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| Yeontoo Moderator Posts: 682 (10/3/00 7:14:12 pm) Reply  |
Knowledge Discussion
2
Yeontoo enters the small area of common ground, a partially shaded area on the old native dias near the center of the island, ...with plenty of seating on fallen logs, and raised a little above most the tree line. She is very pleased with her chosen location. Mz Yeontoo reaches into her pack and takes out her ever-present clipboard. She pulls the top paper out of the clip and sets it on the old stone table, weighting it down with a small rock. The paper simply read: ======================= Topic of Discussion: What if George Washington Carver had died instead of being orphaned. |
| BritSlider Junior Slider Posts: 16 (10/4/00 9:14:55 am) Reply |
Re: Knowledge Discussion
2
BritSlider walked into the clearing; hoping to find Mz Yeontoo so that he could coller her about the latest immunity challenge. She wasn't there, but he found the slip of paper on the stone table and read what it said. "George Washington Carver?" He said to no-one in particular. "Geez, talk about a slight American bias for these discussions! All I know about him is that he was a general in the War of Independance, and that he crossed the Deleware river!" "Actually Brit," said Sabre_Edge, who had wandered in whilst Brit was reading. "That was just George Washington. I think you'll find that George Washington Carver was a scientist in the early 1900s; some call him the father of biochemical engineering." "What! How the hell am I supposed to know anything about him? I doubt if anyone outside of your country or his field of expertise has ever heard of him. This sucks!" Brit seemed less than happy. "Why can't we have debates about things that happen OUTSIDE of the USA; there is a whole other world beyond those borders you know!" Sabre tried to calm Brit down. "Don't blame me dude, Mz Yeontoo sets the questions; you can't hold me responsible for what we discuss." Brit seemed less than impressed with Sabre's argument. "Well, there's no way I can contribute to this debate if we're going to use such obscure figures from history. I don't see what's wrong with talking about people like Alexander the Great, or Hitler; apart from the fact that they're obviously not Americans! I'm going to get back to our camp, it's a bit of a mess at the moment." "More trouble with the monkeys?" "Yeah. You have trouble with them too?" "Sure did, it's almost as if their attacks are being co-ordinated by someone." With that thought running through his head, Brit returned to the Omega camp. |
| Vortex Master
High and Mighty Moderator Posts: 187 (10/4/00 12:40:11 pm) Reply |
Re: Knowledge Discussion
2
I totaly agree with Brit. The 2 of us share the continental distance between us and the rest of you. I, for one, have no idea who George Washington Carver was. <VM went back to camp with Brit and they both sat outside of it with protesting signs> (Oh yeah, and also, I have the right to vote! ) VMaster- The Best Master. |
WldKlly
 Junior Slider Posts: 29 (10/5/00 1:44:43 pm) Reply |
Umm..
ok what Klly knows about Mr. Carver...
So.. ok.. as far as I can remember Mr. Carver was a black inventor. He invented such lovely things out of peanuts, soy beans and yams...such things as: Adhesives Axle Grease Bleach Buttermilk Cheese Chili Sauce Cream Creosote Dyes Flour Fuel Briquettes Ink Instant Coffee Insulating Board Linoleum Mayonnaise Meal Meat Tenderizer Metal Polish Milk Flakes Mucilage Paper Rubbing Oils Salve Soil Conditioner Shampoo Shoe Polish Shaving Cream Sugar Synthetic Marble Synthetic Rubber Talcum Powder Vanishing Cream Wood Stains Wood Filler Worcestershire Sauce (Yea.. ok i stole this list from some site somewhere...) But the bigger point is that he halped the south to find other products to sell when the boll wevil attacked their precious cotton. Without him I believe the south would be much poorer...or would have been.. maybe by now they would have pulled out of it.. hehe. -Klly This is MY tagline, my mighty, mighty tagline! |
| DieselMickeyDolenz
Novice Slider Posts: 101 (10/5/00 2:19:49 pm) Reply | Edit  |
Poorer Indeed.
George Washington Carver's most important contribution was the idea of rotating crops. The cotton that was planted in the south gradually depleted the nitrogen from the soil, making it less productive for cotton use. Carver discovered that rotating cotton with peanuts, soybeans, or sweet potatoes would replenish the nitrogen, making it once again suitable for the growth of cotton. This was all well and good, but at the time there was no market for these. They were hardly even considered crops. To remedy this, Carver set about finding every use he could for peanuts, soybeans, and sweet potatoes. He eventually developed 300 products that could be made with peanuts and 118 products that could be made from sweet potatoes. As Klly mentioned, the use of peanuts and sweet potatoes was vital to the South even without its regenerative effects on soil, since the boll weevil had almost put many cotton growers out of business. These other crops allowed the South to reduce its dependance on cotton. Without Carver, the southern US would have had a much more difficult time recovering from reconstruction. Poverty would have been much more common than it was, and much of the land now in use for food production would have sat dormant for years, waiting for the soil to regain enough nitrogen to again sustain other crops. The benefits of his research reach far beyond the US, however, since his ideas on crop rotation were exported to the rest of the world. I think it's highly likely that the benefits of crop rotation would have been discovered eventually anyway. The ways in which to use peanuts, soybeans, and sweetpotatoes are important from an economic standpoint, but not so much from a developmental standpoint. Given that, the only real differences you'd see would be in the living conditions that exist in the US South and other cotton-producing areas of the world. Diesel |
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