December 4, 2020

For the coming growing season.

I am interested in cross breeding two tomato varieties. I want to cross breed a branch San Marzano tomato plant with pollen from a Portuguese oxheart tomato plant.

I will look at when to start each variety so that they go in bloom at the same time. What I am interested in is how to cross pollinate tomato flowers so that I don’t get the pollen that I don’t want on a stamen. Since tomato flowers point downward, it seems that preventing an undesired pollination is going to be a difficult task. One person believes that very small eyedroppers that can be used to suck out undesired pollen may work, although painstaking. The desired pollen can then be sprayed on the stamen. All that assumes that bees don’t blow up the entire plan, since they are industrious little beasts by day and I have just so much time to dedicate to the effort.

Any experts that have successfully cross bred tomato plants?

I realize that I won’t see the actual outcome until 2022.

On edit: I have done selection of tomato seeds to improve things like size and color, but I have never tried to cross breed. The reason why I am trying now is that I believe that I can tweak the flavor, San Marzano tomatoes are rich flavored, Portuguese Oxheart tomatoes are mellower flavored. One other option is to select seeds for several seasons until I get the San Marzano variant that I envision and forget about the cross pollination.

December 1, 2020

Questions about portable drills and Helicoils for wood applications.

Hi, I have tended to use an electric drill during the few times that I have used tools.

I have a home project where I will be building a holder for heavy rectangle boxes for a relative.

I have done the design, but I have two related questions.

What is the best 18v brushless portable drill on the market. It must take a drill bit up to 1/2 inch? I did some reading this weekend and there seem to be conflicting review information. Bosch, DeWalt and Milwaukee are well known names, but I read a lot of claims that their quality has slipped, people buying expensive drills that either didn’t work, lasted a few uses, or failed after a few months. I generally hate to go through the process of sending a defective item back, typically I just swear off the manufacturer and throw or give the thing away. So, since I need the drill for an immediate project and one later on where I will be doing a gardening construction project, I want to get things right on the first pass.

For those of you that use them regular AND have purchased a drill within the last 2 years, what drill should I buy?

I have used Helicoils before, but there is not a lot of information on ones that work well in wood. The item that I am building for my relative will take a lot of dynamic force. I am concerned that if I use self-piercing screws, over time they will chew up the wood fiber around them and loosen. I found only one video online where a guy inserted Helicoils into wood, but he appeared to have used the same ones that are used for metal and didn’t explain his choice of those particular Helicoils for a wood application.

What are the best Helicoils for inserting into wood? I expect to have some cases where I will be using 1/2 relatively fine thread screws. Should I use the same Helicoils that I would use for metal and put Loctite on them during installation, or would that be a mistake?

October 4, 2020

Masks for Idiots 101.

When I checked news feeds this morning, on Yahoo News, I saw a picture of a group of Trump staffers, including his lying press secretary in masks. Some of them had on Joe Biden Black masks. I laughed spontaneously at their idiocy. Anyone who thinks those idiots should be running the country is ten times more idiotic than they are.

October 3, 2020

Is Fate playing it's hand?

One week ago, it looked like republicans were going to force through an extreme Supreme Court nominee. Today, two republicans one the Judiciary Committee have the Coronavirus, the Supreme Court nominee attended a likely super-spreader event at the White House and could well fall ill. Is Fate intervening on our side to wreck the nomination and give the appointment to Biden and Democrats in January of next year? If so, shouldn’t we say to the religious right that at a critical juncture god intervened on our side, so god favors what we stand for?

September 26, 2020

Driving along and saw a large billboard in my red county in Florida.

A billboard for Joe. It said “Restore Integrity, Vote Biden 2020”. Such a perfect synopsis of the choice that we have.

September 16, 2020

Amendment 4 that is on the ballot.

I have found precious little two sided discussion on this amendment.

My gut is to vote against it. My primary reason is that the Amendment doesn’t place restrictions on the Governor and legislature if the amendment pass the 60% threshold twice. Right now, and 4 doesn’t change it, DeSantis and the Republican dominated legislature can simply decide that they don’t want to implement the voters’ will after a second vote passes citizens. We have seen what they did with the ex-felon vote amendment, and a rightwing US Appeals Court has backed them up.

Currently there are two republican driven bills in the legislature that would make getting an amendment on the ballot harder. One requires that the change meets a signature threshold in all 22 districts in Florida instead of the current 11 districts. The second is similar, raising the threshold in all 22 districts. Effectively both bills give a single red district veto power over all other districts.

I see 4 as a last ditch effort by republicans to maintain the upper hand in Florida, at all costs to citizens.

September 13, 2020

From The Telegraph. Face mask wearing may act as a sort of vaccine.

In that the mask increase the likelihood that a person will take in a low dose that activate the body’s immune response without the person getting sick.

Link:

https://apple.news/An9uNFDcwSTi7dD5kk9hCrg

......................

The article:

Global health

Snip:

Face masks could be giving people Covid-19 immunity, researchers suggest
Face masks may be inadvertently giving people Covid-19 immunity and making them get less sick from the virus, academics have suggested in one of the most respected medical journals in the world. 

Snip:

The commentary, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, advances the unproven but promising theory that universal face mask wearing might be helping to reduce the severity of the virus and ensuring that a greater proportion of new infections are asymptomatic. 
If this hypothesis is borne out, the academics argue, then universal mask-wearing could become a form of variolation (inoculation) that would generate immunity and “thereby slow the spread of the virus in the United States and elsewhere” as the world awaits a vaccine.
It comes as increasing evidence suggests that the amount of virus someone is exposed to at the start of infection - the “infectious dose” - may determine the severity of their illness. Indeed, a large study published in the Lancet last month found that “viral load at diagnosis” was an “independent predictor of mortality” in hospital patients.
Wearing masks could therefore reduce the infectious dose that the wearer is exposed to and, subsequently, the impact of the disease, as masks filter out some virus-containing droplets.

Snip:

If this theory bears out, researchers argue, then population-wide mask wearing might ensure that a higher proportion of Covid-19 infections are asymptomatic. 
Better still, as data has emerged in recent weeks suggesting that there can be strong immune responses from even mild or asymptomatic coronavirus infection, researchers say that any public health strategy that helps reduce the severity of the virus - such as mask wearing - should increase population-wide immunity as well.
This is because even a low viral load can be enough to induce an immune response, which is effectively what a typical vaccine does.

Snip:

While this hypothesis needs to be backed up with more clinical study, experiments in hamsters have hinted at a connection between dose and disease. Earlier this year, a team of researchers in China found that hamsters housed behind a barrier made of surgical masks were less likely to get infected by the coronavirus. And those who did contract the virus became less sick than other animals without masks to protect them.





    

August 23, 2020

Interesting article from Newsweek.

A study found that sociopaths are most likely to refuse to wear a mask. Sort of confirms what many of us suspected.

Snip:
Sociopaths Are More Likely to Refuse Wearing a Mask, Study Finds
August 23, 2020

Snip:
A new study from Brazil has found that people with sociopathic traits are more likely to not comply with mask-wearing and other measures to limit the spread of coronavirus.

Snip:
The study investigated the relationship between antisocial personality traits and compliance with COVID-19 measures using a sample of 1,578 Brazilian adults aged between 18 and 73.
Between May 21 and June 29, participants completed a test that assessed maladaptive personality traits as well as assessments on apathy and compliance with coronavirus-related measures. The findings were published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences.
The researchers found that those who had higher scores in traits including callousness, deceitfulness, hostility, impulsivity, irresponsibility, manipulativeness and risk-taking tended to be less compliant with COVID-19 containment measures, such as mask-wearing, hand-washing and social distancing.

August 1, 2020

Good and bad.

I was driving in the largest city in my red county and saw a truck with “Trump sucks Dik” written in big letters on the rear window. Based upon what they truck looked like, the driver was most likely a young, working class White man. I also notice that there are very few “Trump 2020” stickers on vehicles, in 2016 at this time, there were plenty of vehicles with Trump stickers and “Hillary for Prison” stickers. But to see the window of that truck, with such an “in your face” message was amusing, especially in my red county (though Hillary only lost it by around 10%, even though she put no effort into the county and surrounding area).


On the bad side, I found out today from one of my brothers that an older boy that we grew up around has COVID19 and has been hospitalized for several weeks. He is in a higher risk category (COPD and over 60 years old), so it doesn’t look good. The guy just lost his sister a few months back of a non Covid related cause. I was never part of the guy’s posse, I was younger and bookish and ultimately professional school bound, but from my brother I found out that the guy had led the city’s recreation department for years and just recently won a seat on the City Council in the county’s largest city. My brother thinks the guy likely got infected at his swearing in ceremony, the city’s mayor is an anti-mask mandate Trumper.

July 28, 2020

Is anyone having a problem navigating between posts?

The problem seems to come and go for me. It has been ok for the last week plus, but tonight the navigation arrows don’t show up.

I got a new iPhone around three weeks ago, so I am not sure that it isn’t my phone, since it is a newer IPhone model that has different features from my old phone.