Posted on September 25th, 2007
By laura
at 7:15 am (All, Pots and Pans)
I stumbled across Alfred Lunt’s recipe for Cardamom Bread on NPR.org while I was looking for that cookbook from Friday’s post. When I saw it I thought, ‘FABULOUS! Now I can use up some of that unreasonable supply of cardamom that I have.’ I wonder how much 18 seeds of ground cardamom seeds is… 1/4 teaspoon? 1/2 teaspoon?
“No matter who you are or what your background is, everyone has a ceiling to break through,” [Mike Jones] says. “All my ancestors on both sides of my family have been farmers, but they never owned land. So mine was to own my own farm.”
It took him more than 20 years to reach his goal. Determined to make something of himself, Jones became the first in his family to attend college. He finished his degree with help from the GI Bill, then worked for several confinement hog farms—many of which now contract with Smithfield Foods—to learn the business. He did well, but kept looking for ways to improve the system.
“Finally I came to the conclusion it couldn’t be done,” he says. “I didn’t see how the environment could be managed in a way that was tolerable to me. The profit was there, but I didn’t want to be there.”
Jones’ decision to leave was one of conscience.
“I began to get callused to animals’ suffering, and this bothered me,” he says. “I thought, ‘This is how human rights abuses get started.’ First the animals get abused, then the people.”
There’s a reader comment at the end that claims it would not be feasible for all pigs to be raised in this way. He may be right that not all pigs could be raised in exactly this way, but I think all pigs can be raised in a better way than an entire lifetime spent on 6 square feet of concrete. We can all eat less meat and, most of all, stop turning our noses up at certain cuts. Our pig lasted us nearly a year. We didn’t get to eat bacon and pork chops everyday. Some of those days we ate soups made with neck bones and hocks. There is a cookbook out there about the moral necessity to use the entire animal if we are going to eat it, but I can’t find it. I heard a brief section of an interview with the author on NPR a while back but I’ve searched for the program a number of times to no avail. Does anyone know what this book is, or did I dream it?
Posted on September 15th, 2007
By scott
at 9:59 am (All, Two legs)
I was watching Coleman Jones (a/k/a Jones Soda) play his latest driving game on the Game Cube. He switched to a track that required drift — for the uninitiated game players, that’s driving into curves at high-speed without too much braking if any.
The track exaggerated the drift, giving him a track that’s S-curves.
The game was training the young boy, teaching him. The key was teaching without the usual pedantic methods we use in schools, business, and home.
I want to apply the idea of learning by doing with PmWiki and WordPress. How do you teach and leave the pedantic, ineffective method of lectures and the like?
When I think of my learning style, I know something when I can teach someone. Before that, I rely a bit too much on instinct. You learn by teaching and doing.
I admire game makers for their ability to teach a whole system and leaving the docs behind. However, they build the learning into the system.
I remember an early version of my beloved Age of Empires basically forced you to use their tutorial before setting you lose on the various scenarios.
PmWiki and WordPress have no built-in learning system that allows you to create a document within a tutorial (going back to learning by building/doing).
Adobe and other makers have software that allow you to build tutorials based on a system. I find them too far removed from the program.
I’m not too sure how I can help others master PmWiki and WordPress more effectively. I mean, that’s the key, right? If I spend two hours on X, it will save me eight hours on Y. ROI - Return on Investment.
Well written documentation is good; screencasts (videos of software how-tos) is good; tutorials requiring user interaction is good. Still, not as effective or efficient as the drift tutorial Jones Soda experiences in his video game.
In a report on the August outbreak, the government said that it had most likely been caused by drainage problems at two animal-disease research laboratories — one privately owned, the other run by the government — at Pirbright, in Surrey. Milton Park Farm is about 10 miles from Pirbright, but Ms. Reynolds said it was too early to determine the cause of the latest case.
I keep reading about all of the family farmers who have been put out of business in England because all of their animals had to be culled. If it turns out to be true that the research laboratories are responsible for the outbreak, shouldn’t all of those families be reimbursed for their losses so that they can continue making their living? Does it not work that way in England?
