Fragments From Floyd

Image via WikipediaCan you feel the tides turning? Is America and the world finally starting to look farther into the future than the next four years? Can we clean up the mess we’ve made of the planet and leave the place livable for our great great grandchildren? From ABC News…

In federal and state courtrooms across the country, environmental groups are putting coal-fueled power plants on trial in a bid to slow the industry’s biggest construction boom in decades.

Southern Company’s Plant Bowen in Cartersville, Georgia is seen in this aerial photograph in Cartersville in this file photo taken September 4, 2007. One of the biggest coal-fired plants in the country, it generates about 3,300 megawatts of electricity from four coal-fired boilers.

Coal plants provide just over 50 percent of the nation’s electricity. They also are the largest domestic source of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, emitting 2 billion tons annually, about a third of the country’s total.

Environmental groups cite 59 canceled, delayed or blocked plants as evidence they are turning back the “coal rush.” That stacks up against 22 new plants now under construction in 14 states - the most in more than two decades.

Meanwhile from the Huffington Post…

the Justice Department announced that American Electric Power (AEP) — one of the most recalcitrant operators of outmoded, dirty coal power plants in the country — has agreed to spend $4.6 billion cleaning up its 46 dirty units in the Ohio Valley, including three of the nation’s twenty dirtiest facilities. The settlement was the penalty for AEP violating the Clean Air Act requirement that plants be cleaned up when they are modernized. The case was initiated by the Sierra Club back in 1999 and was joined by other environmental groups and some of the effected downwind states. The Bush Administration attempted to undercut this action with the misleadingly named “Clear Skies” proposal, but when Congress rebuffed the White House, the Justice Department became involved.

Green Miracle or Mirage: Accele-Gro-M
The company has been studying the use of the fertilizer in drought areas, and has seen yields grow from 40 bushels an acre to 180 bushels to 190 bushels per acre, Knight said. Only 8 ounces of the product are required per acre of farmland, and the cost to the farmer is around $8 to $11 per acre, depending on the crop and the area of the world in which it will be used.

NC Says NO to King Coal
Sixty-one percent of the electricity used to power North Carolina homes and businesses is generated by coal-fired power plants. Nationwide, North Carolina is second only to Georgia in its use of mountaintop removal coal.

We Are What We Waste:
Grocery bills are rising through the roof. Food banks are running short of donations. And food shortages are causing sporadic riots in poor countries through the world.You’d never know it if you saw what was ending up in your landfill. As it turns out, Americans waste an astounding amount of food — an estimated 27 percent of the food available for consumption, according to a government study — and it happens at the supermarket, in restaurants and cafeterias and in your very own kitchen. It works out to about a pound of food every day for every American.

China Bans Thin Plastic Bags
“Customers are encouraged to carry their own bags,” an official with the Ministry of Commerce, Men Xiaowei, said in an on-line interview earlier. “It is a ‘habit revolution.’ To limit the use of plastic bags is to protect our environment.”

We Hill Williams Have Had Enough
Our culture tolerates and promulgates stereotypes about Appalachians we wouldn’t stand for a minute about other groups. From Snuffy Smith and The Beverly Hillbillies to The Dukes of Hazzard and Li’l Abner, degrading stereotypes of rural mountain people are abundant. The public is so desensitized to the banjo-playing, toothless stereotype that most of us don’t complain as we would if other groups were ridiculed in this nature. Sure, there are good-for-nothings and ignorant people in the mountains of Appalachia, just as there are in Atlanta or Seattle or Anywhere, USA.

How Does Your Garden Grow (or Not):
Weeds. We hate them because of their success. Left to their own devices, they will out-compete–with absolutely no intervention, special nutrients or coddling–those desirables we work so hard to encourage. What’s a gardener to do, you ask. Answer: Corn Meal. Corn Gluten is a pre-emergent, which is a fancy way of saying that is it is a seed birth-control. Corn meal scattered around an area will keep any seed in that area from growing into a plant. This means a weed seed or a desirable seed. This method is a good option for areas that you plan on planting grown plants in (or for after seeds have emerged–I’m thinking, in my bean patch.)

This is the part of summer I can be happy with. The mornings are cool, the days not consistently too warm, and there are still vestiges of spring yet in the growing things–vigorous but not yet rank. To get across the pasture means taking the mowed path or being resigned to getting soaking wet and/or covered in grass pollen and shed flower parts.

On the one hand, I’d be happy for our neighbor to come get the hay while it is at its peak. On the other, I do enjoy wading out in the waist-high pasture of a morning stalking the spiders who have no idea what beauty they create in their hunger and stealth.

In the evenings, headless deer eyes shine back at us from the tall grass, bodies hidden as if under water.

This obscuring submersion in timothy and bluestem is a way of hiding babies, too–spotted fawns and turkey chicks. The dog smells the nursery across the road the minute we let him out. We’ve pulled him off wildlife babies already a time or two.

Fecundity: the summer benefits we get for the cost of the heat.

Here’s one final fact concerning the odd Earth shapes I’ve been hinting about: there are more than 500,000 of them.

They are not man-made. How did they come to exist, why, and when?

In this small image from Google Earth, you can see hundreds of them outlined within a two-county area in the U.S. Thursday, the rest of the story.

Image via WikipediaNo, it’s not science fiction. It’s the Internet on steroids, enabling downloads 10,000 times faster than today’s typical broadband connection. It’s called “the Grid” and it’s coming to your computer this summer.
Seven years in the making, The Grid will fully come alive in late June, when the European particle physics laboratory CERN fires up its massive Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which is buried under France and Switzerland. Scientists will cause hydrogen particles, hurtling at near-lightspeed, to crash into each other, creating mini-explosions at temperatures hotter than the sun.

In a fraction of a second, each crash will generate a flood of data, which will be picked up by sensors and routed to computers all over the globe for analysis. Some 2.3 Terabytes (2.3 million million bytes) of data will be generated each day of the experiment.

Since that data storm would easily overwhelm today’s Internet, engineers created The Grid to handle the deluge. They set it up with dedicated fiber optic cables and state-of-the-art routing centers. They’ve got 55,000 servers installed now, and expect to have 200,000 within two years. See the movie on YouTube.

 I’ll tell you a little more about the “terraforming” image from last week: they are not on a planet in a galaxy far, far away. They are much closer than that.

This image is said to be the first, taken from a plane in 1933, that saw these rounded impressions on the ground and gave rise to speculation as to their cause.

I’ll post one more teaser this week before telling the whole story.

You’ve just been given this image of a planetary terrain for interpretation. In the image are dozens (hundreds counting the smaller ones) of elliptical pocks on the surface visible from miles above the ground, their long axis oriented northwest to southeast.

That is all the information you have. What are your thoughts as to a possible cause?

Yes, I’m going somewhere with this. But not all of a sudden. Stick with me, the final story Friday June 6.

While I have a brief break at work–I will tell both of my regular weekend visitors that the site will likely be a bit whacko for a couple of days and possibly comments will not be enabled while there are server changes that include an upgrade to the lastest version of Word Press.

We will resume our usual blather on the other side of this non-emergency transition as we move into our spacious, modern, high-tech revolving glass-enclosed blogging complex overlooking Goose Creek and the Fortress Garden.

I don’t seem to have the energy to blog the town and country yet, following in the wake of our whirlwind romp with the g-daughters–but Colleen did, and you can read her description and excerpts from Friday night’s Floyd Readers event.

Image: Jim Webb, Master of Ceremonies for the SAWC Dilbert Awards. Don’t ask. You really have to be there.

Whoever called this spring-flowering tree redbud wasn’t even close, though not all are as pale pink as these growing along George’s Run yesterday. The lighting wasn’t ideal but I’ve meant to stop here in years past while the hillside was awash in this lovely “red” of spring. By the next time I pass that way, the buds will be gone and the heart-shaped leaves will have replaced them.

Redbud is a legume, a member of the bean family, and its roots I believe harbor rhizobia, the bacterial nodules that help put useable nitrogen in the soil. Redbud seems to strongly favor alkaline soils–such as that produced by the limestone bedrock that runs through Georges Run but ends not far north when you cross the Montgomery County line into Floyd.

We don’t have a single redbud on our property or the road in, for that matter. There are a couple more shots of this patch uploaded to the Flickr gallery.