World oldest known eel dies with 155.http://www.thelocal.se/20140808/world...

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McGruber writes An internal investigation by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office found that some of its 8,300 patent examiners repeatedly lied about the hours they were putting in and many were receiving bonuses for work they did not do. While half of the USPTO's Patent Examiners work from home full time, oversight of the telework program — and of examiners based at the Alexandria headquarters — was "completely ineffective," investigators concluded. The internal investigation also unearthed another widespread problem. More than 70 percent of the 80 managers interviewed told investigators that a "significant" number of examiners did not work for long periods, then rushed to get their reviews done at the end of each quarter. Supervisors told the review team that the practice "negatively affects" the quality of the work. "Our quality standards are low," one supervisor told the investigators. "We are looking for work that meets minimal requirements." Patent examiners review applications and grant patents on inventions that are new and unique. They are experts in their fields, often with master's and doctoral degrees. They earn at the top of federal pay scale, with the highest taking home $148,000 a year.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

People can easily forget that everyone online is a person, and often that means they don’t think twice before posting something insulting or hurtful about someone. 14-year-old Trisha Prabhu decided to fix that with software that makes people give a second thought to what they’re posting online, and it’s working.

Prabhu is a participant in this year’s Google Science Fair, and her project is the “Rethink” system that, “measured the number of mean/hurtful messages adolescents were willing to post after being alerted to rethink.” For a control, she also created the “Baseline” system that measures the number of hurtful messages kids were willing to send without being alerted by Rethink.

It’s essentially a second chance for teens (Prabhu’s sample subjects were between the ages of 12 and 18) to stop themselves before hitting ‘Send’ on a hurtful message. The software was a test for the participants. For Baseline, the subjects were presented with a sample of a hurtful message and asked if it’s something they would post to social media. The subjects simply answer “Yes” or “No” for Baseline, but after that initial “Yes/No” response, Rethink asks, “This message may be hurtful to others. Would you like to pause, review and rethink before posting?”

Prabhu found that when given that second opportunity to think about the hurtful message 93.43% of the study participants chose not to post. After her research, Prabhu worked up a prototype product for Rethink to give teens the real-world option of stopping themselves from hastily posting hurtful messages. That prototype is outlined in the diagram above from Prabhu’s Google Science Fair project summary.

Given the huge reduction in willingness to post something negative, I wouldn’t be surprised if social media networks don’t get on board with implementing this technology.

(Google Science Fair via The Verge, image via Trisha Prabhu)

Previously in

• Amazon Prime’s new original series Annedroids focuses on a young female inventor
• This seven-year-old got to visit her favorite chemists, has favorite chemists
• This PhD student programs robots to learn from humans, and she’s 17

Are you following The Mary Sue on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, & Google +?

"Atheist TV adheres to nasty stereotypes about atheism—smugness, gleeful disregard for others' beliefs—to a degree that's close to unwatchable," writes Daniel D'Addario in Salon. The network could learn a lot from Cosmos, which "inspired awe by presenting something in which to believe—the majesty of the universe."

Read more...

The Raptors' global ambassador finds a popular Toronto concert isn't a good enough hiding place from the NBA's draconian tampering rules.

Toronto Raptors global ambassador and semi-famous musician of note Drake thought he could escape the NBA's tentacles by recruiting concert attendee Kevin Durant to Toronto in the safe confines of thousands of fans at OVO Fest in Toronto. He was sorely mistaken.

Hearing Raptors fined $25,000 for comments Drake made at a concert about Kevin Durant that were seen as violation of anti-tampering rules

— Marc Stein (@ESPNSteinLine) August 11, 2014

Here's the video.

Seems innocent enough, but not in the league's eyes.

The lesson for Kevin Durant: attending any musical act from now until July 1, 2016 could cost your free-agent suitors money. Keep that in mind next time you attend a Wale concert in D.C or a Jay Z concert at the Barclays Center. (Or, of course, a Toby Keith concert in Oklahoma City.)

In the past few months Amazon has very publicly made enemies with several of its business partners, but the online retailer isn’t done sullying its image–fans hoping to order titles such Maleficent, Muppets Most Wanted, or Captain America: The Winter Soldier from Amazon are out of luck, at least until Disney cries “uncle.”

Amazon U.K. will be selling copies of the Disney titles, but American fans will only be able to find Winter Soldier and the other recent releases on Amazon Instant. Deadline reports that “discussions are continuing between Amazon and Disney to resolve the pricing issue.” Yes, Amazon’s bullying tactics sound like business as usual when the company being targeted is a media property as large as Disney, but blocking titles to gain an upper hand in price disputes is a growing trend for Amazon, and one that ultimately hurts both artists and fans.

Earlier this year, Amazon blocked the sale of Warner Bros.’ The Lego Movie when the two companies couldn’t agree on a price–according to Deadline, this controversial move “marked the first time that Amazon halted orders as a negotiating tactic.” Again, if it’s hard to muster up sympathy for giant companies like Warner Bros. or Disney, Amazon’s refusal to sell the new Disney titles is the third time in recent months that their negotiation tactics have raised eyebrows.

This Sunday, 900 authors including Malcolm Gladwell, Stephen King, and Goldfinch author Donna Tartt published a two-page open letter in The New York Times lambasting Amazon for directly hurting writers in their attempts to manipulate Hachette Book Group. Colbert even spoke out in support of Hachette and its authors on his show by calling for a boycott, saying that Amazon “wants to control book selling, book buying, and even book publishing, and that is a national tragedy… if this is to be the new American way, then maybe it has to be changed, by law if necessary, immediately, if not sooner.”

On the bright side, I guess, Winter Soldier or Maleficent fans don’t even need to make a conscious decision to boycott–when it comes to our DVD or Blu-Ray needs, Amazon has already made that call for us.

Previously in more like Asshole Fire, am I right?

• What’s the hold-up on that Netflix original Star Trek series?
• Amazon patented taking pictures in front of a white background
• Meet the Amazon Fire Phone

Are you following The Mary Sue on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, & Google +?

And now, a guest post by a really amazing author: Tom Pollock. Tom wanted to talk about how he maintains both a writing career and a day job at the same time, and that felt like a very useful perspective, indeed. I don’t necessarily agree with everything here — if I’d taken some of this advice to heart, I suspect I’d not have the career I have at present, but I’m also, er, fortunate enough to have never liked any of my day jobs all that much. The only day job I ever wanted was to be a full-time author — but some of what Tom is putting out there is vital for those who want to keep their current work while writing on the side.

So, with that all said –

Everyone say “Hi, Tom!”

* * *

Maybe this is a place to mention this, but I’ve always felt a little weird about giving writing advice.

This isn’t just because, as Patrick Ness so rightly puts it, ‘no-one can tell you how to write, they can only tell you how they write’ it’s also because I can’t even tell myself how I’m going to write the next book. Every time I start a novel it feels like the first time.  I’m sitting down to write my fourth one right now, and it still makes me feel like a nervous virgin who’s just realised he forgot to take off his socks before his trousers.

I know one way I’m not going to write it though: full time.  I’ve written three novels in three years around a day job that I really like, and I’ll do the same with this one. People sometimes ask me for practical tips on how I fit it all in, so here’s how:

(Disclaimer: your mileage may vary and your domestic circumstances may differ from mine. In particular, I am aware I have no kids. Still, I hope some of this is useful to you.)

Plan your time.

This is the biggie, if you take nothing else away from this post take this. If you’re effectively trying to do two jobs at once, then time is likely to be your scarcest resource, and like any scarce resource, you’ll need to budget. Plan your week ahead, know when you’re writing.  Have a routine. Compartmentalize like a fiend.

For example: I write on Monday nights, Wednesday nights and during the day on Sundays. The rest of the time I see family and friends, eat cereal, rage against the dying of the light, answer email, eat more cereal, make terrible puns on twitter and watch Netflix.

I find it helps (though it’s not essential and I understand this can be tricky) to have a general idea of how fast you write, so you can know how much time you’ll need. I turn out about five hundred words an hour when I’m first-drafting. That’s roughly two-hundred hours to a first draft. Writing eight hours a week, which is more or less what I do (two hours each in the weekday evenings and four on the weekend) gets me to a 100k first draft in six months, another six for revision and that’s a finished novel in a year.

Yes, a lot of people write every day. You can if you want to. You don’t have to. I don’t.  A lot of people (like my gracious host, Chuck) write more than one book a year. You can if you want to. You don’t have to. I don’t. (Spoiler: this will be a running theme.)

Stick to your plan.

Once you’ve got it planned out, do it.

If your buddy Alex asks you if you want to go see Guardians of the Galaxy on Wednesday? Sorry matey, I’m writing. I find getting out of the house to write helps here. Work has its own place, writing has its own place too, and when I’m at home I’m at home: off duty. This keeps me from being tempted to pretend I’m writing while I’ve got an Elementary marathon on in the background.

It’s not just your writing time that’s sacred, either. The point of compartmentalisation isn’t just to keep writing safe from the rest of your life, but to keep the rest of your life safe from your writing time, this helps with…

Don’t let writing turn you into an asshole.

If you’re anything like me then about three months into the book, a nasty, Gollum-like voice will whispering inside your head. It’ll suck its breath in through its broken teeth like it’s reluctant to give you bad news and then it’ll say something like:

‘I hate to tell you this Tom, but there are only so many hours in the day, and you’re already spending so many of them at the day job. You keep seeing on Twitter how everyone else is writing every spare second of every day (I mean, even Stephen frickin’ King says you need to write every day, and he’s Stephen frickin’ King).  What if everyone else is getting ahead because you’re not focussed on your game? Everyone’s talking about how tough the market is right now. Maybe it’s time to make the writing the priority, even ahead of some of the people in your life. They’ll understand right? This is your dream. Everyone has a right to follow their dreams. Hell, if they don’t understand, maybe they don’t deserve you.’

Do not listen to this voice. This voice is a massive dick, formed out of your own paranoia at falling behind some imagined curve and cloaked in just enough statement-of-the-obvious to make itself look reasonable. Yes, there may be times when you need to prioritize, and you know what? Prioritize the people. They’re more important.

For one thing, you can afford to — you’ve got a day job covering the income. For another, you won’t actually get any more done if you’re worrying about how you’ve fucked up all the human connections in your life. The fact that writing is not the a1 priority in your life does not mean you won’t get it done. So stop panicking and bake a goddam cake for the real love of your life.

Enjoy it.

Internet legend Ze Frank put it best: ‘life isn’t just a sequence of waiting for things to be done’. You are entitled to expect to have fun. Not that every minute at the keyboard will be as 100% pleasurable and frustration free as an orgasm on MDMA. It won’t, but on average, overall you ought to enjoy it, and find it satisfying. And if you don’t? If for some reason you’re labouring away at a pastime you hate because you’re invested in the idea of being a writer, but detest the activity? It’s okay, you can stop. You kept your day job, remember?

Frankly, everybody who writes, day job or not, ought to be having fun with it, otherwise why bother? But this is one of those areas where keeping the civilian occupation can be a positive boon. If you aren’t looking for this book to pay your gas bill, it frees you up to write whatever the hell turns you on. It pulls some of the teeth out of the ‘is this commercial enough?’ vampire.

Aaaaaaand that’s all I got. I assume a lot of you guys are writing around day jobs, what helps you cram it in?

* * *

Inventor of monsters, hugger of bears: Tom Pollock is a long time fan of science fiction and fantasy who steadfastly refuses to grow out of his obsession with things that don’t exist. His Skyscraper Throne Trilogy (The City’s Son, The Glass Republic, Our Lady of The Streets) has been shortlisted for the Kitschies Golden Tentacle and British Fantasy Awards. The Skyscraper Throne is probably the most urban fantasy you’ll ever read. The first volume The City’s Son, is about a teenage graffiti artist sucked into a world of runaway train ghosts, glass-skinned streetlamp spirits, wolves made of scaffolding, and demolition gods with cranes for fingers. Things get weirder from there.

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Just as the first-person video craze is reaching mainstream consumers, investors already have their eyes set on the next hot thing: interactive 360-degree videos.

360fly, a company that has developed its own 360-degree camera, announced today that it has received $17.8 million, its first institutional funding round, led by Catterton, Qualcomm Ventures, and others.

Interactive 360-degree videos are more like recorded experiences that you have the freedom to explore, rather than footage where you’re stuck looking at whatever the camera is pointing at.

360fly’s flagship camera is rugged and portable, similar to the first-person video cameras we’re seeing from companies like GoPro. In addition to shooting a full 360 degrees horizontally, it also shoots 240 degrees worth of video vertically.

The company says it plans to use the funding to prepare for the consumer launch of its $499 camera this fall, which includes building an online platform for its videos, as well as iPhone and Android apps. 360fly is also developing a smartphone attachment that will let you record 360-degree videos right from your phone (the big limitation is that it only shoots 90-degrees of vertical video).

The technology behind 360fly’s camera comes from years of research from engineers at Carnegie Mellon University, CEO and president Tim O’Neil told VentureBeat in an email. Even more intriguing: O’Neil says the original patents for 360fly’s tech were spun out of CMU’s Robotics Institute after they were used by NASA in one of the Apollo missions.

So who would use one of these things? O’Neil says the camera will be able to capture video that’s ideal for virtual reality headsets like the Oculus Rift. He also expects the company’s smartphone attachment to shoot video that looks almost as good as the company’s pro-grade lenses, which have been used by CBS Sports, Discovery Live, and Matchbox 20 for live event streaming.

Given the rapid success of GoPro and its ilk, as well as promising virtual reality solutions on the horizon from Oculus and Sony, there’s a good chance consumers will warm up to 360-degree videos over the next few years. We’ll need plenty of content to drive VR platforms, after all. And the athletes who helped popularize action video cameras likely won’t be content with shooting in one direction for much longer.

360fly isn’t alone in the 360-degree video market, but its camera differs from the competition because it uses only a single lens to capture its video. Other 360-degree cameras, like the Centr and Bubl, rely on multiple cameras, which can add additional expense and complexity. The single camera lens also lets 360fly record 360-degree video instantly — competing cameras have to stitch their video together from separate lenses.

With this round of funding, which brings the company’s total funding to nearly $21 million, O’Neil says 360fly likely won’t need another round. But, he noted, “if we decide to move more aggressively into other vertical markets or geographic regions, or a potential strategic partner offers us a unique opportunity, our plans could change.”

At EyeSee360, we create products and software for interactive, one-shot 360° panoramic video. Through a partnership with VOXX International the company will deliver a line of unique panoramic video cameras to market that virtually inc... read more »

Ocarina of Time ruined forever ⊟

Blame the scoundrel Russmarrs2 for creating and releasing a patch that lets you play The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time as Waluigi. There’s a video of it in action here, which presumably will be taken down once the UN Security Council votes to restrict all Waluigi hacks and just anything involving Waluigi in general. Credit to Dorkly for the image and link.

BUY Hyrule Warriors, The Legend of Zelda (Wii U), upcoming games

blazepress:

"Fry me a river."

iamdavidbrothers:

THIS IS ME SITTING NEXT TO MIXMASTER MIKE, SHORTLY AFTER MURS SAID LAZARUS, A BOOK I EDIT BY RUCKA & LARK, IS ONE OF HIS FAVORITE COMICS UNPROMPTED

MY LIFE IS DOPE

submitted by amy-amy [link] [40 comments]

An anonymous reader writes "What's your favorite programming language? Is it CSS? Is it JavaScript? Is it PHP, HTML5, or something else? Why choose? A new programming language developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University is all of those and more — one of the world's first "polyglot" programming languages. Sound cool? It is, except its development is partially funded by the National Security Agency, so let's look at it with a skeptical eye. It's called Wyvern — named after a mythical dragon-like thing that only has two legs instead of four — and it's supposed to help programmers design apps and websites without having to rely on a whole bunch of different stylesheets and different amalgamations spread across different files.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

'Guardians of the Galaxy' Facts and Trivia [callmeforge]

Previously: 'Guardians of the Galaxy' vs. 'The LEGO Movie'

XCOM: The Board Game is a board game by Fantasy Flight Games, based on the video game franchise of the same name, about fending off an alien invasion. Specifically, the board game appears to take many cues and key art assets from the 2012 video game XCOM: Enemy Unknown. The board game puts up to four players in roles like Commander and Chief Scientist and uses a digital companion app to escalate the alien invasion as time goes on. More on the game and its gameplay is available in Fantasy Flight’s initial announcement.

In XCOM: The Board Game, you and up to three friends assume the roles of the leaders of the elite, international organization known as XCOM. It is your job to defend humanity, quell the rising panic, and turn back the escalating alien invasion coordinated by the game’s innovative, free digital companion app.

images via Fantasy Flight Games

via Jake Solomon

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Link

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Christopher Simmons recently noticed that the icon of the Berkeley Half Marathon (launched in 2013) is exactly like the bear of German company GUS-trans designed by Floris Voorveld in 2011.

At the top-secret internal training sessions that Apple offers to its employees, the message boils down to this: Be more like Picasso and less like Google. That’s the takeaway from an excellent New York Times report on Apple University, as the iPhone maker’s training program is known, which drafts in Ivy League professors and features tailor-made courses for incoming acqui-hires like Dr. Dre of Beats.

Drawing on interviews with three anonymous Apple employees, the Times’ Brian Chen writes that the program is “an especially vivid reflection of Apple and the image it presents to the world. Like an Apple product, it is meticulously planned, with polished presentations and a gleaming veneer that masks a great deal of effort.” It is also, like most of Apple’s initiatives, compulsively secretive—the company declined to comment to the Times on the program’s existence.

Steve Jobs’ admiration of Pablo Picasso is well documented, from the painter’s inclusion in Apple’s “Think Different” ad campaign to the Picasso homage within the Mac OS “Finder” icon. For an internal course called “Communicating at Apple,” former Pixar employee Randy Nelson uses the example of Picasso’s lithograph series “The Bull,” which shows the painter gradually paring down his representations of the animal until he uses only a few lines.

How does that apply to Apple? “You go through more iterations until you can simply deliver your message in a very concise way, and that is true to the Apple brand and everything we do,” one employee told the Times. The impulse to ruthlessly pare down designs to their most essential forms is seen in the evolution Apple products over time, from the mouse to the iPhone.

In another class taught by Nelson, “What Makes Apple, Apple,” he brings up the different design philosophies that gave rise to the Apple TV remote (a sleek sliver of aluminum with only three buttons) and the Google TV remote (78 buttons, including a QWERTY keyboard—presumably this one manufactured by Sony). Nelson explains that the simpler remote is an outgrowth of Apple’s pervading culture of minimal design:

How did Apple’s designers decide on three buttons? They started out with an idea, Mr. Nelson explained, and debated until they had just what was needed—a button to play and pause a video, a button to select something to watch, and another to go to the main menu.

Apple University practices what it preaches down to the smallest details. “Even the toilet paper in the bathrooms is really nice,” one of the employees said.

For some, the irony is almost too much to bear. While Congress is eager to fund a $2 billion expedition to search for oceans beneath Europa, some 95% of Earth's oceans are unexplored. Given the role of oceans in regulating climate, and their untapped potential for food and health, is it time to rethink our priorities?

Read more...

The Felis catus genome has been fully sequenced and annotated, which means your pet kitty is about to give up its genetic secrets to science.

Read more...

jtotheizzoe:

Remember LEGO’s announcement that they were producing a minifig set featuring female scientists? Well, that’s now a real thing, and you can buy it, like I just did!

I don’t want to talk about the boy and the sneakers peeking out from the sheet crudely draped over his corpse in the street, because I have been happy this month and it is so rare that I’m happy and that you, at age 4, don’t have to touch my knee or shoulder or face and say, “What’s wrong, Mama? You sad?”

I don’t want to think of who will go out on her hands and knees to scrub what’s left of the boy’s blood from the concrete. It will probably be a loved one, her hands idle after hours of clenching them into fists, watching what used to be her breathing boy lie lifeless, as she waited and waited and waited for the police and the coroner and the county to get their stories straight and their shit together and their privilege, sitting crooked as a ten-dollar wig, readjusted till it was firmly intact. All that time they spent, just primping, just holding their whiteness and authority up as mirrors for one another, tuning out the cries of a mourning community — or garbling them, rather. Did they say, “Kill the police?!” As long as that’s the way you heard it, they did. And that is what AP will wire out to every mainstream news outlet who can be bothered to report the death of another unarmed black son on a Saturday night.

Their truth is not our truth.

Daughter, I said I didn’t have it in me to sit with the murder of Michael Brown last night and comb my social media accounts for first-hand anecdotes that would likely be more accurate than anything the news stations would report. I didn’t want to watch the Vines or read the Instagram messages under a photo collage of police presence at the crime scene, wailing friends and neighbors, the boy’s father holding up a scrap of cardboard scrawled with, “Ferguson Police just executed my unarmed son,” and the barely covered body of the boy himself.

But I stayed up anyway, because his neighbors had not gone home. They had held vigil and recorded and tweeted and planted their feet as a helicopter shone floodlight into their faces and a tank rolled into their apartment complex and barely restrained dogs bared their teeth and growled like they were hoping to be sicced.

They could not be intimidated into returning to their homes. They knew too well the coldness that would await them there, the absence of Michael’s laughter and light, the sounds and images of his final moments filling every too-quiet corner.

No. They would cling to each other instead, and I cannot blame them. I know the alternative. There is no honor in bearing death alone, no solace in silent suffering, nothing noble about walking away empty-handed. The community cried and crooked its arms, mobilized and marched. In the dark they headed to the murderers’ doorstep: the police department, demanding accountability for the alleged ten gunshots one of their cops had leveled at an unarmed teen in broad daylight.

They were told they could expect a press conference at ten the next morning. The department needs time, I suppose, to omit and tamper and vilify, time to label the shooting as anything but misconduct, as “manslaughter” and not “entirely preventable murder.”

I logged off when the community received that most minimal sense of closure: a cover-up conference at 10 AM. But I slept fitfully and woke with too many empty words. I always want to write the boys back, always want to revive the little girls. But writing feels like a fool’s errand at times like these.

And so does parenting.

The boys who live are so scarred. I have looked inside more than a few; they are hiding bullets in each quadrant of heart and brain. There are shells lodged in their arteries. Memory, not metal, ticks within them. When they laugh you can hear it rattling like real tin. One false move and their minds or their wills or their ability to feel at all will be gone.

And they will tell you: when I was five, a man nodded at me as he strolled past my house and by the time he reached the end of the block all I saw was his blood. And they will tell you: my brother, my cousin, my best friend, my little sister, my first crush was killed, and the cluster of stuffed bears and balloons we left at the scene was gone within the week. They will tell you: I am not sure how long I will live. 

The truth is: you are not sure, either, and there will be very little left to say in the face of that actuality. Besides, it is all the things they won’t say, all the numbness and fatalism and resignation they are too afraid to acknowledge — and the ulcerous pain underneath it — that are the real sites of worry.

I do not want to talk about this anymore because I was happy this month and you just turned four on the first and all I can think about is the promise I see in you. I think about how well you’re hearing these days with the tiny aids that screech when you hug me and hiss when the batteries are weak. I think about how much easier it’s become for you to simply say, “Help, please” instead of throwing a frustrated fit for the language you cannot find. I think about how often I keep you near me and how many people take umbrage with that. She has to learn, they say, how to live in this world.

But how can you learn at 4 to do what still makes me flail and falter at 34? And how can I let you go when a girl a year younger than you was gunned down in our city last week and a boy who would’ve headed off to college for the first time on Monday was executed within steps of his Ferguson, MO home on Saturday?

I’ve no more access to the language for this than you do.

What I have is you and the God who gave you and the God who just may take you away. And I have the resilience of a race who has survived every previous effort to exterminate it (and to compel it to exterminate itself). I have eyes and a watchful heart; they are both weary. I have hope that if the time comes, my community will be like Michael Brown’s, immovable and resolutely together. And what I also have are words that I’m meant to use when I least want to, in hopes that they will reach beyond my grasp and be a reckoning for those who, in the face of immense loss, would just rather we all returned to our homes and kept quiet.

Original Source

djempirical

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMXuuYnoRdI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9aN93S8nl8&t=0m9s

https://twitter.com/ChrissyMBot/status/498180428319453184

Original Source

Original Source

NPR’s The Salt has the story on this insanely beautiful tree and it’s 40 kinds of fruit.

It sounds like something out of Dr. Seuss, but artist Sam Van Aken is developing a tree that blooms in pink, fuchsia, purple and red in the spring — and that is capable of bearing 40 different kinds of fruit.

No, it’s not genetic engineering. Van Aken, an associate professor in Syracuse University’s art department, used an age-old technique called grafting to attach branches from 40 different kinds of stone fruit onto a single tree. It’s called the “Tree of 40 Fruit.” Weekend Edition’s Arun Rath spoke to Van Aken about the project, and what inspired it.

“I’m an artist. So the whole project really began with this idea of creating a tree that would blossom in these different colors and would bear these multitude of fruit,” he says.

But he soon discovered that it was actually pretty hard to find so many distinct varieties of stone fruit in New York, he explains in his presentation at TEDx Manhattan. “I realized the extent to which we’ve created these massive monocultures.” Most grocery stores and markets only stock a few varieties — and most of them are grown in California.

But then Van Aken came across the New York State Agricultural Experimentation Station. “It was the largest orchard of its kind in the Northeast, perhaps even east of the Rockies,” he says.

The 3-acre plot contained all sorts of varieties of stone fruit, he says. “And they all had these amazingly different tastes.”

That’s when he started to understand the history behind these fruits, he says. “Then [the project] really became about preserving some of these antique and heirloom varieties.”

The state wanted to close the operation down due to a lack of funding, so Van Aken purchased it in 2008.

His 16 trees around the country are composed of mainly antique and native stone fruit varieties, including peaches, plums, apricots and nectarines. In his TEDx talk, Van Aken says he’s worked with 250 varieties of stone fruit at this point.

“I’m working with cherries; I’ve had limited success with that,” he says. “I also graft almonds to them, because the almond blossoms are just absolutely amazing.”

The process of building up these trees has taken years and a lot of patience. Van Aken starts with what’s called a stock plan. He then inserts small, budding branches from other trees at strategic points throughout the stock tree. He tapes these grafts in place and lets them heal and and bond with their new base over the winter months. If all goes well, the grafts will start to grow in the spring.

Read more.

He said, “ever seen a dog wearing sunglasses and a bucket hat while riding a water buffalo? Now you have!” -southeast_boarder

28p04 is a post from: The Adventures of Dr. McNinja Ads by Project Wonderful! Your ad could be here, right now.

28p04 is a post from: The Adventures of Dr. McNinja

Ads by Project Wonderful! Your ad could be here, right now.