November/December 1975
By the Mother Earth News editors
In the middle of page 106 of MOTHER NO. 30, Tom, Christine, and Jade Laughlin asked if drinking milk from goats who've eaten poison oak will lend immunity to the plant.
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Why go to all that trouble? There's an easier way!
Each summer, when poison oak begins to show, I choose a small leaf—with a surface area of about one square inch—and eat it. This gives me immunity for some time . . . but the procedure should be repeated once more before the summer is over. Two treatments seem to render me immune for the entire season. And why not? We Indians have protected ourselves this way for thousands of years!
Furthermore, drugstores—for many decades—always kept a bottle of Rhus Toxicodendron fluid extract on their shelves. Doctors prescribed concoctions containing the substance to their patients in order to render them immune to poison oak. The advent of "modern medicines" has pushed such simple remedies into limbo . . . a practice which, no doubt, helps keep drug prices astronomically high.
I'm glad to see so many people working on alternative methods for harnessing power from the wind. For some time, it has seemed to me that old-fashioned methods for generating wind power need to be brought up-to-date with present-day technology.
John Thalmann's wind turbine (see page 82, MOTHER NO. 31) looks like a good idea. It seems to be quite simple (witness self-feathering vanes) and would lend itself easily to the problem of mechanically transmitting power to the ground. But someone seems to have garbled the turbine's engineering.
In the first place, the foot-pound is not used to compute torque . . . it's used to measure potential energy and impact. See any physics text.
In the second place, torque—without a time element—is not a function of power. Any conceivable torque could be concurrent with any conceivable power. What's needed here is a determination of the mechanism's horsepower.
If I had time to work on that problem, I'd go at it this way:
