You don’t need that stuff if you find plants that grow well in your area. For example, cherry tomatoes are basically a weed in my backyard, I don’t think I could get rid of them if I tried. I don’t want to, of course, because it’s pretty cool having cherry tomatoes free for the picking nine months of the year.…

Monoculture is mainly a result of industrialised farming - huge machines running on fossil fuels doing the work of dozens or hundreds of people. It’s a lot more labour intensive to farm multiple types of food (although often less energy intensive), but there’s a relatively high unemployment rate anyway, right? And…

Ironically, biblical literalism is a modernist viewpoint.

THANK YOU! That was my first reaction - Darwin was anything but an “action hero”. The idea of him running around like Indiana Jones appalls me.

I had always thought the Nazis favoured heavily serifed fonts. EG:

So, is the only definition of a colony whether or not the ants attack each other?

I’ve heard that The Divine Comedy is actually a very bitter and pointed attack on Dante’s political opponents, but I don’t know enough about that period of history to judge whether this is true.

It’s also not aided by the fact they have about five different symbols that represent 30 different things depending on what equation is being used...and the same concept uses different symbols in different equations.

I never understood that “I can’t do maths” mentality. You can add and subtract, can’t you? That’s maths. And you probably don’t remember, but it took you years to get it right - hell, it took you years to learn how to count, but you kept at it because that’s simply what you do as a kid. The same applies for…

I read about tempering chocolate, and had a lot of fun mentally comparing the process to tempering metal for swords, but when it came to making chocolates I thought “bugger tempering” and just went for it.

So instead of being a great thing to study for mutualism, they’re a great thing to study for gene expression? Nice.

What about damp? Slippery? Flooded?

So, it’s like the comic sans of words.

I too found the Heart of Gold did lots of unexpected things when I read the book, but then on later readings I found I could predict what it would do.

Of course, most of the resources in the US prison system go to people convicted of petty, non-violent crime...

Laws are made by certain ruthless people, but have to be carried out by others who think they’re a bit over the top.

So, about the same number of people who don’t like bodily fluids don’t like the word moist, or anything that is similar. Is saying “moist” on a date a good way to rule out an uptight partner?

This restores my faith in the arcane arts.

I had no idea that artificial rennet was so recent - I thought it had been around for decades.