200 people can commute in:

Great poster from Seattle demonstrating the space it takes on a street to move 200 people in various modes.

200 people can commute in

Uprisings: The Whole Grain Bakers’ Book

In 1983, the Cooperative Whole Grain Educational Association published Uprisings; The Whole Grain Bakers’ Book. The Foreword of the book is at the bottom of this page.

As a former collective member of Uprisings Baking Collective in Berkeley (one of the contributors to the book), I didn’t want this book and organization to just fade away. There were 32 collective/cooperative bakeries who contributed to the book, many of which are still in business. Collected below are a list of links to the bakeries that are still operating. If I missed any, please fill in the form at the bottom so I can update the page.

The book is a valuable resource for bakers and wannabe bakers. One of its strengths is the index—including the traditional categories of major ingredients and types of foods, but also including a special section on Recipes by Special Dietary Characteristics such as No Eggs or Dairy; No Dairy (but contains Eggs); No Eggs (but contains Dairy); No Wheat; No Sweetener, or Fruit-sweetened; No Added Oils or Fats (may contain high-fat ingredients); No Baking; and No Salt, or Optional Salt.

While Uprisings is out of print, many used copies are available. If you can’t find it at your local bookstore, try abebooks.com using the search box here. abebooks.com is a network of independent bookstores around the country, your independent alternative to Amazon.com.

Click this link to search for Uprisings on AbeBooks:0938432125

There is another book out there with the exact same name, but a different author. If abebooks doesn’t return any books using the ISBN number provided here, try a search for the title Uprisings Bakers to get the other book. I’m not sure if this is the same book, re-published by a new group of authors. If anyone knows about this, please let me know.

Bakeries in Uprisings

Name Phone Address
Alvarado Street Bakery (707) 585-3293 500 Martin Avenue; Rohnert Park, CA 94928
Arcata Coop Bakery (707) 822-5947 811 I St.; Arcata, CA
The Bakery Cafe Closed ?? Albuquerque, MN
Blue Heron Bakery (360) 866-BAKE 4935 Mud Rd.; Olympia, WA
Blue Mango Restaurant Closed Davis, CA (history)
Dharma Crumbs Bakery Closed Colville, WA
Good Bread Bakery Closed ?? Jacksonville, OR
Honey Bear Bakery Closed Kalispell, MT
Little Bread Company (206) 365-7192 11740 15th Ave NE; Seattle, WA
Manna Bakery Closed ?? Amsterdam, Netherlands
Millstone Bakery Closed ?? Washburn, WI
Nature’s Bakery (608) 257-3649 1019 Williamson St.; Madison, WI 53703
On The Rise Bakery Closed late 90’s ?? Syracuse, NY
Open Harvest Bakery (402) 475-9069 1618 South St; Lincoln, NB
People’s Bakery Closed San Francisco, CA Cool photo
People’s Baking Company (612) 721-7205 1534 East Lake St.; Minneapolis, MN 55407
Rebel Bakers Closed San Diego, CA
Rising Star Bakery Closed ?? Victoria, BC, Canada
Slice of Life Bakery Closed 1984 Cambridge, MA
Small Planet Bakery (520) 884-9313 411 N 7th Ave; Tucson, AZ 85705
Solstice Bakery Closed 1999 ? Eugene, OR
Somadhara Bakery (607) 273-8213 215 N. Cayuga St.; Ithica, NY
Summercorn Bakery (501) 521-9338 1410 Cato Springs Rd.; Fayetteville, AR 72701
Sunflour Bakery Closed ?? Bloomington, IN
Sunrise Bakery Closed Tallahassee, FL
Sweet Life Bakery Closed St. Cloud, MN
Uprisings Baking Collective Closed Berkeley, CA (Some old Uprising’s bakers are now baking at Nabolom Bakery.)
Wildflour Community Bakery Coop Closed since at least 1981. Ann Arbor, MI A screenplay including Wildflour.
Wolfmoon Coop Bakery Closed East Lansing, MI
Women’s Community Bakery Open in 1997, currently ? Washington, DC
Yeast West Bakery Closed in 1995 Buffalo, NY

Other Collective/Cooperative Bakeries

Name Phone Address
Black Bear Bakery 314-771-2236 2639 Cherokee Street, St. Louis, MO

Foreword from Uprisings

Welcome to Uprisings, the whole grain bakers’ book. Uprisings has been collectively compiled by expieneced bakers from many small independent bakeries. If draws its inspiration from a number of uprisings—of grain, of bread, and of people. The most basic of these is the grain growing from the earth, nourished by the rain and sun. Wheat, rye, corn, barley, buckwheat, millet, rice—these are the fundamental ingredients of whole grain baked goods. Bakers, with a little help from yeast and other leaveners, create another uprising, as dough rises to produce fresh-baked loaves, filling our senses. The third uprising is the cooperative ethic of the bakeries we work in. There are no bosses, no employees. Instead we all do the work toegher, sharing the responsibilities and the rewards. Our businesses put priority on serving the needs of the community, not on making profits for a select few.
We think it’s a great loss that so many of us are unfamiliar with these uprisings. Few people enjoy the delights of eating fresh whole grain bread, let alone those of making it themselves. It’s also a loss that so few people have the satisfaction of helping to run their own workplaces, doing interesting work that meets real needs. Cooperative whole grain bakeries are part of a rising tide of people taking more responsibility for what goes on in our lives. We want more and more of us to regain power over our food, our work, our health and well-being—in short, our personal, social, and economic existence. To achieve this, we heartily encourage these and other kinds of uprisings in all areas or our lives.

Published 1983


Magic fence or power of inverse square?

On a walk through UC Berkeley, I came upon the following sign on a fence:

Close up of sign

Close up of sign

Here’s a broader view of the sign and its surroundings:

Magnetic field fence

Magnetic field fence

The distance from the building to the fence is about 2m (6′).

The question:

Has UCB discovered a new fence that can stop magnetic fields? Or, is this just an example of the inverse square relationship between the strength of a magnetic field and the distance from it?

Here’s the front of the building:

Wheeler Brain Imaging Center

Wheeler Brain Imaging Center

The building houses the Henry H. Wheeler, Jr. Brain Imaging Center.

Here’s a photo of the imaging device:

If the distance from the magnets to the outside of the building is 1.0 m, what is the relative strength of the magnetic field outside the fence (an additional 2 m away)?

Berkeley Traffic Circles – Share the Lane

No passing in circle

No passing in circle

The traffic circles in Berkeley neighborhoods have created confusion for many car drivers. One of the difficulties is knowing how to interact with bicycles. The Bike Friendly Berkeley Coalition’s email chat list has been discussiong what signage could be placed at the circles to help drivers understand how the circles work. One of the main concerns is to let drivers understand that they cannot pass bicycles in the circles (there’s just not enough space). I developed the sign on the right as a draft sign to provide an image of what a sign could look like. Click on the image to see it larger.

And here’s a second version, including a pedestrian:

Traffic circle sign #2

Traffic circle sign #2

It was interesting to discover that in the US, it seems that all pedestrian sign icons show the pedestrian walking from one side to the other. I found a pedestrian walking forward on a German sign.

I’m sure that if either of these gets selected by the city, professional graphic artists will modify them using standard images and font (mine approximate standards).

The physics (and biology) of snake movement

Science Friday had a great piece on snakes slithering today. The main researcher in the video is Dr. David Hu from the Applied Mathematics Laboratory, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University, New York, NY.

Turns out it’s much more compicated than one would think. The scientists used smooth surfaces and even Jello to test their hypotheses. Here’s the article about the video.

The math in a hybrid car

For an end of the semester project in my physics classes, I posed the following question to my students:

If you put 100,000 miles on a car, which is a better deal, a hybrid or a traditional car?

Students were asked to look up a car they would be interested in buying, but the car has to come in both hybrid and traditional engine models. They were asked to look at the price of the car and the cost of gas over the 100,000 mile “life” of the car (OK, some are going to sell it at 50K, and others hold onto it until it dies, but 10,000 seemed like a good average). We just finished a unit on energy, and I thought this would be a good way to get them thinking about energy and money.

If you want to know their results, you’ll have to keep reading, but I’ve since had time to think about making this question more open-ended, inquiry (thanks to Dy/Dan for keeping my on my inquiry toes). So now I’m thinking of the questions that could be raised in a class discussion:

  • Write an equation for the cost of each car as a function of the miles driven.
  • Using these two equations, solve for the intersection of the lines. What does this intersection represent?
  • Car mileage is rated in both highway and city. Expand your equation to include a variable for the percent of driving that is city.
  • How many extra fill-ups will it take to drive the traditional engine car? If your time is worth money, how much will this cost you if you make $50,000/year?
  • How much gas is saved by driving the hybrid? What percent is this?

The list can go much further than this. Leave it up to your students to develop more.

Oh, the answer.

Students did calculations from the Honda Civic to the Cadillac Escalade (yes, it comes in a hybrid). None of the hybrids broke even with the traditional engine in cost for 100,000 miles. Students were asked to write a short paragraph saying if they thought buying the hybrid was “worth it.” They gave great responses, including those who even looked at the gas they would save just from switching from the car they are now driving to a more fuel efficient car (one student said it wasn’t worth it to buy the hybrid, but certainly was worth it–financially and environmentally–to buy a new car to upgrade her mileage.

Free shoppping?

It’s that time again. Time to wander the aisles of the college town “free stores.”

These stores don’t pay rent, and the aisles move daily (if not hourly). The merchandise are the items the students don’t feel like taking with them. Walk around student neighborhoods as finals and graduation come to an end, and you’ll find all sorts of treasures. A couple months ago I got a “new” CD/tape/radio player that a neighbor had nicely set out on the curb (replaced with an iPod and speakers?). Then, a couple bike wheels. Today, a nice hand-vacuum.

So, help keep these items from the scrapbin of history; give them another life in your house.

Interesting “ESP” site

The test

A friend sent me this. I was surprised at first, but then it didn’t take me too long to figure it out.

Here’s the test: http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/Pickover/esp.html

Try it out (it will open in a new window), then return here if you can’t figure it out.

Scroll down for the solution.

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The solution

Hint: there is only one image for the “before” and only one for the “after.”

Scroll down for more details.

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Here’s the “before” image:

Cards to select from

Here’s the “after” image:

After images

Can you solve it now?

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Notice there are NO identical cards from the first set to the second.

Folks will focus so much on the card they want, that they don’t notice that none of the original cards are present.

The 15th Annual Bike to Work Day is Thursday, May 14th, 2009

The San Francisco Bay Area’s 15th Annual Bike to Work Day will take place on Thursday, May 14, 2009. Bike to Work Day is the premier bicycling event taking place in all of Northern California with all nine Bay Area counties participating in the celebration. The event is just one day of many events taking place in May as part of National Bike Month.

Complete details here: http://btwd.bayareabikes.org/

Studio open in my limited equity coop in Berkeley

There’s an opening in the limited equity coop apartment building I live it. Her’s the description:

Studio Apartment Available June 1st in Limited Equity Housing Co-op

Building is 120’s Spanish style, located close to UCB, Berkeley BART, shopping, and the “Gourmet Ghetto.”

Together, we govern, manage, and maintain this 22-unit building. Monthly assessments cover everything except your electricity. Co-op reviews assessments annually with the goal of having well-maintained housing at moderate cost.

Down payment (member share-value) is approximately $8,800, recoverable with interest on departure. 2009 Assessments are $462/month.

For information and an application, please email walnuthouseselections@yahoo.com or leave a message at 510-59-3140 with an email addres or fax number where we can send you information and an application (email communication is prefered).

Application deadline: Saturday, May 16, 2009

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