a man and his hoe

every day is a good day

Category: Reflections

  • More Signs of Spring

    EarlySpringB

    With the unseasonably warm weather and increasing length of the days, it’s impossible to step outside and not see new signs of spring each day. Daffodils are popping up and sweet daphne buds are bulging. It feels more like mid-February than January.

    EarlySpringA

    It’s a contrast from past Januaries, like January 2007 and 2012. The chickens don’t care much for the snow. They will put up with it, but the boys dream about days when the snow falls thick and fluffy. The deeper the snow, the more fun they have.

    Winter2007
    Winter2012

  • The Law of Beauty

    DyingTree1

    Deep in the woods, an alder has died. The mushrooms and mosses and ferns have moved in and are devouring it. But, even as they slowly turn the tree into dirt, they assiduously follow the law of beauty, one of nature’s preeminent principals. There’s Amalie Noether’s theorem, a fundamental tool of modern theoretical physics and the calculus of variations, which states that any differentiable symmetry of the action of a physical system has a corresponding conservation law. There are Newton’s laws of motion. There are the Einstein field equations, which describe the curvature of space-time due to mass-energy equivalent to the gravitational field. And on and on and on.

    Then there is the law of beauty, Nature’s dictum that whatever must be done must be done with beauty. The mosses and mushrooms and ferns flagrant display of beauty, as they perform the mundane task of dismembering the dead alder, illustrates this fundamental law of Nature. You could say that Nature has an addiction to beauty. The capitalists and industrialists and hedge fund managers which rule us are doing their utmost to make sure we never see this beauty. They are working feverishly to wipe out as much of nature’s beauty as possible. They’ve even gone so far as to turn on as many lights as possible at night, so that we can’t see the glorious stars and planets and milky way and other galaxies when the sun sets. Their insidiousness knows no bounds.

    All it takes is an alder dying in the woods to take heart that in some places at least, Nature’s law of beauty still prevails.

    DyingTree2
    DyingTree3
    DyingTree4

  • Common Things Can Be Amazing

    IsabellaTigerMoth

    In late fall, the Isabella Tiger Moth (Pyrrharctia isabella) caterpillars, called Woolly Bears, are crawling over everything. There are thousands of them just here. Yesterday, I noticed one crawling about already. I never knew how amazing these caterpillars were until today.

    These are northern climate moths. When their caterpillars emerge in the fall, they freeze solid in the winter. In the spring they thaw out and pupate. However, up in the arctic, where summers are so short, they can’t eat enough in one short season to develop to the state of turning into a moth. So they freeze the next winter, eat some more the next summer, and the cycle continues over many years. They’ve been known to live through 14 winters, until finally, they have eaten and grown enough over the short summers to turn into moths.

    Imagine freezing solid and thawing out every winter and spring for 14 years. I know of parents who would love to have children they could freeze over and over again.

    Close to home, the name of the nearby town of Sedro-Woolley is believed to have come from the Woolley Bear. The town formed in 1898 when the two neighboring towns of Sedro and Woolley Bug merged. Legend has it that the old town of Woolley Bug was named so because of all the Woolley Bears that were crawling around there. The town of Sedro got it’s name from the Spanish word for cedar, “cedro”. The man who named Sedro, Mortimer Cook, changed the c in cedro to s to make the name unique.

  • Solar Power Is Coming to A Man and His Hoe®

    SolarInstallation

    The crew from Banner Power Solutions began work yesterday on installing a solar power system on the garage. By next month we should be generating electricity and reducing our carbon footprint. They will be using solar panels made by Itek Energy, a company just twenty-two miles up the road in Bellingham, Washington. Their factory is close to Scratch and Peck, another great local company.

    Even the inverters used in the system will be from another nearby company, Blue Frog Solar in the pictoresque Viking city of Poulsbo. Instead of having a single inverter for the entire system, Blue Frog Solar inverters are small inverters with each solar panel getting it’s own inverter. This maximizes the power produced by the entire system. When a single inverter is used, the solar panel producing the least amount of power, determines the productivity of the entire solar array. With each solar panel getting it’s own inverter, electricity production is maximized, and it’s easy to determine which panel(s) may be having a problem.

    It’s been a longtime dream to do this, and now it’s finally happening. On to realizing more dreams. May you never run out of dreams.

  • The Beauty Within

    GlucokinaseMoleculeDelve into the mechanism of insulin, and you encounter the incredible beauty of protein molecules. They aren’t really these colors. The colors represent the different components of the molecules, but the fantastic shapes are real. It’s like your children took LSD and went crazy with your box of ribbons. The whole stuff of life is this fascinating dance of elaborate dancers, dancing through our bodies, performing all the intricate chemistry that keeps us alive. That’s a glucokinase molecule. There is as much beauty flowing through your blood as there is in any museum of modern art.
    DipeptidlyPeptide

    This fascinating protein is dipeptidyl peptidase-4 which is associated with immune regulation.

    Insulin

    This beauty is insulin.

    Glucokinase(hexokinase4)

    This is glucokinase hexokinase 4.