These Seeds Are Giving Their Lives For Science

We're scheduled to do a major remodel of our house and yard this year, although with the way California regulations work, we may not get our permits until 2032. Our contractor thinks they'll start in June. July is possible. My growing season is effectively shot. In spite of that, I'm taking another swing at watermelon and tobacco.

It's probably a total waste of energy, but I wasn't going to be doing anything else anyway, so why not?

Eastern San Diego, where I live, is more desert than coastal. That means that until later in the year, the nights are too cold for plants from Dixie to get going. I'm keeping the seed trays indoors at night, not that is helping much. We don't turn on our heater at night, so the house gets down into the low fifties. In the day, I put them out on the hot tub cover which acts as a solar butt warmer for the plants. Not because of the hot water inside, but because the cover absorbs sunlight and converts it to heat on its surface.

Anywho, while those seeds are floundering around, I'll be working on some science and engineering projects for the future. In the past, I played with Raspberry Pis and really liked them. I've got an idea for Raspberry Pi-controlled greenhouses and tobacco fermentation chambers. I recently bought this little temperature and humidity sensor and will be learning how to connect it to a Pi.

It's a data logger that connects to your phone via Bluetooth. I was hoping for a WiFi sensor I could access from my server, but those are kind of expensive. My Pi will have to act as a gateway and controller. Since it's Bluetooth, the sensor is a serial device, which means I need to learn how to get at those from either PHP or Python. I know PHP very well, but I've never used Python. I've discovered that it's the number 1 programming language in the civilized world right now, so I think Python lessons will be included in this effort.

I'll blog more about how this all progresses as ... well, as it progresses.

Russia Vs Ukraine

This is a real bum fight. Russia's army is stalled out close to its border. Meanwhile, all kinds of sanctions are being leveled on Russia and some of them look pretty severe. However, Reuters is reporting that Germany still has ways to pay for its oil and gas imports, so there's that.

I looked at the German order of battle for the invasion of Poland in 1939 and compared it to Russia's order of battle for the invasion of Ukraine a week ago. The world-class Wehrmacht going into Poland was ten to fifteen times the size of the vodka-soaked Russian invasion forces. Picking comparable waypoints, the 1939 Wehrmacht blew through Poznan like it wasn't even there on the way to Warsaw. The Russkies of today are struggling to take Kharkiv which is about 30 miles from their border.

Never send a Putin to do a Hitler's job. The guy is not a global threat, he's not a threat to us, he's just another regional warlord. Yes, he has nukes, but they don't mean a thing if you're not going to use them. Meanwhile, the media is whipping us up into a frenzy of Ukrainophilia.

Don't get me wrong, I'm on their side. I'd would love to see Putin take one in the back of the head and get replaced by an oligarch who is more interested in maintaining a flock of 17-year-old hotties to infest his yacht and dacha than recreating the Russian Empire. That's looking more and more likely as the Russians struggle with tackling a nation even less capable than 1939 Poland. 

Just don't tell me this is a globally big deal. Here in the US, our southern border is letting in an invasion force the size of Russia's every three weeks. That doesn't seem to bother our media at all.

Meanwhile, you're still a racist.