Small Streams

Here’s the place to find graph paper. There are instructions here on how to make a cellular automoton with your freshly-printed graph paper.

Just found this site, which has an online BASIC interpreter.

Commentary on the state of farming can be found in the Sunday Styles section of the New York Times. ‘Twas ever thus: The Egg and I, the farming stories of S. J. Perleman, and, of course, Green Acres. Young folks find their way back to the garden, learn about life, cold hard economics, early mornings in freezing rain, etc.

But it’s in the styles section, along with the wedding announcements and stories on relationships, probably for a good reason: this “trend” amounts to a few anecdotes and will only affect the finances of a few. In some ways it’s a typical fashion story, one that gets as irritating as all the ones I’ve read in the past forty years. There’s a new trend among the young.

“Having a cool cheese in your fridge has taken the place of knowing what the cool band is, or even of playing in that band,” she said. “Our rock stars are ricotta makers.”

Wow! As Liz says (I’m pretty sure ironically. By the way, our generation invented irony), “They’ve discovered buying groceries.” Young people live turbulent lives. They then settle down. Newspapers print up stories about it.

What is significant about this story is that there is some evidence that people’s lives are changing. Like a Michael Pollan pipedream, more people are going to the Greenmarket and more farmers are signing up to sell their food there. Maybe we might be getting closer to being locavores. (By the way, today’s Bizarro makes me think that Dan P. is losing it.)

So where do I stand? Where’s my soil? For the past number of years I’ve been a good composter. This year I want to take it to the next level. I know my efforts are a drop in the bucket, and that I’m hypocritical, and depraved, or perhaps just cranky. But if those darned kids can raise enough produce to pay the rent, then I can at least try to raise a few bags of groceries myself.

Please help me out if you can. I want to start a garden. Let me know of good sources of non-hybrid seeds for the following:

• tomatoes
• basil
• marigolds
• peppers
• nasturtiums
• cilantro

Just drop a line to mail at markstroup dot com.

And good luck to all those farmers from Williamsburg. If you ever come to Pittsburgh, I’ll buy you a Pabst. Send me an e-mail if you need some help harvesting.

Pittsburgh 250 Community Connections awarded $50,000 to the Pittsburgh Signs Project. The award will go to the creation of a 200-page, full color book documenting and reflecting on signs from the 14 counties of Southwestern Pennsylvania to celebrate the unique culture of the region. The Pittsburgh Signs:250 will capture the visual treasures of the area and their stories.

Needless to say, I’m pretty excited.

Here’s the P-G article.

Michael Pollan’s article about the deflation of the word “sustainability” appeared in this past Sunday’s New York Times Magazine.

When pesticide makers and genetic engineers cloak themselves in the term, you have to wonder if we haven’t succeeded in defining sustainability down, to paraphrase the late Senator Moynihan, and if it will soon possess all the conceptual force of a word like “natural” or “green” or “nice.”

Pollan follows this with a paragraph about Confucius and how if we’re to repair the world we need first to repair our words. The passage is pretty much lifted whole from Wendell Berry’s “Standing by Words.” I say this as a tribute to both Pollan and Berry. Berry can sound like an oracle at times, so it’s wonderful that Pollan can translate. Soon you’ll find the sentiments expressed in Parade magazine. If it takes 2,500 years to pay attention to Confucius, so be it.

I felt a disturbance in the force  as I read  this article  in the Post-Gazette about the creation of a second Downtown YMCA location. The Y is a venerable institution that  began as a way of making Christians healthy or healthy people Christians. It’s suffered from its downmarket image, and maybe drawn a few snickers due to the Village People song (for the even more snide, check out LWIII’s “The Hardy Boys at the Y”). That our local Ys are renovating and expanding sounds good to me. Muscular Christianity and even Muscular Secularism can make us all look and feel better, but . . .

Given the concentrated population, it “makes sense” to add the location, [John Cardone, executive director of the Downtown YMCA] said. The Y has found that people generally won’t walk more than three blocks to an exercise program.

When I read that I realized why the article made me antsy. You don’t have to walk three blocks to get to exercise, walking is the exercise. Walk an extra 20 blocks a day and you can save yourself a trip to the Y. Now my mind is filled with the image of someone at the Y walking on an electrically powered treadmill and watching CNN under fluorescent lights when they could be taking a walk to the Strip District or the Eliza Furnace trail.

The Two Political Junkies’ have an interesting take on Mitt Romney’s speech. At first I thought the following statement by Romney was rather innocuous:

And you can be certain of this: Any believer in religious freedom, any person who has knelt in prayer to the Almighty, has a friend and ally in me.     

But the statement could be inferred to be exclusive. As Maria says, “The rest of us, I guess, can go to hell.” For those who feel excluded, I offer the following. Anybody who has ever shook his or her fist heavenward and cried “Why?” has a friend and ally in me.    

Thursday’s Trib had an interesting story about wildlife management at the Greater Pittsburgh Airport. Working with the USDA, the airport will devise a plan to keep wildlife away from the airport. No small matter, since the FAA has had reports of 106 bird strikes since 1990, and usually only 20 percent of incidents are reported.

 Among the most serious bird and animal strikes at Pittsburgh, according to the USDA and FAA records:      

March 6, 2004 — An Airbus A300 aborted takeoff after a short-eared owl went into the engine. The aircraft sustained serious damage.

 October 2005 — An Airbus A320 aborted takeoff after striking a hawk. Oct. 5, 2006 — A Bombardier RJ 100 passenger jet hit a coyote during takeoff.

 A coyote?!  But wait, there’s more . . .A P-G article describes incidents with deer. 

 Over the past 20 years, there have been several incidents in which planes hit deer, according to Brad Penrod, airport authority executive director. Penrod has seen propellers damaged on a turboprop plane and a deer carcass propelled into a small plane’s cockpit.     

  So . . . the safest airport ecology is no ecology.  

[Penrod also said,] the airport will institute habitat modification programs to regulate grass height near runways, increase patrols to deter wildlife from congregating near sensitive areas and deter wildlife from being on airport grounds, he said.     

Gary Rotstein covers a matter of great importance in today’s “The Morning File,” what to do with all the cow manure that’s lying around Crawford County. According to the article, a dairy farm there got $600,000 from the state to install an anaerobic digester to harvest the methane from the farm’s cow manure. Apparently, there’s a lot of it, 1,400 cows worth.  The article was partly titled “Bessie could be our ticket to energy independence.” But in a farm with 1,400 cows, I doubt they spend the time naming the cows. So Bessie is probably named “Cow #781.” The farm is shooting to produce around 250,000 kilowatt hours per month, or about 500 times what a house like ours uses. If the P-G’s figure and my calculations are correct, the Bortnick farm will produce about $25,000 worth of electricity per month. You have to wonder why the state is subsidizing a factory farm for a nickel a person. But you can consider about three factors: containment of smell, reduction in use of fossil fuels, and its worth for demonstration purposes. If we could show that you can run 5oo households of electricity off 1,400 cows, why can’t we run 300,000 households (nearly one-twentieth of the population) on half a million cows.  Of course, the opportunities for employment are significant, too. We probably need about a thousand laborers and engineers to operate all the digesters. 

I was talking with somebody about the number line last night and the following concept. A negative factor times a negative factor creates a positive product. Liz pointed out a good way to think about this conceptually. We all know that in language a double negative makes a positive. Think about negation as part of the verb. In the sentence, “I’m not going to the party,” “not going” is the action. Now, negate the “not going” and you have a positive. “I’m not not going to the party.” Let’s party! To make the concept somewhat more concrete, take the example of saving. If you went to the theater every week, you pay ten dollars per week (with popcorn), that means you are out ten dollars. But if you don’t go for three weeks, you save thirty dollars; you won’t not have thirty dollars.   I hope that’s not too unclear.