A place for us to share random info that doesn’t fit into the ‘funny thing’ or apocalypse threads.
TIL
That Jack Black’s mom set a high bar
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Oh god I am SO here for this. I love love love random tidbit learning.
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She is seriously mother to half of Tenacious D? 
OMG
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another one of her sons created the GPS enabled mobile device (military)
and apparently “Many things that today we consider routine — the posting of job openings inside of a company so that anyone could apply, formal job descriptions for every position, and so forth - were her creations.”
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“For decades, First Nations people in British Columbia knew their ancestral homes—villages forcibly emptied in the late 1800s—were great places to forage for traditional foods like hazelnuts, crabapples, cranberries, and hawthorn. A new study reveals that isolated patches of fruit trees and berry bushes in the region’s hemlock and cedar forests were deliberately planted by Indigenous peoples in and around their settlements more than 150 years ago. “
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similarly, the high levels of seafood in the islets is partially due to intentional aquaculture engineering projects
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Makes sense! There’s a lot of info about this in the book 1491, though i believe it’s more focused on Central and South America IIRC.
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Wild. Those beautiful Japanese cherry trees? Basically useless for pollinators. Along with other double petal flowers.
“ Most of the time, the mutation that leads to double flowers converts stamens into petals. But in the wild, the stamen—typically a filament with a yellow anther—has a role to play. It provides pollen… exactly what many pollinators come to look for in a flower. Indeed, many pollinators depend entirely on pollen as a food source. To them, double flowers are a disaster: there is no pollen… or at least, there is less. (Some double flowers still have at least a few functional stamens, but often they are hidden by too many petals and difficult to access.)”
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Oh no, I looooove double flowers.
I guess the solution is to plant more regular flowers too.
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Super interesting. The amount of plastic in the great garbage patch doesn’t account for much of what we know is in the ocean. This video looks at where the rest of it is, research around it all, etc.
Also means we’re going to have to find a new approach for ocean cleanup, since we’ve been focused on what ends up accounting for only 1% of ocean plastic.
(I knew about the micro plastics, but there was a lot in this I didn’t know before. It means beach cleanup actually does make a big difference potentially. May start volunteering for those as something actionable, we’re within a couple hours of the Pacific Ocean).
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You don’t even have to travel all the way to the beach to make an impact. Cleaning up river and stream banks helps prevent the stuff from moving downstream to the ocean during high-water events.
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And in my city even picking trash on walks around the block directly prevents it ending up in the mississippi
Thanks for sharing that @Bracken_Joy!
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We’re running out of sand. And it’s in EVERYTHING. (I didn’t know we used it in making plastics even).
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You can become part of a coral reef when you die.
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The bread for panko bread crumbs are made with ELECTRICITY.
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so cool, thank you for sharing. I was travelling with completely different knowledge. Or perhaps not different, but I understood incorrectly.
“panko is different because there are no crusts” - I thought, “they use Wonderbread style and remove the crusts before making crumbs”.
Also, unrelated, I made pork katsu / schnitzel for dinner with panko. Last year I asked the shadowy one to get us panko because we were low, and likely thanks to the pandemic, the only box they could find was 907g. We are halfway through the first of two bags.
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Apparently that’s a good DIY way to do it though!
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Cool Portland roads history:
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Today I learned about the 1990s rap “Don’t Copy That Floppy” intended to dissuade people from ripping games off floppy discs.
Partner looked at me and said, “Oh no. You’re too young.”
I remember the VHS “You wouldn’t steal a car” anti piracy bits, but missed out on the floppy disc ones!
Context: her next cross stitch project will likely be:
Be gay
Do crimes
Copy that floppy
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Today I learned Long Island iced tea isn’t actually made with iced tea.
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