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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
Ken Heronheart's LiveJournal:
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| Thursday, November 6th, 2008 | | 10:58 pm |
Aural Traditions Podcast
I've been working on reviving my "Best Of" podcast, "Aural Traditions". It went dormant quite a long while back, mainly because I didn't have the energy to write introductions for the show notes. I've given up on that and just use the descriptions from the original shownotes. So if you're interested in the sort of audio that intrigues and excites me you can check it out at http://auraltraditions.blogspot.com/ or feed the following to your podcatcher: http://feeds.feedburner.com/AuralTraditions | | Thursday, October 2nd, 2008 | | 10:50 pm |
| | Saturday, September 20th, 2008 | | 4:39 pm |
Falling Grain Reserves
One of the lesser known, scary trends in the world today is the steadily declining reserves of grain in the world today. The following chart is available here. This is in the face of record grain production since 2000. The problem is that production isn't keeping up with population growth or with the shift to consumption of beef which necessitates high grain consumption.  | | Sunday, August 31st, 2008 | | 10:40 pm |
Individual Airship
Imagine strapping a small blimp to your back, wings to your arms, and literally being able to fly by flapping your arms. Unfortunately, embedding is disabled but you can see the clip here. | | 9:36 pm |
How to crack an egg (neatly).
This is one of those skills I never really picked up. But I've been eating more eggs lately and decided it was time to do some research. The Internet really can be a useful thing at times. | | Saturday, August 30th, 2008 | | 11:41 pm |
| | Saturday, July 12th, 2008 | | 9:04 am |
| | Monday, July 30th, 2007 | | 11:33 am |
Prius too quiet?
Reports are beginning to turn up on various bicycling lists about Prius hybrid cars suddenly, silently, and startingly appearing at the elbows of bicyclists, especially at stop signs. It raises the interesting question of whether something as heavy and as fast as an electric car ought to be required to make some kind of noise in order to auditorally signal it's presence. It could actually turn into a bit of a safety hazard as they become more common. Maybe they could be required to make a noise like the flying car in the Jetsons? | | Friday, July 20th, 2007 | | 4:06 pm |
A Practical Electric Car?
As a rule I avoid writing about technology which isn't yet in production. Too much of it is vaporware. Fortunately these cars are in production. The cost is steep ($45,000) and we still have to think about the greenhouse gases from producing the electricity (usually from coal) but I think they are definitely a step in the right direction.  | | Friday, April 13th, 2007 | | 8:06 am |
Governors and Presidents
Something I've been thinking about lately is the fact that Americans tend to elect (ex)governors and vice-presidents to the office of president. The only exception to this rule since FDR was JFK in a very close election. Nixon was unusual in that there was a gap between his being VP and President, but none the less, Americans were used to thinking of him in that role. Based on this, the only Democrat currently running who has a chance is New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, who is unfortunately rather conservative, although that might actually help him in the general election. The Republicans on the other hand have several governors running for President including Tommy Thompson, Mitt Romney, and Mike Huckabee. Rudy Giuliani is an interesting case in that being Mayor of New York during 9/11 may qualify as being enough like a governor to get him the White House. All in all this is not an optimistic forecast. Based on it, the next President will probably be a Republican, and if not, then a very conservative Democrat. One could make an argument that Hillary Clinton has a shot based on being a former First Lady, which in her case is similar to being a VP, but I'm dubious. She's just not "likeable" enough. But then, hardly anyone "liked" Nixon either. | | Saturday, March 3rd, 2007 | | 7:52 am |
Democrats finally starting to "get" rural issues.
For some time, I've contended that one of the reasons Democrats have difficulty maintaining and expanding power in this country is because they have written off the rural parts of the country as being terminally Republican. This article indicates that Nancy Pelosi understands that. Now if the Greens, the Anarchists, and the Socialists will only learn this lesson as well and get their butts out into the Heartland and start organizing. Interestingly, the Anarchists have historically been more appealing to farmers than Socialists. ( Excerpt from article follows LJ cut. ) | | Wednesday, February 28th, 2007 | | 7:27 am |
Quotes from Derrick Jensen, Michael Ableman, and me
"If your experience is that your water comes from the tap and that your food comes from the grocery store then you are going to defend to the death the system that brings those to you because your life depends on that; if your experience is that your water comes from a river and that your food comes from a land base then you will defend those to the death because your life depends on them. So part of the problem is that we have become so dependent upon this system that is killing and exploiting us, it has become almost impossible for us to imagine living outside of it and it's very difficult physically for us to live outside of it." — Derrick Jensen Which to me neatly explains why so many people are so obdurately unimaginative about the possibilities of radically changing the industrial food system in this country. "... there was something that took place down those rows of apple and pear trees, something very different than what is happening in most agricultural fields and orchards in North America. I went to work each day with 30 of my friends, and while we worked we joked, and we talked, and we discussed our dreams. We tried out our latest theories and philosophies on each other, speculated on the fate of the Earth, and ate our lunch together under the shade of the trees. In the winter, we pruned every day for four months straight. In the spring we thinned fruit. And in the fall it was a ten-week harvest marathon. It was repetitive work, but at the end of each day, instead of feeling I had been chained to some mind numbing drudgery, I felt like I had attended an all day party." - Michael Ableman "People who believe that all physical work is inherently mindless drudgery tend to view the people who do that work as mindless drones and treat them as being invisible." - Ken Heronheart Current Music: Springsteen - Born to Run | | Thursday, January 4th, 2007 | | 6:59 am |
| | Monday, December 25th, 2006 | | 11:16 am |
Pandora Music Service
Lately I've been having a lot of fun with the Pandora music service. Basically you give it the name of songs and artists that you like and it builds a radio station that plays songs similar to those. You refine it with thumbs ups and downs. What seems to work best for me is to just give it the name of one artist and then let it create a channel. "Seeding" it with too many artists seems to make things less interesting. I especially like that it seems to find interesting artists that I've never heard of. You can see my music profile at http://www.pandora.com/people/heronheart Current Music: Breathe by Michelle Branch | | Sunday, December 17th, 2006 | | 5:36 pm |
Alternet article about Urban/Rural politics
Alternet.org has an interesting article about the antagonisms between rural and urban populations. To me one of the more interesting developments is that the rise of cable and the Internet mean that cities are no longer the source of all "culture". While one can debate the value of things like the "Left Behind" series, it's as much a cultural product as "Friends". One Nation, Two Futures?
The formula that emerged from the 2000 and 2004 Presidential elections was provocative: The less dense the population, the more likely it was to vote Republican. Republicans appeared to have lost the cities and inner suburbs, positioning themselves as the party of country roads, small towns and traditional values. Though Bush was often mocked for the time he spent on his ranch, sleeves rolled up, gun in hand, the image was widely promoted and became a cornerstone of his identity among Republican voters.
Conversely, it looked like Democrats had lost the country -- that is, until November 2006 when Democrats won decisive victories in the Midwest and Great Plains, often by leveraging their candidates' rural identities against a national Democratic Party that local voters saw as being overly urban, secular and affluent. By November 8, the electoral map looked a whole lot bluer. Yet Democrats could not have won without appealing to libertarian, anti-urban sensibilities.
"Millions of rural people have come to reject the larger framework of urban life," writes public radio reporter Brian Mann in his compelling new book Welcome to the Homeland: A Journey to the Heart of America's Conservative Rural Rebellion. "They despise the liberal modernism that shaped metro culture in the twentieth century and see it as an ideology that is every bit as foreign and threatening as communism." | | Friday, December 15th, 2006 | | 10:25 am |
Local Food Continues to Grow
From the Capital Times newspaper comes an article about three new retail businesses specializing in local food. But I'm still looking for a supplier of locally grown wheat! Food businesses bring farm closer to home
By Mary Bergin
The milk arrives in glass bottles, at your doorstep. At the store, most of what can be bought has been grown or raised within an hour away.
Quaint sales practices are savvy marketing strategies for new farm-to-market and farm-to-doorstep services in southwestern Wisconsin. Especially during this time of year, and this time in history.
These new efforts, which include Spring Green's Local Choice market and two Barneveld-based home delivery services, give farmers the opportunity to enhance visibility and product sales during winter, when only one weekly farmers' market operates in Madison.More at http://www.madison.com/tct/features/stories/index.php?ntid=111156 | | Tuesday, December 12th, 2006 | | 10:59 am |
Global Warming In Wisconsin
An article about how global warming may already be affecting Wisconsin. Wisconsin Not Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions as Evidence of Global Warming Mounts
by Michael T. Neuman
06 Dec 2006
The average temperature in 2006 is likely to again be amongst the hottest since global temperature record keeping began nearly 150 years ago, climate experts said this week. The impacts of global warming are now beginning to show up everywhere, not just in melting polar ice caps, receding glaciers, increasing heat wave deaths and stronger hurricanes, but also in lower Great Lakes levels, shortened winter recreational seasons in Wisconsin, changes in animal and plant species' season progressions and more bad air days in the Midwest. The sooner we take major actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the better, say most scientists now.More at http://madison.indymedia.org/newswire/display/54269/index.php | | Monday, December 11th, 2006 | | 4:55 pm |
The origins of peak oil doomerism by Toby Hemenway
I haven't really made up my mind about Peak Oil yet, but it's a common meme in the circles I travel in. Here's an interesting article from Toby Hemingway about the millenarian tendency in those circles. article People in the Peak Oil movement chafe at the label of doomer, but many of us do have an apocalyptic bent. Although plenty of Peak Oil commentary is sober analysis, a survey of the major websites and books quickly brings up apocalyptic titles like dieoff.org, oilcrash.com, The Death of the Oil Economy, The End of Suburbia, and The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight. Peak Oil writings are sprinkled with predictions that billions will die, civil order will collapse, and even that civilization will end. Scientists, too, aren’t immune. During geologist Ken Deffeyes’s Peak Oil presentations, he displays the words “war,” “famine,” “pestilence,” and “death”—the four horsemen of the apocalypse. The Right, the saying goes, has the Left Behind books, and the Left has Peak Oil. Both predict that the end is near.
After I published an article suggesting that Peak Oil may lead “merely” to widespread unemployment and hardship rather than collapse [Apocalypse, not, April 2006], hundreds wrote to tell me I was a naïve optimist and a cornucopian. A significant part of the Peak Oil community holds the rock-solid sentiment that the only future is one of chaos. While the end of the oil era possesses “death and taxes” certitude, plausible post-peak scenarios span a wide scope. So why is the most touted one the most extreme? Predictions of any stripe, a review will quickly show, are almost always wrong. The future rarely goes in the direction we expect. The certainty of coming doom held by so many made me wonder why we are drawn to societal collapse and our own extinction.More at http://www.energybulletin.net/23386.html | | Sunday, December 3rd, 2006 | | 9:51 am |
Balsamic Vinegar
I've recently gotten interested in balsamic vinegars. I tried out an $8 bottle of Gaeta and it has a wonderfully complex flavor, but it's clearly not as thick or as sweet as the balsamics I've read about. It appears that to some extent you get what you pay for with balsamics. I'm planning to try a $20 bottle next. So far the best candidate appears to be the 18 year old balsamic from http://www.oilerie.comDoes anybody out there know of any better candidates? | | 9:21 am |
Photoshop 6 vs Gimpshop
I was fooling around with Gimpshop yesterday in order to compare it with Photoshop 6 on my old WindowsME laptop. Gimpshop is a very impressive (free) program, but it definitely feels slow and clunky compared to Photoshop 6 on this machine. Anyhow, I churned out a couple of new icons as test projects.   Somehow I always look a little grim when I try to take photos of myself. I think it's the level of concentration involved in trying to aim a camera without any kind of viewfinder. |
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