Life enrichment by making a difference

If you want to make a difference always choose a cool day.

Next, ask permission if you don't own the land and bring lots of water. If you make a difference on land you do not own the owners may be upset.



After you have made a difference you can feel good about yourself for changing the world.

After

Before

Clouds

We were really hard up for life enrichment today so we just watched the clouds.

Freeloading tip from Mrs TWW

MRS. TWW says TWW should always wash and return the container we get when someone gives us something. Thanks MA. Here is your container so you can recycle it.

Dual Purpose Winestopper/Trailer Hitch

The members of this new collection of trailer hitches are meant to serve two purposes. First, they are fancy trailer hitches. But if the high gas prices and the environmentalists convince you to buy a wimpy hybrid car with no trail pulling capacity, you can also use the trailer hitch as a winestopper.

What's in a name?

Why sequester carbon? The answer is simple: to protect Mother Gaia. So what is the big deal with Mother Gaia?
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Gaia theory is the brainchild of James Lovelock. In the book Symbiotic Planet one of his collaborators in the creation of the theory, Lynn Margulis, tells the story of how the name originated. Lovelock lived in the English countryside and sometimes took walks with William Golding who was author of Lord of the Flies. Until getting some advice from Golding, Lovelock was talking about 'a cybernetic system with homeostatic tendencies as detected by chemical anomalies in the Earth's atmosphere'. (CSWHTDCAEA for short in this blog entry). He asked Golding for help in coming up with a shorter name. Golding suggested the name Gaia and it changed a scientific theory into an earth religion where today global warming is a sign of sin, people can buy indulgences in the form of carbon credits and Prophet Al Gore exhorts humans to turn from the wantonness of their ways and promises to lead them into the promised land of electric cars. What a difference a name makes. It is much easier to worship a Gaia than a CSWHTDCAEA.

imported wood

It is getting kind of slow finally after all the visitors in the past few weeks. Now back to the mission. The carbon in this wood came all the way from India to Indian country.

Night visitor

Some mysterious monster was trying to get the bait from this little live trap and tore up the grass.

Working class bowls

Never one to pass up a potential profit center, TWW Enterprises is announcing its latest new bowl series. Painted bowls are meant for those who do not like yuppie bowls where you can see the grain of the wood and use it to impress your friends. Instead, these bowls have lead paint and are guaranteed to last a long time.

We Recycle All Together

TWW takes some of the recycling from the family cabin down the road to help out since Mrs. TWW is part-owner. The family dutifully separates out all of the recyclables into neat categories like glass bottles, cans, plastic bottles and so on just like they learned in the public schools.



TWW helps the process too by taking all of the separated piles and dumping them all together into his We Recycle box so the waste haulers can haul it all away. TWW thinks his recycling bins should show his support of diversity.

TWW has a friend who is a retired elementary teacher. He told TWW about how he had his students take all of their recycleable materials and put them into separate recycling containers in his classroom as part of learning good citizenship. At the end of the school day the janitor came around and emptied all of the recycling containers into the trash.

Hybrid bowl

Since hybrid is now 'in', TWW enterprises is offering one. An artistic bowl is a functionless (note: we also call these blond bowls) bowl but looks pretty. A utilitarian bowl has value but may not be pretty. A hybrid bowl is all of these. Below is a cherry hybrid bowl in the last stages of production. The metal doohickeys are meant to join wood as in making a truss. Put them upside down and you can dry stuff on them. This hybrid is finished with organic poly.

Pick on someone your own size

Food fight victim looking for sympathy

I'd rather be texting

Want some chips?

Want me to throw you some green juice too?

Birdsmouth bowls and homeless deer

Many coats of organic polyurethane still cannot hide the tool marks but the bowl is still an interesting carbon sequestration prototype.







This poor homeless deer is hanging around and has taken up residence between our sheds.

Another carbon sequestration project

This bowl is different since it is a recycled breadboard from Taiwan. The wood was so uncooperative TWW did not want to sign the bowl due to quality assurance problems. (But was pressured into signing it so he put a disclaimer on the bottom of the bowl). Recycling is not as easy as they say it is at times.

For the record

This is the text of a real letter sent to the local newspaper:

Don’t make things worse by trying to make them better
Published: Wednesday, July 2, 2008 11:24 AM CDT
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Around the year 985 the Vikings sailed to Greenland and set up a colony that initially thrived but then died off as the climate there changed from rising temperatures to falling temperatures. These people left historical records but had no thermometers with them so there is nothing for scientists to feed into their computers for drawing trend lines.
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John Magnuson (mentioned in the June 25 story on the lake conference) has been able to compile records based on calendar data so the scientists can draw their trend lines with computers. These trend lines make it appear the temperatures around the planet are on the rise. What is missing from the data Magnuson has collected is why the temperatures are going up. Some people think it is a natural cycle and use Greenland as an example, and other people program computer simulations and claim that means CO2 is the cause. The result is a controversy.
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Here’s a global warming test for you: What is the most important greenhouse gas? (Hint: you get it when you burn a fossil fuel). Correct answer: dihydrogen monoxide. The loose conspiracy between Big Science with its quest for government grants and Nobel prizes and Big Media in search of ratings and Pulitzer prizes, has created an obsession with carbon dioxide in spite of the fact dihydrogen monoxide impacts the greenhouse effect more than CO2.
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If you believe the environmentalists, there are scientists out there called deniers who have been bought off by Exxon. But the real people we should be watching are the scientists who are on the take in the form of government grants. There is competition for research grant money. Getting your environmental scare into the media helps get more grant money. The alliance between the media and these scientists has almost created a positive feedback loop (getting more of something causes getting even more of it) like the global warming people talk about.This controversy involves what science can really tell us, religious beliefs, mass communications and the politics and economics of how other people want to spend your money.
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A good way to learn more about all aspects of the controversy is “Climate Confusion” by Roy Spencer. He is a UW-Madison Ph.D. in meteorology who is a denier with a sense of humor. Dr. Spencer, the denier, surprisingly thinks the climate is currently warming. Spencer also claims when people say the science is all settled, it’s a sign it's not.
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Finally, I should also add Big Oil has not paid me anything to write this and call water dihydrogen monoxide. My concern is people will make things worse in the name of making things better. One example is planting trees to sequester carbon. Pine trees planted in the northern hemisphere absorb light in the winter instead of reflecting light like snow does. That means they can help heat the planet and that is what planting them hopes to prevent in the first place.

(signed using TWW's real pen name)

Is your TV screen destroying the planet?

" A gas used in the making of flat screen televisions, nitrogen trifluoride (NF3), is being blamed for damaging the atmosphere and accelerating global warming. " or so says this link: http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/07/03/2293369.htm?section=justin

The question is whether your flat screen on your computer is doing the same thing.

Life enrichment through vocabulary enlargement

Gorrelation: A claim one of two positively correlated phenomena actually causes the increase in the other when made by an individual with a Nobel prize in a different field who claims victims status.

Enhanced carbon sequestration

TWW Enterprises latest attempt to help save the planet is to encase sequestered carbon in its bowls with polyurethane to prevent the carbon leaking into the atmosphere. Here are a couple of bowls coated with organic polyurethane.


The bowl above is 7" by 2 1/2" and made of maple. The wood came from a tree blown down in 2005. Rather than let the carbon escape into the atmosphere, TWW cut up the tree and is making bowls to capture the carbon. The new organic polyurethane technique seals in the carbon better than mineral oil (which is made from petroleum).

The bowl below is made of birch and measures 6" x 2".