A 250-million-year-old fossil egg just revealed how an ancient survivor beat Earth’s deadliest extinction.
In the aftermath of Earth’s most catastrophic extinction event, one unlikely survivor rose to dominate a shattered world: Lystrosaurus. Now, a stunning fossil discovery—an ancient egg containing a curled-up embryo—has finally answered a decades-old mystery about whether mammal ancestors laid eggs. Using advanced imaging technology, scientists confirmed that these resilient creatures did reproduce this way, likely producing large, soft-shelled eggs packed with nutrients.
In terms of world domination, Lystrosaurus was arguably the most successful lifeform on Earth.
I can't remember if I've posted any of this before and am too lazy to look back.
I experimented this year with putting in some "winter crops" with variable success. Cabbage probably needed to be planted earlier because one of the varieties is bolting and the other, though not bolting, looks unlikely to set heads. The edible pod peas are doing ok, in part I suspect because I planted them next to the fence, so they aren't getting excessive sun. I harvested a handful of pods today and suspect I can get a handful per week until they give up. The third experiment was some mixed greens (NOT KALE) recommended by the nursery salesperson. I pulled them out when they started to bolt and will do something with them this week.
Because I had to trim some overly enthusiastic grape tendrils, I picked off the leaves, parboiled them, and made dolmas. Very successful (except for not rinsing the rice sufficiently, so the filling is a bit too sticky). Since I had more filling than grape leaves, I pulled some of the bolting cabbage and did cabbage rolls. (The dolmas cooked in broth and lemon juice while the cabbage rolls cooked in broth and crushed tomatoes.)
Last spring, I spotted some asparagus starts at the nursery, having failed to find any sets, and put them in the circular bed around the persimmon tree. I'd more or less had that in mind and hadn't planted anything else in the circle except for some random gladioli. More than half the starts survived the year and then this year I did find asparagus sets so I added them into the mix. It looks like they get enough water from the lawn irrigation system, though I've been supplementing with an extra sprinkler last year, both for their benefit and to help the persimmon get a good start. It'll be a couple more years before they'll be established enough to harvest (and who knows how many years before I'll start getting persimmons).
When I watch various of my friends and acquaintances flit about from place to place, I think about how significantly my life plans are affected by my love of growing things. And how tragic it would be if this property eventually went to someone who didn't value the investment.
The tomatoes are in the ground now--the usual 18 varieties. (Well, except I doubled up on Sun Gold cherry tomatoes because they're my absolute favorite.) Some years I've carefully documented which varieties I plant and how they perform. This year I didn't even make a list. I made my usual sacrifice to hope over experience and planted summer squash and eggplant.
I still need to pick and process the second half of the Seville orange crop. (The first half went to Chaz and has been turned into marmelade.) The lemons that were sacrificed to a bout of pruning have been juiced and frozen as cubes (for summer refreshment), plus zested and packed in sugar (for baking use). There are still a few juice oranges on one of the trees. The strawberries are trickling in. And it's time to update the garden calendar with all of this for data tracking purposes.
Pre-orders are currently open for Piaopiao (飘飘) by Qi Xiao Huang Shu (七小皇叔). The novel is named after its protagonist, Chen Piaopiao. It follows the story of her relationship with love interest Tao Jin through their schooldays, their breakup, and their reunion and subsequent reconciliation as adults.
Pre-orders can be made via the following bookshops:
Well, it's not a cool function, it's an option on a function. Specifically, the Weekday function.
I'm finishing up our taxes. Normally I'd finish them in February or March, but it's been a heck of a few months. One of the things that I do is dump all my prescription drug purchases into a spreadsheet and calculate the day of the week, so I can take a mileage deduction on my state taxes for weekend pickups since I'm not working those days.
Nevermind whether or not we're going to dinner or a movie....
Anyway, the function ends up being:
=IF(WEEKDAY(A1,2)>5,42,"")
A1 is my date field of when the transaction takes place. By default, i.e. without a number changing the day of the week for the date the starting DOW is Sunday = 1. By supplying the 2, you're telling Excel that Monday = 1, therefore if the DOW is greater than 5, it's Saturday or Sunday, therefore the weekend! If that's true, plug in 42 (round trip to Alamogordo and back), otherwise make it a blank cell.
Five trips for an additional 210 miles, at $0.21 per mile towards my state taxes! I have to manually eliminate dupes for multiple transactions on the same day, being multiple drugs refilled and picked up at the same time.
I use spreadsheets a fair amount, but not for anything particularly complex, just as a general purpose tool, so I was kinda chuffed to find this. The question is whether or not I'll remember it for next year!
Have just out of the blue had an email from a meedja person about what a cause of death on early C20th certificate MEANS, a colleague of theirs contacted me - what must have been in days of yore - and I was really helpful. I think that may have been a case in which Sid was involved, this was not, but we do our best in posing as a Nexpert.
I was able to flash a bit more relevant knowledge in the question portion of online seminar this pm (even though I dozed off, did not sleep well last night, during part of the actual seminar).
Have got off my desk and conscience something that has been hanging over me, to wit, second review of article I did a previous review of some weeks ago. Was somewhat prejudiced about it (it is actually not at all bad doing what it does) because it rather glances over the amount of work that went into getting the archive used into usable condition (personal interest there noted) and role of archivists in between the creators of the records and the end-users.
Think I mentioned some while ago possibility that longtime academic friend and self may be editing for publication Important Work on Significant and Highly Relevant Subject of friend of ours who died very unexpectedly last year. We have now received the draft manuscript and it seems more of a manuscript (rather than notes and materials) than we had feared.
Still have review that has been hanging over me and keeping getting put off to do.
Have podcast to record later this week.
Also must begin to turn my thoughts to being instructive yet entertaining on the history of ye baudruche (and finding illos, fortunately I already have quite a few).
Late last year, maybe early this? Toby Hadoke asked various people he knew what 17 missing Dr Who episodes they would pick if they were the only 17 left to be found. It now transpires he almost certainly knew, at that point, that 2 episodes of The Daleks' Masterplan had been found, but it got me thinking. My list is something as follows:
1. & 2. The Tenth Planet episode 4 and The Web of Fear episode 3. These both complete stories and are significant, in the first case for the regeneration of William Hartnell into Patrick Troughton and, in the second, for the first meeting with the Brigadier.
Then I have a string of picking one episode from any story for which no episodes exist so.
3. Marco Polo - there are three episodes in contention for this: episode 3 (which features Ping-Cho giving a storytelling performance something not attempted elsewhere in Doctor Who, or much at all these days), episode 5 which features Tutte Lemkow who is mildly (in)famous for having been in Doctor Who three times, none of which survive and having provided choreography for a fourth episode which also doesn't survive, and episode 7 (which is believed to have good fight scenes which, obviously, don't survive well on audio). I'm going to go for Marco Polo episode 3 for the storytelling - alas poor Tutte Lemkow.
4. The Myth Makers episode 1 - the choices here were episode 1 which sets the scene or episode 4 which pivots from farce into tragedy and introduces new companion Katarina. Doctor Who rarely enough does outright comedy that I've picked the introductory episode and it also features Tutte Lemkow so yay!. Also, with the recent returns we have 3/5 of Katarina's episodes and I've no real desire to see more.
5. The Massacre episode 4 - on the other hand, I'd rather see the conclusion of this one, which seems to have been pretty grim throughout, but I'd be interested to see how the Massacre of St. Bartholemew's Eve portrayed via woodcuts worked in practice. It does mean we miss out on William Hartnell's turn as the Abbot of Amboise however.
6. The Savages episode 4 - Episode 4s are tempting in and of themselves, but in this case we get Frederick Jaeger's impersonation of aspects of the first Doctor - seems well worth it.
7. The Smugglers - lots of choices here. Episode 4 once again has a lot of fighting that doesn't work well on audio, but I'm going to go for The Smugglers episode 2 where Polly convinces the stable boy that she can do voodoo.
8. The Power of the Daleks episode 1 - the other side of the regeneration of William Hartnell into Patrick Troughton.
9. The Highlanders episode 2 - in which the Doctor repeatedly bangs a man's head on a desk in ruse to convince him he is ill with a headache.
10. The Macra Terror episode 1 - because it includes the scene in which the Second Doctor is neatened up by a machine - which was cut from the animation.
11. Fury from the Deep episode 3 - which ends with Maggie walking out into the sea.
So now I have 5 left.
12. The Space Pirates epsiode 5 - The Space Pirates is not much loved but people hypothesise this is because the only episode we have involves the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe stuck in part of a disintegrated space station for the whole episode. So let's have another and I've picked one that features the character Dom Issigri because no one seems to know what he looks like.
13. The Power of the Daleks episode 4 - for no other reason that it would be nice to have a later episode of this, after the Doctor has ceased to be quite such a stranger to everyone, and episode 4 of 6 seems as good a place as any to stick the pin.
14 & 15. Marco Polo episode 7 and The Smugglers episode 4 for the aforementioned fight scenes.
16 & 17. The Daleks' Masterplan episodes 4 and 12 for the deaths of Katarina and Sara respectively.
A Dictionary Names the Wind in the Trees by Susan Cohen
Psithurism because what else would we call sound embedded with leaf mold and breath zithering just below the daily drone of power saws and chippers, eons of air shifting like an old Chevy through leaves, riffling papery corn fields and the eucalyptus, stuttering through windbreaks, jittering an aspen in a beam of breath, lisping nothing pins me down in the language of the Huron, in Olmec, in Sanskrit, chittering all its unpronounceable names, its tunes with the shiver of pine needles and the moves of a river? Psithurism comes as close to the clash of wind and trees as orgasm comes to the friction of muscles, nerves, bodies, which is to say when so many words cannot catch it, those of us always searching for just the right one may as well stop speaking and lift our heads like mule deer, ears twitched for the smallest sound.
[Loiosh, an orange tabby, is almost sitting on my worktable — his butt is a couple inches up. He’s looking up and to the left, ears, whiskers and all his attention focused that way.]
I’m just trying to actually deal with all the pictures I haven’t done anything with over the last, you know, year & some.
There’s a lot of em.
Sometimes when Marisol is being a buttinski & driving her Mumma spare, she gets a free all-expenses-paid trip to the house for the afternoon. Where she causes different problems (usually including eating my plants), but at least gives her Mumma a break.
[Marisol, a tiny longhaired calico, is sprawled at her ease on top of a bunch of stuff on the high shelf in my room. She’s gazing off to the left, majestically. Her whiskers are white, and extraordinarily long, and she’s got a patch of black fur covering most of her chin.]
She is, also, the most adorable. I forgive her everything but the plants. (The plants go on a high shelf, is what.)
[She’s in basically the same spot, but she’s facing the camera now, one eye closed, the other just barely open.]
Me & CJ & Loiosh managed to go to ANOTHER SCA event after Battlemoor, not that we’ve made it to anything since then, on account of everything is NINETY THREE THOUSAND MILES AWAY, but anyway it was fun & Loiosh got the best seat to watch the fighting.
[Loiosh is wearing his bow tie, because he’s fancy. He’s also curled on up a pair of feet, which are wearing a nice pair of medieval-style white leather boots. His leash is almost the same green as the tunic the person is wearing.]
Loiosh continues to enjoy living far enough from anything that he can go outside in reasonable safety, as long as he has a suitable escort.
… he’s not always entirely thrilled about the escort part.
[Loiosh is flopped on a big hunk of cardboard that’s resting on a layer of straw. The legs of a sturdily-built table surround him. He’s glaring at the camera.]
He also, as always, enjoys a nip toy — especially a Falcon’s Mew nip toy.
[He’s meatloafed on the floor of my room, a bright yellow catnip toy held between his forepaws. His head hovers just above it.]
& lastly, Major Tom, who really, REALLY likes the coat with the busted zipper. Which is obviously more comfortable to lay on after he’s dragged it out from under the chair so it covers the hatch that leads to the ladder.
[Major Tom is a big grey tabby. The coat is black fleece. The hatch is cheapass OSB plywood.]
Perhaps next week I’ll have a more coherent post!
originally posted on Patreon; support me over there to see posts a week early!
Welp, that's about enough of that. We're back to not doing deliveries again. At the end of January we started using Chow Now for deliveries. It was a $50/month flat fee, and they were to drop the orders directly into our Revel POS on the back end.
Guess what, they completely failed at their one job. The orders would actually show up in the POS about one time in four, and they could not fix it.
Also we averaged $38 in online sales per week, which is like... a rounding error.
+ gorgeous sunny warm day + MULTIPLE asparagus spears emerging! + finally managed to book 2/3 of my birthday trip flights - something in how I configure my browser means I cannot interact with the airline website and must do everything on the library computers - I bragged to my therapist yesterday about how productive and upbeat I am now that it's properly spring and today I think my everything is made of molasses
I stopped to think about how I notice the price of mailing a letter in Britain. In my youth, it wasn't a cost I thought worth much consideration. So, I stopped to investigate.
The Bank of England turns out to have an excellent inflation calculator allowing users to, check how prices in the UK have changed since 1209, which warms my heart.
If I go back twenty years, apparently something costing £100 back then now costs around £175, handwaving whatever weighted averaging they do to determine that. At that time, a second-class stamp used to cost 23p so we might expect it to cost around 40p now. They actually cost 91p so it's no wonder that I'm noticing the cost in a way that I wasn't before.
I can see why this might be so. Fewer letters are mailed at all so scale may be much worse. No doubt we have the cumulative effects of various government austerity drives. Perhaps there's simply been incompetent management. After all, somebody ought to be paying large sums of money to the many innocent postmasters who were so culpably wronged by senior personnel over many years.
I finished it in March but didn't have the energy to take pictures but I got it out yesterday and got some nice photos. They could have been better but I was working with what I had, which was my phone on a box on the tailgate of my truck, held upright by the handle of a 300ft measuring tape. I really ought to get a phone mount for pictures, I had one but it disappeared in the move.
( process rambling below the cut ) It is such a warm coat and I was sweating by the time I got all these photos taken yesterday. But coat! It's done!
Lying awake at 4:30am, I suddenly realized how Goon Show-influenced this episode was. Embarrassing that it took me so long, given that one of the performers is straight-up doing the Bluebottle voice.
According to the nurse everything went well. The doctor said maybe two words to me. During the procedure no one talked to me, no one asked anything, no one said 'we're going to do this now', 'we're almost done', 'when did you find out you had three eyes?', nothing. It made the whole thing a bit more surreal enhanced by the touch of drugs that nudged me that way in the first place.
The nurse that checked us in was apparently the resovoir of all the personality in the entire place. She was the exact opposite so it was not all bad, not all weird.
I'm more than a little disappointed that I don't get a pirate patch:
This has no class at all. The purpose of it is just to keep me from scratching or touching my eye but I think they could have added a logo or maybe
'Think advertising in weird places doesn't work? Just did!!'
missed an opportunity there.
Now I just sit around and watch one eyed TV for the day.
I've got an appointment tomorrow morning. No eye patch but at night after today so return to normalcy will be quick. I can drive after tomorrow when I feel like I'm OK to do so.