- There is great awe to be found by considering the trivial.
What have you noticed of late?
I like this pattern of thinking. I have often thought about this, particularly when cooking or baking. Friends have commented on how I like to make things "from scratch" which got me thinking, "have I ever really made anything from scratch?" Other than poems, no. Even some poems I've written are not "from scratch" in that I am using "found" materials. I learned the basics of baking from a family friend, who makes his own (fantastic) sour dough loaves. He's using a starter, which if I remember correctly, comes from one started over a hundred years ago and has been continually fed to keep it going. To feed it, he grinds his own flour with a hand-mill, which for a kid, was tons of fun. However, even he doesn't make bread from scratch. That would involve ploughing the field, sowing the seeds, harvesting the wheat, then milling the flour. It would involve obtaining water by one's own power or setting up a mechanism to do so. It would mean attracting flavorful wild yeasts into the starter base. All of that before baking. Then, the baking. Creating an environment to bake the bread in and finding a way to fuel the fire with reasonable temperature control. It's no wonder people lived such short, un-illuminated lives in other ages. This is one reason I enjoy doing things the "long way" though not necessarily from scratch. It also tends to result in better products as attention to detail is present at each step and certainly, it has helped me to cultivate an appreciation for what I consume and how I try to approach my goals. On the downside, I do find myself sometimes overly critical of people who take shortcuts, but I am trying to be more understanding. Still, when some chubby guy tells me again "how hard it is in America" while controlling Netflix on his huge flatscreen TV from his phone, my knuckles get a little itchy.
by the way thenewgreen, I liked the article as well. As for your question, "What have you noticed of late?" -- birds, the sun, sunrises, and the way some impatiens and geraniums have bi-coloured petals.from scratch
I keep a giant periodic table chart above the stove in the kitchen -- have I mentioned this somewhere? When people ask me why is there a periodic table in the kitchen, I mumble something about wanting to remember the ingredients.
My daughter and I have taken to naming the squirrels that play beneath our bird feeders. It's amazing how much more I notice now that I have a little one pointing and asking. She's been in to "Tinkerbell" of late. We have a large tree in our front yard with a big heart shaped knot with a hole in the center of it. I told her that this is where Tinkerbell lives. She's pretty fascinated with that tree now ;-) I enjoyed this piece too, it reminded me of my good friend Olive Watson's piece on Urban Beachcombing. I think you'd enjoy that read too and I think you and Olive would get along very well. Beautiful geranium and a very clever placement of the periodic table!
Some of those colorations are engineered by introducing viruses to the plants. My mother used to be a plant-virologist and so explained it to me as a kid. I don't really remember much about it than that, but it is cool. Hmm. Can you buy Big Bangs in bulk?
Once, on a bus ride to KC from Chicago, I struck up a conversation with someone who didn't seem like much of a stranger after a few minutes of talking. She, studying Physics (I think), and I, a persistent romantic, began talking about atoms and their sub structure. Eventually she told me a phrase her and a friend developed: "God is in the quarks."
What she meant was God is in the details, or, upon closer inspection details support an ocean of mystery and intrigue. I believe this is the same sort of thinking the author is coming from. I've taken that with me where I go, and enjoy that I have a similar mentality as the author. Life is much more interesting from the perspective of everything being a miracle.
Only if the tree is less than 10m tall. 10m tall water column will boil from the top if it's only pumped from the top. The roots and the capillary effect pump it too, he mentions the capillaries but not the effect. There are other cool features of wood the author does not mention. Wood in nature is prestressed because the inner wood dries more than the outer. http://www.doitpoms.ac.uk/tlplib/wood/structure_wood_pt3.php If you compare strength, a good piece of wood can beat some high strength steels (500MPa) in strength/weight ratio. Problem is the high variation of wood.The release of water vapour at the surface of leaves through transpiration is sufficient to draw the column of water from the roots to the leaves.