A knowledge of chemistry is not required to find the odd one out:
a) Ytterbium
b) Gold
c) Ruthenium
d) Copper
e) Lutetium
Hint: An atlas will serve you better than a chemistry textbook.
Highlight for answer: b) Gold. All the others are named after towns or regions--Ytterby, Sweden (also a source of Yttrium, Terbium, Erbium, Thulium (after Thule, the northernmost land in myth), Holmium (after Stockholm), Scandium (after Scandinavia); Ruthenium after the demographic area (never quite a nation) uncomfortably squeezed between Poland, Russia, Slovakia, and the Ukraine; Copper after Cyprus (it may be the other way 'round); and Lutetium after Lutetia, the Latin name for Paris. Other goodies include Strontium, named after a town in Scotland; Rhenium, after the Rhine; Hafnium, after the Latin for Copenhagen; Dubnium, after Dubna in Russia; and gimmes like Americium, Germanium, Europium, Polonium, Francium, Berkelium, Californium, Darmstadtium, and Livermorium.
I just noticed that last week's wordage was more or less a repeat of a much earlier one. My bad.
Wednesday, October 22, 2014
Wednesday, October 15, 2014
Wednesday Wordage Odd Man Out Edition
Busy as heck today.
Which one is the odd one out?
a) shampoo
b) khaki
c) juggernaut
d) panjandrum
e) pundit
Highlight for the answer: It's d, Panjandrum. The others entered the English language through the Raj--"shampoo" is from a Hindi word meaning "to press," which became part of a massage and bath; "khaki" is an Urdu word for "dust colored"; "Juggernaut" is from a word for a float in Hindu religious parades, under the wheels of which devotees were (allegedly) ready to throw themselves, and "pundit" is derived from "pandit," an honorific for teachers or masters of a craft. "Panjandrum" was apparently made up from whole cloth by a guy named Samuel Foote in the middle of the 18th century.
Back to work.
Which one is the odd one out?
a) shampoo
b) khaki
c) juggernaut
d) panjandrum
e) pundit
Highlight for the answer: It's d, Panjandrum. The others entered the English language through the Raj--"shampoo" is from a Hindi word meaning "to press," which became part of a massage and bath; "khaki" is an Urdu word for "dust colored"; "Juggernaut" is from a word for a float in Hindu religious parades, under the wheels of which devotees were (allegedly) ready to throw themselves, and "pundit" is derived from "pandit," an honorific for teachers or masters of a craft. "Panjandrum" was apparently made up from whole cloth by a guy named Samuel Foote in the middle of the 18th century.
Back to work.
Wednesday, October 8, 2014
Wednesday Wordage appropriate nickname edition.
Today is Wednesday, nicknamed "hump day."
It is also the day we are doing all of our goat and sheep matings. Pure coincidence.
It is also the day we are doing all of our goat and sheep matings. Pure coincidence.
Wednesday, October 1, 2014
Wednesday Wordage odd man out edition
This week's puzzle is inspired by a road sign, and presented a la "Says You."
In each group, which is the odd man out?
1) ount, aint, oint, aunt, arat
2) enior, unior, onior, octor, ister
3) ood, ard, eriod, oad, ord
4) iss, oss, sland, ersus, insteinium
Highlight for a clue:The inspiring road sign was exit on Hwy 5 north of Salem for "St Paul Mt Angel"
Highlight for the answers:
1) aunt. The others are abbreviated by the letter "t"--Mt., St., Pt., Kt.
2) onior. The others are abbreviated by the letter "r"--Sr., Jr., Dr., Mr.
3) ood. The others are abbreviated by the letter "d"--Yd., Pd., Rd., Ld.
4) oss. The others are abbreviated by the letter "s"--Ms., Is., Vs., Es.
Any other goodies?
In each group, which is the odd man out?
1) ount, aint, oint, aunt, arat
2) enior, unior, onior, octor, ister
3) ood, ard, eriod, oad, ord
4) iss, oss, sland, ersus, insteinium
Highlight for a clue:The inspiring road sign was exit on Hwy 5 north of Salem for "St Paul Mt Angel"
Highlight for the answers:
1) aunt. The others are abbreviated by the letter "t"--Mt., St., Pt., Kt.
2) onior. The others are abbreviated by the letter "r"--Sr., Jr., Dr., Mr.
3) ood. The others are abbreviated by the letter "d"--Yd., Pd., Rd., Ld.
4) oss. The others are abbreviated by the letter "s"--Ms., Is., Vs., Es.
Any other goodies?
Tuesday, September 30, 2014
Tuesday Tool wise use edition
The tool of the week--of the last several weeks, on a twice-daily basis--is Oxypol veterinary ophthalmic antibiotic ointment. It is a mixture of oxytetracycline and polymixin, in a vaseline carrier.
There is a lot of well-placed concern about the overuse and abuse of antibiotics in agriculture. Our culture's excessive dependence on these drugs is likely to bite us in the butt in the near future. We--that is, anybody who eats a burger at Mickey D's or buys meat at the grocery, or is not particularly fastidious about antibiotic free meat and eggs--all are participants in a system that uses tons of antibiotics every year. These drugs are used as an entirely routine part of the diet of almost all livestock and poultry, partly prophylactically to prevent the spread of disease in crowded settings, and partly because, for reasons not well understood, they promote rapid weight gain. Recently, the FDA came out with a set of (easily ignored) guidelines to get the food industry to reduce its dependence on antibiotics. I don't think much will happen to change the status quo. In our society, the contest between short term profit and long-term public health goods is not a fair fight.
That said, on our farm, we use antibiotics. Our medicine cart and freezer contains a variety of antibiotics, injectable, oral, and topical, and all are hardly ever used. They only come out when there is some specific, treatable disorder.
(Squeam alert--if you're turned off by graphic descriptions of eyes, injuries, or the opening of Un Chien Andalou, probably time to close the page)
Bucks are good at cleaning up blackberry brambles. They are, however, not especially bright, or sensitive to pain (as befits an animal whose primary means of delivering a message is to whack his head as hard as possible against the message's recipient). I have seen a buck, quite contented and happy, with a thorny blackberry stem jammed an inch up his nostril.
Cherubino is one of our many bucks, and one of the dumber ones. Over a month ago, while enthusiastically eating brambles, he jammed a thorn in his right eye, smack in the pupil. The result was a wound which, when I saw him at the end of the day, had punctured the cornea, damaged the iris, and caused massive vascularization of the eye. There looked to be a hole or pit in the surface of his eye, about a millimeter across. It looked like hell, all red and inflamed and swollen.
The Real Doctor, with her expertise in this field (at least with human eyes), prescribed antibiotics right away, and her prognosis was grim: messing with the iris was, for her, the first step to a dead eye. However, as our vet told us, goat eyes are a bit tougher. He agreed with the use of antibiotics, and suggested that the eye would look worse for a couple of weeks, but heal to have a lump of white scar tissue in the pupil, and a deformed but functional iris.
Our vet's prediction is bearing out. The wound initially got black and mounded up, with inflammation and scar tissue creating a bump over a millimeter high, focused on a crater a millimeter across. This blackened ocular landscape was surrounded by intense red vascularization and inflammation of the iris and sclera, so the whole eye looked like an angry volcano that had just erupted. It was the nastiest looking thing on the farm (and there are some nasty things on a farm), and made our eight-year-old niece, who normally has an unconditional and all-encompassing love of goats, scream and run away. Cherubino looked like the hell-goat, at least from the right; from the left, he was totally unconcerned and hungry for more brambles.
Most of Cherubino's eye looks OK now, except for a lump of white scar tissue right in the center. A lot of this healing has been helped by twice-daily applications of Oxypol. Of course, Cherubino does not agree with this regime, and vigorously contests with my applications of the drug. So, twice a day, I have to catch him, lift his forelegs off the ground and tightly grip his neck with my thighs, wrap my left arm all the way around his head and force his right eye open, and oh-so-carefully squeeze a 1-cm-long ribbon of goo into his eye.
I should mention that it is the rut--so Cherubino, like all our bucks, is extra stinky. Like, paralyzingly stinky, a stinky that makes the air gelatinous, a stinky so thick that it is almost audible, a stinky like a lump of Bulgarian feta that has been sent by ship to Borneo and back, a stinky that is repulsive from a hundred feet away. His glands are going full blast, and like all our bucks, he spends a lot of time peeing on his head and beard. So, this is what I have to squeeze between my thighs and wrap my arm around--and about half the time, I notice that he's wet, and it hasn't been raining. So, I have a special pair of "buck pants" and a "buck jacket" that I wear, twice a day, to deal with this. I have about two more weeks left of this treatment.
If I were smarter, there might be a different tool of the week; I have a friend who has a tyvek bunny-suit, just for dealing with bucks.
There is a lot of well-placed concern about the overuse and abuse of antibiotics in agriculture. Our culture's excessive dependence on these drugs is likely to bite us in the butt in the near future. We--that is, anybody who eats a burger at Mickey D's or buys meat at the grocery, or is not particularly fastidious about antibiotic free meat and eggs--all are participants in a system that uses tons of antibiotics every year. These drugs are used as an entirely routine part of the diet of almost all livestock and poultry, partly prophylactically to prevent the spread of disease in crowded settings, and partly because, for reasons not well understood, they promote rapid weight gain. Recently, the FDA came out with a set of (easily ignored) guidelines to get the food industry to reduce its dependence on antibiotics. I don't think much will happen to change the status quo. In our society, the contest between short term profit and long-term public health goods is not a fair fight.
That said, on our farm, we use antibiotics. Our medicine cart and freezer contains a variety of antibiotics, injectable, oral, and topical, and all are hardly ever used. They only come out when there is some specific, treatable disorder.
...........................................................................................
(Squeam alert--if you're turned off by graphic descriptions of eyes, injuries, or the opening of Un Chien Andalou, probably time to close the page)
...................................................................................
Bucks are good at cleaning up blackberry brambles. They are, however, not especially bright, or sensitive to pain (as befits an animal whose primary means of delivering a message is to whack his head as hard as possible against the message's recipient). I have seen a buck, quite contented and happy, with a thorny blackberry stem jammed an inch up his nostril.
Cherubino is one of our many bucks, and one of the dumber ones. Over a month ago, while enthusiastically eating brambles, he jammed a thorn in his right eye, smack in the pupil. The result was a wound which, when I saw him at the end of the day, had punctured the cornea, damaged the iris, and caused massive vascularization of the eye. There looked to be a hole or pit in the surface of his eye, about a millimeter across. It looked like hell, all red and inflamed and swollen.
The Real Doctor, with her expertise in this field (at least with human eyes), prescribed antibiotics right away, and her prognosis was grim: messing with the iris was, for her, the first step to a dead eye. However, as our vet told us, goat eyes are a bit tougher. He agreed with the use of antibiotics, and suggested that the eye would look worse for a couple of weeks, but heal to have a lump of white scar tissue in the pupil, and a deformed but functional iris.
Our vet's prediction is bearing out. The wound initially got black and mounded up, with inflammation and scar tissue creating a bump over a millimeter high, focused on a crater a millimeter across. This blackened ocular landscape was surrounded by intense red vascularization and inflammation of the iris and sclera, so the whole eye looked like an angry volcano that had just erupted. It was the nastiest looking thing on the farm (and there are some nasty things on a farm), and made our eight-year-old niece, who normally has an unconditional and all-encompassing love of goats, scream and run away. Cherubino looked like the hell-goat, at least from the right; from the left, he was totally unconcerned and hungry for more brambles.
Most of Cherubino's eye looks OK now, except for a lump of white scar tissue right in the center. A lot of this healing has been helped by twice-daily applications of Oxypol. Of course, Cherubino does not agree with this regime, and vigorously contests with my applications of the drug. So, twice a day, I have to catch him, lift his forelegs off the ground and tightly grip his neck with my thighs, wrap my left arm all the way around his head and force his right eye open, and oh-so-carefully squeeze a 1-cm-long ribbon of goo into his eye.
I should mention that it is the rut--so Cherubino, like all our bucks, is extra stinky. Like, paralyzingly stinky, a stinky that makes the air gelatinous, a stinky so thick that it is almost audible, a stinky like a lump of Bulgarian feta that has been sent by ship to Borneo and back, a stinky that is repulsive from a hundred feet away. His glands are going full blast, and like all our bucks, he spends a lot of time peeing on his head and beard. So, this is what I have to squeeze between my thighs and wrap my arm around--and about half the time, I notice that he's wet, and it hasn't been raining. So, I have a special pair of "buck pants" and a "buck jacket" that I wear, twice a day, to deal with this. I have about two more weeks left of this treatment.
If I were smarter, there might be a different tool of the week; I have a friend who has a tyvek bunny-suit, just for dealing with bucks.
Friday, September 26, 2014
Friday Flora Fuming Fewments Edition
This week's flora are an anonymous consortium of thermophilic anaerobic microbes. They are not much to look at, so no picture, and until such time as the internet can transmit odor, I can't really convey their impact.
In the African nation of Gabon, there is a town called Oklo that stands atop some rich deposits of uranium. Time and the geology of the area created a circumstance that has been observed only once. Some billions of years ago, the concentration of fissionable uranium in these deposits was high enough that they could form a natural nuclear reactor. By itself, though, the uranium was not sufficient. The spontaneous fission of a U235 nucleus releases a neutron too energetic to trigger the fission of another U235 nucleus. As in any human-made reactor, a "moderator" is required to slow the neutrons, and as in many human-made reactors, water served this role. At Oklo--and as far as we know, only at Oklo--groundwater flowed through the uranium deposits, slowing the neutrons, allowing a chain reaction, which then released energy.
However, this release of energy, as heat, caused the groundwater to boil. The reactor effectively killed itself--until it could cool down, and water flowed into it, bringing it back to life. Some modeling and experimentation suggests that the reactor would be "on" for about a half hour, and "off" for two and a half, and that this cycle lasted for thousands of years.
Today, tucked away in a corner of our main pasture, there stands a majestic compost pile. I'm kind of embarrassed by it; it is in a poor location, on soil rather than concrete, and it is not covered. It reminds me of the Oklo reactor because of its relationship to water. It has been accumulating raw material all summer, and with each new dose--which carried with it a deal of moisture--it would ferment, steam, fume and stink for a few days. It would cook off all the freshly added water, and the reactions would slow down and stop. After a light rain earlier this summer, it again seethed for a bit, and died.
The reactions, of course, are not nuclear. There's a lot of fermentation, to be sure--the sheep's manure and used bedding contains lots of reduced carbon. Where there's fermentation and anaerobiosis, there's going to be methanogenesis and acetogenesis, forms of respiration using carbon dioxide in the place of oxygen. There's also respiration going on using sulfate in place of oxygen; the stink of hydrogen sulfide attests to that fact. All these reactions produce energy for the microbes carrying them out. The second law of thermodynamics tells us that the universe can't allow any reaction to happen without a tax being paid to entropy, so a sizeable chunk of the energy from these reactions is lost as heat--heat that makes the compost warm to the touch, and that has dried the pile out every time it has been wetted.
Now we've just had a good rainfall, thoroughly soaking the pile. Hoooo-weee! It is reacting like mad, smelling and steaming. And so the cycle repeats, a natural reactor getting drenched with water and generating heat to turn itself off, then cooling down and starting over--though probably not for thousands of years, and while the stink might be annoying, it's not producing anything as bad as plutonium.
In the African nation of Gabon, there is a town called Oklo that stands atop some rich deposits of uranium. Time and the geology of the area created a circumstance that has been observed only once. Some billions of years ago, the concentration of fissionable uranium in these deposits was high enough that they could form a natural nuclear reactor. By itself, though, the uranium was not sufficient. The spontaneous fission of a U235 nucleus releases a neutron too energetic to trigger the fission of another U235 nucleus. As in any human-made reactor, a "moderator" is required to slow the neutrons, and as in many human-made reactors, water served this role. At Oklo--and as far as we know, only at Oklo--groundwater flowed through the uranium deposits, slowing the neutrons, allowing a chain reaction, which then released energy.
However, this release of energy, as heat, caused the groundwater to boil. The reactor effectively killed itself--until it could cool down, and water flowed into it, bringing it back to life. Some modeling and experimentation suggests that the reactor would be "on" for about a half hour, and "off" for two and a half, and that this cycle lasted for thousands of years.
...........................................................
Today, tucked away in a corner of our main pasture, there stands a majestic compost pile. I'm kind of embarrassed by it; it is in a poor location, on soil rather than concrete, and it is not covered. It reminds me of the Oklo reactor because of its relationship to water. It has been accumulating raw material all summer, and with each new dose--which carried with it a deal of moisture--it would ferment, steam, fume and stink for a few days. It would cook off all the freshly added water, and the reactions would slow down and stop. After a light rain earlier this summer, it again seethed for a bit, and died.
The reactions, of course, are not nuclear. There's a lot of fermentation, to be sure--the sheep's manure and used bedding contains lots of reduced carbon. Where there's fermentation and anaerobiosis, there's going to be methanogenesis and acetogenesis, forms of respiration using carbon dioxide in the place of oxygen. There's also respiration going on using sulfate in place of oxygen; the stink of hydrogen sulfide attests to that fact. All these reactions produce energy for the microbes carrying them out. The second law of thermodynamics tells us that the universe can't allow any reaction to happen without a tax being paid to entropy, so a sizeable chunk of the energy from these reactions is lost as heat--heat that makes the compost warm to the touch, and that has dried the pile out every time it has been wetted.
Now we've just had a good rainfall, thoroughly soaking the pile. Hoooo-weee! It is reacting like mad, smelling and steaming. And so the cycle repeats, a natural reactor getting drenched with water and generating heat to turn itself off, then cooling down and starting over--though probably not for thousands of years, and while the stink might be annoying, it's not producing anything as bad as plutonium.
Thursday, September 25, 2014
Time
L'shana Tova to all those who keep time thusly; happy equinox to those who mark it. (It doesn't quite rise to the level of Wednesday Word, but I recently heard the fall equinox described as the time when the Earth is three quarters of the way around the sun.)
Either way you mark it, fall is here. It arrived with a good solid rainstorm, bringing about an inch of rain. As I made the rounds yesterday morning, I would open the gate to each herd's enclosure. A few noses would poke out, and then retreat back into the shelter. Rams, bucks, ewes, does, all spent the day under cover, dryly watching me trudge around. The fields are still brown and will be for a long time, but I could sort of hear the underlayer of moss that fills our fields sighing with relief. It's been a long, exceedingly hot summer. It's time for fall.
I mentioned earlier this week how, in the short term, time gets vague for me. I got reminded again how short term planning is futile here. I had planned, yesterday, to do a bunch of drywall work on the addition to the house. However, while I was in town, I received a call from brother H. that the roof had blown off of the rams' shelter ("It just flew off, like a kite!"). Also, I noticed that the roof on the bucks' shelter (a rather old tarp) was on the verge of failure, and that action needed to be taken. Plans? Hah.
Either way you mark it, fall is here. It arrived with a good solid rainstorm, bringing about an inch of rain. As I made the rounds yesterday morning, I would open the gate to each herd's enclosure. A few noses would poke out, and then retreat back into the shelter. Rams, bucks, ewes, does, all spent the day under cover, dryly watching me trudge around. The fields are still brown and will be for a long time, but I could sort of hear the underlayer of moss that fills our fields sighing with relief. It's been a long, exceedingly hot summer. It's time for fall.
I mentioned earlier this week how, in the short term, time gets vague for me. I got reminded again how short term planning is futile here. I had planned, yesterday, to do a bunch of drywall work on the addition to the house. However, while I was in town, I received a call from brother H. that the roof had blown off of the rams' shelter ("It just flew off, like a kite!"). Also, I noticed that the roof on the bucks' shelter (a rather old tarp) was on the verge of failure, and that action needed to be taken. Plans? Hah.
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