Hugelkultur

Hugelkultur is building raised beds with a core of wooden logs or branches; the logs rot down over several years, both providing nutrients and creating airspace in the beds, such that the soil needs neither fertilising nor tilling. As the wood rots it also becomes spongy, and creates a slow-release reserve of water at the heart of the bed.

References: hugelkultur: the ultimate raised garden beds, The Art and Science of Making a Hugelkultur Bed.

Abe visits Yasukuni

And so another Japanese premier visits Yasukuni and, as predicatable as rollers breaking on a beach, the sound of infuriated Chinese and Koreans denouncing it as unacceptable and the Chinese in particular, to emphasise their commitment to a peaceful world, threatening unspecified repercussions.

Two good comments on ZeroHedge. One simply points out that China complains mightily when anyone else interferes in their domestic affairs. The other — well, it's worth quoting in full:

The Chinese leadership failed to mention that the Japanese killed 6-10 million Chinese, yet under Mao the Chinese managed to kill 60-90 million of their own citizens. Interestingly it is the revolutionaries families of the Mao era that are getting filthy rich while most are still suffering.

Hanne Nabintu Herland

Reading a somewhat sensationalist article in The Times of Israel, I come across the name of Hanne Nabintu Herland, who at first reads like she might be simply the usual leftist European-hater, judging from the (admiring) remarks of the author (though in truth, the attitude of Norwegian officials towards Israel, as I've heard it expressed on and off in the news, has often seemed to me to be shall we say rather unfortunate), so I go to her entry in Wikipedia.

A rather different picture is revealed, with surprisingly common-sense positions on a number of topics, including the unintended consequences of creating a welfare culture, the presumably (though one can never be too sure) unintended consequences of feminism, and the poisonous, institutionalised white-hatred of the Norwegian elites (her position on and the latter must be especially painful for those on the receiving end, since she was born and brought up in Africa).

So a good report card overall, but I'm blown away when I read (in the context of her criticism of Norwegian antisemitism, as referred to by the original Times of Israel article) her succinct summary of something that I've believed for a long time, but only ever expressed to instant derision from those hearing it (i.e. my sadly plonk-socialist friends):

Instead of supporting the only real democracy in the Middle East, namely Israel, we blackmail the Israelis in a manner as though we were still in 1939 at the time the socialist Hitler «sieg heil» was shouted in Norway. For the Nazis were Left Wing, and came out of Germany’s Socialist Labour Party, they were not right-wing. The individuals in the Norwegian politically powerful positions that have pushed for these solely negative attitudes for so many years, are responsible for creating a politically-correct hatred towards Israel that has made Norway the most anti-Semitic country in the West.

Yes! She's spotted that the Nazis were left-wing! I don't know why that seems like such an achievement (after all, the clue is in the name!), but whenever I point that out to people the usual look is one of incredulity. To me, it's one of the most amazing triumphs of the left that it has succeeded in painting Nazis as being on the right, when they were clearly a socialist organisation and their methods were simply another version of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Methods that, incidentally, the left continues to employ to this day (Saul Alinsky, anyone?).

Wind power generation mostly useless!

http://www.europhysicsnews.org/articles/epn/pdf/2012/02/epn2012432p22.pdf

There's correlation over an area including Denmark, Germany and Great Britain: when it's windy in one of these places it tends to be windy in the others too. The takeaway is that the wind generation plant has to be supplemented by backup generation, and that that backup generation could quite happily do the whole job without the windmills. In other words, it's an expensive farce.

The future comes to town

One of the stocks-in-trade of sci-fi is a sky full of machines, hovering, whirring, darting and generally busying around, taking off and landing and shooting away in all directions. From The Jetsons to Star Wars, you can't do a prosperous sci-fi future without it.

Now it looks as though that future may nearly be here, with the news that Amazon is testing octocopters for delivery purposes. It sounds incredible, I know, and maybe it's just a publicity stunt (current AI probably isn't up to it — will they have operators flying them by joystick over the internet?) but at least it means that people are thinking about it, and that means it may be about to happen.