Some Knowledge

A wood stove can provide lots of heat on cold days for your house at a reduced cost for fuel.  You will need a chimney.  You will need a modern airtight stove.  You will need some extra time to do more chores.

Modern airtight wood stoves are reasonably efficient at burning wood.  Unlike the old Franklin stoves, you can control the amount of combustion air that reaches the fire.  By controlling the air you control the combustion rate.   With a controlled combustion rate you have control over the amount of heat the stove throws and the amount of wood that will burn in a given time.

Wood stoves are not cheap.  Expect to pay about $700 or more for a decent model.  It will also cost something to install the stove and the necessary pipes and chimney if you don’t have a stove already.  There is some amount of maintenance that goes along with owning a wood stove.  You will need to brush the creosote out of the chimney and stovepipes every year to prevent possible chimney fires.   You will need to keep the area around the stove clear of combustible materials like furniture.  Once you have your stove installed and it is cold outside, it is time to think of operating your new furnace.

You will need firewood.  We’re not talking about the manufactured logs you buy at the grocery store for $5 a piece.  You will need cord wood.  For a typical winter you might go through five to ten full cords of wood.  This is a lot of wood.  That much firewood will cost a fair amount of money.  If you are cheap you might look around for construction sites where trees have been cut down and cut up.  You might be able to approach the builder and arrange to cart away the firewood, if you have a pickup truck.  Maybe you have some trees growing on your property and can cut your own wood.  Most probably you will have to buy firewood.  This is part of the expense of running a wood stove for heat.  Fuel is not going to be free, unless you scavenge.

When you get your wood you may or may not need to split it into manageable chunks.  You may need to purchase a wood splitter or get skillful with a Monster Maul.  You will more than likely have to split and stack your wood in a dry place where it will not rot out from rain and snow.  A barn is a good place to store your wood, but tarps can also be used to keep your fuel dry if you have to stack it outside.  All this adds up to a fair amount of manual labor.  A wood stove is also an exercise program.

During the heating season you will have to haul wood from your stacking area to a rack by the house for easy access.  I recommend building a rack out of Wolmanized 4×4s  outside your front door.  This makes it easy to bring wood inside for the fire on cold nights.  A reasonably-sized rack should hold wood enough for about a week of burning.  You can bring bucket loads of wood in for your fire a few times during the day.

When you wake up in the morning during the heating season one of the first things you will be doing is starting the fire.  It helps if you have some trees around your house because you will need a source of twigs and small branches to act as kindling.  Crumple up some newspapers and throw some twigs and small pieces of split wood on top.  Allow enough space for air to circulate in your stack, then light the paper and wait for the wood to catch.  You need to pay some attention to a fire in a wood stove if you expect it to keep burning.

Once you get a good bed of coals in your stove you can just add logs one or two at a time every couple hours throughout the day.  You will have to adjust the air supply and damp off the stove if the temperature gets too hot.  You should have a magnetic stove thermometer on the pipe just above the stove to monitor the heat from your fire.  When the fire gets low, rake up the coals with a poker and add more logs.

A wood stove is not the best thing for keeping a constant temperature in your house.  It will make the room it is in too hot and the rest of the house too cold.  It is a good idea to run your furnace fan to distribute the heat throughout the house when your fire is going.  On the plus side, if the power or the furnace goes out, you will still have a source of heat.  With a properly installed and maintained wood stove you can expect to save about 50% on your winter heating bill.  You will most likely want to heat with the furnace during the night unless you feel like waking up every two hours to put more wood on the fire.

Wood is a renewable resource and still provides a viable means of heating your home in the winter.  If you’re bored and need more work in your life, there is nothing like tending a fire and hauling wood to give you some extra work to do.  You can save a small amount of money by burning wood in a modern wood stove.  You may enjoy the intense heat provided by an operating stove on cold days.  Just realize, what you save in money will be paid for in extra work for you in tending and maintaining the stove.

A quick search of Google returned over 17 million hits on the terms “content creation.”  There are many companies starting up or that have been in business for a while that provide content creation services for websites.

One of these businesses, SEO Content Creation and Linkbait Services sells content for between $35 and $250 a page.   You can either specify topics for this place to generate copy on or leave them to create pages on their own.  The buyer gets copyright to whatever material they contract for.  Apparently, writers are being organized to sell material to online services.

Of course it was only a matter of time before writers started to cash in on the Internet.  There is so much material available online that nobody would have the time to read or catalog it all.  That’s why there are search engines.  Still, it’s interesting to realize that the pages you post to your blog could be sold as copy for a decent price.  If you are interested in writing material for a targeted market you can always go to Helium Marketplace and attempt to sell your work.   Then again, there is always the possibility of starting your own content creation business.  You would probably need to recruit writers, who could be found by trolling through the various blogging communities online.

With all the websites online it is not surprising that copywriting has gone digital.  You can even take online courses to learn the tricks and skills of copywriting.   If you are writing articles and content for your blog now there is the potential to get paid for the writing you are doing.  Of course there are also Pay Per Post operations that will pay you a fee to write reviews and advertisements for products on your blog.

The world is becoming swamped with the quantity of material that is available on the Internet.  You can now buy content for your websites right online.  Writing is an occupation that fits in well with the kind of instant communication that has made the net possible.  In future, I think more opportunities will become available for people who like to write.

When you think about it, you really can be anything you want in life.  You are only limited by your own desire to become something different than what you are.  Human beings have unlimited potential to grow and prosper on earth.  As you go through life you will find that you are only limited by your own abilities.  If you want something enough, you can find a way to get it.

As we are growing up we are usually told by our parents that we can be whatever we want to be when we grow up.  The thing is, as long as you are alive it is still possible to change your goals and desires.  You might decide that you are interested in a completely different field of study when you have passed a certain age.  You may look into a new career when you get older because you have found that your original choice of occupation does not satisfy you anymore.  This is all part of life.  If there is one thing that characterizes life, it is change.  Rocks and stones stay the same and only move when they are picked up and thrown.  People decide their own fate and make their own choices.

If you are tired with the way your life is going, first, decide what you truly want out of life.  This will take some effort.  You will want to write down your goals and aspirations so you can see what you are thinking.  It is nice to have dreams and grand ambitions, but writing these down is the first step to realizing them.  Be specific about your goals.  Do not only write down what you want, but describe how you are going to go about getting what you want.  If you want a better car, what steps are you going to take to obtain that goal?  If you want to go into another occupation, how are you going to get the training you need to make that change?  If you don’t know what it will take to realize your ambition, describe how you will find out what you need to find out.

It is all very nice to have goals and ambitions in life.  Ambition is what drives us to improve our lives.  It is not the desire that allows us to realize our dreams, it is our actions that do this.  You can have all the dreams in the world for your life, but they will stay dreams unless you do something about them.  The problem is that we may have ambitions, but not realize what we need to do to reach those lofty goals.

The world is full of opportunities to learn.  There is a well-established educational system that helps people learn what they need to learn to improve their lives.  It costs some money to take classes, but this money is invested in yourself and your potential for improving your life.  Often, we can find the same information that can be learned in school in a book or on a website.  Many times specific information on some subject will not even be taught in school.  People need to develop the ability to learn on their own.  This is one of the hallmarks of a good education.  The ability to find things out for yourself.  What you need to remember is that there are always people available somewhere who can help you in your goals.  You should take advantage of your relationships to other people and learn as much as you can from them.  Often, you will find that family and friends have more useful information on some subject than you can find in books.  Practical experience in life is a powerful teacher.

If you want to change your life for the better, start today.  Give up on bad habits that are only holding you back from achieving your goals.  Set simple goals for yourself that you can reach every day.  If your ambition is to write, then write something every day.  If your goal is to learn a new trade, then find and study new information each day.  Nobody is going to come along and just download knowledge into your skull.  You will have to do this for yourself.  Look for opportunities in everything you do and you will find that you can improve your life a little every single day.

Over the last several months I have researched this subject intensely.  Aside from a standard business model where you would sell some product online for a certain amount of money, making some profit, there is only one way to make money with the Internet.  The secret to making money on the Internet is to sell an information product that tells people how to make money on the Internet.  And the way to make money on the net is to sell this product.  In other words, it is a recursive wealth building scheme.  You will sell people some product that tells them to sell a product about how to sell a product that tells people how to make money by selling an information product…  It could go on forever, but it only requires two steps.

Every “make money fast” website sells some kind of information product.  Oddly, none of these products describes how they really make their money, which is selling products telling people how to make money.  There are so many of these different moneymaking schemes it is ridiculous.  You can even get resell rights for free to a lot of the old products that are not selling well.  Most of these information products tell you how to set up a website that sells advertising to Google or sells affiliate products.  Unless you’re getting a million hits a month on your website, you are not going to make money this way.  The business you really want to be in is selling information products.

Everybody wants to get rich.  Nobody wants to work for a living.  If all you had to do was set up a website to take payments from people and give them some PDF file in return, wouldn’t you want to do this?  That’s just what all these Internet Millions websites do.  What they don’t do is tell you the truth about how the owners make their income.  They make their money selling copies of some absurd system they concoct for making money on the web, which is all nonsense.  What they really should be selling you is information on how to sell information on how to get rich.  This is exactly the information I am going to give away to you, my loyal readers, for absolutely nothing.

That’s right, you heard me right.  For no money and no obligation, for all time, you can make yourself rich with a turnkey automated income stream that has only minimal operating costs.  All you need to do is copy this page and sell it to people.  For you see, all the knowledge you need to make untold millions has already been revealed in the opening paragraph of this blog entry.  All you need to do is to sell people the information that they only need to sell information to people on how to sell information on how to sell information on how to get rich without lifting a single finger.  Does this sound complicated?  Well, it isn’t.  It’s the simplest thing in the world.

What you get from my system is honesty.  You only need to tell people that they have to sell a simple computer file full of information on how to sell information to people.  You will need to set up a PayPal account so you can take payments.  You will need to set up a website that has a shopping cart.  No problem, you can get that from PayPal too.  You will need to make this page into a PDF file.  No problem, that’s available for free as well.  Then you will need a host for your site.  Why pay when you can get that for free?  Then all you need to do after you set up your site is to promote it.  Now you have all the information you need to start selling your information.

Does any of this sound crooked?  Why should it?  You are just selling legitimate information on how to make money by selling information.  You’re not breaking any laws telling people how to make easy money.  You’re keeping track of your profits so you can pay all your taxes, aren’t you?  There’s no reason you can’t sell your ideas to people who want to find a better way to make money.  Well, what’s the problem?  I’m being totally honest with you.  If you really want to make money on the Internet you have to sell information on how to make money to people who are looking for ways to make money on the Internet.  It’s a very simple idea, and it’s the idea being used by thousands of get rich quick websites, only, they don’t tell you the truth.  They don’t tell you that if you want to make money on the net you have to sell information on how to make money on the net.

The key is to write something that people are interested in.  How do you find out what interests people?  That’s a question a lot of people ask themselves.  There is such easy access to information on the net these days, you can pretty much write about whatever interests you, and then let people find your article.  You can write just about anything and somebody will have some interest in it.  Even something like a poem can attract attention.

Still, the fact remains:  If you want a lot of readers you need to write about something that a lot of people care about.  You can be pretty safe in the assumption that people on the Internet will have some interest in computers.  This is the one thing any Internet publishing will have in common.  You need some sort of computer to access the net, even if that computer is nothing more than a PDA or an IPhone.  If you write articles about computers there will be a ready-made audience for your writing on the net.

There are many things besides computers that people have in common.  We all have bodies, and we all have some kind of health issues.  Even if people are healthy they are still concerned with how to stay healthy and how to get more healthy.  If you write about how to improve the body, there will be a ready audience for your work.  You do not have to be a doctor to write about health, but you do need to do your research.  It would be unfortunate if you gave people bad advice on maintaining their health and somebody suffered some kind of problem or injury because of something you wrote.  Still, there are books available at libraries and stores that can give you a good foundation in health.  You can even audit college courses on many things by looking for lecture podcasts on the web.  UC Berkeley has many webcasts from different classes if you are interested in picking up some free knowledge.

No matter what you write, if you post it in some place that is accessible to the public, people will eventually find it.  You can maximize your visibility by choosing a good title for your work.   The title of your blog or web page is the first thing a search engine or person surfing the web will see.  You need something that clearly states what your page is about.  If you give your piece a title that has nothing to do with the content of your page you will just confuse people.  Worse than confusion, people will feel misled in looking at your work.  If you lose the trust of your reader you may as well have not written anything.  A good title is short and to the point.  It will convey the subject or theme of your piece and lead the reader into viewing your writing.

The important thing in any piece of writing is the information it contains.  Suppose you are writing a review of some automobile.  You will want to look up all the facts about that car you can.  You will want to know what engines it comes with, what accessories are standard or optional, what colors you can get it in, what kinds of interior it can be equipped with, and what power options are available.  You will also want to know what kind of mileage it gets, what kind of acceleration performance it has, what safety options it can be equipped with, and what tires it uses.  All these facts are the meat and potatoes of any article you write.  You will also want to have information on how the car handles, how comfortable it is to drive, how is the visibility when you are driving, and what entertainment options does it come with.  In short, you will want to look up all the information about your subject that anyone could possibly want to know.

Once you have all the facts for your article it is just a question of putting them all together in an interesting story structure.  You might want to describe a test drive you took, if you test drove the car you are writing about.  You might want to describe how you found out about all the different things about this vehicle.  You will definitely want to make an interesting framework on which you can post the different facts you have discovered.  Your piece should be easy to read and have an enjoyable format.  You are not just trying to cram facts down people’s throats, you are cajoling them into knowledge of your subject.  Use active verbs and descriptive phrases that convey concrete images.  You should describe your own feelings, but do not try to project feelings onto your readers.  If your intention is to sell something, point out all the advantages that ownership will give to the potential customer.  If your intention is just to tell an interesting story, focus on the story of how you interacted with your subject.

In your style of writing it is best to be as simple as possible in relating your story.  Big words and complicated sentence structures only add to confusion.  If you use a word processor run your work through the grammar checker and check your statistics.   You should have some indication of grade level, the Fleishmann-Kinkaide rating I think it is called.  The lower this number the better, to a point.  It is considered best to write to about a 5th grade level.  Long sentences, big words, and convoluted structures will make this level go up.  Also it is best to try and avoid the passive voice.  Say:  He picked up the bag.  Not:  The bag was picked up by him.  Active voice gives a piece a moving quality that makes it read easily.  A grammar checker can point out all these problems.  Do not rely on the computer to write your piece though, as often grammar checkers and spell checkers make mistakes.  Use your own judgment in editing any piece of work.

If you write a good article that has useful information, people will eventually find it if it is posted on the Internet.  You do not have to worry about keyword optimization or anything else if you have good facts in your story.  The facts are the keywords.  If you write clearly in a simple style that people can understand you will attract people to view your work.  If you can give some value to your audience as far as the work you have done in researching your piece, then they will return to see your future efforts at writing.  The Field of Dreams is your work.  The reason people read your work is the benefit they derive from it.  If you place valuable information in an accessible format you will attract attention.

The Forbidden Kingdom is a new kung fu movie starring Jet Li and Jackie Chan.  It is set for release on April 18, 2008.

The plot of this movie seems to revolve around a teenage boy who is transported back through time by the workings of a magic sword.  The boy finds himself in ancient China in the middle of a war for control of the kingdom.  He is taught kung fu by The Drunken Immortal, Chan, and The Silent Monk, Li.  He must defeat the Jade Warlord and the White Witch to save the kingdom.

You can watch trailers for the movie at the above link.  There is a lot of atmosphere and special effects in this movie from what they show in the trailer.  It’s been a while since I’ve gone to the movies and seen a flick on the big screen.  I may check this one out when it is released next month.

I’m not totally sure why I like kung fu movies.  Most of these flicks have absurd plots.  Most of the action you see in these movies is ridiculous and impossible.  A kung fu movie is about the most violent thing you can imagine.  There is no way one person can defeat an army of hundreds, except in a martial arts movie.  Why do I like watching these movies so much?

I guess it’s the fantasy element to kung fu that draws my interest.  Plus it’s the absurdity of the things.  There is no way your iron monkey fist technique can defeat a man with a sword, unless that man is a complete idiot.  Yet, iron monkey fist wins every time.  There is no way you can be punched in the face twenty times and not even have a slight bruise.  You can not have a person kick you in the chest until you cough up blood, then turn around and drop kick them through a wall.  That whole scene is just comical.

I guess what I like about kung fu flicks is that they are so absurd.  The whole genre is surreal.  I like the exotic locations, the forests of bamboo, the mountains, and the ornate costumes.   Most martial arts movies have some sort of a plot you can follow.  They go from a wayward student learning how to fight to a hero who saves the village from the evil hordes of gangsters.  I know it shows me as a simpleton, but I like movies with interesting plots.  I watched the entire “Laughing in the Wind”  Hong Kong TV series on DVD because it was so interesting.

You might think a person could get disturbed by all the violence in a kung fu movie.  For me, the violence in these films is more like some kind of stylized dance.  There is no way a person can leap thirty feet into the air and land on his feet on a clay tile roof.  Yet, through the magic of wires, you see this a lot in such movies.  There is no way you are going to beat somebody to death in the streets in front of all kinds of witnesses and not have the law asking you questions.  These things happen in martial arts movies all the time.  It’s the ridiculous nature of the action in these movies that makes them entertaining to me.  Perhaps it’s warped to laugh at violence, but when the action is so absurd, how else can a person react?

I can hardly stand to watch the TV any more.  Even just surfing channels I am confronted with so many scenes of violence it almost makes me ill.  I know bad things happen to people every day.  Still, what is the point of showing me all these problems?  Am I supposed to feel bad all the time because there is violence and war in the world?  I’m not a law enforcement person who would go around catching killers.  Show your violent pictures to somebody else.

It goes right through from the news to entertainment.  You can hardly watch a movie without somebody getting killed in the show.  Is violence entertaining?  Do you like to watch people bleed?  I think even the Romans with their gladiators and arenas would get sick from watching American TV.  How can people stand to see such horrible things all the time?

I can flip through a hundred channels on the tube and get 90 of them where something bad is happening to somebody.  You’ve got news channels where there is nothing but crime 24/7.  They have fight shows where men beat the crap out of each other while people cheer them on.  Has the world gone insane?  You watch even the science programs and half of them are about either dead people or they are about some disaster where people are getting hurt.  It is the constant theme of mass media: violence.   What kind of a twisted person would be entertained by a show about murderers?  Yet there are dozens of these programs.

It’s not just television.  It’s the whole entertainment industry.  Movies, video games, books, magazines, most seem to have some kind of violent element to them.  Is it some kind of conspiracy by our leaders to make humans desensitized to violence so we won’t object when they tell us to go out and kill Iraqis?   I wonder sometimes.  Why does every program that is supposed to be about science always end up using explosives to wreck something?  It’s idiotic.  Nobody wants a life full of violence, hate and death, yet we entertain ourselves by watching this nonsense?  I just don’t know about people.

Maybe people are just naturally attracted to violence.  Humans used to have to perpetrate violence on animals in order to get food.  Still, if you want people to live peacefully you do not constantly bombard them with violent imagery.  Is the entertainment industry trying to make me happy by showing me people getting hurt?  That’s just idiotic.  Anyone with a shred of empathy would feel lousy if they saw people suffering.  Are they trying to make me depressed?  I wonder sometimes.  What is the point of a society that focuses so much on the bad things that happen and totally ignores the good that is done every day?

I just now got around to dismembering Sunny Bunny the chocolate Easter rabbit.  It seems to have a different taste than a regular chocolate bar.  I know it tastes different then the chocolate eggs I bought.  I’m wondering:  Do they use a different formula of chocolate in the bunnies?

Of course I started with the ears.  The ears are the best part of the chocolate rabbit species.  This was a small rabbit, so it didn’t have much in the ear department.  They tasted good, so I continued and decapitated the little bunny and ate her head.  I swear, it tasted different than most other chocolate.  I think they put more wax in the rabbit chocolate so it molds better.  Maybe it’s just the way the chocolate is tempered before they mold it.   Maybe I’m mistaken and deceived by the cute cartoony form of the creature into thinking it tastes different.

Perhaps there are some readers who have performed a detailed chemical analysis of chocolate bunnies.  Perhaps it is a special strain of cacao that is used in the rabbits that gives them a distinctive flavor.  Maybe the candy companies use some adjunct flavoring to give their rabbits a special Easter taste.  I don’t know.  All I know is that chocolate rabbits taste different than normal chocolate.  I may need to do more research on this phenomenon.

I have studied particle physics in the past.  I have a degree in physics.  We know a lot about the composition and behavior of exotic forms of matter.  Does this knowledge have any relevance in the real world?

The world we inhabit is formed from four elementary particles, for the most part:  protons, neutrons, electrons and photons.  Everything we can observe in nature, aside from particles proceeding from radioactive decay, is formed of these particles.  It is the combination of the elementary particles that form the great majority of observable matter.  These four particles are all it takes to produce a rich and varied universe.

What does particle physics study?  High energy elementary particles produced in the laboratory or found in cosmic rays.  For the most part, particle physics deals with particles produced from energy by man that live very short and somewhat interesting lives.  It is perhaps important in understanding how the universe came into being in the Big Bang, but aside from such a cataclysmic event, most of these elementary particles will never be observed in nature.  Why, in fact, would it matter?  Is it just so we can attempt to explain everything about the structure of matter and energy?  Would our lives be changed in any way if we did not have huge, expensive particle accelerator labs?   I doubt it, except for persons working at these labs.

I’m not against the study of science just for the sake of gaining knowledge, but I wonder what the purpose is in studying high energy artificially-created objects for which there is no practical use.   Yay, you can make some high energy whizz-bangs in some hyper-expensive toy that tells us something about what it was like a picosecond after theBig Bang.  Is this supposed to affect my life in any real way?  Why did I spend so much time and money studying something for which there is no practical use?  I’m wondering about my own motives here.

It’s my personal opinion that governments fund this research because they don’t want to be left behind if somebody discovers how to make a bomb out of elementary particles.  Governments seem to be really interested in new ways to kill people.  There are a lot of Department of Defense dollars going into high energy physics research.  Why would the army be interested in something which has no practical purpose?  Do they just like to throw away money?

Unlike most people, I’ve actually visited a high energy physics lab.  I walked through Fermilab many years ago when they were just installing the first colliding beam experiment.  I’ve seen the bubble chamber close up and been in the control room.  I’ve seen the equipment that powers these things.  It’s all very big and interesting and impressive.  It still doesn’t do much of anything.  Physicists are not looking for any practical uses for Higgs Bosons.  Scientists just want to find out how the universe is put together.  Sometimes I wonder why they need this knowledge.  When they find out how everything works are they going to try to take it all apart?  Does it change anything to have this kind of detailed knowledge of things that only exist when we create them?

I wonder if people’s lives might not be better if they studied things like how to grow flowers.  I wonder if our world would be a better place if we tried to figure out how to feed all the starving people.  I think we would all be happier if governments quit thinking up ways to kill people and instead thought of ways to make people happy.  There is no practical use for the stars in the sky, aside from giving us a sense of wonder when we look at them.  There are many things for which there is no practical use.  We can take pleasure in our knowledge, I suppose.  As to whether particle physics is relevant, I think the answer to that depends on if you are a particle physicist.  Are turtles relevant?  To a zoologist, perhaps they are.  Should we spend so much money on something that has no real use?  Perhaps not.