Robots have been in service in industry such as assembly lines for some time, but they are not “intelligent” nor are they mobile. They are programmed to perform a single task – make a series of welds on an auto body, for example – over and over with great speed and accuracy. Their advantage is that they don’t get bored, tired or distracted and don’t require a potty break every 30 minutes.
Americans are quite familiar with such devices as the Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner by iRobot, a similar unit will clean your pool. These are true robots as they do work independently of your input, they are not merely remote control devices, nor do they wander about aimlessly hoping to get the entire floor clean – eventually. While they do manage to go around obstacles, get themselves unstuck and run a spiral “grid” of sorts to be sure the entire area is cleaned, they don’t seek out dirt to collect, just suck up what they encounter. Another brand (Neato Robots) claims it’s version does not need to bump into obstacles, but uses laser range finding to explore the room ahead of it and map out a course to avoid contacting your furniture. Continue reading “Robots as Servants: the Current Standing”
This is my post strawberry season post. Almost. Actually because I have ever-bearing strawberry plants I will get another crop in another month or two. If these were June berries then the season would be over and it would be time do the final clean-up and put them to bed. The process is similar in both cases; it’s mostly a matter of timing.
A newly planted bed
When I planted this bed I bought plants from a nursery and set them in the spring. The Square Foot Gardening book says to plant them 4 plants per square foot, I modified that according to the number of plants in the flat (about 25). That resulted in a much wider spacing, but that’s OK.
This is the bed’s second season and I now have around 10 plants per square foot: way too crowded! This is because I was lax about this maintenance business last year.
Today I’m going in to clean up. It’s been very wet this year. Too wet. And the leaves of my strawberries are showing signs of a leaf disease which I suspect is attributed to the really wet conditions and overcrowding.
Christine Engelbrecht, of the Department of Plant Pathology at Iowa State University says: “Strawberries in this region are commonly affected by three fungal leaf diseases–leaf spot, leaf scorch, and leaf blight. These diseases typically do not cause serious damage, but when they are particularly severe, they may reduce yield and make the plants more susceptible to devastating root diseases.
Leaf spot is the most common disease on strawberry. Symptoms at first appear as small, round purple spots on the upper surface of leaves. As the spots enlarge, the centers turn pale tan to white, with a purple or rust-colored border.
Leaf scorch appears as small, irregular purple spots or blotches on the upper surface of leaves. The spots enlarge and coalesce, often covering a large portion of the leaf. As they grow, the centers of the spots turn brown.
Leaf blight begins as small, purple spots. These spots enlarge into large, triangular-shaped lesions bounded by leaf veins. The centers of the lesions turn pale brown, with dark brown margins.
Management of all three of these diseases is similar. Some varieties are resistant to leaf spot and leaf scorch. Resistant varieties include the junebearing varieties Allstar, Canoga, Cardinal, Delite, Earliglow, Honeoye, Jewell, Lester, Midway, and Redchief, and the ever bearing varieties, Tribute and Tristar. Maintaining adequate spacing between plants, and managing weeds, helps to increase aeration and reduce leaf wetness. Infected leaves should be removed after harvest to reduce inoculum levels. Fungicide sprays may also be used to prevent infection by leaf diseases.”[1]
Based on her description, I’m thinking this is leaf scorch. Her treatment recommendation is to do pretty much what I planned to do anyway – I love it when that happens.
First I’m going in around the edges of the box where runners have bumped into the sides and rooted, producing a dense wall of young plants, and rip them out. Horrible aren’t I? I will transplant these orphans to another spot in the yard where I need a ground cover, and the birds may have the berries. Or some of them anyway.
Then I’ll snip out any diseased or dead leaves/stalks and clean out the debris around the base of the plants. Last fall’s tree leaves are still in there as well as last season’s strawberry leaves. All that needs to go. The pine straw can stay for now. Strawberries need a slightly acid soil so they LOVE pine straw.
Were these June berries, I’d perform the end of season ritual now; which I will describe in a moment. But I’m looking for another crop from these plants this year so after the clean-up I’ll take a look at the over-crowding situation inside the box.
I want to snip off ALL runners this time around. This will help the plants to direct their energies into producing berries. I will have to do this again when the blossoms appear, because strawberries are stubborn lil things about wanting to produce daughter plants via those runners. But I also want to pull out some plants where I have more than 4 plants per square foot. Leave the bigger, healthier looking plants: they’ll have the best root system, and pull out the sprouts or sickly plants. More plants does not mean more berries, or if you do get more berries they will be smaller because the plants are competing for nutrients and water in the soil. Also be sure to pull out any weeds that may have snuck in.
Speaking of nutrients, after population control it’s time for a feeding. Use a balanced, all purpose nitrogen fertilizer (10,10,10). If using a regular fertilizer try not to get the stuff on the plant’s stems, this may burn them. Side dress them – which is harder to do in a box than it would be in a row. So I use a slow release, granular fertilizer. Don’t over fertilize as this can lead to root problems and inhibit berry production.
This will have the bed ready for the late summer crop of berries. When that crop is done, the winter maintenance consists of going in with grass shears and lopping the heads off the little darlins. Cut the stems about an inch above the ground level or the top of the crown, whichever is higher. Then use a rake to pull all the debris out.
Strawberry plants will normally produce for around 3 years, so if your bed is two or more years old you will want to let the plants daughter. You can leave two runners per plant to propagate, remove the others. Apply fertilizer again and cover the bed with a couple of inches of fresh pine straw. Compost the debris you raked out.
Your strawberry maintenance chores for the year are now done and you can look forward to a bumper crop of plump, delicious berries again next year.
Human shaped robots that are capable of independent thought and mobility so they can perform tasks for us around the home or job site have been fodder for science fiction writers for several decades. The public seems fascinated by the idea of a robotic servant. But is there any real hope that such a thing is possible, and if so is it safe? After all, many of those same sci-fi movies and books are about robots that run amok. Do we really need or want such a possibility in our home?
This is part one of a three part series of articles. Part one looks at our need for robots, part two will explore what robotic science has for us today, and part three will look at the near and foreseeable future of robots. For the far-off future of robots, pick up any good robots sci-fi book! Continue reading “Are There Robots In Your Future?”
A while back Irwin Tools sent me a boxed set of three utility knives to test out and review. One of these quickly became my de facto favorite knife and I carried it with me everywhere but to church. For church I have a slim, 2” folder that fits discretely in the pocket of dress slacks. About a week ago, my favorite knife came up missing: I had it earlier in the day, then it was gone. I looked everywhere. Marie looked everywhere. We looked everywhere again. Finally I decided it was just gone and I’d have to buy a replacement. Not just because I liked the knife, but I needed it for a photo shoot for a magazine article I’m writing on knives.
But I procrastinated.
Then yesterday I was up in the play yard mowing. I was running along the critter fence and had to push the fencing out a little with one hand to keep it from snagging on protuberances from the mower handle. And there it was: hanging by its clip on the fence, about half way up. Waiting patiently for me.
“Thank you Lord!”
On that fateful day I had been up here planting some packing grass because Marie thinks it will make an efficient ground cover to prevent erosion. I must have brushed against the fence, along which I was planting the plugs, snagged the clip and lifted the knife right out of my side pocket. A pick-pocket fence!
When I came up to look (Marie too for that matter), we were looking at the ground. Even moved the grass clumps around, but didn’t see it.
After hanging in a weeks’ worth of rain, the blade is badly rusted, but being a utility knife, the blade it is easily replaced – it has spares inside that did not get wet (even if I didn’t have 100,000 knife blades in a dispenser on the wall). There is a little rust inside where steel bolts pass through the body, but some light oil and steel wool cleaned them up nicely. Even the screwdriver tips escaped rusting.
The garden planner utility I use says that beans and potatoes are excellent companion plants. So I decided this year to let these cohabitate in their boxes. To maximize the companion planting benefits I planted them in a checkerboard fashion in each box. Seemed like a good idea at the time.
And it started off pretty well, but in one box, the potato vines took off and took over. Soon I was hard pressed to find the bean plants at all.
When I pulled the taters aside to look for beans, nearly all of the bean plants had been smothered out. The potatoes are doing GREAT, but the beans… well, this box will not be producing beans this year.
In another box I planted the beans earlier than the potatoes and they got enough of a head start that they’re holding their own. But then, these were *supposed* to be bush beans (like the other box) but turned out to be pole beans that are climbing all over the potatoes. I’ll need to install poles for them to dance on so they don’t molest the taters.
My biggest problem in logic here is that I’ve gotten stuck into a sort-of square foot garden method. In SFG, we plant each square foot of soil with a different crop. I should have put one square foot of potatoes and one square foot of beans in each of 16 different boxes – along with assorted other crops. But taters need a lot more depth than most crops, so that wasn’t going to work unless I doubled or tripled the depth on all 16 boxes to accommodate 1 potato plant. Or two plants in 8 boxes.
By bastardizing the system like I did I’d have been better off to just plant half a box in taters and half in beans, with a security fence between them! I’ll do that next year. It may not make the most of the benefits of companion planting, but it should work better than this crazy scheme. Especially if I make sure I get bush beans.
One of my favorite books is James Burke’s The Day the Universe Changed, which looks at the effects that certain changes in prevailing thoughts, and a few inventions, had on society as a whole. It is amazing what changes can be effected with small shifts in thought and deed.
Jump Point by Oscar Cafaro
In a similar fashion, it can take some innovative thinking to take our mechanical monstrosities to their next level. Lately I’ve been deriding Sci-Fi writers who take the “because I say so” approach to technology in their novels. I admit to being something of a ‘wet blanket’, as Greta playfully put it. At least, I hope she was being playful!
Now that I’ve examined a whole host of the challenges that will need to be met in order for humankind to go frolicking about in deep space, let’s take a look at what we will have to do to meet those challenges. To attack this subject head-on regarding space travel, would involve a huge, stinking, pile of speculation about what we might know and what we might have at our disposal in another hundred years.
We do have some inklings of what might be possible through research channels. But most of the cutting edge stuff is being done by the government in the form or weapons research or reverse engineering alien spacecraft; and governments, especially the American government, are notoriously tight lipped about such research. It isn’t until new technologies show up in our consumer products that we are clued in that they exist. And they will never admit that velcro was a Vulcan invention. Continue reading “Making Things Bigger, Badder, Better”
Ever since I was a kid I’ve had a penchant for photography. I started with an old Brownie box camera and through the decades have worked myself up to a mid-range DSLR. Or… it was mid-range when I got it 13 years ago, now it’s pretty much an antique. But, it has served me well.
I always figured that my next step would be a new(er) high end DSLR.
Video has been a curiosity for me, but I’ve not done a lot with it. I enjoy the videos I see on the internet of people and pets doing silly things, but never really considered joining in. Quite recently, Marie suggested that I reconsider.
I did some homework and decided on a Sony Handycam HDR-CX220. There are fancier models out there, but for what I will be doing I’d be paying more for features I wouldn’t use. There are cheaper brands and models out there, too… but reviews from several places on the web proved discouraging about reliability and/or picture quality. This one seems to do what I want to do, and do it well, for a reasonable cost. That’s called “value”. (Especially since when we bought it there was a $50 manufacturer’s instant rebate in effect… BONUS!) Continue reading “Taking the Next Step: Video with Sony Handycam”
When you look at the cross, what comes into your mind? By this I mean the cross of Calvary, the instrument of Jesus’ death. It’s interesting what different people see when they look at it. It seems most can be grouped into three basic categories.
The first group are those who see only an instrument of torture and death. A symbol they think should not be allowed to be displayed any longer; our society has outgrown such barbarism. Yes, it is a symbol of suffering and death, but if that’s all we see, we’ve missed its purpose and message entirely and know little, if anything about God.
The second group sees a symbol of their own worth to God. They will say something like, “I am so valuable to God and He loves me so much that he sent His only son to die on a cross.” This too has truth to it, for God does love us and values His relationship with us, but if this view is central to our religious practice, we make the cross into a monument to ourselves, not to God or Jesus. Continue reading “Looking At The Cross”
Dark Space, by Jasper T. Scott is a rollicking space opera that kicks off a series of books in high adventure fashion. This review is based on the Kindle edition, this book is also available in paperback.
The Dark Space Story
Ethan Ortane is captain of a badly beat up space freighter, he already owes crime boss Alec Brondi a lot of money for previous repairs and now Ethan and his female sidekick are on the run. But you can’t hide from Brondi.
When Brondi catches them he forces Ethan into a deal he doesn’t want. A deal that would mean he would be responsible for the loss of a great many lives.
Our setting is a place called Dark Space, a galaxy within a shell of black holes. Once used as a dumping ground for convicts it is now the final refuge of humanity’s remnants as they flee a merciless invasion by the Sythians who are bent on the extinction of all humankind.
There are several sub-plots that wind around one another to propel the events of the story. There are surprises and twists too. Continue reading “Book Review: Dark Space”
Actually, what I’ve been building is much more than just eye candy. The thick bed of wood chips over landscape fabric bordered by landscape timbers that now surrounds all the boxes in my “Lower 10” also serve some good purposes:
It keeps grass and weeds away from my garden beds.
I no longer have to weed-whack between the boxes: always a chore and it sprayed plant bits and weed seeds into my boxes.
It makes a cushy surface to kneel on while I’m working the beds.
The landscape timber borders help divert rushing rain water around my garden so it doesn’t flood the boxes or wash away the mulch.
I’m planting flowers around the perimeter timbers that will draw beneficial bugs (bugs that eat the bugs that eat my garden) and add a splash of color.
This should help maintain the moisture levels in the entire area.
My berry house is also done. It encloses a blueberry bed, strawberry bed, red and purple grape vines. Bird netting over the PVC frame keeps the birds away from the berries.
The door is the curved section with all the slats between the strawberry and blue berry boxes. It’s a flap of bird netting that lifts up to allow me in and out, yet keep the avian fiends away from our berries. I stabilized the edges by trapping them between two layers of duct tape (sticky sides together) and stapled the slats on to lay across the door frame to prevent the netting flap from falling through the opening. A piece of PVC at the bottom holds the flap down and keeps it from blowing open in winds.
We just bought some marigolds to plant around the high perimeter to brighten it up a bit and help repel rabbits. They can chew right through the bird netting.
The Middle 10 was completed just days ago. This section required shoring up the lower ends of the paths between the boxes (the slope is steeper here), which meant some extra digging to level the timbers.
For the most part, this work is very simply done; no hoopla. Well, almost no hoopla.
I did angle the cuts when I made the timber pieces that went between the boxes so the ends of the timbers sit flat against the boxes despite the slope, and I could not resist showing off just a little by coping the ends of the timbers where they meet the curved face of another timber.
Otherwise, it’s all pretty much plain-Jane work: timbers, pinned to the ground with rebar, on top of landscape fabric to keep the weeds out and filled with wood chips I make myself by chipping up tree branches from the spring trimming. But it should ease my maintenance chores, make my knees happy, and it looks pretty nice too.
Human shaped robots that are capable of independent thought and mobility so they can perform tasks for us around the home or job site have been fodder for science fiction writers for several decades. The public seems fascinated by the idea of a robotic servant. But is there any real hope that such a thing is possible, and if so is it safe? After all, many of those same sci-fi movies and books are about robots that run amok. Do we really need or want such a possibility in our home?
When you look at the cross, what comes into your mind? By this I mean the cross of Calvary, the instrument of Jesus’ death. It’s interesting what different people see when they look at it. It seems most can be grouped into three basic categories.
Dark Space, by Jasper T. Scott is a rollicking space opera that kicks off a series of books in high adventure fashion. This review is based on the Kindle edition, this book is also available in paperback.
