Balsam Swamp is a sprawling state forest that stretches almost 5.5 miles east-west across 4 towns. The area is very rural, and the landscape surrounding the State Forest is predominantly forested. Balsam Swamp State Forest is comprised of a mix of native hardwood forests, hemlock swamps, and conifer plantations. There are no designated recreational trails on the forest, but there is ample opportunity for self-guided day hikes to explore the diversity of habitats represented on this State Forest. Additionally, the western section of Balsam Swamp State Forest is adjacent to Five Streams State Forest to the south.
The main attraction of this forest is Balsam Pond. The impoundment is approximately 152 acres and is a popular destination for fishing and paddle boat sports. Balsam Pond is a warm water fishery that contains a mix of largemouth bass, smallmouth bass, chain pickerel, yellow perch, brown bullhead and sunfish. Tiger muskellunge have been stocked in the past with the last stocking occurring in 1995. However, there have been very few reports of anglers catching any of the adult tiger muskies. A shallow gravel boat launch is suitable for launching small fishing boats.
A small rustic camp ground is also located at Balsam Pond. Camping spaces are available at no cost on a first-come, first-serve basis and there is no running water or electricity. A fire ring, outhouse, and picnic table are provided for each camping space. A sign on Balsam-Tyler Road in Pharsalia designates the entrance to the boat launch and camping facility. This is a carry-in carry-out facility. Please do not litter.
The SSD drive is for purposes of booting so much faster then a conventional drive — taking my laptop about 4 seconds to boot into Linux with the XFCE window manager compared to 30 plus seconds with the traditional drive.
Applications load somewhat faster, but the real speed difference is when you are preforming operations that are highly disk intensive, such as loading a large database or processing many digital elevation models at once. Obviously, CPU intensive applications aren’t improved by SSD, so if something involves more processing then loading, the benefits will be smaller.
All together though, I’m much happier with the speed of my machine with the SSD drive installed. It’s well worth the $150 to be able to start and shutdown the machine quickly, and have more access to my files. Plus, I still have the old hard drive in the DVD drive bay, so I have ample space on my laptop for years to come.
The Debian Package Manager turned 25 years old last year, and apt-get has been around for two decades now. I am old enough to remember manually installing packages using RPM and having to go around searching for dependencies.
And building a lot of software from source code using to ./configure; make; make install — and having to search around for packages to fix missing dependencies during the configure process. Good ol’ days of GNU Automake. It’s very rare these days to have to build something from source code, unless you are tweaking some of the lines of code.
I have always been very fascinated by the now quite old Richard Hofsteader essay. While his decades-old essay is mostly about the right-wing movements of the earlier centuries, paranoia is a central part of “fringe” politics. Sometimes it’s distrust of monied interests, sometimes it’s Hollywood or big business, sometimes it’s a distrust of a religious group, race or political party.
The Mayo Clinic defines paranoia as a “An unrealistic distrust of others or a feeling of being persecuted”.
If you look hard enough at any community, you are bound to find some people aren’t completely honest. There is a lot incentive to cut corners and we all develop cliques and have close connections that sometimes blind our objectivity. Sometimes there is outright corruption or criminal activity, but they tend to be a lot less frequent then the paranoid imagination would imagine. Most people don’t engage in criminal conspiracy, simply because of the risk to their own reputation and the fact that most institutions are built in ways to actively discourage criminal behavior by having audits and positive reinforcement for good behavior.
Out groups often don’t see that. People who believe the politicians are ignoring their wishes are likely to believe that the reason that representatives aren’t representing them is because they are somehow corrupt or evil. That’s ignoring the fact that politicians often have very active feelers on public opinion — elected officials read and study the newspapers and regularly conduct public opinion polling to ensure that they are acting in ways that the public wants. After all, if a politicians isn’t representing the public will, they are likely to get voted out of office, which means fired from their jobs. And most elected officials want to be loved, not hated by the public if only to stroke their egos.
Sometimes people just have ideas that are different then the majority’s view in their community. The farther you go out and up — the county, the state, the national level — the more diverse the electorate and the more likely to have a majority opinion different then your own in-group. Seeing one’s own political ideals ignored and snuffed out can be alienating, and lead people to search into the depths, looking for evidence that they have been defrauded and that their opponents are not playing honestly, using deceit and other illicit means to achieve their power and prominence.
Often I see paranoia being emphasized as a right-wing phenomenon, but if you look at many of environmental, labor, housing, and anti-war movement activists, you will see many of the same paranoid trends on the left. Some of it might just be rhetoric – often political rhetoric is more paranoid-sounding then actual belief. But you can’t look at the far-left activist and not hear many of the same conspiracy theories you hear on the right.
Are the fracking companies really working to poison your drinking water?
In 2016, spring came early with our first 81 degree day on Wednesday, March 9. It was an exceptionally warm day, the earliest 80 degree day on record. We got rain on Thursday but with temperatures in the low sixties, meant it just further melted the snow and kept the ground from getting too dried out. So what I do? I went out to Schoharie County to camp down at Betty Brook.
It was in the 40s to start out that Saturday, but got up to mid-60s by mid day. Lots of blue skies, although the grass was pretty day. I first started out the day at Franklinton Valie outside of Middleburgh.
I then went down to Mine Kill State Park on this most beautiful of early spring days.
It was wonderful camping down by Betty Brook.
A bit cool in the morning, but I brought my heater.
But by a few hours in the morning, after the time change, it was back up in the 60s. Not bad for March 13th.
The next day I hiked along the Old NY 30 at Max V Shaul State Park, aka Towpath Mountain Park.
After that I hiked Vromans Nose. It looked more like late April then early march this year.
Don’t you wish all mid-March days could be this nice?
One of the most important things for our next president is their job as the chief of law enforcement. The most important laws in our country regulate manufacturing, they ensure products we use every day are as safe, healthy, efficient and non polluting as possible. Regulations push industry to build better products, to innovate and to protect the public interest.
Some are pushing for radical changes in our country. I don’t believe in them. Instead, I think we should push industry to follow the law, and make incremental improvements as standards are increased to better protect the public as a whole.
ο»ΏOne of the problems I think there is with climate change, is it’s discussion has become fraught with self-evident truth. The assumption is that if you believe in the science of climate change, that itβs self-evident that you must believe in radical action to address it. You canβt be numb to human suffering after all, can you? Maybe so.
I am a believer in science, but at the same time, Iβm a practical person. Infrastructure take decades to evolve, and while we should do more to reduce the carbon intensity of our society, and ultimately work towards the goal of reducing emissions, I donβt think the necessary reductions to fully limit the worse impacts of climate change is even realistic. Instead of planning to do what we can do to limit the worse impacts of climate change, we should look more broadly at what we can do to reduce the harm more broadly both by reductions in emissions and adapting our infrastructure.
Many of the impacts of climate change are well studied. When we are upgrading or repairing damaged infrastructure we most certainly should look at the science and work to minimize future harm. We obviously should not be building new large coal plants, and building new renewable generation were ecologically appropriate. We should continue to improve the efficiency on new automobiles and appliances, and work to expand the electric automobile and transit fleet where practical.
Society needs a measured approach β not ignorance but also realistic goals and plans that can be adopted as we upgrade and continue to modernize our infrastructure.
I’ve been watching as Elon Musk is canceling all the subscriptions that various federal government agencies have to newspapers and industry publications, in theory to stop what he is calling payola to “liberal” press. I am a bit horrified, as having been a Communications Coordinator for years, and knowing how important it is to read the papers to know what is happening on the ground and react.
Yes, the press does benefit from government subscriptions and it is an important part of their bottom line, but so is sales of gravel and cement to government. Nobody says though that it’s a pay-off to gravel and cement companies when the public works department buys such materials to build a government office building or highway. Good decision making is based on having information, and depriving government of what the press is writing about it doesn’t help it make good decisions.
