Prior to the 1950s the strain of banana you would have bought in a store was the Gros Michel. Disease greatly impacted the Gros Michels, and cultivation switched to the Cavendish, the strain of banana that is currently the most sold type. Cavendish crops are currently being affected by disease as well, and unless a solution is found we may need to move to a new strain of banana. A likely replacement is the Gold Finger banana.
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Martin Tomlinson is a contemporary British artist who specializes in paintings of motor sports. He worked in insurance for a long time, but eventually parlayed his passion for car racing and painting into a full-time career. These are samples of some of his work.
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| Martin Tomlinson |
Tipper Pressley cooks a meal of fried corn, cracklin cornbread, fried squash, soup beans, tomatoes, home canned pickles, and fat back. Tipper is from North Carolina and runs a YouTube channel about Appalachia. I've showed some of her cooking videos before.
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Gas stations are ubiquitous in the U.S. Of course they are the subject of paintings. However, a large percentage of those paintings are of old-timey gas stations rather than modern ones. I guess it is the call of vintage cars and nostalgia.
Because of the Great Firewall China controls what is posted on Western platforms. China carefully curates it image, preferring to portray themselves as sparkling and modern. Hence the endless shots of high-speed rail, robot delivery vehicles, brand new buildings and so forth.
Logic tells you there is something Potemkin-villagey about all that. Aside from that, a lot of Chinese street videos are nothing more than collections of pretty Chinese girls aimed at Western simps, so finding a good walking in cities video was a bit of a challenge.
The above is a walk through what appears to be middle class neighborhood in Wuhan, China (insert your own covid joke here). I think it is morning, the shop keepers are setting up their stalls and storefronts. He wanders through several streets and alleys. One thing that is striking, a lot of the vehicles and almost all of the scooters are electric, so the traffic sound is much quieter.
As an aside, the video was posted about a month ago. Since then, the upper Yangtze River basin has had a lot of rain and experienced heavy flooding. The Wuhan riverside area was flooded, and some of the interior streets as well.
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Today we have still lifes featuring the humble hamburger. Well, a couple of them aren't technically still lifes since they have people in them, but most fit the definition.
The meat patties are not that visually interesting; it is the condiments, lettuce, and the buns that give the burgers color and attractiveness in the paintings. Also, the paintings that are framed as more traditional still lifes, with fries, drinks, wrappers and a background, work better than the ones that just focus on the burgers alone.
Bon appétit.
Space isn't entirely empty, there are a lot of loose particles, gas, and plasma spread through it. Interstellar clouds are areas of greater concentrations of that material. There are a number of interstellar clouds in our vicinity of the galaxy. In fact, we are currently moving through the Local Cloud and headed towards the denser G-Cloud which Alpha Centauri is located. Of course, all of this takes millions of years.
Could the passage through interstellar clouds influence the Earth and Solar System?
Also within our vicinity is a ribbon of clumps of denser interstellar medium known as Local Ribbon of Cold Clouds. It is theorized that 3 to 4 million years ago we passed through one of these dense areas.
The Solar System is protected by the heliosphere. The heliosphere is a bubble of charged particles the Sun emits that buffers the Solar System from interstellar radiation and materials. However, it is believed that the encounter with one of the dense Cold Clouds could collapse the heliosphere significantly and expose the planets, including Earth, to the interstellar medium. There is some geological evidence that this did happen at the time we may have passed through one of the Cold Clouds.
There is then the question as to what, if any, effect this may have had on the Earth? There is a rough correlation between the time of passing through the Cold Cloud and the start of the Ice Ages. Correlation is not causation, but the timing is interesting. If nothing else, the rain of interstellar particles and radiation causing noticeable climate fluctuations seems to be both possible and plausible.
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Giovanni Segantini was a19th century Italian painter. He was born in Austria and had a difficult childhood after his parents died. He was shuffled between relatives and spent time in reformatories. In fact, it was chaplain at the reformatory who noticed Segantini's artist skills and encouraged him to pursue them. He eventually moved to Italy, which he considered his home, and later to Switzerland.
He painted rural and Alpine scenes. He was quite successful during his life.
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Portrait of Giovanni Segantini by Luigi Gallina |
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We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. - Thomas Jefferson
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People in power are trying to convince us that the villain in our American story is each other. But that is not our story. That is not who we are. That’s not our America. Our United States of America is not about us versus them. It’s about we the people! - Camila Alves
On this July 4th Eve, which some people unimaginatively call July 3rd, we have a video of Chinese firecracker and fuse factories. For the most part the work is dirty and looks to be tedious piecework. I hope they get paid a decent salary. Give a thought to these poor worker bees as you light the fuses on your fireworks tomorrow.
