Posted on July 26, 2015
5-Gallon Bucket Pond Filter
Every once in a while I actually DO one of those little projects on Pinterest. Of all the things I put together, the main reason I thought I’d post this one is that the other million tutorials out there didn’t quite hit the mark for me, so I pulled things I liked from a variety of other posts and made a few more up and here we are.
So I have this pond. The water is green.  For a year or so it filtered well enough with the usual staples — some barley, checking the pH and other levels, and a basic pump, small three-step filter (bio balls and coarse and fine filters in a little filter box), but it was never really clear, just clear enough.  The best it got was immediately after deep cleanings, but they didn’t last more than a month.  For reference, I have a small pond, about 100 gallons, with three 6-10″ long Koi; it tends to be big rains or the direct sun that seems to spawn the evil algae blooms.
Anyway, the design I went for was pretty simple. Â First off, here’s the shopping list:
- 5 Gallon Bucket with lid ($5 at a hardware store)
- A 10 pound or 0.5 cubic foot bag of lava rock ($4)
- Some fine filtration media ($9 for plenty)
- Enough garden hose to reach across the pond and into the bucket (under $10)
- A cheap hose adapter ($3Â for each female and male, or skip if you have an intact hose)
- Male and female 1″ PVC adapters (less than $1 a piece)
- Some cheap, sturdy, plastic box that fits at the bottom of the bucket.  I used a large glad-ware container ($3)
Most of these you probably have lying around. Â The total cost here is $36, and it’s probably more like $25 if you scrounge some things you have lying around.
Tool wise, all I used was a drill and a pocket knife.
Posted on May 7, 2015
When the “Quantified Self” meets Medical Reality
So, there was a bit of a twitter row a few weeks ago when Mark Cuban and a number of healthcare people got in a debate about the frequency of lab testing.  Mark posted a tweet that started, according to Forbes: “A digital firestorm“.  I think the original tweets were deleted, but the Forbes article says they were:
1)If you can afford to have your blood tested for everything available, do it quarterly so you have a baseline of your own personal health
— Mark Cuban (@mcuban) April 1, 2015
2) create your own personal health profile and history.It will help you and create a base of knowledge for your children,their children, etc
— Mark Cuban (@mcuban) April 1, 2015
3) a big failing of medicine = we wait till we are sick to have our blood tested and compare the results to “comparable demographicsâ€
I first heard about this from Aaron Carroll (@aaronecarroll) on The Incidental Economist (TIE) blog.  I’m a regular follower of the blog, and I have a lot of respect for Aaron; his writing is well researched and delivered; he writes for a few sites and it’s all great — here’s his most recent piece on wasting research on settled science, which is spot on, as most of his writing is.  Anyway, the blog (TIE) hits that sweet spot where I agree almost always, but occasionally see a different perspective.  The primary reason for this is that what I do (all things Data) is central to medical research (Dr. Carroll’s main blog focus), but also completely removed from it since I don’t typically use research-level medical data.
I’d pretty much resolved to stay out of this discussion (beyond what I did on twitter), but Aaron posted a video on the topic yesterday, refreshing it in my mind, and this particular topic crosses several personal sweet spots, so I thought I’d chime in.  I think my blog has like 5 readers, so it shouldn’t matter much anyway.
Posted on January 12, 2015
Bad Science or Bad Grammar? Homeopathy, GMO, and Chip’s rantings…
Here’s another “science battles” trend that bothers me. Â There’s a lot of frustration on the internet with this or that being bad science, and for the most part I’m on the side of science. Â People do some really uninformed and blatantly incorrect things.
But a lot of people actually have reasonable positions and simply articulate them poorly. Â The worst cases of these are when people jump on vocabulary bandwagons where they join sides based on a misunderstanding, and then get (improperly) eviscerated for it.
Acupuncture, Aromatherapy and Herbal tea are all fine examples of things that are not homeopathy in the literal sense.
Posted on November 10, 2014
The Truck is Running! Yay!
So it’s been a month since the last post, when I was excited about the new possibilities. And quite a month it has been!
The truck died… I took the carburetor off to rebuild it since the engine sounded lousy and I figured that would be a good place to start since it did start and run, and nothing was particularly wrong with it. The carb rebuild was pretty interesting. I had no idea how these things worked. I’d been thinking of making a venturi pump to clean out the bottom of the pond, so it was nice to see that the venturi effect had a place in car mechanics. Seriously I had no idea how complicated a carburetor was, and I still don’t really know what a lot of the parts actually do, or at least why they’re needed or what affect they have.
Turns out that whoever played with the carb on the truck last put one of the gaskets in backwards. Â Here’s a pic… the thin metal grill with two holes on it should line up perfectly with the holes on the engine block, rather than make the weird crescent shape they do here.
The gasket underneath the carb in my Ford F-100 was put in backwards.
Posted on October 2, 2014
Procrastination via Organization (And Loving It)
I think there’s a name for the mental block that occurs when you can’t start a project specifically due to having not cleaned and organized sufficiently before hand. Â It’s a form of procrastination, I think, but I haven’t been able to find a specific term or treatment of it online; it’s just some vague thing I remember from college that may or may not have been real.
That’s basically the situation I’m living in now, and I LOVE it. Â It’s been over a month without any income for me, since I quit my job to pursue greener pastures, and while I’ve managed to budget reasonably well what I set aside for the adventure, we’ve cut back dramatically on excess spending. Â Instead of head down focusing on building the empire, though, I’ve been focusing mainly on taking care of all the little things that usually get sidetracked in life. Â Cleaning the house, exercising, spending time on hobbies and spending time with people. Read More