Rabbit holes and other mental meanderings...

[DavidBoren]

Disclaimer: I might have an undiagnosed attention disorder...

I have a habit of taking random curiosities to exhaustive lengths.

Some time last year I looked up what alloy would result from melting $0.41 of American change. This required finding the mass, mixture, and percentages for a penny, nickel, dime, and quarter... then crunching some numbers. If my math is remotely correct, it's roughly 70/15/15 copper/nickel/zinc, a cupro-nickel, German Silver, yellow brass. Anyways, I literally had no use for this information then, nor do I now. However, I have found myaelf liking(?) cupro-nickel, as if I have a personal tier system of judging random brass alloys.

So I started a bonsai tree this year, right? And when it comes to choosing a pot, I randomly decide on a little witch's cauldron. Why? I don't know. Lol. I am neither witch or warlock. I don't believe in witchcraft, magic, spirits, haunts, fortune, luck, religion of any sort. But hey, maybe I can find a cupro-nickel cauldron...

Did you know copper can poison plants? What other interactions between plants and metals exist? There's a lot of metals out there, let's narrow the list of possible metals... well, since the tree will be growing in a cauldron, let's see which metals are used in witchcraft. Ooh, seven basic metals... associated with the planetary bodies visible to the naked eye. Huh, what's this all about?

Now I have my freaking star chart... like based on my birtbday, or whatever. Don't believe in any of this BS, but I'm up to my ears in it.

Alice: “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

The Cheshire Cat: “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.”

Alice: “I don't much care where.”

The Cheshire Cat: “Then it doesn't much matter which way you go.”

[Axel]

Your Train of Thought seems to be a few dozen cars longer longer than most. Carry on

[DavidBoren]

Your Train of Thought seems to be a few dozen cars longer longer than most. Carry on

Want to know how I chose which plant to get?

I thought no one would ask... whilst researching cupro-nickel, I read about these trees in Burma(?) that absorb tons of nickel. Naturally, this led me to reading about phytoremediation... using plants to clean up contaminated land. So I made a list of plants and trees that are otherwise worthless other than absorbing tons of water and being able to grow in contaminated soil. Once again, information I have absolutely no use for.

Sometime later, one morning at work, I wondered about reusing the massive amounts of coffee grounds that get thrown away. POW! Another list of plants and trees that are particularly suitable of acidic soils. But wait, looky here, my OTHER list of worthless plants and trees. I wonder what happens to apear on both lists... oh the suspense. Each list was maybe a dozen items long, so they weren't extensive lists to begin with. What are chances I happened to pick plants and trees that appear on both lists? Pretty good, actually... there were several matches.

And this list of matches made it to the top of a tier system for judging worthless plants and trees that I never knew I had. On that random day, when the random thought of buying a tree today motivated me to walk to the store and see what they had to offer, the store I happened to walk into only had but one item on my elite list of matches... the Elderberry.

And now, you know...

[Butch3r]

I went down a similar rabbit hole with mushrooms,
- Hericium erinaceus (lions mane) mushrooms in test with mice was observed to repair neurological damage.
- Pleurotus ostreatus (oyster) mushrooms absorb heavy metals and toxins from the soils, they have been known to absorb petroleum based contaminates as well as radioactive contamination cleaning up the soil in the process.
- Turkey Tail mushrooms have been used for centuries to boost immune systems
- Stropharia rugosoannulata (garden giant) mushrooms will bond to root systems and actively exchange nutrients with plants. They call it the garden giant because it essentially feeds garden plants helping them grow bigger, it does this by breaking down things plant roots cant like rocks and feeding the nutrients it gets but doesn't need to the plants its bonded roots with. its also known for having an apatite for E.coli and can be used to filter harmful bacteria from drainage run off.

IIRC their was a chestnut (definitely some kind of tree nut) farm in Ontario that was loosing trees to black knot and the farmer noticed trees with Chaga mudrooms growing on them were not affected by the black knot so he started transferring Chaga mushrooms to the infected trees and the Chaga kicked the black knot off and saved the farmers trees.

Their are a handful of mushrooms being studied as a way to boost the immune system of Bees and hopefully stop colony collapse disorder as well as the deformed wing issues

as to your note about used coffee grounds, they are commonly used to cultivate certain strains of mushrooms.

[glaman5266]

My mind wanders all the time. Lately I've been thinking/daydreaming about how I would design a house that we'd move into when the kids move out & we don't want the hassle of the huge house we're in now.
As for hands-on stuff, it usually snowballs when I'm messing with a computer, especially with my Linux machine. Learning it, finding new stuff to mess with & configure.
Or with video game lore. When I go down that rabbit hole I'm usually stuck there for quite some time.

Sometimes it goes on long enough a little anxiety kicks in. That's when I gotta pull myself out of it.

[Yellow5]

... the Elderberry.

And now, you know...

Had to be done.

[Tarsun2]

sounds healthy to me...

but then again i see my sons bubble machine that states it makes a billion bubbles. well, i said, well just see about that.
Slow motion footage, bubbles per 1/4 rotation, multiplied by 4 and then doubled (since it has to bubble distribution sides).
how many bubbles per rotation and how long it took to complete one cycle. and then how long it would take to actually produce a billion bubbles...

final summation = LIES lol

ive been on the quest to find a good body lotion (for men). Every "10 best list" has different lotions on it as "the best" and its pretty ambiguous. So then it was onto what exactly makes a good lotion good. What does each ingredient do, and what do i think i want more of. Now what lotion has those ingredients in the proportions i want...

over the summer, i picked up 2 RC boats and low and behold, im building my own li-ion battery packs with scraps here from work. got the BMS sorted out, the balance leads and connector type, and the power leads with a different connection type. Learning how to monitor, maintain, and test 18650 batteries, (internal resistance, cutoff voltages, and amperage). picked up a few balance chargers and shrink wrap and am having a grand old time with it during my lunch breaks.

[dukie]

a point to note. copper is toxic to everything. plants, fish, bacteria, viruses, animals. Its all a matter of how susceptible the organism is.

[DavidBoren]

True.

Plants do need some copper, though, but too much will block the plant's ability to uptake iron. Iron is used in the production of chlorophyll. Iron, or at least iron available to the plant, is often lacking in highly acidic soils... so I put steel wool in the soil for the roots to grow into. I also have pennies and copper wire in the soil to stem the growth of fungus. Hopefully, neither metal is in such abundance that it is ever a concern for soil quality. Iron will flush, copper does not. If my plant turns blue, I will remove the pennies...

[SignOfZeta]

Yep, that’s me. I taught myself Riichi mahjong last year. It’s a four player game, almost never can I get four people together to play it. Now I’m researching old videos from the 80s on how gangsters used to cheat like CRAZY right in front of your eyes with nothing but slight of hand and balls of cupro-nickel. I find this fascinating but useless because I can only play occasionally and cheating would rarely be required to win in my circle...

I’m building synthesizers, resin casting, foreign languages, musical instruments. Buddhism, photography...I don’t know WTF drives so many people to sit down all day in front of a screen and do nothing but watch super hero movies and fight with wannabe Nazis on TwittFace when there is 50,000 years of the human experience to sift though and so little time left in our lives to see it. To never be bored...never be boring.

[bored383]

I was rabbit holing this morning and ended up here

[bored383]

addendum - I forgot to state where I started because I got distracted. here is where I started

[Axel]

Can we come up with a better name than "rabbit holing"

[LUKE]

Hare holing?

[SignOfZeta]

addendum - I forgot to state where I started because I got distracted. here is where I started

Which led to the discovery of the VSP (voiture sans permis), no doubt. Or maybe that’s later tonight. Or maybe the miners strike, or just “alcoholism” in general.

[XEMON]

We used to call them "voiture playmobil" when I was a kid ...

[bored383]

Can we come up with a better name than "rabbit holing"

take it up with Lewis Carroll, Alice, and Morpheus - get back to me with the results

[Rainmaker]

Can we come up with a better name than "rabbit holing"

Spiralling
Quagmiring