Rock City State Forest Road
Driving Rock City State Forest Road at Rock City State Forest.
By the time I got camp up, it was this dark
Cloudy evening but better then recent evenings
Shots – Health News : NPR
According to a recent poll by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Bogema is one of about 2.5 million rural residents (about 7% of the total rural population) who say they have no friends or family nearby to rely on. An additional 14 million (about 39%) say they only have a few people. Like Bogema, many feel isolated.
McGregor, Minn., is one of 18 communities in north-eastern part of the state that is participating in a program that addresses loneliness and social isolation by connecting the young with the old.
People in rural areas report "feeling lonely or left out," says Carrie Henning-Smith, the deputy director of the University of Minnesota Rural Health Research Center and one of the authors of a recent study on rural isolation, despite the fact that rural communities often have stronger social networks than urban ones. She notes that many communities have become more socially isolated in recent years as rural economies have declined and young people moved away.
For me, I doubt living in a small town would be socially isolating -- I think there are a lot of interesting folk who live in small towns -- but it's just finding work that pays decently, lets me live the live-style I desire. While I don't need a lot of fancy toys, a lot of things that you need for a good rural life are pretty expensive.
NPR
All electric buildings were quite popular in the mid 1960s at the dawn of the nuclear age but they fell out of popularity during the 1970s. It's not particularly efficient to convert fossil fuels into electricity compared to burning them directly. It's a different calculation if your generating from renewables though. Also, most American homes are wired at too low of a voltage to be really efficient at using electricity to do very energy intensive tasks well - like quick, instant on heat generation or spinning large electric motors. 240 volt outlets are relatively rare and almost nobody in their home has 480 volt 3 phase electricity. If people had 480 volt 3-phase in their homes, then things like instant-on electric water heaters and electric cars would be a lot more pratical -- but higher voltages require greater separation of the wires, with more insulation, and greater issues with sparks due greater ability of electricity to jump.
Stone crusher draws crowds | News | fltimes.com
SENECA FALLS — Anyone who has ever picked up large rocks by hand knows how menial — and physically demanding — that task can be, especially on a hot and muggy day like Tuesday.
People who want to make that job easier, or eliminate it completely, got a look at the machinery that makes it possible at Empire Farm Days.
Stone-crushing demonstrations by Bugnot, a French company, drew dozens of people who saw rocks the size of flat footballs reduced to stones that would easily fit in the palm of your hand. Smaller stones were pulverized, turned to powder that went into the churned-up soil.
July was the hottest month on record – CNN
July 2019 has replaced July 2016 as the hottest month on record, with meteorologists saying that global temperatures marginally exceeded the previous record.
The European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Programme, which analyzes temperature data from around the planet, said that July was around 0.56 °C warmer than the global average temperature between 1981-2010.
That's slightly hotter than July 2016, when the world was in the throes of one of the strongest El Niño events on record.