I Like Words

too easy

i hate to be rude and intrude on this post but we have decent pictures of the surface Venus too! 

See also below Saturn’s moon, Titan. Mars has a blue horizon at sunset so it looks even more Earth-like in this image:

So it’s not quite snowing on Churyumov–Gerasimenko, unfortunately; the white specks are artifacts of cosmic rays impinging on the CCDs in the camera, as well as a rotating starfield in the background (since the comet is spinning). A few specks could be dust. But, holy shit, that’s the surface of a comet. That’s a spot you could in theory cling to for dear life sit down on. The Cliffs of Comet 76p are a place. 

I FUCKING LOVE THIS

So after days of pleading with other countries to spred awareness about the current situation in Serbia, a tweet with a video showing police brutality got spread:

Serbia’s leader, Aleksander Vucic, is very similar to Trump in that he is more of a TV person than an actual educated politician. I think the two are even friends, or at the very least Vucic looks up to Trump.

Fucking sick of things like this being dismissed because it’s small countries in Europe

“Friend”

Ever heard of blackberries?

I planted mint in the ground 2 years ago.

Our garden plot at my childhood home slowly got overrun by wild blackberries after we stopped managing it while my sister and I were in nursing school. And by overrun I mean it was like a 4 foot tall thicket of wild blackberries. It hadn’t been touched by humans in at least 4 years. I started the ultimately futile task of trying to clear this plot with a machete and discovered to my amazement a patch of mint several feet across underneath the canopy of blackberry, still fighting the good fight all those years later.

Can second the comments of Kudzu.

I’d like to third the comments on Kudzu. These are the battlefields:

Kudzu is an apocalyptic nightmare

Kudzu is on time magazine’s top 10 invasive species to look out for.

Not to keep spamming this post but 

Adding to the spam: yes, kudzu IS edible. In fact, all parts of it but the vine are edible. The leaves are supposedly great in salads or baked into quiche. The flowers supposedly are great in jam. The roots… Well, if you know how to cook other root vegetables, you know what to do with kudzu root. Feed this stuff to your livestock and cook it.

Thread starts with the existential angst of building a treehouse. Ends with recipes on how to eat kudzu.

“But why are trees such social beings? Why do they share food with their own species and sometimes even go so far as to nourish their competitors? The reasons are the same as for human communities: there are advantages to working together. A tree is not a forest. On its own, a tree cannot establish a consistent local climate. It is at the mercy of wind and weather. But together, many trees create an ecosystem that moderates extremes of heat and cold, stores a great deal of water, and generates a great deal of humidity. And in this protected environment, trees can live to be very old. To get to this point, the community must remain intact no matter what. If every tree were looking out only for itself, then quite a few of them would never reach old age. Regular fatalities would result in many large gaps in the tree canopy, which would make it easier for storms to get inside the forest and uproot more trees. The heat of summer would reach the forest floor and dry it out. Every tree would suffer. Every tree, therefore, is valuable to the community and worth keeping around for as long as possible. And that is why even sick individuals are supported and nourished until they recover. Next time, perhaps it will be the other way round, and the supporting tree might be the one in need of assistance. When thick silver-gray beeches behave like this, they remind me of a herd of elephants. Like the herd, they, too, look after their own, and they help their sick and weak back up onto their feet. They are even reluctant to abandon their dead.”