Creeping Charlie is Edible

Posted on 2014-05-12 by Charlie

I have truly ridiculous quantities of lesser celandine (pilewort, Ranunculus ficaria) and ground ivy (creeping charlie, Glechoma hederacea) in the yard… but it turns out both of these are edible! You have to cook pilewort, though, or it’s mildly toxic and tastes bitter.

The only sure-fire way to get rid of pilewort (also called fig buttercup) is to grub up the tuberous roots and completely destroy them, so I was pleased to learn you can boil, roast or hot-pickle the tubers. And apparently right now is the time to harvest them, after the flowers have died and the leaves are yellowing off.

Lesser Celandine Stroganoff
Lesser Celandine and Ground Ivy Stew
Lesser Celandine and Lamb Heart Stew
Ground Ivy Horseradish Mayo (I wonder if you can substitute garlic mustard root for the horseradish? We have plenty of that.)

This area has lots of wild garlic (crow garlic, Allium vineale) too. It’s delicious chopped and mixed with ground bison to make a cheeseburger, and the chopped leaves are like strongly flavored chives.

New theories needed for star formation

Posted on 2014-05-09 by Charlie

“When zooming in on the young star clusters of NGC 2024 (in the center of the Flame Nebula) and the Orion Nebula Cluster, NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory teamed up with infrared telescopes to take a census of star ages. Conventional thinking suggests that stars closest to the center of a given star cluster should be the oldest and the youngest stars can be found around the edges.

However, to their surprise, astronomers have discovered that the opposite is true.

‘Our findings are counterintuitive,’ said Konstantin Getman of Penn State University, lead scientist of this new study. ‘It means we need to think harder and come up with more ideas of how stars like our sun are formed.'”

Hydrogen again rears its petrochemical head

Posted on 2014-05-05 by Charlie

Another breathless article about the wonderful earth-saving hydrogen revolution that’s been just around the corner since the 1980s.

Here’s the breakdown on the hydrogen swindle. It’s all just basic science.

1) Usable hydrogen does not occur naturally on Earth, you have to make it. There isn’t any hydrogen well, there aren’t any hydrogen mines. The easiest way to make large quantities is something called steam reformation but you can also electrolyze water.

2) Since you have to expend energy to make usable hydrogen, hydrogen is not really a fuel like oil or coal, hydrogen is a way to store energy produced in some other way. You don’t get all the energy you spent back out, either; there’s some loss involved. So you can burn polluting fossil fuels to make hydrogen from natural gas, and actually create more pollution and waste than you’d make running directly from the fossil fuels without any hydrogen being involved.

3) Sure, you can make hydrogen using a sustainable energy source like solar or wind. But comparing stored hydrogen to other energy storage technologies, such as batteries, you find that hydrogen has extremely poor energy density – that is, a battery that can store just as much energy as a hydrogen tank of a given size is significantly smaller than the hydrogen tank – and if you are using the latest technologies, the battery will be lighter and safer as well.

So while hydrogen has many wonderful properties, IT IS NOT A FUEL and it isn’t even a very good energy storage medium (at least compared to batteries) for most purposes. And we haven’t even talked yet about the expense and difficulties associated with storing and using it!

The truth is Big Oil likes hydrogen because any so-called “hydrogen economy” would necessarily be built and run on petroleum and natural gas. And another truth seems to be that you can sell any pseudo-scientific energy quackery in California, since they’ve already been around this barn twice now and are apparently still falling for the same nonsense.

Ever wonder where all that road salt went?

Posted on 2014-04-17 by Charlie

Stroud Water Research Center has the the skinny.

A couple of years ago a salt truck driver decided it was quittin’ time and dumped the end of his load in a two-foot deep dune across Upper Pike Creek Road, where it impeded traffic more than the snow it was supposed to be melting. After a while I went out and shoveled it up into a couple of garbage-bag-lined steel trash cans, and I’ve been using it ever since to melt ice at the local Unitarian Church (don’t want those elderly church ladies to slip, they are the backbone of the nation!).

I’d be happier if the USA gave up on salting and plowing roads entirely, but perhaps our people don’t have enough common sense and imagination to survive winter in the real world any more. Certainly most Americans I meet can’t realistically conceive of a world without road salt or snowplows… a world that we once took for granted.

Current Earth Destruction Status

Posted on 2014-04-16 by Charlie

The International Earth Destruction Advisory Board (IEDAB), an independent scientific institution which monitors the current status of the Earth, regrets to inform you that the Earth has been destroyed. Current status: DESTROYED.

Total Lunar Eclipse Tonight

Posted on 2014-04-14 by Charlie

“And I will shew wonders in the heavens and in the earth, blood, and fire, and pillars of smoke. The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood” — Joel 2:30-1, KJV

NASA has more prosaic information, which should be more useful to most of us.

Here in the Eastern Daylight Time zone, the moon’s going to be completely full at 3:42:18 AM on 2014-04-15. The total eclipse will last from 3:07 to 4:25, peaking at 3:46, so it ought to be quite beautiful if the weather co-operates.

Since I worked all day and was in Boston all weekend, I will most likely be asleep. Enjoy it without me!

The Owl and The Pussycat

Posted on 2014-04-11 by Charlie

Fum (Smoke) & Gebra (Frost), the Internet’s favorite Cat and Owl, as animated .GIFs.

Black cat and barn owl playing together

Barn owl and black cat playing together

The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea
In a beautiful pea-green boat,
They took some honey, and plenty of money,
Wrapped up in a five-pound note.
The Owl looked up to the stars above,
And sang to a small guitar,
“O lovely Pussy! O Pussy, my love,
What a beautiful Pussy you are,
— Edward Lear (1812–1888)

There’s an archive of Fum and Gebra, but unfortunately Fum died of FUS last year. Gebra has a new friend, though, and a Facebook page.

Speculative Movies of Real Disasters

Posted on 2014-04-08 by Charlie

Steven Ward is a Research Geophysicist at the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, UC Santa Cruz. He specializes in the quantification and simulation of natural hazards and he shares his research on youtube and his blog.

Some of the results of his modeling don’t match up cleanly with what geologists expect (for example tsunami height and reach for the Chicxulub strike) and Dr. Ward shows admirable openness about this as well as quite a bit of ingenuity in modifying the models to fit known geology.

This movie shows a physics-based computer simulation of the 1883 Krakatoa eruption; Ward suggests that a collapsing pyroclastic flow and lateral blast blew the Sunda Strait dry, which would account for the historical tsunami’s known behavior.

Apparently I know quite little about sloths

Posted on 2014-04-07 by Charlie

This one’s for Maya. SLOTHAGEDDON!

Also, giant anteaters make a cameo appearance.

Those recent headlines about the Black Death…

Posted on 2014-04-02 by Charlie

Alison Atkin gives a concise pictorial guide to interpreting recent news media coverage of research concerning the bubonic plague.

Native American Chickens

Posted on 2014-03-13 by Charlie

No, not Dick Cheney.

The Boston Globe has some newly digitized footage of the New England Heath Hen (Tympanuchus cupido cupido) taken by the Massachusetts Department of Conservation Division of Fisheries and Game in 1918.

If you want to know what the Heath Hen sounded like before it was hunted to extinction in 1932, Arkive.org has more recent footage of the Greater Prairie Chicken (Tympanuchus cupido pinnatus), which is rapidly headed for extinction itself.

Fukushima still not under control

Posted on 2014-03-11 by Charlie

Three years ago Japan’s Fukushima nuclear fission reactor complex was damaged by a tsunami.

At no time, between then and today, has the ongoing ecological catastrophe at the Fukushima site ever been under control. The operator, TEPCO, has occasionally claimed otherwise, but each time subsequent events have proven TEPCO wrong.

Today, and every day of the last three years, powerful and long lasting poisons have been leaking into the soil, water and air we humans share with every other living thing on this planet.

Something many people don’t realize is that nuclear fission reactors are not commercially viable without the sponsorship of governments. This is a simple and incontrovertible fact – no fission reactor has ever turned a profit except through the redirection of tax dollars. Not ever! Furthermore, safe operation of nuclear fission reactors is incompatible with Western commercial values – our socio-economic system is designed to ensure the lowest cost by pitting separate businesses against each other, each cutting corners until a failure occurs, so that the business that runs “leanest” survives to dominate the market and those that cut too far go bankrupt. Unfortunately, the failures that come from cutting corners in nuclear fission plant operation last for generations, and never stop incurring costs during that time. The total costs for remediating a single Chernobyl or Fukushima far outstrip any profits that could have been made by a dozen tax-sponsored “successful” plants.

Perhaps overtly socialist countries like France and Sweden, with their completely different systems of regulation and operation, can have safe nuclear fission. I tend to doubt it; at the timescale these reactions occur, human perfidy is a given. But maybe it can be done, and I admire those countries’ attempts to do it right.

Here in the USA, as in Japan, nuclear fission is an obsolete and foolish technology, incompatible with our needs and vision.

Ogham & Trees

Posted on 2014-03-10 by Charlie

If you want to compose proper Ogham (and not just do some sort of questionable gardenerian casting of runes) it would probably be a good idea to keep in mind that it’s an alphabet of trees.

image of a page from the Book of Ballymote

Is the Sustainable Forestry Initiative for real?

Posted on 2014-02-28 by Charlie

The Forest Ethics website says SFI is a greenwashing scam.

Joseph Priestley

Posted on 2014-02-06 by Charlie

Joseph Priestly died 210 years ago today on February 6th, 1804. Mostly remembered today as the discoverer of oxygen, Priestley in his own day was a noted scientist, educator, political theorist, natural philosopher, dissenting clergyman and Christian apologist. Thomas Jefferson, who was active in the same fields, credited his own conversion to Unitarianism to Priestley’s 1782 book “History of the Corruptions of Christianity”.

Priestley’s scientific and philosophical career is replete with triumph and tragedy; brilliant discoveries and a stubborn refusal to give up mistaken ideas. He was derided as “the last defender of phlogiston” and burned out of his Birmingham house for denying “the divine right of kings” in the so-called Priestley Riots. Priestley made his inventions available to the public and received no money for any of them; the local Unitarian Universalist Church district is named in his honor.

A big week in science…

Posted on 2014-01-30 by Charlie

I didn’t believe in black holes until very recently. But my friends and relatives in the space telescope biz kept seeing things I couldn’t explain any other way, so despite my deep misgivings about Stephen Hawking’s attempts to explain how such things must work, and despite Einstein’s suspicions that their predicted existence was really simply a place where physics formulae break down (a “mathematical singularity” not necessarily corresponding to any real object), I eventually gave in.

So, now that I’ve grudgingly admitted black holes really do seem to exist, Hawking publishes a paper saying “The absence of event horizons mean that there are no black holes – in the sense of regimes from which light can’t escape to infinity. There are however apparent horizons which persist for a period of time. This suggests that black holes should be redefined as metastable bound states of the gravitational field.” Arrgh! Now I have to find time to read more physics.

A more interesting and less aggravating scientific announcement was that physicists at Amherst have created a magnetic monopole! Their synthetic monopole exists at the particle level, but proving submicroscopic monopoles can exist is the first step towards finding out if larger monopoles can exist (most physicists say they can’t) and quite possibly a major step towards finding out if they occur in nature (most physicists say they can).

Finally and most importantly, a team of scientists working in the USA and Japan announced a breakthrough in stem-cell creation that potentially obviates all the kerfuffle about existing medical markets for aborted fetus cells.

Sun Dog

Posted on 2014-01-20 by Charlie

An excellent sun dog seems to have visited Moscow yesterday.

The Simpsons Guide to Radiation

Posted on 2014-01-06 by Charlie

I have decided I like Deep Sea News.

Stainless steel, the metal bacteria love.

Posted on 2013-12-13 by Charlie

Hospitals love stainless steel, because it looks so “clean”. Unfortunately it is a fantastic media for growing pretty much any pathogen, so it’s a major vector for hospital illnesses. Despite appearances, stainless steel is a filthy metal. Should medical care facilities have prioritized an appearance of cleanliness before testing the reality? Most people outside of the profession would say no, especially given how simple the testing is.

But hospitals in North America have been ripping out their old brass hardware for decades, in response to complaints that it “always looks dirty”. Removing those crusty old doorknobs has put patients and visitors at risk. Brass is a copper alloy, and both copper and silver are self-sterilizing metals (although curiously neither one is listed in the antimicrobial index at this time).

All this is pretty obvious from simple observation in my opinion, but there’s been some research done too. Plow through this quote:

small strips of stainless steel, brass, aluminum, and copper were inoculated with broths of Escherichia coli, Staphylococcus aureus, Streptococcus group D, and Pseudomonas species. […] The results were striking. The copper and brass showed little or no growth, while the aluminum and stainless steel produced a heavy growth of all microbes. How fast did the microbes die on copper and brass? The test was repeated at drying intervals of 15 minutes, I hour, 5 hours, 7 hours, 20 hours, and 24 hours. Brass disinfected itself in seven hours or less, depending on the inoculum size and the condition of the surface of the metal, freshly scoured brass disinfecting itself in one hour. Copper disinfected itself of some microbes within 15 minutes. Aluminum and stainless steel produced heavy growths of all isolates after eight days and growths of most isolates (except Pseudomonas) when I ended that part of my investigation after three weeks -link to original here, with pictures.

If you choose to use stainless steel in your kitchen or lunchbox, that’s fine as long as you scour it thoroughly between uses. I don’t recommend those tiny-necked stainless bottles that can’t be properly cleaned, though – I’ve seen stuff grow in the bottoms of those that looked like kelp, I swear. Inch-long strands of waving black kelp.

And don’t ever touch anything made of stainless steel in a sickroom environment. Research from the EPA and others critical of hospitals’ love affair with stainless shows that superbugs like MRSA and clostridium difficile will happily thrive on stainless steel or aluminum indefinitely, but brass rapidly self-sterilizes without the application of antiseptic toxins or antibiotics… and we all know that these superbugs were created by overuse of antibiotics, right?.

If you want a safer home, office or school environment, never use stainless or aluminum where you could use brass or silver instead. And tell your doctor to change his gloves if he’s going to touch a stainless doorknob, that’s just nasty.

Fighting “Doubt Science”

Posted on 2013-12-06 by Charlie

In 2010 Dr. Laura Welch wrote an exhaustively researched and documented amicus brief to the Michigan Supreme Court titled “Asbestos Exposure Causes Mesothelioma, But Not This Asbestos Exposure” exposing the practice of “doubt science”. The brief was signed by 51 other notable physicians and medical researchers.

…the vast amount of additional scientific information regarding asbestos and mesothelioma, provides more than sufficient evidence to allow someone to conclude within a reasonable degree of scientific certainty that a mesothelioma in a mechanic who worked with asbestos-containing brakes was caused by that asbestos exposure. Since 2000, Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler have paid over $30,000,000 to hire consultants for the purpose of generating the very papers they rely upon, and for testifying regarding those papers in Courts.

One of the main industry experts has acknowledged that the papers were conceived and authored for the purpose of buttressing testimony in court cases involving mechanics suffering from mesothelioma.

The same expert also acknowledged that this business model is a pattern he has also followed with dioxin, benzene, hexavalent chromium, beryllium, formaldehyde, and glycol ethers. Recent revelations regarding undisclosed involvement of the employer of these experts in connection with publication of a paper favorable to the chromium industry have been well publicized and led to the retraction of that paper.

It is in no way surprising that the experts and papers financed by these manufacturers conclude that asbestos in brakes can never cause mesothelioma. To the contrary, the exoneration of the sponsoring industry is the expected conclusion of doubt science.

Robert Kehoe, Charles Kettering and Thomas Midgley created doubt science so that General Motors and DuPont could knowingly poison the world with tetra ethyl lead. Over the years the Merchants of Doubt have become an accepted part of the American dialogue, and doubt science is used in courtrooms, newspapers and bar-rooms to justify and applaud all sorts of vicious, completely avoidable crimes against humanity knowingly committed by the wealthy corporations that own our political leadership in order to marginally increase their profits.

SNOW

Posted on 2013-11-12 by Charlie

The first snow of the season was drifting gently and picturesquely at 8AM, and driving near horizontally by 9. Done by 11 and nothing sticking.

Guess it’s time to plan for the Winter Solstice….

Typing Animal

this is the blog part

Category Archives: natural history