Love this article. Thank you for sharing. Read it and felt seen and less isolated as I reflect on some of my own similar mistakes. My colleagues loved it too!
My roommate moved out, and we couldn't fill the room in the coronavirus world, so we started a mushroom farm making a couple hundred pound of oysters per week and haven't looked back:
Make sure you keep a HEPA filter running so you don’t get mushroom lung from the spores. If you’re growing in the hundreds of pounds per week I wouldn’t even go into that room without full PPE.
I found it amusing that you offer a “mushroom column” rental where you grow oyster mushrooms for others, and they can track progress and eventually receive the fruits of their “labor”. Mushrooms as a Service?
Personally, I think they’re fairly easy to grow so I can’t imagine someone paying others to do so - however I wonder if this idea could work for other types of farming, especially if the user could interact with and adjust parameters for their “column” or plot, and eventually choose when to harvest it.
Think of it as a virtual community farm - where a user can manage a mini-farm and have control over various parameters for their plot: light, humidity, irrigation, etc. They could maybe even get a live stream of their crops, or receive time-lapse updates of progress weekly. Telefarming? Telehydroponics? I could brainstorm a couple other interesting directions to take this...
For people outside the USA, the idea of mixed units, or even just the various interpretations of imperial/archaic, I suspect isn't as intrinsically droll as it perhaps is from within a culture that's still trying to work out whether to adopt a basic measurement system in use across 95% of the planet.
However, gripes aside, for fruity measurements you may wish to adopt (read: you may not be aware of, but if you aren't, I suspect you'd approve) the FFF [6] measurement system.
The above relationship would be expressed as 54 furlongs of mycelium per 1.2283533E-7 cubic furlongs. (I think)
No doubt. I`ve come across a few worthwhile perspectives.
Though I observed someone yesterday for the 1st time here that could not form their own conclusion/opinion and was agitated by their incompetence. I agree that the humour is pretty thick sometimes.
From data (Mycorrhizal Functioning: An Integrative Plant-Fungal Process; Michael Allen) an estimate of 200cm per gram of soil is mentioned. This would translate to 2000m per kilogram and 2.000.000m = 2000km per tonne of soil. A cubic meter of soil should weight on average 2.6g/mL so it would come out even higher at 5200 km per cubic meter.
Agreed! I spend a couple hours a week packing bags basically and have found it as a way to relax.
I read Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms by Stamets and subject myself to public shaming on /r/mushroomgrowers, got spawn from North Spore (though there are other several good ones I can recommend if you email me, would probably not recommend going straight to inoculate/spores as you need a more sterile env), bought a fog machine from a mini golf course, racks from home depot, using wood pellets (which come pasteurized as a side effect of pelletization, compared to pasteurizing yourself which is a huge PITA unless you can do it with lime in bulk imho), and a raspberry pi controller to monitor humidity to turn on/off fog machine
Please share more about this! I’ve been thinking about trying this myself, and I’d love to hear more, about both the tech / ops side, and the economic side.
There must be "ease, relaxation, and a general sense of permissiveness." which sounds like an environment that would be conducive to basic questions.
He goes on to say "isolation is required" (for having creative ideas) and maybe that's because it is a way for him to avoid the adult-being-and-always-sounding-smart-forcing-function... even as costly as being alone from a team may be!
Feels like some tall shoulders probably agree with you:)
"Reminds me of some Asimov" may be the single greatest compliment I've ever been paid.
One of the things I love about Asimov's writing is the way in which he builds complex situations with simple building blocks. The Three Laws are the best example of this, but one of my favorites remains his first "article" on Thiotimiline.
They received it on Thursday and wore Wombat costumes to match... right after someone else received one for the amount of saliva produced by small children per day
RIP Professor
Best teacher I've ever had, he let me audit all his classes and took me/my ideas seriously at all times. And would grade my papers even though I was never an official student, or his his words "a paying customer."
First Minsky now Patrick. RIP and perhaps they are both back in touch. ;(
Instead of thinking about how they are both back in touch, why not assume a step further. They are in touch, and they are hoping that you are doing _______ with the most passion [in which they have yet to witness ;)].
Now fill that in and use it as adrenaline to accomplish your next (big, relatively) feat.
I prefer to view it as an opportunity to attempt to fill the big shoes that are now sitting empty, and hopefully do good in the world in the process, even if we don't manage to fully fill the big shoes.
And then maybe even inspiring the next generation, thus continuing the cycle.
It feels meaningful to me and doesn't require any big assumptions :)
I work for a phone company, Community Phone, whose majority customers are seniors. We periodically check in with our customers over text message (helping make sure they achieve their goals, like using Uber, or whatever... which is our business: to enable an improvement in overall quality of life via phones, rather than phones in themselves). As a result, many of our customers FB message/call/email/text us as a sanity check any time they receive solicitation online. It's a service we happily provide, but it does require them to reach out to us, as opposed to us knowing when to intervene.
Other than that, I will be monitoring this thread very closely for more general and automated solutions. Thanks very much for asking this question.
I've never imagined a phone company that aims to improve overall quality of life using phones, rather than just providing mobile service, fascinating to think about.
Are customers able to opt out of additional support and if so do any choose to?
I imagine it's not the cheapest phone company due to the additional service, so if you're not using it, you might be wasting money.
In any case, I think it's good that there are phone companies that compete on quality service rather than price, and specialised service for a specific demographic makes a lot of sense.
You don't have to imagine! We're $15 a month for unlimited talking and texting, and each gigabyte is $5. Or in other words, we beat Google Fi by $5. Support is our marketing budget, and it works rather well :)
I am not sure how this will work between "a company & a customer". But I would like filter my parents SMS, so that they can see messages from known & trusted contacts, while I can ensure that the messages from unknown sender is not spam. 95% of unknown senders are spam.
That pesky 5% can be really pesky though. Though if they naturally resort to POTS, like I would suspect, I have seen that compensate for potential shortcomings.
In the same way that a speech recognizer with 99% accuracy sounds amazing, and is a great technical achievement, is all the while still really hard to use if it misses 1 out of 100 phonemes...
