Cooking In the Backyard

Local organization Solar Cookers International make ovens that cook food in the backyard without using gas or electricity! Very efficient financially, but I'm not so sure about how efficient it is with respect to time.

The organization advocates for use of the cookers in areas where gathering scarce wood for cooking fuel represents a time-consuming source of labor. They also advocate cooking with the sun to pasteurize water. Clever!

Link: http://solarcookers.org/

Yallavva

Meet Yallavva. She lives in India, in the Bijapur district of the southern state of Karnataka, tahsil (county) Basavana-Bagevadi, in the community of Devalapur. She speaks Kannada, a Dravidian language, and I assume she also speaks Hindi, an Indo-European language. Hindu represents her families religion.

Born in 1995, she does not celebrate her exact date of birth, as is custom in her culture.


Her father Mariyappa (born 1960). I have never seen photos of her mother Durugavva (born 1965) or her brother Parashuram (born 2000). Both parents work as laborers. You can see their home behind them--crafted from stone with a corrugated metal roof.

Though she's healthy, Yallavva currently does not attend school due to economic conditions caused by poor rainfall in the last year. Her family receives water from a borehole operated by an electric pump year-round.

She's wearing her best dress and her nicest bracelets, necklace, earrings, and nose ring. Her hair looks neatly combed and tied back. She wears no shoes, as is customary.

I support Yallavva and her community through Plan.

Opting Out

From FindLaw:

For instance, as early as 1970, the U.S. Supreme Court held in Rowan v. United States Postal Service that a government regulation allowing citizens the choice to refuse to receive unwanted commercial mail was constitutional, despite a First Amendment challenge, for it protects individual privacy. As a result, a consumer has the right to affirmatively go to the United States Post Office, fill out a form and to ask never to receive unsolicited mail from a particular marketer.

This evening I called Comcast to opt-out of receiving their commercial postal mailings, and the representative informed me that I'd have to "throw it away"--they don't have a way for people to opt-out of their mailings.

I began this journey to become free of unsolicited postal mail after reading the inspirational story of local resident Matt Conens in the Sacramento News and Review. The article lists 41 Pounds and Green Dimes as two companies which help stamp out unsolicited postal mail.

According to Wikipedia, the USPS uses junk mail revenues to subsidize low-cost stamps for letters. So, in theory, the effect of eliminating junk mail on a wide scale might be the increase of stamp prices.

Junkbusters also exists as a helpful starting point. They note:

A U.S. Federal law gives you the power to stop any non-governmental organization from sending you further mail. You can download a copy or Form 1500 or ask for a copy to be mailed to you by telephoning a major Post Office in your area. Fill it out (it's very short), attach it to one of their opened letters, and lodge it at any Post Office. The form was originally intended to stop pornographic junk mail, but the Supreme Court of the United States has affirmed your right to stop any mail that you don't want. If the company continues to send you mail or sell your name they risk being prosecuted as criminals. Burnett comments that with this move ``name removal is virtually assured.'' (They will still store your name in their databases, but they are unlikely to continue renting it.)

This evening, I ordered the Green Dimes kit, paid the $1 to the DMA to have them remove my address, submitted my info to https://www.optoutprescreen.com/ and geared up to swat down local junk mailers with USPS Form 1500.

Wishing you a junk-mail-free existance!

Others:

• http://phonezilla.net/permanent/form1500.php
• http://www.planetmike.com/journal/category/advertising/junkmail/
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=794wbpg7A3Y
  

Leibniz Named Calculus

A simple question: Where did the name calculus come from?

It took us about 45 minutes to find the answer this evening. Apparently Leibniz came up with the word calculus in conjunction with various suffix words to describe the new concepts he had worked out:

calculus differentialis became the method for finding tangents and the calculus summatorius or calculus integralis the method for finding areas.

The etymology of calculus comes from the Latin calx meaning stone. The diminutive, calculi, indicates tiny stones, which people used for counting purposes. The words calculation thus came about to describe all manners of addition, subtraction, and so forth. Leibniz apparently chose the word calculus to describe a new manner of counting to arrive at solutions to problems. He used the phrases in his works published in 1684 and 1686.

Link:
http://www.math10.com/en/maths-history/history5/origins-differential-integral2.html
http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/PrintHT/The_rise_of_calculus.html