VARDAMAN VIRTUAL FORESTRY COMPANY

The Most Direct Link to Knowledge Workers in the Southeast Forest Economy

All Friday Reports are posted at www.vardaman.com/friday.php

Vardaman Virtual Forestry Company

FRIDAY REPORT OF 09/02 & 09/05

The Most Direct, Frequent Link to Knowledge Workers in the Eastern Forest Economy

AMAZING PHOTOS OF FALCONS AND A FALCONER IN A HANG GLIDER OVER ENGLAND

Click on http://www.marshallfalcons.co.uk/Hang/hang.htm to see three amazing photos of a falconer and three falcons (peregrine falcon sitting near hang glider pilot, Harris Hawk approaching for gob of meat, and peregrine falcon flying alongside). Wow!

COMMENTARY OF CONDITIONS CAUSED BY KATRINA AND GOVERNMENT REACTION TO THEM

Click on

“THE SUNKEN CITY
By John McPhee”

Our title and quotes below are from THE NEW YORKER issue of 09/12/05:

“Torrential rains fall on New Orleans – enough to cause flash floods inside the municipal walls. The water has nowhere to go. Left on its own, it would form a lake, rising inexorably from one level of the economy to the next. So it has to be pumped out. Every drop of rain that falls on New Orleans evaporates or is pumped out. Its removal lowers the water table and accelerates the city’s subsidence. Where marshes have been drained to create tracts for new housing, ground will shrink, too. People buy landfill to keep up with the Joneses. In the words of Bob Fairless, of the New Orleans District engineers, ‘It’s almost an annual spring ritual to get a load of dirt and fill in the low spots on your lawn.’ A child jumping up and down on such a lawn can cause the earth to move under another child, on the far side of the lawn…

“The river goes through New Orleans like an elevated highway. Jackson Square, in the French Quarter, is on high ground with respect to the rest of New Orleans, but even from the benches of Jackson Square one looks up across the levee at the hulls of passing ships. Their keels are higher than the Astro Turf in the Superdome, and if somehow the ships could turn and move at river level into the city and into the stadium, they would hover above the playing field like blimps…

“As sediments slide down the continental slope and the river is prevented from building a proper lobe – as the delta plain subsides and is not replenished – erosion eats into the coastal marshes, and quantities of Louisiana steadily disappear. The net loss is over fifty square miles a year. In a hundred years, Louisiana as a whole has decreased by a million acres. Plaquemines Parish is coming to pieces like old rotted cloth. A hundred years hence, there will in all likelihood be no Plaquemines Parish, no Terrebonne Parish. Such losses are being accelerated by access canals to the sites of oil and gas wells. There are in Louisiana ten thousand miles of canals…

“The coast is sinking out of sight,’ Oliver Houck has said. ‘We’ve reversed Mother Nature.’ Hurricanes greatly advance the coastal erosion process, tearing up landscape made weak by the confinement of the river. The threat of destruction from the south is even greater than the threat from the north.”

Click on http://www.newyorker.com/printables/talk/050912ta_talk_mcphee to read the complete article.

KATRINA KILLED US

As the eye of the hurricane moved NE from New Orleans, it pulled very strong NW winds over the portion of Jackson, MS that contains our office and home. We lost all electric power beginning on 08/29 and didn’t get it back until late afternoon on 09/05. One gust toppled a 22-inch-DBH Tulip Poplar six feet inside our property and dropped it in the front yard of our neighbor. It took $2,000 to remove it. We received notice to boil all drinking water on 08/31. As these conditions struck all citizens, supplies of ice, milk, and gasoline dried up to the point of causing emergencies everywhere. We got our power back at 1830 on 09/05. To get back up to date, we’ll send two issues of the Friday Report this week.

THE DANGER THAT ALWAYS FACES NEW ORLEANS

Mississippi: The River That Gave Birth to America by Prof. James M. Vardaman, Jr., Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan, a book that is now being published, contains this explanation of one danger from hurricanes:

“The second impact on humans is a disaster waiting to happen. The Gulf of Mexico is a hurricane and tropic storm area. When a storm builds over a body of water, it pushes a huge tide of water ahead of the center of the storm. When the storm passes over ‘barrier islands’ and coastal wetlands, they act to reduce the height of that storm surge. It is estimated that every 4 kilometers of marsh grass absorbs 30 centimeters of a hurricane’s storm surge, so the more marsh grass, the better. Here is the problem: Let’s take the case of New Orleans, which is already on average 240 centimeters below sea level. A century ago, the city was protected from the nearest Gulf shore by some 80 kilometers of wetlands. These wetlands absorbed most of the ‘shock’ of a hurricane and its storm surge before it reached the city. But today, there are only 35 kilometers separating New Orleans from the Gulf, and that distance is rapidly shrinking. Given that there are only three major exit bridges from New Orleans, a direct hit by a hurricane there could have a disastrous impact.”

“WINNING THE WAR ON SPAM”

Our title and quotes below are from the 08/20/05 issue of The Economist:

“It is the scourge of e-mail inboxes, plying cheap drugs, septic tanks, new mortgages and bigger manhoods. But ‘spam,’ unsolicited e-mail, seems to be in retreat. The amount of spam that swishes through the internet is holding steady or declining, according to most studies. And of the stuff that still exists, the vast majority is blocked by filters before it gets to an inbox…

“For spammers who get caught – admittedly a tiny minority – the consequences can be severe, far beyond the loss of a Hummer. For instance, in April, a Virginia judge sentenced a spammer to nine years in prison, though the sentence has been suspended pending an appeal…

“Even so, spam remains a serious burden. The costs it imposes include $3 billion a year spent on anti-spam technology in America and lost output that some estimates put at $50 billion worldwide. A study in 2003 by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that over half of all internet users said that spam made them less trusting of e-mail, and one-quarter said it led them to reduce their use of e-mail…

“In January 2004, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Bill Gates of Microsoft brashly predicted: ‘Two years from now, spam will be solved.’ At the time, technology pundits snickered. Mr. Gates suggested that new techniques to identify senders, or the imposition of a small fee to send e-mails, might solve the problem. Mr. Gates was wrong, in that those approaches were not adopted and spam remains pervasive. And yet, paradoxically, his optimism was justified.”

To read the complete article, click on http://www.economist.com/business/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=4307588

“ISRAELI SETTLEMENTS AND OUTPOSTS IN THE WEST BANK TO JANUARY 2002 – HISTORY AND MAP”

Our title and quotes below are from this Internet site to give background for the TV news from Israel:

“Orthodox Jews believe that God promised the land to them. They had formed the Gush Emunim faction, mostly based on zealots within the National religious party. The Likud party, which is the ideological offspring of the Herut movement, asserted that all of 1917 Palestine, including Jordan, belongs to the Jews by right, and was unjustly divided by the British…This conviction grew from the historical experience that the UN Partition plan of 1947 had awarded Israel territories on the basis of those areas that had large concentrations of Jews. Its relevance to the present situation is not clear…

“At present (2002) there are about 210,000 Jews living in the West Bank, a small number in Gaza, and another 200,000 or so Jews living in areas of Jerusalem and environs annexed in 1967…”

Click on http://www.mideastweb.org/map_israel_settlements.htm to access the long article and its outstanding map of the vicinity of Jerusalem.

“TAKING THE BATTLE ONLINE”

Our title and quotes are from The Economist Global Agenda of 09/01/05:

“Microsoft is the latest big technology firm to embrace VOIP (Voice over the Internet Protocol). This week, the software giant announced that it had bought Teleo, an American VOIP-technology firm, for an undisclosed sum. Days earlier Google, a leading search engine, announced that it would launch Google Talk, an instant message and voice service, in competition with other leading web portals. In June, Yahoo! bought Dialpad, a firm offering the same sort of technology as Teleo.

“At the moment, the technology giants generally only allow computer-to-computer voice services. But they may soon extend their offerings to compete with the likes of Vonage, Skype, 8x8, and a host of other new firms that concentrate on providing VOIP services. These companies allow customers to plug their phone into a gadget connected to the internet. By offering this service they have shown they want to compete directly with traditional telecoms firms and the cable companies that have recently joined the fray.

“However, VOIP differs from the usual phone services in that it sends calls as digital packets of information over data networks rather than relying on a dedicated circuit-switched network. As a result, calls are charged at a much cheaper rate: long-distance and international calls can be made for the price of a local call and a home broadband-internet connection. Furthermore, a VOIP user can keep his old fixed-line phone number, which will work not only at home but anywhere in the world he chooses to use the device (as long as a broadband connection is available).

To read the entire interesting article, click on http://www.economist.com/agenda/displayStory.cfm?story_id=4341150

CHANGES IN BOOK SALES

This week we sold several books and deleted them from the offering at http://www.vardaman.com/booksale.php. We deleted all empty spaces and added new books beginning at #406.

NEW SYSTEM FOR BUYING OR SELLING LAND OR TIMBER

For the details, click on http://www.vardaman.com and then on the red horizontal bar “Buy/Sell Land/Timber.” You can offer to buy or sell timber or land. You must post the general area of your interest; be sure to include the state. You must also post your E-MAIL ADDRESS and the URL of your Internet site. Our tracking report will not report the number of visitors UNLESS you enter your URL. If you are selling, you should post the name of the tract. When you have entered all details, click on “Submit,” and what you just entered will appear on our Internet site at the bottom of the page under the red horizontal bar “Buy/Sell Land/Timber.” Be sure to check for and correct errors.

For each tract posted after 05/12/05 and whose owner posted his URL, we charge $0.25 for each visit his ad receives. On each Friday at 0900 Central Time, we will e-mail him a bill for $0.25 for each visit his ad received during the week just ended. You can pay us by e-mailing the money to “Vardaman Virtual Forestry Company” at PayPal or mailing it to P.O. Box 12293, Jackson, MS 39236. We will delete your ad when your payments cease. The new fee schedule does not apply to tracts marked with asterisks::

SELL LAND OR TIMBER

For 107-A. tract in GA, send e-mail to slaseter@comcast.net

BUY LAND

BUY TIMBER

*For tracts in AR, send e-mail to dyork@digitalpassage.com
*For tracts in IL, send e-mail to psftimber@hotmail.com