My Facebook Page
My Facebook postings say a lot about me. Here's my actual Facebook Page for those who do Facebook.
If you are not on Facebook, below are most of my postings, most recent at bottom.
Postings from 2011 to 2023 - To see the images click on the "image" link
2011 - From Tanzania
I am currently working on a sand dam project outside of Dodoma Tanzania (sand dams trap sand and store water in seasonal rivers in this dry region). See my blog at www.mccdodoma.blogspot.com
I'm now on the faculty at St. John's University - Institute of Development Studies, Dodoma, Tanzania. More on my web page www.donlotter.net
I'm coming home for a visit for the first time in nearly three years and will be in Davis from Sept 5 to 7 Oct. I'm planning to go to the Capay Hoes Down Festival (around Oct 6) and hope to see friends there.
I can't wait to get a Gradburger and a pitcher of hefeweitzen micro-brew - those things are what I miss most. The bottled ultra-filtered sterilized beer here just doesn't do it, nor the sorghum beer brewed in a 55-gallon drum, they just don't compare with a good fresh micro-brew draft.
Baobab - My favorite tree - I drink the juice of its fruit every day.
The baobab is perhaps the wisest of all trees. It grows wide (sometimes 20 feet in diameter) and short with sinewy wood that is generally unwanted and difficult to cut. It survives human exploitation while all of the other trees - Acacias, Commiphora, Brachystegia, are cut down.
The bark of the baobab is stripped off (sustainably, never more than 1/4 of the circumference) and used form making rope, beds, basketry etc. The fruit yields an amazingly nutritious powder that is made into a drink. The leaves are eaten as a vegetable. Long droughts cannot kill the tree.
Baobab tree
Masters student Joseph Kibugwa testing biomass gasifying stoves at St. John's University. Tanzanians are cutting 500 million trees a year (totally unsustainable) for charcoal and firewood for cooking. Yet they *burn* crop residues in the
field to get rid of them. We have some small funding from Australia to buy the machines needed to turn the crop residues into fuel pellets to burn in the BG stoves.
More at www.donlotter.net: Publications
Don's travel in Africa - 40 years 1972 - 2012 (Not continuous!). This picture from the train ride from Malawi to Mozambique, 1972. I've just (Dec 2012) done a trip to Lake Tanganyika, took a 100 year-old former German ship down the lake, plus train, bus, lorry.
See pics at https://plus.google.com/photos/101346340372789480529/albums/5829976455793020433?authkey=CJOWsfzr8JWzIQ
My updated work blog is www.sjutlotter.blogspot.com
Topics:
- biomass gasifying stoves and tree-less cooking fuel;
- zero-tillage for doubling staple food production in the central region;
- African indigenous vegetables;
- use of local neem tree seed for pest management on tomato;
- saving the remaining forests around Dodoma;
- online education for African universities
Link to Google Earth kmz file of the Kongwa St Phillips Mpwawa walk route.
Walk - Kongwa St Phillips Academy to Mpwawpwa Road.kmz - Google Drive
Putting the university's first drip irrigation system in. I will be comparing the cost of bucket irrigation, locally made drip, and imported drip systems. It looks like it will be close between locally made drip and bucket irrigation. The drip systems will be irrigating a tomato crop for testing locally sourced neem for pest management. Neem trees grow all over and yet are completely unused for pest management. If pest problems occur the farmers buy insecticides at the local stores, many of which are banned in developed countries.
Also making the first compost (traditionally all leaf waste is burned, believe it or not). I'm utilizing a couple of unused fish tanks for the compost. People openly wondered why collect all of that "trash", until they saw the finished compost come out (behind me) three months later.
The gasification stoves make biochar, an important new soil fertility enhancer for Africa.
My latest project, an article in the journal Agriculture and Human Values (see www.donlotter.net - Publications, for full text.
Facing food insecurity in Africa: Why, after 30 years of work in organic agriculture, I am promoting the use of synthetic fertilizers and herbicides in small-scale staple crop production
Above is the title of a paper I wrote that is in the current issue of Agriculture and Human Values (March 2015, Volume 32, Issue 1, pp 111-118).
Link: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10460-014-9547-x (see www.donlotter.net - Publications, for full text)
Abstract: Food insecurity and the loss of soil nutrients and productive capacity in Africa are serious problems in light of the rapidly growing African population. In semiarid central Tanzania currently practiced traditional crop production systems are no longer adaptive. Organic crop production methods alone, while having the capacity to enable food security, are not feasible for these small-scale farmers because of the extra land, skill, resources, and 5–7 years needed to benefit from them—particularly for maize. Maize, grown by 94 % of farmers, has substantial nitrogen needs. The most practical ways of satisfying maize nutrient needs is via integrated soil fertility management, a combination of organic and Green Revolution methods. Maize has been shown in research to outyield the indigenous crops millet and sorghum in nearly all situations including drought. Conservation Agriculture (CA) in Africa has two main categories—organic and herbicidemediated. The organic version of CA, despite years of promotion, has had a low rate of adoption. Herbicidemediated zero tillage CA via backpack sprayer can substantially increase conventional maize yields while at the same time nearly eliminating erosion and increasing rainwater capture up to fivefold. Glyphosate herbicide is a nonproprietary product produced in Africa and approved for small farm use. The systemic nature of glyphosate allows the killing of perennial grasses that would otherwise need deep plowing to kill. The rooted weed residues protect the soil from erosion. The risks of glyphosate use are substantially outweighed by the benefits of increased food security and crop system sustainability.
Additional comments: This paper has made me a bit of a heretic in the sustainable ag community, however almost none of that community has worked on small-scale staple crop production in Africa. Bottom line: you look at the risks of using herbicides that allow zero-tillage vs. tillage using organic methods and hands down, in my view, the risks of the chemicals are vastly outweighed by the benefits of ZT. When those rains start crashing down on a tilled soil you see the soil washing away by the ton. The ZT plots, with dead intact grasses anchoring the soil, the rain soaks in.
The paper also goes into detail about how maize outperforms the indigenous crops millet and sorghum, even in drought years, and about nitrogen. Most small farmers, even those with some livestock, can only satisfy about 5% of the nitrogen needs of maize with their manures and legumes (they can't rotate land out to legumes due to limited land). Synthetic N fertilizers are the only way to get sufficient N to the maize, at least for the first 5-10 years until programs are developed in which farmers learn to use legumes like Sesbania.
It's a bit frustrating to see volunteers untrained in agriculture come in to an village to tell farmers that synthetic fertilizers "poison the soil", when those volunteers grew up eating food 99% of which was fertilized with synthetics (and whose fields are sustaining high production in Europe, US, Australia). I tell them that they are dealing with hunger and to be very careful.
There was an article in Grist about the paper. (Link: http://grist.org/food/even-this-organic-advocate-thinks-african-farmers-need-herbicide/ )
Facing food insecurity in Africa: Why, after 30 years of work in organic agriculture, I am...
Below is the abstract of a paper summarizing my work on introducing microgasification cookstoves and fuels made from agricultural waste biomass.
Title: Microgasification cookstoves and pellet fuels from waste biomass: a cost and performance comparison with charcoal and natural gas in Tanzania.
Don Lotter , Nathan Hunter , Mary Straub , David Msola
African Journal of Environmental Science and Technology (In Press).
Abstract. Cooking with wood and wood charcoal, done by over 90% of Africa’s population, presents two major challenges: massive deforestation and indoor air pollution from cooking smoke, the latter being the top risk factor for disease in Tanzania. A large-scale transition to improved cooking technologies (ICTs) and non-tree based fuels is needed. Microgasification stoves (top lit up draft [TLUD]) that burn pellets produced from agricultural waste have potential to address both of these issues. We examined the relative efficiency and cost of the major urban cooking fuels - charcoal and liquefied natural gas (LNG) – and compared them to cooking with waste biomass-based pellet fuels, as well as comparing the performance of three models of natural draft (ND) TLUD stove (Troika, Jiko Bomba, St. John’s) and one forced air (fan) stove (Philips).
The Philips and averaged ND stoves used 83% and 133% more pellets by weight respectively to cook beans than charcoal, costing 47% and 93% more at 2013 charcoal and pellet prices. Cooking with LNG cost 325% to 570% more than cooking with charcoal, depending on gas flow rate. The high cost of LNG and LNG stoves will be barriers to the great majority of Tanzanians to move to this ICT.
Biochar production averaged 59% and 29% of total fuel in the ND and Philips respectively.
Interviews of 30 ND TLUD stove users found that 60% abandoned use within one month, 80% stating that they produce too much smoke and 40% stating that controlling the air vent is too much trouble. Seventy five percent said that the TLUD cooked significantly faster than charcoal.
Due to the continued 33-99% annual increase in charcoal prices in Tanzania, work on introducing TLUD stoves and biomass densification technology is justified.
Research from last year.
Lotters on safari 1966. Malawi Trip 2015
Since I have a number of animal-loving friends - I found this wounded African Pygmy Hedgehog outside of my house. It had been preyed upon, probably by an owl, and the wound in its soft stomach area was festering. I put a little bit of ciprofloxicin in honey water and fed it by dropper and then gave it a betadine bath. Alas the wound was too deep and it didn't make it. Such cute animals. The first time I saw one was in the mouth of a big boerbull dog, rolled up like a ball, which the dog brought to us. The hedgehog was fine and after a while was crawling up and down our arms.
An article I wrote has been published in a diplomat magazine - Foreign Service Journal, proposing that US foreign aid to Africa should transition to building American-staffed universities there (Note, 2020: I now advocate building American staffed autonomous brick and mortar university programs within the African university campuses). http://www.afsa.org/development-aid-africa-time-plan-b. This is something I feel strongly about - American universities would help to improve the dismal quality of higher education there - sorry to be so politically incorrect here, but I've been in it for six years. In a nutshell, I believe that US universities would give the Africans the foundation they need to carry out their own development, rather than sinking further into dependency, as is the situation now. I made a Facebook page to follow-up the article https://www.facebook.com/groups/americanuniversitiesafrica/, American universities, I believe, would be the best way for the US to compete with China in Africa, a necessity from the geopolitical point of view.
Thoughts on the below video:
I am told by a friend that in one of the Harry Potter books there is a youngster who goes against his friends on an issue because he believes in it. In the course of his ordeal he is told by a wise elder: going against your enemies and opponents is easy, what is hardest is to go against your friends. Well friends, I believe I have become a heretic amongst many in the sustainable ag and organic farming community – but only with those who fail to understand the gravity of the food insecurity problem in Africa, where I have spent the last six years teaching university, doing agricultural research and outreach, and managing a permaculture farm. I was smack in the middle of Tanzania, dry, dusty Dodoma, where few foreigners go (no game parks there) but where high population growth, crop failure, malnutrition, maternal anemia, low life-expectancy and child stunting are well documented and widespread.
Posted below is a video lecture I was asked to give to an online sustainable ag congress in Brazil. It is based on a paper I wrote in the journal Agriculture and Human Values entitled “Facing food insecurity in Africa: Why, after 30 years of work in organic agriculture, I am promoting the use of synthetic fertilizers and herbicides in African staple crop production”. Long title but descriptive. Before you dismiss me as beyond the organic pale, I ask that you listen to my case in the video, and look at the photos.
Agriculture in Africa is far, far removed from California ag. The food insecurity situation is potentially catastrophic. Tillage MUST be drastically reduced and inputs intensified, at least for the next ten years. Remember that most of us grew up eating food that was 99.9% synthetically fertilized and with chemical weed control, and those crop fields are still producing food,. The Africans are simply going to have to go through a phase in which these technologies are used, in order to emerge from the serious food insecurity situation they currently face.
I first started thinking about this issue when I was managing an organic/permaculture farm in Arusha in 2010. Foreign volunteers (from the white countries), most of them untrained in agriculture, had been telling the local farmers that synthetic fertilizers are “toxic”. This was incredibly irresponsible and was playing with people's lives, families who depend on their maize crops for food. For these farmers to implement organic fertility in order to produce adequate maize (corn) yields (their main crop) takes a lot of training and years of implementation. Maize is the most voracious nitrogen feeder of all of our staple crops. These farmers were risking hunger by eliminating their moderate application rates of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers (about one-third of what the average US corn farmer applies per acre). Their crops were clearly deficient in N and probably P&K, being yellow and stunted. I told them they should immediately go and buy NPK fertilizer (if their crops were well prior to flowering). This is a matter of hunger vs. food security, of children getting enough to eat. It’s not something to mess around with re: concern with possible dis-balancing of soil microbial community and crop biochemistry that happens with applications of synthetic NPK.
Watch the video and then let me know how to immediately address the food security problems (1-5 years) in the drought susceptible areas of Africa. Can you plant crops into those hillsides without losing the soil when the intense rainstorms occur? You’ve never experienced rainfall intensity like Africa’s unless you’ve been there. A half hour rainstorm and a couple of other storms like it may be the only rainfall in the first half of the growing season – that water must be captured. Tilled soil (as in organic production) will lose the water to runoff, along with the soil itself (erosion, rapid OM decomposition).
Green manure crops, alley cropping, grass terracing – these are all things that can be implemented in the future, but for now, I believe crop production has to be agrichemical based in order for Africans to emerge from their deep deficit of soil fertility. I’m NOT advocating GMO crops or multiple applications of herbicide as is done in those systems. One application of systemic herbicide per year to kill the tropical supergrasses, plus 2-3 applications of NPK fertilizer. The dead grass will hold the soil even in intense rain. Seed is sown straight into the soil with a dibble stick. Soil mycorrhizae and organic matter stay intact in the undisturbed soil.
Back from trip to Baja. Thanks to Annika (Annika Forester), Mito (Ahumada Miguel), Bob Echols and Michelle Flom, Chuck Harmon and Yen Wei for the beds/food on the way down. Great to see you.
Camped for a week at San Felipe on the Sea of Cortez. Fishermen are rioting because of the ban on net fishing due to the critically endangered / near extinct porpoise, the vaquita marina, which drowns in the nets. The fishermen were ready to sabotage the Sea Shepard boat, Farley Mowatt, which left that night.
It was fun to get back to Mex and get my Spanish back, albeit with Swahili words creeping in still. I was the odd/eccentric gringo riding a bike around and speaking Spanish with the locals instead of hanging out with the half-drunk gringos. A lot of snow bird retirees there.
Sea Shepherd Mexico - Oficial
https://www.facebook.com/SeaShepherdMexicoOficial/?hc_ref=SEARCH&fref=nf
I have initiated an effort to name the UC Davis soccer field for my Dad. The following is most of a letter I sent to the UCD Athletic Director Kevin Blue (athleticsdirector@ucdavis.edu)
Dear Mr. Blue,
My father, Will Lotter, former UCD soccer coach (as well as tennis, football, baseball) and P.E. Department lecturer, spent hundreds of hours helping to build the seating for the UCD soccer field. Alan Moll, who played soccer in the 1970s for UCD, spent thousands of hours supervising and doing the labor building it. This was a huge contribution to UC Davis athletics.
I would like to advocate that the naming of the soccer field take my father and possibly Moll into consideration. This was the kind of contribution rarely anymore seen.
There are other legacies of my father’s coaching. Every year a few of his players call him to tell him how he influenced their lives. One of them, Tom Parker, who became a superintendent of schools and who played football in the 1950s for my dad. Tom calls every year and tells me how my dad turned his life around with his strict adherence team principles and insistence upon players' good atitude. This was something that was repeated many times during my Dad's career.
There is a true sign of the significance of this uncompromising approach to forming the character of young players, which my dad always attributed in a good part to his former coach at Cal, the legendary Pappy Waldorf, who took Cal to the Rose Bowl in the 1948 season. (If requested, I can relate one of my dad’s stories of a play from that game that ended up on the front page of the L.A. Times the next day [Jan 2, 1949], that illustrates that uncompromising coaching integrity.) Anyhow, a true sign of Will’s influence is that players from the former *opposing* teams, especially the ones who went into coaching, tell him (and me) that they were much influenced by my dad’s uncompromising approach, and the fairness that he insisted upon.
I should mention the many volunteers took part in building the soccer field seating, all coordinated by innumerable phone calls. My mom for years called the soccer field the “damn-field” because of the countless hours my dad spent over there.
Will (my Dad) also did a lot of community work in retirement (see photo). Will is 92 now and sits at home where I take care of him. He has some dementia but he remembers.
Article in the Davis Enterprise by Walt Sherwood supporting the naming of the UCD soccer field, about Will Lotter's (and Jane's) work in Guatemala supporting elderly widows, and young craftswomen. http://www.davisenterprise.com/forum/lotter-extended-a-true-hand-of-friendship/?preview_id=736350%2Ffeed%2F
25 year anniversary of the introduction of EarthAware Software that I developed. I took time off from grad school in 1991 to create what became the first ecological footprint software. EarthAware still works on 32-bit Windows computers (the vast majority) and can be downloaded for free from my website www.donlotter.net. Back then I called it Personal Environmental Impact Accounting (the keywords to find it in Wikpedia). This was before the term "ecological footprint" came out.
I first programmed it in the DOS Basic programming language before Windows existed, and released it as EnviroAccount in 1992. This got press in North America and Europe. In 1993-94 I programmed it for Windows and released it as EarthAware. However, the software and the idea were a couple of decades ahead of their time, as the idea of one's personal footprint just hadn't come into the collective environmental consciousness, I lost my shirt on it and went back to graduate school and finished my Ph.D in agroeocology at the University of California Davis. Since then I haven't worked on it, having transitioned my career to sustainable agriculture, environmental science, and teaching biology at California State University Sacramento.
Here is the description from the original web page:
EarthAware activates its users to investigate and think about their resource use quantities along with other activities relevant to the environment.These "resource use estimates" are the core of environmental literacy. By linking the user to the environment through quantifying their resource use, environmental education using EarthAware becomes personal, dynamic,and exciting. EarthAware is ideal for high school or college environmental education.
EarthAware has six sections:
1) Home Energy and Water
2) Transportation
3) Consumerism
4) Waste
5) Advocacy
6) Livelihood, Land Use, & Family Planning
Each section contains a series of questions. There are 116 questions in all. Each question screen has, in addition to question and answer boxes:- an Information & Resources box; a Web links button; a calculator button.
Links to the Web (This was1993 !! Early adopter of the Internet) provide education and resources. Web links relate directly to the subject in question i.e. solar power - how it works, how to design solar systems, solar equipment manufacturers, solar power research, etc., .
After each section, analysis screens summarize the EarthAware score.Each user receives:
- a score made up of Impact and Action points
- a rating ranging from Eco-Titan to Eco-Tyrannosaurus rex,
- a CO2 budget,
- graphical presentation of their scores,
- recommendations on which areas can be most easily improved.
Graphical presentations augment the analysis, summarizing the analysis and showing strong and weak areas.
The Summary lists all questions and answers as well as all of the Web links.
The user can jump to selected questions or Web sites from the Summary.
A final 7 page printout details everything shown onthe analysis screens.
I've been swamped, thus this much needed posting is late. Pendo arrived March 2 after a 2 year wait for the fiancee visa and we were married March 15. We are here at the Sunset Court house where I was born and raised, taking care of Dad. Pendo is a huge help in this.
I have a disability (now 4 years, a spine malady called Foix-Alajouanine), which I relate here because I walk funny and people wonder why. I don't get out to see people or get things done nearly as much as I would like. I take walks (lurchingly), swim, and ride my bike. I teach a biology course Fall & Spring at Sac State.
Pendo and I met when I went to Dodoma (central Tanzania) in 2011 to work for the Mennonite Central Committee on protecting the watersheds around sand dams they were building. Pendo worked for MCC.
OC 10 1987 Stanislaus complex fire. The names I remember here (not in any order) are Sunil Ramalingam (who sent me the photo), Alan Toms, Richie Hernandez, Manny Diaz, Cheryl Thomas, Mike Z_______, Claudia _____, Jenny Peterson, Gavin Waugh, Steve Lupoli, Russ Merson, yours truly.
I'm starting to get on to Twitter. This hashtag @fivejobsIhavehad I saw in the newspaper because James Comey former FBI director had posted to it.
It is brief selection from the 20 or so jobs I have had since the first one when I was in high school and worked the gravy shift at the old Mandy's Restaurant greasy spoon near the highway in Davis.
Dad ( https://www.facebook.com/willlotterucdavis/) died peacefully early Monday morning (5/20/19) in his favorite place of the past 5 years - his bed on the screen porch, with Coco the puppy sleeping next to him. He had happily spent Sunday in bed being fed by Mike and I (Pendo is visiting family in Tanzania) and a caregiver. I got up at 2 am and covered him up as I did every night, and gave him some nutrition drink. He thanked me as he always did. When I got up at 6:30 he had passed in his sleep.
My brothers, Mike, Scott, and Rick and their wives Beth, Tracy, and Tracy gathered Monday, all of us grateful that Dad had been happy to the end.
We will meet again soon to plan a memorial service 2 - 3 months from now in a venue that will be convenient and large enough. I will post the details for that in the next few weeks.
Here is my 9 minute talk at Dad's memorial service. 1st sentence missing. It starts: "In 1966 when the Lotters were four young boys and two young adventurous parents, we set off in a Willys Jeep from Malawi for a safari up through East Africa...."
Here is a link to the slideshow we showed at Dad's memorial service.
Dad memorial - slideshow to run
Fragrances!
Well friends, I'm "coming out" about a hobby I've dabbled in over the last two decades - men's fragrances. My former passion - hiking / backpacking - is gone (I can walk about a tenth of normal due to deterioration of spinal nerve to lower body) and so I've recently intensified a hobby that I can enjoy in bed, where I have to spend a lot of time. Here are the bullet points:
- Perfumery is an art, conceptually not much different than music - in which dedicated professionals / artists, who develop their olfactory skills over decades, create compositions of 5-20 different mostly natural essential oils - from a repertoire of thousands of essential oils and compounds. These individuals have as much passion for their art and their compositions as musicians or fine arts artists do for theirs.
- Most of the ingredients of the designer fragrances are natural essential oils, with an increasing repertoire of quality synthetics.
- There are distinct genres of women's and men's - I am olfactorily drawn to the men's.
- My interest was started in 1998 when I was asked by a graduate student of Ann Noble's (wine / sensory analysis professor) to come into her lab to do a taste test. Displays of the different essential oils in the classic French perfumes got me interested.
- As an early adopter of Ebay, I picked up several dozen men's colognes back when they went for a song - guys would put up $60 colognes they got as gifts for $5. This is no longer the case (bidding is much higher now). Fragrances keep well and old ones are still just fine - in fact better than newly made ones because the original essential oils that the perfumer used are often not the same or are too expensive nowadays.
- Re: The view that "there are too many cheap smells" - I agree, but there are also too many cheap sounds (elevator music, commercials) - does that mean that you don't listen to beautiful and passionately composed music?
- Re: Allergic reactions: I just don't have any reactions to smells. I mostly put them on at night to appreciate in bed as the fragrance goes through its top, middle, and base notes - like a symphony. Pendo likes many of them and doesn't have any adverse reactions, and puts up with all of this. I put on very small amounts in the morning. Most people can't smell them (I often ask) unless we hug.
- I refuse to be elitist about fragrances - some of my favorites are sold in drugstores - like Drakkar Noir by Guy La Roche. There is an anecdote about a well-known French perfumer (Oliver Creed) being interviewed by an American fashion journalist. The journalist made a dismissive comment about Old Spice. Creed said something like "Old Spice is a wonderful scent and I would be proud to have designed it". Old Spice, which I like, was designed by an American back in the 1930's to elicit his mother's original potpourri baskets. I even once in a while put on Brut! (original - lavender, oak moss, geranium, anise, and others.) In my top ten however is the no-longer produced Gucci Rush for Men that now sells for $250-$500 per bottle. I have an ounce remaining in a bottle from the original $5 days of Ebay. Rush for Men is a combination of essential oils of sandalwood, cedar, and juniper, with, as usual, a half-dozen tiny amounts of others to enhance it, like musk, cypress, and patchouli. The Rush knock-offs don't quite cut it, except for one I got in Mexico 15 years ago (Perfumes Europeos stores in all of the cities of Mexico, but they no longer produce it, they only knock-off current best sellers). Four of my top ten (this year) have juniper or juniper berry - Perry Ellis 360 for Men, Gucci Rush for Men, Tumulte pour Homme by Christian Lacroix, Guy Larouche Drakkar Noir.
- The website I like the best is www.fragrantica.com
- I would never try and make my own fragrances - would be like making my own music - I wouldn't listen to it. I would much rather appreciate the work of perfume artists.
- There are four basic "strengths" of fragrances - eaus de parfum, toilette, and cologne, and aftershaves in that order. Men's colognes are almost all EDTs.
- I dislike the oceanic note, a synthetic that dominated the '90s - '00s (Armani's Acqua di Gio and hundreds of others later). My favorites are mostly pre-oceanic 1980s colognes.
- If you want to dabble a bit you could try a low-cost classic: Pinaud Clubman (pictured) is what the good barbers used to put on our dads and grandfathers after a haircut. Easily had on Ebay for $12 (not Special Reserve - always get the originals of the fragrances).
- Good fragrances are often made of ingredients that cost very little but the final product sells for a high price - but then it's the same with the fine arts - how much was the paint worth on a Pollack painting? There are many very nice fragrances to be had for $20 - one of my favorites is Lanvin L'Homme. However, I can't say the same women's fragrances: my two favorites for women are still Shalimar by Guerlain and Dolce and Gabbana Light Blue. A touch of Shalimar on a woman in 1981 (I had to ask her) elicited my first recognition of perfumes, which had to wait almost 20 years before my starting exploration.
- I'm not a "Nose", but a few of you out there (a small percentage of people) out there for sure are. You can pick out the different essential oil notes by taking one sniff. Some of the main notes in a fragrance I can recognize, but mainly I just enjoy the total composition. I'm getting better though.
- If any of you have neglected men's fragrances sitting around I'd be happy to come and take them off your hands for my collection (nearing 100 - there still are deals on Ebay so I continue to build).
Along with all of the other university faculty around the world, I'm still climbing the learning curve for teaching live Zoom classes, 50+ students, quizzes (via Canvas), answering questions, chat box, share screen.... Next week I try Breakout sessions. It's taking twice the normal time as teaching in person classes.
I start each session with a Covid-19 developments overview (it's a biology class for non-science majors). PowerPoint sample below.
I'm putting this 2016 posting up again. I still think it deserves some thought as we, hopefully, move into potentially eight years of democratic presidency. The revision in which I propose putting a brick-and-mortar and American staffed component into existing African universities makes it much more doable. However I emphasize autonomous and independent American staffed administration and faculty. That would be a top priority to maintain academic standards. For starters it would be one administrative staffer and one teacher using existing EdX and Coursera online courses. These would need to be delivered in a way consistent with African university student skills and then rigorously proctored exams given for u.s. university credit.
I'm camping up in the Sierra at 7200 feet. This is my 13th day and I'm still just getting settled in, so I may be here a month. I'm up a former logging road from the family cabin at Strawberry on 50, Pyramid Peak and Desolation Wilderness in the background, Lake Tahoe beyond that horizon. Huge old growth Jeffrey Pine and Red Fir that survived a fire 30 years ago dominate the landscape. That fire set up the open conditions, with ground dwelling dwarf manzanita around camp. The thick, fire resistant Red Fir bark, the mesquite of the Sierra, full of fragrant resins, is great on the fireplace.
The intense sun and dry environment are very dehydrating, so I've nearly tripled my daily tea consumption from a liter of Mao Feng green tea in the morning to 2-3 liters, with table and potassium salts and honey added.
I do everything slow these days. I can walk about a mile in the morning and then maybe a mile in the afternoon. I hope to at least double that by the end of this trip. Camping replaces my former first love, backpacking. I'm already planning winter break camping on the Sea of Cortez again, pandemic restrictions permitting.
Two of my brothers, Mike and Rick, are up here for a few days each. Coco chases varmints to her heart's content. She loves it when Mike is here and takes runs.
My old Toyota Sienna is a great camping mobile; all the seats in the back gotten rid of and the space filled with camping equipment.
Pendo continues to work at a local nursing home, often taking care of the Covid-19 cases one to two weeks at a time, doing 8-hour shifts in isolation with a patient. She moved to an apartment with other frontline nurses at the beginning of the pandemic.
These are such challenging times. In my biology class at Sac Sate this Fall, via Zoom, I will be spending a fourth of the course on the biology of Covid-19 - it being possibly the defining event of the lives of the Gen Z's. The biology of vaccines looks to be especially important, there being three to four major classes of vaccine coming out early next year - - antibodies, viral protein coats, memory T-cells, RNA, DNA, etcetera - material that will be important for the rest of their (and our) lives.
Part of the class this Fall will be to have students keep a journal, Diario being my app of choice. Journaling has been shown to be a big help in coping. Each student will spend a week writing about their experience with each of six areas of behavior that, when combined, can be as effective as antidepressant drugs: exercise, sleep, nutrition, daily social interaction, stress reduction, and meditation. Much of this is from my dad's teaching of PE-44 Heathful Living for 25 years at UC Davis. I tell them it's alright to laugh at the eccentric professor when I show them how I meditate with my knees-on-the-ground meditation chair. A few out of 60 will benefit from it right away, and I believe someday most of them will use it when they see one or two peers benefiting from it. They will remember the research I showed them in class showing the benefits of daily meditation to the mind, the immune system, and its substantial benefits in reducing autoimmune disease, that other epidemic, which along with obesity kills more people than Covid-19 will.
With the online teaching environment, we teachers are, in less than a year, climbing a learning curve that normally would have taken 5-7 years. It keeps me engaged.
Well, back to camping. I sleep out in the open under the stars. At 4 a.m., before there's any light, you can see four planets - Jupiter and Saturn getting ready to set in the west, Mars midway to the south, and Venus the Morning Star just risen ahead of the Sun. The comet was also clearly visible.
Don
My 3 minute talk at Mom's Remembering Jane Lotter 2016 memorial service. "I'm probably a terrible mother letting you do this.....Be careful!..Have fun!!!" Mike and I were actually 13 & 14 when we spent that week in Bangkok in 1967.
Video of my 3 minute eulogy for Mom: Jane Lotter It's our mom's 95th birthday (1925-2016) so I posted a PDF copy of her book To Africa With Spatula on her Facebook page Facebook page: Remembering Jane Lotter You can download it. Happy birthday Mom!
My latest project, a video about what I have learned in the last 8 months of teaching online. For people who aren't teaching with Zoom and Canvas, the first 3 or 4 minutes will summarize it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSNmfnVMD94
Hi from Baja, camping on the sea of Cortez for a month.
My camp is pretty much set up under a palapa in my favorite corner on the beach and somewhat protected from the offshore wind. Camping is great for meeting interesting people. They are trickling in - a young Argentinian who has driven all the way up from there into California and now is on her way back in a little van, about the size of a 1960 Volvo van. She has a little dog she picked up in Costa Rica, same age, size and demeanor as my Coco. There's a Mexican family nearby. Mexicans camp more now, like me, minus the little house on wheels, just using tents (I don't even use a tent because it's dry here). A couple from Canada, the woman a roller derby pro - margaritas always in hand and a story to tell ( she is the one who gets whiplashed by her teammates ahead of the opposition). Two gals from Oregon in a converted mini school bus. A group of millennial "Amazon Campers". They sign up for 3 months to work for Amazon, choose from a list of Amazon warehouses all over the US, Amazon finds them places to put their campers. Then there is Penny, a perennial here like myself. She's an anti-masker. Aargh! Do people have the right to drive drunk? Is it an infringement of their rights to arrest drunk drivers? Not wearing a mask puts others at the same kind of risk when a third of infected people are asymptomatic and don't know they may be spreading the coronavirus. I just don't get it. "Oh I just don't believe in that fake science." Okay, when you go to the hospital for any kind of surgery or for medical treatment you need to tell them that you don't believe in germ theory because you don't believe in that science. Idiots! It's the same science that has shown repeatedly that mask-wearing saves lives. Hypocrites! Okay Don cálma te.
Everybody wears masks here in town. They are stricter here than in Davis. No anti-maskers tolerated. The grocery store here takes everyone's forehead temperature, doses out hand sanitizer, and sprays the carts. Not a single anti-masker seen, unlike Pollock Pines Raley's where there were many of them defiantly walking around when I was there. My exposure on this trip has been no more than going to Trader Joe's or Costco. Probably even less because I'm camping and outdoors all the time.
A sustainability anecdote:
(Note: a documentary film by National Geographic called Sea Of Shadows (on YouTube) about the poaching of the totoaba fish causing the imminent extinction of the vaquita marina porpoise is background to this. The fishermen here rebelled against the government enforcing anti-poaching laws. They rioted and burned the vehicles and a boat of the Mexican Marine police a couple of years ago.)
This morning Mario, a strapping big fisherman who I got to know last year came by. He had been out netting camarones - large shrimp. Drag nets are illegal in the upper Sea of Cortez but the rebellious fishermen are using them.
I told him the story, in the best Spanish I could muster, of the classic case of the rebellious "Newfie" (New Foundland, Canada) cod fishermen who refused to follow the government regulations back in the '70s and '80s, after marine scientists warned that the cod fishery could collapse if they all kept fishing maximally as they had for 400 years (originally out of Britain). There are videos of the fishermen attacking (with fists) Canadian government MPs and officials. The traditionally non-confrontational Canadians gave in and didn't enforce the regulations, as the Mexicans are appearing to do now.
The result, now a classic case study in ecology that I teach in my biology class, was that the cod fishery collapsed in the '90s and has never recovered because other non-marketable species have moved in to that niche (ecologists say "nitch").
I related how the Norwegian cod fishermen, with their Arctic Cod fishery, listened to and followed the pleas of the marine scientists, reduced and regulated their fishing via the science of "maximum sustainable yield", and are continuing to make a good living on cod.
The Newfies are still crying in their beers (paid for by government welfare checks) and are the subject of jokes (Newfie jokes) in BC and Alberta.
Mario wasn't very happy hearing this, but as with all teaching it will go into his processor and wait for a peer to bring up the subject someday, after which he will hopefully relate the story (los pescaderos Canadenses).
San Felipe, Baja California Norte: I got one root canal done, one to go. Two root canals two crowns total $1,000 vs $5,000 in California. A big reason why I made this trip. Perfectly good, reputable dentistry.
Pendo continues to work at the local elder care center. She should be getting vaccinated very soon as she and the residents are at the very top of the priority list.
It's just great to be here.
Don
For my old fire crew friends: this song is worth listening to every year, for anyone actually.
James Keelaghan - "Cold Missouri Waters", about the 1949 Mann Gulch Fire tragedy
Here is the song by Keelaghan: (listen to this one first): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dztj4X3fQps
Here is the song by someone else, probably, but with numerous photos of the incident: (watch after the one above, which is much much better) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgQNeGPJdcQ&t=20s
The Mann Gulch Fire: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mann_Gulch_fire
Photo: Davis Fire Crew, 1987 Yours truly in front, middle. Image
The north wind blowing fiercely in the Fall months is something we never had growing up, and is responsible for the huge wildfires we've had in the last few years.
Here's my latest letter to the Davis Enterprise, on the science of it. Driving force: typhoons off of Korea!... which have increased in strength due to warming ocean temperatures. Image
Rejuvenating a long-neglected garden plot between the street and my house. It had river rock on it for decades. I put in a winter cover crop in November and just mowed it down last week. It is now under a tarp to decompose. Soil-building summer cover crop seed ordered for this hot, hard soil plot.
Update to 2016 article: Five years ago I published an article in a U.S. diplomatic journal about how U.S. can most effectively help Africa accomplish its own development goals: by building U.S. universities there. https://www.facebook.com/don.lotter.1/posts/10154064713684424
The letter below, in this month's Foreign Service Journal, outlines a more doable version of the proposal: to build a single small building on university campuses, staffed by 2-3 U.S. faculty and ITs, and administer online courses in a way that is adapted to the Africans (Ubuntu). Below I briefly outline how I did this at St. John's University of Tanzania with a course from MIT.
My letter in the current issue of Foreign Service Journal: go to 3rd page http://www.afsa.org/sites/default/files/flipping_book/0421/10/index.html
As to the question of "Why don't the Africans do this?": they probably are by now in some universities, but read the original article. Upshot: The Africans are hungry for U.S. university education - just talk to any of the university students there. Why not bring that quality, the best in the world given the huge scale we have of it and the dedication of our Ph.D.'s and faculty (not to be taken for granted!), to Africa?
In a Reddit science discussion (r/science) "Farming without disturbing soil could cut agriculture’s climate impact by 30%" https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/n0ae79/farming_without_disturbing_soil_could_cut/gw91qey?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3I I posted this nutshell summary of my agriculture experience in Africa:
Related to this topic, I published a paper in the journal Agriculture and Human Values: "Facing food insecurity in Africa: Why, after 30 years of work in organic agriculture, I am promoting the use of synthetic fertilizers and herbicides in small-scale staple crop production." http://donlotter.net/Lotter_Facing_food_insecurity_in_Africa.pdf
In the paper I describe the crucial importance of going to zero tillage in Africa, which is losing its soil at a catastrophic rate, crucial enough for me to abandon a career of research and practice of organic crop production and recommending the use of herbicides that are manufactured in Africa, are cheap, accessible, non-proprietary, and can be applied via backpack sprayer, in order to achieve a soil-protecting crop/weed residue layer to defend against the intense rains when they come, far more intense than what most of us here in the U.S experience.
Let me put it this way: when catastrophic illness or injury strikes your child, you are not going to ask for organic this or that at the hospital. The soil situation in Africa is similarly at-risk. Zero tillage is only feasible using herbicides and can only be done by abandoning organic methods.
My colleagues in the organic community here in California have completely rejected my approach (although we are still friends), but none of them have spent the nearly ten years that I have working in African agriculture. I am expecting responses here that will say that various forms of non-chemical conservation tillage, sustainable agriculture, alley cropping etc. can be used.
I've worked with them all, and in the paper I propose transitioning to those methods after perhaps ten years of educating farmers and saving the soil of Africa with herbicides and synthetic nitrogen fertilizers (maize, the staple food crop, is a voracious nitrogen feeder, and it's very difficult for small-scale African farmers to grow good crops of maize organically).
Ten years of zero tillage would substantially increase soil organic matter in those tropical soils and the carbon sequestration would be consistent with that shown in the paper that this subreddit discusses.
I just re-watched "The Green Zone", just put up by Netflix. It made me angry again about that war that Dubya (George W. Bush) led the U.S. into.
A month before the invasion of Iraq, in February 2003, I marched with a million people in New York City (pic below) to keep us from going to war. At the time I was doing my post-doc in Kutztown, PA (near Bethlehem, Allentown, Reading) and went with a busload of locals. Most people against the war didn't go.
That war's consequences are too long to list: so many lives lost, the disintegration and destruction of Iraq, the destabilization of the Middle East, ISIS, extremist-led Iran's ascendance there, the dilution of the U.S. effort in Afghanistan leading to our now imminent loss there. And don't forget the 5-10 TRILLION dollars.
And no one seems to want to hold the Republicans' feet to the fire about it. Yes I realize Democrats sanctioned the invasion, but they were trying to be bipartisan and "close ranks". Ha. It was Bush's and the Republicans' war.
My research and publications are at www.donlotter.net. Some are summarized below.
40 year break in Dream Journal entries! My sleep (REM) dreams have been coming more and more into my consciousness - their vividness and weirdness - juxtapositions of completely random parts of my life. So I found my dream journal, started in the mid-1970s when I participated in one of the late Nancy Jungerman's dream groups at UCD. The last entry was 1981 !! The next was 2021 ! Forty years! (please excuse the early morning drowsy scrawl, if you do choose to read it).
My latest letter to a newspaper.
I stirred up a tempest in a teapot on Nextdoor.com. Ended up with almost 100 comments, most of them supportive and decrying the anti-vax stance. The few opposed were from both the right and New Age left. The right-wingers argued that if insurance benefits are denied "where will it end", leading to an entire discussion of lifestyle-driven obesity and medical costs. The New Ager scattered angry posts about distrust of government, as if science plays no part in their life. The post was removed by Nextdoor.
A guy's way of expanding the waist of thrift store bought 1980s Wrangler jeans, my favorites, that are a size too small - cut the identical piece out of any old discarded jeans and, yes, staple it in! It works until I can get to Baja again and have the seamstresses properly do it for $3.
The old Wranglers have the leather logo patch on the pocket. Post-2000 ones have a larger patch on the beltline. Anyone out there a jeans buff?
My spine disability makes is a lot of work to put on and take off pants, so I keep them on 24/7, including sleeping. I have a dozen pairs of Levi's and Wranglers of all ages and just change out every couple of days. Jeans are so well adapted to California heat as well as cold.
Outdoor smoke vs. indoor VOCs:
My gut feeling, since there's no comparison research, is that volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in household indoor air are about as bad for health as, again my gut estimation, about level 100 to150 of EPAs PM2.5 (the orange level on purpleair . com).
Here are my assumptions and thoughts:
- For a million years our bodies have dealt with smoke inhalation in caves and huts, but not synthetic VOCs.
- Purpleair has indoor meters, but they are for PM2.5 (smoke), not VOCs, which are much smaller gaseous molecules.
- I don't worry much about being indoors 12 hours a day, I just try to keep my diet full of anti-oxidants to clean my lungs and blood.
- I have slept outside for 35 years. My friends who've seen me bed down on all manner of flat surface outdoors (rooftops, gardens, etc.) will comment below on this, I'm sure.
- If AQI hits or trends red, I sleep indoors.
- These thresholds are all based on how I feel sleeping indoors vs. out, with some study (sample paper below).
This book is giving me some hope for Afghanistan and other countries under Sharia law (and for the world in general). Kurdish women, fully supported by the wider Kurdish movement for regional semi-autonomy within each country (not independence), took up arms and ferociously fought ISIS. Women became commanders of mixed troops.
In the audiobook version, the author, an American, reads it.
This 2-minute clip from The Daughters of Kobani says it all for me, giving me hope for those Afghani girls and women under the Taliban.
A young girl approaches a Kurdish officer involved in clearing a town in northern Syria of the incredibly vicious ISIS.
This post is about coming out, in the philosophical realm, to my friends - you'ns - about a couple of environment-related things that I have converted to that I know most of you have strongly opposed - both having to do with sustainable living systems - the primary focus of my community of friends for nearly 50 years now. It's a long post but it has to be for something this important.
Some 25 years ago when I read the first Harry Potter book, I have always remembered the quote below.
Well friends, here are a couple of things I've changed on that only a few of my friends know so far. Actually, in today's politicized and partisan social environment, I think it's harder to come out to your friends about something that strongly goes against their beliefs, something that you believe in your heart and have for a long time, than it is to argue it with your opponents
I decided to do this because I'm using both of these, especially the latter one, in my biology class at Sac State. The first and most important point is to *please* (* = italics) keep in mind that it is all about the risk/benefit view, not ideals and being uncompromising. I got into this in my in-depth lectures about why students should do a thorough risk/benefit assessment about the COVID vaccination (get vaccinated). I used the example of driving - always with risks of death that we tend to ignore, but that brings many benefits.
The other important point is that, as a scientist and university lecturer, I need to be responsible to communicate what, to the best of my knowledge is the truth for these kids 'futures. I was trained by Professor Jeff Granett at UC Davis to analyze and then adapt, and it's what I'm doing now.
The first change involves using glyphosate herbicide, yes, the one that has been in the news as carcinogenic, in African small-scale backpack sprayer farming to **help Africa take advantage of the technology to feed itself and keep its soil from eroding away, which is being lost, research shows, at a catastrophic rate**. The Africans badly, very badly, need to produce annual crops on these one acre family plots via zero-till conservation agriculture in which the previous years' crop and weed stubble is left on the soil and not dug in and turned over.
The African traditional agriculture was developed and worked well when their population was 10% of what it is now - slash the forest, burn it, crop it for 3-4 years, and then go find more forest that's virgin or fallowed for 20 years. There is none of that remaining, it's all gone. Tanzania is at 60 million people and heading to 90 million.
I remember seeing the last remnants of those forests in the mid-60s, when the Tanzania population was about 10 million, when my parents were in the Peace Corps and we drove up through Tanzania to Nairobi, through hundreds of miles of endless Miombo woodland (not rainforest - it's semi-arid). Miombo woodland is semi-savannah, open with grasses. You can still see it in the national parks, which have been ecologically very well kept, in central and southern TZ.
In the paragraph below I address the most common counter arguments that people use, like "you should just let the Africans use their traditional methods" etc. I also ask my dedicated sustie friends who shake their heads at my "heresy" "do you really know what hunger is like? To experience your family members dying from the disease that hunger allows into the body?"
Some herbicide exposure is a small small issue here my good organic and sustie friends (who are still my friends and, who, the few who have heard these issues, have not ostracized me - maybe called me a maverick bordering on heretical, but still friends).
And BTW, the paper I wrote on this for Agriculture and Human Values (peer reviewed, cited below) states that I still favor moving to mostly organic farming in California because we have the knowledge and wherewithal to do so.
I like to use the example of getting urgent, life-saving medical care - are you going to ask the surgeon who's saving your child's life if they are using organic and sustainable methods? No, of course not! It's a catastrophic situation. Hunger and disease in children, because your 2 acre eroding crop field doesn't yield enough grain, is catastrophic.
With the herbicide mediated zero tillage issue, I can honestly say that I am an expert, having done years of research and work in a critically food-insecure region (central Tanzania where I taught and did research at a small impoverished university). Of all of the friends who have questioned and opposed this view, none of them have worked for any lengthy amount of time in Africa. Organic or non-herbicide zero tillage can't be done at the stage the Tanzanians are at right now. This *will* be possible after about ten years of herbicided zero till, after the soil weed seed bank is depleted. Few have experienced the tropical African grasses that come up after hoe-tillage at first rains - Bermuda Grass on steroids - rhizomatous and near impossible to dig out. Glyphosate kills it. We're talking a twice a year application via backpack sprayer, a far cry from the case that made the news about glyphosate causing cancer - in men who applied it *every day for years* without adequate protection.
My other change of mind involves *being open* (not completely converted) to the new, completely revamped, researched, and tested modular nuclear power and its potential to *enhance and bolster* all of the renewable energy technologies that we will be implementing in order to try and reach carbon neutrality, which, to tell you the truth, I do not see us achieving, soon enough, anyway.
I'll write less on this because I'm not an expert. The guy who convinced me was Bill Gates, when I watched Netflix's 3-part "Inside Bill's Brain". In episode 3 (more than halfway through that episode) he talks about the new nuclear power. Yes, I know he has invested money in it, moderately heavily. He also has a TED talk on it, and discusses it in his not-to-be-left-unread book if you are serious about carbon neutrality: "How to Avoid a Climate Disaster". Yes, I know that Bill isn't PC these days, but he's a very very smart guy who, most importantly, has shown **an ability change with the times**. (He cares deeply about the future of his son and daughter).
You really need to think risk / benefit assessment again. How are we going to get to "Zero Net Carbon" as Bill says in his book.
I will let you watch his TED talk and read the book. The main point: the technology for nuclear power has completely been revolutionized from the old risk-prone nuclear reactors (that I totally opposed and still oppose), a few of which are still around (Diablo Canyon), and that famously ruined things for these researchers and investors (Fukushima). Watch HBO's "Chernobyl". Hands down the best TV I've ever watched - well, until I got to the Spanish production "Money Heist", which kicks Hollywood's butt when it comes to bank heist films.
A slide for my lecture at Sac State introductory biology class tomorrow to mostly freshman non-science majors, who tend to not have reliable (professional journalists backed by fact checkers) news sources. I rarely make commentary, as in the 2nd & 3rd paragraphs, but these days I just feel that I have to. I usually just stick to the science.
Vaccines, viruses, COVID-19, and the Earth's biology (climate change) are all parts of this course, so I'm really not going outside of my purview.
Politics interact with science in very important ways these days.
The undergrads who did KDVS over the years got these people to do station IDs when they visited to do shows or speeches. The last three are improvs by students. They are priceless. Listen at www.KDVS.org (you have to wait for them, one/hour. I list them below.
KDVS will restart archiving their shows soon. I'm bugging them to restart.
My cat Berry is a real character - a Nextdoor_com post I made is getting comments from cat (and dog) people. Here's the post:
Berry walks with me and Coco the dog every morning around the block. He hides in the bushes, lets us walk by, then sprints ahead, hides in the bushes again, and then ambushes Coco when she goes by.
Berry occasionally does drive-by hugs of my calf (lower leg, not the bovine kind). He'll run up, put both forepaws around my calf, give it a quick split-second hug, no claws, and then run off as if to say "Hey, luv'ya man but I can't be too sentimental about it." Kind of a tough guy thing.
Berry will only eat Friskies Indoor Delights kibbles. My brother brings expensive organic zero-grain cat food, canned and kibbles, from a high-end house in Marin County and Berry just sticks up his nose and won't eat any of it. He wants his Friskies.
I'm quite aware of the issue of male cats getting urinary blockages from dry cat food but my view on that is that 1) Berry knows what's best for him, and 2) Friskies has been making cat food for perhaps a hundred years, has research labs etc. and I just assume that they have a formula that reduces the risk. The urinary tract issue apparently originates from these dry pet foods being made mostly from plants, and felines didn't evolve eating plants in any significant amount. Their physiology is not adapted to plant compounds. However, again, I assume that the Friskies company has looked at the different kinds of plant compounds that are problematic and stay away from those. I also give Berry lots of opportunities to drink water, running water preferably.
My philosophy on this: My great-grandmother, a cowgirl who used to ride and shoot as good as any of her nine brothers, used to tell my Dad: "Well Willard, if any of them kids goes bad it's their own durned fault because I always let him do what (sic) they pleased."
So I let Berry do what he pleases.
Here is the link for the post: Lots of comments on the food. I like the one from Aileen, the "farm girl". https://nextdoor.com/news_feed/?post=206606654&comment=680685958&ct=J9H91O7ZyHktlI-Dt0yUYbnKIfHSXwIbqTZJ-UgLUG1Cxf-mp5CIIJo_D5EPvY7h&ec=CUuITXfgC4y3JTZ2xRbYqsCEDVfj1pLaDEEEO8rW-uw%3D&lc=66
A couple of rants: 1) those idiot elliptical exercise machines that move your feet for you vs. rotating stairs that actually make you work; and 2) the minimalist-house de-cluttering thing preached for "peace of mind".
1) My spine disability (explained in previous posts) doesn't allow me to lift my feet - it's really really difficult. I need to work those muscle systems. The vast majority of people just take this muscle action for granted and appear to not even be aware of it. The ellipticals push your feet up and then make you push down and forward for the exercise. It's nearly useless for me. Fitness centers all have a dozen stupid ellipticals and one or two rotating stairs, often fully occupied, which are a much better workout. You actually have to lift your feet and keep your balance (if you do it hands-free).
Balance is another dynamic here. I do the rotating stairs hands-free, working on my balance, a dynamic that is, again, taken for granted by most spinal cord abled people. Keeping one's balance takes perhaps 50 muscles, all responding to a signal sent from your inner ear to instantly keep you balanced. My signal is degraded at mid-spine and I need a lot of practice on those stairs.
2) The Amazon list of books of the de-clutter-your-house-de-clutter-your-mind ilk is long. My view: those two things just don't need to be coupled together! It seems to be some kind of insecurity-driven thing: what you look at and own, or don't own, gives you security.
We live in a society with a huge amount of stuff, more than any other society in history, a surprising amount of it well-made, potentially useful, and being discarded or sold for pocket change at thrift stores and yard sales or being given away on Nextdoor.
Some of that stuff is potentially useful or just fun or interesting to have when one is in a certain mood, or can be used by a friend in need. Most of us have big houses and the space to keep stuff, including my double-wide.
My bottom line: You can have a lot of stuff and still have peace of mind. If stuff becomes a health or safety issue, then pare down, but other than that, if you think you'd like to keep it, why keep it and don't worry about it.
I'm not talking here about consumerism and shopping. Thrifting is good. It's not consumeristic. Buying something at the thrift store does not send a market signal to use the energy and resources to make another one.
My emergency toilet, in storage shed, while I wait two days for our local plumber. I also show this photo to my students (thus the labels) because in class we cover compost toilets (along with sewage biology and composting biology). The white toilet insert fits nicely over the toilet bucket. A handful of the leaves from the leaf bucket goes on top after you go #2 (no #1, urine goes into another vessel or the garden., diluted 5/1) The plastic garbage bag makes it easy to lift out when it gets full. Just close it up, put it into a barrel with others you've done, and let it compost in the plastic for a few months.
The toilet inserts are easily gotten free when houses get cleaned out.
It doesn't smell.
I post this now because now's the time to collect leaves.
If you want to appreciate life, don't miss watching "NOVA Universe Revealed: Alien Worlds". Free to watch. The search for life in space. I just assigned it to all of my biology students as the last video of the semester - what a great perspective on everything we have here on Earth.
Hint: they find an exoplanet 124 lightyears away that has water and is the right distance from its sun/star for life to exist, out of billions of exoplanets. One scientist says that she believes they will find life in the next 10 years.
Note: I am impressed by the number of young women astronomers they interview. This is good to show my Sac State students, mostly first year non-science majors, 2/3 women with little past exposure to STEM.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/nova-universe-revealed-alien-worlds/
The imminent loss of our democracy as we know it. A 1-minute excerpt from Terry Gross' Fresh Air interview of the author of a Dec 6 The Atlantic article "Trump's Next Coup Has Already Begun". Excuse my amateur video production. The situation is becoming urgent and I believe we need to focus.
Fresh Air: https://www.facebook.com/FreshAirwithTerryGross
The Atlantic article: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/01/january-6-insurrection-trump-coup-2024-election/620843/
Best quote so far in this book: "Only the British would describe an animal species as 'impertinent.'". Title: "A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life and Epic Journey of the World's Smartest Birds of Prey". I'm listening to it in OverDrive. Fun. Here's a blurb on Amazon about it: ".... bird so wickedly smart, curious, and social, it boggles the mind.”
And while I'm on the subject, for you bird people, "The Ravenmaster: My Life with the Ravens at the Tower of London" is also a really good listen, read in the author's inimitable east London accent.
Video: Sojourns in Africa
Article in SF Chronicle about where our compostable waste goes. Upshot: the end product, compost, is not only very valuable fertilizer, much better for the soil and our food crops than synthetics (this was my dissertation research topic), but it prevents large amounts of methane, generated by the anaerobic environment of landfills, from escaping into the atmosphere - a powerful greenhouse gas.
I support California's pioneering effort to divert and compost waste.
Article at: https://digital.olivesoftware.com/olive/odn/sanfranciscochronicle/default.aspx
"This situation is good for you grocery workers and others, they're going to have to raise your wages, and I don't mind at all paying the higher prices."
This I told a beleaguered Trader Joe's worker who was recounting to me, probably for nth time, the supply chain problems, tied to labor shortage.
He visibly brightened. Even at my 10K/yr teaching salary (1 class), I really don't mind paying more for food. We Americans pay the lowest percent of of income of any country in the world. I believe in supporting livable wages for our workers.
This, below, posted by Bob Zomer is really interesting because back in the '70s, as an undergraduate at UCD studying what was called "Alternative Agriculture" (the word organic was too controversial back then, officially, and the term "sustainable" wasn't popularly invented yet), I read up on Steiner's biodynamic philosophy. Maria Thun was a main writer on biodynamics in their journal, I believe it was entitled Biodynamics. Thun showed diagrams of the phases of the moon and planting times and discussed how those phases affected plants.
Gravitational action of sun and moon influences behavior of animals and plants, study shows
My friend and former colleague at St. John's University of Tanzania, Michael Msendekwa, posted this. I loved the Gogo singing. The Gogo people are the tribe around Dodoma. They are legendary for their music. Listen to to minor key (I believe that's what musicians would call it).
One morning I came particularly early to my office, before anyone was there. The offices were divided by short walls, open above to hear everything. The cleaning woman in another office didn't hear me come in and was singing a Gogo song. I swear, it could have been Billie Holiday. I begged her less shy colleagues to ask her to sing the song again so I could record it. She was too shy. She sang a church song instead. Major key.
The college choirs (Anglican and "Roman" [Catholic]) used to sing near my house on campus. It was pure pleasure listening to how they could go in and out of cadence and tune and then right back in without missing a beat.
I would walk over to listen. They would go find a chair for me.
Major key singing: here is singing from Malawi. This singing, I believe, is in a major key, do you hear the difference from the previous post? Lovely in its own right. On the shores of Lake Nyasa, Nkhotakhota town.
A historical mystery solved: the term "Sydney coveys" in my 6th great-grandfather, T.W. Bradley's, 1851 letter about life around San Francisco. I discovered this letter in the California Archives about 40 years ago and have never been able to figure out "Sydney coveys", except that, back then, Australia was associated with criminals, because Britain had, earlier in that century, "transported" many of its "criminals" (half of them just starving people who stole a loaf of bread - read "The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia's Founding").
By 1849 in what is now Tasmania, there were thousands of ex-convicts who had done their time, and when word about gold in California got around, they came by the shipload, so many thousands that their part of San Francisco became known as Sydney Town, and they were known as Sydney Ducks (See Chronicle article, URL below). A good portion of them were indeed criminals and ne'er-do-wells and word got back to the East (Pennsylvania for Bradley's) that San Francisco was overrun by crime and criminals. The now famous Vigilante Committees were the result and apparently they sent many of the Sydney Ducks off in "coveys". Not sure where. Perhaps back to Australia.
Article in Chronicle archives: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/When-derelicts-from-Down-Under-overran-San-13092716.php?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=headlines&utm_campaign=sfc_chroniclevault&sid=59c4c37cd7aaa8ed448b4d8b
The remarkable process of 21st century science is represented in an article in the NYTimes on how the mRNA vaccines were developed for COVID - everything important in contemporary science is there: the immigrant as well as home-grown visionaries; the long, demoralizing struggle with failure (HIV vaccines); the struggling, isolated lab techs; the lucky encounters; capitalism; bureaucracy; peer-review; how vaccines work.....
"Halting Progress and Happy Accidents: How mRNA Vaccines Were Made" https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/15/health/mrna-vaccine.html
The image below shows a human cell infected with SARS-CoV-2 virus particles.
Then, after reading that, if you have time, you can perhaps join me in thinking about, and struggling with, the big picture, which for me right now can be condensed down to the spectrum between the above quite incredible cultural dynamic, and a video, "Requiem for the American Dream", that distills the 50 years of Noam Chomsky's incisive thought on the "historically unprecedented" inequality in American society today.
I don't have answers, mostly questions. I'll just say that I value both, and: how do we keep the critical elements of the science dynamic and at the same time reduce the inequality?
Thanks to Gabriele Streuer for turning me on to that video in one of her posts. After 50 years of reading bits and parts of Chomsky, it put it all together for me.
Well I had no idea that adjusting the photo from my 2 year old post about my "coming out" about one of my eccentricities collecting and appreciating men's fragrances, otherwise known as "colognes".
A 20+ year hobby, now much more important since having to give up hiking and backpacking - my original first love in life.
My latest favorite are shown:
Well friends, I'm "coming out" about a hobby I've dabbled in over the last two decades - men's fragrances. My former passion - hiking / backpacking - is gone (I can walk about a tenth of normal due to deterioration of spinal nerve to lower body) and so I've recently intensified a hobby that I can enjoy in bed, where I have to spend a lot of time. Here are the bullet points:
- Perfumery is an art and perfumes are compositions, conceptually not much different than music - in which dedicated professionals / artists, who develop their olfactory skills over decades, create compositions of 5-20 different mostly natural essential oils - from a repertoire of thousands of essential oils and compounds. These individuals have as much passion for their art and their compositions as musicians or fine arts artists do for theirs.
- Most of the ingredients of the designer fragrances are natural essential oils, with an increasing repertoire of quality synthetics.
- There are distinct genres of women's and men's - I am olfactorily drawn to the men's. (There's also a large category of "unisex" fragrances.)
- My interest started in 1998 when I was asked by a graduate student of Ann Noble's (wine / sensory analysis professor) to come into her UCD lab to do a taste test. Displays of the different essential oils in the classic French perfumes got me interested.
- As an early adopter of Ebay, I picked up several dozen men's colognes back when they went for a song - guys would put up $60 colognes they got as gifts for $5. This is no longer the case (bidding is much higher now). Fragrances keep well and old ones are still just fine - in fact better than newly made ones because the original essential oils that the perfumer used are often not the same or are too expensive nowadays.
- Re: The view that "there are too many cheap smells" - I agree, but there are also too many cheap sounds (elevator music, commercials) - does that mean that you don't listen to beautiful and passionately composed music?
- Re: Allergic reactions: I just don't have any reactions to smells. I mostly put them on at night to appreciate in bed as the fragrance goes through its top, middle, and base notes - like a symphony. Pendo likes many of them and doesn't have any adverse reactions, and puts up with all of this. I put on very small amounts in the morning. Most people can't smell them (I often ask) unless we hug.
- I refuse to be elitist about fragrances - some of my favorites are sold in drugstores - like Drakkar Noir by Guy La Roche, a really nice "frag". There is an anecdote about a well-known French perfumer (Oliver Creed) being interviewed by an American fashion journalist. The journalist made a dismissive comment about Old Spice. Creed said something like "Old Spice is a wonderful scent and I would be proud to have designed it". Old Spice, which I like, was designed by an American back in the 1930's to elicit his mother's original potpourri baskets. I even once in a while put on Brut! (original - lavender, oak moss, geranium, anise, and others.) In my top ten however is the no-longer produced Gucci Rush for Men that now sells for $250-$500 per bottle. I have an ounce remaining in a bottle from the original $5 days of Ebay. Rush for Men is a combination of essential oils of sandalwood, cedar, and juniper, with, as usual, a half-dozen tiny amounts of others to enhance it, like musk, cypress, and patchouli. The Rush knock-offs don't quite cut it, except for one I got in Mexico 15 years ago (Perfumes Europeos stores in all of the cities of Mexico, but they no longer produce it, they only knock-off current best sellers). Four of my top ten (this year) have juniper or juniper berry - Perry Ellis 360 for Men, Gucci Rush for Men, Tumulte pour Homme by Christian Lacroix, Guy La Roche Drakkar Noir.
- The website I like the best is www.fragrantica.com
- I would never try to make my own fragrances - would you make your own music to listen to? - I wouldn't listen to my own. I would much rather appreciate the work of perfume artists who spend a lifetime blending.
- There are four basic "strengths" of fragrances - eau's de parfum (EDP), toilette (EDT), and cologne (EDC), and aftershaves in that order. Men's colognes are almost all EDTs.
- I dislike the oceanic note, a synthetic that dominated the '90s - '00s (Armani's Acqua di Gio and hundreds of others later). My favorites are mostly pre-oceanic 1980s colognes.
- If you want to dabble a bit you could try a low-cost classic: Pinaud Clubman (pictured right, along with Timbuktu by L'Artisan) is what the good barbers used to put on our dads and grandfathers after a haircut. Easily had on Ebay for $12 (not Special Reserve - always get the originals of the fragrances).
- Good fragrances are often made of ingredients that cost very little but the final product sells for a high price - but then it's the same with the fine arts - how much was the paint worth on a Pollack painting? There are many very nice fragrances to be had for $20 - one of my favorites is Lanvin L'Homme. However, I can't say the same for women's fragrances: my two favorites for women are still Shalimar by Guerlain and Dolce and Gabbana Light Blue. A touch of Shalimar on a woman in 1981 (I had to ask her) elicited my first recognition of perfumes, which had to wait almost 20 years before my starting exploration.
- I'm not a "Nose", but a few of you out there (a small percentage of people) out there for sure are. You can pick out the different essential oil notes by taking one sniff. Some of the main notes in a fragrance I can recognize, but mainly I just enjoy the total composition. I'm getting better though.
- If any of you have neglected men's fragrances sitting around I'd be happy to come and take them off your hands for my collection (nearing 100 - there still are deals on Ebay so I continue to build).
In her book "Blowout" Rachel Maddow gives a great overview of Putin, Ukraine, and the major U.S. oil company that propped up Putin as he stripped the assets from the major Russian oil and gas companies and jailed executives who didn't line up behind him. These investments and partnerships by the U.S. company (in the 1 minute clip), along with Morgan Stanley Bank, were made at a time when there were efforts within Russia to move to a democratic and global market-oriented socio-economy - described in other books. The one I read was "Putin's People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took On the West". These companies were advised of this situation and asked to reconsider their Investments.
Profits, and Putin, prevailed. We, and the Ukrainians, are now paying for this.
The PBS Frontline episode on Putin is really really good.
https://www.pbs.org/video/putins-road-to-war-ggv39p/ However, nothing, not a thing, about the gas and oil part of the equation, which includes the role of Big Oil and their exclusive focus on profits in Putin's rise to power, most prominently Exxon Mobil and Morgan Stanley Bank, very well described in Rachel Maddow's "Blowout".
My posting (URL below) on Maddow's book has a one minute clip of Maddow you should listen to, featuring Rex Tillerson: https://tinyurl.com/mwfm33h4
FRONTLINE | Putin's Road to War | Season 2022 | Episode 2
I'm watching Ukrainian president V. Zelensky's old TV show "Servant of the People" on Netflix. LOL. It shows the city of Kiev too, in better times. He plays a school teacher who was surreptitiously video'd profanely lambasting the current government, the bleep-ridden video went viral, he was drafted to run for president as part of an experiment in "unsupervised democracy", and won.
At his old school he's presented with a traditional Ukrainian weapon, a mace called a bulava. How prescient and symbolic for what is happening now.
The show incisively pillories the Soviet-era apparat (class) system he inherits, as represented in the face of his bodyguard on his first day as president.
The first line is one of my mantras "I yam what I yam". Ca. 1935
Here's a posting I made in response to family friend Ray Klein's posting noting National Submarine Day. My post ended serendipitously with a note to relevance to today's world events:
Our former Sunset Court neighbor, the late Tom Allen, wrote a memoir. He was a submarine officer in WWII in the Pacific, patrolling Iron Bottom Sound. He wrote that two subs that came from the same Treasure Island SF shipyard went down without a trace, no combat. The Navy went to the shipyard. Found a sub being built with completely faulty, non-double welding of the sides. They went to the welding inspector's locker. It was full of comic books.
I guess it takes double-redundancy (three levels) to ensure quality. Two bad guys, the welder and the inspector, sent two crews to the bottom of the Pacific. Tom's sub was from that yard.
That was the times, a disturbing part of that incredible effort our parents made to fight fascism. That accomplishment is a lesson for today.
His book: https://www.amazon.com/Growing-The-Santa.../dp/1490933026...
Growing Up In The Santa Clara Valley: From Picking Prunes To Submarine Service
This is the work I've been doing. There is a huge problem of student apathy in universities, as summarized in a recent Chronicle of Higher Education article "A ‘Stunning’ Level of Student Disconnection" (URL below).
I stumbled on some version of active learning that seemed to help students engage - you can pause the video and read their post-course comments. I did this when we transitioned two years ago to all online teaching via Zoom. I knew I didn't want exams - too difficult to do online, but I wanted students to actually write the words and phrases of biology.
This is what seems to be the "active learning" aspect: writing the words, not just clicking on a multiple choice button, while the concept goes into the memory - e.g. excessive sugar consumption can lead to metabolic syndrome and type 2 diabetes, or, daily meditation has been shown in research to significantly reduce anxiety and depression.
Yes, I know student apathy has always been a problem, but even the old-timers are saying it is much worse than they've ever seen.
The Chronicle of Higher Ed article: https://tinyurl.com/2p8jbfpf
Here's the entire article: https://tinyurl.com/2p9x8sm9
Here's a PDF that summarizes my work and has more links: https://tinyurl.com/57wsnaff
Improving Engagement and Equitability with Canvas Quizzes
Below is my comment on the Whole Earth Festival ban of the age-old, much loved, ever-tolerated drum circle. #wholeearthfestival2022
Tomorrow, Sunday, I'm seriously considering bringing my African drum and just drumming. How about a protest drum circle? What are they going to do arrest us?
I haven't done drum circle for 30 years and now I want to.
And maybe I can talk my wife, who is from Tanzania and loves to drum with all kinds of people here, into coming along. She can keep drumming after I get arrested.
I will also wear my Maasai belt and "poncho" (whoops, I'm appropriating from the Mexicans). And BTW the Maasai pullover things are Scottish plaid (the Scottish traders got there in the mid-1800s).
But I don't have any Scottish ancestry or culture - all English, German, Finnish.....
Oh, I will also wear my Pashtun wool cap...... Let's see, what else? Oh, my Guatemalan traditional Mayan shirt, which they gifted to me....
At least 20 Swainson's hawks over this field. Alfalfa is a great crop for supporting raptors. I took this video out Mace Blvd towards Putah Creek. It shows at least 20 Swainson's Hawks over alfalfa that is being mown. Alfalfa is a 3-5 year crop, therefore it allows the ecological food web to develop and support birds with rodents, insects etc. The Swainson's is known as the grasshopper hawk.
Alfalfa is flood irrigated, the most inefficient type of irrigation, and takes a lot of water, but I favor implementing ways to keep this crop because of its importance to wildlife.
Wildlife researcher Sean Smallwood showed this in his research (see screenshot).
Three weeks before this I saw the same flock of Swainson's hawks over this field when it was being flood irrigated. The flooding drives rodents and insects up to the surface.
The mowing and irrigating will be done intermittently throughout the growing season, that combination total may be a dozen times, which may be an important factor in enhancing wildlife diversity.