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Cake day: July 29th, 2023

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  • Great question (and we are reaching the outside edge of my knowledge here). Something like 3-5% of carbon in plants is taken up from the soil by plant roots. I don’t fully understand the mechanism, but the organic carbon percentage is an important competent in the calculation of how much artificial nitrogen a crop is going to need, so I guess it’s probably some biochemical process for making the nitrogen available.

    The organic carbon percentage is closely watched by farmers and is something of an indication of soil health. ie if your crop rotation is reducing the OC% over time then you probably need to reconsider it. It’s one of the reasons burning crop stubbles is a much rarer practice now.


  • Hay is cut from any sort of cereal plant early in it’s lifecycle, specifically before the plant starts concentrating it’s energy into the seeds. At this stage the plant stalk is sweeter (even to a human - give it a bite). After flowering, the plant is concentrating it’s energy into the seeds. By the time it’s fully done this (which takes a number of weeks), there is very little protein in the stalk, and it’s far less palatable (or nutritious) to animals. The plant stalk is now essentially ‘straw’.

    Commercial hay can be mowed from a meadow (in Australia usually ryegrass) in which case it will have all sorts mixed in, or from crops intended for making good hay (in Australia usually oats or wheat). Commercial straw (which has a tiny market) is cut after the grain has been harvested from the top of the plant. In commercial broadacre cropping in poor soil areas (the bulk of Australia’s grain areas) it’s usually better economics to keep your crop residue including straw since the cost to replace the carbon would be higher that what you’d get for the straw after the cost of harvesting it.

    Source: I play a lot of Minecraft






  • For anyone without the inclination to wade through 47 pages, here’s what they say about HTMX, which they’ve classified as “Assess” rather than “Trial” or “Adopt”

    htmx is a small, neat HTML UI library that recently became popular seemingly out of nowhere. During our Radar discussion, we found its predecessor intercooler.js existed ten years ago. Unlike other increasingly complex pre-compiled JavaScript/TypeScript frameworks, htmx encourages the direct use of HTML attributes to access operations such as AJAX, CSS transitions, WebSockets and Server- Sent Events. There’s nothing technically sophisticated about htmx, but its popularity recalls the simplicity of hypertext in the early days of the web. The project’s website also features some insightful (and amusing) essays on hypermedia and web development, which suggests the team behind htmx have thought carefully about its purpose and philosophy.


  • I’ve been around - did COBOL at uni. DOne a lot of commercial work in Delphi and C++. I loved the few months of Swift I tried, but started on webdev 6 months ago. I felt really unsafe in JS, and was looking forward to moving onto Typescript. But, as time’s gone on, I’ve found JS just seems to work how I think it’s going to. I haven’t run into problems with types at all. I assumed I’d end up on a complied language for server side, but the Node ecosystem’s so mature it’s just been efficient to stay in JS land.

    If I was going to teach kids to code, this is where I’d start. Low friction to get going, and powerful enough to run most of the world. Bountiful resources to learn and get support.