Planty of the Hamchuks

Fermentation sterilises the cider. Apple juice must be sterilised to be safe for human consumption).

In the cider making counties of UK and elsewhere a lot of the larger producers use machinery like this to harvest the apples off the ground. There are quite a few agricultural machinery companies producing apple collecting equipment. We test the cider produced from our ground collected apples and there has been no contamination. We collect in our apples at peak ripeness when about one third have fallen with a Tuthill Temperley M2000.

The ones remaining on the tree are ready to fall and are easy to dislodge with panking onto tarps. #cider #orchard #fermentation #panking

Recently, Nigel Farage (the Member of Parliament for Clacton, and the frog-faced leader of right-wing fascist party Reform UK) has come under scrutiny for receiving a £5 million "gift" from a crypto billionare, and being unable to give a consistent answer for why. He has denied any wrongdoing, he has threatened reporters for asking questions about the matter, and he is currently under investigation by the Parliamentary Standards Commission.

If the Standards Commission finds Farage in breach of conduct, he will likely face a recall election in his district in September. He is unhappy with this possibility, so he has decided to "resign" and trigger a special election now. I say "resign" in quotes because he is standing in said election, and intends to remain in Parliament. Theoretically, winning this election will demonstrate that he has a mandate from the people in his district to continue representing them in spite of the allegations against him.

This is idiotic for several reasons. First, resigning now does not permanently shut down the Standards Commission investigation; if he is re-elected, the Commission can still find against him later on and still force him to face a recall election, meaning the Clacton constituency might have to hold two elections in the space of a few months.

The other problem for Farage is that essentially nobody else is bothering to entertain this farce. No major party is running a candidate against him, arguing that Farage is throwing a tantrum and wasting public money in the process. Only one opponent of note has put their name forward: intergalactic space warrior and perennial satirical candidate Count Binface.

The above image gallery is, at time of writing, the entire slate of candidates for this election.

This gambit has backfired spectacularly on Farage. He thrives on media attention, but with no serious candidates standing, this campaign won't receive any. No journalist who does cover it will bother asking him policy questions, so they will have to ask him about the £5m "gift" instead, which he hates discussing. He cannot run his usual shtick of presenting himself as the "anti-establishment voice", because the only thing more absurd than running against a comedian with a dustbin on his head is referring to said dustbin comedian as an "establishment politician". He cannot even attack Binface for not being local to the district because, to quote Binface himself, Farage "spends more time in America than in Clacton". The whole process will humiliate Farage --doubly so if Binface (as the sole protest candidate) garners a significant portion of the vote -- and one of the few things that fascist politicians cannot stand is humiliation.

06.07.26

a bunch of archives of incredibly important government datasets like maternal mortality statistics are about to be deleted forever. in a regime where they're known to fudge numbers, we can't trust a lot of the data coming from them to not be altered. open source backups like those found on data.world are vital to being able to verify that the data coming from our government is still intact and not altered. and they're about to delete all of it.

i don't know if we need to start a petition or what. nobody seems to fucking care. there are millions of users on data.world and yet nobody is raising the alarm bells and it makes me feel like I'm going insane. somebody needs to do something. i don't know what to do. it feels like more and more of this world is being destroyed and dismantled. it's not only US centric data, either! it's all sorts of countries from around the world! and they're about to fucking delete everything.

the only things that won't be deleted are private companies who happen to use the paid version of their platform (which isn't accessible data to the open source community; some people have just been using their service to host their own data on privately)

and the kicker? this announcement was made... via an AI generated blog post. so not even any sort of human touch. just a generic, soulless announcement made by a soulless human about to take a wrecking ball to one of the more important websites that exists on the internet.

an example of some of the things that will be deleted on July 11th:

https://www.re3data.org

There are over 3500 respectable data repositories on one respectable global registry; to a researcher there’s no point in data existing if not findable; if you’re trying to find a new home for your dataset, start there

Here are some of the scripts I’m using to email University Research Librarians and department chairs/assistant and associate deans who I know oversee faculty who use resources from data.world for their lessons:

Welcome to Lumiere, a quirky 1971 home in Richmond, CA, that has crystalline pieces in the walls that refract light like a prism and make walls translucent. 2bds, 1ba, 1,186sqft.

It stands out in the neighborhood.

This June, Colombia passed a law to enhance its ability to trace cattle that have been grazing on illegally deforested land. Officials will be able to implement stricter registration and monitoring in deforestation hot spots and within the next two years all parts of the cattle and meat-packing industries will be required to implement due diligence measures.

the protruding wax shards offer several significant advantages over a smoother liquid wax coating.

Firstly it gives superior water repellency by the Lotus Effect (named after the lotus plant). This is because of 2 synergistic properties, rough surfaces and waxes. The roughness of these crystals or shards trap pockets of air beneath water droplets.

Due to the high contact angle and the surface tension of water, the latter forms droplets as it cannot flatten out and wet the surface. The droplets roll off the hydrophobic surface easily washing away dirt and bacteria etc.

The wax shards offer solar and thermal protection by light and UV scattering. They also have a role in gas exchange regulation. The crystalline structures form a porous, breathable network allowing necessary oxygen and carbon dioxide exchange while slowing down water vapour loss though the cutin down to the lenticels below.

Interestingly the cuticle changes into a smoother continuous liquid wax layer near harvest ripeness which seals the lenticels pores as the metabolism in the apple changes to starch breakdown.

I painted this in honor of my hometown & then i got super depressed and plans for making prints fell apart. As a bonus, the original started growing mold because my apartment is a swamp, so I'm putting this up on Inprnt for everyone who enjoyed it while I work on fixing or remaking it:

Kostick said data centers create a low humming noise, which can usually be felt by animals and can be known to alter behavior. Animals including elephants and cassowaries, both of which can be found at the Nashville Zoo, are impacted by that noise because they communicate through low-frequency vibrations, she said.

“Zoo animals are often already living in semi-unnatural habitats including more often noise from an urban environment, and zookeepers work hard to make those habitats as natural-feeling as possible for the animals through enrichment, habitat design and carefully balanced meals,” Kostick said.

She said the data center would createadditional noise pollution, making it harder for zookeepers to make the animals’ habitats as livable as possible.

Zoo officials also say they’re worried about the strain a 50-megawatt facility could place on the electrical grid. Rick Schwartz pointed to previous outages that have already affected zoo operations, including a multi-day power loss during this year’s February ice storm, saying additional demand on the grid could complicate care for the animals."