Cover Crop And Global Warming

I am sure that 99% of you never heard of a "cover crop" and if you did, I am sure that you don't understand its significance.  That is the point of this blog.

I often watch the farm channel on TV because there is almost nothing else on TV worth watching.  For the past several years, there have been several shows on "cover corps", but none mentioned the Global Warming connection.  Exactly what is a cover crop?  Think of it this way.  You grow a crop of corn and when it is harvested, you plow the field waiting for next year when you can plant corn again.  That is the normal process.  What if you planted another crop after you harvested your corn, but the growing season was too short to actually harvest that second crop?  That second crop is a "cover crop" and even if you can't harvest it, it is still a crop.

Cover crops are normally plowed under before you plant your corn.  Does that mean the cover crop was a waste?  No way!  What you get from the cover crop is a reduction in erosion and a bunch of add organic matter for your soil.  Why waste all that rain and Sun shine that is falling on your land?  This is normally where the story stops, but I have more.

The Global Warming people are all concerned about putting Carbon-Dioxide into the air. but they don't seemed near as concerned about systems to "take it out".  That is what a cover crop does.  As plants grow, they take Carbon-Dioxide out of the air and the farmer plows that organic material into the ground.  I don't think that most people understand how much Carbon-Dioxide is trapped in the soil and how much more could be stored here.  Most gardeners understand that adding organic mulch is good for their gardens and it is the same for farmers.  What they don't understand is that this mulch is organic like wood that has converted Carbon-Dioxide from the air into "organic material".

I guess that I am surprised that the government has not mandated that all farmers plant some kind of cover crop after their primary crop has been harvested.  If you were to ask one of these Global Warming nuts where most of the Carbon is, they would not know. Only a very small percentage is in the atmosphere in the form of Carbon-Dioxide.  Most is in the ocean or in things like limestone or Calcium-Carbonate or oil or coal and a lot is in the soil in the form of organic material.  Normal farming tends to release the Carbon from the soil due to plowing.  Low-till is one of the other things that farmers are now doing to save on cost, but at the same time prevent the release of Carbon-Dioxide from their soil.  Why don't you hear about this stuff?  Most farmers around the world are not doing the things that our farmers are doing.  Why is that and why don't our farmers get more credit?

This blog has gone on long enough.  I think that you get the idea.  Why are all the voters in our big cities who never grew a thing voting to kill our economy with their "War On Coal", when they know so  little about the facts?  That's the big problem!!!

New Global Warming Strategy

I am not going to debate the if Global Warming is "significant" or not in this blog.  I am going to "assume" that it is significant and based on that assumption, "What is the best strategy".  Sounds logical doesn't it?

Strategy just means a series of actions that one choses.  Strategy is just a fancy name for a decision choice.  Realistically, there are many possible strategies or choices, but here, I am only going to deal with the two that I feel are most significant, and what are those?

First, "save the world" by stopping global warming and maintaining the Earth in its current state.  That is, making sure the Earth does not get warmer or colder.  We know from history that with and without the presents of humans, temperature and conditions on the Earth have changed over time.  That is a fact.  Further, we have no real evidence that the presence of humans have made any significant differences in the temperature of Earth up or down.  You would need a double blind test and we can't do that.  For the record, I have found no believer in "Global Warming" who can explain why the Ice Age ended just a few thousand years ago and humans were here during much of that time.  Well, trying to stopping Global Warming by human action is a possible strategy.  What is the other?

Second, "be the last ones standing"!  Rather than trying to save the world so that all the world can remain standing when Global Warming hits, what about making sure that the USA and most of its people are "still standing"?  I think that we can all agree that it will cost the people of the USA a very lot to try to stop Global Warming and that 99% of any benefits will go to people outside the USA who are investing very little.  Think about it this way.  What if it was clear that the seas were rising and our coast area was being flooded?  Should we all go out with buckets and bail water out of the sea and put it in to lakes on shore or should we build dikes or move back from the flooded areas?  Do you think that we could "save the world" by bailing with buckets?  You know the answer.

How do we become the "last ones standing"?  We build up our wealth now by using the cheapest energy available.  When it gets warmer, we build air conditioners.  If we run out of fresh water, we desalt  sea water with our cheap energy to grow food.  We keep out dead beats who want to cross our borders from places that are worse off  .and free load on us when they squandered their wealth.  We don't let them steal our food or energy.

If and when Global Warming becomes significant, we don't want to be so poor as a country that we can't deal with any problems that it may bring.  With the current policies and mind set of many, what we are doing is going to mean that when Global Warming comes, we will have flat broke because we have "squandered" our wealth and we will have "no" options.  We will be in the same boat as every one else and thus not be "the last ones standing".

Real simple isn't it?

PS---Remember that a similar thing happened on Easter Island and rather than reducing their population and getting it into balance with their resources, they built giant stone statues to get some kind of magical power to save them.  You don't believe in magic or Obama do you? 

After a few years of serious Global Warming the people in "poor" and "over populated" countries will be dead.  That would leave us standing with no competition for food or energy while the production of Carbon-Dioxide  dropped to almost zero!  I would count that as a "win".

Test For Politicians

I have come up with a simple test for politicians that I think you will understand and like.  Here it is.

I have been looking at a lot of our politicians and see a common thread regarding which ones seem more competent.  First off, I don't like lawyers.  They mostly run their mouths and I  know from going to undergraduate school with them that they never take any classes that are difficult.  I never had one in one of my science or engineering classes.  They only take the "fluff" type classes.  They never produce anything that we can sell around the world to help our trade balance.  Did you ever think about that?  They buy things from China, but they never sell anything to them.  Interesting?  Sorry, that I got a little off track.

What you need to do is to see if the politician makes more money by being in office than he or she could have made in a regular job.  At least 95% of the politicians that I have analyzed make more money as a politician than they could have made in a private job or profession.  This makes you wonder if we are getting the best people to represent us or the best that "money can buy"?  It is no wonder why most of our politicians try to protect and hang onto their offices so hard.

I know that there are many who like being a politician for their big egos.  Many of these are people who did not earn their money, but married into it or inherited it.  Look at the whole Kennedy bunch?  What did any of them ever produce?  Not much!.  How about our Senator from Arizona John McCain?  His father was an Admiral. That is how he got into the Naval Academy.  Clinton's only claim to  fame was that she was married to a President.  Her and Bill never made so much money until they both held public office.

The bottom line is that we need people in government like we had back in the beginning when politics was a part time job and everyone made more money in their regular jobs than they did from milking the taxpayers and the government.  I think that Trump is the first one in a very long time who would take a pay cut by being President.

Obama, Clinton and Trump

Is there no hope for the USA?  I am not so sure.  I don't think that it is just the candidates, it is our brainless voters.  That's right, it is you.  Are you old enough  to have read the comics when Pogo was the strip of the day?  If you are not, go look it up.  In one episode Pogo was out in the Okefenoke Swamp talking to his alligator friend about the fact that they had been looking for the "enemy" and concluded that,  "it was them."  It appears that some things never change.

Obama is out on the stump praising himself for the fact that our economy has grown a factional percentage under his watch.  That is a fact and it is true, but that is not what is significant.  World wide those involved in technology have prospered.  That has been the case through out human history and it more the case today.  Why do we call it the Stone age or Bronze age or the Computer age?  You never hear anyone calling it the "truck driver age", or the "lawn mower age"!  That is because they were not the source or driver of wealth.  My point is that the technical segment of our economy has grown faster than the non-technical has declined.  The net affect of that is a modest increase in the "total" economy.

Think about this.  Our gross national product  is about 18 trillion dollars a year.  During the Obama Presidency we added over 10 trillion dollars to the national debit.  That is almost 2 trillion per year or over 10% of the economy.  When it results in a net growth in our economy of less than 1%, that does not sound like such a good deal to me.  How about you?

I know that most of our voters do not know what "the median" means.  It is way over their heads.  To keep it simple, if we arrange the population from the poorest to the richest, that person in the "middle" is the "median".  Kind of like the median strip in the highway.  Understand it now?  I we were to just focus on than person in the middle, it would paint a very different picture than the one painted by Obama.  Since Obama has been at the controls, the median families income has gone down from about $54,000 per year to about $47,000 per year.  At the same time their net worth has gone down by an almost equal amount.  The fact is, the median person or family is poorer by over 10% today than when Obama took office.  Those are the facts!

I have proposed in my blogs in the past that we should be focusing on the "median" income and net worth rather than the total.  If we were to do that, it would be clear that 99% of emigrants whether legal or illegal, lower the median net worth and thus make us poorer.  You only have to look at countries like Switzerland to see the impact of their very strict immigration policy.  The Swiss are much richer than we are by every measure.  Notice also that it is a law that every household must posses a gun.  How about that?

How is it even possible for the median income as well as the median net worth go down while we are borrowing and over 10% of our annual gross national product?  If this were not true, you would think that I have been smoking something.  We don't need to think about how we are going to get moving ahead, we have to think about how we are going to "stop" going down.  We can't go up until we stop going down.  We are starting to look exactly like Argentina and they have been going down for over 50 years and there is no good news in sight.  That will be the fate of the USA and the future for out children if us voters don't start using our brains.  I don't know if Trump will be able to stop our decline, but I am 100% sure that Obama and Clinton can't.  All they want to do is to dig a deeper hole for those who voted for them while they live the good life on your dime!

John Locke On Raising Children

I don't know if many of you are familiar with the writings of John Locke, but those writings are the basis of this blog.

John Locke was born in England in the early 1600's and died just after the turn of the 1700 century.  His writings had a lot to do with the thinking of those who formed the USA and who wrote the Constitution.  Like many thinkers, there was more to him than just politics.  I think that some of his most interesting writings were about "education" and how children should be raised.  Remember that this was all written in the mid 1600's.  I am not going to repeat what he had to say, but to point out that he was clearly a proponent of "tuff love".  He did not think that it was in the interests of the child to make life easy or to spoil the child. For the record, I agree with that position.  This brings me to my main point about human nature.  Human nature has not changed.  Remember that!!  You may think that it has changed, but per John Locke in the mid 1600's,  it is clear to me that it has not.

There is a great advantage of being older in that you have the opportunity to see events play out over a long period of time.  What one finds is that many things do not play out as one might have expected and that is the big lesson that comes from age.  I was born into a very poor family and was raised during some very difficult times.  I  had my share of "love", but life was still difficult.  What my parents gave me was, what we might call it today was "tuff love".  I was not spoiled, I had to work and go without.  Looking back now, I think that it made me the person that I am today.  Now to some human nature.

A common thread in human nature is that we all want to be liked.  We also want to help others in need.  These are the traits that make us "human".  With me so far?  These are good, right?  What if you are a parent who is practicing the principles of John Locke and strengthening  your children so they can deal with the world with "tuff love", how does this all play out?  Years ago when most of us were poor, it worked OK, but times have changed.  Now, when you try to use "tuff love" there are all kinds of people who come to the aid of your child and cancel out your efforts.  A child who is being asked to do more or go without is an easy target for a person who wants to "do good" and gain the friendship of your child.  When I was a kid, all the kids that I knew were poor and thus there was not any of these "do gooders" getting in the way like we have now.  Starting to see the problem?

Years a go, most parents followed the principles of John Locke in raising their children with out even know it, but as we have become more affluent things have changed.  How many times have you  heard a parent say, "I don't want my kids to have to work as hard as I had too"?  My guess is about 98% and what has been the affect?  What we have is a generation of kids who don't want to work or be without any comfort.  Our kids are soft and are being pushed around by poor kids from around the world.  Our kids take the easy classes in school while poor kids from around the world take the hard classes and end up kicking our butts.

Look at our school teachers?  Do you think that we have any of those "hard ass" type teachers like in the old days?  No way!  We have teachers who want to be loved and who cancel out the efforts of parents who want their kids raised on "tuff love".  I think that I have made my point and it is up to you and others to try to turn this thing around.  Knowing and admitting that we have a problem is the first step in solving the problem.  That was my objective.

PS--Look at it this way.  Conservatives tend toward "tuff love" while liberals tend toward "spoiling".  In the short term liberals appear to be best, but in the long term conservatives appear best.  The problem with the USA is that we tend more and more to only consider the short term.  Other wise, we would not be looking at a 20 trillion dollar national debit.  We have eaten a lot of T-Bone steaks that we did not pay for.  Whos is going to have to pick up the tab for us?

Are You Better Off After 7 Years Of Obama?

How many times have you heard this or variations of it?  It is both a stupid question and a "loaded" question all at the same time.  That is what this blog is about.

I am going to use some abstractions to explain this and I hope that most of you are smart enough to understand the logic.  You are in a boat rowing up a river and you are 30 years old.  After seven years of rowing, how far up the river are you?  If you are farther up the river than where you started, then you would answer the stupid question "yes".  With me on this one?  What if you were not farther up the river, but were actually a little further down stream than where you started?  In that case you would answer the stupid question "no".  I think that now, you understand the problem with the stupid question.

What if we had a slightly different situation where we had asked this same question "7" years ago to a group of "different" people and saved the results to compare with your answer.  I think that we would get the similar answers, but here would be a big difference.  Now what could that be?  Rather than just asking if they were farther up the river, we would add the detail of "exactly how far up the river were you?"  Now, things take on a very different interpretation.  What we notice is that those people "7" ago were much further up the rive than those who we just asked!  Big deal, right?

It would be like asking a person working for the post office if they now make more than they did before Obama was elected.  I can tell you that 100% would say "yes".  Why is that?  Because they are "7" years older on the job.  What we need to compare are people who are, today, the same age that you were "7" years ago and see if they are better off than you were "7" years ago.  When you do this, you get a very different answer.  Now do you understand why the question is both stupid and loaded?

When I was 28 years old back in the 60's, with a BS and a MS degree in Engineering, I made enough to qualify for a loan to purchase a 4 bedroom 3 and 1/2 bath formal dining room and rec-room with a fireplace and wet bar in San Jose.  Now, you find me a similar person with two kids and only "one" income who could do that?  That is the comparison that you need to make and the answer is clear that we are "not" better off.  We are going backwards and don't even know it.

There are a couple of additional things about the boat in the river.  First off, the river is flowing faster.  That is a fact of life.  This is because we are now competing with more and more people around the world and it is getting cheaper every day for them to shop their products here.  They don't come by Camel as in the past, they come by supertanker or container ship.  The other thing is that we used to be good boat rowers, but we have gotten fat and lazy while the rest of the world have become much better at rowing boats.  Getting the message?

The next time you hear some simple minded person asking "are you better off now", think about how stupid this question really is.!

Algorithms And Education

I have been very concerned about education for a very long time and have finally started to understand the whole thing.  How about that?  It has taken me over 70 years though.  I would like to share some of my ideas with you.  That is the purpose of this blog.

First, a little short story.  Years ago I heard this story about a person who was trying to put together a complicated puzzle and was getting no where.  When they turn the pieces over, they found that on the back side was this picture of a boy and when they put the boy together, they also put the complicated puzzle together.  That may not of sounded like such a big deal, but it was.  The human mind has been programmed over millions of years to deal with the problem of survival in the physical world that we lived in.  The human mind does not deal so well with artificial games that us humans have cooked up. 

Take language.  Humans have been communicating with vocal language for millions of years before a human cooked up the idea of a written form.  A lot of the first trials at a written form did not work out too well.  Many tried pictures to represent the words and that did not work very well.  It was when the cymbals were for the individual sounds of the words that humans started making real progress on a written language.  Humans still kept the original sounds of the words and did not have to shift to a code cooked up by inventors.  If you look at "Windows" as used by computers, you will also find that it follows the natural mental organization of the human mind.  Remember some of the first attempts with a totally nonhuman code?  It was complicated and did not work very well.  This build up is to point out how critical it is that any type of education needs to build on the natural human mind rather than something that is totally cooked up and foreign.  Now education.

Given the above, are you starting to see how our education needs to build on the natural programing of our human minds and not some total abstraction?  I contend that you are born with what ever real "smarts" that you are going to have and that no amount of education can change that.  We all know that not all people are born with the same level or mix of "smarts", but most have this basic naturally programmed "smarts" and it is that natural "smarts" that education needs to build on.  Now. exactly what is education?

From my point of view, it is the learning of a bunch of "algorithms".  Don't know what an "algorithm" is?  It is a procedure that if you follow will yield the answer to your question.  Here is an example.  What is 9 time 8?  It is 72, right, but what does it mean and how did we get the answer?  Think of it this way.  We all have 10 fingers so we count in sets of 10.  That is natural isn't it?  If you were to give me a hand full of nuts containing 9 nuts and you did that 8 times, how many nuts would you have given me?  Ever think about why we use the term "times"?  Now you know.  We could have laid the nuts out in 8 rows of 9 nuts each and the counted them up to get the number 72 which would be the "area" measured in units of 1.  Calculus goes to great lengths to find area by a process they call integration, but down deep, it also builds on this natural human programming. 

When it come to education, what mostly goes on is that we learn "algorithms".  Look at a dictionary.  The words are arranged in alphabetical order and by knowing that simple algorithm, we can find almost any word in the dictionary.  One complication is that when us humans cooked up the alphabet to match the sounds of spoken  words, we did not do a very good job and for that reason spelling is still a challenge to this day.  When it comes to just simple memory without any natural backup, us humans do not do too well.  If there is some kind of natural law, rule or concept backing up the algorithm the human can master it much better.  Now, some people have naturally more "smarts" than other and can learn these algorithms faster and find the answers faster,  In school when you take some kind of test, it is mostly to see if you can follow an algorithm and also how fast you can operate that algorithm.  As a kid, I was about average on leaning algorithms, but I was one of the fastest when it came to operating the algorithm.  For that reason, I often got the highest grade on the test.

All algorithms are not about math and numbers, many are about decision making that one will need to survive in the real world, but that is not made very clear in school.  Here is an example.  We learn all kinds of facts about history, but it is not clear to students exactly why.  The purpose of all the facts is to help make our decisions in the future.  Take the Second Amendment to the constitution that allows us to own guns.  To make a current decision on how much regulation we should have on gun ownership, we need to fully understand why we had the Second Amendment in the first place.  Without that understanding, how could a person today come to the best answer and many don't.

Some education is clearly just for entertainment and pleasure.  Learning about Old English writers is enjoyable, but it is not what real education is all about.  It is clearly an optional part of education as are sports and music.  What we need is the understanding of the "natural" laws of nature and the world that many of the algorithms are built to deal with.  Given an understanding of those natural laws, we should  be encouraged to invent our own new algorithms.  Have you ever come up with an algorithm for anything or do you know anyone who has?  I did not thinks so.  Does knowing a lot of algorithms make one "smart"?  I don't think so.  Can a person expect to get by in this world by only knowing a few important algorithms?  Yes!!  These people are often referred to as "one trick ponies".
The problem is that we have too many of them.

The challenge for education of the future is how efficiently we can teach students needed algorithms and developing new and better algorithms.  We appear to have come to a mature plateau when it comes to teaching algorithms and if the human race expects to progress farther we need to figure out how to teach needed algorithms to students at a younger age and more efficiently.  Currently it costs too much and takes too long to teach the needed algorithms.  We have to solve that problem!!

PS---Isn't a tool or a machine just another algorithm?   Think about it?  We don't need any more people who only know the algorithm of how to walk behind a mule pulling a plow.  Algorithms of the future will be more complex.  Sorry about that!