Monthly Archives: August 2008

Science

How Did I Not Know This?

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While reading a list of strange scientific phenomena, I saw a throwaway comment about a natural nuclear reactor underneath the surface of the Earth at “what is now Oklo in Gabon.”  It had to be a joke.  Surely I had stumbled across some obscure viral marketing for the next horrible scifi movie, and when I researched Oklo, I’d find some website talking about it that looked old but had no archival record prior to 2007, with speculation from prominent UFOlogists suggesting it was from a crashed spaceship.

Except my search quickly brought me to a sub-site of the US Department of Energy talking about how it happened, how they know it happened, and what it means for disposal of radioactive materials.  Huh.  Now, I don’t expect to have learned everything there is just yet, but damn it if this isn’t the most awesome thing nobody seems to talk about. Our planet spontaneously made its own nuclear reactor millions of years before any mind ever considered the possibility.

It ranks up there with the moment I learned that in 1975, the USSR landed probes on the surface of Venus, withstanding the crushing pressures and lead-melting temperatures long enough to take pictures and gather some environmental data and transmit it back to Earth.  6 years later, they repeated their success and returned color pictures.  Badass.  If you check out their timeline, you’ll see that they failed for 14 years until they got it right, which is possibly very inspirational, but I can’t escape the mental imagery of a special Siberian gulag just for disgraced Venus mission leaders.

Uncategorized

Apparently, People Read This Stuff

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Slides from my recent talk were downloaded an unexpected number of times, leading me to conclude that either I’m being abused by aggressive PDF-indexing search bots, or that more people than I suspected may actually read my blog.

If you haven’t posted a comment so far, feel free to just say hi.  I’m still content to write what comes into my mind, but if anyone has a particular topic of interest, it may prod me into action to turn a half-baked concept into an actual readable post.  (You’d pass out if you saw all the drafts I have queued up…)

Horticulture, Humor

Botany is Pseudoscience

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We have a habit of planting seeds from fruits and vegetables, and I decided to try this with some avocado seeds. My failed first attempt was to stick the large seed in dirt, water it, and see what happened. Then, somewhat in parallel with this, I stuck a bunch of seeds in a clear vase outside. After several weeks, nothing had happened.

Frustrated my my attempts to figure this out for myself, I decided to employ the geek’s last resort, i.e. reading the manual. The prevailing theory is to puncture the rock-hard seed thrice with some soft toothpicks and then – well, it doesn’t matter what the and then bit is, because this is crazy talk, akin to dissolving titanium with your mind. I attempted a hybridization of the crazy instructions and what my wife recommended. She pointed out that seeds like air, and I was depriving my submerged seeds of all the air, so I now have a seed half-in and half-out of water, which has cracked and split and is otherwise showing no signs of becoming useful.

In the meantime, I discovered that my failed first attempt, which I had stopped watering and had put next to all the other pots that can be used for other plantings, had sprouted and produced a 6-inch-tall avocado plant.

If I didn’t know better, I’d say that there’s a vast online conspiracy to thwart efforts to grow avocado plants from seeds. If you’re searching on methods to grow avocado plants from seeds, follow my easy guide:

  1. Rinse the seed in water.
  2. Stick the seed in some dirt.
  3. Water the dirt once a day for 4 weeks.
  4. Give up.
  5. Neglect the seed.
  6. Enjoy your new avocado plant.