Musings

The other day I came across a discussion of perhaps the most common protein on earth, rubisco, technically styled RuBisCO. Its long version is Ribulose-1,5 bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase. I have no recollection of encountering mention of RuBisCO before.

RuBisCO is an enzyme, and it is critical for plants in extracting CO2 from air as part of the photosynthetic process. One key aspect of RuBisCO is that is extremely slow-acting, for an enzyme.

The utility of RuBisCO for human dietary needs is still under development, although I don’t know what the holdup has been…maybe it’s all chemistry? 🤣 Anyway, it has to be extracted from plant matter, then purified, etc., all without altering its protein properties.

My perspective is merely from trying to manage the onslaught of vegetative summer growth, without consideration of its potential RuBisCO content. Think: mowing, walking, cutting, and the like…. How would these chores be different if I could dump the plant-matter into an extractor…and, pfft, there’s dinner.

Posted at 9:28 PM | Comments Off on Lost in the weeds?

Dunno if one can judge one’s own brat-ness. Now it’s morphed into demo(b)rat, I’ve read. Pardon me, I’ve gotta go study up on Charli XCX lyrics and the meme-world.

BTW, it was rainy all day, with a few breaks of drippy grey. The rain barrel had surface bubbles, which I never remember seeing there before.

I used the noir filter on this shot. I don’t remember ever using a filter on a shot I’ve posted here before. It’s a visual reference to today’s sunlessness. Unfortunately, the noir takes away the iridescence. So much of art—and life—is trade-offs.

Posted at 8:16 PM | Comments Off on Are you brat?

You can’t tell it’s the moon even, I suspect, but I’m sure it’s clearly waxing gibbous if you didn’t have the screen of vegetation and you’d been tracking the moon-change.

BTW, my dictionary indicates that gibbous is etymologically in a roundabout way from the Latin gibbus meaning ‘hump.’

Posted at 9:45 PM | Comments Off on What hump?

Pareidolia is not psychodelia. The word I encountered today was pareidolia. This word is not in your everyday vocab? Not surprising.

It’s the idea that you, for example, look at a cloud and see a figure, face, a shape you can identify. But it’s just a cloud, and the figure is something that your brain came up with.

This word surfaced for me in an online article titled “Conversations with Caves…” by Izzy Wisher and others (here) The discussed pareidolia related to how the painted figures were placed on the concave and convex shapes of the rugged surface of cave walls. This happened a long time ago in the period archaeologists call the Upper Paleolithic.

Anyway, going forward…I’ll be trying to remember the word pareidolia. Relevance to today? Today, we had a relatively even overcast, so shape identification would have been…difficult.

Posted at 9:28 PM | Comments Off on Pareidolia

I got curious about what word or phrase rhymes with hydrangea. I couldn’t think of any, so I requested suggestions from Out There. AI must have generated the lists I saw, as offerings included grandma, grandpa, and raffia. Mentally, I give each zero points and a nasty buzzer noise.

Posted at 10:21 PM | Comments Off on I’m no rhymester

The English word avocado etymologically traces to the Nahuatl (“Aztec”) āhuacatl also written auacatl. The spelling is different, but the sounds are more similar. That final -tl is tricky. We English speakers tend to stick a vowel sound between them. Nope. It’s slightly easier for me to eliminate the vowel temptation by starting with tl- in practice. Still, -tl without a vowel sound is against the customary English sound patterns.

It’s better to learn a language by listening rather than reading/writing, I think….

Posted at 9:50 PM | Comments Off on Fruity thoughts

Had a few plumbers through the house today, even though we don’t have lead pipes (I hope!). Mostly plastic instead. We don’t call them plasticers (plastickers?), though. Anyway, the word is that the flushing mechanisms now are all tip-top.

Posted at 8:59 PM | Comments Off on Misleading

I used our spring REI discount on a lightweight, well-cushioned shoe for my near-daily walks. They look a bit like modernized corrective shoes, but, man-o-man do they feel good for my feet and knees (after two days). [Fingers crossed this continues!]

Words floating by today: Patapsco, prill, torque.

Posted at 8:39 PM | Comments Off on Lightweight power

I enjoyed algebra in an odd way because I got to look at x y and z more often…than in literature and other subjects. I still like those letters, their linearity and symmetry, and that they’re at the end of the alphabet.

Posted at 8:55 PM | Comments Off on I’m weird

Photo from this day in 2020. Never quite grasped the logic behind “the world is your oyster.” Oysters are slimy and evanescent. Their shells are durable and hang around for thousands of years. If the saying refers to pearls, as some allege, why doesn’t it use the word pearl? I’d rather find parallels, and hope, with oyster shells.

Posted at 10:22 PM | Comments Off on Live like an oyster shell?