brad roon

Henry - so to you, UV-A is UV-B and UV - C.  It also isn't different from infrared. Let's just think a little bit. Of course i'm coming from advantage here in having read "FOUR ARGUMENTS AGAINST TELEVISION" by Jerry Mander in the 80. In that book, at one point he talks about a former banker named Melvin Ott who had his little desk lamp flourescent bulb die out. It was over a plant he kept on his desk. The only bulb his secretary could find to fit that lamp quickly, was a pink fluorescent bulb. Mr Ott noticed over the next weeks and months that the plant grew differently in that light. It actually grew out and away from the light source. He found this so fascinating he eventually quit banking and studied light.

He has been given honorary degrees for some of his findings. For example, there is a strain of lab mouse designed to develop cancer quickly, and when grown under pink fluorescent light, it's tail drops off and it gets cancer. Not under regular fluorescent lights. He found that children in schools under coolwhite fluorescent tubes have a much higher incidnece of ADD/ADHD.

In the Civil War an American doctor from the north did healing with colored glass through sunlight. That was taken much further by a NY City police airplane pilot named Dinshah. He developed Spectro-Chrome light healing system which has been used to heal people "impossibly". In the 1920s one little girl with 2nd degree burns over her torso and down her legs had a specific light spectrum used on her, and she ended up not only surviving (treatment of the day was lock them somewhere quiet and let them die with morphine) She ended up not only surviving, but surviving without scars.

Today they are using specific laser light frequencies to repair some damage in the macula, there are K-class lasers which penetrate skin and heal wounds and over time, repair arthritic issues.

But, light is light. So why don't you light your home with lasers? Or fire. Same thing.

Please remember that having too much LED light in your life destroys your macula and WILL eventually make you blind.

CFLs not only have mercury, less light than incandescents, don't last as long as advertised - but they have a deep blue spectrum. Using this at night fakes your body into thinking it is still daylight out - and so your melatonin and sleep cycle becomes disrupted.

The light CLOSEST to actual sunlight IS the incandescent. So-called "full spectrum" and grow lights miss significant portions of the light spectrum (worse than incandescents) and have huge spikes at other frequencies. Look up Dinshah...

Use them of course, in moderation - but keep yourself in the sun because i think we are humanly solar powered to greater degree than we'd thought.

i'm convinced that hate is a very inefficient form of love.

Say that for some belief conflict - i hate someone. They despise permaculture, say. So i argue, i yell, i discuss, i bring proof, i.... you know what you do when you have to convince your important peeps - you do what you can to have them not make your life harder in permaculture.

As they learn something and start to mellow out - you (i) don't hate them so strenuously. As they understand the sanity of permaculture more and more (or Buddhism, or whatever floats your boat) you find their veiwpoints more in line with what you believe. They don't upset you nearly as much, nor you them. Soon you are at the level where you can discuss instead of preach and rant. If they end up going so far as to start studying and practicing permaculture - they become friends, and perhaps dear friends.

Look at all that time and energy we spent hating them and working SO HARD to turn them into people whom we would find it easy to love.

If i were halfway awakened, i'd just start loving those people that irritate me and then see if we can meet on the discussions and thought levels....

Thanks back at you prabhu. Namaste'

If the logs are narrow the splitting really isn't an option. i've done mostly red oak in WVa/Appalachia - and you want "huggers" a trunk section you can put your arms around and hopefully not touch fingers. With most woods you have to split roughly in half and then half and then half, and work them in your riving brake - reasonably hard work once you break the blanks down to that thickness. If you did something the size of say your larger timber logs there - you'd end up with about 4 inch shingles i'm guessing - by the time you split off the sapwood. Sapwoon never has as many tannins as the heart - but teak might have enough tannins in the sapwood to have some preventative effect - never worked with it and haven't bothered looking it up in Hoadley's book to see - since i will ONLY get to use tiny pieces on our sailboat at most, lol.


Outside the tropical jungles - Appalachia has more tree species than anywhere else on earth - and we had multiple trees with good preservative properties. One of the best going was Yellow or Black Locust - but it frequently had carpenter ant holes through it. 40 yrs as fence post, then pull and flip it. The American chestnut was king until the blight. 70 years as fence post and flip for 70 more. i'd be shocked if there were no other weather resistant woods available unless they have all been cleared for industry and farms and stuff. Just your luck, the only thing that would replace the teak might be Rosewood which is likely even more expensive, lol. The Walnuts - black - in the US are quite resistive. In Indiana a sill log - in contact with the soil directly for 150 years - was hewn into a letter "L" shape and the joists were pegged onto the hollow part. The sapwood had rotted off in the first years, the sill logs were fine 150 yrs later. Since the "english" walnut is actually from the middle east, perhaps some of that family sharing similar phytochemical resistance is around somewhere. (Grow as big as your thumb and then no higher than 6 feet, lol.)

Good luck with your project. With you in spirit.

Om Namo Bhagavate Vahsnudevaya.

b

i'm loving this. Was a Vaisnava for a little while on New Barsana in Western Colorado farm - and some of the best, most peaceful times in my life were my reading to the devotees as they ate lunch in the sun around the root cellar on the farm. i've also done living history - was a 1700s woodworker and back-up blacksmith at a 1700s era refuge fort in the early 80s. Had my own shaving horse, broad axe, carpenter's adze (toe adze) etc. Split enough shingles with a froe and riving knife to roof many squares of roof.

Your pitch is really steep in the drawing - looks to be about 14 or more - 16?  Regardless - there is no need to plane the wood - best would be a rough sawn cut and let the gravity do the work. When you plane you have more cell walls cut through. That makes them more susceptible to rot, molds, mildews, etc. Broken cell walls allow the exterior moisture in more easily and they expand more easily, contract more easily. The strongest would be splitting as almost all cells will remain intact. Next best would be a rough sawn shingle. Least desirable from the wood standpoint - and it adds extra time and processing - is the planing. If you nick your blades that shortens their lives too. i personally don't like wasting steel, and i have enough equipment left over from when i built million dollar houses in SW Colorado mountains that i own multiple sets of planer blades. And a sharpener for them. But i would not ever consider what you're talking about.

Before i did that, i'd rig up some sort of depth controlled v-groove maker that i pulled toward me. Think good high carbon steel with a v-shape, a cross piece that would prevent the chisel tip digging in (being sawn - SOME of that wood grain will pull you up, some down and you may rip it deeper than you want if you aren't real careful to follow the grain in your shingle blanks, or you hit knotty or wild grain, or compression wood, or...)

Well, i'm loving it. Always been afraid to go to India because i'm afraid i'd never want to come back.

brad

`My wife and i went through similar during the 80s when we moved off the grid into the backwoods of West Virginia for ten years. My family was basically in Chicago (boo chi-town) and hers was in Northern Calif. Needless to say, visiting was virtually impossible.

That said - and assuming it is POSSIBLE for you to visit, even if it is a great inconvenience, i really think you need to stop lying to them.

Telling them you are SICK??? Well - THERE'S a great advertisement for the health of your lifestyle - and i'm guessing health and such are important parts of your reasons to live this way in reality.

Maybe there is some parallel situation they may be able to relate to - jetting off to Hawaii or Borneo several times per year and spending thousands on accomodations....i don't know. It should reflect their dream and show the difficulty of incessant output on your part.

That's my two cents.  They tried to get us to come on out, but while i love my family, there is a reason we moved so far away - and raising our kids OUR way (as not being possessions, or teaching them to fulfill some dream i didn't catch, or....) was a critical aspect. We just wanted to do it in the woods and raise our food.

My ideal was to move cabinets back from the kitchen window about 18" each side, and build a series of shelves of brass, that gently slope to the window and slightly toward the person washing the dishes. You can use non-lead solder for this i suspect. Each shelf would be connected with brass tubing - bent, and on each tube would be wires and hammered decorative leaves - grape or whatever floats your boat. The tubes would drain each shelf into the drain line back along the counter - probably make the lowest shelf a single back drain.

Then i'd stack the dishes there - they'd be back from the window about six inches so it wouldn't feel claustrophobic, and if i didn't put them away it would still look reasonably cool. You could make the brass drain tubes look like any sort of vine thing that you preferred, really, or why stick with vines? i just think it would look bitchin' - and wash, rinse, stack, do something.

Hey - carbon from trees is way different from carbon from petro and coal that has been locked up for a really long time. Therefore it really isn't the same animal at all, if one even wants to pretend that man made CO2 is really the cause of climate change.
Personally i think it's imperative to get rid of the bad energy systems now extant, but for a multiplicity of reasons, and carbon isn't high on the priority list. There, but nowhere near the top.
Did any of this calculation figure in the energy costs (in carbon if that is your measurement) needed to drill, refine, transport the gas/diesel, etc? You could go back to the energy necessary to make the huge amount of refinery infrastructure, tools, etc. Chainsaw is a tad less than a refinery and trucking/tank farm set up, lol.

Personally i'm more worried about the petro runoff killing our plankton/cyanobacteria and it's having reduced more than one-third of our poor planet's oxygen production - yup - to now get your #35 oxygen each day you now have to work 50% harder. Hmmm. Not good. Plus virtually every petro is an endocrine disruptor - which damages in a non-monotonic and non-linear manner at levels in the parts per BILLION - frequently MORE at the lower ranges than in the higher many parts per million, believe it or not. There is science on this, and nothing says we have to treat everything like Paracelsus concluded prior to 1543, lol.

Amadean and Alfrun

A ketogenic diet - reduced glucose/starches/carbs from grains etc - and replacing some of that with a medium chain triglyceride like a good quality coconut oil has REVERSED Alzheimers in multiple people. It also has producee many anecdotal reports of reduced MS, ALS, etc. Neural issues all.
By reducing the carbs less glucose/glycogen is produced. Then the brain fires with ketones at about six times the efficiency. The fats repair the myelin sheathing (indicated in all alzheimers, MS, Lou Gehrigs, and many other issues) AND repairs synapses.
Lowfat/no fat diets are horrible for our bodies. We NEED cholesterol - not just for the hormones used everywhere for almost every biochemical aspect, but they are powerful anti-oxidants, necessary for (LDL here) Vitamin D3 manufacture in the skin to prevent 20+ cancers, etc.

Medicinal mushrooms are great, but like all dietary stuff, the more angles one can deal to a problem the better YOUR individual biochemistry will use the correct stuff in the correct way for you. Oh - carpal tunnel. Most don't know this but about 90% of the people w/carpal tunnel have had their neck injured - think the C6 or C7? Consider chiropractic with a barter if possible.

Friend in N Cal goes to Oakland and teaches people about mushrooms. Been doing it for about 3 decades. While not a PhD or anything - he (they) DID teach a person with a Masters in Biology with an emphasis on mycology how they could functionally and easily grow a variety of mushrooms without the million $$$$ sterile lab environment.

Ray and Patty - really, really good people here, so be nice and tie into their facebook group. You'll learn more than you knew you didn't 'know. Or whatever.

www.mushroommaestros.com/classes/attend-a-class/