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["Toni Hawryluk" <tonihawr AT msn.com>]

from Don :
> Hanford has been the site of numerous nuclear experiments since the early 
> 40s long before anyone really worried about contamination.  At one time 
> they released plutonium into the air just to see where it went.

My, what intellectual giants ... not-so-simple
aborigines would have kept a smudge burning ...
>From tonihawr AT msn.com  Wed Dec  1 00:59:01 2004
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From: "Toni Hawryluk" <tonihawr AT msn.com>
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Subject: Re: [Homestead] Re: Globalism - was 'stolen'
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----- Original Message ----- From: Bill Jones<mailto:billj AT harborside.com> 
> uninvited value judgments on other peoples' lives have rubbed more than one 
> person the wrong way.

Daaaannng ! and here I thought I was the only one ...
>From billj AT harborside.com  Wed Dec  1 01:01:15 2004
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From: Bill Jones <billj AT harborside.com>
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Subject: [Homestead] Notes From the Farm (November 2004)
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Well it was superstition over sophistry by a nose.  I'm really sorry the
Dems couldn't come up with a reasonable candidate.  Next stop Syria,
where we need to secure the sources of the Jordan for AIPAC.

Lee's Thanksgiving trip flew right by.  We spent the weekend trying to
implement my surface drawing software on the new BASIC compiler I got.
I first conceived of this method almost 20 years ago, and finally
computers are fast enough for this simple algorithm.  Back then I had to
settle on a somewhat complicated program that drew black dots randomly
distributed on the surface (ask me how I did that!), but now we have 255
intensity levels and 3 colors for each pixel (not to mention
lightning-fast computers).  First the program uses vectors to set up a
mathematical representation of the screen between the viewer's position
and the object.  For each point on this screen, the program constructs a
line from the viewer position to the point.  For planes and quadric
surfaces it's very simple to figure out which among several surfaces is
the nearest surface along that line, so as to hide the other surfaces
behind it.  Finally the program puts a dot of the appropriate color,
depending on which surface is foremost, in the corresponding hardware
pixel.  The intensity of the dot is chosen so that the color is drawn
more intensely at points where the surface is viewed on edge.  The
result is beautiful, graceful surfaces that appear to be made of ruby,
emerald, or sapphire.  In the final version the user will be able to
rotate a composite shape formed by several surfaces, of the sort seen in
calculus III, and easily visualize their intersection curves.  But they
sure don't make it easy.  It took almost all of Thursday to install.  In
order to implement the lengthy code that you have to write just to get
it to set up a graphics window, we had to type in some examples from the
tutorial and delete the meaty portion of their code, substituting my
own.  Saturday night we had a program to draw a paraboloid, and by
Sunday morning I had entered and debugged the code to graph a general
quadric surface, if you just change the coefficients in the program and
recompile.  But believe it or not, we could not figure out how to get
that Microshaft compiler to take data from the keyboard, as any toddler
can do with an Apple II.  No, no, you have to initialize a dialog box
object, pass parameters from the dialog box actuation procedure to the
calling module, etc.!  So Lee had to leave without a working program to
draw a general quadric surface.

Our dinner was mostly traditional, but we tried something new.  Lee made
a huckleberry sauce.  My idea was to create a mock cranberry sauce using
our less popular fruits of early summer: 'Yellow Transparent' apple,
Canadian elderberry, and black currant.  It wasn't that impressive, even
with added citric acid.  But the evergreen huckleberry, Vaccinium
ovatum, has the necessary fruitiness to make it more similar to
cranberry.  So we opened up a can of mock cranberry, and added some
huckleberries.  It was great.  Huckleberries don't fall apart like
cranberries, so I'm going to try grinding some in the blender with some
mock cranberry.

I planted six beds of garlic this year.  It's easiest to put four
varieties in each bed, so that makes 24.  There's another bed with some
more onion sets, potato onions, Egyptian walking onion, and Chinese Pink
garlic (the earliest garlic by far).  I put a disk of carrots at the
center, and despite the cold, I think they'll sprout, because it has a
greenhouse plastic cover.  I also planted a whole bed of parsnips, which
aren't up yet, and some breadseed poppy where the beets came out, which
are up as of today.  The only things left to plant will sprout on any
day of the year, like fava beans, mustard, flax, and corn salad.  There
are still tomatoes on the living room floor, and we had all the salsa we
wanted this weekend.  The best news is that I harvested over 100 pounds
of yacon from one little round bed!

I've thought of another big simplification in the vapor engine design.
It's not necessary to have disposable plastic bags for bladders.  If the
water is hot, the propellant can be injected into an upside-down
hemisphere, and will produce the same buoyant force, without mixing with
the water.  Any propellant that accumulates at the bottom of the water
tank, or any water that condenses into the propellant reservoir, can be
drained off through a valve (thanks, in the first case, to a containment
bladder that keeps any propellant vapor from escaping).  But I do fear
that I have to give up on the idea of using calcium chloride brine to
increase the buoyant force, since without a plastic barrier between the
propellant and the brine, salty stuff would eventually get into the
valve and make it corrode.  But this idea is great news because it means
that no parts will need replacing often.

I've been reading the story of human migrations as revealed in the
Y-chromosome.  Geneticist Spencer Wells has analyzed the genetic markers
of thousands of men around the world.  The conclusions are astounding.
The first people to leave Africa, those whose descendants still live
today, emigrated only 2000 generations ago.  So we're really non-natives
on every continent except Africa.  After they settled in southern
Arabia, this lineage split into an eastern migration along the south
coast of Asia, and a northward migration into Mesopotamia.  The eastern
group became the Melanesians, Andaman islanders, Australian aborigines,
and Ainu, following the coast all the way to America to eventually
become the Athabaskan tribes.  Part of the Mesopotamian group spread
eastward into eastern Iran.  From here three great migrations populated
the rest of the world.  A southern migration produced the Dravidians of
southern India, an eastward migration produced all the major peoples of
east Asia, and a northward migration into central Asia begot all the
remaining peoples of the earth.  The last group was truly the original
ice people.  One subgroup of these central Asians went westward into
northern Europe, and another into Siberia.  Some of these Siberians
spread into North America and became the Eskimo-Aleut peoples.  Much
more recently, there occurred significant migrations of north Alaskan
origin into all of North and South America, a significant migration from
Mesopotamia into the Balkans, and the well-studied "Indo-European
migration" from Scythia into India.  It's really fascinating how this
intertwines with linguistics.  Linguists had long thought that American
aboriginal languages were divided among 3 large phyla, called Na-Dene
(Athabaskan), Eskimo-Aleut, and Amerindian.  And sure enough, each group
has its own genetic marker associated with it.  Unfortunately there is
no support for the Nostratic Hypothesis (that Semitic, Caucasian, and
Altaic languages were one with Indo-European only 11,000 years ago).
There is also no genetic evidence for a Polynesian settlement of the
Americas (a la Kon-Tiki), nor any influx from western Eurasia (despite
the Book of Mormon).

This has inspired me to study the local Athabascan language, known as
Coquille-Tolowa.  Unfortunately there are no speakers alive today, and
records are scanty.  We have over 100 recorded place names from the
area, most ending with the suffix -tunne, meaning people.  The closest
living related language is Hupa in California.  Hupa place names usually
end in -ding, like Djishtangading (Tish-A-Tang?).  These seem to be
cognate suffixes.  It's really a fun challenge to get inside the mind of
the transcriber, and I have a great talent for it.  For instance, after
seeing the sequence "lth" at the beginning of several words, I realized
that this is the voiceless l-sound, written "ll" in Welsh.  This is not
the only trigraph that indicates a single sound.  The sequence "rgh"
occurs frequently, and at the beginning of words, so it's tempting to
conclude that this is a retroflex fricative as in Czech ("Dvorak").
Extra tees and esses that don't seem to belong are probably indicators
of glottal stops or ejective consonants.  I know it's a long shot to
think that I can decode some of these place names, but I can't get over
the great stuff I've been able to deduce without knowing any Hupa or
having any Coquille-Tolowa word lists other than some numbers and
kinship terms.  The ultimate thrill would be to be able to match place
names with locations.  It's hard to imagine that happening, but once
again, there's some reason for optimism.  There are few places in the
Rogue, Elk, Sixes, or Coquille valleys that would make suitable
settlements.  A potential settlement has to be not too hilly, within an
easy walk from the part of the river that's navigable by canoe in the
dry summer, and yet not be in the flood plain.  Also spots on the south
banks are usually so shady that no one would want to live there in
winter.  So the number of potential village sites isn't much greater
than the number of place names we have.  Now if only those place names
were based on something descriptive of the terrain!  My favorite modern
place name of indian origin has to be Applegate.  Start with the name of
the local tribe, the Dakubetede (-tede is also a suffix).  Remove the
first letter and also the last three (these are common phonetic changes
that are frequently observed).  Now we have [akubet].  Now suppose that
the k and the b swap their place of articulation, but keep their
voicing.  We now have [apuget].

Today I started work on a program to draw the extension office in 3-D.
I want to see how it would look with landscaping.  It's just a simple
program that creates a line drawing of the building from any desired
viewpoint.  The plants will be represented by ellipses.  I can use the
same routine that I'm writing for the surface graphing program, to allow
the viewer to rotate the building using the mouse.  I'm using a similar
approach to the plotting, only in reverse.  Unlike quadric surfaces, the
line drawing consists of one-dimensional segments.  If we selected
screen points and asked where the infinitely thin ray to the object
intersects with these infinitely thin line segments, the answer would be
almost nowhere.  So we have to instead start with the endpoints of the
lines as given, and construct a ray from the viewer to each corner
point, finally computing the intersection point with the imaginary
screen.  Once the screen coordinates of a line segment's endpoints are
determined, the segment connecting them can just be drawn in two
dimensions, saving untold amounts of computer time.  We still need to
learn how to take data from the keyboard so that the user can enter the
sizes and coordinates of plants.

When the rainy weather sets in next week I have plans for yet another
great piece of software.  It seems that twice now I've needed to graph
complicated non-linear relations in two variables.  When we designed the
PVC frame for the round beds, we chose a shape that maximized the volume
of the interior for a given width of Reemay ag cloth cover.  When I
tried to obtain a solution in closed form, I ended up with two
non-linear relations in two unknowns, and if only I had software that
graphs relations like xy^3 + yx^3  + x + y = 1, I could easily see the
solution as the intersection point of two graphs on the screen.  A
similar example occurred when I innocently asked where two unequal
masses come to rest when hung asymmetrically from a horizontal cable.
This problem results in two eighth-degree equations in two unknowns, and
again I could just read the result right from the screen if only the
computer could graph generalized relations.

It's great to be able to make the computer actually do something.  It's
funny how we've gone from having computers that empowered the user to
write their own programs, to computers that foster helplessness and
monotony.  Until I got this compiler I really can't say I used my
computer as much more than a typewriter and picture viewer.  I don't
think I'll notice the winter very much this year either.

The last Plant Clinic of the year has ended, and the Master Gardeners
graduation ceremony is just a couple of weeks away.  Tomorrow I'd like
to order one more gift.  I have a few more rainless days to finish
piling compost before the endless rain begins.  After that I'll be
addressing Christmas cards on Saturday.  Then the following week I hope
to begin work on the basic components of the vapor engine, and produce a
test model that runs on compressed air before it's time to start
cleaning for Christmas.

I turn 45 in only a month and I'm totally into it.  I've never felt more
confident and able, the master of all I survey.

I hope everyone has a wonderful holiday season.  Merry Christmas!

Bill