18 March 2024

Wisteria


The (unquestioned) beauty is deceptive.  Multiple comments at the Pics subreddit post attest to the destructive capabilities of Wisteria vines.

Reposted from 2018 to add this:


Image cropped for size/emphasis from the original in a gallery of homes with gardens at The Guardian.

A blueberry the size of a golf ball


Developed by a fruit and vegetable vendor in New South Wales:
It’s dark blue, about the diameter of a golf ball and it weighs 10 times as much as your average blueberry.  Picked on 13 November, the piece of fruit was this week officially recognised by the Guinness World Records as the world’s heaviest blueberry...

Hocking said while typically a sacrifice in quality is expected with larger fruit, blueberries of the Eterna variety were “firm with a really good shelf life”.

Hocking said the fruit wasn’t an abnormality within the Eterna variety: there were about 20 blueberries of a similar size present when the berry was picked.

He said there was a growing demand for bigger fruit, which he attributed to a shift from using fruit in baking and on breakfast cereal to snacking.

CAPTCHAs - updated re "I'm Not a Robot" clicks


Embedded image 😀 via Interesting Engineering.  Today I learned that CAPTCHA is an acronym.

Reposted from last year to add some interesting information.
Some people have always presumed the 'I'm not a robot button' functions in a way to catch out artificial intelligence pretending to be human by seeing whether or not a robot is actually capable of identifying the traffic lights or marking the box with a tick...

As BBC's QI revealed in 2020, ticking the little box is actually letting the site check things like your internet browsing history to determine whether you're a real person or not.

"Ticking the box is not the point. It's how you behaved before you ticked the box that is analysed," writer, comedian and broadcaster Sandi Toksvig explained to the panel...

"Essentially, when you are clicking ‘I am not a robot’ box, you are instructing the site to have a look at your data and decide for itself.

"If the machine is not sure, that’s when it directs you to click on lightroom pictures of fire hydrants that aren’t there."

World Down Syndrome Day is March 21


The 21st day of the 3rd month was chosen for World Down Syndrome Day because the syndrome is caused by trisomy of the 21st chromosome.  This video was created to encourage "normies" to reexamine their presumptions about the syndrome.

One way to support change is to wear colorful or mismatching socks (because socks are shaped somewhat like chromosomes), and the oddness may generate useful commentary and discussion)

Jetsam


Such a tragically sad photo, taken in Batsen Province, Indonesia (credit Willy Kurniawan/Reuters) via The Guardian.

To get something positive out of this I decided to look up the etymologies of flotsam and jetsam.  Not too complicated - the former related to "float" (Anglo-Norman via French and German), and the title word related to "jettison," (same sources) referring to material intentionally thrown overboard to lighten a ship in distress.  I had always thought that flotsam was still in the water while jetsam was on shore, but apparently that distinction is not implicit in the terms.

For a curiously odd photo, go to this gallery and scroll down to the one that seems to depict an extra-small jockey riding on the back half of a six-legged horse...

14 March 2024

Runway model at Paris Fashion Week


I have in the past been chastised by readers for using the fashion subsection of TYWKIWDBI to make fun of modern trends in designer clothing, revealing my apparently unimaginative "retro" frame of mind.  To keep myself and readers here up-to-date on style, I will continue to post selected images, but rather than offer any personal commentary, I'll just let the ipsa loquitur for the resVia.

But I can't help pointing out that none of the viewers along the catwalk are smiling at this design.  They are taking it all quite seriously.  Perhaps the model has just arrived after attending a hockey game.

A pie-cutting template from West Point

"More recently, though, pie at West Point lost its innocence. For cadets who passed through the Academy in the later decades of the 20th century, a favorite form of hazing centered on pie. At dinner in the mess hall, plebes were made to cut the dessert into a mathematically impossible number of exactly equal slices: seven, nine, or 11. Upperclassmen looked on, taunting. The Zip-Locks under plebes’ hats? They held pie-cutting templates—literal pie charts—that helped plebes cut perfect slices and, most importantly, avoid their elders’ wrath."

Posted for Pi day 2024. 

13 March 2024

An invasive wood decay fungus


"You learn something every day" is the motto of this blog.  A couple weeks ago I had no idea that there was such a thing as an invasive wood decay fungus.  Then I attended the Annual Research Symposium at the University of Wisconsin Arboretum, where I saw the poster embedded above - one of numerous interesting presentations by doctoral candidates.  

I discussed the poster's findings with the lead author, then went online to seek more information.  There is of course a Wikipedia page for Pleurotus citrinopileatus, but the best discussion I found is at Forager Chef, whence these pix and text:

Golden oyster mushrooms are native to the hardwood forests of eastern Russia and northern China, as well as Japan. They're a popular edible mushroom over there and take well to cultivation, so it's no surprise that mushroom cultivation companies started selling them to grocery stores, as well as in grow kits for people at home where their spores can fly with the wind and spread...

The term "invasive" can be used in a number of ways. While some disagree, and they haven't been legally recognized as invasive (as if it would do anything to stop them) I consider them invasive and describe them to others as such for a couple reasons.

First, the mushrooms aren't native, and they're consuming resources that other native mushrooms (pheasant backs, mica caps, and wild enoki) could use...
Secondly, and what I don't see discussed much, is their fruiting pattern. Like their cousins, golden oysters are decomposers... As someone who hunts a lot of morels with elms, the preference of golden oysters for dead elm trees, which the mushrooms seem to consume whole, worries me. As these mushrooms spread throughout the Midwest, what will happen to the morels? I have a theory...
Informed discussion continues at the link, including information on identification, harvesting, and cooking ("a great mushroom meat substitute").

A boy and his... capybara


This interesting photo (credit: Sergio Attanasio) was the winning entry in the "Lifestyle" category of the 2024 Sony World Photography Awards.  Via a gallery of winners at The Atlantic.

12 March 2024

Remembering my cousin Bruce (1945-2024)

The lead photo is from his college years at Carleton (1965); the others are sequential from a childhood in North Dakota to a youth in Florida to an adult in New Mexico.


Gone but never forgotten.

08 March 2024

The "Four Yorkshiremen" sketch



John Cleese and Graham Chapman (before their Monty Python fame), with Tim Brooke-Taylor and Marty Feldman, lampooning the stereotypical "rich people claiming they were happier when they were poor."

One of my favorite comedy bits of all time - and one that is especially relevant in times of economic uncertainty.   I had posted this a long time ago, but the video was pulled from YouTube - so watch it now, because it may not stay up long.

Reposted from 2010 because that old video was in fact taken down a second time, but a Britbox version is now available on YouTube, so this may stay up for a while.

Reposted for 2024 because we need laughs now more than ever.

07 March 2024

A new word puzzle at The New York Times

"Strands, the new word-search game still in beta, seems to fuse some of the best features of Wordle, Connections, and the crosswords... Connections may torment its players with little room for error, but Strands rewards wrong guesses, in a way, by filling in a progress bar that gets you to a hint. The game displays its daily theme front and center, crossword-style, which helps you with the first, and toughest, word to find. From there, each further discovery shrinks the board and makes the next one that much easier, delivering a pleasant sense of acceleration toward victory."
The embedded graphic shows my attempts in order (used a hint, found four theme words, then the unifying "spangram" phrase, then the last three theme words).  As discussed at the link, Strands is essentially an advanced form of word search, which for me is a rather unsatisfying time-wasting game.  I will probably try it a few more times and then drop it, as I did with Wordle and Connections.  If you want to give it a try, the game is currently available online here.

06 March 2024

Distinguishing Sundial lupine and Western lupine


We have had lupine in our gardens for 10-15 years - in part because it's a showy, attractive plant, but also because it is the host plant for the caterpillars of the endangered Karner Blue butterfly.  But I didn't know until recently that there are two types of lupine.  Lupinus perennis ("Sundial lupine") is native to the eastern and midwestern U.S., while Lupinus polyphyllus ("Western lupine") is native in the western states.  The video embedded above explains the morphological differences between the two lupines [TLDR: the Western lupine has 11-17 leaflets on the palmate leaf, while the Sundial has 5-11].

The distinction is important because only Lupinus perennis ("Sundial lupine") will support the Karner Blues.  If Karner Blues lay their eggs on Western lupines, the cats will die.  See this excellent page from the recent Prairie Moon Nursery catalogue:


Western lupine has been introduced in the east because it is somewhat more showy, but it should not be encouraged, for the sake of the Karner Blues.

A shout-out to Prairie Moon Nursery


There has been a significant increase in recent years of nurseries offering and emphasizing native plants for gardens.  One of the best of these is Prairie Moon Nursery, based in Winona, Minnesota.  We have purchased seed packets from them for several years, and when their catalogue arrived yesterday [as archetypal springtime garden porn] I was delighted to see that they now incorporate into the catalogue the names and photos of the lepidoptera (butterflies and moths) that use these plants as host plants (i.e. as depositories for eggs and thus food for the caterpillars - as opposed to nectar plants supporting adult pollinators).  Here is a sample page:


Some of this information is also codified in a massive table to big to embed -


- but easy to access via the Prairie Moon Nursery website.

Iditarod mushing is way different from other sports

As reported by The Athletic newsletter: 
Dallas Seavey, a record-tying five-time Iditarod winner, told officials with the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race early Monday morning that he was forced to shoot the moose with a handgun out of self-defense, “after the moose became entangled with the dogs and the musher,” a statement from the race said.

Seavey told an Iditarod Insider television crew he then “gutted it the best I could, but it was ugly.”

According to Iditarod Rule 34, if an edible big game animal — like a moose, caribou or buffalo — is killed in defense of life or property, the musher is required to gut the animal and report it to race officials at the next checkpoint. Mushers who follow must help gut the animal when possible and no teams may pass until the animal is gutted and the musher gutting the animal has proceeded. Any other animal killed in defense of life or property must be reported to a race official but is not required to be gutted. 

Race Marshal Warren Palfrey said officials “are making sure that every attempt is made to utilize and salvage the moose meat,” according to the statement.

Seavey encountered the moose 14 miles outside of the Skwentna checkpoint, roughly 80 miles from the starting point in the 975-mile race. When he reached the next checkpoint at Finger Lake, Seavey dropped off his injured dog who was immediately flown to Anchorage and, as of Monday, was being evaluated by veterinarians there.

On Tuesday, Seavey’s X, formerly known as Twitter, account posted an update saying that the injured dog, Faloo, had surgery and is in critical condition. [other news sources say Faloo is recovering]
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