carrot and stick—tomato, tomato

While of course toil with or without motivation is certainly possible—and in fact, most of us are either compelled to at the end of a whip or in involuntary indenturehood that’s a bit of a looser leash, I enjoyed reading this little bit of cheerleading on how to be smarter about procrastination and focus.
It’s of course too easy to get distracted by shiny-objects or going for low-hanging (what’s beeping or vibrating and clawing for our attention) fruits to the perpetual off-putting of addressing more pressing and systemic matters (or even trivialising them to convince ourselves what we’re avoiding isn’t all that important after all) but there is value to be had in structured procrastination, especially if it’s something that might put one more in the flow. Given oneself license to engage in doing nothing can also be productive in the long term, rather than fight against apathy and lethargy to the point of exhaustion. It does appear vital, however, that we allocate a certain amount of time—not to complete a task, but rather to work on it, or take a break from it. One timeboxing technique to explore is called the Pomodoro (an efficiency-expert named his method after the tomato-shaped kitchen timer that he used in his student years) whose steps are pretty straightforward but could prove effective for some people struggling to stay on task: commit to something that needs doing, set the timer for twenty-five minutes, work until the bell rings and repeat—taking ever longer breaks between iterations. While I am sure there’s an app for that, I imagine that they’re already too culpable in indulging our interruptions or at least a convenient scapegoat.

fungus among us

Though not quite the confectionary house of the witch that lured inside Hansel and Gretel, a very clever student at London’s Brunel University (named for the famed architect and civil engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel) is developing a construction medium that fruits from edible mushrooms. The stringy, root-like mycelium is mixed with cardboard as a filler and then left to grow to form a pretty robust frame. The student envisions future bottom-up, pop-up kiosks and food booths serving dishes plucked off the walls. Apparently mycelium has already been field-tested and there is a precedent for these “mushroom sausages” as building elements with bio-bricks and other experiments that one can learn more about at the link above.

soylent blue

The private bioinformatics company’s that’s responsible for the research that drives several different markets from medicine to agriculture to biofuels latest venture involves harvesting algae as an energy source.
Usually the by-products that humans find useful are rather inimical to the organisms continued existence—fat in this case which the algae produces but only naturally in dire situations and when it’s deprived of essential nutrients. Some gene-editing, however, can induce simulated starvation and cause the algae to produce fat that is efficiently converted into fuel, almost equivalent to a vegetable oil. While earlier iterations of renewable biofuels were fraught with controversy as green-washing and not truly sustainable as it was competing with food-crops, there’s algae in abundance and this particular variety can thrive in polluted and brackish waters and perhaps even cleaning them up a bit in the process. What do you think?  Do developments like these take some of the edge of engineered Nature and ought they?

elements of eloquence

Language Barrier reacquaints us with the unwritten guidelines of style that native English speakers follow without thinking and the exceptions that make the rule.
Adjectives need to be presented in the following order, lest they ring dissonant, according to author Mark Forsyth: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose plus the noun or gerund being modified.  For example, one can plan for a sturdy great old crooked black English umbrella—whereas shifting any of those attributes around would make one sound rather unnatural. Those outliers, like Big Bad Wolf (size preceding opinion), can be explained by another unconscious rule—that of ablautive reduplication that mandates alternating vowel sounds go from i to a or o (for the sake of economy) and not the other way around: flip-flop, tick-tock and so forth. Ding dang dong.

7x7

alpha quadrant: astronomers spy more terrestrial exoplanets in our corner of the Milky Way

glymphatic node: new anatomical system discovered charged with cleansing the brain and spinal cord

 twitterpated: applying artificial intelligence to group and identify bird song

sub-space: a helpful, accessible explanation of that Chinese satellite network’s quantum entanglement experiment, disabusing our expectations of instantaneous communication

kalkül: images from a vintage East Germany children’s maths text book—site tip from Everlasting Blört

lacquer: Australian researchers are making advances with “solar paint” that pulls hydrogen from the atmosphere like a photosynthesising plant

tame: in depth genetics study suggest cats self-domesticated—or maybe it’s their humans that are house-broken

apocrypha

Wil Wheaton, having engaged with a commenter expounding on the historical context regarding the origins of Christianity and the received tradition unmediated by political expediency, improved vastly on the slogan entreating God to save one from his followers, by remarking that “Canon Jesus is better than Fandom Jesus.” I much prefer the way Wheaton turned out to the way the series imagined he would, as well.