Phil Stevens

Inside scoop on a real live book munching facility

It might be like chayote (choko) and require shorter day lengths to trigger flowering. I just picked another dozen chokos off the ground here and winter is nearly over. They only started dropping in June and they were flowering like mad in April and May.

Glenn Herbert wrote:"Exposed bedrock" can mean many things depending on the type of rock. Some like shale might be fairly easy to quarry or pull up chunks, while others like granite would be totally impractical to modify without specialist tools and knowledge... and a whole lot of energy :)

Did someone say they needed a little homemade black powder?

When I as at uni and worked in a lab, one of my jobs was to look after the hydroponic greenhouse where we grew the plants for tissue. As it happened, the standard soluble nutrient mix called for a lot of potassium nitrate, and there were many bags full of powdered sulfur to use on fungal oubreaks. I really couldn't say how much of those ingredients went unaccounted for, nor could I speculate on how I crushed a bunch of charcoal behind the apartment I lived in.

I only realised many years later that I should have invited my uncle over. He was a munitions tech in the Marines and did a little freelance work after he returned to civilian life.

The problem is the completely opposing use cases for Project Gutenberg, which scans the books and makes the text freely available, and the LLM trainers, who are only interested in ingesting the text for training their models. The source is preserved in the first example but turned into the semantic equivalent of Pink_slime in the second...all the meaning and context reduced to token representations that merely assign a statistical weight to the the order of combinations of letters.

It's not just the physical destruction of the rare books. It's the annihilation of the very meaning of the texts by feeding them into the models and reducing everything to numbers in a predictive algorithm.

Jay Angler wrote:

Eric Hanson wrote:...  Strangely, the only time I ever remember it being audible was when the sky was overcast.

I don't think that's strange at all - clouds can reflect light. I suspect they can reflect sound to some degree also?

OK, a quick bit of research implied that it isn't actually the clouds, but different layers of air at different temperatures slowing, speeding or focusing the sound. The clouds tend to form at different levels and are definitely affected by temperature.

Do we have any physicists out there who could explain this better? Is it actually a thing that works? I recall from my son's music classes that low notes travel further than high notes (which is also why fog horns are the tone they are.)

Clouds are often indicators of air layers that can reflect, refract, and focus sound -- especially low frequencies -- over surprisingly long distances. There is a large wind farm on the ridgeline close to where I live. The nearest turbines are only 2 km line of sight and there are more than 50 of them. When the wind is strong from the southeast a curved shear zone sometimes develops (basically a Nor'west_arch but from the opposite direction), and this acts sort of like one of those parabolic reflectors that you can use to eavesdrop on a conversation or listen for enemy aircraft. This produces an interference pattern at really low frequencies, so that I can go out in the paddock and, if I stand in certain spots, the sensation is pretty intense. It's felt rather than heard but it's a whole-body sensation, with period of about one WHUMP every 1.5 seconds. If I move just a couple of metres in any direction, it goes silent, but by shifting positions systematically I can pick it up again in many places, sort of in a checkerboard array.

I'm lucky in that it doesn't seem to appear inside the house, but have neighbours nearby who have a major issue at times.

Joao Winckler wrote:Been following Götsch's work for a while and it keeps showing up in unexpected places. The chopping and mulching in place idea sounds simple but trusting it takes time, especially when the plot looks a mess for a few months. Phil, curious what you've seen most improvement in, soil structure or water retention?

I haven't really done a lot of soil sampling yet. All the system improvements I'm noticing are at the broader scale, with the fertility increase in the understory and nearby alley cropping and pasture strips getting the benefits of shelter and more diversity at the edges. I take a lot of the prunings to make biochar, which isn't a "pure" syntropic agroforestry technique because those nutrients aren't being cycled right there. But I would still be getting that root dieback and renewal process, and keeping the trees in a cycle of youthful vegetative growth rather than letting them reach full size.

I'm sold on the concept and have been gradually implementing it more and more here.

Kia ora Geoff. Welcome to permies.

Syd Smith wrote:I think this will depend so much on other environmental factors that it would be hard to be universal about it. Tropical volcanic areas where soils form from rocks and ash quickly will be very distinct from arctic ones where soil formation is very slow. The styles of volcanism and volcanic products in a place like the Congo would be dramatically different from, say, Hawaiian or Icelandic volcanism.

Large parts of the North Island have volcanic soils or at least show the influence of past eruptions. Where I live there are tephra/ash deposits that show up in road cuts and quarry faces, and the clay component of our silt loams is partly the result of ash fall. Around Taupō there are layers of welded tuff and ignimbrite. Good luck getting anything to grow in that. The central plateau has huge expanses of deep pumice soils, which are somewhat fertile, with a goldilocks attribute of being free draining and still holding lots of plant-available water, but missing some essential minerals, which means if you want to graze livestock there you will have to supplement with elements like selenium and copper.

It's like a mosaic and the soil types can vary dramatically within a district. Just south of Auckland, which sprawls across a field of extinct "one-off" cinder cones, are the best market garden soils in the country. Gorgeous, deep red, crumbly, friable volcanic loam that grows just about anything you plant in it. But if you go to the northern fringe of the city it's a completely different story: kaolinite, a pale greyish clay derived from ash, sat underneath subtropical kauri forests for millenia and weathered to form something that's about as infertile as tropical laterite soils. One of my colleagues runs a food scrap composting project incorporating biochar and has completely transformed the soil in trial paddocks. She brought before and after samples to show off at our booth at the big agricultural field days in June and it was pretty amazing. One bucket was like brick and the other was dark, with crumb structure, worms, and that smell that says "I grow things."

Great article. I sort of got stopped near the end when they described one of the scientists holding some carefully collected fish. Think on that for a minute.