Better living through explosives

My folks used dynamite to fix a flooded basement.

The downstairs toilet would occasionally bubble sewage. We did a perk test out front where you pour some water in a hole and see how long it takes to drain. It didn't. A problem, because septic tanks are designed to spill into the drain field and seep into the earth. Otherwise, stuff backs up and heads to the basement toilet. Not the stuff you're looking for...

So a new system and a new front yard. It was Summer break and free labor was at hand; my Mom, Mike, me, our stepfather Joe and his other sons Bruce and Hugh.

We set to it. Shovels and picks and buckets. Trenches were dug in a modified palmate pattern. At the end of each day you couldn't tell Pharaoh from slave.

Two feet down, however, the ground was still impervious. A heavy rain could send it all right back up into our basement. The three foot level was the same.

Joe and my Mom consulted and came up with the big idea: dig a real deep hole at the low end and let all the, ahem, water drain to there. Hard pan couldn't go down forever.

 The hole was about four foot a side and as it got deeper we built a gantry to winch up the buckets of muck.

Bucket after bucket... Thirty miserable feet later we were still in clay, shaky aluminum ladder to the bottom and each load heavier than the last. This boot-sucking crap had to end somewhere!

And then Joe thought: dynamite.

It would punch right through through the hard pan! Loosen it up, anyway. We had already broken one shovel.

Naturally we had a box of dynamite on hand. We wired a few sticks on the bottom of the hole and tossed down some branches and stuff to "deflect" the force. We pulled up the ladder and cleared the area. I was stationed on the road out front to stop any traffic. Joe checked on everyone, yelled Fire in the Hole! and threw the switch.

I was about forty feet away, watching for cars. There was a nice bang, somewhat muffled and dust fountained out of the hole.  Then within a breath, the road convulsed and I was tossed to the ground.
Today you'd hear dozens of car alarms go off, but this was Suburbia in the Sixties and a quieter time (well, not on that particular day).
The blast had no appreciable impact on the clay. Just as smooth as we had left it but covered in debris. We wearily called it good and filled the well with loose dirt and gravel.

The basement toilet seemed to work okay for the next twenty years and then the sewer came to the neighborhood.

Door to Door

The children were much more serious about Halloween than we were.
They'd ring the bell and I'd display the goods and usually someone would ask "How many can we take?" Once I said two, one good piece and one bad, and that set them to work. Little hands hovered over the selections, and came to a group decision: Twizzlers were good and Almond Joys were bad. One defector stage-whispered to a friend as they rushed away "I took two Good ones."
Another time when asked how many I said "One point five," which puzzled them only a moment. A little pirate quickly figured it out. "Oh, that means one candy and one cards" (we also offered small decks of cards which proved unpopular). All of that group followed his example.
We had fifty to sixty kids this year. A neighborhood blog (myballard.com) provided a googlemap for households to display Halloween participation and this may have boosted activity.

porch raising

A couple of springs ago we started hearing strange sounds at night. Something like a rusty nail being slowly drawn from an old board, somewhere near our bedroom window. Spooky and unnerving. It would pass, but in a few hours we might hear it again.

As the days passed it got louder; we could feel the vibrations shake the house. Pretty freaky.
We started staying up to catch the noisemaker.

One night we spied a 'possum squeezing out from under our wooden porch. There was a gap between the concrete and the porch of less than two inches; we watched the whole structure move up and down as she slowly, painfully worked her way out.

Mystery solved but we were still curious so one morning I pried up one of the steps and there was Mama and her babies staring up at us with that frozen death rictus grin they use in extremis.

We burst out laughing and nailed the step back on.

Oh, and Mama had a open red gash on her back from wiggling in and out from her den. I had to admire such devotion to her litter, but after she vacated the premises we filled in the gap with a board and haven't heard from her or her kin since.

Coat and pants

A dim don did moan in his rue
and cursed the clergy, Earth's haters
"They gave me just one B. S. clu:
when I've passed Ed's asp this game craters."

Think I'll Have One Now

Mix in a microwave safe cup 3 tablespoons of a good dutch cocoa, 3 tablespoons of sugar (table or superfine) and a pinch of salt. Stir in a little water; you're looking for about a 30 weight consistency.

Nuke for 25 to 35 seconds on high!

Add a splash of vanilla extract and you have a quick and dirty ice cream sauce for two, or heat it up with a cup of milk for a nice, rich hot cocoa for one.

Give me an F

It seems that any fool can write about evolution as I shall demonstrate:

Consider an entity that makes copies of itself.

Do we now have a population of identical replicators?

Some copies, of course, may meet the complex environment and quickly bite the dust. Some may escape damage and some may be altered. There may be incorrect copies.

The majority of the population may well be identical to the the parent but as waves of copies bounce against the world and are perhaps changed errors may survive and reproduce.

Assuming fairly constant circumstances the original parent and it's clones will churn out product over time with an average reproductive success rate of F, which stands for fitness. Higher F values mean more descendants.

Any variant can only have a value for F that is smaller, larger or the same as the parent.

When altered copies have a nonzero success rate then we should expect the population over time to be dominated by high F variants. This allows for a larger pool of possible variation.

A change in circumstances may favor a low F variant; smaller pools with fewer varieties may not survive a new environment at all.

An inconstant world drives a population with differing strategies.

Catastrophic Seedballs!

Occasionally, every X million years or so, the Earth is slammed by a extraordinarily large and fast comet or asteroid. The land shakes violently, tsunamis scour the coasts, falling debris heats the air and pummels the ground. The resulting dust storms will likely induce an ice age.

For perhaps hours or days the temperature of the atmosphere is raised in some places as high as that of boiling water, followed by several years of freezing dark. A majority of species, and most life will die.

Can we do anything? Consider the aftermath. Any surviving animals, be they insects, chipmunks or people, that crawl out of the ice will face a bare and chilly world without food or shelter. Encouraging quick plant growth should be our main concern.

I'll concentrate on a way to preserve seeds through this period to establish a new ecosystem as soon as possible.

As an idea, imagine an amalgam of manure and straw, in the form of a ball, with the seeds mixed in (feel free to imagine other possible compositions). Dip it in some insulating foam to allow it to survive the heat and cold, spread them far and wide and wait for things to warm up again. They should be designed to disintegrate when wet, allowing the seeds to sprout and grow, yet not fall apart prematurely.

One way to test seedballs is to make differing batches, bake them in a oven for a day and store them for a year or more in a freezer. Set them out on some soggy, ash choked piece of ground and see what happens.

The first generations of seedballs won't work very well. Assembling something that can protect seeds for so long at such temperatures is probably difficut. No seeds, or at most a very small percentage will live to germinate.

Several generations of testing may be necessary before a combination of materials and seeds can be found that has a chance of success.

However, even a poor seedball could be viable with some cover. Bury them under a little soil or toss them in a lake and they might survive post-impact conditions quite well.

Of course, the ideal is a seedball that is inexpensive to make and easy to distribute. If they can be frozen for years, so much the better. Take them out when needed. They could also be spread around at any time, as they are made, even if no particular threat loom. If they germinate, no big deal. If disaster strikes unexpectedly, we are that much better prepared.

Imagine a time when we do not have a significant space presence but we detect the inevitable comet en-route to a meeting with our vulnerable planet. We may have years to prepare, or we may have only days. There is no chance of diverting catastrophe, only, perhaps, one of easing the aftermath.

The cost of preparation can be relatively cheap. Of course, grant money can be sent to various universities to investigate seedballs and other possible interventions and it may be a good investment. However, I think an X Prize might be a more efficient spur. After all, the research seems to be fairly inexpensive; seeds and soil, ovens and freezers; nothing very high tech. Anyone can play and the prize need only be paid out for success.

A few million dollars spread out over several decades might be money well spent. The end of the world will be a much more expensive proposition.