Labels

Plants with Labels

Went for a three mile walk yesterday, first time to cover that much distance in several years (two? five?). Guess my body has recovered from the two surgeries I had this year. Anyway, out walking and I notice all these little signs with the names of the plants. I have never been very good with plant names, most of them just sound like gobble-de-gook. Somebody went to a lot of trouble to label these plants. Unfortunately the sun has bleached out much of the writing. Still, a good effort.

The Decemberists

When The War Came
TheDecemberists

I'm reading a story about a new Russian play about The Decemberists. Okay, but who are the Decemberists? Google knows:

A Decembrist refers to one of the liberal Russian noblemen and military officers who led an unsuccessful uprising against Emperor Nicholas I in December 1825. Inspired by Enlightenment ideals and Western European reforms, these revolutionaries sought to abolish serfdom and establish a constitutional government in Russia.

The term has expanded over time into a metaphor for someone willing to sacrifice personal comfort, privilege, or status for a greater political or social cause.

The 1825 Uprising
Following the sudden death of Tsar Alexander I, there was a confusing succession crisis. Taking advantage of the chaos, a group of about 3,000 officers and soldiers gathered in Senate Square in St. Petersburg on December 26, 1825. They refused to swear allegiance to the new Tsar, Nicholas I, and instead called for the accession of his brother Constantine and the creation of a constitution.The rebellion was quickly suppressed by forces loyal to the Tsar. In the aftermath, the leaders were executed and hundreds of other conspirators were imprisoned or exiled to the harsh climates of Siberia.

Historical Impact
Despite its failure, the revolt became a foundational myth in Russian history. The martyred Decembrists became a powerful source of inspiration for succeeding generations of Russian dissidents and revolutionaries throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Cultural References
The name has since been adopted by modern entities, most notably the indie folk band The Decemberists. Frontman Colin Meloy chose the name to draw on both the historical drama of the 1825 uprising and the general melancholy associated with the month of December.

Did The Decemberists sing any songs about Russia? Yes, they did:

Yes, The Decemberists sing the song "When the War Came" (from their 2006 album The Crane Wife), which is explicitly set in Russia. The song tells the true story of the agricultural scientists and botanists at the Vavilov Institute in Leningrad during World War II. To protect a massive, priceless seed bank from being eaten by the starving, besieged population, the scientists made a pact to guard the seeds and tragically starved to death in the process.

 The Decemberists are famous (in my mind) for The Mariner's Revenge Song.

Hydrogen Embrittlement

Steel Absorbs Gas Like a Sponge
Steve Mould

I've known about hydrogen embrittlement for a long time, but I had no idea that carbon and methane were involved. I don't think Steve ever mentions the term 'hydrogen embrittlement'. You have to excuse Steve for his horrible pronunciation of methane, he calls it ME-thane. I dunno, maybe all Brits do that. Anyway, Steve's video is pretty great. He ties several bits of esoteric technology together to tell this story.

At the tale end of the video (14:50) he tells an amusing story about AI scams. That leads into at ad. I don't get any spam calls. My phone tells me it's a spam call, so I just reject the call. Don't know how accurate it is.

Video from U. S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board:

Animation of Explosion at Tesoro's Anacortes Refinery
USCSB

Marathon - Anacortes Refinery, Washington State

Caffeine

Caffeine is Very, Very Strange...
vlogbrothers

I've encountered most of the pieces of this video but I never connected them all together.

Roses

My kids have some big roses in their yards. The red one is near five inches across.

Flowers

Streptocarpus also known as Cape primrose

Byron has been messing with flowers and he brought a couple of his plants to lunch the other day. He won an award at a flower show in Seattle earlier this month, admittedly in the novice category. Another endeavor of which I am almost totally ignorant. More photos here.

Latex

The little-known tree that revolutionised global communication – BBC REEL
BBC Global

Ask Google Shopping for Gutta Percha and all you get is dental supplies. It comes from trees and sounds a bit like rubber, but it is different. Some notes I collected from Wikipedia articles about Latex, Gutta-Percha and Natural Rubber:

Gutta-percha was difficult to harvest. Only trees that had grown for 35 years or more were economical to harvest. Felling a single tree could yield 12 catties (16 pounds) of gutta-percha; cutting boreholes to harvest gutta-percha from a living tree yielded much less, and often killed the tree anyway due to fungal infection.

Rubber latex is extracted from rubber trees. The economic life of rubber trees in plantations is around 32 years, with up to 7 years being an immature phase and about 25 years of productive phase.

Latex is not to be confused with plant sap; it is a distinct substance, separately produced, and with different functions. The word latex is also used to refer to natural latex rubber, particularly non-vulcanized rubber. Such is the case in products like latex gloves, latex condoms, latex clothing, and balloons.

The latex of many species can be processed to produce many materials.

• Balatá and gutta percha latex contain an inelastic polymer related to rubber.
• Chicle and jelutong tree latex was used in chewing gum.

Gutta-percha . . . is a polymer of isoprene which forms a rubber-like elastomer.

Rubber, also called India rubber, latex, Amazonian rubber, caucho, or caoutchouc, as initially produced, consists of polymers of the organic compound isoprene, with minor impurities of other organic compounds.

Poppies

Cascade of Poppies

Liz Hinds went "to Mumbles in the evening for the beacon lighting ceremony, part of the D-Day 80th anniversary commemorations. . . . The event was held in the Castle Field. Swansea Yarnbombers had made a cascade of poppies."

There is a connection between poppies and WW1.

Oystermouth Castle

Wikipedia article about the castle.

Cloud Forest

Episode 12 1:15:15 Mark

We finished watching Little Women, the insane Korean dramatic series, this evening. A while back the two younger girls, Oh In-hye, youngest of the three sisters, and Park Hyo-rin, daughter of the villain and his wife, have run away to Japan. Later on we get a passing comment from Choi Do-il, the inscrutable boy-friend / psychopath, that the girls are in the Netherlands. Shoot, Choi and Oh In-joo, the eldest sister, board a plane for Europe to try and locate them because they are sure the bad guys are after them. However, a crisis arises and they bail out of the plane. Well, not literally, it's still at the terminal and connected to the jetway. No big deal, just another bit of nutso behavior. 

So the girls are on their own and we don't hear any more about them till we get almost to the end of the last episode when we see them wandering around some fancy botanical garden (top). Where is this place? The show doesn't give you any clues, and since the last clue we had was the Netherlands, I go looking there, but I'm not finding much. So I feed the screen capture to Google and up pops this image:

Katie Lolas at Cloud Forest

Ah Ha! The girls aren't in Europe, they're in Singapore. 

Gardens by the Bay
Cloud Forest are the two snail like, glass structures along the water

Cloud Forest is part of Gardens by the Bay, a large botanical garden near the Marina Bay Sands Hotel.

P. S. Tech talk - Katie's image is on Instagram, which doesn't enable saving images, so I printed the page to a PDF file and then fed that file to an on online program to extract the images. Whole lot of monkey motions just to give Katie credit for giving me a clue.

Flowers

Flowers
77 Piece Jigsaw Puzzle

The Forest Spirit

The Forest Spirit

Via daily timewaster

Trees

Why almost all coal was made at the same time
I ran across the story of coal a while back and I meant to do something with it, but it didn't happen. Now we've got this big tree planting project and everybody and their brother are making videos about trees and this one pops up and it's got some science. So here we have the story of coal and I didn't have to do any work other than embed this video.

Given that there a zillion trees in the world already, I don't think another 20 million is going to make a big impact, but hey, it's not going to hurt. I mean, trees are good. Let them grow for a while and you can cut them down and use the wood for all kinds of useful things, like building houses or making fires to heat your house or cook your chicken dinner. I have a fir tree in my back yard that is 40 or 50 feet tall. It was maybe 8 feet tall when we planted it ten years ago. They grow fast. Problem is when we cut them down faster than they grow. But now I wonder, how many trees are lost to natural fires compared to the number cut down by people? We hear about these fires in California and the Pacific Northwest that consume zillions of acres of forest. And then we hear about how the Amazon rain forest is losing a zillion acres to people clearing land for crops. Talk about an army of ants. Which one wreaks more destruction?

Trees are made of hydrogen and carbon (hydrocarbons), but being as carbon outweighs hydrogen by a factor of 12 to one, you can say that trees are mostly carbon.

Dead Link in the middle of the road

DEAD SKUNK IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD - LOUDON WAINWRIGHT III
Iaman reports:

I am clearing off my HP desktop to git rid of it.   Too bulky for my minimalist style and the text is wonky on the screen. Googling a fix,  one sites says  involves 20 steps....then find out the video card is no longer supported.

Exported my chrome browser bookmarks,  then finding more than half of those links are dead,  being 10 years old or so.

"Go to Texas, it will be warm" they said.

Texas Pollen

 A couple days ago I got sick with postnasal drip, along with all of central Texas,  cedar bloom from hell.  Couldn't get a decent sleep,  cough kept me up even with Snoring J gone.  Contemplating if I should go to eastern Louisiana, Northern Colorado or west Arizona.  None of those particularly appealing.  So I went to Walmart Pharmacy,  the antihistamine aisle was packed 4 deep with snifflers.  My Loratadine not working,  picked up Flonase Allergy and Cetirizine Hydrochloride.  $15.00 hope it works, better than driving all over.

Dead Skunk was big hit on the radio back in the early 70's. It's a great tune, though I only need to hear it once every ten years or so.

Update January 2021 replaced missing video. Google had age-restricted the last one. This one is very similar. I have no idea why this video was included in this post. Just one of the quirks that makes this blog so special, I guess.

Bergamot

Seems there's more than one kind of Bergamot. Condensed from three articles in Wikipedia:

    The Bergamot orange is a fragrant fruit the size of an orange, with a yellow colour similar to a lemon.  It is commercially grown in southern Calabria (the toe of the Italian boot), where more than 80 percent are produced. It is also grown in southern France and in Côte d'Ivoire (Africa) for the essential oil and in Antalya in southern Turkey for its marmalade. The fruit is not grown for juice consumption.
    Citrus bergamia is a small tree which blossoms during the winter. The juice tastes less sour than lemon, but more bitter than grapefruit. The distinctive aroma of bergamot is most commonly known for its use in Earl Grey tea.
    The bergamot orange is unrelated to the herbs known as bergamot or wild bergamot, Monarda didyma and Monarda fistulosa, which are in the mint family.
It is sometimes confused with (but is not the same as) Citrus medica (citron, the yellow fruit of which is also known as etrog).
    Monarda didyma (crimson beebalm, scarlet beebalm, scarlet monarda, Oswego tea, or bergamot) is an aromatic herb in the family Lamiaceae, native to eastern North America from Maine west to Ohio and south to northern Georgia. Its odor is considered similar to that of the bergamot orange (the source of bergamot oil used to flavor Earl Grey tea).

Wild bergamot or Bee Balm^[1] (Monarda fistulosa) is a wildflower in the mint family widespread and abundant as a native plant in much of North America.^[2] This plant, with showy summer-blooming white flowers, is often used as a honey plant, medicinal plant, and garden ornamental.^[3] The species is quite variable, and several subspecies or varieties have been recognized within it.

This HMS Bergamot was a Flower-class corvette that served in the Royal Navy during WWII.

I put this together a while back because someone, probably one of my far flung correspondents, had mentioned it and being as it was a slow news day I investigated. Roberta X mentioned it today, and I said, wait a minute, I've got some bookmarks on this. So I drug 'em out and here we are.

P.S. I don't like Earl Gray tea. I like plain old black (orange pekoe). I also like Constant Comment, if someone else is buying.