What Is A Diagram?

This question comes up in search queries for my blog often. Most readers will already know the answer to this, but since so many do not, I am going to answer it in an extra post. I am also going to refer you to other posts connected to it.

In case you wound up on this post without reading the title, the question is: "What is a diagram?" A diagram is a simple picture that helps to understand ideas more easily. That is my own definition of a diagram. I am going to give you a link to a dictionary definition of it also. I hope that you will be able to look up any words you don't understand after you read this. I have posts on how to use the internet to look things up. You might want to read those also.

Here is a dictionary definition in red:


di·a·gram
[dahy-uh-gram] Show IPA noun, verb, di·a·gramed or di·a·grammed, di·a·gram·ing or di·a·gram·ming.
noun
1.
a figure, usually consisting of a line drawing, made to accompany and illustrate a geometrical theorem, mathematical demonstration, etc.
2.
a drawing or plan that outlines and explains the parts, operation, etc., of something: a diagram of an engine.
3.
a chart, plan, or scheme.
verb (used with object)
4.
to represent by a diagram; make a diagram of.
Origin:

1610–20;  < Latin diagramma  < Greek:  that which is marked out by lines. See dia-, -gram1

The definition above comes from this link: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/diagram

You can use the dictionary or others online to look up other words you don't know. You can type the word you want to find out about into your search engine or browser with "def" after it (short for definition) and you will usually get a lot of different dictionaries with their version of the definition. I think it is good to try different dictionaries to see which ones you like the best.

I believe that the most important diagram among my posts on this blog is about what happens when a nuclear bomb explodes. My diagram is not that great, but it gives you some idea of what happens when a nuclear weapon explodes and makes it easier for readers to think about it. This makes it possible to make a plan to live through a nuclear war. I do not care what side anyone is on who reads this information. I think it will be hard to keep enough people alive to save the human race after a nuclear war starts, so the more people who live, the better.

Any survivors will be so busy trying to stay alive, that continuing a nuclear war will not be a priority. I think we will need all of the genetic diversity we can get. We certainly won't have enough people left to kill off more after a nuclear war. I hope that a few more people will do emergency preparedness, including for nuclear war because of my blog.

I have other diagrams on my blog for things like a cheap, easy-to-make solar oven and for a rocket stove that is basically a fancy hole in the ground, but takes very little fuel. If you look at these diagrams and study them a little, you will be able to take the ideas and make your own versions of a solar oven or a rocket stove with the materials you have available. I put lots of links into my posts to help you understand and use the information in my posts.

I started this blog as a public service to as much of the world as possible, to help more people live and thrive in spite of the damage that humans have done to the Earth. 

I believe that people are capable of behaving much better than we have so far and hope that this blog and all of its posts will help us to become better humans. First, we have to stay alive.

Are You A Builder Or A Wrecker?

Something both religious and non-religious types can find to agree about is what general effect your actions have on the rest of the universe. It comes down to this: Are you a builder or a wrecker?

I am tired of endless useless arguments about good and evil. Builders and wreckers are easier to decide about and don't require so much argument.

It doesn't matter whether you think you will face Divine Judgement at the end of your life, or worms and decay into dirt. You can look at someone's life, so far, or all the way to the end if they are gone from this life. 

Perhaps you don't know enough about that person, to know whether their actions make the world better by building it up, or worse by tearing it down. It does not matter to you whether that other person is a builder or a wrecker. What matters to you is which you are.

Are you building up the world and making it better as you go through your life? 

This question is not fancy. It doesn't require that you set any records or built anything visible from space. It is only whether your actions generally tend toward making things better.

None of this means you have to spend every waking minute doing good deeds. None of us are able to be a builder every waking minute. All of us have bad days. Some of us have lots of bad days, but still manage to do small things that add up to making the world a better place.

You can still make the world a better place by doing one small, quiet thing at a time. Something as small and quiet as a smile or a kind word at the right time, can be your way of building up the world and making it a better place.

Prevention is part of emergency preparedness. Part of prevention is being a builder and doing our best to make the world a better place.

Every one of us has some special areas that we are good at. We need to find those, build them up and use them. We can all be builders instead of wreckers.

What Is A Survival Bracelet?

Somebody searched about what a survival bracelet is. Thanks. That takes care of a nice post for tonight that I don't particularly need to do any more research on.

A survival bracelet is a USA fad for wearing a bracelet that can help with disaster preparedness. Each bracelet is made of extremely tough cording. The cording is so strong that a thin piece of it can support the weight of a human being. 

A survival bracelet is made so that each one contains several yards of the aforementioned tough cording. They are made so that they can be quickly and easily unraveled in an emergency. This will allow you to safely lower yourself or others from a high window to allow you to escape. This could be in a fire or home invasion for example.

The cording in a survival bracelet was begun by soldiers who made them from parachute cording. The originals were only standard military colors. Now they can be found in a whole rainbow of colors to suit your fancy.

People have come up with endless good uses for the cording in survival bracelets. Youtube is full of survival videos that show possible uses for it. They may not specifically mention survival bracelets or paracord, which is a name for the cording. You may have to think a little to notice when the video applies to survival bracelet paracord.

One of my favorite uses is to build a makeshift survival shelter in case you get stranded overnight and need to stay warmer. It is a lot easier to build a faster and better shelter if you can use some paracord from your survival bracelet to build it. You can tie branches together to make a framework to start the shelter.

Another good use for the survival bracelet stuff is to hang a cooking pot over a fire. It is easier to get just the right height to keep it cooking, without burning the food.

If you have a survival bracelet during an emergency, you will be inspired to find many more good uses for it. 

It seems to me that having a survival bracelet handy at all times is pretty easy. You just wear it on your wrist. Something that easy to do, that can be so valuable during an emergency, seems like a good investment in time.

I wrote another post on links to videos about making your own survival bracelet (s). Some of the videos have how to make a jig that simplifies and speeds up making survival bracelets. 

I hope you will consider adding a survival bracelet to your preparedness items. It is very cheap to make your own and not that hard to do.

Getting Your Feet Wet In Aquaculture

If you want to be self sufficient aquaculture is an efficient way to make sure you have enough to eat. Some fish need very little to eat and can be fed off of scraps and leftovers from other creatures including humans. 

The fish wastes are very good for plants and can require less work to keep the plants thriving and healthy. 

Aquaculture is still mostly a dream for me. I am in the stage where I got my first aquarium so I can learn how not to kill fish. The idea of killing fish while I learn to do this stuff is no good for me, so I don't even have any fish yet. 

The pet store where I bought a few fish items offers free water testing, so I am going to use that to see whether it is safe to risk putting fish in there yet.

The aquarium tank and most of the rest of the equipment were given to me, so that lowers my investment. It is a good thing, because getting going in aquaculture is not going to be cheap to start out. 

I guess if you start very small with a glass bowl and one goldfish it could be.
According to a friend who has raised fish professionally, goldfish are not very demanding for the conditions they need to live in. 

One goldfish is not going to provide enough plant nutrients to get you very far, however.

Thrift stores in different areas vary, but it is likely that a thrift store near you will sell you an aquarium and perhaps air hoses and filters and bubblers to help lower the cost of getting you started towards aquaculture. If you do that, be sure to clean them very well in case the fish that used to be in there had something contagious.

My aquarium has a bunch of plants as the only live non-microscopic thing in it. This aquarium comes from healthy fish and some of their friendly microorganisms are probably already happy in there. I hope this will make things easier for my fish when I get them.

The pet store sold me some aquatic fish tank kinds of plants by the bunch. I haven't taken them apart yet, but there seem to be 5 or 6 of them. The fish guy for the store told me that the plants I got don't require a lot of light. The light that came with the aquarium was an incandescent and had one bulb out. 

Costco (big box store) has 6 packs of daylight compact fluorescent bulbs that fit in the aquarium light holder. That made it even brighter than the store aquariums with only one bulb in there. I was afraid it might hurt the fish or plants with two right off, so now it is only one bulb. The plants seem to like it a lot and are growing at an amazing rate. It is much faster than most dry land plants grow. If my fish like those plants, they are sure to be happy in there.

The motor for the bubbler is loud. I have to turn it off at night to sleep. Articles on the internet say that some brands are especially quiet compared to others. 

They are also supposed to last a long time. They are also quite pricey. They probably work out to inexpensive over several years, but they can cause sticker shock.  I am not going to post about those, until I feel more confident about my knowledge. 

As soon as I learn more and get fish in there, I'll share that with readers. It might save you from making a few mistakes.

I hope all of you have a nice Holiday Season, whatever way you like to celebrate it, or call it.

Develop Expertise In A Survival Skill For Barter

Even if you do not believe in any kind of TEOTAWKI  or WTSHTF events  happening in your lifetime you may be starting to see how you could end up in a disaster that will last for an extended period of time. Examples of this could be a hurricane or earthquake.

Destruction can be so extensive that it will require a long time for things to return to normal in your area. That can mean you will have to deal with chaos for a while.

Preparedness for long term disasters is different than for short term disasters. Long term preparedness requires more planning and a different way of thinking and looking at your planning.

Supplies, infrastructure to get more supplies in, and financial structure can all be in short supply for a long time. This means that if you are ready for a barter economy in your disaster area, you and your loved ones will be better off than if you are not prepared for a barter economy. 

You can plan to have extra essential supplies to barter during a long term disaster, but they will eventually come to an end and might not be replaceable. Having a skill to produce items that others will want or need during a disaster could be more helpful to you than having a finite amount of extra supplies to barter.

Some of the skills that you already have may be useful for barter. Part of your disaster planning could be taking a look at the skills that you and your loved ones already have. 

If you and your loved ones do not have any skills that might be good for barter in a long term disaster, you can pick a skill and develop it. 

Survivalists and preppers have many views on what kinds of skills might be good for barter. This blog post does not begin to have enough space to go into detail about what kind of skill you should develop for your own use and for barter during a long term disaster. 

Medical care is a skill that is always in demand during disasters and should include alternative medicine. If you know the herbs in your area and are well stocked and know how to get more, you can barter those skills and take care of your needs and those of loved ones.

That is just an example to get you started. You can look at your own likes and dislikes for what skill you might like to develop. If you think a certain skill might be helpful during a disaster, others will probably need the same thing.

If you can not afford to go to school or pay to learn a survival skill for barter, then look on the internet. You can learn almost anything you really want to learn on the internet for free. I already wrote a post on the use of search engines for preparedness. That can include preparedness by learning a new skill. You can look on the internet and learn that new skill.

Choose To Live

You and your loved ones will have a much better chance to survive, if you choose to learn the skills necessary to survive in rough conditions. You must  develop the thinking to help you adapt to changes. You must learn survival skills. You must pass them on to the generations after you if you want to have generations after you. If you do not do this, you might as well join the majority of people who choose to give up their lives to their televisions. 


Nothing I can say will make you learn what you need to know to keep yourself and your loved ones alive in the disasters that are now occurring all over the world. These disasters will increase in frequency, severity, and area affected for the rest of the lives of everyone alive now. The disasters will keep doing that for many generations. 


People who do not prepare themselves and their loved ones have very little chance to survive much longer. I wish readers of this blog to have that chance. You do not have to learn how to survive from my blog. Learn it any way you like to learn it, and any way you can learn it. 


If there is something that you would like to learn to  help make yourself and your loved ones safer, please make a comment on this blog and tell me. I will do my best to help you.


My blog is free. It is available right now. You can  use it if you wish. You have my best wishes for your learning and your safety and the safety of your loved ones.

I Decide To Blog About Saving My *ss (Survival)

About a year from now, a large number of people from past and present think that the world will experience an enormous catastrophe that may end life on the earth. There are some real heavyweights lined up on this idea and it is pretty scary that there are so many of them. This could make a person wonder about their survival, which I do not like.


The Mayan and Egyptian calendars agree within about a year. Nostrodamus and more recent prognosticators agree about it. Youtube has enough about the subject to let you watch depressing videos for hours, maybe days. I didn't watch them all, but it was enough to worry me a lot.


These gloomy ideas are about the physical part of the world. The prevailing engine of all of this destruction is largely agreed to be a polar shift. This is when the magnetic poles of the earth shift so that compasses point to a new north. The process involves the rather sudden shift of tectonic plates and that means a big mess for anything sitting on those tectonic plates, including humans. Part of that mess is earthquakes that would probably make a 9.0 look puny, and tsunamis to match. Another part would be volcanoes erupting en masse.


As if all the above was not bad enough, financial whizzes are talking bad stuff in their area. We seem to be on the verge of a global financial collapse. I think I am on the email list for every one of these bozos and they are all offering me free videos to rain on my parade. I watched one that showed me graphs that absolutely prove that if all the income of every single person in the USA were used, paying off the national debt would be impossible. Math is not one of my gifts, but we owe trillions and we keep adding more trillions yearly. My math is adequate to tell me a trillion is an awful big number and we are in deep doo doo.


It does not require rocket science to guess that my reaction would be to want to hie myself to the country and hole up for the cataclysm. I had already independently concluded that we are in for a polar shift in the near future, before I was made aware that a lot of other people think it will come next December 21.


I have been blogging away on various and sundry subjects that strike my fancy. I read that you should blog about what you know and what you are passionate about. I know a lot of different things since I have been in training for becoming self sufficient for most of my life. I am passionate about quite a few things too, but what could I be more passionate about than my personal survival?


I feel pretty strongly about making sure I die a natural death at the end of my allotted span. I believe I will just blog about this. Lots of things are involved in this prospect for me, so it will get a lot of variety in there so I don't get bored blogging about the same thing all the time. In some ways I have a short attention span. I gather that the attention span of the average internet surfer can be compared to that of a gnat, so that might work out well.

Sifting Predictions For Next December's CataclysmicDisaster

I am a female prepper. I believe that we are to be differentiated from survivalists because we are more focused on our survival itself than on making it into a competitive activity. I had already been working on disaster preparedness before I found out what the excitement was about for 2012.


Youtube is the first place I discovered predictions about the disasters expected next December 21 of 2011. A lot of impressive types agree about it. The Mayan and Egyptian calendars are in agreement within about a year. A year sounds like a lot to us, but these folks made these predictions thousands of years ago. On the time scale of thousands of years, one year is pretty close, especially when you consider they were not using the same year lengths.


The majority of people who expect the world to end next December think it will come in the form of a polar shift. A polar shift is a sudden rearrangement of the tectonic plates that we humans live on. The continents shift in movements big enough and fast enough to cause massive earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions.


I do not think the world will end next December, but I do think it could be a rough year to live through. I am not ready for such a big disaster as is expected, but I can handle smaller ones ok. I am making an effort to be prepared for next year's disaster the best I am able to do. I figure it is better to be ready and not have the disaster and not have it happen than the reverse.


I have given several people a quick tour of youtube videos on the subject of next year's cataclysmic disaaster. They were all pretty upset by what they saw, but all thanked me for it and said they would rather know than not. It occurred to me that more people might also appreciate it, so this blog post is going to do the same for my gentle readers.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-l0SC3bRLn8&feature=related


This one explains what a polar shift is and that scientists have found they have happened before


This one is maps of what will be under water after 2012


There are lots more of these and whole sites with nothing but this stuff. It is enough to scare stuff right out of you. I do not think you should let it make you panic. I am going to do more posts about suggestions on what to do if you think this might or will happen.