The U.S. new case count dipped to 38 / 100K / day, versus 39 for most of the prior week. This appears mostly due to declines in new cases in California and New York. Continue reading Post #1565: COVID-19, finishing out the data week with a little dip in new cases.
Edited 8/6/2022: I may have been somewhat hasty in my original post. I removed the insect barrier. As expected, I am now getting full-sized summer squash. But the largest of these, so far, has only a vestige of seeds. For all intents and purposes, it’s seedless. To me, this suggests that, at some point, these squash plants did indeed begin producing full-sized fruit despite a lack of pollination. Perhaps they have to produce a handful of tiny ones first, before they give up on getting pollinated and begin producing full-sized parthenocarpic fruit.
The original post follows.
One tiny detail. The seed packets for parthenocarpic squash failed to mention one tiny, little detail.
Looking on the bright side, you know how summer squash will go from small to gigantic before you know it? One day they’re barely edible, three days later they’re barely liftable?
Or how you can be inundated with zucchini, to the point where you have to keep dreaming up new ways to cook it? Where you start figuring out ways to hide it in food, so that your family won’t object.
The good news is, parthenocarpic squash have both of those problems licked.
They’re tiny. Unless a miracle happens, my parthenocarpic summer squash are going to weigh in somewhere around one ounce each.
If you’re interested, read on. Or just check the photos below. Continue reading Post G22-050: Parthenocarpic squash, is this a joke?
The COVID-19 new case count is unchanged at 39 new cases per 100K population per day. Deaths are still running 350 per day. And for reasons unknown, hospitalizations are now up to 6500 a day. Continue reading Post #1564: COVID-19 non-trend to 7/27/2022
Every once in a while I check in on the status of the U.S. canning lid market. Continue reading Post G22-049, canning lids revisited. Looks like 50 cents per lid is the going rate for wide-mouth Ball lids.
I’ve been harvesting ripe tomatoes more-or-less continuously over the past week.
Accordingly, it’s about time I admitted that my prediction of a period of no ripe tomatoes, due to excess heat, was wrong. And it’s time to do the autopsy. Continue reading Post G22-047: Heat and tomato ripening, just one more thing that I can’t test this year.
Just thought I’d say it, because nobody seems to be. Below, the top graph is gas, bottom graph is crude oil.
People were stupid enough to blame the rise on the President. But the President, praise the Lord, was not stupid enough to take credit for the fall. Yet. Though he did remark on it as being a good thing. Continue reading Post #1563: Meanwhile, the price of gasoline continues to plummet
The U.S. stands at 39 new COVID-19 cases per 100K population per day, unchanged over the past seven days. Deaths are still running 350 a day or so. Hospitalizations appear to have peaked at just over 6000 a day.
Data source for this and other graphs of new case counts: Calculated from The New York Times. (2021). Coronavirus (Covid-19) Data in the United States. Retrieved 7/27/2022, from https://github.com/nytimes/covid-19-data.” The NY Times U.S. tracking page may be found at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html
If I smooth out the worst of the holiday-related data reporting artifacts, you can see that this is now the longest “flat” stretch in the U.S. pandemic. The new case rate has been at more-or-less the same level for three months.
As importantly, there’s nothing new on the horizon. Omicron BA.5 and BA.4 together account for 95% of all new COVID-19 cases in the U.S.
Source: CDC COVID data tracker, accessed 7/27/2022
Recall that the World Health Organization applied the name Omicron to a specific strain of COVID around Thanksgiving 2021. Three quarters of a year later, and nothing new has arisen that merits getting a new Greek letter applied to it.
Source: Greek-alphabets.com
The absence of pi is finally attracting some press coverage. If you skim over that Time article, you’ll see this quote, emphasis mine:
Trevor Bedford, a professor in the vaccine and infectious disease division at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, says ... The evolutionary jump from Delta to Omicron was large, and the virus may not change that dramatically again for years—if ever, ..."
I’ve just been taught a first-hand lesson in why hardware stores sell 30% acetic acid (vinegar) as weed killer. That’s because regular household-strength (5%) may or may not work.
Here you see a section of my driveway, sprayed yesterday with vinegar (4%). It’s now a mix of dead and clearly undead weeds.
Perhaps this explains the mixed reviews that vinegar gets, as an herbicide. Above, it clearly left most of the grasses untouched, but did seem to kill some of the crabgrass. Continue reading Post G22-046, Vinegar and other organic herbicides
This post is about killing a whole lot of weeds growing up through a long stretch of poorly-maintained asphalt driveway. Options considered include:
This post is just about gathering the facts, trying to make my mind up. I haven’t really tested any of these yet.
Arguably the biggest revelation (to me) is that several of the alternatives (e.g., vinegar, heat) are really no different from using a weed whacker. It took me a while to figure that out, but all they do is take the tops off the weeds, leaving the live roots intact. That’s just a roundabout way of doing what a weed wacker does directly. In which case, it’s hard to argue in favor of some D-I-Y approach, when there’s a tool actually designed for the job.
After a false start with vinegar, I’ve decided to go with heat. Primarily a solar approach, which seems to fit my situation well. It’s an approach that isn’t typically used so there isn’t a lot of information out there on how well it works. It’s plausible that I can amp it up enough to kill the roots. Plus, I already have the materials on hand to try it.
The idea is not just to get the driveway surface hot enough to kill the top of the weed (and have it re-sprout), but to bake the driveway so hard that it kills the entire weed, root and all. We’ll see if I can achieve that, or whether that’s just so much wishful thinking. Continue reading Post G22-045: Today’s driveway forecast: Mostly weeds, with occasional stretches of partly pavement.
The daily new COVID-19 case count remains at 39 per 100K population. But hospitalizations are now over 6200 a day, per the US CDC. Continue reading Post #1561: COVID-19 trend to 7/22/2022, cases steady, hospitalizations continue to rise
