Will USA Suffer Brain Drain?

Watching the Trumpidency from afar is not fun. Even though that idiot will have less of an impact here in the EU, the way things are going, he might start a worldwide recession that will make the Great Depression look insignificant in comparison.

He might start a WW3 by giving Putin and Xi Jinping carte blanche to do whatever they want to their neighbors, who won’t just roll over.

But it is his anti-science position that will inevitably hamper scientific progress worldwide that makes me wonder – will young scientists flee the USA in significant numbers to be considered brain drain? They will have one barrier less than scientists from other countries who try to do the same – English language is currently the language of science and thus can be used anywhere in academia. No doubt many competent scientists will be welcome in the EU, or even in China.

Nazi Germany suffered from loss of scientific knowledge prior to WW2 and some of those immigrant scientists did eventually help the USA to invent the nuclear bomb first. But I doubt that stupid narcissist suffering from dementia is capable of comprehending that by targeting science, he is shooting his country in the foot whilst simultaneously giving others a boost.

The Great Gardening of 2025 – Part 2 – First Sowing

You might think that it is too early to sow anything, and you would be right for about 99% of crops that can be grown in my area. But the weather got warm enough this week to prepare my big greenhouse. It was a lot of work because I worked on the soil significantly.

Firstly I used an old baking tray the whole winter to prepare a lot of charcoal from woodchips made from twigs cut off my hornbeam fence. I filled the tray with wood chips and put it in my house heating oven towards the end of the heating cycle each day. That way the produced wood gas is not wasted because it burns in the oven and is used to heat the house. And I got some fine charcoal at the end. In the picture is the tray filled with spruce board offcuts that I am using now to make coal of larger sizes. Unfortunately, the tray got deformed and cannot be used anymore, but about that soem next time (I made a better receptacle to make charcoal).

I got about 100 l of fine charcoal but I did not make a photo of it. So here is a slightly blurry picture of approximately the same volume of charcoal of bigger sizes. This bigger charcoal will be put in plastic mesh bags and then used in the last filtering stage of my sewage cleaning facility. After it soaks up the phosphorus and nitrogen etc. from my waste water, it will be put into the compost and soil. In the meantime, I soaked the fine charcoal from wood chips in fertilizer and used it to complement the soil in the greenhouse rightaway.

Some people sing the praises of this charcoal (aka biochar), some say it does nothing and it is just the fertilizer that is of use. I have no way of knowing who is right but I did find some scientific articles that got positive results with it and since I can make the charcoal without needlessly adding CO2 to the atmosphere and I need to use charcoal in my sewage cleaner anyway, I decided to give it a shot. It meant though that I had to dig up all the soil in the greenhouse and mix it with the charcoal in a ratio of approximately 9:1, also 10% charcoal by volume.

You can see there were some bigger lumps of charcoal in there, those will probably get broken up over time. The wooden stakes marking the rows of my first sown crop are not very visible, but they are there.

Like I said, it is mostly too early for sowing anything but in my quest to maximize harvest from my garden, I bought seeds of three different varieties of radish. The first one can be sown at the end of February in the greenhouse, which is exactly what I have done. The second one can be sown in March, also in the greenhouse. And the third one will be sown in April outdoors. If it goes well, I should have a few months of steady supply of radishes.

Both greenhouse-grown varieties should be finished at about the time when I can plant my tomatoes and bell peppers in their stead. This way I should get two crops from the same space. I have done this already, albeit with only one variety, so it is not completely new and should work.

German elections, quick and dirty rundown

So Germany has voted, and yes, it’s bad, but it could be a lot worse. We needed early elections after the FDP (libertarians) broke up the coalition with the SPD (labour) and the Greens. The campaigns were overshadowed by two deadly attacks by Afghani refugees, one probably with an islamist background.

First, the naked data, and yes, it looks grim:

Source: Tagesschau

The black ones are the conservatives. Their leader worked together with the far right AfD to “stop immigration” a few weeks ago, sparking wide protests all over the country. Merz will be our next chancellor and apart from his politics, his Black Rock past and lack of experience, he is lacking the character to lead a country. They are the strongest party, followed by the far right AfD, Elon’s and Trump’s favourites.

SPD and Greens lost big, also pretty much deserved. they allowed the FDP to run the show and they also allowed the conservatives and the right wingers to dominate the whole discourse with nothing but immigration.

Then we have the FDP, who rightly got kicked out. Their treachery didn’t pay off and neither did their ultra libertarian course.

And the BSW, the “Union Sarah Wagenknecht”, which split off the party “die Linke” (the left) about a year ago, because the Left wasn’t racist and homophobic enough. Actually, they’re mostly like the AfD minus the ultra capitalist angle. I always say that Sarah puts the “national” in “socialist”. She’s also an absolute Putin pal. Good riddance.

Leaves us with the Left. Now, that’s where my sympathies lie. I know, their Ukraine policy is shit and my one big issue, but I’ll say this: if you think that their Ukraine policy is a dealbreaker, but can overlook the Greens’ and the SPD’s policy on Palestine, then be at least honest: you don’t care about human rights, you care about white people. What is amazing is that after the split off, everybody thought that was it. In the polls, they were at 3%, well below the magiv 5% you need to make it into parliament. And then they did something no other party did: they actually fought for the votes. They refused to bow to the “we need to stop refugees” narrative and were the only party to have a truly humanist position. They were also the only ones that positioned other topics like high rents and inflation. They pushed hard on social media, actually reaching young voters and made a huge come back.

And this is why I’m not desperate. Before the CDU started campaigning, they consistently polled way above 30%, at 37% at their highest. And then their shenanigans lost them a lot of votes, with only a minority of them going to the AfD (about 1%).

Now the work begins. Since Merz deemed to insult all of those protesting against fascism as “not having all the cups in the cupboard” (aka being several cards short of a full deck), the motto is: get up, fill the coffee cup, keep fighting!

The Great Gardening of 2025 – Part 1 – LED There be Light

I decided to significantly change the way I treat my garden this year. My goal is to raise as much food as I can and that means a wide variety of crops grown in a wide variety of ways. I am planning to write about the endeavor to maximize my edibles from my huge garden and this is the first post in a series about that.

And although I am cash-strapped, I had to begin by buying some LED-lights. Because I want to grow onions and peppers from seeds,

Onions and peppers need a really long time to germinate and grow in size sufficient enough to be planted outdoors. I tried to sow three types of onion but so far only one started to grow, which bums me out. So far I had very little success with onions in my garden, I hope to change that but preliminarily I have little reason for optimism.

After (if) the onions are big enough to move into the greenhouse, I will use these lights to start my tomatoes, pumpkins, beans, and corn indoors too. I do hope that this way I will get plants big enough to resist slug damage later on. Once the plants are big enough, the slugs should not damage them anymore. I also want to try growing these in a novel-ish way, so stay tuned for that.

When I am not growing anything under the lights, I now have a consistent diffuse light for photographing my handmade products, something that I needed for some time by now.

(sex cells are binary)≠(sex is binary)

It never ceases to baffle me that there still are people who insist that there are only two genders because sex is binary because there are only two types of gamete (in humans, there are life forms with more than just two gametes). I am especially disappointed in Dawkins, a writer whose popular scientific books I really enjoyed and who, as a biologist, really should know better.

Trying to conflate “sex” as it refers to whole persons with “sex” as it refers to gametes is a prime example of a bad kind of scientific reductionism. Just because there is one word – in this case “sex” – does not mean that it means the same thing all the time, everywhere.

Firstly, sex at birth is not assigned according to any kind of gamete that an individual produces, it is assigned as a best guess based on external genitalia at birth. As such, it is mostly right, but there are cases where it cannot be ascribed with confidence and also cases, where it later shows being wrong. And cases where surgery is actually used to shoehorn a person into one of the two boxes.

Secondly, there are a lot of people who never produce any kind of gamete their whole life. What sex do these people belong to? If one decides that sex must be a binary based on the type of gamete produced by an individual, one must then decide that these people do not have any sex whatsoever. This is the exact point where the concept of binary sex when referring to people and not gametes breaks down. There are a lot of further complexities, but this suffices to disprove the idiotic notion that people can be sorted into exactly two categories based on gametes.

And that’s without going into the whole concept of gender, which has nothing to do with just biology. Gender is a linguistic/social construct. Just as gametes are just one criterion in determining a person’s sex, a person’s sex is just one criterion in determining their gender.

So although sex as it pertains to gametes is binary, sex regarding whole people is a bit more complicated. The word sex cannot mean the same thing in both cases and does not need to have the same constraints. Sex, when referring to whole individuals, is not binary but bimodal. Which is similar, but not the same.

Wishing for reality to be simple because one specific language (in this case English) has just two words for gender and wishing to shoehorn everyone into those two words is akin to insisting that the rainbow has a limited number of exactly distinct colors because we have assigned distinct words to some bands of wavelengths.

Russian “Morality”

The almighty algorithm recommended this video to me, and it is really good:

Describing Russia as a pseudo-feudal society with components of a Mafia-esque hierarchy is very interesting and very apt, in my opinion.

And unlike many other people who opine on Russia online, this one cannot be easily dismissed because she is Russian herself.

Gingy Breads – Ree-Sye-Pea

This is the basis for the recipe that my mother uses most for her yearly gingerbread creations. It is not the actual recipe she uses, because she made changes to it that cannot be easily conveyed by text. I will write the changes at the end if you want to experiment, this is what she started with.

Ingredients:

650 g fine flour
240 g powdered sugar
4 whole eggs
100 g honey
50 g of vegetable fat, shortening, butter (ghee), or lard according to taste and availability
1 tablespoon of cinnamon
1 tablespoon of gingerbread spice mixture*
1 teaspoon of baking soda
2-3 tablespoons of cocoa powder if a darker color is desired (optional)

Process:

Put the sieved powdered ingredients and some flour on the rolling board. Add the eggs and molten fat with honey and start adding the rest of the flour. Work from the center of the board towards the edges and knead the dough until it is smooth but firm. A kitchen robot can be used at the start but elbow grease will be needed for finishing the dough because it becomes too firm.

Roll the dough to approximately half the desired thickness of the final product and cut the shapes with a butter knife or forms.

Bake at 170-180°C until the color changes to golden brown (approximately 10 min). Te exact time depends on the actual kitchen equipment available.

If a shiny surface is desired, egg wash can be applied with a pastry brush on hot pieces directly after they are taken out of the oven (my mother does not do this).

For the best taste, they should be left to wait for a few days until they soften up a bit. For decorations and building more complicated structures, like gingerbread houses, you should proceed ASAP while they are rock-hard.

My mother’s changes:

3 egg yolks and 1 whole egg instead of 4 whole eggs
300 g of honey instead of 100 g
flour is added to the mixture not by weight but until the desired dough consistency is reached so the actual amount of flour used depends on the size of the eggs, the honey consistency, etc.

Gingerbread spice mixture is sold in CZ. Here is the site of the manufacturer (-click-). Ingredients according to Google Translate are: ground cinnamon, ground coriander, ground star anise, ground allspice, ground cloves, ground anise, ground nutmeg, ground mace, and ground fennel.

Hippo New Year (with plush)

I’ll say it out oud, 2024was not my favourite year. Apart from the world going to shit, I had to deal with a lot of health problems and I don’t like that. Also work was very stressful, especially towards the end of the year. With roughly 1/3 of people being sick, the rest of us worked a lot of overtime and I just made it to the christmas break before going down as well.

But at least I got a break and got myself a gift: time to make a pattern I’ve been wanting to make for months but didn’t have the time: a baby hippo modelled on the infamous Moo Deng

The face pieces nearly drove me nuts, and I didn’t wire the legs because that cutie lives in my bed, and I’m totally in love with her.

Image of a plush hippo, front. You can see the wide open pink mouth, the feet and one ear.

Side veiw of the hippo. You can see the chubby legs and the neck rolls

Gingy Breads 2024 Xmass – Part 3

Aaaand for the third part the gingerbread cottages.

Gingy Breads 2024 Xmass – Part 2

Today a few Christmas trees.

Gingy Breads 2024 Xmass – Part 1

Today just a little teaser of my mother’s creations this year. She made so many gingerbread houses this Christmas that I will have to post them over a few days. I shoulda start two weeks ago but I somehow never got to it.

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