Most Watched Forager In The World
Hello there, I’m Green Deane and I’ve been foraging since I was a child or for nearly 60 years.
Long before I went to school my mother would hand me a table knife and a paper bag and tell me to go find some dandelion greens for supper. While doing that I noticed wild strawberries, later checkerberries, raspberries, apples and roses. My mother foraged as did my grandmother and great grandmother. I learned about plants long before I learned what their names were.
As a latchkey kid I also spent a lot of time alone in the woods, hiking, camping, fishing, exploring rivers, stone walls, old orchards, mountains, woods roads and old homesteads. I also made my first batch of home made cooking-malt beer then dandelion wine while in junior high.
After military service and college I moved from the land of ice and snow to orange groves and gardening year round. I studied locally with noted forager Dick Deureling and was a member of the Native Plant Society. Foraging is like rigging, you learn by doing.
I started to give wild food presentations about 20 years ago. Towards that end I created my “Itemizing” system to help beginners not only organize information but to give them a successful method to investigate a plant and make sure key points are covered. Nearly all of my plant articles are organized with my system in mind and I wrote every one. A few years ago I started making wild edible videos for my friends. That has made me via You Tube the most watched forager in the world with around two million views. I also started a foraging website in 2008. I teach about wild edibles full time. My goal is to help people who want to know more about foragables to enjoy the process and be safe while doing so. While I am now based in Florida my website and experience includes northern climates and international foraging.
I hold a degree in education, summa cum laude, from the University of Maine and did two years of graduate study in communication at the University of Central Florida. I am the author of two published books and am an award-winning writer and photographer. Besides being a life-long professional musician, my interests include cooking, cast netting, canoeing, kayaking, dancing and visiting relatives in Greece. Somehow through all of that I also manged to unintentionally remain a bachelor.
While most of the articles are about plants and a few off-beat animals there are some editorials here and there. If you are a beginning forager you might want to get started with my videos and read the accompanying articles in that the first several dozen videos are in seasonal order. Learning a plant or two a month is quite easy.
You can contact me personally here. Thanks for visiting. Toodles
http://www.eattheweeds.com/about/
utube channel
http://www.youtube.com/eattheweeds
The Chinese seem to take the mayan thing seriously,
Chinese survival pods to defend against 'apocalypse' (PHOTOS, VIDEO)
As believers across the globe prepare for the forecast Mayan apocalypse, a Chinese villager says he’s going to save humanity with his giant tsunami proof survival pods.
The pods are made using a fiberglass casing over a steel frame, cost $48,000 each to make and are equipped with oxygen tanks, food and water supplies. They also come with seat belts – essential for surviving in storms.
“The pod won’t have any problems even if there are 1,000 meter high waves, its like a ping pong ball, its skin may be thin but it can withstand a lot of pressure,” the balls’ creator Liu Qiyuan, told AFP from his workshop outside Beijing.
“The pods are designed to carry 14 people at a time, but it’s possible for 30 people to survive inside for at least two months,” insisted Liu
Indeed, their insulation is such that “a person could live for four months in the pod at the north or south pole without freezing,” Liu continued.
Liu explained that he was inspired into making the spheres after seeing the Hollywood disaster film “2012”, which is itself inspired by the expiry of the Mayan calendar on the 21st December 2012. The Mayans were an ancient American civilization whose 5000 year old calendar shortly ends.
“If there really is some kind of apocalypse then you could say I’ve made a contribution to the survival of humanity,” said Liu.
Farmer Liu Qiyuan posing with survival pods that he created and dubbed 'Noah's Arc', in the village of Qiantun, Hebei province, south of Beijing (AFP Photo / Ed Jones)
Despite their tough design Liu is yet to sell any of the pods and he’s worried about paying back the loans he took out to build them.
“I worked for many years without saving much money…invested most of my money in the pods, because it’s worth it, it’s about saving lives,” he said.
But Liu isn’t alone in his bid to save mankind. A businessman in China’s eastern Zhejiang province has built 21 similar spherical survival pods which he’s called “Noah’s Ark” and sells for 5 million yuan each.
While another Chinese man from the northwestern Xinjiang province invested all his life savings of $160,000 to build an ark in case his home is flooded out.
Meanwhile, Chinese authorities have sought to reassure citizens that the world is not going to end on December 21st. Beijing police have posted an online notice telling people that “the so-called end of the world is a rumor” and citizens should instead use “scientific concepts.”
http://rt.com/news/apocalypse-china-survival-pods-004/ And some Americans, this is from Survival Blog yesterday Packin' for the 'pocalypse: Several readers have sent me letters with this theme: "Due to the erroneous Mayan prophecy date of December 21st, 2012, there is a strong possibility of some self-fulfilling prophecies on an individual level, such as suicides, murder-suicides, mass-suicides, or people 'going postal' in public places." They recommend that everyone that has a CCW permit or that lives in a Constitutional Carry state to fully exercise their right to carry (and pack a few extra magazines) between now and December 31, 2012. That sounds wise to me!
http://www.survivalblog.com/2012/12/odds-n-sods-2451.html
This from last year, but nice to know. I know a few years ago Buckshot (of Buck shot Trapper fame) http://www.survival-center.com/buckshot/ recommended the Pal light, that worked off 9 volt.
pak-lite…it is like inhuman lighting machine…
I guess the title is true..it really IS an inhuman lighting machine. so is a match. I digress.
.the pak-lite..avert your eyes..AHHHHH! 2 settings..high for 60 hours, low for eternity setting
We have officially had the pak-lite lit up for over 1 month. It was rated for 600 hours on an everyday cheap 9v battery and now we are up to 756 hour of non-stop running. Neat stuff..you can get 9v batteries for next to nothing so this is going to be great. I also got my red light pak-lite in the mail yesterday so I am going to run this one too and see if there is much of a difference when using different LED’s..I got the red so I could have night vision but still see for when I do things like star-gaze or hunting snipes…and for security too. If someone is thinking of breaking into a place and they see a video security camera lit up with a red light I think that they will think that security is active..Its sort of like the movie ‘Clerks’..not the movie but an idea in that movie..If people think they are being watched they will usually follow established norms..I am hoping that the norm that they feel obligated to follow is the one where people don’t break into other peoples houses. If they decide to break established norms then I hope they break into my house ONLY to make my bed..that would be really odd and against so many norms it could blow my mind.
Pak-lite…over and done.
..so last night the old pak-lite got to a level that it was not really lighting anything up anymore..it WAS still lit but it was not doing much more that that..so for the porpoises of this eggsperiment I am going to say: DONE.
the final totals are in…1 pak-lite with one 9v battery was switched on and stayed on for a total of:
2,851,200 seconds or 47,520 minutes or 792 hours..which equals out to $0.0025 per hour.
…not too bad for $2 worth of batteries. I set up the new red light too..looks really great and lights up the front of my video camera. its only a trick but from anything further then 20ft it looks like a security camera that is on..so it will accomplish its task for now.
Anyway..just a quick post. Happy Holidays everyone!
http://eagergridlessbeaver.wordpress.com/2010/12/22/pak-lite-it-is-like-inhuman-lighting-machine/
http://9voltlight.com/ Pak-lites website http://www.palights.com/ Pal litghts web site
Princeton’s nanomesh nearly triples solar cell efficiency
inShareThere is huge potential in solar power. The sun is a giant ball of burning hydrogen in the sky, and it’s going to be sticking around for at least a few more billion years. For all intents and purposes, it’s a free source of energy. Sadly, humanity hasn’t been very good at harnessing its power directly. Our current methods of capturing the sun’s energy are very inefficient. For example, modern silicon and indium-tin-oxide-based solar cells are approaching the theoretical limit of 33.7% efficiency. Well, a research team at Princeton has used nanotechnology to create a mesh that increases efficiency over organic solar cells nearly three fold.
Led by Stephen Chou, the team has made two dramatic improvements: reducing reflectivity, and more effectively capturing the light that isn’t reflected. As you can see by the illustration below by Dimitri Karetnikov, Princeton’s new solar cell is much thinner and less reflective. By utilizing sandwiched plastic and metal with the nanomesh, this so-called “Plasmonic Cavity with Subwavelength Hole array” or “PlaCSH” substantially reduces the potential for losing the light itself. In fact, it only reflects about 4% of direct sunlight, leading to a 52% higher efficiency than conventional, organic solar cells.
PlaCSH is also capable of capturing a large amount of sunlight even when the sunlight is dispersed on cloudy days, which results in an amazing 81% increase in efficiency under indirect lighting conditions when compared to conventional organic solar cell technology. All told, PlaCSH is up to 175% more efficient than conventional solar cells. As you can see in the image to the right, the difference in reflectivity between conventional and PlaCSH solar cells is really quite dramatic.
The gold mesh that sits on top is incredibly small. It’s only 30 nanometers thick. The holes in the mesh are a mere 175nm in diameter. This replaces the much thicker traditional top layer made out of indium-tin-oxide (ITO). This is the most important part of the innovation. Because the mesh is actually smaller than the wavelength of the light it’s trying to collect, it exploits the bizarre way that light works in subwavelength structures. This unique physical property allows the researchers to effectively capture the light once it enters the holes in the mesh instead of letting much of it reflect away. The bottom layer of the cell remains the same, but this implementation allows the semiconducting layer of plastic in the middle of the cell to be much thinner.
The research team believes that the cells can be made cost effectively using a nanofabrication method that Chou himself invented over a decade ago. Most importantly, it replaces the costly ITO element from solar cells. This will be affordable, and much more flexible than the brittle ITO layer of traditional solar cells. While research is still being done using semiconducting materials other than plastic, this method should work for silicon and gallium arsenide solar cells as well, so it will be able to reduce the size and cost of them drastically while providing similar efficiency benefits.
This is all very new, and the information was only published to the internet in the past few weeks, but this technology has the potential to make solar power a financially sound investment for more people. Not only will we be able to generate more power, but it will use less resources to make the cells. We’ll obviously still be using fossil fuels for decades to come, but this research and other breakthroughs like it are accelerating the rate at which we can move to alternate energy sources. (Which is probably a good thing, considering star-encompassing Dyson spheres are still a few years away from becoming a reality…)
Now read: Is the slumping solar market temporary or a long-term trend?
Research paper: http://dx.doi.org/10.1364/OE.21.000A60 – “Ultrathin, high-efficiency, broad-band, omni-acceptance, organic solar cells enhanced by plasmonic cavity with subwavelength hole array”
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/142962-princetons-nanomesh-nearly-triples-solar-cell-efficiency
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