Monthly Archives: June 2019

Everest Climbers With No Supplemental Oxygen

Posted on 21-June-2019 by mathscinotes

I recently have seen pictures on the news of a line of people preparing to summit Mount Everest (Figure 1), which got me thinking about the difficulty of waiting in line under low-pressure conditions.The vast majority of the people who climb Everest use supplemental oxygen. The air pressure at the summit of Everest is about 0.3 atmosphere, which is not enough to support human life for an extended period of time. But a relatively small number of people have climbed Everest with No Supplemental Oxygen (NSO). In this post, I will look at this very select group of people. Continue reading →

Posted in History Through Spreadsheets | 2 Comments

My Robot Lawn Mowers

Posted on 14-June-2019 by mathscinotes

I am working today in my garage office at my cabin in northern Minnesota. From the office window, I can see a Worx Landroid robot mowing the lawn (Figure 1). I installed two of these mowers  (one for garage and one for cabin) because I am not regularly at the cabin and wanted to ensure the lawn was mowed even when I could not be there. Continue reading →

Posted in Cabin | 2 Comments

US Dairy Industry Stats

Posted on 3-June-2019 by mathscinotes

Early in my life, I spent quite a bit of time around cows on small farms with about 160 to 200 acres of land, and 40 to 50 cows. I never saw a corporate farm. Three years ago, I spent quite a bit of time in Iowa working on a number of fiber optic deployments in rural areas populated with a large number of dairy operations. While performing fiber installation inspections, I noticed that many of the old farmhouses were occupied by renters and the land was being farmed by corporations. As I looked around both Iowa and Minnesota, I realized that the number of dairy farms is dropping fast (Figure 1).  Continue reading →

Posted in Farming | 1 Comment