spring
sastyk | March 23, 2012...My laundry pile was empty. I mean, empty. Nothing more to wash.
This unprecedented state of affairs (in a working farm household with 6 people, four of them attracted to mud like magnets) didn't last long - then Asher dumped his muddy socks on the floor and Eli took a bath and pushed the towel into the tub and then the kids got out of the clothes bearing the day's accumulated grime - but I did briefly have no laundry to do. None.
Other people may think this is a weird thing to worry about, but you have to understand my life. There is ALWAYS laundry in the pile, there are ALWAYS…
sastyk | March 19, 2012The season cycled over the weekend - officially it is not quite spring, but in fact, spring now has a toe hold. Even if it goes back to chilly or even snows, the ground is too warm for it to last, by the end of an unusually warm week the grass will be green and the soil dried enough to move forward. That doesn't mean my (optimistic) plantings of peas and bok choy, spinach and sweet peas may not stagnate or my fruit tree blooms get caught by frost (we can't even say a late frost, it is two months to my last frost date, and anything can happen in upstate NY and usually does), that the boys in…
sastyk | March 9, 2012
Spring is a trick of the light - it should be, after all, since ultimately the shift of seasons is about angles and sun. At some point in March the light changes - a new "certain slant of light" and thus, spring is here. It will be a while most years before the green and the daffodils or even the spring peepers arrive in upstate NY, but in the meantime, the sky and the air and the angle of sun says spring.
Seed starting is in full swing now and I sometimes feel I spend far too many of my days elbow deep in potting soil - but the smell of moist compost is energizing as well. It is…
sastyk | April 15, 2011Well, first there's the baby goats. Last Friday, we collected our foster goat, Tayish. He belongs to a friend from our synagogue who won him in a raffle, believe it or not. He's a 10 week old wether, and the kids have made a pet of him. Here's Simon holding him:
Then, on Sunday, Bast gave us our first birth and our first doe of the season, Calliope. It was nice for Bast that she just had the one little one - last year in her first season she had triplets!
Each season's babies name choices have a "theme" - this year is Greek mythology. Calliope was a (probably hopeless) expression of…
sastyk | February 11, 2011"Did you look at the forecast?" "Is this it?" "Should we get them out?"
My children keep asking, and I keep telling them that I think so, but that no one can know for sure. We are talking of the change in the weather, slated to begin today, warming us up from the last wave of bitter cold with night temperatures last night around -12 (we hit -29 earlier this winter, so that's pretty balmy), to days in the 40s (gasp, and maybe even near 50) next week, while nights are just below freezing.
It is possible, of course, that the warm spell will turn and go south, although the predictions are…
sastyk | April 20, 2010I've been sadly slack on content the last few days, but well, it is spring and I'm busy. And tired at the end of the day. And Stoneleigh of The Automatic Earth was visiting. And well...hey, it is 66 degrees, sunny and beautiful. I'm in the middle of a piece answering a reader's question about why even economists should be concerned about peak energy but it lost to the sunshine. The problem is that the computer is in the house, and I don't go there this time of year if I can avoid it ;-).
On the other hand, what I do have, for the first time in a long while, is a working (until one of the…
awild | April 20, 2010
Forget the heavy pro-grade camera gear for a moment. This shot was taken with a $300 Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS3 digicam. These small cameras do wide-angle macro exceptionally well, and their tiny sensors and lenses give them a small-world perspective that SLR cameras struggle to replicate. Here, I placed the camera on the ground underneath a foot-high canopy of mayapples.
sastyk | March 12, 2010Note: It hasn't happened yet here, although we heard them down the hill in the valley yesterday. But we seem to be having an early spring, even though we've still got more than a foot of snow to melt off. I wrote this last year, and though the precise circumstances are different, the need for that sound is just the same. I know I owe y'all new content, but this one seemed appropo. Has spring sprung for you?
Spring doesn't come easily in upstate New York - she wrestles with Old Man Winter for a long, long time before he gives up. The first sign is the daffodils, up a small amount in…
sastyk | March 3, 2010
It has been an exciting morning - and it isn't even 10 o clock. Today was the day to pick up our new buck goat, Ring Bearer (again, not responsible for his name). For those of you who have never had the pleasure of having a buck goat, or do have buck goats, but own pickup trucks or other more sensible farm vehicles than our ancient Ford Taurus, you may not be famliar with the way a buck goat smells in close quarters.
This time of year, it isn't that bad, but there is a definite musk. This muskiness makes said goat sexually irresistable to all ladies of the goat persuasion, but let's…
rallain | July 14, 2009This has been on my list for quite some time. Really, it must be since i posted about measuring acceleration in free fall with an iphone. So, this post will be all about accelerometers.
How does an accelerometer work? Really, an accelerometer measures force some way on a known mass. Let me show an extremely simple accelerometer - a mass on a spring.
(image from Science Buddies where they have instructions on building such a device)
Suppose I put this accelerometer in a stationary and non-accelerating elevator. Let me draw a free body diagram for the mass on the end.
No magic here, right…
awild | May 7, 2009Mayapple
Brownfield woods, Urbana, Illinois
photo details: Canon 17-40x wide angle lens on a Canon EOS 50D
ISO 400, 1/30 sec, f/7.1, leaf backlit with handheld 550ex strobe.
gregladen | March 14, 2009Spring is an ecological phenomenon of weather and biota linked to orbital geometry. More importantly, spring is here, as of this very moment, in Anoka County, Minnesota.
The parts of Anoka County, Minnesota that are not built on consist of scrubland, prairie, and marsh. So there is a lot of grass. For the last several weeks it has been unseasonably cold. So the soil beneath the grass is frozen solid. This frozen-state is facilitated by the fact that we have not had much snow, which otherwise might have insulated the ground and kept it warmer. And, this lack of snow means that when we…
rallain | October 4, 2008Magic tricks are cool. Especially when the trick is really physics. In this trick, I can make one of the four balls move more than the others. (When you watch the video, you will see why I am not a professional magician). You could set this up in a variety of ways. I state that if we (me and people around me) all work together with our mind and focus on the same ball, our brain waves can resonate with that ball and make it move. I let the people around me pick. In this video, I make the smallest two move.
So, what is the trick? The trick is not a trick. It is not resonance with brain…
grrlscientist | April 25, 2008tags: spring, nature, Image of the Day
Spring.
Picture snapped a couple weeks ago outside the College Park Metro Station. By the way, do you see the nesting bird in this image?
Image Karen Davis [larger].
grrlscientist | April 17, 2008tags: Spring, Thomas Wolfe, poetry, National Poetry Month
April is National Poetry Month, and I plan to post one poem per day, every day this month (If you have a favorite poem that you'd like me to share, feel free to email it to me).
My poetry suggestions are starting to run dry, which means I will start posting my own favorites (but you've seen many of those already) or you can send me your favorite poems, which I probably haven't read before! Today's poem was suggested by "The Ridger", a long-time reader who was inspired by yesterday's photoessay (the images I snapped for that were taken…