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Return On Investment
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/ |
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