Saturday Tweets: Vive la Revolution!

August 11, 2018

...ized, and how it causes damage at the highest policy levels. (For shame @nytimes) https://t.co/ccwSDLyHdj — Peter Kalmus (@ClimateHuman) August 9, 2018 A siege. A bomb. 48 dogs. And the black commune that would not surrender https://t.co/v2JAS9X1Sk — Root Simple (@rootsimple) August 6, 2018 I’ve been sounding this alarm for a while: horticulture is in decline worldwide because young people are not filling positions of previous generations. This co...

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Defeating Squirrels With Tech

Mr. Homegrown

June 9, 2017

Fruit Trees, Gardening, Pests

6 Comments

...d, turning that technical know-how towards the most important issue of our time: squirrel deterrence. As it turns out I’m not alone. At a Python programming conference, back in 2012, software engineer Kurt Grandis presented a research project he entitled, “Militarizing Your Backyard with Python: Computer Vision and the Squirrel Hordes.” Grandis’ motivation was a squirrel attack on his peach tree and, worse, his kid’s pumpkin patch. The full lectur...

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Are Miniature Books the New Smartphone?

Mr. Homegrown

October 17, 2016

Thoughtstylings

10 Comments

...man historian whose extant books chronicle the tumultuous years around the time of Constantine. So far it’s even more lurid than the updates on our current presidential election I get when I glace at the iPhone. Yes, you can read books on a smartphone, but I still think that the medium of a paper book lends itself to developing a greater ability to focus. And as Cal Newport suggests, anyone who can focus on a problem in depth for a long period of...

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Bill Cunningham’s Uniform

Mr. Homegrown

January 23, 2017

Design

7 Comments

...uniform for himself in keeping with his frugal lifestyle, but at the same time, oddly stylish. Wherever Cunningham went you’d see him in a French worker’s jacket or bleu de travail. Reading between the lines in the documentary, it seems like he’d stock up on them when the Times would send him to Paris. Blue worker’s shirts and jackets have a long history in all Western countries including the U.S. It’s the origin, of course, of “blue collar.” Ame...

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A Guilty Pleasure: The Mid-Century Menu

Mr. Homegrown

January 19, 2016

Food

5 Comments

Back in my time-wasting grad school days I made somewhat of a hobby out of thrift shopping. Along with the mandatory copy of Herb Alpert’s Whipped Cream, every thrift store would have a collection of post-war, space-age cookbooks. Recipes, in this period, are a kind of recombinatory matrix of industrial ingredients. You take some cocktail wieners, a dollop of mayonnaise, some ketchup and a surprise ingredient, say dried prunes and roll them all u...

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