No, I missed that. Right: put it up tomorrow then. I'll try and make some time to follow it up.

..with my useless comments.

As I said.. I was thinking about writing something along the lines of this first diary. So please, keep the relevnt parts of this diary in the answer as well together with whatever you write on part 2.

I mean, just copy and paste...plus the second part..but do not leave this diary out.. it says much mroe clearly all what I said in the comment with Migeru..so please.. my humble opinion: keep it also.

A pleasure

I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact. Levi-Strauss, Claude

Please do post your diary on Saturday. I'll promise to hack at it mercilessly all weekend, as well as posting a diary in which I review the "whereases" in the 2003 EU Directive with a view to seeing which justifications for biofuels remain valid and which don't.

Nothing is 'mere'. — Richard P. Feynman

agreed.  the achievement of life -- the whole process of life on the planet's surface, from the obscure beginnings (primordial soup and all that vague stuff) to the protoplants, the first real plants, and the astonishing capability of life to defy entropy on a local scale -- is mind boggling.  the "investment" represented by a couple of feet of good topsoil is almost impossible to imagine -- the number of interacting species and the complexity of their interdependencies that produce this medium in which more, and more various, life then flourishes.  speciation, diversity, the dense filling of fractal niches, self-organisation, the intricate cycle of nutrition...  it's a level of complexity and function that challenges our human brain, which is still tuned to grunt-basics like threatening/nonthreatening and edible/inedible.

In 1995, Sillett received a Ph.D. in botany from Oregon State University, in Corvallis. Soon afterward, he took his present job, at Humboldt, and began to explore the old-growth redwood canopy. No scientist had been there before. The tallest redwoods were regarded as inaccessible towers, shrouded in foliage and almost impossible to climb, since the lowest branches on a redwood can be twenty-five stories above the ground. From the moment he entered redwood space, Steve Sillett began to see things that no one had imagined. The general opinion among biologists at the time - this was just eight years ago - was that the redwood canopy was a so-called "redwood desert" that contained not much more than the branches of redwood trees. Instead, Sillett discovered a lost world above Northern California.

The old-growth redwood-forest canopy, Sillett found, is packed with epiphytes, plants that grow on other plants. They commonly occur on trees in tropical rain forests, but nobody really expected to find them in profusion in Northern California. There are hanging gardens of ferns, in masses that Sillett calls fern mats. The fern mats can weigh tons when they are saturated with rainwater; they are the heaviest masses of epiphytes which have been found in any forest canopy on earth. Layers of earth, called canopy soil, accumulate over the centuries on wide limbs and in the tree's crotches - in places where trunks spring from trunks - and support a variety of animal and plant life. In the crown of a giant redwood named Fangorn, Sillett found a layer of canopy soil that is three feet deep. Near the top of Laurelin, or the Tree of the Sun, which is three hundred and sixty-eight feet tall and still growing, Sillett found a huge, sheared-off trunk with a rotted, damp center. Masses of shrubs are growing out of the wet rot, sending their roots down into Laurelin.

footnote

the tree is an entire ecosubsystem -- with a build time of centuries, with its "canopy meadow" supporting a whole community of variegated life.  a world that could take a team of biologists years to document or understand.  it can be cut down in a single day, destined to become N board-feet of lumber, or N cubic yards of pulp to make disposable paper products.  this is burning the intricate life's work of something far older than  most of today's "nations" and almost of our technology.  we have somehow created a culture that almost literally (except for a few specialists) sees a tree as a brown stick with a green ball on top, painted on a flat piece of paper.  if we saw the tree as a system -- even through some Cartesian/mechanical metaphor -- we would be blown away by the impossibility of building a working model of it w/in the same footprint, even with our most advanced technology.  if we killed all the trees and had to build mechanical trees to do the work that trees do, we could not do it.  we are not capable of reproducing what we are destroying.  is there a better functional definition of stupidity?

it appears that the only thing we are seriously clever at is destruction.  and destruction, of course, is not particularly clever.  I know I've said it before, but any fool can smash a pocketwatch with a hammer, without knowing how a pocketwatch works or how to fix the damage or how to build another.  granted our hammers are very ingenious -- grotesquely large and steam powered and incredibly "efficient" (god help us), but we still don't understand how the pocketwatch works, nor can we build another.  [I note in passing that it is a common error among little boys to imagine that being able to destroy something means that you "own" it or are its master -- if you can kick over the sand castle and trample on it, that proves that you "win", or that it's "yours".  as if smashing a Stradivarius could make me a master of the violin.]

a mon beau château, ma tante tira lira lira,
a mon beau château, ma tante tira lira lo.

le notre est plus beau, ma tante (etc)

nous le détruirions, ma tante (etc)

and so it goes.  it amused me in a savage Swiftian sort of way to watch the West gasp and cry "Egad, how barbaric" as the Taliban (barbarically indeed) destroyed the giant Buddha statues in Afghanistan -- the vandalism of a harmless artifact created with such boggling effort by so many hands... while our own cultures continued to destroy daily, with ever-accelerating efficiency, vastly more complex "artifacts" of vastly longer accumulated effort which are not only harmless, but necessary for the support of life on the outer skin of this large rock we live on.

and btw, I think the "controversy" over the viability biofuels is about as legit as the endlessly manufactured "controversy" over global climate destabilisation.  just more feelgood propaganda to assure the voters that they can go on driving SUVs and running air conditioners 24x7 and still "save the planet".  in the last 5 years or so I haven't read any version of the math that works -- in the sense of enabling the frenetic energy burn rate that has insanely come to be known as "normal".   biofuels as a necessary and integral component of an aggressive program of demand reduction and efficiency enhancement, sure -- but biofuels as a plugnplay replacement for fossil resources without a radical change of urban form, transportation modality, housing design, agricultural practise?  snake oil, sez I, just like the "hydrogen economy."

and as for burning fish for fuel, when half the world is protein-deficient -- can we spell "obscene"?

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...

ah, that gets me back to the original reason why I came to ET, which was to write about energy literacy.  and one of the prime obstacles to energy literacy is the dizzying variety of units of measurement.  even physicists carry around conversion tables, and for the layperson it's a jungle of jargon.  one of my long term projects is to translate these units into terms easily imaginable by the average person, and to create tables of equivalence that make it, at last, fairly easy to understand energy density, lossiness, etc.

I found a good resource a while back on energy density of various fuels from wood (dry or wet) to refined petroleum.  might have used it as a link here.  it certainly belongs in everyone's mental back pocket.

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...

Heh, I get spam asking me to invest in "new exciting companies" and last week one of the spams was about a company that is developing biofuels from algae.

Nothing is 'mere'. — Richard P. Feynman