One of the photographs of the week at The Guardian.
"Participants perform during the annual Day of the Dead parade in Mexico City." Credit: Gustavo Graf/Reuters
03 November 2019
Monarch costumes
To me, the top photo is more fascinating
The images are "before and after" photos of the "El Castillo" step-pyramid at Chichen Itza.
The lower photo reveals the incredible workmanship and brings to mind the probably decades of human labor required to create this magnificent structure. The upper photo shows how the natural world "reclaimed" the pyramid during a thousand years of rampant growth, giving just a hint of what can be accomplished given enough time. Extend that to tens of thousands of years, or hundreds, and wonder how much of the "anthropocene" will be detectable in our planet's future.
The "tears in rain" soliloquy
"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.I suppose I watched Blade Runner two or three times before I finally came to view this very brief soliloquy by the replicant as one of the key thematic moments of the film.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain."
Hauer, director Ridley Scott, and screenwriter David Peoples asserted that Hauer wrote the "Tears in Rain" speech... In his autobiography, Hauer said he merely cut the original scripted speech by several lines, adding only "All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain" although the original script, displayed during the documentary, before Hauer's rewrite, does not mention "Tanhauser Gate"...Reposted from 2017 because today is Roy Batty's birthday ("incept date") - as documented by this screencap from an early scene in the movie:
Hauer said that these final lines showed that Batty wanted to "make his mark on existence... the robot in the final scene, by dying, shows Deckard what a real man is made of."
When Hauer performed the scene, the film crew applauded and some even cried. This was due to the power of the dying speech coming at the end of an exhausting shoot.
And reposted once more, because November 2019 is "Blade Runner month", as indicated by this frame from the movie's opening credits:
The proper term for the above is an "intertitle" (with a tip of the blogging cap to Miss C).
The "technical debt" of America's infrastructure
Excerpts from a very sobering article in The Atlantic:
A kind of toxic debt is embedded in much of the infrastructure that America built during the 20th century. For decades, corporate executives, as well as city, county, state, and federal officials, not to mention voters, have decided against doing the routine maintenance and deeper upgrades to ensure that electrical systems, roads, bridges, dams, and other infrastructure can function properly under a range of conditions. Kicking the can down the road like this is often seen as the profit-maximizing or politically expedient option. But it’s really borrowing against the future, without putting that debt on the books.In software development, engineers have long noted that taking the easy way out of coding problems builds up what they call “technical debt,” as the tech journalist Quinn Norton has written...Almost everywhere you look in the built environment, toxic technical-debt bubbles are growing and growing and growing. This is true of privately maintained systems such as PG&E’s and publicly maintained systems such as that of Chicago’s Department of Water Management. It’s extremely true of roads: Soon, perhaps 50 percent of Bay Area roads will be in some state of disrepair, not to mention the deeper work that must occur to secure the roadbeds, not just the asphalt on top.Then there are the sewers and the wastewater plants. Stormwater drains. Levees. And just regular old drinking water. Per capita federal funding for water infrastructure has fallen precipitously since the 1970s. Cities are forced to make impossible decisions between funding different services. And even when they do have the money they need, officials make bad or corrupt decisions. So, water systems in the United States have built up a $1 trillion technical debt, which must be paid over the next 25 years. The problem is particularly acute in the Great Lakes states. One investigation, by American Public Media, found that from 2007 to 2018 Chicago residents’ water bills tripled, and Cleveland residents’ doubled. In Detroit, a city with a median income of less than $27,000, the average family paid $1,151 for water. At these rates, poor residents are far more likely to have their water shut off, and the systems still aren’t keeping up with the maintenance they need. Runaway technical debt makes it nearly impossible to pay the “interest,” which is just keeping the system running, let alone to start paying down the principal or start new capital projects.All told, the American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that it will cost $3.6 trillion to get Americans back to an acceptable level of technical debt in our infrastructure.
The linked article by Quinn Norton is also sobering.
What Californians, as well as many other Americans, and hundreds of millions of people around the world need to give up on is living where they think they ought to be able to live. Californians are busy building new neighborhoods into the rightful territory of giant fast moving infernos; post-Hurricane Texans think they have the right to build in low-elevation Houston, and poverty-stricken Bangladeshis and Indonesians think they should hold on to the shores they’ve always lived on.
Houston is technical debt. New Orleans is technical debt. Puerto Rico is plagued by intertwined monetary and technical debt.
30 October 2019
29 October 2019
Seeking advice re dahlias
I am new to the world of dahlias. I've been told it should be "in my blood" because my Norwegian grandfather used to dig up his dahlia tubers to store in the root cellar in the winter (probably buried in sawdust or sand) along with carrots and potatoes.
I grew up living not far from the University of Minnesota Landscape Arboretum, which has a section devoted to dahlias (photos above and below).
Each year the Dahlia Society of Minnesota plants a new selection of hybrid dahlias (Dahlia var.) which are then monitored by the Society for growth, habit, disease, flower quality and other guidelines and makes recommendations to The American Dahlia Society. Therefore you will only find numbers and letters on the labels - not names.The blossoms are sometimes spectacular:
But the naturalist in me noted that the bees prefer the more basic (?more primitive) flowers -
- rather than the complex ones that the hybridizers prefer. I've noticed that with other types of garden flowers - convoluted ones probably have less accessible nectar and pollen.
The other thing I noticed about the arboretum dahlias was the impressively robust stems (tip of my trekking pole for size comparison in the photo above). Clearly these particular specimens are several years old and have had their tubers protected through multiple Minnesota winters.
This year I decided to add dahlias to our garden. This past spring at our local Farm & Fleet I purchased a couple dahlia tubers. I didn't think to take any "before" photos, but they were basically small scrawny shriveled things that were totally unimpressive. I tilled the top couple inches of an unused portion of the garden and stuck them in. By midsummer I had to add some vertical supports because they were already 3 feet high. By the end of the summer they were about 5' tall, with fist-sized attractive blossoms.
After the first frost but before the hard freezes to come, it was time this past week to dig up the tubers. I wound up having to dig a rather deep trench to be able to get under them (and note the plant stems are still rather gracile compared to the old-timers at the arboretum) -
The digging entailed a bit of work, because the plants had sent roots below the topsoil into the clay underneath, and I didn't want to fragment the cluster of tubers while getting them out.
I checked out a couple library books for advice on how to overwinter the specimens. The first step seems to be to "hang them up to dry", so I've got them sitting in an elevated wire basket on the wall of the garage -
After they dry out a bit I'll clean them up by brushing the dirt off, but won't wash them because moisture increases the risk of mold. I plan to wrap them in newspaper and keep them in the unheated garage, which in midwinter will get below the recommended 40-50 degree optimal storage temp, but should protect them from the subzero temps that will occur outside.
When spring arrives I apparently will have the choice of subdividing those clusters or replanting them as they are. I'll probably choose the latter.
I'm posting this partly for family but also to ask readers here for any advice you may have to offer on the management of dahlias. The books and website I've read offer some variations on how to store and how to replant the tubers; I'd love to hear comments from any readers who have actual hands-on practical experience with these plants.
Related: First prize at Corso Zundert, 2012.
First snow of the year
Wet snow falling on a windless night turned the pagoda dogwood, the elm, the crabapple, and the Monarda into what would be devilishly difficult jigsaw-puzzle images.
It's distinctly unusual for Madison to experience measureable snow in October (this was the heaviest October snowfall in a decade). More is expected on the 31st, so I suspect we will have lots of Halloween treats left over.
9-year-old boy in Amsterdam during the hunger winter of 1944-5
The Dutch famine of 1944–45, known in the Netherlands as the Hongerwinter (literal translation: hunger winter), was a famine that took place in the German-occupied Netherlands, especially in the densely populated western provinces north of the great rivers, during the winter of 1944–45, near the end of World War II.More at the link, including this interesting bit:
A German blockade cut off food and fuel shipments from farm towns. Some 4.5 million were affected and survived thanks to soup kitchens. Loe de Jong (1914–2005), author of The Kingdom of the Netherlands During World War II, estimated at least 22,000 deaths occurred due to the famine. Another author estimated 18,000 deaths from the famine. Most of the victims were reportedly elderly men.
The famine was alleviated by the liberation of the provinces by the Allies in May 1945. Prior to that, bread baked from flour shipped in from Sweden, and the airlift of food by the Royal Air Force, the Royal Canadian Air Force, and the United States Army Air Forces – under an agreement with the Germans that if the Germans did not shoot at the mercy flights, the Allies would not bomb the German positions – helped to mitigate the famine. These were Operations Manna and Chowhound. Operation Faust also trucked in food to the province.
The discovery of the cause of coeliac disease may also be partly attributed to the Dutch famine. With wheat in very short supply there was an improvement at a children's ward of coeliac patients. Stories tell of the first precious supplies of bread being given specifically to the (no longer) sick children, prompting an immediate relapse. Thus in the 1940s the Dutch paediatrician Dr. Willem Dicke was able to corroborate his previously researched hypothesis that wheat intake was aggravating coeliac disease. Later Dicke went on to prove his theory.
Vintage footage from the London Underground
28 October 2019
Harvest time
My weekly drive to the local Target takes me past cornfields and soybean fields. This time of year I'm always fascinated to see how the harvest is done, with equipment that not only reaps the beans and corn, but mulches the stubble and spreads it back on the field. In my grandfather's time the broken cornstalks would have been left standing through the winter, then plowed under during the spring cultivation. Not much cover left nowadays for pheasants and other wildlife.
One of the Photos of the Week in the recent Atlantic was this image taken in a Chinese sorghum field:
The same essential process - "harvesters, stubble choppers, and soil preparation machines" - deployed on an industrial scale.
Drawing dotted lines
A gif of this video was posted at Reddit; I was startled to note numerous comments indicating that people didn't understand that the split nib was designed to hold ink (they thought it was a clamp). I still have two drafting kits that my father owned, with precision instruments embedded in velvet-lined custom cases. I try to find uses for them when I can, because they are a joy to use.
But for drawing dotted lines on a chalkboard, there is a different technique -
Cordyceps on a tarantula
I've previously posted a David Attenborogh-narrated video of cordyceps in ant brains and emerging from a leaf-roller. Now here it is affecting a tarantula, via BoingBoing.
Reposted from 2012 to note that the "gold rush" for cordyceps in Tibet is fading. The Economist reported on the phenomenon last year:
Children are at the front line of the armies of Tibetans (almost every able-bodied rural resident in Yushu) who will spend a frenzied month scouring the hills for what they call yartsa gunbu. In Chinese its name is dongchong xiacao, literally “winter-insect-summer-grass”, for that is what it resembles...Much more information at the long read at The Economist, including discussion of the social and environmental impacts.
This is Tibet’s annual gold rush. Yartsa gunbu is so highly valued as a medicine that it often sells for more than its weight in the metal. It has many purported benefits, ranging from preventing cancer to curing back pain. But what makes it so prized is its supposed ability to improve sex lives. It is often described as a “Himalayan Viagra”, good for treating erectile dysfunction and (in women as well) low libido...
The children’s good eyesight and short stature make them the best spotters of the fungus among blades of grass and stalks of ground-hugging cinquefoil shrubs that soon, as the weather warms, will dot the slopes with bright yellow flowers. It is not a job for those unused to the plateau’s thin air. Caterpillar fungus, as yartsa gunbu is usually called in English, is generally found at altitudes above 4,000 metres (13,100 feet). That is higher than Lhasa, the capital of the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) which borders on Yushu and occupies about half of the plateau...
Digging them up requires painstaking effort. A small pick is used, with great care taken not to break the sprout from the caterpillar’s body. There is little demand for separated pieces; yartsa gunbu is dried and consumed whole. Aficionados gauge the quality of a caterpillar fungus based partly on the relative lengths of body and sprout—impossible if there is no way of being sure whether they were once attached...
[d]espite much effort, no one has yet succeeded in producing commercially viable quantities of good-quality yartsa gunbu in artificial conditions. This means colossal dividends for Tibetans. In the TAR the retail value of the more than 50 tonnes of yartsa gunbu harvested there in 2013 was around 7.5 billion yuan ($1.2 billion), equivalent to nearly half its earnings from tourism..
To boost demand for the fungus, some merchants adulterate products made of it with Viagra...
This year there is evidence that the mania is subsiding:
The trouble is, it’s getting harder and harder to hunt down the caterpillar fungus, which can’t grow fast enough to keep up with Chinese appetites. Tibetan nomads told Frayer that the yield from this year’s harvest was the lowest they’d ever seen...Photo credit Kevin Frayer (more images at the link)
Meanwhile, prices for the fungus are falling, and harvesters fear China’s crackdown on corruption could hurt demand for the product as a high-value gift for officials. A recent health warning about arsenic levels in caterpillar fungus products is a further headache for cordyceps hunters.
“The locals know it’s a false economy, or at least temporary in many ways — one Tibetan man referred to the fungus as “fool’s gold” and he worried that one day they will be worthless,” Frayer said.
Reposted from 2016 to add this new photo of an infected tarantula corpse (via):
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