The Village Hemorrhoid is talking about the screwworm making inroads into Mexico. Wasn't supposed to get this far north. Something needs to be done. I expect the gummint is doing something. Let's hope it's effective.
Mexico seems to be a bit of a mess. I was thinking we could solve that problem by making them the 52nd state, after we annex Canada. We do that and the USA would cover the entire North American continent. Wait, isn't that common thing in science fiction novels? The Noram Complex? Maybe, I'm pretty sure I remember reading it somewhere, but Google isn't helping.
Of course, since Mexico is such a mess maybe we don't want it as a state, but it might work well as a colony. Of course any number of people would object, but even if we treated Mexico like white men have always treated colonies of colored people, could it be any worse than it is now? Besides, in this 'enlightened' age we might treat them considerably better. I don't see much chance of the USA taking over Mexico in the next ten years or so, but who knows? There could be some major upheaval next week in lower Elbonia that will turn the world on it's head.
Why the US Drops 14.7 Million Worms On Panama Every Week
Half as Interesting
The trouble with the news is you only hear about disasters, you never hear about the systems that are working properly. It's like the politicians and anyone who wants to influence policy gets up and starts screaming about something and 'the people', being easily panicked, panic and run screaming in whatever direction they are being herded, kind of like sheep. Huh. Psychopaths and morons, that's the way it's always been and likely the way it will always be.
So we have a serious method for getting the grain down the river to the ocean from Lewiston, but how do we get all that grain to Lewiston? So I started thinking about combines and how many you would need and I figured we need some videos. There are bunch of modern ones. Many of them are very long. Here's a short modern one and a couple about the old days. I thought the 20 mule team was a big operation. That's nothing compared to these guys.
24 million bushels are exported out of Lewiston each year. An acre of ground can produce about 50 bushels of wheat, so you would need 480 thousand acres, which translates into 750 square miles of land. If you are driving a combine with a cutter head width of 15 feet and you are traveling at 4 miles per hour, if will take 66,000 hours to harvest all that wheat. Figure you got a month to get it all cut, and you're working 24 hour days, you're going to need 100 combines to get it all cut. And you probably are not going to have a month, you might have two weeks, and 24 hours a day is wishful thinking, so more likely you are going to need 500 combines. Make allowances for problems as the necessity to get the wheat harvested come hell of high water, you are probably going to want double that number.
The Palouse is a distinct geographic region of the northwestern United States, encompassing parts of north central Idaho, southeastern Washington, and, by some definitions, parts of northeast Oregon. It is a major agricultural area, primarily producing wheat and legumes. Situated about 160 miles (260 km) north of the Oregon Trail, the region experienced rapid growth in the late 19th century.
The Palouse is home to two land-grant universities: the University of Idaho in Moscow and Washington State University in Pullman. Just eight miles (13 km) apart, both schools opened in the early 1890s.
Clearing Wooded Land with Anchor Chain and Bulldozer
FLT
I don't quite know what to make of this. I think the problem is that the narrator isn't showing any kind of bias. He's just explaining what's happening: 'here's a bulldozer, it's clearing land.' Seems like when I see any kind of video like this, the narrator is always selling something, like 'bulldozers bad, trees good', or 'look how efficient our mighty machines are, buy one now'.
In any case, I've never seen this particular technique before. I suppose if you want to get rid of all the trees that would be one way to do it. In any case you'd need to be clearing a large parcel of land to make hauling in the bulldozers a worthwhile expense. Not to mention the chain, though I suppose you might be able to pick up a scrap one. Hmm, wonder if there is a market for used anchor chains. All ships need to carry them, but if the ships are run efficiently they would never need to use those chains, so when it comes time to scrap them, the anchor chains might be something that can be pulled out and sold.
I started watching a video about this project, but while it was entertaining it wasn't showing any maps, so I traced the canal out on Google Maps and here we are.
Take a virtual tour of Port of Newcastle, Australia
Port of Newcastle
If you listen to the news reports it kind of looks like the whole world has lost its mind. In normal times the media are full of all kinds of bullshit, but ever since Russia attacked Ukraine it seems like someone has turned the level of idiocy up to eleven.
Russia is the world’s largest exporter of wheat, accounting for over 18% of international exports. Together with Ukraine, which has also stopped shipping grain, the two countries account for about 30% of global wheat supplies. The crisis threatens to push food prices across the world to an all-time high.
Our fearless leaders are probably jabbering about more sanctions on Russia. What is that going to do to the price of bread? Wait, don't tell me, I'll bet it's going to go up. So not only are a bunch of people going to freeze to death, they're also going to starve. Vunderbar. All so Biden can continue to collect his measly few million in commissions from pipeline tariffs. I hope you're happy, Marky.
Okay, enough about the bullshit. Time for a little technological wonder. Looking for a picture of a ship loading Russian grain, I found this one:
The page I found it on is talking about Russian wheat, but that picture sure doesn't look like any Russia I know, so I ask Google about it and Google points to the video (at the top of this post). I watched the video, and I did not see this ship anywhere in there. But the setting looks the same. So I'm thinking Google scanned the video and recognized the buildings on the docks, or maybe the configuration of the land, or something and concluded it was the same place. I understand how you can compare different size still images through some mathematical function and tell whether they are the same image or not. If you can do it for still images, you could do it for videos as well, but given that a zillion hours of new video is uploaded to YouTube everyday, it would be a massive undertaking to run a computational analysis on all of them. Just comparing frames of the video to image wouldn't be enough though, because this ship isn't in there. They would have to analyze the scene enough to be able to recognize the place, with or without the ship. It just boggles my mind. Anyway, if you're curious the place is Newcastle in New South Wales, Australia.
To give you some idea of just how out-of-control this whole internet server business has gotten, here's a Google Streetview of the newQTS Data Center on what used to be Shute Road.
This image may be a year old. I drove by it today and the building is finished. It's not fancy, bare concrete walls and a wall of screens around the top that barely conceal the army of industrial sized air conditioning equipment, but it's big, and it's not the only one in the area.
The Power of the Dog | Official Teaser | Netflix
Netflix
Stupid, boring and irritating. But my wife liked it. We've got two brothers running a successful ranch in 1925 Montana. Their parents got old and moved away, to the big city presumably.
Two brothers, one smart, full-on cowboy, one not so smart, but solid and reliable, live together is a giant frigging house in the middle of nowhere. The brothers are in their 30's. Solid up and marries the widow who runs the restaurant in the nearby crossroads. Smarty was perfectly comfortable with the way things were and doesn't take kindly to having his applecart upset. Widow has an effeminate teenage son who is studying to become a doctor. Eventually we see smarty's true colors, and now it starts to make sense. It's still stupid, but hardly anybody gets to live a smart life full of adventure and happy, smiling people.
Cattle drive on the Great Plains - Castaigne, J. Andre - 1892
The scenery is cool, but the cattle look a little too fat. Pictures of cattle on old time trail drives look like they are skin and bones, relatively speaking. I suppose fat cattle is what they raise now. Oh, there is murder by anthrax, a common disease with cattle. That's kind of interesting.
New York has fruit trees with multiple grafts on them, producing multiple fruits from the same tree.
Now jumping to Detroit, the inner city is basically barren of trees, residents actually cut them down so as not to have to maintain or the cleanup expense of trimming overgrown trees.
Puzzling to me at first when I heard this. Save the day with Fruit trees? A food source and a beautification program.
Fruit trees are wonderful - if anyone can be bothered to pick the fruit before it falls on the ground.
We had some kind of plum tree in our front yard in Beaverton. Never bothered with the fruit except when it fell to the ground and you had to avoid stepping on it and tracking it into the house.
My dad liked fruit. I think that was part of his motivation for buying the orchard.
When we lived in Phoenix there were orange trees everywhere. There was an organization called the gleaners who attempted to harvest these oranges. They couldn't keep up.
My son took out the plum tree in his backyard.
Fruit is nice, but it's more like entertainment than food. When I am hungry I would rather have something more substantial.
Started watching this European murder mystery series last night. It's got all the standard elements (good guys, bad guys, tough girls, lunatics, poor people, rich people) and it promises to be very entertaining. In Spanish, with subtitles, on Netflix.
It is set in southern Spain near Almeria. The place is home to the largest collection of greenhouses in the world.
A giant study costing zillions of dollars, but what exactly did it measure? I have no idea. I wonder if anyone else does.
Let me just say this about that:
Bees are having problems. Of course, bees are wild animals and wild animals have all kinds of problems. Are their current problems worse than usual? Some people seem to think so.
Neonicotinoids are new. The did not used to exist, at least I don't think they did. I got it in my head that this chemical was invented in a lab somewhere, but that might not be the case. It might be an extract from a common plant, or from a Peruvian sea slug's gall bladder, I have no idea.
One thing I read said that 'if the chemical was applied according to directions, it would have no effect on bees'. Well, that's nice, but I somehow doubt whether everyone is following directions. I can easily imagine someone along the distribution chain getting it wrong by a factor of ten or even a hundred. Normally, I would consider this unlikely. Chemicals cost money, farming is a marginal business, so in order to minimize costs you don't want to use any more of that chemical than you need to. On the other hand, if you have a particular nasty problem, you might think it worthwhile to spend a little extra and increase the dose by maybe half or even double to be sure that it takes care of the problem. You don't want to have to come back and do it again, that costs more money, and any delay can mean more damage to the crop. Depending, of course, on just what you are spraying for.
Take those three together and my conclusion is that this new chemical is causing the problem with the bees and the new study is a smokescreen.
Lastly, the new stuff for controlling fleas on cats and dogs uses the same chemical and it's really expensive, like $20 a dose. It's also a little scary, but it seems to work and I ain't dead yet.
Lastly plus one, I looked for a picture and came up with the above video, which kind of slants it the other way. So it might be a case of the know-nothings hollering because that's all they can do. Previous posts here, here and, if you want more, here.
OK, they are likely palm trees, not fruit trees, but still it's odd to see order like this in the middle of nowhere. Yes, those are buildings in the upper right corner of the image.
Updated December 14, 2014, because Google Maps changed and my old map quit working. I also added the picture because the order is not visible at the current level of zoom in the map view.
Yeah, I know they aren't crop circles like we find in the West. Something must have gotten crossed up in the translation. Fran sent me the pictures.
In other news, back in 2007,
Japan's subsidy for rice fields grew to
180 billion yen. Can't say as I blame them. It's kind of important to be able to grow your own food. They could buy rice from China for much less than it costs to grow it, but what happens if China decides they don't want to sell you any more rice? Watchya gonna do then, 'ay bucky?
Why would China do that (decide not to sell you any more rice) you ask? Because they are dirty reds and can't be trusted to do the right thing. Or they might have a crop failure and need all their rice for their own people. Or somebody might kill all their honey bees, or all our honey bees. I really suspect the CIA of being involved in this. Someone is trying to build artificial bees, robot bees. Sometimes I really think we're walking right along the edge of the abyss. There is a big chasm just waiting to swallow us all up, but it's just over the horizon, so we can't see it yet. Other times I think, nuts, life has been going on here for an untold number of ice ages. Life will go on. Might not be you and me, but some will survive, even if they are only cockroaches, speaking literally or figuratively.
Update July 2026 Picasa has gone away and so has the slideshow, so now we have just a single image from Wikipedia.
