In article ,
"songbird" wrote:

David Hare-Scott wrote:
songbird wrote:
David Hare-Scott wrote:
You have some interesting things to say and you have clearly thought
about them but you do yourself a disservice in your presentation.

your attention is appreciated,
your responses read if i'm still
alive to press the key or click the
mouse, but i'm unlikely to change
my writing style to your satisfaction.


I am not the one who should be satisfied with what you type. I only
point out the problems I see in case you didn't realise they were
there. If you know already and don't care there is nothing I can do
about it.

well i do care, but it is hard to change.
and i do know my pinkies are much
happier with few caps.


considering much is wandering
OT of r.g.e. i'm quite happy to
drop much of it.


Your postings are often made up of very long one-sentence paragraphs
all in lower case.

grammar takes a backseat
and howls to the music of
wurlds colliding.


Your grammar is fine, it's the layout that is the issue.

her knickers about her
sneeze her shoes in a
bundle and (to be true
to this group) a rhubarb
pie on the dash.

...

more seriously, words and ideas
first, am i clear enough that you
understand what i'm aiming at?

Yes you are clear. If you can achieve clarity why not ease as well?

ease is defined too many
ways. for me ease means
lower case most of the time.
the short length i can read
the entire chunk at a glance.


or if i am confusing, you can ask
questions and we can have a
conversation (instead of throwing
links back and forth as seems to
be what is happening to usenet
these days).

paragraphs are for formal
writing, this isn't that kind of
writing.

Sorry no, paragraphs are for readability as is sentence length or
having discernible sentences at all. The way the words appear on
the page determines how easily they are read because (except for very
slow readers) we read in chunks of words.

yes, i read chunks at a time too.


i'm here to have fun
and talk, not write papers for
publication. some of my aim
is to be entertaining and playful
while also being challenging.


Good. Why does that exclude ease of reading?

i read things just fine, i find capital letters
jarring.


You may think that messy old usenet doesn't
require your finger to ever hit the full stop or the shift key but
we will read more and skip less if you employ them.

i like being little. i am keeping my
ego on a leash, don't encourage me
to get all formalic like the big ants in
the amazon do. they scare the shit
outta me, always marching, always
eating, and oy veh the smell!


May I also suggest
that you adjust the line length of your newsreader as it wraps lines
rather short, which is hardly good for your text but it mangles the
quotes because they are then chopped twice.

oh, ok, i didn't notice i'd chopped at 65 instead of 72,
i've now adjusted it upwards. i'm still testing out my
linux side setup for slrn so as soon as i get that working
the way i like it i will be switching newsreaders... at
this rate it will be a few months yet. i'm in the middle
of too many projects and gardening season is on.

peace and good evening to all,


songbird

And goodnight to you.

we have wandered far afield,
but i'm going to return and ask
about the two calorie output vs
one Billy pulled out of ?


This is called "Modeling Behavior".

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan
p.45 - 46
http://www.amazon.com/Omnivores-Dile...ls/dp/01430385
83/ref=pd_bbs_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1206815576&sr=1-1

The reason Greene County is no longer green for half the year is because
the farmer who can buy synthetic fertility no longer needs cover crops
to capture a whole year's worth of sunlight he has plugged himself into
a new source of energy. When you add together the natural gas in the
fertilizer to the fossil fuels it takes to make the pesticides, drive
the tractors, and harvest, dry, and transport the corn, you find that
every bushel of industrial corn requires the equivalent of between a
quarter and a third of a gallon of oil to grow it‹or around fifty
gallons of oil per acre of corn. (Some estimates are much higher.) Put
another way, it takes more than a calorie of fossil fuel energy to
produce a calorie of food; before the advent of chemical fertilizer the
Naylor farm produced more than two calories of food energy for every
calorie of energy invested.

From the standpoint of industrial efficiency, it's too bad we can't
simply drink the petroleum directly.

and the other question for
Billy is how does organic
gardening sequester carbon
dioxide? improving soil is
good, mixing organic stuff in
and making all the various
critters happy is great, but
that is nutrient cycling not
carbon sequestration... we
need carbon sequestration
at this point. can we get
that via organic gardening
methods at present?

Only in terms of bio-mass, unless you include "terra preta", and its
charcoal.

Teaming with Microbes: A Gardener's Guide to the Soil Food Web
Jeff Lowenfels and Wayne Lewis
Ch.1, second paragraph.
http://www.amazon.com/Teaming-Microb.../dp/0881927775
/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1206815176&sr= 1-1

In addition to all the living organisms you can see in garden soils (for
example, there are up to 50 earthworms in a square foot [0.09 square
meters] of good soil), there is a whole world of soil organisms that you
cannot see unless you use sophisticated and expensive optics. Only then
do the tiny, microscopic organisms‹bacteria, fungi, protozoa,
nematodes‹appear, and in numbers that are nothing less than staggering.
A mere teaspoon of good garden soil, as measured by microbial
geneticists, contains a billion invisible bacteria, several yards of
equally invisible fungal hyphae, several thousand protozoa, and a few
dozen nematodes.
----

Gaia's Garden, Second Edition: A Guide To Home-Scale Permaculture
(Paperback)
by Toby Hemenway
p.78
http://www.amazon.com/Gaias-Garden-S...ulture/dp/1603
580298/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1271266976&sr=1-1

Like most living things, leaves are made primarily of carbon-containing
compounds: sugars, proteins, starches, and many other organic molecules.
When soil creatures eat these compounds, some of the carbon becomes part
of the consumer, as cell membrane, wing case, eyeball, or the like. And
some of the carbon is released as a gas: carbon dioxide, or CO, (our
breath contains carbon dioxide for the same reason). Soil organisms
consume the other elements that make up the leaf, too, such as nitrogen,
calcium, phosphorus, and all the rest, but most of those are
reincorporated into solid matter‹organism or bug manure‹and remain
earthbound. A substantial portion of the carbon, however, puffs into the
atmosphere as carbon dioxide. This means that, in decomposing matter,
the ratio of carbon to the other elements is decreasing; carbon drifts
into the air, but most nitrogen, for example, stays behind. The
carbon-to-nitrogen ratio decreases. (Compost enthusiasts will recognize
this C:N ratio as a critical element of a good compost pile.) In
decomposition, carbon levels drop quickly, while the amounts of the
other elements in our decomposing leaf stay roughly the same.



1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus : Charles C. Mann
http://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelatio...mbus/dp/140003
2059/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1269536235&sr=1-1

According to a recent study led by Dirse Kern, of the Museu Goeldi in
Belem, terra preta is "not associated with a particular parent soil type
or environmental condition," suggesting that it was not produced by
natural processes. Another clue to its human origin is the broken
ceramics with which it is usually mixed. "They practiced agriculture
here for centuries," Glaser told me. "But instead of destroying the
soil, they improved it, and that is something we don't know how to do
today" in tropical soils.
As a rule, terra preta has more "plant-available" phosphorus, calcium,
sulfur, and nitrogen than is common in the rain forest; it also has much
more organic matter, better retains moisture and nutrients, and is not
rapidly exhausted by agricultural use when managed well. The key to
terra preta's long-term fertility, Glaser says, is charcoal: terra preta
contains up to sixty-four times more of it than surrounding red earth.
Organic matter "sticks" to charcoal, rather than being washed away or
attaching to other, nonavailable compounds. "Over time, it

p.346

partly oxidizes, which keeps providing sites for nutrients to bind to."
But simply mixing charcoal into the ground is not enough to create terra
preta. Because charcoal contains few nutrients, Glaser argued,
"high-nutrient inputs‹excrement and waste such as turtle, fish, and
animal bones‹are necessary." Special soil microorganisms are also likely
to play a role in its persistent fertility, in the view of Janice Thies,
a soil ecologist who is part of a Cornell University team studying terra
preta. "There are indications that microbial biomass is higher in terra
preta than in other forest soils," she told me, which raises the
possibility that scientists might be able to create a "package" of
charcoal, nutrients, and microfauna that could be used to transform bad
tropical soil into terra preta.

Despite the charcoal, terra preta is not a by-product of slash-and-burn
agriculture. To begin with, slash-and-burn simply does not produce
enough charcoal to make terra preta‹the carbon mostly goes into the air
in the form of carbon dioxide. Instead, Indians apparently made terra
preta by a process that Christoph Steiner, a University of Bayreuth soil
scientist, has dubbed "slash-and-char." Instead of completely burning
organic matter to ash, ancient farmers burned it incompletely to make
charcoal, then stirred the charcoal into the soil. In addition to its
benefits to the soil, slash-and-char releases much less carbon into the
air than slash-and-burn, which has large potential implications for
climate change. Trees store vast amounts of carbon in their trunks,
branches, and leaves. When they die or people cut them down, the carbon
is usually released into the atmosphere, driving global warming.
Experiments by Makoto Ogawa of the Kansai Environmental Engineering
Center, near Kyoto, Japan, demonstrated that charcoal retains its carbon
in the soil for up to fifty thousand years.

i really need to study
charcoal production methods...
perhaps a solar oven could
do it... gotta go look now.


songbird
--
- Billy
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the
merger of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Arn3lF5XSUg
http://radwisdom.com/essays/this-is-your-brain/