October 2012 – John's Random Thoughts and Discussions

Feeding for Healthy Chickens

It’s essential that you maintain close contact with your animals to ensure they remain healthy. Even if you do all of the right things, It isn’t always easy to maintain good animal health. This seems to be especially true with chickens.

We decided to start raising laying hens this year after building a new chicken coop from recycled materials (see the series of coop-related articles). At first the chickens were quite happy and produced eggs regularly. However, with the excessive summer heat, we noticed that their egg shells (not the inside of the egg) seemed to suffer. The eggs weren’t quite as smooth as normal and the shells were thinner.

We had given the chickens oyster shells to eat and they have access to a wide variety of plants and insects, so we thought we were covered. However, it turns out that the chickens weren’t eating the oyster shells and that the summer heat was severely draining their calcium levels—yet another effect of global warming. Because we were inexperienced, we missed some warning signs and the chickens actually began eating their own eggs.

After a lot of thought, we finally found some solutions to fix the problems with our chickens that may be helpful to anyone else who is encountering this problem. Here are the things we changed in our coop and our chickens seem a lot healthier now than before.

Place the water feeder where it won’t get dirty (after all, chickens are birds and will fly to the water).
Mix the oyster shells into the feed at a ratio of 9:1 to ensure the chickens get enough calcium in their diet.
Collect the eggs several times a day.
Remove any broken eggs from the coop.
Add a vitamin D supplement to the chicken’s water during high heat times when the birds are less likely to get the full amount of sun they require (if you don’t want to use the supplement, then give the chickens vitamin D enhanced milk).
Provide fake eggs in each of the nest boxes (the chickens will peck the fake eggs, find that they won’t break, and be less likely to peck the real eggs as result).

Things could have easily been worse. We didn’t lose any chickens this summer and they do all seem to weigh about as much as they should. All of the chickens have remained active. We also didn’t make a few of the mistakes that novices can make, such as feeding the chickens raw eggs or eggshells (which will encourage the chickens to eat their own eggs). Even so, as with everything else we’ve done so far, this summer has been a learning experience and I expect that we have more to learn as we move forward.

Making sure your chickens have access to a variety of greens and insects is an essential part of raising healthy birds. However, there is more to it than that and unfortunately, chickens don’t come with a manual. You may find that you need to work with individual birds to get the most out of them. Let me know your thoughts about raising chickens at [email protected].

A New Kind of Recycling – Bicycling

I try to keep up-to-date on as many of the current recycling efforts as I possibly can because I feel strongly that reusing resources is one of the most important ways we have of reducing pollution, or at least dealing with it in a way that reduces the damage caused by the resource usage in the first place. One of the resources that see a lot of usage is cardboard, yet I often see the resource wasted in various ways or simply added to a dump somewhere. That’s why an article entitled, “Cardboard bicycle can change the world, says Israeli inventor” attracted my attention. The fact that the bicycle looks nothing like cardboard is interesting, but even more interesting is that this inventor plans to use cardboard for a wealth of other products where metal is traditionally used today.

I find it interesting that the inventor thinks he might be able to use cardboard for items such as cars. I’m not sure what the ramifications of such use would be, but it’s definitely going to prove interesting. For example, what would happen to a cardboard car in an accident? The point is that people are finding ways to use items that would be traditionally labeled junk in all sorts of ways that make the item useful again. At one time the world practiced reuse in significant ways and it looks like we’re headed in that direction again today. It’s no longer possible to waste resources as we have in the past.

What would you think about riding a bicycle made of cardboard? Can you think of other uses for resources such as cardboard that might reduce the burden on landfills? In fact, can you think of a way to reduce trash to the point where landfills aren’t even necessary any longer? The idea of recycling absolutely everything isn’t quite possible today because of the way things are packaged. However, with some effort and clever thinking, it may become possible to recycle absolutely everything at some point, but then we’ll need to have people willing to buy the recycled products. Let me know your ideas at [email protected].

An Experiment in Noise Pollution Reduction

I’ve been trying an experiment over the past year. It includes trying to reduce the amount of noise pollution I endure during the day. No, I haven’t buried myself in an anechoic chamber. What I have done is consciously reduced the noise around me, including the sound levels of all sorts of sources. As I’m able, I’m reducing the sound levels of my music and of the television (for example) or turning them off completely. What I’m finding is that the sound levels I listened to when I started sound absurdly loud to me now. I don’t have enough medical knowledge to know whether someone’s hearing can repair itself, but I do know that turning down the sound has forced me to pay attention better when I want to hear something. The difference in focus has had a profound effect.

Reducing sound levels has both health and monetary benefits. The health benefits, at the least, are improved hearing. The monetary benefit is that I find I’m using less electricity to produce sound that I didn’t really want to hear in the first place. In addition, because I’m able to focus on a task with all of my energy, I complete tasks faster and with fewer errors, which usually has a positive monetary impact (or, at least gives me more time to do something else). These are the effects that I thought I would achieve when I started my experiment and they have proven to be quite easy to justify. Most importantly, I now find that I can hear things that I would have missed in the past. For example, if my wife requires aid, I can actually hear her more often (she’s incredibly soft spoken).

I’m finding a few surprise changes as the result of my experiment. For one thing, my blood pressure is less on days where I have fewer noise sources to contend with (as much as 15 mmHg), which bodes well for my long term health. I’m also finding that I suffer fewer headaches and that I appear to have more energy. So far, I haven’t seen much difference in my heart rate, which is something I had expected given the other changes I’ve noted. I wish there were some way to quantify how much of this effect is due to sound reduction and how much is due to overall health improvement due to our self-sufficient lifestyle, but I have to think that the sound reduction has a significant effect.

There are a few negative effects to the sound reduction experiment. The first is that I find that I wake easier at night. Sounds that I didn’t notice before are quite obvious now. So, when an animal is killing a rabbit outside, I wake now, rather than sleep through it. The disruption of my sleep does have a negative health effect, but I think the consistent positive health benefits I’ve received outweigh this somewhat negative effect (given that I fall back to sleep quite easily). The second is that I sometimes find myself straining to hear a sound that isn’t there. This psychological effect will likely become less pronounced as time goes on, but for now, it causes some level of stress when it occurs, which is only occasionally.

I haven’t completely cut out sound sources. For most of us, the complete loss of sound sources isn’t obtainable, desired, wanted, or even needed. What I have done is made a conscious effort to reduce the loudness of sound sources when I can. For example, instead of listening to the television at the 35 level, I’ll listen at the 25 or 20 level instead. I’ve cut music sources down to half their previous levels and I turn the music off completely in the afternoon when I’m focused most on writing. I also use hearing protection now even if the sound source isn’t what most people would consider absurdly loud (when using the lawn mower, for example).

Noise pollution poses serious health risks to people today. It isn’t just annoying, it causes all sorts of health, environmental, and monetary problems. While I have always advocated the use of hearing protection when working around loud equipment (wood chippers, weed whacker, chainsaw, blower, circular saw, and so on), this is my first foray into reducing sound levels from all other sources. The effects have been pronounced and I’m now beginning to wonder just how far I can take this and still maintain quality of life. There is a balance to things, after all. Have you considered the effects of noise pollution in your life? What can you do to reduce it? Let me know your thoughts on noise pollution at [email protected].

Maintaining Your Chainsaw

It’s wood cutting season and I’ve already been in the woods a couple of times. Nothing is quite as nice as a fresh breeze, wonderful scenes, the feel of nature, and the smell of freshly cut wood. I choose the wood carefully, as described in Choosing Wood Carefully. However, no matter how carefully you choose the tree, the task is only as easy as the condition of the tools you use. The tools must be the right size, fully maintained, and inspected carefully. Of the tools I use, the one I worry about most is my chainsaw. A failure of my chainsaw at the wrong time could mean death. This means that as well as thorough inspections, your chainsaw must be of good quality, like these top rated cordless chainsaws.

I know a lot of people maintain their saws personally. However, given that my small engine experience is limited, I normally take my saw to a professional for its annual maintenance. This includes everything from cleaning the air filter and changing the fuel filter, to making sure the saw is clean and has a sharp chain on it. This annual workup is enough for my needs because I’m not using the saw professionally. I cut just enough wood to meet my heating needs each year, plus stock up a bit of emergency wood.

However, I do perform certain types of maintenance every time I go out to cut wood, the kind that may need some stuff from safety equipment suppliers to perform safely. This frequent maintenance may seem like overkill, but I really don’t want to end up dead due to an equipment failure, so I perform these checks absolutely every time I use my chainsaw:

Clean the exterior of the saw.
Inspect the saw for damage.
Check the sharpness of the chain and replace it if necessary.
Clean the area that houses the chain when I have the chain off.
Verify the chain is at the proper tension.
Grease the bar sprocket.
Fill the chain lubricant reservoir.
Fill the gas reservoir.
Check my safety equipment, which includes safety glasses, hearing protectors, and heavy gloves.

Even performing all of these checks, it’s possible that you’ll have an equipment failure, but it’s a lot less likely. If you’re smart, you’ll continuously check for potential problems while you’re working in the woods. Make sure you check the saw every time you refuel it and always ensure that you add bar chain lubricant when you gas up. It also doesn’t pay to be cheap in this case-use high quality lubricant and make sure your gas is fresh and has the proper two-cycle engine oil in it.

It often amazes me that people don’t take more care when they prepare to go into the woods. Even though I feel that the woods are one of the most beautiful places on earth, I also give them the respect their due and you should too. Let me know your thoughts on chainsaw maintenance at [email protected].

Why Did You Choose that Word?

Readers sometimes question my word choice in a book, which makes me think about how I’d reword the text to make it more understandable. There is a perception that one word will work just as well as another in writing, but that’s not the case. A smart author knows that word choice is incredibly important. In fact, choosing the right word is something that an author spends a considerable amount of time doing and the reason I encourage authors to build their word power by subscribing to sites such as Word of the Day and A.Word.A.Day. So, just why is word choice so important?

Each word has a subtle difference of meaning so that equivalent words in a thesaurus aren’t precisely the same.
Words with similar meanings have different connotations—or secondary meanings assigned by society to the word.
A word carries with it an emotional meaning. Even when words mean about the same thing, the emotions evoked by the words will differ.
Some words will appeal more to the reader that others will. No matter how precisely a word fits, it doesn’t matter if the reader has no idea of what you’re trying to say.

There are a number of other reasons that word choice is important, depending on what you intend to write. For example, the number of syllables and the sound of the word are important to poets. Technical writers will often choose a word because it’s the jargon used by the community as a whole. However, the reasons listed here apply to everyone. Believe it or not, even technical writers need to elicit an emotional response or suffer the dubious honor of putting a maximum number of readers to sleep.

Long before a reader ever asks me why I chose a particular word, the editors ask the same question. It’s a good question. Sometimes I use a word because it feels familiar and looks right in a particular location—neither reason is a good one for choosing a word. If I can’t answer the question, then another word might be a better choice. Obtaining the required result from the text means choosing words that fit the situation and the reader’s needs.

There are situations where a number of words will fulfill the need. In this case, the author is free to choose the word that sounds best. This is a situation where the author’s voice comes through to the reader. The reader begins to relate to the author at a personal level through the word choices the author makes. In many situations, word choice reflects regional biases, so the word that feels comfortable also reflects the author’s environment.

Editors can help authors get out of ruts by suggesting alternative words. For example, an author may use the same word so often that it begins to lose its special meaning and choosing one of the useful alternatives will actually result in more varied and interesting material for the reader. Unfortunately, what the editor and the author feel is a great word choice may end up confusing the reader and that’s when I often get e-mail from you.

The next time you’re tasked with writing something, consider why you choose the words that you do. Think about the needs of the reader and what you’re trying to accomplish with the text you’re writing. Let me know your thoughts about word choice at [email protected].

Green Doesn’t Mean Pollution Free

There is a misconception about green technologies that I hear more and more often. The idea that a green technology is necessarily pollution free simply isn’t correct. I’ve been giving the notion a great deal of thought and haven’t been able to come up with a single green technology that is free of pollution of some sort. In fact, I have come to wonder whether some supposedly green technologies may actually produce more pollution than the technologies they’re supposed to replace. Yes, I realize that this is a radical position, but hear me out before you make a decision for yourself (and I would welcome discussion on this particular issue).

I’ll start with the simplest green technology that I could come up with. Years ago my wife gave up her drier for a clothesline. Not only do our clothes last longer and smell better, but she gained some important space in the laundry room, our costs for drying the clothes are smaller, and using a clothesline is definitely green. However, is a clothesline pollution free? It isn’t for several reasons.

The clothesline we use is plastic covered metal wire, which means that manufacturing it generated several kinds of industrial waste and hydrocarbons.
The hooks used to support the clothesline are made of metal, which means yet more industrial waste.
The posts used to support the hooks are made of treated lumber, so they contain toxic chemicals.
The posts are also painted, which means more toxic chemicals, along with industrial waste and potential hydrocarbons.

Using the sun to dry your clothing is a green technology. There are few continuing pollution sources when using this approach, yet, it can be easily argued that the clothesline will eventually require replacement, as will the posts and the hooks. The posts will last longer if I continue to paint them, but that means continued pollution in the form of toxic chemicals as well. So, this green approach to drying clothing does generate a small amount of pollution—it isn’t pollution free as advocates would have you believe. (However, it is demonstrably better than using a drier.)

After thinking this issue through for a while, I did come up with some ways to reduce the pollution generated by drying clothing outside, but never have created a solution that is completely pollution free and still provides the desired result. Here are some of the changes I considered:

Use black locust posts and cross beams that require no painting and are naturally resistant to decay.
Use natural fiber clotheslines that don’t generate as many pollutants during production.
Avoid the use of hooks by tying the clotheslines directly to the cross beams.

Even with these changes, however, the simple act of drying clothing generates pollution. For example, I have no source of natural fiber strong enough to support the clothes on my property and even if I did, I have no way of turning the fibers into clotheslines. In short, drying clothing generates some amount of pollution in the form of industrial waste even with the best planning. I’ve been able to use this same approach to consider the pollution generated by burning wood instead of propane to heat the house (despite my replacement of the trees I burn to maintain the size of the woods) and other ways we try to be green. Humans simply generate pollution for every given activity no matter how benign or well considered.

So, now you need to consider how this information translates into other green technologies. When you look carefully at my arguments against calling a green technology pollution free (as has been done in the hype generated in the news lately), you quickly see that many green technologies generate considerable pollution. Most of the articles I read on the topic are woefully inadequate and some are downright inaccurate. For example, I read an article from Scientific American that tries to paint solar cells as relatively pollution free. The article does consider the burden of fossil fuels used to construct the solar cells, but doesn’t consider the content of the cells themselves. For example, when you talk about the silicon used to create a solar cell, you must consider the heavy metals used to dope the silicon in order to make it into a semiconductor.

Unfortunately, while I do know that toxic industrial waste is produced when creating solar cells, there is a terrible lack of material on just how much. It’s a dark secret that you won’t read about anywhere. The article also doesn’t consider the emissions produced by the manufacture of plastic housings and metal castings used for solar panels. So, while using a solar panel does reduce locally produced pollution, I have to wonder whether the technology doesn’t simply move the pollution to another location—the place of manufacture. It makes me wonder whether our grandchildren might not consider solar technology as an ill conceived maneuver designed to make everyone feel better at the expense of toxic output that is even worse than the technology it replaced. In fact, I have read an article or two about this particular issue already—we may be making some places in China uninhabitable in order to clean up our own country.

Of course, these are simply musings of mine that I’m choosing the share with you. My point is that we need to consider the potential ramifications of theoretically green technologies that we embrace and consider the full cost of each. There are many technologies, such as the use of ethanol in gasoline, that many people have already questioned as being reckless. You can find a lot of articles questioning the use of ethanol in places such as the New York Times, Scientific American, and Environmental Working Group that say ethanol is a wash at best and potentially worse than simply using unadulterated gasoline from a health perspective. I have an open mind when it comes to green technologies, but I’m also cautious in saying that we’re making progress because so far, I’m not seeing much real progress. Let me know your thoughts on the green revolution at [email protected].

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