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They are cyclical and are related to milkweed availability. But given that milkweed is considered a noxious weed and often targeted for eradication, it damages the Monarch food cycle. Too bad that milkweed is on the weed management area list.

this is interesting, having grown up around banana plants etc. So you know all bananas are clones as it's next to impossible to grow a banana from a seed those are the little dots along the core of a mature banana. Banana's are one of the most nutritious fruits and they are cheap. I'm sure this may not be a lofty a solution as you would like to see but the bottom line is it is a efficient way to feed people. Since you are in a complaining mood one thing to complain about is single sourced bananas, despite being a easy to grow tropical fruit the US does single source much of it's fruit resulting in the need of a mega plantation as opposed to several small sustainable locally owner options.

Banana propagation
https://www.ndsu.edu/pubweb/ch...

Banana nutrition
http://nutritiondata.self.com/...

If you actually knew anything about producing cattle you would know that nobody feeds them significant amounts of corn for any amount of time. It's simply too expensive. Cattle spend the majority of their short lives eating hay, alfalfa, or other roughage. The small amounts of corn that supplement their diet before they go to the feed lot is not enough to harm them even if it was actually toxic. It's no more toxic to them than it is to you. In fact, feeding them too much corn negatively impacts their growth.

http://www.ag.ndsu.edu/pubs/ansci/beef/as1238.pdf
http://www.meatmythcrushers.com/myths/myth-feeding-cattle-corn-is-unnatural.html

You really think feeding them more corn for the few weeks they are at the feedlot is significant?

Well, not really. Israel imports substantial quantities of grain (approximately 80% of local consumption) What does that have to do with water? Grain trade is essentially a trade of water, in concentrated form. Growing wheat, for example, takes 584 lbs of water per lb of crop produced (it might even be worse, since I'm not sure if that is the entire wheat plant or just the grain). So importing 1 lb of wheat equates to importing about 600 lb of water. Maybe we think "water" means drinking water or taking showers, but that is a minuscule fraction of overall usage.

Prussic acid poisoning happens when conditions are right, and this farmer did everything right. And CBS is totally wrong calling an F1 hybrid "GM".

Something that occurred to me reading the article was that when I saw the term "cell division" I immediately pictured a developing embryo, but that would be a somatic mutation rather than a germinal mutation. It's important to remember that all these evolutionary mutations didn't happen in the animals, they happened in the animals' gametes, the sperm and eggs. A mutation that occurs in the cell division of a developing embryo wouldn't have any affect on the individual's gametes, the mutation had to occur in the sperm or egg first.

Not entirely true.....Imagine that the zygote (or even later as the morula) is at the 1, 2 or 4 cell stage when a mutation occurs.....subsequently 1/2, 1/4th or 1/8th (respectively and etc) of the animals cells will now contain the "error". This could A) directly affect said animal if this cell happens to migrate to the brain area and cause a change in the "traditional" development pathway, or B) could migrate to the germ-line cells affecting the progeny or C) the cell further divides and goes both directions making parent and child mutants. The probability being (roughly) directly proportional to the "earliness" of the "mistake".

To quote from your reference

Most tissues are derived from a cell or a few progenitor cells. If a mutation occurs in one of the progenitor cells, all of its daughter cells will also express the mutation. For this reason, somatic mutations generally appear as a sector on the mutated individual.

However, what your fine reference fails to adequately explain for is that the germ-line cells and somatic cells originate from the same point (the zygote)....only further along do they differentiate into those distinct cell lines....and those progenitor cells are just as likely to undergo an "error" in replication as any other cell. To the point, this occurs frequently in humans, it's just that most of these "errors" are true errors that result in a non-viable fetus and are spontaneously aborted. As an aside, humans, despite what one may believe, are horribly bad at reproducing...65-70% of all pregnancies do not go to term. I personally remember being taught that > 80% do not result in a live birth, excluding those aborted for elective or need reasons; however, I'll stick with a published reference.

I think Richard Dawkins made it okay to use these quasi-anthropomorphic terms to describe processes of evolution when he titled his book "The Selfish Gene," so long as you constantly remind people, as he does laboriously in his text, that genes do not have wants, intentions, or consciously-implemented strategies. It's like saying photons are both a wave and a particle, I've read many physicists who point out that we use the wave-particle duality as a means of conceptualizing something so alien to our macro-reality into something we can understand so the non-expert can enjoy the wonder as well. So too do we attribute all sorts of human concepts to the algorithm of natural selection to make it easier to understand.

Still, your criticism is a valid one and something people need to be reminded that we are talking about inanimate processes.

Something that occurred to me reading the article was that when I saw the term "cell division" I immediately pictured a developing embryo, but that would be a somatic mutation rather than a germinal mutation. It's important to remember that all these evolutionary mutations didn't happen in the animals, they happened in the animals' gametes, the sperm and eggs. A mutation that occurs in the cell division of a developing embryo wouldn't have any affect on the individual's gametes, the mutation had to occur in the sperm or egg first.

bacteria from a well is a STRONG possibility. its easy to contaminate a well. hell, Many farmers poison their own families if they store fertilizer wrong. The nitrogen will get into their well water and poison them fast.

http://www.ag.ndsu.edu/pubs/plantsci/soilfert/eb64w.htm

when I worked as a Water Chemist we would have at least 4 calls a year to test a farm's well for nitrogen contamination.

drinking critters is far less risky than drinking chemical contamination.

Plus these bugs are way down on the harmful chain compared to the nasties that the water filtration facilities are treating for.

Go get yourself a case of Amoebic Dysentery or Guardia-Lamblia.

You get about 10% less fuel economy and reduced power out of biodiesel then traditional petroleum diesel and that you need about 10-15% ethanol/methanol to make the fuel meaning more is being used.

I was going to just reply to this and point out the inaccuracy, but the more I read the more I started to wonder if you were just pulling all of this out of your ass.

The loss in fuel economy is more likely a difference in LSD versus ULSD. LSD has 140,000 BTUs, and the ULSD that the US changed to last year is 130,000 BTUs. I was sure that I had read that Bio was 138,000, but the article linked below says 130,000, the same as ULSD. The numbers that I have heard is about .5 to 1 mpg loss for OTR trucks running ULSD compared to LSD. Which is pretty significant when you are starting at 7 mpg.

Ref:
Pre ULSD numbers

Looking at their table, I suppose I could have confused Bio BTUs with the B20/LSD mix. Regardless, this article is a good primer for Biodiesel, taking into account that is hasn't been updated for ULSD. And for reference they should add #1 diesel.

Note that #2 diesel is now 130,000 BTU, as opposed to the prior 140,000

There is also the problem with the bio-diesel contaminating the rubber bushing for fuel lines and such causing the need to replace them a lot more often along with some injector clogging.

Are the fuel system bushings next to the muffler bearings? Biodiesel attacks natural rubber. It will cause it to swell and start to leak. Nobody has used natural rubber in fuel systems since the mid 90s, and it's a reasonably inexpensive one time fix.

It seems to extract atmospheric moisture which causes a bunch of other hassles decreasing it's efficiency in use.

Pure bio is a good medium for growing algae. If you've been running a marine diesel you are familiar with biocides. If your car sits for long periods, it should be treated. (just like with gasoline) Diesel has always had moisture and algae concerns. Condensation in the fuel tank is a concern if the vehicle sits for long periods, and with water comes algae. It's no more of a concern, or hassle, than putting a fuel stabilizer in gasoline that is going to sit for several months.

Most warranties can be voided with it's use too.

You should check again, most are allowing B5 now in older engines now. Although the 2007 emission changes threw a wrench in that. 2007/2008 engines are NOT certified to run Bio due to the new emission equipment. I haven't researched it in depth, but I believe it is related to the new particulate traps.

Most OTR (long haul) trucking companies report around a 12% loss in power and around 10%-20% decreased fuel efficiency for B100 (pure bio). To compensate, they have ordered larger engines in newer trucks and turning some of the older engines up.

You have a reference for this? OTR firms are not using Biodiesel because of availability and quality control issues. If Flying J and Pilot would start carrying it, the OTR companies would start using it. They're just looking for a guarantee of consistency. They don't want to buy Bio that Bubba has brewed in his garage, they have a $100k plus asset that needs to roll everyday to hit it's 100-150k miles per year.

Thirty years in the IT industry, and my fallback career is cattle rancher. My in-laws own a small ranch where I work from time to time. If peak oil predictions prove to be optimistic, I'll still be able to put food on the table.

People will always need to eat, so in that sense you're right. However, while cows are ruminants and are natural grass eaters, today cattle eat mostly corn and it takes a lot of petrochemicals to grow the corn. Even more important is the water the cattle need, and they need a lot of water. Forget about peak oil, we're heading into peak water. "Aquifers and Rivers Are Running Dry."

I'm no expert on this, but I am sure researchers can find a way to feed farm fish from sources other than ocean fish, and I'm sure it's already done today to a certain degree

Nature is always trying to balance itself ... high population counts result in starvation for some percentage of that population which decreases the population. We humans have broken this natural limit by being able to transport food over large distances and nature can't react quickly enough. We've developed insatiable appetites and the means to pillage entire stocks. If the good professor is right and we're arriving at some kind of point of no return then again nature will do what nature does: eliminate the problem and restore balance. *Life* will go on on this planet ... just not humans.

This is why whenever I read something about how we're messing up the environment and people say: don't worry, it'll fix itself I think to myself "yup ... but you might not like how nature deals with the problem..."

imho we desperately need to return to a more natural way of living and make sustainability the priority, decrease our dependance on chemicals, and dissallow corporate externalization of environmental costs ... just a start, and just my 2c.

I have a fundimental problem taxing people in North Dakota and Virginia to pay for protection for people who built homes below sea level.


Yeah, why should North Dakotans pay! They know better than to build houses in places that flood!

I'm at NDSU in Fargo (insert obligatory joke here), and for once ITS had a semi-intelligent solution. They found some way (haven't had a chance to ask for specifics) to find out when a computer was infected (or even vulnerable, I hear), and then they just denied that MAC address an IP from the DHCP server. Once it's cleaned up, you call or email them and they put you on the list to be reactivated. Of course, it's a bit bothersome when you have to wait overnight to get a PC back online, but it's better then losing all network access while you wait for them to check everything. (Of course, this solution only came about when they didn't get the patch rolled out in the computer clusters and most of them were shut down to getting infected.)

I'm the SysAdmin for the math department, and we're still facing sporadic infection on computers that didn't get patched when I sent out an email this summer. (Would have patched them myself, but I was 1500 miles away.) Fortunately, our lab got patched the night before Blaster was triggered, so we were safe there. Only a couple faculty members who could wait a day or two to get back online.

Congrats to the #1 rookie team!

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