Best place to Live?

[AndyF]

>> You never see industry owned timber land going up in flames. That's because it's valuable, it's their future, so they manage and protect it. It's probably much higher quality forest for enduring this "management" and probably support more wildlife and more "diverse" wildlife.

Having worked in the Forest Products industry with the nation's largest private landowner, all that I can say about this comment is that is wrong. Much of the industrially owned and managed forest, especially in the south and up in Maine is really more of a farm than what people think of as a forest. Think single species, even aged stands cut as soon as they can be run through a stud mill or pulped. You're right that they usually don't burn, but corn fields usually don't burn up either. You're wrong on diverse wildlife. With young even aged stands, you don't get a lot of diversity. Sure there might be some buffer strips along a river or lakefront and some areas which are set aside for habitat protection, but most of the land doesn't support a real diverse wildlife population.

On the positive side, the "forests" are high yielding, and up until the company is ready to sell them fairly well managed tree farms. I'm glad the forest products companies have them and utilize them efficiently, but they are not a good model for our national forests.

Our national forests are a different animal, they typically aren't in areas which can be managed to be as productive as a private forest, which is why they are public, if they were real good productive forests, the government would have been able to sell them.

The national forests are supposed to provide more than just cheap government subsidized timber. They also provide recreational and hunting opportunities and space for wildlife to live. They're also going to have fires sometimes and if someone's house burns down that's part of living in the forest, just like hurricanes are a fact of life on the Atlantic coast and tornadoes are part of living in Oklahoma.

[Pat]

austi

You said, "And because of its complexity, chaos theory states that certain effects cannot be modelled, or predicted. "

Would you mind providing a reference to where a clear, concise, and communicable exposition of "Chaos Theory" could be found that unambiguously supports your statement, in context?

I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with your general contention but your apparent "fluency" in chaos has piqued my curiosity. Sweeping generalizations are often amusing to disect.

Pat

[Pat]

tdenny, Didn't you kind of "gloss over" San Diego? There is more than just beach access and good weather. What about being less than an hour from snow in the mountains in the winter, an hour from beautiful desert locations, significant water sport recreation locations, dune buggy-4wheeler off roading opportunities, proximity to Baja California and its many recreational opportunities, urban and rural bike trails, mountain biking, world class colleges and universities, great health care facilities, vast varieties of fresh produce at good prices, a decent baseball and football teams, and on and on. It is a vacation destination for many visitors. It has an average rainfall on the ordere of 13 inches per year so you aren't rained out very often. It is irrigated desert with climate mitigation due to proximity to Pacific ocean and prevailing westerlies. I saw one brief and extremely light snowfall in 35 years. Virtually no one in our neighborhood had A/C and it would not have been needed very often. The most serious drawback after the usual ills of overpopulation is $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ which is why we moved from a delightful neighborhood less than a mile from the beach, 2 miles to our yacht club, and 3 miles from our workplace to a rural location in South Central Oklahoma. The entire state of Oklahoma has fewer people than the county of San Diego and decent land is much more afordable. Rush hour traffic congestion in Oklahoma city is about equivalent to the lightest that traffic gets in San Diego. Away from the city, traffic gets pretty sparse. Of course there are tornados but tornado violence does not exceed reasonably prepared shelters. Earthquake violence can easily exceed your best preperations.

I have been to the "Garden of Eden" locales of Washington and Oregon. Some are beautiful, in the right season, and if weather cooperates but it all too frequently doesn't. Sequim, Washington (pronounced skwim) was a huge dissapointment. It misted and rained for the week I was there. I guess folks who don't know any better, like it, In light rain and mist they carry on as if it were a sunny day and comparitively I guess maybe it was. Sequim is touted as being in the "rain shadow" of the Ho peninsula (rain forrest) and has much less rain than surrounding areas. I think it is like wading in a swamp that is only a foot deep rather than in the "bad" swamp where it is 2-4 ft deep.

I hate to dwell on $$$ but... I traded a postage stamp rental property in a mediocre mixed neighborhood of San Diego where it wasn't safe to walk at night for the equivalent of 25 city blocks of gently rolling parkland with 8 stocked fishing ponds (now 10) with improvements (35x70 shop, haybarn, good well, fenced and cross fenced and so on.) I have oodles of wild turkey, deer, some quail, racoons, possum, fox, coyote, occasional bald eagle, and a plethora of other birds and mamals as well as various frogs, turtles, lizards, etc. Pecan and hickory trees, blackberries and various mushrooms and willd greens. The downside is that the weather isn't perfect. Some years we get more than a light dusting of snow. We are subject to power outages from lightning and ice storms. We don't have and can't get cable (satellite is good) and telephone is not the best service we ever had but not too bad. There are a surprising number of EX-Californians in this area so I am not the only one to retire and move here.

I have a pair of Canadian geese raising three goslings at one of my ponds so gotta go now and toss them some corn so they may be tempted to stay.

Pat

[Pat]

Thadeus, Where are you buying CFLs for about $2.50??????? Are you talking complete screw in replacements for tungsten, complete with built in ballasts or are you thinking of JUST THE FLUORESCENT TUBE???

Pat

[EJB]

>>I traded a postage stamp rental property in a mediocre mixed neighborhood of San Diego where it wasn't safe to walk at night for the equivalent of 25 city

Juswt curious, but how many acres is about "25 city blocks"?

[Pat]

EJB, City blocks vary in size but I guessed from about 10 to 15 per mile. To be conservative I chose 10 blocks per mile. My parcel of land is approx 1/2 mile x 1/2 mile or 5x5 blocks or 25 square blocks. It is 160 acres more or less (just a tad over since the section that my quarter section is in is a little oversized.) I wasn't trying to be super accurate, just put it in terms that might promote better understanding. Not everyone can visualize 160 acres or 1/2 mile by 1/2 mile.

The purpose of this comparison was to illustrate the relative land costs of one area (not really desireable) to another (pretty nice). I think the property in San Diego was about 80x145 or about the size of the house/garage/shop I'm buillding which is financed through the sale of a small San Diego lot with a 1500 sqft stucco frame house built in 1928. Of course this second house was in a better location location location.

Costs to build are cheaper our here as well. I expect to build this home for about what I sold my prevous one for. the difference being it was 1500 sq ft on a postage stamp and this one will have over 4000 sq ft of finished space and another approx 12-1500 sqft of space we aren't planning on finishing and a 48x57 ft garage-shop-tractor/implement parking storage building attached to the house and finished ouit to match.

No way could I ever aspire to build this in SOCAL. A good point to make is that the relative costs are out of proportion to the actual relative benefits. Luckily, many folks don't know any better and don't know how desireable a location this is(help me keep the secret!) The number of city folk buying out in the rural hinterlands is on the rise. A friend in realty tells me that there is a significant flow of Californians to the rural midwest and that Oklahoma is getting a good portion of them.

I like the space! I have room for a 1000 meter target range!

Pat

[austi012]

Pat:

For an exposition of the theory, with weather as a prime point of discussion, see 'Chaos: Making a New Science' by James Gleick. Very readable.

For compact florescents (ballasts and all) I get 'em at Home Depot. Bought a 3-pack of 25 watters for 5.59 about a month ago on sale. They have them now with the light frequency 'adjusted', so you don't get that sickly light quality the older ones had.

cheers

Thaddeus

[egon]

Pat:

Many Californian's are merely returning to their roots of sixty or seventy years ago.

Egon

[Pat]

Thadeus, Thanks for the recommendation. I read it years ago. It is a decent "Chaos for the Layman" sort of thing. It skirts the edge of Einsteins comment that everything shold be made as simple as possible but no simpler. In the lab where I worked we applied chaos to signal processing both in the electromagnetic spectrum and acoustic (see also anti-submarine warfare, acoustic detection, counter detection in a masking noise field, etc) The walls of our halls were covered with poster sized prints of enlargements of the Mandelbrot set etc.

CFL: Good price, haven't seen anything like that for years. Local utility in San Diego (like many across the country) subsidized or gave rebates to encourage CFL sales but it has been a while since I saw any of that (doesn't happen around here). The figure of merit to which you refer in your "frequency" comment is CRI (Color Rendering Index) Daylight (direct sun + skylight) at something up around 6000 Kelvin is arbitrarily assigned a value of 100 (like 100% as good as daylight) and other light sources are compared to it for color rendering ability. Newer CFL don't "put out a new or different frequency. They put out a spectrum whose composition results in a CRI. Above about 80 is pretty decent. Good CFL do better than marginal in CRI as well as Lumens/Watt. The poorest CRI is from monochromatic light like a laser or the double "D" lines of sodium in a low pressure sodium light.

Pat

[austi012]

IIRC, the Chaos model came out just about the time I was finishing up my minor in Environmental Systems modelling at the UW Madison. I read a couple of books on it and came to class, and asked my professor what the implications were to our discipline. The look on his face told me all I needed to know...

Kind of OT, I had constructed a couple of models, one was an erosion model for mountains. I had hoped it would make useful predictions on the impact of different activities... road building, trekking, logging, etc. Worked pretty well, but to make it accurately reflect real-world conditions (i.e. correspond to actual field measurements) I had to inject a 'mystery constant'' in one of the equations. The model was very sensitive to changes in the constant. And I had no real-world analog to explain the need for, and value of, the constant. So I suspected the whole thing was pseudo-scientific horse puckey. I could make Mt. Ranier completely erode away in 3 years by changing the value of the constant by a tiny bit. Sigh. The model was much more robust when dealing with flat or rolling topologies, the constant became irrelevant.

Like Einstein, I have no use for such mathematical gerrymandering.*

Thaddeus

* Any oher similarity to Albert E. is here expressly disavowed.
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