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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • There is no actively growing onions in the field. It looks like it’s about ready to seed.

    The brown rows is likely barley. It’s used as a cover crop over sandy soil. Before they plant the onions they spray the field with an herbicide. The beds are cultivated and seeded leaving a few inches of the dead barley.

    The rows of dead barely acts as a windbreak to reduce sandblasting of the young plants with the wind.


  • All farming is bad for nature. There is no such thing as environmentally friendly farming. The “less damaging” methods of farming are “it only destroying 95% of the habitat, not 98%.”

    We could grow everything we need with 1/2 of the land if we banned dry land farming and moved to all irrigated. What’s better? less damaging farming or millions of acres re-wilded.




  • Yeah the lack of criminal charges indicates that it was a manic episode. She probably spent several weeks in a mental health ward. Otherwise she would have been charged for the abuse to the flight attendants and others.

    She also likely had a ton of drugs in her system as well as the booze. People undergoing manic episodes will take about anything.

    I am not so sure about the FAA fines. The U.S. civil court system is inherently unjust. There are many draconian rules that punish the mentally ill and impoverished.




  • Heat is what everyone thinks of, however that’s only part of the equation.

    More importantly they maintain higher air moisture level around the leaves close to the saturation point.

    This allows the plants to keep their stomatas open longer. This keeps the photosynthetic pathways operating for more time during the day. More time = more carbohydrate = more production.

    They are also usually watered by drip irrigation as well. Providing he right amount of water, not too much or too little, greatly increases a plants yield.

    A high tunnel is a unheated/cooled greenhouse/nethouse that is popular in every country not stuck in the dark ages with their agriculture. They come in many sizes. For example 100m x 20m ones popular in the middle east and Australia. In southern Spain they built ones that cover 20ha or more. A few in Poland were my favorite. They used split pine rails to build them.



  • Farming is always environmentally destructive. There is no such thing as “environmentally friendly” farming. The solution is massive investment into the farming infrastructure and rewilding of vast tracts of land.

    https://ourworldindata.org/land-use

    We use around half of the arable land for agriculture. The sad fact is we only need to use 10% of it. The rest we farm because we can make a profit. Not because it makes sense.

    It would take a complete upheaval of our agricultural system. Massive investment into water storage, irrigation systems and protected culture. It would also mean the forced migration of a millions people from rural areas to be rewilded to areas under intensive agriculture.

    Aka it’s not an easy fix. t’s a systematic change to the way we interact with the environment.

    So, it’s not going to happen.



  • The first one is the main reason we could afford to have kids.

    We were able to buy our first house because of three things. First the housing market crash in 2008-9. My wife’s car was totaled by a rich bitch in a Mercedes. Our rented duplex was robbed and we had renters insurance. The combination of insurance payments and cheaper prices allowed us to purchase our first home.

    My house payment hasn’t changed since 2009. It made up 36% of our take-home income then. Today it makes up less than 11%. I pay less per month than it costs to rent a 1 bedroom apartment in my area.

    The older I get the more I see that landlords are a parasite on society. They extract huge amounts of wealth from the suffering of others.


  • The_v@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzAnt smell
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    1 month ago

    Look up the “TAS2R bitter taste receptor gene family”. It’s a fun little group of genes that control how well bitterness is detected.

    I am a moderate bitter taster. So I do not like celery (mildly unpleasant flavor) and prefer cucumbers that contain the recessive bi gene that stops the production of cucubitacin in the plant. The ones that contain the bt gene, the skin gets too bitter for me. This gene mostly stops the cucubitacin production in the fruit but not the plant.


  • The_v@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzCannabis
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    1 month ago

    Life is much more complicated than the middle school definition. Some of the more interesting species are “sterile” crosses that have overcome the sterility. For example the ancestry of wheat.

    Wheat is mostly a hexaploid aka 6 copies of each chromosome. It arose from a triploid interspecific cross (triploids are always sterile) that spontaneously doubled (hexaploids are fertile).

    As a hexaploid it can be crossed to diploid rye to produce fertile offspring called triticale (tetraploid). Crossing triticale to either wheat or rye creates sterile offspring (pentaploid & triploid)

    So are they all one species because they can sometimes produce fertile offspring?


  • The_v@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzBig Science
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    1 month ago

    It’s ironic that what most people think of as a highly intelligent person is a polymath aka somebody who is an expert in multiple topics.

    Academia today is designed for extreme specialization of knowledge. So it actively selects against anyone that would be classified as a polymath.

    It’s a pretty big disconnect between expectations and reality.


  • “Seed” in 1910 was not even close to what it is today. This was also likely cereal grains and maybe some pulses. What you could buy was basically grain from the previous year.

    Also the local Coop’s/grain sellers would absolutely give free seed to new immigrants anyways. It was just smart business for them. The new farmers had no place else to sell the harvest but to them. More production = more money for them. A few pennies invested that yielded dollars for years.


  • “boy do I have thrips” triggered a funny memory.

    When I worked in Ag. Research we had a big international field day. People from 50+ countries visiting in. I got the wonderful job of doing presentations in the field all day long. This was in late summer on a bad thrip year.

    Well, one of the office goons decided that they would order all the staff polo shirts for the three day event. We were all supposed to wear the same color on the specified day.

    They ordered in a light blue, yellow, and green polos. The first day was to be light blue. I “accidentally” wore the green one instead and had a few very irate office goons on my back first off that morning. Strangely enough all of the experienced outdoor staff “accidently” wore the green shirt as well.

    For those that don’t know, thrips are highly attracted to light blue and they bite. I laughed my ass off most of the day.

    The following two days everyone wore green. Except for the one determined office goon who wore the yellow shirt. In a field full of honeybee hives…