• 22 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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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




  • This is correct, I already installed the minio cli, but when I came back and read this, I tried it out and yes, once garage is running in the container, you can

    alias garage="docker exec -ti <container name> /garage"
    

    so you can do the cli things like garage bucket info test-bucket or whatever. The --help for the garage command is pretty great, which is good since they don’t write it up much in the docs.







  • Yep, it’d have to be a tiny town to not have a war memorial. If there’s no war memorial there’s probably an honour bord with the names of the fallen in the hall or RSL. Since ANZAC it’s been a part of Australian culture that those who died in service of their country is a sort of sacred thing. It’s significance has ebbed and flowed a bit over the years. Our pride in the services was especially damaged in the Vietnam war years, when ANZAC day crowds shrunk quite a bit and you could have imagined at the time that it might all die out. It’s had a bit of a resurgence since.

    After most big wars, the federal government has put a bit of money into war memorials, and it was pretty much just a matter of the local RSL or town council writing a letter to get a decommissioned artillery piece of some sort, or an old torpedo for the local park as a centrepiece for your ANZAC day ceremony. Also, if you read the plaques on 1950’s or 60’s buildings in the bush, you’ll often see many of them are “War Memorials”. War Memorial swimming pools and sports grounds are common ones. The reason communities did this is that at the time donations to “war memorials” were tax deductible.

    You’ve made an interesting observation. For Aussies this is probably something they’ve never noticed. It’s probably not an indication that we’re very war worshipping, just that for a small country, the deaths involved in the wars we’ve been part of were significant, and perhaps especially so for little country towns where the surnames on the honour board match some of the street names and the bloke you were just chatting to at the post office.