Quote of the day...

Actually, I never really have quotes of the day, but I watched Kung Fu Panda the other day and liked this one:

One often meets his destiny on the road he takes to avoid it.

Life and plans

Life is what happens between your plans and the plans of those with more power.

Hoarding

Finally watched The Hobbit last weekend. Came out on DVD here. I had lost interest in these Tolkien movies, with the oversimplification of good and evil. But I recently started having an appreciation of the simplified view of power. And in this film in particular, the concept of hoarding.

I won’t go into any details of the plot, but the take-home for me was the more you try to hoard something, the more you’re likely to lose it.

Compost

I don’t think I’ve mentioned it, but I’ve started to pick up an interest in farming. Maybe I did mention it when I said I was reading Walden, and Thoreau was saying all we really need is food and shelter. ...Or maybe I just said that verbally to someone but never actually wrote it down.

Anyway, lot’s of interesting things about farming, but for this post I’ll just mention something about composting...or rather the bacteria that rise to power in hot composting and how it relates to human cultures as well.

The basic setup is like this; given the right conditions in the compost, bacteria will move in and raise the temperature of the the pile to make it inhospitable for other organisms, thus insuring their own survival. This new condition, in turn, gives rise to other bacteria that raise the temperature more, eliminating the first batch of bacteria. Then this new environment gives rise to another type of bacteria that turns the heat up more, eliminating the second batch. And so forth.

The interesting thing is that the third batch of bacteria could not have come into power were it not for the second batch, nor could the second batch have come into power without the first batch. And the first batch could not have come into power were it not for the right conditions in the compost.

I’ve been reading a lot about the French Revolution lately out of some concern for the similar conditions to the US right now. But that’s were the idea came from. The first batch; King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, the second batch; Maximilien Robespierre, and the third batch; Napoleon. 

If guns don't kill people...

...then they don't protect people.