We've developed a problem in the house. Somewhere, common houseflies are reproducing. We're not sure where. It could be any of a number of plants, and because of the hydroponics setup, we also have a number of places where there is (mostly) static standing water. However, I'm not going to cull any of my babies on account of flies.
Today I came up with the solution (hopefully the solution, not just a solution): carnivorous plants. Turns out there are a number of people growing them in hydroponics and there's a fairly healthy industry of cultivators and distributors (though nothing even remotely as active as orchids and cannabis cultivators).
I've been thinking about this some, and it occurs to me I have an opportunity to create an ecosystem rather than just another hydro tank. I'm picturing a shallow fish tank with aquatic plants and goldfish being used as the nutrient solution, and plants with expectation of poor or no nutrients (e.g., orchids and the carnivores) suspended into it via grow buckets. I still haven't quite figured out how to work that, and it almost certainly requires use of lighting (which I kind of don't want because it's hot and it costs money). It works out to be a pretty simple closed-loop ecosystem, and with a heating pad or two, I think I can even get everyone to agree (maybe even my truculent fern!) that it's tropical. ish.
And so it would seem that 2010 is the year when my garden fights back, taking sides with the humans. Not that it had much choice, heh.
05 January, 2010
04 January, 2010
Archaeology, 2009 style
I just cleaned up my books-read pile that started around February. It's enormous. In sum, it's a hair shy of 15,000 pages of reading. To apply perhaps more meaningful metrics to that, I normally allot one minute per two-hundred words of text. Rounding out something like three million words, or one hundred solid days of reading (2400 hours), of course not accounting for sleep. I generally don't take sleep in eight-hour increments (usually long gluts of sleep on the weekend and relatively little during the week), but if we are to assume that we are awake only two-thirds of our lives (244 days a year), we can further extrapolate this to 41% of my time awake is spent reading words-on-paper. Obviously, I'm not including time reading text on my laptop or otherwise busy with work stuff (which has been remarkably light this year), or with audio books, as I'm not sure how to "measure" how many audio books I've "read" or how to normalize the time spent "reading" them (as it is split between reading and managing traffic or on the subway, or whichever).
So, in 2009, I spent very close to half my waking hours (we can construe this as "my life", rather than "waking hours," but I'll wager some people would argue that sleep is statistically significant) reading. Remember, too, that I had a serious concussion in February and couldn't read words-on-paper for about a month thereafter. The number becomes far more than half if we factor in the missing months (thus making it a ten-month year instead of twelve) or the time spent completely unable to read or move due to (among other things) motor vehicle accidents.
I am still gnawing on a seventies-era CJ Cherryh book (Finity's End), and I received the concussion (in February) while reading Regenesis (also Cherryh), so that's a cute little pair of (chuckle) bookends to those numbers.
As to the content of the books: if somebody had asked me to project how much I would read in 2009, and in what ratios of content, I would have said something like 10% glossy magazines (The Economist, The Atlantic, SuperBike [and lots others, there...], and various trade rags [regarding IT or aerospace and defense]), 60% fiction, with the overwhelming majority there in the science fiction genre, and the rest either as-needed (and usually non-fiction, like O'Reilly books) or handed to me (the chronicle of Herodotus, Caesar's Anticato, and the like). On looking back, it's really a lot more evenly split. I think I spent a very small minority of time on magazines, and split the rest between non-fiction (history, technical, literature, and "homework," such as reading up on the new Wankel engines before diving headlong into an RX-8) and fiction, with the fiction split about 35/65 in favor of science fiction (note I do not use the term "speculative fiction") and the rest being, idunno, garbage I picked up here and there. Thud, for example.
Only two books were thrown across the bedroom in disgust (but this is of course not where all the reading gets done): Lucifer's Hammer, and something else that was so hideous I only remember throwing it across the room, not what its title was. I'm rather afraid to go looking after that last one. It's probably lurking somewhere.
Reread in 2009 were Corky Bell's somewhat dated Maximum Boost, Iain Banks' The Algebraist, and Richard Morgan's Woken Furies ('make it personal'). Perhaps that's a useful enough sample in and of itself.
Also interesting is that my wife began reading Alastair Reynolds this year, as well as Richard Morgan. Banks is kind of a towering ogre of a writer, and she didn't like The Business (which I loved to pieces) because he (her words, but I mostly agree) seems to be using the reader as an outlet to show just how very clever he is. But that's definitely a first. One wonders what she will wind up with in 2010.
Someone at this point should probably ask "why on earth do you have a stack of books ten months old?" Well, I don't have an answer for that. Now we need more bookshelves. I've dug out of this heap, and realized there was nowhere to place the books that weren't already on shelves; the shelves were full already.
Now I need something new to read. Dammit.
So, in 2009, I spent very close to half my waking hours (we can construe this as "my life", rather than "waking hours," but I'll wager some people would argue that sleep is statistically significant) reading. Remember, too, that I had a serious concussion in February and couldn't read words-on-paper for about a month thereafter. The number becomes far more than half if we factor in the missing months (thus making it a ten-month year instead of twelve) or the time spent completely unable to read or move due to (among other things) motor vehicle accidents.
I am still gnawing on a seventies-era CJ Cherryh book (Finity's End), and I received the concussion (in February) while reading Regenesis (also Cherryh), so that's a cute little pair of (chuckle) bookends to those numbers.
As to the content of the books: if somebody had asked me to project how much I would read in 2009, and in what ratios of content, I would have said something like 10% glossy magazines (The Economist, The Atlantic, SuperBike [and lots others, there...], and various trade rags [regarding IT or aerospace and defense]), 60% fiction, with the overwhelming majority there in the science fiction genre, and the rest either as-needed (and usually non-fiction, like O'Reilly books) or handed to me (the chronicle of Herodotus, Caesar's Anticato, and the like). On looking back, it's really a lot more evenly split. I think I spent a very small minority of time on magazines, and split the rest between non-fiction (history, technical, literature, and "homework," such as reading up on the new Wankel engines before diving headlong into an RX-8) and fiction, with the fiction split about 35/65 in favor of science fiction (note I do not use the term "speculative fiction") and the rest being, idunno, garbage I picked up here and there. Thud, for example.
Only two books were thrown across the bedroom in disgust (but this is of course not where all the reading gets done): Lucifer's Hammer, and something else that was so hideous I only remember throwing it across the room, not what its title was. I'm rather afraid to go looking after that last one. It's probably lurking somewhere.
Reread in 2009 were Corky Bell's somewhat dated Maximum Boost, Iain Banks' The Algebraist, and Richard Morgan's Woken Furies ('make it personal'). Perhaps that's a useful enough sample in and of itself.
Also interesting is that my wife began reading Alastair Reynolds this year, as well as Richard Morgan. Banks is kind of a towering ogre of a writer, and she didn't like The Business (which I loved to pieces) because he (her words, but I mostly agree) seems to be using the reader as an outlet to show just how very clever he is. But that's definitely a first. One wonders what she will wind up with in 2010.
Someone at this point should probably ask "why on earth do you have a stack of books ten months old?" Well, I don't have an answer for that. Now we need more bookshelves. I've dug out of this heap, and realized there was nowhere to place the books that weren't already on shelves; the shelves were full already.
Now I need something new to read. Dammit.