Nick Doty @npd@octodon.social

Do you want to do the responsible thing and get tested for COVID? hahaha you can't.

well, you can, but you have to wait a week for an appointment and another week for test results, by which time the results are no longer very informative or actionable. and you should look forward to waiting in long lines in your car or spending hours on the phone, in order to find out that you can't be tested.

But if so, why do we call it windflower in English? My conjecture is that it's because in North America we have anemones like Pulsatilla nuttalliana (previously Anemone nuttalliana) and other pasqueflowers (another interesting etymological debate on that term), whose long, flowing styles are designed so that the seeds will blow away on the wind. So the anemone/windflower terminology made sense again (even though the pasqueflowers get removed from the Anemone genus later).

So maybe the Greeks imported the myth of a beautiful man tusked by a boar and the blood-red flowers that sprung up and kept a Grecian version of the previous name for the flower.

And then a Roman (Ovid) re-tells the story of Aphrodite and Adonis in the Metamorphoses and says the name is a poetic reference to how quickly the petals blow away in the wind, because he knows Greek and it needs a wind-related etymology, and he doesn't know the Phoenician history.

Sure, it seems like "Anemone" must come from the Greek word for winds (~ anemoi), and we also call these windflowers in English, but everyone refers to the myth of Adonis and what does that have to do with the winds?

Well, the myth of Adonis is derived from the Syrian/Phoenician myth of Nea'man (also Tummaz or Dumuzid), also tusked by a boar, and the flowers are still known in Arabic as the blood/parts of Nu'man or ~ an-nu-man.

#florespondence

Our garden plots are coming along. The flowers (poppies, phacelia, sunflowers) are beautiful and comforting, but it's also producing a fair amount of our produce now: snap peas, broccoli, lettuce, kale, green beans that we harvest once or twice a week.

To come in the second plot, with luck: shishito peppers, corn, cucumbers, carrots, more green beans, more kale, more flowers.
#florespondence #garden #communitygarden

It looks to me like the City of Durham State of Emergency declaration marked the beginning of a rapid change in behavior: either because Mayor Schewel picked up on an inflection point in larger trends or because residents responded to that announcement.

The City, County and State Stay-at-Home orders seem mostly to have confirmed the behavior that was already taking place, rather than creating a large change through legal mandates.

When did people change behavior to stay at home in Durham?

Aggregate cellphone mobility data timelines for Durham County, with orders of state of emergency and stay-at-home marked.
Data from Google: https://google.com/covid19/mobility/

also, even though they disabled access to all the Adobe software, that doesn't mean I can uninstall the several gigabytes of it. a final indignity as I try to kick it out the door.

(To use any of the uninstallers, I need to log in to an account that has approved access to the software.)

Anaconda is a tool where you copy and paste a command from anaconda.com, watch a spinning prompt next to "Solving environment:" for a few minutes, and then you're asked whether you want to downgrade some of your software.

tfw you've been away from an open source project you were working on long enough that the version of Python it depends on has reached end of life in the meantime

I've spent months talking to people here in Durham about it and it's encouraging to see some names behind this effort:
https://greennewdealfordurham.org/
We can take climate action at the local level and it can be a direct benefit to the community.

I know intellectually that apathy is the biggest threat to collaborative work on so many important issues, including climate change. But antipathy affects me so much more deeply; I have a tendency to become numb and shut down when exposed to it.

oh, mailman

I read a mail archive for a while and then hit back to the listinfo page and subscribe: mailman tells me the page is too old and I need to try again.

So I refresh the page, fill out my email address and immediately click Subscribe. And mailman tells me that I filled out the form too quickly and I need to take more time.

$10/gallon is actually not at the high end for what it may take for high estimates of the social impact ($20/gallon would be closer), and those high estimates are reasonable given the catastrophic outcomes. but $10/gallon is the scary number that people in bad faith are using to try to scare people about the Green New Deal, so it's one more data point to consider

anyway, you may need to anticipate that local gasoline prices will go up by between 50¢ and $10 per gallon in the short term, and should make budget plans accordingly