Profile

dsgood

August 2016

S M T W T F S
 123456
78910111213
14151617181920
21222324252627
2829 3031   

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

(no subject)

Sep. 29th, 2025 16:58
jhetley: (Default)
[personal profile] jhetley
"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there."

Food

Sep. 29th, 2025 15:26
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
Junk food can scramble memory in just 4 days

Scientists discovered that high-fat junk food disrupts memory circuits in the brain almost immediately. Within just four days, neurons in the hippocampus became overactive, impairing memory. Restoring glucose calmed the neurons, showing that interventions like fasting or dietary shifts can restore brain health. This could help prevent obesity-related dementia and Alzheimer’s.


Of more immediate application: if you need to study for anything, don't eat junk food while doing so. Eat brain food.

Birdfeeding

Sep. 29th, 2025 15:01
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
Today is mostly sunny and sweltering.  In late September.  Fuck climate change. >_<

I fed the birds.  I've seen a few sparrows and house finches.

I put out water for the birds.

EDIT 9/29/25 -- I watered the telephone pole garden and some savanna seedlings.

I saw a huge corn devil in the field across from us that was harvested recently.  This wasn't the usual 10-15 foot tall kind.  This was a wide, strong spiral of air that threw corn leaves hundreds of feet into the sky.  Impressive.










.
 

(no subject)

Sep. 29th, 2025 15:16
jhetley: (Default)
[personal profile] jhetley
Some topics are poisonous to touch. This ranges from a poison-ivy itch to blue-ringed octopus level of poisonous.

Nature

Sep. 29th, 2025 13:38
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
This post has an interesting discussion about human/wildlife relationships.

Read more... )

Clarke Award Finalists 2016

Sep. 29th, 2025 12:15
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll
2016: The Chilcot Inquiry illustrates the meticulous process by which the UK went to war in Iraq, Lord Lucan is declared dead, and the UK’s narrow vote to leave the EU is at worst the second stupidest collective decision made by a Western democracy in 2016.

Pretend I caught that the poll autofilled the wrong question and that it reads "which 2016 Clarke Award finalists did you read?"

Poll #33672 Clarke Award Finalists 2016
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 35


Which of these look interesting?

View Answers

Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
18 (51.4%)

Arcadia by Iain Pears
2 (5.7%)

Europe at Midnight by Dave Hutchinson
5 (14.3%)

The Book of Phoenix by Nnedi Okorafor
9 (25.7%)

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
29 (82.9%)

Way Down Dark by James Smythe
0 (0.0%)



Bold for have read, italic for intend to read, underline for never heard of it.

Which 2016 Clarke Award finalists did you read??
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Arcadia by Iain Pears
Europe at Midnight by Dave Hutchinson
The Book of Phoenix by Nnedi Okorafor
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers

Way Down Dark by James Smythe

(no subject)

Sep. 29th, 2025 11:32
jhetley: (Default)
[personal profile] jhetley
Ash trees continue to amuse. Some are bare, some defy the season and remain green. I have no idea how much of this difference is genetic and how much environmental.

Oopsie observed

Sep. 29th, 2025 10:32
jhetley: (Default)
[personal profile] jhetley
House on my walk route had the driveway repaved a few weeks back. Today's saunter around the neighborhood found a crew tearing up that driveway, prior to repaving. Did not interrogate said crew further.

Weekly (ish) check in

Sep. 29th, 2025 21:37
fred_mouse: drawing of mouse settling in for the night in a tin, with a bandana for a blanket (cleaning)
[personal profile] fred_mouse posting in [community profile] unclutter

It's a long weekend where I am, so Monday is the new Sunday. Which brings me to the topic of the post!

How goes the decluttering? Have you shifted anything out of the house? Found something to sort through? Had thoughts on things you can let go of?

Comments open to locals, lurkers, drive by sticky beaks, and anyone I've forgotten to mention.

(no subject)

Sep. 29th, 2025 07:50
jhetley: (Default)
[personal profile] jhetley
Hark, hark! the dogs do bark,
Beggars are coming to town.
Some in rags, some in jags,
And some in velvet gowns.

Götterdämmerung

Sep. 29th, 2025 07:00
jhetley: (Default)
[personal profile] jhetley
Air temperature 48 F, wind southwest 4 mph, sunny. A few gulls across the park, also a couple of crows. No coordinated advance apparent. Ambitions limited to a walk, maybe to include meet-up with a cat friend.

Monday Update 9-29-25

Sep. 29th, 2025 03:46
ysabetwordsmith: Artwork of the wordsmith typing. (typing)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
These are some posts from the later part of last week in case you missed them:
Today's Cooking
Philosophical Questions: Peace
Poem
Sustainability
Birdfeeding
Today's Adventures
Sustainability
Birdfeeding
Philosophical Questions: Effects
Today's Adventures
Pigeon Pea Recipes
Follow Friday 9-26-25: Jane Austen
Holiday Activities
Birdfeeding
Hobbies: Crochet
Artificial Intelligence
Birdfeeding
Hard Things

Let's Boycott Mississippi has 60 comments. Affordable Housing has 50 comments. Robotics has 72 comments.


"An Inkling of Things to Come" belongs to Polychrome: Shiv and needs $200 to be complete. Shiv attends the first session of his Worldbuilding class.


The weather is sweltering again. >_< Seen at the birdfeeders this week: a mixed flock of sparrows and house finches and a fox squirrel. I heard a blue jay screaming but didn't see it. Currently blooming: dandelions, marigolds, petunias, red salvia, verbena, lantana, sweet alyssum, zinnias, snapdragons, blue lobelia, perennial pinks, oxalis, moss rose, firecracker plant, tomatoes, tomatillos, yellow squash, zucchini, morning glory, chicory, Queen Anne's lace, sunflowers, cup plant, firewheel, cypress vine, sunchokes, sedum. Tomatoes, ball carrots, cucumbers, and groundcherries are ripe. Fields are about half harvested.

Menz B Weeerd

Sep. 29th, 2025 09:58
oursin: My photograph of Praire Buoy sculpture, Meadowbrook Park, Urbana, overwritten with Urgent, Phallic Look (urgent phallic)
[personal profile] oursin

I do not think these are healthy or useful ways to look at SEX. Notches on the bedpost was bad enough, or how many times per night they could Do It, but really, these are taking the whole thing to new levels.

My boyfriend sees sex as a competition he is losing. How can I change his mind?:

He feels like he doesn’t perform enough (he does) and worries he isn’t big enough (he is!). He grew up without a father – the father’s fault – and I wonder if this has something to do with it. How can I assist him to see sex as non-competitive?:
Response:I assume he doesn’t think he’s losing the competition with you, somehow, but with imagined manly foes, comparisons, symbols of everything he (imagines he) isn’t?

I suppose there isn't actually some scoreboard somewhere out there Rate My Manly Performance but I wouldn't entirely rule that out, alas.

Because of this: Sperm-racing investors blow $10 million on ‘seed round’ for sports venture:

Last weekend, Zhu flew to YouTuber David Dobrik’s slick white Los Angeles mansion, collected the sperm of three influencers, and injected it onto a small race track as a crowd gathered in the living room. The competitors — Harry Jowsey, Jason Nash, and Ilya Fedorovich — watched a video of their swimmers, overlaid with animated tadpoles, zoom to the finish line.

Apparently, 'Zhu insists he has a deeper, more profitable mission: to gamify health and build an empire around male fertility'.

Yeah, well, I'm over here going

a) tortoise and hare, and are those sprinters whooshing right past the ovum in their mad gallop?

b) bit of an assumption that they are actually, you know, viably fertile, which I don't think at all correlates with speed. Motility is one thing, having what it takes to fertilise that ovum is another (and haven't I read something somewhere about It Is The Ovum That Chooses? Heh.)

c) Mary Ellman's image in Thinking About Women: 'the activity of ova involves a daring and independence absent, in fact, from the activity of spermatozoa, which move in jostling masses, swarming out on signal like a crowd of commuters from the 5:15.

(no subject)

Sep. 29th, 2025 09:39
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin
Happy birthday, [personal profile] violsva!

Time Travel

Sep. 29th, 2025 02:52
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
I found this amusing.

When People Travel to the Past

Read more... )

D.O.P.-T.

Sep. 28th, 2025 23:04
weofodthignen: selfportrait with Rune the cat (Default)
[personal profile] weofodthignen
It was indeed cool almost all day. And threateningly cloudy. But no rain. So I mowed the meadow in front of the house, digging out a disgusting black toadstool that I discovered in there. (White puffball-style things that go black overnight. I usually find them when they're a couple of inches across; this was a 5- or 6-inch clump.) With that plus leaves, the greenwaste bin is pretty much full.

Cat food got devoured in quantity. I wonder whether Mama Violet got shut in somewhere and busted out this morning.

Today's Cooking

Sep. 28th, 2025 23:51
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
We made two things today!

My partner Doug riffed on a recipe using the sourdough bread we had that wasn't optimum for grilled cheese sandwiches.  So he blended up eggs, cheese, and stuff to pour over slices of bread and broil.  It was amazingly good.  :D

I cobbled up a fruit crisp in muffin tins because I had a cooking apple, some leftover strawberries, and for the crumble topping I added a broken-up gingersnap to the usual ingredients.  It turned out quite tasty.  \o/

I like that we know enough about cooking to throw together something from what we have available, and it works. 

Philosophical Questions: Peace

Sep. 28th, 2025 23:30
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
This is an extra question I stumbled across and thought would fit with this project:

What is your contribution to peace?

What is your contribution to peace?

Read more... )

Poem

Sep. 28th, 2025 20:19
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
I finished one of my unfinished poems from a previous fishbowl.

"New and Innovative Approaches"
Story Date: Tuesday, December 13, 2016
Summary: Frank the Crank attends a council meeting about earthquake recovery.
411 lines, Buy It Now = $206

I don't know what to make of this

Sep. 28th, 2025 20:37
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


The Cherryh titles I dropped into ngram fell into 3 patterns:

Ones whose titles don't play nicely with ngrams. I dropped those.
Ones where the mentions per year decline fairly steadily year to year.
Cyteen. What's up with Cyteen? Did Jo Walton mention it on tor dot com around 2009?

Sustainability

Sep. 28th, 2025 14:25
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
22 Best Ethical, Sustainable Amazon Alternatives For Home, Cleaning & Personal Care Products

Amazon: It’s Jeff Bezos’s 2-day shipping giant that seems almost impossible to avoid.

But the company’s impact on both the environment and the lives of its workers has catalyzed conscious consumers to switch to alternative companies that are more ethical, environmentally friendly, and aligned with their personal values.

The good news? There are plenty of options online to meet a variety of needs. (Not to mention all of the in-person, small business, and secondhand shopping you can do, too!)



Birdfeeding

Sep. 28th, 2025 14:23
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
Today is mostly sunny and hot.

I fed the birds. I've seen a few sparrows and house finches.

I put out water for the birds.

EDIT 9/28/25 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.

EDIT 9/28/25 -- I did more work around the patio.

EDIT 9/28/25 -- I did more work around the patio.

As it is suppertime, I am done for the night.

Culinary

Sep. 28th, 2025 19:14
oursin: Frontispiece from C17th household manual (Accomplisht Lady)
[personal profile] oursin

Last week's bread did some spectacular mould action, bah, so I made the light rye loaf from Elizabeth David's English Bread and Yeast Cookery, discovering as I weighed out the ingredients that I had rather less strong white flour than I thought and had to make up the requisite proportion with white spelt. Turned out v nice, though.

No Saturday breakfast rolls because of rushing off to conference.

Today's lunch: pork spare ribs, which I rubbed with a mix of maple sugar, hot and sweet smoked paprikas, black pepper, garlic salt, and salt, and left overnight, then wrapped in foil and cooked for 3 hours in a very low oven, then basted with what was more of a barbecue sauce than a glaze of a small tin of chopped tomatoes + apple vinegar + dashes of tabasco and worcester sauce, simmered together, and cooked at a slightly higher temperature for 45 or so minutes - v tasty if a little dry - possibly did not need quite so long at that final stage; served with tenderstem broccoli and okra simmered for 45+ minutes in coconut milk with ginger paste and fresh coriander (possibly a little overdone?); baked San Marzano tomatoes; and cornbread (plain white flour + baking powder, half and half with mixture of fine/coarse cornmeal).

Sunday floral/avian report

Sep. 28th, 2025 11:50
jhetley: (Default)
[personal profile] jhetley
Masses of the brilliant purple asters by the roadside, mixed again with the chicory and goldenrod. More milkweed pods starting to split open. A few of the highland trees turning, red and orange and yellow.

Flock of about 10 turkeys by the roadside, about 4 miles into my route. No threat postures, at least one tom. Airport metal birds limited to a couple of commercial takeoffs and the Army whirlybirds. No roadkill beyond a couple of small patches of flattened brown feathers.

Got out on the bike, temperature about 62 F when I headed out and 75 F now, wind gusting over 15 mph but at my back on the way home. Did not die.

15.69 miles, 1:30:04