our home and cherished land

Image ~ ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

jtotheizzoe:

compoundchem:

Great graphic from James Kennedy () comparing natural & artificial peaches.

Interesting infographical look at how a few thousand years of human intervention can result in a deliciously juicy summer treat. Most interesting? The percentage of sugar a peach holds has not gone up that much, only the edible flesh ratio and percent water have.

I should add that in this graphic, “artificial” just means that the modern peach was artificially selected by farmers who chose which variants to propagate, as opposed to being subject to the unguided processes of natural selection. I worry about the misconception that “artificial” here might be misconstrued into meaning “inferior” or “dangerous” or “fake”. It is none of those things.

Don’t fear the fruits of science. Especially the juicy ones. 

(Breaking down the chemical fear and overuse of scare quotes that surround the “natural vs. artificial” food movement is the whole point of James Kennedy’s infographics, like his famous list of ingredients in an all-natural banana, I just want to make sure that it comes across to people not familiar with his work!)

A lovely infographic for a lovely fru–*sees greyed-out Canada* Wait, what? That’s definitely not right. I have personally eaten Canadian peaches.

Ah, if you click on the link in the OP, you’ll find Kennedy has replaced this version of the infographic with a corrected one. Much better.

Tags:

#the power of science #food #yummies #our home and cherished land #I only just discovered the joys of stonefruits last year #oh nectarines #where have you been all my life

Ace Pride Canadian Provinces

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment
 
 
 
Ace flag themed state maps for the 10 provinces and 3 territories of Canada.    

Tags:

#asexuality #our home and cherished land #I like living in a province where you can write the name in the outline #’New Jersey’ is always written in the ocean with an arrow pointing to the state it’s referring to #and I always felt a little disappointed by that

Video ~ ~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

colchrishadfield:

For fun this Canada Day, my brother and I set out to make the most Canadian music video ever. How’d we do?

Tags:

#our home and cherished land #music #good old Chris Hadfield #my family doesn’t own any Canadian Tire money #though we do have a Tim Hortons donut hole #(…we’ve had that donut hole since our Yay Citizenship party two months ago) #(we really should get rid of it) #(but *not* on a day of the week where it would fall to me to wash the container we put it in) #(if Mom really wants to keep that disposable container she can wash it herself)

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~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

secretlifeofamovieproducer:

gridmark:

thejeweloffourderps:

confusedtree:

peel-a-potato-with-a-potato:

confusedtree:

Happy Canada Day

Canadians scare me a little more every day.

This isn’t even my final form you pitiful mass of flesh

I WAS NOT EXPECTING THAT AT ALL, WHAT

I THOUGHT CANADIANS WERE NICE IVE BEEN LIED TO

Da hell

Tags:

#our home and cherished land #that’s a nice costume #though how nice depends on if it has armholes hiding somewhere or not #my first Canada Day as a citizen! #:D #after breakfast I will go put on the maple leaf pin they gave me at the citizenship ceremony

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

tree-whispering:

beep beep

 

mimibon:

What is that!

 

nge:

mim its a lighting bug or whatever they light up

 

mimibon:

WHAAAAAAT THATS SO COOL HOW DOES HE  DO THAT! ITS JUST A BUG BUT IT LIGHTS UP

 

somuchawkwerd:

lol it had never even occurred to my that there were parts of this planet where lightning bugs are not indigenous

 

miss-freeman:

I AM SO JEALOUS I WANT TINY LITTLE BUG LANTERNS

 

angelicfallacy:

It’s so weird to read people calling Fireflies, “Lightning Bugs”.

 

arcanelegacy:

Ah, regional differences in language. Lightning Bugs, fireflies… (Google also tells me that they are sometimes called “Moon Bugs”, “Fire Devils”, or, my new personal favorite, “Golden Sparklers”)

I used to have a lantern-shaped bug cage as a child. Many summer evenings I’d go out and see how many I could catch for my lantern-cage, before letting them all go at the end of the hunt. They’re so easy to catch, you know. They fly slowly, and they don’t try to flee from you.

Damn, I miss fireflies.

Tags:

#fireflies #my childhood #our home and cherished land #is not cherished by fireflies #(at least we have dandelions)

slepaulica asked: is there a way i could have tagged that post that would have helped? i covered the options i could think of but if you have something in specific saviored i can try to use that in the future

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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I don’t have anything relevant saviored. You’d be surprised how rarely it comes up*, and when it does it’s usually people talking about how ill they are under readmores (so I don’t need an add-on to let me skip it). And like I said, all in all I’m glad for the warning.

*On the Internet, I mean. It comes up a lot when grocery shopping and suchlike. (Did you know Canada doesn’t have a consistent date-writing method? Good luck figuring out whether a bar of Cracker Barrel labelled “14 DE 13” is still good. (It is. Cracker Barrel writes the year first. But you can’t generalise that to non-Cracker-Barrel products.))

 

{{Looks like the linked post has been access-locked, so here is my comment from it:

“You can never have enough pi. There’s always some digits you’re missing.

Besides, Canada doesn’t have a single standard date-writing method. The closest we’ve got is 2013 MR* 14, but a lot of things don’t use it. (Say you have a box of crackers. The current date is October 20th, 2012, your phobia of rotting food prevents you from eating only-just-expired crackers but you have a friend nearby who will eat them, and the expiration date on the box is “11/10/12”. What should you do with it? The correct answer is “It is impossible to say without more information on how this particular brand of crackers writes their dates.”)

*Every month-word shares at least two letters in English and French. Many share more (there’s not really a significant difference between “November” and “novembre”), and if you saw a date written “2013 Fev 03″ you could almost certainly guess what it meant even if the third letter isn’t quite right. But two letters means it can be completely consistently written.”}}

Tags:

#tales from the askbox #I hardly ever eat strawberries anyway #I got a rash after eating strawberry baby food #so I spent like fifteen years thinking I was allergic #and when I got up the nerve to try them I found them a bit of a let-down #too crunchy #in which Brin has a food poisoning phobia #our home and cherished land

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~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

orangewave:

getting real damn tired of having people yelling “LO OL WTF ARE MILK BAGS LOL” 

 

mediocre-misadventures:

This is disgusting and you should be ashamed.

 

orangewave:

calm down friend jesus christ there is nothing wrong with it, it saves space and it produces less garbage and is easy to recycle

 

grouchythefish:

you do have a pretty ugly milk jug tho

 

izzy-sukeban-jones:

if you cut the tip off, how do you seal it when you save it for later?

 

bakamic:

^^^ Seriously. How do you store it after you open it?

 

orangewave:

Step one: step two: 

 

note-a-bear:

This is still a problem, because if you don’t have a cover for that jug, your milk’s gonna get all kinds of funky smells.

If you’re gonna use bags for milk, why not do the bags with spouts that soda machines use for soda???

Like, a spout just saves so much needless stress.

 

blue-author:

No, this is part of the “less waste” thing. If you can taste every single thing you’ve got in your fridge whenever you take a drink of milk, then you won’t have to use a piece of paper to write a shopping list.

 

slepaulica:

just buy the half litre bags and drink it out of the bag. that’s what i do.

Less waste? Bagged milk causes more waste. It’s a waste of plastic (unless you can recycle the inner bags and just nobody told me, in which case it’d be no more or less a waste than cartons and jugs*), and it’s a waste of milk. Bagged milk (even unopened) goes bad much faster than milk in cartons or jugs (even opened). The milk manufacturers will tell you it lasts just as long, but they are lying. (Do not buy bagged milk with less than a week left before its sell-by date, and exercise extreme caution when drinking it: it will probably have gone bad already.)

(The really weird part is the financial incentive for consumers to use this plastic-and-milk-wasting method. 4L of bagged milk costs only slightly more (absolute, not per-litre) than 2L of carton. I have sometimes seen (not on sale) 4L of bagged milk for two cents less than one 2L carton. Therefore, per litre-actually-drunk, buying a 3-pack of bags and throwing one of them away is cheaper than buying a 2L carton and finishing it.)

*They do not have plastic gallon jugs in Canada, as far I can tell. I miss jugs.

Tags:

#food #our home and cherished land #the dark side of bulk discounts #especially ridiculously large ones #up with jugs #I don’t think we have half-litre bags here #just four-thirds litre bags #and only in 3-packs #my bag of milk tasted funny yesterday in the way it does the day before it goes lumpy #so I expect I will have to throw it away today #we managed about 2.5 bags this time #not bad relatively speaking #(sometimes) #(if my brother and I are sufficiently diligent in our milk-drinking) #(we can even finish all three) #(those are good times) #(non-guilty times)