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Botanical Geek Tour - Italian edition continues
Our Italian Botanical Geek Tour continues with a changing cast of characters, some not so garden oriented, so the Phactors soldiered on to visit the Giardino Boboli and Giardino Bardini, which are...
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Slay the syllabus!
Now that TPP’s academic alter ego has retired is it time for TPP to stop pointing out the absurdities of higher education? Nah! Nada! Not a chance! So how nice is this that a columnist at Slate has...
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Who is a botanist?
The Phytophactor is a botanist. His official title is Professor of Botany Emeritus, his graduate degrees are in botany, and the courses he taught were botany courses. Too many of my colleagues think...
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Friday Fabulous Flowers - Italian Renaissance Edition
Several thoughts came to TPP while perusing the Uffizi Museum. Could there really be that many works of art featuring the Madonna and Child? (Yes!) You really had to have some big houses to commission...
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Italian bread with no salt - an update
The question of why Italian bread has no salt has raised two hypotheses and here are some of the ideas about this from the local natives, Italians themselves. First, they all agreed on exactly one...
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Aidan Dwyer and a new fotovoltaic design
Aidan Dwyer, was one of twelve students to receive the 2011 Young Naturalist Award from the American Museum of Natural History in New York for creating an innovative approach to collecting sunlight in...
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Thoughts on travel
The Phactors like travel, but not traveling. To be clear travel is when you are at someplace that is not home; traveling is the act of getting to that someplace. Traveling has become drudgery, a...
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Sansa Stark's portrait in the Uffizi?
Renaissance art is mostly of a religious theme; the rest is portraits of important people. You don't see landscapes except for background details. Some of the frescos in the Uffizi about which they...
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Do high voltage power lines cause cancer?
This could be a very short article. I could just write “no, power lines don’t cause cancer"—but that wouldn't explain why so many people believe otherwise. And it won’t help people who are thinking...
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Modular drug design software?
The latest issue of C&EN has an interesting article (unfortunately subscription only) about how quantum chemists are making code for standard protocols in quantum chemistry calculations available...
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Aequitriradites: The Mark of the Cretaceous
Diagram of Aequitriradites ornatus, from Upshaw (1963).The Cretaceous period is best known in popular culture as the time of Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops, of Pteranodon and Quetzalcoatlus, of...
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September 2014 Desktop Calendar
We are off on vacation this week visiting friends and family in New York and Connecticut. On one of our hikes we came across this great patch of Leucobryum. I couldn't decide which shot I liked better...
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Fabulous fungus and pesto pizza
It's been awhile since TPP blogged about food, so here's a nice recipe to consider especially if your F1 likes a meatless Monday dinner (except this week she missed it!). Isn't that a pretty pizza? And...
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Supernatural believers see minds at work behind random patterns
“Theory of Mind” is the term used to describe the mental ability to put yourself inside the mind of someone else – to imagine what it is that they are thinking. Recently, there’s been some evidence...
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The Great Gelato Challenge - Post game wrap up
TPP is surprised you could stand the suspense, but here it is, with time running out, with the lay-over in Rome coming to an end, so just before we departed Italy, Mrs. Phactor yanked victory from the...
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First Class in the Books
The state fair is over indicating the end of summer and the beginning of a new semester. I taught my first class today, which of course means I basically met the students and introduced them to the...
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Book Review: The Amazing World of Flyingfish, by Steve N. G. Howell
In June of last year, I was standing on the deck of a ferry in Taiwan, headed for the island of Lüdao (commonly known as Green Island), keeping an eye out for any interesting sights. I was particularly...
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US foreign policy - dumb and dumber
Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat the past. TPP was a young adult of military draft age during the Vietnam Conflict (only Congress can declare war, and no war was declared), and...
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New look at September
September has always been a hectically busy month, so much so that it was never much fun, and yet it's a nice month, one that starts with some leftover summer and ends with the beginning of fall. In...
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Witches Kitchen 1971
http://t.co/sHn7nJ4uFj a #funny image about #mathematics by Alexander Grothendieck Riemann-Roch Theorem: The final cry: The diagram is commutative! To give an approximate sense to the statement about...
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