I purchased the Zojirushi 3 liter dispensing pot, and it runs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week in my house. We drink tea constantly, and it is wonderful not to have to wait to boil water. The Zojirushi allows you to set the desired water temperature based on your needs (i.e. 175 for green/white teas, 195 for other teas, 205 for cooking). The unit is tall enough to fit even our tallest to-go cup under the dispensing spout.
Since we've had the kettle, I wondered about the energy efficiency of it, since the outside of the unit can be fairly warm, suggesting that it isn't very well insulated. I also happen to have a Brand electric meter, an expensive and highly accurate meter used for measuring electric consumption. So I plugged the Zojirushi kettle into the meter, and let it run. 
I happen to have some foil insulation bubble wrap laying around. This inexpensive insulation product is often used to insulate crawlspaces. It has a pretty low R value, but is compact and flexible. I cut a piece to cover the water kettle, leaving room to dispense water, see the water level indicator, and creating a flap to allow access to the lid for adding water. Ideally the insulation would have been tight to the body of kettle, with as little room for airflow as possible to give the best possible performance. But in practice, using rubber bands and paper clips, there were still some big gaps.Commoncraft blog has a nice post on making the simple choices that reduce administration overhead and complexity:
The Beachcomber Cafe has made choices in how the business is run. Sure, they have the potential to try to squeeze every dollar out of people who need wifi, but they don't. They provide wifi as a worry-free service and rely on the good nature of people to support the business in other ways.
Further, they put a priority on the lightweight choice - the wifi is always on, always free and open to everyone. Any other way would create more hassle than she needs. The store hours are even easy to remember.
I'm not talking about business practices, but philosophy - a philosophy that's built on shedding unneeded administration and focusing on providing opportunities that give people ways to feel good about the relationship.
The first step is realizing you have a choice. Your business doesn't have to operate like others. Sure, you can make 8 dollars a day on wifi, or you can smile at your customers and tell them the wifi is free and goes great with today's paper and a candy bar.
I think kind of simplicity as a philosophy is exactly what makes free business models possible, and is a driving force behind much of the web 2.0 innovation.
Why is it endangered? L. tasmanica is endangered because it only occurs naturally in one small area in the world. The total wild plant population is around 500 individuals all restricted to one disease and fire prone area. Kings lomatia (Lomatia tasmanica) occurs as a single population in Tasmania's remote southwest within the Wilderness World Heritage Area.
It is a Tasmanian endemic, first recorded by miner and naturalist, Deny King in 1937 at New Harbour but this population seems to have since disappeared. During the 1960's Deny sent specimens of the plant to the Tasmanian Herbarium to be identified and so it became known to science. Its common name "Kings lomatia" is in honour of the man who discovered it.
Why are these plants unable to sexually reproduce? Although this plant does produce flowers it has never produced fruit or seed. The reason for this is that the plant is a triploid. This means it has three sets of chromosomes instead of the normal two. This renders the plant sterile. Other Tasmanian species, L. tinctoria and L. polymorpha are diploid (two sets of chromosomes), as are other species of the genus and the subfamily to which it belongs.
The only way it can reproduce itself is by vegetative means. It simply clones itself. When it gets old and falls down, it puts out new suckers and grows up again. It is still theoretically the same plant.
In fact latest research has shown that Kings lomatia is all one single clone. There is no genetic diversity within the population. This means that all the individual Kings lomatia plants are genetically identical.
The oldest plant clone in the world! Amazingly, this plant clone has been around for at least 43,600 years. At Melaleuca Inlet some Pleistocene fossils of Lomatia leaves were found that appear to be L. tasmanica. Radio-carbon dating gave a minimum age of 43,600 years for the layer in which the leaf fossil was found.
It covered tons of topics never discussed on the blog before: proposed improvements to Gmail (please!), the real original book title, using telephone vs. e-mail, principles and case studies, metrics (including exercise), analysis vs. intuition, the declining dollar and personal outsourcing & geoarbitrage, and much more.
The Canadian government moved Friday to ban polycarbonate infant bottles, the most popular variety on the market, after it officially declared one of their chemical ingredients toxic. The action, by the departments of health and environment, is the first taken by any government against bisphenol-a, or BPA, a widely used chemical that mimics a human hormone. It has induced long-term changes in animals exposed to it through tests.
A report in today's Science describes how researchers recorded the drainage of one such lake in Greenland. The lake was roughly 5.6 km2, but drained completely in less than an hour and a half. The lake's contents rapidly made their way down to the bottom of the ice sheet, 980 m below the surface. During this period, the average drainage rate was 8700 m3/s. For reference, the average flow rate for Niagara Falls is only 5700 m3/s.
I left my 9-year-old at Bloomingdale's (the original one) a couple weeks ago. Last seen, he was in first floor handbags as I sashayed out the door. Was I worried? Yes, a tinge. But it didn't strike me as that daring, either. Isn't New York as safe now as it was in 1963? It's not like we're living in downtown Baghdad.Growing up in Brooklyn, NY, I fondly remember wandering a distance of several miles at around the same age with my cousin Douglas.
Anyway, for weeks my boy had been begging for me to please leave him somewhere, anywhere, and let him try to figure out how to get home on his own. So on that sunny Sunday I gave him a subway map, a MetroCard, a $20 bill, and several quarters, just in case he had to make a call.
Follow the link for more great ideas.
- Quit buying vitamin supplements (see my Nutrition Manifesto Myth #4) and apply that cost savings to whole plant foods.
- Quit buying chips, soda, and packaged cookies and candy. Quit buying meat. Quit buying fast food. These things are costing you more than you may realize.
- Instead, buy grains and legumes, which are higher in protein than people expect, inexpensive, and they keep in storage for years. Try serving grains/legumes most nights a week instead of meat.
Dave Gray has a great video on the basic elements of visual language: Forms, fields, and flows. He also has a new website where he is consolidating his thoughts on visual thinking in preparation for a new book.
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