Ratatouille

That Rataouille movie thats coming out actually looks pretty good. I made ratatouille for the first time last summer, its actually one of those good for you dishes that tastes awesome, cold or hot, summer or winter, especially with a little red wine. Heres the recipe.

My (first) Mid-Life Crisis

Take a look at what Jeff Hazboun has been up to, fresh off the crazy (read alumni) suocer listserv. I am officially old, I read that and thought "ah to be young again". Old age is a sneaky little bastard.

Solstice Mystery

The article below was in the "Guest Column" of the Skaneateles Press Today:

Comments?


Guest Column in the Skaneateles Press

“As a worker of the earth, we observe many things. Our business as farmers depends on weather and indirectly the orientation of the earth. One thing I have noticed since December 2006, is that something is off kilter. On our porch railing, I have a set of nails positioned to line up with the winter solstice, as well as the summer solstice. For many years they lined up perfectly with the setting of the sun on the western horizon. The difference is nearly 90 degrees and it always amazed me how much the sunset moves in one season. This past Dec. 21, I sat out on my porch with may neighbor Joey, waiting for the sunset, as it was a perfect evening to observe this once a year event. I had invited my neighbor Joey to watch with me as he is in middle school and the solstice is an important part of understanding earth science at that age. We waited and when the moment came to line things up, they didn’t. I am not talking someone hit the nails and they were out of line, I am talking a half mile on the other side of the lake. The difference was so great that I contacted Syracuse University among others about my observation. I was not given any comfort. So I thought, I must wait until June to see how things line up. But to my surprise on May 30th the nails lined up on the horizon just over Mandana to where the sun should set on June 21, the longest day of the year. We still had 20 plus days to go. So my finding in December was not a fluke. What does this mean you ask? Basically, my theory is the earth (they said it wobbled during the Tsunami) wobbled off its normal tilt of 23 and half degrees. We should henceforth have the same climate as southern Pennsylvania as the difference on my porch was about three degrees… Huge in solar system standards. It also means that the Tropic of Cancer and Capricorn could no longer be of any significance. To test this I should travel on June 21 to a point 150 miles north of the Tropic of Capricorn… or is it Cancer; to see if my shadow is directly under me at noon. This raises so many questions in my mind. Does this relate to global warming; at least for us Northern Hemisphere people? If nothing else, it is neat to think that something that I thought was so permanent has changed in my world. Even if no one else believes me, I know I did my homework and my results are valid to my porch and me. Here’s to a longer summer!”

Editor’s note: Since then there have been other observations: “There are other things that I noticed, like the shadow of may windmill on my barn never hit the top of it on the solstice as it usually does. The shadow went off the barn a month earlier than usual., laying itself along the lawn. Presently the shadow of the windmill is a lot closer to the windmill that in has ever been. The birds have been noisy lately too.”

Mr. Wizard

I know not everyone had cable growing up, but we have to talk about Mr. Wizard today.

Whenever I get on a plane, I think about a demonstration he did about why flight paths look curved on a flat map. I tried a number of the experiments he did at home -- usually involving water and me making a big mess. Like pouring water down a string into a glass on the other side of the room. Or taking two glass juice bottles filled with water -- one was hot and dyed red, the other was cold and clear -- and putting one on top of the other with a playing card in between. When you removed the card the waters mixed and you could see the currents of hot and cold. So cool.

I was so jealous of the kids on his show. I was totally smart and cool enough to do their jobs. :)

Did anyone else watch Mr. Wizard back when Nickelodeon was good?

For Jon

I saw this article and photo in the Skaneateles Journal today....

http://www.skaneatelesjournal.com/articles/2007/06/10/news/community/community01.txt

Cool video

Our Netflix list was getting a bit stale but then we were alerted to this video on youtube. It's a neat countdown from 100 to 1 using movie quotes. Around the mid-sixties Bill and I started shouting out the movies as we figured them out. Sadly, Bill decided every movie with Jimmy Stewart was Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and even got It's a Wonderful Life wrong.

Well, it inspired us to add a bunch of new movies to our queue...well, a bunch of new old movies. Cary Grant is hot.

NY Times Magazine Green Building

This link may disappear after a while but this weekend's NY Times Magazine has a number of articles on green building.

Jingles Update

Just a quick update about Jingles- we just got some pictures this morning.
She just passed Phase 2 of the training program (out of 4). She is now training out and about- not just in the neighborhood around the training school- and is working around Peekskill. The person with her is her trainer, Susan.

http://www.simpleliving.net/

This website lists a bunch of good references for the happy hippie lifestyle

Birds?

Anyone see any cool birds lately now that spring migration is starting to pick up?

Had a few white throated sparrows singing out in front of my office this week.


Baby ducks in the pond out back. Tis the season for heavy binocular use.

Confusion on greenhouse gases

Warning: wikipedia - based discussion

I have been reading about carbon sequestration to try and understand what the heck "carbon-neutral" means, and I found an interesting article on wikipedia that says that the US sequestered about the same amount of CO2 in agricultural soils as was released by burning fossil fuels.

This is contrary to everything else we've learned about our use of fossil fuels and the effect on global warming, indeed it would refute Mr. Gore's Inconvenient Truth. So now I am very confused: are we (the US) producing greenhouse gases? Has anyone read a good book on this topic? I never took organic chemistry but none of this seems logical.

How cool is google maps?

I've been making a map of our New Zealand trip on Google Maps. It's a work in process, but its really lots of fun. Hope to add video shortly...

Bored. Bored. Bored.

I am totally checked out for the day.

Here is a poem I wrote in a staff meeting this week.

Staff Meeting. A Poem of Despair.

A bunny came upon a building; 7 people sat in a conference room around a table meant for 25.
They talked around each other, over each other, through each other.
Language bouncing off, hitting walls, reflecting into faces.
Everyone trying to throw their speech higher, faster, harder.
The bunny fled away from the oversized table, the flinged words, the building.
The bunny fled into the road and was hit by a car.

What's up with the bees?

So this is a question for Chris and Kelly...

I've been hearing all over the place lately that there is some mysterious affliction affecting beehives. One friend of mine at work told me that she heard that cellphones may be responsible for interrupting the hives? Hope that yours are all OK!!!

Great way to pass time at work!!

So I discovered this tonight while on my quest for quilting patterns (more of an obsession)...
http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/offthemap/html/create_your_own.html
I couldn't get it to save my design, but it was fun to create anyway!

Hope everyone is well and fairing in Northeaster! So far it has been heavy snow and lots of rain!

Quick Survey

I was recently talking with someone who called our office, concerned about all the kids that play in a local creek during the summer time- worried that their play (turning over rocks, building forts, miniature dams, etc) would be having a negative impact on the stream. We talked for a while and I was also reminded of an article that I read this past year...

http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/March06/wild.nature.play.ssl.html

Interesting, that more formal types of environmental education do not have the same type of long-term impact on kids that "free time" play outdoors has. (or so they say) I can think of quite a few people that fall into this category and others that do not.

Likely the kids playing in the creek are lucky to have "freedom" to explore outside, that many others' parents don't allow because of safety concerns, jam-packed school and sport schedules, etc. I wonder if most kids still get unsupervised times in the woods or off on their own, like most of us probably did. I know my parents didn't worry if, as a kid, I was outside and out of sight for hours and hours at a time- up in trees, in the woods trying to get birds to eat out of my hand, capturing catepillars to build my own butterfly conservatories, crawling through stream culverts, sending messages down the creek on homemade boats, catching & categorizing bugs I collected in the fields, running around in corn fields, or buiding forts under the neighbor's forsythia bushes. My brother Nick was usually with me- and we didn't grow up to be exact opposites, but I don't think the fact that he doesn't recycle weighs on his conscience any...

So out of curiosity, here's a quick survey ...

How many of you, assuming you generally consider yourself to be an environmentally-minded person, spent a lot of time playing outdoors in "wild"nature before the age of 11?

Article referenced was: http://www.colorado.edu/journals/cye/16_1/16_1_01_NatureAndLifeCourse.pdf

Your daily dose of fear, uncertainty and doubt.

What better way to come back from vacation than to stumble upon this recently released GAO report:

http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d07283.pdf

Don't read it. Really.

NZ Wallpaper

Back to our blogging roots. A selection of possible wallpapers...
More photos on Flickr.

Pasture land, near Mt. Doom

Abel Tasman National Park

Tasman Bay, near Nelson

Bubbling mud in Rotorua

Follow-up to Camera Post

Here is the information Dad provided me about the camera flash. I have to be honest I don't know much about the electronics lingo...

"Below is the website that I found for the strobe information. The
plans called for a 103D SCR that is used for the strobe that works
with the amplifying circuit that you make yourself.

If you use a cassette recorder that has a monitoring system that uses
an earphone, you can use a 106B SCR. I found these SCR's to be more
common than the 103D.

I also put a RCA jack in the back of the camera so I can use a regular
patch cord to make the connection from the strobe to the amplifier. Of
course, you could solder the wire directly to the contacts in the
camera and have this wire connect directly into the cassette recorder
using a mini-phone jack."

http://hiviz.com/tools/triggers/makeown.htm#st

Who is the better enviromentalist...?

Look over the descriptions of the following two houses, and see if you can tell which one belongs to an environmentalist.

HOUSE # 1:

A 20-room mansion (not including 8 bathrooms) heated by natural gas. Add on a pool (and a pool house) and a separate guest house all heated by gas. In one month this mansion consumes more energy than the average American household in an entire year. The average bill for electricity and natural gas runs over $2,400.00 per month. In natural gas alone (which last time we checked was a fossil fuel), this property consumes more than 20 times the national average for an American home. This house is not in a northern or Midwestern “snow belt,” either. It’s in the temperate South.

HOUSE # 2:

Designed by an architecture professor at a leading national university, this house incorporates every “green” feature current home construction can provide. The house contains only 4,000 square feet (4 bedrooms) and is nestled on arid high prairie in the American southwest. A central closet in the house holds geothermal heat pumps, which draw ground water through pipes sunk 300 feet into the ground. The water (usually 67 degrees F) heats the house in winter and cools it in summer. The system uses no fossil fuels such as oil or natural gas, and it consumes 25% of the electricity required for a conventional heating/cooling system. Rainwater from the roof is collected and funneled into a 25,000 gallon underground cistern. Wastewater from showers, sinks and toilets goes into underground purifying tanks and then into the cistern. The collected water then irrigates the land surrounding the house. Flowers and shrubs native to the area blend the property into the surrounding rural landscape.

HOUSE # 1 (20-room energy guzzling mansion) is outside Nashville, Tennessee. It is the abode of that renowned environmentalist (and filmmaker) Al Gore.

HOUSE # 2 (model eco-friendly house) is on a ranch near Crawford, Texas. Also known as “the Texas White House,” it is the private residence of the President of the United States, George W. Bush.

It's one thing to fear monger and tell other people that they need to be environmentally aware (through movies/mainstream media liberal bias ;-), public policy, etc... ) it's another thing completely to set a positive example for others to follow. At what level do/should we hold ourselves responsible for our actions?