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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Eli's LiveJournal:

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    Tuesday, July 7th, 2009
    11:17 pm
    am I reading too much steamslash subtext into this?
     http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200907/climate-engineering
    If we were transported forward in time, to an Earth ravaged by catastrophic climate change, we might see long, delicate strands of fire hose stretching into the sky, like spaghetti, attached to zeppelins hovering 65,000 feet in the air. Factories on the ground would pump 10 kilos of sulfur dioxide up through those hoses every second. And at the top, the hoses would cough a sulfurous pall into the sky. At sunset on some parts of the planet, these puffs of aerosolized pollutant would glow a dramatic red, like the skies in Blade Runner.
    [...]
    The scariest thing about geo-engineering, as it happens, is also the thing that makes it such a game-changer in the global-warming debate: it’s incredibly cheap. Many scientists, in fact, prefer not to mention just how cheap it is. Nearly everyone I spoke to agreed that the worst-case scenario would be the rise of what David Victor, a Stanford law professor, calls a “Greenfinger”—a rich madman, as obsessed with the environment as James Bond’s nemesis Auric Goldfinger was with gold.
    The Atlantic may well be making the case that planet-scale climate hacking isn't wise, but I have to say they are failing here to make a case that it is anything but totally sweet.
    Saturday, July 4th, 2009
    10:59 am
    ants, mushrooms, garlic
     After sitting on the stone bench early last morning I came into the kitchen and something bit me on the neck. I flicked it off, but my hair was full of flecks, crawling with ants. I tried to knock them off and simultaneously step on them before they got into the pantry, which was a losing game. Run to the shower, dripping ants on my way.

    [info]hosterman, the Hericium abietis sawdust-sack has at least one good blob growing out -- it doesn't have the icicle-spines yet, but I think it's just starting to deploy them at the bottom.

    We found ourselves out of garlic at 11:30 last night, so I went out with a headlamp to dig up one of the plants that had been withering. The first one I dug up... had no bulb, anywhere, in all that dirt. The second one I found a bulb on, about the size of a walnut, with three good cloves in it. Maybe the non-withering plants are that way because they have bigger cloves?
    Monday, June 29th, 2009
    11:23 pm
    taste perversion from pine nuts?
     http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_nut
    Risks of eating pine nuts

    The eating of pine nuts can cause serious taste disturbances, developing 1-3 days after consumption and lasting for days or weeks. A bitter, metallic taste is described. In general, a minority of pine nuts on the market present this problem. Though very unpleasant, there does not seem to be a real health concern.

    This phenomenon was first described in a scientific paper in 2001.[6] Since the article, experiences of the phenomenon have been reported by hundreds of people worldwide (US, Canada, South Africa, Finland, Iceland, Germany, and many more).[7] [8]

    If you search the web for [pine nuts taste] there are tons of reports. One journal article, which describes pine nuts in one case as "oxidized and not fit for consumption", and in others as "imported from China". (A lot of people on the internets have picked up on the "from China" angle, reporting that their pine nuts were from China too (most pine nuts are from China); my bet is on the rancidity.)
    Sunday, June 28th, 2009
    11:09 pm
    10:54 pm
    Asparagus harvesting machine shows effectiveness
     http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2009391116_apwaasparagusharvesting.html
    The goal of the machine is to cut and gather asparagus ready for market without damaging spears that aren't fully grown, Haws said.

    The imposing green machine boasts a row of photoelectric sensors that can be adjusted to the desired height of the spears, 8 or 9 inches.

    When a sensor detects a spear as it's driving down rows, it trips an arm with a large tonglike mechanism on the end. The tong closes on the spear and an attached blade cuts it.
    [...]
    The machine, which is the 15th prototype of the Haws Harvester, is getting close to going commercial, Haws said.

    Since the harvest season only lasts a few weeks, there's only a small window of time for testing it each year, he said.
    [...]
    Joseph Haws, 29, remembers sorting asparagus atop the machine when he was little and is excited by how it has developed over the years.

    "It's part of my life," he said. "It's like a younger sibling."
    Saturday, June 27th, 2009
    9:18 pm
    please tell me Peeps has a biologically unreliable narrator
     because in the first twenty pages we have

    • instant-acting pills. Vampires have fast metabolisms, okay stipulated, but do they have pill-triturating gizzards?
    • bats eating carrion. BATS AREN'T BUGS.
    • trematodes identified as fish. wtf.

    And I'd let this all go, but the narrator says he's a bio major. Please tell me there's some plot reason, that the parasite has eaten the bio lobes of his brain for its own purposes.
    8:34 pm
    if you grab some devil's club
     Sit tight, the burning will subside in fifteen minutes or so. (Almost subside. What's left is probably just these little embedded slivers. (until they reach my heart at which point I become a clubwraith under their control of course))
    Friday, June 26th, 2009
    1:23 am
    Thursday, June 25th, 2009
    10:48 pm
    I'm not going to repost every mantisshrimp article
     so you had better subscribe yourself.

    But just this oncetwice!


    "The flowers of butcher's broom grow in the center of the cladophylls"

    Snow roots:
    http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17299-unique-roots-let-plant-forage-in-the-snow.html
    Botanists have discovered that Corydalis conorhiza grows a never-before described network of roots that reach upwards into the overlying snowpack to grab nutrients. This makes the plant the first species known to forage for nutrients in the snow.
    [...]
    The team reasoned that the unusual roots must be used to gather nitrogen that is trapped in snow flakes as they form. To test the hypothesis they added a traceable isotope of nitrogen in water to snow above C. conorhiza plants. After a few days, the team found that parts of the plant were rich in the isotope.
    Saturday, June 13th, 2009
    11:16 pm
    tuatara parietal eye
     http://www.animalcorner.co.uk/reptiles/rep_tuatara.html
    The tuatara has a third eye on the top of its head called the 'parietal eye'. It has its own lens, cornea, retina with rod-like structures and degenerated nerve connection to the brain, suggesting it evolved from a real eye. The parietal eye is only visible in hatchlings, which have a translucent patch at the top centre of the skull.

    Tip from mantisshrimp.
    10:51 pm
    another round of seed catalogs
     Columnar apple trees remain creepy and wrong.

    By some crossing of the wires I have been identified as a likely buyer of bulbs in wholesale quantities. I am, I admit, intrigued by the idea of buying 1000 camas bulbs, $155.75 (plus shipping). In the same way as buying 50 pounds of Dow Corning 3179 Dilatant Compound, you know.

    Maybe I'll try planting chard for overwintering.
    Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009
    12:15 am
    12:08 am
    12:01 am
    Monday, June 1st, 2009
    11:35 pm
    12:04 am
    bay tree flowering
     It held the buds for I think a whole year, but finally opened them.

    From 2009-05-11 bay tree flowering
    Sunday, May 31st, 2009
    11:47 pm
    Thursday, May 28th, 2009
    11:34 pm
    I know where the duck boats sleep
     47.658436, -122.367713
    11:05 pm
    Monday, May 25th, 2009
    11:26 pm
    seen at low tide

    • Starfish: purple, orange, many-legged sunflowers. Very common hiding under moon-snail egg collars. Enormous foot-and-a-half sunflower star unhappily high on the beach.
    • Sea cucumbers, orange-red with fractal feeding tentacles.
    • Anemones, mostly balled up, some red-and-green mottled.
    • Barnacles doing their Jabba tongue thing wherever they're below the waterline.
    • Nudibranchs white-striped on pink-brown. (Armina californica)
    • A one-inch sluggy creature, two "horns", back covered with fingers, streaked black and iridescent green and pink -- some aeolid? Poss. Hermissenda crassicornis?
    • The name sounded like "agagids", prob. "aglajids", Aglaja ocelligera. A boy found one and the beach naturalist was all aglee, agagids agagids, you always see their mucusy egg masses but she'd never seen the animal before. (It must be a good day for them, we found two more once we knew to look closely at shiny blackish oblong pebbles.)
    • Gunnels, many being eaten by crows, one dropped by a crow and wriggled into the mud, the crow pecking at the ground aggrievedly.
    • A little spiral of green on the underside of a moon snail egg: polychaete eggs.
    • Tobiko! Red-orange egg masses attached to seaweed -- sculpin eggs, a naturalist thought -- and one huge agglomerate mass the size of a hat -- gang of sculpins?
    • Flat sunflower-seed-spirally cellule colonies on brown seaweed: bryozoans, Membraniporea membranaceae (or related).
    • turtle turtle turtle duck turtle turtle.
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