Horror Zone Tell Tale

No, no "horror", silly audio-to-text translator. It's a Horizontal Tale for the title, I am just too lazy to get out of bed, and too lazy it appears to aX-chew-ally do my own typing.

I reach up and remove a cc or so of water from my face while reading Facebooq. No, I'm not crying, just my eyes early this morning thinking they need to participate in this bit of a cold in my head by precipitating. A great way to lose weight after eating holiday quantities from festivities. Leaking. Well, not a great way numerically, but its a start. On to the coffee maker, now!

No motion.

This would be the world's greatest invention: Be able to point ANYTHING at your teleBision set that has a volume button (i.e. my phone) and be able to turn down the volume or continue holding the button to turn it off without having to brave the cold to find the remote lost somewhere on the other side of the bedroom. "...  if you call within the next 20 minutes we'll throw in this second set of knives ...", please, no, please, no knife throwing, not even free ones, this early in the morning.

If its any comfort I did make my batch of chocolate cookies in the middle of the night, and I remembered to put in the coconut that my son left out of his batch. They are called Fudgies. I have been making them since childhood. But I haven't made them in at least a year. It took me forever to find the recipe but I finally found the eXtremely faded index card. I very carefully wrote over the ancient letters and numbers with new ink AND more importantly I photographed the recipe card. Now I have it forever!

A Tip for Brazil Nut Farmers

A friend of mine posted a note about Brazil nuts being unusually high in radioactivity. So I investigated the situation and came up with this "solution" to the problem.

It appears that the uptake of the element radium by the root system of the plant results from the need for the element barium as a micronutrient. Radium occurs at a typical concentration of one part per trillion in the soil (one million out of one million) and the radium is concentrated by the root system because there is a lack of barium in the soil.

Radium in the soil is the natural result of the radioactive decay of uranium.

If the farmers of Brazil nuts would introduce barium into the soil in small amounts, most likely through irrigation, the plant would preferentially pick up barium, and the radioactive "problem" would greatly diminish. I am not sure what concentration of barium would be appropriate, but if the barium were at a concentration of one part per million in the soil, it would be on the order of a million times greater than the radium. They would just need to eXperiment with this idea to see if it is practical and actually works. I think that barium compounds are relatively cheap and most are relatively insoluble in water.

I believe this barium increase idea follows the chemical reaction rule called "Le Chatelier's Principle", although there may be a better rule that accurately describes it.

Link to Wikipedia article: Le Chatelier's Principle