Lif Strand

There were some really wet winters in the central California coastal areas in the 1980s. We lived in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains east of Freedom CA, which were covered with Monterey pines and eucalyptus trees all 75 ft. and more tall.

The pines have really shallow roots, and during one particular storm we could see the ground moving as the trunks of the huge trees swayed in the wind. Our horses were freaked out. I went out to calm down one of our Arabian stallions, and was standing next to him in his pen when suddenly a two-foot diameter tree trunk was laying on top of the metal fence panel inches from my shoulder. The tree had fallen so silently that we had no warning. The stallion and I simply stood there, trying to comprehend what had just happened. To this day I have no memory of any sound but the wind, though the top rail of the fence panel was deeply bent!

That was a near miss, for sure, but we put off taking down the pines that were too close to structures until one fell down on a single-wide mobile home during another storm. Luckily no one was hurt in that incident either. Lesson learned: clear the land of trees near structures, no matter how much you think you need shade on your roof.

(Kudos to Powder River for their equine fence panels that we hauled all the way to New Mexico when we moved, because they were too good to leave behind).

Jay Angler wrote:
The idea of using solar collectors and fiber optic cables makes sense to me, as I don't think we really appreciate some of the nuances of real sunlight. It's the difference between "NPK  fertilizer" which hurts the biome, vs homemade compost tea. To make lights "more efficient", much of the range has been removed and focus is on the "essential to work" light wavelengths. Just because we don't know what goodness comes from the non-visible spectrum, doesn't mean it isn't important?

I think that DVDs or aluminum foil or whatever "found" reflective materials we might use would be great for bouncing light from the non-visible spectrum, but I know that glass (and many plastics) block at least the UVB rays needed for vitamin D production in humans. Metal bounces UVB rays better than regular mirrors due to the glass surfaces of mirrors. I'm guessing that this would be true of other non-visible spectrum lighting.

If the important thing is getting full-spectrum light into a building, then it has to somehow not have to go through glass or most plastics.  Google says good quality plastic greenhouse panels (clear polyethylene or polycarbonate) transmit the entire full light spectrum best, so to me the setup would be a sunroom attached to a building, with clear polyethylene or polycarbonate greenhouse panels. Then light that is bounced off of metal surfaces deeper into the house or other structure would be healthier for humans, critters, and plants.  

Pearl Sutton wrote:
The other things I like are carefully crumpled tinfoil behind glass, smooth foil with no glass, and dead CD and DVD disks. The DVDs change the scatter pattern a lot and soften the glare, and change the color.
The crumpled foil really spreads light around. Smooth foil doesn't do as well (I think it gets dirty fast) but still brightens up dark corners.

I would think that crumpled foil would work the way you are describing because it has many surfaces to reflect kind of like the DVD discs do. Now I'm thinking about some kind of a combination of aluminum can tiles with DVD discs. A work of art rather than merely functional.

Pearl Sutton wrote:What I'm looking at here is bouncing light around in a house...

I love that you are experimenting. That makes me want to experiment, too!

Now I'm thinking about what using a bunch of "tiles"made of aluminum cans  on a ceiling would do. Or the same on walls.

A kelly kettle (a.k.a. ghillie kettle) is really a kind of rocket stove, isn't it?

Northern lights (Aurora with bush)
So magical seeing the Aurora Borealis all the way down here in New Mexico... but then, this IS the Land of Enchantment.
(c) 2025 Lif Strand
#Gaia #PhotoArt #DailyPhoto #Aurora

r ranson wrote:

What the heck does "sound real" mean, anyway?

It's very well explained upthread.  Perhaps you missed it?

Never mind. It's just one more rule that I don't understand the logic for (I went to the very first post in this thread and immediately didn't get it). I often don't understand the reason for rules or the logic in how they're set up - this is obviously a me-problem and not a Permie problem. I will shut up.

Nancy Reading wrote:Real staff review the names here.
Picking another 'edge case' name after your first choice is rejected often doesn't go down well. Sometimes people are lovely and have no trouble with the name policy here though.

I am an unlovely person I guess. I think one big issue is that "edge case" is too much a matter of opinion. Permie FAQ says if you need to use a fake name, it should "SOUND real".  But what if Permie decides my real name is fake simply because you're unfamiliar with what it sounds like? What the heck does "sound real" mean, anyway?

If it's my birth name and everybody in my part of the world recognizes that name because it's a common one, but the spelling is weird to English language speakers because my name is e.g. a legit click language name, and if nobody on the Permies knows what it actually sounds like, then... it's rejected as fake?  

What is the purpose of this qualification in the first place? This is a text forum. We don't need to know what people's names sound like. We just need an identifier that is easy to read, don't we?

Burra Maluca wrote:This is couve galega, and it's Brassica oleracea. Nothing to do with goat's rue. It's one of the original brassicas to be domesticated and never had its perennial tendencies bred out. Probably older than anything currently labelled 'kale'. Every self respecting Portuguese garden has these growing just outside the back door. The lower leaves double as toilet paper.

Aha - translation issue. Thanks for the correction!

paul wheaton wrote:I like this general idea that this can be morphed into other zones, other conditions, other challenges ...   Before I can contemplate those, I guess I would like to ask... etc  

and then

paul wheaton wrote: What I really want to do is be able to say something like
      - spend 30 minutes gardening the way I tell you.  NO FUCKING VARIATIONS!  Obey my instructions or fuck off.

Well, THAT made me consider leaving permies, until I calmed down and went to page one of this thread, the first post, where I saw that you wrote " I want to start putting the idea out there and see if a dozen others out there wanna play with this thought experiment."

I did not read that original post before I read the fuck off comment. Now that I have read it, I understand the frustration. I just would like to remind you that I'm probably not the only person who didn't read the first post, and I assumed it was just like any other thread where it's a conversation, not a controlled thought experiment. Really, the frustration would be nonexistent if the title of this thread had been "THOUGHT EXPERIMENT: Automatic Backyard  Food Pump" and that every Paul Wheaton post in this thread reminded us what the point was, along with the request to stick with the stated purpose of the thought experiment.

With that, I will bow out of the whole thread.