Welcome to the vortex! It's filled with many random and fandom things. (Disclaimer: While mostly tame, mature content may show up at times and will be tagged accordingly. Enjoy!)
Farmer family friend has an out of control mint problem around one of his greenhouses because he had a potted mint plant that he set on the ground and it grew a tendril out of the pot which touched the soil and grew roots.
It had never occurred to me before that a potted plant could escape.
When I was in elementary school we had a ton of mint growing under a bush in our front yard and once I found out it was mint and edible I fucking devoured ALL of it in a week and it never came back
this is literally the first time i’ve seen this meme with the artist’s signature not blurred or cropped, so I looked him up and learned that he is Genildo Ronchi, a 56 year old Brazilian artist. He created this on his birthday in 2013 after changing his usual seat in his bus ride home and realizing he had a much nicer scenary to look at from the sunset-facing seat.
Genildo said in an interview that he is happy to see his piece doing the rounds on the web, but adds: “[the piece] being turned into a meme is great for sharing my work, but it’s important that you keep my signature.”
Dave Brandt was so much more than a meme. He partnered with universities to experiment with and expand soil conservation and cover crop techniques, worked to educate other farmers through worldwide conventions and direct mentorship, founded the Soil Health Academy, and was called the “Obi-Wan Kenobi of soil health” by the chief of the USDA’s conservation department.
There is no healthy planet without healthy ag practices, and this guy was a legend.
The A-horizon on his farm was 4 feet deep
You do not understand
Most modern Ag operations don’t even have a proper A-Horizon. They’re too busy turning the earth every time they replant. The A-horizon is the Black Gold that makes Soil Soil. It’s a structurally complex soil horizon that must be built in place by the interactions of Plants and Fungi and Insects. It is The Thing that soaks up rain and holds onto it for plants. The A-Horizon is The Thing that builds up when you let a field sit fallow. The act of tilling creates fecundity by breaking up the A-horizon. On a really good Organic no-till farm you might find an A-horizon between 3-6 inches.
His A-horizon was 4 feet deep. 50 inches.
I-
I have no context. His farm was covered in a living skin thick enough for a child to stand in.
Gives me hope for what we could accomplish if we got our collective heads on straight, you know? Like. This was one guy. A brilliant man, who knew what he was up to, but. The thing about brilliant ideas is they can be shared.
50 inches. The mind reels.
This is so much more impressive than I can understand and comprehend and I would love to know more about A horizon
Do you love the color of the Soil?
Humus, or Humic Compounds, are a cryptic and poorly understood set of organic substances. As the final metabolic result of once-living things being digested first by macroscopic organisms, and then by microorganisms, they resist most forms of analysis, and have cryptic structures. A few that we have managed to isolate and study are the Humic & Fulvic Acids.
Humus has a number of remarkable tendencies. It is capable of retaining water far better than any raw mineral clay; it also retains electrically charged clay granules, which themselves retain mineral ions, all of which is essential to make a soil a high-quality resource for Plants to grow in.
A composter is a box that contains an environment that is conducive to the production of Humus, but the best way to produce it is in-place, by laying layers of organic material down over an unbroken earth and growing things out of that. The interaction of the plants rooting, the fungus weaving itself through everything, the bacteria and archaea metabolizing as they do, and inorganic weathering forces all combine to gradually build up the microscopic equivalent of a complex megastructure capable of retaining far more water, and containing far more nutrients, than any inorganic substrate.
This stuff is black gold. This is the stuff that determines whether or not a plot of land is going to be “productive.” The knowledge of how to make it, how to care for it, is an essential piece of wisdom that our civilization needs to remember.
Fortunately, folks seem to have the right response:
Farmers are more important to the continuity of civilization than administrators, no matter what the elitists say. This knowledge is important.
This mild Wikipedia sentence is like the understatement of all time
Here are some crazy grasshopper mouse facts for those who are not familiar with the most badass mouse species on the planet
- They are primarily carnivorous, and their diet is made up of not only bugs but also snakes, lizards and other mice.
- They hunt like true predators, slowly stalking and creeping up on their prey before ambushing them. They will sometimes let out a screech as they attack.
- Like wolves, they howl to establish territory and have a specially developed throat to produce louder vocalizations. They will stand up on their hind legs and throw their head back to howl- a sound that can be heard from 100 meters away!
- Grasshopper mouse behavior is linked to lunar cycles and they are more active during a full moon.
- These mice have been hunting bark scorpions and evolving alongside them for so long that they’ve evolved a mutation where scorpion venom that is lethal to other animals is converted into a painkiller in the grasshopper mouse’s body.
Jack Dorsey funded this with his nonprofit AndOtherStuff. The home page for the organization explicitly lists AI as one of its pillars, saying a goal is “making NOSTR the best social protocol for open source AI development and implementation”
It’s a program that publicly shares its code for free online, so that anyone can use it for themselves. This means that anything this AI is trained on could eventually make its way into any business, social media site, etc. That uses this code. Or, if not, it’ll have the ability to harvest content as well as this.
Even since the app doesn’t allow AI openly on the videos themselves, the app is likely to use our original content to train its AI. You might have seen that some AI have experienced a positive feedback loop of declining quality, training itself on other AI slop until anything it produces is unintelligible.
This is likely an attempt to prevent that in video format
Then, any other company that wants to use the code can use this better trained AI to make it even harder to recognize AI across the board.
You can read about the connection to AndOtherStuff, as well as the developers’ reasons for the project here:
TLDR; do not give Jack Dorsey any credit for this, do not download the app, and tell others not to either. It’s a nostalgia-bait attempt at fueling another AI model
a few days ago I started my college class with “goldfish have long memories, Einstein never failed math in school, and the brain does not stop developing at 25, these are all things people just repeated until they sounded true, so let’s talk about media literacy” and I could tell I had broken every brain in the room
The repost added to this plays rent free in my brain whenever I think I know something and then learn it’s false or a myth. Genuinely
