Pearls of Wisdom From My Hollywood Folks

[sleepy]

Thank you Patch. I got that bum bit of information about "corn as nightshade" from somewhere a loong time ago and I never caught the error.
Corn is not a nightshade plant.

 

[Coil_Smoke]

That is very interesting Coil and I need to look this up.
I took for granted (assumed) that the GMs worked by increasing phosphorus levels in order to block digestion of the food. White corn is an example of this property. The white, just like white hair on an old man, comes from the phosphorus and its chemical activity.
For that reason, white corn is not a great source for food.

But bio-pesticides as the GM crop? Corn, tomatoes, potatoes, and tobacco are all members of the Nightshade species of plants, and nicotine from tobacco has been used in the past as a natural insecticide spray on food crops. Because these plants are related and because corn is a prime GM crop, if they are using bio-pesticide genes for GMs, does this mean that they are using tobacco genes to produce the GM? It would be easier to swap genes from similar plants, to avoid rejection of the genes.

I don't think the induced pesticides are related to nicotine or its amides. The guy that told me about this is a bit of an industry insider. I did not ask about the origin or nature of the pesticides. I assumed they came from something like pyrethroid genes from chrysanthemums.

 

[Patch]

Avery Island is a good example to look at, Sleepy
... tobacco mosaic virus ...

 

[sleepy]

Chrysanthemums aren't food to me, by any stretch of the imagination.
The smell is like that of a chrysanthemum with a prickly thorn. Like blood.

Is the smell caused by the insecticide and are they assuming that it will volatize (evaporate) from the food when heated? That isn't going to help when eating raw.

 

[Patch]

Clitoria is better eaten raw ... just don't chew it

 

[sleepy]

Now I plead ignorant. I thought you meant ...
...and I don't have any teeth left, so it would take me all night to chew it.

 

[Patch]

there's no such thing as an all purpose fertilizer
vegetables need the 'P' in NPK, & not so much the 'N'

 

[Patch]

@ Nic
... could Fred Flintstone keep that baritone "yabba...." voice
with this critter in his face ? :)

 

[Patch]

Oops! Sorry Sleepy & Coil_Smoke ... I'll get back to ...
I only know chrysanthemums as the Mother's Day flowers, wasn't aware of any other
attributes, they may have ... I don't like flowers, but they're great in compost heap,
as being paper thin, they decompose real quick, haha. Rose plants are everywhere
around here & so is the aphid population, so it pisses me off when aphids pick on my chile plants.
But then I grow more than needed, & simply ditch affected chile plants, as
I don't like using pyrethrum in any form - affects bees - more than it does aphids.

 

[sleepy]

I was just using poetic license. The chrysanthemum has no thorns, but the smell of them always makes me think that they probably should. They have a sharp unpleasant smell to me, like a bed of thorns.
Now a Carnation with the sweet, mildly florid cream-like smell, like a cachet. Totally different from chrysanthemums.

 

[sleepy]

About the aphids, do you have ladybugs or fireflies in your area?
They love eating aphids.

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

@ Nic
... could Fred Flintstone keep that baritone "yabba...." voice
with this critter in his face ? :)

might insta-shift him up to an alto! that's not one of yours, is it?



re: nicotine,
most psychotropics are natural pesticides. the plants produce them to ward off critters, then we humans purposefully eat the 'toxins'. but other mammals prolly do, too.

 

[Isaac Sauvage]

wow... just opened the the living room window and on my bug screen, a wolf spider just captured a small wasp and is feeding on it. this is seven floors up, mind you.

 

[Coil_Smoke]

Logic is a wreath of pretty flowers that smell bad.....
Liar's Paradox - YouTube

 

[sleepy]

That's a shame Ike. Wasps eat flea larvae, so I Like Them!

In the L.A. deserts we have cockroaches in the shaded sands and when that population explodes in warm to hot dry weather, they then feed and support the Black Widows.
I've had Black Widows outside the door and a couple inside my unit at one time under the wooden desk. One was pulling in a live roach by its web threads which, between seeing that and the increase in roaches proportional to the sudden appearance of the Black Widows, is where I figured that part out. The female Black Widow is the poisonous one, large with the classic black and sometimes red hourglass which may not be present, while the male is a small beige and striped hoppy critter, hopping around like a mad jumper, that looks like a caraway seed and serves as the female's meal after mating.

A cockroach will die in warm soapy water, or in water that is 95 degrees.

And fleas seem to die in fog. I think maybe that the droplets of water in moist air collect in their airholes, sealing them off by the surface tension, but all I know for sure is, fleas vanish after a foggy or moist day. If they fly over a pot of steaming water, they tend to fall straight into the pot.

About wasps, the yellowjackets are a pain because they are hyper-defensive, but there is a furry brown variant that is totally docile. I think it's a desert wasp?

 

[Patch]

Sleepy ... no, don't see enough ladybirds & not sure about fireflies.
Ladybirds & other predatory bugs can be bought, but not cheap
& then really only suitable for greenhouses, where they can't 'move on

Nic ... no, that's a Tasmanian gouldi, world's largest freshwater cray
endangered due to logging. I think they're doing there best tho' to change that
Next largest is from Steve's territory, the marron.
Mine are just common cherax destructor, smaller, but they're the hardiest & most aggressive

 

[Patch]

Other bugs to contend with are whitefly - I use sticky yellow traps for them.
Cabbage moth, I didn't do well trying to shoot them with a rubber band gun.
Easier to wait till they show as little grubs, then just pick them off & feed them to the goldfish.
Also grow nasturtiums which help steer moths away from the brassicas.

 

[faralos]

but in Newtons time dark matter wasn't known about
so he based his theroies on what was known at that time
just like the old equation E=MC squared
does that now not hold water seeing that there now exists dark energy
so in theory the "E" ain't exactly true any more than is it
if there can be dark energy than maybe e= mc isn't correct
without taking into account the presence of dark energy and dark matter
the equation can't really take place as stated
if energy can be dark or in the negative then is matter always constant?
I ain't a scientist nor do I pretend to be one
these are just some of the questions I dream up
hey someone's gotta think of this crap right?

 

[Coil_Smoke]

The Path Not Taken......

I wish great minds like Newton and Einstein could have had the benefit of modern astronomical discoveries. Einstein knew the universe is expanding but I don't think he knew it was expanding at an accelerating rate. Apparently Einstein toyed with the idea that gravity was a positive repulsive force. If he had known about the acceleration he probably would've stuck with that theory. As for the E equals MC squared thing Einstein would've been amazed to see the speed of light slowed to a crawl in recent laboratory experiments. Last I heard the speed of light had been slowed to 36 ft./second In a supercooled Bose Einstein condensate. That blows my mind. So light isn't the constant (except in a vacuum) we were taught about back in school after all. I don't think Einstein would've believed in dark matter are dark energy either. I believe he would of thought these ideas were feeble attempts to the force recent observations into current scientific dogma.

 

[sleepy]

The ability to slow the speed of light indicates either that light is composed of physical particles, photons, etc., else light is pure energy (force) but requires transmission through physical particles. Some materials like glass and water slow the speed of light, causing a slight delay in exiting the material.
Passing a laser beam through a photo slide or film and then through Oil has been used to do this, to create a phase difference in order to synthesize a hologram from conventional 2D photographs and films. The result is less than usable, more like fake holography.

And outer space may not be empty. Light through space may be transporting minute particles. It seems that sunlight contains metals.
We do know that small particles and small thin sheets of silver can be pushed by light. A small fan blade of silver will spin under the force of light.

Laser beams can and will transmit physical particles. This was the original hope for laser printers, that a laser beam could pick off ink from a droplet well and carry it directly to the paper to create the print.

 

[Coil_Smoke]

Some Body Stop Me

Who would have guessed that pinball nirvana would end up being the place for scientific exposition. But here I go again.One has to wonder what's so special about light. I believe light is an energetic wave that acts like a particle when it hits something. This is what spins the radiometer in my kitchen window. I believe it is lights energy level that separates the way it behaves from longer wavelength forms of electromagnetic radiation. Lights energy is converted into mass the instant it is absorbed. All lower frequency waves below light and heat are converted into electricity when they are absorbed. That is how radio waves induce a current to flow in a antenna. It's kind of like of phase change occurs at the energy level necessary to create a photon.

 

[sleepy]

Aren't radio waves electricity? I think so, which is why an antenna with an earth ground path delivers a much higher signal, when the ground potential from the transmitter is also earth grounded. Without the ground path, both the transmitted and received signals are much smaller. EDIT: Most radios also use a current-to-voltage drop across the primary coil of an RF Transformer with the antenna lead in series with the primary as a combined parallel circuit. Isn't that correct?

There also exists a method by Tesla to broadcast electricity in the place of wired power systems.

 

[Shockman]

In a way everything is made up of solids and nothing is solid. What is over my head is not the explanation of potential energy, but the understanding of it. And it has a very simple explanation. I just don't know if I buy it because it is not just a wound up spring, but a roller coaster car stopped at the top.

Light is M in E=MC2 meaning it is more than a wave but all waves are more than a wave or all waves would be the same, right? E=MC2 suggests that something giving off light is shedding mass. The C is the speed of light.

What is special about light is that the speed is unrelated to velocity. Meaning if you are traveling 99.9% the speed of light and turn on a flashlight, the light will be traveling the speed of light but from your perspective 00.1% the speed of light where a bullet fired from a gun would be going 99.9% the speed of light + the speed of the bullet. Increase the speed of your travel to closer to the speed of light, say the speed of light -1/2x the speed of the bullet and then fire the gun ahead and turn on the flashlight at the same time. Would the bullet go faster than the light from the flash light? It would be expected if you did not realise the paradox. The question is if a gun is going 100% the speed of light and is fired ahead, would the bullet go faster than the speed of light? I don't know. I would think if yes you would not see it anyway, but that it could not happen anyway. The paradox. I think it is totally accepted that it is not possible to go faster than the speed of light, not because it is the speed of light, but that it just happens to be the barrier that light is trapped by.

 

[Shockman]

Radio waves. Yes EM. They too go the speed of light further suggesting that the speed of light is not a property of light any more than the speed of a falling object is a property of that object.

 

[sleepy]

Light is M in E=MC2 meaning it is more than a wave but all waves are more than a wave or all waves would be the same, right?

I am an itinerate(sp?) on all such subjects, but the matter of light is like the matter of pixels on a screen. A single pixel cannot describe the details of an image. The pixels are in groups, or packets, in order to display the on/off states and Frequencies and contrast and color levels necessary to create the illusion of a picture.

And levels now. Consider that a standard light bulb produces light by heating a filament which then basically builds its energy level to saturation of the filaments mass until the filament's capacity to retain the heat is filled, at which point the heat energy creates harmonics in the visible spectrum.

The filament has valence rings and levels and as they fill, they create higher rates of groups/packets of energy identified as harmonics or as higher frequencies.

The first working laser was achieved by taking a cut Ruby, hooking up electrodes to it in a tube which delivered high velocity pulses of electricity while at the same time exposing the gem to a very high level of light, so that the combination of forces filled the valence rings of the atoms in the ruby and then caused release of those combined energies as a lasing pulse of light. This was in 1959.
So, the valence rings of atoms appear to relate to the ability to absorb or release energy at various frequencies, from very low physical waves due to physical pressure all the way to illumination when the object is set afire.

If my memory of science class serves me, and it Probably Doesn't, the valence rings of an atom run something like a ring of 8 electron positions immediately surrounding the proton at the center, while the second ring surrounding the first ring also has a set of 8 electron positions. The next outer ring has 16(maybe?), and the next outer ring has 52 (not sure), and so on.
The greater the density of the element, the more electron valence rings it has, I THINK??? It's been a loong time since I studied it.