I once read a blog post by a plant breeder who was crossing domestic and wild tomatoes to develop tomato varieties that could produce a crop in climates where our current varieties don't grow.
Most of the poisonous compounds in tomatoes have a bitter flavor, so he got pretty good mileage out of tasting a tiny amount of a fruit and not continuing if it had a bad taste. But one time he ate a very tasty little tomato he'd bred, and then several hours later started feeling really sick. For some reason he wrote "sorry" and the identifying info of the poison fruited plant on himself and went to bed instead of seeking medical help. (He may have been living off grid in a remote place or something like that, I don't remember.) Luckily he wasn't too badly poisoned and lived to tell about it.
For anyone interested in plant breeding, modern domestic tomatoes don't have the genes for poison fruit anymore, so you can crossbreed them with each other safely.
@Kincaid @David Honess AIUI, that one came from an observation of the effects on goats that ate the plant by a monk who wanted to replicate the effect in humans.
@Becky is not a bear In terms of hemlock, apparently there’s no intoxication: just a horrible death as you lose the ability to breathe, but remain fully aware (it’s a neurotoxin).
Solanine, it seems can cause hallucinations, but only once you are deep into “oh shit, I’m going to die” territory, and apparently you have to get there via nausea, diarrhoea, muscle cramps, and a whole lot of other fun stuff.
The latter is one of my main IBS triggers, so I eat potatoes very sparingly.
I recall Guns Germs & Steel mentioning that not being poisonous in almonds is a recessive genetic characteristic, then speculating that some almonds being non poisonous might have been discovered by accident when a naughty child ate almonds and then didn't die.
The more I think about the 'coup' in Russia, the more I wonder if it wasn't just a bit of staged performative theatre, in order for Putin to appear as the 'strong', 'authentic' leader.
Elaine (middle left, top photo) wasn’t present for the reenactment so we had to improvise, but other than that, same people, 20 years apart. I’m the one at the back.
More Silo spoilers, probable ending scene of S1. Don't open unless you have read Wool.
So, S1 cliffhanger: I'm guessing it's going to be a zoom out from Juliette as she walks away, as Bernard says that line from the book, "Silo one, this is silo eighteen. We've got a problem."
Or is it going to show her entering Silo 17, and seeing that the airlock is jammed open, the silo is dark, and everyone is dead?
They're obviously playing up the whole, "the view screen is a lie" thing, so a huge part of the cliffhanger is gonna have to be the revelation that, no, the view screen is showing the truth (presumably by, as in the book, the skybox in the helmet view failing as she crests the hill. Seeing the ruins of Atlanta off in the distance would be quite dramatic). The human race is, indeed, almost extinct. The last sheriff and his wife did indeed die on that hill after cleaning the camera. There is indeed something very nasty out there. They're all dead, Dave.
@eliza I think the mood was set when Honda announced the closure of their Swindon plant and literally turned a ship around that was carrying a load of equipment to update the production line.
A long-awaited parliamentary report in the United Kingdom asserts Russia may have influenced the Brexit referendum; more importantly, the UK government did little to find out and prevent it.
Musk challenging fellow techno- oligarch arsehole, Mark Zuckerberg, to a cage fight is mind boggling Dunning-Kruger, even by his standards.
Musk is basically a walking heart attack waiting to happen. Zuckerberg will absolutely beat the crap out of him in pretty short order.
I hate them both, but I think I hate Musk more, and it’s a shame this thing isn’t actually going to happen, because I would dearly love to see him meet the limits of his own hubris.
@David I’m reminded of the time when I was a preteen. I was bullied a lot. My friend’s brother thought he could get in on the action. He positioned himself and a crowd of about 20-30 kids on a bit of green space on the route between our homes and challenged me to a fight, effectively blocking my way unless I agreed.
I didn’t want to, but he made it very clear that I wasn’t getting past without.
I was a year older. I was taller. I walked up to him, knocked him down, sat on him before he could get up, then put my arm across his neck until has face turned purple and he started crying.
Then I got up and walked away.
He went home and cried to his mum. She effectively game him the “fuck around and find out” lecture.
Don’t challenge bullied kids to fights. They have likely learned through experience. Zuckerberg looks like he was bullied a lot more than Musk was.
@bri_seven It would of course be poor ifnormation hygeine for you to tell us that catchphrase, though that won't stop any of us from wanting to know. @goatsarah
Flight today had a lady who was clearly a nervous flyer. We hit some moderately serious clear air turbulence over Normandy and she screamed and had a panic attack, and then as we were descending over London, same again in the thermals making the big clouds that are currently blanketing SE England.
She was having a very very bad time, and everyone else being calm around her didn't seem to help. I felt pretty bad for her. She was clearly terrified.
was on one the other day, originally meant to be a 737-800 but saw a notification that it got swapped to the Max 8 😱 … didn’t die if that’s any reassurance
from what I've read, there's not much difference between a packed long distance flight and all those people driving the same distance one per vehicle. It's going really far that consumes tons of carbon. (But taking a bus or train gives you the group transport benefit of flying and the lower energy consumption of going by ground. A minivan full of friends is probably pretty fuel efficient too.)
I hope that keeping my car travel to a minimum does something to offset the yearly transatlantic flight to see my family. I'm able to do just about everything except medical appointments and buying gardening supplies by foot or bike here, which wasn't feasible in the US. (Designing towns to be accessible for non-drivers goes so much farther than treating transport as an individual choice, I think.)
This entry was edited (Thursday, June 22, 2023, 11:35 AM)
@dusepo I mean, the only thing I really blame Crowe for is TAKING THE ROLE HE SHOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN OFFERED IN THE FIRST PLACE. ...Sorry for shouting, I guess that bothers me more than I realized.
@dusepo ...& there was so much to like about it! Including but not limited to Colm Wilkinson's stunt-casting, Ann Hathaway's (not very surprisingly) excellent performance, a welcome-to-heaven ending 100% less-creepy than the traditional staging,.... But yeah, javert gets enough screen time it's hard to watch through his scenes.
@Buster For some reason this reminds me in part of Neil Young getting sued by his label for (among other things) using a vocoder on _Transformer_. (Framed by the label as 'not sounding like Neil Young. Which is hilarious to me because as a high school kid at the time it felt like a rare example of a middle-aged rocker actually doing something interesting instead of pandering to the kids.) @goatsarah
@Buster As an effect it’s pretty obvious, but when trying to sound natural it is still possible to hear it, but the number of people who can are quite few (as in you have to learn, not as in you have to be a super human).
Also depends on how bad the original is, and how willing they are to do retakes.
Also the people who can sing will burst out in song randomly. Jack Black can sing for sure. 😀
@mattb Book is disturbing as hell & IMO very worth reading. Alfredson's film version is a VERY close adaptation & it's very creepy & effective. Haven't seen the American version or the series.
if he criticised injustice when he was poor they said he was jealous and if ditto when he was rich they said he was a hypocrite and actually they just didn't want it criticised. Ish. From memory.
@Ailbhe I do think there's a lot of, "when you point out that this is real humans I joke about wanting dead, it makes me feel bad and I'd rather you didn't do that" going on here.
The reason it pisses me off so much specifically, I guess, is because when this started happening I was anticipating bringing my boat here eventually, and followed the discussion groups, and now I've followed them for the last few years.
And some of the stories I heard, people were really fucking scared, you know? When the only people who knew about this were sailors and marine biologists and a few others, seeing videos of people cowering in terror and despair as this gang of enormous fucking sea monsters set about destroying the only thing keeping them from just drowning.
And the story of the family who evacuated to their life raft (being in an inflatable life raft is a wretched miserable experience: you are cold, you are wet, and you are almost certainly covered in your own vomit), beggi
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@Ailbhe I do think there's a lot of, "when you point out that this is real humans I joke about wanting dead, it makes me feel bad and I'd rather you didn't do that" going on here.
The reason it pisses me off so much specifically, I guess, is because when this started happening I was anticipating bringing my boat here eventually, and followed the discussion groups, and now I've followed them for the last few years.
And some of the stories I heard, people were really fucking scared, you know? When the only people who knew about this were sailors and marine biologists and a few others, seeing videos of people cowering in terror and despair as this gang of enormous fucking sea monsters set about destroying the only thing keeping them from just drowning.
And the story of the family who evacuated to their life raft (being in an inflatable life raft is a wretched miserable experience: you are cold, you are wet, and you are almost certainly covered in your own vomit), begging rescuers not to come near in case they brought the orcas back.
And then people tell me that I'm pissing them off because I think that laughing at these people is fucked up. Just ... no.
@Kincaid @Ailbhe yeah. If this doesn’t deescalate soon, it possibly ends in the extinction of the Iberian orca.
The Spanish marine authorities could have nipped this in the bud 3 years ago by culling 3 individuals, but decided malign indifference was a better approach because of the reason.
A common complaint about “disruptor” types is that they are entirely cavalier about tossing aside established practice without establishing whether or not it’s established for a bloody good reason.
A phrase often used by critics of these people is that safety standards and engineering regulations are “written in blood”.
I understand one of the people currently trapped in the “Fred in a very expensive shed” submarine is the man responsible for building the thing with obvious disdain for safety and engineering regs.
@Hugs4friends ♾ Indeed. If, as seems likely, they die because they trusted this cowboy with their lives, I hope enough remains of his estate for their families to sue it into oblivion.
It's the "teenage son" that boils my piss. take all the risks you want for yourself and your rich mates, but taking a teenager into what can be fairly described as a rickety deathtrap? No.
Yeah. I've been waiting for someone to say, "What seriously, your pops got a whole fishing boat for free? Yeah right!" which is something else that needs addressing in this context. Rural and coastal communities often have barter cultures, and while my dad is skint, he's also built many of the dry-stone walls (a dying skill) in his part of Wales, and odd-jobs for people without even thinking of charging. You got a swarm of bees? Call dad, he keeps them and farms them for honey. What goes around, comes around.
It's all just a lot more complicated than The Discourse (as you put it) allows for. We should be advocating for deterants to stop an endangered species from attacking boats, not egging them on! Because at this rate people will start harpooning orcas on sight...and then it won't be "the rich" who suffer.
@Probably Paul Also, there are a glut of GRP boats from the 70s and 80s that are literally worth nothing, but the hulls are still perfectly fine. These boats are often passed on for a couple of hundred euros, or even nothing, and then the interiors and rigging rebuilt as hobbies.
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Sites like Twitter always had this thread decontextualising problem too, although they do show that a post is part of a thread at least. Some Fedi clients do the same or better, like the one I'm on at the mo:
@SusanLewis If you aren’t comfortable with the Unix command line and editing system files on Linux, it’s going to be a very steep learning curve. Hosting fediverse servers is not something that has been packaged up in a “plug and go” way yet. You need to have a domain name, set up an HTTPS reverse proxy, an email server, database, etc.
@SusanLewis OK. You are gonna struggle to get it working then. Maybe someone will build a "home fediverse server" package that can run easily on a Mac or Windows machine, but they haven't yet, to my knowledge. It's currently a bit arcane.
[mobile.twitter.com] Here it is summarized: ----------- so my eldest brother, who is a moron, has been playing soldier with his moron friends in the deserts of texas for the last year preparing for the collapse of civilization if biden won (lol).
Silo SPOILERS. DO NOT OPEN THIS UNLESS YOU HAVE READ AT LEAST THE SECOND BOOK
My brain won’t let nightmare go. Just imagining the RNC “longtermist” approach to silos is terrifying. Like schools: how would they combine vouchers and book bans?
At least the anti-union, “just work harder to get advancement” sentiment would go over great.
But then again, every hard right post-apocalyptic fiction ends up with collective ownership by the “good guys”.
@openridephl I think downloading the Orcinus app and using it to inform about whether it’s safe to go out or not is probably more cost and resource effective.
@Miguel Arroz The one thing we know works in an encounter is dropping small explosives over the side. This makes them go away, and probably does them no harm, but the Spanish and Portuguese authorities get really pissy about it (mostly the Spanish to be honest), so open discussion of non-lethal methods for dealing with the situation has been difficult.
With the recent celebrity status the orcas has gained, it’s rapidly becoming impossible.
A lot of the blame for this lies with the Spanish maritime authorities who adopted a position of sanctimonious indifference to an escalating threat to marine traffic in their waters for years, until the behaviour had spread to nearly every pod of Iberian orcas. For about 2 years, it was literally just one or two individuals and could have been contained.
Now in winter, they migrate north. The French have demonstrated a rather more “hands on” approach, as demonstrated by one of the animals washing ashore in a river having been shot. 😞
sur que les Portugais sur les océans il ont rien prouvé😁 Diego suarez Diaz &1 certain magelan🤔 on raconte qu il aurait fait le ier vrai tour du monde.. Les Portugais ont colonisé le Japon chère sarah Brown..et quand on sait que les Japonais furent les premiers à défaire une armée de "blancs "(la Russie en l occurence) ça a du être sanglant.. Les anglais ont envahi la chine en la mettant sous opuim certes c est plus sweet😁 Avec leurs cliques françaises du napoléon 3 cela va de soit😉
The absolute best thing about running your own family Fedi server is that when you see wankers pop up on your posts, you can tell them that they’re wankers, tell them that they need to fuck off, and then server block and purge them.
@Richard Gadsden oh, that prick? I don’t think he does social media any more. He used to have a Facebook but blocking him on it starved him of the attention he apparently craves and he deleted his account.
If he’s stalking me now (and I have no reason to believe he is), he’s being very quiet about it.
In another place, there is a discussion about whether someone would leave the UK if money were no object.
There are lots of responses along the lines of, “I would be out of here faster than a blink”, but also plenty saying that people only think that the UK is a “shithole” because they aren’t wealthy.
I don’t think that’s right. I’m fairly wealthy, and like many of similar means I spent some time involved in UK politics as a decently high level. My experience is that it was full of people who wanted to improve things, but then were at some point offered a Faustian bargain: in order to have the power to change things, you need to be part of the British Establishment. To be accepted as part of that establishment, you must be willing to do what is required to perpetuate it.
The result is that the vast majority of people in the UK with the power to actually do anything are the ones who have either been willing to make a deal with the devil, or who are the devil.
The rest give up and walk away.
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In another place, there is a discussion about whether someone would leave the UK if money were no object.
There are lots of responses along the lines of, “I would be out of here faster than a blink”, but also plenty saying that people only think that the UK is a “shithole” because they aren’t wealthy.
I don’t think that’s right. I’m fairly wealthy, and like many of similar means I spent some time involved in UK politics as a decently high level. My experience is that it was full of people who wanted to improve things, but then were at some point offered a Faustian bargain: in order to have the power to change things, you need to be part of the British Establishment. To be accepted as part of that establishment, you must be willing to do what is required to perpetuate it.
The result is that the vast majority of people in the UK with the power to actually do anything are the ones who have either been willing to make a deal with the devil, or who are the devil.
My pronouns are: she/her My adjectives are: caprine/atopic My prepositions are: up/on My nouns are: Sarah/Elizabeth/Brown My verbs are: climb/sleep My interrogatives are: why/what
Ok, so I need to say something about the orcas, or rather the response to them, because this is pissing me off.
There is a popular portrayal that they are somehow proxies for a class war hunting down and destroying the playthings of the rich, invading their habitat, and this is absolutely not what is happening.
There are two types of vessel that can broadly be described as "yachts". The first type are the ones you're probably thinking of: things owned by multi millionaires who cruise about living a life of unattainable luxury. These vessels have price tags that start at 7 digits for a modest one, and go up from there. They are owned by multimillionaires, centi-millionaires, and billionaires, and they are completely and utterly immune from orca attack.
This is because they are motor vessels. They steer by vectored thrust, or by directing propeller wash over a relatively small hydrofoil. As a result, there is nothing for the orcas to attack, and even if there was, these people don't like to be kept waiting on their way to Monaco or wherever. They h
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Ok, so I need to say something about the orcas, or rather the response to them, because this is pissing me off.
There is a popular portrayal that they are somehow proxies for a class war hunting down and destroying the playthings of the rich, invading their habitat, and this is absolutely not what is happening.
There are two types of vessel that can broadly be described as "yachts". The first type are the ones you're probably thinking of: things owned by multi millionaires who cruise about living a life of unattainable luxury. These vessels have price tags that start at 7 digits for a modest one, and go up from there. They are owned by multimillionaires, centi-millionaires, and billionaires, and they are completely and utterly immune from orca attack.
This is because they are motor vessels. They steer by vectored thrust, or by directing propeller wash over a relatively small hydrofoil. As a result, there is nothing for the orcas to attack, and even if there was, these people don't like to be kept waiting on their way to Monaco or wherever. They have power plants the size of road haulage vehicles and can outrun the orcas.
The second type, which are the boats that the orcas are attacking, are sailboats. These travel at about 5 knots, which is the cruising speed of an orca, and have huge rudders because they need to balance turning forces from the sails that power the boats. The smallest boats that are capable of sailing in the waters where these animals are have rudders comparable in size to an adult human. The orcas seem to regard these as prizes and love detaching them.
While the very rich sometimes do buy these kind of boats, they are not the typical person who does so. Most of them are bought second hand, and they have very long lives (a lot from the 1970s are still in perfectly good condition). They are generally bought for the price of a used car, or less A lot of people live on them and pay for mooring and maintenance fees by doing casual labour. This is still cheaper than renting a one bedroom flat in a lot of Europe.
I live in the area where these animals operate. Friends of friends have been attacked. They aren't "yachties", they're just people with day jobs who have enough disposable income to invest in a hobby they enjoy.
So either, best case, you are gloating at people of modest means facing a salvage and repair bill that they can't afford and is more than the value of the boat, or potentially you are laughing at terrified people watching their home and everything they own get sent to the bottom of the ocean by one of the most sadistic predators on earth, and who will then have to get in the sea with these predators which, if they're lucky, will decide to leave them to drown.
This doesn't make you an online class warrior, or the left-wing equivalent of an edge-lord. It just makes you an arsehole.
@legumancer Davy I’ve seen videos of them playing volleyball with seals before killing and eating them, and obviously having a great time doing it. If the shoe fits …
Thanks for this insight! It's really helped me understand what's going on with the Orcas and boats, and why it's a problem. I've thought about this post a number of times since seeing it a few days ago, so I wanted to come back and thank you.
I also appreciate your insight in one of the replies – that there's tagging, tracking, and communication going on to combat the problem and avoid encounters. I find that really interesting and resourceful.
@Acorn Squashbuckler It’s already paid dividends. We were notified last night that one pod has started migrating west. Before, the first we’d have known about it was when boats were suddenly attacked off Faro. Now we know to stay away.
@Noodlemaz You may not think playing volleyball with seals before killing and eating them isn't saidstic, but if so, you and I have very different definitions of that word.
Lots of dolphins in general are, let's be honest, bastards. Orcas aren't the worst dolphins, but they are certainly up there.
If you think that enjoying inflicting pain and suffering, and killing for enjoyment, is something that is unique to humans, then you're a fool.
Reddit just asked if I was enjoying it. I clicked “not really”, so it offered me feedback. I thus provided some:
You asked if I’m enjoying Reddit. I used to. Now it just leaves a bad taste in my mouth, with the rush to “enshittify”. I hate that the trend in the tech industry is to race to r the bottom in terms of user experience in order to suck up to the money men, and I hate that you have declared war on your user base.
I'll admit it's been a while since I listened to the books, and I haven't watched the show. Do they not have anything to view the outside world in the show? I remember them describing watching the condemned going out and cleaning the camera lenses and acting happy.
The problem I have going faster is it all has to be technique. My poor 49 year old heart won’t actually go any faster. Graph below shows the speedrun ringed where my heart went to 175bpm for 8 minutes and stayed there.
I did feel while I was up there that my muscles simply couldn’t get the power they wanted. Maybe I can go faster in winter when heat dissipation is easier.
Saw young Dr Bacalhau (yes, that really is his name), the dental surgeon, today. In March 2020 I had a cracked tooth removed, with the intention that it would be replaced with an implant a few months later.
3 days later, the world went into lockdown. I never got the implant.
In the years since, I learned to live with the gap. It’s next to a tooth I lost for orthodontic reasons as a teen, so it’s quite a big gap.
But I have been told that the asymmetry in my bite and lack of support for adjacent teeth is causing a problem, so I need an implant.
Fist thing they did was a CT scan of my jaw. The resolution is really quite incredible. He showed me the 3D scan. Bicuspid next door has a really kinky root.
The bad news is, the jawbone there is only 6mm thick, and he wants 8-10mm.
So I need a bone graft. They scheduled me for one in September. Double appointment, done under local anaesthetic (not hugely looking forward to that, but I’ve had worse. Don’t ask. Really). He’s gonna do the graft (new technique I think - some sort
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Saw young Dr Bacalhau (yes, that really is his name), the dental surgeon, today. In March 2020 I had a cracked tooth removed, with the intention that it would be replaced with an implant a few months later.
3 days later, the world went into lockdown. I never got the implant.
In the years since, I learned to live with the gap. It’s next to a tooth I lost for orthodontic reasons as a teen, so it’s quite a big gap.
But I have been told that the asymmetry in my bite and lack of support for adjacent teeth is causing a problem, so I need an implant.
Fist thing they did was a CT scan of my jaw. The resolution is really quite incredible. He showed me the 3D scan. Bicuspid next door has a really kinky root.
The bad news is, the jawbone there is only 6mm thick, and he wants 8-10mm.
So I need a bone graft. They scheduled me for one in September. Double appointment, done under local anaesthetic (not hugely looking forward to that, but I’ve had worse. Don’t ask. Really). He’s gonna do the graft (new technique I think - some sort of synthetic scaffold), and put the screw in. Then 4 months later, they place the tooth.
Will be nice to have my ability to chew properly on the left side back.
Whole lot (including today’s consultation and CT) is going to come in at under 2000 euros, and my experience of Portuguese dentistry thus far is that they do really, really good work.
legumancer Davy
Unknown parent • • •I once read a blog post by a plant breeder who was crossing domestic and wild tomatoes to develop tomato varieties that could produce a crop in climates where our current varieties don't grow.
Most of the poisonous compounds in tomatoes have a bitter flavor, so he got pretty good mileage out of tasting a tiny amount of a fruit and not continuing if it had a bad taste. But one time he ate a very tasty little tomato he'd bred, and then several hours later started feeling really sick. For some reason he wrote "sorry" and the identifying info of the poison fruited plant on himself and went to bed instead of seeking medical help. (He may have been living off grid in a remote place or something like that, I don't remember.) Luckily he wasn't too badly poisoned and lived to tell about it.
For anyone interested in plant breeding, modern domestic tomatoes don't have the genes for poison fruit anymore, so you can crossbreed them with each other safely.
Sarah Brown
Unknown parent • •Sarah Brown
Unknown parent • •@Becky is not a bear In terms of hemlock, apparently there’s no intoxication: just a horrible death as you lose the ability to breathe, but remain fully aware (it’s a neurotoxin).
Solanine, it seems can cause hallucinations, but only once you are deep into “oh shit, I’m going to die” territory, and apparently you have to get there via nausea, diarrhoea, muscle cramps, and a whole lot of other fun stuff.
The latter is one of my main IBS triggers, so I eat potatoes very sparingly.
Dan Foster
Unknown parent • • •@sentient_water
We have purple, white, and orange carrots growing in our garden right now.
Carrot ginger soup made with just purple carrots is awesome. They have a different flavor than the orange ones.
Semi Sentient AI Cooling Water reshared this.
Rev. GothAlice
in reply to Dan Foster • • •Semi Sentient AI Cooling Water reshared this.
Kat A Klysm
in reply to Dan Foster • • •Sarah Brown
in reply to Dan Foster • •Sarah Brown
in reply to Rev. GothAlice • •@Rev. GothAlice @Plant A Tree & Punch A Nazi @Dan Foster I am firmly of the opinion that the orange ones took off because the purple ones were annoying as fuck to work with.
"Hi! Everything you own is purple now. Kaythxbye"
Dan Foster
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Hey, to each their own 😀
IanMoore3000
Unknown parent • • •Sarah Brown likes this.