For the New Year.
1. YOU CAN ONLY WORK FOR PEOPLE THAT YOU LIKE
2. IF YOU HAVE A CHOICE NEVER HAVE A JOB
3. SOME PEOPLE ARE TOXIC AVOID THEM.
4. PROFESSIONALISM IS NOT ENOUGH (or THE GOOD IS THE ENEMY OF THE GREAT)
5. LESS IS NOT NECESSARILY MORE
6. STYLE IS NOT TO BE TRUSTED
7. HOW YOU LIVE CHANGES YOUR BRAIN
8. DOUBT IS
BETTER THAN CERTAINTY
9. IT DOESN'T MATTER
10. TELL THE TRUTH
Milton Glaser
Regards,
Aki and Scott
It almost feels like sun worship. Watching our garden grow, working,
feeding our electricity habit and staying healthy by the sun. That is
the point. The sun.
We live and work in an isolated spot in the interior of British Columbia. We started with two 85 watt panels and two golf cart batteries 25 years ago. Powered our 12 volt tv and a light. Now we run 3 small, independant solar arrays.
The smallest is made up of a 75 watt panel fixed to our roof, facing south connected to a charge controller. The controller is connected to one 12 volt deep cycle battery. It powers a 12 volt light in the pantry, a 12 volt water pump from our well, a cd, tape player and radio.
 |
| 500 watts of solar panel |
Sun trackers can provide a 45% increase in power.
We built this one 20 years ago. It has been modified since then to hold 4 panels vertically.
We live and work here. The trackers are manual. We turn them directly on the sun three or four times a day in the summer. Spring and fall, 2 or 3 times. In the winter they are static. Working with the sun. On dark winter days we run a 3000 watt inverter generator for a few hours, assuring everything stays rock hard in the freezer.
Besides lights, computers and the odd kitchen appliance, we power our shop. Our most demanding machine is the band saw with a 3/4 horse power motor.
What we have learned to get the most from your solar panels is:
charging batteries and relying on that stored power is not the way to go. Battery technology is inefficient. For us stored power is just enough for lights and computers when there is no sun. When the sun is out we'll work. From March until October we have unlimited power for our needs. We work full time with smaller machines (10 amps and less) when the sun is out. The bigger machines we use intermittently and because of our lighter wiring we run one 3/4 horse machine at a time.When the batteries are charged and there is a 60% sun day the process is a lot more efficient. Solar energy flows through the panels. The batteries act like a conduit. Energy the inefficient batteries will not accept on a full sun day is the energy we can use up.
After working in the shop, at the end of a day the batteries have as much charge as they had at the beginning of the day. If the day involved lots of heavy use, like using the table saw ripping or milling apple wood with the band saw etc, all over 15 amps, then we would alternate system. Keeping the batteries charged.
 |
| Our shops |
This power set up could be doubled, tripled, quadrupled... You would just need more. Heavier wiring, more wattage (panels), larger capacity controllers etc....
We help charge the batteries with a generator in the low sun months from November until the middle of February. We need to use a generator for machine power in the winter and on heavy load days in the early spring and fall. We slow our work right down in the winter. It works out.
Having two main systems that are interchangeable has proven to be a great asset in the low sun months. As one system is being used and discharges the other is charging.
4.6 billion years old. The sun will start a tranformation into a red dwarf in 5 billion years. Swallowing the earth, Mars...
Consider, the sun provides enough power in one hour than the planet of people use in one year.
We are fortunate to live and work with the sun. A few panels and batteries have worked for us. What we've paid for our 1000 watt systems, today, you could buy 6 or 7 times as much power. A system of 5 or 6 thousand watts would pay for itself in 2 or 3 years if not sooner.
It almost feels like sun worship. Watching our garden grow, working, feeding our electricity habit and staying healthy by the sun. That is the point. The sun.
Regards,
Aki and Scott
This is a recording of Dennis Saddleman's poem.
We post this in the wake of another residential school's graveyard of buried indigenous children found in Kamloops, BC. It is estimated that upwards of 15,000 to 25,000 children are in unmarked graves around residential schools in Canada.
Imagine the government comes with police. They take your child..children. It's the last time you ever see them.
Regards,
Aki and Scott
Last week, the CDC acknowledged what many of us have been saying for almost nine months about cleaning surfaces to prevent transmission by touch of the coronavirus: It’s pure hygiene theater.
“Based on available epidemiological data and studies of environmental transmission factors,” the CDC concluded, “surface transmission is not the main route by which SARS-CoV-2 spreads, and the risk is considered to be low.” In other words: You can put away the bleach, cancel your recurring Amazon subscription for disinfectant wipes, and stop punishing every square inch of classroom floor, restaurant table, and train seat with high-tech antimicrobial blasts. COVID-19 is airborne: It spreads through tiny aerosolized droplets that linger in the air in unventilated spaces. Touching stuff just doesn’t carry much risk, and more people should say so, very loudly.
Like many, I spent the early months of the pandemic dunking my apples and carrots in soap. That was before I read a persuasive essay in the medical journal The Lancet by Emanuel Goldman, a microbiology professor at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School: “Exaggerated Risk of Transmission of COVID-19 by Fomites.” (In medical jargon, fomites are objects and surfaces that can transmit an infectious pathogen.) This opinion ran contrary to the conventional wisdom of the broader scientific community, and Goldman told me that several journals rejected his essay. But he was not alone in his quest. Writers such as my colleague Zeynep Tufekci and researchers such as Jose-Luis Jimenez, an aerosol scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder, were also outspoken in their insistence that we needed to focus on ventilation rather than surfaces, windows rather than Windex. They were rebuffed, not only by loudmouths on Twitter and on TV, but by other scientists who clung stubbornly to an outdated view of viral spread.
These days, Goldman is extending his crusade against fomite fear from COVID-19 to other diseases. The old story is that if you make contact with a surface that a sick person touched, and then you touch your eyes or lips, you’ll infect yourself. While Goldman acknowledges that many diseases, especially bacterial diseases, spread easily from surfaces, he now suspects that most respiratory viruses spread primarily through the air, like SARS-CoV-2 does.
“For most respiratory viruses, the evidence for fomite transmission looks pretty weak,” Goldman said. “With the exception of RSV [respiratory syncytial virus], there are few other respiratory viruses where fomite transmission has been conclusively shown.” For example, rhinovirus, one of the most common viruses in the world and the predominant cause of the common cold, is probably overwhelmingly spread via aerosols. The same may be true of influenza. Many experiments that suggest surface transmission of respiratory viruses stack the deck by studying unrealistically large amounts of virus using unrealistically ideal (cold, dry, and dark) conditions for their survival. Based on our experience with SARS-CoV-2, these may not be trustworthy studies.
Unlike the coronavirus, hygiene theater is very much alive on surfaces across America. Transit authorities are still taking subway cars offline to power-scrub their walls. Baseball parks are banning cash to protect fans from fiat germs. Schools throughout the country still require deep cleanings that sometimes shut down classes for hours or days. The Los Angeles Unified School District’s COVID-19 posters still urge people to “clean high-touch surfaces frequently,” with no mention of ventilation, air filters, or keeping windows open. Target is still running ads on Hulu bragging about how it calls in workers at 6 a.m. to mop and scrub for several hours, for the comfort of its germophobic customers.
Read: The difference between feeling safe and being safe
Alas, not even my own employer is immune to the scourge of hygiene theater. In an update on our back-to-office policies yesterday, The Atlantic instituted a “clean desk” protocol starting this summer that will require “daily neatening and sanitation of workspaces.” Anybody who works in journalism, or has ever seen a movie about journalism, knows that journalists take to daily neatening the way lions take to vegetarianism. Beyond being unnecessary, workplace-sanitation rules also carry the risk of enforcing an awkward parent-teen relationship between bosses and employees. In this business, “clean up this paragraph” is hard enough on one’s self-esteem; “... and clean your filthy desk while you’re at it” is not the sort of workplace banter that eases one’s psychological transition back to the office.
Whenever I’ve written about hygiene theater, some people have responded with the same objection: “Hey, what’s the matter with washing our hands?” That’s an easy one: Absolutely nothing. “Pandemic or no pandemic, you should wash your hands, especially after you prepare food, go to the bathroom,” or touch something yucky, Goldman said.
But hygiene theater carries with it an immense opportunity cost. Too many institutions spend scarce funds or sacrifice scarce resources to do microbial battle against fomites that don’t pose a real threat. This is especially true of cash-strapped urban-transit authorities and school districts that have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on soap technology rather than their central task of transporting and teaching people.
Hygiene theater also muddles the public-health message. If you tell people, “This disease is on surfaces, on your clothes, on your hands, on your face, and also in the air,” they will react in a scattered and scared way. But if you tell people the truth—this virus doesn’t do very well on surfaces, so you should focus on ventilation—they can protect themselves against what matters.
At the ideas level, the jealous protection of hygiene theater is an example of a larger American crisis. “When the CDC doesn’t update its fomite language for months while scientists are screaming about aerosolized spread, it just seems like a case of the precautionary principle taking over,” Goldman said. In his 2011 book, The Beginning of Infinity, the physicist David Deutsch defined the precautionary principle as a form of pessimism that “seeks to ward off disaster by avoiding everything not known to be safe.” The opposite of the precautionary principle is something like epistemic optimism: We don’t know enough, and we should always try to learn more.
That point might sound airy and theoretical, but it makes direct contact with America’s worst pandemic failures. Too many U.S. institutions throughout the pandemic have shown little interest in the act of learning while doing. They etched the conventional wisdoms of March 2020 into stone and clutched their stone-tablet commandments in the face of any evidence that would disprove them. Liberal readers might readily point to Republican governors who rejected masks and indoor restrictions even as their states faced outbreaks. But the criticism also applies to deep-blue areas. Los Angeles, for instance, closed its playgrounds and prohibited friends from going on beach walks, long after researchers knew that the coronavirus didn’t really spread outdoors. In the pandemic and beyond, this might be the fundamental crisis of American institutions: They specialize in the performance of bureaucratic competence rather than the act of actually being competent.
The CDC’s announcement should be curtains for theatrical deep cleanings. But until companies, transit authorities, retailers, and magazines embrace the value of scientific discovery and the joy of learning new things, the show, and the soap, will go on.
Two Massachusetts writers who have had an impact on our lives here here.
Before
After
Bees are amazing. Privileged to work with them.
Bumble bee and mustard.
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived".
Henry David Thoreau
Aki sun dries, freezes, sauces and cans. We eat a lot of tomatoes.
Peas, Aki and fireweed.
Fireweed and rocks.
"We do not go to the green woods and crystal waters to rough it, we go to smooth it. We get it rough enough at home, in towns and cities".
George Sears, Nessmuk.
Lots of rain this year. We lost our lakeside garden to the lake.
I viewed Thoreau's ideas as my own. It only made sense to me.
Living simply. Living with a light footprint. Feeding ourselves with the food we grow.
So we live by isolation in the boreal forest while the world changes.
It
felt serendipitous, a few years ago we made a connection. George Sears
was born in 1820 at what is now Webster, Massachusetts. Less than 100
kms away from where Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts in 1817. They grew up at the same time and essentially the same place. They were neighbours.
Photographs by Aki Yamamoto
Thoreau, July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862, was a an essayist, poet and philosopher. He was a transcendentalist. Thoreau wrote a book Walden which we have our son reading outloud to us these days when people are following rules and avoiding each other.
"Thoreau's books, articles, essays, journals, and poetry amount to more than 20 volumes. Among his lasting contributions are his writings on natural history and philosophy, in which he anticipated the methods and findings of ecology and environmental history, two sources of modern-day environmentalism. His literary style interweaves close observation of nature, personal experience, pointed rhetoric, symbolic meanings, and historical lore, while displaying a poetic sensibility, philosophical austerity, and attention to practical detail.[5] He was also deeply interested in the idea of survival in the face of hostile elements, historical change, and natural decay; at the same time he advocated abandoning waste and illusion in order to discover life's true essential needs.[5]
He was a lifelong abolitionist, delivering lectures that attacked the Fugitive Slave Law while praising the writings of Wendell Phillips and defending the abolitionist John Brown. Thoreau's philosophy of civil disobedience later influenced the political thoughts and actions of such notable figures as Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr.[6]
Thoreau is sometimes referred to as an anarchist.[7][8] Though "Civil Disobedience" seems to call for improving rather than abolishing government—"I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government"[9]—the direction of this improvement contrarily points toward anarchism: "'That government is best which governs not at all;' and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have".
(I copied this from Wikipedia only to give a little insight into Thoreau)
Aki and Scott
