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Showing posts with label botanical knowledge. Show all posts
Showing posts with label botanical knowledge. Show all posts
Berry-go-round #19
Zip on over to Quiche Moraine for the latest round up of plant related blogs. As always you'll find some interesting items, including a couple from yours truly. Since the theme was food, my asparagus blog was dug out special. You really do have to try the avocado butter.
What's new in botany?
My colleagues have been very busy, and the things you can learn from them.
Horsetails may have been a favored food of sauropods, and cycads the least favorite.
Water clover ferns have been around unchanged for over 100 million years.
Somebody else got did a similar experiment to one of mine and got the same results!
One colleague began his talk with a summary and conclusions because of his penchant for going too far too fast and covering too much. There was applause.
Our scientific discipline has some really bright young people.
The newest molecular techniques are completely unknown to me, even the name was new.
At least two chapters in a book I'm writing have to be revised. Blast.
Evolutionary relationships among seed plants remain uncertain.
Hornworts are now considered the sister group to the rest of land plants, which are mostly vascular plants. Liverworts are now even more certainly the oldest lineage of land plants.
Termites were eating wood more than 100 million years ago.
OK, you get the flavor. Some of these and others deserve elaboration, so explanations will be forthcoming. What sounds most interesting?
Horsetails may have been a favored food of sauropods, and cycads the least favorite.
Water clover ferns have been around unchanged for over 100 million years.
Somebody else got did a similar experiment to one of mine and got the same results!
One colleague began his talk with a summary and conclusions because of his penchant for going too far too fast and covering too much. There was applause.
Our scientific discipline has some really bright young people.
The newest molecular techniques are completely unknown to me, even the name was new.
At least two chapters in a book I'm writing have to be revised. Blast.
Evolutionary relationships among seed plants remain uncertain.
Hornworts are now considered the sister group to the rest of land plants, which are mostly vascular plants. Liverworts are now even more certainly the oldest lineage of land plants.
Termites were eating wood more than 100 million years ago.
OK, you get the flavor. Some of these and others deserve elaboration, so explanations will be forthcoming. What sounds most interesting?
Ask a botanist, dummy
Nobody ever has a botanist around when they need one, and nobody ever thinks they need one. Nobody ever asks a botanist for answers to botanical things. (I told the local poison control center MDs that if I ever see them thumbing through a Peterson field guide again attempting to ID a plant some kid had eaten I'd scream. Imagine what an MD would do if they found me drawing a line an someone's belly while consulting a step-by-step pictoral guide to an appendectomy! And I know more about vertebrate anatomy than they know about botany.) And very few people ever take enough botany, heck, any botany, to know even the simplest things. So here’s some botanical stupidity of the most basic sort.
A British military campaign in Afghanistan is reported to have seized “1.3 tonnes of poppy seeds destined to become part of the opium crop that generates $400m a year for the Taliban”. Now that is one heck of a lot of poppy seeds. “Major Rupert Whitelegge, the commander of the company in charge of the area, tugged at one of the enormously heavy white sacks. "They are definitely poppy seeds," he said emphatically.” But of course they weren’t poppy seeds but mung beans. This was determined after an “analysis of a sample carried out by the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation in Kabul…”
Right. I don’t know how many nanoseconds it would have taken me to recognize mung beans, but it’s faster than I can say “bean”. What kind of damned analysis is necessary to identify a mung bean? “Dr Samuel Kugbei, the chief FAO technical adviser in the Afghan capital, said: "We have been waiting all day to see these dangerous materials …and now we see that they are just mung beans!" Good old Dr. Kugbei is sounding like one of those MD type doctors who avoided botany like the plague in college. And it raises the question of what kind of technical advisor working for the UN’s FAO who wouldn’t recognize mung beans? He's technical advisor on food and agriculture who doesn't recognize major crop plants?
And of course, poppy seeds themselves aren’t dangerous in any way, shape, or form, which is why we put them on rolls and bagels (yes, those poppy seeds!). You have to grow them into poppy plants, and then wound the developing fruits, and then harvest the gummy sap that oozes out (opium) before you have anything dangerous. Mung beans (an Asian native) are a fairly new crop introduction to Afghanistan, so maybe that could explain the ignorance of some government official.
This is just one more example of "military intelligence". “Well, it looked like a grenade at first, but it turned out to just be an ear of corn.” Ha, even the military can’t get away from botanical influences. Grenade is named after pomegranates and the old practice of a bride throwing the fruit on the ground to see how many seeds pop out, which divines how many children she will have.
A British military campaign in Afghanistan is reported to have seized “1.3 tonnes of poppy seeds destined to become part of the opium crop that generates $400m a year for the Taliban”. Now that is one heck of a lot of poppy seeds. “Major Rupert Whitelegge, the commander of the company in charge of the area, tugged at one of the enormously heavy white sacks. "They are definitely poppy seeds," he said emphatically.” But of course they weren’t poppy seeds but mung beans. This was determined after an “analysis of a sample carried out by the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation in Kabul…”
Right. I don’t know how many nanoseconds it would have taken me to recognize mung beans, but it’s faster than I can say “bean”. What kind of damned analysis is necessary to identify a mung bean? “Dr Samuel Kugbei, the chief FAO technical adviser in the Afghan capital, said: "We have been waiting all day to see these dangerous materials …and now we see that they are just mung beans!" Good old Dr. Kugbei is sounding like one of those MD type doctors who avoided botany like the plague in college. And it raises the question of what kind of technical advisor working for the UN’s FAO who wouldn’t recognize mung beans? He's technical advisor on food and agriculture who doesn't recognize major crop plants?
And of course, poppy seeds themselves aren’t dangerous in any way, shape, or form, which is why we put them on rolls and bagels (yes, those poppy seeds!). You have to grow them into poppy plants, and then wound the developing fruits, and then harvest the gummy sap that oozes out (opium) before you have anything dangerous. Mung beans (an Asian native) are a fairly new crop introduction to Afghanistan, so maybe that could explain the ignorance of some government official.
This is just one more example of "military intelligence". “Well, it looked like a grenade at first, but it turned out to just be an ear of corn.” Ha, even the military can’t get away from botanical influences. Grenade is named after pomegranates and the old practice of a bride throwing the fruit on the ground to see how many seeds pop out, which divines how many children she will have.
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