Our Better Nature: Great Pumpkins | Hacker News Reader

Our Better Nature: Great Pumpkins

saturdayeveningpost.com

54 pointsbookofjoe32 comments

"In 2023, Minnesota resident Travis Gienger, who teaches horticulture, aptly enough, broke the world record for the biggest pumpkin. His 2,749-pound entry beat the old record, set in 2021 by an Italian farmer, by 47 pounds."

I was there for that! I used my photo of the moment he beat the world record in my blog post about GPT-4 vision prompt injection attacks: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Oct/14/multi-modal-prompt-inj...

Here's my Mastodon thread from this year's competition. Travis competed (and won) again but didn't get a new world record, though another competitor did set the record for the largest pumpkin ever grown in California: https://fedi.simonwillison.net/@simon/113306150061413548

How much does that cost to grow?

(ehum... vegetable steroids -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibberellin ).

Genetic and care help, a lot, but there are fertilizers and "fertilizers".

I dimly recall a Daedalus DREADCO column which, starting from hydroponics, was exploring the limits of artificial vegetative growth, and came to the conclusion that under the right conditions, it was all a question of how much energy one was willing to pump in.

Maybe we need a fleet of satellites beaming formed microwaves down to our giant Cucurbitaceae?

(my wife kept prompting me to harvest my radishes this summer; by the time I actually got around to it, they'd grown to sizes ranging from a small potato to an entire fist)

Most impt itswise problem of our preneoceramic age is [how to sell] radiative cooling..

Unfortunately, being not on the convex hull (pareto front) of the funders (now or ever? But thanks Stanford for trying!) (that is, not amenable to dual usage..?)..

Yeah, I guess orbit (better yet: points further out on the ITN*?) must be pretty much like being in a giant Dewar...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Transport_Netwo...

Lagniappe: https://i.sstatic.net/YDcKQ.jpg

Without using greek or latin: models where e&m charges dont alter the curvature of space are close approximations to the real thing.

Contemporary physicists call this a “constant coupling” https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/3901/what-is-a-g...

This is not true for the strong force, but you wont get nonsense either if you zoom out far enough (coarse graining, right).

[So “perturbation theory works for SM”, but saying gravity is “non-renormalizable” gives the impression that Manuel Bronstein didnt already anticipate this before he was purged.]

mtw have a mnemonic “space tells matter how to move, matter tells space how to curve”. you arent allowed take short cut as in em “charges tell charges how to move”. Indeed (already true in SR) the fields themselves have mass, so short cuts blow up your face..

Otoh, if you try to take the proper path (integral) you run into the issue of nobody knowing how. Roughly, you need the intrinsic curvature for the integral but you need the integral for the intrinsic curvature..

See Dyson equation, no lucky initial guesses, 3+1d

2010.10500

Yep Percival knew what was up, but even at the phySE page above “algorithmic compression” was spoken. Gisin you linked had “Kolmogorov complexity”, no delvings?

poor (bedniy?) MPB's neighbourhood would eventually gentrify: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ugivNRYfjc&t=214s

If one avoids the uv catastrophe by substituting a fixpoint, are there ever multiple possibilities? (in computer semantics we sometimes have entire lattices of fixpoints from which to choose)

there are other fixed points, but they are too benign to get attention. (Ir). and manifolds.

I was hoping you were wrong but nope. We can’t even have pumpkin growing contests anymore without PEDs.

>Gibberellic acid: In the young fruit stage of pumpkin, apply 10-20mg/L gibberellic acid solution to the young fruit, apply once every 5-7 days for a total of 2 to 3 times, which can obviously promote hypertrophy and accelerate maturity, which can improve quality.

>https://m.plantgrowthhormones.com/info/for-pumpkin-planting-...

I’ve had terrible luck growing pumpkins until this year when I put five root bound starts in the former bedding of my goose flock. All the starts were tangled together in a two gallon pot, didn’t even bother separating. Those plants easily produced 200lbs of pumpkins.

My neighbor, who gave me the starts and took much greater care with the plants, had all of his die from various pests and diseases.

I had a pumpkin patch growing earlier this year that was decimated by bugs. I tried every "organic" method of treating the bugs to no avail. It was all just for the lulz, and specifically wanted to avoid pesticides. The bugs won

My takeaway from that experience is that nutrition is the best way to prevent disease/pests. once there’s a problem it’s probably too late.

The plants were healthy until the bugs. The vines were growing, the leaves were huge, and they had just started to produce flowers. I've never seen the type of bugs, some stink bug type of beetle, in my yard ever before. Now that I've removed the dead plants, there's no sign of the bugs. For as many as there were, I'd expect to see some remaining. It's always a learning experience growing new plants

> especially as they mature and gain from 30 to 50 pounds per day

That's about 0.25 grams per second. Or 15 grams per minute. If put on a scale, i am assuming you could witness it growing in near real-time.

The greatest part of that continuously added mass is just water pumped from the soil.

When you compute the added dry mass per second, divided by the mass of the plant, the rate is still big, but much less impressive.

That’s what I’m going to tell myself when I stand on the bathroom scale in the morning. “I’m not fat, if I just compute my dry mass, I’m in superb condition.”

> That’s what I’m going to tell myself when I stand on the bathroom scale in the morning. “I’m not fat, if I just compute my dry mass, I’m in superb condition.”

So fun fact: I like to weigh myself before and after long runs on sunday (15mi+). 5lbs to 7lbs difference. All water. You really can sweat off 7lbs of your weight in a couple hours if you want to.

Reminds me my little brother in high school, running for hours in a rubber suit to make his weight.

probably mostly respiration?

Yes, most weight loss is indeed through respiration, believe it or not!

https://youtu.be/C8ialLlcdcw?si=Hz_PHtrFElw6jgtr

Giant vegtable growing contests are ancient and in certain pacific island populations,social status is closely conected to the size/quality of the yams that someone grows the first true gigantic pumpkins were grown just down the road from me,and giant pumpkins are growing (hidden) everywhere,highly competitive and subject to ANY tactic to grow/get a bigger pumpkin or judging by the paranoia,finding a way to induce splitting in a rivals pumpkins,as any hole or split,suspicious marks,disqualify a pumpkin from competition

Would be fun if somebody would grow them in a big acrylic glass cube to make them come out square.

Start small: https://www.amazon.com/SCI-Cuisine-International-Square-Pres...

Brings back memories from the early web:

  https://www.ding.net/bonsaikitten/

You could use a square melon mold https://www.amazon.com/Watermelon-Growing-Mold-Sapodilla-Tra...

Disney has been doing Mickey-shaped ones for a while[0] in the greenhouse at The Land at Epcot.

[0] https://www.delish.com/food-news/a29003871/disney-world-epco...

No pics of the title subject? Pics or it didn't happen.

I saw it in person ages ago. Didn't take any pics, lol. Sorry.

Yeah, but unless you wrote the article, the fail isn't on you

They would have a burst acrylic cube on return. This fast growers are simply too big and too heavy to be contained

And not a single Blandings Castle or Lord Emsworth joke.

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