Podcasts about linnaeus

Here at Autocrat, we quite often cover a lot of mythical beasts. Examples would include the Lernaean Hydra which Heracles and Iolaus dealt with, the sphinx tormenting Thebes, and the sea monster Cetus which Perseus rescued Andromeda from.However, how possible would some of these creatures really be? Take, for example, the griffin and the hippogriff. We know what species create these two, so could we see whether the number of chromosomes they have make them feasible?Well, on today's episode, we re-release episode 67 of Biopedia to answer this very question!Sources for this episode:Ewart, J. C. (1910), Are Mules Fertile? Nature 2143(85): 106.Geldenhuys, M. E. (1989), Die kariotipering van di lieu (Panthera leo). Journal of the South African Veterinary Association 60(1): 41-49.Johnson, F. (1976), Mythical Beasts Coloring Book. New York: Dover Publications, Inc.Mead, D., Ogden, R., Meredith, A., Peniche, G., Smith, M., Corton, C., Oliver, K., Skelton, J., Betteridge, E., Doulcan; J., Holmes, N., Wright, V., Loose, M., Quail, M. A., McCarthy, S. A., Howe, K.,Chow, W., Torrance, J., Collins, J., Challis, R., Durbin, R. and Blatter, M. (2021), The genome sequence of the European golden eagle, Aquila chrysaetos chrysaetos Linnaeus 1758 (version 1; peer review: 3 approved). Wellcome Open Research 6: 112.Rodriguez, M., Understanding Genetics, The Tech Interactive (2007), Chimeras, Mosaics, and Other Fun Stuff: Why can't mules breed? I understand that a horse and a donkey make a mule but why can't 2 mules have a baby mule? (online) (Accessed 29/07/2023).Rosen, B. (2009), Mythical Creatures Bible: The Definitive Guide to Legendary Beings. New York: Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.Ryder, O. A. (1993), Przewalski`s Horse: Prospects for Reintroduction into the Wild. Conservation Biology 7(1): 13-15.Author unknown, Wikipedia (date unknown), Golden eagle (online) (Accessed 20/07/2023).

Hello Interactors,This week, the European Space Agency launched a satellite to "weigh" Earth's 1.5 trillion trees. It will give scientists deeper insight into forests and their role in the climate — far beyond surface readings. Pretty cool. And it's coming from Europe.Meanwhile, I learned that the U.S. Secretary of Defense — under Trump — had a makeup room installed in the Pentagon to look better on TV. Also pretty cool, I guess. And very American.The contrast was hard to miss. Even with better data, the U.S. shows little appetite for using geographic insight to actually address climate change. Information is growing. Willpower, not so much.So it was oddly clarifying to read a passage Christopher Hobson posted on Imperfect Notes from a book titled America by a French author — a travelogue of softs. Last week I offered new lenses through which to see the world, I figured I'd try this French pair on — to see America, and the world it effects, as he did.PAPER, POWER, AND PROJECTIONI still have a folded paper map of Seattle in the door of my car. It's a remnant of a time when physical maps reflected the reality before us. You unfolded a map and it innocently offered the physical world on a page. The rest was left to you — including knowing how to fold it up again.But even then, not all maps were neutral or necessarily innocent. Sure, they crowned capitals and trimmed borders, but they could also leave things out or would make certain claims. From empire to colony, from mission to market, maps often arrived not to reflect place, but to declare control of it. Still, we trusted it…even if was an illusion.I learned how to interrogate maps in my undergraduate history of cartography class — taught by the legendary cartographer Waldo Tobler. But even with that knowledge, when I was then taught how to make maps, that interrogation was more absent. I confidently believed I was mediating truth. The lines and symbols I used pointed to substance; they signaled a thing. I traced rivers from existing base maps with a pen on vellum and trusted they existed in the world as sure as the ink on the page. I cut out shading for a choropleth map and believed it told a stable story about population, vegetation, or economics. That trust was embodied in representation — the idea that a sign meant something enduring. That we could believe what maps told us.This is the world of semiotics — the study of how signs create meaning. American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce offered a sturdy model: a sign (like a map line) refers to an object (the river), and its meaning emerges in interpretation. Meaning, in this view, is relational — but grounded. A stop sign, a national anthem, a border — they meant something because they pointed beyond themselves, to a world we shared.But there are cracks in this seemingly sturdy model.These cracks pose this question: why do we trust signs in the first place? That trust — in maps, in categories, in data — didn't emerge from neutrality. It was built atop agendas.Take the first U.S. census in 1790. It didn't just count — it defined. Categories like “free white persons,” “all other free persons,” and “slaves” weren't neutral. They were political tools, shaping who mattered and by how much. People became variables. Representation became abstraction.Or Carl Linnaeus, the 18th-century Swedish botanist who built the taxonomies we still use: genus, species, kingdom. His system claimed objectivity but was shaped by distance and empire. Linnaeus never left Sweden. He named what he hadn't seen, classified people he'd never met — sorting humans into racial types based on colonial stereotypes. These weren't observations. They were projections based on stereotypes gathered from travelers, missionaries, and imperial officials.Naming replaced knowing. Life was turned into labels. Biology became filing. And once abstracted, it all became governable, measurable, comparable, and, ultimately, manageable.Maps followed suit.What once lived as a symbolic invitation — a drawing of place — became a system of location. I was studying geography at a time (and place) when Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and GIScience was transforming cartography. Maps weren't just about visual representations; they were spatial databases. Rows, columns, attributes, and calculations took the place of lines and shapes on map. Drawing what we saw turned to abstracting what could then be computed so that it could then be visualized, yes, but also managed.Chris Perkins, writing on the philosophy of mapping, argued that digital cartographies didn't just depict the world — they constituted it. The map was no longer a surface to interpret, but a script to execute. As critical geographers Sam Hind and Alex Gekker argue, the modern “mapping impulse” isn't about understanding space — it's about optimizing behavior through it; in a world of GPS and vehicle automation, the map no longer describes the territory, it becomes it. Laura Roberts, writing on film and geography, showed how maps had fused with cinematic logic — where places aren't shown, but performed. Place and navigation became narrative. New York in cinema isn't a place — it's a performance of ambition, alienation, or energy. Geography as mise-en-scène.In other words, the map's loss of innocence wasn't just technical. It was ontological — a shift in the very nature of what maps are and what kind of reality they claim to represent. Geography itself had entered the domain of simulation — not representing space but staging it. You can simulate traveling anywhere in the world, all staged on Google maps. Last summer my son stepped off the train in Edinburgh, Scotland for the first time in his life but knew exactly where he was. He'd learned it driving on simulated streets in a simulated car on XBox. He walked us straight to our lodging.These shifts in reality over centuries weren't necessarily mistakes. They unfolded, emerged, or evolved through the rational tools of modernity — and for a time, they worked. For many, anyway. Especially for those in power, seeking power, or benefitting from it. They enabled trade, governance, development, and especially warfare. But with every shift came this question: at what cost?FROM SIGNS TO SPECTACLEAs early as the early 1900s, Max Weber warned of a world disenchanted by bureaucracy — a society where rationalization would trap the human spirit in what he called an iron cage. By mid-century, thinkers pushed this further.Michel Foucault revealed how systems of knowledge — from medicine to criminal justice — were entangled with systems of power. To classify was to control. To represent was to discipline. Roland Barthes dissected the semiotics of everyday life — showing how ads, recipes, clothing, even professional wrestling were soaked in signs pretending to be natural.Guy Debord, in the 1967 The Society of the Spectacle, argued that late capitalism had fully replaced lived experience with imagery. “The spectacle,” he wrote, “is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.”Then came Jean Baudrillard — a French sociologist, media theorist, and provocateur — who pushed the critique of representation to its limit. In the 1980s, where others saw distortion, he saw substitution: signs that no longer referred to anything real. Most vividly, in his surreal, gleaming 1986 travelogue America, he described the U.S. not as a place, but as a performance — a projection without depth, still somehow running.Where Foucault showed that knowledge was power, and Debord showed that images replaced life, Baudrillard argued that signs had broken free altogether. A map might once distort or simplify — but it still referred to something real. By the late 20th century, he argued, signs no longer pointed to anything. They pointed only to each other.You didn't just visit Disneyland. You visited the idea of America — manufactured, rehearsed, rendered. You didn't just use money. You used confidence by handing over a credit card — a symbol of wealth that is lighter and moves faster than any gold.In some ways, he was updating a much older insight by another Frenchman. When Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in the 1830s, he wasn't just studying law or government — he was studying performance. He saw how Americans staged democracy, how rituals of voting and speech created the image of a free society even as inequality and exclusion thrived beneath it. Tocqueville wasn't cynical. He simply understood that America believed in its own image — and that belief gave it a kind of sovereign feedback loop.Baudrillard called this condition simulation — when representation becomes self-contained. When the distinction between real and fake no longer matters because everything is performance. Not deception — orchestration.He mapped four stages of this logic:* Faithful representation – A sign reflects a basic reality. A map mirrors the terrain.* Perversion of reality – The sign begins to distort. Think colonial maps as logos or exclusionary zoning.* Pretending to represent – The sign no longer refers to anything but performs as if it does. Disneyland isn't America — it's the fantasy of America. (ironically, a car-free America)* Pure simulation – The sign has no origin or anchor. It floats. Zillow heatmaps, Uber surge zones — maps that don't reflect the world, but determine how you move through it.We don't follow maps as they were once known anymore. We follow interfaces.And not just in apps. Cities themselves are in various stages of simulation. New York still sells itself as a global center. But in a distributed globalized and digitized economy, there is no center — only the perversion of an old reality. Paris subsidizes quaint storefronts not to nourish citizens, but to preserve the perceived image of Paris. Paris pretending to be Paris. Every city has its own marketing campaign. They don't manage infrastructure — they manage perception. The skyline is a product shot. The streetscape is marketing collateral and neighborhoods are optimized for search.Even money plays this game.The U.S. dollar wasn't always king. That title once belonged to the British pound — backed by empire, gold, and industry. After World War II, the dollar took over, pegged to gold under the Bretton Woods convention — a symbol of American postwar power stability…and perversion. It was forged in an opulent, exclusive, hotel in the mountains of New Hampshire. But designed in the style of Spanish Renaissance Revival, it was pretending to be in Spain. Then in 1971, Nixon snapped the dollar's gold tether. The ‘Nixon Shock' allowed the dollar to float — its value now based not on metal, but on trust. It became less a store of value than a vessel of belief. A belief that is being challenged today in ways that recall the instability and fragmentation of the pre-WWII era.And this dollar lives in servers, not Industrial Age iron vaults. It circulates as code, not coin. It underwrites markets, wars, and global finance through momentum alone. And when the pandemic hit, there was no digging into reserves.The Federal Reserve expanded its balance sheet with keystrokes — injecting trillions into the economy through bond purchases, emergency loans, and direct payments. But at the same time, Trump 1.0 showed printing presses rolling, stacks of fresh bills bundled and boxed — a spectacle of liquidity. It was monetary policy as theater. A simulation of control, staged in spreadsheets by the Fed and photo ops by the Executive Branch. Not to reflect value, but to project it. To keep liquidity flowing and to keep the belief intact.This is what Baudrillard meant by simulation. The sign doesn't lie — nor does it tell the truth. It just works — as long as we accept it.MOOD OVER MEANINGReality is getting harder to discern. We believe it to be solid — that it imposes friction. A law has consequences. A price reflects value. A city has limits. These things made sense because they resist us. Because they are real.But maybe that was just the story we told. Maybe it was always more mirage than mirror.Now, the signs don't just point to reality — they also replace it. We live in a world where the image outpaces the institution. Where the copy is smoother than the original. Where AI does the typing. Where meaning doesn't emerge — it arrives prepackaged and pre-viral. It's a kind of seductive deception. It's hyperreality where performance supersedes substance. Presence and posture become authority structured in style.Politics is not immune to this — it's become the main attraction.Trump's first 100 days didn't aim to stabilize or legislate but to signal. Deportation as UFC cage match — staged, brutal, and televised. Tariff wars as a way of branding power — chaos with a catchphrase. Climate retreat cast as perverse theater. Gender redefined and confined by executive memo. Birthright citizenship challenged while sedition pardoned. Even the Gulf of Mexico got renamed. These aren't policies, they're productions.Power isn't passing through law. It's passing through the affect of spectacle and a feed refresh.Baudrillard once wrote that America doesn't govern — it narrates. Trump doesn't manage policy, he manages mood. Like an actor. When America's Secretary of Defense, a former TV personality, has a makeup studio installed inside the Pentagon it's not satire. It's just the simulation, doing what it does best: shining under the lights.But this logic runs deeper than any single figure.Culture no longer unfolds. It reloads. We don't listen to the full album — we lift 10 seconds for TikTok. Music is made for algorithms. Fashion is filtered before it's worn. Selfhood is a brand channel. Identity is something to monetize, signal, or defend — often all at once.The economy floats too. Meme stocks. NFTs. Speculative tokens. These aren't based in value — they're based in velocity. Attention becomes the currency.What matters isn't what's true, but what trends. In hyperreality, reference gives way to rhythm. The point isn't to be accurate. The point is to circulate. We're not being lied to.We're being engaged. And this isn't a bug, it's a feature.Which through a Baudrillard lens is why America — the simulation — persists.He saw it early. Describing strip malls, highways, slogans, themed diners he saw an America that wasn't deep. That was its genius he saw. It was light, fast paced, and projected. Like the movies it so famously exports. It didn't need justification — it just needed repetition.And it's still repeating.Las Vegas is the cathedral of the logic of simulation — a city that no longer bothers pretending. But it's not alone. Every city performs, every nation tries to brand itself. Every policy rollout is scored like a product launch. Reality isn't navigated — it's streamed.And yet since his writing, the mood has shifted. The performance continues, but the music underneath it has changed. The techno-optimism of Baudrillard's ‘80s an ‘90s have curdled. What once felt expansive now feels recursive and worn. It's like a show running long after the audience has gone home. The rager has ended, but Spotify is still loudly streaming through the speakers.“The Kids' Guide to the Internet” (1997), produced by Diamond Entertainment and starring the unnervingly wholesome Jamison family. It captures a moment of pure techno-optimism — when the Internet was new, clean, and family-approved. It's not just a tutorial; it's a time capsule of belief, staged before the dream turned into something else. Before the feed began to feed on us.Trumpism thrives on this terrain. And yet the world is changing around it. Climate shocks, mass displacement, spiraling inequality — the polycrisis has a body count. Countries once anchored to American leadership are squinting hard now, trying to see if there's anything left behind the screen. Adjusting the antenna in hopes of getting a clearer signal. From Latin America to Southeast Asia to Europe, the question grows louder: Can you trust a power that no longer refers to anything outside itself?Maybe Baudrillard and Tocqueville are right — America doesn't point to a deeper truth. It points to itself. Again and again and again. It is the loop. And even now, knowing this, we can't quite stop watching. There's a reason we keep refreshing. Keep scrolling. Keep reacting. The performance persists — not necessarily because we believe in it, but because it's the only script still running.And whether we're horrified or entertained, complicit or exhausted, engaged or ghosted, hired or fired, immigrated or deported, one thing remains strangely true: we keep feeding it. That's the strange power of simulation in an attention economy. It doesn't need conviction. It doesn't need conscience. It just needs attention — enough to keep the momentum alive. The simulation doesn't care if the real breaks down. It just keeps rendering — soft, seamless, and impossible to look away from. Like a dream you didn't choose but can't wake up from.REFERENCESBarthes, R. (1972). Mythologies (A. Lavers, Trans.). Hill and Wang. (Original work published 1957)Baudrillard, J. (1986). America (C. Turner, Trans.). Verso.Debord, G. (1994). The Society of the Spectacle (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). Zone Books. (Original work published 1967)Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). Vintage Books.Hind, S., & Gekker, A. (2019). On autopilot: Towards a flat ontology of vehicular navigation. In C. Lukinbeal et al. (Eds.), Media's Mapping Impulse. Franz Steiner Verlag.Linnaeus, C. (1735). Systema Naturae (1st ed.). Lugduni Batavorum.Perkins, C. (2009). Philosophy and mapping. In R. Kitchin & N. Thrift (Eds.), International Encyclopedia of Human Geography. Elsevier.Raaphorst, K., Duchhart, I., & van der Knaap, W. (2017). The semiotics of landscape design communication. Landscape Research.Roberts, L. (2008). Cinematic cartography: Movies, maps and the consumption of place. In R. Koeck & L. Roberts (Eds.), Cities in Film: Architecture, Urban Space and the Moving Image. University of Liverpool.Tocqueville, A. de. (2003). Democracy in America (G. Lawrence, Trans., H. Mansfield & D. Winthrop, Eds.). University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1835)Weber, M. (1958). The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (T. Parsons, Trans.). Charles Scribner's Sons. (Original work published 1905) This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io

Fossielen zijn de vaak versteende resten van mensen, dieren en planten die in gesteentes, modder of zandlagen worden teruggevonden. Die vondsten hebben mensen altijd gefascineerd maar ook voor raadsels gesteld. Waren het grillen van de natuur, vergelijkbaar met mineraalafzettingen of wonderbaarlijk gevormde zwerfsteen? Of waren het resten van ooit echt levende dieren? In het Mycene van 1200 voor de jaartelling bewaarden mensen fossielen van neushoorns, paarden en schelpen als iets bijzonders. In veel culturen in Azië, Europa en Amerika werden fossielen in verbinding gebracht met mythologische wezens. Nog in 1657 publiceerde de vermaarde dierenkenner Joannes een boek over viervoetige dieren met afbeeldingen van draken. Die waren vermoedelijk gebaseerd op fossiele reptielen. Op Cyprus werden fragmenten van een dwergnijlpaard in een kerk vereerd, omdat men dacht dat het een heilige was.Wat nuchterder keek de Griekse filosoof Xenophanes zo'n 500 jaar voor de jaartelling naar fossielen: zeeschelpen moesten toch wel aangeven dat sommige gebieden ooit onder water gestaan hadden. Goede beschrijvingen van fossielen leverde rond het jaar duizend de Perzische wetenschapper Ibn Sīnā (980 – 1037), een aantal eeuwen later gevolgd door bijvoorbeeld Leonardo da Vinci. Maar de positie van het christelijk geloof maakte het steeds moeilijker om fossiele vondsten te interpreteren. In de eerste plaats was er het grondidee dat Gods scheppingen volmaakt zijn, en dus kan van uitsterven geen sprake zijn. Vondsten van fossiele skeletten van grote dieren als mammoeten betekenden dus dat die ergens op aarde nog aanwezig moesten zijn, en dat kon natuurlijk altijd zolang de aarde niet compleet in beeld was. Wat dacht u trouwens van het monster van Loch Ness? En wat kan er wel nog niet in de diepe oceaan leven? De vondst van schelpen en andere resten van zeedieren ook in hoger gelegen steenformaties vormde wel een probleem. Daar bracht de zondvloed uitkomst. Daar waren indertijd waarschijnlijk heel wat zaken misgegaan, zoals ook de zondvloedmens in 1725 gevonden in Öhningen, vlakbij de Duitse kant van de Bodensee. En wel 4032 jaar na de zondvloed. Een jaar later werd deze vondst als de “homo diluvi testis” beschreven door Scheuchzer. In een voor zijn tijd revolutionair betoog beschreef hij dus dat wel degelijk dieren uitgestorven konden zijn, al was het dan alleen in de kerkelijk goedgekeurde variant van de zondvloed. De “verdronken zondaar” werd gekocht in 1802 voor de collectie van Tylers museum in Haarlem. Even later werd het exemplaar door de Franse palentoloog Cuvier in 1807 gedetermineerd als ”reuzen salamander”.In zijn gelijknamige boek heeft Jelle Reumer de geschiedenis van de paleontologie prachtig beschreven. Cuvier geloofde dan wel niet in het zondvloedverhaal, maar dacht toch wel aan catastrofen waarom dieren uitgestorven waren. Het is pas later duidelijk geworden dat Leonardo da Vinci al niets van die zondvloedtheorie moest hebben, dat kon volgens hem nooit verklaren waarom zeedieren hoog in de bergen terecht waren gekomen. Maar om dat in zijn tijd te publiceren was levensgevaarlijk, de brandstapel van de inquisitie dreigde, en dus schreef hij zijn aantekeningen over uitsterven van organismen in het geheim in spiegelschrift op, pas veel later ontdekt. Cuvier was een in veel opzichten een geniale onderzoeker, maar hij had ook zijn eigenzinnige opvattingen. Hij moest niet hebben van het systematische systeem van Linnaeus, en was het ook in het geheel niet eens met Lamaerck die veronderstelde dat soorten in elkaar over konden gaan. Tyler's bevat nog veel meer klassieke schatten van de paleontologie. Zoals die van een reuzenkrokodil die in Maastricht in de Pietersberg in 1764 was gevonden en in 1784 gekocht door de directeur van Tyler's. Uiteindelijk was het Adriaan Camper, een zoon van de in Groningen beroemde Petrus, die samen met Cuvier tot de conclusie kwam dat de Mososaurus geen krokodil maar een op een varaan lijkende reuzenhagedis was. Ook ligt te midden van veel anders prachtigs in Tyler's een mooie Plesiosaurus, een zee-reptiel van drie meter lengte ontdekt door een vroege vrouwelijke fossielen-zoekster aan de Jurassic Coast, Mary Anning.De veranderende inzichten in de geologie, zoals door Charles Lyell in 1830 gepubliceerd, tezamen met de uitwerking van de evolutieleer door Wallace en Darwin veranderde de interpretatie van fossielen uiteindelijk compleet. Die staat geheel in het teken van de ontwikkeling van soorten, waarvan verreweg het allergrootste deel weer is uitgestorven. Soms was dat door een catastrofe, zoals het eind van de dinosauriërs (op de vogels na), na een botsing met een komeet. Maar veel vaker als de uitkomst van de vele oorzaken die in de natuurlijke selectie van het voortbestaan een rol spelen. In de puzzel op zoek naar die oorzaken speelt de paleontologie onverminderd een rol, ook door steeds weer nieuwe vondsten, waaronder in ons land. Al zijn die niet zo spectaculair als recent in Schotland, waar 150 meter pootafdrukken van dinosauriërs werden blootgelegd.Vond je dit leuk? Deel deze nieuwsbrief met vrienden, familie, of wie dan ook van een goed natuurverhaal houdt.Tot de volgende nieuwsbrief!Hartelijke groet,Menno & Erwin

In this episode of The Peripatetics, we turn our attention to names — their meaning, their limits, and the tension they create between essence and identity. With Thoreau as our guide, we wander through the wild landscapes of Walking, reflecting on his assertion that “at present, our only true names are nicknames.” What do names reveal, and what do they obscure? And how do we move beyond the constraints of the names we've inherited to discover the truth of who we are? Such a journey requires vulnerabiltiy, and willingness to remember the things we ultimately need to forget. Modeling this, Trey traverses the topography of himself through the stories of some of the names he's answered to in his life. Along the way, we trace the philosophical threads of Aristotle, Linnaeus, and Monet, weaving their ideas into a rich tapestry of inquiry into clarity, essence, and the human need for connection. Join us as we strip away the labels, rediscover the unbridled nature within, and seek the truest name of all — the one that emerges when we dare to crest the higher hills of our own becoming. Transcripts of all episodes are available here. Find Trey on Instagram. Episode Themes Include: The Essence of Identity: This episode delves into the meaning and limitations of names, reflecting on Thoreau's idea that “our only true names are nicknames.” By examining the tension between essence and identity, we explore how names can reveal, obscure, or constrain our understanding of who we are. Remembering to Forget: In a conversation that spans millenia, this episode explores the paradoxical act of remembering the things we must ultimately forget to see clearly. Drawing on the ideas of Monet, Aristotle, and Linnaeus, the episode challenges us to strip away the assumptions and biases attached to names and labels. The Journey to the Truest Name: This theme explores the idea of becoming — how the names we answer to evolve with us and how discovering our truest name requires vulnerability and self-exploration. The episode reflects on the human need to transcend inherited labels and connect with the unbridled nature within. About The Show Inspired by the ancient tradition of walking philosophers — from Aristotle and his followers to Thoreau and Nietzsche  — who walked as a way to engage deeply with their thoughts and ideas, The Peripatetics wanders through th e thoughts of great thinkers in nature, art, literature, and philosophy as they intersect with the simple, transformative act of walking. In season 1, we are discussing Henry David Thoreau's definitive essay on the subject of walking, connecting it with wisdom from a wide swath of philosophic tradtions which share his devotion to achieving clarity and peace through movement. Whether you're a fellow walker, someone looking for a bit of tranquility, or just curious about how a good walk can change your perspective, you're in the right place. May your path be smooth and your pace steady. About The Host Trey Hill is a filmmaker who cut his teeth as a photographer and one-man-band storyteller for non-profits and NGOs, work which carried him around the world as he sought to expose the inner light present in some of the planet's most overlooked people. He also spent 10 seasons in the NHL as team photographer for the Dallas Stars and has, for the better part of the last decade, directed TV commercials for global brands, working with household names, musicians, sports heroes, and politicians. In 2019, his feature-length debut, the documentary LOUD KRAZY LOVE about Korn's Brian “Head” Welch, premiered on Showtime.

Did you know that the forbidden fruit in the Biblical Garden of Paradise, that tempted Adam and Eve, was once thought to be a banana instead of an apple? That's why Carl Linnaeus gave it the scientific name, Musa paradasiaca. Who was this fellow anyway, the Swedish botanist and doctor whose concept of naming living things and grouping them by similarity established a coherent way to talk about and understand the diversity of life? Linnaeus' system of binomial nomenclature using genera and species adjectives is still used today.  In this unconventional biography of the ”King of Flowers” we visit a tropical greenhouse at Central Washington University to understand how Linneaus got a banana "tree"  in the Netherlands to produce the first banana fruit grown in Europe. We also talk with science historian Dr. Tamara Caulkins about Linnaeus, the time when he was working (1700s), his rival George LeClerc du Bufon, and the book he worked on throughout his life: Systeme Naturae.  Finally, we hear two delightful classical guitar pieces played by our Tamara and Neil Caulkins, from their Grand March album. 

This is Stargate SG1 For the First Time! From the creators of Babylon 5 For the First Time, Jeff Akin is watching this iconic show for the first time while Brent Allen, who has seen it at least 47 times, is watching for the first time for those sci-fi messages that hold a mirror up to society or show us how to be better human beings.The Tok'ra Parts 1 and 2 - Season 2, Episodes 11 and 12Visit https://www.babylon5first.com/ for more!This show is produced in association with the Akin Collective, Mulberry Entertainment, and Framed Games. Find out how you can support the show and get great bonus content like access to notes, a Discord server, unedited reaction videos, and more: https://www.patreon.com/babylon5firstSpecial Thanks to all who support our show through Patreon, including: Executive Producers:Todd K, Terrafan, Kat, Todd J., Colin B, Jeffrey H., jal'Zha, Andrew, The Space Pope, Trekkie Trey the Trekker, Andrew B, Fabio K, Matt Ion, Snatcher42, DAG, Mr. Krosis, Rob B, ClupPro70, Commodore Trev, Peter S, Ron H, Mattie G, Stuart H, Martin S., Becky S, Timo H, Acesoldia, Starfury 5470, James H, Chris L, Ian M, NJRetiredLEO, Paul H, Suzanne E, Demi-DW, FellKnight, Calinicus, Neil M., Gregory C, Anthony P., Thomas M, James O, Frankie, Linnaeus, Kenny K, Max H, Joel T, Jack Kitchen, fcast17, Katerina K, Joey P, Duane B.Producers:Adam P.David B.Guy K.John K.framedKatFollow us on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/BabylonFirstVisit https://www.patreon.com/byenerds to join the Patreon for full, unedited videos and an incredible community.Support the Show.

Two veteran Star Trek podcasters watch Babylon 5 for the first time. Brent Allen and Jeff Akin search for Star Trek like messages in this series, deciding if they should have watched it sooner.This is it! The end of the road for Babylon 5. At least for now. Jeff and Brent try to decide if the best way to describe perfection is "Sleeping in Light." This show is produced in association with the Akin Collective, Mulberry Entertainment, and Framed Games. Find out how you can support the show and get great bonus content like access to notes, a Discord server, unedited reaction videos, and more: https://www.patreon.com/babylon5firstSpecial Thanks to all who support our show through Patreon, including:Executive Producers:Todd K, Terrafan, Kat, Todd J., Colin B, Jeffrey H., jal'Zha, Andrew, The Space Pope, Trekkie Trey the Trekker, Andrew B, Fabio K, Matt Ion, Snatcher42, DAG, Mr. Krosis, Rob B, ClupPro70, Commodore Trev, Peter S, Ron H, Mattie G, Stuart H, Martin S., Becky S, Timo H, Acesoldia, Starfury 5470, James H, Chris L, Ian M, NJRetiredLEO, Paul H, Suzanne E, Demi-DW, FellKnight, Calinicus, Neil M., Gregory C, Anthony P., Thomas M, James O, Frankie, Linnaeus, Kenny K, Max H, Joel T, Jack Kitchen, fcast17, Katerina K, Joey P, Duane B.Producers:Adam P.David B.Guy K.John K.framedKatFollow us on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/BabylonFirstWebsite: https://www.babylon5first.com/All rights belong to the Prime Time Entertainment Network, WBTV, and TNT. No copyright infringement intended.Copyright Disclaimer, Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for 'fair use' for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use.Visit https://www.patreon.com/babylon5first to join the Babylon 5 For the First Time Patreon. Support the Show.

This is Stargate SG1 For the First Time! From the creators of Babylon 5 For the First Time, Jeff Akin is watching this iconic show for the first time while Brent Allen, who has seen it at least 47 times, is watching for the first time for those sci-fi messages that hold a mirror up to society or show us how to be better human beings.Bane - Season 2, Episode 10Visit https://www.babylon5first.com/ for more!This show is produced in association with the Akin Collective, Mulberry Entertainment, and Framed Games. Find out how you can support the show and get great bonus content like access to notes, a Discord server, unedited reaction videos, and more: https://www.patreon.com/babylon5firstSpecial Thanks to all who support our show through Patreon, including: Executive Producers:Todd K, Terrafan, Kat, Todd J., Colin B, Jeffrey H., jal'Zha, Andrew, The Space Pope, Trekkie Trey the Trekker, Andrew B, Fabio K, Matt Ion, Snatcher42, DAG, Mr. Krosis, Rob B, ClupPro70, Commodore Trev, Peter S, Ron H, Mattie G, Stuart H, Martin S., Becky S, Timo H, Acesoldia, Starfury 5470, James H, Chris L, Ian M, NJRetiredLEO, Paul H, Suzanne E, Demi-DW, FellKnight, Calinicus, Neil M., Gregory C, Anthony P., Thomas M, James O, Frankie, Linnaeus, Kenny K, Max H, Joel T, Jack Kitchen, fcast17, Katerina K, Joey P, Duane B.Producers:Adam P.David B.Guy K.John K.framedKatFollow us on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/BabylonFirstVisit https://www.patreon.com/byenerds to join the Patreon for full, unedited videos and an incredible community.Support the Show.

Carolus Linnaeus'un çiçek saati projesini konuşuyoruz

Elefantes são animais terrestres, de grande porte e extremamente inteligentes. Separe trinta minutinhos do seu dia e descubra, com a Mila Massuda, as características físicas e comportamentais dos elefantes. Apresentação: Mila Massuda (@milamassuda) Roteiro: Mila Massuda (@milamassuda) e Emilio Garcia (@emilioblablalogia) Produção: Prof. Vítor Soares (@profvitorsoares) @Matheus_Heredia e BláBláLogia (@blablalogia) Gravado e editado nos estúdios TocaCast REFERÊNCIAS: African savannah elephants call one another by “name”. Nature ecology & evolution, 10 jun. 2024. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-024-02430-8 CAMPBELL-STATON, S. C. et al. Ivory poaching and the rapid evolution of tusklessness in African elephants. Science, v. 374, n. 6566, p. 483–487, 22 out. 2021. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abe7389 KASWAN, P.; ROY, A. Unearthing calf burials among Asian Elephants Elephas maximus Linnaeus, 1758 (Mammalia: Proboscidea: Elephantidae) in northern Bengal, India. Journal of Threatened Taxa, v. 16, n. 2, p. 24615–24629, 26 fev. 2024. https://doi.org/10.11609/jott.8826.16.2.24615-24629 MARTINS, A. F. et al. Locally-curved geometry generates bending cracks in the African elephant skin. Nature Communications, v. 9, n. 1, p. 3865, 2 out. 2018. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-06257-3 SCHULZ, Andrew K. et al. Skin wrinkles and folds enable asymmetric stretch in the elephant trunk. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, v. 119, n. 31, p. e2122563119, 2022. https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2122563119

Labo dumar ah ayaa lagu xiray dalka Mareykanka, kuwaas oo looga shakisan yahay in ay ku lug lahaayeen dil. Isbeddelka cimiladu waxay keentaa xilliyada xasaasiyadda oo is beddela, taas oo ku adkeynaysa dadka xasaasiyadda faxalka iyo neefta qaba. Anders Persson, oo bare ka ah cilmiga siyaasadda ee jaamacadda Linnaeus oo diiradda saaraya Israa'iil iyo Falastiin, ayaa xafiiskiisa la burburiyay, sida uu sheegay Expressen.

fWotD Episode 2560: Anna Blackburne Welcome to featured Wiki of the Day where we read the summary of the featured Wikipedia article every day.The featured article for Wednesday, 8 May 2024 is Anna Blackburne.Anna Blackburne (baptised Anne Blackburne; 1726 – 30 December 1793) was an English botanist and collector who assembled an extensive collection of natural history specimens and corresponded with several notable naturalists of her era. Blackburne was born at Orford Hall, Orford, Warrington, Lancashire, into a family of landowners and merchants. After her mother's death, she lived at Orford with her father John Blackburne, who was known for his interest in botany and his hothouses for exotic plants. John Blackburne also had an extensive library where Anne probably studied botany; she later taught herself Latin so she could read the Systema Naturae of Carl Linnaeus. She developed a natural history museum where she collected insects, shells, minerals and birds. She regularly met with the naturalist Johann Reinhold Forster while he was teaching at Warrington Academy. Forster instructed her in entomology and helped with her insect collection.Blackburne corresponded with other naturalists including Linnaeus, to whom she sent a box of birds and insects. Her brother Ashton, who lived in New York, sent her specimens of North American birds. The Welsh naturalist Thomas Pennant studied these bird specimens and included them in his book Arctic Zoology. After her father's death, Blackburne and her museum moved to nearby Fairfield Hall. When she died in 1793, her nephew John Blackburne inherited the collection. Several species are named after Blackburne, including the beetle Geotrupes blackburnii, the Blackburnian warbler and the flowering plant Blackburnia pinnata, now called Zanthoxylum pinnatum.This recording reflects the Wikipedia text as of 00:48 UTC on Wednesday, 8 May 2024.For the full current version of the article, see Anna Blackburne on Wikipedia.This podcast uses content from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.Visit our archives at wikioftheday.com and subscribe to stay updated on new episodes.Follow us on Mastodon at @wikioftheday@masto.ai.Also check out Curmudgeon's Corner, a current events podcast.Until next time, I'm Ruth Neural.

In this episode, we're working on our element of Resilience and exploring the third "Root of Resilience" known as aligning with nature. The Roots of Resilience were laid out in one of Dr. Emmons book, "The Chemistry of Calm." This root builds on our last one ("managing energy") by embracing the cycles and rhythms that are part of a much bigger system. This may seem "woo-woo," but.. well, it's not. Like all mammals and really every other living thing, we are influenced by cycles around us. A growing field of study known as chronobiology is bringing more scientific understanding to these cycles (for example: seasonal affective disorder and seasonal mood shifts). We'll talk more about this root and how increasing awareness of your connection with nature and adding some simple skills in response to this connection can support your mood, energy, and resilience in really powerful ways.   Key moments: 00:00 Welcome to Joy Lab 00:46 Introducing the Roots of Resilience Series 01:46 Aligning with Nature: The Third Root of Resilience 02:03 Exploring Bio Rhythms: A Key to Mental Health 04:39 Diving Deep into Ultradian Rhythms 10:39 Circadian Rhythms: The Impact of Sleep on Mental Health 22:32 Infradian Rhythms: The Examples of Menstruation and Seasonal Affective Disorder 26:44 Wrapping Up: The Power of Aligning with Nature   Joy Lab and Natural Mental Health are community-supported. When you buy through the links below, we may earn a commission. That support helps keeps the Joy Lab podcast free for all!   Sources and Notes: Joy Lab Program: Take the next leap in your wellbeing journey with step-by-step practices to help you build and maintain the elements of joy in your life. Your Joy Lab membership also includes our NMH Community! NMH Community: Access lots of extra resilience-boosting resources (like our Sleeping Well Workshop) AND you'll join a group of inspiring folks who play an integral role in keeping this podcast going... which means powerful resources stay accessible to everyone.  Free Resilience Quiz and free Mini-Course: Based on decades of clinical experience, we've created a model of resilience that is both helpful and practical. True to our approach at Natural Mental Health, we start with strengths. You'll identify these strengths in your Resilience Type. Your Resilience Type highlights your unique strengths, what fuels your joy, what keeps you in balance, and the lifestyle practices that most nourish you. After you find your Resilience Type, sign up for your free mini-course to receive tailored lifestyle practices (e.g., foods to eat more of, ideal forms of exercise, supplements, and mindfulness activities) that can support your mood, resilience, and overall wellbeing. Joy Lab Podcast #13 (The Roots of Resilience) This episode is a broad overview of what we'll be talking about over the next 9 episodes. It's a really helpful summary! Chemistry of Calm (Dr. Emmons' book referenced in this series) Where to shop: Our partner store at Fullscript: This is where you can find high-quality supplements and wellness products. Except for our CBD Gummies, any product links mentioned in the show notes below will require an account. Sign up for your free Fullscript account here: https://us.fullscript.com/welcome/nmh/store-start Resilient Remedies: This is where you can find our line of trusted, high-quality CBD gummies: https://www.resilientremedies.com/ Supplements Mentioned to support SAD and drops in mood during winter: TruAdapt NeuroMood Pure Pack Vitamin D (we like this October-April) The 20 Minute Break (book) Linnaeus' Flower Clock More on light therapy in our blog here. More on seasonal affective disorder and seasonal mood shifts from our blogs: Natural Approaches for Seasonal Affective Disorder and Supporting Winter Mood Does Winter Get You Down? (video) What Causes Seasonal Affective Disorder? Seasonal Affective Disorder in the Summer A Light on Seasonal Affective Disorder: Definition, Treatment, & Prevention How does the brain deal with cumulative stress? A review with focus on developmental stress, HPA axis function and hippocampal structure in humans Cumulative Stress and Health Subscribe to our Newsletter: Join us over at NaturalMentalHealth.com for exclusive emails, updates, and additional strategies. Check out our favorite resilience-boosting reads: https://bookshop.org/shop/NMHreads     Full transcript available at: https://www.naturalmentalhealth.com/podcasts/joy-lab-podcast/episodes/2148589404   Please remember that this content is for informational and educational purposes only. It is not intended to provide medical advice and is not a replacement for advice and treatment from a medical professional. Please consult your doctor or other qualified health professional before beginning any diet change, supplement, or lifestyle program. Please see our terms for more information. If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, help is available. Call the NAMI HelpLine: 1-800-950-6264 available Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. – 10 p.m., ET. OR text "HelpLine" to 62640 or email NAMI at helpline@nami.org. Visit NAMI for more. You can also call or text SAMHSA at 988 or chat 988lifeline.org.

The sun is back, what'd you miss in vet med?Banfield Survey on HeartwormLayoffs in the UKExpanding Tech Roles in ColoradoVetCT Founder AwardSubscribe to the Fountain Report weekly newsletter: https://bit.ly/3JTYjRzHelpful links:Decreasing the prevalence of heartworm infection in pets

O pai da taxonomia morreu há 246 anos.

Una de las plantas que tenemos a nuestra disposición si tenemos problemas para dormir, ansiedad o estrés agudo es la passiflora incarnata, esta flor contiene flavonoides, alcaloides, fenoles, ácidos orgánicos, entre otros compuestos, que tienen la propiedad de calmarte de manera natural, asimismo, su efecto sedante que no generan dependencia, por esta razón, permíteme explicarte como es la flor que reemplaza el clonazepam. LA PASSIFLORA INCARNATA, LA FLOR QUE REEMPLAZA EL CLONAZEPAM La pasiflora tiene características en su composición química que ayuda a manejar el estrés y la ansiedad, principalmente por impactar directamente en el sistema nervioso de forma positiva, de igual manera, esta flor ayuda a incrementar los niveles del neurotransmisor GABA, lo que ayuda por mencionar una cosa a controlar los niveles de sueño y a controlar las palpitaciones o taquicardias generadas por la ansiedad. Los diversos beneficios de esta planta han sido muy estudiados de manera exhaustivas hay que añadir que si quieres profundizar en esto, al final de este escrito encontrarás investigaciones muy interesantes sobre este tema, como la llevada a cabo en corea por Lee y colaboradores, en donde administrado 60 miligramos de pasiflora lograron curar a pacientes de insomnio crónico, igualmente, la realizada en Polonia por Janda y colaboradores, donde haciendo un metaanálisis de los estudios acerca de la passiflora incarnata, encontró sus beneficios para combatir la ansiedad y sus efectos. PRECAUCIONES SOBRE EL CONSUMO DE PASIFLORA Es importante señalar que no debes automedicarte con esta flor, ni con ninguna otra que desconozcas los efectos que puede tener en ti, acude a médicos naturistas o médicos generales que puedan evaluar tu condición y te autoricen el consumo de esta flor que reemplaza el clonazepam SOBRE LAS DOSIS Antes de consumir flor que reemplaza el clonazepam, se debe tener en cuenta ciertas variables para medir su dosificación ideal, empezando por el peso, la estatura, la edad, así mismo la más importante, qué tipo de problema que se quiere enfrentar. Tomando como referencia los estudios expuestos, encontramos que si se desea combatir el insomnio la dosis es bastante pequeña, alrededor de 60 miligramos, por otro lado, si lo que se enfrenta es ansiedad o ataques de pánico, la dosis ideal se encuentra entre los 200 y 600 miligramos, y debe consumirse dos veces por día. Existen varias presentaciones como gotas, infusiones o en cápsulas, considera consumir la que mejor se adecue a ti. REFERENCIAS Janda, K., Wojtkowska, K., Jakubczyk, K., Antoniewicz, J., & Skonieczna-Żydecka, K. (2020). Passiflora incarnata in neuropsychiatric disorders—A systematic review. Nutrients, 12(12), 3894. Disponible en: https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/12/12/3894/pdf?version=1608530383 Lee, Jeewona; Jung, Han-Younga; Lee, Soyoung Irenea; Choi, Ji Hob; Kim, Shin-Gyeoma. Effects of Passiflora incarnata Linnaeus on polysomnographic sleep parameters in subjects with insomnia disorder: a double-blind randomized placebo-controlled study. International Clinical Psychopharmacology 35(1):p 29-35, January 2020. | DOI: 10.1097/YIC.0000000000000291 Disponible en : https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Shin-Gyeom-Kim/publication/337190383_Effects_of_Passiflora_incarnata_Linnaeus_on_polysomnogra phic_sleep_parameters_in_subjects_with_insomnia_disorder_a_double-blind_randomized_placebo-controlled_study/links/5f0ed953299bf1e548b706b7/Effects-of-Passiflora-incarnata-Linnaeus-on-polysomnographic-sleep-parameters-in-subjects-with-insomnia-disorder-a-double-blind-randomized-placebo-controlled-study.pdf Sarrico, L. D., Angelini, A., Figueiredo, A. S., de Sá Eufrasio, B., Vedolin, E. C., Noqueli, L. V., ... & Cardoso, M. A. P. (2022). Um estudo do uso de chás da hortelã (Mentha x Villosa Huds), folha de Maracujá (Passiflora Edulis), Camomila-vulgar (Matricaria Chamomilla L.) E de Erva-cidreira (Melissa Officinalis) no auxílio ao tratamento e prevenção à ansiedade: uma revisão bibliográ: A study of the use of mint (Mentha x Villosa Huds), passion fruit leaf (Passiflora Edulis), Chamomile (Matricaria Chamomilla L.) and Lemon balm (Melissa Officinalis) teas in the treatment and prevention of anxiety: a bibliographic review. Brazilian Journal of Development, 8(9), 61985-62005. Disponible en: https://www.brazilianjournals.com/ojs/index.php/BRJD/article/download/51941/38904 Zanardi, R., Carminati, M., Fazio, V., Maccario, M., Verri, G., & Colombo, C. (2023). Add-On Treatment with Passiflora incarnata L., herba, during Benzodiazepine Tapering in Patients with Depression and Anxiety: A Real-World Study. Pharmaceuticals, 16(3), 426. Disponible en: https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8247/16/3/426/pdf ENLACES DE INTERES Adiós a la Ansiedad ashwagandha (https://nelsonarturopsicologo.com/adios-a-la-ansiedad-ashwagandha/) TRATAMIENTO ANSIEDAD: EL MEJOR PARA CADA CASO (https://nelsonarturopsicologo.com/tratamiento-ansiedad-el-mejor-para-cada-caso/) LA PLANTA MILENARIA QUE TE AYUDARÁ A SUPERAR LA ANSIEDAD (https://nelsonarturopsicologo.com/la-planta-milenaria-que-te-ayudara-a-superar-la-ansiedad/)

This week we look at a very special giant silkmoth that comes from North America (Luna moths). The species is incredibly iconic, and there are many different meanings for it across various cultures. The best part is you can also raise them relatively easily as a pet!    Patreon -> https://www.patreon.com/user?u=46499107 IG: https://www.instagram.com/insects4fun/ FB: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100085443614825 Email: Insectsfordummies@gmail.com     Music provided by Lofi Girl with featured artist: Brillion.    Transcription:    Welcome back to episode 60 of Insects for fun! I wonder what we should do for episode 100… I've also been thinking of adding other arthropods into the mix. What do y'all think? Let me know in the comments section either on IG, FB or in your podcast player. Also when this episode is released I'll be on a flight back to Japan from the states, so I'm currently writing this weeks in advance. Recently we have had some moon viewing stuff going on in Japan, and I figure what better time than to talk about one of my favorite moths, the Luna moth.    Lunas are in the giant silkmoth family Saturniidae and the genus is Actias. There are actually quite a few species of moon moths in this genus, but not all of them are green like the well known luna. Fortunately in Japan the two different species we have are quite similar to the luna, and I'll be trying my hand at raising one of them next summer.    Actias luna have large and gorgeous pastel green wings with big fluffy white bodies, and one eye mark per wing. The wingspan can reach 5 inches across and also have long tails which only further adds to their celestial appearance. The name Luna is actually in reference to the roman moon goddess Luna, but this was not always their name! The initial name for these was actually plumata caudata which translates to feather tail, and these moths were the first American giant silk moths to be documented in literature. The name was later changed by Linnaeus in 1758. There are actually quite a few giant silk moths with mythological names like Polyphemus, Prometheus and Atlas for example, but the majority of them are brown or a variation of it. The Luna moth can only be found in North America, and not even the entire continent either. These moths chose a side and thankfully for me it was the east! You can find lunas from Canada down to Florida but they stay east of the great plains, and in Canada they're found from southern Saskatchewan to Nova Scotia. I'll never forget the first time I saw one, and thankfully finding them doesn't seem to be all that difficult if you know where to go.    Luna moths are quite partial to forested areas but what kind of plants they eat is dependent on their geographical location. For example the caterpillars we have in Vermont love eating Birch, but I've also been successful at raising them on black walnut as well. Other common hosts include Butternut, Sumac, Sweetgum in the south, Alder, Beech, wild cherry and even persimmon. The time of year to find adult moths also varies heavily by location as well and this is because warmer weather allows them to have multiple breeding seasons unlike the northern populations. In Northern Vermont we have one generation a year and our Lunas start coming out of their cocoons in late May. In the south it's not uncommon to have 2 or three generations in a year depending on the state. Massachusetts for example is right under VT but can have a partial 2nd generation.    The caterpillars are also an incredible green, and they can get pretty big. The 5th and last molt reaches a size up to 3inches or 7.5 cm and has red dots sprinkled over its back. What's unique to these compared to other giant silkmoths is that the entire caterpillar actually turns red right before it begins making a cocoon. At least that's been my experience but I've also read that some of them turn brown or orange as well. But it's not the color or the ability to change colors that makes Luna moths interesting or the moths in the genus Actias. It's actually the tails on their wings that have attracted a lot of attention. Some species in the genus actias have tails on their wings that reach 12cm in length, and that's just the tail section! I can't tell you these are the only moths with long tails on their wings but I can definitely say they are one of a handful, and the reason they have these tails is to protect them from bat attacks! Bat's rely on echolocation to find their prey, and it's one of the reasons why they fly in close quarters to people fishing in the evening. The sounds bouncing off the water from lures being whipped draws them in which can be intimidating I gotta say, and the tails on moon moths disrupt the air waves in a way that confuses bats into missing the body of the moths entirely. In fact studies found that Brown bats are near 50% more successful at hunting lunas when their tails are missing. The tails on these moths are never straight either. At the very base of these tails the wing has a slight curve which catches air in a way that changes the source location of their sounds. For example a moth with no tails is essentially a flying target because the sound originates from the body, but a moth with the tails has its sound point from further below the main body.    Some people had previously questioned whether the tails were used for attracting a mate but uh ima be real with you. These moths could not care less about what their partner looks like. Some of them are so blind that they try to mate with anything. And that brings me to my second point. The female luna moths like all saturniidae release a pheromone to lure males, and half the time aren't even looking in the direction of where males are flying in from. The males have to initiate everything after the female starts calling, so whether or not she lays fertile eggs is dependent on the health or age of the male as well as how closely related they are. Generally speaking the moths have different times of day when they start flying based on gender which is a form of control against inbreeding. Some males won't even recognize their siblings' pheromones.    Now because luna moths are relatively famous as far as insects go, there are cultural and spiritual meanings tied to the moth. One super simple one is transformation and rebirth but that's like a copout meaning given to any insect with relevance that has multiple life stages so we aren't gonna focus on that. The other meanings though have more to do specifically with the luna moth like inner guidance and intuition. I don't know much about chakras but I guess a soft green color is supposed to represent the heart chakra and is connected to our ability to connect to our inner wisdom, and instincts. The other meaning which I really like connected to these moths is divine femininity. Its gentle temperament and grace links to compassion and intuition often associated with a woman's instincts.    In some native american folklore the luna moth is associated with rebirth and spiritual guidance. Similarly in celtic mythology the luna moth is associated with the fae, and is seen as a symbol of rebirth and magic. It really does seem that throughout the world and history these moths have held a special place in the eye of those who see it.  If you would like to raise luna moths it is totally possible to get eggs or cocoons. Especially if you live in the United States, but people can order eggs and cocoons from the US in other countries as well. You just have to be mindful of the host plants you have around. If you simply google luna moth eggs or cocoons for sale you find many different people willing to sell and ship you these insects. They're also sometimes used in elementary schools as a fun classroom pet to showcase metamorphosis. If you want the cocoons to stay dormant during the winter it's important that you make sure the insects came from natural conditions. The amount of light they received as a caterpillar dictates whether or not they are going to diapause or sleep during the colder months, and it's also important that you leave the cocoons outside. They need to stay synced to the natural temperatures and humidity of their environment. Some people put them in the fridge but if you do this the container needs to be air tight because they will 100% dry out and die otherwise. They don't require much oxygen at all while they are in this state of sleep, but if you're concerned you can open the container and give them a slight misting before putting them back in the fridge. Too much water and they will suffocate or get moldy. Also if you live in a colder climate I definitely recommend finding a vendor who lives in a similar place. You don't want souther cocoons coming out early on you.    This concludes today's episode on Luna moths! I may come to this topic again in the future when I have more time on my hands, but for now hopefully this is enough, thank you as always for listening and if you want to support the show you can rate it and leave a review! Or if you need more insects for fun content or want to further support me and the podcast you can head over to Patreon.com/insects for fun to get bonus episodes, ad free episodes, vlogs, and some new things I'll be working on as well. 

Crocodiles leave their mouths open for long periods of time, and we don't really know why. We also take a long tangent on the swiftlet nest business and what wee reptiles are cashing in themselves. Become a Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/herphighlights Merch: https://www.redbubble.com/people/herphighlights/shop Full reference list available here: http://www.herphighlights.podbean.com Main Paper References: Price C, Ezat MA, Hanzen C, Downs CT. 2022. Never smile at a crocodile: Gaping behaviour in the Nile crocodile at Ndumo Game Reserve, South Africa. Behavioural Processes 203:104772. DOI: 10.1016/j.beproc.2022.104772. Other Mentioned Papers/Studies: Quah ESH, Chong JL. 2022. Reptile predators of swiftlets (genus Aerodramus) with a focus on their impact on the swiftlet farming industry. Herpetology Notes. Wüster, W., & Tillack, F. 2023. On the importance of types and the perils of “en passant” taxonomy: a brief history of the typification of Coluber naja Linnaeus, 1758 (Serpentes: Elapidae) and its implications, with the designation of a lectotype. Zootaxa, 5346(4), 403-419. Other Links/Mentions: AmphibiaWeb. 2023. University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA. Accessed 28 Sep 2023. https://amphibiaweb.org/cgi/amphib_query?where-scientific_name=Hyperolius+tuberilinguis&rel-scientific_name=contains&include_synonymies=Yes Audio from flamelily via iNaturalist: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/152630015 Editing and Music: Podcast edited by Emmy – https://www.fiverr.com/emmyk10  Intro/outro – Treehouse by Ed Nelson Species Bi-week theme – Michael Timothy Other Music – The Passion HiFi, https://www.thepassionhifi.com

Record date: 7/12/23 Edited by: Caitlyn   Dranks No Coast Grainspotting IndiaPale Lager   Announcements and Gravel Knits Events Year Long Fiber Challenge Submission Form - New for 2023! #gkgrowmal   2023 MALs! We will continue to go head to head for the stein Stein if participate in all 4 get an entry Q1 Do something new for you - "New Year New Skills" (Jan-Mar) (april15) Q2 Expand your knowledge on a skill - "Grow Your Skills" (Apr 1-July 15) Q3 Follow a pattern from a designer you haven't tried before (July-Sept) Q4 (Oct-Dec)   Toasts (Shout Outs): CamelChops Bags https://www.camelchopsgear.co.uk/   What have you been listening to? gary_knits_gary_rides   What's Brewing (Current projects/ cast ons) Kelsi: Syrah https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/syrah-7 Tricot Designs MCL Marie-Christine Lévesque   Ship Shape Heidi Kirmaier https://www.lovecrafts.com/en-us/p/ship-shape-knitting-pattern-by-heidi-kirrmaier   SOCATOAH Socks Sarah Jordan (PA KnitWit)   Spinning!!!   Radnor from Southern Cross Fibre 4 ply on my e-spinner     Caitlyn: Fleet Feet Socks by Fatimah Hinds Yarn: Comma Chameleon Yarn Co. Hardy Sock Colorway: You're turning violet, violet! Needle: US 1½ - 2.5 mm Ravelry Link   Sea Glass Tee by Wool & Pine Needles: US 3 - 3.25 mm & US 4 - 3.5 mm MC: Victoria House Fibers Superwash Merino Yak Sock Yarn - ONYX - Superwash Merino/Yak/Nylon 70/20/10 CC: Fibernymph Dyeworks advent yarn: Linnaeus– 70/20/10 SW Merino/Yak/Nylon, Ravelry Link   Thanksgiving socks held triple? started working with the yarn I recycled from 2nd hand sweaters seems like the gauge isn't what I'm wanting so I'm going to add purple! Thanksgiving Socks by Summer Lee   Garter and Lace Market Bag https://www.ravelry.com/projects/CaitlynNLloyd/garter-and-lace-market-bag Yarn Lily Sugar'n Cream Ombres Colorway 228 Natural ombre   Sunflower Prayers Potholder by Donielle Oliver Showvay Yarn Lily Sugar'n Cream Solids & Denim https://www.ravelry.com/projects/CaitlynNLloyd/sunflower-prayers-potholder https://knittingcoachblog.com/   What's on tap (FOs) Caitlyn: Pi Hat Winter Palette Pi Mountain Tweed Merino DK 3.0 mm needle https://www.fibernymphdyeworks.com/ https://www.ravelry.com/projects/CaitlynNLloyd/pi-hat   What's Hopping (Stash Enhancements/Yarn collecting) Caitlyn: Three! I visited a yarn store in DC! https://www.loopedyarnworks.com/ Super fun! I got some needle savers and two matching skeins of Punkrock Unicorn yarn   Bridesmaid Gift Yarn from Leah Blue Heron Knittery, LLC in Decorah, IA Ella Rae Lace Merino (Fingering) Araucania -Aran superwash merino   Maddy Yarn!!! Watts Yarn form her patreon!           Topic: Christmas is coming!!!   Find us You can find us on facebook at: Gravel Knits Instagram and Untappd as: GravelKnits Our Website is: GravelKnits.com You can email us at: gravelknits@gmail.com Support us on Patreon! www.patreon.com/gravelknits Kelsi Ravelry & Instagram: BikesBrewsEwes Untappd: kelsij Caitlyn Ravelry & Instagram: CaitlynNLloyd instagram: CaitlynKnitsandBikes   Please message us to let us know what you would like us to talk about! And we would love to hear what you think about the show. If you like the podcast-please share it with a friend! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/gravelknits/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/gravelknits/support

Tay-Sachs, Greek prefixes, Order Anura, Linnaeus versus Hennig. 

Author Laura Beatty discusses her book, Looking for Theophrastus, delving into Greece, the interconnectedness of space and time, the concept of wonder, and why we should care about someone who lived 2,400 years ago.   

Linnaeus schiep orde in de biologie met zijn ingenieuze systeem van geslachtsnamen en soortnamen. En zelfs nu nog, 245 jaar na zijn dood, is de Zweedse botanicus Linnaeus de meest invloedrijke persoon op Wikipedia. Wie was deze uitgesproken en soms ijdele man?Hebben wij nog geen aflevering gemaakt over jouw favoriete bioloog? Laat het ons weten via Twitter, @nrcwetenschap.Presentatie: Laura WismansGasten: Gemma Venhuizen & Hendrik SpieringRedactie & montage: Jeanne GeerkenZie het privacybeleid op https://art19.com/privacy en de privacyverklaring van Californië op https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life, ideas and legacy of the pioneering Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus (1707 – 1778). The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau once wrote: "Tell him I know no greater man on earth". The son of a parson, Linnaeus grew up in an impoverished part of Sweden but managed to gain a place at university. He went on to transform biology by making two major innovations. He devised a simpler method of naming species and he developed a new system for classifying plants and animals, a system that became known as the Linnaean hierarchy. He was also one of the first people to grow a banana in Europe. With Staffan Muller-Wille University Lecturer in History of Life, Human and Earth Sciences at the University of Cambridge Stella Sandford Professor of Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University, London and Steve Jones Senior Research Fellow in Genetics at University College, London Producer Luke Mulhall

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the life, ideas and legacy of the pioneering Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus (1707 – 1778). The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau once wrote: "Tell him I know no greater man on earth". The son of a parson, Linnaeus grew up in an impoverished part of Sweden but managed to gain a place at university. He went on to transform biology by making two major innovations. He devised a simpler method of naming species and he developed a new system for classifying plants and animals, a system that became known as the Linnaean hierarchy. He was also one of the first people to grow a banana in Europe. With Staffan Muller-Wille University Lecturer in History of Life, Human and Earth Sciences at the University of Cambridge Stella Sandford Professor of Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University, London and Steve Jones Senior Research Fellow in Genetics at University College, London Producer Luke Mulhall

In this episode, we're working on our element of Resilience and exploring the third "Root of Resilience" known as aligning with nature. The Roots of Resilience were laid out in one of Dr. Emmons book, "The Chemistry of Calm." This root builds on our last one ("managing energy") by embracing the cycles and rhythms that are part of a much bigger system. This may seem "woo-woo," but.. well, it's not. Like all mammals and really every other living thing, we are influenced by cycles around us. A growing field of study known as chronobiology is bringing more scientific understanding to these cycles (for example: seasonal affective disorder and seasonal mood shifts). We'll talk more about this root and how increasing awareness of your connection with nature and adding some simple skills in response to this connection can support your mood, energy, and resilience in really powerful ways. Supplements Mentioned to support SAD and drops in mood during winter: TruAdapt NeuroMood Pure Pack Vitamin D (we like this October-April) Note: These product links go to our partner store at Fullscript (with an ongoing 10% discount for you + free shipping on orders over $50). You must have an account to view products and shop. Create your free account at: https://us.fullscript.com/welcome/nmh/signup Links and Sources Mentioned: NMH Resilience Quiz and Mini Course Joy Lab Program (step-by-step practices to help you build and maintain the elements of joy in your life) Joy Lab Podcast #13 (The Roots of Resilience) This episode is a broad overview of what we'll be talking about over the next 9 episodes. It's a really helpful summary! Chemistry of Calm (Dr. Emmons' book referenced in this series) The 20 Minute Break (book) Linnaeus' Flower Clock More on light therapy in our blog here. More on seasonal affective disorder and seasonal mood shifts from our blogs: Natural Approaches for Seasonal Affective Disorder and Supporting Winter Mood Does Winter Get You Down? (video) What Causes Seasonal Affective Disorder? Seasonal Affective Disorder in the Summer A Light on Seasonal Affective Disorder: Definition, Treatment, & Prevention Resilience definitions, theory, and challenges: interdisciplinary perspectives Annual Research Review: Positive adjustment to adversity -Trajectories of minimal-impact resilience and emergent resilience The Coffee Bean: A Simple Lesson to Create Positive Change (book) Effects of a 12-week endurance training program on the physiological response to psychosocial stress in men: a randomized controlled trial No man is an island: social resources, stress and mental health at mid-life How does the brain deal with cumulative stress? A review with focus on developmental stress, HPA axis function and hippocampal structure in humans Just think: The challenges of the disengaged mind (this is the study of people shocking themselves out of boredom) Emotion Suppression and Mortality Risk Over a 12-Year Follow-up Cumulative Stress and Health The Times of Our Lives: Interaction Among Different Biological Periodicities

Teachers in Denmark are using apps to audit their students' moods https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/04/17/1071137/denmark-teachers-apps-student-mood-audit-software/ A Fresh History of Lactose Intolerance https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/a-fresh-history-of-lactose-intolerance The A.I. Dilemma – March 9, 2023 https://youtu.be/xoVJKj8lcNQ Accelerating melt of ice sheets now ‘unmistakable' https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-65317469 Linnaeus https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001l291 O panóptico das delícias https://www.estadao.com.br/opiniao/eugenio-bucci/o-panoptico-das-delicias/ meu perfil no Post: https://post.news/renedepaula meu canal no Koo https://www.kooapp.com/profile/renedepaula meu mastodon: rené ... Read more

The name "chipmunk" comes from an Ojibwe word which translates literally as "one who descends trees headlong." First described by Mark Catesby in his 1743 The Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands, the chipmunk was eventually classified as Sciurus striatus by Linnaeus, meaning "striped squirrel" in Latin. The scientific name was changed to Tamias striatus, meaning "striped steward," by Johann Illiger in 1811.

Dr. Don and Professor Ben talk about the risks of eating crabs after transporting live crabs via checked luggage. Dr. Don - not risky

The HBS hosts argue for the merits of studying the history of philosophy.In a recent essay, Hanno Sauer argued against the importance, for philosophy, of the history of philosophy. In summary, he presented a positivistic, scientistic model of philosophy, namely, that like physics, biology, and chemistry, philosophy has actually “made progress” on many of the issues that philosophy struggled with from Thales until relatively recently. Because of this progress, Sauer's argument goes, we do not need to study the history of philosophy. The model of the sciences shows why this is the case: in biology courses, no one is struggling with Aristotle, Linnaeus, or Mendel. In chemistry, no one pays attention to the history of alchemy, the theory of phlogiston, or the ether. In physics, no student learns Aristotle's theory of why bodies “fall,” or the medieval notion of “impetus.” Is Sauer right that philosophy has similarly progressed? Should philosophy leave its history to the historians? Then, beyond Sauer, we can add that the history of philosophy is a history of both dead white guys and the history of the victors. If the history of philosophy is ethno-centric, and therefore racist, if it is phallo-centric and therefore patriarchal, why should philosophy continue to engage it? Or is there something philosophically relevant about the history of philosophy? Full episode notes available at this link:http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-79-the-history-of-philosophy-------------------If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe and submit a rating/review! Follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast, on Facebook, and subscribe to our YouTube channel!You can also help keep this podcast going by supporting us financially at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions. 

Are animals a human invention? What is a lama like? Do plants have sex? Was Amelia Earhart eaten by crabs? These are just some of the questions posed by Shahidha Bari and addressed by her guests Katherine Rundell, Dan Taylor, Helen Cowie and Stella Sandford, as they trace the history of human conceptualisations of animals and the natural world. From the Medieval tendency to draw moral lessons from animals, to Linnaeus' attempts to organise them into taxonomies, via Darwin's abolition of the distinction between humans and animals, to the sense of wonder at the natural world needed to orient us towards tackling ecological crises. Plus, the growing area of plant philosophy and how it overturns the history of western metaphysics. Producer: Luke Mulhall

It's fun to have favorite plants to look for on excursions into the hills. Looking back at photos and my notes, we have been checking on this particular population of Lemmon's milkweed for a few years. I'm guessing that as long as we're in the area, we'll continue to stop by for a visit. And yes, I did grab a couple seed pods (follicles) from a plant. Stay tuned. Botanical names of plants are usually followed by the name of who named it…the author citation. The genus Asclepias is followed by an L. That's Linnaeus. And if one looked through the numerous species names (200 plus), after tuberosa you see the citation L. Someone sent Linnaeus a dry specimen of a North American milkweed and Carl named it. So he is cited for both the genus Asclepias and the species tuberosa. But listen, it was the famous American botanist of the 1800s, Asa Gray that honored the husband wife botanists John and Sara Lemmon with the name lemmonii, for the species jabbered about in this episode, Asclepias lemmonii. Yay! The photos are mine.

There are a dozen species of Melampodium and I wonder which one Linnaeus was looking at when he honored  Melampus with the genus name. And I wonder when the genus name started being misinterpreted to mean blackfoot and not honoring the mythological soothsayer.  The genus translated as blackfoot sure had (and has) a lot of folks scratching their heads about the meaning. “What or where is the blackfoot on this plant?” But listen, the neat thing I learned about Melampus, besides him being a “legendary soothsayer” was that he was “reputed to understand the speech of all creatures.” My kind of guy. Er…god. This was a fun discovery for me in the old paperback booklet of plant names. If you are a total plant geek and interested in plants named from Greco-Roman mythology (not me, of course), the book Gods and Goddesses in the Garden by Peter Bernhardt is a fun read and though Melampus isn't mentioned, there are plenty other mythological characters and botany through out. Yay! The photos are mine. The little purple flower peeking through is the wonderful Allionia.

This week Erica sits down with researcher Deborah Vicari to discuss her recent publication regarding the discovery of hybridization between belugas and narwhals using geometric morphometrics on museum specimens. Deborah and her colleagues were able to determine Narlugas do exists by studying their skulls. Source: Skull ecomorphological variation of narwhals (Monodon monoceros, Linnaeus 1758) and belugas (Delphinapterus leucas, Pallas 1776) reveals phenotype of their hybrids

Listener Lara wrote into the Naked Scientists to ask "Is there a biological benefit for cats and dogs to bury their faeces? Can it help plants grow similar to horse manure?" Otis Kingsman spoke to the primary medical care director of the veterinary medicine company Linnaeus, Dr Simon Hayes, about this question on the fascinating function of faeces... Like this podcast? Please help us by supporting the Naked Scientists

What if the Roman Empire had experienced an Industrial Revolution? That's the compelling hook of Helen Dale's two-part novel, Kingdom of the Wicked: Rules and Order. Drawing on economics and legal history, Helen's story follows the arrest and trial of charismatic holy man Yeshua Ben Yusuf in the first century — but one with television, flying machines, cars, and genetic modification.In this episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I dive into the fascinating world-building of Kingdom of the Wicked with Helen. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.James Pethokoukis: Your Kingdom of the Wicked books raise such an interesting question: What would have happened if Jesus had emerged in a Roman Empire that had gone through an industrial revolution? What led you to ask this question and to pursue that answer through these books?Helen Dale: There is an essay in the back of book one, which is basically a set of notes about what I brought to the book when I was thinking. And that has been published elsewhere by the Cato Institute. I go into these questions. But the main one, the one that really occurred to me, was that I thought, what would happen if Jesus emerged in a modern society now, rather than the historic society he emerged in? I didn't think it would turn into something hippy-dippy like Jesus of Montreal. I thought it would turn into Waco or to the Peoples Temple.And that wasn't necessarily a function of the leader of the group being a bad person. Clearly Jim Jones was a very bad person, but the Waco story is actually much more complex and much messier and involves a militarized police force and tanks attacking the buildings and all of this kind of thing. But whatever happened with it, it was going to go badly and it was going to end in violence and there would be a showdown and a confrontation. And it would also take on, I thought — I didn't say this in the essay, but I thought at the time — it would take on a very American cast, because that is the way new religious movements tend to blow up or collapse in the United States.And so I was thinking this idea, through my head, “I would like to do a retelling of the Jesus story, but how do I do it? So it doesn't become naff and doesn't work?” And so what I decided to do was rather than bring Jesus forward and put him now, I would put us back to the time of Jesus — but take our technology and our knowledge, but always mediated by the fact that Roman civilization was different from modern civilization. Not in the sense of, you know, human beings have changed, all that kind of thing. We're all still the same primates that we have been for a couple of hundred thousand years or even longer. But in the sense that their underlying moral values and beliefs about the way the world should work were different, which I thought would have technological effects. The big technological effect in Kingdom of the Wicked is they're much better at the biosciences and the animal sciences. They're much weaker at communications. Our society has put all its effort into [communication]. Their society is much more likely to put it into medicine.To give you an idea: the use of opioids to relieve the pain of childbirth is Roman. And it was rediscovered by James Young Simpson at The University of Edinburgh. And he very famously used the formula of one of the Roman medical writers. So I made a very deliberate decision: This is a society that has not pursued technological advancement in the same way as us. It's also why their motor vehicles look like the Soviet-era ones with rotary engines. It's why their big aircraft are kind of like Antonovs, the big Ukrainian aircraft that we've all been reading about since the war has started in Ukraine. So, in some respects, there are bits of their culture that look more Soviet, or at least Britain in the 1950s. You know, sort of Clement Attlee's quite centralized, postwar settlement: health service, public good, kind of Soviet-style. Soft Soviet; it's not the nasty Stalinist sort, but like late-Soviet, so kind of Brezhnev and the last part of Khrushchev. A few people did say that. They were like, “Your military parades, they look like the Soviet Union.” Yes. That was deliberate. The effort has gone to medicine.It's an amazing bit of world-building. I was sort of astonished by the depth and the scale of it. Is this a genre that you had an interest in previously? Are there other works that you took inspiration from?There's a particular writer of speculative fiction I admire greatly. His name is S.M. Stirling, and he wrote a series of books. I haven't read every book he wrote, but he wrote a series of books called the Draka series. And it's speculative fiction. Once again, based on a point of departure where the colonists who finished up in South Africa finished up using the resources of South Africa, but for a range of reasons he sets out very carefully in his books, they avoid the resource curse, the classic economist's resource curse. And so certainly in terms of a popular writer, he was the one that I read and thought, “If I can do this as well as him, I will be very pleased.”I probably didn't read as much science fiction as most people would in high school, unless it was a literary author like Margaret Atwood or George Orwell. I just find bad writing rebarbative, and a lot of science fiction struggles with bad writing. So this is the problem, of course, that Douglas Adams famously identified. And one of the reasons why he wrote the Hitchhiker's books was to show that you could combine science fiction with good writing.In all good works of speculative fiction of the alt-history variant, there's an interesting jumping-off point. I would imagine you had a real “Eureka!” moment when you figured out what your jumping-off point would be to make this all plausible. Tell me about that.Well, yes. I did. Once I realized that points of departure hugely mattered, I then went and read people like Philip K. Dick's Man in the High Castle. The point of departure for him is the assassination of Roosevelt. I went and read SS-GB [by] Len Deighton, a great British spycraft writer but also a writer of speculative fiction. And in that case, Britain loses the Battle of Britain and Operation Sea Lion, the putative land invasion of the UK, is successful. And I really started to think about this and I'm going, "Okay, how are you going to do this point of departure? And how are you going to deal with certain economic issues?"I'm not an economist, but I used to practice in corporate finance so I've got the sort of numerical appreciation for economics. I can read an economics paper that's very math heavy because that's my skill based on working in corporate finance. And I knew, from corporate finance and from corporate law, that there are certain things that you just can't do, you can't achieve in terms of economic progress, unless you abolish slavery, basically. Very, very basic stuff like human labor power never loses its comparative advantage if you have just a market flooded with slaves. So you can have lots of good science technology, and an excellent legal system like the Romans did. And they reached that point economists talk about of takeoff, and it just never happens. Just, they miss. It doesn't quite happen.And in a number of civilizations, this has happened. It's happened with the Song dynasty in China. Steve Davies has written a lot about the Song dynasty, and they went through the same thing. They just get to that takeoff point and then just … fizzled out. And in China, it was to do with serfdom, basically. These are things that are very destructive to economic progress. So you have to come up with a society that decides that slavery is really shitty. And the only way to do that is for them to get hooked on the idea of using a substitute for human labor power. And that means I have to push technological innovation back to the middle republic.So what I've done for my point of departure is at the Siege of Syracuse [in 213-212 B.C.]. I have Archimedes surviving instead of being killed. He was actually doing mathematical doodles outside his classroom, according to the various records of Roman writers, and he was killed by some rampaging Roman soldier. And basically Marcellus, the general, had been told to capture Archimedes and all his students and all their kids. So you can see Operation Paperclip in the Roman mind. You can see the thinking: “Oh no, we want this fellow to be our DARPA guy.” That's just a brilliant leap. I love that.And that is the beginning of the point of departure. So you have the Romans hauling all these clever Greek scientists and their families off and taking them to Rome and basically doing a Roman version of DARPA. You know, Operation Paperclip, DARPA. You know, “Do all the science, and have complete freedom to do all the…” — because the Romans would've let them do it. I mean, this is the thing. The Romans are your classic “cashed up bogans,” as Australians call it. They had lots of money. They were willing to throw money at things like this and then really run with it.You really needed both. As you write at one point, you needed to create a kind of a “machine culture.” You sort of needed the science and innovation, but also the getting rid of slavery part of it. They really both work hand in hand.Yes. These two have to go together. I got commissioned to write a few articles in the British press, where I didn't get to mention the name of Kingdom of the Wicked or any of my novels or research for this, but where people were trying to argue that the British Empire made an enormous amount of money out of slavery. And then, as a subsidiary argument, trying to argue that that led to industrialization in the UK. … [So] I wrote a number of articles in the press just like going through why this was actually impossible. And I didn't use any fancy economic terminology or anything like that. There's just no point in it. But just explaining that, “No, no, no. This doesn't work like that. You might get individually wealthy people, like Crassus, who made a lot of his money from slavery.” (Although he also made a lot from insurance because he set up private fire brigades. That was one of the things that Crassus did: insurance premiums, because that's a Roman law invention, the concept of insurance.) And you get one of the Islamic leaders in Mali, King Musa. Same thing, slaves. And people try to argue that the entirety of their country's wealth depended on slavery. But what you get is you get individually very wealthy people, but you don't get any propagation of the wealth through the wider society, which is what industrialization produced in Britain and the Netherlands and then in Germany and then in America and elsewhere.So, yes, I had to work in the machine culture with the abolition of slavery. And the machines had to come first. If I did the abolition of slavery first, there was nothing there to feed it. One of the things that helped Britain was Somerset's case (and in Scotland, Knight and Wedderburn) saying, “The air of the air of England is too pure for a slave to breathe.” You know, that kind of thinking. But that was what I realized: It was the slavery issue. I couldn't solve the slavery issue unless I took the technological development back earlier than the period when the Roman Republic was flooded with slaves.The George Mason University economist Mark Koyama said if you had taken Adam Smith and brought him back to Rome, a lot of it would've seemed very recognizable, like a commercial, trading society. So I would assume that element was also pretty important in that world-building. You had something to work with there.Yes. I'd read some Stoic stuff because I did a classics degree, so of course that means you have to be able to read in Latin. But I'd never really taken that much of an interest in it. My interest tended to be in the literature: Virgil and Apuleius and the people who wrote novels. And then the interest in law, I always had an advantage, particularly as a Scots lawyer because Scotland is a mixed system, that I could read all the Roman sources that they were drawing on in the original. It made me a better practitioner. But my first introduction to thinking seriously about stoicism and how it relates to commerce and thinking that commerce can actually be a good and honorable thing to do is actually in Adam Smith. Not in The Wealth of Nations, but in Moral Sentiments, where Adam Smith actually goes through and quotes a lot of the Roman Stoic writers — Musonius Rufus and Epictetus and people like that — where they talk about how it's possible to have something that's quite base, which is being greedy and wanting to have a lot of money, but realizing that in order to get your lot of money or to do really well for yourself, you actually have to be quite a decent person and not a s**t.And there were certain things that the Romans had applied this thinking to, like the samian with that beautiful red ceramic that you see, and it's uniform all through the Roman Empire because they were manufacturing it on a factory basis. And when you come across the factories, they look like these long, narrow buildings with high, well-lit windows. And you're just sort of sitting there going, “My goodness, somebody dumped Manchester in Italy.” This kind of thing. And so my introduction to that kind of Stoic thinking was actually via Adam Smith. And then I went back and read the material in the original and realized where Adam Smith was getting those arguments from. And that's when I thought, “Ah, right. Okay, now I've got my abolitionists.”This is, in large part, a book about law. So you had to create a believable legal system that did not exist, unlike, perhaps, the commercial nature of Rome. So how did you begin to work this from the ground up?All the substantive law used in the book is Roman, written by actual Roman jurists. But to be fair, this is not hard to do. This is a proper legal system. There are only two great law-giving civilizations in human history. The Romans were one of them; the English were the other. And so what I had to do was take substantive Roman law, use my knowledge of practicing in a mixed system that did resemble the ancient Roman system — so I used Scotland, where I'd lived and worked — and then [put] elements back into it that existed in antiquity that still exists in, say, France but are very foreign, particularly to common lawyers.I had lawyer friends who read both novels because obviously it appeals. “You have a courtroom drama?” A courtroom drama appeals to lawyers. These are the kind of books, particularly if it's written by another lawyer. So you do things like get the laws of evidence right and stuff like that. I know there are lawyers who cannot watch The Wire, for example, because it gets the laws of evidence (in the US, in this case) wrong. And they just finish up throwing shoes at the television because they get really annoyed about getting it wrong.What I did was I took great care to get the laws of evidence right, and to make sure that I didn't use common law rules of evidence. For example, the Romans didn't have a rule against hearsay. So you'll notice that there's all this hearsay in the trial. But you'll also notice a mechanism. Pilate's very good at sorting out what's just gossip and what is likely to have substantive truth to it. So that's a classic borrowing from Roman law, because they didn't have the rule against hearsay. That's a common law rule. I also use corroboration a lot. Corroboration is very important in Roman law, and it's also very important in Scots law. And it's basically a two-witness rule.And I did things, once again, to show the sort of cultural differences between the two great legal systems. Cornelius, the Roman equivalent of the principal crown prosecutor. Cornelius is that character, and he's obsessed with getting a confession. Obsessed. And that is deeply Roman. The Roman lawyers going back to antiquity called a confession the “Queen of Proofs.” And of course, if confessions are just the most wonderful thing, then it's just so tempting to beat the snot out of the accused and get your bloody confession. Job done. The topic of the Industrial Revolution has been a frequent one in my writings and podcasts. And one big difference between our Industrial Revolution and the one you posit in the book is that there was a lot of competition in Europe. You had a lot of countries, and there was an incentive to permit disruptive innovation — where in the past, the proponents of the status quo had the advantage. But at some point countries realized, “Oh, both for commerce and military reasons, we need to become more technologically advanced. So we're going to allow inventors and entrepreneurs to come up with new ideas, even if it does alter that status quo.” But that's not the case with Rome. It was a powerful empire that I don't think really had any competitors, both in the real world and in your book.That and the chattel slavery is probably why it didn't finish up having an industrial revolution. And it's one of the reasons why I had to locate the innovation, it had to be in the military first, because the military was so intensely respected in Roman society. If you'd have got the Roman military leadership coming up with, say, gunpowder or explosives or that kind of thing, the response from everybody else would've been, “Good. We win. This is a good thing.” It had to come from the military, which is why you get that slightly Soviet look to it. There is a reason for that. The society is more prosperous because it's a free-market society. The Romans were a free-market society. All their laws were all sort of trade oriented, like English law. So that's one of those things where the two societies were just really similar. But in terms of technological innovation, I had to locate it in the army. It had to be the armed forces first.In your world, are there entrepreneurs? What does the business world look like?Well, I do try to show you people who are very commercially minded and very economically oriented. You've got the character of Pilate, the real historical figure, who is a traditional Tory lawyer, who has come up through all the traditional Toryism and his family's on the land and so on and so forth. So he's a Tory. But Linnaeus, who he went to law school with, who is the defense counsel for the Jesus character, Yeshua Ben Yusuf, is a Whig. And his mother was a freed slave, and his family are in business in commerce. They haven't bought the land.A lot of these books finished up on the cutting room floor, the world-building. And there is a piece that was published in a book called Shapers of Worlds: Volume II, which is a science-fiction anthology edited by a Canadian science-fiction author called Ed Willett. And one of the pieces that finished up on the cutting room floor and went into Shapers of Worlds is a description of Linnaeus's family background, which unfortunately was removed. You get Pilate's, but you don't get Linnaeus's. And Linnaeus's family background, his dad's the factory owner. The factory making cloth. I was annoyed with my publisher when they said, “This piece has to go,” and I did one of those snotty, foot-stamping, awful things. And so I was delighted when this Canadian publisher came to me and said, “Oh, can we have a piece of your writing for a science-fiction anthology?” And I thought, “Oh good. I get to publish the Linnaeus's dad story in Shapers of Worlds.”And I actually based Linnaeus's dad — the angel as he's referred to, Angelus, in the Kingdom of the Wicked books, and his personality is brought out very strongly — I actually based him on John Rylands. Manchester's John Rylands, the man who gave his name to the Rylands Library in Manchester. He was meant to be the portrait of the entrepreneurial, Manchester industrialist. And to this day, authors always have regrets, you don't always get to win the argument with your publisher or your editor, I am sorry that that background, that world-building was taken out of Kingdom of the Wicked and finished up having to be published elsewhere in an anthology. Because it provided that entrepreneurial story that you're talking about: the factory owner who is the self-made man, who endows libraries and technical schools, and trains apprentices, and has that sort of innovative quality that is described so beautifully in Matt Ridley's book, How Innovation Works, which is full of people like that. And this book as well, I've just bought: I've just bought Arts and Minds, which is about the Royal Society of Arts. So this is one of those authorial regrets: that the entrepreneur character wasn't properly fleshed out in the two published books, Kingdom of the Wicked book one and book two. And you have to get Shapers of Worlds if you want to find out about Linnaeus's industrialist dad.Is this a world you'd want to live in?Not for me, no. I mean, I'm a classically trained lawyer. So classics first, then law. And I made it a society that works. You know, I don't write dystopias. I have a great deal of admiration for Margaret Atwood and George Orwell, who are the two greatest writers of dystopias, in my view, in contemporary, and not just contemporary fiction, probably going back over a couple of hundred years. Those two have really got it, when it comes to this vision of horror. You know, the boot stamping on the human face forever. I greatly admire their skill, but those are not the books I write. So the society I wrote about in Kingdom of the Wicked is a society that works.But one of the things I deliberately did with the Yeshua Ben Yusuf character and what were his early Christian followers, and the reason I've taken so much time to flesh them out as real characters and believable people [is] because the values that Christianity has given to the West were often absent in the Roman world. They just didn't think that way. They thought about things differently. Now some of those Christian values were pretty horrible. It's fairly clear that the Romans were right about homosexuality and abortion, and the Christians were wrong. That kind of thing. That's where they were more liberal. But, you will have noticed, I don't turn the book into Gattaca. I try to keep this in the background because obviously someone else has written Gattaca. It's an excellent film. It's very thought provoking. I didn't want to do that again. It's kept in the background, but it is obvious — you don't even really need to read between the lines — that this is a society that engages in eugenics. You notice that all the Roman families have three children or two children, and there's always a mix of sexes. You never have all boys or all girls. You know what they're doing. They're doing sex-selective abortions, like upper-class Indians and Chinese people do now. You've now dealt with the problem of not enough girls among those posh people, but they still want a mixture of the two. You notice that the Romans have got irritatingly perfect teeth and their health is all very good. And people mock Cyler, one of the characters, because his teeth haven't been fixed. He's got what in Britain get called NHS teeth. He hasn't got straightened teeth, because he genuinely comes from a really, really poor background. I have put that in there deliberately to foil those values off each other, to try to show what a world would look like where there are certain values that will just never come to the fore.And as you mentioned, industry: how those values also might influence which areas technology might focus on, which I think is a great point.I did that quite deliberately. There is a scene in the first book in Kingdom of the Wicked where Linnaeus — who's the Whig, the nice Whig, the lovely Whig who believes in civil rights and justice and starts sounding awfully Martin Luther King-ish at various points, and that kind of thing; he's the most likable form of progressive, Stoic Roman ideas — and when he encounters a child that the parents have kept alive, a disabled child, which in his society would just be put down at birth like Peter Singer, they have Peter Singer laws, he's horrified. And he doesn't even know if it's human.I actually wrote a piece about this couple of years ago for Law & Liberty, for Liberty Fund. I did find that people wanted to live in this sort of society. And I just sort of thought, “Hmm, there are a lot more people out there who clearly agree with things like eugenics, Peter Singer laws, a society that has absolutely no welfare state. None.” There are people who clearly find that kind of society attractive. And also the authoritarianism, the Soviet-style veneration of the military. A lot of people clearly quite like that. And clearly like that it's a very orderly society where there are lots of rules and everybody knows where they stand. But even when the state is really, really very powerful.I deliberately put a scene in there, for example, where Pilate's expectorating about compulsory vaccinations — because he's a Roman and he thinks compulsory vaccinations save lives and he doesn't give a s**t about your bodily integrity. I did try to leave lots of Easter eggs, to use a gaming expression, in there to make it clear that this is a society that's a bit Gattaca-ish. I did that for a reason.I don't know if there's a sequel in mind, but do you think that this world eventually sort of Christianizes? And if this is what the world looks like 2000 years ago, what would that world look like today?I haven't thought of the answer to the first one. I must admit. I don't really know the answer to that. But in the second one, I did discuss this in quite a bit of detail with my then partner. And she said, “I honestly think that with that sort of aggressiveness and militarism, they will finish up conquering the planet. And then it'll start looking like a not-nice version of Star Trek. It won't be the Federation. It will be much more likely to be Khan and the Klingons and they'll start looking really, really Klingon basically.” That was her comment at the time.Like a more militaristic version of Star Trek.Yeah. But sort of very militarized and not the Prime Directive or any of that. Obviously Star Trek is very much an American conception of Americans in space. My Romans in space would look much more like the Centauri out of Babylon 5 or the Klingons in Star Trek. They would be much more aggressive and they'd be a lot more ambiguous…I don't know how much of a Star Trek fan you are, but of course there's the mirror universe, which kind of looks like that. We have the evil Kirk and the evil Spock. There's still advance, but there's like a Praetorian Guard for the captain and…All of that. Yes. I hadn't really thought about the first question, but the second question I thought, “Yeah, if this persists into the future, imagining a hypothetical future, then I think you are going to be dealing with people who are really, really quite scary.”Apparently you're not working on a sequel to this book, but what are you working on? Another book?Yes. I'm actually being pursued at the moment by a British publisher, who I won't drop into it because otherwise, if I say the name, then I will never, never be forgiven. And then they will insist on me writing a book. I'm never going to be the world's most super productive novelist. I think that I may finish up in my life writing maybe another two. I look at Stephen King. That man writes a door stopper of a book every time he sits down to have a hot meal. Incredible. How does he do it? I'm not that person.Helen, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.Thank you very much for having me. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe

Mary Mary, Quite Contrary , How does your Garden Grow?Or more importantly what grows in it, is it geometric or naturalistic, and who's doing the spade work?Gardens in 18th century America run the gamut from pure survival to combining pleasure and purpose, to being show pieces entirely - Just like the Dowager Lady Grantham'sMost Important (and very readable) Book for this Episode: Leighton, Anne. _American Gardens in the Eighteenth Century: For Use or Delight_Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976 Music Credit: Fingerlympics by Doctor TurtleShow Notes: https://thehistoryofamericanfood.blogspot.com/Email: TheHistoryofAmericanFood@gmail.com Twitter: @THoAFoodInstagram: @THoAFood

The eastern chipmunk (Tamias striatus) is a chipmunk species found in eastern North America. It is the only living member of the chipmunk subgenus Tamias, sometimes recognized as a different genus. The name "chipmunk" comes from an Ojibwe word which translates literally as "one who descends trees headlong." First described by Mark Catesby in his 1743 The Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands, the chipmunk was eventually classified as Sciurus striatus by Linnaeus, meaning "striped squirrel" in Latin.

Here's something we hear all the time: if only more people knew more about environmental problems, then they would certainly act in some ecologically beneficial way. But the problem is, it's not true. We're now deluged with data about the climate crisis; and yet, this abundance of available environmental information has not led to an abundance of environmental action.This deficit model of climate communication is flawed, even though scientists, environmentalists, and other proponents of climate action continue to speak and act as if people would do more if they just knew more about the climate crisis and understood the science of climate change.Heather Houser writes about environmental ideas and themes in art, literature, culture, and the humanities. Her work blossoms with keen insights about the importance of culture in confronting ecological crisis.Heather is Professor of English at The University of Texas at Austin. I met her many years ago in Austin, when I was developing a film about dance and environmental justice. She is both a dancer and an environmental humanities scholar.Our conversation explores climate information overload, the idea of what she calls eco-sickness in literature, the thorny topic of human population size, and whether artists should reject or rework artistic tools of the past that might be tainted by colonialism, racism, or other forms of oppression.You can listen on Substack, Apple Podcasts, and other podcast platforms.Please rate, review, and share to help us spread the word!Heather HouserHeather Houser, Ph.D, is Professor of English at The University of Texas at Austin, and the author of two brilliant books: Infowhelm: Environmental Art & Literature in an Age of Data (2020), and Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect (2014), which won the 2015 Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Book Prize and was shortlisted for the 2014 British Society for Literature and Science Book Prize. She is also a co-founder of Planet Texas 2050, UT Austin's climate resilience-focused research challenge, and has led the following initiatives for the environmental humanities: 2015-16 Texas Institute for Literary & Textual Studies, Environmental Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin, and Texas Ecocritics Network.Quotation Read by Heather Houser“It's astounding the first time you realize that a stranger has a body - the realization that he has a body makes him a stranger. It means that you have a body, too. You will live with this forever, and it will spell out the language of your life.”- James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could TalkRecommended Readings & MediaIntroJohn FiegeHere's something we hear all the time: if only more people knew more about environmental problems, then they would certainly act in some ecologically beneficial way. But the problem is, it's not true. We're now deluged with data about the climate crisis; and yet, this abundance of available environmental information has not led to an abundance of environmental action.This deficit model of climate communication is flawed, even though scientists, environmentalists, and other proponents of climate action continue to speak and act as if people would do more if they just knew more about the climate crisis and understood the science of climate change.Heather Houser writes about environmental ideas and themes in art, literature, culture, and the humanities. Her work blossoms with keen insights about the importance of culture in confronting ecological crisis.Heather HouserI mean, especially if you are an environmentalist, you pay attention to these issues. But really, even if you're, you know, you're not, there's a lot just so much like information coming at us about, say, the percentage of extinct mammals, right, how many mammal species are extinct, or bird species are extinct? All the data about climate crisis, whether it's like warming temperatures, ocean acidification, you know, how much of the ice sheet has melted? You know, it's all all this data is like, how do you make sense of that? Yeah. What do you do with that? I mean, what do you do with that, not only as a way to understand the phenomena at maybe, you know, objective or straightforward level. But what do you do with that emotionally if you're an artist or communicator.John FiegeI'm John Fiege, and this is Chrysalis.Heather Houser is Professor of English at The University of Texas at Austin. I met her many years ago in Austin, when I was developing a film about dance and environmental justice. Heather is both a dancer and an environmental humanities scholar.Our conversation explores climate information overload, the idea of what she calls eco-sickness in literature, the thorny topic of human population size, and whether artists should reject or rework artistic tools of the past that might be tainted by colonialism, racism, or other forms of oppression.Here is Heather Houser.---ConversationJohn FiegeSo, I'd like to start with an essay you're working on about your childhood, which you shared with me. In this piece, you talk about the instability of your upbringing - from your parents' rocky marriage to their financial woes. And the constant moves that resulted. You moved about thirteen times in your childhood, largely around the Poconos region in Pennsylvania, I think, and to other states as well. In the midst of that instability and constant "shifting ground" as you call it, you found a sense of stability, grounding and joy in dance. You write:“At this age I hadn't yet met the idea of the plateau or of the precipitous fall. This was the time for the joy of movement, the satisfactions of devotion, and a belief that the alchemy of body, space, music and time can make you other than who you are and where you came from.”I love this idea of seeing your childhood and who you became through this lens of dance. Can you talk more about where you come from and maybe what your relationship to the rest of nature was as a child? And how this, this alchemy of body, space, music, and time led to your interests in the environment?Heather HouserYeah, thank you. So I was born in the Poconos region of Pennsylvania, which is in the North East part of the state right along the New Jersey border. And if you know it at all, you likely know it as a tourist destination for urbanites, you know. When - this was, I should say I was born there in 1979 and grew up there with one one gap when I lived in Massachusetts, but I lived there from 1979 to 1997.I think things have changed, but back then, it was - certainly there were a lot of resorts, honeymoon destinations, summer camps, so a large tourist influx from New York and New Jersey and Philadelphia. But then there were the locals like myself, so it was a place of abundant nature, I would say. You know, the Appalachian Trail ended and started there. Lots of lakes. It's a hardwood forest area, lots of ponds and creeks, or, as I say, in that essay, "cricks" my grammy and pappy said. I didn't pick that up, but that's what parts of my family called creeks.But that was actually not my family's orientation. So I lived in this place with so many things I now wish were right outside my door. And, of course, Austin, TX has its own beautiful environments, but, I honestly did none of that. There was one swimming hole we would go to called the 40-foot. It was a 40-foot jump, which I did not do because I was afraid of heights, but I don't remember swimming in the lakes or the "cricks" aside from that. We never went on hikes, except for maybe, you know, walks in the woods near our house (or houses, since there were many of them).So that relationship that I now have, like the appreciation and really the need to be outside is, is something that developed really in my college years when I lived in Portland, Oregon.  When I think about dance and the environment, personally - and my relationship to it - is about movement. Being able to move in space, I think is one of the continuites from my dance persona to my like, environmental appreciation. And even though those are completely divorced - or separate, just didn't really exist when I was a kid - I feel that continuity now for sure.John FiegeAnd you know when you were in the Poconos area as a child. Did you have a, did you have a sense of people from the cities coming there as like a location of nature and looking for this kind of pristine wilderness experience, did you have a sense of that?Heather HouserOh absolutely, and you know, I mean, this is - I was very hard on the place when I lived there. I mean, I really wanted out. I went almost as far as you could go within the continental United States when I went to college. Kind of foolishly to go to a private liberal arts college across the country. But it worked out OK. But I did not - I mean, I definitely knew that people were coming to the Poconos for that experience of nature, and wilderness. And you would, quite honestly - I interacted a lot with tourists because I worked at an ice cream shop - one of those time-honored things you do on the summer vacation is going to the ice-cream shop.John FiegeHow iconic.Heather HouserBut you know, I was there - not stuck there, I wouldn't say that. Because I did like that job and my bosses and coworkers so I didn't feel stuck, but certainly different experience. And so I had a lot of contact with tourists that way, but really never befriended any tourists or had deep interactions with them, but it was clear that was a big part of the experience, was something so drastically different from, say, NYC or Philadelphia. And I mean we used to kind of, you know, make fun of or just roll our eyes at tourists, sort of fascinated by the so-called "wildlife" that for us was much more domesticated.You know, like, certainly we had wildlife, we had bears that would come up. We lived in pretty remote - even within the Poconos - pretty remote parts, 'cause there is like a downtown area that's a little bit denser. But we always lived outside of that. And we had bears that would walk up our driveway, and we had, we had turkeys like a turkey mound that they just hung out on, and these sorts of things. So there was some, there were some animals that were, maybe even felt a little bit wilder even to us.But yeah, so we would just find it amusing that tourists would find things like foxes or you know, deer, like really, fascinating, and even frightening, right? Like these things that you're not used to seeing are often scary. Even if there isn't much reason to be afraid of them.You know, I wasn't taking as much advantage of what surrounded me as I would at this point in my life, and so in some sense, I think the people who are coming in maybe appreciated it more than I did because it was such a stark difference from their day-to-day reality. But of course, like most tourist destinations, it had it's very - pretty detrimental effects, right? All that tourism.John FiegeRight, the development and the trash and the traffic.Heather HouserYeah, traffic and all of that, yeah.John FiegeWell, let's fast forward to what you're doing now. So, what are the environmental humanities, and how did you come to focus your work within that field?Heather HouserYeah, so the environmental humanities. I mean, it really encompasses a cluster of academic disciplines - like history and literary studies and religious studies and anthropology. Often it can capture the arts too, creative arts, but really (that academic cluster aside), it's it's really the - the impetus behind the environmental humanities is, a recognition that we can't understand human relationships to the more-than-human (or "nature," as we you know, typically call it), we really can't understand that through scientific or policy or economic approaches alone. That we need to also understand the cultural aspects of that. We need to understand the artistic aspects of human relationships to nature.So, that's one dimension of that. Like, if we're going to understand human relationships to nature, which vary over time and across cultures, we really can't just rely on some quantitative analyses. But another dimension, I think, looking forward, is if - thinking especially of environmental issues, challenges disasters. We also need those cultural, historical, and artistic understandings if we are going to really address these challenges, especially in an equitable manner. That - you know thinking about the history of, for example, climate policy you know? Or thinking about the history of colonialism when we're thinking about how to respond to climate crisis today, you know, we need those historical dimensions if we're going to move people.And this "we" is variable, right? Like it's not that there's a uniform across the environmental humanities, there's certainly not a uniform outcome that people have in mind. But if you're thinking about responses to say climate crisis or extinction, whatever it might be, that you need to also marshal all that cultural representation, all that artistic expression, bring to the conversation. Because that's really what moves people, it's what helps people imagine other futures, and also to reflect on what brought us to the present. So it's really, you know, historical, cultural, and artistic and expressive - and within the cultural I also think of, you know, spiritual and religious dimensions of environmental relation and responses.John FiegeRight.Heather HouserYou asked me how I came to this - I was an English major as an undergraduate, and then took some time not in school. But when I went back to graduate school, I didn't know that that would be a focus. I actually thought, I had lived in Portland Oregon, and living there had become much more attuned to environmentalism, largely of an urban nature, but not necessarily exclusively. And also just had become - became much more of an outdoors person, camping, backpacking, hiking. All of those things.But I thought that was a part of my personal and political life and not part of my academic or intellectual life, right? But midway or so through my graduate - time in Graduate School - you know, you need to define your dissertation. And I really had two paths I was considering. And one was just was finding a way to merge my personal interest in commitments to environmentalism with my academic life, and I wasn't sure I wanted to do that. Actually, I didn't have coursework in that area, but there was my advisor in a professor, Ursula Heiser, she's really a one of the most prominent people in the field of environmental humanities. So she was she was at Stanford, where I went to grad school. So I certainly had someone to guide me, which she did, amazingly. But yeah, it was, it was a question for me of whether to keep certain spheres of my life separate or to try to bring them together, and I decided to bring them together.John FiegeAnd was that a good decision, in retrospect?Heather HouserI made that decision because I thought that could carry me through some of those hard and dark times of being a graduate student, like to sort of think about my commitments beyond the academic sphere. But it has - it is challenging, in that it can feel like everything is a part of everything, and you know, activism or serving on advisory groups or whatever it might be outside of the academic world, and suddenly it's not at all separate, right? So, I don't know. I think it served me well. But there are weeks and days where it can feel, yeah, like there is no "outside".John FiegeWell, I can feel the passion of it in how you write, and what you write, so I think that's, you know, that's definitely the positive side of it. So, your first book is called Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction, so can you tell me - what is "ecosickness"?Heather HouserSo that idea is - it's really capturing how often, environmental degradation or change and bodily damage, or change - how often those things go together. There were a number of writers I was noticing, and I talk about - Leslie Marmon Silko and Richard Powers, David Foster Wallace, among others - in their writing, you know, they are taking stock of environmental damage, in most cases in the literature that I was examining. And at the same time, they're taking account of all of the transformations to bodies that are happening in the 21st century.And you know, I think in a more scientific register or even a more maybe environmental justice register, we often think of these as "causal relationships," right? So there's a toxin that a polluting industry is releasing into the water, and people consume that. And then they experience maybe cancer or neurological change or, you know, infertility or reproductive changes. I think that causal relationship between the environment and the body is pretty prominent in our thinking of environmental health, but a lot of these authors weren't thinking so directly causally. It was more - they're interested in how we actually can conceptualize the environment, and what's happening to it, in terms of the body  - and a body that's sick rather than a healthy body.Now back in the 19th century in the US, with some of the white male proto- or early environmentalists like John Muir, Henry David Thoreau. You know, that relationship between the environment and the body was also often one of health, and robustness, and, you know, getting out into nature and climbing mountains - and you know, sort of overcoming some of the challenges.But in the 21st century, or late 20th century and 21st century, certainly that still exists, but we often have an understanding of the relationship between the body and the environment through, through sickness or damage or some kind. So the book is like tracking how really, that phenomenon, that it exists, and also then how it manifests very formally, artistically in a set of novels and memoirs.John FiegeYeah, and you mentioned you mentioned Rachel Carson as well, who is one of my favorite writers. And she's known as a non-fiction writer but, it made me think of the opening of Silent Spring, which is kind of written like fiction. I think even referred to it that way. And so I wanted to read just a quick section of that, 'cause I thought maybe - I would be curious to hear how you relate this to this idea of ecosickness. So this is from the opening chapter in Silent Spring called the Fable of Tomorrow. So Rachel Carson writes:“There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example, where had they gone? Many people spoke of them, puzzled and disturbed. The feeding stations in the backyards were deserted. The few birds seen anywhere where moribund. They trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices.”So how does this, how does this passage in this book relate to this larger body of ecosickness literature? You know, in in this example, there's there's sickness in the body of the bird, not body of human, but later in the book she talks about it in the body of humans.Heather HouserWell, Rachel Carson is just an amazing writer. I mean, she's certainly probably most popularly known for Silent Spring, but her writings on the ocean are just amazing. And she calls that the fable for reason, so she's already marking it as some you know, somewhat fictional. But of course, fables always point us to deeper truths.John FiegeRight.Heather HouserSo, and there's been - I mean, there's been billions of words written about that opening, I don't really write about that opening, but Carson is really inspirational to me in that project of Ecosickness, but also she's really inspirational for thinking about this relationship between the environment, and the body, through through illness, through rapid transformations that were unforeseen. But that - I mean, there's no causality in that opening, right? The rest of the book is explaining the mechanisms of that, and the sources of the death and disruption of bird populations, among other animals, including humans. But in that opening, right, it's this more evocative feeling of, of the consequences, like there's something out of joint here, right? There's no more birdsong. We don't, maybe yet know why, but we know that that's a problem.And I mean, I think one of the reasons that so important for thinking about Ecosickness, or you know, environmental health outside of strict causalities. That is, like something that you can conclusively prove through empirical studies, scientific research data, all of that. I think it's important to think outside of those, because it takes a long time - and sometimes it's even impossible - to pin down causalities and that feels really comforting like, especially when you want redress, you want blame, you want compensation, you want quick solutions.But even before you get there, like to feel that something is wrong and not to ignore it, like that's something that that opening I think really does powerfully, as, as an entree to the rest of the book. And like certainly does for my project of Ecosickness. Like these authors aren't trying to directly explain how, say, depression results from a toxin. It's more thinking about, you know, a toxic environment more broadly and how they coexist and have similar mechanisms and manifestations.John FiegeYeah, well, you know Rachel Carson fits into the next thing I want to talk to you about as well. You know, I think one thing that makes her so powerful is she's, she's a scientist who really - who's been trained as a scientist, really knows the science, and she's a brilliant writer - which is a really rare combination. And I love what you say in the opening of your book about the importance of literary and humanistic knowledge. You talk about how science illiteracy is no longer an option for humanists. But at the same time, you flip that to argue that narrative illiteracy is no longer an option for scientists, or anyone who wants to confront environmental issues. Can you talk about what you mean here?Heather HouserYeah, so um - and that's where that that idea of complementarity comes in, right. Like meeting and sort of both sides coming to a middle more than anyone abandoning a side that is science or art and narrative. There's this amazing book that I write about in my second book, Infowhelm, called Objectivity by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, who are historians of science. But they talk about epistemic values - which I know epistemic is a jargon-y term, but basically, the values that are privileged in a knowledge enterprise, like science. And so you know, things like objectivity, things like quantification, causality, universality, things like that.So also understanding those aspects of science are, I think, part of scientific literacy. But then on the other - you know, the compliment there is when I say that narrative literacy is so important is, I think, goes back to earlier in our conversation. That - I've said this a million times, so I kind of  chuckle when I say it, like, data and facts alone are not going to, as you said earlier, "move the needle." It's really through storytelling, understanding the stories and all dimensions of the stories that move people - or don't move people - to think about and act on an issue. And that can often be thought of as science communication. But it's so much more than that, because-John FiegeIt's not a very exciting term, right?Heather HouserAnd there are people doing great work with that and using the arts for that, so I don't want to dismiss that way of thinking about things, but there's so much - communication, and the way it can be understood, I guess in in “laypersons terms” can seem like unidirectional. Like, we have this bit of information, we need to find the best way to get it out into people's ears and eyes, right.But really, I think narrative just introduces so much more complexity that - there really isn't anything unidirectional or predictable about the way stories affect people, right? So, narrative literacy is not only - it's similar to scientific literacy. It's like, “well, what are the stories already out there, and how can those be understood as providing a foundation for environmental relations?” And also, I'm also thinking about environmental futures. But then it also means understanding how narratives work, and they aren't often so predictable or-John FiegeRight.Heather HouserAs some - as one might think.John FiegeYeah, and you say you write in your book that particular tropes, metaphors, and narrative patterns carry an “affective charge” that can activate environmental care, when empirical studies alone cannot. And so if I'm reading this correctly, you're not saying that any kind of storytelling can activate environmental care, but that particular kinds of storytelling can. And I just wonder if you could talk a bit more about that, and maybe even describe some of these tropes, metaphors, and narrative patterns more specifically that you're thinking about.Heather HouserYeah, in Ecosickness, one of the things I was interested in, as I said, their affect or emotion, the way that narratives generate and represent emotions, and how that does a lot of work on its own to, to affect how people are understanding an environmental problem and reacting to it. So for example, the emotion of anxiety. This is a really powerful emotion, in environmental representation of disasters, or future disasters, or, you know, climate change in general. You know, cultivating, generating anxiety is something that a lot of you know, dystopian or apocalyptic environmental narratives will do. It makes us anxious, makes us uncomfortable, makes us uncertain. You know, anxiety is much more amorphous. Like, there might be sources for it, but it becomes this like pervasive, nebulous thing that's very hard to like, solve, or surmount.So anxiety is this emotion that I think is quite familiar from representations of environmental damage or crisis. And I look at Leslie Marmon Silko's novel Almanac of the Dead, which is a very, very large, sprawling and challenging novel. 'cause it does depict a lot of the horrors of colonialism, and oppression, and violence against indigenous peoples throughout the Americas. But this, it's a novel that really cultivates anxiety. And so I was interested in that as certainly a powerful way to help people think about problems, right? And to recognize them as problems.But then what happens to that emotion, right? Like is this an emotion - it might lead to care or to awareness, but is it an emotion you can act on? Or is it an emotion that actually shuts you down, because it is so powerful, pervasive, but also overwhelming. So I think about, you know, those. And I also think about an emotion like wonder. You know, very different. Like has a lot of positive associations with it. But you know what, what are some of the environmental understandings and actions that an emotion like wonder can produce?John FiegeAnd another emotion you discuss is optimism. And you have this wonderful discussion of the split between environmental writers and activists on this question of optimism. So does hope fuel our ability to address ecological crisis, or does hope hinder our ability to confront very daunting realities? Or do these contradictory thoughts happen all at the same time? So here's one of my favorite lines from your conclusion:“Smart grid, smart phones and smart cars won't alone won't deliver us from our dumb ways of living, so much as perpetuate them.”So can you talk a bit about this complicated, contradictory idea of optimism?Heather HouserI think we often hear it with more through the - and you said this a moment ago - through the idea of “hope” because I mean, often we conflate hope and optimism. But some people like to keep them separate. Like that optimism can be taken as an even more, like a stronger expectation that things will just work out okay no matter what. Whereas, hope is often, I think, a little more mixed. At least within environmentalist circles. But hope is this emotion that I think drives you, even if you don't know, or even if you think things will not work out okay.There's a - I think it's, well, it's an anticipatory emotion as they say, much like anxiety. Like you're sort of looking out into the future, and imagining what that future might hold. And you - I think what's, what's useful about the reason - at least I remain hopeful, even though I do not remain optimistic, I guess - is that it's something that can drive you in the present, right, even if what you look at on the other side in the future, you're not really sure that it will all work out okay, sort of in the day-to-day reminds you that there's something you care about, that you want to preserve or improve.And so I think that for me, hope is about care, regardless of the outcome. And just how it motivates people to stay engaged, to form communities around issues and to act, even if they're not certain that action is going to make any any great changes.John FiegeRight. Yeah, well within the environmental film world I hear funders and others talk all the time about the importance of hopeful narratives, and they want, they want films to go in positive directions and make people feel empowered to act, rather than hopeless or solely produce anxiety like what you were saying before.But you know, I, I don't disagree with that, but I question it. You know, I think of a book like David Wallace Wells The Uninhabitable Earth. You know, that is a very anxiety producing book that came out, what, last year? Um, but it maybe had some of the biggest impact on the environmental conversation last year. Broadly, I'd say. I, I feel like that - those modes of anxiety and fear and danger you know can be very motivating also. So you know, it makes me think. Do we need to hunt for a particular emotion or do we need to cover the range of emotions?Heather HouserYeah, yeah, and I want to - like, I think in some comments earlier, it might sound like I was saying there's something conclusive, or definite. Like “oh, we'll just find the right narrative, find the right emotion and that will do XY or Z, whatever your XY or Z are.” But I don't think that. Yeah, it's not - one of the, I think important, aspects of emotional and narrative literacy is that the trajectories are not so certain. You might think you're writing a hopeful ending, or you might think you're cultivating concern, actionable concern, when in fact you're deadening people, or overwhelming. You know, just nothing is so predictable in how people respond to a story.There's often a desire to have a hopeful ending without a recognition of what has come before, as if you end on a certain note, and that - that that is a teleology, or an end point that the whole narrative is driving toward. But actually we have responses to the, you know, everything that came before, that an ending can't necessarily compensate for, or redirect. So I think there's also that tendency to think like, if you end on hope something is accomplished.And that's where, I mean, I often use the phrase “cocktail of emotions” in my writing. Because it is. It is this blend of things that you know, just like when you're making cocktail. If you are - if you don't drink, your baking. Like you wouldn't know from those ingredients, you know, what necessarily will result, and often not the same thing does result. Even if the ingredients are, you know, you start from the same recipe and it's not right.John FiegeSo the title of your second book is Infowhelm, that's one of those words that I never heard before. But as soon as I heard it, I instantly thought I knew what it meant.Heather HouserGood! So when I was shopping around that title, like most people would say that, but some people would say, “oh, but why these this wonky, weird word?” But -John FiegeRight, right. So does it mean what we think it means? And how does it - you know, and specifically, why it was related to our ecological state of being. So I was wondering if you could talk about that a bit.Heather HouserYes. And I should say, I did not coin the word, though I think I came up with it, and then looked to see if other people had used it. And you know, you never know how words worm their way into your brain, and you don't even know they're there. But yes, that word has been out there, but not, not so prominent as words like info-fatigue, or whatever it might be. But it is what you think it means, which is like being overwhelmed by a lot of information.And the way I saw that pertaining to environmental issues, and actually, the conclusion to Ecosickness, is a bridge, somewhat of a bridge, into Infowhelm. In thinking about, how does data feel when we consume it? Especially those of us in, you know, more privileged or wealthy media consumers in the West, in America, where you can be deluged by news, Twitter, post-feeds, whatever, all the time. And what does it feel like to have all of that data, all of that information coming at you, when it's not even really bidden? It's not like you're always even looking for it.And so, Infowhelm sort of acknowledges that phenomenon that so much is coming at us. And in the environmental sphere, I think, I mean, especially if you are an environmentalist, you pay attention to these issues but really, even if you're, you know, you're not, there's a lot - just so much like information coming at us about, say, the percentage of extinct mammals, right? How many mammal species are extinct, or bird species are extinct? All the data about climate crisis, whether it's like warming temperatures, ocean acidification, you know, how much of a, of the ice sheet has melted? You know, it's all, all this data, especially that just can stream at us?John FiegeLike, how do you make sense of that?Heather HouserYeah. What do you do with that? I mean, what do you do with that, not only as a way to understand the phenomena at maybe, you know, objective or straightforward level. But what do you do with that, emotionally, if you're an artist, or communicator? I don't just write about artworks in that book. Like, what do you do as a way to convey that information? And what are you also evoking when you when you do that? And that's where the sort of like history and traditions of science piece comes in.John FiegeRight. And you talk about, you talk about a deficit model of climate communication, which you say, holds that the public's lack of information and comprehension is the primary obstacle to environmental action. So, what's wrong with this deficit model, and why has an abundance of available environmental information not led to an abundance of environmental Action?Heather HouserThat deficit model, you know, sociologists, psychologist, science communications people, communications people have, have really talked about this a lot. And it's an idea that the problem is just that people don't have all of the facts. And if they just saw the complete picture of what's happening, say, with climate change - or if it's something like toxic environments, and public health - if they just had all the information, then surely, you know, we would collectively act to make changes. Or individually, like, you know, well, surely you would choose to drive less or fly less, or whatever it might be. And you know, that model of like, “people are vessels, and you just fill them with information, and the outcome will be predictable,” or maybe a factory model, right, you like, input some ingredients, and then there would be this output.That just doesn't work. As you said, I think at the beginning of this conversation, you know, the so much -  there's a lot more to know, of course but - so much of the scientific phenomena of climate change, like changes to our geophysical processes resulting from carbon or methane in the atmosphere, a lot of that is known, or it's known enough. And yet here, here we are in America, but really globally, here we are too.And so we need to account for all of the other factors that come into play, when people are making decisions at individual and communal, governmental levels, when they're making - when they're responding to that information. I mean, there's certainly an element. And I don't even get into this too much. Because I think there's been a lot of work about like, denialism. There are books like and studies like Merchants of Doubt that just show like, there's right there's people denying the information and clouding it.But that aside, it's still not a direct, like, give people information, and they respond this way. So we need to understand the emotional factors, issues of race and class and, economics and geography and sex, sexuality, gender. All of these things that really play, play such an important role when people are responding to that information. And I think that's where, where the arts and different forms of cultural representation are so important.John FiegeYeah, and I love in this book, how, you know, you're looking at these writers and artists who incorporate scientific information into their work. But the way they do it addresses both the limits, and the necessity of knowledge derived from science. And one thing you write is, “artists are key players, not only in making sense of climate crisis, but in making meaning from it.” I was wondering if you could talk about how making sense and making meaning are related, but different?Heather Houser The sense part might be more like that picture, that maybe a science teacher or someone wants to paint, of just what are the, what are the processes at play here? So, what does happen when we put so many greenhouse gases into the atmosphere? What does get affected? That's maybe, you know, making sense of it. Because it is, I mean, it's not as if climate crisis is like, straightforward, right. It's like, terribly complex. So there's that sense making, just like what is this thing? And how did it happen? And what is happening to, to the natural world, and the social world in response?But then the meaning is, okay, so what do people do with that, that knowledge? How does it become relevant to their daily lives? How does it not become relevant to their daily lives? How does it become - even if it feels irrelevant to their lives - how does it become a matter of concern about other people's lives, and other beings' lives that might be affected? That, yeah, the meaning is just what we think what we do with that, or different groups do with that information. And how we respond to it.John FiegeRight, right. And let's talk about the God's eye view from aerial photographs and satellite imagery for a minute. In Infowhelm, you say, “in the 21st century that air is the space from which millions access new places and perspectives on the planet.” And this connects back to the first photographs taken of Earth from space, which emerged as the modern environmental movement was gaining momentum. And many people argue that these photographs themselves helped catalyze the environmental movement. Most famously, “Earthrise” in 1968, and “The Blue Marble” in 1972. When astronauts, rather than satellites, were actually taking the pictures.And for the first time, many people saw the earth not as vast and limitless, but as finite and fragile floating, and vast emptiness. And they wanted to protect it from harm. And you explore how literary and visual artists use aerial techniques to point out some of the problematic histories of the aerial perspective, and at the same time show how it can be used to reorient our relationship to the earth and ecological crisis. Can you talk a little bit about, about this tension that emerges in these works?Heather Houser Yes, certainly. So I mean, the view from space has been analyzed quite extensively in environmental studies. And so this, you know, my thinking about it is extending off of that work. And it is often thought of as this catalyst environmentalism but, then there's also this thought of how it is a position of mastery or control, right. Like, even if you see the fragility of the earth, it can also instigate a feeling of, “well, this is something I can take care of.” Which is a good sentiment, but also, “this is something I have some control or some mastery over.” So that's where that God's eye view.I mean, Donna Haraway is a very famous thinker about what that view, that God's eye perspective entails. This idea of mastery, objectivity, as well, authority, those sorts of sentiments that are, you know - can be quite problematic for, you know, not only what one does to the environment, but the, you know, how it impacts different communities as well. And so the artists, I, I was looking at - not just artists, also activists that I was looking at - they absolutely acknowledge the affordances, you know, of the aerial. Like how important, how powerful it is, how much it moves people and grabs people's attention.I mean, one of the activist groups I talked about is this group called Sky Truth, which uses aerial imagery to sort of like to get purchase on illegal forms of extraction or the damages of extraction, they were really important during the Deepwater Horizon spill. And in seeing how the government was - and BP were - under reporting, the extent of the spill. So there are all these things that the aerial vantage point can really do to, you know, hold people to account to see what's really, what is happening on the ground. So these artists and activists, they acknowledge that. They don't want to say like, well, the aerial is - I think a term I use is like, they don't want to, they know they can't “purify” the aerial of its problems. But they want to still use it at the same time.And so they deploy it in this way that's very, I talked about as being very self-referential. So instead of thinking of the aerial as like a clear window on to the world. They show what the smudges are, I guess, on that window. So how the aerial perspectives are deeply tied to military histories, they're often a privileged perspective that's owned or controlled by government and corporate partnerships. It's also - the technologies that give one purchase on from the air, or from space, have their own histories of militarization, corporate control, colonial control. And they use these tools and at the same time, recognize those histories.And those histories are sort of like reminders that this is not an objective perspective, right? That there's so many interested parties, or forms of oppression and manipulation that go along with those perspectives. So, the aerial, it's really important to talk about it. Because it's not something we want to get rid of, or not use if we are environmentalists, or environmental artists. But it's certainly something you want to be aware of, just what its histories are, what its uses have been and how those really travel with the technology whenever you're using them.John FiegeYeah, definitely. And I love this idea of co-opting the tools for beneficial reasons. But at the same time, it makes me think of that famous Audre Lorde declaration that “the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.”Heather HouserI mean, that term “master,” right, evokes slavery, it evokes patriarchy, it evokes a lot of a lot of things, I think, for Lorde. And for my study certainly evokes, especially colonial histories. But it also - just this general desire for mastery that often is - comes along with the scientific enterprise or thinking about solutions to environmental problems. So that that phrase, or you know, that quote, was certainly evocative and sort of traveling with me. And I do think I mean, there are some who would say absolutely, like, she's, she's right, right, you do not use the thing. Like, if you're an artist, for example, you do not use a form, you don't use a medium, you don't use a tool or an instrument that is so tainted by, you know, the very thing that you want to fight against. But I think that's quite hard.John FiegeI think it also taps into this, this plague of purity. I think that infects a lot of progressive movements, where you know, this assessment of any particular thing or object or perspective - “Is it pure? Is it not pure?” And if it's not pure, we have to stay away from it. And that's a really complicated and difficult way to assess the world. And it's self-delusional in a lot of ways.Heather HouserYeah. And I think of what, at what scale are we talking of the tool? Like, for example, the novel, right? I mean, you have something like, the novel, or poetry, or documentary film. But then, you know, you get more granular, and you might say, like, the sonnet, or the realist novel, or - I know less about documentary film, so I'm not gonna have as good examples here - but so, sort of like an interview based or-John FiegeObservational.Heather HouserRight. So you know, you also when you're thinking about tools, I think they're - and now like maybe deviating a bit from what Lorde was talking about, but thinking about the representational and the aesthetic sphere, you know, there's, I think, a lot of different levels at which you can think about that. That, you know, do you want to say like the tool of the novel or the tool of poetry, the tool of documentary or photography is sort of tainted for some reason. So you avoid it entirely? Or do you think about some of the more particular forms that you want to avoid or in fact, like, manipulate and call attention to, be really self-reflexive about the problems with them as you try to reorient them? And that was what you know, I argue, activists and artists.So, I mentioned Sky Truth as an activist group using the satellite imagery, in a very self-reflexive way that calls attention to the limits of the technology itself. But then I also look at a photographer named Fazal Shaikh, who takes aerial, so not satellite, but aerial photography of the Negev desert in Israel, thinking about the colonial oppression and manipulation of the environment in that region. I mean, he's actually interested in the displacement of Bedouin peoples. And, that I mean, he is certainly using aerial photography. He's using photography itself and acknowledges, through his use of angle - he takes an oblique angle.And the way he uses texture, and shows texture, and the layering of these pieces, as a way to sort of thwart our sense of visibility and transparency. You know, if we think of the, often the aerial and the satellite image as offering this window, or like offering an objective or transparent direct view of something, he's sort of using that tool of the aerial, to show how it is incomplete, but certainly shows us a lot of things at the same time. And then going back to your point about knowledge versus feeling, like evoking a lot of feeling in that practice too.John FiegeRight, right. And back to this idea of Sky Truth versus ground truth, you know, Fazal Shaikh's, a vast majority of his work is his portrait photography, of, you know, refugees and displaced people. So, yes, he's bringing in that element ofSky Truth. But, you know, the vast majority of the work he's doing is ground truth. So there's something about contextualizing all these tools with other tools that can make them, I think, more meaningful, less problematic, less tied to an oppressive history.Heather HouserYes. And he writes that, his work for it's called The Erasure Trilogy, this photographic project that does have, yeah, portraiture as well as aerial photography. He then collaborated with Eyal Weizman, who's an architectural theorist and known for what's called forensic architecture in the human rights domain. And they collaborated on this book called Conflict Shoreline, which incorporates the photographs.But then they talk about how they are constantly moving between the ground and the air. So you know, the aerial leads back to the ground, the ground leads to the aerial or even the subterranean and so that it is this constant moving between positions and that's something I also argue for and demonstrate and that part of the book that it's an argument for a multiplicity of perspectives, rather than sort of the “perfect” or the “objective” perspective.John FiegeRight, right. So, in Infowhelm, you talk about the new natural history. These are artworks, as you say, that speak the same tongue as Western natural history, but tell a story of ecological deficit. Can you talk about why these works interest you?Heather Houser Yeah, so that was a section of the book that really arose from just being a reader and a watcher or looker-at-er of, of environmental, art and literature. So I started to notice that a lot of contemporary writers - so those writing, and artists producing work, in the last 20 to 30 years - were harking back to these traditions of natural history. And so those traditions, I mean, we know often, many of us probably know, or have been to natural history museums. And it's this practice of classifying the natural world, naming it, putting it into categories, displaying it.And so things like if you've heard of Linnaeus - very famous person, naturalist who created the system of binomial nomenclature for naming plants and animals. All of these practices of basically ordering and classifying the natural world that arose during the Enlightenment period in Europe, and then in America. And these were like responses to like, greater access to the variety of things on the planet because of colonial expeditions and endeavors. So it's like, oh, you know, you're in Latin America, for example, and suddenly, there are all these new plants, animals, and of course, peoples, because the naturalist enterprise applies to peoples as well in this period. And so it's, it's a way of responding to that abundance by ordering it. A way of understanding it and sort of containing it.Now, there's always slippage out of that container that are really fascinating, as well. So artists today, were like, referring back to and reproducing those practices. So for example, you might have a poet who - I write about this poet, Juliana Spahr, who has a poem in which, interspersed within the lines, are the names of species that are on the endangered and threatened list of species for New York. And so they are, these artists are using those techniques of representation, and classification or ordering, but as a way to think through a loss of environmental abundance. So whether it's extinction, or deforestation or radical change, changes to the land through mining or dams, things like that.So they use those techniques, but as a way to get purchase on what is happening today. And to really think through the histories of enlightenment thought and colonialism that have produced the environmental degradation happening today.John Fiege You wrote an article for Yes magazine that explores the question of population control, and limiting the number of children we have as an approach to addressing the climate crisis. And you discuss how readily calls for reproductive limits touch what you call “the third rails of modern environmentalism: racism, eugenics, xenophobia, and even death dealing.” For you, what does it look like to deal appropriately with the question of population control outside of the racist and xenophobic history of those things in the environmental movement? Or maybe, how can we acknowledge or address the racist and xenophobic elements, past or present, of the environmental movement while still confronting the difficult question of reducing our global population?Heather HouserSo, that piece is actually part of a new thing I'm starting, but actually one where I don't know the answer to that question, and don't even know how to bring these two conversations together - if they should be. Because I mean, one of the things is not to say “population control.” So you know, controlling population has, at least in the environmental context, in the context of global development, colonialism, it's always been about controlling certain populations, it's been about advancing white supremacy and often, it's been about reducing the fertility, or - of people who have disabilities.So really, like the whole, and I'm not the first to say this, there are a lot of people have talked about, like the very phrase “population control” can't but evoke all of that. And so I say, a lot of people have talked about it, but I think that is not something like we all talk about. And so it's important to, to acknowledge that and, and that history is very tied up in environmentalism, both past like reaching back to the 19th century and further, and more present. Thinking that, you know, the earth has limits, or certain ecosystems have limits, and therefore, we need to prevent people from coming into those spaces or limit the number of people reproducing in those spaces to preserve them. But again, that is always about some people, some communities, some races, some types of people being preserved at the expense of others. And so that whole, like, “population control” is just like tainted.John FiegeRight.Heather HouserSo the question though, is, there are a lot of people who think about the relationship between their own reproduction, and the fate of the environment. And this can be everything from “I look around me, and things don't look good, so why should I bring another being into a world that is so shattered? And whose future I don't know.” But then there are some people who think about, again, going back to causality like, “well, if I put another person on this planet, will they be, you know, consuming more resources, emitting more carbon dioxide, will I just be contributing even more to the problems that we're facing?”And then there's certainly like other, other ways people think about this relationship between the environment and reproduction. And that can include actually, you know, populations who have experienced genocide, or near-genocide, or whose ability to thrive on an environment and ability to reproduce have been significantly harmed. And so, in that case, like having children can be a response to that in the affirmative. You know, sort of creating, shoring up those traditions, creating that sense of connection between place, and community.So I think, for me, if I continue to think about this, that framing of reproductive justice is, is how I would think about it. And so that's not about you know, deciding there's a limited capacity on the earth, and we need to stick to those limits by curtailing reproduction, but really thinking about the varieties of responses to having children. But also forming different kinds of family or kinship relationships in response to environmental degradation, and particularly climate crisis. Because that reproductive justice framework is much more about thinking about people's bodily self-determination. Thinking about that there is no one “right family,” there is no one “right'' (so called) number of people that we're seeking, but really curating the conditions for thriving for the widest variety of people and families.John FiegeYeah, well, I see how connected it is to your other work in this sense of looking at something that is very tainted from the past, you know, whether it be aerial photography, or classification, you know, natural history and classification and, and interrogating that. Do we need to reject that because it's tainted? Or do we need to, to, you know, reorient it and, and use it in a different way, with an awareness of, you know, how problematic it's been in the past?And one element of your essay that jumps out at me, is your note about Project Drawdown, where they say, you know, two of the most effective things we can do to deal with the climate crisis globally are to provide family planning universally, and to increase education of girls. And those two things, you know, shift much more towards the rights of women rather than the control of women, which is so much of what the history of population control has been. Have you thought about it in those terms?Heather HouserThe way I thought of the continuity of this work from past work was, or one way, was actually probably more at a sort of, like, methodological level - to be nerdy about it - which is, you know, my work in Ecosickness, really venturing into medical discourse, the medical humanities, as it's called, and then also my, my interest in environmental issues. So I sort of saw it as like a return to some of those confluences of like, the medical and the environmental, the bodily.But I can see like, I like, I like this continuity you're finding between like, what are, you know, these legacies of colonialism, of the enlightenment, of racism, enslavement, like, they, how they really travel in environmental, scientific and environmentalist discourse in ways that don't, some of us can to easily forget, or like think that it's a part of the past or, or just discard entirely. So yeah, yeah. I like how you're drawing that connection. It's often other people who see connections that you cannot see.John FiegeYeah, well, it's actually it's through our conversation today that I connected that actually, which is interesting. And I'm going to step back to Infowhelm for one second. But I wanted to ask you just to see what your first thought was. So I love this term, you use the ‘coming of mind plot', which is a play off of the ‘coming of age plot'. Can you tell me what is a ‘coming of mind plot' and how does it relate to climate Infowhelm?Heather HouserYeah, the coming of age novel or movie is something quite familiar, right? Like, you have a young person, usually someone at the cusp of adolescence or in adolescence, like coming, coming of age, entering into maturity and all of the struggles there. And, you know, often it's about like integrating into society or not. Or resisting that. And so that is kind of a familiar trope or genre and so many different narratives.And I was interested in how there were some climate narratives where - often adults - who is having to, like come to what sort of an environmental maturation or not, you know, like, suddenly comes to have to confront the, the facts, the data of climate crisis. And one of the examples of that, like, the reason, the texts that made me come up with this idea was Barbara Kingsolver's Flight Behavior, her novel.And in that case, it's a woman, the protagonist, is not versed in any real environmental or climate knowledge. But there's this migration of butterflies that erroneously lands in her part of Tennessee. And suddenly, she's starting to think about the facts, the existence of climate crisis. But this information comes into conflict with many aspects of her social life, religion, her socio-economic position, her gender, all of these things. And so yeah, it's this confrontation and integration into a different, like, knowledge reality, and the conflicts that happen, and what results from that.John FiegeSo I wanted to go back to where we started, with you delving into dance as a child in order to make you “other” than who you are and where you come from. I wonder what that project to remake yourself has led to, and how it informs your view of your relationship to the rest of nature in our collective environmental predicament now. I know that's a huge question. But I just wanted you to kind of think through that, that broad sweep of time to see if you had any thoughts about it.Heather HouserI think one, well, I guess starting from the more personal side of things. Well, I was a good student as a kid, but nothing like exceptional. So, like the intellectual part of myself, I think I developed more after I was kind of forced to see dance as not my future in terms of a profession. And there was a certain, I think, just mean, that was a sad moment for me. And sometimes I still question that choice, even though, despite what I wrote or said. But there's, there was a certain opening up I think, like there was something also scary about thinking about being a dancer and how it takes up - it takes so much, it takes so much out of you. And it does that in the very young years of your life where you're committing to something.John FiegeIt can easily destroy you.Heather HouserAnd yeah, it destroys most, you know, especially ballet and some of these intense - well, really all of it. But like, it does have its damages for sure. And letting go of that was also sort of like, well, things can develop over time, right? Like, I don't have to know at fourteen what I want to do and commit to it so wholeheartedly, and that sort of like, I mean, I say this to people and that they're like, that's bananas, because like, how much commitment does it take to become, you know, get your PhD and become a professor? And like, yeah, absolutely.But there was a lot of, like, I didn't know what I wanted to really study when I got to grad school, and I, I discovered it along the way. And I think that receptivity is really important to me and thinking about not only like my relationship to the world around me, like being out there and being receptive to smells, and sights and sounds and tastes, sometimes I guess. But just also being receptive to, you know, different positions on environmental issues. Not being dogmatic, not seeking purity. Like, listening and, and learning a lot rather than, you know, being so fixed in one's understanding. I don't know. I feel like, that's very important for environmental conversations today, even though I have strong opinions and you know, fall on an ideological side and political side.John FiegeAnd do you still dance?Heather HouserI do. I come into and out of it a lot more than I used to. And so I really, I stopped in college, more or less. And then I came back to it really wholeheartedly for about, you know, 10 years, and had this amazing teacher and, and community when I lived in San Francisco. And one of the upsides of the pandemic - which I know, like, we're sick of that phrase just as much as all others - is, I'm able to take ballet classes with my most beloved teacher from my San Francisco days. And, you know, granted from my living room, which is not the way I would prefer to dance. It's not a very big living room. But it's sort of clicked in my brain like, oh, well, they're probably offering classes I could take from my living room.John FiegeWell, the other thing that clicks in your mind is “this isn't ending anytime soon.”Heather HouserWell, that's true. Like, I did think about the virtual dance class way at the beginning. And then I was like, “I don't want to do that. I love to move. Like I love to take up space, like this is going to be pathetic and confining.” But then, as the months wore on, I was like, well.John FiegeSo, almost to the end here. I've one more kind of big question for you. Why does our struggle to create a more just and ecologically sustainable society need the environmental humanities?Heather HouserWell take the environmental humanities broadly, which is like thinking about those cultural, emotional, historical relationships to the environment. I mean, I don't see how you could think otherwise. Right? Like, it's just there's no way. I mean, I'll take an example of like, you know, conversations about climate reparations, that is like, do certain countries or community you know, states even - do they owe other nations or communities compensation for the damage that those communities are facing? That question, I mean, there's an economic way of thinking about it. There's a sort of quantitative, empirical way of thinking about it like, well, what are the actual harms to those people? Whether it be health or loss of land or livelihood. Certainly there are those perspectives on it.But so much of this is going to be thinking about the history of those relationships between countries or communities, thinking about just what the whole idea of reparations signifies for people. Like in the US, certainly means something different with the legacy of enslavement than it might in another country that doesn't have that same legacy. Those are all things that you just can't really approach without - whether you call it the environmental humanities, like that's what us professors call ourselves, right. But, you know, you might not have that label for yourself, but those kinds of perspectives are just so essential for really any environmental decision or or relationship that we're thinking about today.John FiegeRight, right. I feel like, you know, it's, it's this complicated thing sometimes to hold where we hear these calls for following the science, which I totally agree with. But I think a lot of what your work is pointing out is: yes, we need to follow the science, but it also needs to be in the context of, of all this other stuff, so that we can make meaning of it, and that we can understand what to do with it.Heather HouserAbsolutely. In the very early days of the Infowhelm project, I had, you know, wrote, wrote an early chapter, and someone said, like, you know, this could sound like you're questioning science, you know, fueling a denialist position, or a skeptical position. And that's why I say at many points in the book, like, this is about finding those complementarities; finding, you know, I borrow from a science studies scholar, S

Hello, this is wild suzhou.Today, we will be talking about the harpy eagle, specifically the American harpy eagle. It's the largest and most powerful bird of prey that can be found in a rainforest, and one of the largest in the world.The upper side of the harpy eagle, such as the back of the body and tail, is grey, while the underside is mostly white. However, the leg feathers are striped black and white. The head is grey, and there is a thick black border on the neck. The head has a crown that consists of two rows of dark grey or black feathers. The bill of the bird is dark grey or black, and the feet are bright yellow.Harpy eagles are fierce predators, and are at the top of the food chain. This means that they eat many other animals. This also means that there are little or no animals that hunt down harpy eagles. However, there was a case where two young harpy eagles were reintroduced into the wild, but were caught by a jaguar and an ocelot. Harpy eagles mainly prey on tree-dwelling mammals, such as sloths and monkeys. This includes species like the brown-throated sloth, Linnaeus's two-toed sloth, and Hoffmann's two-toed sloth. There are many species of monkeys that may be caught by harpy eagles, but some species are capuchin monkeys, howler monkeys, and spider monkeys. They will also eat other animals, such as squirrels, armadillos, other birds like macaws, other carnivores, like weasels, and even porcupines.Harpy eagles are able to hunt effectively due to their talons, which are the largest of any eagle. Because of this, they are able to snatch and carry away items about the same weight as them, such as monkeys and sloths. The female eagles, which usually catch larger prey, can grab onto animals and then fly away without having to land, showing how strong these birds are.For Wild Suzhou, I'm Ciana, thanks for listening and see you next time.

Subscribe Apple | Google | Spotify | Stitcher | iHeart   Support The Daily Gardener Buy Me A Coffee    Connect for FREE! The Friday Newsletter |  Daily Gardener Community   Historical Events 1669 Birth of Sébastien Vaillant ("Vy-yaw"), French botanist. Appointed to the King's garden in Paris, Sebastien loved organizing and cataloging plants. Biographical accounts say Sebastian showed a passion for plants from the age of five. His masterpiece, forty years in the making, Botanicon Parisienne, was a book about the flora of Paris. It wasn't published until five years after his death. Sebastian's work on plant sexuality inspired generations of botanists and set the stage for Linneaus to develop his sexual system of plant classification. Linnaeus used the male stamens to determine the class and the female pistils to determine the order. And like Sebastion, Linnaeus often compared plant sexuality to that of humans. Linnaeus wrote, Love even seizes... plants... both [males and females], even the hermaphrodites, hold their nuptials, which is what I now intend to discuss. Sebastian caused a sensation at the Royal Garden in Paris on June 10, 1717. On that day, he presented a lecture titled, Lecture on the Structure of the Flowers: Their Differences and the Use of Their Parts. He began by reinforcing the idea that the flower is the most essential part of a plant - essential to reproduction - and then he began to lead his scientific colleagues into a deep dive on plant sexuality - at six in the morning, no less. Before Sebastian's lecture, the topic of sex in the plant world had only been touched on lightly, allowing flowers and blossoms to maintain their reputation as pure, sweet, and innocent. Today, we can imagine the reaction of his 600-person audience as he began using fairly explicit language and the lens of human sexuality to describe the sex lives of plants. A 2002 translation of Sebastian's speech was presented in the Huntia - a Journal of Botanical History. Sebastian started his lecture with these words, Perhaps the language I am going to use for this purpose will seem a little novel for botany, but since it will be filled with terminology that is perfectly proper for the use of the parts ... I intend to expose, I believe it will be more comprehensible than the old fashioned terminology, which — being crammed with incorrect and ambiguous terms [is] better suited for confusing the subject than for shedding light on it. Sebastian's discussion of the plant embryos was rather poetic: Who can imagine that a prism with four faces becomes a Pansy;  a narrow roll, the Borage;  a kidney, the Daffodil;  that a cross can metamorphose into a maple;  two crystal balls intimately glued to each other, [Comfrey], etc.?  These are nevertheless the shapes favored in these diverse plants by their lowly little embryos.   1742 On this day, Horace Walpole wrote to Horace Mann, in part describing his visit to Ranelagh ("Ron-ah-lay") Gardens in Chelsea. Ranelagh had opened just two days prior, and it was one of several pleasure gardens opened around this time. Horace wrote,  Today calls itself May the 26th, as you perceive by the date; but I am writing to you by the fireside, instead of going to Vauxhall. If we have one warm day in seven, "we bless our stars, and think it luxury."  And yet we have as much waterworks and fresco diversions, as if we lay ten degrees nearer warmth.  Two nights ago Ranelagh-gardens were opened at Chelsea; the Prince, Princess, Duke, much nobility, and much mob besides, were there. There is a vast amphitheatre, finely gilt, painted, and illuminated, into which everybody that loves eating, drinking, staring, or crowding, is admitted for twelvepence.  The building and... gardens cost sixteen thousand pounds.  Twice a-week there are to be ridottos... [entertainment] for which you are to have a supper and music. I was there last night, but did not find the joy of it. Vauxhall is a little better; the garden is pleasanter, and [you arrive] by water...   Horace must have come to prefer Ranelagh. He later wrote, It has totally beat Vauxhall... You can't set your foot without treading on a Prince, or Duke of Cumberland.   Finally, it was Horace Walpole who wrote, When people will not weed their own minds, they are apt to be overrun by nettles.   1811 On this day, Thomas Jefferson wrote to his granddaughter, Anne, who was visiting her in-laws: Nothing new has happened in our neighborhood since you left us.  The houses and trees stand where they did.  The flowers come forth like the belles of the day, have their short reign of beauty and splendor, and retire like them to the more interesting office of reproducing their like.  The hyacinths and tulips are off the stage, the irises are giving place to the belladonnas, as this will to the tuberoses etc.    Thomas was not able to garden much during the summer of 1811. His arthritis had flared, and he found himself almost entirely bedridden.    1921 On this day, Kate Lancaster Brewster resigned as editor of the bulletin she funded and started for The Garden Club of America for its first six years. At the time of her resignation, Kate reported, Cost of Publishing the Bulletin (including postage) between July, 1920 and May, 1921 totaled $4038. Number of paid subscribers... 55 Number of lapsed subscribers... 21 2 Paid subscribers have become Members-at-Large. I Paid subscriber has become a member of the GARDEN CLUB OF AMERICA.   As for Kate Lancaster Brewster, she had a beautiful Italianate garden in Lake Forest, Illinois. She was friends with most of the prominent gardeners and garden writers of her time, including Mrs. Francis King (Louisa Yeomans King). When Louisa published The Little Garden Series, Kate wrote one of the books called The Little Garden for Little Money. Kate and her husband Walter were ardent art collectors and loved to travel. The couple helped establish the Chicago Art Institute. During WWI, Kate left her service work in Chicago, California, and New York to go to France. There, she assisted her friend, the indefatigable Mabel Boardman of the American Red Cross, with hospital work.   Grow That Garden Library™ Book Recommendation The Thoughtful Gardener by Jinny Blom This book came out in 2017, and the subtitle is An Intelligent Approach to Garden Design. Well, Piet Oudolf has high praise for Jinny Blom. He writes, The most romantic, creative person in garden design I know.   So that's high praise right there from one of our top modern garden designers. Like Piet Oudolf, Jinny Blom is a force all her own. She's designed well over 200 gardens, and they represent a diverse range of garden styles - proving that Jinny Blom really is The Thoughtful Gardener. Now, one of Jinny's superpowers is to take a look at the current landscape, look at the setting, look at the surrounding ecosystems and communities, and then determine what vision best fits that landscape. And, of course, she has to throw in client desires and other challenges that might come up in the creation of that garden. And whether it's topography challenges or resource constraints, Jinny has indeed seen it all. Through her myriad experiences, she's come up with six different steps to help you become a thoughtful gardener too. Now I think one of the things that Jinny does almost unconsciously at this stage in her career is that she really thinks through what she's trying to accomplish in any given landscape. And I don't care what you're trying to accomplish; you will definitely do a better job of reaching your anticipated goals if you take the time to do your homework and truly think things through. The six different sections in Jinny's book are understanding, structuring, harmonizing, rooting, and liberating. Jinny also has another superpower that I think really helps her when it comes to her garden design skills, and that is that she can see gardens as they will look when they are mature, and that's a particular skill for garden designers. I remember the first time I interviewed the Renegade Gardener, and he said the same thing to me. He said that he was a successful garden designer because he could imagine what a plant would look like at maturity or in any particular setting in the future. And so he knew what to plant where - and how it would look when it was all grown up. And so his goal as a designer was not to make sure that the garden would look good immediately - although that was a temporary concern and a nice to have - he was more concerned with his ultimate goal, which was to be able to drive by these properties that he had designed, especially early in his career and see their mature beauty in the fullness of time. Jinny also has that ability. Now Paula Deitz, Editor of The Hudson Review, wrote the forward to Jinny's book. And here's what she wrote, Rare is the garden book, like this one, that makes the reader feel personally included as a friend in a long conversation with the writer.  Like Lancelot 'Capability' Brown, whom she lauds for his estate management in the 18th century, Blom is herself a cultural geographer who scopes out the historical features of paths, gates and antiquated farm buildings on a given property prior to drawing up a plan that proceeds almost instantaneously, a process fascinating to follow. Whether in town or country, with either single or multiple garden areas, Blom establishes architectural enclosures, like Cotswold drystone walls, prior to the overlay of her signature, beautifying horticulture, thus creating what she calls environments for intimate experiences'. And that is the quintessentialJinny Blom landscape. Now, this is how Jinny herself describes this book. She writes, So this book is about how I've developed my way of working over the last twenty years in progression from apprentice to journeyman to master craftsman.  It takes a long time and I've learned at the elbow of countless masters, not in a schoolroom.  I choose plants with compatibility in mind, appropriate materials arise from their locale, and I consider the people who will live in the garden, the wildlife, the weather. I'd like to share some of what I think about when designing, in the hope that it kindles the fires of excitement in others. I've climbed a big mountain to get to this point and hope there's a view worth sharing.   From the reviews of this book, the Amazon ratings, and the commentary by her peers, I can tell you that Jinny Blom definitely has a view worth sharing. She's hit it out of the park - out of the garden - with this beautiful book called The Thoughtful Gardener. You'll get to see images from so many of Jinny's gardens. You'll see her thoughtfulness and creativity in action certainly. But most of all, you'll get to know Jinny. She is funny and intelligent, and she thinks about plants and gardens and landscapes on a level that very few garden designers do. It feels like she's always one step ahead, and I think that's because Jinny does such a thorough job of researching and thinking about her garden designs - so that by the time you see the final product, it just seems so effortless. But I suppose that is Jinny's method behind the madness at the end of the day. This book is 256 pages of learning garden design with one of our modern masters, Jinny Blom. You can get a copy of The Thoughtful Gardener by Jinny Blom and support the show using the Amazon link in today's show notes for around $16.   Botanic Spark 1847 Birth of Edgar Fawcett, American poet. Edgar wrote some famous garden verses. He wrote, [A]ll life budding like a rose and sparkling like its dew. And Come rambling awhile through this exquisite weather Of days that are fleet to pass, When the stem of the willow shoots out a green feather, And buttercups burn in the grass!   Edgar's poems often remind us of the value of all green living things. We say of the oak "How grand of girth!" Of the willow we say, "How slender!" And yet to the soft grass clothing the earth How slight is the praise we render.   My favorite Edgar Fawcett verses feature trees. Here's one about lovers speaking to each other using the language of birds: Hark, love, while...we walk, Beneath melodious trees… You'd speak to me in Redbreast;  I would answer you in Wren!   Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener And remember: For a happy, healthy life, garden every day.

Subscribe Apple | Google | Spotify | Stitcher | iHeart   Support The Daily Gardener Buy Me A Coffee    Connect for FREE! The Friday Newsletter |  Daily Gardener Community   Historical Events 1707 Birth of Carl Linnaeus (books about this person), Swedish botanist, zoologist, taxonomist, and physician. Carl was a fan of flowers early on in his life. As a young child, his mother gave him flowers to soothe him whenever he was upset. On May 1st, 1753, the publication of his masterpiece Species Plantarum changed plant taxonomy forever. The work gave Linnaeus the moniker Father of Taxonomy; his naming system is called binomial nomenclature. Binomial means "two names," which in the naming game includes the plant's genus (which is capitalized or could be abbreviated by its first letter) and species or specific epithet (which is all lowercase and can be shortened sp.) If you have trouble remembering taxonomy, I like to think of it as a person's given name and surname, but in reverse order. Linnaeus's names live on unchanged and are distinguished by an "L." after their name. And it was Linnaeus himself who said: God created, Linnaeus ordered.   There are many stories about Linnaeus, but I thought I'd share a few more-obscure stories about him and his work. First, Linnaeus' friend Anders Celsius created the Centigrade thermometer in 1742, with water boiling at 0 degrees and freezing at 100. Three years later, Linnaeus reversed the scale - sharing it in an article with the Botanical Garden at Uppsala University. Second, there is a memorable story about Linnaeus and the genus Commelina, the genus of the Asiatic Dayflower. Linnaeus named the genus after the three Commelin brothers, two of whom achieved much in botany and one who died young before amounting to anything. Linnaeus wrote: Commelina has three petals, two of which are showy — where the third is not conspicuous. Next time you see the Commelina communis or Asiatic Dayflower (with two large blue petals and one tiny white petal), you can remember the Commelins and Linnaeus' kind commemoration of the three brothers. Another fun story about Linnaeus involved a trip he took to Lapland when Linnaeus was 25 years old.  Carl spent nearly six months there, and he came back with stories of an obscure part of Scandinavia few people knew existed. The expedition was trying, and Linneaus suffered from hunger, mosquitoes, freezing temperatures, near death from a rockslide and a gunshot wound. Through it all, Linnaeus fell in love with the Lapland. He even brought home a traditional costume complete with a magical drum as a souvenir from his adventure. Five years later, an obscure German painter named Martin Hoffman painted Linnaeus' portrait. And, guess what did Linnaeus choose to wear for the sitting? His Lapland costume (Of course!). In Hoffman's Linnaeus, a 30-year-old Linnaeus is seen wearing boots made of reindeer skin. He's also wearing an early version of a toolbelt. Suspended from the belt is a magical drum from a shaman, a needle to make nets, a snuffbox, a cartridge box, and a knife. Linnaeus is also wearing traditional Laplander gloves, and in his right hand, he holds his favorite plant: the Twinflower, Linnaea borealis.   1799 Birth of Thomas Hood was an English poet, author, and humorist. Thomas is remembered for his poems "The Bridge of Sighs" and "The Song of the Shirt." Here's an excerpt from his poem Song. 'Tis like the birthday of the world, When earth was born in bloom; The light is made of many dyes, The air is all perfume: There's crimson buds, and white and blue, The very rainbow showers Have turned to blossoms where they fell, And sown the earth with flowers.   And here's my all-time favorite Thomas Hood poem, and it's called No. No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease, No comfortable feel in any member - No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees, No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds - November!   1843 Birth of Georgiana Molloy (books about this person), English-Australian pioneer and one of the first botanical collectors in Western Australia. Georgiana's life in the 1830s in Western Australia was one of extreme hardship. Her first child died shortly after it was born, and her only son ended up drowning in a well. After these events, Georgiana naturally struggled to find joy in her life. But in 1836, at the end of the year, Georgiana received a letter from a man named James Mangles. James was an officer in the Royal Navy and a naturalist, horticulturist, and writer. He wrote to ask Georgiana for help, and his request for botanical specimens gave her life new meaning. James had made arrangements for several people to collect for him in Australia. He was very strategic in that regard. But it also meant that James was uniquely qualified to review the work done by collectors in Western Australia before 1850. The result was that James was a huge fan of Georgiana's work. He once wrote. [Georgiana's collections] were full of pressed plants that were mounted and set out with delicacy and precision and carefully numbered showing great evidence of care and cleanliness in the sorting.   Georgiana would have been delighted to know that many of the seeds she collected were sent to botanists and horticulturists worldwide, and they were found to be especially viable. Sadly Georgiana's life was cut short at the age of 37. After giving birth to her seventh child, she suffered for four months from December 1842 until her death on April 8th, the following spring. And when the English naturalist George Wailes learned of the death of Georgiana Malloy, he reached out to the man who inspired her love for botany, James Mangles.  George wrote. Not one in 10,000 who go out to distant lands has done what she did for the gardens of her native country.     1905 On this day, Louisa Yeomans King (books about this person) recorded an entry in her garden diary, which became her book, The Flower Garden Day By Day. MAY 23. Sow seed now of the beautiful pale yellow oenothera ("ee-nah-THAIR-ah”) (Evening-primrose), Afterglow, at the back of the border near Physostegia ("fy-sah-STEE-jee-ah ver-jin-ee-AYE-nah")(Obedient plant). A group of these two with Artemesia lactiflora (White Mugwort) and the little annual sunflower known as Primrose Stella, will make August well worth waiting for.   Grow That Garden Library™ Book Recommendation The Less is More Garden by Susan Morrison This book came out in 2018, and the subtitle is Big Ideas for Designing Your Small Yard. You should definitely check out Susan's book if you have a small garden. Right off the bat, when I saw the cover, I knew that I would love Susan's book, and you know, most people are small-space gardeners. Susan writes. In my practice as a landscape designer, most of the backyards that I design measure less than 2,500 square feet and layouts are rarely more than 40 by 60 feet. I no longer think of that as small, it has become standard. Interestingly while active gardeners are often concerned with fitting in everything, into a space that's generally smaller than the backyards that they grew up in. I am just as likely to hear from homeowners, more interested in creating a space that will be as simple as possible to maintain... no one wants another to-do list item, but most of us want backyard that's a refuge... [and] the shift in how we live, work, and play is what led me to develop the less is more approach to garden design and outdoor living.   And here's how Susan defines as her less is more garden approach. She writes: At its heart, this approach to garden design means: Less space, more enjoyment Less effort, more beauty Less maintenance, more relaxation, and finally Less gardening-by-the-numbers, more YOU.   This book is 225 pages of small-garden design with the less is more approach. You'll find practical and helpful advice, inspirational photography, and many creative and unexpected tricks to help you get the small space garden of your dreams. You can get a copy of The Less is More Garden by Susan Morrison and support the show using the Amazon link in today's show notes for around $18.   Botanic Spark 2021 Death of Eric Carle (books by this person), American illustrator and writer. Eric had a wide-ranging knowledge and love of nature. His early books include Nature Thoughts, Flower Thoughts, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, and The Tiny Seed. Here's a quote from Eric's most memorable work, The Very Hungry Caterpillar:  On Saturday, he ate through one piece of chocolate cake, one ice-cream cone, one pickle, one slice of Swiss cheese, one slice of salami, one lollipop, one piece of cherry pie, one sausage, one cupcake, and one slice of watermelon. That night he had a stomach ache.   And it was Eric Carle who said, Whatever our eyes touch should be beautiful.   In 2007, Eric Carle gave a commencement address at Bates College in 2007. He concluded with these words:  Love your partner and tend your garden.  Simplify, slow down, be kind.   Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener And remember: For a happy, healthy life, garden every day.

Lisa Thee is a consultant to some of the world's most innovative healthcare and global technology companies including Microsoft and UCSF's Center for Digital Healthcare Innovation. She is the co-Founder of Minor Guard, an Artificial Intelligence software company focused on making people safer online and in real life. A staunch advocate for the protection of children Lisa is unstoppable in her efforts in protecting children, and in fact families, from online bullies and criminals.   You will get to hear this week about this incredible and unstoppable woman. We will get to share many of her experiences including how she has been forced to deal with the effects of Covid-19 and how she continues to move forward today. She will even tell us about how her registered emotional support dog helps her continue to do the work she began many years ago. You can't help but be inspired and motivated by what Lisa does and how she lives her life. About the Guest:   Lisa Thee is a Top 50 Global Thought Leader for AI, Privacy, and Safety with demonstrated experience in delivering revenue and solving complex business technology, governance, privacy and risk challenges at scale.   Ms. Thee is a consultant to some of the world's most innovative healthcare, and global technology companies including Microsoft and UCSF's Center for Digital Healthcare Innovation to accelerate FDA approval for AI use in clinical settings. She is the CEO and Co-Founder of Minor Guard, an Artificial Intelligence software company focused on making people safer online and in real life.  She is a keynote speaker including her TEDx talk “Bringing Light to Dark Places Online: Disrupting Human Trafficking Using AI.” She hosts the Navigating Forward Podcast. She has been named to the 2021 Top Health and Safety, Privacy, and AI Thought Leaders and Influencers and Women in Business you should follow by Thinkers 360. She was recently named to the 2022 “Top 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics” global list.   https://lisathee.com https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisathee/     About the Host: Michael Hingson is a New York Times best-selling author, international lecturer, and Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe. Michael, blind since birth, survived the 9/11 attacks with the help of his guide dog Roselle. This story is the subject of his best-selling book, Thunder Dog.   Michael gives over 100 presentations around the world each year speaking to influential groups such as Exxon Mobile, AT&T, Federal Express, Scripps College, Rutgers University, Children's Hospital, and the American Red Cross just to name a few. He is Ambassador for the National Braille Literacy Campaign for the National Federation of the Blind and also serves as Ambassador for the American Humane Association's 2012 Hero Dog Awards.   https://michaelhingson.com https://www.facebook.com/michael.hingson.author.speaker/ https://twitter.com/mhingson https://www.youtube.com/user/mhingson https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelhingson/   accessiBe Links https://accessibe.com/ https://www.youtube.com/c/accessiBe https://www.linkedin.com/company/accessibe/mycompany/ https://www.facebook.com/accessibe/       Thanks for listening! Thanks so much for listening to our podcast! If you enjoyed this episode and think that others could benefit from listening, please share it using the social media buttons on this page. Do you have some feedback or questions about this episode? Leave a comment in the section below!   Subscribe to the podcast If you would like to get automatic updates of new podcast episodes, you can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. You can also subscribe in your favorite podcast app.   Leave us an Apple Podcasts review Ratings and reviews from our listeners are extremely valuable to us and greatly appreciated. They help our podcast rank higher on Apple Podcasts, which exposes our show to more awesome listeners like you. If you have a minute, please leave an honest review on Apple Podcasts.     Transcription Notes Michael Hingson  00:00 Access Cast and accessiBe Initiative presents Unstoppable Mindset. The podcast where inclusion, diversity and the unexpected meet. Hi, I'm Michael Hingson, Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe and the author of the number one New York Times bestselling book, Thunder dog, the story of a blind man, his guide dog and the triumph of trust. Thanks for joining me on my podcast as we explore our own blinding fears of inclusion unacceptance and our resistance to change. We will discover the idea that no matter the situation, or the people we encounter, our own fears, and prejudices often are our strongest barriers to moving forward. The unstoppable mindset podcast is sponsored by accessiBe, that's a c c e s s i  capital B e. Visit www.accessibe.com to learn how you can make your website accessible for persons with disabilities. And to help make the internet fully inclusive by the year 2025. Glad you dropped by we're happy to meet you and to have you here with us.   Michael Hingson  01:22 Hi, and welcome once again to unstoppable mindset. We're glad you're here, wherever you are. And we hope that you will enjoy us this week, we have a kind of a really interesting person, kind of she absolutely is an interesting person and some good stories to tell. And I'm sure we're going to have a lot of fun in our discussions. Today we'll talk about AI, we're going to talk about a lot of things related to health care and disabilities and other things. So I'd like you all to meet Lisa v. And I assume you want me to refer to you that way.   Lisa Thee  01:54 Yes, that's great. Hi, everyone. My name is Lisa Thi and I am the data for good practice sector lead at launch Consulting Group.   Michael Hingson  02:04 And so why don't you tell us a little bit about kind of you younger and bring us up to date and how you got where you are today.   Lisa Thee  02:14 Yeah, I grew up in the Midwest. And kind of what people might consider the dress, the Rust Belt these days of Detroit, and studied engineering in school, and came out west to California after graduation and worked in the tech industry for 18 years before I retired as a director at Intel, and their hybrid cloud group and went off to do my own company for as AI software startup, called minor guard and have been working in the entrepreneurship innovation space, in consulting, Keynote, speaking and advising for the past few years now.   Michael Hingson  02:53 So what did you exactly do it Intel?   Lisa Thee  02:56 Oh, goodness, and also one of those awesome places where you get to try a lot of things. So in the decade that I worked there, I worked in different groups, from supply chain planning, to marketing to it to business development, and ultimately leading their AI solution group working on new applications for AI to improve things in society.   Michael Hingson  03:18 So Intel being very much a chip manufacturer and so on. How does AI get into that in terms of why why did they do that?   Lisa Thee  03:29 Yeah. So when you have a chip manufacturing company, the way that you increase your available market is to increase increased consumption of compute. So that could be through cloud providers that could be through personal computers, it can be through gaming, lots of different applications. So one of the ways that AI really benefits Intel as a company is by increasing utilization and solving bigger and hear your problems. So whether you're buying compute space in Google, or Amazon, or Microsoft, all of those, all those roads lead back to Intel, because they're providing the chips for the cloud infrastructure.   Michael Hingson  04:07 So at some point, maybe we'll find a significant amount of AI on chips. And of course, you've got people like Ray Kurzweil who talk about the singularity, and discuss the time when, well, what we're calling AI or computer intelligence, and human intelligence, Mary and M become all part of the same brain.   Lisa Thee  04:28 Absolutely. And in fact, it was hard to wear enabled AI solutions that launched me from being a corporate citizen, to an entrepreneur in my 40s when the iPhone 10 launched, I got a call from a colleague of mine from Apple, and he shared with me that he was no longer under NDA. And he thought we could do a lot in terms of prevention of child abuse online by identifying issues on the chip itself on the phone before they got saved to the cloud. And so that's what launched our company minor guard where we go Because on improving online safety for kids, online and in real life together by leveraging AI and nudity detection, to make sure that they weren't making 30 site decisions that were ruining the rest of their lives.   Michael Hingson  05:15 So I'd love to learn more about that. What? What did you all create? And what how does it work? And what does it do?   Lisa Thee  05:22 Yeah, so today, our technology inspired some of the changes that Apple made and iOS, when we started our journey, it took 130 unique decisions to block your child from taking a nudey kitty photo, that is illegal content and technically a felony. Today, it only takes a single choice, if you have a family iOS account, and you identify your child is using that device. So we help them to see the opportunity to really focus on safety in a way that was frictionless and allowed kids to be kids and make mistakes, but hopefully not the kinds of mistakes that will follow them for decades to come.   Michael Hingson  06:04 How does AI enter into that? I mean, if you would think I can just push a button and my child won't be able to access the site anymore. Where do they I get into that?   Lisa Thee  06:15 Yeah, so most apps today are end to end encrypted. So there's not a lot of visibility on the device, once you're in App if you're on a tic tac, or you're on a Snapchat or any of those popular social apps. And so we knew we needed to do it at a device level. Because once it was in the app and software, there was no way to make sure what what was happening. So when Apple you got to the generation with the iPhone 10. And beyond, they had an AI accelerator chip in the phone that allowed for facial recognition to unlock the phone. And by having that AI accelerator on the device that opened up the window to be able to do some detection on the device before you saved, saved it to the cloud. To make sure that before it got into an encrypted vault, you can make sure that a child isn't doing something that's illegal, and will possibly honeypot them for perpetrators.   Michael Hingson  07:08 So what does so let's say somebody takes a kiddie porn picture. What does ai do?   Lisa Thee  07:17 It identifies that the device is registered to a child through iOS, and identifies that image is explicit, and it blocks that image from ever being saved to the device. And secondly, to check what somebody sends them, it's going to prevent your child from taking their own content, because we learned through the process of working through this challenge with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children who is the nationwide clearinghouse for all reports of child sexual abuse material online. For tech companies, the public and law enforcement, that 40% of these images are actually taken by children themselves. They're often groomed or influenced by others to make a bad choice. And they don't really realize the stakes that they're entering when they move from being a regular kid to being somebody that has now created and distributed Child Sexual Abuse material, which is a felony.   Michael Hingson  08:15 And we're making any kind of progress on going the other way, which is people sending pictures to a child.   Lisa Thee  08:22 Yes, I think safety, that is harder. It is. So in my day job, I work with some of the leading thought leaders at the big tech companies in this space. I think there's a very large desire to make sure that the policy groups and the legal teams that are setting the terms of service to align with all the regulations internationally, have better tools were the operators that are trying to moderate that content, to be able to identify it and get it off of platforms. It is definitely a threat to every business owner to be hosting illegal content. I don't think anybody wants it there. It's an industry wide challenge. But unfortunately, criminals don't usually play by the rules, they intentionally find the places where they can break them. And so that's where I think AI comes in as a great complement to the humans, where AI can do what it does particularly well with just pattern recognition, tactical reordering of things to make it easier to process extremely large volumes of data. And make sure that the right things are in front of the moderators at the right time to get the most egregious acts off of the internet as fast as possible.   Michael Hingson  09:30 So they're they're always pictures and things like that. But what about bullying and those sorts of things where it's perhaps a lot more textual and so on, does aI have yet any real influence on dealing with that kind of situation bullying and such?   Lisa Thee  09:46 Absolutely as as much advancement as we saw on the video and photo side of AI. In the last 10 years, there's a whole new renaissance around natural language processing speeds typically around being able to use AI to detect things in context. So one of the companies that I advice for that I'm really passionate about is spectrum labs, because they are taking over 40 international languages and being able to apply models that are uniquely trained to identify 40 Different abuse types. So whether that be cyber bullying, whether that be Daxing, whether that be human trafficking, they can pick up the signals in the noise, and help moderators to take action on accounts that are problematic and creating harm across the platforms. So I'm really excited about their tech because I've been under the hood of most of these solutions. And I do know that they're able to do things in multi language that are unprecedented. And so that's why I chose to back behind them. I also have some experience working at a business to consumer products called bark technologies. And bark is really focused on parents being able to moderate their own children's communications on social media applications, I know that when mine get old enough, I will definitely be using their product. Because there is a big difference between somebody saying, I just tripped in front of that girl, I like I want to kill myself, and my life is meaningless. I want to kill myself, and having AI help bring the right alert at the right time can change the trajectory of a person's life. And I've seen that many times over. Because it's really connection and humans that help to intervene when things get dark. It's not going to be technology, but sometimes you don't know until you get an alert that they need special attention.   Michael Hingson  11:44 Course Gaia, somebody trips in front of a girl that he really likes, what we need to do is to send a message saying you got to call this guy he's really embarrassed.   Lisa Thee  11:55 Yeah, that one is recoverable. But when you are mentioning things like time, and your conflict that we know that they're significantly more likely to take action on that feeling, because they've been researching how to do it. And so you know, I am, I am definitely somebody who learned a lot of mistakes the hard way through hard knocks. And I'm grateful that I grew up in a generation where you could make a lot of mistakes, and it wasn't in the public domain for the rest of your lives. But unfortunately, for this generation, that's just not the case. And so they do a lot more typing than talking. And so when you can use technology to that, and especially AI to make sure that you can give them as much privacy as humanly possible. Well, getting the signal from the noise of something is really going from an affordable mistake to a life altering one. I'm really passionate about that. So I think Burke on the consumer side spectrum on the business side are really the leading folks that I see that can really help with this problem.   Michael Hingson  12:53 I think you bring up a really interesting issue, which is, as you said, there's a lot more typing than talking today, and I go back generations before you. And I remember growing up, I'm sure I was an oddity, but I wasn't really bullied, we didn't have internet at all, in the time that I was growing up. And I don't I don't think that we had nearly as much bullying as is appeared later. Or at least if we did, it wasn't talked about very much. And there was no social media. But But you are right people type today a whole lot more. How do we get people back to interacting with each other? I read an article, I think last year in the New York Times about the art of conversation has has died or is is not much in existence anymore. And that was all at that time discussing how politicians were treating things, but still, it also involved how they were treating and how other people started treating each other and not conversing, not talking and not sharing ideas and trying to find commonality. How do we deal with that?   Lisa Thee  14:11 It's a really good question. I wish I I wish I knew the full answer, there's a few things that come to mind. The first is that empathy is a very slow dobro skill that requires a lot of face to face communication. And in a lot of cases, this generation just isn't having as much opportunity to see the impact of their words, and how they can affect other people. So I think it allows them under the veil of anonymity online to speak to people in ways they wouldn't in real life. And I think that extends to adults as well. So I think a lot of it is really seeing the impact of your words and connecting back with that humanity piece. And the second piece I wanted to mention was really around the areas of cyber bullying and what does that like versus maybe what some of us who are in older generations experienced bullying is not new. No I do think that the 24 by seven never able to get away from it is. So you may 20 years ago, when I was graduating from college, you, you may have had a bad experience. And people may have been really mean to you when you're at school, for example, but you could come back to your apartment and just be separated from it, and have a little bit of a break and a respite and to be around people that were maybe more positive in your life, maybe that's your family, and maybe it's your friends. But you could you could get a break from it. Today's generations, they are scared to go to sleep, because they want to know what's being said about them at two in the morning. And I can relate in a small way. I mean, when I made a mistake, when I make a mistake at work, for example. I know I'm looking for that email from my manager or my client saying that it's okay. And we'll be alright. And this is how we're going to fix it. And when I have, I don't have that reassurance or that connection that it's going to be okay, and people are bombarding me with messages about what a problem this is. Now, I certainly feel anxious, I don't think there's any solution for that human condition. So I actually have a lot of empathy for growing up these days, they don't have a lot of room to make mistakes and, and grow from them. And realistically, I don't think humans are much different than computers, they learn much more from their mistakes on their successes. And that's how we advance AI is all the failures. And I think that's how humans learn as well.   Michael Hingson  16:34 Well, I think that's right. It's not just you learn from your failures in ai, ai, you learn from your challenges, your failures, as you said, much more than your successes in real life, just because the mistakes and the frustrations stay with your consciousness longer. Oh, I did that really? Well. Great. And then you move on, oh, my gosh, I screwed up. What? What is that going to do to me, and it's not anything new to have those kinds of feelings. But we do have today, such a much easier advice environment, on the parts of so many of us to ignore dealing with it, like you said, you wait for that email, and somebody doesn't take the time to say it to you to send you the email because they're off now doing other things. Whereas in the past, things were done much more face to face.   Lisa Thee  17:28 Yeah, you have much more real time feedback. And yet, you didn't have an eyes on culture, like work ended at a certain time. And I think there's been a lot of studies post pandemic that as we've shifted to a more virtual work environment, people aren't really having a hard time guarding their time at both ends of the day. Now in a way that wasn't as big of a problem when we had commutes. And when we had a lot more face time.   Michael Hingson  17:52 I have heard many times the joke about people, kids in the back of of cars, parents are driving in two kids sitting next to each other. And they're texting back and forth rather than talking. And I've actually seen that I've been in vehicles where they do that. And to me, it's just hard to fathom. Why don't you just talk to each other?   Lisa Thee  18:15 Privacy? They don't want the adults to hear it. Right? Yeah, that's true. Yeah. When you, when you put yourselves in the shoes of a digital native, they just they've had so much more access to information than we did so much younger, they have a lot more complexities to manage through in terms of social structures and growing up, and everything's public. So I can understand wanting to keep something between a couple of people because it's not so easy to do anywhere else in their lives.   Michael Hingson  18:47 Right. The other side of it is that I think to some degree in the past, when a family was in a car, and people were sort of forced to talk to each other, it did help invoke a better and higher level of trust than just keeping things private. Oh, I don't want them to know, because I can't trust them. So we've we've lost some of that trust that we used to have, it seems to me, I may be misinterpreting. But that's kind of what it seems.   Lisa Thee  19:16 Yeah. For me, what I've observed is we're making trust a problem for families and consumers and individuals versus looking at it at a societal and platform level. And I'm really hopeful as we come out of 2022 that we start to get more regulation around was expected from platforms to keep kids and families safer. I don't think this should be a consumer problem. I think this is a legacy of, you know, the growth of social and mobile and cloud that we've seen over the last 20 years. When we looked at regulating this industry 20 years ago. We just couldn't have envisioned the law So we live today. And you know, going into this whole Metaverse of web app three dot O generation, I think we have a lot more people online, we have a lot more opportunities for harm, as they're interacting with each other as building community has gotten so much easier. And it's time for us to be thinking through policies like we do with cybersecurity. On the digital safety side, that's where I'd like to see trust grow by having a level playing field for all the innovative startups all the way through to the large, multinational corporations. What we all agree is just off limits. I think today, there's just too much gray zone,   Michael Hingson  20:39 it seems to me that a lot of that is going to have to be done within the industry, because the politicians are so divided. They won't agree or do anything with it you had for four years, one party in power, who was just from their political stance against regulation doesn't matter what it is. And now we have a different party in power. But still, the people who don't want regulation or who say they don't want regulation, that's part of the interesting thing. It seems to be part of the time, what we're seeing are people just oppose each other just to oppose each other, rather than dealing with doing the right thing.   Lisa Thee  21:20 Yeah, for me, what I can say about this is I don't usually get the call until it got pretty bad. And trust me, the things that I get involved in, these are not tweener situations, right when the victim is six, or under which by the way, 56% of victims of child sexual abuse material are whose privacy is more important, the adult that's trying to consume that for entertainment value, or the crime scene victim who's having their images consumed for the pleasure of adults, I think the privacy in the regulation needs to fall a lot more on protecting our legacy and our next generations and protecting people's rights. And if people really understood the level of severity of what's being searched for and how an invasive the technology has to do it, it's very lightweight, just like a spam filter, I think there would be a lot less opposed to regulations. I think I wish that we could get better at helping people understand that if you really want privacy fully, you need to make sure that you turn off all of your spam filters to right like we're willing to make trade offs for privacy to not get attacked by criminals. Why would children not deserve the right to be able to use very labor? Wait hash matching technology that is not invasive? It's not going through your emails, personally, it's looking for picture matches for reported crimes, things like that. without even opening your stuff. I think if people really understood what we were talking about at that level, there would be a lot less gerrymandering happening in politics.   Michael Hingson  22:56 How do we deal with that? How do we make that happen? How do we get people to understand? And I guess that's really getting back to the whole issue of we're so polarized today. How do we break this logjam?   Lisa Thee  23:09 I would love to say that I have an answer. In 2021, I did a TED talk on the topic and started a petition to try to get some of the Department of Justice recommendations into the regulatory bodies for communication Decency Act 230 revisions, they, they did interviews with industry leaders and advocates for victims and the NGOs that do best in breed and came up with some very comprehensive and very rational guardrails that we could be adhering to. And I really hope that as Europe and the US are looking at some of these new bills, we don't get pulled to the to either side of all the things we disagree about, but we've had something we can all come together on. Unfortunately, I don't think that that helps people get reelected by being agreeable. So we'd love to see more pressure from people writing to their local representatives that they expect movement on this. And if you want to learn more about the bill that the petition and support that it's on my website, Lisa v.com/ted. Talk.   Michael Hingson  24:27 th, Lisa v th e,   Lisa Thee  24:30 right. Yes. And I I've been working with my California representatives to try to get some legislation brought forward because this is far overdue. We're gambling with things that are just the stakes are too high for kids.   Michael Hingson  24:47 Is the industry moving toward doing more to truly and not only intellectually but emotionally regulating itself on this It doesn't have to be left to the politics to do it and the politicians to do it.   Lisa Thee  25:04 I think that anytime you need to clean up technical debt and be looking for criminals abusing your systems, there has to be some kind of incentive or policy in place to make sure that you get the appropriate amount of funding. I have never met anybody that works in the industry, whether it be at Google or Microsoft, or all the other places that doesn't do this work, because they care. There's a lot easier ways to make a paycheck with a data science background, trust me. But unfortunately, a lot of times the boards in the C suite executives don't fully understand what it takes to do this, right. And it's grossly underfunded. So I think regulation will be the place where it allows them to make better trade offs for shareholders and better trade offs for their leadership to understand why the investment is absolutely mandated. And I think the other challenge you get into so you get a lot of hero complexes here and you get people that will just work themselves to the absolute core like to the bone. And it's because how do you ever measure someone else's suffering against your own? I gave myself PTSD, in 2017, from working every night, every weekend, on morphine drips in the hospital after injuries, because I had a really hard time turning it off, when you know, what's really going on. And I think that's why regulation really matters. We need to make this everyone's priority, that actually gets done. And I think we wouldn't see privacy and cybersecurity come to the forefront for a long time until regulation GDPR allowed people to make those investments, I think we're gonna have to see something similar in the digital safety front to help companies come along. I don't think there's a lack of talented smart people that can innovate and do what needs to be done. But there needs to be an impetus to act. And that's going to come from regulatory bodies.   Michael Hingson  27:08 We live in an era where it's not new, but people say, Well, we've got to do what we do. And we're all about just getting money for the shareholders. And personally, I understand why people say that. But companies were also originally formed many times from an entrepreneurial standpoint, to do something good. But we lose that along the way. And we get to the point of well, we're just all about making money for our stockholders.   Lisa Thee  27:39 I think this one is a little bit trickier. I think there's a lot of unintended consequences going on. When you build a platform to connect the world and have all these visions and wonderful ways it can happen, you're probably not thinking about the creepy guy in Estonia, that's going to start targeting sixth grade girls and Columbus, Ohio. When the nefarious actors typically are, innovate faster than these companies can keep up with. In terms of the ways they're misapplying their technology. So I think a lot of it's going to always be a balance of pushing a ball. I do think that the same way that privacy has really gotten much more regulated, I think we're gonna see online safety going that direction as well. And looking forward to that day, I don't anticipate by the time that Gen Z is parenting, that they're going to have the same struggles that I do with a nine year old and a 10 year old in the world. And I look forward to that, because they've grown up with this stuff. And they know how people use it. And they're not naive. I think right now we have a huge education gap, with our lawmakers, with our citizens, on really the ways that people are taking advantage of access to young people.   Michael Hingson  28:59 The kinds of things you're saying, to me, it seems, are things I've heard before. So what I'm saying is, I don't think they're necessarily new. So I think there's a little bit more to it, then people are just totally uneducated or uneducated. We're also not seeing the will to change and you're right with the Gen Z environment. hopefully over time, the these kids growing up, will recognize that we've got to change the world. But I hope that it happens before then because it's not like the concepts are new. It's more that we're not yet emotionally accepting it as such a reality in all of our lives unless we're specifically hit by it with a with a specific or concrete example for our child.   Lisa Thee  29:53 I have to have some tough talks with friends and family at least a couple of times a year and it's usually the somebody comes to me because something's happening in their family with one of their kids on safety. And I tell them what I know and what they can do. And then oftentimes, they don't want to do that, because it's a lot of work and who the heck has extra time for anything right now, or they don't want to make their child feel like their privacy is being invaded or a whole host of reasons. And then I get a call six to nine months later with law enforcement involved when people are missing when you know, things have gotten really off the rails. And I got to the place where I had to tell people look, I am happy to help you. If you are willing to take multiple hours to get things set up properly. And if you're not willing to commit that in the next 48 hours, I can't help you. Because I can't sit here and just wait to watch the train wreck. And I think that that's where the policy piece comes in where platforms have to design in safety by design. And parents don't need to be investing hours and hours and hours to set things up properly. Because frankly, I have an engineering degree, I founded an AI startup, I consult for some of the biggest thought leaders in this area. I don't know how to set their crap up. I don't I don't think this should be a consumer problem.   Michael Hingson  31:16 Oh, I hear you. And that's what I'm getting at. It's not like this information is new. And it's not like these people don't have the the industry doesn't have access to the information, and probably has heard it. But they under strict   Lisa Thee  31:32 chair, they don't lose market share. If they don't do it. That's the problem. We vote with our feet.   Michael Hingson  31:37 Yeah, that's that's the problem, we're still back to. It doesn't matter how important it is to do. From a reality standpoint, emotionally and intellectually. We're not there yet.   Lisa Thee  31:50 I mean, I tried to hold myself to a different standard, because I do have more access to information. And frankly, nothing the Facebook whistleblower service is new to me, but it to her being, you know, testifying to Congress before it kicked my Facebook habit, again, for like the fourth or fifth time. It's hard to stay away from some of these platforms, because they are a way for us to connect. They are a way for us to educate ourselves. They're fun. And I think if adults have a hard time staying away from things that aren't necessarily good for them, I think we have no right to expect the next generation to do better.   Michael Hingson  32:28 Not until they get older and hopefully become wiser.   Lisa Thee  32:31 I mean, your brain doesn't develop to anticipate long term impacts of your decisions fully until you're 24 years old. What are we expecting out of 1415 year olds? It's nonsense.   Michael Hingson  32:42 Yeah, much less six year olds?   Lisa Thee  32:44 Absolutely. No question. The age of my first phone, globally is estimated to be 10 years old these days. first smartphone,   Michael Hingson  32:52 I like actually, I got my first iPhone in 2009. It was the iPhone three, three, 3g. And so we've been using them ever since. And they're a wonderful tool. That's also part of it is that we've got to recognize it's a tool. But we also need to develop in our own minds much less in a regulatory way. What it really means to be able to positively use the tool and cut out some of the negative stuff. And it is just so easy to do that today to have all the negative stuff. It's so frustrating.   Lisa Thee  33:28 It is I think we'll continue to improve and innovate. I think there's too much more awareness of what really can happen. I think that some some of the places where I'm seeing a lot of innovation in terms of regulation and safety by design are coming out of places like Australia, huge superfan of the Safety Commissioner over there. Julie and Julie came from the tech industry and kind of knows where some of the popples are, and is starting to bring regulation that really can bring us forward in terms of hate speech in terms of cyber bullying in terms of protecting children. So I I feel like we will get there. I just wish we have gotten there already. I'm impatient at this point. I've been working in this field since 2015. And I'm ready to see some real movement   Michael Hingson  34:21 Yeah, it's it's got to be very frustrating for you because you're very close to it and you have children of your own and all you can do is do your best to bring them up and teach them how to make the right decisions and hopefully they'll do that but it is easy to to make a mistake and there's such a fine line today.   Lisa Thee  34:38 And it's not the parents negligence, it's we're not You're not set up to win. And even if you keep your kid off of it, they go to school and totally on unsupervised and have older siblings that you know it. We need. We need help. We need help.   Michael Hingson  35:03 Personally, I'm gonna start to worry when I get an email from someone that says that your dog just complained on Facebook that you weren't giving him enough bones, then I'm gonna worry.   Lisa Thee  35:14 There you go. I think AI to translate animal language would be a very interesting application, I only has to say about me,   Michael Hingson  35:25 it would be a whale out but not too many negative things. I think that there's a lot more positivity going on than we think. But they're very strategic. Some of these dogs are very intelligent. We had we had a dog. She was a breeder for Guide Dogs for the Blind. One day she was on the bed chewing on a bone but the bone kept slipping. Do you know what do you know what a doughnut is? I'm not sure I do. It's a it's a rubber doughnut. Very tough. It's really hard to to chew up. And in fact, I think they come with a warranty that if your dog happens to do it, which is very rare. They'll replace it for free. But it's it looks like a doughnut. Well, anyway, so our dog Fantasia was chewing on this bone and kept slipping away. She just deliberately left the bone on the bed, jumped down, went and grabbed a doughnut brought it back up on the bed. But she then picked up the bone, put the bone in the hole of the go nuts, so she could chew it and it wouldn't slide around. tool users tool users all the way   Lisa Thee  36:30 up. Absolutely. I also love their attunement. I feel like my dog knows the emotions and feelings of everybody in the family and knows who needs to snuggle and who needs a lick and who needs cuddle. At all times. They're they're really wonderful complements to our lives.   Michael Hingson  36:46 My fourth guide dog was named Linnaeus, she was a yellow lab. We were at a party and I, I took the harness off because everyone knew Lynnie. And so we let Lynnae wander around and visit people. And our pastor was there. She came up and she said, You know, it's interesting, Lynnae clearly is empathic and intuitive. She goes to the first person who's the most in pain, and then she'll visit the rest of the crowd. And you know, she said I don't mean physical pain. And when we started observing Lynnie that was absolutely true. And because Sheree had seen her at several parties, and so new Lynnie well, but it's absolutely true. They do have a lot of empathy and they know what's going on. You know, I've talked about that with me and the World Trade Center. The decisions that I made on September 11 came in large part because of what I saw Roselle doing and not doing. Because I've been working with dogs so long, Roselle there was a colleague who started shouting, there was fire and smoke above us. And there were millions of pieces of paper falling outside the window, and I could hear the stuff falling by the window, but I didn't know what it was at the time. But you know, David said millions of pieces of burning paper, I believed him. But with all of that Roselle is just sitting next to me wagging your tail going woke me up. i What are we doing here? And so that told me that whatever was going on wasn't such an imminent issue for her that she was even the slightest bit nervous.   Lisa Thee  38:22 Interesting, and then forgive my lack of awareness. How did you proceed out of that building with her guidance   Michael Hingson  38:30 downstairs. I mean, that was the only way to go. I was the Mid Atlantic region Sales Manager for Quantum. So I ran that office, and I spent a lot of time learning about emergency preparedness, what to do in emergencies and so on. And part of that actually led to why we're calling the podcast unstoppable mindset, because what I actually develop that day was a mindset. Well, not that day, but before that day of what to do if there's an emergency. And I really got to the point of knowing that whatever happened, if there were ever an emergency, I was as prepared as I could be, to deal with it. Now, of course, there are things that could have happened, that would have changed all of that, like the building just collapsed, and in which case, we wouldn't be here. But it was truly all about developing a mindset. And I think that gets back to what you're talking about here. We've got to change our mindset. And that's what what I did on the days before in the months before September 11th was develop that mindset. So I always observe what my guide dogs are doing anyway. And so it was a natural part of things to go oh Roselle is not acting nervous at all. So I believed everything that David said about what he was seeing paper falling burning paper falling fire above us and so on. But whatever was happening was in such an imminent issue, that we had to panic and just run out of the office, which wouldn't have done any good anyway.   Lisa Thee  39:58 Wow. Wow. Yeah, and I think that's exactly a great lead in to some of the things that I learned about in digital safety for the other folks that are maybe listening to this and a little bit nervous about what their kids are doing online, after hearing me, and that is, you know, teach your kids to do emergency drills, we teach them for tornadoes, we teach them for fires, we teach them for all sorts of natural disasters, that oftentimes will never happen in their lifetime. But coming across something on the internet, that's inappropriate, or makes you uncomfortable, is probably going to happen to 99.99% of kids, before they turn 18. And so I think one of the tricks that I've learned through being in the industry is really, you know, teaching your kids what to do when they do have that moment. So it's the stop, walk and talk method. And I'm sure my kids are sick of hearing it from me, but it's when you see something that makes you feel uncomfortable, you need to stop what you're doing, walk away from your computer, and come talk to a trusted adult, and know that I'm not going to freak out, I am here to support you. And that secrets can't live in the dark.   Michael Hingson  41:10 That is, of course, the other part of it, which is that you have to react appropriately and help even stronger, encourage and emphasize and enhance the trust, which is what you're really implying. And it's important that kids understand that parents really mostly do want to have that trusting relationship, there are some who give up those responsibilities, which is unfortunate. But that's not generally what happens.   Lisa Thee  41:41 And that's why I don't say talk to a parent, maybe it's talk to a trusted adult, maybe it's his uncle, maybe it's a teacher, maybe it's my market research was the majority of times that kids come in contact with the adult world online. It has come into being pushed towards them. And it's not something they're actively seeking out. And shame is a huge deterrent from getting help. And kids are not equipped to be able to handle the coordinated behavior and malicious adults is just not a fair fight. So I, I tried to remind that myself and them that I have the mindset that I'm here to be a resource for you and not to make this about my shame triggers not to freak out and overreact. I'm teaching you how to be in the world. And the world sometimes can be a little messy. And I know that criminals are looking for easy targets. They're looking for the people that don't have somebody that has their back. Yeah. And I don't ever want to put my kids in the position of not having somebody behind them.   Michael Hingson  42:48 Did you have any of these kinds of experiences growing up bullying or those sorts of things?   Lisa Thee  42:53 Nope. Um, my drought of this came mostly from my travels in my 20s as a global IT manager and until I hit 36 countries before the age of 30. Seeing in the business hotels, I was often mistaken for a flight attendant. So people acted really comfortable in their own environment. And I saw a lot of the business travelers taking advantage of human trafficking victims, it was very blatant. And it was something that really cemented in me that when I was in a position where I could have the authority to do something about this crime that I would, and that came later in my 30s. But it was my it was the fuel and AI engine, so to speak, to say, what's the point of being a woman with any kind of power in the world, if you're not advocating for marginalized women and children, I, there's, that's the only reason to keep doing what I do every day.   Michael Hingson  43:53 I think I said earlier was fortunate and not having any real bullying or anything like that. Now I faced discrimination as a blind person. I've had a number of examples of people who discriminated or treated me inappropriately because of being blind. And I think the first example of that was when a high school superintendent in our district decided that my guide dog wouldn't be allowed to ride on the school bus because there was a rule in the district that said, no live animals allowed on the bus, which was well, which it was contrary, contrary to state law, also at the time, and he was a bully. And so he was really trying to just make his position, the only one that mattered to them and disregarded everything else. And it actually took getting the governor of California involved to fix it. But the Governor did. As I tell people I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when the superintendent was summoned to say perminova over it. But the next week I was back on the bus.   Lisa Thee  45:05 I love that. It's awesome. It is so nice to see people that are abusing positions of power and authority to have some kind of accountability. I'm glad you didn't just advocate for yourself, you advocate for everyone that comes after you, right?   Michael Hingson  45:20 Sure. The The interesting thing about it is we first took it to the school board. And the board voted, even though we pointed out the state law, we pointed out case law my father did that demonstrated that the penal code in California took precedence over a rule in the school district, the board voted three to two to support the superintendent. That's how cowed several of the people were, or just took the position. Well, the superintendents, the boss, and we got to go along with what he says. And that's why it eventually went to the governor. But it was my first lesson in the fact that because I happen to not be able to see, I would be treated differently than than other people.   Lisa Thee  46:02 Wow, that's really powerful.   Michael Hingson  46:07 But it happens. And, you know,   Lisa Thee  46:09 I'm glad that you have a family that supports you, not everybody has the luxury of a functional family, to advocate for them. And that's why I do what I do. I'm not really worried about this happening to my kids to be honest, I they have a lot of advantages. But there's a lot of kids in foster care, there's a lot of kids that are maybe from families that maybe the LGBT community or other reasons are not under the protections that are. And I want to make sure that we we rise as a society for our most vulnerable, not only the privileged,   Michael Hingson  46:48 well, and you are taking the steps that you need to take with your children so that they grow up aware they grew up, hopefully wiser for it. And they grew up trusting their mom,   Lisa Thee  47:02 we'll see the jury's out time will tell the talks about Stranger Danger online and drives him nuts. Who knows?   Michael Hingson  47:13 That's right. I mean, you know, who knows what will happen, but all you can do is your best. And ultimately, you've got to live with that, that you can only do your best. And, and so you just kind of move forward as best you can. I'd like to read because you brought it up, you've experienced COVID, and so on, and which brings up the whole issue of, of disabilities, which is, of course another whole subject about people and how they treat people and so on. So I'd love to learn a little bit more about kind of, if you will, what happened to you and where you feel you fit now on the spectrum of people with disabilities and what where you feel society isn't all   Lisa Thee  47:52 that great question. So I was early to being exposed to COVID. I got sick in June of 2020. Well, before testing was readily available. And we knew what the possible long term effects of this disease were. My husband got it at the same time, unfortunately. And thank goodness my kids didn't. So very interesting all living in the same environment. But the adults were susceptible and the children weren't. I didn't have a lot of the classic symptoms they were looking for at the time, I never had a fever from COVID. I had pretty mild symptoms, according to the classifications, but unfortunately, it awoke at something in my immune system, that it's still having a hard time turning off. So since having COVID, and being diagnosed with long COVID with neurologic mild neurological impairment, I've lost half my hearing in my left ear, I have the hearing of a 60 something in my 40s I have a lot of Gi challenges that take a lot of medication to keep under control. And I get a lot of brain fog and insomnia because sleep apnea, so I have to be treated for that. And now I'm in the process of physical therapy and occupational therapy to recover some of my processing time and my brain when I'm trying to use my executive functioning skills. So as somebody that was labeled gifted before I started kindergarten, it is really, really hard to manage through the world. At the bottom 2% of the population, it's very foreign from what I've known before now, and I get lost picking my kids up from school. I sometimes am in a room and I don't know why I'm there. It is really hard for me to learn new things. Fortunately, I have a lot of things I learned before I got sick, but I still have a lot of access to. But new things are really, really tough for me, logistics names, things that I would just do without ever thinking about it. And I'm on disability from work right now I'm on a reduced schedule, I have been for a year and a half. I don't want to be put out to pasture I want to be part of the world. But unfortunately, that's as much as my body can handle at this point in time.   Michael Hingson  50:33 I have a friend who has brain cancer, and she's had it for several years, and she has gone through several brain surgeries and has had to work totally from home and not able to an infant back home is right now across country from where she works and so on. So it's it's a challenge. But the fact is that sometimes things occur, and she's, she's going through it pretty well. And she is able to, to move forward, although sometimes there are setbacks, and then those occur, but but she's really, she's really learned to be as strong as she can be at addressing it. So for you, what are they what are you doing, or what what can be done to kind of help some of the issues of the brain fog or the mental activities and so on?   Lisa Thee  51:26 No, I'm the results of my full diagnosis are only about a week old. So I'm sitting with a lot of acceptance right now, that's a big part of the game is just accepting that this is medical, it's not something I will be able to will myself thought of, or practice crossword puzzles and be done with. So I think part of it is reducing my stress around expecting more for myself and what I'm capable of today. I think secondarily is learning to how to have boundaries with friends, family and employers, what is possible for me, my doctor has been a really great partner in all these believing me and helping me get the right resources, make sure that I can, you know, keep my hours down, because I function very well, when I'm not fatigued, I just get fatigued much quicker than most people do post post injury. And I think also, you know, we've seen the impacts of the pandemic, disproportionately pushing women out of the workplace, or back to the 1980s levels of representation. So I feel really grateful that I have an entrepreneurial background to fall back on. I don't think I could keep up in a full corporate environment today. And I'm really grateful for advocates that I have within Funch consulting, that allow me to work and do what I do particularly well, in the times that I can do it so that I can still be part of society and make those accommodations. I'm really grateful for that. But I must admit, it's so really painful. When people clearly are expecting me to do things that I'm just not capable of, because I don't look disabled examples. So Girl Scout cookies for the last five years, totally not a big deal. I couldn't reconcile the number of boxes and what we ordered this year, I just simply couldn't do it. Or, you know, my kid forgot to I drop my kid off late to school this week. And they're like, Okay, you just need to go here into the attendance person and write this email and do this and do that. And I had to be like, I'm sorry, I have brain damage. I am not going to have the wherewithal to do that. On top of everything else I'm doing today, like, Can this be enough? You're seeing me right now seeing that my kid is here with me? Can you make an exception? And I found that unless I'm more vulnerable and actually say I have a disability, can you please? People are really kind of condescending, to be honest. And so I'm still tinkering with it. I haven't really come up with the way to protect my dignity and get the accommodations I need. Do you have any suggestions? Because honestly, I'm a little newer to this.   Michael Hingson  54:24 What did the attendance person do with a fine with that?   Lisa Thee  54:27 They argued with me three times until I said I have brain damage and then they stopped.   Michael Hingson  54:33 Yeah. The The problem is we haven't taught each other how to be inclusive and we haven't taught ourselves to address difference. So you're right people expect you just because you look quote normal and have quotation to be normal, even though in fact you might not be dyslexic. He is a perfect example of that kind of thing where it's an invisible disability, but it affects many people. And people have learned ways to address the issue, and sometimes hide the issue. But they've, they've learned to be able to be successful. And I think the biggest thing is, is what you're saying and doing right now you accept it, you accept the fact that there is this, this change in your life, which classifies you as a person with a disability. And there's nothing wrong with that. If you can address some of the issues medically or, or in some way, and your physical and occupational therapists and others can help you address some of that. And it may be creating new neural paths and of some sort, or it may just be that some things won't totally go back the way they were. But if you accept that, and figure out how to deal with it, that's the best that you can do.   Lisa Thee  56:04 Yeah, I think I'm early in that journey. But I know that that's where I need to go next. And it's funny, I've technically been on disability, because I've worked part time instead of full time for almost a year and a half. But it wasn't until I got that final doctor's diagnosis, that I able to accept that that it's real. And even though I'm living with it, like they didn't say anything in that report that I couldn't tell you what's happening all the time, seeing it validated in writing, with specific tests that they don't know anything about me, and they can detect, it really helped me come to at least say, Okay, I don't need to blame myself anymore for this. And I don't need to hide all the places that are hard for me. And maybe this is as good as I'll be. Or maybe I'll improve over time with new learning new ways. Like you mentioned with dyslexic people. I mean, how CEOs are dyslexic Creative Learning. Well,   Michael Hingson  57:06 that's exactly right. You know, Malcolm Gladwell wrote the book, David and Goliath, and he talks in there about CEOs who are dyslexic, they didn't say anything, but they learned to deal with it. And the fact is, I still take the position that there is not one person on this earth who doesn't have a disability. For most people. It's you depend on light. And I sometimes say that facetiously. But it is absolutely true. You don't have access to electric lights, or candles, or whatever power goes out, and you're not in a room with a window, you're most likely in a world of hurt. We've developed accommodations for that, because we've invented the electric lights, they, yes, Thomas Edison and others invented the electric light. And, and we have done a number of things to allow light to be around whenever we want it. It doesn't change the fact that in reality, physically speaking, most of us still have that same disability.   Lisa Thee  58:12 I mean, at the end of the day, 2021 was tough, I was getting scanned for brain tumors, I was getting many, many medical tests, I probably didn't go two weeks without some kind of doctor's appointment the entire calendar year. And I still had to deliver a TED talk that I get selected for before I got disabled. And when it's really hard for you to learn new things, it's really hard to memorize, even if you wrote the speech. And I mean, until the week I was on that stage, I really wasn't sure, really until the morning of if I was going to stand up there like a deer in headlights and not be able to deliver it because they don't allow any visual aids in the TED family.   Michael Hingson  58:58 And he's they're smart. They're smart. Who needs visual aids? That's what I say,   Lisa Thee  59:03 You know what, you know, who needs them? People with neurological damage?   Michael Hingson  59:07 Yeah, no, I understand. Yeah.   Lisa Thee  59:11 You know, I don't think many people that would follow me on social media on LinkedIn or such would envision that I have a disability. And so I just encourage everyone to be generous with their kindness for people you never really know what people are managing through. Most of 2021 Even though I was named a top 50, global thought leader in AI, privacy and health and safety and they did a TED talk. I was in bed by two o'clock because I couldn't physically hold my head up. Yeah. So   Michael Hingson  59:47 and, and the reality is we we don't need to and shouldn't pity ourselves. Sometimes. Yeah, you have to have a little pity. But ultimately, what we have to recognize is We are who we are, with whatever gifts we have, sometimes those gifts change, but we we have the gifts that we have. And what we need to do is to maximize our ability to use them. And sometimes that also helps us grow and improve our ability to use gifts. But it is ultimately a mindset. And it is a mindset that we need to adopt to basically get ourselves to recognize that we can probably be better than we think we are.   Lisa Thee  1:00:31 And that's actually what's inspired me now to write my book, the 90 day career cleanse, how to go from burnout to sustainability, sustainable living, because I had to learn a new way, it wasn't an option. And I see a lot of people suffering right now with feeling like they can't keep up. And they can't keep doing this. And I want to give some lived experience and some hope and some frameworks to people to be able to make that transition more gracefully. Because it's a lonely road when you're in the middle of it.   Michael Hingson  1:01:01 Well, how is your puppy dog helped you in terms of dealing with all the things that have happened to you.   Lisa Thee  1:01:09 Um, I think one of the strongest ways he helps me as accountability. He doesn't care how I feeling he expects a walk every day. And that gets me out in the sunshine and helps me see the tops of the trees and the blue skies of California and be reminded at how little anything I'm doing matters in the scheme of the world and not to be so hard on myself or others. I think the other ways that he helps is, you know, the, the cuddles and snuggles and the attunement. I mean, you can't be in your head and not be present in the moment when the warm cuddly puppy in your lap, that you're heading, it just brings you back into your body. And I find so much of what needs to happen to get through the stressors of life and mental health, whether that be mental health or medical, or, you know, just the the wear and tear of adulting is getting out of your brain and into your body. And I think that's where animals really help.   Michael Hingson  1:02:11 We have been talking for some time about writing a book, of course, I wrote thunder dog, which has been a number one New York Times bestseller, and it's actually called Thunder dog the story of a blind man, his guide dog and the triumph of trust. And if you out there who are listening to this have read it hope you will. Alamo says that it would be really great Elmo being my guide dog. It'd be great if you buy books, because we need to get money for kibbles. So you know, just keep that in mind.   Lisa Thee  1:02:38 More of those donut toys, right?   Michael Hingson  1:02:40 And go nuts. Yeah, well, he's got a couple of he plays with them. But, but the thing about it is that in there, of course, I talked about being in the World Trade Center. And we talked earlier about the mindset that I developed, that kept me from being afraid or allowed me or helped me use the fear, if you will, that I had to help me focus. But I've never taught people how to do that. So we're actually writing a new book, The working title right now is a guide dogs Guide to Being brave, awesome. And we're going to we're talking with people about fear and the things that that they have accomplished and overcoming fears and so on. And of course, we're emphasizing a lot with animals. So if you don't mind, we're going to probably see if we can draft you to be interviewed for the book.   Lisa Thee  1:03:26 Oh, it will be an absolute honor. Thank you.   Michael Hingson  1:03:30 And, you know, we're really excited about it. Because there's so many things that and we've talked about it here that we talked about in our lives, that are creating so much fear, we've got to be able to move beyond the fear. Because if we allow fear to just overtake us, then we are no longer in a good position to make decisions and think the way we ought to about how to deal with whatever problems we're facing.   Lisa Thee  1:03:57 I can't say that I bring my dog most places because I do still have a lot of triggers for my PTSD. I was in a school when they went into lockdown for an active shooter in 2016. And I came out okay, but we didn't know that for those three hours, we were hiding in the dark under a desk, wondering if I would ever see my family again. And then going into Child Safety Online. I I know what can go wrong and a level of detail that most people will never ever have to deal with. And so I get a lot of judgment a lot of times when I bring my dog because he's he isn't an emotional support animal. He has been registered as one but a lot of people think that's a joke and not a real thing. And, you know, I just hope that people can remain a little bit more open that not not everything on the surface is all the story and he really does help me and I'm sure there's other people that maybe take advantage of that system and you know, have fun do all sorts of crazy animals are traveling with or whatnot, but I just, I just encourage people to judge less than accept more.   Michael Hingson  1:05:09 Well, the the issue with emotional support animals in part is even ones that are registered are not necessarily trained to deal with the public and so on. And of course, a service dog or assistance dog is an animal that's been trained to provide a service. And so one of the things I'm immediately thinking of is that you ought to explore the scene, what else you could do or how someone could help you even better train him to help you with PTSD, because that is recognized as a service.   Lisa Thee  1:05:43 Oh, that's wonderful. I'll, I'll talk to you after this. Learn a bit more. I would not put myself it's an amazing drug dog trainer that is not in my skill set of things that I can   Michael Hingson  1:05:54 use. Okay. That's okay. Well, listen, we've been doing this a while. So we should we should end I think, unless you've got something else you want to talk about?   Lisa Thee  1:06:03 No, this was, this was wonderful. Thank you, Michael. How can how can people   Michael Hingson  1:06:07 reach out to

Wonder at the natural world has inspired people and fuelled curiosity for millennia. The ancient Greek Theophrastus had interests that spread far and wide, from biology and physics to ethics and metaphysics. But although he was Aristotle's friend and collaborator, and his notes on botany inspired Linnaeus, his name has mostly been forgotten. The writer Laura Beatty's new book, Looking for Theophrastus, aims to rescue him from obscurity. The scientist, Suzie Sheehy, still feels a childlike wonder at the way physics seems to be able to describe everything – from the smallest subatomic particle to the scale of the Universe. In The Matter of Everything: Twelve Experiments That Changed Our World, she looks back at the people who engineered ground-breaking experiments, and the human ingenuity, creativity and curiosity, as well as luck and serendipity that propelled them forward. While physicists attempt to describe and define the universe, the workings of the human mind still remain a challenge to scientists and philosophers. In The Book of Minds, the science writer Philip Ball looks at what we know about the minds of other creatures, from octopuses to chimpanzees, and of the workings of computers and alien intelligences. By understanding how minds differ, he argues, the better we can understand our own. Producer: Katy Hickman

Subscribe Apple | Google | Spotify | Stitcher | iHeart   Podchaser Leave a Review   Support The Daily Gardener Buy Me A Coffee    Connect for FREE! The Friday Newsletter |  Daily Gardener Community   Historical Events Floralia April 28th marks the beginning of a six-day festival called Floralia in the Roman calendar. And it's held in honor of the goddess of flowering crops and plants, and she was known as Flora. Now the goal of this weeklong festival was a satisfying appeal to Flora for a great growing season, a bountiful harvest, safety for workers, and probably a solid grape harvest for good wine.   1834 Birth of Harry Bolus, South African botanist, artist, businessman, and philanthropist.  If you've ever heard of the Bolus Herbarium in South Africa, it was named in honor of Harry. Harry founded the Herbarium, and he bequeathed his extensive library and part of his fortune to establish the South African College, now known as the University of Cape Town. Harry Bolus was not originally from South Africa. He was actually born in Nottingham, England. And the school that he attended, Castle Gate School, had a headmaster who corresponded with a plant collector named William Kensit. When Kensit required an assistant, Harry Bolus was the student who was selected for the job. Harry moved to South Africa and promptly fell in love with William's sister Sophia. The two were married, and they had three sons and a daughter. In 1864, when their oldest son died at six years old, a friend and fellow botanist named Francis Guthrie suggested that Harry take up botany to help heal his broken heart. Well, the rest, as they say, is history. Harry started his great botanical collection in 1865, and he soon struck up a correspondence with the most famous botanists of his day. And there's one other story about Harry Bolus that I thought you would enjoy. In 1876, Harry and Francis Guthrie traveled together to the world's Mecca for botany - Kew gardens in England - along with a large collection of plants. Even though their ship hit a reef on their return voyage and their collection was lost, Harry always referred to that trip as "Forty happy days."   1852 On this day, Henri Frederic Amiel, Swiss philosopher and poet, wrote in his journal:  Once more, I feel the spring languor creeping over me, the spring air about me. This morning the poetry of the scene, the song of the birds, the tranquil sunlight, the breeze blowing over the fresh green fields — all rose into and filled my heart.   1947 Birth of Bonnie Marranca, New York City-based critic, publisher, and writer. In her book, American Garden Writing (1988), Bonnie wrote, I judge a garden by the gardener who cares for it, the one who invests space with daydreams. How well I know the downward gaze into the face of the earth, the feeling of a luxurious body and good, dark soil that slips through the fingers in the rush to return to its dirty delirium. Each gardener creates an ideal world of miniature thoughts that drift languidly into each other like flowers on a dry afternoon. Hear silence has the rhythm of wishes.   Grow That Garden Library™ Book Recommendation The Perfect Specimen by Durlynn Anema This book came out in 2019, and the subtitle is The 20th Century Renowned Botanist: Ynes Mexia. This book is a wonderful biography of Ynes Mexia - the Mexican American botanist born in 1870 and who discovered the Sierra Club at age 50. And that led her to her life's calling and her legacy as a botanist. And so I love what Durlynn wrote and the dedication of this book because she wrote, This book is dedicated to those people who gained confidence in their abilities later in life.   And that is certainly the case with Ynes Mexia. She loved her experience with the Sierra Club so much that she decided to enroll in botany classes at Berkeley. In fact, over a 16-year period, she just kept taking botany classes on and off; She never had the goal of graduating. She just wanted to keep learning - so that's quite a paradigm shift. And as the mom of four young adults who are either in college or about to go to college, I love that perspective of being a lifelong learner - which is undoubtedly something that Ynes achieved. Now, I don't want to give the impression that Ynes was all about coursework and classrooms because that's really only a very small portion of Ynes's story. She was actually very drawn to fieldwork. She took countless trips through the Southwestern part of the United States into New Mexico and even into South America. She was very drawn to unique plants. She loved sunflowers, and she was a voracious collector. Many scholars argue that Ynes was one of the most accomplished collectors of her time. On her very first collecting trip, she collected over 500 specimens, which is essentially the same amount Darwin collected on his first expedition on The Beagle. Over her lifetime, Ynes collected over 150,000 specimens -500 of which were brand new plant species that had never been identified before. Ynes's story sadly came to an end in 1938 due to lung cancer. She was actually in Mexico on a plant collecting trip when she just could not go on any longer. So she cut her trip short, returned to the United States, and then died at Berkeley that summer on June 12th. And aside from her staggering amount of work, Ynes left a legacy when part of her estate was donated to the Redwood Preserve in California (which I think of as kind of a full-circle moment - harkening back to her work with the Sierra Club.) And so, forty acres of the Mexia estate were donated to the preserve, and one of the very tallest trees was named in honor of Ynes - a woman who is definitely worthy of a biography. I also wanted to share just a bit of what Durlynn wrote in the author's note at the beginning of this book because I think it does a beautiful job of outlining the extraordinary nature of Ynes's story. Durlynn writes, Most successful people, no matter their endeavor or occupation, find inspiration through either a parent, an important or inspirational person or an event. This is not the case with Ynes Mexia. A shy, quiet girl. She seemed to fade into the background with both her parents. She led a lonely life, which ironically aided her in her later endeavors. Mexia's is a story of retreat into self in the early years, and then blossoming to reach her highest potential after 50 years old. It is also the story of a doctor, who during the infancy of psychiatry and psychology, mentored this woman to her potential and became the father figure she never had. Read Marvel. And enjoy. Ynes Mexia's story.   It's a good one. This book is 174 pages about the life of the renowned botanist Ynes Mexia. You can get a copy of The Perfect Specimen by Durlynn Anema and support the show using the Amazon link in today's show notes for around $14.   Botanic Spark 1701 Birth of Madeleine Françoise Basseporte ("Mad-ah-lin Frahn-swahz Bass-ah-port"), French botanical artist, miniature painter, interior decorator, and teacher. Madeleine was a student of Claude Aubriet, the man honored with the naming of the Aubrieta ("Aubreesha") genus. The only reason Madeleine was able to study with Aubriet was that her talent was undeniable.  Despite his lack of credentials, Claude himself had risen through the ranks to become the Royal Painter of France. In 1741, Madeleine succeeded Claude as the Official Painter of the Royal Garden - an unprecedented appointment as Madeleine became the first woman to hold the position.  It was a role she would carry out for over four decades. Madeleine was 40 years old when she took on this assignment. She never married or had children. Instead, she dedicated herself to her work. At a minimum, she was required to produce twelve botanical paintings for the King every year. On top of that, King Louis XV also gave her the responsibility of teaching all the princesses how to draw and paint flowers. Madeleine also taught botanical art to many other artists and scientific illustrators throughout her career. She also became the godmother to several children from academic families she knew well. Madeleine also had the honor of working as an artist and designer for the King's official mistress, Madame de Pompadour. Pompadour was a major patron of creatives in architecture, porcelain, and decorative arts. Madeleine had an instant rapport with Pompadour. After Madeleine captured the beauty of the flowers around Madame Pompadour's chateau, Madame Pompadour insisted that the King give Madeleine a pay raise. And he did. Now it's important to know that as the first female Official painter of The Royal Garden, Madeleine did not work in a bubble. She exchanged letters with the French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc and the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau who appreciated her work so much that he wrote, “nature gives plants their existence, but Mademoiselle Basseporte preserves them for us forever.” (Translation my own). Madeleine was also a contemporary of Carl Linneaus. On January 30, 1749, Bernard Jussieu wrote a letter to Linnaeus teasing that Madeleine was "very proud of the title you give her, of your second wife.”   Despite her work alongside the top scientific minds of her time, her beautiful, botanically accurate art, and her groundbreaking appointment, Madeleine (unlike her predecessor Claude Aubriete) was never honored with the naming of any flower. But that doesn't mean she wasn't deserving of it. Today scholars hold Madeleine's work in esteem as scientific art - designed to show the structure and physiology of her plant subjects.  To me, Madeleine's art has a delicate, sensitive quality. Her expression of leaves, in particular, shows her depth of understanding regarding her plant subjects.  In 2021, Nina Gelbart wrote a book called Minerva's French Sisters by @yalepress. The book explores the biographies of six forgotten female scientists from 18th century France - including Madeleine Françoise Basseporte.   Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener And remember: For a happy, healthy life, garden every day.

Subscribe Apple | Google | Spotify | Stitcher | iHeart   Support The Daily Gardener Buy Me A Coffee    Connect for FREE! The Friday Newsletter |  Daily Gardener Community   Historical Events 1711 Birth of John Mitchell (books about this person), American physician, botanist, and polymath. John was educated in Edinburgh. As a young man, John returned to Virginia and settled in Urbanna - about seventy miles from Richmond. There, he began botanizing throughout Virginia, and he corresponded with most of the colonial botanists of his time. For instance, John sent a list of Virginia plants to Peter Collinson for inclusion in his book on new world plants.  John Mitchell and John Clayton both botanized in Virginia. The American writer Henry Theodore Tuckerman once wrote, Mitchell and Clayton together gave to the botany of Virginia a distinguished lustre. John also corresponded with Linnaeus, who named the sweetly trailing Partridgeberry Mitchella repens ("Mi-CHEL-uh REE-pens") in his honor. The word repens means "creeping" and describes its growing habit. Partridgeberry is in the Madder family. The berries are red and sport two bright red spots. By 1746, John and his wife had returned to England. He arrived utterly penniless after losing all of his botanical work on the voyage over from America. He paused his botanical work to create a map to help Britain identify their colonial territories. The Mitchell Map took five years to complete and became the most detailed and largest 18th-century map of eastern North America. The Mitchell Map also is regarded as one of the most significant maps in American history. Published before the Seven Years' War, the Mitchell Map was used in the Treaty of Paris (1783) and (ironically) helped define the boundaries of the newly independent United States. And Lewis and Clark used the Mitchell Map on their expedition.   1743 Birth of Thomas Jefferson (books about this person), American statesman and Founding Father who served as the third president of the United States from 1801 to 1809. Thomas loved plants and gardening. He once wrote, The greatest service which can be rendered any country is to add a useful plant to its culture.   He also once wrote, On a hot day in Virginia, I know nothing more comforting than a fine spiced pickle, brought up trout-like from the sparkling depths of the aromatic jar below the stairs of Aunt Sally's cellar.   1851 Birth of Helen Maria Winslow (books by this author) (pen name Aunt Philury), American writer and poet.  Helen's nature poems are charming. Here's the beginning verse to her poem, Spring Song. The bluebird from the apple-tree  Pours forth a flood of melody ;  The sky above as blue as he.  Shimmers and shines, an azure sea.  And the robin sings, 'What cheer, what cheer ?'  Summer is coming, and Spring is here!"   1909 Birth of Eudora Alice Welty (books by this author), American writer and photographer who wrote about the American South. Eudora's novel The Optimist's Daughter won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973. She famously wrote, One place comprehended can make us understand other places better. Today, Eudora's house and garden in Jackson, Mississippi, is a National Historic Landmark and is open to the public. The home was built by Eudora's parents, Christian and Chestina. Eudora lived in her family home for seventy-six years and wrote all her major works there. In the 1930s, Eudora hosted the 'Night Blooming Cereus Club' of Jackson, Mississippi, in her moon garden to watch the annual blossoming of the flower known as the 'Queen of the Night.' Eudora learned to love gardening from her mother, Chestina. Chestina designed the garden at Eudora's home in 1925. The two spent the next two decades working in the garden - planting, digging, weeding, and harvesting. Today, the gardens are beautifully restored based on Eudora's photos and letters and Chestina's garden journals. The garden is not a show garden - it's a gardener's garden - and that's the way Eudora wanted it to be maintained for future generations.  Eudora found inspiration in the natural world. Over 150 different plants are mentioned in her various works.  In 1931, Eudora and her mother turned to the garden after the sudden death of her father. During that time, she wrote short stories, including a story inspired by the garden called A Curtain of Green. Looking back at the years following the loss of her dad, Eudora wrote, No experience could have taught me more about grief or flowers, about achieving survival by going, your fingers in the ground, the limit of physical exhaustion. In Delta Wedding (1946), Eudora wrote, The evening was hot; it was the fragrance of the lemon lilies that was cool, like the breath from a mountain well. Gardeners often say that gardening is cheaper than therapy. Eudora knew that garden time had benefits that were on a higher level. She once wrote to a friend,   I like the work in the yard, never get tired, and can think out there... or maybe it's dreaming.   Grow That Garden Library™ Book Recommendation The Garden of Lost and Found by Harriet Evans This book is an oldie, but goodie - it debuted in 2009 - and this is a fiction book that should definitely be part of your garden fiction collection. Now, as with most of the fiction books that I recommend, this book has a beautiful cover and bonus points: it has the word garden in the title. In addition to all of that, Harriet Evans is a wonderful writer. Now the publisher of this book pitched it this way. One house for women And the secret that binds them all. Lose yourself in this unputdownable tale of the enduring power of family love told by three generations of extraordinary women. Now I bought this book back in November of 2020, and I know that because Amazon was kind enough to remind me when I went to find what year this book was published. Anyway, I remember reading it over Christmas break, and I would say it's part mystery and part thriller. So if you're looking for something to read over spring break- or maybe for a beach read over the summer- this would be a fantastic option. And by the way, this is a big book. It is 560 pages. I thought I'd give you just a little bit of a teaser here. It starts with the setting at Nightingale House in 1919: Liddy Horner discovers that her husband, the world-famous artist Sir Edward Horner burned his best-known painting called The Garden of Lost And Found. And he did that just days before his sudden death.  And then, of course, we're off to the races. So there you go. You can get a copy of The Garden of Lost and Found by Harriet Evans and support the show using the Amazon link in today's show notes for around $2.   Botanic Spark Here's an excerpt from HLV Fletcher's book of garden gossip called Purest Pleasure. This is from his chapter for April, and it includes an exchange with a 70-year-old friend and fellow gardener named Micah. He wrote: I had been working in the garden almost as long as the light lasted, and when dusk fell I went down to see Micah. He had a sore throat and was treating it with boiled Nettles, and we got to talking about them. Everywhere now the young Nettles were growing, their strong new growth making a mat of rich green. To most people, accustomed to think of them only as weeds, the sight is hateful, but I don't know. As weeds I do not find them very hard to destroy; as herbs there are less handsome plants.  It certainly makes an excellent green vegetable about this time of year, went the tips are young and tender. The Romans are said to have used it like Spinach.  Micah had a riddle to ask me. "What did Adam first plant in the Garden of Eden?" I tried a number of plants and then gave up. "Well, what was it?" He grinned triumphantly. "His foot, of course."   Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener And remember: For a happy, healthy life, garden every day.

Subscribe Apple | Google | Spotify | Stitcher | iHeart   Support The Daily Gardener Buy Me A Coffee   Connect for FREE! The Friday Newsletter | Daily Gardener Community   Historical Events 1727 Birth of Michel Adanson, French botanist and naturalist. He created the first natural classification of flowering plants. Although today we think mainly of Darwin and Linnaeus when it comes to classification, these two men and others stood on the shoulders of Michel Adanson. The great botanist Jussieu ("Juice You") adopted Michel's methodology to create his masterpiece called Genera Plantarum (1789). Michel was the first person to question the stability of species. When he saw breaks or deviations in nature, he came up with a word for it: mutation. Linnaeus honored Michel's contributions with the genus Adansonia, which features the spectacularly unique Baobab ("BOW-bab") trees of Africa, Australia, and Madagascar. The Baobab tree (books about this topic) has a Seussical quality, and it is one of the most massive trees in the world. They are called "The Queens of the Forest" or "The Roots of the Sky in Africa." The last name refers to a legend that tells how long ago, in a fit of anger, the devil pulled the Baobab tree out of the ground, only to shove it back into the earth upside down - leaving its roots shooting up into the air. The story offers the perfect description of how the trees look.  The enormous trunks of the Baobab tree can store up to 32,000 gallons of water. The outer bark is about 6 inches thick, but the cavity is spongy and vascular. This is why animals, like elephants, chew the bark during the dry seasons. Carbon dating indicates that Baobabs may live to be 3,000 years old.  And here's a fun fact: the cooking ingredient Cream of Tartar was initially made from Baobab seed pulp. Today, it is mainly sourced as a by-product of making wine.   1775 Birth of Francis Cabot Lowell (books about this person), American industrialist and anthropologist. The first planned company town - the city of Lowell, Massachusetts, is named in his honor. One of the fathers of the Industrial Revolution in America, Francis once wrote, One lifetime is never enough to accomplish one's horticultural goals.  If a garden is a site for the imagination, how can we be very far from the beginning?   1869 Birth of David Fairchild (books about this person), American botanist. In terms of plant exploration, David was single-handedly responsible for introducing more than 200,000 plants to the United States, including pistachios, kale, mangoes, dates, nectarines, soybeans, and flowering cherries. In 2019, David's incredible adventures and contributions intrigued author Daniel Stone so much that he wrote a magnificent biography of David called The Food Explorer: The True Adventures of the Globe-Trotting Botanist Who Transformed What America Eats. David also brought the Avocado to America. David loved the Avocado and wrote, The avocado is a food without rival among the fruits, the veritable fruit of paradise.   In 1905, David married Mary Ann Bell; his father-in-law was none other than Alexander Graham Bell - who, along with his wife, also enjoyed gardening. Today the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Coral Gables is filled with many of the plants David collected, and of course, the garden is named in David's honor. In The World Was My Garden: Travels Of A Plant Explorer (1938),  David  wrote, The human mind prefers something which it can recognize to something for which it has no name, and, whereas thousands of persons carry field glasses to bring horses, ships, or steeples close to them, only a few carry even the simplest pocket microscope. Yet a small microscope will reveal wonders a thousand times more thrilling than anything which Alice saw behind the looking-glass.   1940 Birth of Steven Vogel, American biomechanics researcher and the James B. Duke professor in the Department of Biology at Duke University. In The Life of a Leaf (2012), Steven wrote, I'm not even much of a gardener—my contribution to the family garden consists mainly of compost.   Grow That Garden Library™ Book Recommendation The Fine Art of Paper Flowers by Tiffanie Turner This book came out in 2017, and the subtitle is A Guide to Making Beautiful and Lifelike Botanicals. When it comes to making permanent arrangements and using elements like paper flowers, there is no better teacher than Tiffany Turner. By the way, this book has the most beautiful cover. Tiffany is a bit of a polymath - she's multitalented. She's licensed as a California architect. She's a fine art instructor and an artist in her own right. Her work has been featured all over the country. Tiffany typically explores nature in her work, and she creates botanical specimens that can be staggeringly large or very, very, very tiny. Now, Tiffany was raised in the woods of New Hampshire. But, for the past twenty years, she's made San Francisco her home, and that's where she and her husband are raising their two children. There's no doubt her children have delighted in their mother's beautiful, beautiful work. There's something about Tiffany's work that reminds me a bit of Mary Delany - the famous crate paper artist from the 1700s. I think Mary would really delight in what Tiffany can do with paper, and I especially love what Publishers Weeklysaid about Tiffany's book. They wrote, Under the mantra 'You must make what you see, not what you think you see,' this book guides artisans to astonishing results.   Tiffany walks you through how to make these awe-inspiring creations, but the most crucial element is how to start — how to approach each floral subject — whether you're talking about a poppy or a rose, or a peony. Each flower has a little bit of a different approach. Tiffany's book is a fantastic resource because it's an in-depth instructional guide where Tiffany leaves nothing to chance and lays it all out on the table. So even if you are a complete novice in crafts and working with an element like crate paper, you will quickly be put at ease by all of Tiffany's encouragement and simple, straightforward instructions. Now, one of the ways I love to use this book is whenever my daughter says that she and her friends want to do something - they're bored, but they have no idea what to do. Crate paper flowers are enjoyable to do with a small group of friends. They're not very messy. You can start and stop the project at any time. And generally, by the time the gathering is over, people are leaving with flowers in their hands - and that's what you want. You don't want an overwhelming project that can't be finished in a sitting. So I love this book. This is one of my go-to resources for botanical crafting. This book has been out for five years, and it's still one of the very, very best resources for paper flowers. This book is 264 pages of paper, crafting gift decorating, flower arranging, and more from your trusty guide: Tiffany Turner. You can get a copy of The Fine Art of Paper Flowers by Tiffanie Turner and support the show using the Amazon link in today's show notes for around $15. So fun.   Botanic Spark 2020 On this day, Female First shared an article about Dame Helen Mirren (books about this person), English actor. Speaking to Yours magazine, she shared: I love to spend time in my garden. If I have a few free hours I love to dig around in the dirt. It's so calming, worthwhile and a really good way of keeping those dark dragons away which I do have at times.  Gardens and green spaces are vital for people and the planet. ...They should teach it in schools. ...Gardening is learning, learning, learning. That's part of the fun of it. You are always learning." It comes after the 74-year-old actress revealed she is a pomegranate farmer and harvests the fruits at her farm in Salento, Italy. She explained: Apart from acting, my other job is that of a pomegranate farmer.  My husband I have planted over 400 pomegranate trees and we're producing juice for the market. The juice is delicious.  Our little company is still in the early stages but we want to sell our juice in Italy and abroad. ...The first time I saw the full moon rising from the sea and shining on my pomegranates, I burst into tears.   Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener And remember: For a happy, healthy life, garden every day.

Subscribe Apple | Google | Spotify | Stitcher | iHeart   Support The Daily Gardener Buy Me A Coffee   Connect for FREE! The Friday Newsletter | Daily Gardener Community   Historical Events 1528 Today is the anniversary of the death of the German painter, engraver, printmaker, mathematician, and theorist from Nuremberg, Albrecht Dürer (books about this person). Albrecht's work was extraordinary, and by the time he was in his 20s, he was already quite famous. During Albrecht's lifetime, explorers shifted their focus from medicinal plants to ornamental plants. As an artist, Albrecht captured many new exotic plants with incredible attention to detail. If you're looking for bunny art, you should check out Albrecht Dürer's watercolor called Young Hare. It's a beautiful piece, remarkable for its accuracy and realism. One of Albrecht's most famous pieces is The Great Piece of Turf (German: Das große Rasenstück), which he created in 1503. This exceptional watercolor shows a very natural grouping of natural plants together in community and features grass that has gone to seed, plantain, and dandelion.   1732 Birth of José Celestino Mutis (books about this person), Spanish priest, botanist, and mathematician. He's remembered as the architect of the Royal Botanical Expedition of the Kingdom of Granada (what is now Columbia) in 1783. For almost 50 years, José worked to collect and illustrate the plants in Colombian lands. In Columbia, José created an impressive botanical library and a herbarium with over 24,000 species. During his lifetime, only Joseph Banks had a bigger herbarium than José.  José's study of the Cinchona tree (Cinchona officinalis) at the Bogota Botanical Garden helped develop a cure for yellow fever or malaria. The Cinchona tree grows in the cloud forests of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. The bark of the cinchona tree contains quinine, the chemical used to create medicines. During José's lifetime, Cinchona was believed to have the potential to cure all diseases, and so the Spanish crown encouraged José to continue his work with Cinchona. José sent thousands of specimens back to the Madrid Botanical Garden. He also used local artisans to create over 6,500 pieces of botanical art. The majority of the collection remained in shipping crates until 2010 when they were finally exhibited at Kew. Today, thousands of pieces of the Mutis collection are housed at the Botanical Garden in Madrid, Spain. The pieces are significant - mostly folio size - and since they haven't seen much daylight over the past two centuries, they are in immaculate condition. The old 200 pesos banknote in Colombia bears the portrait of José Mutis, and the Bogota Botanical Garden is named in his honor.   1759 Death of Johann Zinn, German anatomist and botanist. He died young from tuberculosis at 32. Johann accomplished much in his short life, and he focused on two seemingly disconnected areas of science: human anatomy and botany. From an anatomy standpoint, Johann focused on the eye. He wrote an eye anatomy book and became the first person to describe the Iris. Today, several parts of the eye are named in Johann's honor, including the Zinn zonule, the Zinn membrane, and the Zinn artery. As a young man, Johann was appointed the University Botanic Garden director in Göttingen (pronounced "Gert-ing-en"). He initially thought the University wanted him to teach anatomy, but that job was filled, so he took the botany job instead. One day, Johann received an envelope of seeds from the German Ambassador to Mexico. After growing the plants, Johann wrote about them, drew the blossoms, and shared the seed with other botanists throughout Europe. Those seeds were the Zinnia (click here to order Zinnia seeds).  When Johann died so young, Linnaeus named the Zinnia in his honor. The Aztecs had a word for Zinnia, which basically translates to "the evil eye" or "eyesore." The original Zinnia was a weedy-looking plant with a dull purple blossom. This is why the Zinnia was initially called the crassina, which means "somewhat corse." Once the French began hybridizing Zinnias, the dazzling colors began turning the heads and hearts of gardeners. This gradual transformation of zinnias from eyesores to beauties is how Zinnias earned the common name Cinderella Flower. Zinnia's are a favorite flower of gardeners, and it is Indiana's state flower. In addition to their striking colors, zinnias can be directly sown into the garden, they attract pollinators like butterflies, and they couldn't be easier to grow.   2021 On this day, The Book of Difficult Fruit: Arguments for the Tart, Tender, and Unruly by Kate Lebo was released.  In her book, Kate Lebo - essayist, poet, and pie lady - shares a natural, culinary, medical, and personal history of twenty-six fruits, including: Aronia or chokeberry - a member of the apple family and it is not poisonous. Like raspberries, the Aronia pigment stains clothes. Durian - fruit from the tree of the hibiscus, or mallow, family. The unique rind contains a sweet freet. But the durian is very pungent - the odor subtly shifts between sweet and stringent on a spectrum from peaches to garlic. Medlar - a very squishy and very sweet fruit. It tastes similar to an over-ripe date, toffee apples, or apple butter. Medlar is beloved by gardeners for its flowers. Quince - has a bright fragrance of pear, apple, and citrus. Once cooked, quince softens and the flesh transforms from white to pink. Kate's book includes one essay along with recipes for each fruit. The fruits that Kate profiles are notoriously challenging. They might be difficult to grow or harvest. The window of ripeness might be very brief. The fruit may have a toxic aspect. Or, it may be invasive and not suitable for the garden. But in Kate's book, these fruits make the cut, and she shares all kinds of insights and culinary uses for these fruits. Kate reveals all kinds of tips, including why Willa Cather included the pits in her plum jam. Great book. The Book of Difficult Fruit was named a Best Book of the Year by The Atlantic, New York Magazine, and NPR.   Grow That Garden Library™ Book Recommendation Private Gardens of South Florida by Jack Staub By the way, I should mention that Rob Cardillo took the fantastic photographs in this book. This book is a treat, and I am thrilled to share it with you on today's show. It's been out for about six years, which means that this book's used prices have gone down. This was a $50 book when it came out, but you can now get copies for about $12, which is such a deal. In this book, twenty-two private gardens from South Florida are featured. And if you love tropical gardens, you've got to get this book because it's the only way you'll see some of these secret gardens and grounds that are so unbelievably designed. For instance, you'll meet a painter-turned-horticulturist who transformed her garden into a mysterious forestlike escape. There's a couple that created their garden after being inspired by the Near East, so their garden is something that you might see in a Persian Royal Garden. And of course, all the gardens are set in Florida, so you're going to see all kinds of pools, fountains, ocean views, and just incredible vistas - not to mention avenues of palms. (That's something I love because clearly, we will never have that here in Minnesota.) The palms add such a stately majestic aspect to tropical gardens. Now, of course, Jack himself gardens on Hortulus Farm in Pennsylvania. His main concern was finding diverse gardens to feature in his book. Jack really wanted to show the full spectrum of private gardens - everything from a grand estate to tiny, hidden oases. Jack also wanted to find gardens that had owners that were very invested in them, that actually cared about them, and had a significant relationship with their gardens. And I think to me, that makes all the difference in the way these gardens are portrayed because you can tell that these gardens are loved. One other thing I want to mention about Jack Staub and his writing is that he is such a compelling writer. Jack, himself is passionate about gardens, which comes through in how he writes about gardens. For instance. One garden is introduced by Jack this way: There is something very Hansel and Gretel about this garden as it reveals itself so slowly and circuitously. One is nearly sufficiently disoriented to strew a trail of crumbs behind one so that one is guaranteed away out of the forest. People just don't write like that about gardens - and so I appreciate that about Jack and his writing. And while you might be sitting there going, why would I get a book about the gardens of South Florida? Well, I would say stretch yourself. This book may show you gardens that are out of your growing zone - that are a little foreign -but you will learn a ton about composition, design, and how to look at gardens through the wise eyes of Jack. And that, my friends, is very much worth investigating. This book is 256 pages of enchanting properties that will inspire you not only to partner with nature and design in new ways but also to create your little slice of paradise right in your backyard. You can get a copy of Private Gardens of South Florida by Jack Staub and support the show using the Amazon link in today's show notes for around $12.   Botanic Spark 1809 Birth of Alfred Lord Tennyson (books by this author), English poet. During most of Queen Victoria's reign, he was England's Poet Laureate. Today, you can take a tour of Tennyson's walled garden on the Isle of Wight. Both his home and the garden have been restored to their former glory, and the property gets top ratings on TripAdvisor. Tennyson loved his "careless-ordered" garden. In 1863, he wrote, I hope no one will pluck my wild Irises which I planted. ...if they want flowers there is the kitchen garden — nor break my new laurels, etc. whose growth I have been watched... I don't like children croquetting on that lawn. I have a personal interest in every leaf about it. And here's Tennyson's most quoted sentiment is a favorite among gardeners: If I had a flower for every time I thought of you… I could walk through my garden forever.   Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener And remember: For a happy, healthy life, garden every day.

Subscribe Apple | Google | Spotify | Stitcher | iHeart   Support The Daily Gardener Buy Me A Coffee    Connect for FREE! The Friday Newsletter |  Daily Gardener Community   Historical Events 1699 Birth of John Bartram, American botanist, and explorer.  John founded the first botanical garden in America, and Linnaeus called him the "greatest natural botanist in the world."  Like many botanists of his time, John was born to a farming Quaker family in Pennsylvania. He never forgot his rural roots, and he always thought of himself as a farmer first. When asked to describe how he ended up in botany, he wrote,  One day, I was very busy [plowing]… and being weary I ran under a tree to repose myself.  I cast my eyes on a daisy; I plucked it mechanically and viewed it with more curiosity than common country farmers are wont to do, and observed ... many distinct parts, some perpendicular, some horizontal.  ...I thought about it continually, at supper, in bed, and wherever I went.... On the fourth day I hired a man to plow for me and went to Philadelphia. [I bought] a Latin grammar [and] ...applied to a neighboring schoolmaster, who in three months taught me Latin enough to understand Linnaeus... Then I began to botanize all over my farm.   1907 On this day, a school garden for boys only was started at a school in Rhode Island. A summary report was published with the State Board of Education. Here's what the report said,  On March 26th, all the boys wrote for catalogs, some sending several letters or cards.  It proved a valuable letter lesson in letter-writing and geography as they looked at the places they had sent the letters and inquired about distances, railroads, and mail trains.  More than fifty attractive catalogs were received. Tomatoes, lettuce, and radishes were planted in boxes ready for early transplanting. The seeds were obtained through a member of Congress, and despite all the rumors regarding the poor quality of government seed, [they] proved excellent. Two boys found an old sink in a dump. This was sunk in the middle of the West yard, partly filled with cement and now used as a birdbath. Each boy chose several vegetables from a list of corn, squash, onions, carrots, beans, beets, lettuce, radishes, pumpkins, potatoes, peas, and parsnips. The corn and a row of sunflowers were planted next to the fence; the other vegetables [were planted] according to height, living lettuce, and radishes in the front. Difficulties: There have been many difficulties in the way. Most of the work has been done outside of school hours, at noon when some of the boys have to hurry home or at night when they carry papers. Most discouraging of all, vegetables have been stolen and Gardens trampton almost nightly. Effect: But the effect of the garden work on the boys has been excellent.  First of all it's giving them an outside interest. They have learned courtesy and generosity and showing visitors the garden and giving away their vegetables. Toads which we have raised from eggs are to be put in the garden when school closes.  There has been less time for running about the streets and cigarette smoking. Since the gardens were started, there's only been one case of truancy and very little absence. Ten or fifteen minutes hard work during the school hours has often served to bring a cross, restless boy back to quiet and pleasant.  Of the 23 boys, 18 have made gardens at home and most of them are doing well. A copy of one boy's notebook will give an idea of the garden from the boy's standpoint. March 25: Began to pick rocks. Got a backache. Wrote for catalogs. March 26: Laid out 23 beds - [each] 6 by 14 ft March 27: Planted radishes, lettuce, tomatoes in boxes. Miss Allen paid $0.25 for loam. May 1: Put down sink for Birds bath. May 3rd: Planted pumpkins, potatoes, beans, beets, lettuce, radishes. May 15, 16, 17: Cleaned up West yard. Got loam. Planted shrubs and trees.  Planted marigolds, candytuft and poppies, Boston Ivy, cornus, weigelia, lilac, crab.  It looks slick. May 20th: These seeds are up in my bed: radish, lettuce, beans. May 21: brought Bush to school. Went to Arlington for ferns. Pumpkins up. Put violets beside Birds tub. June 12th: Brought home 10 radishes. They were good ones.  Saw a jay in our bath and a chipping sparrow. June 17: Mr Randall out. Hoeing. A lot of teachers came. Took home lettuce June 18: Sent radishes to Mr. Small. A man and lady came to see if we will get a prize. June 19: Everything in my garden is growing fine. It's a good thing. We have spent $11.45.   1913 Birth of James C. Rose, American landscape architect, and author.  A high school dropout, James was expelled from Harvard University as a landscape architecture major because they disapproved of his design style.  James fulfilled a lifelong dream despite his personal struggles with educational institutions when he created The James Rose Center for design study and landscape research.  In From Creative Gardens (1958), James wrote, A garden is an experience.  It is not flowers or plants of any kind.  It is not flagstone, brick, grass, or pebbles.  It is not a barbeque or a fiberglass screen.  It is an experience.  If it were possible to distill the essence of a garden, I think it would be the sense of being within something while still out of doors. That is the substance of it; for until you have that, you do not have a garden at all.   1923 Birth of Norman Thelwell, English cartoonist. He is remembered for his humorous drawings of ponies and horses. In his book, From a Plank Bridge by a Pool (1978), he wrote, When I look at the tree in the dark days of winter, its huge green-black skeleton silhouetted against the ashen sky, or hear its tracery seething in a westerly gale as I lie snug and warm in bed, I wonder who it was planted this giant for so many generations to enjoy. And in the balmy days of summer when its leaves are overlaid like the breast feathers of a great bird to form high domes of rounded foliage, I wish I could call back this gentle spirit of the past and say,  “This is your tree. Look at it now, for it is gracious beyond words.”   Grow That Garden Library™ Book Recommendation The Cook's Herb Garden by Jeff Cox and Marie-Pierre Moine This book came out in 2010, and the subtitle is: grow harvest cook. As someone who loves to grow herbs, this is one of my favorite books on herbs because it features beautiful photography of over 120 culinary herbs. Then, Jeff and Marie-Pierre offer more than 30 delicious, practical recipes that show you what you can do with your herbs - everything from making your own salad dressings and marinades to flavored butter, pestos, herbal teas, and cordials; in addition to seasoning your favorite meals. And I love what Jeff writes. He says, I always think of culinary herbs as the champions of the kitchen garden. And he reminds us that their volatile oils serve a purpose: they were the compounds that plants used to defend themselves from insects and fungi. As for Marie, she says that, As a cook herbs are my best friends. Just a handful brightens up the concoctions that I make in my kitchen. And she also reminds us that when space is at a premium, herbs should be a priority. So whether you're going to store some ginger root in the freezer, or a roll of herb butter or even just a little cilantro ice cube. They are all well-worth their shelf space. This book is 192 pages of fantastic herbs -and the photography is top-notch. This is a DK book - and it looks like it. You can get a copy of The Cook's Herb Garden by Jeff Cox and Marie-Pierre Moine and support the show using the Amazon link in today's show notes for around $4.   Botanic Spark 2011 Death of Elizabeth Taylor, British-American actress. She was the highest-paid movie star in the 1960s. She won two academy awards - for BUtterfield 8 (1960) and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) In 1999, she was named the seventh-greatest female screen legend of Classic Hollywood cinema by the American Film Institute. Elizabeth was an early AIDS activist, and she founded the National AIDS Research Foundation. In 1990, she championed Ryan White Care Act to stop discrimination against people with H.I.V. One of her tactics was to send lavender-scented notes to senators and congressmen that simply read, "I think you should see this," along with detailed information about H.I.V.  Elizabeth's Bel Air home garden was located behind the swimming pool. A private tropical paradise, the garden featured her favorite flowers - gardenias and lilies of the valley - along with birds of paradise. Tucked beneath lush palms and bamboo, a small greenhouse held her collection of orchids. In 2004, Elizabeth's mobility declined, and she stopped walking through her beloved garden. In 1987, Elizabeth was one of the first celebrities to launch a signature fragrance: White Diamonds. Her garden served as the muse for her fragrance. The White Diamonds scent is made up of Italian neroli, Egyptian tuberose, narcissus, and Turkish rose. It has generated more than $1.5 billion in sales, and Revlon reports that four bottles of the scent are sold per minute in the United States, and a bottle is sold every 15 seconds worldwide. Elizabeth died at 79 from congestive heart failure. She left instructions that her funeral service started 15 minutes late as she wanted to be late for her own funeral.   Thanks for listening to The Daily Gardener And remember: For a happy, healthy life, garden every day.

(Get Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MOXIE - Enter promo code MOXIE for 83% off and 3 extra months free!) T-shirt for Ukraine, all proceeds and matching donation to Ukraine Red Cross at yourbrainonfacts.com/merch Who you gonna believe -- me or your lying eyes?  Today we look at court cases where people try to avoid taxes by arguing that things aren't the things that they clearly are. 00:50 Tomato 08:18 Jaffa Cakes 17:48 Hydrox vs Oreo 37:40 X-Men Links to all the research resources are on the website. Hang out with your fellow Brainiacs.  Reach out and touch Moxie on Facebook, Twitter,  or Instagram.  Become a patron of the podcast arts! Patreon or Ko-Fi.  Or buy the book and a shirt. Music: Kevin MacLeod,  Want to start a podcast or need a better podcast host?  Get up to TWO months hosting for free from Libsyn with coupon code "moxie."   We like labels, as humans we like labeling things.  Taxonomy is the branch of science concerned with classification and there used to be several inconsistent and sometimes conflicting systems of classification in use.  Then came Carl Linneaus and his influential “Systema Naturae” in 1735, laying down the system we use to this day.  Linnaeus was the first taxonomist to list humans as a primate, though he did classify whales as fish. Years later, a New York court agreed with him.  My name's… D&D Stats Explained With Tomatoes Strength is being able to crush a tomato. Dexterity is being able to dodge a tomato. Constitution is being able to eat a bad tomato. Intelligence is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing not to put a tomato in a fruit salad. Charisma is being able to sell a tomato based fruit salad.   TOMATOES So that's more clear, but it raises a rather mad –and for some, maddening– question: Is the tomato a fruit or a vegetable?  Well, yes, it's both, but actually no.  Botanically, it's a fruit. But legally, it's not.  A fruit is technically the seed-bearing structure of a plant whereas a vegetable can be virtually any part of the plant we eat.     Things must have been slow in March of 1893, because this definition was set by the Supreme Court.  The issue at hand was tariffs, specifically a 10% tariff on the import of vegetables into the United States.  Just veggies.  Imported fruits were not.  This was of particular interest to John Nix of Manhattan.  He ran a produce wholesale business along with his four sons and found himself the proud owner of an enormous tax bill on a shipment of Caribbean tomatoes.  John Nix & Co. were one of the largest sellers of produce in New York City at the time, and one of the first companies to bring the Empire state produce from such far-flung places as Florida and Bermuda.  Nix disputed the tax on the grounds that tomatoes were scientifically-supportably fruit.  Full of seeds, ain't they?  That's the part that seems to turn grown adults into fussy toddlers when their burger has a tomato despite their very clear instructions.  Worse than the anti-pickle crowd.  Anyway, Nix filed a suit against Edward L. Hedden, Collector of the Port of New York, to get back the tax money he'd been forced to pay under protest.    The crux of Nix's case was the opening of an uninspired speech -  counsel read the definitions of the words "fruit," "vegetables," and tomato from Webster's Dictionary, Worcester's Dictionary, and the Imperial Dictionary.  Judgment for the plaintiff, case closed!  But wait, there's more.  Not to be outdone, defendant's counsel then read into evidence the Webster's definitions of the words pea, eggplant, cucumber, squash, and pepper.  Oh, it's on now! Countering this, the plaintiff then read in the definitions of potato, turnip, parsnip, cauliflower, cabbage, carrot and bean.  That's when, I assume, all hell broke loose in the courtroom and perhaps a giant musical number broke out.  Just trying to jazz it up a bit.  Nix's side called two witnesses, not botanists or linguists, but men with a lot of years in the fruit & veg business, to say whether these words had "any special meaning in trade or commerce, different from those read."   The supreme court decided to look more practically and less pedantically at the situation and ruled that it's how a tomato is used that makes it a vegetable, not the official scientific definition.  If people cook and eat them like vegetables, then vegetables they must be, and so they were subject to the tariff.  “Botanically speaking, tomatoes are the fruit of a vine, just as are cucumbers, squashes, beans, and peas,” wrote Justice Horace Gray in his 1893 opinion. “But in the common language of the people, whether sellers or consumers of provisions, all these are vegetables.”     What was really important about Nix's case was the timing.  We're talking late Victorian, after the age of sail had been obviated by the steam power of the industrial revolution.  You might have heard about it, it was in all the papers.  Ships could now cross the Atlantic in 1-2 weeks, rather than the 6-12 weeks it took in a century prior.  Foods from the tropics could now reach New England in a week or less, making their import a viable option.  This was when bananas went from being expensive oddity to must-have trend to staple of every grocery store, though that was the Gros Michelle banana, the one our fake banana flavor is based on, not the Cavendish banana we eat today, but that's a topic for another show.  To service the evolving tastes of urban population, a new class of national wholesalers, such as the Nixes, were born.   The tomato's identity crisis was far from settled, though.  In 1937, the League of Nations, precursor to the UN, sought to classify various goods for the purpose of tariffs and they too labeled tomatoes a veggie, putting them under the heading of “vegetables / edible plants / roots and tubers.”  Not to be left out, the U.S. Department of Agriculture agreed, citing 1890s Nix v. Hedden case.    But there are always exceptions, hold-outs, outliers, and just plain contrarians.  Tennessee and Ohio made the tomato their state fruit.  If you think that's silly, you might want to swallow your coffee before I tell you the state vegetable of Oklahoma is the watermelon.  I did not care to look into their reasoning.  The European Union went a step further with a directive in December 2001 classifying tomatoes as fruit — along with rhubarb, carrots, sweet potatoes, cucumbers, pumpkins and melons.  It's bad enough all prepackaged fruit bowls have some form of melon in them (which causes me instantaneous reverse peristalsis), but it you gave me a fruit salad and it had cucumbers in it, I have a parking lot and I'll fight you in it.   But I think I'll give the last word to George Ball of the Burpee's seed and plant company: “Are [tomatoes] fruits? Of course,” he said. “Are they vegetables? You bet.”  Though Burpee's does put “vegetable” on the seed packet, so maybe it's not settled after all. JAFFA CAKES Maybe things that grow are too ephemeral for man's taxonomy.  Things are a lot of simpler when we're talking about man-made goods, things that don't grow on trees, and it is only a tragedy that you can't plant an entire orchard of Jaffa cake trees.  For those whose life has not yet contained this job, a Jaffa cake it a little round of dense yellow cake –sponge, as they say in the home counties– with a disc of orange jelly on top enrobed in chocolate.  It.  Is.  So. Good.  You can sometimes find them in big grocery stores like Kroger and Publix if they have a large enough “International” aisle stock Branston pickle along with pad thai sauce and Tajin.   This issue here it again taxes, but this time VAT.  For those that don't speak British, VAT or  Value-Added Tax is “A type of consumption tax that is placed on a product whenever value is added at a stage of production and at final sale.”  Basically sales tax cranked to 11.  VAT is a tax that is paid by everyone involved with the manufacture of a given object or foodstuff, as well as the consumer.  As I go to air, the VAT rate in the UK is 20%.  If you're a UK-based widget-maker, you pay VAT on the price of the raw materials.  When you sell the widgets wholesale to a store, the retailer pays VAT on that sale.  Then, when someone comes into the shop to buy one of your cutting-edge widgets, they pay VAT too.       As with most areas of life, there are exceptions –  a number of things are subjected to a reduced 5% rate and some things are exempt altogether.  The exceptions are for the really necessary things, like mobility aids, menstrual hygiene products, stamps, end of life care, and most food, including cake.  That's some grade A foreshadowing right there.  But some foods are just so wonderful, they absolutely must be taxed and taxed fully.  Such luxury items include alcohol, mineral water, confectioneries and, with the specificity that all governments seem to love, chocolate-covered biscuits.  Regular biscuits are apparently basic essentials.  No, American listeners, not like buttermilk biscuits, because even I'd have to think twice about covering one of those in chocolate.  Whereupon I would do it.  I could make that work.  You're talking to the chick that made a startling good roasted garlic and parmesan ice cream.  No, British biscuits are cookies.  And British listeners, don't at me on soc meds with the definition of biscuit, because you know you're not consistent with it.  The only word that's more confusing is pudding.  Is that a dessert course, a sausage made of 80% blood, a flambeed Christmas dessert, or a suet dough stuffed with beef and veggies and steamed for eight hours?  While I'm on British language, Cockney rhyming slang has got to be the worst thing…   The McVities company had a notion otherwise.  They appealed, prompting a Customs and Exchange VAT tribunal.  Jaffa cakes, they said, shouldn't be taxed at the “most food” 20% rate, but at the 5% rate of chocolate-covered biscuits.  It takes a lot of brass to make that claim when you yourself named the product Jaffa *cakes. [tiktok] origin story] According to the website for Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs, the court first had to establish a legal definition of what made a cake a cake and what makes a biscuit a biscuit, before determining which column Jaffa Cakes belonged in.  Jaffa Cakes were assessed using the following criteria: The product name, ingredients, texture, structure of the product, the size, how the product is sold, and how the product is marketed.   Towards this end, the main arguments on behalf of the office of Customs and Excise were that Jaffa Cakes are the approximate size and shape of biscuits, are stocked on the shelves with the biscuits, and, owing in no small part to McVities' own marketing, people eat them in the sort of contexts biscuit are eaten.    McVities countered by stating that Jaffa Cakes are baked in the manner of cake and of the same base ingredients.  Their master stroke was staleness – cakes go hard as they stale and biscuits go soft.  When Jaffa cakes go stale, and it's hard to imagine them sitting there long enough, they go hard.  McVities actually let a bunch of them out to go stale and brouhght them into court as evidence.  And in a legal tactic I'd like to see more often, McVities baked a big ol' 12-inch version of a Jaffa Cake, to show that if you blew it up to the size of a normal cake, it would just be a cake.    If I were on the other side of it, I might make a big deal over the name, but the judge presiding over the case, Mr D.C Potter, ruled that to be of “no serious relevance” because a product's name often has little to do with its actual function.  In the end, the court decided the Jaffa Cake was, in fact, a cake, and the Irish Revenue Commissioners agreed, though their ruling was based on the Jaffa Cakes' moisture content being greater than 12%.  So no VAT on Jaffa cakes, which means we can buy more of them, hooray!   HYDROX VS OREO In 1882, the entrepreneur Jacob Loose bought a biscuit and candy company that would eventually be known as Sunshine Biscuits, the company that would eventually give us Cheez-its, which my ex-husband went through at least a box of a week, dipping in port wine cheese spread.  About as close as he ever got to a balanced diet.  In 1908, launched the cream-filled chocolate sandwich biscuit known as Hydrox.  The name, he thought, would be reminiscent of sparkling sunlight and evoked an impression of cleanliness (probably because it sounds like a disinfectant).  This was after all only a few years after the Pure Food and Drug Act, before which your canned veggies might be full of borax and your milk be a watered down concoction of chalk dust and cow brains, and you wouldn't know.  Some tellings have it that Hydrox is a portmanteau of hydrogen and oxygen, the elements that make up water, the gold standard of purity.  Meanings aside, the fact that there actually was a Hydrox Chemical Company in business at the time, one that sold hydrogen peroxide and was caught up in a trademark lawsuit at the time over the use of the word “hydrox,” should have given them a hint to maybe go back to committee.  Hydrox chemicals lawsuit, btw, pointed out that the word “hydrox” was already in use for such disparate things as coolers, soda, and ice cream, so maybe Jacob Loose figured the word is out there, might as well use it.   For four years, Hydrox cookies with their lovely embossed flower design made cash registers ring for Sunshine Biscuits.  Then, 90 years almost to the day of this episode dropping, the National Biscuit Company came along –you probably know them by their shortened name, Nabisco– with the launch of three different cookies, the Mother Goose biscuit, the Veronese biscuit, both now lost to history, and the Oreo.  The cookies were very similar, with Oreos even being embossed by the same time of production machine, but Hydrox have a sweeter filling and less-sweet cookie.  Like VHS vs beta, which you can learn more about in the book and audiobook, the newcomer soon came to dominate the landscape, and there's no clear reason why.  Any chocolate sandwich biscuit is offhandedly called an Oreo, no matter how cheap a replica it may be.  It's literally the best-selling cookie in the world now, with $3.28 billion in sales in the U.S. alone.  They sell 92 million cookies per day throughout 100-plus countries under the parent brand Mondelez International.  That ubiquity has led a lot of people to erroneously assume that Oreo is the original and Hydrox is the Mr. Pibb to their Dr. Pepper.  Hydrox did manage to hold onto a cadre of die-hards, especially in areas with significant Jewish populations, because Hydrox were always kosher.  Oreo cream used to be made with lard from pigs and Nabisco would later have to invest a lot of resources into replacing the lard with shortening in the 90's.     Sunshine Biscuits was purchased by Keebler in 1996, who replaced Hydrox with a reformulated product called "Droxies," which 100% sounds like drug slang for a veterinary tranquilizer.  Keebler was acquired by Kellogg's in 2001, and Kellogg's yanked Droxies from the shelves before adding a similar chocolate sandwich cookie to the Famous Amos brand, then discontinued them.  In August 2008, on the cookie's 100th anniversary, Kellogg's resumed distribution of Hydrox under the Sunshine label, a limited distribution, one and done.  Hydrox-heads besieged Kellogg's with phone calls and an online petition, asking that Hydrox be brought back for good, but all for naught.  Less than a year later Kellogg's had removed Hydrox from their website.  “This is a dark time in cookie history,” one Hydrox partisan, Gary Nadeau, wrote, according to the Wall Street Journal. “And for those of you who say, ‘Get over it, it's only a cookie,‘ you have not lived until you have tasted a Hydrox.”  As of the time of writing, I've never had one myself, but I'll see if I can't lay my hands on some before going to air.   Getting my hands on some may be a touch trickier than it should be.  They exist; that's not the issue.  In 2015, entrepreneur Ellia Kassoff, a lover of Hydrox who knew the trick to getting a trademark someone else had allowed to lapse, was able to pick up Hydrox for his own company, Leaf Brands—itself a dormant brand that Kassoff had revived.  Hip to the time, Leaf Brands made Hydrox available on Amazon, so anyone anywhere could get them whenever they wanted (plus two days for delivery).  These new Hydrox weren't going to bow gracefully to the dominant Oreo.  Their website points out that they use real cane sugar instead of high-fructose corn syrup, and no hydrogenated oils, artificial flavors, and GMOs, and warn consumers, "don't eat a knock-off!"  Hydrox are also made in the USA while Mondelez International was laying off U.S. workers.  Sales of Hydrox grew by 2,406 percent from 2016 to 2017, amassing more than $492,000 in sales — clearly, still light-years away from Oreo's overwhelming dominance in the market, but impressive progress nonetheless.   If you ask Leaf Brands, they'd be doing a lot better if not for Mondelez – not out-competing them, deliberately sabotaging them.  This is the hard-to-find bit I alluded to.  In August 2018, Leaf Brands filed a lawsuit against Mondelez International, seeking $800 million in damages because of "lost sales and reputation.”  The charges claimed that Mondelez was using its massive industry muscle "to place their own products in favorable locations in stores and move competitors in less desirable positions on store shelves."  On their Facebook page, you can see pictures of grocery stores where Hydrox cookies are hidden behind other displays, scooted to the back of shelves, and even turned sideways so the short end is facing out.  If you've never worked grocery retail, your instinct may be to blame the store staff, but a lot of brands are actually stocked by the manufacturer.  Ever pass a guy in a Pepsi polo shirt with hand-truck loaded with soda?  That, but with cookies.  And it's not just their own products.  Mondelez is what's called a “category captain,” meaning they get to determine much of the layout for the whole cookie aisle.  Leaf alleges that Mondelez employees and agents are deliberately making Hydrox harder to find while making Oreos pert near impossible to miss.   This is far from the first lawsuit over Oreos.  A class action lawsuit was filed claiming the cookies misled buyers by stating that the product contains real cocoa.  The judge dismissed the case.  And they were sued for Fudge Covered Mint Oreos not containing any actual fudge.  The plaintiffs claim that these cookies don't contain any milkfat from dairy, a key component of fudge, but rather cheaper palm and palm kernel oil.  As so often happens, there are eleventy-hundred articles from the week the case was filed and nothing on the outcome.  That's what happened with the main point of this article.  I was dead sure I remembered Hydrox and Oreo going to court over the basic infringement question, and Hydrox losing, but I couldn't turn up anything on that because of the sabotage lawsuit sucking up all the search results.   X-MEN It's not all foodie fact fun today.  I'm going to risk a copyright strike to play 15 seconds of a song that will make everyone near me in age go “aw yeah!” [sfx Xmen theme]  For the young or those who had social lives in high school, that's the theme song to the 90's Xmen cartoon, and it slaps, as they kids used to say.  For the truly uninitiated, and c'mon even my mom knows who the Xmen are, the story centers on a group of superheroes who get their powers from genetic mutations…and government experiments, time travel, by dint of being aliens – it's a comic book, what do you want.   Ever since their introduction to the Marvel Universe in 1963, the X-Men have always had to deal with questions about their humanity.  While their enemies will stop at nothing to cast them as monsters, the team continues to fight for a world where they are treated just like humans.  That's in-universe.  In the broader reality, it's actually in the X-Men's best interest not to be considered humans.  Well, Marvel comics financial bottom line, anyway, and they went to court over it.   In 1993, international trade lawyers Sherry Singer and Indie Singh found an interesting provision in a book of federal tariff classifications – “dolls” are taxed at 12% on import while “toys” are only taxed 6.8%.  The devil is in the details, or in this case, the definition.  A “toy” can be any shape, representing any thing, but a "doll" can only be a representation of a human being, like Barbie or GI Joe.  [tik tok Joe's thumbnail]  Singer and Singh knew this distinction could be a sizable financial benefit for their client, Marvel Entertainment, who had an ownership stake in ToyBiz at the time.  For years, Marvel had been importing action figures that were taxed as dolls, despite their wide panoply of brightly colored characters often being anything but human.  Taking a direct approach, the two lawyers gathered up a literal bag full of action figures and went to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection headquarters in Washington, D.C. to try and convince them that Marvel wasn't importing humanlike “dolls,” but instead very non-human “toys.”   The Customs staff's reaction to the bag of toys is not recorded, but their official response was that the “non-human characteristics” of the X-Men and other action figures “fall far short of transforming [these figures] into something other than the human beings which they represent.”  Singer and Singh were locked onto this tactic and pursued it for a decade.  A judge considered various figures from Marvel's whole line to decide whether or not individual characters were human or not.  Rippling pecs, long claws, blue skin, red eyes, all were scrutinized, as lawyers on both sides expostulated on the philosophical ramifications of what it means to be human.  How can these action figures be human if they have "tentacles, claws, wings, or robotic limbs?"     I'd loved to have been there to hear people with expensive educations in tailored suits, stand before a learned jurist in a wood-paneled courtroom and say things like,  "The figure of 'Kingpin' resembles a man in a suit carrying a staff. Nothing in the storyline indicates that Kingpin possesses superhuman powers.  Yet, Kingpin is known to have exceedingly great strength (however 'naturally' achieved) and the figure itself has a large and stout body with a disproportionately small head and disproportionately large hands. Even though 'dolls' can be caricatures of human beings, the court is of the opinion that the freakishness of the figure's appearance coupled with the fabled 'Spider-Man' storyline to which it belongs does not warrant a finding that the figure represents a human being."   In 2003, Judge Judith Barzilay ruled that Marvel characters aren't quite human enough to taxed as dolls.  “They are more than (or different than) humans. These fabulous characters use their extraordinary and unnatural physical and psychic powers on the side of either good or evil. The figures' shapes and features, as well as their costumes and accessories, are designed to communicate such powers."   Yay, a victory for the giant multimillion dollar corporation!  But a slap in the face for diehard X-Men fans.  Chuck Austen, one of the writers for Uncanny X-Men at the time, said his whole goal in the story was to show the team's humanity.  The nerds grew restless and Marvel had to issue a statement that read, "Don't fret, Marvel fans, our heroes are living, breathing human beings—but humans who have extraordinary abilities ... A decision that the X-Men figures indeed do have 'nonhuman' characteristics further proves our characters have special, out-of-this world powers." And that's… To protect the public from contaminated oil, New York State law required that all fish oil be gauged, inspected and branded, with a penalty of $25 per barrel on those who failed to comply.  Samuel Judd purchased three barrels of whale oil that had not been inspected, and James Maurice, a fish oil inspector, sought to collect the penalty from him.  Judd pleaded that the barrels contained whale oil, not fish oil, and so were not subject to the fish oil legislation. At trial, one side said the term "fish oil" was commonly understood to include whale oil, and the other side plead the obvious science that whales are mammals.  The jury deliberated for 15 minutes and returned a verdict in favor of the fish oil inspector.    Mr. Judd, dissatisfied with the verdict, moved for a new trial. By then, the Legislature was in session and the Recorder, knowing that a new fish oil bill was pending, delayed his decision on the motion. The new enactment limited the inspection to fish liver oil, and the Recorder took the view that this implicitly confirmed that the earlier legislation covered whale oil. Accordingly, he refused to grant Judd's motion for a new trial.   James Maurice resigned his position as fish oil inspector because he considered that the position under the new law had too little value or importance.     Sources: https://www.constantpodcast.com/episodes/are-whales-fish https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/12/26/256586055/when-the-supreme-court-decided-tomatoes-were-vegetables https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/10/18/the-obscure-supreme-court-case-that-decided-tomatoes-are-vegetables/ https://www.insider.com/interesting-facts-about-oreo-2018-7#oreo-first-appeared-on-the-market-in-1912-1 https://www.mashed.com/223360/the-strange-history-of-the-oreo-and-hydrox-cookie-rivalry/ https://www.mashed.com/702384/why-this-snack-food-giant-is-being-sued-over-an-oreo-flavor/?utm_campaign=clip http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2015/10/time-company-baked-giant-cake-win-court-case/  https://www.edinburghnews.scotsman.com/read-this/is-a-jaffa-cake-a-cake-or-a-biscuit-heres-the-definitive-answer-as-decided-by-a-court-1379222 https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/92007/why-us-federal-court-ruled-marvels-x-men-arent-humans https://www.polygon.com/comics/2019/9/12/20862474/x-men-series-toys-human-legal-issue-marvel-comics https://observer.com/2007/12/thar-she-blows-19thcentury-court-case-harpoons-a-whale-of-a-story/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nix_v._Hedden https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtpJFEBcKoE