Hawaii Travel

Archive for June, 2009

New archaeological studies from the famed Kona Field System appear to confirm the dramatic expansion in organized Hawaiian agriculture starting as early as the year 1300, and certainly by the late 1400s.

In terms of calories produced, one of the key crops of the drylands was the sweet potato. Did the late arrival in the Islands of this rich source of carbohydrates prompt the development of extensive, highly organized dryland agriculture? It’s possible, researchers said. The crop was popular enough that large sections of land were dedicated exclusively to its production.

(Image: Sweet potato in a modern dryland agricultural application.)

The new study, published in the May 2009 issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science, includes a dozen radiocarbon dates from the Kona agricultural fields, but the authors also studied pollen, starch grains and cellular material from plant materials found in the soil at a dozen locations.

The paper is “Sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) and banana (Musa sp.) microfossils in deposits from the Kona Field System, Island of Hawaii,” by Mark Horrocks, of The University of Auckland School of Geography, Geology and Environmental Science in New Zealand, and Robert Rechtman, of Rechtman Consulting in Keaau, Hawaii.

“The oldest radiocarbon ages of the sampled deposits are 1300–1625 AD and 1310–1470 AD,” the authors write.

The Kona Field System is perhaps the most famous dryland agricultural system in the archipelago. It is a vast area on the slopes between Kailua and Honaunau on the Big Island, where plantings of sweet potato, paper mulberry, breadfruit, dryland taro, bananas and other crops were grown in elevation zones linked to the species’ moisture requirements.

Researchers have suggested that this kind of large-scale, organized agriculture could not have occurred without a centralized governing authority, and the establishment of the Kona Field System has been linked by some to the first island-wide governance, perhaps by the famed chief ‘Umi-a-Liloa.

Horrocks and Rechtman said they were able to identify various kinds of pollen, and the remains of banana leaves and starch from the roots of plants, including of sweet potatoes.

They found that pollen evidence for trees and shrubs appeared to suddenly decline as the cultivated plants appeared—suggesting land clearing of forested areas for agriculture. There was also evidence that sweet potatoes were being grown exclusively in some specific areas.

“The apparent absence of starch and xylem remains of other tuberous crops archaeologically identified elsewhere in Polynesia suggests that tuberous cropping within the study area was mono-specific,” the authors wrote.

Other places in Hawai’i also had agricultural field systems. There is another well-known field system at Kohala. And on Moloka’i, there is recent evidence that the Kalaupapa peninsula, whose agricultural fields were once believed to be post-European, extended well back into the prehistoric period.

Researcher Mark McCoy, now an anthropologist with San Jose State University, conducted extensive research on the peninsula that juts northward from the base of Molokai’s cliffs. In a paper published in 2005 in the Journal of the Polynesian Society, “The Development of the Kalaupapa Field System, Moloka’i Island, Hawai’i,” he cites dates similar to those of the Kona Field System.

“This field system was largely ignored in previous discussions of Hawaiian agriculture because it was initially assessed to be a 19th century construction,” he wrote.

Radiocarbon dates of botanical material found on the peninsula and in adjacent valleys suggest that there may have been humans there perhaps as early as 800 AD and almost certainly by 1200 AD.

There are questions about the validity of the earliest dates, but certainly by 1200, Hawaiians were in the area and beginning to establish settlements. And while there is some evidence of agricultural activity, it appears this was not particularly intensive for another 250 years.

That’s when the serious land clearing started.

“Widespread burning across the Kalaupapa Peninsula, which signals of the beginning of the Kalaupapa Field System, does not commence until 1450-1550,” McCoy wrote.

The field system appears to have been abandoned at Kalaupapa in the late 1700s, and then reopened about 1850, as Hawaiian farmers began providing potatoes and other crops to the participants in the California gold rush.

This revival of agriculture at Kalaupapa was halted in 1866, when the crown relocated native residents of the Kalaupapa region to establish the Hansen’s disease colony there.

In general, McCoy said that the field system studies, along with other archaeological work, tends to suggest that residents settled and farmed the wetter regions of the Islands first, and then moved into the drier areas.

Why did the move from wet to dry occur about the same time in many areas? Perhaps it was population pressure. Perhaps it was the arrival well into the last millenium of the sweet potato, a crop from South America. Sweet potatoes, ‘uala in Hawaiian, do not appear in the earliest archaeological sites, suggesting they had not yet arrived.

“There are a number of equally attractive, alternative hypotheses to explain concurrent construction of field systems in the Hawaiian Islands, including the late introduction of the sweet potato, population pressure, an increased demand for social production to fuel the political economy, or a combination of some or all of these,” McCoy wrote.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2009

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The hottest car in the world may be an electric car.

For those of us accustomed to thinking about golf-cart-like electric car models, something like Tesla’s Roadster is the game changer.

It’s what car magazines would call “smoking hot,” a sexy low-slung sports car that goes 0-60 in four seconds, and whose top speed is double the highest posted speed limit in Hawai’i.

Touch the car with a finger and go “Sssss.” (Image: Tesla Roadster. Credit: Tesla Motors.)

There are a couple of them in Hawai’i already and more coming, bought by well-heeled customers. (They run a bit north of $100,000.)

Tesla just picked up $465 million in federal loans for efficient cars, which Tesla will use most of to produce its latest product, the $49,900 Model S, a seven-passenger family sedan with four doors and a range, depending on battery package selected, of up to 300 miles per charge. (More than my truck gets between fillups.)

But Tesla’s far from the only player in the field, and Tesla’s not what we’re talking about when we say the hottest car in the country may be electric. Rather, we’re talking about categories.

In Hawai’i, Project Better Place has planted its flag. The company has a new paradigm for electric cars, creating a charging and battery replacement network that it expects will make ecars the standard. (Charge them at home or at work—no gas stations. Need a quick charge? Just swap the battery pack.)

The Hawai’i Legislature this year passed a bill to allow Project Better Place to issue $45 million in special revenue bonds in Hawai’i “for the planning, designing, construction, and development of transportation infrastructure, equipment, and apparatus to support electric vehicles in Hawaii.”

Gasoline is the place where cars have been, and electric sure looks like the place the automobile is going.

Tesla got its half-billion from Uncle Sam, but it was just a bit player.

The U.S. Department of Energy has a $25 billion box of cash for energy efficient vehicles, and a fair chunk will be focused on the electric vehicle. Tesla’s loan came from there. Nissan is slated for a $1.6 billion loan to build, in the United States, electric vehicles, as well as to build a new battery manufacturing plant.

Nissan’s first electric car is scheduled out by the end of next year. That one is to be built in Japan, but using the federal money, Nissan expects to produce an American-built ecar by 2012.

Ford is in for a big chunk of change for efficient vehicles, about $5.9 billion, and

is promising multiple models of pure electric and hybrid cars in the coming years.

The American-made electric vehicle that’s probably gotten the most news play is troubled General Motors’ Volt. It’s been argued that the company is pinning its entire future on the success of this car, which is not technically a pure electric car, but a plug-in hybrid. They’re talking about a $30,000 price.

Chevy just showed off the production model, which thankfully is far more attractive than its boxy concept style, has a couple of really nice exterior features, but overall seems rather staid to this reviewer. (Image: Volt. Credit: GM.)

But it could be worse. Tata has announced an electric version of its Nano. (Think golf cart). (Image: Nano. Credit: Tata Motors.) And there are lots of electric cars in the golf cart style, like Norway’s Buddy, and India’s Reva. (Go ahead and Google, Yahoo or Bing them). Cute, but it’s not clear you’d feel comfortable on the freeway.

The Mini Cooper has a Mini-E, its electric counterpart. It takes twice as long 0-60 as the Tesla Roadster, but this car has its own brand of cool.

China has announced it plans to be a world leader in electric cars in as little as three years.

Ecars, once ridiculed, are filling all the vehicular niches: your small cars, your big cars, your hot cars, your cute cars, even your dorky cars.

This is a wave. Might want to start paddling.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2009

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There was a time when you just fixed broken stuff, no questions asked.

Busted handle on a teacup? You glued it.

Cracked metal on a mower, you got a neighbor with a torch to weld it.

Today that stuff ends up at the dump, and there’s a thriving market on eBay and in stores for replacement gear.

We toss things out casually, often when they are still functional, and only challenged aesthetically.

A Dutch design firm, Platform21, and the Dutch magazine BRIGHT are collaborating on a contest for repairs that are not only functional, but creative and attractive. Dremel will give away a multifunction tool to winners. Winners will also get the repair award seen in the photo above, by artist Jan Vormann.

“Have you ever repaired something that unintentionally turned out to be more beautiful or extra handy? A repair that you were very proud of? Or is there something broken in your home that is in bad need of repair, but you need some encouragement to start fixing? Now is the chance,” they said in a press release.

“Whether it is a torn car seat, an exploded bread toaster, or your ripped jeans, if you didn’t throw it out but repaired it with love and care instead, we would like to see it… We invite submissions of clever, funny, skilful or creative repairs, with their stories attached, from all over the world.”

It’s a great idea. A lot of us are doing what we can with the three Rs—reusing, recycling and reducing—but how much fixing is there?

Repairs as art. What a concept.

Entries with photographs can be emailed to info@platform21. For more information, see the websites www.platform21.nl and www.bright.nl. The deadline is August 30, 2009.

Platform21 has developed (you can see it at the website) its Repair Manifesto. Some of the points:

Things ought to be designed so they can be fixed.

Repair is independence.

Repaired things are unique, and collect memories. Furthermore, “even fakes become originals when you repair them.”

The design company argues that there should, in fact, be not three Rs, but four of them.

“Stop recycling. Start repairing,” it says.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2009

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spend some time talking to the north shore’s jimmy dicarlo why don’t you? he’s brilliant. i’m so excited to go over to soho at 6 tonight that i’m actually blogging about it. everyone welcome. come on down.
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actually, before i get in to this i just want to say that nights like this don’t happen as much any more…

…that’s kind of why i had to rush through my last post to share.  this was the same night as the bombay sapphire dinner. normally i would crawl home to bed after something like [...]
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not like i need to prove i’ve been busy with work with a photo update. but. i’ve been busy with work. here’s proof. in a photo update…

this is a quickie. for any new readers i might have picked up that can’t be bothered with the whole scroll down for lots of photos thing….

and for any [...]
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…but I’d work my ass off if I actually was selected to be the Lifestyle Correspondent at Murphy Goode’s Winery. Jeez… I’d kinda just do what I’ve been doing here since forever, only about wine.
What they say:
“We’re looking [...]
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You got your lead-acid batteries, your lithium batteries, and of course, those sugar batteries.

Sugar batteries?

Battery technology has been identified as a key factor in the future of alternative energy, and lots of folks are working on ways to advance battery science. Some of it tweaks existing technologies, and some is going to entirely new places.

Two researchers from the University of Hawai’i’s Hawai’i Natural Energy Institute, Daniel Scott and Bor Yann Liaw, have just published a report on a new way to use sugar to produce power in a battery.

The paper is “Harnessing electric power from monosaccharides—a carbohydrate-air alkaline fuel cell mediated by redox dyes,” printed in the journal, Energy & Environmental Science. The link: http://www.rsc.org/publishing/journals/EE/article.asp?doi=B906770A.

“Here we show a simple, inexpensive approach to harness chemical energy from glucose, converting it directly into electric power without a precious metal, enzyme or microorganism to promote monosaccharide oxidation,” they write.

There’s still a long way to go before you can power your cell phone with a spoonful of cane sugar. The researchers are still working out the details of the system, but their laboratory battery produces power, and produces it for an extended period of time without a lot of fuss. Scott and Liaw feel there’s potential in their system.

“This approach might open the door to a broader possibility in using such monosaccharides in energy storage and harvesting to power small devices,” they write.

There have been sugar-based batteries before, but most have problems that interfere with their movement into commercial production—problems like cost, complexity, short operating times and so forth.

The Scott-Liaw battery system uses off-the-shelf components, and functions at room temperature and pressure.

“The resulting current and power density surpasses any existing glucose fuel cell designs. It is simple to assemble and operate with a variety of inexpensive raw materials. The process uses materials that are abundant and therefore is not projected to be resource limited.”

© Jan TenBruggencate 2009

(Just for the record, the image of a spoonful of sugar with a couple of electrical probes in it is a joke.)

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Remember the cold weather of January, February and March?

They were days and nights so chilly that some climate change deniers of my acquaintance actually cited them as proof against climate warming.

Well, that’s just so last season.

April warmed up some. The fifth warmest April since records have been kept. Here’s the citation for that, from NOAA: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/2009/apr/global.html.

Next? May was hot, too. The fourth warmest ever. Here’s that citation: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/2009/may/global.html.

As you might expect from those figures, the spring season as a whole is also turning out pretty warm. March to May had the fifth warmest record for any northern hemisphere spring.

It wasn’t that hot everywhere all the time, of course. In fact, NOAA cites Hawai’i’s cool late winter and early spring:

“March-May 2009 temperatures were above average across Mexico, Europe, southern South America, northwestern Alaska, northwestern and southern Africa, parts of Australia, and most of the contiguous U.S., and Asia. Cooler-than-average temperatures occurred across the Hawaiian Islands, Canada, and parts of the north central and northwestern United States,” the agency said.

Climate, after all, is variable on any number of scales. It’s variable over time. It’s variable over geography. If you can’t step back and see the bigger picture, it’s hard to draw reasonable conclusions.

The graphic at the upper right of this post shows how January to May temperatures around the world have differed from the average since about 1880. Over an extended period of time, the short-term variations fall into the background and the warming trend is quite clear.

But it is also clear that there’s a significant amount of variability within the larger trend.

Some folks point to the flat to downward trend of the past five or six years as proof of a cooling climate. That’s a little like claiming that a cool week in February is proof of cooling.

To descend into hackney, we’ll just say this: That dog won’t hunt.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2009

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aaaaaaa, let me sit down and get some of these photos out. in case any of you ever tear yourselves away from facebook long enough to read blogs anymore =)
i gotta tell you. becker is so fun! he brought like seven hundred glow stick thingies WITH the fasteners so we could all be fun colorful [...]
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