Month: May 2011

Posted on

Cold Rain on Lake Erie

The drive from Virginia to Michigan took us back to early April in terms of weather & leafing out of the trees. I wonder how different my impressions would be if the weather was warmer. Highway 75 goes near Lake Erie, but never in sight. So we went down to get a fast look at the lake, which I don’t ever recall actually seeing.  We came to the water near a place called Monroe, Michigan. There was not much to see. I suppose there are lots of prettier places and I understand that my view could be pretty much any lakeside, but I walked through a half foot of water & drizzly rain to get to the pier to see the lake, so I am sharing it with you.

Lake Erie is the shallowest of the Great Lakes. Some scientists said that it was dead back in the 1960s, but the reports of its death were exaggerated.  Because it was shallow, it got polluted faster than the other Great Lakes, but it also could flush out and clean up faster. It is now an ongoing environmental management challenge, but not dead. Many of the sources of pollution have been addressed, but not all. And the problem of species composition and invasives remains.

Posted on

The Road to Ohio

I have been on that road many times before, but I have never seen so many dead deer. We saw twelve dead deer by the roadsides. The population is really high. Besides that, even with that, the drive from Virginia to Columbus, Ohio was uneventful.

We made only a few stops.  We stopped at a Roy Rogers for lunch. We don’t have them anymore in Virginia, so we wanted to go in for old times’ sake. We stopped for gas at Pilot and at a Pennsylvania rest stop that featured a miner memorial.  The only long stop we made was at the Dawes Arboretum. That was a chance encounter. We saw a sign and stopped in. I took some pictures that are included. I will explain them at the bottom.

We have been to Columbus many times before because it is about a day’s relatively easy drive from Washington.  But Columbus was always just an overnight stop. We got here a little earlier this time, so we stopped at Columbus’ “German village.”   As the name implies, this is the part of town built by German immigrants. According to the brochures, the place thrived from around 1840 to the end of World War I. It seemed very familiar. It has some characteristics of Milwaukee, not surprisingly. There were more brick buildings and the neighborhood is more intact than comparable ones in Milwaukee.

We ate supper at the Schmidt Haus. They had German sausage & potato salad, very good. The restaurant also featured a duo (an accordion player and a tuba player).  I had a good time. Chrissy liked it too, but maybe less.

Pictures:

The picture up top is the cypress swamp at Dawes Arboretum. Of course, it is not natural. Bald cypress will grow as far north as Minnesota, but they do not naturally reproduce outside the south. The northern boundary of their natural range is just about the southern line of Virginia. Next picture is Roy Rogers.  The one below that is the Miners’ Memorial. It commemorates a mining accident that took place under the rest stop and killed 37 workers. The man portrayed is John L Lewis, the famous leader of the Mine Workers. Next is a big beech tree at the Dawes Arboretum, one of the biggest I have seen.

The pictures below are from the German Village.  The first is a couple of houses on the same lot. The German village is pleasant and upscale, judging by the cars parked outside the houses. I suppose that the people who lived here originally were not so rich.

Below is the Schmidt Haus restaurant.  It used to be a livery stable.

Above shows the amusing use of mixed languages.  They use the German “haus” plus English fudge and gift.  Fudge doesn’t mean much but “gift” in German means poison.

Posted on

Early & Late in Washington

I don’t like to get up on my bike before dawn, but I am embracing it, since I have no choice. I have to be at work before 7, which means I have to leave the house at around 5:45, which is just almost sun-up this time of year. It is relaxing to ride through that twilight, knowing that it will soon be lighter.  There is also a lot less traffic on the roads, although – ironically – a few more bikes and runners on the trail.

Although I get to work early, I still stay until I can take the subway home. But I go down near the Potomac to enjoy the evening twilight.  So I get the early twilight and the late twilight. Sweet.  

The pictures – Up top is the sun rise over Washington from Ft Myer. The sun is blinding at this angle, so I ride right in that shadow of the tree.  Next is flag raising at Ft Meyer. Below that is the reflecting pool with no water. Everything needs maintenance. Below here are people fishing in the Potomac at the end of the day. And under that are buses parked in the Potomac Park. Evidently this is now the new tour bus parking place. I don’t like it.

Posted on

High-Tech Countryside

Brazil is becoming is an agricultural superpower and it is growing bigger all the time. I look forward to seeing the changes but until I get there I studying through the Brazilian media. I have been reading a lot about mechanization of Brazilian agriculture and the expansion of the agricultural frontier.

Some crops still need to be picked by hand and there is plenty of nasty, dirty work in the fields, but a lot less.   For example, sugar cultivation & harvesting used to be one of the most difficult and sometime brutal parts of agriculture. The cane has sharp leaves that need to be burned off. There are snakes and lots of chances to get hurt or killed. (I read that plantation owners in the old South used to sometimes hire “free” labor, especially Irish immigrants, to do the dangerous work rather than risk slaves.) Those days are gone. Today most of cane is harvested mechanically. I saw the machines at work. They are like those big corn harvesters. The machines harvest and process the product, virtually eliminating the need for unskilled labor. On the other hand, it creates places for skilled labor and Brazil doesn’t have enough of it, according to press reports.

Brazilian government training programs, in cooperation with firms that make the new machines and chemicals such as Syngenta, John Deere e Case IH. The chemicals and seeds are complicated. The machines run with GPS and other electronics. The new techniques require more than just the ability to read and write.  

An article read today about technologies in the farm field talked about all these things and pointed out the machines are getting bigger and bigger as farms in places like Mato Grosso are getting bigger and bigger. The new machines require much more sophisticated operators. Some even drive themselves using GPS. What the modern farm needs are workers who can plant the plantings & harvests and keep the machines running. These guys are a lot more likely to be or resemble technicians & scientists than they are like peasants of field workers of old.

Brazilian media reflects the ambiguous relationship that much of the world feels with China. China is now Brazil’s biggest trading partner. This has made a many Brazilians rich and the country as a whole richer. But China is after Brazil’s raw materials. The products it exports to Brazil are finished products, making the relationship look neocolonial.  Chinese products are displacing Brazilian industrial products both at home and abroad.  I wrote about the situation with shoes. Of course, agricultural products are raw material, but has that changed in the modern age?

An industrial product is intrinsically no better than primary product. The difference between industrial and primary production was really about value added and productivity. Countries wanted to move up value add & the productivity food chain to improve the quality of jobs. Farm labor was on the bottom in terms of skills and value.  It was hard and dirty but easily learned, easily replaced and low paid. This was also the case with early industrial jobs. What changed was the introduction of technology, knowledge and capital, exactly what is now happening down on the farms.  Modern farming is moving in that direction. Furthermore, it is riding on the MOST advanced technologies, including biotechnology and nanotechnologies.

There is an excellent chance that agriculture will be the high-tech industry of the next decades. The soybeans, other grain and fruit may be raw products, but the technologies that allow them to be produced in such quantities are hardly simple. Beyond that, the biotechnology aspects may soon mean the manufacture of chemicals, fuels and medicines by biological/agricultural ways. Now that is value added. Maybe the Chinese emphasize on essentially 19th Century machine manufacturing is the less intelligent bet.

Posted on

Leafing Out & Buckeyes

I am down at the Main State again, very long days. I have to get on my bike before 6 am and I am not done until 6 pm.  I am doing the nuts & bolts press work, clearances etc. I don’t like it very much, but I don’t have to do it very long. I am being useful. Usually, I like my job more, so a little payback is fair.

I do enjoy riding my bike in the pre-dawn semi-light. I love that time of day, but I am too lazy to get up unless there is something coercing me.  I also get to enjoy the twilight at the end of the day.  The trees are almost fully leafed out now.  I took some pictures.

The pictures show buckeye trees along (fittingly) Buckeye Street in Potomac Park. The buckeye is the state tree of Ohio.  It is a relative of the horse chestnut and, as you can see, looks a lot like it. I think the flowers are the result of selective breeding.  The natural trees I have seen are not as colorful.

Posted on

Scary Myths Laid to Rest (Again)

We have had several deadly tornadoes recently, so the short memory set is talking again about killer weather. The fact is that weather related deaths have been dropping for a generation. But it is like other news of improvements, such as the drop in crime, drop in traffic fatalities or the drop in cancer deaths . It goes unnoticed and reports of the facts are greeted with disbelief or even hostility. For the 30-year span of 1980-2009, the average annual number of Americans killed by tornadoes, floods and hurricanes was 194—fully one-third fewer deaths each year than during the 1940-1979 periods, as outlined in this article. This is even more remarkable, since the American population in 2009 is more than double what is was in 1940, so your individual chances of dying in a weather related event is even lower. The weather has not become more benign since 1940. The weather is … the weather. It varies a lot. It gets very cold sometimes and hot other times. Sometimes it rains a lot; other times it rains hardly at all. The difference is human adaption. We are better at predicting weather and better at saving lives. People are adaptive.

My posting is based on an article by Professor Donald Boudreaux of George Mason University. He believes that the number of weather related deaths will continue to decline and has offered to bet $10,000. the dooms sayers always underestimate is human ability to adapt and triumph. They see what is today and cannot conceive of anything that doesn’t follow in direct projection. They assume that in the face of a rising tide, human beings will sit like King Canute instead of moving.

The bottom line is that my life is significantly better than my father’s. My sons and daughter will live better than I do. When I was 18 I didn’t believe this. We were told that the American dream was over and that we would face bleak futures. I think they tell us that every year, but people seem to forget the earlier predictions. It is like that clown that predicted the rapture … and then it didn’t happen. We have secular versions of that too. It seems we all like to think our times are uniquely difficult. It provides an excuse for our personal failures.

Progress will end. Everything ends, but probably not today, not tomorrow and not soon. The new hi-tech, such as biotech and nanotech, will revolutionize the way we live, creating greater wealth and engendering new anxiety among the weak minded and the credulous. Twenty years from today, people will look back on our times and claim that our challenges were nothing compared to theirs, just as we do with earlier times. They too will be wrong.