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Currently at Toronto Pearson: 3. High today: 10, at midnight; dropped to 5 at 1 a.m. Intermittent hailstorms this afternoon; streamers still coming off Huron and Georgian Bay. Frost warning for tonight and tomorrow--I had been planning to plant my various nightshades tomorrow....
Speaking of nightshades: once upon a time for a job I had as a research assistant--this was the only time I was ever a research assistant; this job also involved skimming a bunch of books by Pierre Bourdieu and writing reports on them, which is how I learned that the College de France has some kind of weird inferiority complex in relation to the Sorbonne or something--I read an article about how abstract inferences can impede the progress of science and knowledge and stuff, which noted that for centuries Europeans assumed that tomatoes were poisonous because they come from nightshade plants. (You'd think they would've thought the same of potatoes. Maybe they did, I dunno.) I don't remember how they figured out that tomatoes were not poisonous--maybe they fed them to their enemies and their enemies failed to die--but what I do remember (vaguely) is the story of how it was determined that some antibiotic cures some parasitic (protozoan, maybe) disease, after years of resistance to the plain evidence that this antibiotic cures this parasitic disease, because antibiotics don't kill parasites. Eventually someone discovered that the parasite needed some kind of bacteria living inside it, and the antibiotic killed the bacteria.
Today in the backyard, a white-crowned sparrow:
Haven't seen any of those in quite a few years. Apparently they just pass through here on their way up north.
Last week out front, what I suppose is a clouded sulphur butterfly on a tulip in the rain:
Speaking of nightshades: once upon a time for a job I had as a research assistant--this was the only time I was ever a research assistant; this job also involved skimming a bunch of books by Pierre Bourdieu and writing reports on them, which is how I learned that the College de France has some kind of weird inferiority complex in relation to the Sorbonne or something--I read an article about how abstract inferences can impede the progress of science and knowledge and stuff, which noted that for centuries Europeans assumed that tomatoes were poisonous because they come from nightshade plants. (You'd think they would've thought the same of potatoes. Maybe they did, I dunno.) I don't remember how they figured out that tomatoes were not poisonous--maybe they fed them to their enemies and their enemies failed to die--but what I do remember (vaguely) is the story of how it was determined that some antibiotic cures some parasitic (protozoan, maybe) disease, after years of resistance to the plain evidence that this antibiotic cures this parasitic disease, because antibiotics don't kill parasites. Eventually someone discovered that the parasite needed some kind of bacteria living inside it, and the antibiotic killed the bacteria.
Today in the backyard, a white-crowned sparrow:
Haven't seen any of those in quite a few years. Apparently they just pass through here on their way up north.
Last week out front, what I suppose is a clouded sulphur butterfly on a tulip in the rain:
