pluteoid

It's really not so simple as this. It's really dim under the sea ice and these divers have used strobes and floodlights to pick out subjects in a dramatic way. On that front I don't think the images required much tampering with. It's just a photographic way of trying to convey the grandeur and beauty you'd experience if you were actually there.

In terms of how "vivid" the photos are, the problem is often quite the other way around to how you put it.

I've spent a lot of time exploring jungles and coral reefs, marvelling at the divesity of nature, all the jewel-like lifeforms on display. It's very difficult to capture with a camera what your eyes perceive as brilliant coloration and exquisitely contrasted form. Your visual system makes many profound processing adjustments based on your total lighting environment: chromatic adaptation, simultaneous contrast, perceptual constancy, and so on. You perceive a green insect on a green leaf as vivid and striking when you're in the jungle with it, but dull when looking at the correctly exposed photo you took of it.

Not to mention your vision has a larger dynamic range than a camera sensor and a wider color gamut than a typical computer screen.

Crude postprocessing will attempt to correct for this by just pumping up saturation, which is maybe what you're complaining about on Instagram. But the best nature photography compensates in other, more subtle and appropriate ways, and the result approaches the wonder we experience "in real life".

For one thing, consumers favoring the convenience of supermarkets means choice gets limited to what large scale agribusiness can supply profitably. Local species and cultivars whose horticulture does not scale well, whose harvest can't be mechanized, which have a short ripeness window, which only produce crops rarely or under ideal conditions, and/or are too delicate to transport over long distances, don't fit with agribusiness production and supply models (nor with the patented GM sterile seed industry that is ever more forced on small scale farmers).

If you negate that list, you get a list of traits agribusiness tries to breed into more conventional plants often at the expense of optimal tastiness.

Yet the "reject" plants might be super delicious and perfectly suited to local soil and climate conditions and to traditional agricultural practices and regional cuisines...

In Malaysia as a child the roadside markets offered incredible local fruits like tampoi, certain distinctive cultivars of mangoes, langsats, salak, mangosteen, little-known species of durian and other jungle fruits, and many others that are much harder or impossible to find today. (Although the commercial varieties of mangoes, durian etc. are still very good if you know about seasonal variations and exactly where they're grown; and, according to my palate at least, the fresh produce available in S.E. Asia still far, far surpasses the range and quality available in northern Europe.)

The qualities of the Saqqara boxes are entirely consistent with what we know about the mathematical and engineering sophistication of ancient Egyptians. There is nothing well-verified "not in the books" that upends the "conventional timeline". The only people claiming otherwise are Discovery Channel nutcase types who want you to believe, without real evidence, often with fake evidence, and always with fatuous reasoning, that angels and aliens intervened in ancient human history.

https://nathandickey.wordpress.com/2014/02/03/demythologizin...

They are one of the most biodiverse habitats, if not the most diverse, home to a vast array of often spectacular species. And unlike other highly biodiverse habitats, much of this spectacle is densely represented and constantly on show.

In a tropical rainforest, you can ramble uncomfortably through dense undergrowth for hours, hearing many animals but glimpsing few, usually from a limited range of phyla, and seeing mostly plants. On a healthy reef, drift but a few minutes through the clear, warm seawater, and the sheer abundance and variety of algae, corals, anenomes, molluscs, echinoderms, sponges and many other invertebrate phyla, as well as algae and of course fish, will be immediately apparent.

This is interesting to think about. As I'm sure you've considered, bacteria and other living cells exist in a state of highly regulated homeostasis. In bacteria, things like charged ion concentrations are maintained internally by various physiological mechanisms (chiefly the membrane-bound transport channels you describe) at specific concentrations with little variation. Salinity concentrations are generally the same as the surrounding seawater (marine bacteria are usually osmoconformers, as opposed to more sophisticated osmoregulators like fish), and the transport mechanisms exist as adaptations to maintain this state.

So while some aquatic bacteria can exist at a wide range of external salt concentrations (they are "euryhaline"), I don't know of any bacteria that have adaptated to actively concentrate salt internally above the salinity of typical seawater. Beyond a certain not-very-useful threshold, this would disrupt too many metabolic pathways and kill the bacterium. So I don't see how a concentrate-in-the-bacteria-then-filter-them-out approach to industrial desalination would work.

You might be thinking about brine pool extremophile bacteria / archaea, but again, they are just well-adapted when it comes to expelling salt or resisting salt intake, not actively concentrating it internally.

However, if you could embed euryhaline bacteria into some kind of impermeable membrane in a controlled orientation, and engineer them to express the right kind of one-way channels on opposite sides of the cell... there are some big bioengineering obstacles to doing this, but it's an interesting idea. It would basically be a sped-up version of the double reverse osmosis desalination approach already widely used, potentially more efficient and available to be powered more easily by sustainable / free energy sources.

I'm just typing as I think there, so maybe there's been work in this area already.

Is this excerpt about mosses really in the chapter on lichens?

It's hard to directly compare the challenges of growing fungus vs. meat. Remember that in the case of fungi, the desired product for the food industry is usually a specialized reproductive structure (mushroom, truffle, etc.), produced by the fungus only occasionally, and according to complex environmental cues. So you need a more or less complicated fruiting protocol, depending on the species, on top of maintaining the fungus in culture. This is quite unlike meat, where you are "just" trying to grow a complex of somatic tissue types that is present by default in the wild organism.

On top of this, truffles have complex ecological requirements (mutualisms with plants and associations with soil microbiota), so unlike saprophytic species they are very difficult to grow in artificial culture to start with (even just spore germination is tricky). Fruiting is tied to seasonal changes in the host plant and we're only just beginning to understand the genetics underlying all of this.

I agree with you actually, but I think it is some decades away and will require lots of GM, and lots of work on how to get control over metabolic and fruiting systems without changing flavor profiles.

Roger Penrose wrote an interesting (if unavoidably controversial) book about these questions, "The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds and the Laws of Physics".

London has fantastic arts, music, literary, theatre scenes, both contemporary and classical. Many of its venues, galleries and museums are world leading institutions. The science & tech research groups at its top universties are doing really exciting stuff. It's filled with extraordinary people and fascinating architecture. The food is amazing, some of the best chefs from Europe and SE Asia come here to work. Also, it has Kew Gardens.

Yes Brexit has put many of these things at risk and taken a shine off their appeal for many. And yes you have to be relatively rich to have a spacious, comfortable home here, to cushion yourself from the awful public transport, and to partake of all the delights on offer. But someone who's actually lived here and can't cite one example of London's special attraction is sleepwalking through life.

And that's exactly what we'll probably see here – 2/3 majority call for a general election. Just read the current headlines.

As things stand, Cameron will be replaced by a new Conservative leader in October who will be under pressure to call a general election more or less immediately (without the present mess we were not due another one until 2020). The Liberal Democrats, our third largest party, have pledged to run an election campaign based on nullifying the Brexit vote. So it seems what you propose is going to happen, but unfortunately the "Illiberal Undemocrats" are an unpopular choice for a wide variety of reasons...

In the UK at least, sellers are required to offer PayPal as a payment option.

Well that's definitely not true. Many of the most potent toxins known to us are produced by living organisms – for an example, actually read the comment you replied to. You can find examples of substances that are spectacularly lethal to us from all of the five major kingdoms of life. Merely saying something is natural does not imply we co-evolved with it at all, and even if we had, it doesn't automatically follow that selection always gives us the means to "deal with it" in the way you suppose.

The tek you link starts from grain spawn. You don't need sterile conditions at all to propagate loads of mushroom species if you're already starting with a robust dikaryotic culture, especially those of wood-decay (lignicolous) species. That's one principle of "spawn". And there are some dirtier methods that can work, e.g. just dumping spore water onto suitable unsterilized outdoor mass substrates.

But I've seen home cultivators who manage to do things like culture single spore isolates, breed and select dikaryons, clone wild specimens, and fruit very fussy species, all indoors with basic and improvised equipment. That deserves respect.

>All the techniques that I learned can be applied to cultivate any kind of mushroom...

If only this were true. Sterile culture techniques only work for the subset of species that aren't obligately mycorrhizal (forming mutualisms with plants), parasitic, or that have other complex ecological requirements. Thus there are all kinds of delicious and interesting species we can't grow so easily, or at all.

But I have a lot of respect for home cultivators like this guy, who go beyond the grow kit stage. It's straightforward to culture and fruit many mushroom species in a properly equipped microbiology lab. But when you're in your kitchen, making do with "gloveboxes"[1] instead of HEPA laminar flow hoods, stovetop pressure cookers instead of autoclaves, and fridges and terrariums instead of programmable incubator units, things can get really challenging.

[1] http://www.instructables.com/id/Glove-bag-for-Mushroom-Growi...

My reaction to the article (even the end of it) was "wow, this is far less bombastic and egotistic than Stephen's normal writing, how refreshing." There are lots of books and articles purely about Ramanujan, why not offer something that's more of a personal reflection and interesting/relevant to Mathematica users? Maybe it only seemed good by contrast, but the level here of self-referencing his own background, work, products, interests didn't seem to me to be "disgusting", "extraordinarily annoying" or "deeply disappointing", it all seemed quite nicely tied in.

Those plantings use herbaceous plants, climbers, and well-behaved shrubs of moderate size. Not trees.

The people working for only slightly more than the UBI will get more than twice the income of someone not working at all. Universal basic income means everyone gets the income.

...for this particular satellite imagery. It's a rather limited overview of color correction in general.

> On top of this, what we see with our eyes is very different from the raw data captured by a scientific instrument or digital camera.

Yes, this is why photographers who avoid postprocessing because they're "purists" who like "unenhanced, natural images" sometimes deliver unnaturally bland images. The visual system phenomena at play are high dynamic range, simultaneous contrast, chromatic adaptation, and perceptual uniformity. Correcting for these things effectively often requires a separate treatment of each (but software lets you do that quickly). The article shows a rather crude approach – there are techniques available that give better results in the same time.

See for example Dan Margulis's well-regarded "Modern Photoshop Color Workflow".

As others observed this is a common condition in plants (where repeated hybridizations can result in even higher ploidy conditions, e.g. tetraploid wheat, sexaploid sedums).

But as you ask, why isn't it observed as often in animals, or indeed at all in mammals? One argument is that plants generally feature fewer tissue types, and their anatomy shows less interdependency of parts: they have a body plan of repeated units showing some redundancy. (Cutting off a branch is not like cutting off a leg.)

In other words, by many metrics of organismal complexity, plants are less complex than animals, such that their developmental programmes can "tolerate" relatively major disruptions to genomic organization.

There are some insights in this paper: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15780745

Foraging for wild mushrooms is part of the ancient and rich culinary tradition of many European countries, where poisoning rates among those brought up in the tradition are very low. Yes reliably identifying a range of edible wild species takes knowledge and experience, but it's rewarding (in terms of both ecological and culinary appreciation), and it's only a little bit more challenging than learning to ID wild berries, for example. If you don't appreciate those rewards personally, there is no need to denigrate those who do.

For me, the flavors and textures are so varied, each suited to a different range of classic dishes, that saying common table mushrooms should suffice is the position of a philistine. I mean, bananas are tasty and plentiful, why bother with mango and papaya and passionfruit...

Correctly identifying any given mushroom can be hard, requiring the right taxonomic keys (and the comprehensive ones come in multiple volumes), a microscope, various stains and reagents, and lots of training. Field mycologists have a term, LBM, meaning "little brown mushroom", which speaks to the pain of separating such specimens to species level even with lots of ID experience.

On the other hand there are many edible species which are unmistakeable and which you can quickly learn to reliably identify based on obvious features. In many European countries, foraging for wild mushrooms is a traditional pastime and intimately linked with national cuisine.

There are no simple rules like that which can reliably differentiate edible mushrooms from poisonous ones. The best way to start foraging is by learning some relatively unmistakeable edible species and only picking those.

It's not even an article I'd want to present to a high school class. An RGB pixel on your monitor is not emitting red, green and blue monochromatic (single wavelength) light. Same goes for the light reflected from a CYM pigment. Metamerism is at play, just like in the "real world". The author confuses the need to choose three primaries with a requirement those primaries be monochromatic. And since when have painters stuck to three pigments?

Exactly. I have the broadly same issue with my doctorate: I know essentially what I showed, but I only ever really completely understood my thesis's more abstruse passages around the time I was writing them (and being examined on them). But I don't find this surprising or concerning. The overriding motivation for doing a PhD was to try to contribute some original knowledge and insights to a field I find interesting. All this article talks about is, what did my PhD do for me personally, and tangentially how can the PhD experience help to train the mathematical brain. To me those are secondary issues, my reward is that my thesis, although hardly earth-shattering, gets checked out of the library every so often, and I get emails from interested and interesting people asking me about it.

You don't have to travel back in time, as the article suggests, to find societies where the dead are accorded a physical presence among the living. There are still several tribes in Africa and New Guinea which maintain generations of mummified ancestors at sacred sites, transporting them back to their villages to "participate" in ceremonies and festivals. See for example http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25998636

The character of Mozart in Amadeus is more frivolous, more alcoholic and more undisciplined than the real Mozart could have been, given his extraordinary compositional output over such a short lifespan. But the film also shows Mozart taking his art incredibly seriously and with a sense of great dignity. He's determined to make time for working very hard (even as he lays dying in bed), and fights movingly and eloquently for the commission of works he passionately wants to create. And that passion is shown to be driven by a need to express vital things about the human condition, with all its weaknesses and sense of fun and as well as its sublimity. He's not just a buffoon, the character has real depth.

The real Mozart on the other hand, as we know him from his letters, did have a penchant for the vulgar, for the irreverent, for scatalogical humor, for good booze, for pretty ladies, and all the rest of it. Of course that's just one side of him.

Young musicians aren't so incredibly stupid as to be "harmed" by Amadeus – it's clearly entertainment. One of its messages is that you can dedicate yourself absolutely to the development of your art while retaining a sense of playfulness. Another message is simply that this music is incredibly rich and exciting and profound, music you can explore for a lifetime.

No – significant preprocessing of photoreceptor cell signals occurs in the eye, in the retina. The "raw" signals from the three cone types are processed into luminance and two color-opponent channels before being sent to the visual cortex. (While there are around 130 million retinal receptors, there are only approximately 1.2 million axons bundled in the optic nerve.)

It dampens your enthusiasm for the whole of South America? The threat of kidnapping can't be so bad everywhere. How about French Guiana, which is a department of France and in the EU? And some of my colleagues describe exploring stunningly beautiful areas in national parks in Brazil and Argentina, where the few people they encountered were mostly other European scientists and photographers.

Too bad they're so heavily indebted to China, and thus proceeding with plans to sell to them the oil exploration and mining rights to 1/3 of their remaining pristine rainforest.