Am on Bluesky

I did not post on my Twitter account for a while, I had only two followers, and I got zero engagement anyway. I also could not figure out how to delete it since I logged in via Google and thus had no Twitter-specific password. Today, I invested a bit of time into how to get rid of it, and finally, I managed to do it.

I made a new account on Bluesky.

I am going to continue there what I intended to do on Twitter, before it became definitively shitter – to shout out new articles on my knife blogge. So if you are interested in that, follow me on Bluesky @kb-noze.bsky.social

Will USA Suffer Brain Drain?

Watching the Trumpidency from afar is not fun. Even though that idiot will have less of an impact here in the EU, the way things are going, he might start a worldwide recession that will make the Great Depression look insignificant in comparison.

He might start a WW3 by giving Putin and Xi Jinping carte blanche to do whatever they want to their neighbors, who won’t just roll over.

But it is his anti-science position that will inevitably hamper scientific progress worldwide that makes me wonder – will young scientists flee the USA in significant numbers to be considered brain drain? They will have one barrier less than scientists from other countries who try to do the same – English language is currently the language of science and thus can be used anywhere in academia. No doubt many competent scientists will be welcome in the EU, or even in China.

Nazi Germany suffered from loss of scientific knowledge prior to WW2 and some of those immigrant scientists did eventually help the USA to invent the nuclear bomb first. But I doubt that stupid narcissist suffering from dementia is capable of comprehending that by targeting science, he is shooting his country in the foot whilst simultaneously giving others a boost.

The Great Gardening of 2025 – Part 2 – First Sowing

You might think that it is too early to sow anything, and you would be right for about 99% of crops that can be grown in my area. But the weather got warm enough this week to prepare my big greenhouse. It was a lot of work because I worked on the soil significantly.

Firstly I used an old baking tray the whole winter to prepare a lot of charcoal from woodchips made from twigs cut off my hornbeam fence. I filled the tray with wood chips and put it in my house heating oven towards the end of the heating cycle each day. That way the produced wood gas is not wasted because it burns in the oven and is used to heat the house. And I got some fine charcoal at the end. In the picture is the tray filled with spruce board offcuts that I am using now to make coal of larger sizes. Unfortunately, the tray got deformed and cannot be used anymore, but about that soem next time (I made a better receptacle to make charcoal).

I got about 100 l of fine charcoal but I did not make a photo of it. So here is a slightly blurry picture of approximately the same volume of charcoal of bigger sizes. This bigger charcoal will be put in plastic mesh bags and then used in the last filtering stage of my sewage cleaning facility. After it soaks up the phosphorus and nitrogen etc. from my waste water, it will be put into the compost and soil. In the meantime, I soaked the fine charcoal from wood chips in fertilizer and used it to complement the soil in the greenhouse rightaway.

Some people sing the praises of this charcoal (aka biochar), some say it does nothing and it is just the fertilizer that is of use. I have no way of knowing who is right but I did find some scientific articles that got positive results with it and since I can make the charcoal without needlessly adding CO2 to the atmosphere and I need to use charcoal in my sewage cleaner anyway, I decided to give it a shot. It meant though that I had to dig up all the soil in the greenhouse and mix it with the charcoal in a ratio of approximately 9:1, also 10% charcoal by volume.

You can see there were some bigger lumps of charcoal in there, those will probably get broken up over time. The wooden stakes marking the rows of my first sown crop are not very visible, but they are there.

Like I said, it is mostly too early for sowing anything but in my quest to maximize harvest from my garden, I bought seeds of three different varieties of radish. The first one can be sown at the end of February in the greenhouse, which is exactly what I have done. The second one can be sown in March, also in the greenhouse. And the third one will be sown in April outdoors. If it goes well, I should have a few months of steady supply of radishes.

Both greenhouse-grown varieties should be finished at about the time when I can plant my tomatoes and bell peppers in their stead. This way I should get two crops from the same space. I have done this already, albeit with only one variety, so it is not completely new and should work.

The Great Gardening of 2025 – Part 1 – LED There be Light

I decided to significantly change the way I treat my garden this year. My goal is to raise as much food as I can and that means a wide variety of crops grown in a wide variety of ways. I am planning to write about the endeavor to maximize my edibles from my huge garden and this is the first post in a series about that.

And although I am cash-strapped, I had to begin by buying some LED-lights. Because I want to grow onions and peppers from seeds,

Onions and peppers need a really long time to germinate and grow in size sufficient enough to be planted outdoors. I tried to sow three types of onion but so far only one started to grow, which bums me out. So far I had very little success with onions in my garden, I hope to change that but preliminarily I have little reason for optimism.

After (if) the onions are big enough to move into the greenhouse, I will use these lights to start my tomatoes, pumpkins, beans, and corn indoors too. I do hope that this way I will get plants big enough to resist slug damage later on. Once the plants are big enough, the slugs should not damage them anymore. I also want to try growing these in a novel-ish way, so stay tuned for that.

When I am not growing anything under the lights, I now have a consistent diffuse light for photographing my handmade products, something that I needed for some time by now.

(sex cells are binary)≠(sex is binary)

It never ceases to baffle me that there still are people who insist that there are only two genders because sex is binary because there are only two types of gamete (in humans, there are life forms with more than just two gametes). I am especially disappointed in Dawkins, a writer whose popular scientific books I really enjoyed and who, as a biologist, really should know better.

Trying to conflate “sex” as it refers to whole persons with “sex” as it refers to gametes is a prime example of a bad kind of scientific reductionism. Just because there is one word – in this case “sex” – does not mean that it means the same thing all the time, everywhere.

Firstly, sex at birth is not assigned according to any kind of gamete that an individual produces, it is assigned as a best guess based on external genitalia at birth. As such, it is mostly right, but there are cases where it cannot be ascribed with confidence and also cases, where it later shows being wrong. And cases where surgery is actually used to shoehorn a person into one of the two boxes.

Secondly, there are a lot of people who never produce any kind of gamete their whole life. What sex do these people belong to? If one decides that sex must be a binary based on the type of gamete produced by an individual, one must then decide that these people do not have any sex whatsoever. This is the exact point where the concept of binary sex when referring to people and not gametes breaks down. There are a lot of further complexities, but this suffices to disprove the idiotic notion that people can be sorted into exactly two categories based on gametes.

And that’s without going into the whole concept of gender, which has nothing to do with just biology. Gender is a linguistic/social construct. Just as gametes are just one criterion in determining a person’s sex, a person’s sex is just one criterion in determining their gender.

So although sex as it pertains to gametes is binary, sex regarding whole people is a bit more complicated. The word sex cannot mean the same thing in both cases and does not need to have the same constraints. Sex, when referring to whole individuals, is not binary but bimodal. Which is similar, but not the same.

Wishing for reality to be simple because one specific language (in this case English) has just two words for gender and wishing to shoehorn everyone into those two words is akin to insisting that the rainbow has a limited number of exactly distinct colors because we have assigned distinct words to some bands of wavelengths.

Russian “Morality”

The almighty algorithm recommended this video to me, and it is really good:

Describing Russia as a pseudo-feudal society with components of a Mafia-esque hierarchy is very interesting and very apt, in my opinion.

And unlike many other people who opine on Russia online, this one cannot be easily dismissed because she is Russian herself.

Gingy Breads – Ree-Sye-Pea

This is the basis for the recipe that my mother uses most for her yearly gingerbread creations. It is not the actual recipe she uses, because she made changes to it that cannot be easily conveyed by text. I will write the changes at the end if you want to experiment, this is what she started with.

Ingredients:

650 g fine flour
240 g powdered sugar
4 whole eggs
100 g honey
50 g of vegetable fat, shortening, butter (ghee), or lard according to taste and availability
1 tablespoon of cinnamon
1 tablespoon of gingerbread spice mixture*
1 teaspoon of baking soda
2-3 tablespoons of cocoa powder if a darker color is desired (optional)

Process:

Put the sieved powdered ingredients and some flour on the rolling board. Add the eggs and molten fat with honey and start adding the rest of the flour. Work from the center of the board towards the edges and knead the dough until it is smooth but firm. A kitchen robot can be used at the start but elbow grease will be needed for finishing the dough because it becomes too firm.

Roll the dough to approximately half the desired thickness of the final product and cut the shapes with a butter knife or forms.

Bake at 170-180°C until the color changes to golden brown (approximately 10 min). Te exact time depends on the actual kitchen equipment available.

If a shiny surface is desired, egg wash can be applied with a pastry brush on hot pieces directly after they are taken out of the oven (my mother does not do this).

For the best taste, they should be left to wait for a few days until they soften up a bit. For decorations and building more complicated structures, like gingerbread houses, you should proceed ASAP while they are rock-hard.

My mother’s changes:

3 egg yolks and 1 whole egg instead of 4 whole eggs
300 g of honey instead of 100 g
flour is added to the mixture not by weight but until the desired dough consistency is reached so the actual amount of flour used depends on the size of the eggs, the honey consistency, etc.

Gingerbread spice mixture is sold in CZ. Here is the site of the manufacturer (-click-). Ingredients according to Google Translate are: ground cinnamon, ground coriander, ground star anise, ground allspice, ground cloves, ground anise, ground nutmeg, ground mace, and ground fennel.

Gingy Breads 2024 Xmass – Part 3

Aaaand for the third part the gingerbread cottages.

Gingy Breads 2024 Xmass – Part 2

Today a few Christmas trees.

Gingy Breads 2024 Xmass – Part 1

Today just a little teaser of my mother’s creations this year. She made so many gingerbread houses this Christmas that I will have to post them over a few days. I shoulda start two weeks ago but I somehow never got to it.

Aye Maide Some Cutting Boards

I haven’t posted here about crafting for a long time, so I decided to do some posting now. I already made my first cutting boards from jatoba and they are currently tested in three different kitchens. Here are the pictures:

So far they work reasonably well. Jatoba is very hard so whilst the surfaces get scratched by knife blades, the scratches are extremely shallow and since these are end-grain cutting boards, it will take a lot of cutting to wear out some material. Considering that ordinary side-grain boards from beech wood still hold reasonably flat for decades, I think these will last a lifetime. Which means I won’t need new cutting boards, ever.

My mother already forgot the middle-sized one (with slanted rows) on a wet towel and it warped something awful. But after it dried out, it straightened again and the glue held. She put the board on a wet towel so it does not slide on the table and this was not the first wooden board that had warped due to this ill-thought-out practice. From now on, she is using a silicone mat for that purpose, and the problem is solved. I also put a few offcuts in the dishwasher and they performed as I expected – the glue failed.

Currently, I am making jatoba cutting boards for sale. And just like with knives, I will prepare short documents about how to care for them to customers. That is why I am actually glad that my mother did the thing with wet towel because I would not have thought of it and I do need to know all the different ways these can fail.

Although I must say, if someone gives a wooden cutting board in a dishwasher, then they are probably about as smart as an average Trump voter, and thus probably just as resistant to information. Well, c’est la vie.

When making the next cutting board, my drum sander broke. I had to improvipair it and today I got to work on it for several hours. It does indeed have higher power now and thus it functions a lot better. I might be able to flatten boards without the router, as I originally intended. I did flatten this board like that, and it is huge.

It is made from black locust and I made it for myself. Not for the kitchen – it is 60×30 cm, a bit too large for that – but for my workshop for leather work. I expect it to be more cut-resistant than even the very best cutting mat. I love how the black locust grain looks and I am contemplating making kitchen boards from it too.

I am writing about making the boards weekly on the knife blogge but I will write a series of posts here too.

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Am on Bluesky

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Will USA Suffer Brain Drain?

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The Great Gardening of 2025 – Part 2 – First Sowing

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The Great Gardening of 2025 – Part 1 – LED There be Light

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(sex cells are binary)≠(sex is binary)

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Russian “Morality”

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Gingy Breads – Ree-Sye-Pea

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Gingy Breads 2024 Xmass – Part 3

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Gingy Breads 2024 Xmass – Part 1

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Aye Maide Some Cutting Boards

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