Once again, the longest night of the year is upon us. On Dec 21, daylight lasted only 9 hours 42 Minutes here in NC, 8 hours 22 Min in Freiburg, Germany, 4 hours 7 Min in Reykjavik, Iceland.

In the old days, when people did not really understand how our solar system works, they worried about the sun and performed ancient rituals to make sure that the sun was strong enough to re-emerge from the darkness and start warming them again once spring came. For many people in the North this was also the beginning of the months of starvation, and they filled their bellies one more time on fresh meat and the wine, beer and mead of the fall before the fight for survival during the deep Winter months.

Today, we have other worries. For many of us, starvation is less of a worry than weight control. We do know that the sun will be back because we know how the Earth rotates around our star, but many other things are not so clear and reliable. So this holiday season let’s celebrate the things we can rely upon – the sun, the moon, our planet, our community, our family.

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An hour ago, at 3 AM Eastern, I rolled out of bed to check out the lunar eclipse. The moon was almost completely in the shadow of the earth. Only a sliver on the right side was still brighter than the rest of the moon. I bundled up and went outside and took a good look at it. The cold Winter air was crisp, the sky was clear  and the moon was bathed in an eerie dark orange color. Coyotes were howling in the distance.

I noticed that someone had left the door to the hay shed open and the horses had pulled out a bale of hay and were eating it. I put the bale back and gave them a couple of flakes (they have an entire roll of hay in the pasture).

Then I went back to the house and got Laura and the kids out of bed to check the cool astronomical event. But when they finally were all bundled up and ready to go out there was nothing to see! In the 15 Minutes it had taken them to wake up and get ready clouds had rolled in. How disappointing! So they went back to bed and I stayed up for a while to see if there is any chance of a break in the clouds – but no. I’m going to bed now, too.

Starting on March 1, 2011, the German military will “suspend” the general draft that has been in effect since 1957. After that date, only volunteers will be drafted into German military service – which essentially transforms the German military into a volunteer army.

This morning Der Spiegel reported that the general draft is only suspended and not completely abolished so that it can be re-instated easily in case of a military conflict. The Federal agency that oversees the conscientious objectors – or Zivis – will be transformed into a national service agency – a sort-of domestic PeaceCorps – that will offer 35,000 men and women every year the opportunity to serve the country in civilian jobs at  non-profits and charitable organizations.

Personally, I am sad to see the draft “suspended” – I would have liked to see it transformed into a draft for a general “national service corps” where the military is one of many options for young Germans to apply their talents to serve the greater good. The two years I worked for the German Red Cross as a conscientious objector were a pretty important time for me and had a lot to do with choices I made later on.

Transforming the German military into an all-volunteer force probably makes sense from an efficiency and efficacy perspective. A smaller, professional force will be better equipped to deal with modern military assignments. But this might also weaken the military’s connection with the general population and its democratic foundation. Yet, of course, a general draft is such a Cold-War relic. I just wish someone had had the wisdom to turn the draft into a proper, progressive tool, not just get rid of it – or suspend it … how half-assed is that!?. But that’s certainly asking too much from the current, half-assed gang of comedians in Berlin.

Tonight, inspired by a recent post on BoingBoing, we braved the chilly 27F/-3C night and I handed the kids my trusty old binoculars and told them to take a look at Jupiter. As cold as it was, the sky was really clear and visibility was great. None of us had trouble spotting the four biggest  moons of the planet – which were the first objects in space observed to orbit an object other than the sun or the earth.

For the kids especially, it was an amazing experience to take a closer look at this bright spot in the night sky and to realize it’s Jupiter, and to be able to see Jupiter’s moons  just like that, with a pair of binoculars.

OUR moon also is amazing to watch – it is in its third quarter right now, and on a crisp, clear night you can see the texture of the surface and the curvature of the sphere. At the day/night border you can see the craters and mountains very clearly. It feels like you could reach and touch it. Very cool.

Not sure this is going to help resolve the crisis in Côte D’Ivoire:

The UN Security Council has issued a statement saying that Ivory Coast opposition candidate Alassane Ouattara won the disputed presidential election.

The statement came after three days of debate at the UN, in which Russia expressed concern that the UN was exceeding its mandate. (BBC, 12/9/10)

Gbago and his supporters have spent years attacking Ouattara and his supporters as being beholden to foreign interests. So all the international support for Ouattara might just play right into these fears and deepen the resistance of the South against a power transition.

It is curious, though, how eagerly the International Community does support Ouattara. In my experience, the ECOWAS, AU, EU, UN, etc … tend to either stay out of domestic power struggles or carefully support the status quo over change. Most of the time, they really don’t have a mandate to get involved anyway. Apparently the UN argues it does have a mandate in Côte D’Ivoire based on the peace treaty after the 2002 civil war. I suspect that Ouattara, a former Deputy Managing Director at the IMF, has a strong international network, which makes him attractive to these international organizations.

However, I wonder if it is in the best interest of the people of Côte D’Ivoire for the UN to take sides. If this strategy causes Gbago to dig in his heels even more, it will deepen the distrust and cause more suffering to the ordinary people.

As of last weekend, Côte D’Ivoire has two competing presidents: incumbent president Laurent Gbagbo, and is challenger Alassane Ouattara, whom the international community considers the winner of the run-off election. The electoral commission, controlled by Ouattara’s party RDR, certified the result of the Nov. 28 runoff and declared Ouattara the winner with 54 percent of the votes. The Ivoirian Constitutional Court, however, is controlled by Gbago’s party FPI and it refused to certify the result. So Gbago was declared the winner by his supporters and sworn in – the same day Ouattara was sworn in at an Abidjan hotel guarded by UN troops.

On the surface the situation looks simple – the ruling party is clinging to power, supported by the army. But it’s not that simple. Yes – Gbago and his party are clinging to power and it does look like they lost a reasonably fair election. But this is so much more complicated than a mere political power struggle because of the ethnic dimension. Simply put, the country is divided North vs. South and Gbago is supported by the South – dominated by Kwa and Krou – and Ouattara is supported by the North – home of the Gour and Mandé people. Currently the North is controlled by the rebel “New Forces” who support Ouattara and the South by the regular military, which supports the Gbago and the Status Quo.

That’s not all. Apparently there has been a long-running dispute regarding Ouattara’s eligibility to run for office at all.

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Today, we had our first snow this winter. The weather report called for some flurries tonight, but instead we had about a 1/2 inch of snow this afternoon.  I went out around 5:00 to see if I could get to the grocery store, but even Guess Rd. was totally covered, and so I turned around. No need to risk anything for some goceries … going back up the hill it got a bit interesting with the Mercedes, as the wheels started slipping and spinning. Made it OK, but I almost had to walk home.

Funny – 10 days ago it was 77 Deg. F (25 C)  – I did not see this coming … Wally and Cleo are pretty well unfazed by the snow. They had their heads buried in the hay bale all day. Now that the apples are gone, the hay is dwindling rapidly, again.

FIFA just announced some interesting choices for the Worldcup hosts for 2018 and 2022 … Russia will host the 2018 Worldcup …  considering the  safety discussion around the Worldcup in South Africa, the safety discussion should be really interesting regarding the country with the worst hooligans and worst xenophobia problems in Europe.  And Quatar? Yeah – that’s a lovely place in the summer. No crime problems here. Too f@(%!’n hot for crime, there. And good luck with those air conditioned stadiums … Well, I hope it works out OK. Congratulations to Russia and Quatar!

The internet has done it again. It has spawned yet another amusing way to waste huge amounts of perfectly good time: product reviews of some of the more absurd items on Amazon.com. Tuscan Whole Milk for $99??!! And … more than 1200 reviews for this product!! Or a $6,000-speaker cable … or a jar of uranium ore … a JL421 Badonkadonk Land Cruiser/Tank maybe? Only $19,999.95 … Or maybe just  a delicious, “fresh whole rabbit” or a Male Testicular Exam Model Anatomy … or maybe, just maybe you always wanted a yodeling pickle??

As odd as some of these products may be, the reviews are truly absurd – and funny.

… I noticed to my surprise when I hooked them into my Mole-Richardson 4-Phase Warp-Drive power amp (hand built by a guy in india called Gandhi) The “gain” knob directly modified the temperature of the sun, which was very impressive. … ($6,000 speaker cable)

I ordered one of these Fresh “Whole” Rabbits, but when it arrived its head, fur and insides were missing. Not exactly whole, I’d say! Maybe it was just damaged during shipping, but I won’t be buying another one. (Fresh “Whole” Rabbit)

I purchased this product 4.47 Billion Years ago and when I opened it today, it was half empty. (Uranium Ore)

There is the occasional adult humor, especially with some items

Finally, a rubber scrotum that I can use for exam training purposes. My room mate was going “nuts” (pardon the pun) because I kept trying to use his. I wish he wasn’t such a light sleeper. Oh well. (Male Testicular Exam Model Anatomy)

On my beach walks, I’ve found that the pickle can be carried around by conveniently tucking it down into the front of my Speedo. I’ve met tons of nice ladies on the beach since scoring the pickle. (Yodeling Pickle)

Some of the “product reviews” or not just funny or odd, but fairly elaborate video musical productions, like this one for the mystical Three Wolf Moon t-shirt (incl. a warning not to spill Tuscan Whole Milk on the shirt). Yet others are skillfully crafted pieces of literary art  … could this be the birth of a new literary form? The  Amazon review short story?

We live underground. We speak with our hands. We wear the earplugs all our lives.

PLEASE! You must listen! We cannot maintain the link for long… I will type as fast as I can.

DO NOT USE THE CABLES!

We were fools, fools to develop such a thing! Sound was never meant to be this clear, this pure, this… accurate. For a few short days, we marveled. Then the… whispers… began.
(read the rest)

And some are just epic … like this one for the Tuscan Whole Milk:

Once upon a mid-day sunny, while I savored Nuts ‘N Honey,
With my Tuscan Whole Milk, 1 gal, 128 fl. oz., I swore
As I went on with my lapping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at the icebox door.
‘Bad condensor, that,’ I muttered, ‘vibrating the icebox door –
Only this, and nothing more.’

more below the fold …

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Last Thursday was Thanksgiving (yes – some people who read this might not know that. I responded to an email from a guy in England on Thanksgiving … he was wondering why no one in the office picked up the phone or answered emails.) We usually take off Wednesday and – of course – Thursday is a holiday. Laura’s sister visited and Laura cooked a wonderful brined Turkey. After the feast we sat around a campfire and had some fine Cognac, while the horses sniffled our heads and munched on their Orchard grass.

On Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving) in the afternoon, we had some friends over and we tapped a keg of Foothills Sexual Chocolate Stout. Dan and I had acquired that keg last February when the 2010 edition of that beer was released. I made a fire next to the pond and we baked potatoes and made s’mores and … drank a bunch of positively fantastic beer. As the evening wore on, some of us got on the zipline and zipped across the pond on it, while others paddled around on the pond in the kajak – all in the dark – just with flashlights.And yes – we ended up having to fish some people out of the pond. Read the rest of this entry »

Polystyrene, better known by its trade name Styrofoam, is a huge environmental burden to our planet.  This petroleum-based plastic is found everywhere, from disposable coffee cups to packaging to insulation. Styrofoam cannot be recycled  and it takes a thousand years to decompose. Americans throw away 25,000,000,000 Styrofoam cups each year and many, many products are packaged in Styrofoam. And when you break it, the damn stuff clings to everything!

So I was exited to find out that a biodegradable, non-toxic replacement material is on the horizon – made from milk and clay.

Scientist led by engineering professor David Schiraldi strengthened a cow milk protein, casein, with clay and glyceraldehyde (a triose monosaccharide).  They chose casein, already popular for use in adhesives, because it is water soluble.  Alone, casein is not ideal for packaging, but mixing it with the other two ingredients and freeze drying that mixture creates an aerogel, which is then baked in an oven to create a substance comparable to traditional Styrofoam.  Milk Styrofoam is sturdy, lightweight, and largely biodegradable.  The material is not yet mainstream as researchers are still working out practical and technological kinks. (InventorSpot)

If you have read my posts over the summer, you’ll know that we pretty much spent our summer vacation building a 1200 foot (400 M) pasture fence. Well, Google Earth noticed too, and took some great pictures of our work – from space!

Google hat vor Kurzem die Satelitenphotos von unserer Gegend erneuert und mir ist aufgefallen dass man unseren Weidezaun sehr gut sehen kann, da die Erde um die Pfostenlöcher noch nicht mit Grass bewachsen sind. Man kann auch meinen Pickup unter dem Baum an der Nordseite des Zaunes sehen. Das gab mir die Idee nach Satellitenbildern von anderen Projekten zu suchen.

Looking at the highest-resolution version of the picture, I can see the truck parked under the trees at the northern fence line. It looks like the gates and the fence are done, but you can still see the tire tracks of the truck, so we were probably still working on either finishing the fence or on building the shed. When we moved the horses in, I did not leave the truck in the pasture any more, and the grass had grown so much that I doubt the tracks would have still been visible. So that photo must have been taken in early to mid-July.

This got me thinking of other projects I was involved in that are visible on these satellite photos.

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Sunday afternoon we went Trick-or-treating in the neighborhood with some friends and with Waldo and Cleo.The horses behaved themselves as much as can be expected. The cars and dogs did not bother them much, but Cleo did not like the stop signs. After 1 1/2 hours it started getting dark and and they had had enough, so we  took them back home and headed out to Halloweeno …

It’s fall and the snakes are on the move. A while ago, Laura and I saw a (we think) Northern Watersnake by the pond and recently, I had to kill a big Copperhead near the horses shelter (and hay storage). A few days ago, I caught a juvenile Ratsnake inside the hay storage, and today Jacob spotted another one in the pasture and Laura caught it. Here are the pictures of the ratsnakes:

Ratsnake no. 1

Ratsnake no.2

These are all quite common snakes in the N.C. Piedmont, so It’s no surprise to see them. Still, they are fascinating and very beautiful creatures. And the little ratsnake is probably going to school for show-and-tell before we set him free again …

Leaving work this afternoon, I encountered this beauty in the parking lot; a 1956 or 57 Porsche 356 Speedster (early Type A).

I think this is one of the prettiest cars ever built. Yes it was essentially a souped-up beetle. But as such it combined the efficiency and simplicity of the early beetles with the spunk and style of a performance racecar. To this day, this is the essence of Zuffenhausen’s finest motor vehicles.

(Deutsch weiter unten)
Cleo and Wally have been living with us now for 2 months and, I dare say, our horse-farm project is going really well. Laura has put a huge effort into training and care, to get our two new family members into top form. She (and Julia and Gaylen) have worked hard to clear up Wally’s rain-rot skin condition with regular grooming, washing and various treatments, and she’s treated some minor thrush on Cleo’s hoofs. We invested in a lot of nice hay and good, locally sourced grain in addition to the forage from our pasture (and the apple trees). The results of these efforts are now visible – just look at the pictures below.

Yesterday, Wally and Cleo had their first vet checkup with us, and the vet confirmed that they are in great shape and perfectly healthy. He floated Wally’s teeth (filed the sharp bits of his teeth) and gave both a good looking-over. This vet gets around a lot and sees a wide variety of horse property, from backyard pastures to big barns, and he gave our setup a “thumbs up!” Check out how nice Wally and Cleo look, now that we’ve fattened them up a a bit and trained them. Compare that to 2 months ago.

Wally lookin’ good

Cleo is pretty fancy

More picture in the Photogallery

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… or horse manure, to be precise, is a wonderful thing.That’s because the biodiesel production process produces also a significant amount of glycerol that needs to be disposed of (circa 10 Gallons per 50-gallon batch of biodiesel). For years I have taken the stuff to various horse farms in the area and blended it into their composting manure piles. Now that we have horses I can do this right here. However, we have no barn – just a run-in shelter, so I have begun collecting horse manure from all over the pasture. I blended every wheelbarrow of manure with five gallons (20 liters) of glycerol and in that manner constructed the elegant poop pile below, where about 80 gallons (320 liters) of glycerol are now composting into wonderful juicy dirt. Next year we’ll use that dirt to start a little garden and grow some veggies from our bioddieseled horsepoop.

Horse manure with 80 gallons of glycerol

Yeah! We did it! In April this year we set out on our horse-farm adventure and today I call it complete. We bought the pasture, built the fence, built the run-in shelter, cleaned up the weeds and brush in and around the pasture … and, most importantly, we got the horses.

Today, we finished the tack storage in the shelter, put on the last bit of hardware on the fence (gate wires and closures) and installed a light in the shelter. I call it done. At least the “construction phase” is definitely done now. There is still some cleanup to do. The work never ends. We also want to paint the shelter. But all the important parts are in place now.

Waldo and Cleo are now quite at home. I am very pleased that they seem to like the shelter and spend a bit of time there every day (mostly to poop). When I am working on the shelter, they always come over to check out what I am doing (and to see if I have any treats). They always sniff over all the tools … and lick some of them. When I work on something I sometimes look up and look right at Cleo’s face. She looks at me like “Uhh … what yer doing there?” It’s really funny. She is very curious and she has to have her big ole nose in whatever is going on. At one point she tried to climb into the truck to see if there are any treats in there.

The only damper on our excitement about finishing this project today was the big copperhead snake I had to kill right outside the shelter. These snakes are always more active in the fall, and I suspect he was attracted by the mice that are already moving into the shelter.  The mice are a bit annoying, so I have been encouraging the cats to come out there. But I just  can’t have a copperhead roaming the shelter where the horses and my kids hang out all the time. And you really cannot relocate a poisonous snake. It’s dangerous, and no one else wants one in their back yard, either. So, I am afraid I had to end its exploits. Sorry!

What a summer! This was a lot of work, and it feels good to call it done. But there is much more. We want to clean up the pond, build a tree house, make a campsite and I want to get a pulling harness for Waldo so he can help me clean up the fallen trees in the woods. That’ll be fun!

This is beautiful mystery of nature: on a dry lake bed in Death Valley in California, rocks are moving around and no one knows exactly how or why. The rocks leave tracks in the dirt and they appear to move sometimes at speeds faster than a human walking. Yet, no one has ever seen one move. The sailing stones of Racetrack Playa have inspired many theories: from aliens, gravitational abnormalities and compressed gasses in the rocks to wind, water and ice pushing them around.

This is beautiful because it is such a poetic and stubborn mystery. For decades researchers have tried to figure this out. But so far no one has ever observed the actual event. Probably it is also not really a huge scientific priority. It’s not like solving the “mystery of the sailing stones” would earn a scientist a Nobel prize. But the effort to figure this out would be considerable. This is a very remote and hostile environment, with brutal temperature changes, hurricane-force winds and sudden flash-floods. The stones apparently may not move for years, and when they move they do it suddenly.

And yes – they have attached GPS devices and eventually someone will set up a camera with a motion detection system and capture a the mysterious event. But until then, we get to enjoy the mystery. It’s good to know that there are still such strange puzzles out there. This one feels a little bit as though nature had a sense of humor.

Preserved at 50 Meters depth on a ship wreck in the Northern Baltic Sea, divers discovered a cache of roughly 200-year-old beer and champagne. Experts seem to think the drinks are still good, because they were “stored” at a constant temperature of about 5° Celsius in total darkness. CNN – Sept. 3, 2010:

“At the moment, we believe that these are by far the world’s oldest bottles of beer,” Rainer Juslin, permanent secretary of the island’s ministry of education, science and culture, told CNN on Friday via telephone from Mariehamn, the capital of the Aland Islands.

“It seems that we have not only salvaged the oldest champagne in the world, but also the oldest still drinkable beer. The culture in the beer is still living.”

Very cool – I’d love to taste that stuff!