This is the trash can. Feel free to visit anytime.

(via bsky)

In case anyone hasn't heard, the cyclospora outbreak affecting tons of people in the US right now is coming from Taylor Farms produce. Best to stay away from bagged lettuce and prepared salads completely right now, but especially the ones mentioned in the screenshot:

Taylor Farms Earthbound Farms Little Salad Bar (Aldi) Marketside (Walmart) Kroger House Brand Target private label greens Costco salads and greens etc Trader Joe's chopped salad kits and fresh produce Fast food: McDonalds, Taco Bell, (Yum! Brands), Chipotle, Subway, Pizza Hut, KFC, Olive Garden, Top Golf, Red Lobster, Burger King, etc.

This is not the first time I've heard about a Taylor Farms foodborne illness outbreak. I stopped eating their salads after reading a description of the conditions in their facilities. Doesn't sound like they've improved anything.

On the 16th of April of the year 1044, a woman named Alba wrote and signed a purchase document about what she and her husband were buying. This is the first time --or at least the oldest time that has survived-- where a woman signed a legal document in Catalonia.

Her name was Alba. You can see her signature at the end of the document: "Alba Femina Scripsit", which means "the woman Alba wrote this".

We know she was from the city of Vic, where her father Guibert was a teacher, having moved to Catalonia from Liège (modern-day Belgium). He taught his three sons and three daughters how to read and write, in a time where very few people knew how to, and even less women. He also taught them Latin, since it was a time where Romance languages (the languages that evolved from Latin, in our case Catalan) were not written down yet, they were the language that people spoke, but when it was time to write a document it was done in Latin. We see that Alba used great Latin, as well as an excellent calligraphy; but it's fascinating to see that she used a few of words in Catalan within the text, like era ("threshing floor"), casals ("houses"), coma ("mountain pass" or tiny valley), and puio (modern Catalan: puig; "hill") to describe the location they're buying. This was starting to become common at the time: the text itself was in Latin, but the specifics could be written in Catalan to make sure it was correctly understood.

This is the only document we have from her. But we know a few more things from other documents: she got married to a man named Jobert, they lived in the town of Santa Eulàlia de Riuprimer and had three daughters (named Guilla, Adaleds, and Magensburg) and three sons (Guillem, Ramon, and Artall), and from her husband's will we can see what they named everything in their possession: they had a piece of land nicknamed Coma Erma ("Waste Mountain Pass"), a house named Rosta, a cuirass named Claramalla, a horse named Giscafred, a mare called Gaçola, and an hauberk (mail shirt) named Omnia bona (Latin for "All Good").

They want to act like high levels of sickness whether it be airborne or foodborne are normal and not the responsibility of agencies like public health or food safety regulation so they can get away with dismantling them.

Why is the mountain range square. How did the mountain range form. Why is there one singular volcano in the center. Why does it act like a composite volcano but have magma that acts like it’s from a shield. If it’s hotspot based volcanic activity why is there only one volcano.

my favorite thing is the american great lake snowbelts! so, the 'flow' of weather across north america, in very general terms, blows from the northwest on down south and east to the gulf of mexico.

so the wind is blowing from west to east, and in the winter it's a dryer wind than in the summer because it's colder. but after blowing across a great lake for a hundred miles, the wind is wet again. and that wet turns into snow. so for all of these lakes, the big cities are on the west side, not the east sides, because the east sides absolutely suck to live on.

the sole exception is buffalo, NY, which literally has to be there because, unfortunately, that's where all the important canal stuff between lake ontario and lake erie is happening.

also this always strikes me as cool, check out where cleveland is:

On a Watsonian level, sure.

On a Doylistic level, Mordor looks like that because plate tectonics was a fringe, ludicrous, laughable theory that nobody outside serious geology nerds had ever heard of until scientists proved seafloor spreading in the early 1960s. The first edition of the LotR trilogy was published in 54-55. We literally did not know that plate tectonics was real until almost a decade after the book was published, so obviously, it was not something Tolkien could have been considering as he made his maps.

LotR has recurring themes of the reckless imposition of one's will on the natural world creating ugliness, an order you thought was inherently an improvement that in fact is inferior to what you have displaced. (Typified by reckless tree-felling; a reflection of the despoiling of the English countryside and the world by Progress.)

Moria is the only place in Middle-Earth where mithril is found, right? That's kind of a big deal. So, why? What makes that location so special? Is it just random?

I found a paper that had just been published *that year*, 2011 or 2012 as I was writing it, that studied the locations of precious-metals mines in the Pyrenees, the similarly long skinny mountain chain that divides Spain and France. This paper discovered that where there was a bend in the mountain chain, from one of the continental plates having an awkward corner in it that got subducted under the other plate, that had dug deeper into the mantle and caused precious-metal-bearing ores to flow up to the surface in ways they didn't do anywhere else in the Pyrenees.

There's a conversation in The Fellowship of the Ring where one of the hobbits -- I don't have my copy handy or I'd get the direct quote -- asks why they can see the Misty Mountains ahead of them at one point if they're still heading south from Rivendell, and it's explained that south of Caradhras (which you may recall is the surface mountain under which Moria runs) the mountain chain bends and runs southwest instead of due south for a while.

Tolkien had absolutely no way to know *why* this particular feature of a mountain range was associated with intrusions of rare and unique metal ores, but he had gone backpacking in mountains enough to know How Things Should Look.