Botanical & ecological mega linkdump, chonky buddies, and sunning your mushrooms
If you’re reading this, two things are true:
You’re going to die.
You haven’t yet.
The rest is up to you.
—via YG2D
Plants
Bay Area ecological organizations
I took myself to the Berkeley Botanical Garden for my birthday, and it was the most intensely dense plant-overload experience of my entire life. I have never seen so many completely different yet utterly cohesive plant ecologies from all over the world packed into one place. And every single plant was labeled!! It was a dream. I had a borderline religious experience sitting with a coast redwood about 8 feet in diameter and over a hundred feet tall. Here’s a picture of maybe one percent of their herb garden.
Then I found out that there are over 340 botanical gardens in the U.S. who participate in the American Horticultural Society’s reciprocal admission program! In other words, if you have a membership to one of them, you can get free admission to any of them, and the Berkeley Botanical Garden is part of that program! Wow!
Ecology Center is a Berkeley-based resource hub packed to the gills with sustainability, ecology, climate resources, and a directory of local organizations (many of which have volunteer opportunities!) making tangible local impact.
Plant-related distracteronis
Thanks to herbalism and Braiding Sweetgrass, I knew that many fast-growing bioaccumulator plants are used by ecological restoration teams for their ability to help suck up industrial pollution from the earth and water. But did you know that 15,000 gallons of cottage cheese were also once used to detoxify chromium-polluted groundwater beneath Emeryville, CA???
Boquila trifoliolata: the most versatile impressionist in the forest | National Geographic. Summarized half-accurately in this meme below. I will not attempt to find a photo of this plant because it can look like a lot of things.
I’ve been using Urtica dioica (stinging nettle) quite a lot recently for various things. (Stinging nettle seed may cause improvements in kidney function in individuals with CKD, and stinging nettle leaf is commonly used as a diuretic, to reduce allergy symptoms, and for its high iron content.) While on my latest PubMed trawl, I came across an unexpectedly wacky non-clinical-research entry that I think qualifies as a bona-fide distraction: “Was the famous astronomer Copernicus also a nephrologist” (no punctuation).
Mushrooms (okay, not a plant)
I’ve also been reading Medicinal Mushrooms: The Essential Guide by Christopher Hobbs, a renowned mycologist (amongst other areas of expertise), and I’m only a few chapters in but it’s already an exceptionally interesting read. Mildly surprising learnings so far:
Oyster mushrooms are 25-35% protein by dry weight!
Mushrooms are a complete protein?? (“Complete protein” provides all 9 essential amino acids, which no single plant source provides. Plant-based complete proteins are made by combining multiple sources, such as beans and grains.)
Mushrooms are a good source of prebiotic fiber, which is helpful for your gut microbiome.
And some not-so-mildly surprising learnings that, as always, make me wonder how much closer mushrooms are to animals than to plants.
Mushrooms are also a shockingly good source of (non-heme) iron. Shiitake mushrooms apparently have 10x more bioavailable iron than chicken thigh by dry weight. Why do we even do meat any more??
Many cells in our immune system have receptors specifically for fungal polysaccharides (mushrooms traditionally considered “medicinal” have been found to have exceptionally high amounts of polysaccharides, particularly beta-glucans), an interesting look into dietary co-evolution. The presence of fungal polysaccharides appears to improve immune function.
All mushrooms use ergosterol to build cell membranes. Ergosterol converts to human-bioavailable vitamin D when exposed to UV light. However, many culinary mushrooms are grown without much sunlight. So if you slice up your mushrooms (to maximize surface area) and let them sit in the sun for a couple hours before you cook them, you can nontrivially increase your vitamin D intake. Dang!
Cute computery things
Chonky Palmtop: a cute lil Raspberry Pi brick buddy with a fold-out crkbd that tingles my heart.
I set up my Adafruit MagTag today! It’s a really nice little e-ink IoT module with loads of peripherals, sensors, built in LiPo support, and extra ports packed in for a surprisingly low price. I’ve been wanting a wireless, interactible mini e-ink display for little projects for a while and this thing is pretty fantastic out of the box.
I forgot to post about this last month, but while I was still doing computer stuff full-time in April (I had to take emergency leave from software for the second time this year, this time to take care of Reese full-time during his medical crisis), I wrote a short blog post about the XOR distance metric in Kademlia, the 2002 distributed hash table famously used for applications such as BitTorrent! I think it’s a really cool data structure!
True Distraction Files
How Jun of Jun’s Kitchen trained his cute cats to be a good kitchen audience!
White Squirrel is a Washington-based company that handles order fulfillment and store management for a bunch of my favorite artists and creators, including E. Lubanko, Yoshi Yoshitani, Wizard Zines, and many future favorites whom I am distractibly browsing as we speak.
In particular, I am simultaneously thrilled to learn today that CHONK FRIEND: MEGA TIGER is something that exists, and sad that he is out of production and I may never get to hold him.
With his funding long over, I will never know the joys of pledging to any of his Kickstarter tiers: Big Thank, Fine Boi, He Chomnk, Heckin’ Chonker, HEFTY CHONK, MEGA CHONKER, O L A W D H E C O M I N’, or Big Chungus.
Stay heckin’, y’all.