I went to the botanical garden a few weeks ago, for the Japanese festival. It was pretty nice--they had a display of bonsai and ikebana out, and all of them were absolutely gorgeous. I've never seen so many bonsai in one place before, and I'd never considered how useful branches could be in flower arrangements before seeing the ikebana. They make ( Read more... )

Gardening goes well. We're having a truly terrible weed problem this year, but it is slowly being resolved. Some beds are being deconstructed... which is sad, but ultimately necessary. The plants are being consolidated in other gardens, though. So things will be more filled in, which reduces the amount of gardening we have to do. This can only be a ( Read more... )

If you could call these 'reviews.' Really they hardly deserve to be dignified with the term.

Basically, I read a lot of books when I was in Belize, and a lot since then. Here's my thoughts on some of the new ones I read.

Master of Djinn by P. Djeli Clark -- It's your standard "magic comes back to the world, someone gets murdered, and magic cops go ( Read more... )

I'm going to be gone for a month. I'll post details (in an access locked entry) later, but long story short, I'll be in Central America for a while, and I'm not going to have access to the Internet.

Best of luck to everyone while I'm gone (and heck, even when I'm back).

So, I read this article a few days ago.

I have to be honest, I have mixed feelings about research like this.

It's not because it's wrong. I mean, it is to some extent; one of the authors of the study pointed out that they know the dataset has issues, but that's going to be true of pretty much any dataset that tries to cover something like human ( Read more... )

We may, shockingly, actually finally no longer be fighting a war in Afghanistan, as of later this year. And I have to say, it will be rather surprising if Biden actually ends up being the one to end one of the USA's forever wars. He is not exactly one of the country's leading dovish voices, and in other matters of national security and foreign ( Read more... )

Blazing star is coming up--lots of it. All of what came up last year survived the winter, and of course the seeds spread out. I'm hoping for more purple; I don't like the white variety. Here's a photo; you can see the old stems.


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Well, this is impressive: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/03/sea-slug-cut-its-own-head-and-lived-tell-tale

Decapitating yourself in order to get rid of parasites; that's a new one.

There's a video, which is pretty hilarious and I recommend everyone watch.

It has been an eventful month.

The snowstorms have affected us--well, not as badly as a lot of areas. Compared to Texas, we're blessed. But yes, it's snowed just as much as you'd have thought, and today is the first day it's gotten above freezing in weeks. Most days it's been in the single digits (Fahrenheit!). We're right in the middle of the ( Read more... )

No, I'm not warning for spoilers because this is a mockumentary.

I like speculative evolution, so it was with considerable anticipation that I watched Alien Worlds, which Netflix released about a month ago.

After watching it, I don't think it's a work of speculative evolution. I think it's a work of science education, using speculative evolution to ( Read more... )