Thispunk.

I would take diagnosis around Neurodiversity with a grain of salt. I suspect both conditions might be the same brain differences presenting differently, and I don’t think science has really gotten to the ground of this yet.

It’s a technological and a physical issue. We just can’t store every bit of information plus a picture of everyone’s cat. We can’t guarantee that no information ever gets lost. We’ve also not really stored and archived every shopping list, advertising, pamphlet, silly poem, ugly drawing etc. since the time of the printing press and that’s okay.

It might be a good idea to store and archive some written material as time passes but we want to be a bit picky about what we store. That said, I wouldn’t mind to find more shopping lists and less posh documents in museums.

Yeah, just like most material that was ever printed or carved into a clay tablet. It’s the way of things.

I wonder how to take on the efficiency question when considering waste heat. Would and older model generating more heat be the better choice? Has anybody started to dig into the complexities of calculating efficiency for circular systems?

No need to read the full article. Clipped ear shows it got neutered, so now it has more time to focus on business things.

Hmm I would personally categorize both the portable hydro as well as the capsule as junk gimmicks. I would want something reliable and farm-worthy for permanent use.

What do we really know about animal and plant communication? They might very well be talking to each other. Don’t be too quick to assume that as a human you would even know how other consciousnesses, let alone ways of communication, could work.

People who work closely with animals seem to lose their ‘human smart, monke stupid’ attitude relatively quickly, and those who study non-human consciousness deeply seem to make one groundbreaking discovery after the other these days.

We have to stop gatekeeping knowledge and start listening.

That would lead into philosophical discussions as to what knowledge means. I do see that we have the tendency of assuming others have less agency or are less aware of their actions than us. We do that as individuals and as a species, so I tend to be careful. I also wish I had useful food cravings, mine don’t tend to be too healthy.

That must be the most encouraging thing I’ve read in a while. Sounds like a fairly good future.

Goats know. Sheep know. Equines know. If I make sure the farm animals have access to different flora around the pastures they won’t get ill. It’s nice following the animals around and finding out what they eat, and other ways they use plants. The more time I spend with animals the more I think it’s us humans being the dumb ones.

On that note, watching what great apes do in their natural habitat might teach us a few things about plants.

I got into and forced my way through a degree in EE just to prove I could as a foreign student working mother. Dropped out after half the time in part due to burnout, in part due to loss of motivation.

Learned a million different things (literally from basket weaving to drone racing) all stored away or suffering from lack of time after figuring out how to do them well. These days I’m between pretty decent and almost hopeless at everything. Want a mediocre wooden bed? A fairly good bathroom with mosaic art? A vegetable garden? A small computer program?

I sometimes wonder what this ADHD thing is good for, for sure it must have some purpose? It’s like I’m waiting for the big conclusion of something that connects all the things I have been picking up throughout the years.

I’ve looked into some models I can purchase, but haven’t played with them. I like the rams because they are so low tech even a stupid like me can handle them, and the energy supply is direct. The one I’ve set up the other day (dumped into the river and tied to a stick) is still pumping.

I also love solar thermal, for the same reason. To me it just seems to make more sense to develop tech that doesn’t transfer energy from one form into another a million times, because that is something pitifully underdeveloped in our electrical monoculture. That’s why I keep building and advertising the rams.

For my daily life micro hydro power would be a useful addition, really want to get into that when I have time.

No, conciseness is the ability to describe things in few words. You probably meant to say consumption.

I snorted, slightly ashamed of myself

oh no you just reminded me

Oh there’s a lot of info in this that I didn’t have, thanks for sharing!

I don’t think anybody knows them around here. I showed mine to my neighbour and explained her that it doesn’t use electricity or fuel and she looked quite impressed. The mountain areas here with water running from every hill are just ideal grounds for the rams. I’m still trying to figure out how they could be not just used for gardening, but wisely integrated into fire prevention. I know I can’t just water an area indiscriminately with a ram pump - the pump works till July or August, grow lots of vegetation, which then dries out and is a fire hazard. But maybe something with restoring vegetation around old waterlines first, or storing the water in reservoirs. Ram pumps in combination with reservoirs make great energy harvest and storage as well.

Exactly, I’m working with just 60cm head, which is on the lower end of it working at all. Maybe next year I add another 100 m of tube to reach a spot where the pump can sit outside the stream.

If you have been diving into ram pumps before, I’m curious if you have found any infos about one thing I haven’t had time to research or experiment with: does the distance between the two valves make any difference in terms of efficiency?

Sorry, just those two for now. I’ll need to gather courage before I wade into the stream again for a closeup, especially with my phone in hand. With the heat returned I also was busy installing the hose from IBC to garden to water the veggies. I’m still figuring out the connection between the two IBCs and mixing water coming from a heating panel, and waiting for a washing tank to arrive to go next to it. And then the summer heat and the corn field will dry the stream out in no time … I hope this system runs till End of July at least, but to be honest I don’t know. But even if I have this running only one month on ‘stream energy’ and 11 on electric it will be worth it.

I think ram pumps are lovely, they are so robust - it just took a couple of hours to get it back into the stream and back working (it also got a couple of hours of maintenance in the workshop, of tightening the connections again). This year it runs on a really slow frequency compared to year 1, and it seems to pump the water higher. I’d like to get some numbers one day, but it’s hard to measure anything exactly around here with our installations. Only thing I know is they run so robustly. They find their rhythm and then they just go and go and go.

This reminds me very much of Riddley Walker, have you read it?

Is physics true now? Is truth something with exactly defined borders?