Author: admin

Wasting time

Your time.  Can’t get it back. How many days have you thrown away the hours? Sometimes there appears to be a good reason, but usually there isn’t. I’m as guilty as anyone of not maximizing my time on earth. Changing ones habits?  That’s another story.

The highly productive musicians who’s lives were cut short, Mozart, Hendrix, Coltrane, Dolphy etc. seemed to be keenly aware that their time was short and yet made the most of it. They didn’t just blow off months and months in a pub.

Challenge questions

In an effort to combat forum spam, I’m experimenting with challenge questions. It’s an interesting problem with a seemingly infinite amount of options. The typical 2+2 = ? is too easy for the bots, as are most math problems. Word problems, especially ones that are relevant to the forum are proving more effective. This may be for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that the questions are in English and the bots coming out of China don’t know what they mean (any more than I can understand the simplest of Chinese characters).

Then there’s the logic behind the question. This can be set very high or low. Set to an extreme, you can be sure that only a handful of people would know the answer, for example, who attended a private event. Other techniques, such as using various forms of cryptology to scramble or obfuscate the questions, is another direction an admin could go to weed out the bots.

Bob’s weed killer (part 2)

Next target: Blackberry

Blackberry is the main reason I concocted this salt weed killer, because there is tons of it here.  In researching salinity sensitivity in plants, I was encouraged  to see that blackberry is very sensitive.  So far in the plants I’ve sprayed, this seems to be true! In only a few hours, the leaves are wilting.  The test of course will be if it gets to the root ball and finishes it off for good.

9/10 10:56 am

12:56 am

 

9/11

I ran out of the Hain Sea Salt which I had got at Grocery Outlet for $0.50 per pound a few months ago. Decided to try 40 lb bag of Diamond Crystal Solar Naturals salt which I picked up at the local grocery for $8.

The salt crystals are course, not fine, like the Hain was and consequently don’t dissolve as quickly. Lots of stirring needed. After spraying some blackberry, the results don’t seem to be as good as they were with the Hain. I figure the salinity wasn’t as high, so now I’m grinding up the salt into a fine powder using my coffee to see if that makes a difference.

From what I’ve read online about sea water salinity and salt absorption, sea water is some 35 grams of salt per liter whereas the maximum salt saturation level in water is nearly 10x that at 357 grams of salt per liter. I’m guessing that’s probably where the first batch using the Hain was at, not so sure about the Diamond Crystal. Will know more later today, when I hit the blackberry using the salt powder water.

Seawater has a salinity of roughly 35,000 ppm, equivalent to 35 grams of salt per one liter (or kilogram) of water. The saturation level is dependent on the temperature of the water. At 20 °C one liter of water can dissolve about 357 grams of salt, a concentration of 26.3%.

9/14 10:36 am

Salt water is doing the trick! Everything I spray it on quickly begins to wilt and start to die.

Bob’s weed killer experiment

9/6/2019

1 gal water
2 pounds salt
1 squirt Dawn

The target: Spray leaves of small Live Oak tree cut last month that is now suckering up (I know Round Up would work, but will this? – hope so!)

9/7/2019
9:30 am – first spray
3:50 pm – seems to be working!

3:50 pm – second spray

9/8/2019

8:00 am  – third spray.  Rained/misted last night and washed off the leaves.  Still looks to be working as is evidenced by the drooping stems.

1:49 pm

9/9/2019

7:55 am

6:58 pm

9/14

4:01 pm