The secret world beneath our feet is mind-blowing – and the key to our planet’s future
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Bacteria, fungi, plants and soil animals, working unconsciously together, build an immeasurably intricate, endlessly ramifying architecture that, like Dust in a Philip Pullman novel, organises itself spontaneously into coherent worlds. "The idea is to let the plants put back at least as much carbon and minerals as we take out."Tolly tells me that "The green manure ties up nutrients, fixes nitrogen, adds carbon and enhances the diversity of the soil. The more plant species you sow, the more bacteria and fungi you encourage. Every plant has its own associations. Roots are the glue that holds and builds the soil biology."The other crucial innovation is to scatter over the green manure an average of one millimetre a year of chipped and composted wood, produced from his own trees or delivered by a local tree surgeon. As Tolly explains: "It isn't fertiliser; it's an inoculant that stimulates microbes. The carbon in the wood encourages the bacteria and fungi that bring the soil back to life." Tolly believes he's adding enough carbon to help the microbes build the soil, but not so much that they lock up nitrogen, which is what happens if you give them more than they need. If we can discover how to mediate and enhance the relationship between crop plants and bacteria and fungi in a wide range of soils and climates, it should be possible to raise yields while reducing inputs.
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Who owns Einstein? The battle for the world’s most famous face
An interesting look at the legal world surrounding likeness protection after death, specifically looking at how it has been handled in the case of Albert Einstein.
Forced myself to go to stop coding and go to bed at 1am last night. I was coding and messing with the lichess API. I've had it on my backlog of things for this blog to do something with pulling in the games of chess I play each day. This morning I did some more and also began checking the Chess.com API. We'll see where this ends up going. It might just be as simple as tracking my daily game count and results. I don't think I'm going to integrate a chess game viewer or anything like that. Though I do intend to set up a system (eventually) which archives my games from both sites so I can have a complete personal chess database.
Yesterday I polled my Twitter followers about whether the automated tweets updating them about recent posts:
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Overall the feedback was that they were fine. Which is better than a resounding amount of people telling me they were annoying. I did get a good suggestion to add a tag which people could filter out, so, I did that. Along with that, I improved the overall coding.
First, I fixed it so the grammar of the tweets will be correct regardless of the number of posts made, or tags used. Previously, on days with few posts or tags, would lead to some poorly worded tweets.
Second, I refined the system for how it chooses tags to highlight. It's still far from perfect, but it first looks at the tags used in the day and ranks them by frequency of use. If there is hierarchy there, it goes with it. If not (aka, the tags are all used once) then it falls back to ranking tags by their frequency of use across the entire blog. Still not perfect, but better than the purely random highlight of tags.
Lastly, I cleaned up and refactored the code. In fact, as I was writing this blog post, I had to stop and go back as I realized I could further improve the refactoring of the code.
John Cleese Talks Religion and the 'Life of Brian'
A clip from the Dick Cavett show, originally aired 10/12/1979.
The Spurs will play in the Champions League
To think that the Spurs could finish here after the start of their season is incredible. Congratulations to the Spurs and I look forward to seeing what next season holds.
Wikipedia's Most Wanted
Came across this page, which collects a list of the articles that the site has found linked from multiple sources, but which the article does not exist. Interesting to peruse through.