Ah that would certainly explain it.
My working theory had been that maybe they were being selected for size à la strawberries, which have grown almost comically huge in recent years. But it's as though nature can only provide a set amount of flavour per fruit, and by growing it larger, it only gets diluted over a greater volume? But I haven't been able to determine whether fast food tomatoes are behemoths since they are already cut up.
That's a beautiful story. Thanks for sharing. My mom was an avid gardener also. I miss her so much!
Oh man, you sound like my mother! She was actually Japanese and grew her own tomatoes. She was always forcing them on me, saying Ne, umai-deshou! (See? They're full of umami!)
I actually like cooked tomatoes in all forms, but there is something in the flavour profile of a raw tomato that turns me off.
That is fascinating! You should do an AMA.
I would love to see fewer monocultures at the supermarket. I have noticed lately that a number of new apple varieties have been popping up, at least where I am in Canada. I keep hoping for some kind of craft beer-like renaissance in produce where there is a lot more to explore and rabid fandom over particular varieties.
1st reaction: lmao
2nd reaction: hey wait, this is pure genius!
One time I was in Mexico with my wife while our daughter was still a baby and the lady at the front desk of the hotel where we were staying offered us a crib we could borrow. It was a kind gesture, but I was a little concerned because the crib seemed wobbly. I realized there were some screws loose but though I had a multitool on me, the holes were stripped.
So later, I was talking with a local and he's like "I can fix that." He comes over and pulls a pack of toothpicks out of his pocket. He sticks one into each hole and breaks it off so that it's not sticking out anymore. Then he drives the screw back in. I shook the crib after that and it was rock solid!
Now I always keep some toothpicks handy. Fast-forward to just this year. My daughter is now an adult living in a condo, and was complaining the screw popped out of a kitchen cabinet door when her roommate yanked on it too hard. "I can fix that."
holds the potential to store up to 2 MW of energy
2nd paragraph and he's already lost me. It would be nice if tech columnists had the equivalent of even a single semester of high school physics.
Speaking as a Canadian, the Bush presidency was certainly wince-inducing. I was genuinely surprised he got re-elected after that clusterfuck of a first term. By the end of the 2nd, I was fairly convinced the best days of America were behind it.
But the difference between him and Trump is the wounds were more self-inflicted on the country with Bush. Still not great for Canada, whose fortunes rise and fall on what happens on the other side of the border.
But Trump had a genuine animosity for freedom-loving, democracy-respecting American allies and a love for oppressive dictatorships. He tore up trade agreements, levelled tariffs, etc. against Canada and Europe while advancing diplomacy in person in the likes of North Korea.
And on a more social level, he poisoned public discourse and stoked right-wing authoritarianism all over the world. I have family members I can't talk to anymore. And the lunatic fringe came out of the woodwork under his term. We even had a mosque shooter here in Canada who was quite candid about Trump being his inspiration.
Within the US, Americans hate Americans with a passion. What a mess. Another civil war is not out of the question. As such, I am coming down on Trump being far, far worse.
Anything you see on LockPickingLawyer.
a catastrophic potato explosion
…or a bombe de terre, if you will.
She grew up in Japan. All her friends are Japanese. Her life experience is of Japanese society and culture. She's been through it all. What is she if not Japanese? Get over it.
I am part Japanese myself and the language is literally my mother tongue, but when I go to Japan to visit family, I always feel alienated because I don't look the part. Don't get me wrong. People are very polite to foreigners, but you will always be a foreigner. Even when I spent a year at a Japanese elementary school, I felt this persistent sense of not belonging.
But maybe things are starting to change? I admittedly have not been back in a couple of decades. I hope so.
The first time I met the dad of the woman I would eventually marry was when I flew out to have Christmas with them. He was a big-shot lawyer, and I was a little scared of the guy. Not gonna lie.
I thought I gotta bring him a gift. But what? I had very little money, having just graduated. What could I get lawyer dad that wouldn't seem tacky? I went to a book shop and got around to the true crime section. He's a lawyer right? Maybe he likes true crime? So I read a few back covers and found one that looked sort of interesting. It was about a murder on a college campus, but looked like the investigation had lots of twists and turns with a big trial at the end? Would he like it?
Anyway, I meet him and give him the book and he sort of tosses it aside and grills me, as expected. I kind of shrank in the chair, but my to-be-wife and her siblings said I did okay.
Now fast-forward several weeks. I'm back home and get an email from her dad. Oh boy! What did I do? But he's like, "I just finished the book. It was set at the college where I got my law degree. I even knew one of the profs who's a character in it! How did you know?!?" I didn't. "It was so nostalgic. The author mentioned landmarks, some of which aren't even around anymore. But I remember. That was the best book I've read in years! I couldn't put it down!"
We were all good after that.
I've been on long flights where I wished there had been designated seating for introverts. But then I considered the implications of packing all the extroverts together in one place nearby and thought better of it.
So jealous… I think where I live, a doubling of the cycling population would be like "Oh hey look, there's another guy!"
I think about this sort of thing from time to time, and every time I come to the same conclusion that manufacturers of bulk goods need to take more responsibility for the entire life cycle of their products. They're getting a free ride with municipalities stuck footing the bill for recycling plastics, and have zero incentive to solve the problem.
Let's say the city sent all the recyclables to some regional warehousing facility where they would get sorted by barcode according to manufacturer. Then the companies would be charged for storage and would have strong incentive to come collect their property before it really starts to pile up.
Initially, they will no doubt gripe about it, but in the long term, it may be a win-win in that if say Coca-Cola realizes it can get all its bottles back, it could switch to a more reusable design that could reduce bottling costs?
I imagine you're probably talking more about content, but you've uncovered a pet peeve of mine having more to do with the structure of web pages.
The original vision of html was to have this beautiful format that flows text and graphics elegantly over whatever space you give it. I remember thinking this is great! One day we will have pocket-sized displays and the web is already future-proofed to work seamlessly in that world.
Then fast-forward to smart phones. By now, web pages were so rigidly formatted that they had to design special mobile versions of every site.
In Putin's Russia, even the chips defect.
As a GenX, I would prefer seeing them made into some sort of public space? We are losing a lot of that, at least where I live. Indoor space in particular.
Fast fashion. At least I hope it does? It's such a wasteful abomination that we don't need right now.
I am not deaf, but this is triggering a pet peeve.
It seems a pretty common occurrence that I will be walking into a restaurant, bar, airport, doctor's office, or whatever, and there will be a TV on a news channel with the sound muted or very low. For F's sake, put the captioning on! What's wrong with you?!?
literally good for you
I actually asked my family doctor at one point about the health effects of masturbation. She said that as a guy, if you are not otherwise sexually active, it's good for the prostate to keep the plumbing working down there.
That's why we need passive daytime radiative cooling. In theory, it could completely eliminate the urban heat island, but it still seems to be mostly at the pilot project stage so far. I did read somewhere that you can DIY with some packaging tape (which somehow has the right properties?) over a reflective backing. Maybe I'll experiment a bit this summer.
I think it depends a lot on the individual cat? In my experience, their attitudes towards humans can vary quite considerably.
Some are more aloof and independent and see their human as a source of food like you say.
But then I think about our current cat. He’s a rescue who’s clearly been through a lot on the streets. When I come home, he just wants to climb onto me and head butt and do that slow blink thing. He wants this more than food, even, which is a first for me.
When we were adopting him, we fostered first for a couple of weeks before he had to go in for a surgery, and in the week or so when e was boarded, the staff said he was wailing every night wanting to go home. So he had clearly developed an attachment to us that transcended simply wanting any human who provides food and shelter.
Years ago I watched a documentary about Trump's shenanigans in Atlantic City. Basically, he stiffs the contractors who build his casino. They sue, and so he hires some big shot lawyers to defend him. They get him off for the most part, but then he then turns around and stiffs the law firm itself! Like what even?!?
I was astonished by the Great Green Wall Initiative in Africa. The plan is to create a continent-spanning wall of vegetation to prevent the Sahara Desert from expanding southward. It is nothing if not ambitious.
Apparently, the first phase is to create huge number of these tiny plots shaped in a special way to prevent rainwater from running off and planting drought-hardy native species in them, some of which can be harvested as a food source. Eventually, once the soil has recovered sufficiently, they can plant trees.
The initiative is high-tech in the sense of applying state-of-the-art knowledge on land management but low-tech in the sense that it will involve a whole lot of manual labour with simple implements.
But the scope of it is insane with 22 countries having signed on. It gives me hope that collective action in the face of climate change is possible anywhere in the world.
Lemmy, in its current state, reminds me of a university online forum. It has a university-ish population of active users who seem reasonably well-educated, and you run into people with disproportionately varied interests and passions compared to the general population.
I joined last summer when I became annoyed by the reddit shenanigans and have never looked back. For me, at least, lemmy already has the critical mass needed to occupy my attention. After the initial reddit wave, the active user count dropped steadily from around 70k to 40k, but seems to be slowly rebounding now as it has climbed back to 50k or so recently.
I think one thing of note is that when people flood into the fediverse for whatever reason, there is a tendency for them to congregate at whatever is perceived as the most central instances. This can be devastating if the servers in question are not up to the task of a sudden influx. I am guilty of this myself. I initially opened an account at kbin.social which was swamped. As I learned how the fediverse works, I eventually settled on lemmy.ca, which is a middling size instance that seems quite stable.
I guess my worry, then, is if lemmy goes viral at some point, it may not be up to the task of dealing with all the people flooding in? Viral trends have an exponential growth pattern, so it only takes a few doublings before you're looking at a million users and beyond. At the moment, scalability worries me more than social concerns in terms of the future of lemmy. But I suppose that may, to some extent, be because it's much harder to predict how the latter will play out with a much larger network, so I am giving it the benefit of the doubt?
The article seems focused on Arizona Mormons, and that's a swing state.
I was astonished to find the other day that LibreOffice has no problem opening ClarisWorks files. That is an ancient Mac format that even Apple's Pages has long since abandoned.
Never lived in the USSR but travelled through the country on the Trans-Siberian Railway with my dad years ago when just a kid. He spoke fluent Russian and struck up conversations with locals wherever we stopped. At one point, they broke out into gales of laughter before we reboarded the train. I asked him what that was all about.
He said he had asked if anyone practiced religion in the USSR? At first, they were reluctant to answer. Who wants to know? Why do you ask? And he said well, I notice there are signs all over the train station that it is forbidden to walk over the tracks. Yet I see people going so far as to crawl under one train to reach another. After a moment of awkward silence, that's when the laughter broke out. "Ah shit man, you got us. Religion is alive and well here!"
Fair, though I guess my interpretation was that void* is kind of like a black hole in that anything can fall into it in an unsettling way that loses information about what it was?
As a Gen X, I think my typing speed peaked around late high school/early university? I tried to teach myself touch typing and got moderately proficient. Then I got into programming where you need to reach all of those punctuation marks. So my right hand has drifted further to the right over the years, which is better for code but suboptimal for regular text.
One thing that's really tanked for me though is writing in cursive. I used to be able to take notes in class as fast as the prof could speak. Now I can scarcely sign my own name.
Compiler/interpreter: Can't find variable farfignewton.
Earlier:
Me: Declare variables near, far
IDE: Oh! You mean farfignewton right? I found that in some completely unrelated library you didn't write. Allow me complete that for you while you're not paying attention.
The bow is also on the wrong side of the bridge. Though now that I think of it, that might produce an even higher sound like you would expect of a microscopic violin?
Gotta hand it to them. They've perfectly managed to capture that feeling of driving on a highway with endless billboards.
I think the pros outweigh the cons? Anything that steers us away from car culture is desperately needed at this point, and this is one of the only practical alternatives in suburbia.
I would be for bike safety being taught at schools, though I feel licensing for minors would be a quagmire? Let's not go there. I would be for speed limiters that are harder to bypass. For example, I can disable mine by phone app. If I had any trouble I could ask, well, a teenager? lol
But perhaps most importantly, cycling infrastructure, at least in North America, is a joke and there is so much that can be done on the safety front it's not funny. I wish the decision makers were all bike commuters. Then they would understand the level of impracticality in their well-meaning but futile attempts to improve the situation.
Ah, so it's not just my kids (I'm Gen X). Neither has expressed any interest in driving. One's a starving student, so I guess there's that. But the other's graduated and scored a cushy job where he could certainly afford wheels if he wanted. I asked him about it and he's like nah. I'll just take a lyft or whatever if I need it. And he's a software dev so he spends the time on his laptop. I guess if he were driving, his time would be less productive? I dunno.
We actually went to the same tech convention last fall in Denver and shared a hotel. I knee-jerk rented a car thinking Denver sounds like a driving town. But parking at the convention was exorbitant and we wound up ride-sharing there anyway, so I am beginning to see the merit in his way of thinking? The only time we got any use out of the rental was the last day when we had a little free time before the flight and drove up to Red Rocks. But seriously, for that one trip, the rental was hardly worth it.
Articles like this really float my boat! It reminds me a bit of the discovery of the Wollemi Pine in Australia.
You have to understand that religion was banned by the communist regime of the day. Admitting to it could get you locked up.
But my dad, as a tourist making this casual observation about flagrant rule-breaking going on in plain sight even as he spoke, broke the tension completely and made the locals admit there is a lot of rule-breaking going on everywhere.
The other day I ordered a burger and they put tomatoes on it even though I asked them not to. I was about to complain, but decided to take a bite anyway and…huh. The tomato had no flavour whatsoever. I used to not like the taste of tomatoes but how could I object to this?
So what does this mean? Are my taste buds not functioning like they used to? But I spent lunch looking it up and apparently, there is a fair consensus that tomatoes, along with a host of other fruits and vegetables, really are blander today than when I was a kid. For something I never liked, this kind of works out but…