1,673 firearms were collected this weekend for the 2012 Gun Buyback program, spearheaded by the Mayor’s Office of Gang Reduction & Youth Development (GRYD) and LAPD. Thank you to the Angelenos who turned in a firearm and helped us secure a safer City for everyone.
Guns organized (relatively) neatly.
Not sure how I feel about this.
Want.
Genetics of the Beautiful “Glass Gem” Corn
Corn gone viral? You’re looking at an ear of a corn variety called “Glass Gem”, grown by Greg Schoen of Seeds Trust. This is real corn! How does it grow this way?
First you have to understand a few things about corn. Each corn kernel is actually a sort of unique plant. A corn plant’s male parts (the “tassels”) sit at the top of the stalk, and drop pollen downward. Unfertilized ears (the female parts) catch the pollen with the sticky ends of their corn silks. Each corn silk (I hate when that gets in my teeth) grabs a pollen grain, shuttles it allllllll the way down inside the ear, eventually creating one kernel for each pollen-silk-ovum combination. It’s one of the more interesting and inefficient breeding schemes I know of.
If you’ve taken genetics, you know that the parents’ genes will combine by chance, leading to certain ratios of inheritance in the offspring. This is the basis of Mendelian genetics (great Khan Academy video here).
With corn, we’ve simply carefully bred all the interestingness out of them. Native Americans were used to multi-colored corn, because corn plants held many varieties of color genes that could combine at random. Now all we are left with are one-color clones.
This “Glass Gem” corn is the other extreme of the spectrum, a combination of corn color hybrid genes and random pollination. It’s almost too pretty to eat!
(via Discover Magazine)
This week, PBS and ITVS - Independent Television Serviceare co-presenting a special web series, The Lexicon of Sustainability.
These online videos profile individuals who are helping to influence farming practices and food production — by defining and promoting the language of sustainability — in an effort to educate consumers about the American food system.
Read a Q & A with Douglas Gayeton, one of the co-producers of this multimedia project, in today’s post from KQED’s Bay Area Bites.
Boulder, Colorado, couple fulfill lifelong dream, living large in a 133-square-ft. home
Some homeowners prefer the sprawl of suburban McMansions. Others opt for cozy old bungalows near city centers.
Not too many opt for a 133-square-foot home — you read that correctly — that on first glance looks not much larger than a Great Dane’s doghouse.
But Christopher Smith and Merete Mueller did just that. The Boulder couple built a 7-by-19-foot wooden house whose foundation is a two-axle trailer bed. Last week, they towed it to a 5-acre patch of isolated hillside 20 minutes outside this town, which sits on South Park’s eastern edge.
Could you live in (or share) a space this small?
If you’re comfortable risking the use of lethal force to defend your property or that of your neighbors, you’re doing so against the teachings of Jesus. If you’re a Christian and yet you think risking the end of another person’s life to protect your house or possessions is reasonable, we don’t merely have a difference of opinion. I’m calling you out and telling you to repent.
Zimmerman was armed, we’re told, because there had been numerous burglaries in the neighborhood and he wanted to protect his community. By carrying a gun, he implicitly acknowledged his willingness to use it in defense of property. I understand that many Americans have no problem with that. But a Christian must object.
As someone who has been robbed, had guns held to his head, and sat under the threat of lethal force as I watched my apartment being ransacked, I can emphatically say it is wrong to use force to defend your possessions. I did not sit there seething, wishing I had a gun. I offered the men a drink. I share this not because it is remarkable but because it the least that any Christian should be expected to do in similar circumstances.
Two hundred years ago today, the General Land Office (GLO) opened its doors for business. Today that “land office business” continues at the Bureau of Land Management-Eastern States office, which will commemorate the occasion with events scheduled throughout the year.
In 1812, a young American nation faced the challenge of transforming wilderness to agricultural use and acquiring the revenue to pay its war debts. The GLO was established to handle the business associated with the sale of public lands for private ownership, transforming wilderness to agricultural use, and generating income for the Federal government. The GLO, in fact, became the “Gateway to Land Ownership” for millions of Americans. As the successor agency to the original GLO, the BLM, a bureau of the Department of the Interior, was established in 1946 with the merger of the Grazing Service and the GLO.
Learn more about the history of the GLO and BLM here.
Photo: Bureau of Land Management
Dangerously Beautiful: New Self-Guided Bullets
The beautiful path tracing across the twilight desert above is not a firefly. It’s actually an LED streaking across the sky.
Only that LED’s attached to a new self-guided bullet developed by Sandia Labs. It has the ability to make 30 flight adjustments per second to zero in on a laser target over a mile away. It can be fired out of traditional guns to within 8 inches of a target at a half mile’s distance.
There’s a really frightening and deadly beauty to all of this. On one hand, it’s a truly amazing feat of modern engineering. On the other hand, couldn’t they have made a self-guided butterfly instead?
It reminds me of the awful 1980’s film Runaway starring Tom Selleck and Gene Simmons, who were decades ahead of them in the guided bullet department.
Previously: If the bullets aren’t bad enough, check out these cute-for-now-but-wait-until-they-get-a-weapon robots jumping and flying/playing music like never before.
(↬ Co.Design, image by SandiaLabs)
Just heard about 35 acres with house barn and well for $60,000.
So. Tempting.
