Please forgive me for this political agenda on my gardening blog

I hope you will take the time to read this essay Ive written. It describes the systematic failure of our political system.

The Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) of 1972 required candidates to disclose sources of campaign contributions and campaign expenditures. It also limited spending on media advertisements. But that portion of the law was ruled unconstitutional — and that actually opened the door for the Citizens United decision. This was a step forward for equality and transparency of our elected officials. But the very powerful very rich were still in pursuit of more control and contrived a treacherous plan to deceive us by suing in two important cases.

In 2010 the US Supreme Court ruled on the Citizens United vs Federal Election Commission and gave corporations and unions the right to spend unlimited sums on ads and other political tools. Its important to note that the Citizens United decision was about spending, not about contributions. This did not affect contributions. For that they created what is know as "independent-expenditure only committees" such as Speechnow.org which represent spending by individuals, groups, political committees, corporations or unions expressly advocating the election or defeat of clearly identified federal candidates.

In 2010 the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals also issued its ruling in the Speechnow.org v. FEC which removed contribution limits as applied to SpeechNow. Previously the courts had ruled that limits set by the Federal Election Campaign Act applied to this group called SpeechNow. It is still illegal for companies and labor unions to give money directly to candidates for federal office, but together with the Supreme Court’s earlier Citizens United decision allowing unlimited corporate expenditures, the SpeechNow ruling was just what the ultra wealth needed to create a government controlled by "Political Action Committees" (Super PAC) where most of the funding comes from just a few rich individuals.

The Supreme Court kept limits on disclosure in place, and super PACs are required to report regularly on who their donors are. The same can’t be said for “social welfare” groups and some other nonprofits, like business leagues leaving another loop hole for the billionaire industrialist Koch brothers to create a nonprofit called the “Association for American Innovation” that will act as a hub for funneling undisclosed spending towards the Kochs’ political projects.

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is another "Business League" which allows corporations and wealthy individuals to use congressmen as lobbyist and collaborate on bills, often presenting industry-backed legislation as a grass-roots organization. It brings Republican state legislators and big corporations together to frame right wing legislative agendas in the form of model bills.

In November we will have an opportunity to vote on reversing the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court ruling for Citizens United. Please vote.

As you know I am an advocate of the https://mayday.us/ superPac. Its time we used their trickery and corrupt laws against them and put an end to "Political Action Committees" (superPAC) . Jim Rubens is the only Republican running for Senate that supports Campaign Reform, but there must be others who would like to get back to running the country rather than spending 70% of their resources on being re-elected. If we persist we can make this happen. Please contribute to Mayday.us

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Epic Adventurer Thinking something actually happened

Something actually happened!

I did something.

I secretly fed a duck and a turtle in a park near a hospital (Where there are "please dont feed the wildlife" signs, but I picked at the bark and leaf litter on the ground, and fed other bits of the wildlife to the other wildlife, so I figure...

Wheres the crime?

anyway... they looked hungry and made pleading sounds, so I fed them some other things

but I guess I DID feed them things that (if I could read exoskeleton facial expressions) looked very frightened, and screamed in utter misery the entire time...

But anyway...

after that, and more importantly, I have more stuff in my brain that I did the other day.

and that feels a little odd

Its been a while.

Ive had a tummy ache.

They thought C17H19NO3 might help so gave me lots of it for ages.

Lately it feels like theres been a eighteen month slow leak of stuff from my brain rather than the thing I was going to say but forgot a bit...

So Ive got that going for me.

But today I continued on from the other day, and actually finished some work on my solar boat that may have actually got me a little closer to something.

Which is nice.

It doesnt sound like a lot. To anyone who hasnt tried to make a trailers wiring communicate with a cars wiring it wont sound like a lot, but if you have, and you know either something, or nothing about electronics, youll know that having your brake lights strobe when you turn left is actually a reasonabe outcome. At the very least, the person behind you knows that something is about to happen, and they should probably change lanes and get as far away as they can.

Not such a bad outcome as far as safety is concerned.

But what works even better is a system that uses the correct lights where they are appropriate!

Who knew!

But the best part, is that I wired it up, hot glued it in place, plugged it in...

And it actually worked.


Today at least, physics does my bidding.


120ThingsIn20Years - Bam!

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Photography Hack a macro lens from a zoom lens

I decided to make a more permanent macro lens.

The improvised one here was just too crazy to use. Everything had to be held together with tape, string, and luck.

It turns out its pretty easy to hack a macro lens, if you already have a short zoom lens you dont need.

There are a lot of canon kit lenses that came with the cameras floating around out there for only a few dollars. The best price I saw was $3.98 US.

The lens Im using is a canon EF 35-80mm zoom. I got it for free from someone who paid around $5 for it in Japan.

 The first step is to find some screws that might let you get inside.

The object here is to remove the front lens element.

My screws were found under a sticker, but different lenses hide the screws in different places.

Removing the sticker revealed 3 screws.

The sticker is useless after you remove it, so dont try this unless you want the change to be permanent.

Thats the wrinkled corpse of the sticker in the background.

Undo the screws.

This allows the top lens element to be removed.

This lens cluster does the focusing as far as I can tell.

At this point you can take a macro shot, but the lens will leak a lot of light onto your censor. The black plastic surround covers a gap between the outer lens casing, and the inner sleeve that controls the zoom.

In my lens, it wasnt possible to remove the lens from the plastic surround, so I had to cut it off.

If you were trying to do this as a temporary thing, and wanted to try it before you commit, all you need to do is cover the lens front with something light proof with a hole around 2cm in diameter in the centre.

Im guessing gaffer tape would work well.



The main thing is to create a cover for the gap between the outer casing and the inner zoom sleeve.

The lenses are of no use, but the plastic surround is very useful, because it has a screw thread to take filters.

A clear glass filter, or a UV filter will be the thing that keeps dust out of the lens.

The large black plastic thing is the bit we are keeping.

There was an extra hole that I filled with a screw to keep everything light tight.

A clear glass filter, and its all done.












The results are pleasantly surprising. The original lens could zoom into around 6cm in width. This is closer to 1cm.

The focus ring no longer does anything, but the zoom still zooms. 

There are two ways to focus. 

Moving the camera or the subject until the scene is in focus is where you start. The distance from the lens that the subject needs to be is only around 5cm. Once you have the subject roughly in place, you can use the zoom to change the point thats in sharp focus. 

The zoom also works as a zoom, and changes the field of view between 12mm and 25mm from one extreme to the other. ie at full zoom (as per the shot of the pencil, you can fill the frame with a 12mm object)

All in all, not quite as functional as a proper zoom lens, but for $5 it represents a pretty good compromise, and something Id call a total success.

120 Things in 20 years - If canon just made the front lens element removable, I wouldnt have needed to do this lens hack to convert a zoom lens to a macro. 

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Wheelchair Gardening

Rolling Thunder crossing the Memorial Bridge in Washington D.C.
Cristiano Del Riccio, 2009
With this weekend being Memorial Day weekend, I have been thinking about relatives, friends, and co-workers who have served in our armed forces, and the many veterans who survived combat but must use wheelchairs to get around.

There are times, thankfully brief, when Ive been wheelchair bound. But I got to thinking about what Id have to do to convert my aquaponics greenhouse for wheelchair accessibility.

Pros for accessibility:

• The grow beds are raised already
  
• Grow media (hydroton or expanded shale) are easy to work
  

Accessibility considerations:

• Ensure walkway is paved and level
  
• Ensure walkway is wide enough for chair to pass (36" or 915 mm)
  
• Ensure there are places where a wheelchair can turn (60"x60" or 1525 mm x 1525 mm)
  
• Ensure ramps are no more than 1:12, with 1:16 to 1:20 preferred
  

To modify my current garden for wheelchair access, I would need to eliminate all piping, cords, and boards that cross the walkway. I would also need to increase the width of the walkway to 36 inches. A 12 ft. by 10 ft. greenhouse would easily accommodate my current system, along with vertical grow towers, in a configuration that could be easily negotiated by a gardener in a wheelchair.

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Photography New to me Canon EOS 20D camera

My new camera is a lot like my old camera in so far as they both take pictures, and they are both 8 megapixel cameras.

But after that they diverge a bit.

The Sanyo Xacti that Ive been using for the last 1300 photos Ive taken was gifted at me by someone (Thanks anonymous company) when I really needed a replacement because all the point and shoot digital cameras Ive bought to make this blog (I think its 3 now) fall over just after 5000 happy snaps.

5000 seems like a lot when I put it in print, but in terms of time, that equates to less than a year per camera.  Sure they cost less than AU$100, but I still want more than a year out of anything I buy.

This one that Ive been using is still going strong, and does a pretty good job of it I suppose, but I found the interface very heavy going.

It has quite a few options and features, but all of them have to be accessed via a clunky multi-level menu system. That means that every time you want to do anything other than what its set to do now, you have to explore a stack of menus to finally find what you need, and by the time youve found it, the ladybird has finished eating its aphid, and flown away.

My new camera on the other hand is a zillion times better to work with. Ive only had it for around 10 hours, but it already feels comfortable.

Its taken around 1200 pictures so far in its life.

I have very greasy fingers.

Im eating zucchini and haloumi fritters.

Delicious.


The new camera is a Canon 20D. It was originally sold for around AU$1500 (Australian dollar) in 2004, and was described as a "semi-professional" or "prosumer" camera at the time, which of course means substantially more than other imaginary words and their associated imaginary metrics.

But on the whole, the camera rocks.

Thats my official rating out of 5.

It has a 4 GB CF memory card, which is the size of a bulky circa 2012 64GB mp3 player, and that cost around the same as a bulky circa 2012 64GB mp3 player. It takes a while to transfer photos, but it has very nice functionality, and best of all has an interface that works.

It also comes with some nice lumps of glass in the lens. It seems to be the lens that lets down lots of little point and shoot cameras. The quality of the photos taken by my new 8 megapixel camera is a lot better than those Ive taken with an 8 megapixel point and shoot style camera.

The second lens feels a bit like it might blow away, but at $10 its a very nice thing to have around.

The camera came with a Canon 18-55mm f3.5 image lens, with image stabalizer. Ive just discovered I love image stabalizing. Image stabalizing allows you to be a bit shakey, and have the lens do some stuff to fix it.

As I understand it, there are exactly two ways to do image stabilizing.

• 1. Project an image onto the censor, so that the image is a little larger than the censor, and the image has some extra image in the margins. Then have the camera track your shakey projection, and then use magic or software or something to knit together a nice crisp image.

• 2. Track some points on the image, and move the lens around a bit so that any given point on the censor always sees the same bit of the image, or move the censor to achieve the same thing.

• 3. Use gyroscopes mounted on at least two axes to resist the movement of the entire camera. Things spinning around like to keep doing it. If you take the tire off your bike (stop first) and hold the axle while someone else spins it as fast as they can, it becomes difficult to change the angle its on. This is why a spinning top (do they still have those?) stays upright, and is simply due to the universe being an amazing place.

Amazing!

The camera shows its age through its 8 megapixelness, as at the time of writing, thats about 16 megapixels short of where it should be.

I bought it from a second hand camera store in Japan for $150 with the Canon 18-55mm zoom, and I got the second lens, a Tamron 100-300 zoom, for $10 from the bargain bin.

Thanks Tom.

Toms a friend of mine.

Hes really good at buying way too much camera gear from junk bins. His hobby includes buying those instamatic film cameras that were big in the 70s. He likes to buy them when they have rolls of film still in them so he can process the film. In some subtle way, thats slightly different from buying some old photos.

Which is nice.

For him.

Hes kind of a time traveller, but he only gets to look, and doesnt get to choose what he looks at.

Mostly he gets to look at darkness.

Sometimes darkness, but with slightly mouldy edges.

Luckily, I dont suffer from collecting things other than my collection of odd people I know.

Toms one of my favourites.

Thanks Tom.




120 Things in 20 years - One of the best parts about getting my new, second hand Canon 20D camera, was getting to look at the Japanese supermarket junkmail it was packed in. Its been 20 years since I was in Japan, and the junkmail paper is now of even better quality.

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We has bluegills and shellcrackers!!

FishWagon, aka Arkansas PondStockers

Spending $10 for less than a pound of catfish on Thursday increased my appetite for buying my outdoor fish.

I knew the Fish Wagon [aka Arkansas PondStockers] was going to be at the Manassas Southern States Coop Friday. So I went for it. I picked up 25 hybrid bluegills, 50 redear, and a pound of minnows - all for less than $60. I plan to pick up a handful of catfish in a month or two, when Ive got the 300 gallon tank in place.

I know Im doing it all backwards. But having the fish in the tank, crying out for the greenhouse to be built, has made clearing a couple of trees an emergency. Mere planning for a greenhouse would have allowed the hard tree-clearing part to get delayed for weeks, months, years.

Trees are down now, with a small bit of bad news. Apparently my greenhouse cant be taller than the brick wall at the end of my property. Which would make the greenhouse, I dont know, like 48" tall. The lady purveying the unhappy news did make some helpful suggestions that might work, though. And my greenhouse design can be scaled to whatever height is allowed.

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Making smoked foods Brining and smoking

It seems that brining is really important.

Its soaking food in a salt water solution.

Gratuitous smoked rib shot from last night

From here on in, it gets a little hazy.

Last night I made a brine of water sugar and salt. Id tell you the proportions, but I dont know what they are. It started with a half cup of rock salt and a half cup of brown sugar, and around two litres of water. But then I added some more water so I really have no idea.







Luckily, my recipe or lack there of isnt the point of this post.

This is...

Apparently brining initially adds salt to the cells in the food, then when the solution is a bit depleted, a cell might have more salt than the surrounding brine, so it starts to draw in water. From what Ive read, it might be worthwhile to figure out when that transition takes place, and remove the brine once the cells have started to turn towards taking on water, and replace it with a flavoured liquid instead of just the brine.

With this in mind, I spent a reasonable amount of time probing my whole chicken in brine with the probes of my multi-meter.

Its been an odd night.

It stands to reason that the changing salt content might change the resistance of the chicken. Resistance measures how conductive something is. Im pretty sure salt water conducts better than pure water, and less sure that perhaps pure water might not conduct electricity much/at all. Either way, there might be something useful to be gained from sticking probes into chicken.

Wikipedia says this on the subject (on conductivity, not on probing chickens)...

--------------------------------

from...  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purified_water#Electrical_Conductivity

Electrical Conductivity

Electrical conductivity of ultra-pure water is 5.5 × 10^?6 S·m^?1 (18 M? cm in the reciprocal terms of Electrical Resistivity) and is due only to H⁺ and OH^- ions produced in the water dissociation equilibrium.^[7][8] This low conductivity is only achieved, however, in the presence of dissolved monoatomic gases. Completely de-gassed ultra-pure water has conductivity of 1.2 × 10^?4 S·m^?1, whereas upon equilibration to the atmosphere it is 7.5  × 10^?5 S·m^?1 due to dissolved CO₂ in it.

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Im not really sure why it says that. Im guessing it means something to someone, but I think its roughly agreeing with me.

So...

With this in mind, it might be possible to detect the point at which the food stops taking in salt, and starts taking in moisture.

Currently Im at the stage in my research where I find it annoyingly difficult to get a good reading. The harder you press the probes, the better chicken conducts. Im guessing this is just because theres more chicken exposed to the current, because theres more probe exposed to the chicken.

So for my next trick, Il be concentrating on the brine and its conductivity because I can completely submerge the probes, and as a result, I might get more consistent readings.

Im also at two more stages.

One is not being sure what I should be looking for in the readings. ie how whats happening should effect the conductivity of the readings.

And the other is wondering if perhaps I should just have a bit of a lie down, and forget the entire episode.




120 Things in 20 years - Maybe the reason aliens are always probing things is because they are trying to ascertain the correct procedure for brining and smoking everything. Aliens like making smoked foods.

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