• 2 Posts
  • 22 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 29th, 2023

help-circle
  • Great question (and we are reaching the outside edge of my knowledge here). Something like 3-5% of carbon in plants is taken up from the soil by plant roots. I don’t fully understand the mechanism, but the organic carbon percentage is an important competent in the calculation of how much artificial nitrogen a crop is going to need, so I guess it’s probably some biochemical process for making the nitrogen available.

    The organic carbon percentage is closely watched by farmers and is something of an indication of soil health. ie if your crop rotation is reducing the OC% over time then you probably need to reconsider it. It’s one of the reasons burning crop stubbles is a much rarer practice now.


  • Hay is cut from any sort of cereal plant early in it’s lifecycle, specifically before the plant starts concentrating it’s energy into the seeds. At this stage the plant stalk is sweeter (even to a human - give it a bite). After flowering, the plant is concentrating it’s energy into the seeds. By the time it’s fully done this (which takes a number of weeks), there is very little protein in the stalk, and it’s far less palatable (or nutritious) to animals. The plant stalk is now essentially ‘straw’.

    Commercial hay can be mowed from a meadow (in Australia usually ryegrass) in which case it will have all sorts mixed in, or from crops intended for making good hay (in Australia usually oats or wheat). Commercial straw (which has a tiny market) is cut after the grain has been harvested from the top of the plant. In commercial broadacre cropping in poor soil areas (the bulk of Australia’s grain areas) it’s usually better economics to keep your crop residue including straw since the cost to replace the carbon would be higher that what you’d get for the straw after the cost of harvesting it.

    Source: I play a lot of Minecraft







  • I switched from Copilot to Codeium after only a couple of months of Copilot use - just based on the cost since currently I’m just a hobby coder.

    The main difference I’ve noticed is that Codeium doesn’t seem as smart about the local context as Copilot. Copilot would look at how I’m handling promises in a project, and stick to that, whereas Codeium would choose a strategy seemingly at random.

    A second, and maybe more telling example, is that I do my accounts using ‘plain text accounting’ in VS Code. This is a very niche approach to accounting software and I imagine is hardly in the training sets at all - there certainly would not be a lot of public domain text accounts in the particular format (BeanCount) I use in public code repositories. Codeium doesn’t make any suggestions for entries as I’m entering transactions, whereas Copilot would see that the account names I’m using are present in another file in the project and suggest them, and very quickly figure out the formatting of transactions and suggest them correctly.







  • Yes, in a shallow tourist mine in Australia. Apparently coal starts to flake easily once it’s been exposed to air for a bit, so they kept a big chunk in a large jar of water that you could take out and handle. It felt like a light wet rock.

    The sample, and the coal at the workface of the mine was stereotypicaly black. We wore hats with lights on, and when we emerged back out to the daylight I had an overwhelming urge to speak in a Monty Python type Yorkshire accent and go home and have my back scrubbed clean of the coal dust by my swarthy tired looking wife while I sat in a tub in front of the fire in the kitchen and our urchins played in the street.

    I don’t want to give the impression I’m a big fossil fuel tourist, but I’ve also seen blobs of crude oil on beaches near Mediterranean sea oil terminals.

    Sadly, I didn’t try to set fire to them on either of these occasions, which I now regret.




  • I don’t sew, but a follow several people who do (for vintage and modern clothing) on Instagram - just to emotionally vampire off their irrepressible happiness when it all comes together and they make something that comes out as great as they imagined (lots of “and it has pockets!!!” moments) or they master a new skill they had been struggling with - like sewing button holes in denim or whatever.

    It’s not for me, but I love the obvious satisfaction and joy other people are getting out of it.