Balcony Garden: Day 0

Ever since I moved into an apartment with a balcony last summer, I’ve been itching to put a container garden out there.  But last year the growing season was already well underway, so I’ve had to wait impatiently all through the fall, winter, and spring until the danger of frost is gone.

Now.  Now is the time.

From the PBS plant sale I picked up two tomatoes (a cherry and a Roma), two bell pepper plants, one basil, and a hosta.  I there are also some lettuce seeds and a pair of mots who you’ve already met.  The mots are going outside for the season.

From the left: the basil and the bell pepper plants, the tomatoes

From the left: Mot 1, lettuce seeds, Mot 2, hosta, Mot 3

This is an east-facing balcony, so it’s iffy whether the tomatoes will make any fruits.  We will have to wait and see.

PBS Plant Sale

This actually happened a couple of weeks ago, but the photos are going up now.  The PBS plant sail is the annual fundraiser for the plant biology and horticulture grad students.  The Phytograds raised over $1000!

 

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This is Neat: Caulerpa

Source: www.reefcorner.com

How many cells do you think this thing has?

a.  100,000

b.  1 million

c.  10 million

d.  1 billion

One.  This is all one cell.  What you’re looking at is a frond from a genus of seaweed called Caulerpa.  Caulerpa grows in tropical waters and is considered an invasive species in the Mediterranean Ocean.  Each individual of Caulerpa is one huge, enormous cell.  The inside of the plant is a syncytium, which means that millions of cell nuclei are floating around with no cell membranes to separate them.

This is neat: Chip Art

If you take a pair of pliers to your laptop and crack open the plastic casing, you’ll find a greenish motherboard with all the guts of the computer attached to it.  One of these guts is the computer’s CPU, a little square computer chip that probably has the word “Intel” printed on it.  If you strip the epoxy coating off of the CPU and put it under a microscope, what you’ll see will look a lot like the downtown of a city from a helicopter.  Rectangles and rectangles and rectangles of transistors printed on a silicon wafer.

And this.

Source: Chipworks

When there’s extra space on a computer chip, sometimes the chip designers like to have fun with it.

The practice of putting little pictures on computer chips is called chip art.  Though the practice is discouraged, it’s hard to get caught doing it – you’d have to void the warranty on your computer and put it under a microscope to see that it’s even there.  There were even reports of “bill sux” inscribed on a Pentium chip, but it turned out to be a hoax.

Chipworks, a company that specializes in analyzing computer chip circuitry for copyright infringement, keeps a gallery of all the chip art they’ve bumped into over the years.

There he is!
Source: Chipworks

Paying for an Online Newspaper – Follow-Up

One of the most fascinating things about getting Freshly Pressed the other week was all the comments people left about the New York Times digital paywall.  They ranged from “I can’t afford the subscription fee” to “Guys?  It’s actually pretty easy to get around the page view limit” to “I happily subscribe because we need to support newspapers.”

There were a lot of people who were willing to pay for the Times even though they could have hacked it.

I wonder if it is valid to compare the New York Times’s business model to Netflix and iTunes.  I know that it’s really easy to steal movies and music over the Internet (and I don’t want to go there), but these two sites make it convenient to pay real money for them.  What are peoples’ motivations for choosing iTunes over the Pirate Bay?  I know mine is that I want to pay money for this stuff, because it’s good.

Also compare the recent phenomenon on Kickstarter.  Kickstarter is a fundraiser site that people can use to raise capital for starting creative projects.  The webcomic Order of the Stick gives away its content for free and keeps itself funded by selling merchandise.  Recently, artist Rich Burlew raised quite a lot of money on Kickstarter because fans adored his strip so much that they were dying for the chance to give him money.

Is this an anomaly?  Or is building up the goodwill of your readers the business model of the future?

Mother of Thousands

My little plantie has plantlets!

My plant is a Mother of Thousands (Kalanchoe daigremontiana), which I got as a freebie from the American Society of Plant Biologists meeting last August.  It reproduces asexually by making baby plantlets on the edges of its leaves.  Eventually, the baby plantlets will fall off and form new plants that are genetically identical to the original Mother of Thousands.

Freshly Pressed

Wow, WordPress, I’m honored.

Yesterday, Paying for an Online Newspaper got Freshly Pressed, and it turns out a lot of people have an opinion about paying for the New York Times.  I’m happy to see so many people in the camp of “their news is so good, I want to support them.”  This bodes well for the future of journalism.

Thank you everybody for checking Steam Trains and Ghosts out!  You can expect more rantings and ravings of a mad scientist-in-training in the future.