Rachel Maddow and Bill Nye on Climate Change

Just because big winter storms are happening, doesn't mean "global warming" is false. For god's sake I'm tired of hearing this crowing from the right. In fact, it could be a proof that climate change is actively in progress creating that very storm.

Here is Bill Nye on the Rachel Maddow show addressing this sentiment directly.

The quote that says it best from Nye is, "there's more energy in the atmosphere, and this is stirring things up." The global climate is a complicated system, you heat one area and another could get very cold because of it -- thus the 'stirring things up' he's referring to.



Enjoy logic and reason applied to large planetary problems,

Bp

Roman Army Knife scoops Swiss by 1,800 years or so

Check out that beauty -- a real multi-tool, but dating back to 200AD. It's made of silver, though the blade is iron. Pure class I tell you.

Check out the details at the Mail Online article.

Enjoy ingenuity years ahead of its time,

Bp

[via my faithful Canukistani operative, "Yuri." Photo credit in linked article.]

The Pig and the Butcher

Here is a great short on Vimeo showing a butcher taking apart a pig with very little waste. Click the text link for more info on the film and the butcher.

It reminds me of a sentiment I got from Gary Snyder, from one of his books of essays -- simplistically paraphrased: If you want to learn about mastering something, hang out with masters of any sort. You can learn to be a master meditator by hanging out with a master mechanic.

Watch a master butcher.

The Pig & The Butcher from Quarter Productions on Vimeo.

Enjoy getting closer to your food sources,

Bp

[via my faithful Canukistani operative, "Yuri"]

Time lapse photography of Antarctic giant sea worms and sea stars

Here is our favorite nature narrator, David Attenborough, in a series called "Life" on BBC talking a bit about antarctic scavengers. 3 ft. nemertean worms aren't to be missed.



Enjoy the diversity of wiggling things on our planet,

Bp

[via my faithful Canukistani operative "Yuri"]

How to build a Coracle (traditional Irish hide boat)

I love seeing skills like this demonstrated. Those that are, to quote the narrator, in the "ancient and sufficient way."

Text from Neatorama's post:

This video incorporates footage from 1935, in which Irish craftsmen build a coracle from willow and an ox hide, then use the craft to set their nets in the River Boyne. One has to admire the skill and experience required to propel a keel-less craft in a reasonably straight line. As the narrator notes, these river craft are related to the larger currachs that were capable of substantial ocean voyages.

Enjoy peeks into the past through traditional skills,

Bp

[via Neatorama, dedicated to my faithful Canukistani operative, "Yuri"]

Brooklyn Beekeepers -- Breakin' the Law!

It would probably be best to have this song stuck in your head as you watch this video of rooftop beekeepers in NY, NY.

Brooklyn's Urban Beekeepers: Breaking The Law For The Planet (Part I) from SkeeterNYC on Vimeo.

Enjoy people doing the right thing and having a good time doing it,

Bp

[via my faithful Canukistani Operative "Yuri"]

Take a baby Mushrooming! Take a class on taking your bebeh mushrooming!

What have I been doing you ask? Well, getting out and mushrooming as often as I can. Since I'm home with the Bebeh 3 days a week, we just take her along.

Some very helpful, patient and kind friends and I have made two trips up into the Oregon Cascades for mushrooms in the last two weeks. The first trip was dry and sunny and provided us with those lovely, early-season tan chanterelles. Dry and clean and perfect for pasta.

The second trip was much colder (in the low 40's) and wet, and we really had to bushwhack to get in. The baby was an absolute trooper, got swaddled up and conked out for an hour once we got into good mushrooming territory. Thanks to Canukistani Kate not only for the pictures but for being on Nap Duty both trips.

As for the class, here is the info from Arctos School of Herbal and Botanical Studies:

Mama/Papa and Babe Mushroom Outing with Missy Rohs
Tuesday, October 6, 10am-4pm

By special request, this excursion is geared towards parents with little ones. The day is a little shorter, and we won't be away from the car for more than an hour and a half at a time. This parent- and baby-friendly hunt will focus on delicious edible mushrooms like Chanterelles and Matsutake. Our hope is that we'll not only find an array of beautiful fungi, but score a basketful to take home and savor! Bring sturdy hiking shoes, water, and lunch.

Carpool will meet in SE Portland. Register by Oct. 3rd by emailing missy@arctosschool.org.
Cost: $35 per adult (sliding scale available) -- kids under 10 are free!







Enjoy sharing your life with little ones,

Bp

[huge thanks to Canukistani Kate for not only the pictures, but all the baby holding]

The 6 Most Frequently Quoted Bullshit Animal Facts

Normally, I avoid cussing in the title of a post, but I figured it best to represent the title of this cracked.com article in its entirety.

Many myths challenged in one article. I have to say, I think a little contest for readers of this blog to provide counter information to this article would be fun. See if you can dig up some info to call BS on some of these assertions and post in the comments.

Some examples: Bumble bees violate the laws of aerodynamics, and chameleons change color to camouflage themselves.

Now I'm not taking this comedy website's word as the final, end-all-be-all comment on these subjects, especially considering they didn't take the time to get a picture of an actual Bumble bee as opposed to honey bees for their graphics. I am, however, willing to peruse their research for entertainment purposes.

Enjoy yet more intartube obfuscation,

Bp

Wild Kingdom in our back yard: Katydid about to get eaten by Miranda

I have a thing with Carnivorous plants. They're just too cool.

Last Mother's Day I sent The Wife to the local Orchid show with some money and said "get something that makes you happy." It was her first Mother's Day after all. She came home with the most amazing plant -- a Nepenthes Miranda Asiatic cobra plant. It's gorgeous.

I must plug Sarracenia Northwest here. They are a local Portland Oregon plant nursery that specializes in carnivorous plants. I'm happy they had a display at the Orchid show so the wife could run into this impressive plant. If you ever had an itch to get a carnivorous plant, click that link and see just how much variety and information they provide.

So -- on to the video.

Today when I came home for lunch I saw a bright green leaf on one of the pitchers. Then I saw it move. I got closer and saw that it was a Katydid. I've never seen one in our area so Miranda did quite a job of luring him in from who-knows-where. Amateur video to follow.



And the video in which I find out my flip camera software has no "rotate left" option in its edit options. Sorry 'bout that, but I'm posting it anyway.



Enjoy beautiful plants eating bugs,

Bp


[photograph via Petflytrap]

Backwards Beekeeper shows how he harvests honey

I just stumbled across this video on Boing Boing, and am now intrigued. The video is a nice watch about how the "Backwards Beekeepers" harvest their honey. One gets the sense that they do much of their beekeeping in an unconventional, bee-friendly fashion.

Here is a link to the Backwards Beekeepers blog -- I've only just started researching their methods and philosophy and I do like it, and their attitude. Biologically, their philosophy of maximizing and propagating already-naturalized populations of bees makes perfect sense. I strongly suspect I'll have more to report after I've spent some more time with their information.



Enjoy folks using their heads, and making awesome local honey in the process,

Bp

How to carve steel with saltwater and a cheap tin earring

This fascinated me, check it out.



Enjoy posts when they happen,

Bp

[via Boing Boing]

Master Pickler Alex Hozven

Occasionally, my past rises up and startles me.

I knew Alex back in The Day, when I was a free-range bohemian living in a VW bus in Bezerkeley.

Now, she's a master pickler, her shop is called the Cultured Pickle Shop. I wish she had her shop in Portland because I love real cultured veggies. I'll let the video speak for itself, great stuff.



Enjoy your blasts from the past,

Bp

[via the Good Reverend John Nathan B.]

Free books online, no joke

The Burgomeister's Books is a site where you can find scads of books for free.

The terms are completely reasonable. You can only download 5 books in a two week period. And when done, you nuke them from your hard-drive.

It's a free service, but the kind host does appreciate donations to keep it going.

Enjoy public access to goodies,

Bp

[via Canukistani Kate, illustration is The Librarian, by Guiseppe Arcimbolo, via Wiki Commons]

D.C. police chief denounces ‘cowardly’ iPhone users for monitoring speed traps

A wonderfully subversive idea -- use mobile internet devices to tag and warn about photo radar sites. The cops calling folks who use these apps "cowardly" is even better. I love it.

It does help folks avoid drunk driving stops as well, however, which isn't awesome in my book.

Enjoy the complexity of being amused,

Bp

[via Uncle Ted, photo credit in Mac Daily News article]

Ant mega-colony takes over world

Ok, I lifted that blog title directly from the BBC Earth News article, but it was so awesome I felt I had to.

The Institute of Jurassic Technology does tend to talk about the whole invasive/non-native situation in biology. It's an interest of mine. So this article really caught my attention -- as Argentine Ants are spreading world-wide, reaping havoc on local bug populations, like the Reavers of the insect world.

On to the study. In short, researchers pitted ants from different colonies around the world against each other in single ant-on-ant combat. This, of course, was couched in the guise of research but we all know it's exactly the same as fighting spiders in the schoolyard in dixie cups.

The ants from the largest colonies around the world refused to fight. They rubbed antennae and acted like old buddies. Meaning -- they are from the same colony.

This is intense, because that means that this is probably the largest expansion of one cooperative species on Earth outside Humanity itself.

Like humans, Argentine ants show a wide diversity and adaptability in their diet. According to this UC San Diego paper, they switch from being vicious predators to "farmers" of aphids and scale bugs once they are established.

Genius! Come in strong, settle down and start farms. Sound familiar? Like -- oh ancient Rome maybe?

Go Ants!

I mean -- how terrifying.

Enjoy seeing other species succeed using human-like tactics, even if it is kinda evil,

Bp

[via my faithful Canukistani operative "Yuri," photo credit in BBC Earth News article]

Laminar flow demonstration

This demonstration was filmed at the University of New Mexico in the physics department.

It doesn't matter that we don't really understand laminar flow, the video is only two minutes long, go for it.



Enjoy geekiness, even in instances where it may be useful in life,

Bp

[via my faithful Canukistani operative "Yuri"]

Margaret Wertheim: The beautiful math that links coral, crochet and hyperbolic geometry

The Ted Talks rock.

This talk starts off almost quaint -- a group of women crochet a coral reef as an art project. It is cool, it looks amazing. But then the presenter goes into the math of crochet, and the math of coral and Nudibranchs (maybe my favorite group of animals on the planet), and suddenly things get very interesting, very geeky and very deep.

By the end she's talking about The Institute for Figuring, and how mathematical thinking has gotten a bit too separated from reality and "things" and how thinking through playing with objects (like crochet and its connection, directly, to non-euclidian geometry) has enormous potential for widening human thought.

This is a long way of saying, watch the whole thing, it's only 18 minutes and it just gets deeper and more interesting as it goes along.



Enjoy the constant march,

Bp

Saturday Morning Awesome: Geek Hierarcy

See where you fit.

[image below is clickable, but this link gives additional options]



Enjoy knowing, finally, where you fit,

Bp

[via Muse]

Nettle Time -- Part 4, cooking

Now for the fourth and final installment about my first spring picking of Nettles -- recipes.

Here is the easy answer as to how to use fresh/parboiled nettles -- treat them like spinach.

Some recipes I tried were Nettle Quiche (top), and Sauteed Nettles.

The Nettle Quiche is very straightforward, I just used a basic quiche recipe and put some chopped, sauteed nettles into the mix with the cheese.




The Sauteed Nettles are simply onions cut thin, sauteed down until carmelized, then the parboiled, chopped nettles introduced into the pan with some salt and pepper and tossed until warm and coated with tasty onion oil goodness. The non-veg version is to cook bacon in the pan first, pour off most of the fat, keeping about 2 Tbs., then cook the onions and Nettles as above, but adding bacon bits into the mix. Mega tasty.

Although I used freshly-parboiled Nettles for the dishes pictured here, frozen ones work just dandy. The flavor is preserved, and if you were sparce with parboiling as I mentioned in Part 3, then the texture will be good as well.

The taste of the nettles was most apparent in the saute recipes, so if you are wanting to show off their unique flavor I'd go that route.

I found out that folks have been able to buy nettles at farmers markets lately, so you might want to check that option out if you don't have time to hit the woods but want to experiment with these greens.

Enjoy exploring wild foods this spring,

Bp

Nettle Time -- Part 3, freezing

Freezing is now my favorite way to store Nettles. The end product is versatile and super tasty.

Farmer Theo said that his frozen Nettles ended up weird, slimy and black. I was hoping that was due to over cooking, so my main goal was to parboil the nettles just long enough to make them edible, but not long enough to make the leaves break down. I succeeded.

This first picture is of my parboiling setup. I use a stainless steel stock pot with a pasta insert. I get the water (with a little salt added) to a roiling boil, full power, and dump the full pasta insert in with the nettles. I stir the nettles to make sure they're all exposed to the boiling water -- 30 seconds to 1 minute maximum. The closer to 30 seconds the better in my book.



Here is the finished parboiled product. Note the bright green stems and still-green leaves -- this is what you see when they are correctly boiled. None of the leaves are more than slightly wilted, and definitely none of them are a dark, blackish-green color. That is a sign of over-cooking.

At this point they are ready to eat, and we did eat plenty of them right out of the pot -- no salt, no butter no nothing. I really love the taste of these guys, it is like a flowery, mellow spinach flavor. Oh and here's something I learned the hard way -- don't store the newly-cooked greens in a big pile (say in a huge steel bowl) for very long, because they keep cooking and can over-cook. Spread them out to cool and get em bagged up as soon as you can.



For bagging up, I use a Food Saver Vacuum Machine. For the price it works dandy. You can see from the pictures that I leave a lot of empty space in the bags. That is because I re-use them if I've only stored vegtables in them. They are easy to clean (I throw them in the dishwasher -- mine doesn't have a heating unit in it to melt them) and the extra space keeps them a good useable size.

Anyway, there they are, labeled and dated and ready for the freezer. If vacuum sealed they should stay for 2+ years in the freezer. Having "only" picked 5 full grocery bags full of nettles (and drying 2 of them), we're almost out already. In my house at least, don't expect them to stay around too long.

In the 4th and final installment, I'll talk briefly about how I've used the fresh Nettles in cooking.



Enjoy storing up wild foods,

Bp