Log rafts, geology and migration
One of New South Wales’ main inland rivers is being choked with woody logs and other floating debris after unprecedented flooding. Several large rafts made of wood and other debris are blocking parts of the Macquarie River in the state’s west. Logjams like these are a natural phenomena on rivers, often after flooding. Willow logs are creating many of the blockages as willows float and then bind together to form rafts bridging from one bank of the river to the other. The longest raft is about 130-metres long, with thick vegetation growing on it since it has been there for months. (more…)
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A robust and resilient creation
When I had a prostate biopsy in March, core samples from 32 needles were used to check for the presence of prostate cancer. The prostate is located in the male pelvis beneath the urinary bladder. It’s about the size of a walnut. I had no side effects from this procedure and afterwards the prostate continued to function as usual. That’s amazing! What if we stuck 32 needles through a smartphone? It would be useless and never work again.
The human body is robust and resilient
This shows that the human body is more robust than human-engineered machines. In fact, your body is a miracle of precision engineering. It’s also robust with built-in redundancy. As the human body can heal itself from injury and disease it’s also resilient. “Robustness” is the ability to resist failure, and “resiliency” is the ability to recover from failure. (more…)
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Endless weeding
Onion weeds are the bane of many gardeners. They are very tough to get rid of. The reason they are so hard to get rid of lies in their bulbs. If you attempt to remove the weed by digging it up and shaking off the excess dirt, you have just shaken the numerous bulbletts attached to the larger bulbs at the root of the weed and you have just multiplied your weed problem instead of eradicating it.
On Monday mornings I do gardening with Easy Care Gardening. Sometimes this involves controlling onion weed in garden beds by weeding or mulching. If you try to pull onion weed out of the ground, the stalk will break off and leave the bulbs in the ground. This means that before too long, the weeds will return. To eliminate the weed, you have to take a small trowel and dig the whole plant out of the ground, bulb, soil and all. If the parent bulbs release tiny bulbs (bulbils) from the base of the main bulb, these grow into mature plants, and all the digging has achieved is multiplication of the problem. (more…)
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