blogs

     I ranted on for a bit the other day about Food, Inc., a movie I haven't seen yet sort of reviewed, presuming to know what it was about. Food, Inc., is an indictment of Big Ag, which includes Monsanto, Tyson, Cargill, etc., but which I think also includes many of our regular readers. You might say, "It's not right to review a film you haven't seen," and there's a point to that. But in my defense, I would say that a lot of the movie reviews I've read have had almost no resemblance to the movies I've seen.

 When they start breeding chickens for feathers, I want to see what the birds look like. And I'd like to know if you can rig them up like a kite to take them to market. If they could float in a 5 mph wind, think of all the trucking costs you could save just by tethering a thousand or so birds to the pickup and flying them to the  processing plant. Which would have to be upwind from the farm, of course.
    Why am I talking about breeding for feathers? It's the hydrogen economy, which may or may not ever be upon us. If it is to be, then carbonized chicken feather fibers could be in demand as a storage medium for hydrogen gas. Keratin, a natural protein found abundantly in chicken feathers, forms strong, hollow tubes when it's heated. This increases the surface area, making an efficient and economical storage medium for hydrogen.
    A 20-gallon carbonized chicken feather tank would add $200 to the cost of a new vehicle. Which is significant, but less so then metalhydrides , which would add about $30,000 to a car's cost, and nothing like the mind-boggling $5.5 million it would take for a tank filled with carbon nanotubes.  A chicken feather report from the American Chemical Society Green Chemistry Institute will run in the Ag Science section of Saturday's edition of Lancaster Farming.

     A year ago, the Bush administration's EPA released documents outlining how the Clean Air Act could regulate greenhouse gases. Buried deep in the documents was a single paragraph about the amount of methane released into the atmosphere by bovine belches.

    Using EPA guidelines on the costs of ameliorating various environmental threats, the American Farm Bureau quickly coined the term "cow tax" and figured out how much it would cost farmers if it ever came to be. TheAFB's estimate for an emissions permit would have been $175 for each dairy cow, $87.50 per head of beef cattle, and $20 for each hog.

     The Smoker-in-Chief disses tobacco. President Barack Obama has had almost as much press for sneaking cigarettes as he has had for his jump shots. One would assume that he's finally kicked the habit and that he's able to get up and down the court a little faster, but we don't really know for sure.
    We do know for sure that earlier today he signed the toughest anti-smoking bill ever. In a ceremony to mark the signing, he said nine out of ten new smokers are under the age of 18, and he mentioned that he was one of those kids, and he knows how tough it is to quit.