NYT is spouting every headline they can imagine to shift votes toward Trump, and not just lately. Their entire editorial focus is to cast confusion on Democrats' prospects. They should be recognized as firmly partisan and no longer serving a journalistic purpose. Unfortunate, but that's the times in which we live.

You would think "I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose voters." -DJT Jan 2016 would have pretty much filtered the US population into two camps long ago. The "swing" population that is reflected in every poll since then is a gaggle of . . . I don't know . . . forgetful? inattentive? I am trying not to be invective, no matter what.

Swimming pools are normally constructed empty. They were withstanding surrounding soil before they were filled, and concrete strength increases with age (for about 90 days, typically). On the other hand, a sunken structure like a pool that is roofed over, becomes a "confined space". Unlike a typical structure, heavier-than-air gases cannot escape from the pool. Such gases could originate from the drain system or flow from leakage outside the pool area. For examples, leaking propane or various gases from sewer lines in the vicinity. A sunken greenhouse would almost certainly be a building code violation for that reason. If you build it, ventilate it by means both active and passive and do not enter if you can't verify that ventilation is working.

"Think globally, act locally" - or, how do you eat an elephant? Answer; one bite at a time. You pick something you can get your hands around and get to work. You do what you can when you can and don't second-guess yourself.

Not to speak solely in aphorisms, but Confucius said "If your plan is for a year, plant rice; if your plan is for a decade, plant trees; if your plan is for a century, educate children." So educate others about your activities when you can and lead by example the rest of the time.

It can be a hard road to stubbornly refuse to follow the path of least resistance. But it is vital that as many as possible forge alternative paths or the path of least resistance (Chrome) can become the ONLY path.

The statistic of low Firefox use is based on accessing US government websites. Could it be that there is significantly LESS government site access by the population of users that prefer Firefox? As a corollary I recently read that game companies observed significantly HIGHER bug reporting from Linux users on Steam, not because there were more Linux-related bugs, but simply because that set of users were more likely to initiate bug reports. Of course Firefox is not Linux and Steam is not the world, but a statistic from a relatively narrow segment of the internet should not be assumed representative of the whole.

I declare the weeds to be wildflowers and then I just have to deal with them if they actually over-run something else. Then my tool is a machete.

Three! Aptera!

I used to have a solar water heater for my swimming pool, and it had a wax-actuated valve (!) When the water in the panels was hot enough to melt the wax, a paddle could start turning, and water could flow in the panels. If the water cooled, the wax would congeal and the paddle would "freeze" - blocking water flow - the pool circulating pump had a pressure regulating valve and relief valve, so when the panels on the roof were not accepting water, the pump would bypass them and deliver water straight to the pool without heating. I thought it was quite clever (the wax and paddle assembly were inside a sealed device - I never actually saw how it functioned, only recall the vendor explanation). I have not seen a comparable invention in several internet searches over the years.

The main appliance-economization we used was to not have an upright refrigerator. Chest-type freezers work on the same principles and with the same machinery, but because they are made to be colder, they tend to be better insulated. Also, when you open them, the cold air does not spill out (and be replaced with warm, tropical air). Of course we don't want everything to be frozen, so we replaced the freezer thermostat with a refrigerator thermostat ($20). Unfortunately refrigerator thermostats come with a different knob-shaft to keep idiotic repairmen from installing the wrong type, I suppose. So that required a bit of "customization" to make the factory knob fit the "wrong" thermostat. One must be flexible! I like the low-form look it gives the kitchen.

I am investigating some components of a system to make biochar with a solar concentrator but it is slow going. My idea is to circulate molten salt through the focus zone of a double-parabola channel. This focuses heat on the target pipe for a broad range of sun angles with no tracking. I have read that a eutectic mix of sodium carbonate and potassium carbonate (aka soda ash and potash, respectively) has a melting point under 500C, and fast pyrolysis is possible with molten salt at this temperature. I am trying to find information about electromagnetic pumping (aka magnetohydrodynamic pumping, just like Red October!) but there are very few such devices sold - mainly for continuous metal casting, apparently. If molten salt could be heated by sun and fast pyrolysis could be done (which makes a larger fraction of pyrolysis oil than slower processes would do), then there would be very little emissions and very little waste heat I think. Still some steam I suppose.

There is about 1000 gigatonnes of excess carbon dioxide in the Earth systems from the burning of fossil fuels. It is already THERE, and will not naturally return to the lithosphere in less than thousands of years. So that is a really terrible deal for sure. Of course we should not keep adding to the problem - we must get off fossil fuels as quickly as possible. But there are likely to be some hard-to-eliminate uses and there is already this giant legacy of CO2 we have to deal with. I don't think we have any actual choice to not do carbon dioxide removal - not and retain an appreciable percentage of the world's biodiversity.

I'd invite anyone interested to also join https://openaircollective.cc - an all-volunteer network involved with carbon dioxide removal. Many of us are also active in CCL. We are developing laws, public outreach efforts, and doing DIY-level projects in various CDR approaches to speed development (because at this point, we simply do not fully know how to clean up this giant mess!)

actually, you better wait for the pics to say that . . .

When I used to live in Florida, we'd go once a year to visit the Keys and eat some "bugs" - they were Caribbean Spiny Lobsters. If you think about it, they are pretty closely related - insects and crustaceans. If you are ever confronted with the option to tuck into a big bowl of insects, consider it like a big bowl of shrimp! (full disclosure: I have not had this option, this is only my intellectualization of how to think about it. It is related to my intellectualzation of pretending spiders are crabs, to overcome arachnophobia - though this only extends to not screaming when touched by a spider rather than trying to catch spiders to eat them)

They like to grow in hay bales too, I hear. And why is a BALE held together with BAILING wire? Oh . . . TIL it is baling wire - just one "i". I guess bailing wire is what you use to bale your bail money.

This is a nice informative video. I wish the creator would tell us his qualifications - though at the end he does refer to a source for his ideas - Living Web Farm (which I have not checked out).

He states several times in the video that crushing biochar is detrimental, and maybe he is right. But the high porosity of biochar is a microscopic feature which may or may not be affected by breaking up the char. In the related material, activated carbon, particle size is chosen on the basis of optimizing flow of air or water through the media, not because it has any effect on the capacity of the carbon to adsorb. So put a pin in that point - it may be inaccurate. Big pieces may take longer to adsorb AND release nutrients. The interior of big pieces may not be accessible to plants or fungi (though in the fullness of time the carbon pieces will break smaller and smaller).

Biochar is becoming one of the most common and discussed ways of CDR - it is so accessible to the average person in many variants. I suspect that in the long run, the means of making char will become much more sophisticated and the gas produced by pyrolysis will become a valued product itself - not something that we'd want to burn. But that is for another decade or two . . .

left (smaller) unit is a chest freezer unmodified. right (larger) unit is modified to refrigerate but not freeze.

The relativistic effect that gives rise to red-shifting will equally give rise to time-dilation and foreshortening, so not only are quasars red and slow from our perspective; but I hereby predict they are also flattened! I guess if they had NOT found evidence of slow quasar clocks, the headline would have been on MSNBC and CNN instead.

When I was living on a sailboat, the logic of overcast days was this; that overcast days are often stormy days, so have a wind generator for the "bad weather". But this may not work in your place - sometimes it is just a low-energy day; cloudy and calm.

Of course the other approach is storage; but it tends to be expensive.