a man and his hoe

Big Data – Small Data

October 14, 2015

There is a lot of talk about big data, about companies processing vast quantities of data to do whatever. Big data is nothing new, even to mice and chickens. They all do big data. Each of us has been doing big data forever. Our brains handle vast amounts of data. An average person has 100 billion neurons, each of which is connected to a thousand or more neurons, all sending data back and forth. There is a constant stream of data flowing through our neurons, processing gigabytes of information all the time.

In every cell of our body, there is a copy of our entire genome, over 3 billion base pairs of information, about a third of a gigabyte of date. We have between 10 and 100 trillion cells in our body, so we have anywhere from 3.5 to 35 trillion gigabytes of data just in all the copies of our genome in our body. Our bodies do big data very well.

It makes my use of these wireless sensor tags seem like very small data, insignificant data. They’re still a lot of fun. They’re what I’ve been looking for. I’ve wanted to know at any time, how hot is the compost pile? What’s the temperature in the hoop house? What’s the temperature in the garden?

These wireless sensor tags work with a tag manager you put on your home network. A single tag manager can monitor up to 255 tags. The tags are not waterproof, so you need to protect them if you’re going to use them where they might get wet. They’ll work from hundreds of feet away.

I have them hanging in the hoop houses, in a pipe inside the compost pile, in the chicken yard, and elsewhere. Every five minutes, they send the current temperature and humidity wirelessly. You can have them send this information from every 30 seconds to up to once every 4 hours.

You can monitor the tags from your computer, your cell phone, or your iPad. You can also graph the temperature and humidity over time. And you can get notifications if the temperature gets out of a specified range. For example, in my compost piles, I need to know when the temperature gets up to 170ºF. Compost piles that hot are going anaerobic and need to be turned. Whenever my piles get to 170ºF, I’ll get an email so I can attend to them immediately. It’s small, but very helpful data.
Fall’s Beauty Comes in Tiny Bits

October 14, 2015

It’s a crisp fall morning, mist rising off the cold ground. In the woods, fall’s beauty lies gently on soft blankets of moss. There’s so much wonder hidden in the woods, that you best forget about looking at the time. Some leaves fall on the ground. Others have the good fortune of landing on a cushion of soft moss. There is so much beauty in every square foot of woodland. And when you think about it, most of the beauty in a forest is never seen by any human. It’s just for the birds, the foxes, the rodents, and smaller creatures to enjoy.
Kindling

October 12, 2015

Kindling is a necessity this time of year. Maybe not for you, but for me it is. Quite a few years ago, my husband gave me this handy Swedish design log splitter. It’s called a Smart-Splitter and makes splitting logs into kindling a breeze.

Axes are good for splitting rounds into firewood. But when it comes to splitting firewood into slender pieces of kindling, the Smart-Splitter works even better. The blade rides a fixed post, so you can set the blade exactly where you want it, and when you drop the weight which falls onto the blade, it splits the log in two. It’s a failsafe way to split smaller and smaller pieces of wood in two. It doesn’t take long to make a bundle of kindling to start fires.

Seeing Hazel with her whole brood this afternoon was a pleasant surprise. With some hens, the break with their children is immediate. One minute they are sweet mother hen, “Here’s a plump worm children.” The next minute they are, “You’re off on your own – shoo!”

Other hens are like Hazel, spending less and less time with them each day, but still there when the children need some reassuring. Sort of like people, some chicks grow up with stern mothers, others with gentle ones. There are the no nonsense, “Children! Stay within eyesight at all times!” mothers, and the carefree ones who let their children do most anything they want, with every parenting style in between.

I never would have thought mother hens have so many different parenting styles. You certainly don’t read books detailing the parenting styles of mother hens, though if one were to write a serious one, it would easily require hundreds of pages. Add illustrations, studies on how childhood experiences influence parenting styles, the effect of this and that, the roles mother hens play in the success of roosters, et cetera, et cetera, and you’re talking about a thousand pages or more, perhaps even a few volumes. Now that would be a find in a library: three to five, leather bound, hefty volumes, an exhaustive treatise on how mother hens raise their children, with a companion compendium on evolutionary similarities between human and chicken child rearing.
Getting to the Other Side

October 11, 2015

This morning I found Hazel by herself, enjoying a quiet morning, drinking water alone after spending the night on the roost. None of her chicks were around. They were outdoors, on their own. Her mothering days are over. She was a great mother. Just yesterday, I took the picture below of her with her chicks around her. Two and a half months ago, in late July, she was basking in the glow of hatching a clutch of lovely chicks. The baby chick on the far right of the second photo below, is the chicken without neck feathers to the far left of Hazel. The gray chick in the middle the black chicken to the left of Hazel. The yellow chick is the yellow chicken whose head is behind Hazel’s tail. There are two more of her children not in the photos.

I wonder how hens feel when they finish raising their clutches. Are they relieved, exhausted, sad? Do they feel anything? The first hen I saw raise a clutch, Madeleine, went for a long walk in the woods when she finished raising her chicks. The look on her face said, “I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time.”

Madeleine would have loved the new bridge. It is a hit with the chickens. They use it all day long to get to the other side. Getting to the other side … it’s a big thing with chickens.
Yeah! No Rain!

October 9, 2015

Yeah! No rain! Unlike the other day when Tangerine had to huddle her chicks out of the rain, there’s no rain, and she and her chicks can take their after lunch nap outdoors, where chickens would rather be.

It doesn’t matter how windy or cold it is, nothing beats a grassy spot outdoors for an after lunch nap. While she preens and stands guard, her chicks nap and preen, nap and preen, nap and preen. Though, lunch isn’t something chickens do. They peck and eat much of the morning. It’s more like a digestive break after an extended brunch, think of upperclass Victorian women resting after a long morning of tea, biscuits, and gossip.

This afternoon the gray chick may have napped too long. Maybe it was having one of those dreams from which you can’t wake up. It got separated from its mothers and siblings. They were deep in the woods, scratching through the brush, and it was peeping frantically, running everyplace looking for them. After twenty minutes of running around, it found them and settled down.

a man and his hoe

Big Data – Small Data

Fall’s Beauty Comes in Tiny Bits

Kindling

Getting to the Other Side

Yeah! No Rain!