Noticing presence

One of the most enjoyable articles I have seen in the news lately is at http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2013/04/23/178467726/noticing-how-to-take-a-walk-in-the-woods "Noticing: How To Take A Walk In The Woods" by ADAM FRANK.

It is so refreshing to read a news article that is life-affirming, offering some helpful wisdom for everyday life.

It also is a plus to me for bring up the point that we all are a scientist, from when a kid playing in the yard or splashing in the bathtub, noticing what happens to the water shapes and feel in the happy splash; or putting mud and sticks together to make something imaginative. The article uses a cute description of taking a walk in the woods "getting your naturalist on." And points out it is all about presence, learning to have presence in observing the magnificent world around oneself.

Jigsaw puzzles ethanol pressure cooker

Jigsaw puzzles were one of the few forms of entertainment I had as I grew up. It also helped my mind, too, looking back.

I have also noticed at times that not everybody appreciates what I have to say; although I think that mostly is the old problem of Aspergers vs bullies: we Aspergers can't be kept in line by the bullies so easily as most people are. But that is a different subject than of this post. I think.

Jigsaw puzzles involves putting together pieces of cardboard that have been cut out in a squiggly way, so they are all different shapes. Yet they were also cut from a picture; so the seeking of the connected picture fragments is helpful in picking out pieces that fit with each other. Eventually more and more pieces are found that fit with each other, a picture is beginning to form that helps arrange clusters of assembled jigsaw puzzle pieces. And eventually a complete picture is formed, the last piece of the puzzle in place. And one can then suddenly appreciate the entirely different set of shapes, that of the whole picture.

It was one of the things I liked to do, as a youth, that was available for me to do.

In life's struggles of later years, at times I have in exasperation commented to myself that it was like putting together a jigsaw puzzle that was made of a whole bunch of jigsaw puzzles with the pieces all shaken up together and some pieces missing. Gathering pieces that maybe have similar colors and patterns into separate piles, is a way to separate out the different jigsaw puzzles, and then it is perhaps possible to get pieces to fit together.

I think this mental training was important in the development of my abilities I used to build my Topanga Canyon bridge, then independently think of what is now called the Space Elevator, and then think of the hoop-type ground-to-space transportation structure concepts that do not have the strength-to-density materials problems of the space elevator.

That jigsaw-puzzle making training also sometimes comes into play in more practical daily life, too. This provides me with interesting things to do, such as my experiments in electro-herbalism, designing and building the associated experimental instrumentation, and even writing high tech science fiction novels and self-publishing them.

The self-health applications of electroherbalism is very wide-ranging, not just about electronics thingys. One of the things is the removal of toxic materials from one's environment, insofar as possible. One of the more toxic types of things are the common substances commonly used for antiseptics and housecleaning. One of the best non-toxic substances is ethanol, which is the type of alcohol that is also the cheering part of alcoholic beverages.

Ethanol is non-toxic in small quantities, in contrast to other forms of alcohol commonly sold for use as antiseptics, solvents and cleansers, such as methanol and isopropyl, which are toxic to a human in any quantity.

I have long used ethanol as a cleaner and antiseptic at home. It works well as a germicide on surfaces.

Obtaining it is the problem, however. Part of that is that I have to live very economically. The balance of cost vs quality and availability seems to have become the lowest cost vodka with 50% ethanol. But it is hard to find it at the cut-rate stores. However, they sometimes have an even better percentage in small bottles, but at very high cost.

Now, some years back I did some volunteer work which involved use of 95% ethanol for preserving biological specimens, and got me acquainted with it. It was available in bulk quantity at that 95% purity, so much so that the lower percentage of ethanol of 70% that was used for many specimens, was made by careful dilution of some of the 95% ethanol alcohol with distilled water. A huge canister of 95% ethanol always sat nearby, had about ten gallons in it. And that required a bit of caution, but no one had problems with it. I was in that environment off and on for several years, no problems. Concentrated ethanol was safe and a very fine tool for people to use, used with appropriate care, of course, as most everything else is too.

But to me as an individual, 95% ethanol is not available. Even the 70% is hard to find and very expensive; it would be a better antiseptic and household cleanser, if I could get it economically.

I also use ethanol for health, at the one or two ounces of ethanol per day level. This provides a few moments of a bit of comfort to me, too each evening, usually. This is usually gotten most economically and purely by purchasing cheap vodka, and the 40% ethanol is the common percentage, not so good as an antiseptic, however. Rubbing alcohol is 70% alcohol but is of a deadly type of alcohol, very hard for the liver to detoxify. Isopropyl alcohol is similarly extremely toxic stuff to have around for "rubbing alcohol" purposes, so I have discarded all of that.

Now, I have noticed that the vodka is in some way a bit uncomfortable for me. Guessing that it might be that vodka is usually made from wheat, and since I have a wheat gluten sensitivity, could be that despite the vodka purification processes, some traces of the gluten quality remain in the vodka.

So I found some low cost rum, also of the 40% ethanol percentage. And indeed, the subtle upsetting that results from vodka, was not present with rum. But I could not find rum in antiseptic percentages of ethanol.

So I went online, to see if one could make it oneself. Lots of info about it for do it yourselfers, both for vodka and rum.

Rum is made from sugar cane or sugar beets, as a rule. Unlike the home brew vodka which was made with wheat. I found a description online of how to make rum at home cheaply, and best of all, it starts off at about 95% ethanol, and needs to be diluted with water to get down to the beverage alcohol percentages. And the raw material is common white sugar; which is pure and results in pure ethanol when made, discarding the first few ounces which are toxic. The technique involves careful temperature control and timing, and involves finding an old pressure cooker for an essential part of the brewing process. It also says to be very careful.

I looked online and in the local store, pressure cookers are not easy to find anymore. I recall the pressure cooker my mother used a lot; we lived at a high altitude much of the time such as when I was in High School a mile above sea level, and some things would not cook well unless done in a pressure cooker. It was a cast aluminum thing, with a popup valve on top that regulated the pressure inside. It enabled fairly quick cooking, too. But that pressure cooker was lost along with most of the family stuff when my father passed away, my mother sold the house to marry again and move closer to where I was living at the time.

I have about given up on the home-made 95% rum-type ethanol project, as it looks a bit too risky to do, especially living where there are some mischievous yet extraordinarily skilled folks who just can't keep from getting their fingers into just about all my belongings and projects; so keeping my projects as safe as possible is a way to keep them from setting me up for a real big mess.

Yet the problem of the lack of quality low-cost rum-type ethanol for daily health-beverage and cleansing use, is thus not available to me.

Now, the jigsaw puzzle effect has come back "online" for me. Similar shaped pieces maybe fit together. The larger picture is way out of sight; but then, just getting a few pieces to fit, due to their uniqueness similarities, is entertaining to me.

When I recently read of what is titled nowadays the "Boston Marathon Bombing" fracas, the name "pressure-cooker" was used a lot. Was said the bombers used a couple of pressure cookers filled with sharp objects and explosive material, to make home-made bombs. That was the first time I had heard of pressure cookers, other than my own discovery that it was needed for home-brew ethanol making, and my other's pressure cooker. I have never heard of pressure cookers being used for the numerous roadside bombs etc. So the pressure-cooker word has been used in connection for something that I had previously been searching online for, and in the local store. In my case, it was for helping enable low cost health and well-being for myself; but the other folks seem to be into strange violent seemingly insane doings. A bit like the folks who mess with my belongings, but even more dangerous.

The third piece of this jigsaw puzzle fell into place for me fairly quickly: it involved another of the self-health experimental protocols that I had found so beneficial to me, that of the HRClark zapper device, a 30 KHz pulse generator producing single polarity pulses at about 10 Volts peak and supplied to a pair of metal pipe handholds that are covered with soaking wet paper towel material. This has produced some totally amazing health benefits for me, despite my great skepticism and engineering critical eye. The experiments have gotten far more complex and interesting too over the years; I have little doubt that it will become a major medical protocol, once the problem of it being competitive with the powerful established medical businesses, has been solved.

But back to the jigsaw puzzle pieces. Back about 15 years ago, not long after Hulda Clark went public with description of how to build your own Clark-zapper instruments for one's own use, and which required a pair of pipe handholds four or five inches long, for the conductive coupling of the 10 volt peak pulse signals from hand to hand. And back then shortly after that publication, there were news stories suddenly happening for the first time: "pipe bombs". It was reported that people were putting explosives into small sections of pipe and setting them off, killing and injuring random people nearby.

Suddenly the obtaining of small sections of pipe, started getting suspicious looks by people at the hardware stores. And to make these handholds as part of zappers and try to mail them, will likely excite the x-ray machines in the mail system, so that blocks the distribution of these health-saving devices to a large extent.

So, jigsaw puzzle pieces that look alike appear. The new way to maintain one's own health very economically, even better in some ways that the existing very expensive commercial medical system offers, involve the copper tubing handholds, and then suddenly shortly afterwards the news broadcast people were killing other people with "pipe bombs" for no apparent reason. And now that a pressure cooker would be required to make economical very high quality ethanol for home use for cleansing and health-enhancing beverage use, again would cut deeply into the profits of household and health materials suppliers, and suddenly for no sane reason the news says pressure cookers are suddenly being used to make things that blow up and kill and maim people.

Just like the pipe-bomb thing, starting shortly after the Clark-zappers needed the acquisition of short pieces of copper pipe for handholds.

Now, what the adjacent pieces of this unhappy jigsaw puzzle might look like, is even more scary to me. One is the certainty that the pipe-bomb mentality and now pressure-cooker-bomb mentality, play a lot rougher than I think people ought to play. But then, the movies are full of heroes going wild big bangs shooting up etc and hero gets the girl as a result, so there is a lot of that pattern in the public thinking.

It seems to me that people could live so much better if they would be guided by seeking and utilizing ways for better health and well being, instead of focusing on who is stronger than whom. But clearly that is not what lots of other people think. And those guys seem to get the girls, while I live mateless, so tragic for me. I suppose that proves that the violent tough guys are the winners, superior, in the eyes of the gals looking for mates. (Could also be that the tough guys stalk and harm the gals who look for gentle lovers instead of only accepting the tough-guys too, thus controlling their options. People-stuff is complicated.)

So I still do the jigsaw puzzle mentality thing; it entertains me economically. Just like when I was a youth, with few options then either; same as in my low income retirement days. But sometimes the pictures that form from the newer news-supplied jigsaw puzzles are not always so pretty.

3-D house in 1974

This blog post is another of those for which my blog is not widely seen.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22152212 Tells about plans for making a house by a 3-D printer in the near future. It will involve printing interlocking sections out of plastic then putting them together.

I have mixed feelings about this. First one was to mentally say, wow, another of my ideas is coming into reality, vindicating me.

The next thoughts were a jumble of things like I described how to do that back -- about 1974, and have included another version of it in my sci fi novel "Going Past The Town Prison ( IS N 978-1450568470 ) written in 2009, copyrighted the paperback book in 2010.

Am not sure when I first thought of the idea, was early 1970's as I was being a weekend-daddy after divorce, and one of the entertainments I created for them was to make such an object, more of a 3-D art form of their own choosing. They built them in buckets, and I made one too at same time, and somehow that object has survived and sits on a shelf behind me as I type this.

But the house version was the seed idea, original intent. It would start with the erection of a large open-top cylinder of steel, surrounding the construction site. Then within that strong steel large cylinder - bigger than the building that would ultimately stand there - a computer program would simply shift the nozzle flow from two sources, one was a sand-cement mixture like concrete topping; and the other was just wet sand. The nozzle would scan back and forth across the area of the inside of the cylinder, depositing either the concrete mixture or the wet sand, according to the computer's program, each layer being built on top of the next one. Each layer would be like a horizontal slice section of the building.

When the concrete hardened, the steel cylinder sections would be unbolted, the sand flushed out by a hose, and the hardened concrete building would remain.

That was the concept in simple form, but in practice there would first need to be the placement of the tied-together steel reinforcing rods, and the placement of tubing for plumbing and electrical conduits put in place first; and the computer's program would have to arrange for the sand-cement nozzle to dodge this reinforcing and tubing, as it scans back and forth across the horizontal slice layers of the building to be.

The essence is that the wet sand couples the lateral pressure of the cement over to the surface of the surrounding steel cylinder, keeping the cement in position while it cures to a hard material, while the wet sand does not harden. Thus after hardening of the structure within the cylinder, the sand will wash out but the cement will remain in place.

Another burble on Global Warming

Bernie Sanders post "The Hoax" article says it well.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rep-bernie-sanders/the-hoax_b_3072401.html It ends with "Global warming is real. It is not a hoax. It is a planetary crisis but one that we have the knowledge and technology to address."

The coal and oil barons do not want anything but business-as-usual, buying huge amounts of the hydrocarbons that they rip out of the earth's crust, to power the energy systems our civilization has grown to depend upon. Coal and oil, and nuclear fission powerplants to a significant extent too, have performed an essential role in enabling our incredible industrialized civilization to exist. Many thanks to those folks and to the hydrocarbons the Earth supplied in the process.

Yet I see it as a temporary fix. The hydrocarbons burned in the earth's oxygen of the atmosphere, harnessed to drive generators of the electricity that powers our industries and homes, are an emergency means to enable us to get up the technological and manufacturing steam to go direct to the tremendous daily solar energy influx our planet receives. For example, if all the solar influx falling on the area of the desert town I live in, were to be stored and converted to electricity, it could power the whole city for a year - we don't have to be perfect, we have 365 days a year to capture and use enough of the solar energy.

And I feel optimistic that once that transfer of power source to that directly provided by our Sun has been adequately completed, we can also begin the slow and difficult process of removing the oxygen from the carbon dioxide, and putting it back into the air that all animated life needs on this planet with which to breathe, and putting the hydrocarbons back into the ground or building useful stuff out of it, to reverse what damage we have done to our world, as we rapidly created an energy-intensive civilization.

Going back to sourcing energy from animal and human grunts, is not a wise move, I think.

Much better to keep on high flying as we are now. But the sooner and more completely we get off the need for burning oil and coal in the air's oxygen - even the burning of methane hydrates frantically before the earth releases it into the air in a life-terminating methane belch - the sooner we can solidify our civilization's chances for long term survival. Energy availability and its uses, is what powers our knowledge-based way of life.

It is up to us. Do we learn and use our enormous abilities as a species to resolve problems; or do we fail, maybe not even try, and just let the planet Earth - that just happens to be a lot bigger than we are, in case the tough muscle bully-brained guys are listening, in case this means anything to them - will probably summarily resolve, as has so often happened in the past of our world. Humans were an interesting experiment. Next?

We don't seem to be able to fix our mistakes

It has been over a month since I have posted here, so maybe this post is mostly to indicate that I am still alive and able to post here.

My recent experience has been, of course, as usual for me seen through the eyes and body of an Asperger's man: naive, brilliantly insightful, off-the-wall solutions being suggested, an irritant in the eyes of many of the powers that be. Nothing new there.

At this point, my outlook seems dismal. Yet a post ought to suggest constructive solutions instead of just going ouch ouch ouch.

A current article http://www.huffingtonpost.com/russell-simmons/the-war-on-drugs-is-a-war_b_3038081.html has inspired this effort at a post. That article seems to me to be an example of a humongous problem that keeps expressing here in America. I won't attempt to summarize that problem in Five Easy Words but that article seems to be an example of ... something ... that is a complex and big problem - or at least seems to me to be a big problem, but I suspect that the bottom line is that there are lots of people making big bucks and have fine jobs and want to keep things just the way they are, so as to keep on living their pompous luxurious lifestyle at the expense of the living of huge numbers of other Americans. Of course me making a statement like that, probably puts me in the crosshairs too.

As for expertise on the subject of "drugs", I have little, other than a brief training session about drugs while learning to be a crisis line listener volunteer back in the mid-1970's. Plus having known a few quite peaceable people who smoked marijuana at times in the intervening times, so it is not all theoretical experience from where I speak. Yet it is not "drug use" that is the theme of this post. It is about how not only myself, but a bunch of the lawmakers and enforcers and big corporations, that also seem to not be able to learn about reality from experience.

I uncomfortably remember the old saying that the definition of "Crazy" is not just someone who does not agree with consensus reality, but instead is someone who continues to repeat doing things that do not fix the problem, as shown by past experience, over and over again, thinking it is going to fix the problem.

The referenced article is an example of this. The making of the agriculture of hemp - which is not a drug - treated as if it were a major drug offense, is another example: we don't seem to be able to fix our mistakes. The banning of the essential nutrient L-Tryptophane supplements another example.

Most intelligent beings quickly learn to fix their mistakes or they soon perish.

Intelligent beings that are very powerful do not perish that quickly, however. Worse, they tend to make a big mess of everything around them in the processes of going down.

There is another saying "Fool me once and shame on you. Fool me twice and shame on me. Fool me a third time and shame on both of us."

I have a growing worry that we as Americans and we as the human species, are getting fooled big-time.

So what are some words for potential solutions to the problem? Nevermind that the powers that be are going to pompously declare - as usual - that they are the only ones who have anything worthwhile to say and they are in total control and are boss, end of subject.

Maybe it is to seek to learn the real problems. And not to express as accusations and ego-busting. Just figure out what is wrong, proceed with fixing the problems as we all of the people and the living planet; figure out how to placate the ones who were benefitting by the business-as-usual that was perpetuating the problems; and go from there. Maybe that is a better way to go from here than the way we are going.