What I Learned Today

My new house in Oregon is located within the “Madrone Estates”. That’s right, I apparently now own an Estate! Ha ha!

I assumed that “Madrone” probably referred to the last name of the person who established the neighborhood, or something like that. But then I discovered that instead it refers to the madrone tree – a lovely native tree that’s all over my property! Its fancy latin name is arbutus menzeiseii, and it is easily recognized by the dramatic red peeling bark. (The beautiful picture to the right is not mine but it gives a good idea what they look like. Are they not gorgeous?)

Apparently in the spring they bear bell-shaped flowers – something to look forward to as the months roll by!

A couple of weeks ago, I was walking to the library and I was struck by so many beautiful flowers along the way in people’s yards and gardens. I decided to collect a few and share them here. (Click for bigger versions of each.)

Then I thought I would try out Google image search on each one to see if it could identify each flower by finding a match within the first 10 hits (in some cases I looked through many more than that, hoping to find a match, but it seems that if it isn’t in the first 10 then it isn’t going to find it).

Red passion flower. Google: failure (not found in the top 10 hits).

California poppy. Google: hit #5. Success!

Orange lily. Google: hit #1!

Probably some kind of daisy. Google: could not find an exact match.

Google: failure. Closest match is a “balloon flower” which has pointy petals (these are rounded).

Google: failure. I think their image search is only looking at color distributions rather than shape features. Object identification is hard! (Does anyone know what this is?)

Cape mallow (or some other kind of mallow). Google: hit #10. Barely snuck it in there!

Google score: 4 of 7. I guess we still need flower identification handbooks. And humans! :)

The world just expanded by a factor of ten. At least.

Of course this is true in a literal sense, given the arrival of my Celestron 44345 microscope. I can now see down to scales previously invisible to my eye, magnifying at 40x, 100x, 200x, 1600x! But even more meaningful is the figurative way in which things have expanded. I have access to a rich, teeming layer of reality that previously existed only in a hypothetical fashion. And because this is a microscope with a digital camera embedded in it, I can also store and share what I see.

I first took a look at the seven prepared slides that came with the microscope. Here are some examples of the fantastic sights I saw (click to zoom):

Pine:

Epithelium:

“Apple” (seed? cell? blossom? wha?):

I’ve now placed an order for a set of blanks so that I can prepare my own slides to study anything I encounter — and even just within the confines of my house there is a veritable zoo of things to study. High on my list is sampling from the cornucopia of interesting structures that grow in my compost bin. I can’t wait to share what I discover!

I recently had the pleasure of seeing tea being made into tea bags, right before my eyes! While in Boulder, CO, for a conference, I stopped by the Celestial Seasonings tea factory. They have not only a wonderful gift shop but also a free tea-tasting bar filled with great art and a free tour of their factory facilities.

After donning a hair net (plus beard net for whiskered men), we entered the factory and got to see black tea being milled (chopped up), filling the air with the most delicious odors. We walked past bales of herbs piled to the ceiling, filled with hibiscus and chamomile and tilia and all sorts of other things. We entered the tea room, where actual tea (black, green, and white) is stored, and then the “world famous” mint room, which of course is filled with mint. It turns out that a room full of mint bales, kept closed 99% of the time, builds up an overpowering mintness. Two feet into the room, my nose started to tingle and then burn faintly. I couldn’t get back out because of the flow of people coming in, so I edged over to the spearmint side of the room since it was less painful than the peppermint side.

Next we entered the main assembly room floor. This was so awesome I’m having trouble putting it in words. It was heaven for any tea-loving geek — like Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, but with tea! Little conveyor belts sent half-assembled boxes of tea zooming around the room, pausing to be folded or stamped or sealed or wrapped in plastic, all by amazing automated machines. I wanted to stop and stare and figure out all of their gears and mechanics, but the tour kept pushing onward. Perhaps most intriguing was their “Robotic Palletizer”, which picked up packed cartons tea boxes in groups of six and stacked them precisely on a pallet. Later I saw the whole pallet being spun so it could be wrapped in plastic, a 6-foot stack of tea cartons all wound up like a cocoon. I could have spent the whole afternoon watching this busy, enchanting process.

Right there at the factory, the various herbs and constituents are magically converted into a lovely beverage experience. They mill, mix, and bag the tea (using unique no-string teabags so as to save frightening amounts of paper), then deposit the bags into boxes that are sealed and sent off for distribution and sale. You can get some glimpses of this geeky awesomeness through the Celestial Seasonings virtual tour; click on the tea cups marked “3” and “4”. Enjoy!

I haven’t ever eaten a fresh fig. Friends tell me they’re quite tasty, especially here where you can get locally grown ones. Figs with wasps inside? Maybe not so much.

Figs are not actually fruits but a mass of inverted flowers and seeds that are pollinated by a species of tiny symbiotic wasps. The male fig flower is the only place where the female wasp can lay her eggs, at the bottom of a narrow opening in the fruit that she shimmies her way through. The baby wasps mature inside the fig into males that have sharp teeth but no wings and females ready to fly. They mate, the males chew through the special fig pollen holders and drop them down to the females, chew holes in the skin of the fig to let the females out, and then die.

The females, armed with the pollen, fly off in search of new male figs to lay her eggs in. In the process some of the female wasps land on female figs that don’t have the special egg receptacle but trick the female into shimmying inside. As the female wasp slides through the narrow passage in the fig her wings are ripped off (egg laying is a one-way mission) and while she is unsuccessful in laying her eggs, she successfully pollinates the female flower. The female flower then ripens into the fig that you can get at the supermarket, digesting the trapped wasp inside with specialized enzymes!

[From Christina Agapakis, via The Atlantic’s Daily Dish, via Hacker News, via my officemate Ben.]

There is also a PBS special, called “The Queen of Trees”, that includes actual footage of this process (!). Here’s a preview:

These are tiny wasps, only 2 mm long. So their contribution to your protein intake would be minimal. Further, it seems that not all figs use this method of reproduction; some (those most often cultivated in the U.S.) instead use parthenocapy. This is the process of producing fruit without fertilization, which is handy if the plant has been imported without a fertilizing partner (or wasp), or if the desired result is a seedless fruit. New plants can be created “vegetatively” (e.g., putting a stem in water and having it sprout, or grafting one plant onto another). Clever, clever!