rabbit-holes-hourly

[rabbit-holes-hourly]

TIL: The floating Uros Islands of Titicaca, Peru

Lake Titicaca = largest high-altitude lake in the world

Home to Uros Islands

Predom indigenous inhabs have 100s-old traditions, some predating the Incas

Titicaca = "cradle of the Sun and the Inca Empire"

What are the Uros Islands?

Floating islands of human-woven Totora reeds

60-70 islands total

Changeable bc islands can merge into each other or disappear entirely

Do new ones get woven?  A few minutes' googling couldn't get me an answer

How the islands are made

Get Tortora reeds floating on the lake at harvest time, rainy season (Nov-Mar)

Apparently only men go "catch" the reeds

Tie roots of Totora reeds to make light, solid base layer

Pile many reeds on top of the root layer until stable

Drive eucalyptus stakes on ropes into the bottom of the lake to anchor island

Maintenance

A well-made island can last up to 30 years

To maintain, (mostly men) add a layer of T reeds once a week during rainy season; dry season once a month

Similar concept: Floating homes in Iraq wetlands

Messy Nessy, 2018

People called the Ma'dan ("Arabs of the Marsh") lived in floating houses made of reeds floating on the water

Called mudhifs

Built in 3 days or less -- no nails, wood, or glass

The islands they sit on are made of rushes and compacted mud

Construction method used for thousands of years -- mostly gone recently :(

The wetlands were drained and villages destroyed during a war.  Almost gone

After some dike breaching and a drought-end in 2003, the wetlands have been largely restored

Not many have returned to the marshes, but some are living and fighting for it

Nature Iraq is leading efforts to save the marsh and its community, with financial support from a few other countries

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Why is pus a little green?

Could be from the presence of a greenish antibacterial protein called myeloperoxidase

produced by some white blood cells

Could be from the pigment pyocyanin

produced by bacteria Pseudomonas aeruginosa

This kind of pus is foul-smelling -- pus from anaerobic infections can more often have a foul color

Main source: Pus on Wikipedia

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Prev reblog tags for context:

Just did some quick research about succession in this post. 6 phases seems to be the pattern in a lot of models. Shouldn't be too hard to scrunch that down to 5 and assign them Magic flavors.

Starting thoughts

Bare rock lines up pretty straightforwardly with Mountain

Intermediate succession probably Plains

Maturing would probably be Forest

And I'm gonna take a liberty and add Old Growth Forest, which has some unique behaviors. Mechanically links up with Swamp

Interesting, we got 6 down to 4!

Now to deal with water

Rather than try to shoehorn aquatic elements into a specific stage of succession, I think I want to give it a facilitating property

Like an item you can equip for future increased productivity

When present, water will bring in soil and nutrients from other ecosystems, speeding up the succession process

Also increases randomness in the system: lots more colonizers competing, members of all stages

(Note this for LBS succession timeline acceleration)

Yep this makes sense to me!, and it's even more compelling than the Seasons interpretation. Let's try to put together a narrative of a game of Magic in light of this.

Narrativizing MTG as ecological succession

Every stage of succession has its own behaviors

Mountain summarizes the bare rock, lichen, and early plant stages. Since there's not enough conflict going on in the extremely slow soil-making phase, we gloss over that and go right to fast-living annuals. This is reflected in the quick-acting Red magic.

Then, annuals are supplanted by grass and perennials, who gather lots of sunlight. They sit in a medial position, outcompeting pioneers by topping up on energy and bouncing back to life. I'd say this fits the White style to a T!

Eventually, trees start establishing themselves. It takes a while to get going, but once they're big enough, they're sticking around and doing really cool growth things. Perfect Green.

As the forest ages and spreads, the middle pool takes on the powers and properties of Old Growth Forest. Fungi make civilizations of fallen logs, and nurse stumps give rise to new trees. River eddies settle into quiet ponds. The dust and smells of life and death intermingle sweetly, creating happy harmonies of later life. The golden age is here. Energy draws from death; if you really look, you see there is more death than life here. It is death willing, tired from old age and content to go. Fire has long since burned out. The dynasty is established; new surprises have no room. it is a story of stagnation, perhaps. Of rest. Of non-movement, which is, by definition, Death. This is the essence of Swamp.

And through it all, shaping the time an space of succession, is water. Streams brought soil and deepened into rivers, carving boundaries through the forests, taking materials from one place to another. Water has no quarrel and no side, but it has shaped the battlefield from the moment it showed up. Water was here before life, and it may be the end of this cycle and the mother of a new. Whatever the disturbance, the water will run long after life has left this place, shaping, enabling, mitigating. Its many powers reflect in the versatility of Island magic.

Of course, most MTG players don't work with all 5 colors in a deck. They specialize in 1-3, aiming for higher ground in their combination. In the context of the Succession Interpretation, I think your deck color combination is essentially your best guess at what phase of succession the forest is in, and how much of a given type is present. Whoever wins had the better eye for the state of growth (and, thus, which version of the community would be most successful at this point in time).

To what end do we make this guess? I think it's,, survival. That iterative fight to keep being that drives everything that lives.

Conclusion

I like this interpretation a lot! Little bugged that I couldn't get the literal island of Island to tie in, really. Maybe something with you or the personified essence of water standing on the island, conducting. Something about bits of land breaking up the water, microcosms of the ecosystem tying it to the forest. Sand as solid behaving as liquid, somewhere between stone and soil....

Fire is a bit of a stretch, too, simply because irl life doesn't directly use fire or magma for its biological processes. To this, I have 2 answers to pick from.

Fire is metaphorical, the "fire of life" being established, which all future life will pull from and grow, fueled by sunlight.

These early organisms actually CAN make use of geothermal energy, and speed up the Pioneer phase because of it!

This one is far more literal, magic-as-tech, whereas the first interpretation gets at that philosophical wonder side of fantasy. Both are viable, and I think the one you pick depends on what kind of vibe you're going for in your game.

I dunno what I'm going to do with this analysis yet. I really like the idea of playing other games with Magic cards, and I'm really craving something that simulates succession in some way. I'll let this stew in diffuse mode and see what emerges in time :)

Some Magic magic thoughts

Every so often I start thinking about why the land types in Magic: The Gathering are that and not something else. My thoughts today link the colors to important processes with regard to life. Here's what I've come up with (eternally tentative). It's all about energy and life..:

Plains -- Sun -- Sunlight fuels the vast majority of life on the planet. Most easily collected in fairly flat, open spaces with forb-ish plants. Other biomes where you can collect white magic fairly efficiently: Desert, Chaparral, Savanna. Also solar panels and blacktop.

Mountain -- Fire -- Geothermal. The little energy not ultimately derived from sunlight comes from the heat under Earth's crust. Most easily collected in life-scarce areas close to the mantle. Other biomes to collect red magic: Tundra, Taiga. Also at geysers, thermal vents, and volcanic-adjacent regions.

Forest -- Green matter -- Living processes. Lots of energy derives from eating organic material. Most abundant in areas rich in biomass and biodiversity, such as tropical rainforests. Other biomes to collect green magic: Temperate deciduous/evergreen forest, man-made Agrarian. Also whale falls, algal blooms, regions undergoing secondary succession, and high-concentration city centers. Swamps (and other wetlands), to some degree.

Swamp -- Rot matter -- Decomposing processes. Carbon, hidden from the frantic piñata scramble of life, can store plethora patient energy. It builds no-longer-life slowly, in a shadowed mirror of plants' build-growth from will-be-life energy. In the short term, it becomes a precursor for life fuel. In the long-term, it balances energy, sinking it from the realm of magic altogether -- only to be used with knowledge and magic-immiscible metal. Biomes collecting: Swamps, other Wetlands, Caves, and Soil. Also Urban garbage dumps and anywhere there is plenty of dead matter ready to be processed. Autumn.

Island -- Water -- Fluid convection (and water as solvent). Water holds matter and energy between its polar bonds, and its great lung carries life up and over, unliving but making possible life. Water moves. Water facilitates. Places to collect water: Aquatic ecosystems, polar ice, clouds, any water where life is present in rather small quantities proportional to the solvent.

Some notes:

Note: Water is an outlier in this conception (which differs from my associations! Usually I think of Swamp as the odd one out) in that it isn't a direct provider of energy to life. It carries and buoys, but no one uses water currents as food. I think this is neat!

Brings up a possible future rabbit hole of life figuring out how to evolve itself steam power...

LATER

(To be fair, Swamp is also an outlier in another way: None of the Platonic Terrestrial Ecosystems [I split it at trop forest, sub, deciduous, boreal, taiga, tundra, desert, chaparral, grassland, and savanna] are devoted to the type. Wetlands, caves, autumn, and dead things exist in every biome, and you can't really have a thing dedicated to only rot for very long. So Swamp is less its own thing and more of the awkward necessary shadow to everyone else. Is this how Hades felt?)

(Kinda cool it gets to be the transition between magic and metal, life and technology, though!)

(However, by that liminality logic, water outlies as well. Wherever there's cells, there's water. Only two things are certain in life...)

This creates an emergent dynamic of 2 element supergroups: Landholders and Liminals. White, Red, and Green primarily associate with particular areas, where Blue and Black collect in the spaces between. Swamp and Island are simply the terrestrial areas where you can get a decent distillation of the respective type.

Another kind of grouping also arises: Originators and Derivatives. White, Red, and Blue are all their own thing, helping drive life. Green and Black are the life (and death) that give all that stuff reason, direction. They're parents and children.

Relevant earth processes: Radiation, water cycle, carbon cycle, rock cycle, organic nutrient cycles & one-direction energy flow. I was thinking about these as I worked through the post.

Missing but worth considering: Phosphorus and Nitrogen cycles

You may want to associate Swamp with entropy, but that is a different thing. Entropy isn't accounted for in Magic. It would be interesting to come up with worldbuilding, and possibly mechanics, that would do such a thing.

Though this analysis does well accounting for these types and associated ecosystems, it doesn't engage at all with how the magic flavors behave mechanically. I'll be thinking on why those five behavioral classes are what they are.

That autumn bit gave me another idea: Magic types tied to seasons. Gonna reblog with preliminary thoughts on that.

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Ecological succession: Phases

(short rabbiting session because I have to do chemistry homework before I go to bed)

Stages

Nudation (formation of bare land)

Invasion (pioneer species colonizing)

Competition (between species)

Reaction (environmental modification)

Stabilization (climax community)

Autotroph establishment patterns & timeline

Pioneering ~~ 0-3 years

Bare rock

Lichens, bryophytes (soil creators)

Nitrogen fixers

Small forbs: annuals

Intermediates ~~ 3-30 years

Grasses, perennials (start to beat out pioneers)

Shrubs, shade-intolerant trees

Toward so-called "climax" ~~ 30-70+ years

Shade-tolerant trees (beat out less competitive members -- supplanted only by another disturbance)

Interesting the diagram seems to imply the autotrophs need roughly their height in soil in order to get established

Thoughts

Looks like roughly 6 stages in a lot of these diagrams

All makes intuitive sense to me

Wonder if lichens remain important in every stage, or if others can take over soil production. When?

Will be thinking about the next phase -- hypothetical plants that could outcompete deciduous hardwoods

I'm thinking a Leveled Up Lichen: combined kingdoms that can move, eat, and photosynthesize

What would it take for none but the worst of disturbances to displace the organism/association?

Maybe getting metal involved... mantle-reach roots geosynthesizing...

Phoenix.......

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and now I'm researching eco successional patterns, for no reason at all (:

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Ok season thoughts! Real quick, it seems easy to sort the MTG flavors into seasons:

White is spring (new life getting energy primarily from the approaching sun)

Green summer (lots of biomass, competition, eating each other)

Black autumn (things dying, fall leaves & berries, plenty of rot)

Red winter (bold take, but this is when you need fire to keep warm the most -- barring that, mantle is the greatest source of warmth)

and Blue is liminal, snaking through the gaps between other types, connecting them, smoothing the transition between them, possibly keeping them in order. It is the magic of the cycle. Of cycling.

Some Magic magic thoughts

Every so often I start thinking about why the land types in Magic: The Gathering are that and not something else. My thoughts today link the colors to important processes with regard to life. Here's what I've come up with (eternally tentative). It's all about energy and life..:

Plains -- Sun -- Sunlight fuels the vast majority of life on the planet. Most easily collected in fairly flat, open spaces with forb-ish plants. Other biomes where you can collect white magic fairly efficiently: Desert, Chaparral, Savanna. Also solar panels and blacktop.

Mountain -- Fire -- Geothermal. The little energy not ultimately derived from sunlight comes from the heat under Earth's crust. Most easily collected in life-scarce areas close to the mantle. Other biomes to collect red magic: Tundra, Taiga. Also at geysers, thermal vents, and volcanic-adjacent regions.

Forest -- Green matter -- Living processes. Lots of energy derives from eating organic material. Most abundant in areas rich in biomass and biodiversity, such as tropical rainforests. Other biomes to collect green magic: Temperate deciduous/evergreen forest, man-made Agrarian. Also whale falls, algal blooms, regions undergoing secondary succession, and high-concentration city centers. Swamps (and other wetlands), to some degree.

Swamp -- Rot matter -- Decomposing processes. Carbon, hidden from the frantic piñata scramble of life, can store plethora patient energy. It builds no-longer-life slowly, in a shadowed mirror of plants' build-growth from will-be-life energy. In the short term, it becomes a precursor for life fuel. In the long-term, it balances energy, sinking it from the realm of magic altogether -- only to be used with knowledge and magic-immiscible metal. Biomes collecting: Swamps, other Wetlands, Caves, and Soil. Also Urban garbage dumps and anywhere there is plenty of dead matter ready to be processed. Autumn.

Island -- Water -- Fluid convection (and water as solvent). Water holds matter and energy between its polar bonds, and its great lung carries life up and over, unliving but making possible life. Water moves. Water facilitates. Places to collect water: Aquatic ecosystems, polar ice, clouds, any water where life is present in rather small quantities proportional to the solvent.

Some notes:

Note: Water is an outlier in this conception (which differs from my associations! Usually I think of Swamp as the odd one out) in that it isn't a direct provider of energy to life. It carries and buoys, but no one uses water currents as food. I think this is neat!

Brings up a possible future rabbit hole of life figuring out how to evolve itself steam power...

LATER

(To be fair, Swamp is also an outlier in another way: None of the Platonic Terrestrial Ecosystems [I split it at trop forest, sub, deciduous, boreal, taiga, tundra, desert, chaparral, grassland, and savanna] are devoted to the type. Wetlands, caves, autumn, and dead things exist in every biome, and you can't really have a thing dedicated to only rot for very long. So Swamp is less its own thing and more of the awkward necessary shadow to everyone else. Is this how Hades felt?)

(Kinda cool it gets to be the transition between magic and metal, life and technology, though!)

(However, by that liminality logic, water outlies as well. Wherever there's cells, there's water. Only two things are certain in life...)

This creates an emergent dynamic of 2 element supergroups: Landholders and Liminals. White, Red, and Green primarily associate with particular areas, where Blue and Black collect in the spaces between. Swamp and Island are simply the terrestrial areas where you can get a decent distillation of the respective type.

Another kind of grouping also arises: Originators and Derivatives. White, Red, and Blue are all their own thing, helping drive life. Green and Black are the life (and death) that give all that stuff reason, direction. They're parents and children.

Relevant earth processes: Radiation, water cycle, carbon cycle, rock cycle, organic nutrient cycles & one-direction energy flow. I was thinking about these as I worked through the post.

Missing but worth considering: Phosphorus and Nitrogen cycles

You may want to associate Swamp with entropy, but that is a different thing. Entropy isn't accounted for in Magic. It would be interesting to come up with worldbuilding, and possibly mechanics, that would do such a thing.

Though this analysis does well accounting for these types and associated ecosystems, it doesn't engage at all with how the magic flavors behave mechanically. I'll be thinking on why those five behavioral classes are what they are.

That autumn bit gave me another idea: Magic types tied to seasons. Gonna reblog with preliminary thoughts on that.

[rabbit-holes-hourly]

Some Magic magic thoughts

Every so often I start thinking about why the land types in Magic: The Gathering are that and not something else. My thoughts today link the colors to important processes with regard to life. Here's what I've come up with (eternally tentative). It's all about energy and life..:

Plains -- Sun -- Sunlight fuels the vast majority of life on the planet. Most easily collected in fairly flat, open spaces with forb-ish plants. Other biomes where you can collect white magic fairly efficiently: Desert, Chaparral, Savanna. Also solar panels and blacktop.

Mountain -- Fire -- Geothermal. The little energy not ultimately derived from sunlight comes from the heat under Earth's crust. Most easily collected in life-scarce areas close to the mantle. Other biomes to collect red magic: Tundra, Taiga. Also at geysers, thermal vents, and volcanic-adjacent regions.

Forest -- Green matter -- Living processes. Lots of energy derives from eating organic material. Most abundant in areas rich in biomass and biodiversity, such as tropical rainforests. Other biomes to collect green magic: Temperate deciduous/evergreen forest, man-made Agrarian. Also whale falls, algal blooms, regions undergoing secondary succession, and high-concentration city centers. Swamps (and other wetlands), to some degree.

Swamp -- Rot matter -- Decomposing processes. Carbon, hidden from the frantic piñata scramble of life, can store plethora patient energy. It builds no-longer-life slowly, in a shadowed mirror of plants' build-growth from will-be-life energy. In the short term, it becomes a precursor for life fuel. In the long-term, it balances energy, sinking it from the realm of magic altogether -- only to be used with knowledge and magic-immiscible metal. Biomes collecting: Swamps, other Wetlands, Caves, and Soil. Also Urban garbage dumps and anywhere there is plenty of dead matter ready to be processed. Autumn.

Island -- Water -- Fluid convection (and water as solvent). Water holds matter and energy between its polar bonds, and its great lung carries life up and over, unliving but making possible life. Water moves. Water facilitates. Places to collect water: Aquatic ecosystems, polar ice, clouds, any water where life is present in rather small quantities proportional to the solvent.

Some notes:

Note: Water is an outlier in this conception (which differs from my associations! Usually I think of Swamp as the odd one out) in that it isn't a direct provider of energy to life. It carries and buoys, but no one uses water currents as food. I think this is neat!

Brings up a possible future rabbit hole of life figuring out how to evolve itself steam power...

LATER

(To be fair, Swamp is also an outlier in another way: None of the Platonic Terrestrial Ecosystems [I split it at trop forest, sub, deciduous, boreal, taiga, tundra, desert, chaparral, grassland, and savanna] are devoted to the type. Wetlands, caves, autumn, and dead things exist in every biome, and you can't really have a thing dedicated to only rot for very long. So Swamp is less its own thing and more of the awkward necessary shadow to everyone else. Is this how Hades felt?)

(Kinda cool it gets to be the transition between magic and metal, life and technology, though!)

(However, by that liminality logic, water outlies as well. Wherever there's cells, there's water. Only two things are certain in life...)

This creates an emergent dynamic of 2 element supergroups: Landholders and Liminals. White, Red, and Green primarily associate with particular areas, where Blue and Black collect in the spaces between. Swamp and Island are simply the terrestrial areas where you can get a decent distillation of the respective type.

Another kind of grouping also arises: Originators and Derivatives. White, Red, and Blue are all their own thing, helping drive life. Green and Black are the life (and death) that give all that stuff reason, direction. They're parents and children.

Relevant earth processes: Radiation, water cycle, carbon cycle, rock cycle, organic nutrient cycles & one-direction energy flow. I was thinking about these as I worked through the post.

Missing but worth considering: Phosphorus and Nitrogen cycles

You may want to associate Swamp with entropy, but that is a different thing. Entropy isn't accounted for in Magic. It would be interesting to come up with worldbuilding, and possibly mechanics, that would do such a thing.

Though this analysis does well accounting for these types and associated ecosystems, it doesn't engage at all with how the magic flavors behave mechanically. I'll be thinking on why those five behavioral classes are what they are.

That autumn bit gave me another idea: Magic types tied to seasons. Gonna reblog with preliminary thoughts on that.

[rabbit-holes-hourly]

What does my eye prescription mean?

I just got an eye exam yesterday, for the first time in my adult life (not that I didn't need it before -- I'm just socially anxious and poor). They printed out my prescription, and THIS is what it says:

I have zero idea what any of this means.

In fact, I don't understand how every part of the eye testing process works, either.

Let's fix that.

The following are my notes from preliminary googling to try and parse what I'm seeing, in many senses of the word.

Interpreting my prescription

O.D. = Oculus dexter, i.e. right eye

O.S. = Oculus sinister, i.e. left eye

O.U. = Oculus uterque, i.e. both eyes. (Not shown in mine)

SPH = Sphere, i.e. the power needed to fix your vision. "-" next to the # = nearsighted. "+" means farsighted. Ranges between 0.00 and +-20.00. -5.00 indicates severe nearsightedness, so mine is pretty bad but not the worst.

CYL = Cylinder, i.e. my degree of astigmatism (= part of the cornea has a different curve). Astigmatic eyes are more football shaped than basketball.

Axis = where the astigmatism is on the cornea. The # is the degrees (1-180) where it lines up.

So what I'm seeing is that my left eye is blurrier but my right eye has a worse astigmatism. And the astigmatism axis is wildly different for each eye. Interesting!

Add: Any additional lens powers go here. Bifocals, for example. (Not applicable to mine)

PRISM/BASE = Lens correction for double vision. (N/A to mine)

DIST P.D. = Pupillary distance. (N/A to mine -- Damn! I would love to know what it is)

Apparently Warby Parker has a web tool to measure PD online!

Contact prescriptions are different

Because contacts sit right on the eye, their #s are different

Prescription includes measurements specific to the size & brand of the contacts I use.

GOOD TO KNOW! I've used exclusively SofMed so far, but I'm looking into long-wear options of any affordable brand. Because I just will not take my contacts out every day. I won't do it.

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Fried worms

Some jots about farming, prepping, and eating earthworms

"Have any of you tried eating worms?" -- r/Vermiculture

Is eating worms dangerous? -- Healthline

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Rock-Nature-Scissors research

Been thinking about examples of stable, cyclical competition in the wild (and how we might apply that to revolutionary society, but that's neither here nor there). Doing some brief midnight research to my own for-the-moment satisfaction

Intro links

These Lizards Have Been Playing Rock-Paper-Scissors for 15 Million Years -- PBS Deep Look, YouTube

Side-blotched lizard males come in 3 flavors: orange, yellow, and blue -- all the same species

Oranges are big; yellows are sneaky; blues are monogamous

Orange beats beats blue by bullying

Yellow beats orange by secretly mating with his females while he isn't looking

Blue beats yellow by guarding his mate carefully

Blues are also known to behave altruistically with each other

The Plankton Paradox -- MinuteEarth, YouTube

Thousands of species of plankton coexist in aquatic habitats

One possible explanation for why one doesn't outcompete the others:

When 5 or more species are competing for 3 or more resources, the entire system gets caught in a chaotic loop -- no one can get a steady foothold and push out the others

Future rabbit holes

Going deeper into each example

Finding more examples

Can we apply this to business?

How about society in general? (Keeping power at a fair distribution between a lot of people)

Is it possible to give people "plankton power" while also growing the overall amount of power we have?

Random questions

Does the plankton phenomenon connect at all to the intermediate disturbance hypothesis? (Could we act as intermediate disturbances, in society, ourselves? Ought we?)