561 karma · joined August 12, 2020
Contact: biotinker@gmail.com
Former staff software engineer at viam.com
Formerly a bioinformatician at pgdx.com
Founder of Central Oregon Tool Library: cotool.org
Project lead of the Heritage Apple Corps: heritageapplecorps.org
Here's some more reading:
https://www.cumminsnursery.com/learn-trees/fruit-tree-bloom-...
https://www.cumminsnursery.com/learn-trees/fruit-tree-pollin...
Not sure where you're located, but this isn't true in the US. The vast majority of apples available here are seedlings of crosses by two other varieties. Examples:
Golden Delicious, one parent is Grimes Golden, the other unknown.
Fuji, Red Delicious × Ralls Janet
Gala, Kidd's Orange Red × Golden Delicious
There are certainly some sports (the technical term for for the spontaneous mutations) like you mention. Royal Gala, available in NZ, is a sport of Gala. But most are not.
An enormous amount of industry effort goes into crossing known varieties, growing the seedlings, and looking for the apples with the best traits. Cosmic Crisp is a great example of a recent one.
Remote: yes, or in person here
Willing to relocate: No, but open to travel
Technologies: Golang, python, perl but it's rusty. Experimenting with large scale AI data extraction pipelines. 5 years experience in robot arm motion planning. 5 years experience in bioinformatics.
Resume: https://biotinker.dev/files/Peter_LoVerso_Resume.pdf
Email: biotinker+hn@gmail.com
Staff software engineer, most recently at Viam. Wrote most of the motion planning stack, from the linear algebra ground up. Used Universal Robots and Ufactory arms extensively. Medium experience with small-scale electrical engineering for robot projects. Some experience with robot navigation, but not as much as arms.
My wife and I went on a backpacking trip in the wilderness some years ago. We decided to take a shortcut, bushwacking down a river drainage (1.5 miles) rather than taking the trail all the way around (7 miles) hoping to extend a later part of our trip.
We got downhill through the bushwhack to the bottom of the river valley just fine, but discovered at the bottom that a fire had come through the area a year or two prior. It had completely obliterated the trail, any markers, etc, and trees were fallen everywhere making moving in a straight line very difficult.
Despite having a phone with GPS and offline maps showing exactly where the trail "should" be, the lack of the trail actually existing combined with the challenging terrain made navigating out of the area a huge challenge. It was very easy to start wandering off in the wrong direction away from where the trail used to run without realizing and having to course correct back. I think we were moving at maybe 1/3 mile per hour, for 5-6 hours, until we finally made it out of the burn to where the trail existed again.
Most recently I made a portable AQI meter, since the air quality here in Central Oregon can quickly get bad.
It's a small 3d printed box containing a rpi pico, an 18650 battery, an e-ink display, and a SEN66 sensor.
I hit a button, it turns on, runs the sensor for ~40 seconds to get a good reading, displays on the e-ink, and then turns off. So there's zero power draw when it's off, and the battery lasts for ~1500 readings. Accuracy seems fine, the AQI, temp, and CO2 readings all match my permanently placed sensors inside and outdoors.
Other projects include using some of the old leftover robot scrap to automate irrigation in my apple orchard.
Just encountered myself doing this. I was reading John Birmingham's Axis of Time books. The first three sucked me in and I devoured them in a day or two apiece. Starting the fourth...something was off. The writing felt stilted, like the author was trying to cram in too many pop culture references or something. I put it down and have given it two more tries since with the same result, so now I'm done.
I'm sad, because I was really looking forwards to having several more books in the series.
I live in Bend, Oregon. We have hot summer days, cool nights, and sometimes really bad wildfire smoke.
I can save a lot of money on AC if I open the windows at night and use the attic fan to pull in outside air. But if smoke rolls in, then we'd all be breathing 200+ AQI air all night.
I have outdoor AQI sensors, which if the AQI spikes, will close up the house and turn on the air purifiers.
> Why would I want to automate lights?
We're bad at remembering to turn lights on and off. We like having our porch light on an hour or two after sunset, but don't need to leave it on 24/7. We also have stairwell baseboard lighting that's completely unnecessary during the day, but very nice to have already be on if we get up in the middle of the night. To each their own, though. These are just nice to have. The AQI automation is an actual health benefit to us though.
Our nonprofit has a fairly extensive list of trees we catalog and maintain on both public and private land. Here's the public trees: https://heritageapplecorps.org/index.php/All_Trees
But our mission is really heritage trees, which we loosely define as pre-WWII. We do work with landowners to get their trees DNA tested and identified if they're interested. But despite maintaining the encyclopedia I linked in the other comment, we're a small group of volunteers (~6 people) and are mainly focused on a specific geographic region.
I run a nonprofit group that maintains a similar but different database, ours focuses on identification of heritage varieties, I.e. apples that existed pre WWII. We're in the PNW so we also have catalogs of where they were sold to make their way to us, etc, as we identify trees in old orchards.
I've learned some interesting stuff along the way, like that English varieties keep showing up in eastern Washington because English nurseries shipped to Vancouver in the late 1800s.
Our apple database is here: https://heritageapplecorps.org/varieties/
We haven't been doing that for now. The success rate doing so is somewhat less than directly grafting the whole top of the tree onto rootstock, for a few reasons. Since our primary goal is preservation and a lot of these trees have zero clones and could be wiped out by wildfire on any given year, our first priority is to get clones of every tree.
The neat thing is that these tend to be self-selecting! These older orchards drop a lot of fruit and can self-propagate new seedlings. The ones that manage to survive are the ones well adapted to current local conditions.
Apple trees are pretty easy to propagate if they're alive. Snip off a twig, graft it onto another tree, and away it goes.
Some poor-condition trees can certainly present a challenge in terms of finding ideal graftable wood, but even a poor-quality scion is a lot easier to propagate via grafting than trying to culture in a petri dish.
I'm in the middle of building out a similar big project that takes a different tack: looking through every period pomological text (e.g. Apple of New York, Fruits and Fruit Trees of America) and pulling the images, descriptions, etc for every heritage apple variety. Includes the watercolors too. I also pull in every scanned catalog from nurseries selling fruit trees in the PNW from the late 1800s.
The goal is a tool we can use to identify apples, and also have comprehensive info on every variety, using public domain period content.
It's not fully done yet, there are bugs/issues right now but you can take a look here: https://heritageapplecorps.org/varieties/
I think we grafted ~90 scions this year. A lot of them we haven't actually DNA tested yet so no idea what they are. So many of these trees are on their last legs, so our priority is cloning them first, and then once the clones grow, DNA test those as funds are available.
I make my own cider too (though as a hobby). If we ever find ourselves in the same city I'd love to meet up and we can swap scions/cider/etc.
I took the info and organized it into a nice wiki-style site with maps and descriptions so everyone in the community can learn about the old orchards.
https://heritageapplecorps.org/index.php/Main_Page
I've also learned how to prune and graft hundred year old apple trees and now have a couple dozen young grafted trees growing in my garage, all clones of local hundred year old trees, some of which genetically tested unique and are of currently unknown varieties.
I hope we see a lot more posts like this in the future.
The Equinox EV is one of the better EVs to offer AWD out there right now, matching the range of a Model 3 at a decently better price and obviously massively better UI. Slower charging is the only real downside.
And a used pre-2020s Bolt is a really excellent value, because they are insanely cheap (under $15k) and due to the whole catching-on-fire thing they all had their batteries replaced in the last few years, which means you get a much newer battery than the mileage/age of the car would suggest. The Bolt is replacing a much older Leaf, so bumping the range up to ~200 miles from ~70 is a huge upgrade for us.
Personally I use Gonic rather than Navidrome, because I don't care about a web UI, but if you go to the Navidrome website and look at the "Apps" page it lists every Subsonic API compatible app. There's a lot.
Both times, the touchscreen-only controls were such a pain in the butt that we vowed we would never purchase such a car. It was a timesaver, because in that period our family has gotten two new (to us) cars, and our experiences with the rental Volkswagons allowed us to exclude an entire manufacturer from consideration.
If they haven't re-broken their interiors by the next time we look for a new car, I guess we'll have to consider them again.
As someone who grew up there, this isn't really true. It's more that buildings have been upgraded/replaced over time by choice, resulting in a sparse patchwork of old buildings rather than large old cities. Places like the Wayside Inn[0] predate the country by a century, and have been "preserved" only because they have more-or-less continuously operating as an in since 1686.
The New England climate isn't all that different than the original England. I think the cultural and legal climate around old buildings is more impactful here. I would be curious to know about the comparative longevity of 17th-century wooden buildings in Europe.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wayside_Inn_%28Sudbury%29
A player that in good faith wanted to role play such a character, would work with the DM in advance to structure rules well-understood by all parties about exactly what would happen if they abuse their situation.
All the DnD situations can be trivially resolved by good-faith and communication on all sides.
Unlike Chat Control, where good faith cannot be assumed.
If you're playing an off-the-shelf campaign this is problematic. If the GM is creating the game as you go, then a good GM should be able work with the player to make this reasonable. The GM can always use GM-power to prevent a player from doing something, even if it involves a literal hand of God reaching down to stop them.
A conversation with the player beforehand to make sure you're on the same page about this sort of thing would go a long way. Let them know under what circumstances you're willing to allow them to use whatever the power is. Let them know the consequences if they don't follow those rules.
Unlike with ChatControl, a D&D game is a situation where the necessary trust is able to exist.
An example: agree the player character is some trickster djinn sent from another plane to learn to be a human and how to trick people. They have immense cosmic powers of life and death, but as part of being sent over, they can only use the power for immediate comedy. Violations result in the djinn getting yanked back to their plane and disincorporated.
Boom done. Now you have a massively OP character that can only use their power in humorous situations that don't affect the storyline, and if they try to abuse that then that's instant-death.
There is a lot of mythology about gods walking among men, hiding their true nature, etc. And more recent examples include the TV show Lucifer.
Someone wanting to roleplay that sort of being is entirely plausible. Without knowing the person's personality (which you presumably did) it's hard to say whether they would have genuinely wanted to do that or if it was an excuse.