It takes a lot of picking to get enough blackberries for eating and baking. In order to pick enough, one must first farm.
Ever since early spring, I’ve been doing a good job of keeping up with yard work. Well, mostly a good job. With all the travel we did in February through May, I fell behind a little.
But I kept at it. Before the weather turned hot, I went out almost every weekday, weather permitting, and worked 30 to 60 minutes. Once the weather turned hot, I shifted my schedule to going out first thing upon rising in the morning and putting in the same amount of time. I had planned for blowing last year’s leaves out of the yard during the first week or two of September. But I found an efficient way to do it, and got it done in four days.
So I looked around at what I needed to do next. I looked at the blackberry vines at the front of our woodlot. Aha! The very thing that needs doing. After blackberry season, I allowed the vines to grow where they wanted to. I had two separate rows, plus a mass of vines behind the second row that had newly spring up. By early September, the first row (a shorty) was still separate, but all the rest was one big mass.
I had walked the area several times around the edges of the bushes/vines/whatever you call them. trying to figure out whether it would be better to cut rows either north-south or east-west. I finally decided to keep them north-south, as they were before. Around September 10 I got to work on them. I found it a little easier to do than I expected.
Until I got to the back. To make a long story short, I was able to trim the vines into five distinct rows. They aren’t as straight as I would have liked, and I’m not sure I’m done cutting them back. But I have five rows running north-south. The total length of the five rows combined in probably 80 feet or so. Further to the south is another mass of vines that I need to decide what to do with. I would have tackled them by now except for several days of rain preventing me from doing things where it’s wet, which these vines are.
So does 80 feet of vines cut into five rows make me a blackberry farmer, rather than a hobbyist who likes some free fruit? Perhaps. The proof will be in the harvest next year.
Harvest. Using that word, maybe I’ve answered my own question.
I love being out in nature. Too bad my knees and heart prevent me from going on long, woodland hikes.
I think, a few posts ago, I mentioned I had a new writing idea. Not sure if it will be a book or something else. Right now, it’s just an idea not yet fully developed.
I got this idea from the book I’m currently reading, Darwin’s Century. This is a book that talks about Darwin’s predecessors among naturalists, who came up with a piece of the evolutionary theory. Darwin put them all together. The part I’m at now is about Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle, and how this impacted his intellectual journey on his scientific road. Soon it will get into the theory itself, and talk about the people who helped to “sell” Darwin’s theory to the scientific community and the world. Right now, without having looked ahead or checked the Table of Contents, I’m not quite sure where the book is going—other than it’s pro-Darwin and pro-evolution.
This is the seventh book I’ve picked up about evolution. I find the story fascinating. I have only one more I plan to read (if I can find it at a reasonable price) and re-read one other. That should complete what I feel like I need to know to be well informed about the subject.
Oh, make that eight books. I forgot about the novel I read recently that dealt with some of these issues.
These have got me to thinking about the opposition that the theory of evolution has set between science and religion. Many people who believe in God think evolution is bunk. And many people who believe in evolution think God never existed but was a manmade concoction.
The crux of the matter falls into two categories, or maybe it’s three: God’s sovereignty, creation of humans, and old earth vs. young earth. I’ve been trying to put this into succinct, short paragraphs describing what I see as errors on both sides, but I haven’t yet been able to find the phrasing I want. I’m making progress, however.
I’m tempted to put the drafts of two paragraphs in this post, but will hold off. I need to learn to finish things before posting. Suffice to say I like how the two statements are shaping up.
So what about this book, or whatever this writing idea turns into? What’s the premise? It’s that God is seen in nature, that all that we see is His creation—however He set it in motion and however it continues. Also that science is an ever-changing thing, and we need to be careful about ever saying “The science is fixed,” and basing any type of beliefs about what science says at present.
Well, this post is unfocused today. Sorry about that. That tells you where I am with this writing idea: unfocused. Perhaps I’ll get some focus before long, as I put little thoughts on paper.
No, climate change did not bring down this tree. It grew too big for its root system on the rocky hillside.
What is it they say? When engaging in conversation, avoid politics and stick to the weather and your health? But who wants to hear about my new aches and pains, or how my good knee has started to hurt a lot? So that leaves the weather.
But it seems even the weather is a source of contention these days. This seems to have been a hot summer. Across social media, people are posting memes “Only [so many] days until fall” says a man sweating under a hot sun, holding one of those portable, battery-operated fans as he can barely put one foot in front of the other on the sidewalk. It’s as if people forgot, from last year to this, that it’s hot in July and August.
The problem is that discussing the weather leads on to global warming—or climate change to use the latest term. Look how many hot days we had this July compared to last. It must be global warming. Mankind’s activities must be heating up the planet. Thus, a simple mention of weather in casual conversation become a source of contention, as one believes in climate change and the other doesn’t.
Right now, people can’t wait for cooler weather. What will they be saying in January?
I had occasion to begin studying my utility bills recently, trying to see if a gadget my wife bought is having the advertised effects on our power usage. Our meter reading for July 2023 was indeed significantly below July 2022. Might this gadget be working? For the first time I noticed that our utility bill shows average temperatures for the month. July’s average high was 89°. I checked last year, and the average high was 93°. So this year was cooler, or should I say less-hot. We also have a new air conditioner, put in at the end of August last year.
I’ve heard lots of complaints about the temperature this summer. They tend to come from the same people who complained about the weather last winter. Hot, cold. Doesn’t matter. People need something to complain about.
Right now, remnants of Hurricane Hillary are hitting the western US, the first tropical storm to make landfall in the USA from the Pacific Ocean in over a quarter century. I can’t wait for the pundits to come on TV to say this is obviously an effect of manmade climate change and we must change our ways if we are going to save the planet for future generations. A couple of days ago, a tornado touched-down in my native Rhode Island—a very rare occurrence. It hit the cemetery where my parents and grandparents are buried and did a lot of damage to mature trees. Are people already saying, “See, see! Climate change!”
People, it’s hot in summer and cold in winter, depending on where you live. Some years are hotter than normal, some cooler. Some hotter than normal in the East, some cooler than normal somewhere else. Turning weather into a discussion on climate change, which necessarily morphs into politics, is a waste of time.
One storm, or two storms, or one summer season, are not enough to make a claim that human activities are causing climate change. It may be that they are. In fact, I feel fairly certain that modern society, as we live in the USA, is adding heat to the atmosphere. Whether that’s changing earth’s climate in an irrevocable manner is another question, one I’m not ready to discuss in social settings.
It’s now 6:20 a.m. on Monday morning. Got up earlier than I wanted to when I couldn’t get back to sleep. I’ll now get dressed and go outside for some yardwork, trying to beat the heat on what is predicted to be a 100° day. It’s summer, and heat is expected. I have a small place that is overgrown with weeds and I’d like to get it cleared today. Tomorrow, maybe I’ll tackle deadfall on the woodlot.
By next week it is forecast to be in the 80s for the highs. Happens every August.
Hurricane season is upon us. So will be the claims that the number of hurricanes we see is evidence of climate change.
You hear it all the time. “Look at this cold snap. No way does global warming exist,” or “See how hot the summer it? That proves global warming exists,” or “Tornadoes, hurricanes, and blizzards show that climate change is really happening.”
If only it were that easy. We need to learn to differentiate weather from science. Weather is what’s happening today, what’s predicted to happen for the next 15 days, and maybe what the different almanacs suggest will happen over the next couple of seasons. Climate is the norm for the area, based on years and years of data.
How many years? Well, if I’m remembering what I learned in “Earth Sciences”, 2nd semester freshman year (1971), with professor Dr Edward Higbee, climate is figured on a 40-year basis. Average the conditions over the last 40 years, and there’s your climate. Once you have a new year of data, drop the year 41 years ago, add the new year, recalculate the average. A 40-year moving average.
I wonder if I’m remembering that correctly. Forty years seems a very short time to say this is our climate. Seems like a hundred, or several hundred, or even a thousand years would be better to define climate.
The problem is available data. A thousand years ago, no one was taking daily or hourly temperatures in 6,000 stations spaced scientifically around the world. No one was measuring upper atmospheric temperatures. That’s not to say we have no evidence of what the climate was 1000 years ago, but we don’t have much data.
Which leads me to wonder if 40 years was chosen more based on convenience than science. Sometime, maybe 80 or 100 years ago, someone decided to base climate on 40 years of data because that’s how much comprehensive data they had accumulated to that point. So they established the 40-year moving average as the basis for climate.
There may be some validity to the 40 years. I just don’t know. That seems short enough that the data can be skewed by certain events. For example, I said in a prior post that I thought the “mini-ice age” of the 1960s-70s was caused by air pollution—lots of particulate matter in the global atmosphere. It took a decade before the positive impacts of the Clean Air Act of 1969 began to have an impact. Maybe by 1990-ish, the atmosphere was cleaner, and temperatures worldwide were probably back to their norm. But, the data from 1950-1975 (call them the years of maximum pollution) still dominated the 40-year moving average, a.k.a. the climate. In fact, it wouldn’t be until 2015 that the impact of the mini-ice age was fully gone from the climate average and we had an accurate picture of the climate and if it was changing.
Now, if you say that the worst of the polluting years were 1950-1975, and I’d accept arguments that maybe it was a little different than that, then you also have years on either side of those that were also polluting years, just maybe not quite so much. So the 1940s and 1975-1985, say, were also polluting years, but perhaps less so. I’d make the argument that beginning in 1986, global average temperatures would start to go up as atmospheric pollution went down, and be noticeable in the change in the moving average over the previous five years, because you dropped off the polluting years of 1940-1945 and added the normal, non-polluting years (or call them the much less polluting years) of 1980-1985. And it appears you have global warming. Continue another 10 years and you drop more polluting years, add more normal years, and boom, you have higher temperatures.
The change was indeed manmade, but in this case man’s polluting his world in the 1940s, 50s, 60s, and 70s, and reducing his pollution in the 1980s, 90s, 00s, etc.
Does this make sense? It does to me. I need to study some data to see if my suppositions are correct. No, suppositions is not the right word. It’s more musing, or all-other-causes elimination. Those who claim climate change is totally manmade need to consider whether coming out of the polluting years might have skewed the data for 20 years, because for 20 years we were killing out atmosphere with pollution.
In a later post in this series, I’m going to talk about longer-term climate and whether that’s changing as a result of mankind’s activities.
Not so fast. We know that earth’s rotation isn’t exactly 24 hours. It’s a little less than that. That’s why we have to add 397 leap days every 400 years. Yet, even that isn’t quite accurate enough to keep our solar-year-based calendar exactly aligned with a true solar year.
The world recognized the inexactness of the 24-hour day to measure a year. The Julian Calendar was produced during the reign of Julius Ceasar, creating the concept of a leap year and leap day. A long time later, mankind found that wasn’t accurate enough, and the Gregorian calendar was created, tweaking the Julian and getting us enough into alignment for, it was thought, a few millenia.
Now, however, we have scientific instrument so accurate that they have found that not only is the Gregorian Calendar off a little, but the earth’s rotation is not a fixed amount. It changes regularly, and can change with each rotation. So one day, it might be 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4.1 seconds. The next day it might be 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4.11 seconds. Or some such variation.
A while back I studied this. I wondered: Is it possible that the earth’s rotation is slowing, and what impact would that have on climate. I found data showing that the earth’s rotation is slowing. Every now and then, those that keep the atomic clock announce that they will add a “leap second” at such and such a time. Somehow all these electronic clocks we have get the message and the second is added, or they are manually reset. Maybe that’s why our analog clock in the kitchen keeps running fast.
The current info on Wikipedia’s “Earth’s Rotation” page is that earth’s rotation seems to be slowing about 2.3 milliseconds per century for the last 15 centuries. Except, in 2020, scientists noted a change, an infinitesimally longer rotation. Whether this is a trend of just an anomaly is too early to stay.
What would the effect be of a slowing rotation of the earth on earth’s climate? You would have longer consecutive daylight and longer consecutive dark. It seems like this would result in more weather extremes. Over time, the climate should exhibit more extremes.
But, how much difference can a few seconds over a milenia or two make? Surely, you will say, I’m over-emphasizing this potential factor as a potential natural cause of currently observed climate change. Maybe so. But I think we have several factors to consider. One is that we don’t know that this slowing has been at this same rate forever in the earth’s life. What if it slowed at a faster rate for a billion years and is now reaching some kind of steady state? The other is what if the cumulative effects of slowing rotation have just reached some kind of critical mass, and the climate is showing the effects of thousands of years of slowing?
I looked for answers to these questions, and didn’t find them. Possibly it’s like with volcanic activity—articles not available in 2018-2019 when I did my studies didn’t exist but they are out there now. Someday I’ll repeat my studies, but not now. For now, I see no mention of the earth’s rotation as a factor in climate change, only pat dismissals.
Remember the oil wells set afire by Iraq? It really happened. Here’s Lynda in June 1991 when she went back to Kuwait as a Red Cross nurse.
In my first post in this series on climate change, I mentioned the amount of volcanic ash in the atmosphere as a possible cause of global warming. I asked if global warming was in part caused by a reduction of volcanic activity over some period of time. I looked for an answer to that back in 2018-19 when I did my studies into this topic, and found nothing about it.
You might wonder why this came on my radar. The answer is what I observed in Kuwait in 1991. Those old enough will remember that Iraq, as they realized they were losing Kuwait and about to withdraw, set Kuwait’s oilwells on fire. When the US moved into the just-liberated country, they found an environmental disaster in progress. As soon as the country was secured, oil fire fighters from around the world, but especially from the USA, went to work on the fires in Kuwait. But within a couple of years, the ash was gone, the temperatures were back to normal.
The fires started around Feb 25, 1991. I went back to Kuwait in early July 1991. Some of the fires had been put out at this time, but many, possibly most, were still burning. I noticed that the ambient temperature was much lower than during my previous years in Kuwait and the Gulf region. Maybe as much as 10-15°F. Why? The ash in the atmosphere was clearly the reason.
I paid attention to this for a while. The plume of smoke was blown southwest by the dominant winds, though sometimes to the south. Areas downwind also experienced lower than normal temperatures. It took months to get all the fires out, and the lower temperatures persisted even beyond the time the last fire was out.
I’m sure we track the incident of volcanic activity. Finding info on that was harder than I expected it to be.
This stayed in my mind. The global warming (later rephrased as “climate change”) debate was just getting started at that time. As the debate built over the years, I read what I could about it. Those most vocal were, in general, people who I didn’t think very highly of. This made me skeptical of their arguments.
However, as I said in the first post in this series, it is intuitively obvious to me that mankind’s activities today produce heat compared to mankind’s activities, say, two or three or ten centuries ago. The question becomes, how much of the global warming is being caused by mankind and how much, if any, is being caused by natural causes that mankind has no control over?
As I gave this a lot of thought, I also took note of the “mini-ice age” that was observed in the 1960s and 1970s. This was a time of colder than normal temperatures in the USA and elsewhere. That ended somewhere in the first half of the 1980s, and average temperatures going up. Don’t remember the mini-ice age? You should be able to find out something about it by a simple internet search.
To me, the cause of the mini-ice age and the eventual end of it were obvious. The cause was particulates emitted into the atmosphere by industrial activity. The end of it was the result of changes in emissions brought about by the Clean Air Act (and similar actions in other countries). Passed in 1969, it took a while to retool our industrial infrastructure to reduce emissions. That began to take hold more and more each year after we began to address our crass treatment of the world we live in and the air we breathe.
Sometime in the early 2000s, these different things came together in my mind. Dump a bunch of pollutants into the atmosphere from smokestacks, lower the temperature. Stop doing that, raise the temperatures. Dump a bunch of oilwell fire ash in the atmosphere, lower the temperatures. Put the fires out, raise the temperatures.
That led me to think about volcanic activity and I wondered, are there different periods of increased and decreased volcanic activity, and might that be a contributor to climate change as the activity increases or decreases? In 2018-2019ish, I began to look for answers to this question, the internet being my main library.
Great reductions in worldwide temperature were experienced after major volcanic eruptions. 1815, 1883 (Krakatoa), 1991 (Mt. Pinatubo) were all major eruptions that resulted in global cooling. The effect lasted for years.
What about the less major eruptions? Have we tracked those, and do we have a database that shows the amount of volcanic ash disgorged into the atmosphere? And can this activity be correlated to changes in the climate? I looked for this information, even perusing the website of the organization of the organization that vulcanologists belong to, and couldn’t find it. As I said in the first post in this series, perhaps the information was available and my research techniques were at fault.
But thanks to a cousin, who posted about an article by the University of Cambridge (England), I now have access to a scholarly article about this. It was posted 12 Aug 2021, so after I did my searching. I’m quite glad to know that others are thinking about this.
This is a long, long article, filled with technical language that I’m wading through. It’s going to take me a while to digest it and be able to post about this. I’ll make other posts in the series, I think, before I get back to this.
Next post will be more on volcanic activity as a potential contributor to global warming.
My last post, the first of a short series on the climate change debate, generated a little debate of its own. Not here, but on Facebook. Before I go on to the next post in the series, I’ll clarify a couple of points. That’s easier than going on to the next post and, given that I’m dead tired today after three busy weeks with almost no break, I’m glad for this diversion.
I am NOT saying that climate change is occurring devoid of man-induced causes. In fact, I’m saying just the opposite. It’s clear to me that mankind is doing things to put heat into the world. To me that’s intuitively obvious without a lot of reasoning or studies.
What I’m saying is that the climate is changing as a result of a combination of man-induced causes and natural causes. Or rather, the observed changes MAY BE the result of a combination man-induced and natural causes. I am not, at this stage in my studies, convinced that scientists have studied all possible natural contributors to climate change and ruled them out. In my last post I mentioned two natural contributors that come to my mind for which I’ve looked for refuting data/studies and can find none: volcanic activity and gradual slowing of the earth’s rotation. As I stated in my last post, I could find nothing on those two possible causes.
Why can’t I find that? Perhaps the one doing the searching is deficient in researching abilities. Maybe the studies and data are out there, posted or referred to on the internet, and my searches just haven’t found them. That’s entirely possible. But is it also possible that those studies haven’t been done? If not, why not?
It has been suggested that scientists have no agenda. That they are without the natural human trait of having beliefs and coming to conclusions before they have completed all needed studies. I reject that. Scientists are just like the rest of us and can base their work on false premises resulting in false conclusions. They are not more “pure,” if that’s the right word, in their motives.
In a couple of future posts, I will further explain why these two possible natural factors and why I wonder if they are contributing to climate change. I’ll also add a couple of other factors I’m wondering about. Given my Monday and Friday posting schedule, this will take several weeks to play out.
My prior studies have shown that some possible natural factors do not seem to be contributing to climate change, something I planned to discuss later in the series. One of those was the wobble in the earth’s rotational axis. In fact, the current direction of that wobble would suggest that the earth should be cooling slightly. Another is the earth’s elliptical orbit, which also seems to not be a contributor to the warming observed in the earth.
A cousin provided a link to an article from the University of Cambridge, England, which discusses volcanic activity in relation to climate change. I’ve opened the article but have not yet read it. I note that it was published 12 August 2021, which was a couple of years after my studies. I’m glad to see this, and will read it as soon as I catch up from my three weeks of extreme busyness. The same for the other linked article, which was published Feb 27, 2020, also after I did my searching. I had, however, seen a similar discussion in an earlier article and learned what the scientists had concluded about these two possible natural causes.
So, it’s good to know about this article on volcanic activity and that someone else has thought about this. I don’t like the term “shaming” to describe my thoughts on this. When you can’t find any scientific discussion about what you think is important, you naturally wonder if you are alone in your thinking. That’s not shaming. And I hate that buzzword—as I hate most buzzwords.
Friday, if all goes well this week, I’ll bring up why I first began to wonder about volcanic activity, and hopefully will be able to summarize what the U of C article has to say on the subject. Depends on how much catching up I get done.
Progress is being made in the USA at reducing greenhouse gases. Is the situation really as dire as the media would have us believe?
Nowadays, when the media mentions “climate change”, the assumption is it’s human-caused. You never hear anthropogenic—i.e. human-caused. It’s just assumed that it is all human caused. No debate is tolerated.
Now, it’s obvious that human activities generate heat. If you rub two plates together or drive a piston up and down through its place in the motor, you will generate heat from friction. Consuming energy to move the plates or piston will also generate heat. Those who say that human activities have no impact on the plant aren’t really thinking clearly.
But I’ m not convinced that natural processes don’t have a bigger share in the changes taking place.
Some years ago, I dug into the data that says the climate is changing. That’s the first step: to verify that a change is taking place. Using only on-line sources, I was able to learn a lot, but I wasn’t able to learn the one thing I felt I needed to know: the placement of the climate measuring stations and the distribution of them around the world. I wanted to assure myself that the measuring stations aren’t placed in such a way that the aggregated data is skewed. Alas, I couldn’t find this information on-line.
Not that I think these stations are purposely placed to guarantee an outcome that someone wants, but the principle of due diligence requires that you determine this.
I then wanted to see what I could learn about any natural causes that might be adding to the climate change. It turned out that it was impossible to find any discussion or links to—or even reference to or citations of—scientific papers about natural causes of climate change. It seems to be a taboo subject.
I must say here that the internet is a vast library, and that maybe those papers are out there and can be found. But I couldn’t find them despite trying. What kind of natural processes? Well, what about decreasing volcanic activity resulting in less ash in the global atmosphere that prevents sunlight from reaching earth’s surface? What about the gradual slowing of the earth’s rotation? What does that do to the climate.
“Now you’re just being silly and disingenuous,” you say. “The slowing rotation of the earth? Is it happening? And how could that result in climate change?” Well, yes, it is happening. Every now and then the official keepers of the atomic clock announce that a “leap second” will be added. This has been going on for a while. The length of a day has increased by a minute or two over the last 100 years. Before you say this is silly, that is 1/10th of 1 percent added to the length of a day. Small? Perhaps. But that means whatever part of the earth is in sunlight has sunlight 0.1 % longer than it used to, and the same for the part in darkness. What would be the result? Greater extremes, for sure. Longer sunlight means more heating, and longer darkness means more cooling. What is the net result?
And what if it is shown that, though the slowing of the earth’s rotation is small, after a few billion years some kind of point of no return has happened in how this impacts the climate? Let’s be sure of that before we ask people to make drastic changes.
One other thing I never see, and haven’t been able to find online, is life-cycle environmental impacts of different measures proposed. The current administration is really pushing electric vehicles. Sure, they don’t emit the type of greenhouse gases that internal combustion engine vehicles do. But power is being generated somewhere to charge the EVs. New transmission mains, even a whole new electrical grid, is needed to power these cars. What is the environmental cost of the vehicles themselves, the distributed charging infrastructure, and the distribution system upgrades necessary to make it all work with some reasonable similarity to the society we now have? This isn’t discussed.
I bring all this up because those who preach man-caused climate change want us to change our habits so as to reduce or, preferably, reverse these manmade effects. They frequently want to bring about this change by taxation. A carbon tax is most often proposed. In other words, if you can’t get people to change their behavior voluntarily, make it more expensive to maintain the old way of doing things rather than change to the new ways. Taxation is proposed to achieve this end.
Before these massive expenditures of a whole new transportation infrastructure happen, how about we do a lot of study and computer modelling on a macro, world-wide level to rule out every possible natural cause? Volcanic action. Earth’s slowing rotation. Probably some other things. Let’s have that public discussion, laying all the data on the table. Let’s prove through comprehensive studies what the environmental footprint is of those infrastructure changes—cradle-to-grave footprints brought back to an easily stated standard.
I’m going to have a couple more posts about this. They may not be consecutive, however.
File this under “sad things that are sometimes necessary”. CEI is growing; we have taken on some new rental space. When we moved into this building in November 2009, renting out our much larger corporate headquarters, we occupied six modules of the seven in this building. The seventh module, near the center of the building, was occupied. That company had had the parking lot to themselves for years, and were not happy when we inundated the lot with our corporate pick-ups and engineers and surveyors. So they moved to new quarters across the street.
We got first dibs on their vacated space, but haven’t needed it till now. Next week we do whatever modifications are needed to make this space work. The best solution the space layout people came up with was to move the library to the new space and install cubicles where the library is. It’s a more efficient use of space.
But, the library must shrink. Since I took responsibility for the library during the last move, I was tasked with it now. First thing to go are old State and City standards. Most of our copies are out of date, and most states and cities have them on-line now, so out they go. If it’s a 3-ring binder I open it, salvage any clean divider sheets or tabs, put the paper in an OOP recycling bin, discard glossies and the like, and put the empty notebook in a pile for our off-site supplies storage. For comb binding, about the same thing, including salvaging the comb. My old college buddies would expect no less from the HEEDonist.
Next will be the manufacturers catalogues, most of which are for materials we don’t use, are out of date, and are on-line. So out they go. Next will be the Federal standards. Same out of date/on-line situation. Then will be a few shelves of old CEI project notebooks. I won’t discard these, since I can’t be sure they are duplicates. So I’ll box them for off-site archiving. We have 132 shelf segments, and I anticipate I’ll reduce the remnant to a little less than sixty shelves. I’ll report back when done.
This is sad to me. Perhaps these are not real books, but they are books nonetheless. I hate to discard them. The world won’t be a worse place for their being gone. In fact, it might be a better place. We will not have to purchase 3-ring binders for a few years probably (reduce). Less building space will be needed for the same size business (reduce). What can be re-used will be re-used (reuse). And the old office paper will become new paper products (recycle). Maybe the folks who many years ago formed Humans to End Environmental Deterioration would be proud. I won’t shed a tear, but neither will I rejoice.
I’m thinking of applying for a Feature Writer position at Suite101.com. Right now I’m a Contributing Writer there. The CW earns money when people click on ads, and when they get to fifty articles they earn a 10 percent bonus on those clicks. If one is a FW, the bonus changes to 20 percent and, when you get to 100 articles, it changes to 30 percent. A FW has a slightly higher commitment for writing articles, and must write so many articles in the category they are FW of. I would like to be FW of engineering, but that’s taken and I don’t know if I want to wait around and hope it is relinquished.
Yesterday, I learned the the FW position for Environmentalism is open. I learned that somewhat by accident. I had been planning to write some articles on Earth Day, this being the 40th anniversary of the first Earth Day. Yesterday I was researching ED for some in-house CEI purposes, and decided to make an article out of it. Hopefully I’ll be able to write four or five related articles.
Why now, you ask, when ED is not until April 22? Well, just as in print publishing, articles in on-line publishing need some lead time. The problem is how Google and other search engines index articles, which includes some of how Suite101 pages are organized. Google, I take it, is not constantly crawling the web to find every new article. The web is too big, and just as a city will plow the snow off the main roads first and the side roads second, the search engines must prioritize. Some areas of the web they crawl regularly, some less frequently. Suite101 has a home page for each category of articles, and on each of those home pages is a list of latest articles. Google crawls those pages multiple times a day, and the new articles get picked up right away and indexed. However, once the article falls off that page, as newer articles are added, Google somehow de-indexes the article.
Also, I understand that Google et. al. gives a page rank boost to new content. So in the first few days of a web page’s appearance, Google gives it a boost. However, once the new page boost ends, a page sinks to lower ranking in the search. It then has to sink or swim on its own based on quality, back-links, and whatever other factors the search engines put in their search algorithms. So that all means that if I want my articles to stand out from the Internet crowd as much as possible as April 22 draws near, I have to write them and get them posted now. The lead time in on-line publishing is much shorter than for print, but there’s still a lead time.
So I posted the article, then went to the home page for Environmentalism to see how it looked among the new ones. When I got there, I didn’t see the picture of the FW for Environmentalism. A light bulb flashed. Ah ha! There is no FW for Environmentalism. Why, that’s something I could probably do. I was one once–an environmentalist–and still believe in much of what the movement stands for, though not what I consider the excesses. Perhaps I could apply for and get this position and add some balance to the environmental debate on the WWW. I’m thinking about it. The time and creativity commitment is really minimal. I would probably change my article mix at Suite101, but that’s no problem. I’m taking a day or so to ponder and pray about it, but will probably make the application.
Those of you who didn’t know me in college are probably wondering about the title of this post. The student environmental club at the University of Rhode Island was H.E.E.D.–Humans to End Environmental Deterioration. I joined right away freshman year (fall 1970) and became active. I never was an officer in the club, but made some significant contributions. Some one of my friends at college (not sure which one, though I think it was CJN) started calling me the Hedonist, getting a chuckle out of the play on words but not really getting the spelling right. So that became one of my college nicknames, and continues to this day among the (un)informed.
I suppose, if I get that FW position, I will once again be the HEED-onist.
