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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 9th, 2023

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  • I’m not too sure about varietals of any of the trees. One mango I know is called a lemon meringue mango, and as you might guess is very citrusy. It’s much smaller and paler than the usual Caribbean mangoes at the supermarket. Likewise not sure about either avocado. One is what’s colloquially called a Florida avocado. It’s huge - like bigger than a softball - with a smooth, bright green skin. The flesh is a bit watery, to the point where I use cheesecloth to wring it out if making guac. Milder than a haas as well. The other variety is really interesting. It ripens on the vine until it is dark purple or almost black, like an eggplant. This one is delicious and slightly floral. I haven’t seen any fruits on either tree again this year, so something is definitely up. An arborist was over a few years ago to do some pruning and didn’t mention anything problematic about either, so it will likely take some research to figure out. I’m not aware of other avocado trees in the neighborhood, but certainly one possibility is that they’ve lost their pollinators.


  • Gene sequencing wasn’t really a thing (at least an affordable thing) until the 2010s, but once it was widely available archaeologists started using it on pretty much anything they could extract a sample from. Suddenly it became possible to track the migrations of groups over time by tracing gene similarities, determine how much intermarrying there must have been within groups, etc. Even with individual sites it has been used to determine when leadership was hereditary vs not, or how wealth was distributed (by looking at residual food dna on teeth). It really has revolutionized the field and cast a lot of old-school theories (often taken for truth) into the dustbin.




  • South Floridian here. We have 2 varieties of avocado, 2 of mango, 2 of coconut (6 trees in total), blood orange, lemon and grapefruit. When they’re in season there is too much fruit to even give away, since many neighbors have some of the same growing as well. I use stake fertilizer twice a year on the citrus and keep them mulched as they’re still a bit small. The others are well established and take no maintenance other than occasional pruning.

    Something is up with my avocados though. They were great producers for years (one is quite old, probably 60+ years, the other is probably in its 30s but not sure), but these past two years there have been so many blooms but almost no fruit. So you get the downsides of massive “rains” of pollen when there’s a slight breeze, but none of the upside of free avocados :/

    I also have about 2 dozen pineapple tops that have been propagated and planted. Many of them are pretty young, but we get around 3-4 teeny-tiny pineapples per year. Again no maintenance once they’re going (I usually propagate them in water until the roots are a good 6-8" long before putting them in the ground).

    I’m thinking about adding a banana shrub, but have also thought about sugar cane since then between that, (once I learn how to process and distill it) the coconuts and the pineapples I could realize my life-long dream of making a fully home-grown piña colada.







  • There is one variant called Magnetized Target Fusion that kinda-sorta works like this, where the “cylinders” are made of liquid Lithium. On each “stroke” of the engine:

    • A rotating chamber of liquid Lithium is spun to make a cylinder of liquid metal
    • 500 pistons situated at the site of each spinning Li pool are precisely synchronized to push the liquid metal inward, turning it into a sphere
    • Fusion fuel (H plasma) is injected into the middle
    • The intense pressure forces the fuel to undergo fusion, pushing the pistons back out and distorting the Lithium back into a cylinder