Phil Stevens

Welcome to permies, Olabiyi! I have a small amount of land, similar to yours, and have been applying permaculture and agroforestry principles for many years. We have a cool temperate climate here, so many of the species and methods that are working for me won't be applicable to your location. But I do have bananas and taro growing, and maybe someday I can try to grow cacao.

The problem with AI-generated graphics is that they totally miss the picture. That farmer should be a multinational corporation, and the above ground scene should be huge pivot irrigators, not bucolic barns.

Just ran across this article from 2010 about the "secret sauce" in the mortar of the Great wall:

Article on sticky rice in GW lime mortar

Hi Erika, and welcome to permies. I think that floor will be fit for purpose as long as you're prepared to do the occasional patch when something heavy gets dropped. If anything that goes in there has narrow legs, they will probably need "coasters" to stand on so that they don't make divots in the surface. It should be really nice underfoot...way better than standing on concrete.

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.