invasive species – Welcome to Third Age Thoughts

More and better updates! Cower in place 39

– in which Dorn again avoids thinking of new topics.

1 In my post looking forward ten years post-Covid (here), I joked that Facebook had achieved the status of a sovereign nation. I’m now reading a book that takes this conceit to a whole new level: Qualityland by the writer and (apparently) cabaret artist Marc-Uwe Kling. Reviews have called it “hilarious and terrifying” and compared this book to the love-child of a three-way between George Orwell, Terry Pratchet and Douglas Adams.

The premise of the book is that the newly-renamed country of “Qualityland” has allowed all the commercial and information-management techniques of Amazon, Facebook, and Google to run to their logical extreme conclusions. All citizens are fully characterized by ubiquitous AI algorithms, to the point that all the goods and services they want or need are predicted and delivered to them “without the hassle of having to ask for them”.

But warning: the book is so chock full of clever ideas that it gets headachy to read sometimes, and the consequences of business decisions that seem plausible in today’s world, while almost always funny, are also sometimes horrific to Third-Agers like me who grew up in a world without AI. Also it trash-talks Pride and Prejudice.

Still, give it a shot for a good funny, scary read. Or just wait—I hear HBO has already signed for the movie rights to the book!

2 I now have objective proof that Mark Zuckerberg is the devil. After my bloody battle with invasive Arum Italicum, (chronicled here and here), I had hoped that I’d seen the last of that particular invader from the Old World.

But the evil Arum showed up again to get me when I was at my weakest—reading Facebook! I was innocently checking up on the doings of my friends and relations, when up popped an unsolicited ad, actually tempting me to pay money to get some new Arum Italicum plants. Oh, insidious! See how the invaders get in your head—if they can’t invade by one route, they find another.

3 I mentioned my own miminal contributions to finding a Covid treatment here. When I agreed to lend my computer’s down time to a massive computing project searching for Covid antagonists (literally, it’s the least I can do!), they gave me access to online statistics that claim to show the size and importance of my contribution. (That sentence ended up sounding pretty cynical. Can I believe nothing from the internet any more?)

Anyway, my contribution must be pretty significant, because they awarded me a medal for it. And not just some cheesy participation medal, this is a Gold medal for 90 days of partipation! Why, I have returned almost 600 computational results to the OpenPandemics project, and am now ranked as the 234,099th most prolific contributer worldwide (no lie!). It’s still not too late for you to join!

4 It would seem that the Illustrious Order of Immunati (revealed here) has a new member. President Trump yesterday announced his Covid immunity amid congratulations from his fans, skepticism from the medical community, and a flag from Twitter for “misleading Covid-19 information”. As a courtesy to my millions of micro-readers*, I will not make jokes that support or disparage any individual candidate, but I will repost an unattributed quote I saw on Facebook: “I got the China virus and I beat it, beat it very badly. Do you think Sleepy Joe would’ve beaten it? I don’t think so. Weak on crime, weak on immune systems. SAD!”

Illuminati spokesbeing E— R— would not come out from under the bed to comment.

Editor’s note: E— R— did not really refuse to come out from under the bed. In the patois of modern medical pseudo-journalism, she has been “Fauci-ed”.

Thanks, and, depending on your bent, Happy Columbus Day/Indigenous People’s Day.
Dorn
10/12/2020

UPDATES: cower in place 36

– in which Dorn adds some postscripts to some, uh, post scripts.

1 My post that peered ten years into the future (here), talking about face masks that translate what you say, was off by ten years in how long it would take them to come to market. According to an article in CNN Business last Monday, a Japanese tech form started making such face masks, that translate what you say into eight different languages.

Apparently the firm Donut Robotics was working on a robot until the epidemic dried up that market, so they repurposed their communication technology into a more of-the-moment product. Smart move, although they could do something with the product look, so that it less resembles a Jason horror-flick hockey mask!

The flexible screens that made me think of moving mouth images on a future face mask already exist, of course. The military has had them for years (the flexible screens, not the face masks), and lately I’ve seen ads for new smartphones that bring back that nostalgic concept of a cell phone folding in half, right across the view screen. Sounds like a gimmick to me!

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2 My brain still hasn’t unfrazzled, apparently. A few days after writing this confessional about my mental state (here), I sent my beleaguered wallet on a trip through the wash cycle.

On the whole, this might have had more of an up side than a down side. My old leather wallet is now clean and fresh, the credit cards and license seem intact, and all those old business cards and bus tickets from when I worked for a living are now in such a state that I am forced to do what I should have done when I retired—throw them out! One must not cling too hard to the past.

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3 I ended my post about the invasive species in my back yard (here) with the admonition that I had to KEEP WATCHING for more invasions. Good thing I did, too. Nothing has reappeared at invasion ground zero, but a couple of days ago, about 25 yards away and vaguely downhill from there, I was admiring what I first thought might be wild elderberries (I think they turned out to be Pokeweed, a poisonous but at least American native plant). Hiding a little ways behind the Poke, I saw the pretty red head of one of those invasive Arum Italicums cautiously peeking out!

I dug it up—carefully this time so as not to be splashed with its toxic alien acid-blood—and looked around for any of its invasive brothers. I didn’t see any, but the area of this new sighting is so large, swampy, and thorny-weed infested that I despair of inspecting the entire area.

Now I worry that some day I’ll wake up and find a hundred new Arums in that patch, more than I can possibly hope to eradicate by hand. Oh, what dangers one careless fling of unknowns seeds can bring! Let that be a lesson for all of you!

Thanks
Dorn
8/11/2020

Invaders!

– in which Dorn spins a tale of gardening gone wrong.

My story starts many months ago. A dear friend, whose name I withhold to protect the guilty, offered us a dozen or so black seeds, like little wrinkled baby peas. “Plant them! You’ll like what you see!”

Our (especially my) skills at gardening ornamentals are commensurate with our (especially my) interest in it, so we weren’t holding our breaths for a spectacular result. After the seeds sat around the house getting in the way for a sufficient length of time, I tossed them out back, and promptly forgot about them.

Today, in the heat of high summer, it was time to hack down the undergrowth that was taking over our back, uh, 40. I was donning my protective gear and scoping out a plan of attack, and I saw that among the usual morass of weeds and vines was peppered here and there a squat stem, atop of which sat a cluster of bright berries in the process of changing from green to red. “How pretty! Why have we never seen these before?”

Kathleen figured it out. “It’s those seeds you threw back here last year! They sprouted! Now, what the heck did she say these were called?” Neither of us had any idea, so we sent a query out on Facebook. Several people said they were Jack-in-the-Pulpits, but that didn’t look quite right. One friend called them Lords-and-Ladies and said they were a popular garden ornamental in England. Another helpfully pointing us to the Washington State Noxious Weed Control Board. Uh-oh…

It’s Italian Arum, in the same family as Jack-in-the-Pulpit, and also known as Lords-and-Ladies. It’s also a class-C weed (whatever that is) in Washington State, poisonous, and an invasive species.

Now, I don’t like to brag (shut up), but at one time in my career I was quite the high mucky-muck in the world of invasive species. I was hired by NOAA to work on their invasive species efforts at a time when (a) after years of warnings by scientists, their damage was finally starting to cost big bucks, and (b) NOAA’s research arm, and especially the Sea Grant Program, was one of the only significant sources of federal funding for invasive species research and outreach.

Those were good times, when I was responsible for designing and executing the program to hand out invasive species grant funding! Back then, within a certain audience, my insights were wiser, my scientific observations were astuter, my jokes funnier, and my boondoggles boon-dogglier. Ah, memories!

But nothing lasts forever, and the funds appropriated by Congress for Sea Grant to give out for invasive species work slowed to a trickle, much too little to justify my job of managing said funds. My audience followed the money elsewhere, and I moved on to other things. But my pulse still quickens when an invasive species emergency looms!

And now I had my own invasive emergency of sorts. Apparently, this stuff thrives in the environment where I threw the seeds, and it can grow and propagate, not just by seeds, but also by sending up new shoots if you pull out the plant, but leave the root ball, or “corm”. So I had to dig out all the plants—there were 15 or so—while being careful not to let any of the seed-carrying berries fall off and roll under the brush, and not to pull too hard on the stalk and break it, leaving the corm behind to sprout again. That corm, by the way, is a woody, round, tendrilly, creepy looking thing that resembles a coronavirus, if a coronvirus were two inches in diameter.

I was more successful at capturing all the escaping berries, I think, than at rooting out all the corms. Sometimes, the stems broke and I just couldn’t find the woody corm at the bottom. So I think we’ll have to stay vigilant next year to see if new Arums pop up.

We destroyed all the plants, seeds, and corms I could find, except for one survivor, which we let live so it could tell the others what happened here, and to warn them to keep their old-world tuberous toxic selves away from our shores!

Is my language species-ist?

Thanks,
Dorn
7/17/2020

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EPILOG – July 22, 2020

The Arum italica got its revenge. As it clearly says on the Washington State Noxious Weed Control Board webpage, “avoid skin contact with Italian arum as plant parts may cause skin irritation, which can be severe for sensitive individuals”

(I will be writing to the WSNWCB about the vagueness of the warnings on their website. Clearly, that sentence should have ended with THIS MEANS YOU!)

Anyway, sure enough a few days after my hand-to-hand combat with the Arum, I got this rash that morphed into blisters after a while on the back of my hand. I got a few spots elsewhere too, but I didn’t include photographs as they don’t really add to the story (read: not gruesome enough). I had worn stout leather gloves, but when I would accidentally break a stalk and have to root around in the dirt, my sense of touch wasn’t sensitive to find the corm unless I took them off.

So I guess the Arum got the last laugh. Or maybe, the fight isn’t over even yet—any seeds or corms I missed could still sprout up to taunt me, or worse! So I must KEEP WATCHING. KEEP WATCHING THE YARD. KEEP WATCHING. (That’s a homage to the closing line from that great 1951 movie about another invasive plant, The Thing From Another World .)