• 2 Posts
  • 697 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

help-circle

  • Water + evaporation + water collection tray = salt buildup. Depending on the water source it can take decades or a few months. It’s one of the top reasons not to use softened water on houseplants. The addition of sodium can mess them up quickly.

    It’s pretty easy to remove however. I haul the plant outside and run around 50 gallons through the pot in a day or so. You can do the same thing in a bathtub for smaller plants. After leaching the pot always fertilize the plant.


  • Monsteras are very drought tolerant and do better with intermittent watering. Soak the pot then let them let them dry out. They need another dunking when the sheen of the leaves get a little dull.

    They also break any rule about pot size you have ever heard. That’s a 10 gallon pot btw. For the first 10 years of its life, I kept it in a 2.5 gallon one. I had to water (2-3 weeks) and fertilize (2x per year) more frequently but it grew to the same massive size.




  • The_v@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyz8 years of RBF
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    15
    ·
    1 day ago

    Growing up in Montana, we had a herd of around 20 mule deer on the bottom fields.

    With a little bit of time you can easily tell them apart. There is quite a bit of variation in their appearance; head shape, body size and shape, ears, coloration, etc. When the bucks start growing their antlers every one is different as well.






  • I used to spend several thousand every year buying books. Usually from small independent bookstore. I was also always in the library checking out books but the local libraries collection was very small and limited.

    Next I got one of the early generation kindles keyboard when I was traveling all the time before I had a smart phone. I of course found all the free books and downloaded several thousand of those. Amazon made almost nothing off of me for that one. I still hit the library regularly for books I could not get for free or stuff for my kids.

    Then my local library started offering digital books via Libby and Hoopla. I have pretty much completely stopped using kindle completely in favor of those two apps. I vote every chance I get for the library to get more funding as its back to being my go-to place. I physically have only gone to the library once in the past 5 years however.

    Honestly, I would rather see a massive extension of library services than more private bookstores.



  • Close but not quite. 3N plants are sterile. This is because the odd number of chormosomes cannot line up during meiosis and form gametes.

    They use diploid pollen 2N pollen to trigger fruit formation but the resulting fruit is parthenocarpic. The white pips and even the occasional colored hard seed coat does not contain an viable embryo.

    Crossing of plants with different numbered chormosomes can create fertile offspring if the resulting ploidy is even. For example crossing wheat (6N) with cereal rye (2N) creates Triticale (4N). The Triticale is fertile.


  • The story of seedless watermelons.

    Originally developed by a scientist in Japan pre-WWII, the technology was picked up by watermelon breeding programs at universities in the South-East U.S. Over the next 30 years the university programs worked to develop the technology. Progress was very slow as it takes 15 generations to create a new female line.

    Unfortunately for everyone the universities decided to use their tasteless, bland, long distance shipping types to create these females. The most famous of which is Charleston grey.

    Finally in the mid-70’s the universities released the female inbreds to private companies to create seedless watermelons. The private companies crossed tasty, elongated allsweet and crimsons sweet types as a diplod male with the bland grey females. What resulted was the bland seedless types with large white pips and bland flavor. After all 2/3rd of the genetics came from those terrible females.

    For the next 25 years all of the seedless watermelons used the same terrible female lines with slightly improved male lines.

    Then a breeder from originally from China decided to create new females. He used small seeded varieties from China and Thailand with deep red color and much thinner rinds.

    The resulting seedless watermelons had dark red color, tiny little pips, and a slightly bitter flavor. You see the breeder from China failed to recognize the different flavor profiles in the gene pools. Asian watermelons often have bitter flavors that are completely acceptable in those markets but not in European ones.

    And thus we are stuck with bland or bitter shitty seedless watermelons at the store.

    There was once a brave lady who attempted to buck the trend. She bred the most flavorful delicious seedless watermelon ever seen on the planet. It was almost honey sweet with strong aromatics and not a hint of bitterness. It was crisp and juicy without a hint of mealyness. It was large elongated and looked just like the good old seeded ones. Alas the market rejected them because “they look like seeded types”. She retired early with a big FU to them all.


  • A C-section will run you $60K easy. With the 80:20 insurance thats $12K owed by the parents. . With the federal out of pocket maximum being $9,450 for the mother. The baby also has a $9,450 out of pocket maximum. So the family will likely owe at least $12k before leaving the hospital

    $5K handout is seriously ignorant. It will cost a hell of a lot more to reverse the trend

    In order to increase the birthrate above replacement level here are a few things that need to happen.

    1. Free universal healthcare including dental.

    2. Rent control for all apartments locked to single income minimum wage.

    3. Ban on investment properties for single family homes. If the house is classified as single family, you can’t rent it out. It must be sold.

    4. Free childcare.

    5. Free education from pre-K to Graduate levels.

    6. Open immigration policies for countries with higher birthrates.

    7. Increase minimum wage to make it a livable wage.

    8. To pay for it all - Increase corporate taxes to 95% for more than $100million income. Increase personal taxes to 95% for more than 1 million in income.




  • Yes I did on my personal machine. I got a Compaq on sale right after XP came out in 2001. It was a really nice build that just kept running back before HP turn the brand into cheap shit.

    Then my first son was born in 2004 and money was very tight for a few years. Vista came out in all its glory so I kept the Win 2K for a few more years. When 7 launched I finally replaced it in 2009. It lasted 8 years.

    I currently have a 11 year old Win8 laptop that is dual booting Win10 and Mint right now ( Upgraded to a Sata SSD) My main laptop is on Win11 and is 6 years old.



  • I drove over 7K miles last month. I would much rather see traffic enforcement cameras than police cars sitting on the side of the road.

    Traffic cameras attempt to document actual behavior with real evidence in an impartial manner.

    Most cops are dumb, undertrained, and overpayed parasites on society who have violent and agressive behaviors. Then they sit on the side of the road being bored out of their minds all day. When an accident does occur they mostly stand around directing traffic while the paramedics, firefighters, and wreckers do all the work. Hell the most useful thing I have seen them do is remove debris from the road with a broom and dustpan.

    City I lived in had a serious issue with people running red lights at a few intersections. Many fatal accidents and pedestrian injuries happened because of it. They put in a red light light cameras on the worst intersection. The first month it generated over $350K in fines at $125 each. Around 2,800 drivers ran that intersection. Within 3 months the number of tickets dropped to under 20 per month. The number of accidents dropped respectively as well.


  • My son fell into a bad group of mostly straight A kids in middle school.

    They collected a large collection of webpage based games. They started out attempting to host them on the schools network through shared docs etc. The IT guys wised up to them and shut it down.

    Then they turned into 14 year olds and took it up a notch.

    Got together and paid for a hosting location overseas. Built a video hosting webpage with thousands of pirated educational videos. Made a secondary menu without any links on the homepage. They have to type in the index page in the URL. All of the games pages show up as educational videos in the history.

    Most of the teachers in the school are using the free educational videos so the webpage is on the trusted site on the school districts content filter.

    The IT teacher at highschool figured it out. Instead of ratting them out and banning the webpage. He started working on getting them scholarships to colleges. Now most of the ringleaders have full ride scholarships.

    My son was invited in because he is extremely good at games (unusually fast reaction times). He holds the high score on most of the games. I don’t play against the little shit. It’s pointless to try to beat him.