well, there isn’t anything to say. Just light a candle for New Orleans and hope the people I know there are safely on their way northeast. Hope that everyone affected has a way out and takes it.

At any rate, this morning I saw this nifty little solar energy calculator on Weather Underground. Put in your address or your latitude-longitude, information on size and efficiency of solar panels you are considering, and it will tell you how much energy you can expect to generate. Cool!

And, boy oh boy, is there ever a wealth of information on passive solar heaters.

In my less busy days, I bought the plans for this: Mother’s Heat Grabber. Unfortunately, though, I never got around to making it, in part because my neighbors had made me so self-conscious about doing anything. Long story, but …

… this was about the time I was planting trees out front at my old place. Mind you, I lived on pure rock, or so it seemed, and digging a hole deep enough for a tree required I use a hammer and stake. Now, just try sitting on the ground out front pounding away with a hammer and stake without attracting the attention of cowboys and bubbas and lay-abouts everywhere determined to stop you in your tracks. If it wasn’t “You shouldn’t be doing that, let me help you!,” it was the piling on of totally useless tools and advice, the worst being the post hole digger. Oh, yea, right, a 5’2″ female is going to bore right through a boulder with a post hole digger.

I swear, they about drove me crazy.

So perhaps it isn’t my lack of engineering expertise — more likely it was my fear of cowboy and bubba interference, and their determination to get me to stop doing whatever I was doing as quickly as possible because otherwise someone might expect them to do something.

But here: I have a privacy fence! Even better, I have relatively industrious neighbors!

Which means that, here, I can finally build my passive solar heater, unless, of course, I really am an engineering doofus!

In any case, there are plans for sale here. They were a mere $10 a few years ago and, hopefully, they still are reasonably priced.

I love my solar oven. I’ve had it since 2003 and have cooked countless meals in it. True, it’s a bit glitchy — I planned to use it today to to roast a nice buffalo chuck roast, but storms moved in last night and it’s too cloudy now. And it does require moving every few hours so that it catches the best rays.

Still, it does the trick, all the while saving on electricity and helping to keep the house cool on 95 degree days.

And, unless you’re insistent on technical sheets, it doesn’t require special recipes, at least not in my experience. I just put everything in it and go. True, as a result of my devil-may-care approach, there’ve been a few things I’ve been unable to replicate. For one, I was making a fantastic kind of upside down shepherd’s pie a few years ago, and danged if I can remember now how I did it.

But even my recipe memory lapses don’t stop me. My general approach is to just pile it in and go.

And food poisoning? Meh. I remember trying to have solar oven conversations on dKos and being besieged by Nervous Nellies horrified by the prospects of food poisoning! zomg, they would never, not in a million years, what am I thinking??

::pained sigh::

It boils down to this: if you know how to cook without landing yourself in the hospital with food poisoning, you know how to cook in a solar oven.

It’s why I only use mine on sunny days when I can be here to watch it. I simply put my ingredients into a covered Pyrex casserole dish, set the casserole into the solar cooker, aim the cooker at the sun and turn it however often is needed.

But, if you need further reassurance (which, if you’re reading this blog, you don’t need), this little article might help. Ultimately, though, it boils down to this: you don’t leave a nice roast in a crockpot overnight unless that crockpot is on. You don’t stew a chicken on the stovetop, then turn the flame off and leave it sitting ’til tomorrow. And you don’t cook a brisket in the solar oven, then let it sit for hours and hours when clouds move in, then evening approaches, then oops, it’s midnight, let’s see how that brisket turned out.

Common sense and knowledge of simple cooking techniques will ensure that botulism isn’t lurking around every corner, ready to chew you up and spit you out.

And, of course, you can make your own solar oven. I’m a bit of an engineering doofus, though, so I’ve never tried. If anyone has, though, your hints and guidance are most certainly appreciated!

The Urban Homestead: your guide to self-sufficient living in the heart of the city
by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen
$11.53 from Amazon

I can’t recall where I first saw mention of this book, but the subtitle convinced me to check it out. Then I saw that they included a chapter on stealth backyard chickens, so how could I not buy it?

I hadn’t had a chance to read it until yesterday, which was spent chauffeuring to yet more doctor appointments and the associated waiting in various rooms for medical personnel to do their thing. I also carried a C J Sansom novel in case this one was too dry or uninteresting, but I needn’t have bothered.

This book, while not an in-depth “how to” guide to everything, is lively and very funny in places. Skimming through the three-page section on composting toilets, I came across this little sidebar:

If you have the space, stash away an old five-gallon bucket with a lid, filled with sawdust or peat moss, just for this sort of event [failure of the sewage disposal system]. It might be difficult to find a sawdust source while simultaneously fighting off zombie hordes.

To paraphrase some movie or other: You had me at “zombie hordes.”

Then I read the chapter on backyard chickens. I live in a small municipality that prohibits most kinds of livestock except dogs, cats, pet birds, fish — the usual suburban family pets. I would love to have four or five chickens in my backyard to lay eggs and to eat the ticks that are thick as blackberries back there. But not only am I fighting City Hall, I have a very anti-animal husband to contend with. The dogs are okay because he is attached to them, but NO ANIMALS, he says. How to overcome this prejudice?

The chapter was fun to read and gave good information on the most important step to keeping chickens (or ducks) in your urban back yard — win over the neighbors. Don’t keep a rooster. Hens make little cooing noises and only a few breeds cackle when they lay, so they tend to be relatively quiet and unobtrusive. If you tell the neighbors and allay their fears of noise, smells, filth, and negative impact to their property values, you are very likely to be able to glide under the official animal control radar. Bribing the neighbors with fresh eggs doesn’t hurt, either.

Unfortunately, it didn’t address the problem of the uncooperative spouse, and it specifically warned against keeping chickens in the same space as dogs, which tend to look upon them as play toys and/or prey. For the time being, then, chickens on my urban homestead are a no-go.

There’s a lovely bit on very small houses that would appeal to biscuit and to Anne, I think. Chapters on food preserving and cheesemaking are also good introductions to those subjects.

In general, the book is full of terrific ideas but does not always go into great detail on how to accomplish a particular goal. You’ll need more in-depth guides to gardening and energy conservation; they touch on these topics but there is much that was omitted. Some topics, such as water conservation and graywater harvesting, are covered in more depth, but even here there’s a sort of magical Jedi hand-wave that tells you to hook up a pipe to divert the washing machine water to your garden without telling you how to do it.

Pros: Excellent list of sources in the back of the book. Upbeat, optimistic tone while at the same time acknowledging the imminence of peak oil and the realities of the current unsustainability of American consumer culture. Solid suggestions on What We Can Do to help the situation and how to prepare for the future.

Cons: There is no index. The extensive table of contents is helpful, but an index would have been more so.

Many of the boxed sidebars and additional information pages are reverse printed using white text on a particularly vivid acid green background and are quite difficult to read. Black on light gray would have set off the text as well and been much easier on old-hippie eyes.

All in all, this is a fun introduction to the topic of urban homesteading, and a useful addition to your TEOTWAWKI library.

What do you plan to eat the rest of the year? Will you rely on industrial foods grown by strangers from all over the world and shipped thousands of miles? With increasing interest in healthy eating, sustainable local food supplies and self-reliance, many people are discovering the benefits of a solar food dehydrator.

Read the rest at the link.

The infrared band lies just above the microwave, and just below the visible. Issac Newton discovered it by taking a thermometer and placing it in different spots on a projection of a spectrum of sunlight provided by a simple glass prism. He noted that there were area of higher temperature below the violet (now called ultraviolet) and above the red (now called infrared). These terms come from the natural distribution of a solar spectrum by a prism, the red being at the top of the graph.

So, here once again we go.

Infrared radiation is all electromagnetic radiation between microwaves and the longest wavelength of red light that may be sensed by the human eye, that sense beginning around 400 nm (nanometers). Infrared can be sensed by the skin indirectly, as it causes heating and thus stimulates the nerve endings. Some Crotalid serpents have discreet infrared sensors (“pits”, hence the name “pit vipers”) that can triangulate on infrared and use it nearly as we do visible wavelengths.

I suppose now is as good a time as any to talk about “blackbody radiation”, also known as “cavity radiation”. This radiation is electromagnetic, and the wavelength depends solely on the temperature of the body that radiates it. This observation actually was one of the reasons that Max Planck came up with the earliest idea of quantum theory, because the original idea led to the “ultraviolet catastrophe”, wherein the mathematical model collapsed. For tonight, it is sufficient to know that the average maximum of radiative output is a function of temperature. The brilliant statistical physicist Boltzmann also contributed to this development.

In a nutshell, blackbody theory says that both the intensity and the frequency of EMR radiated from a body has to do in a nonlinear way with temperature, and the relationship is complex. That is why we do not see much radio nor microwave from a warm body, just not enough of either factor. In any event, this is not a dissertation about blackbody radiation, but the concept is necessary for further developments.

Infrared is, optically, much like visible light. It pretty much follows the same rules insofar as reflection and refraction, we just can not see it with our feeble eyes. But it has one unique property.

This changes with infrared. At temperatures sufficient to produce it, there is enough both in intensity and wavelength to measure. I will go back to the campfire analogy: coals produce little visible light but will burn you at a distance if you hold your hand close enough for long enough.

Blackbody radiation is essentially a continuum, with the wavelength and intensity peaking depending on temperature, with no special bands of high intensity here or there.

But in this spectrum there are both continua and discreet emissions. The continua come from hot bodies, and the discreet from atomic vibrations within molecules. In fact, infrared spectra are a fingerprint for molecules unlike any other.

There are selection rules for infrared activity that have to do with quantum mechanics. The main one is that the dipole moment of the molecule has to change to be active. For example, carbon dioxide has the following vibrations: a symmetrical stretch for each oxygen to flee or approach the central carbon at the same rate (infrared inactive), an asymmetrical one where one oxygen approaches as the other one departs (infrared active), the “scissoring” one where the oxygens open and close (the symmetric one is inactive, but the one that looks like a bird flapping is active). This is just a very simple example.

Broadband IR is used for military purposes to look for heat, meaning troops or engines, and also used by civilian law enforcement to track down criminals, or at least that is what they say. It can be used to track down anyone.

Well, this is long enough. I will stick around for questions, flames, and comments for a bit. I will also crosspost at Dailykos.com. Warmest regards, Doc.

Remember, water conservation is essential.

Rescuers reach epicenter of China quake:

China – The first rescue teams arrived at the epicenter of China’s worst earthquake in modern times, scouring the rubble of mountain villages in Sichuan Province for survivors and airlifting emergency supplies to them. Makeshift aid stations and refugee centers are springing up across the vast region, where hospitals were leveled and survivors must be treated in the streets. In the city of Yingxiu in Wenchuan County, only 2300 out of 10,000 residents were left alive. Source

New Measures Against Water Waste:

Yemen – The Yemeni government recently signed new laws against water waste throughout the country. This includes not only monitoring the quality of potable water in certain areas but also the depth of new wells. Source

Iran allocates $163m emergency fund for drought:

Iran – In Tehran, Iran’s Deputy Energy Minister for Water and Wastewater Affairs, Rasoul Zargar, announced that the government had budgeted the equivalent of $163 million U.S. to implement emergency plans in case of a devastating drought. Source

Huge project to restore Everglades to be suspended:

Florida – The construction of a 25-square-mile reservoir designed to help restore water flows in Florida’s Everglades wetlands is on hold due to a lawsuit. The vast basin was scheduled for completion in 2010 and is intended to store rainwater that would normally be diverted into the sea to prevent flooding. When the wetlands need replenishing, the water will channeled from the reservoir. The Natural Resources Defense Council is suing the South Florida Water Management District, not to stop construction, but to get a legal commitment from the state to use at least 80% of the stored water for environmental restoration. Source

Laws passed to regulate recycled water:

Australia – In Brisbane, capital of Queensland, Australia, Parliament passed legislation to regulate the safety of drinking water and the addition of recycled wastewater to the supply. Queensland Health will set quality standards and the Department of Natural Resources will be responsible for ensuring that those standards are maintained. Source

My favorite: Wind to fuel Sydney’s desal plant

Australia – The desalination plant under construction near Sydney, New South Wales, Australia will be powered by wind, announced Premier Morris Iemma, who called it Australia’s biggest-ever “green energy” contract. The Capital Wind Farm, run by the firm of Babcock and Brown, is under construction in Bungendore and will be operational by 2010. Source

Ways of Ancient Mexico Reviving Barren Lands:

Mexico – Jesus Leon Santos, a Mixtec Indian from San Isidro Tilantongo in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, helped to found the Center for Integral Campesino Development of the Mixteca, or CEDICAM, to revive pre-Hispanic farming practices and the economy of his barren region. Source

Cote d’Ivoire: Waste management – The residents of Abidjan exposed to real dangers:

COTE D’IVOIRE – A four-day international workshop on waste management in West Africa opened on 12 May in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire, at the Abobo-Adjame University. Delegates from 12 African countries, Germany, and Belgium are discussing the creation of research and training programs in environmental engineering at African universities and how to improve the collection and treatment of wastes. Source

More research on climate change and water supplies needed, UA climate scientist tells Congress:

Washington, D.C. – Professor Jonathan Overpeck, director of the University of Arizona’s Institute for the Study of Planet Earth in Tucson, Arizona, told the U.S. House of Representatives in Washington, DC that because water supplies and climate change are so closely linked, allocating more money for research on both topics is essential. Source

In one of his most out-spoken interventions in the climate change debate, he said a £15 billion annual program (roughly $25 billion) was required to halt deforestation or the world would have to live with the dire consequences.

 

“We will end up seeing more drought and starvation on a grand scale. Weather patterns will become even more terrifying and there will be less and less rainfall, we are asking for something pretty dreadful unless we really understand the issues now and [the] urgency of them. The rainforests, which provide the “air conditioning system for the entire planet”, releasing water vapour and absorbing carbon, were being lost to poor farmers desperate to make a living”, he said.

He also said that every year, 20 million hectares of forest – equivalent to the area of England, Wales and Scotland – were destroyed and called for a “gigantic partnership” of governments, businesses and consumers to slow it down.

“What we have got to do is try to ensure that these forests are more valuable alive than dead. At the moment, there is more value in them being dead,” he said.

He estimated that the cost would be about £15 billion a year but said that this should be viewed as an insurance policy for the whole world. “That is roughly just under one per cent of all the insurance premiums paid in the world in any one year. It is an insurance premium to ensure the world has some rainfall and reasonable weather patterns. It is a good deal.”

Last month I had read that the Prince had a meeting at St James Palace with four state governors from Brazil to discuss the best way to allocate the money. One option would be for an organization such as the World Bank to administer the fund. The Prince made clear yesterday that if nothing was done there was a “severe danger of losing a major part of the battle against climate change”.

In an interview on Radio 4′s Today program, the Prince disclosed that he had raised his concerns with the White House, Vladimir Putin, the Russian prime minister, and President Sarkozy, of France. He said he had pressed Barclays (UK bank), Shell, Goldman Sachs and McDonald’s to join his campaign. But he also said consumers had to play their part by choosing products that were environmentally sustainable and called for improvements in labeling.

Reading from Greenpeace, the number of birds, animals, marine and freshwater creatures in the world has dropped by almost one third. It found that between 1970 and 2005 land-based species fell by 25 per cent, marine species by 28 per cent and freshwater species by 29 per cent. We’re doomed. But even though I detest royalty (remember, in France we beheaded those parasites in 1789!) hat off to the man who is doing something about the fate of the rain forests.