|
|
"History is just people doing things" THE ABQ
CORRESPONDENT
ISSN 1087-2302
Online Edition Number 317......May 2022 Published since 1985 for clients and contacts
of of The ABQ Correspondent is "the
impact of new ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PICK
YOUR NEMATODES CAREFULLY Nematodes are a big family of
little worms a
millimeter or two long with worldwide distribution. They’re about as tough as
related tardigrades of which the Correspo has recently spoken. Sometimes
you’re glad to have nematodes eating other little critters that prey on the
crops in your fields. Companies even sell beneficial nematodes to spread
in the fields. Then again, other types of nematodes are unwelcome to
farmers raising crops like soybeans and potatoes, “taking 10% of crops
worldwide every year.” (I watched a farmer friend make a decision one morning
about whether or not to spray a 3000 acre soybean field with anti-nematode
potion. He knew there was some nematode infestation, but also knew that if it
were to rain…and the weather was uncertain…the potion would have no helpful
effect. At $10/acre for the potion, he was making a $30K bet, one among
several scary bets in a week.) A team
at North Carolina State University has been experimenting
successfully with a new approach to shooing nematodes away from potatoes, sharply
increasing yields while dramatically reducing the amount of anti-nematode
potion used. They start by collecting the waste stems from which
bananas are harvested, grinding them to small particles, making
a slurry of that material, and spreading it thin to dry. That
provides sheets of “banana paper.” They wrap the potatoes they are
planting (small pieces of potato containing “eyes” from which new plants
grow) in the banana paper and stick them in the ground. The paper
contains natural chemicals that prevent the nematodes from detecting the
aroma of delicious new potato roots, so the new plants thrive. In a
somewhat more complicated version of this, the paper is treated with a
very small amount of anti-nematode potion…making the overall application
of the stuff less than 5% of what would be sprayed in a field…and net potato
production is enormously increased. It sounds labor-intensive to wrap the
seed potatoes that way and one supposes that it helps to be working where
bananas are grown (the team has been working in Africa), but the risk/reward
ratio looks appealing. Nobody has speculated in the reports we’ve seen
about wrapping soybeans in banana paper when planting, but maybe some
analog of the potato method would be helpful. NOT AFOOT It was startling the other day to encounter a group of folks riding horses in Corrales, not because horses are unusual in that rural community, but because one of the riders was in a saddle atop a huge draft horse among the usual equestrian mounts. (This rider and her horse effectively stared down impatient drivers as the troupe crossed the road.) This recalls Mado’s report of their first encounter with German soldiers during the WWII invasion as she and her mom and sister fled Brussels to the family home in La Flèche in France. Some of the invading soldiers were riding draft horses bareback, transport they’d picked up from farms along the way. It seemed incongruous then as now. Surprisingly WWII featured more than one cavalry charge (we’re talking real horses, not tanks). I had long thought that a 1939 Polish Cavalry charge was the last in “modern” times, but even more recent activities of that sort have occurred. See this and this. Think Green Berets. A friend received a Bronze
Star for his participation in the Battle of the Bulge.
All he’d say about it was, “There was a hassle and I
helped hassle.” When pressed once, he admitted
that he had been in the Artillery. “The Infantry
walks. The Artillery rides.” Item: In their concentration on efforts to guide automated vehicles the media found time recently to report on successful efforts to train a fish to guide a vehicle...not a boat, surprisingly, but a wheeled vehicle. (The second video at the site is more informative.) This recalls Iben Browning’s report of chatting with animal trainers at John C. Lilly’s porpoise establishment long since. Those folks were persuading a variety of improbable animals to perform tasks. “The turtles must be quite a challenge,” said Iben. A trainer just shrugged, commenting “If it eats, we can train it.” Fish eat. Item: The Correspo
has touched more than once on substantial commercial efforts to produce
meat… hamburger, steaks, chicken, fish, etc…by
means other than growing animals and killing them, on the theory that the
process can be more humane and will provide big environmental benefits. We
shall see. A company called Compound
Foods is with decent funding now developing artificial methods to produce
coffee, ideally in varieties with all the nuances the
coffee connoisseurs seem to detect and appreciate. No specific
humanitarian issue in this, apart from the reduction of need for pesticides
(do nematodes like coffee?), but one worries about the coffee farmers and
their employees, along with ranchers and their cowboys, fishermen, the
manufacturers of coffee grinders and all that. We have managed to get along
without needing many buggy whips and without a whole lot of swords as
technology has changed, but the social aspects of changing the source of
coffee (no, not Postum) are intriguing. Item: In the Item From The Past below I’d first typed “Cripes!” instead of “Challenges abound.” considering it a pretty much inoffensive expression like “Yipe!” but thinking on it, of course it’s another euphemism for “Christ!” This recalls participating in a radio production of some Restoration Comedy years ago in which a character expressed annoyance by saying “Zounds!” The Yankee actor pronounced it “zownds.” The director stopped him to explain that this was very strong language in its time, not just a quaint phrase, but a shortened version of “God’s Wounds!” and would be spoken with vehemence. Our daily languages are fraught with little leftovers of meaning of which we’re mostly unaware. This item from 2006 is
brought to mind by the current confusion arising
from the change in this new Covid Era from
gathering in offices for work to performing that
work remotely. THE POWER OF NEGATIVE THINKING Americans, who worry a lot
about high blood pressure, are sometimes startled to hear that the French worry more about low blood
pressure, and take steps to prevent it. One hears also that the epidemic of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome in
the United States, attributed to repetitious activity like working at a
keyboard, is virtually unknown in some
countries where similar percentages of the population engage in the same
activities. It isn’t just that folks there are too stupid or stubborn to
recognize the problem...they really don’t have it. Expectation seems to have much to do with creating real effects. An acquaintance who is involved in
setting up production plants for a multinational company (they go to
places like secondary cities in China, where the culture is notably different
from that in Wichita or Buffalo) reports
some surprising experiences. In
Vietnam, for example, official doctrine reportedly declares that an eight
hour workday is virtually built into the laws of Nature so firmly that
any increase over eight hours of work will have physically debilitating effects
on the workers. Taught by enthusiastic
believers in this idea, the population at large has embraced it. A number
of multinationals these days are
organized on a four-day work week with ten-hour shifts on those days. The scheme is popular with employees in
many Western countries because it gives them regular three-day weekends to
use as they will. Since company operations in different time zones all over
the world are coordinated, operating any one plant on a different schedule
becomes complicated. When one
multinational negotiated a trial of the four-days-of-ten-hours schedule in
Vietnam, workers fell ill, even fainted when working the longer shifts.
The employees weren’t malingering; they
were really affected, not by working longer hours, but by their belief that
it was bad for them. Obviously, Americans
have also cultivated a variety of superstitions that produce real physical
and mental effects...some of them presumably desirable... that have no
other detectable causes. One wonders
what they are, and how to change them or preserve them. The general perception, quite new in society, is that that anybody who carries a smartphone is not only available for communication at any time in any place, has access to immense resources, and is equipped to use them for productive work.
It’s almost true; everybody now seems to have a smartphone, and knows how to use it better than I. This gives us frightening vulnerabilities along with empowering flexibility while reducing the need to pay rent for office space, buy furniture, and hire cleaning services. The “virtual company” whose people may be spread all over the world, and may be constantly on the move, their locations unknown, did not begin with Covid, of course. Some of us began slipping ever deeper into that mode some decades ago, but until the last few months, this was not a universal cause for private soul-searching and public concern. Just sticking to the narrower consideration of employee health touched on in this item from sixteen years ago…there are some practical as well as moral issues in this. Governments have begun to pass laws forbidding companies to contact employees outside of specified working hours, basically because it seems like exploiting them. Well, yeah, but I’ve had meetings at four in the morning with people who were alertly having their third cup of coffee at their desks at ten in the
morning in Europe. Whose time do you go by? An associate is managing work in as many as sixteen different time zones, and is often exhausted by trying to communicate with everybody only in their suitable working hours. The media have recently featured discussions of conventional sleep hours, pointing out that the habit of sleeping a good eight hours each night is fairly recent…in other eras, two shorter sleep periods were considered normal. The number and timing of meals in a day (“but we haven’t had second breakfast!”) seems also to depend not
only on the availability of food, but the habits of local society. The use of random work hours in random locations is enabled by new communications technology that society has not yet assimilated, and which will be changing as we proceed. It’s always hard to figure out what’s real, and what’s superstition. It’s even harder when you’re dog-tired. Just a note: The smartwatch I bought a few days ago to aid my activity in virtual companies does much of its work through my still-a-mystery smartphone. So far I cannot reliably get the watch to show me what time it is, but it keeps telling me to stand up for a couple of minutes and congratulating me patronizingly if I happen to do it for other reasons. Maybe the copy of Apple Watch for Dummies that arrived this
morning will help to sort out these issues. Challenges abound. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Everybody is a Somebody --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ISBN: 978-0-557-05785-6 Review(s) Available
at Lulu.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Copyright © 2022 ABQ Communications Corporation All Rights Reserved |
|
m |
