Month: February 2017

Maple Sugar Season Update

We are about done boiling off sap from the first run — good timing, too, since it looks like we’re going to have a week or so of really warm weather (should be a good sap flow) followed by a freeze at the end of the month – extending the sugaring season into March.

We pulled the hallow ice cap from most of our buckets, so the sap started slightly concentrated. We’ve condensed about 39 gallons of sap to 2.5 gallons of not-quite-syrup. It will sit in the pan overnight to cool; tomorrow, we’ll filter it and transfer it into a pot. We will finish the syrup indoors.

Legal Precedent

This may set an interesting precedent:

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2017/0213/Bowe-Bergdahl-lawyers-say-Trump-s-comments-mean-he-cannot-get-a-fair-trial

Not quite the same as saying the preconceived notions broadcast by the now-CiC of the military branch means it would be impossible to achieve a just result from a military tribunal … but extrapolating a little can any minority get a fair trial in an executive branch run by Trump? Can a woman?

Dodd Frank Rollback & Regulatory Costs

I heard a statistic today that JP Morgan has over 43,000 regulatory and compliance employees — for every four employees doing other ‘stuff’, there’s a regulatory guy. I don’t know who all counts as an employee engaged in banking business (does an HR person count?) or as a regulatory employee (one hour a year doing something related to federal regulations qualifies you?) but I’m willing to take the statement on its face. I don’t necessarily see that as a failing in regulations as a failure in automation.

Healthy Preschool Valentines Party Snack

I made the heart cut-out PBJ sandwiches – with no peanut butter. Or jelly. But the same idea — you need two heart-shaped cookie cutters. The pair I have leaves about 1/2″ between the two cutters.

We made our own strawberry compote – a pound of strawberries sprinkled with one tablespoon of tapioca powder (to thicken the sauce). This was heated on low until the strawberries got mushy and the tapioca started to thicken. I used an immersion blender to create a smooth sauce, then refrigerated it for a few hours to allow the tapioca to set.

We used two different loaves of bread — a white bread and a whole wheat with sunflower seeds. Use the large cookie cutter and cut out 2 hearts for each sandwich you are making (e.g. we have eighteen people in the class so cut thirty six large hearts). In half of the hearts, center the smaller cookie cutter and punch out the center.

To assemble, take an uncut heart. Spread with ‘butter’ of your choice — we used sunflower butter because the school forbids nuts of any sort. Then spread with strawberry compote. Top with a cut-out heart.

Instead of pre-staging all of the components, Anya helped me make them. She cut one large heart, and while she cut a second heart, I got it spread with butter and compote. As she cut another heart (the back of the next sandwich), I took the one she just made, stamped out the centre, and put it on top. Anya removed the small heart from the cookie cutter, then got her big cookie cutter and started all over again.

You now have a little heart shaped sandwich with a red heart in the middle.

Gain of function

It says something about the Trump administration that they can lift the moratorium on government funding of gain of function research and it doesn’t make headlines. There’s hypothetical benefit to making known viruses deadlier — more readily transmitted, deadlier, survive longer outside the body — but there’s non-hypothetical risk. And not just the thriller movie plot where someone smuggles a sample out of the lab to infect the millions of passengers a day on the Underground. Time will tell, and hopefully I’m wrong … but my tax dollars going to make a worse Ebola (or whatever) isn’t on my happy list.

Innocence

“You think our country’s so innocent?” … now Trump was talking about murder, but I am thinking about it in light of Russian interference in the election. We’ve backed regimes coming into power, supported coups overthrowing foreign governments … sometimes both for the same individual (e.g. Ngô Đình Diệm). We distribute propaganda for favoured candidates, obtain and publicize embarrassing information about unfavoured candidates … and with the proliferation of computer technology, I am certain we have used hacking to obtain this information.

Trump’s seems to assume public objection to Russian meddling presupposed the US hasn’t taken the same actions. Not true. It isn’t anger that Russia turned these techniques on us … or even sour grapes that they managed such a stunning success. A significant number of people object to this behaviour when the US does it too — I don’t agree with assassinations, executions, or interference in elections be it by the CIA, MI6, KGB, China’s Ministry of State Security, or any other state security apparatus.

Maple Season Underway

We’ve finished tapping our maple trees today. We got more than half done this past weekend (fifteen trees, eighteen taps), so managed to hit the awesome tap flow at the beginning of this week.

 

This year we are going to try tapping one sycamore tree (supposedly a butterscotch flavored syrup) and a hickory tree (no idea what that will taste like). We have twenty four maple trees tapped – a few of our biggest trees have two taps.

Last year was the first year that we tapped maple trees. We hadn’t identified the trees ahead of time, so we didn’t know if we had sugar maples, red maples, not.a.maple trees. We got about forty gallons of sap and used it to brew a dark maple beer.

Early autumn 2016, we took a couple cans of spray-paint, hiked the property looking for trees, and marked the trees with a small spot of paint at the base on the West side of the tree. White paint indicates a sugar maple, red paint indicates a red maple. The hickory trees are shag barks, so fairly easy to identify without leaves. The sycamore is in a unique location along the lake side of our property.

I don’t know if the “tree saver” 5/16″ taps are actually better for the trees, but that’s what we decided to use. As a non-commercial venture, potential reduction in production quantity isn’t detrimental … and I cannot see how they would be worse for the trees than the larger 7/16″ taps.

All of the equipment is stashed in a dump cart. When the ground was frozen, we took our Raven out into the woods. Now that the ground is thawed, we pull the cart by hand. We bought food grade five gallon buckets and lids from Lowes. There are a lot of types of spiles – I wanted stainless steel that we could re-use each year, and I wanted to use tubes instead of buying super expensive hang-on-the-tree buckets. There were still two different types – a straight tap and one that makes a 90 degree angle. It is a lot easier to put the tube on the 90 degree angle ones before inserting into the tree, and they look like they are going to be easier to remove.

We have two different types of tubing: the flexible blue 5/16″ tube meant for maple sap collecting and clear 5/16″ tube that is meant to be a siphon line when brewing beer. At 24$ for 100 foot of tubing, the beer siphon line was a great deal. We’ve got about 100 foot of tubing used for all of our taps.

In addition to these items, we use a battery powered drill with a 5/16″ bit, a small hammer for tapping spiles into trees, a rubber mallet for getting the lids onto the buckets, a little plastic tape measure to check tree size, and a little tool for pulling the lids off of buckets – I could NEVER get lids off plastic buckets, and this tool has turned it into a couple of second task.

With our cart full of tapping gear, we head out into the woods. Grab one bucket and lid, some tube, a spile, and the hammers. You are supposed to drill about three feet up on the tree, but stay at least six inches away from old tap holes. Conventional wisdom is to tap the south side of the tree as that side has sun exposure and will be warmer. I want to log our production per tree from the south side and north side to determine if there is any validity to the practice, but it would be a long-term study of overall production across multiple years to control for weather variations.

Once a hole is drilled, the tap is inserted and the tube pushed onto the tap. The other end of the tube is inserted into the bucket. On level ground, we just leave the bucket sitting next to the tree. In other cases, we use ratcheting straps around the tree and hang the bucket from one of the strap hooks.

We should begin boiling our sap tomorrow – yesterday was an awesome day for sap flow, and we had a lot of 1/2 to 2/3 filled buckets. It’s going to be below freezing for about 36 hours, so figured we could leave the buckets out overnight and begin collecting them tomorrow.

Lessons learned so far: (1) Buy your equipment in the off season. I bought stainless steel taps for under 1$ each, but we needed more taps that I’d purchased. They’re 2.50$ each! (2) Get more storage vessels than you think you need — we have twenty six 5 gallon buckets out in the woods and are scrounging around to find storage containers for collected sap. (3) Collect sap often. Twenty six full five gallon buckets is 130 gallons of sap! If each bucket was emptied when it had two gallons, that’s 52 gallons of sap that gets boiled down to just over a gallon of maple syrup … two or three times, but still it is easier to find a place to store 50 gallons of sap and a couple gallons of maple syrup than it is to find holding containers for 130 gallons of sap.

My Latest Conspiracy Theory (Movie)

There is a logical extrapolation to a world with facts and ‘alternative facts’ — why would alternative facts just be used to refute a report? They can just as easily make a story of their own. Trump has made a lot of outlandish campaign promises — ones that require significant money, legal maneuvering, and time to complete. But why bother completing them at all? You can just say it is done.

So they declare the wall built. Then there’s a whole conspiracy theory about it not actually having been built, people trekking down to Southern Texas and to get pictures of the not.a.wall down there. Government press releases with this huge, aesthetically pleasing, immigration stopping wall. How do you know which is the fact and which is the alternative fact (i.e. an obvious lie).

The problem with lying is you’ve either got to have people sufficiently willing to believe you to overlook the missing logical consequences of whatever you lied about OR you’ve got to create the same conditions either way. There are a lot of people willing to believe Trump *now* … but if they don’t start seeing results, either his wall was a complete waste (yeah, it was – I still say a massive fleet of drones could actually stop human traffic across unauthorized checkpoints for FAR less money — not saying I think the stopping human traffic is a good thing or not, but if we’re hell bent on DOING it, at least DO IT) or illegal immigrants were not the cause of unemployment and huge government spending on entitlements (yeah, they weren’t).

A priori assumption: an insufficient number of people are willing to believe the lie as evidence against it mounts to sustain a re-election campaign. Now they need to recreate their predicted result … government assassins offing some percent of people on public assistance (so they can declare reducing illegal immigration eliminated this money we’ve been wasting) and maybe even offing a random percent of the gainfully employed population (to open up jobs now that illegal immigrants aren’t “stealing our jobs”).

Just need some out there hippy type in an old VW bus cruising around the country trying to stop this murderous conspiracy.

Ideas – not exactly a viral infection

I remember a stir not too long after Obama took office – mid-April 2009. He was attending a conference in South America, and Hugo Chavez gave him a book, “Las Venas Abiertas de America Latina”. And people who were already saying he was a disgraceful president who undertook an apology tour decided that the mere possession of a book chronicling the history of American imperialism in South America was just farther proof of his anti-American beliefs. The whole thing struck me as silly – I’ve read Mein Kampf and the Communist Manifesto. Managed not to become a Fascist or a Socialist. I’ve read stories about unicorns flying over rainbows too; didn’t turn me into one. I didn’t realize that making oneself aware of opposing viewpoints was so controversial.

What makes me think of this incident now? The problems the UC system has had with Milo Yiannopoulos’ speaking engagements. Discourse is civil discussion of issues with people – even if their opinions differ from ours. Compromise isn’t bullying others into taking up your beliefs. To have an effective governance of a large, incohesive population requires compromise. How can there be any compromise between individuals who fear being made aware of an alternative viewpoint? No matter how abhorrent you find someone’s belief, there is generally a reason for those beliefs. And without understanding the reasons, you have no way to find a path that addresses both people’s desires.

It’s easy to dismiss someone as a white-supremacist. Or a fascist. Or an ape, or any other ad hominem attacks that forestall the type of compromise that is necessary to govern effectively. We’re setting ourselfs up for marginalized minorities (even when there are three million MORE people in the “minority”) or radical swings between left and right leaning governments as they trade off every couple of years and un-do whatever the previous administration has accomplished / mucked up (depending on your point of view).

Educational Philosophy

I was discussing educational philosophy with my mom a few days ago — especially early childhood education, which wasn’t either of our specialties. But as Anya is getting older, it’s becoming relevant. And I’m surprised by the rigorous curriculum adopted by one of the local “elite” preschools around here. It’s got a wait list and enormous price tag. And it ignores a great deal of recent research regarding childhood learning – essentially that very young kids form the neural connections that are needed for formal schooling through free play. Not by getting them to sit down and listen to lectures at an earlier age, not by being told what to do and doing it … but by being left to their own devices to use toys “wrong” and run and climb.

Made me think of my experience with education — and I graduated top ten in my class, so this isn’t just “the school is why I’m failing, not me” complaining. School managed to take all of the fun out of any subject. Not sure if that’s just the Puritanical history of the country dictating that work shouldn’t be fun or just a reality of trying to teach 30 kids in a class.

I love reading. And talking with friends about what I’ve read. I do *not* love reading a few chapters and writing a five page double spaced Arial 12 point text essay on the allegory … you get the idea.

I started University as a history major – but I don’t care as much about the exact date that the Treaty of Versailles was signed as much as the socio-political impact the treaty content had on much of Europe. I don’t want a list of the crusades and their dates – but the cultural impact, the religious impact, hell even the political impact that having a large number of military leaders and men roaming across the continent had “back home”.

Chemistry lab experiments were graded on the % deviation between your results and the predicted outcome. You were essentially being tested on your ability to get exactly 12 milliliters into a container. Or you had the good sense to BS your way through the experiment, calculate the intended results, and reverse engineer your experimental values with a variance somewhere between 91% and 97%.

Art – first of all, I find the idea of grading such a subjective subject to be right silly. Personally, I would have graded on attitude and effort. Someone who lacks hand-eye coordination but put a lot of thought into the media and technique may have made an ugly picture … but they got something from the experience. A talented artist may have fobbed off the class but made a beautiful piece. I have to say, I had a physical education instructor who graded with that exact logic. Someone from the girls’ basketball team could grade poorly in the basketball unit not because they didn’t make baskets but because they were disruptive to class and weren’t trying. Someone who was putting forth a lot of effort but didn’t make any baskets could still get an ‘A’. Usually, though, physical education was graded on one’s ability within specific sports.

Maths and physics become a memorization challenge. Foreign language classes were recitation. Any class – they managed to turn it into an unpleasant experience.