Sunday the new PM Kevin Rudd, the Kruddster, announced plans for the 2020 summit on the weekend of the 19 & 20 April.

The summit will deal with 10 critical areas:

Future directions for the Australian economy – including education, skills, training, science and innovation as part of the nation’s productivity agenda
Economic infrastructure, the digital economy and the future of our cities
Population, sustainability, climate change, and water
Future directions for rural industries and rural communities
A long-term national health strategy – including the challenges of preventative health, workforce planning and the ageing population
Strengthening communities, supporting families and social inclusion
Options for the future of indigenous Australia
Towards a creative Australia: the future of the arts, film and design
The future of Australian governance: renewed democracy, more open government (including the role of the media), the structure of the Federation and the rights and responsibilities of citizens
Australia’s future security and prosperity in a rapidly changing region and world.

The summits has the following objectives:

To harness the best ideas across the nation
To apply those ideas to the 10 core challenges that the Government has identified for Australia – to secure our long-term future through to 2020
To provide a forum for free and open public debate in which there are no predetermined right or wrong answers
For each of the Summit’s 10 areas to produce following the Summit options for consideration by government
For the Government to produce a public response to these options papers by the end of 2008 with a view to shaping the nation’s long-term direction from 2009 and beyond.

Mike Cannon-Brookes (Co-founder and CEO of Atlassian)
Reverend Tim Costello (CEO of World Vision Australia)
Harry Evans (Clerk of the Senate)
Frank Fenner (Scientist)
Ross Gittins (Political and economic journalist and author)
David Holmgren (Permaculture co-originator)
Father Bob Maguire (Co-founded Open Family)
Joel Malcolm (Aquaponics originator)
Warwick McKibbin (Economist, RBA board member)
Laurel Papworth (Social Networks Strategist, Lecturer at University of Sydney)
Mark Pesce (Inventor)
Andrew Peters (Natural Sequence Farming originator)
Cameron Reilly (CEO of The Podcast Network)
Rory Robertson (Economist, Interest rate strategist at Macquarie Bank)

I'll be adding more manes as they come to mind.

Here are two places worth keeping an eye on.
2020Summit.org
bloggerati

Lets get this show on the road!

Gnoll110

Queensland floodwater and where will it go?

2008-01-30T21:04:00.000-08:00

Over the last month or so, there been good to flooding rainfall over the Queensland catchments of the Murray Darling Basin.

There has been flooding rains in the upper catchments of Condamine/Balonne and more recently in the catchments of the Warrego and Paroo Rivers.

It will be interesting to trace these waters once they get into the Darling. Just how much will make it to the Darling’s month near Wentworth and finally to the Murray’s mouth.

There was one ecologist on ABC Radio this morning, he thinks very little will make it to the Darling’s mouth. Guess we’ll just have to wait and see. What is also important is have long it takes. Fast is bad, it shows how much the system has degraded. It use to take anything up to 12 months. I’m expecting 2 months!

Gnoll110

Farming is gardening

2007-12-31T16:04:00.000-08:00

Who said farming isn’t gardening

Farming is a lifestyle. Take Christmas day. Father, brother-in-law and I spent about an hour pulling a new weed.

This one is called Despina(sp?) Pea. It’s a short thing, 3 to 4 feet. Well I’m not sure how tall it gets, isn’t that the aim of weeding. You don’t get to see how tall it gets or what colour its flower is.

First time I saw it was last summer, my bother and I pull one patch (unrelated to this years patches).

As an invader, where did it come from? We think its seed was in some hay, brought onto the place as drought feed, 12 to 24 months ago. Given its spread and amount, it must have only been in one load of hay.

It’s also been spread a bit from one of our stock feeding spots. We’ve been cleaning up some re-growth, before the election. This appears to have spread some seed too.

We’ll either get it all or we won’t. If we don’t, we’ll keep hand pulling the stuff until it’s to big a job. Then we’ll move onto other strategies. Hand pulling will put this of for years. That’s good economically and ecologically.

Gnoll110

New Governement

2007-11-30T15:37:00.000-08:00

Was an election here last weekend.

Change of government, after a 'me too' election campaign. Both sides trying to look like to other in areas where it thinks it is weaker!

Three things happened this week:

At the start of the week, two states announced they plan to let their genetically modified (GM) release moratoriums lapse early next year. Other states are reconsidering. Two have said the are opposed to any releases. No comments from the fed Labor. Soon get to see if Monsanto etal has them in their pockets too.

The 'Agriculture' and 'Forestry and Fisheries' are to be combined under on minister.

Due to a poor performace of the shadow minister, 'environment, water & chimate change' are being split. Peter Garrett (of Midnight Oil's fame) keep environmanet.

The week that was.

Gnoll110

Global Warming: the biggest event of the year?

2007-10-24T07:26:00.000-07:00

From a Global warming prospective, I think the biggest event of the year has just occurred.

What is it, you may ask. The 17th National Congress of the Communist Party of China. Why do I think this?

Basically, the two lynch pins on turning Global warning around is China & India. There are other important players, like Russia, US, Australia, Canada, Brazil etc. But China & India are special. They are both huge emerging economies and members of the ‘Big Five’ coal nations.

The worst didn’t happen. The worst is that the ‘economics development at any cost’ faction could have gain complete ascendancy. There are socially conscience (anti-poverty) and environmental conscience factions that still hold some power in terms of numbers & positions held.

Basically I think emission global, can only start to decrease once BOTH Chinese and Indian governments think the likelihood of civil unrest & revolt caused climate chance are more likely than civil unrest & revolt caused by economic instability & poverty. Everyone else’s decreases in emissions will just be eaten up by China & India until this happens!

Gnoll110

Permaculture: Lessons from the New England

2007-09-27T05:34:00.000-07:00

On Sunday, 23 September 2007, ABC's Landline aired an report titled "Wool industry spreading tree message". The reporter was Pip Courtney.

The New England region of Australia has suffered some wear and tear over the last 150 or so years. This came to a head in the 1980s, with the death of large numbers of mature trees.

Research into the problem has shown that the cause of the problem was an environmental imbalance. Boosted pasture productivity lead to increased insect loads. Some of these species also used and eat tree foliage. Basically, these insect demands overwhelmed the surviving trees, killing them.

The show covered five operations from an in-detail survey of 10 leading landcare leaders from the New England.

The one the interested me the most was ‘Luna’. It’s using a cell grazing system. This system in the result of antidotal observation and research in the grazing impact of the migratory savanna herds of Africa. Basically, heavy graving for short period appeared to be a stable productive grazing pattern. The result is ‘cell grazing’.

Here is the relevant section of the transcript. There are also link to streaming video resources.

TIM WRIGHT, 'LANA', URALLA, NSW: We're sort of realising that it's important to look after the whole. You know, we have more to manage than just pastures and sheep or cattle. You know, there's everything we've got to start to think about.

PIP COURTNEY: The first thing he changed were the fence lines.

TIM WRIGHT: Well, we started in 1990 and we had about 35, 40 paddocks, which was probably a fair few paddocks for that year. And now, 17 years on, we have approximately 270 paddocks.

PIP COURTNEY: Each paddock is grazed lightly four times a year.

TIM WRIGHT: So, that works out roughly eight to 10 days of a year or 95 per cent of the year a paddock is rested, which might sound pretty amazing, but we've increased our carrying capacity, the cost of production has gone down, the soil is in much better shape.

Sadly, there were no figures for the kinds of productivity change that had been produced for this site, over the years.

Cell grazing looks very like tractor grazing of chickens and pigs in permaculture.

Gnoll110

technorati tags:
permaculture chicken+tractor cell+grazing new+england landline

Sustainable House Day

2007-09-06T20:18:00.000-07:00

Sustainable House Day is on the 9th Sept, 2007. That’s this weekend.

House locations are on the site, grouped by state.

This Ainslie house look very interesting. The TV grab says it’s water independent and grid connected. It aims to be energy positive in the summer and have some energy drawdown in the winter.

In Canberra, the open houses are on Sunday. On Saturday, there will be open days at several schools and an office building.

Gong to go to a few, armed with a camera.

Gnoll110

Technorati tags:
global+warming peak+oil water energy carbon building+design permaculture global warming global warming

Permaculture: Doing things with feeling

2007-09-06T17:55:00.000-07:00

Been reading the current edition of E. F. Schumacher’s 1973 classic “Small Is Beautiful”.

In chapter 3, “Resources for Industry”, I’ve just found the provoking paragraph.

It is fashionable today to assume that any figures about the future are better than none. To produce figures about the unknown, the current method is to make a guess about something or other – called an “assumption” – and to derive an estimate from it by subtle calculation. The estimate is the presented as the result of scientific reasoning, something far superior to mere guesswork. This is a pernicious practice which can only lead to the most colossal planning errors, because it offers a bogus answer where, in fact, an entrepreneurial judgement is required.

I think this is the beat argument I ever seen for doing things with/by feeling and being entrepreneurial.

It’s interesting to read a pre global warning environmental book. One of the core factors in the current debate just isn’t there. Yet the core logic and directing is as current today as it was then, during the first oil shock.

Well worth the read.

Gnoll110

schumacher small+is+beautiful entrepreneurial peak+oil carbon energy enviroment permaculture

Carbon: is Algae a solution?

2007-08-28T08:21:00.001-07:00

Yesterday, there was a post on the treehugger site.

Its title is ‘Seambiotic: Algae That Clean Up and Put Out’.

The company has built a prototype algae farm consisting of eight shallow algae pools, filled with the same seawater used to cool the coal-burning power plant.

I think this is the core statement of the article. It’s a great concept. In deed, it’s very close to how the biosphere disposes of carbon, via the death of phytoplankton as the Oceanic conveyor plunges down to the abyssal plain in the North Atlantic.

But it not a solution to carbon from coal fired power stations. We are still burning fossil carbon and releasing it into the carbon cycle.

When running the ruler over any solution, my rule of thumb is ‘follow the carbon’!

Gnoll110

Technorati tags:
global+warming algae coal+fired carbon+cycle treehugger

Peak Oil: Wheat prices & media spin

2007-08-26T07:02:00.000-07:00

This just can through my news aggregator from Energy Bulletin.

BBC News
Wheat prices have hit record highs on global commodity markets, bringing the threat of rising bread prices.

Bad weather in key grain growing areas such as Canada and parts of Europe has limited supplies as demand has risen, sparking fears of a supply shortfall.

Surging prices are also expected to have widespread fallout for consumers.

While it will mean higher bread prices, it could also trigger an increase in meat and dairy prices as farmers battle to pass on rising feed costs.

Global wheat stockpiles will slip to their lowest levels in 26 years as a result, official US figures predicted earlier this month.
(24 Aug 2007)

It’s spin. In money terms this may be true, and it’s headline grabbing. But is it really true. In terms of hours at medium wage rates, how long would it take to buy a tonne of wheat? How much gold would it take to buy a tonne? Any measure got to be better than fiat paper money!

There are all kinds of rules of thumb. Some measures can be personal, measured in relation to your own experience. I’ve heard of one farmer who uses house prices as a measure. He built a home (average 3 bedroom at the time) in the 60’s and he uses the amount of wheat he would have to grow to build an average 3 bedroom home as his measure. He thinks wheat is about a quarter of the price it was 45 years ago.

Gnoll110

Technorati tags:
global+warming peak+oil wheat media+spin

Trains and peak oil

2007-08-23T16:19:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, at the start of the Difference of Opinion program titled 'Are We Running On Empty?', one of the panelist Professor Peter Newman commented about rural rail line closures.

Here is the whole transcript

PROFESSOR PETER NEWMAN:

…But we are still building suburbs as though cheap oil is going to be around for the next 50 years. We're still - we're about to close down the wheat lines, the rail lines that go out to our wheat-belt areas, as though trucking will be able to use fuel that's as cheap as it was in the last 50 years. These stupid things have got to stop. We have to face up to a future that is much more constrained. It's not going to run out, right, but it will be seriously more expensive and we're not all going to be able to have access to it. A lot of poorer people will really suffer.

My family have always tried to use rail first. It safer. Less people die in rail related accidents the road accidents. The big trucks used to carry wheat are dangerous and they damage the roads far more that cars.

These line closures are an ongoing process. At home they have been fighting a local closure since the Goss labor government.

Labor just don’t seem to understand that the last section of a rail line will generate the least money. That the freight carried will generate usage and money for all sections of line between there and its destination (usually Brisbane). The removal of a tributary means less flow at the mouth of a river.

So with peak oil and global warming, I think we need to go a step further. Once you decide to not close a line, you should be thinking of electofication. Current most country trains still use fossil fuels (diesel). We are still omitting new fossil carbon into the carbon cycle. With electricity, currently, you would still be powering trains with fossil fuels, either coal or petroleum gas. But, electricity is an energy transportation system, not an energy generation system. You can always convert the ultimate power sources over to alternative energy sources on an incremental basis.

An electrified rail system can ultimately be turned into a non fossil carbon emitting system!

Gnoll110

Technorati tags:
train rural+rail line+closure peak+oil alternative+energy difference+of+opinion are+we+running+on+empty peter+newman

Kevin07: is there a bullet out there?

2007-08-07T06:06:00.000-07:00

Logging on check mail today, I noticed in a splash headline that Kevin Rudd has a new web site.

It’s called Kevin07. But what does it mean? Cult of personality?

Are we going the American style over substance route? Look like it to me.

So if we are going to follow the American Presidential style of campaigning in future. Will style over substance lead to a frustrated someone introducing another American political tradition, the Presidential Assassination? (I know, RFK was only his parties nomination at the time, for me that is effectively the same, the assassination was a political act)

Is there an Australian Lee Harvey Oswald or Sirhan Sirhan out there?

Gnoll110

Technorati tags:
election+2007 kevin+rudd labor alp presidential+assassination australia+assassination

Rammed Earth: Albury

2007-08-07T05:57:00.000-07:00

More about the Melbourne trip (21&22 July).

Drove back from Melbourne on the Sunday afternoon.

Stopped in at Albury to check out the rammed earth building at a Thurgoona campus of the Charles Sturt University and a local church.

The C D Blake Lecture Theatre is pictured in Sticks Stones Mud Homes: Natural Living by Nigel Noyes. This is how I knew these buildings existed. A bit of googling with ‘Thurgoona’ and ‘rammed earth’ also brought the church to light.

The Lecture Theatre building also has an earth roof over the theatre end.

Arrived at the site only expecting the one rammed earth building. Was delighted to find that most of the other buildings on site where also rammed earth.

Do to lack of planning on my part; I had no replacement for the almost flat battery in my camera. So no rammed earth pics.

Gnoll110

Carbon Bumper Stickers

2007-07-30T20:47:00.001-07:00

Better late that never.

Last weekend, 21 & 22, I went down to Melbourne for an IT workshop.

While there I was park behind little red Hyundai. It had a big bumper sticker with “This vehicle’s emissions have been offset”, www.carbonnuetrel.com.au and in small print “Men of the Trees WA Inc”.

First thing I wounded was “Is that for this year's carbon or last years?” Normal Rego stickers have the year of coverage is printed in big black letters on the sticker.

I had a look at their web site, it’s hard to tell, but it looks like their project are what I call ‘percentage coverage’ projects. Timber lines, clumps and alike. Good stuff.

What worries me is project that cover the landscape from fence to fence, creating a monoculture of a given tree mix. Not a mosaic of cover and open country.

My number one option is alternate energy schemes. That is, not to burn fossil carbon in the first place. For me, tree coverage should be a decision driven by the custodian’s knowledge of the land, not by some carbon exchange on Wall Street, The City or Chicago.

Gnoll110

The Romans: Water engineers

2007-07-08T03:25:00.000-07:00

There is a scene from Monty Python’s ‘Life of Brian’ that I really love. It’s the "what have the Romans ever given us" scene.


Reg     And what have they ever given us in return?
Rebel2  The aqueduct?
Reg     What?
Rebel2  The aqueduct.
Reg     Oh yeah, yeah. They did give us that. That's true, yeah.
Rebel3  And sanitation.
Loretta Oh yeah, the sanitation, Reg. Remember what the city used to be like.
Reg     Yeah, all right, I'll grant you the aqueduct , the sanitation are two
        things the Romans have done...
Mathias And the roads.
Reg     Well, yeah. Obviously the roads, I mean the roads go without saying,
        don't they? But apart from the sanitation, the aqueduct, and the
        roads...
Rebel4  Irrigation.
Rebel2  Medicine.
Rebel5  Education.
Reg     Yeah, yeah, all right. Fair enough...
Rebel1  And the wine.
Rebels  Oh, yeah 
Francis Yeah. Yeah, That's something that we'd really miss, Reg, if the   
        Romans left, huh.
Rebel6  Public baths.
Loretta And it's safe to walk the in streets at night now Reg.
Francis Yeah, they certainly know how to keep order. Let's face it, the only
        ones who could in a place like this.
PFJ     Huhuhuh. Huhuhuhuhuh.
Reg     All right. But apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education,
        wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system, and
        public health... What have the Romans ever done for us?
Rebel2  Brought peace?
Reg     Oh, peace. Shaddup.

I want to focus on a group of the related systems: the fresh water system, irrigation, the aqueducts and sanitation.

SBS TV have just shown a 3 episode of documentary titled ‘The Roman Empire’.

The second episode includes a study/poke around the World Heritage listed ruins of the Roman city of Timgad in North Africa.

2: Timgad: Roman Africa – 1 July

The city of Timgad in North Africa is a perfect illustration of the Empire’s impressive system of expansion. It is testimony to the Roman method of cultural domination and assimilation. The program takes a look at this showpiece city, whose purpose was to instill in the natives of Mauritania the desire to become, and remain, Roman citizens. Every stone bears witness to an intense, exhilarating lifestyle, like the traces left by games of hopscotch or marbles, or the telling anonymous graffiti which reads: “Hunting, bathing, gaming, jesting – this is the life”.

The part of the episode covers the city’s water systems.

The city had a water collection and conservation system which provided water for its 15,000 people, plus numerous public fountains and baths. This included 27 public and numerous private baths. The city also had an extensive sewerage system, of a standard only surpassed in the last 250 years.

The city’s primary supply was via aqueducts from springs 3 miles away. Rainfall within the city was captured for drinking and other uses. Storm water run off was also harvested and filtered for reuse.

Other aqueducts carried water greater distances for irrigation of wider farmland areas. Some parts of these aqueducts are still in use today.

These local water systems were integrated into the fibre of the city. The city included house site up to several hundred metres square. This means, site large enough to include permaculture zones one, two and three. Site plan from the 'House of the ship Europa'(named for the wall drawing of a ship) in Pompeii, confirm the use of grape vines, fruit trees, olives, nuts, vegetables, cisterns (water tanks), terraces and plant nurseries (presence of grafting pots & crushed lava together) within a townhouse compound[i].

In a world with cheap energy (oil & coal), the cheapest/easiest way has been to use the low material/high energy solution of building big dams and pumping the water over distances.

In a world where the labour energy cost ratio have reverted to a pre 1750 balance. Material intensive solutions like those used by the Romans make sense again.

In a post peak oil/global warming world, permaculture mean embodying large amount of labour and materials in long lived infrastructure.

Gnoll110

[i] Kevin Green, Archaeology of the Roman Economy, Batsford, London, 1986, p. 97 via G.H. Leigh, The World's Greatest Fix - A History of Nitrogen and Agriculture, Oxford UP, New York, 2004, p. 48.

Technorati tags:
global warming peak+oil permaculture roman+city+design timgad pompeii irrigation aqueduct sanitation

Permaculture: A Crude Awakening - peak oil

2007-06-23T20:48:00.000-07:00

Last week, At the Movies on ABC, did a review of A Crude Awakening.

Included in the takes, was part of an interview with Dr Colin Campbell. Seeing this, especially with his accent, reminded me that I have some podcasts that include one presentation by Colin.

These were recorded at the Fuelling the Future Conference (link to podcasts) held at Kinsale, Co. Cork, Ireland on 18 & 19 June 2005.

There are a number of great podcasts from this conference, including from Richard Heinberg (peak oil author) and David Holmgren (co-originator of permaculture)

A Crude Awakening is on staggered release in Australia, so people are going to have to keep an eye on the papers/net and wait.

If they have got an interview with Colin Campbell, I expect it to be good, detailed coverage of the subject.

Gnoll110

Technorati tags:
global+warming peak+oil at+the+movies a+crude+awakening fuelling+the+future colin+campbell richard+heinberg david+holmgren permaculture

Context: Green Roofs

2007-06-16T23:38:00.000-07:00

Green Roofs for Healthy Australian Cities has a word press blog called Green Roofs. It’s a great source of posts and particularly photos.

A post from the start of May interested me. The Brisbane City Council (BCC) is looking at green roofs in the ‘Action Plan’ that is currently being drawn up by its Climate Change and Energy Taskforce.

For me, it’s an issue of context. Over most of the BCC’s area, green roofs would not be a good course of action.

Where are green roofs a good course of action? I think three factors need to be considered. These are:
1/ Rainfall
2/ Open space
3/ Insulation

Is local rainfall high enough that the addition high quality run off from a hard roof would not be missed?

Is the value of the additional usable open green space is greater value than the value of the addition high quality run off?

Is the value of the insulation provided by the green roof is greater value than the value of the addition high quality run off?

Background: Brisbane is a city currently in a water crisis, due to climate change and a lack of government planning (since an incoming state government cancelled a major dam in the late 1980s).

Over suburban Brisbane, the additional run off would be of great use for both as drinking and garden water.

Only in the inner city, would the value of a green roof as open green space and insulation combine to make is a good choice of action.

Gnoll110

Technorati tags:
green+roofs permaculture global warming inner+city suburbia water rainfall open+space green+space insulation brisbane australia

Fined for using home made fuel

2007-06-12T22:53:00.000-07:00

The following story just hit Slashdot.

It’s titled ”NC Man Fined For Using Vegetable Oil As Fuel”.

"The News and Observer reports on an Charlotte, NC driver who has been fined $1000 for not paying a fuel tax when he fills his tank with vegetable oil. Perhaps the funniest quote is this one: '"With the high cost of fuel right now, the department does recognize that a lot of people are looking for relief," said Reggie Little, assistant director of the motor fuel taxes division. "We're not here to hurt the small guy, we're just trying to make sure that the playing field is level."' Sure, since the field is so plainly tilted against Arab oil interests.”

Now it may look funny from this side of the pond, but…

A few years ago, there was a situation here (au), where a government backbencher commented the ‘small’ farmers/hobbyist who brewed their own bio-fuels for their own use shouldn't/wouldn't be subject to fuel excise. The federal treasure rebuked the backbencher, saying the all fuel would remain subject to excise no matter who the producers & consumers are or how it was made.

Can't find the story on the net, darn pay walls!

Gnoll110

Technorati tags:
bio+fuel fuel+excise peak+oil global+warming alternate+energy

Permaculture niche: Dry Climate Trees

2007-05-17T02:26:00.000-07:00

Over a month ago, there was an interesting item on Gardering Australia. It featured a visit to the Waite Arboretum in Adelaide.

It highlighted a group of plants I feel fill a permaculture niche not filled by Australian natives, large deciduous dry climate trees. I had been looking to the Med Basin, particularly North Africa.

Here is a batch of links.

Fact Sheet: Californian Oaks

the ecosystems

Wikipedia list 6 ecostytems
* Oregon Oak woodland
* Blue Oak woodland
* Coast Live Oak woodland
* Valley Oak woodland
* Island Oak woodland
* Engelmann Oak woodland

Many species of oak and other tree are listed

The three highlighted species were
* blue oak or Quercus douglasii
* valley oak or Quercus lobata.
* coast live oak or Quercus agrifolia

Imagine these Oaks, in a line north (south in the Northern Hemishere) of the House, shading it in the summer and letting the sun in during the winter. Solar passive design.

Gnoll110

Technorati:
carbon design permaculture solar

Carbon Offsets

2007-04-30T05:34:00.000-07:00

In this quarter’s issue of the Alternate Technology Association’s (ATA) ReNew magazine, there is an article about carbon offsets.

The article deals with a number of factors and points. It defines the difference between the two main types of certification. These are the Renewable Energy Certificate (REC) and the New South Wales Gas Abatement Certificate (NGAC).
A REC equates to one MWh of renewable energy. A NGAC equates to one tonne of carbon dioxide ‘stored’ for a hundred years.

Carbon Abatement to me is cheating and consumes a different limit resource, land. Putting land under forest to tie up carbon is silly. You shouldn’t be paid to plant trees. You should be paid when you burn timber instead of burning oil, coal or gas.

For me buying RECs is much better. With that in mind, I looked at the article’s table of offset providers.

The two I would recommend is Climate Friendly and Neco (wind renewables), who are both private companies.

http://www.climatefriendly.com
http://www.neco.com.au

Gnoll110

A Tree Farming Paradox

2007-04-02T05:11:00.000-07:00

The paradox is that a system design can’t improve efficiency without reducing current effectiveness. There must be a trade off between effectiveness (gross output to time ratio) and efficiency (the output to input ratio)

Since the industrial revolution, horticulture & agriculture has tended towards short cycles, I.e. annuals. This is understandable. With cheap plentiful energy, the name of the game has been effectiveness. Growing as much food & fibre as you can from the land whist trying to reduce expensive capital and labour with energy being the driving input.

With the availability of cheap energy in question. The game starts to swing back to efficiency. I.e. perennials. You improve efficiency by increasing the amount of growing time per planting-harvest effort, by replacing bulk energy with smart compact energy (I.e. labour) and injecting capital instead of energy.

In the industrial age systems, the outputs were food & fibre. In a carbon constrained world, we start to consided energy as a valued output as well.

Here is the paradox. Generally, the higher the efficiency, the longer the production cycle. This mean reduced effectiveness, less food, fibre and energy out per annum.

So what is better, using hemp or timber for paper production?

Gnoll110

Why Planting Trees for Carbon Neutrality is a Problem, not a Solution.

2007-03-10T16:35:00.000-08:00

Australian PC Authority magazine’s cover story for this month’s (April) edition is ‘Green Computing’. In the article’s ‘Before you buy your PC’ section, there is a picture of trees with the caption ‘Planting trees allows manufacturers to claim their products, on balance, don’t create CO2’.

The article criticizes the base assumptions the chip makers use to argue the manufactures are Carbon Neutral.

The more general problem with this kind of Carbon Neutrality is that it is not sustainable. It consumes a different, very finite resource; land. Land that we are going to need as we move away from using mined fuels (coal, petroleum and radioactives).

It is okay to use trees that are harvested to produce energy or fibre. These trees are not a carbon sink. They are being used as a pool in the ongoing carbon cycle. Carbon goes in as trees are planted and grow, carbon comes out as trees are felled for timber or to be burned as fuel.

The carbon neutrality described in the article mentioned above is fraudulent. There is no substitute for not burning coal & petroleum for energy.

Gnoll110

Queensland: How the West was lost.

2007-02-28T13:13:00.000-08:00

Spent some time at home around Christmas time. There is an interesting/melancholy situation at home currently.

With people selling up or moving to other jobs, it looks like we don’t have enough kids to keep the school bus. People are trying to employee workers/get share farmers with primary school aged kids. Without extra kids, we’re likely to loose the bus during the year. Without the bus, we’re likely loose some of the remaining kids to other schools, local and not so local.

Looks like we may loose the local primary school at the end of the year, depending on what happens to numbers.

Without the local school, it makes it that much harder the keep/get young farmers and farm workers with young kids in the future too. Given that there has been Labor Queensland state governments for all but two of the last 20 years and we’re west of the Great Divide. Once we loose the school, it unlikely we would ever get it back, this side of peak oil.

Gnoll110

Global warming: $75 billion fix

2007-01-31T08:24:00.000-08:00

ABC News ran a story called Sydney given 'doomsday' climate change warning tonight.

Also, tonight (not sure where I saw it). There was talk about the move to lower emission technologies costing Australia $75 billion, in the long term.

Given that there are just over 20 million Australians, that is $3750 per capita. To me that sound like a small price to pay. Too small, but it's starting to get people ready to the scale of adjustments needed.

Gnoll110

Technorati Tags:
global+warming lower+emissions abc+news

Also in Britain, today...

2006-12-31T20:24:00.000-08:00

Britain finishes repaying the last of the World War II loans from the US.

What is being repay these last few day of 2006 are the last of the recovery loans made to Britain by the US and Canada in 1945 and 1946.

The non-monetary condition the US attached to its loans to Britain during this period cost Britain a lot.

Some press coverage here, here and here.

Some critics, including Lord Keynes, saw the loan as a means used by America to subjugate Britain after the war.

It appears I agree with one of the greatest economists of the 20th Century too.

"Nations have no permanent friends or allies, they only have permanent interests."

Lord Palmerston PM (twice) & English Statesman, 1784-1865

There is another quote the goes something like, "Leaders have friends, nations only have interests", but I can't find it today!

Gnoll110

The fall of Rome...1600 years ago today!

2006-12-31T20:02:00.001-08:00

On the 31th December 406 AD, Vandels, Alans and Suevew crossed into the Roman Empire for the first time.

On this night, the Rhine froze solid in the Mainz area. For my this date marks the begining of the Fall of the Empire.

They move westward into the empire. They isolated Britannia from Rome. First, Rome withdrew the 2 legions, one at a time. By 410AD, undefended, Roman rule ended in Britannia.

An interesting date. The fall of empires are always interesting times.

Gnoll110

The fall of Rome...1600 years ago today!

2006-12-31T20:02:00.000-08:00

2006-12-29T21:59:00.000-08:00

Leo Mahon started a thread dealing with Queensland water law on the Permaculture Research Institute site.

the thread

I am developing a rural property in queensland the smart state, and I have discovered that I am allowed to store in a dam 2.5 meg litres for domestic use, and 60,000 litres per annum per cow.

I cannot apply for a water license as no more are being issued in the area. While the land is being rehabilitated it is unstocked. I am planting saltbush for fodder, rainforest timber species as wind breaks etc, in all several thousand trees on a hundred acres.

If I use water from the dam to water the seedlings, I am breaking the law by stealing water that belongs to Sunwater Qld Gov, who may one day privatise and sell. By law I am only entitle to use stored water on the property for stock and domestic. It is illegal for me to establish a commercial nursery unless I buy in water or use roof water only. The land has its own watershed. The only water that flows on the property is rain that falls on the property. My only conclusion is that a change of law is urgently required.

If I change the species to free range poultry and lambs for instance, I will use a fraction of the water that cattle require.

If there are other people with an interest in this topic please contact

Leo Mahon
Director Permaculture Design Institute
janahnforest@bigpond.com
leomahon@yahoo.com.au

Firstly, there is a typo in the original post, 60,000 litres per annum per cow should read 60,000 litres per cow. 20,000 litres per annum per cow is the figure used in the current version of the code.

The thread goes on to deal with using swales and the general direction of water policy changes.

I'll like to add some thoughts.

Been reading the Code for Self-assessable Development for Taking Overland Flow Water for Stock and Domestic Purposes. Even the title makes it sound like your taking government water. That the land and it's custodian have no entitlement. To me it's a natural justice issue too, the lands where the rain falls should get first bight at its water. That bight should be limited, but it should be first too.

Rumour has it that parts of the current code are not being enforced due to flawed assumptions. Too many people have run out of stock water too quickly.

That means they've been drawn up with too conservative assumptions!

The first version of the code didn't even allow for multi-year droughts, it assumed that dams would be refilled each summer. I've seen a dam built during this period, it last filled (& last overland flow) last February 06, it's getting pretty low now.

Is there a new code on the way? Third time lucky?

The 20,000 litres/annum for cattle and horses seems reasonable, not generous, but survivable. Leo, did I read somewhere that you intend to run sheep or goats? I'd use the stocking figure you expect to run when your system is mature as the basic for your total dam capacity calculations. The current code allows 4,000 litres/annum for sheep and goats.

The problem is in the Evaporation and Storage Factors. They are too conservative for pre global warming conditions. Add global warming means an extra margin is also needed (maybe 15 to 30%).

With regard to using water for raising plants for on-farm use, that's a grey area. It's not domestic (for use in the home & garden) but it's not a direct commercial use of water either. How do Landcare groups get their water? Leo, have you looked at the Code for Assessable Development for Operational Works for Taking Overland Flow Water? That seem to be the next stage after self-assessment. Not looked at it myself yet.

some of the codes

It also needs to be remembered that Australia is a common law country. That means that once a law (and its associated regulations) exist, a body of court rulings start building around it. So how the law reads may not be how it applies.

Give me back the old days, when what was important was how you caught the water, not how you used it! Darn technology.

Gnoll110

Stirling Engines and Photovoltaics

2006-11-30T05:58:00.000-08:00

One big advantage of systems that use Stirling Engines have over Photovoltaics is that many Stirling based systems have a battery built into the basic design. For example High Temperature Helostat and Dish systems use a salt-graphite mass at their focus as the hot-end block of their Stirling Engines. The mass behaves as a thermal battery

The state change temperature of salt from solid to liquid (molten) is 900 C. Like any solid to liquid state change, it absorbs a great amounts of energy. The physics of salt means that salt behaves in a constant desirable way between 600 C to 1500C. The thermal battery is heated by solar input during the day. Overnight, the Stirling Engine continues to draws off heat energy and generate power. The thermal battery's internal temperature falls accordingly. The follow days solar input reheats the salt graphite mass.

So these kinds of Stirling designs are potentially more cost effective for base load applications than Photovoltaics and Wind.

Gnoll110

Technorati Tags:
stirling+engine stirling+engines photovoltaics solar heliostat salt graphite base+load

A Complete Food Chain and the 12 Permaculture Design Principles

2006-11-09T19:43:00.000-08:00

There is an interesting post over on Backyard Aquaponics. It's called Complete Food Chain

In the thread Daniel wrote two posts;

once i have quarantined my shrimp long enough to go into the tank with the fish, i could probably achieve this, but only with a very small stocking density of fish.
Farming fish in farm dams extensively rely on this, and they fertilise their ponds before adding fish to increase algae growth, which in turn supports more microorganisms, and so on

and

wait, if i did what was mentioned in my post above, i couldn't have any plants growing aquaponically with only an input of CO2 and sunlight

well i have confused myself, i have a feeling that there would need to be an input of fish food/nutrients to grow plants aquaponically as well

ah well someone else probably has some more helpful insight, and i will check this topic with eagerness to see if its possible

I'd like to add two comments about Daniels posts.

Firstly, about fish growers fertilizing their dams to increase algae & intermediate organisms before adding fish. This fertilizer is effectively embodied fossil fuel energy. In the systems we are trying to build, we can do these kinda things, but the way we do them means the scale will differ. Our processes will require more labour, land/water area, time and/or capital/materiels so that we can embody solar energy. We can play with the mix, but it won't be the fast easy fix of cheap fossil fuels.

Secondly, Daniel commented about growing algae precluded growing plants aquaponically. True, but another way to think of it, is that the fish components of the system produces a certain amount of nitrogen. It's your decision as the designer/maintainer to determine how much of the nitrogen flow goes to plant production (for human/animal use) and how much goes to algae production (for internal system feed stocks).

After I made my initial post, I was looking for a better way to express additional idea threads.

Then I hit upon the idea of using David Holmgren's 12 design principles as a lens.

Observe and interact
Na
Catch and store energy
Developing a system that captures and stores solar energy in usable/valuable forms
Obtain a yield
Developing a system that captures and stores carbon, nitrogen etc as high nutrition food stuffs
Apply self-regulation and accept feedback
Using large ponds, with caged off sub ponds and 'side' ponds to for produce feed stocks for the main fish speices. Thus using some of the nitrogen produced by the fish stocks to produce their own feed stocks. The system can also comsume excess output of Terrestial systems.
Use and value renewable resources and services
Produce high omega-3 fish meats, with commerial value.
Produce no waste
Using food stuffs that are in excess (roosters) as a feed stocks for a system that produces food stuffs that are in limited supply (omega-3 rich meats)
Design from patterns to details
Na
Integrate rather than segregate
Meshing the aquaponic system design with terrrestral systems.
Use small and slow solutions
Use many sub pond and 'side' ponds rather than a small number of large ponds.
Use and value diversity
Using many feed stock source to ensure more stable system dynamics.
Use edges and value the marginal
Ulitize and manipulate pond surface & pond walls/floor to increase cumclative total production.
Creatively use and respond to change
Na

Is it time to draw a mind map?

Gnoll110

Technorati Tags:
permaculture design+principles carbon nitrogen food+chain david+holmgren aquaponics backyard+aquaponics fossil+fuel peak+oil

Water for the Cities

2006-11-06T02:17:00.000-08:00

While down south, I also heard that there are purposals to devert water from the Waranga Mallee channel (at Colbinabbin) to the City of Bendigo and possibaly to the City of Ballarat.

Note that Ballarat is on the south side of the Great Dividing Range water shed. So water would be being diverted from the inland to the coastal margins.

I would think that the value of the uses of this extra water would justify some solar desalination research.

See Landline and Pyramil Salt

Gnoll110

Technorati Tags:
colbinabbin bendigo ballarat water solar+pond

An old teachers view of the drought

2006-11-05T17:07:00.000-08:00

I've been away during the last 10 days. Down south in Melbourne.

Yesterday I was talking to a retired school teacher. He taught in a number of country schools in his younger days.

His commented about this winter's drought was that Melbourne was getting Bendigo's weather and the Bendigo was getting Mildura's weather. That the rain in Melbourne this winter would be just about right for a wheat crop, where normally it would be too wet.

Technorati Tags:
global+warming melbourne bendigo mildura wheat drought

My first Stirling Engine book...

2006-10-26T07:07:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago I ordered my first Stirling Engine book. Got it from powells.com and was ordered via amazon.com.

It was "An Introduction to Stirling Engines", by James R Senft,
ISBN 0-9652455-0-0
1993 (Sixth Printing 2004)

It looks to be a good book. But I do note there is no Table of Contents or Index. It has good review both on the net & by word of mouth.

Lots of basic diagrams, cut-aways, pictures and historical stuff.

After I've read it, I'll decide what to get next.

Next, I've been thinking about another Senft book, "An Introduction to Low Temperature Differential Stirling Engines", ISBN 0-9652455-1-9. The other I'ld like to get is "The Regenerator and the Stirling Engine", by Allan J. Organ, ISBN 1860580106, but I want to build something that works from a Plan first. The Organ book is for serious designers!

Gnoll110

technorati:
stirling+engine solar+energy james+r+senft allan+j+organ

'The Harmonious Wheatsmith'

2006-10-21T03:26:00.000-07:00

I found this reference Thursday night, 'The Harmonious Wheatsmith' by Mark Moodie (ISBN 0-9517890-0-7). It's about a method of no-till farming developed by Marc Bonfils, a French ecologist/grain farmer.

Yesterday I found this abstract

Author: Mark Moodie
The only text on the Bonfils/Fukuoka no-till methods of cereal cultivation. A delightfully idiosyncratic booklet with quirky illustrations.
Book's abstract at permaculture.org.uk

This morning I found this

An e-book of 'The Harmonious Wheatsmith'

then this

Authors website with e-book versions of his works (Buy via payloadz.com/paypals.com)

Here is Marc Bonfils, the developers enter on wikipedia,

I also remembered that CSIRO was doing Clover/Lucerne research in the early 1990s. They were using Lucernes summer growth to produce a mulch layer for winter growing veggies and Clovers winter growth to produce a mulch layer for summer growing veggies.

I saw a backyard Clever Clover patch in suburban Canberra in the early 1990's. It was during an 'open garden' organized by Permaculture ACT (now defunct). An Ex-Pacters out there?

While googling I found these interesting looking links.

Australian Journal of Soil Research
Long-term effects of crop rotation, stubble management and tillage on soil phosphorus dynamics
E. K. Bünemann, D. P. Heenan, P. Marschner and A. M. McNeill

Australian Journal of Agricultural Research
The effect of boron supply on the growth and seed production of subterranean clover (Trifolium subterraneum L.)
BS Dear and J Lipsett

Australian Journal of Experimental Agriculture
Survey of the productivity, composition and estimated inputs of fixed nitrogen by pastures in central-western New South Wales
A. M. Bowman, W. Smith, M. B. Peoples and J. Brockwell

Grains Research and Development Corporation (GRDC)
Research Update for Growers - Southern Region - September 2004
Putting the system together - Testing the value of lucerne with GRAZPLAN decision support tools
Libby Salmon, CSIRO Plant Industry

Then I hit pay dirt.

product info from the Diggers Club website and

info from a Canberra Organic Growers Society member. and

Organic Weed Management Survey results, Uni of New England research project

All the initial 'Clever Clover' stuff I found was from this decade. Then I found an early reference.

And guess where it was...

...in a article written by David Holmgren in 1991
Development of the Permaculture Concept.
There is a reference to Clever Clover in the Natural Farming section (page 4-5)

Attempts to apply his [Fukuoka] methods have not necessarily been successful because any sustainable system is context and site specific. However, farmers inspired by Fukuoka or working independently have developed similar methods to produce organic and biodynamic grain. The techniques of growing grains and legumes together, over sowing of crops with no intervening cultivation or use of herbicide, and appropriate use of flooding and animals for weed control are now accepted in agriculture as at least possible. Recent research work by C.S.I.R.O. on vegetable growing using living mulches and green manure crops (including Clever Clover) without cultivation reflect as least the conceptual influence of Fukuoka's work.

Perhaps the most universal aspects of Fukuoka's work, the learning from nature, remains the most difficult for people to adopt and without that no amount of technical information on permaculture will lead to sustainable systems.

then back to the 2000's where I found a similar observation to David Holmgren's about the value of observing nature.

In a Science Show discussion panel, with the subject of the 'Serendipity in Science', Clever Clover and its originator Richard Stursacre are used to illustrate observation and serendipity.

Panel Transcript

David Salt: David Salt from ANU – just a bit of serendipity that I’m aware about, a friend of mine Richard Stursacre, he’s a young scientist at CSIRO Land and Water and he came up with this system called Clever Clover which was all about low till agriculture and he basically stumbled on this idea when he was trying to figure out how to help farmers basically till the soil without causing it any damage. And it was a system of sowing vegetables through sub-clover which would naturally die down and you basically didn’t have to cultivate it at all. He’s a really wise scientist but he says the secret of his success and it ties into so much of what you people have been saying, is that he gives himself a time of reflexion, he says that the most important part of his day, in fact the time when he does all his science is when he goes out into his field trials and he wanders through them and he doesn’t do anything but in his mind he moves the various components of the systems that he’s working on around in his head and he just asks himself questions – what if I do this, this way, or what if I do that this other way? And basically it’s that time in his experimental garden that first half hour he says that’s all the science, the rest of the day is just work, but it’s the reflexion where he actually does his science. So it would be great if you come up with a system basically where we all get half an hour in our garden each day where we just reflect upon what’s important in life.

Brad Collis: I’d very much like to follow on from that because I know Richard Stursacre and he’s developed something which I think is of far more profound importance than Clever Clover. He’s developed a little device that will tell you where the water is in the soil as it travels down through the soil, a Wetting Front Monitor it’s called. I believe that this could possibly go down in history as one of Australia’s greatest discoveries ever because three quarters of the world’s water is used to grow crops. With this device you can tell exactly how much water you need to put on the paddock and no more, you can then turn the tap off. You can make one of these devices with computer electronics and things like that and it can be expensive but you can also make it for 25 or 30 cents with a clay pot and a polystyrene rod.

This could actually fundamentally change the world from a water deficit world into a world with adequate water to do all the things we need to do. But Australia hasn’t shared this knowledge with the rest of the world. We’ve spent as far as I’m aware the last few years trying to commercialise this product with a small company and not really getting anywhere and yet this is knowledge that every country on earth desperately needs at the moment. How do we reduce the impact of the thirst of the irrigation industries that support our urban communities? This is a technology that will work on an African family farm or on a big Australian cotton spread. I think it’s a classic example, it’s very smart science, it’s good physics and good mathematics encased in some very humble and basic technology and it’s a classically Aussie solution to the problem. And I think that that’s what this country really you know is made of, clever science but very basic robust useable technology which is you know essentially one of our traditions. And I think you know Stursacre’s discover embodies what we have got to give to the world in the coming 50 years when water is going to be absolutely short, a third of the world’s countries without enough water, are severely water stress by 2030.

I wonder if a 'Wetting Front Monitor' is anything like the 4 foot steel rod an old farmer I know uses? ;)

I did some searches on Richard Stursacre, both on google & CSIRO, but it lead nowhere.

I do agree about the best thinking being done when your out in nature. I walk in the mornings, it's my best thinking time.

gnoll110

the+harmonious+wheatsmith mark+moodie marc+bonfils clover lucerne csiro clever+clover permaculture+act subterranean+clover trifolium+subterraneum medicago+sativa david+holmgren natural+farming permaculture masanobu+fukuoka richard+stursacre

Sustainability within a Generation:A new vision for Australia

2006-10-17T20:29:00.000-07:00

David is currently speaking on the ABC, at the National Press Club in Canberra.

David Suzuki has been talking to the ACF about an Australia version of this Canadaian document.

We need to be creating submissions for each on the following area like:
Food
Transport
Energy
Air
Water
Waste
etc

Towards the goals of

GENERATING GENUINE WEALTH: Supplementing the narrow goal of economic growth with the objective of genuine wealth

IMPROVING EFFICIENCY: Increasing the efficiency of energy and resource use by a factor of four to 10 times

SHIFTING TO CLEAN ENERGY: Replacing fossil fuels with clean, low-impact renewable sources of energy

REDUCING WASTE AND POLLUTION: Moving from a linear "throw-away" economy to a cyclical "reduce, re-use, and recycle" economy

PROTECTING AND CONSERVING WATER: Recognizing and respecting the value of water in our laws, policies, and actions

PRODUCING HEALTHY FOOD: Ensuring Australian food is healthy, and produced in ways that do not compromise our land, water, or biodiversity

CONSERVING, PROTECTING AND RESTORING AUSTRALIAN NATURE: Taking effective steps to stop the decline of biodiversity and revive the health of ecosystems

BUILDING SUSTAINABLE CITIES: Avoiding urban sprawl in order to protect agricultural land and wild places, and improve our quality of life

PROMOTING GLOBAL SUSTAINABILITY: Increasing Australia’s contribution to sustainable development in poor countries

Gnoll110

Technorati:
permaculture global+warming peak+oil food transport energy air water waste

Of Weeds and Native Legumes

2006-10-11T04:51:00.000-07:00

Today I found a negative comment about permies from an bush regenerator. It relates to farm/garden escapee plants.

I posted a comment in defence of permies and why I think using the equivalent natives is an issue in the current legal environment.

I will also to expand on my ecoliving centre post here.

Here is Robyn Williamson original post.

We all know that seeds are the first link in the food chain and that nobody's getting anything to eat without them. We have a widely accepted definition of what permaculture is, but WHAT IS A WEED?

SEEDS, WEEDS AND PERMACULTURE

We all know that seeds are the first link in the food chain and that nobody's getting anything to eat without them. We have a widely accepted definition of what permaculture is, but WHAT IS A WEED? [For some answers to this I have relied heavily on "A Field Guide to Weeds in Australia" Rev. Ed. 1979 (Inkata Press P/L Melbourne) by Charles
Lamp and Frank Collett, who in turn have relied heavily on authors of various publications about the flora of Australia and the world.] The following is an attempt to shed light on the question and elaborate on the sound advice put forward by Russ:

On Wednesday, January 19, 2005, at 06:59 am, Russ Grayson wrote:

> Biologist Tim Low treated the Permaculture and weeds
> issue in a book published several years ago, probably
> influencing the perception of the link between weeds and
> Permaculture and taking it to people who otherwise
> would have remained ignorant of it. This, though, is what
> comes when you act in the public sphere, which is what
> Permaculture has done to a limited extent but which it
> will likely increasingly do as the accredited training
> takes it more mainstream. Permaculture organisations and
> teachers are going to have to repeatedly refute such
> assertions as those made by Low and clarify those
> made in the way that McMinn makes his. To ignore such
> allegations and to fail to publicly refute or discuss
> them does not make them go away. It merely confirms the
> criticism in the minds of readers. To adopt a policy of
> silence in today's media-saturated culture is to
> surrrender the argument to those making the allegations.

[Ignorance is the key word here]

> As always, critics should be asked for evidence - hard
> evidence, preferably, rather than circumstantial. To
> McMinn's credit, he had provided this.

As we have learned from permaculture there are no "answers" to problematic issues like "weeds", only solutions and/or useful suggestions. One way to answer a question however, is with another question, so we can begin by using words like what, where, when, who, why, how and finding out which plants are weeds.

WHAT IS A WEED?
Weeds are often defined as *plants out of place* or worse *a plant growing in the wrong place* such as an exotic in the Australian bush or grasses in a vegetable garden. To a wheat farmer, a weed could be anything growing in a wheat field that is not wheat. *A plant for which we have not yet found a use* is another description which is somewhat negative and certainly inaccurate in a permaculture sense
where every element in the design has at least 2, if not 3 or more functions. Every plant has its uses and functions even though humans may not be fully aware or choose to remain ignorant of them.

"Weeds" are most often the first plants to colonise disturbed ground, their roots bind the soil and protect it from erosion, their leaves shade and mulch the topsoil stabilising soil temperatures and preventing evaporation, they provide habitat for other organisms, their leaves transpire vapour which is part of the natural water cycle, their flowers produce nectar and pollen, etc., we can come up with a dozen or more functions for any plant before we consider what direct use they may be to humans. In practice, they are "indicators" of soil and climatic conditions and permaculturists observe them closely in order to "read" the landscape. They are also accumulators or "miners" of various minerals, e.g. chickweed accumulates copper.

WHICH PLANTS ARE WEEDS?
A Field Guide to Weeds in Australia has photos and details of around 300 species with weedy potential including both exotics and indigenous native plants. Here are some examples that may or may not surprise you:

Yarrow - Achillea millefolium
Bird rape - Brassica campestris (a parent of "Canola") a.k.a. "colza" or coleseed oil, an industrial grade lubricant used as a fuel in lamps and in the manufacture of rubber
Tagasaste - Chamaecytisus proliferus (is this now called Leucaena?)
Good King Henry - Chenopodium bonus-henricus
Chicory - Cichorium intybus
Afghan melon - Citrullus colocynthis
Paddy melon - Cucumis myriocarpus
Couch - Cynodon dactylon
Nut grass - Cyperus rotundus (a native - arguably the world's worst weed)
Wild rocket - Diplotaxis tenuifolia (the last time I bought so-called 'Baby Rocket' it was about $20 a kilo - that's for the leaves!)
Fennel - Foeniculum vulgare (a weed or a feed, depending on your taste buds)
Topped lavender - Lavandula stoechas
Nardoo - Marsilea drummondii
Lucerne/alfalfa - Medicago sativa
Evening primrose - Oenothera stricta
Kikuyu - Pennisetum clandestinum
Cane grass - Phragmites australis
Plantain/ribgrass - Plantago lanceolata
Broadleaf plantain - Plantago major
Sago weed/small plantain - Plantago varia [a native of the Cumberland
Plain and Blue Mountains (rare), probably extinct since last time I looked the Cumberland Plain was covered with unsustainable housing developments]
Tussock grass - Poa labillardieri
Self-heal - Prunella vulgaris
Bracken - Pteridium esculentum
Sorrel - Rumex acetosella
Chickweed - Stellaria media
Buffalo grass - Stenotaphrum secundatum
Broughton pea - Swainsonia procumbens
NZ spinach - Tetragonia tetragonioides (a native, despite the common name, extends to oceania)
Salsify - Tragopogon porrifolius
White clover - Trifolium repens, and 8 other species of clover, including Subterranean clover - Trifolium subterraneum Cumbungi - Typha domingensis

You will note there are many plants listed that are useful as accumulators, food, fodder and first-aid e.g. bracken, an indigenous member of forest communities and healing plant, marvellous for ant bites. I was certainly surprised to see lucerne and "sub" clover in there. Apparently lucerne is considered a weed in irrigated vineyards
and citrus orchards of the Murray River system. Due to oestrogenic activity, "sub" is apparently troublesome in potato crops where it reduces the yield and slows down harvesting.

Therefore, the answer to "what is a weed?" depends firstly on who you are, and leads to the next question:

WHO ARE YOU?
The greenkeeper or home gardener who weeds, feeds, waters, snips and mows his treasured lawn of couch, kikuyu, buffalo, or all 3 together, is often blissfully unaware that they are aggressive weeds of bushland, roadsides and other places (like community eco gardens), while they
consider anything with a broad leaf to be a weed of lawns and/or turf.

Corporate scientists, particularly geneticists, appear to consider anything that is not GE Canola, BT corn, rice, wheat, RR soya beans or cotton, needs weeding out and may even believe they can feed and clothe the world with these 6 plants. This is total nonsense of course. Of the billions of tons of biocides that are sprayed annually on these and other agricultural crops, approximately 1 per cent reaches the target organism.

Horticulturists are actively cultivating known weedy species for sale to home gardeners as "ornamentals", as we speak.

Bush regenerators think (rightly IMO) all exotics growing in bushland are weeds.

So everybody has a different interpretation of a weed, depending on where it is grown, where it originated, what plant it is, who is growing it and why. The classic case is Paterson's Curse [Echium sp.] which is called Salvation Jane by sheep farmers in arid regions of South Australia. Apparently it can sustain sheep through a drought, is
a source of great honey and the seeds have now been found to contain Omega 3 fatty acids. Another Echium sp. is a known cure for snakebite.

WHERE DO WEEDS ORIGINATE?
Evidence in the form of pollen profiles indicates that weeds are the creation of agricultural man.

It seems that only the English language has a specific word for them.
The Aborigines knew nothing of weeds until the arrival of white man.
The Chinese term for weed translates to something like "wild grass", the French say "mauvaise herbe" [bad grass/herb] and the Spanish "mala hierba" [ditto], plural [weeds] is "ropa de luto" [clothing of mourning]. Interestingly, Germans use the word "Unkraut" [the opposite
or antonym of "Kraut"] meaning anti- or non-plant. I would be interested to hear of any others.

The word "weed" is evidently derived from "woed", a corruption of Dyer's "woad", Isatis tinctoria which was used by warring medieval Britons to stain their skin blue.

WHEN DID WEEDS FIRST APPEAR?
Evidence of weeds goes back as far as Neolithic times (about 3000 BC) when the elm decline occurred and for a long time it was believed that this was due to climate change.

However, work by Iverson, Troels-Smith & Jorgenson (1949) examining pollen profiles in the mud beds of Danish lakes suggests the elm decline began when agricultural man fed elm branches to newly domesticated cattle and cleared forests in order to grow primitive cereals. Their evidence shows that the decrease in elm pollen was associated with charcoal layers. You guessed it. Neolithic man used
fire to clear the forests. Further experiments revealed that 3 men could clear 500 sq. metres in 4 hours using polished Neolithic axes.

Previously inconspicuous pollen grains began to appear above the charcoal layers, together with cereal pollens and the first weed to show up was plantain or ribgrass, Plantago lanceolata, qualifying it as the "first weed of European agriculture". The North American Indians
certainly knew where it came from and so dubbed it "white man's footprint".

WHY DO WEEDS MATTER?
Weeds are economically significant and inconvenient in agriculture yet agriculture creates them. The problem suggests the solution and we all know what that could be.

Russ wrote:
> Finally, there is the age of the guilty Permaculture book
> bearing the notorious list - it is now 30 years old,
> though I have not seen the most recent editions and it
> would be good to get feedback from others on this
> listserver as to the status of the list in these recent
> editions.

HOW CAN PERMACULTURISTS HELP?
The word "weed" itself has such a negative aura that I don't even like using it. I try not to, but it just rolls off my tongue like waves on the beach especially when faced with acres of recalcitrant couch and kikuyu.

I suggest for a start that we come up with a new and more satisfactory definition of a "weed". Maybe something like: "an adaptable, vigourously recurring, dominant, aggressive and/or tenacious plant with non-ecological and/or anti-social behaviour and the disgusting habit of
reproducing itself sexually, bisexually and/or asexually ".

We may also need to prepare our own lists of potentially weedy species, classified into bioregions.

Any more ideas?

Robyn

CONTACT DETAILS:

Robyn Williamson
PDC, Urban Horticulturist
Hon Sec, Fagan Park Community Eco Garden Committee
Local Seed Network Coordinator
NORTH WESTERN SYDNEY COMMUNITY SEED SAVERS
mobile: 0409 151 435
ph/fx: (612) 9629 3560
email: rz.williamson@optusnet.com.au
http://www.communityfoods.com.au
http://www.au.gardenweb.com/directory/fpceg
http://www.seedsavers.net/lsn/32.html
http://www.sydney.foe.org.au/water

(Note for Robyn W: Tagasaste and Leucaena are different species, they fill the same niche (tree fodder) in temperate and tropical regions respectively, Leucaena is frost sensitive.)

Here is Robyn Becket comment.

Hello Robyn,

I found your article very interesting.

I love to hate weeds. (The sort that invade bushland and my food garden) I think its interesting that for me and plenty of others weeding is a therapeutic activity. Perhaps if there were no weeds I'd just spend more time planting and watering and harvesting.

Also I am a bush regenerator, who tries to live holistically. I expect to be paid for some of my bush regeneration work, not all. My knowledge of permaculture design principles is limited, but I think I get the gist and with my knowledge of bush regen I can integrate the two. I do plan to learn more about Permaculture design, and watched the film at the Peats Ridge Festival.

I have visited Bill Mollison's place in N. NSW and didn't like it much.

Primarily there was a difference in ethics and from the people there at the time a defensive attitude about plants escaping from the farm and growing as ferals in the bush. I didn't like the attitude that it didn't matter.

My philosophy is that in providing for ourselves we shouldn't have a negative impact beyond our borders, and if we make a mistake in our experiments and plants escape we are responsible and must deal with them. We need to be aware of the plants likely to go feral and not use them.

At Bill Mollisons the tree Tipuana (I can't check proper name, I'm using a computer away from my books) used for nitrogen fixing was going feral. It is rapidly becoming a problem in bushland and has been hugely promoted by Permaculture practicioners.

I think it has been a huge mistake to promote Tipuana in Australia and the people who did should address the problems they have created. What amazes me is that the local native nitrogen fixing plants that would already exist on many properties are not acknowledged at all.

This message is getting a bit long, and I hope I'm not being too negative, but I'm glad for the opportunity. I'd be interested to see what you think about my comments.

Regards,

Robyn Becket

Here is my reply comment.

Robyn B

While using local native nitrogen fixing plants would be great, I personal could not recommend them to anybody.

The problem is legal. The use of local natives in any (permaculture or not) system, risks these elements of the system being classified a 'remnant' vegetation, and all the inflexibility/problems with current 'anti-clearing' laws. This varies so much between the states.

The devaluation of land that occurs when isthe usage condition are made less flexible is real. The state government have drafted these law in such a way, that generally compensation is not available for the holder. So I in good faith won't use native legumes in my guilds/mass plantings etc. This is really a pit, a large region in the northern half of the eastern Australian grain belt has a leguminous native is one of it's dominant species, a farmers wont let is regrow and increase N levels for this reason.

This issue is stopping farmers from developing ultra long term crop/pasture/woodland rotation systems more suited to Australian dryland areas, than the current modified 'imported' practices.

What good are nitrogen fixing woodlands (to the farmer), if you can't clear it for rotate it back into crops. In PNG they have been doing 70+ year rotations for over 10,000 years.

Dumb politically driven law making usually generates some silly results.

With regards to permies not caring an about escapees, for me it's a matter of priorities. The centre of me attention currently (and for years to come I suspect) is Global Warming and Peak Oil.

What use is stopping directly human caused plant invasions, if the whole ecosystem disappears.

Global Warming is/will drive far more plant (and animal & diseases) invasions than invasions directly caused human plant prorogation. As climates change, the plant and animals move generally uphill and towards the poles. Greatly increase rates of invasion at most every ecosystem edge!

Now that I've finished my rant, in truth, I will use native legumes. But only in Zone 5 and parts of Zone 4 that will never be rotated into another Zone at some stage in the future. Get rid of the bad laws and I would use them in all zones.

Good leadership requires planning for change, good planning requires flexibility. Flexibility is undervalued by most.

Gnoll110
http://www.gnollsinspace.blogspot.com/

Now I want to expend on my comments in two area.

One, what legal environment would I like to see. The problem is the the current set of laws is design to serve 3 master! 1/ Bio-diversity presivation, 2/Carbon freezing and 3/ City vote retension!

We all know what they say about serving two (or more) masters!

I outline where I think the law should be, in a post on the ABC's Four Corners forums and the "A-Team" story.

Where is the science that says what is needed to really preserve biodiversity?

This is politics.

If there was real science, there would be two sets of laws.

A 'Biodiversity Preservation Act' to do what the name says.

And a 'Biomass Act', with the aim of maximizing the net reserves of carbon while maximizing Biomass production for energy production, thus reducing the burning of Oil, Gas and Coal.

The 'Biomass Act' would replace the various anti-clearing laws, with all their faults.

When Global Warming & Peak Oil meet, something must give!

Any given piece of land would be subject to one to one Act or the other. It either being managed to preserve biodiversity OR mitigated Global Warming!

Note 'Carbon freezing' is a knee-jurk reaction, what is needed are systems that both store the large amounts of Carbon while cycling Carbon to mitigate Global Warming.

Also note in the same thread I question the Green Lobbies preoccupation with Hemp! As it's an annual crop, my knee-jerk reaction is that it should be less environmentally sustainable than wood chipping done right. See David Holmgren's "BIOMASS FUELS FROM SUSTAINABLE LAND USE: A permaculture perspective" page 2.

Someone needs to do the EMergy calculations for both.

Is Hemp a solution.

Or would it just be an Oil to Paper converter.

The problem the modern intense cropping is that about as much energy (as Oil) is consumed as is produced as embodies in the paper.

To get more embodied energy out, you need to go to use perennials, and the longer the perennial grows, better the energy input:energy output ratio.

This is why permaculture use lots of food forests, timber forests etc.!

Please note I was not the only 'Ned' on the forum that night, so only some 'Ned' posts are mine!

Two, the native legume I refered to above is Acacia harpophylla, commonly known as 'Brigalow'. The soil region where it grows is commonly called the 'Brigalow Belt'.

Technorati:
global+warming peak+oil permaculture weeds native+legumes anti-clearing+laws ecoliving+centre four+corners bill+mollison david+holmgren tipuana tagasaste leucaena brigalow acacia+ harpophylla brigalow+belt biomass biodiversity emergy

An Inconvenient Truth - Too optimistic

2006-09-30T09:49:00.000-07:00

I saw Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" tonight.

I want to make three comment about it.

Firstly, it was very informative. Lots of new information tidbit I've not heard before, like the first Hurricane/Cyclone in the South Atlantic.

Secondly, I think it was to optimistic. Particularly about the amount of carbon emission's that can be cut (on both the supply & demand sides) while NOT having a large reduction in the standard of living/quality of life/complexity (in the developed countries) AND enabling the rest of the world to catch up.

Lastly, I think that 'we' only looked at the tail end of the problem. The (main) symptom, not the cause. We looked at three main graphs in "Truth". These being Atmospheric CO2, Global Temperature and Global Population, but these are all lagging graphs. There is a four graph, a leading graph, that most people don't think about at the same time. It comes in two closely related forms, Global Energy Use and its biggest sub component, Global Oil (and Gas) Use (Peak Oil).

Five hundred years ago, reason thinking developed, replacing symbolic thinking. This resulted in new ideas, constant change and new technologies. 250 year ago, we started accessing fossil fuels (Coal). Over the last 100 year or so, we have been accessing Oil (and Gas), we have been in top drive! This effectively removed energy as being a limiting factor in the resource mix that we have had at our disposal. All the other graphs are the result (directly or indirectly) of this fundamental change.

Ultimately we need to end up back where we were 250 years ago, operating within the Annual Solar Input Basis. The question is how much scale & complexity will we be able to maintain? Me thinks a lot less than the popular media & progressive governments think/promote. How long will the fall take?

Go see it!

Gnoll110

al+gore an+inconvenient+truth annual+solar+input+basis peak+oil

Update:
and speak of the devil, Cameron has been on the same subject
backlink (blog): Exxon funds "misleading" climate change lobby groups
backlink (blog): TPN promoting "An Inconvenient Truth"
backlink (blog): Tread Lightly... and carry a big microphone
backlink (podcast): the "Treading Lightly" podcast 3

The Branson Trigger!

2006-09-30T08:40:00.000-07:00

This is a stub, for the moment!

Stay tuned.

Gnoll110

Peak Oil & Permaculture

2006-09-02T20:57:00.000-07:00

Currently Authors Richard Heinberg & David Holmgren are on an Australian Tour. Last Thursday I left work early and drove up to the Kuringai Town Hall, 1186 Pacific Highway, Pymble (Sydney).
I got their a bit late.

I saw the end of Richard's talk. Very interesting, he was talking about the Oil Depletion Protocol.

David Holmgren's talk start with the history and stages of permaculture over the late 30 years. He then covered the history of energy/resource use, population and pollution and how their trends & magnitude parallel each other. He then outline 4 possible future scenarios: Techno-Explosion, Green-Tech Stability, Earth Stewardship/Creative Descent & Atlantis (Collapse). David stated why he think Creative Descent is the most likely outcome.

David listed some aspects and (permaculture) practices that Creative Descent would incorporate. Then the seven domains of permaculture action where covered.

We then, being in Sydney, look at Peak Oil and Creative Descent applied in suburbia. The example used was a 4 house street, starting in the 1950s. David followed its changes & total population (thus population density) over the late 50 years. He then outline measures that would lead to lower energy/recourse use and greater population density (the holy grail of town planners for the last 20+ years).

There was also a Q&A session. Didn't get a chance to ask my question. I asked David, privately, afterward. I'll write up the a post, and get David's ok to post it.

Then a long drive home, but I did bus it to work for most of the week.

first half slides (6.7MB PDF)
CSIRO article with figures of the model 4 house street

technorati
peak+oil david+holmgren richard+heinberg permaculture

the supply chain, China & water

2006-08-19T22:57:00.000-07:00

Ove at the ABC, the is a Water Forum, dealing with current water issues.

I just posted to it, talking about why we must fo for best practice.

There is a post limit of 3K, this post went to 3.1, so I've posted the 'long' version here.

Speaking of supply chains...

The rumours of the last fortnight have been confirmed, looks like Coles is in play! And the first suitor to get a guernsey is the father of the modern supply chain Wal-mart.

What is the power of the supply chain? To illustrate let me use Wal-mart. How did Wal-mart get from 6 stores to the largest retailer in the world. Supply chain reform!

Back when Wal-mart was little, the way a shop (or individual stores in a chain) got it goods was from a wholesaler, who got it from the manufacturer. The wholesaler's role was distribution.

At the time Wal-mart for a fraction of a percent of the size of the big retailers. A sardine with sharks. Sam Walton ask himself, how do I get big and avoid being eaten?

Sam's answer. Build his own distribution centre and buy straight from the manufacturers. What happened to Sam's cost? The cost of the distribution centre etc increased costs by 2 to 3 percent. The reduction in costs from bulk buying from the manufacturer, 5 percent!

What did Sam do with the extra 2% to 3% of cost saving. Reduced prices to buy market share & reinvest for expansion, especially supply chain reform!

This I why I think the fact that Wal-mart is the hunter is very poignant.

What do I think of the supply chain. Well is a love-hate relation ship.

As a customer, I love the supply chain, for the constraint down would pressure it has on prices.

As a producer of service & the son/brother of primary producer, I hate the supply chain, for the constraint down would pressure it has on prices of both good & services. Even as a producer of services, it has a downward effect of my prices. It reduces the input costs of my direct competitors and it reduces the costs of other products/services (especially those where goods are a higher percentage of total cost) that could be substituted for mine.

What's at the other end of the global supply chain these days. China...and the other developing countries like India, Brazil etc (who must follow China or be left behind).

What does China want, in the end. China started just as the physical maker of the products. China wants for end up doing the lot, from concept, to design to production. China is aiming for the top of the food chain.

With it's population, China should be able (with set backs) to get there in any product or service (remember the Internet, if the output of a service can be digitized, the service can be done at a distance) that has a high labour content!

How do wheat growers control the supply chain, off farm? By owning one of the major player and the bigger that player the better. Most farmer see this. Two groups think they would be better of without AWB. The biggest growers (who think they are big enough to bargain and win) and niche producers. It will be interesting to see what happens. There are pros & cons to breaking the single desk.

If we are going to keep any wealth production (besides the hole in the ground stuff, this include oil & gas) here, we need to aim for the top too. This especially includeds water, one of our more limiting resources.

2006-07-31T06:53:00.000-07:00

'David C' posted this under the title 'Peak Oil and Lack of Market Response' on the Four Corners Open Letters forum.

The curious thing about the situation in oil is not that its price is rising seriously, but the lack of market response. It would appear that there are a number of technologies that exist to take over from oil, and have the added advantage of not creating the sort of environmental damage that oil does. Is it because this price increase has been both sudden and seen as an abberation, rather than a permanent state? If so, your report may have done the world a favour.

I've posted a reply...as Ned

Peak oil has been coming since 1981, when discovery (gross increase in reserve size) was outstripped by usage (decrease in reserve size), giving a net decrease in reserve size.

In the last few year, usage has outstripped the ability to extract from the total reserves due to China & India mainly.

While the 'ability to extract' may increase, short term. The net change in total reserves is a long term trend.

The markets response will be a long term trend too!

The market is starting to respond. Look at the price of sugar (a commodities that is more an energy commodity than the food commodity it use to be) and look at the dollars being paid to farmers for site turbine masts on their land.

When the main source of energy was from mining, farming was a food and fibre game. In future, farming will be a food, fibre & energy game.

I should add that this assumes that Coal, a fossil fuel where the peak is way farther into the future and where the decline would be slower, will not indirectly replace oil, for carbon emission reason.

In effect we would move away to the cheap fuel of the last 250 years(coal), and particularlly the last 100 years(oil). This changes the whole value equation between labour(time) and products (matter & the energy used to transform it).

Interesting times indeed!

The Blogoshere & the Mainstream Media - Peak Oil

2006-07-11T03:35:00.000-07:00

Last night Four Corners ran a show about Peak Oil/Hubbert's Peak. The show also has an extended online edition and a forum afterward.

I first heard of Hubbert's Peak/Peak Oil in October/November 2005, via Blogs initially & other online resources.

Since that time, the only stories I've seen on Australian Mainstream Media have been 'human interest' stories about high fuel prices or 'business' stories about increased demand from China & India causing short/medium term (< 5 year) high prices.

Four Corners is the first Mainstream Media coverage I've seen.

So, I expect some coverage on shows like ACA & the breaky shows over the next month, follows by a story or two on 'Sunday' or maybe '60 Minutes' over the next few months.

I'm sick of Soccer!

2006-06-12T05:17:00.000-07:00

Well it’s Monday night here. A public holiday, Queen's Birthday and all that. Congrats to everyone out there, who got gongs!

Went to the gym this morning. Then, later in the day I went to the CONSTABLE : impressions of land, sea and sky Exhibition. The last day, today, cutting it too fine! They had sold out of the exhibition's companion book :(

Well the TV seems to be wall-to-wall World Cup Soccer, the last few weeks. I'm so sick of it. Australia plays its first game tonight, Eastern Standard Time.

I think I should email Keith Dunstan about starting a Soccer Division of the Anti-Football League.

Anti-Football+League World+Cup+Soccer Keith+Dunstan

Stirling Engines - Links page

2006-05-23T22:17:00.000-07:00

Just found a cool looking links site, with a page of Stirling Engine links

I'm currently looking for a site that has pics of a Japanese or Chinese designed Low Temperature Differential (LTD) Stirling Engine, generating about 700W. They are about the size of an old 44 gallon drum.

Back to the hunt.

Stirling+Engine Stirling+Engines Low+Temperature+Differential LTD

New Tech Blog

2006-05-18T20:24:00.000-07:00

I'm going to start posting my IT Tech posts on a new blog The Gnoll in the Machine.

I've start, with a post about the ANZ banks stuff-up, double processing 400,000 transaction with a combined value of 45 million dollars.

Natural Sequence Farming in Organic Gardener, Autumn 2006

2006-05-16T19:07:00.000-07:00

There is an article in this quarters issue called ‘Catching the Flow’. It runs from page 34 to 39.

It was written by Stephanie Alt and Hogan Gleeson.

The article has some interesting quotes too. Stuff I’ve heard people say and talk about, but never so succinctly!

The introduction talks about the authors’ journey to Gerry Harvey’s property, ‘Baramul’. It also goes into brief outline of how we arrived at the current situation.

There are two quotes that clash with popular understanding in the bulk of the community.

Aboriginal people once used fire to control game and increase the productive capacity of the land, creating in effect, a farmed landscape. Many of us imagine there was once simply a great expanse of forest. Some of the forests and woodland that were cleared by later generation of farmers appeared after the land came under British control, disrupting thousands of years of Aboriginal stewardship. Many perennial grasslands, previously maintained by the fire stick, became thick, woody scrubland, which shaded out the grasses, leaving the ground bare beneath.

There is lore in my family about these long term changes in both central NSW and southern Queensland. People should be aware that the Pilliga is not a natural forest.

It’s important to remember that ‘opening up’ the land was carried out with good intensions, using the accepted knowledge of the day. The gradual nature of these changes in the landscape meant each generation experienced it’s own ‘normal’, masking steady but fundamental degradation of the ecosystem.

Indeed, often land clearing was a condition of leases, you couldn’t upgrade a lease without meeting these conditions. Unlike commercial leases, the unstated aim of crown leases was to move land into private ownership, once the land had been developed as the government saw fit. These conditions were laid out in the lease and/or lease conversion regs.

With improved travel and increasing rates of change, it’s become far easier for people generally and farmer in particular to see these changes. Old farmers have some interesting stories about ‘the way we were’.

The next paragraphs talked about initial presentations at 'Bamamul'. The head of the research team, Dr Richard Bush and then by Peter Andrews himself talked. It's noted that what is being studied is NSF, in its application to river rehabilitation. This being only part of NSF as a "whole farm approach".

The tour of the property is outlined. A few of the earthworks a described, the changes in flows and finally the water table & soil moisture are noted.

The tour also visited 'Tarwyn Park', where Peter's son now farms. The differences with most of the neighbouring properties are clear. A neighbour, Grant Fleming, who father owned 'Tarwyn Park' in the 1950, talks about what the area was like then and how NSF has changed it and late his own family farm. It's also noted that ground water salt level have dropped from 1200 to 450 parts per million.

Ecological concerns about fish movements are outlined and its notes that legislation controlling in-stream structures means that NSF structures are illegal.

Peter's use of non-indigenous plants has also been questioned. They are used as they are volunteer species that fill the niches in the early sequences.

Looking at the opposite bank, he points out places where native vegetation is coming back naturally once willows have stabilised the banks.

Natives are regarded as a better option.

While the major ‘wet fully’ recharge the floodplain aquifers, less water flows down stream. When recharge is achieved, the system is in a new equal equilibrium. Flows should return to a level with lower peak flows, but with an increased duration.

here is a link

I’d link to the article too, but it’s published by are a subsidiary of "Dinosaur Press Inc".

Natural+Sequence+Farming Catching+the+Flow Organic+Gardener Peter+Andrews Richard+Bush Stephanie+Alt Hogan+Gleeson Gerry+Harvey Baramul Tarwyn+Park Willows

Canberra - Fire resistant plants

2006-05-15T19:40:00.000-07:00

I’ve got friends who have just brought a small acreage block, just north of Canberra.

We were having smoko, when I was told about their purchase. They get the title in a few weeks. One of the first things we talked about was windbreaks. I immediately suggested they needed at least two species. A fast grower for get short term cover (I thought wattles) and a second that would be big, long lived ‘core’ species. That was my 60 second answer.

Thinking about it afterward, I realize that another consideration fire sectors & fire resistance plantings.

Anyone got any suggestion?

I’m so looking forward to seeing their new block.

fire+resistant+plants sustainability windbreak fire+sector

'The Times' has a Blog!

2006-05-10T23:18:00.000-07:00

I just found The Times blog and there is a blog for one of my favorite authors, William Rees-Mogg.

Im happy :)

Canberra Java Users Group meeting

2006-05-10T18:43:00.000-07:00

Went to the monthly CJUG meeting last nigth.

The topic was 'code smells'. A great talk.

Lots of talk about Refectoring.

Design Patterns has its GoF (Ganf of Four).

We think that Refectoring may have its Gang of Three.

They are:
Ward Cummingham See here
Martin Fowler here
Kent Beck and here

Stirling Engines and Heat Pumps

2006-04-30T20:22:00.000-07:00

Just read this post. In the comments there is a link to Heat Pumps & some talk about their use.

My comment was...

Why would you get a headache?

You have a heat to motion to electric power system, where part of the electric output is feed back into the system to improve efficiency and/or decrease the cost of the total system.

How is this so. Well if you use the heat pump to 'focus' the heat into a 'point' of higher temperature, you can do two things. Increase its efficiency (by changing the hot-end temperature & thus the hot-end cool-end ratios, as measures in degree K). You can also use the smaller & cheaper (per unit of energy output) stirling engine.

Anyway, that how I read it. Comment welcomed!

John Maynard Keynes

2006-04-30T00:11:00.000-07:00

On ANZAC day, I had a broswe at Academic Remainders

They had a biography of John Maynard Keynes.

Paperback: 1056 pages
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (August 30, 2005)
Language: English
ISBN: 0143036157
I think this is the one. The cover art at amazon is different.

I was aware of Keynes generally and had skimmed his work 'The Economic Consequences of the Peace' on the net a few year back. A very interesting overview on the centery before the Great War and the likely (prophectic) effects of the Treaty of Versailles (1919).

It's a very interesting book, but not light reading.

Meet Sid & Nancy, the Stirling Engines.

2006-04-20T20:38:00.000-07:00

I have also just found these pics

The interesting ones are:

Inside the AASTINO, jetfuel from the stirling engine has leaked and caused the blue anti-static map to bubble - and it stinks.

Sid the Stirling engine arrives on a sled behind the skidoo

Nancy the Stirling engines heads back to the factory

Jon fits the engine cover onto Nancy

Jon fills the Stirling engine with coolant

So, what can we tell from these pics & their caption.

They run on 'Jetfuel', so I'll assume they mean 'avgas', unless someone cares to correct me.

Therefore the Stirling engines are High Temperature Differential (HTD) engines. Their relatively small size seams confirms this.

The 'coolant' is Glycol, I assume this mean that the operating fluid is Glycol.

Update:

More googling shows what I expected, they are Whispergen engines, made by Whisper Tech in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Stirling Engines - Polar usage

2006-04-20T20:27:00.000-07:00

Just found this post, dated 11th January, 2002.

Someone has a Stirling engine in Antartica

Our traveling companions include the Brothers Pernic (Ed and Bob - Bob is the site manager at South Pole for the astronomy project; Ed is the last in a long line of people who've tried to get the TEG working, and is busting to see the Stirling engine) and Wilfred Walsh - a PhD graduate from UNSW Astrophysics.

It would be interesting to findout is stats.

I hate morning news TV. Its just an ad!

2006-04-13T00:25:00.000-07:00

Saw something funny on Today, yesterday morning. They had in interview with an author of a book about communicating the children.

The Author commented that kids are bored with life, loser parents etc and that they amerce themselves in computer games, mind dead TV etc as a results.

You should have seen the male host trying to cover Today’s arse! It was so funny. The Author did throw him a lifeline by saying Today had some educational value. ;)

Newspaper Archives, what the!

2006-03-30T17:22:00.000-08:00

Read the 'Canberra Times' last Saturday (25/03/06). There was an article about a speech that Julia Gillard made recently at the NSW Fabian Society. The speech was about what Labor should do to beat John Howard.

Went online today, 31/03, to try to get the text of the article. I did searches of the paper's archives on ‘Gillard’, ‘Labor’ and ‘Howard’ and could not find the article. According to the searches, neither the word ‘Gillard’ nor ‘Labor’ even appeared in last Saturday’s paper.

Someone has either legal, policy or technical issues to figure out about the quality & usage of their archives!

To point ‘em in the right direction, here is what Doc Searls write in his Mercury Falling post!

Get net-native, not net-hostile!

Stirling Engines - A Lay Engine Builders Weblog

2006-03-28T20:43:00.000-08:00

Just found the weblog of a Victorian engine builder, Terry Thompson.

This post turned up on Tectnorati.

There is also a second, older post, with a diagram.

Terry also has some entries about solar home idea.

Bread & Circuses

2006-03-21T17:29:00.000-08:00

Gee, where to start?

Well, I suppose the best place is with the important bits of the thread on Cam site.

Did the Commonwealth Games opening ceremony suck?

Apparently lots of people think it did. I obviously didn't watch it. Did you? What did you think? Was it pathetic? The whole "flying tram" thing seems lame to me. But I hate opening ceremonies…

To which I posted a comment about “Bread & Circuses”, lifted from the US PBS site, ‘cause I was to lasy/time constrained to write my own.

Bread & Circuses

Augustus, realizing that the masses of average Romans had to be kept both fed and happy enough to remain peaceful, began the system of patronage we now refer to as "bread and circuses." He gave the people food — by means of grain distribution and legislation of food prices — and free entertainment such as chariot races, gladiators, and lavish spectacles in amphitheaters and the Circus Maximus.

a quote from http://www.pbs.org/empires/romans/life/life3.html

So, every wondered why farmers & truckies never get a break?

At the end of it, I added a general throw always line, about farmers & truckers. The responses I got to that comment, I didn’t expect. It all goes to show what you think is common sense & common knowledge, isn’t!

Cam’s response was

Farmers and truckies? What do they need a break from?

and my response

Cam, when a government arranges a benefit for a group of people, it can fund it in one of two ways. Take from a large group (usually everyone) and hope that noone notices or take from a small group(s), knowing that no matter how hostile a group(s) becomes, it's too small to make a difference.

In the case of cheap food, Australia uses the second option! The small groups in this situation are farmers & truckers.

If a government/system can keep the bulk of the population 'fat, dumb and happy', it can stay in power without doing much else.

When I say 'farmers & truckies', I mean the people who do the real work for not much money, the drivers etc, not Lindsey Fox or Janet/Peter Holmes aCourt.

and Cams response

So give us details Gnoll! How are the government taking money from the farmers and truckers?? The last I heard, farmers were getting subsidies and cheap loans and truckies were making $100K a year including overtime.

How's the car situation going?

Now where now? Timeline…

As me original comment about ‘Bread & Circuses’ shows, governments/systems have understood (for a least 2000 years), the desirability of having a cheap food supply for keeping the bulk of the population happy/staying in power.

Crop failures & civil unrest during the depths of Little Ice Age reinforced this lesson to governments from Ireland to Japan as recently as C17.

Europe had this lesson reinforced again in late C18, in the form of the French Revolution.

Keeping food cheap requires action in two areas, firstly the cost of the produce itself and secondly in the cost of getting the produce to the consumer. To do this requires one of two actions, either rigorous free markets or systematic subsidies.

The driving force in setting global food prices is the massive subsidy system of the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (the CAP). This has been the situation since the EU’s inception as the EEC (European Economic Community) in the 1950s. Remember the Europeans have starved as recently as the early 1940’s.

The US also subsidies it’s farmers, but does not set the pace, it only matches the EU. It would rather put its money into other project/activities.

Australia’s only option is to use rigorous free markets in production & transport to try to match the EU & US. Why, because the EU & US have productive industrial bases they can use to subsidize their agricultural sectors.

Australia doesn’t have this industrial base to subsidise agriculture. Indeed, Australia has historically used its primary industries (both agriculture & mining) to subsidize its industrial base to create jobs in the cities, build infrastructure etc. This historical cross subsidization dates back to early C19 and was strongest during the gold rushes & agricultural booms from 1850 to 1890. This period was the ‘Golden Age’ of Australian agriculture.

It is this rigorous free market environment from 1890 onward that leads me to make the “So, every wondered why farmers & truckies never get a break?” comment.
Miners and transport generally have been under these rigorous free market conditions since the 1890s too. The rest of the economy has been shelter to some degree until the reforms of the 1980s began.

Now I want to divide recent history into 2 periods, for some additional analysis. The first period is what I’ll call the ‘High Industrial’ period. It’s the time from 1890 to the early 1970s. I chose 1890 as a start date because it’s the end of the initial settlement development booms. I chose the early 1970s as the end date because it’s the end of the great post WWII boom.

During the ‘High Industrial’, the isolation between national economies was strong enough to allow each nation to set its own economic policy (within reason). Ggovernments could choose how each section was ran and what cross subsidizations were allowed/encouraged. As long as the books balanced overall & in the long run. The isolation could be maintained due to the relative solidness of nation borders.

In the 1970s, the Oil Shocks started to destabilize the situation.

At this point I’d like to add to the definition of ‘bread’. In Roman times, ‘bread’ referred to food alone. Over the last 500 years, ‘bread’ has grown to include access to shelter, clothing, transport & energy. Like with food stuffs, the cheaper, the better for stable government.

During the late 1970s, the micro computer emerged. New machines like the Apple IIE where developed. This meant the changes that were start to occur in government & big business could spread to all other part of the economy. In the early 1980s, IBM released the PC. This legitimised the micro computer for general use by business. In parallel, cheap high speed communication were also emerging.

The stage is set!

Now we get onto the second period I wish to call the ‘Information Age Transition Crisis’ period. I’ll want to define this as starting in 1989, with the Fall of the Berlin Wall. For me this event marks the first major crisis caused by the affect of information technology/high speed telecommunication on the solidity of national borders.

As the porousness of national borders increases, the industries used by the developed world to cross subsidies other sectors have begun to leak to other places.

So the EU and US are losing the old sectors they used to subsidize their agricultural sectors to Asia and Latin & Central America. They are trying to develop new sector to keep their economies stable.

The EU still wants to retain its subsidies to agriculture. To-date France have held the line against moves for change from Germany and particularly Britain. Guess the French want the subsidies way more than the British & Germans want change. The reason, in France, farmers are critical swing voters. Goes to show, it pays to be a swing voter in a marginal seat!

The US feels it can’t stop its farm subsidies until the EU does. It too, is trying to develop new sectors to counter the move of manufacturing, particularly to China.

In Australia, we are also trying to develop new sectors. We have given ourselves a better start by not trying to hang onto inefficient industries, anywhere near as much as the EU or US have.

So the Information Revolution has made the old ‘High Industrial’ status quo unviable. Where to next? Gnoll looks to his crystal ball and notices it is cracked! The crystal ball gazing of others is welcome.

Well that’s the timeline done.

Next, some comment about specific comments in Cam’s thread

comment 1

How are the government taking money from the farmers and truckers??

As I’ve outline above, the main interest of government is keeping ‘bread’ cheap. This is done by rigorous free markets. If the farmer has the money in the hand, he made too much profit. The government have failed to keep prices as low as possible. I know this is a cynical outlook, but at a very fundamental level it’s true. What makes it impossible to achieve continuously is random variation in weather at both the local & global level. Farming is after all a percentages game.

This aside, there are plenty of examples of governments with hands in farmer’s pockets. I will outline two here.

The first example is from the ‘High Industrial’ period.

Back in WWII, farmers sold wool to the government as part of the war effort. The government got good prices & terms. The terms include delayed payment of significant amount of money until after the war was over.

After the war was over, the time came to make the post war payment. The federal government of the day invented a number of new fees and charges to be taken out of the outstanding monies. The fees and charges were large and bore no relationship to any real expense incurred to the government. A special once off tax in all but name!

The second example is from the ‘Information Age Transition Crisis’ period.

Now I’m not going to go into any detail for this one, it’s a current issue. All the stuff I hear about it are rumours I don’t want to repeat in detail here. I will talk about the rumours only in their general nature. I could not find any solid details from googling.

The rumours are that both the NSW & Queensland state governments have/are entered into public private partnerships of the Cross City Tunnel & Lane Cove Tunnel style. 4 Corners recently run a programme on these public private partnerships.

The difference here is that the private partners are not building new assets, they are taking over existing assets (government programmes) intrusted to the state governments.

The state governments are getting up front lump sums from the private partners. The private partners are getting access to the cash flow on the programmes. They can then ciphen part of the cash flow as their profits, leaving the remaining cash flow to fund the programme’s core function.

The total cash flow comes from a federal statutory levy. The farmers direct it to whom they choose. It will take money or time to redirect these monies to other/new bodies. It may even lead to the establishment of new non-profit NGOs. They regard this as still their money, put aside for a dedicated purpose. Farmers/industry bodies only agreed to the current programmes being establishment on the understanding that all of the levy would go to the programme’s core function.

comment 2

The last I heard, farmers were getting subsidies and cheap loans

subsidies and cheap loans?

Let’s look at what a real subsidy system looks like. Firstly, there is lots of money involved. After all, the government is trying to reduce the price of the product to below the cost of production. Secondly, everyone producing the product gets some of the action. Thirdly, the more you produce, the more money you get. Big player get more money.

Look at the Australian measures. They trend to be disaster recovery or industry restructuring. Once off payments/loans, not systematic payments/loans. They tend to be small, measured in 4 digit figure range for diaster recovery. Like all government compensation, industry restructuring payments/loans tend to be on the very low side.

When a government runs one of these schemes, they try to maximize the publicity they get within the industry and the general community. Often figures get rolled out. Remember these are maximum figures, based on wanting to look like they are doing something. Often, after the fact, the actual amounts of money spent can be as low as less than 5% of the headline figures.

These schemes are hard to qualify for and also usually have strict asset & income tests. See the second and third points of what a real subsidy system look like.

There are many political tricks that governments pull to look good on the media

Tax exemtions

Farmers do get a few special things. Like a few cents tax exemption on diesel fuel. Some tax exemption on farm vehicles (Utes). These exemptions are usually justified by the user pays principle. The taxes were introduced to fund roads and the farmers on the few occasions have successfully argued they should be exempt because their uses of fuel and vehicles are off-road.

comment 3

and truckies were making $100K a year including overtime.

A new one on me. Any examples, anyone?

I surrendered

2006-03-14T19:02:00.000-08:00

The end of last year, someone broke into the car and stole the battery.

Well last week, it was the whole car.

Can out to go to work last Tuesday and it was gone. Reported it to the cops and bussed it to work.

The cops rang at 3:30pm on Wednesday, to say that the car had been found, 5 kms out of town on the road to Cooma. Got out there in the evening, the bastards had broken all the glass and driven it into something & punched the radiator.

It took 4 fills of water to get the car back home. Teed up my regular mechanic to get a rough figure to fix it. The earliest they could fit it in was Tuesday this week. Saw them this morning (Wednesday), they said it was not worth fixing (as I was expecting).

Took the plates off and surrendered them today.

I was 15K short of the magic 500K. I’l miss the old girl. Sniff.

Stirling Engines. The Diff between HTD & LTD

2006-03-06T17:56:00.000-08:00

Dean Kaman of Segway fame has a ‘new’ project.

There is a post about it on treehugger

...In 1993 a product of the year was his water purifier; his latest idea for the third world is his stirling engine powered electricity generator that can be powered by anything, including the omnipresent cow patties in India. ...

... He has developed a microfinance model to support it and may soon be building them in a factory in Bangladesh. ...

Last time I looked there were 4 comment also posted.

The 1st comment was a negative politial speal.

The 3rd was a interesting non techo comment with a link.

From comment 4:

I will buy one as soon as available. Biomass heating is far cheaper than electricity. I heat with $2.00 a bushel corn.

Note: a bushel is a volume (not a wieght), there are 36 bushel to ton of wheat (old language).

The last (4th) comment is a feel-good statement. It can’t be acted on until you know the characteristics & costs of the sterling engine and the system that it’s a part of.

The second comment is the one I wish to deal with in a little more detail.

At least this time around he's not pretending it's all his inventions. And if the whole project fails, that means that there will be a mess of stirling engines lying around for other people to use. I've been thinking of using a stirling engine to generate electricity from a solar water heater, but have been discouraged by the utter lack of any affordable engines to run the generator. If Deano's great leap forward™ craters, the bankruptcy sale might yield a few cheap stirling engines.

I’d like to make two comments here.

Firstly, a failed venture may provide a few engines, but is no basis for building a co-generation industry.

Secondly, the comment ‘using a stirling engine to generate electricity from a solar water heater’ shows a lack of understanding. It show that the writer does not understand the difference between High Temperature Differential (HTD) and Low Temperature Differential (LTD) engines.

Low Temperature Differential situations are generally where the difference between the hot side and cold side is less than 100 degrees C. I.e. a good strong cup of tea could drive it.

High Temperature Differential situations are generally where the difference between the hot side and cold side is greater than 100 degrees C. I.e. a naked flame or 'stronger’. Non-combustion examples of HTD energy sources are solar furnaces and super heated geothermal springs/vents.

The engines in the article are HTD engines. The engines that the authour would like to get hold of are LTD engines. Solar hot water would only just get these HTD engine to turn over (if at all). This would not be cost effective. Because HTD engines have an intense heat source, they can be compact and small. LTD are large bulky things, they need to be, to get any meaningful amount of energy transfer.

This is the reason for the 'utter lack of any affordable' LTD engines.

LTD engines are the dream engine. With this type of engine you could build the massively distributed power networks that would be particularly terrorist resistant, in the same way that the Internet is. Not single points of failure.

Bye bye Google. Hello Technorati

2006-03-06T16:10:00.000-08:00

I've just changed my default homepage from Google to Technorati

Why. Google is something you use to initially research a new topic. Technorati is what you use to check if there is any new activity in the topics that you have decided that you have an ongoing interest in.

If topic tracking is more important that initial research, what should be your default home page?

Libraries Australia

2006-02-27T18:09:00.000-08:00

Have seen a couple of news stories about this new library catalogue search site.

Libraries Australia

It's a new online internet service. It give access to the 3 main library catalogue systems in Australia. Including at academic libraries system, that about 25 or 30 years old.

Note that the site is part of the Australian National Library's domain. You don't get anymore credible than that. They get a copy of all books published in the country, like the Library of Congress (US) and the Bodleian Library (Oxford, UK).

Had a look today. Did a search of one of my pet topics, "Stirling Engine". Found that the ADFA library (pass ADFA on the way to/from work) has a copy of a book I'm interested in buying, maybe. Must get an inter-library loan.

the book...

Record Id: 13361268 (Australian Library Collections: Subjects)
Author: Organ, Allan J.

Title: The regenerator and the Stirling engine / by Allan J. Organ.

Published: London : Mechanical Engineering Publications, 1997.

Description: xlii, 623 p., [7] folded leaves : ill., plans ; 25 cm.

ISBN: 1860580106 :

LC Call Number: TJ765

Dewey Number: 621.42

Notes: Includes indexes.

Subjects: Stirling engines -- Design and construction.

Language: English
Want to contact your library about this item?: Find contact details
Libraries that have this item:

Academy Library, University of NSW@ADFA (ADFA) 222453 main TJ 765 .O73 1997
James Cook University. Townsville Campus (QJCU) 546471 Held
Murdoch University. Murdoch University Library (WMDU) .b14604772 621.42 ORG 1997
University of Melbourne. The University Library (VU) held
University of Queensland Library. Dorothy Hill Physical Sciences and Engineering Library (QU:PSE) b19944317 TJ765 .O73 1997
University of Western Sydney. Penrith Campus, Allen Library (NUWS:A) 385980 621.42 O1

Mind Maps at the Canberra Linux Users Group (CLUG)

2006-02-27T17:27:00.000-08:00

The Canberra Linux Users Group had it's monthly meeting last Thursday (23/02/06). The topic of the night was mind mapping software

Here is Wikipedia entry on the topic.

We looked at 2 Open Source software packages VYM (GNU/GPL) and Kdissert (GNU/GPL).

I think that Kdissert looked the better package. It looked to have the better user interface. Both look better that the Freemind maps I saw about a year ago.

Google & Lent - Any relationship?

2006-02-22T17:54:00.000-08:00

Just found this post over on Doc Searls weblog.

So, looking for something to give up for Lent? How about Googlefasting!

A link and another link

MDA at the Canberra Java User Group

2006-02-11T16:02:00.000-08:00

The CJUG had their first monthly meeting on the 08/02/06.

The Topic was doing Model-Driven Architecture using AndroMDA, an Open Source package.

The notes etc are on their site.

Going to give it a "play" some time, in all my spear time!

China overtakes France

2006-01-31T15:31:00.000-08:00

Back in December 05, I noted that China had overtaken Italy in economic size.

New economic figures for China show that its overtaken France as the world's 5th largest economy. It should also overtook the UK this year.

I do note that one of the issues facing the Chinese is land grabs. I had heard that land grabs happen there, I didn't realise that it was considered a major problem.

All counties have methods for the compulsory acquisition of land. Here(au) it gets used for public infrastructure. New roads, road widening, future dams, that kind of thing. Here, it's also in the basic law that there must be fair compensation.

In China, a place without a strong rule of law tradition, government at all levels can and do routinely move people off land. This is done 'in the national interest', but when the land is given to commercial ventures (with officials pocketing yuan), it's just a fancy cover for what is corruption. Often a people affected are peasants. For these people, it is stealing their life savings usually with token compensation.

ABC turns the tables

2006-01-28T21:06:00.000-08:00

Last week I saw an ad for West Wing. I posted a comment over on a post on Cameron Reilly's blog.

Today, after Landline, I saw the ad again. Yes I can confirm the ad was on the ABC. A real turn around for the usual, ABC does the first run plus repeats then the program is brought by a commercial channel.

Cultural Money and the Country

2006-01-28T20:36:00.000-08:00

Landline is currently in its summer recess. The programme runs in a 3 stories of 20 minutes format. During the summer they are running repeats of 3 popular stories for a selected industry. Today it was Wines turn.

The last story was a 'human interest' story, about an Opera Event at Jimbour House on the Darling Downs.

Cut into the story was an interview with someone from the Queensland Music Festival. The first parts talked about the funding, saying the people in the bush pay taxes, so are entitled to some state government funding.

LYNDON TERRACINI: Well, I've always said you know, that people throughout regional Australia pay the same taxes as everyone else. Fortunately the Queensland State Government believes that people should have access to the activities that take place in capital cities and so they've supported the Queensland Music Festival and in fact increased the funding this time, so that we're able to go to more places and stage events people want to go to like this event here. We've got 23 centres all over Queensland this time and we play more than 2 million kilometres and to over 200,000 people, and I think that's a wonderful thing.

In the second part, talked about the future of the event, its commercialisation and that the Queensland Music Festival would be withdrawing funding. The speaker didn't actually say weather there was any link between the too.

LYNDON TERRACINI: Well, I hope that over time the Queensland Music Festival actually won't need to exist, that all of these places will take on these events and ideally they run them themselves and so tourists come from all over Australia to experience those events and be part of it, which will assist the local economy, and also it brings communities closer together, so I hope that's the legacy we can leave.

This last quote is not what I remember from the TV. Maybe I'm mixing what two peolpe said. I cut the quotes in after I wrote the rest. The last bit of the second quote does sound like he does not expect funding to continue long term.

So is this going to be another example of government putting in some money and yelling 'Look what we are doing for the country' (in the city media). Then a few years later it withdrawing the money while no one is looking!

Maybe I’ve spent too long in the public service!

Core business in the dawn of the Information Age

2006-01-24T18:27:00.000-08:00

I had to read this heading twice!

"Konica Minolta to withdraw from Camera & Photo businesses"

This is what I found on their web site.

Konica Minolta Group is aiming to become more powerful corporate group by swiftly meeting market changes and pursuing “selection and concentration”. We will, from now on, be concentrating our business resources on non-consumer businesses, such as the core “business technologies” field, the strategic “optics and display devices” field, and the growth expected “medical imaging” and “sensing” fields, increase competitiveness, and endeavor to further expand corporate value.

and

Outline of camera business

Main business: Manufacturing, sale, and related services of photographic equipment such as digital cameras, film cameras and lenses

Fiscal year ended March 31, 2005:
Net sales: 117,000 million yen (Forecast for fiscal year ending March 31, 2006 is 75,000 million yen)
Operating Loss: 7,300 million yen

Outline of photo business

Main business: Manufacturing, sale, and related services of consumer and commercial photographic materials, inkjet media, and related equipment

Fiscal year ended March 31, 2005:
Net sales: 151,500 million yen (Forecast for fiscal year ending March 31, 2006 is 110,000 million yen)
Operating Loss: 1,400 million yen

These sales are expected to drop by about 30% year-on-year and that is a lot of red ink!

These companies have been in the line of business for like 100 years! My Mother's 21st birthday present from my Grandfather was a Minolta camera (that she still keeps in working order for sentimental reasons). This is a big move.

The Information Age keeps rolling on!