Say Say Say Hey Hey now Llamacorn

But in places where big pools weren't feasible, they did everything in their power to reduce the amount of fuel required for the production of salt, because fuel takes a lot of time and effort to collect and drives up costs.

Enter the graduation tower!

The idea is that you take some source of salty water, pump it up to the top of a wooden tower filled with brushwood (typically blackthorn), then let it trickle down, which greatly increases evaporation by maximizing surface area and exposing the water to the wind along the way. When the saltwater reaches the bottom, it's saltier than it was, and you can send it through again until it's reached the point of saturation. If you do this with ocean water, you can reduce the amount of fuel needed by a factor of ten.

Plus it looks and sounds awesome - these were sometimes called thorn towers.

And at the start of the 20th century, when other forms of salt production had skyrocketed in efficiency, the graduation towers began to be used for healthcare, because as you might imagine, the air next to the graduation tower is very salty, more than it is next to the seaside. From what I can find it seems like the main thing it does is thin mucus, though there are a lot of other health claims.

Botanically, a tomato is a fruit. A fruit is scientifically defined as the part of a plant that develops from the ovary after flowering and surrounds the seeds. It’s defined by its structure and function. In botanical categorization, apples, peaches, grapes, tomatoes, bananas, avocados, pumpkins, peppers, and corn kernels are fruits.

Culinarily, a tomato is a vegetable, because it’s a plant food that is neither starchy nor sweet and you usually don’t just eat it raw. Vegetables are culinarily defined by their flavor and how you cook them. In culinary categorization, any part of a plant can be a vegetable: roots (carrots, parsnips), leaves (lettuce, kale), stems (celery), seeds (peas, lima beans), and yes fruits (tomatoes, peppers, pumpkins). In culinary categorization, “fruits” are usually botanical fruits, though occasionally they are other parts of the plant instead, as long as they’re juicy and sweet (strawberries are actually the stems of a plant; the ovaries surrounding the seeds are the little seeds on the outside! Pineapples and figs are a weird flower-ovary fusion called multiple inflorescence!)

These are simply two different categorizational schemes that through the weirdness of historical linguistics use the same word “fruit” to mean different segments of the totality of plants. Neither is incorrect, because they are two different ways of categorizing plants for two different purposes.

Categories aren’t “real.” Categories don’t exist in nature. Things exist in nature, plants exist in nature, rocks and animals and genes and hormones and human experiences exist in nature. And humans look at the totality of everything and we come up with names and categories to sort and understand them. A category is not real; it is only useful or not useful. Botanical categories are useful for different reasons than culinary categories are, but they’re both useful ways to break up and understand the world. And they are useful in their own contexts, and may not be useful in other contexts. Botany has no use for defining what is and isn’t a “vegetable” so that’s just not a category in scientific botany. It’s a useful category for low-sweetness low-starch plant parts you cook in order to eat, though.

And we put everything into categories, and we have reasons for categorizing things the way we do—but we choose what traits are important to group by, and what traits aren’t. Vegetables, nuts, fruits, and grains are culinary plant food categories. And some categories are silly, like “is a taco a sandwich?” That’s a categorization game: what traits do we decide make an individual item part of the category or not?

2tbsp of peanut butter. a splash of rice vinegar, soy sauce, sesame oil, maple syrup. some chili flakes, some sesame seeds. a splash of water to thin it out. now you put in your noodles (cooled!!!! boiled and rinsed so they’re cold!!) and then some chopped up cucumber or carrot or avocado or cabbage or any crunchy vegetable. i just used cucumber

ISSUE 1397: SGOW

but joy and meaning can be

found despite it all

In antiquity, in the Grecco-Roman cultural world across multiple centuries, marble was a common and extravagant material used for sculpture and architecture both. In the centuries since the Roman empire, much of these works fell into ruin, from lack of maintenance or from explicit quarrying for materials by the people that lived there. Between the 1400s and 1800s, archaeology developed and classical art became popular again, as a direct reference to antiquity. This lead to the rise of the Neoclassical movement, a style of art and architecture that sought to directly emulate the stark white marble and architectural forms of Roman art. Cities like Washington DC in the United States were built in this style, to evoke Rome.

It was only with further advances in archaeology was it discovered that Classical architecture and statuary was not white: it was painted. Buildings were colorful and statues were painted to appear as lifelike as possible. But the paints were far less equipped to survive the ages compared to the marble, so the visuals did not persist.

This became a piece of common trivia in the early twenty-first century. Perceptions of classical art are locked to the stark white seen in museums and in neoclassical buildings, so this deviation from trained expectations made for a striking bit of information, similar to dinosaurs having feathers (in violation of previous expectations).

In comparison, Brutalism, an architectural style from the mid 20th century, is explicitly a dreary, colorless brutal style. The drab grey of concrete is the intended feature, made to evoke utilitarianism and drab reality, without ostentation beyond form and function.

joke about classical art

and architecture.

pack it up boys we've made a social blunder

let's run that again

one more time normal style

I'm going to become a statistic

further proof god is out to get me

it's because I tore my acl senior year

I couldn't do it for religious reasons

my ex took my talent in the divorce

Good form but a little shaky on the landing.

I used to be an adventurer like you but then I took an arrow to the knee.

I meant that, I meant that, that's exactly how I wanted that to look.

Fuckin meow.

That's going on my highlight reel.

that, that’s exactly how I

wanted that to look.