I’ve told you I don’t sketch much, and that’s true. That doesn’t mean I never sketch. These are some selected doodles of late, as I kick around yet again an ancient concept from the recesses of my brain. Speaking of recess, I can say I am exploring ideas, but I think in reality these sketches depict what I’d rather be doing than what I am actually doing at the moment. Note the mermaid: I have always thought real mermaids probably more closely resemble manatees than fish. I mean, that makes sense, doesn’t it? And they probably aren’t quite as pretty and don’t sing quite as well as we give them credit. Anyway, don’t ask me what this is all really about, because I can’t say.
A sketch in time
By Jimmy Johnson
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115 responses to “A sketch in time”
Other side of the coin: I know a DVM who became an MD and went to work in a rural health clinic in the same area. One of his first patients there was man who got a very strange look on his face when the doc walked into the exam room. “Aren’t you a veterinarian?” he asked.
People on Go-Comics are talking about the “lived in” look of the DVM in the current A&J story line.
Maybe he was patterned after Robert Redford! Have you seen any close-ups of him lately?
Just sayin………
I tell the following on my wife-Redford: “Can we make love for a million dollars?” Wife: “Will you take a check?”
Wrestle around horses, cows and hogs for 50 years and most anyone would look “lived in”.
If you don’t get enough oxygen, you suffocate or asphyxiate. If you don’t get enough food, you starve. If you’re immersed too long in water you drown. Can anyone help me find a single word that describes dying from lack of hydration?
And regarding the Malthusian equation, what happened to the food riots in NA as predicted for the late 1970s by Paul Ehrlich in his book, The Population Bomb? The only food riots I’ve heard about were in Central America; those were tied to the diversion of corn to ethanol production here in the US. I find it passing strange that we grow so much food that we can afford to burn it in our cars.
TR: Check out Brazil. If memory serves, they fuel all their vehicles with home-grown ethanol; one result is that Brazil does not concern itself with oil prices. As Brazil is less populous than the US, as well as physically larger, there is greater potential for food production there than here. [I am assuming similar fertility in parts under cultivation.]
I wrote a long response / Ehrlich’s foolish prediction, but his sound basic insights, hit the wrong key, and it all disappeared. Too busy to create again, but it ended approximately thus: Some future text [if there are any] will say, “The trouble is, they didn’t do that.”
Our grandchildren, or great grandchildren, will not thank us.
As many of you realize, I am a liberal [but not that easily pigeon-holed], but try to be consistent. I voted for Adlai Stevenson, and have no regrets / that, but winced whenever he said/wrote, “ever-expanding economy.” That’s an ecological impossibility. None of my political liberalism is relevant here. Biology, science in general, and behavioral sciences are, and maybe theology is. Dives and Lazarus.
Peace, emb
Peace, emb
Only seven more years until the year of the setting of “Soylent Green”, and no one has fed me any long pig. Yet. As far as I know.
It’s people!
Ghost, some of what happened was we got a little smarter about resource conservation, and our agronomists (Borlaug, et al) worked some miracles (“green revolution”). I actually got to meet Erlich at a conference when I was in grad school…his point was, he WANTED to be “proven wrong” by humanity doing better at things. We have a long ways to go, and there are limits to what the carrying capacity of the planet is. We do not want to discover these the hard way… 🙂
We survived 1984, 2001, and 12/21/2012. Hopefully we will survive tonight’s “debates”.
TruckerRon, we don’t have the capacity to grow food enough to burn it in our cars. That bit of ill-advised Federal law that required a certain percentage of our annual corn crop be used for ethanol production had many negative results. Among those were the increase in the price of anything made from corn, price of livestock feed with following increase of price of livestock, and increased difficulty of the low-income families in affording food. And the ethanol damages components of the fuel systems in small gas engines such as those used in lawnmowers. If the initial plans to use other sources of fermentable materials had been followed through, most of the negative consequences would not have happened.
Brazil’s ethanol relies mostly on sugar cane production and huge tracts of land. I don’t think the United States has enough suitable areas to grow sugar cane to make that model work here. I have seen one interesting proposal that outdated alcoholic beverages be reprocessed to produce fuel additives. That would most likely work well, with the quantities we produce.
I’ve read that experiments with sawgrass, whatever that is, hold promise for biofuels. OTOH, ethanol hasn’t hurt my lawnmower at all…
http://www.homedepot.ca/wcsstore/HomeDepotCanada/images/catalog/975178_prime_4.jpg
Yes, Jerry, I hope we can, too. I’m not watching — I don’t watch TV any more. I can read about it (a little) in the morning.
And emb’s ideas on the future of the planet, I think are correct. He and I won’t be around, but for the grandchildren and later generations — hope for the best, but expect the worst.
“…outdated alcoholic beverages”, Mark? I wasn’t aware there was such a thing. 🙂
Ghost, like beer that’s past the sell-by date. By the way, I read this story today: http://consumerist.com/2015/08/06/angry-orchard-recalls-hard-cider-because-beer-bottles-arent-supposed-to-break-when-you-open-them/
Does that mean that this product really is “the bomb”?
“That bit of ill-advised Federal law that required a certain percentage of our annual corn crop be used for ethanol production had many negative results. Among those were the increase in the price of anything made from corn, price of livestock feed with following increase of price of livestock, and increased difficulty of the low-income families in affording food.” All very true.
It’s also a blatant subsidy. Corn farmers [in MN and elsewhere] love it, but I believe most corn is grown by Cargill and such, so it’s largely a subsidy to corporations.
The irony is: ethanol LOWERS mpg. Simple chemistry [the only chem I’m capable of]: you cannot burn oxygen. Gasoline, ignoring minor additives and impurities, is hydrocarbons, all C + H. Cx + Hx + 02 yields 100% oxidized C & H, ideally CO2 and H2O. E.g., octane is C8H10.
Ethanol is C2H5OH. Atomic wts: C=12, H=1, O=16, so 2C=24, 6H=6, O=16, total 46. By weight, ethanol is about 1/3 unburnable. MN gas pumps sometimes say, “enriched with ethanol.” Such gas is actually diluted with ethanol.
Corporation Speak is not much different from Government Speak. Peace, emb
emb. you are right. The ethanol actually makes the engine more inefficient, reducing both horsepower and mileage. So, other than reduction of oil-based components, where is the savings?
I don’t know chemistry, but I think oxygen is flammable in high concentrations. It’s used in oxyactelene cutting/welding rigs, and home oxygen users have a no smoking sign where the oxygen is used. I have read of oxygen users who have caused flash fires due to refusal to stop smoking even when wearing an oxygen mask.
Mark:
Sorry, O2 is not itself flammable. High concentrations of O2 from the sources you mention increase the likelihood of other hot or highly oxidizable fuels catching fire. Oxygen is quite eager to fill the two vacant spaces in its outer ring with electrons, especially from atoms with only 1 or two electrons in their outer rings. You cannot leave a lump of metallic sodium [1 such electron] sitting out in a room; it will burst into flame. But it’s the sodium that’s flammable, not the O2.
O2 is a molecule where those 2 spaces in each atom fill each other’s rings, but they’d rather accept electrons from other sources. O2 is a fairly reactive gas; if we detect significant traces of it in the atmospheres of exoplanets in the ‘Goldilocks’ zone of an moderate-sized star [and we’re close to where we can do that], there will be champagne bottles opened in astrophysicist/cosmologist labs [and I’ll have a Taddy Porter], because that will suggest something like photosynthesis going on there, replenishing its atmosphere’s O2. If photosynthesis stopped here, the free O2 in our atmosphere would gradually disappear, leaving a lot of CO2, some CO, and rust around. That’s a major reason Mars is reddish.
Peace, emb
A tragic example of a high-oxygen environment intensifying a fire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1
Debbe 😉 Here is another bonus track for those occasions when I have time to go over an hour.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VxoXn-0Ezs
I’d been noticing a young lady at the gym for a while now, not because she’s cute and curvaceous (which she is), but because she appears to be awesomely fit. Today, I got there in time to watch her go through her entire workout routine, and I’ve decided she might possibly be the physically fittest individual I’ve ever personally known. I asked the owner about her and was told she is on summer break from the university where she getting her degree in exercise physiology. So I suppose you could say she’s at the gym doing her “homework”. If it were not so late in the summer, I’d ask her if she gives private instruction. Not because she’s cute and curvaceous, of course. Even though she is. 🙂
I have seen empirical samples of 15% reduction in fuel mileage with 10% Ethanol
So there is a negative gain to start with – then there is the energy cost to produce the
corn and then make alcohol. In the US we have to use clean burning NG.
In Brazil they use the bagasse to make the alcohol and the temperature rarely gets to
plus 40* so they can use higher concentrates.
Now that subsidies are off the gas comp. buy where it is cheapest (not US).
BP even bragged about it in one of their ads.
GR6 Thanks for the 9:57am
We are on “spaceship earth” when consumables are gone they are gone.
One figure I saw was (a palindrome) that earth can support 3 Billion people indefinitely less would be better.
A while back it was thought we (human kind) could get all our protein from the sea –
well scratch that idea – there would be more if we ate more diverse fish verities.
Poke me again and I will rant some more.
Hang in there Debbe, Ian is not far – mine is 1500 miles.
GR6
cute and curvaceous, is always a bonus.
When I heard that Apollo 1 was using pure O2 I really scratched my head –
even as a 19 year old in the Army I had heard horror stories of high O2 environments
going bad – and here they were sitting on top of a BIG fire.
One might consider that the O atom found in ethanol means that much less atmospheric oxygen is needed for combustion. Effectively, it means that the ethanol is already a tad bit oxidized. I have never attempted to study all the variables in its usage in fuels.
BTW, the various isomers of octane all have the formula C8H18, not C8H10. Only one isomer is best suited for gasoline usage; it formal name is 2,2,4-trimethylpentane. It is one of the octanes because there are a total of 8 C atoms (one in each methyl, plus five in the pentane chain), and solely H atoms and single bonds otherwise involved.
I just deleted a wonderfully witty commentary on the debates. I’ll just give you the straight line and you provide the punch line. Eight Republicans, Rand Paul and Donald Trump walk into an auditorium in Cleveland……