A.C. Flory's Blog, page 80
February 20, 2019
The taste of real food
Strawberries, glorious aren’t they?
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The image above came from freeimages.com, and I can only assume the strawberries are store bought because mine look like this:
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Yes, that is a bog standard dinner fork for comparison. My homegrown strawberries are truly tiny, and yet…when I bite into one my taste buds sit up and beg for more. No need for sugar, no need for whipped cream. These tiny red gems are so full of flavour, and natural sweetness, they literally do not need anything else to ‘enhance’ them.
To be honest, I haven’t bought strawberries from the shop in years. Not because I was growing my own but because they had no flavour unless drenched in sugar. Ditto tomatoes and apricots. The store bought ones are all big, beautiful and utterly tasteless. We may eat with our eyes, but these commercially grown fruits supply very little to our taste buds. They also tend to be expensive except when they are in season.
So what’s the answer? Grow your own, of course.
Wait! Don’t go.
Even if you only have a pocket sized garden, you can grow one, small apricot tree. They don’t grow very big, or at least the one that has been growing in my garden hasn’t. And they don’t require much care. I do water mine every night while it’s fruiting, but I don’t ‘feed’ it, or even cover it with netting half the time. Despite that, there’s usually enough for me, my little nephews and the neighbourhood wild life.
And this brings me to something even closer to my heart than good food – it’s the look on a child’s face when they first bite into warm, tree-ripened fruit. They blink in surprise, and then their little faces light up with wonder. I saw that wonder on my nephew’s face when his Dad lifted him up so he could pick and eat his own apricot, straight from my tree. I think it was a moment that neither of us will forget.
But what if you don’t even have a pocket sized garden?
All of the following pictures were taken on my deck. It’s about 2.5 x 6 [metres], so a decent size, but even if you only have 1 x 1 metre, you can plant one big pot with both a tomato and a strawberry in it. Both like a fair amount of water and seem happy to share. That is precisely what I’ve done here:
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If you look to the left of the tomato, you can see the strawberry plant that shares its pot.
I invested in some big terracotta pots, but you don’t have to go to that much expense, a big plastic pot will do just as well. Size is the important thing because smaller pots dry out too quickly.
This is a pic of my basil pot, with a foot thrown in for comparison. There’s also a small tomato plant and some weeds. 
February 18, 2019
The Apprentice Returns
I don’t like posting great chunks of an unfinished story because once they’re out there, they tend to be ‘set in stone’, and I like to be able to change things, or even delete them entirely, if I think the story needs it. This time, however, I really need the feedback as I’ve completely re-written the first chapter in which I re-introduce Kaati. The basic intent is more or less the same, but all the nuances have changed, as has Kaati’s character arc.
Anyway, this is going to be a long post so grab a coffee before you begin. 
February 10, 2019
A naughty weekend in Warrandyte
No! Not that kind of weekend…;) This kind of weekend:
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The lighting effects are truly glorious in Elder Scrolls Online, and they inspired me to create classically inspired interiors for my in-game house. That involved finding recipes, gathering ingredients and finally crafting beautiful items like:
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…the goblets and knick knacks you can see displayed on that shelving.
I also splurged and bought a very expensive recipe for a glass goblet and some ‘food’. In this last screenshot, you can see my wedge of cheese, the bread platter, and some kebabs. Dinner chez moi.
February 6, 2019
Vokhtan calendar – complete
This is the final version of the Vokhtan calendar. It shows the interactions between the two suns and the planet with respect to seasons [roughly] and the day/night cycle [also roughly].
For the days, I made an executive decision and decreed that the Vokhtan day would comprise 24 ‘turns’. I chose the number 24 because I needed to dissect a circle into ‘wedges’ of time. Now, a circle has 365 degrees and a ‘wedge’ of 15.2 degrees goes into 365 almost exactly 24 times. This is something Corel Draw does very easily:
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Now, when I place these wedges of time over the visuals of the planet, I get a kind of clock that tells me how many turns of bright light, red light, orange light and dark there are in the day at different times of the year:
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Bright light = yellow sun Takh alone in the sky.
Red light = red dwarf, Takhti, alone in the sky.
Orange light = both suns in the sky at the same time.
Dark = truedark, i.e. when neither sun is in the sky.
This is a representation of a day in the middle of Piihoh. The red dwarf is completely eclipsed, so Vokhtah has just a simple, day/night cycle:
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This next graphic is from the middle of Tohoh:
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The day begins with almost 2 turns of Takh [yellow star] alone in the sky [because the planet rotates to the east]. Then Takhti rises and creates an orangey kind of light. When Takh sets, Takhti is alone in the sky for a couple of turns and it’s like a red twilight. When Takhti finally sets, truedark begins.
This next graphic is what the Vokh see in the middle of Kohoh – half red twilight, half bright yellow day, no truedark:
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And finally, the graphic from the middle of Tuhoh. This is a mirror image of the same time during Tohoh but…this time, it’s the red dwarf that ‘rises’ first [because the planet rotates to the east]. It’s alone in the sky for a couple of turns and the inhabitants experience a red, gloomy morning. Then Takh [yellow sun] rises to brighten the gloom. At the end of the day, Takh shines alone. When Takh sets, truedark begins:
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So there you have it. Time on Vokhtah has been tamed. Most days start with firstlight, progress to secondlight, peak at midlight, dim with firstdark and end with truedark. Middark is the halfway point of any dark cycle, while deepdark is the ‘dead of night’ and corresponds to the time between middark and firstlight.
Was all this work worth it, given that it was all based on guesswork?
Yes, for me, because I’ve never been good at ‘fudging’ things, and I desperately needed to know what Takh and Takhti might feel like, to a creature living on the planet.
Why didn’t I just get an astronomer to help me?
Because I don’t know any, and none of the websites I visited had what I was looking for. So I made my own.
February 3, 2019
The Shame Of Our Nation … — Filosofa’s Word
“The Trump administration says it would require extraordinary effort to reunite what may be thousands of migrant children who have been separated from their parents and, even if it could, the children would likely be emotionally harmed.” – Associated Press, 02 February 2019 Say WHAT??? The first thing that comes to mind is … let’s […]
January 31, 2019
As I Walk Through the Valley of the Shadows of Hungry Ghosts
We all have addictions, or have people close to us who do. Some addictions are small, some are totally debilitating. And we’re not helping ourselves.
Please watch the 50 odd minute video in this post. It is really important:
via As I Walk Through the Valley of the Shadows of Hungry Ghosts
January 28, 2019
Pictures not words
The Aral Sea, before and after:
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The cause? River in-flow to the inland sea diverted by the Soviets for irrigation.
The US Dust Bowl
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The cause? Drought + inappropriate farming practices. Ploughing destroyed the prairie grasses needed to hold the top soil down. One Black Blizzard [pictured above], blew all the way east and covered the Statue of Liberty.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch
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One of five areas in the Earth’s oceans where plastic rubbish collects due to the action of ocean currents.
The cause? Our rubbish, flowing into rivers and from there into the ocean. Our fishing nets, lost or dumped overboard.
Chernobyl
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Radiation causes mutation in plants, animals and humans. Wild animals around Chernobyl are still radioactive because they eat radioactive plants.
The cause? Our nuclear power plant[s]. Other notable nuclear accidents include Three Mile Island [US] and Fukushima [Japan].
France – The Red Zone
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The Red Zone is a no-go zone that was created by ordnance and chemicals left behind by 2 world wars.
The cause? A war that happened more than 100 years ago.
Maralinga in South Australia
A few words for this one:
‘The plutonium contamination at Maralinga was caused by these minor trials, two of which involved burning plutonium and detonating fissile material using conventional high explosives.
As a result just over 22 kilograms of plutonium-239 was dispersed around the site.
Plutonium-239 has a radioactive half-life of more than 24,000 years. This dangerous carcinogen is hazardous to humans if inhaled, ingested or absorbed through breaks in the skin.’
Two clean-ups were necessary.
‘Between 1996 and 2000, all but around 120 square kilometres of around 3200 square kilometres of Maralinga country had been cleaned to a standard considered safe for unrestricted access.’
‘In the worst-contaminated areas, 350,000 cubic metres of soil and debris were removed from an area of more than 2 square kilometres, and buried in trenches. Eleven debris pits were also treated with in-situ vitrification*. Most of the site (approximately 3,200 square kilometres) is now safe for unrestricted access and approximately 120 square kilometres is considered safe for access but not permanent occupancy.’
*In-situ vitrification is a process that melts things, including soil, into something similar to glass. Apparently it’s good for radioactive waste.
The cause? British testing of atomic weapons on Australian soil.
https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/maralinga
These are not the only examples of man-made damage, but they are the ones that resonate with me. I’m sure people can think of, or find, many other examples.
We may not have been capable of changing the planet 300 years ago, but we are now. In fact, if you include nuclear weapons, we have the capacity to destroy all life on the planet, many times over.
Meeks
p.s. And as a small aside to Aussies only – let’s not forget the Cane Toad, the foxes, the rabbits, goats, pigs, horses, waterbuffalo and camels.
January 26, 2019
Binary star systems
Since starting to write the Suns of Vokhtah series again, I’ve tripped up on some unexpected hurdles, one of which is the effect the binary star system has on the day/night and seasonal changes as experienced on the planet.
I thought I’d worked it all out over five years ago, and I do have graphics to prove it, but as I looked at those graphics I realised that I couldn’t remember the thinking behind them:
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Was it actually right? I no longer knew. And it niggled so much I knew I had to go back and reinvent the wheel. So these are the earliest of the new graphics:
Creating the day/night cycle in Corel Draw 8 stage 1:
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As you can see, the planet obits the G2 [yellow] star in an elliptical orbit which makes EVERYTHING so much harder. The lines connecting the centre of the star to the centre of the planet are always at right angles to simulate the orientation of the planet to its star. Assuming the star and planet exist on a flat plane, I think that’s right, from the point of view of geometry. Seems logical, but I know very little about actual astronomy.
Anyway, the big yellow star is Takh and the small red one is its binary companion, Takhti.
Next step in Corel was to group the positions of the planet, and flip a copy of them horizontally. A bit of realignment was necessary to get it looking like this:
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And finally, I filled in the gaps at the top and bottom:
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I haven’t modelled the effect of the dwarf red star yet, so it’s hard to see the significance of the example at the very bottom, but mid-Piihoh is the time in the planetary cycle when the dwarf red sun is completely eclipsed by the G2 star.
The example at the very top is mid-Kohoh. This is when the planet experiences virtually no dark – i.e. night time. Again, this will become more obvious once I complete the red dwarf overlays. Of course, working /that/ out requires some hefty mental shifts on my part because the planet rotates in an easterly direction around its own axis, but revolves around the G2 sun in an anti-clockwise direction…
Nevermind, I sort of know what I’m doing, but it still gives me brain-ache.
cheers
Meeks
January 24, 2019
Melbourne Airport – 46 C at 2:26 pm
I don’t think it got anywhere near 46 C at Warrandyte, but it was bloody hot nonetheless. Coldstream hit 43.8 C and I think Warrandyte would have been similar.
Feels almost blase saying we only reached 43.8. This is a temperature graph from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology:
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I grew up in that middle bit where there are a couple of hot spikes but mostly cool to cold troughs. I remember what summers were like back then. We lived in a solid brick, Federation Edwardian house that stayed cool most of the time. We didn’t even own a fan. Back then, the priority was staying warm in winter.
Now…43.8 C, air-conditioning and multiple fans and the inside temperature of the house stayed at 30 C all day. Bearable, but only because we were lucky and only lost power for about 10 minutes.
Is this ‘proof’ of Climate Change? Or is it just weather? When I look at that graph I can’t help thinking we’re experiencing the predicted, climate change extremes already, and that scares me. If this one day was so bad, how will we cope with even worse days?
And yes, there are still those who believe that all of climate change is just some kind of global conspiracy. I’ve been arguing with a few on Twitter today. But you can’t really have a ‘meeting of minds’ when the other person attempts to use personal put downs to win the argument.
Logic doesn’t work with people like that. Facts don’t either. Yelling and name calling might, but I was brought up to believe that emotive arguments are shameful and weak. That people who use them are shameful and weak.
So I walked away with my integrity intact but a truly bad taste in my mouth. Not because I didn’t ‘win’, but because I couldn’t change things for the better.
When did facts and logic become such blunt tools?
You’d think I’d know better. My Mum was an emotive arguer and it used to drive me crazy. I guess the truth is I never found a way to discuss anything with her, not without it becoming a huge screaming match. Apparently, I still don’t know how to do it. The only difference is that I’m 66 instead of 16, and I don’t yell and scream any more…
Apologies for the rant. I’m hot, tired and angry. 
January 17, 2019
Kaati – a new beginning
[image error]I began the second book of Vokhtah back in 2013, but then Innerscape captured my imagination and ‘Kaati’ disappeared into a digital drawer for five years. I finally restarted the project today by writing an 800 word Prologue. In it, I refresh my memory a little and set the stage for the story of Kaati, the young Trader who helped The Blue survive the crossing of the Spine of the World.
The words aren’t set in stone, but this part of the plot is. I hope you like it.
