Jonathan Krohn

Heather Sharpe wrote:

Jay Angler wrote:OK, now I'm curious - anybody know *why* these things glow under UV light? Is there some evolutionary benefit, or is it just left-over genes from when we all lived in the ocean?

I wonder that too! One thing I recall reading about why it supposedly shows up lice or mites is that they have chitin in their exoskeletons. Though I wonder if that really is it, because I shone the light on a wolf spider, who presumably also has chitin in its exoskeleton and saw no fluorescence. On the other hand, fungus also contain chitin and those definitely fluoresce strongly.

Looking this up, I found this article, which also has some beautiful arthropod photos under UV light:

https://www.wired.com/2013/11/arthropods-are-having-a-secret-rave/

A couple of relevant or otherwise humorous quotes from the article:

'Short answer: we don't really know for a lot of these animals [why they glow under UV light]. For non-scorpions, a lot of the literature is pretty much summarized as "Whoa, Dude! It Glows!" '

"Two compounds are involved in scorpion UV fluorescence: beta-carboline and 4-methyl, 7-hydroxycoumarin. You might recognize coumarin as a common plant compound, and it's often used as a perfume or in cinnamon flavors. I do not advise sniffing or licking a scorpion to see if they taste like a Cinnabon, though."

Pearl Sutton wrote:
Might be able to wax some of the cotton bags. Open them up, wax, then resew the seam.

I would think it might be easier to figure out a way to keep the two sides of the bag from touching while coating in beeswax than it would be to resew after coating. The two sides could be touching while you were adding the beeswax, you'd just have to separate them while cooling. Maybe insert a wire cooling rack, or hang it open over a couple metal utensils, like you would for drying a ziplock bag.

amy escobar wrote:So, this is old, but has anyone supplied some decent evidence yet? Did anyone win the $1000 gift card?

Yes, but my evidence didn't show the desired results, so the prize went poof. Sort of like most research nowadays - to keep your funding your results have to support the donors' desired conclusions!

Hi Travis, thanks for the further story about your last couple years there, financials, and your plans for this year. I hope you do well with the markets this year! I'm looking forward to hearing how it goes!

Jonathan

Travis Schulert wrote:
I built a greenhouse for around 90 dollars. Used salvage wood and bought the pvc and plastic. I will make another post this weekend and put a link into this thread about how i did this cheap greenhouse.

...

We made almost 10k up front from our csa, that will def get debt paid off quicker.

Hi Travis, thanks for the various posts! I just read your greenhouse post. Thanks much for the reports from the field! My family has been discussing some sort of hoophouse or caterpillar tunnel (Jean-Martin Fortier's term) recently, so it's great to hear what others are trying.

If you don't mind some prying from someone who is hoping to make a living farming in the next few years, was the 10k your first year gross income or net profit? I've been reading a lot about farming as a business and will be interning with a farm this summer, so I'm curious what your initial financial results have been, if you don't mind sharing.

Thanks!

I got logged out of my account a couple days ago and again today (I didn't tell it to keep me logged in), so I got to view the forums from an "outsider's" perspective. I recall reading earlier in this thread about how the eyeball button (hide categories) and the page navigation buttons within long threads (Page 1, Page 2...,) were going to be handled, and at the time I thought it sounded like a bad idea to basically make these "premium" (i.e., logged-in) features. Now that I've experienced it without those options again, I think it's a really bad idea, especially on the page navigation buttons. This is not a "premium feature": it's basic functionality that is always assumed - until you run into the strange permaculture website where they violated the principle. Please put page navigation buttons at both the top and bottom of each page (where it's relevant, I mean) for everyone, regardless of whether they're logged in or not. For your own sake, please don't try to ignore this standard. If you think it will encourage people to sign up/log in, it won't. It'll work for some existing members (because the alternative will be painful to use). It will also backfire for some members and discourage them from using permies. And for visitors who aren't yet members, they'll just assume that you forgot to include some important features, or that you didn't have a real developer to design the site. I don't think that will benefit permies in any way either short- or long-term.

The other thing I noticed when I went to log back in was that afterwards it redirected me to the forums home page, not the page I was on and wanted to reply to (I think this was mentioned before, too). I didn't think this was a hard feature to set up in the forum design (it's pretty standard on web forums), and it would make the forums a lot more usable. As it was, I had to go back two pages in my history to the thread I was viewing, and then refresh the page and wait for it to load before I could hit the reply button.

Thanks for looking into these!

Got both on Gmail.

Jonathan

And I see that the "What is a fair price per acre for land?" thread has 180695 views, 1 apple, and 1 post like, and it's ranked at 182 apples. And I liked two of your posts above, and now this thread is ranked at 1 apple.

Actually, I really like this idea of ranking based on page views and likes, since those are received a lot more easily than apples. So this ranking will be based largely on what average users think, not just on how the 94 rank things.

Though I still think that using apples to mean two different things is a bit confusing.

Jonathan

So number of apples is based on several factors, one of which is number of apples. Got it.

In seriousness, though, that sort of multi-factor ranking makes a lot more sense than anything I had thought of. Thanks!