DIY, Growing Food in Winter
These are lettuce and pea seeds I put in last week. They are growing in my back yard, in a plastic container that held spinach. Yes, it is cold. And it freezes and sleets and ices up, still. But this is winter gardening and people do it even in colder climates than northern Virginia.
You just wash a plastic container that has a lid, punch some holes in the top and bottom, put in some soil (I use a seeding mix) and sprinkle in seeds. Water, close the container, label it with a permanent marker. Place it outside in a sunny area. Now you have a greenhouse environment for your seeds to grow. I may need to transplant these into a larger container before it gets warm enough to plant in the garden.
I also have some flowers and pampas grass sprouting.
Your seeds really want to grow, even in harsh conditions. Like us, they are animated by the life force.
ur-sound
I suspect, even without knowing the context, the sound would be deeply unsettling.
via Suzanne Fischer
Metta World Peace thanks Jesus Christ that he still has his teeth
So not only did he build the world in seven days and seven nights, but he also said, “OK, let them lose their teeth early, rather than late.”
Owlet Caterpillars of Eastern North America
My same friend Susan who brought us the critically acclaimed Omega Institute in Your Pants, 2010 edition today supplied the following list, from the book Owlet Caterpillars of Eastern North America by David L. Wagner, Dale F. Schweitzer, J. Bolling Sullivan, and Richard C. Reardon:
Sordid Snout
The Herald
Feeble Grass Moth
Dead-wood Borer
The Betrothed
The Little Wife
Serene Underwing
The Consort
Dejected Underwing
Inconsolable Underwing
Tearful Underwing
Sad Underwing
The Penitent
Sappho Underwing
Youthful Underwing
Darling Underwing
Read more
The Dust Library
So what can this unusual library tell us? First, there is the simple parts list. The most common component was organic material, present in 40 of the 63 particles – exactly what is unclear, but it could be anything from pollen to sloughed-off bits of researcher. Quartz, found in 34 particles, came next, followed by carbonates (17 particles) and gypsum (14). “The minerals blow in,” says Coe. “They come from all over the world.” Other ingredients included air pollutants and fertiliser chemicals.
Trust me, don’t read this
And definitely don’t click on any of the image links
from my voicemail
Uh, yes, my name is ————. My telephone number is ————. The purpose of my call is I’m listening to public radio, and, uh, they’re talking about, uh, viral, uh, strains of, uh, birds. Uhhh, I was parked at Walmart, and a woman was feeding birds, and I said, “Ma’am, don’t do that,” I says, “Ya know, they they they know how to live on their own.” And, uh, the guy from Walmart came out, the manager of the store, and says, “Oh, you’re gonna have to leave here because, uh, the, uh, asphalt’s too weak for an RV.” And he was, it was pouring rain out; he was really acting like an idiot. I did call for the Centers for Disease Control, and they don’t seem to care what one way or another that people feed birds. And I just can’t imagine why, since birds spread diseases more than anything else, uh, why, uh, these people just aren’t taking it seriously. But. I’m sixty-six years old; I’ll be dead in a few years. So what difference does it make to me, ya know? It just it irritates me how ignorant we are, ya know? Umm, just don’t feed the birds, ya know? It’s crazy. They can fend, they know how to forage for themselves. And I love birds. I learned how to fly. I’ve been a pilot all my life. And, uh, airlines and corporate. And, uh, but, uh, you just don’t feed birds. That’s that’s craziness. Ya know, and I, but, uh, if more people, if they, uh, really know about it, then, uh, maybe they might do something about it. But, uh, there’s the other people that’s just gonna say, “Oh, hooey, I’ll feed birds whenever I feel like. It’s my right to do whatever I want to do, so.” Well. I guess that’s the case, ya know? Anyways. Take care. Bye.
Also: The related episode of WHYY’s Fresh Air.
You’re built like a car (You got a hubcap diamond-star halo)
Europeans have all the fun: lower drinking ages, funner beaches, easier lifestyles and . . . dinosaur skeletons having sex in their museums. This exhibit, which clearly shows two T-Rexes “mating”, is located in the Jurassic Museum of Asturias in Spain.
Via @leatherarchives.
Our bodies, our flock: Parthenogenesis.
I’m sorry to have neglected “Our Bodies, Our Flock” for so long (previously), but I’m lazy. Here’s a new one for you, on parthenogenesis!
Humans, like all mammals, are incapable of performing parthenogenesis.
Did Dropping Acid Make Steve Jobs More Creative?
Slate Magazine is discussing the question, citing several experiments during the 50′s and 60′s that seem to point to LSD as a catalyst for innovation and creative thinking:
Taken as a whole, the studies suggested that people who are creative to begin with may experience a slight increase in inspiration or insight during and after an acid trip. That’s not true for non-artistic types, although psychologists did find that most participants thought they got more creative on LSD, regardless of what the tests actually showed…
Despite the relative paucity of rigorous scientific data, Steve Jobs—who once suggested that Microsoft products would be better if Bill Gates “had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger“—is far from alone in his belief. Francis Crick reportedly claimed to have envisioned the structure of DNA during an acid trip. John Lennon attributed the Beatles’ album Revolver to the group’s acid use.
Connecting the dots, the author doesn’t seem convinced by the studies, but it’s still a fascinating idea. Jobs was obviously a visionary, predicting technologies years or sometimes decades before they would be fully realized by Apple (this 1996 interview on NPR’s Fresh Air seems to include prediction for both the iPad and Apple TV). That’s either serendipitous prescience or the product of some very constructive acid trips (or more probably, a combination of both). Either way, it reminded me of something Deron once shared (or maybe a book he was reading) that discussed the proposition that human culture evolved through the use of hallucinogens. Humans have had the same DNA for something like 250,000 years, yet only developed complex societies and culture in the last 15,000 or so – Steve Jobs just took it all a massive step further.
Little is known about the details . . .
(yeah, right), but for the past week I have been enraptured with your Octopoteuthis deletron.
These squid just don’t care about the sex of other squid they bump into.
Little is known about the details but it seems that the male ejaculates a packet of sperm at the mating partner, and the packet turns inside out, essentially shooting the sperm contained in a membrane into the flesh of the partner, where they stay embedded until the female (if the shooter has been lucky) is ready to fertilize its eggs. If males are the recipient of these rocket sperm, they are just stuck with them.
I was up late one night last week looking for video. I was over at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute site. Because who wouldn’t want to see “a tentacled invertebrate that shoots sperm into its mate’s flesh”? Sperm in a packet that turns inside out! That’s like something out of a Cronenberg film.
(Thanks to Ju Ju Pongo for this and for indirectly keeping me up all night.)
quote out of context
This starts to explain something about Full House like why Joey stuck around all those years. At some point you’d think he’d want to sleep in a regular bedroom or bring a girl home. Or own property. Helping out his widowed friend is one thing, but devoting his life to a family that wasn’t his is another. Or was it? After seeing blonde baby after blonde baby being born, he probably knew what was up. This is why he lived with them for so many years; it was so he could be close to these girls who he knew to be his illegitimate daughters.
tweet of the day
from the comments
Pam:
Not to put too fine a point on it, but I think that’s a vulva tattoo.
pregnancy tourism for a master race
In the film, the lady tells us how she isn’t the first, and “definitely not the last” to travel this far to have an Aryan child, one who, she imagined, would grow up grateful for the gift of racially superior intelligence. She speaks of an organised system behind such pregnancy tourism, but refuses to elaborate. “It’s not wrong, what I’m doing,” she says, “I’m paying for what I want.”
The movie is called Achtung Baby: In Search of Purity, and is about German women travelling to Indian villages to get knocked up by men they believe are the last of the pure Aryans.
(via the browser)
quote out of context
“What is quite clear in this animal is that it is hardwired to find the poison, it is hardwired to chew it and it is hardwired to apply it to the small area of hairs,” Kingdon said.
question out of context
You gave your talk at the TED conference last week wearing your mushroom death suit. How does the suit work?
Racists now in need of a new set of jokes
If your heritage is non-African, you are part Neanderthal, according to a new study in the July issue of Molecular Biology and Evolution. Discovery News has been reporting on human/Neanderthal interbreeding for some time now, so this latest research confirms earlier findings.
justification for drawing within the chaos of visual experience
From a review of a new book, Field Notes on Science & Nature, edited by Michael Canfield:
Ecologist Jonathan Kingdon writes that drawing “represents a species of translation that is different from what emerges in photography. Given the new research on how the brain processes visual input and given that drawing is a mental process, no further justification need be made for the utility of drawing in lifting out relevance from within the chaos of actual visual experience.”
About the above illustration he writes, “The iconography of caracal ear- or head-flagging is intricately crafted, and fingers on a pencil can scarcely keep up with the rapidity of their flickering movements. Nonetheless, I believe drawings can be a clearer medium for exploring such a visual Morse code than laborious written accounts or quantified records of frequencies.”
just do it (now)
Generally speaking, athletes start to see physical declines at age 26, give or take. (This would seem in line with the long-standing notion in baseball that players tend to hit their peak anywhere from ages 27 to 30.) For swimmers, the news is more sobering, as the mean peak age is 21. For chess grandmasters — participating in an activity that no doubt relies more than mental acuity and sharpness rather than brute, acquired physicality — the peak age is closer to 31.4.
Okay, young’uns, you’ve been tipped.
Spada Codatronca Monza
Initially unveiled at the Top Marques Monaco a couple of months ago, Spada has only now revealed the details in full. The roadster packs the same 710-horspower twin-supercharged 7.0-liter V8 (presumably based on the Z06′s LS7), but in an open-roof bodystyle named after the legendary Italian racing circuit. Weighing in at only 2,600 lbs, the show car features a stripped-out cockpit with Sabelt buckets and full data acquisition system centered around the F1-style steering wheel. It rides on a fully adjustable suspension with OZ Ultraleggera wheels, Pirelli PZero Corsa tires and Brembo brakes with the same ABS system employed in the FIA GT3 series. The Spada boys say these factors add up to a 0-62 mph time of three seconds flat and a face-shredding 208 mph top end.
The Age of Mechanical Reproduction
If you haven’t read Paul’s piece yet, you should:
We don’t tell many people about what we are doing. When we do some say: “Well, it must be fun trying.” Or: “Are you sure you’re doing it right?” I laugh with them; after all, how many times have I said something insensitive while trying to be funny? I don’t talk about the large doses of medicine that I inject into my wife’s buttocks that cause her to inflate like a hormonal balloon. Nor do I discuss how intimacy itself has become such an awkward, uncomfortable thing that it’s scheduled on a Google Calendar named “LadyStuffings” with events that show up in pink.
neuroscientist David Eagleman on the competing nature of self
From an interview with neuroscientist David Eagleman on his new book Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain.
Wired.com: So if we’re not consciously directing our own decision-making, how do our brains handle the process?
Eagleman: I make this argument about the brain being like a team of rivals. I synthesize a lot of data to show that you are not one thing, but instead your brain is made up of these competing networks that are all battling it out to control this single output channel of your behavior. And so your brain’s like a neural parliament, and you’ve got these different parties in there like the Democrats and Republicans and Libertarians, all of whom love their country and feel that they know the best way to steer the ship of state. But they have differing opinions on how to do it, and they have to fight it out.
This is why we can cuss at ourselves and cajole ourselves and get angry at ourselves, and this is why you can do behavior and look back and think, “Wow, how did I do that?” It’s because you are not one person, you are not one thing. As Walt Whitman said, “I am large, I contain multitudes.”
I think Incognito is next on my list after The Information.
sex with neanderthals
When the Neanderthal genome was published last year, it offered the first conclusive evidence that humans had swapped genes with our closest hominid cousins. This was seen as another possible way in which humans had driven Neanderthals to extinction — when we couldn’t out-compete them, we simply assimilated them into our bloodlines. But the question of whether we actually gained something tangible from sexual contact with Neanderthals went unanswered.
Until now, that is.
(via @tcarmody)
from the comments
I think the suit is fine, he just had an ill-fitting body.
