Brunch Coffeeshop

Things People are Talking About…

In the entire history of Microsoft Corporation, they did just one good thing — so now of course they have decided it was a mistake. About two and a half years ago Microsoft announced they would bring ‘millions’ of public domain books and articles to the Internet. They teamed up with the Internet Archive and several major libraries, and began scanning.

This resource has been a major boon to those of us more interested in obscure and arcane topics rather than the latest Brittany Spears gossip — admittedly a minority, and probably not the most economically influential market on-line — but still a huge group of devoted users. The information is free, only has some annoying watermarks advertising the Microsoft role in the project, and has archived for the future a wealth of information. About 750,000 books and 80 million journal articles were scanned, according to a New York Times report. So Microsoft is discontinuing its support for the project.

The Library of Congress has about 30 million books. There is no such thing as a complete collection anywhere, but we can guestimate that if LOC has 30 million books, there are probably at least that many public domain books available (i.e. the currently copyrighted books probably number roughly the same as expired copyright books that the LOC does not have.) So Microsoft got about 2% of the job done, then quit. Typical.

Google, of course, has a similar project, but not anywhere near as useful. They do not allow access to many books that are clearly expired copyright; the company owns and controls the database, so it’s archival future is at the whim of corporate managers; and they have not focused on expired copyright books, so the vast majority are not fully accessible.

When the history of Microsoft is written, the book search project will be remembered as the one good thing Microsoft ever did — too bad they gave up after barely scratching the surface of available materials.

Taco Bell has introduced a new ‘value menu’ with several items priced under a buck! What luck! Junk food junkies rush on down to the Bell fast as your fat ass can waddle. This beats real food any day:

Triple Layer Nachos – Nacho chips topped with Taco Bell’s simmering Red Sauce, warm beans, and Nacho Cheese Sauce for 79 cents.

For nacho chips read fried sawdust. For red sauce read watered down ketchup. Warm beans? What an invention! and Nacho Cheese Sauce, which has no cheese but is saucy, compared to other congealed coconut oil products.

Melted Three-Cheese Roll-Up – A flour tortilla filled with a blend of three melted cheeses and rolled up for 79 cents.

Roll-up or throw-up? The same fine pseudo-cheese in three colors (depending on age) in thin layers on a wheat tortilla. Yummy.

Big Taste Taco – A flour tortilla filled with seasoned beef, crisp lettuce, crunchy Red Strips, cheddar cheese, and topped with Taco Bell’s Creamy Jalapeno Sauce for 99 cents.

Hey people — that ain’t no taco! Tacos are made with corn tortillas — that’s an unfolded burrito. For seasoned beef read cow brains with salt and black pepper. Of course the lettuce is crisp, it’s still frozen. Red Strips — I won’t even go there. More of that ‘cheese’ and Jalapeno sauce that is miraculously un-hot.

Man, just go down to the nearest Mexican Village in any American city around midnight, and look for the carts — they will be selling the real tacos there. Have some chicharrones too, and wash it down with a real beer (anything made outside the USA).

What’s Terra Preta, you ask? Well it’s dirt, or soil to be more accurate, and it is amongst the most fertile of soils on Earth. The odd thing is, it is found primarily in Brazil, and to a lesser extent in other South American countries.

Tropical rain-forest soils are typically fairly poor, because the frequent rains wash nutrients out. They get plenty of organic material from the jungle canopy, but as fast as those organics break down the beneficial chemical compounds are washed into rivers brown with dissolved organics and minerals.

Slash and burn agriculture is used to clear land for agriculture, but such exposed soils wear-out within a few years and the farmers move on to expose new plots, at the expense of the forest. But it hasn’t always been that way.

Apparently the Native South Americans of about 500 B.C. found a way to enrich their soil and keep those organic nutrients from washing away. There is some argument whether they intentionally enriched the soil, or it was an accidental by-product of their lifestyle. Knowing how observant pre-industrialized humans tended to be, I think the rich soils probably began as a by-product of their lifestyle, but was soon noticed (i.e. ‘discovered’), and expanded intentionally.

So what is the secret to these amazingly rich soils that remain fertile to this day — hundreds of years after they were abandoned by their original tenants? In a word, charcoal. Not the big chunks in your grill, but fine powdery charcoal dust. The charcoal itself does not add nutrients to the soil, and is in fact almost inert — taking thousands of years to break-down into its chemical constituents. But the carbonized organics facilitate chemical reactions (high cation exchange capacity), and harbor beneficial bacteria, retain moisture, improve soil texture, and may have other, as yet unrecognized, beneficial effects on the soil.

As if all that weren’t enough, if modern agriculturists adopt biological charcoal (Biochar) as a soil enhancement, it may help save the environment and reduce global warming! In the tropics, artificial Terra Preta could help replace slash and burn agriculture with a more sustainable and more productive alternative, saving the rain forest. Meanwhile, use of Biochar anywhere would contribute to the ‘carbon sequestration’ method of reducing atmospheric carbon — helping to slow global warming. Soils that retain their nutrients better will also need less fertilizer, leading to cleaner rivers and lakes, since the main water pollutant in many areas is agricultural run-off. This stuff is near-miraculous, and dirt cheap!