Great video/animation – and very thought provoking stuff.
Are humans really wired for selfishness, capriciousness, greed and narcissism?
Ever got the feeling things are not the way they are by accident?
I have been pondering this recently, as I just got an allotment (more on this later). How did we cope before seed companies?
40 years ago most people would be saving the seeds of their favourite crops to reap the successes in subsequent years.
I came across this text on the Real Seeds site today, which sums up my thinking better than I could put it 
Why Save Your Own Seed?
Until recently, every gardener in the world saved their own seed. And every gardener was, therefore, a plant breeder. They simply saved the seed of the plants that did best for them, and which they liked most. Although simple, this was efficient.
Each gardener was maintaining a slightly different strain of each vegetable, and this made for a huge living genebank that was very resilient against disease or climate change. If things changed so that your cabbages didn’t do well, someone down the road had a slightly different one that would cope.
This has worked very well for the past 11,000 years. That includes the Bronze Age, the building of the Pyramids, the rise and fall of all the major empires. Every year, without even thinking about it, millions of people added to the achievements of their ancestors to maintain and improve the previous years’ varieties. Because their seed was real, open-pollinated seed, every seed was a bit different, so it was widely adapted, but also adaptable – it could cope with all sorts of change.Now, we have thrown this all away. In the past 40 years, almost all these adaptable local strains have been lost. Gardeners have forgotten how to save their own seed. They are sold hybrids, where every seed is identical, in every packet, year after year – no adaptability for different soils, or for changes in climate over time.
And because these hybrid seeds are all the same in every field in every country, people have to bludgeon the environment into some sort of ‘standard’ growing medium with fertilisers and chemicals, to grow their standardised seeds. Should the climate change, or the supply of cheap oil (to make all these chemicals) dry up, then these hybrids will do badly, and there will be no real seeds left to breed from.
Profits for the seed companies now, but disaster in the future . . . real farming is a project that has been ongoing for millennia, but now in the height of our tiny period of cheap oil, we think we know better and have turned it into just another industrial process. Peoples food should represent stored sunlight and water, but 90% of its calories come from oil these days – for the ploughing, spraying, fertiliser, transport. When the oil runs out, who will have the real seeds that can grow without it?
Seed-saving is easy. You’ll get better seed, better food, and help preserve 11,000 years of work for the future! Continue reading
1685g Elderberries
700g Brambles (Blackberry)
2kg Sugar
6l water
1 Tsp ginger
2 tps Pectin Enzyme (pectolase)
2l pure grape juice (I used red and white)
Destalk and wash the elderberries and brambles.
Add 2l of water to fruit in a large pan and warm gently, mashing with a metal potato masher.
Remove from heat at about 80 degrees C. Add sugar and mash/stir some more. Once cooled add Pectolase (mix it up in a cup of water) and stir some more. Leave overnight.
Add to fermentation bin, mix in the rest of the water cold, add the yeast (leave it on the surface for 15 mins then mix in) and cover with a tea-towel or other fine material and use an elastic band or similar to hold in place. It should be bubbling away in a few hours after pitching the yeast.
Leave to ferment for 5 or 6 days giving it a mash/stir every day with the sterilised potato masher. Strain out the pulp through a tea-towel – it helps if you have a 2nd bucket/bin as there is a lot of pulp – a jam strainer would also probably be handy. I tried straining directly into some home-made demijohns (5l water bottles with a hole drilled in the lids for the airlock) and was mostly successful
I divided the liquid into the two DJs and topped up with the grape juice – screwed the lids on and primed the airlocks.
Left it for about 6 weeks and then racked into another couple of fresh water bottles and put the normal lids on. I also syphoned off a glass full to taste. OMG! It’s like – red wine! Proper bouquet, vanilla and berry… can’t wait to bottle it and mature it. My wife is in shock that I didn’t make vinegar.
A definite success considering it was a made up recipe.
Cheers!
EDIT: at second racking I added a crushed camden tablet and some another heaped teaspoon of pectolase – it wasn’t clearing up as much as I would have liked and everyone adds a camden at this stage (helps prevent oxidisation and prevents further fermentation apparently) 
Here’s a satirical look at Britain’s nuclear power plans…
I was just reading this story on the Guardian about the ‘Cashless Man’ Mark Boyle – and read this line:
“I thought it would be just that: a little blog.”
Now – not wanting to pick on Mark, as I love the work he has done and he gets a lot of stick from people who cannot contemplate living without ‘stuff’ and cash, but…
A blog (short for weblog) is a website with a number of timestamped entries/stories/articles. In netspeak these are called posts – or blog posts.
Some people call them entries (like a diary), you could conceivably call them stories or pieces or even articles – especially if they appear on a newspaper website.
When you write a post – you are also ‘blogging’ a verb ‘to blog’: the act of writing/editing a post or updating your blog.
This is not a blog. This is a blog post.
Hahaha. I have often noticed some amusing suggestions when typing in a search query into my Firefox Google search box – but someone showed me this collection of 20 funniest suggestions on Google Suggest on the Telegraph site today and it made me truly laugh out loud.
Try it yourself. Maybe start with “Is there”…
Just in case you missed it on World Environment Day…
Ever wondered where the wind comes from? Apparently it is mostly a combination of the sun, and the earth’s rotation – namely the Coriolis Effect. I just saw this and found it to be a very good, and quite amazing illustration…
A friend of mine dropped off her Compaq laptop the other day, apparently it had been running slow and a friend of hers came round and “did stuff” to “sort it” – unfortunately it didn’t go to plan, and instead of the system performance improving as a result of the activity – it deteriorated to the stage where XP would display a blank desktop on startup (as in no taskbar, start menu, desktop shortcuts or anything).
So this was the state it was in when I got it. Here’s what I did:
Step 1: Get access to Windows Explorer
Hit ctrl-alt-delete – this only worked after leaving it alone for a couple of minutes after boot-up. Click “File>New Task (run) and type “explorer”. This brings up the windows desktop furniture.
Step 2: Find out why it isn’t loading
I wondered what her friend did.. I looked at the most recent installed apps in Programme files – there was an app called “TuneUp Utilities 2009″. A likely suspect I thought. In the wrong hands these tweak/tuneup utils can do more harm than good. I loaded up the app and undid all the “fixes”
Step 3: Check a little deeper
Restoring the TuneUp files didn’t solve the explorer.exe problem, so I figured that something else must be up with it. I suspected malware. I have rescued several Windows systems from malware (spyware, trojans etc) before using a great bit of software called MalwareBytes AntiMalware. I couldn’t get the faulty system to read the installer from my USB drive, so I had to burn it off onto CD. While I was doing that – I also stuck ‘FixShell‘ on there (a visual basic script that restores explorer.exe to the XP shell).
Step 4: Safe mode scanning
I restarted the PC and hit F8 repeatedly as the laptop started up, which brought up the XP menu with the option to load ‘safe mode’. I did this and logged in as administrator (which for some reason had not appeared during normal startup). This time it loaded up with explorer.exe no problem. I ran MalwareBytes AntiMalware quick-scan and it picked up 27 items. Some were trojans, mentions of rootkit (eek) and other registry entries (including disabling security centre). I opted to ‘fix’ them all and restarted again as prompted (some nasty bits of malware can only be deleted on boot). This still did not fix the issue. I ran another scan just in case. It found a few more bits. Restart.
Step 5. Manual(ish) restore of explorer.exe
…. this is where it got quite interesting… after several unsuccessful attempts to restore command.exe, including creating a slipstreamed SP3 disc to run sfc /scannow – I finally installed Avast Antivirus Home Edition and did a boot time scan (AVG8 was already installed but I removed it, finally realising it hadn’t done its job). Avast picked up lots of win32:JunkPoly infections. JunkPoly is Avast speak for Virut.
Worse than bad – it’s terminal.
Format and reinstall is the only option. Backing up is risky.
So now I need to get the photos off, scan them thoroughly and format the hard-drive and reinstall XP.
It probably came from a P2P service, somehow got passed AVG8 (outdated virus def probably), and started infecting the system with all kinds of malware.
Just downloading Ubuntu now – will attempt to back the data up tomorrow…
My Stumblings…