Farm News 02-28-07

Sunday afternoon, after remembering it was Sunday

Ad Astra

Thursday evening I stepped out and looked at the moon. Sure enough, the terminator appeared to be a straight line across the moon: First Quarter. If things go as they have for all of recorded history up to this point, the moon will continue to rise 50 minutes later each night, and each night it will become more and more round, more gibbous, until finally it rises at sunset on Friday, Groundhog Day, when it will be full.
The Exploratorium, in San Francisco, is a very interesting place. They have a web page that allows you to find the size of the solar system according to different scales. Give it a try here. There is an interesting demonstration of the size of the solar system here, also. Both of the preceding links, and many others, can be found here.

Weasel

Weasel is our new dog, a companion for Tessie. Weasel looks like a black Labrador with Dachshund legs. She is about ten years old, agile but lazy, and has no interest in going out on the road or going into the house. She has fixed up a corner for herself in the barn and is quite happy with her new life. Weasel has always been a farm dog, and this farm is just to her liking. She and Tessie have accepted each other and all is quiet and content in the barn.

Whoops!

The first Farm News went out 10/24/04, and I have sent it out every week since, with only one or two omissions. This week I completely forgot about it until Sunday afternoon. Oh, well, such are the joys of aging. Here it is, such as it is.

Farm News 01-21-07

Sunday morning, after chores, 36°, 4” of new snow


Ad Astra

Wednesday was the 10th anniversary of the death of Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of Pluto. He grew up near Burdett, out on western edge of the Smoky Hills, where he could look up at night and see a lot of stars. Burdett's current population is a little under 250 people, so there isn't a lot of light pollution around there.

Thursday was the New Moon, the time when the moon passes between the earth and sun. Now the moon is a thin, waxing crescent. Next Thursday will be the First Quarter, when the moon is exactly half a circle. After that it will be a waxing gibbous moon.

In the winter the constellation Orion is clearly visible in the southeast sky. Orion has three stars in a row and close together, called Orion's Belt. A little above them is the bright star Betelgeuse (pronounced beetle juice), a star made famous in Douglas Adams' Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy.

Open Source Software

A great deal of open-source software is developed either in universities or hobbyist's homes. When I started with computers the first open source word processing programs were the big frontier. Half the geek world was trying to create a better word processor. Even I wrote one, the files for which have long ago been erased, and all the different word processors competed for space on user's lists of useful programs.

We weren't trying to make money, we were after glory, or at least some recognition as being worthwhile, so we not only gave away the software we created, we also published the source code, the original programming language contents, so all of our fellow geeks could see how clever we are.

Such challenges do not stand unanswered for any length of time in the land of the geeks. Other programmers start saying, “I could have done that, except I would fix this problem with the gadget wiggler,” and so on. By the time the initial fuss settles, it might be only the fixed gadget wiggler that remains, is incorporated into a library of useful routines, and enters into general use by other open source programmers.

All this activity seems to me to match up fairly well with William Calvin's Six Essentials for a Darwin Machine. Lines of code are replicators competing for space in an environment of computer programs just as our genes compete for space in an environment of plants and animals.

A Darwin Machine creates complexity. The Darwin Machine based on genes created the biosphere. The land of the geeks created an evolutionary environment that emulates both biology and memetics and is self-directed to increased complexity. An interesting phenomenon: we humans, the products of a Darwin Machine, have, by thinking, created a virtual Darwin Machine that is itself creating complexity. What's next?


A Reader Writes

Winter news from Colorado:

More snow this weekend--but just a paltry 2-3 inches (so far) of very dry fluffy stuff. Cold? It was 15 below zero Friday night and had warmed up to 13 below when I went out to do the chores. Best money I ever spent was on automatic waterers (heated) for the horses.

Its supposed to clear up tonight and I'm betting it will be colder than -15.

Craziness

It requires a special kind of craziness to live in the country and keep animals. Paula and I once lived about 150 miles north of where the reader lives, and we got up lots of mornings before the sun was up to do chores in -15° temperatures. It seldom gets that cold here, but I'm much older now and 15° above zero feels awful cold some mornings. Why do we do that? Well, I like to have baby goats in the spring so I can watch them play in the pasture. As I said, it requires a special kind of craziness.

Friday evening I received a telephone call from Calvin. He was in Lyndon, a town a little over 60 miles from here, with no way to return home. Boy, was he lucky. I had just prepared a nice alcoholic beverage for myself but had not yet partaken. I do not drink and then drive, period. So, instead of enjoying the effect of ingesting ethanol, I drove about 125 miles round trip to rescue a dumb teenager.

Calvin and a friend had cut a cord or so of firewood for which they had a buyer, they thought, in Lyndon. They loaded the firewood and drove to Lyndon where they ran out of gas for the truck before they could sell the firewood. Calvin's friend had a place where he could spend the night in Lyndon but there was no place at the inn for poor Calvin. Poor Calvin couldn't find anyone to take him home and, though dumb, he wasn't dumb enough to try walking 60 miles in winter weather, so he called me.

I had just finished Terry Johnston's Blood Song, a novel about the Powder River campaign of General Crook, which was conducted in what is now Montana in the winter. The high temperature for some days was -15°, and some days it was colder. I shivered all the way through the book. I couldn't let poor Calvin spend the night freezing his dumb butt off, so, like one of Johnston's characters, I rode off to the rescue.

Terry Johnston died several years ago, but his books will last for a while, I hope. In his books the plants are real and native to the area, the animals act don't talk, and the moon phases make sense. When a writer has a full moon rising at midnight, I put down the book and find another one; Johnston's books offer historical, environmental, and celestial accuracy. I recommend his Plainsman series, with their hero Seamus Donegon, as entertainment as well as an overview of the wars against the Plains Indians.

The Palestinian-Israeli conflict contains echoes of the red-white wars of the late 1800's. That seems to be the way of wars, they all have much in common: the suffering of the innocents and the callousness of the leaders. I was raised to believe that WWII was a 'just' war. My uncle Steve brought back horrifying pictures of the Nazi concentration camps, and, after seeing them, I knew that the war was justified, but later I also 'knew' that the war in Viet Nam was not. Then there comes the time of the year when we remember Dr. King, and I wonder how any war could be justified. Just more craziness.
 

Farm News 01-14-07

Sunday morning, after chores, cold

Ad Astra

Stephen Hawking was born 300 years after Galileo's death, and Monday was the 365th anniversary of Galileo's death and the 65th of Hawking's birth. The sky didn't fall nor were there any other celestial spasms that I noticed. Thursday the moon went through its Last Quarter, changing from a gibbous waning moon to a crescent waning moon. Half the stars in the sky might have blown up this week but it will be many years before the news will reach us. The universe continues, as far as I can tell.


Weather

It is COLD!!! Keeping water available for the goats, geese, rabbits, chickens, ducks, cats, and dog is a real problem. This morning I glanced out the window at breakfast to the porch, where we have a heated dog water bowl, and saw the Mockingbird having a drink. At night a good deal of the water disappears, so I assume that I am keeping some wild animals watered, also.

This is the ragged northern edge of Mockingbird territory, but every winter for the past four years there has been a Mockingbird here. I'm fairly sure she is a female because I have never heard her make a sound, and male mockingbirds tend to sing all day and half the night most of the year. What is she doing here in January? Mockingbirds eat insects, mostly, so there is no good food source. I have never seen her at the woodpecker feeder, which is the closest thing we have to insect meat on the place. Nor have I ever seen her in the summer. Interesting.

Lucy the goat and Sally, her daughter, are both pregnant. Goats seem to like to have their babies on the coldest nights of the year, so I am watching for baby goats. I never saw either of them bred, but I thought, based upon their behavior, that the babies would appear in February. Does that mean that we will have even colder weather in February? We probably will, but, contrary to popular opinion, animals aren't any better at predicting the weather than are humans.


A Trip to Lyndon

Young people: the stronger their hormones roar, the more stupid they act. I remember being that age (barely, I'm happy to say) and try as I might I don't think I could recall a moment of my life between the ages of 15 and 25 when I wasn't walking into walls and lamp-posts because I was too busy thinking about sex to watch where I was going. It was worse when I tried to talk, but I spent a great deal of time talking anyway, because I thought it would help me get closer to a female of my age. My chatter was the social equivalent of walking into a wall. The female, awash in her own hormones, would giggle, then sniff, walk away (into a wall), and giggle again, a display meant to convey, “Yes, you are male, but not the male I choose, so I will insult you.”

Calvin is now nineteen, almost twenty, and has been experiencing his own variety of testosterone toxicity. His version of walking into a lamp-post was to be caught walking down the street with a shotgun under his coat, a situation that could possibly lead to a felony conviction. If you don't understand country boys, you need to know that owning a pickup truck with a gun rack in the rear window, with a gun, is, for a country boy, an essential element in his mating displays. I have been busy most of this week trying to keep Calvin's stupid butt out of jail, where adolescent mating displays can be downright dangerous.

Thursday morning I sat down in the car at 7:30 am and started off for Lyndon. He had a court appearance on Thursday at which I gave a letter I had written to the County Attorney and Calvin's attorney. In the letter I promised to keep Calvin on a short lead and make him take GED classes for two years or until he obtained a GED if the court would agree on a guilty plea to a misdemeanor and probation with no jail time or fines. I had already paid the bail bondsman to bail him out of jail, so Calvin owes me a chunk of money and I won't get it back if he's in jail; I was acting out of self-interest. Justice moves slowly: the next appearance is over a month away. Lawyers aren't slow readers, it's that once a piece of paper is part of the mess they call a desktop it will be a month or more before they can find it again.

Of even more importance to my self-interest, it will give me more Calvin stories to write for Farm News. For those of you who are new readers, it should be sufficient introduction to say that Calvin, then 18 and acting as the representative of The Farm, attended the National Turkey Testicle Festival in Illinois. It made an excellent story, his younger sister said.

Calvin, who has been living in another county, will soon return to Jefferson County to live, work on his GED, find a job, and establish a residence independent of parental support. By doing this successfully for two years he will supposedly prove to the court that he wants to be a good citizen and shouldn't be in jail. Also, if I'm lucky, he will pay back the money he owes me. Then he can return to full time mating displays.


Neighborhood Networks

At the Consumer Electronics Show last week in Las Vegas, Bill Gates announced the Home Server, a server for a household network. Hah! I'm out in front of the richest man in America (and one of the smartest). I have been working on the concept of a neighborhood server, a system that provides internet services and more for 5 to 500 households. The Neighborhood Server provides backup, system restore points, lots of games, chat, messenger, morning wakeup, photo albums, etc. It can also be configured to filter web sites for households that wish to self-censor their reading. All this, plus broadband internet access out in the country.

Perry Lake is a few miles from where I live, you can find it on Google Earth by looking for a trident shaped lake, the middle fork the longest, about 50 miles west of KC. Twenty years ago I was in Chicago at the planetarium where they had a composite satellite photo of the US. I immediately spotted Perry Lake by its shape.

The lake is surrounded by small communities: Lakeside Village, Lakeshore Estates, Lakewood Hills, etc. Those folks need high speed internet access and the only practical way to provide it is by wireless links. Neighborhood Networks are designed around wireless links. I have added the concept of local groups owning their server, domain, and local network. That way, the residents of Lakeshore Estates could have email addresses like JohnAndMary@LakeshoreEstates.com. Brilliant, no? (By the way, if you click on the John and Mary link, it will send an email to me.)

So far, most of the interest in my bright idea has come from some architects. Anyone who has seen a school in the midwest with a flat roof over the library knows that architects aren't always real bright. A few years ago every high school in this county had a library with a flat roof that leaked. I was on the local school board at the time, and our library had a leaky roof. Architects must not know how much it costs to replace 500 water damaged books.

 

Farm News 01-07-07

 Sunday morning, after chores

Ad Astra

Monday evening the clouds began to clear, the temperature dropped, and the waxing gibbous moon was clearly visible in the east. Monday I could see the moon and sun at the same time in the evening, the sun low in the west and the moon low in the east. That meant that the moon, which rises 50 minutes later each day, would rise just at sunset on Wednesday, which I was able to confirm that it did. That was a full moon, the time when the moon changes from a waxing gibbous moon to a waning gibbous moon. (Gibbous is a great word, the beginning is pronounced jib, not gib.)

The word terminator can refer to any number of things, including the line that separates the dark part of the moon from the bright part of the moon. If you look at the moon with binoculars or a small telescope, the terminator is usually the most interesting area. That is where the shadows are long and you can see the mountains and craters, one side bright and the other dark.


Bah!

That's all there is to Farm News this week. Some nasty bug has taken up residence in me and is interfering with my activities.