so I saw this facebook post recently on a watermelon disease and when I cut open my recently-bought watermelon, I found the same telltale signs.
but when I actually looked into it, these markings indicate a disease in watermelon known as Hollow Heart. it’s entirely plant-based, so you won’t get sick from eating a melon that looks like this. check out Leadstories’s and Snope’s articles on the matter, where I got these quotes from respectively:
“The picture on the right is likely not related to a disease but a cultural condition called Hollow Heart. It can happen in any watermelon but may be more likely in seedless watermelon. It comes about when the flower from which the melon develops is not adequately pollinated. This could be for a number of reasons - too cold, too hot, too dry, lack of bees, but the result is the same. Internally the fruit can have odd patterns and hollow areas. Researchers at the University of Delaware have been researching this for a number of years and have found some amazing swirls and patterns. Also fine to eat but the flavor and texture may be a bit off.” - an email response from Steve Reiners, professor and chair of the horticulture department at Cornell University
“Yes, you can eat squash and melons that are infected with mosaic virus. These viruses are not harmful to humans and do not cause the fruit to rot. Often the discoloration is only skin deep. In cases where fruit is severely distorted, the texture of the fruit may be affected and may not be desirable for eating.” - a blog post by University of Minnesota
moral of the story and why you read this post: you can still eat the melon if you see slight swirl markings in the texture. maybe it’ll taste a little less-sweet but if you’re like me, you’re not about to throw away a whole watermelon just because it has slightly less sugar.
keep in mind though, that if it’s too spotty or the rind has discoloration, the melon has an entirely different disease and you shouldn’t eat it.
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Lygia Clark, "Óculos" ("Goggles"), 1968
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Joohn Choe
Did you know that half of U.S. adults can’t read a book written at the 8th-grade level?
It's a constraint on victory outcomes in counter-disinformation work; it's a problem when you declare war on things like QAnon or the Republican industrial lie complex.
It arises when you use a technique from military planners called "thinking backwards".
This doesn't mean "be old-school and nostalgic" (I mean, you'd think), it means "start from the outcome and work backwards".
Illiteracy turns out to be a problem when you consider the basic problem of active measures defense as an exercise in thinking backwards. You get new solutions and new problems; illiteracy, and being literate but not reading, or alliteracy (irritatingly not a word in spell-check), are some of those problems.
First, let's talk about the outcome.
The fundamental problem with disinformation studies is that you can't define what disinformation is unless you take a stance on what information is, and how it's used in society.
It's meaningless to point your finger and say "liar!" as we are wont to do in this field if you're not even clear on what role that should play in society, or how things are supposed to work normally. You can't diagnose a dysfunction in how society produces and consumes information if you don't even have a view on how it functions.
You need to have a defensible, testable theory of how America's information economy operates normally if you are going to put yourself forward as some authority on how it's functioning abnormally. You cannot be a counter-disinformation operator without being a philosopher, and to some extent, a systems theorist and, increasingly, I'd argue, an aestheticist (as in "studies aesthetics", not "aesthetician who does your nails").
This is incredibly basic. I still find it odd that even very professional people and companies in this field don't grapple with this issue. Even the data is meaningless, no matter how impressively objective it is, if you're lacking that kind of context; you end up having anomalies with no baseline, like an endless stream of singleton events.
That's no way to run a railroad, like the old saying goes.
So, back when I had a startup, with advisors, I talked to one of them who actually taught a class at Berkeley on startups about this crazy recording of a Federal crime I'd gotten in Alabama, and I asked for advice for what to do about it in terms of the fight against disinformation.
The answer he gave ended up being a lead-in to thinking about this in a systems-oriented, long-terms sustainable kind of way. I still come back to it as a recurrent point in shaping outcome scenarios.
He suggested, first off, in this sort of infuriatingly wise way that he has (he's an old Asian dude, so) that you have to ask, first: is zero percent really possible?
What kind of victory state are you after, if this is actually a lie that involves disinformation on the scale that you observe it?
He argued that you have to fit disinformation into a place with other aspects of how we talk to each other. On his account, there was potentially value in giving people the ability to create and pass on value in determining what was disinformation and what wasn't, and it verged into a discussion of a crypto-currency based anti-disinformation app that I ended up not really wanting to do.
Credit where credit is due, though: his argument about the achievability of zero percent disinformation made a lot of sense.
The outcome state we're after can't be "zero active measures" and "zero disinformation". Not only is that unrealistic, if you even did manage to achieve that, you'd have North Korea. They have no problem with differing versions of state truth and reality, because everything is state truth that excludes reality.
Diversity in viewpoints is one of our strengths as a country, too; reducing everything down to one version of truth, even as generous as the boundaries might be on that, would inevitably end up flattening society. Like, no one wants "information socialism", that just... sounds bad.
You could argue that disinformation is a flipside of a coin, actually. Disinformation is in a state of mutual entailment with socially accepted official truth; there can't be one without the other, in one way of looking at it. And that's what I think my advisor was getting at.
It's like that old cliché about "tHe sIgN fOr cRiSiS aNd ChAngE ArE tEh sAmE iN cHiNeSe" which is like, you understand, up there with Sun Tzu quotes and "your people are so hard-working!" as far as Things I Ain't 'Bout As An Asian Person, You Feel Me Though (the game show!).
And don't even get me started on people ripping off strategy ideas from theorists of Chinese stick-poking and rock-throwing warfare.
In a normal time, you could say that there's a balance between disinformation and truth, and truth is usually the winning side on that, because normally, the President and the ruling party aren't active sources of disinformation with the veneer of authority on it.
We're getting out of a period of time in which that balance was badly, badly disrupted on the side of disinformation. The kind of abnormalities we see as a society - from the Capitol insurrection to how weird people around us are, compared to what they were like in 2015 - those can all be seen as stemming from that state of imbalance.
The outcome, the advisor argued, was fundamentally about balance. Not about destroying disinformation, or striking it until it wasn't a problem; the paradigm was rebalancing, he argued.
Winning isn't reducing disinformation to zero. It's achieving a new balance between disinformation and truth where the boundary favors truth more.
Almost every victory state for "The War On Disinformation" boils down to that, actually.
If you see it as rebalancing, then new ways of achieving achieving victory by restoring balance open up.
For starters, you could add to the flow of information coming out; you could even make oppositional truth part of it. That's really what "fact-checking" is on social media - Politifact and LeadStories aren't "fact-checkers", because fact-checkers are people at media institutions who run quality control on news, and they are not that. They pick and choose what stories to oppose, at times seemingly arbitrarily, at times politically, and calling them "fact-checkers" hides the essentially subjective nature of that practice.
You could create personal truth, give people new ways to be, new role models to emulate and new social roles to fulfill - "offensive fact-checker", "Nazi-hunter", "deplatformer", and the like. And you could even amplify it and try to drown out the misleadingly framed truth, and the outright mistruths, coming out of the disinformation industry.
You could mobilize the truth to create political crises, and work to reset the boundary on allowable lies. This is the core methodology of an activist, it's creating strategic dilemmas for institutions based on public perception and the pressure to do the right thing.
Outcome-focused political activism, where you're trying to get a specific candidate elected or voted out of office, is one way of specifically mobilizing the truth, instead of just sitting on ass and feeling good about having it (this is common, I'd argue). We can not only reduce disinformation better - interdict it better, ban it better, find it better, track it better - we can also get better at producing alternative presentations and modes of appeal for truth.
The problem with all these solution scenarios, though, and the area that I see where we could really stand to improve, and maybe even something that I'd work on for a minute, is our culture.
I'd argue we just don't have the kind of intellectual culture that supports a lot of these solutions. We can't, not with fundamental adult literacy the way it is; not with the state of the public intellectual the way it is.
There was a point around 2015 when people were declaring a crisis of the French public intellectual tradition; since Henri-Levy, basically, Pierre Bourdieu if you count him, there just haven't been globally notable, famous French philosophers like there used to be. That traces to any number of factors with them, but a lot of them are factors we share, like the ever-wider spread of spectacular culture and its increasing efficacy at exploiting us, drawing us into addiction loops, even, with social media and "binge-watching" TV shows.
I'd argue that the best counter-disinformational solutions we have right now come down to art and aesthetics, actually, because we are so bad as a culture at reading.
Militarized truth, and grassroots truth, and offensive truth, are forms of rebalancing between disinformation and truth, yes, but it's a reactionary, almost frantic kind of truth. The jobs that it gives people, the roles that it puts people into - content moderator, offensive fact-checker - eat people up in the long run because they're in a race against disinformation, and disinformation keeps winning.
And it ends up repeating the basic problem of piling truth upon truth without mobilizing it, positioning it in a way to get through to people.
If it takes a pretty image and a witty notion to introject a critical idea into someone's head; if it takes a song and a dance, even, to get someone to have a bullshit filter... I say, do it.
Call it less "Art of War', more "War of Art".
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Lygia Clark, "Óculos" ("Goggles"), 1968
https://www.politico.eu/.../decline-of-french.../
https://www.wyliecomm.com/.../whats-the-latest-u-s.../
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