constitutional conventions or prairie home companion

A bit like the decision of Illinois to make its official language American, which requires I think a bit more than cursory curiosity to get to the bottom of it, the territory of Minnesota, when the US Congress through its enabling acts, invited voters to join the union in 1857, factious fighting in the corridors of power in Saint Paul kept resulting in a gridlock and the failure of the new government to produce a state constitution. Facing this impasse to accession against the will of all constituencies, two constitutions were drafted, one that the Republicans found acceptable and one palatable for the Democrats of the territorial government.
Aside from being transcribed on plain white paper and blue tinged stationary respectively and differences in grammar and syntax (neither party would relent to the other’s victory but the antagonism had no real substance to it), both of these documents upheld the letter of the law in essentially the same way and both documents were submitted to Washington, concluding the convention. Despite the fact there was no difference between Republican and Democrat editions and I think that Minnesota’s founders never intended the members of one political party to be subject to a different prevailing policy to those on the other side of the aisle, it does not seem like a very good precedence in any terms. I wonder if the oddity is still on the books, or if eventually, one or the other parties conceded. I realise that there are other versions of America’s national constitution out there—with transcription errata, like editions of the Bible with damning typos—but without a definitive copy, what would it mean to make amends?

morphology

A shrub called the Butcher’s Broom (Ruscus aculeatus oder Stechende Mäusedorn) has a very wide range spanning from Iran to the Meditteranean and a venerable history in traditional medicine, as the Presurfer informs.
Also called Kneeholm as it’s knee-high in the garden, one could be forgiven for overlooking this common and ornamental evergreen which seems less colourful than other holly bushes but it has an interesting adaptation that, like cactuses, called phylloclades that are essentially flattened stems that appear and function as leaves, and of all the trees that are in the wood, this holly bears its flowers and berries directly on the leaf. Part of the large asparagus family, its fresh shoots can be gathered and eaten the same way.

green fairy, ruby slippers

Nag on the Lake beckons to us to join her on the hunt for Italy’s answer to absinthe served up in a ruby red concoction called Tamango by a mysterious bar in Turin of the same name.
Just as one has to have reverence and respect for the Green Fairy, one also has to drink this signature cocktail very gingerly or face hallucinatory consequences. The travelogue is fraught with rather terrifying tales of patrons who failed to choose wisely. These poor souls could not straightaway click their heels together to go home. Cin cin!—but an abundance of caution is advised.

super nintendo chalmers

Though Ralph Wiggum may have had professional aspirations to be either a caterpillar or a principal when he grows up, some—nay, all—of the prodigy’s one-liners make are suitable and believable stump-speeches for a higher office. Dangerous Minds graces us with the collected quotations from one cartoon character put into the mouth of another.

insignia or fossil-fuelled

The Atlantic science correspondent Ed Yong unearths the intriguing stories behind the forty-three of the fifty American states that have designated a State Fossil, including polities where the subject of evolution is contentious and not to be mentioned in polite company, via Neatorama.
While most choose to enshrine a dinosaur whose fossil specimen was discovered locally, others were more esoteric in their selection—going for petrified tree bark or other mega fauna, a giant ground sloth and several states going for mammoths or mysteriously (for Connecticut) a track of footprint impressions left a couple hundred million years ago by an unknown hunter. I wonder if this this same dicey and political process is repeated for other national symbols.

stochastic engineering

The ever stimulating Kottke directs our attention to a nifty widget that simulates complex systems with representative emojis that you populate your environment with and add protocols about how they interact and then the resulting models can provide forecasts for things like weather-patterns, wildfires, predation or epidemics—or for whatever scenario you can imagine rules for. This experiment, which examines the stability and sustainability of environments, reveals our weaknesses and fallacies when it comes to complicated and contingent reactions. This tool reminds me of that Microsoft Windows Game of Life, which simulated evolution with pixels forming larger, more complex shapes and gaining locomotion by a few simple rules.

vine-ripened or food for thought

I was remiss in not mentioning the contribution and suggested subject of a reader until weeks afterward, as the subject of food waste and the broader implications of nutritional policy and food-security are coming under scrutiny and have become major talking points in the news. The infographic and article at the link is an in depth but an accessible and circumspect look at the different arenas of food waste that may not occur to one as having knock-on effects beyond wonky fruits and vegetables or faulting green-grocers for tossing out edible food rather than sharing it with the needy (the statistics focus on the UK but surely it’s global in applicability and consequence).
Markets and restaurants, in fact, have been quite forthcoming in redistributing foodstuffs, though there’s always room for improvement and sometimes it is easier and cheaper to dispose of or repurpose ingredients in situ rather than delivering it to a foodbank. Household consumers are big contributors in terms food being thrown away but that’s in part due to promotions that encourage people to buy more than they need, reflected up the chain by markets that can quickly change suppliers to impact the livelihoods of farmers and state-subsidies. Surplus production can find other outlets but the production itself—even without considering the packaging and transportation—has significant environmental repercussions and small efforts towards reducing this loss can not only benefit economically, they could also help Britain and many other countries be more in compliance with their ecological pledges.

check-digit or super-symmetries

The maths world is a little giddy over a new mystery discovered through brute computing force. No one is quite sure what to make of it, but examining the distribution of prime numbers, mathematicians are realising that they try to be more different from the nearest neighbours on the number line than they need to be.

Prime numbers, above the single digits can only end (regardless of their size) in one of four numbers: 9,7,3 or 1—otherwise, you needn’t bother checking. One might expect that the law of averages would hold across infinity and there would be a one-in-four chance that one prime might end with the same digit. That does not happen, though, and mathematicians, should the findings hold, are wondering what these apparent aberrations might mean, and whether this might suggest that there is a way to break encryption and unsettle a formerly secure foundation.