Ecce Sigum

Immanentize the Empathy

Author: John Winkelman

The Weekly Avocado, week 4 – and a how-to

John Winkelman

Avocado Tree, week 4

Yup. More roots coming in. Shouldn’t be long before there are shoots coming out the top.

In other news, two more of my avocado seeds have started sprouting. At the same time. The same day, even. So for all you people who want to know my secret, here it is:

1. Eat an avocado.
2. Clean the pit carefully, and set aside of a couple of days, until completely dry to the touch.
3. Carefully peel all of the brown skin from the pit. At this point it should come off fairly easily.
4. Cut the top and bottom from the pit; maybe a quarter of an inch each, but be careful on the bottom that you don’t slice into the seed inside the pit.
5. Now you should be able to see the natural split in the avocado pit. Carefully, very carefully, insert a thin knife blade a bit and just barely begin to pry the two halves apart. You don’t want them to come completely apart; just enough to weaken the seam between the halves.
6. Toothpicks around the perimeter, suspend the pit half submerged in a container of water as in the above photo.

The change here, from other online instructions, is the weakening of the seam between the halves of the pit. In most every failed attempt, the pit remained a solid whole and I think this prevented the seed from sprouting. This is not to say this method is foolproof, but it seemed to work okay for me (call it fool resistant instead).

I have two more pits waiting, and I will try with them too. I will post progress if and when there is any to report.

The Fulton Street Farmer’s Market is Open!

John Winkelman

Fulton Street Farmer's Market

At long last, the Fulton Street Farmer’s Market is open for the season. After a long bland winter, I now have access to vegetables which are bred for flavor instead of toughness. For the moment the vendors are mostly selling plants and various non-food wares, but as the growing season picks up we will see a shift over to more foodstuffs. This morning the big sellers were asparagus, rhubarb and various meats.

Yum!

The Cognitive Sinks

John Winkelman

A few days ago a crime mapping article I wrote for the People Design blog went live. It pulls together thoughts I have had about this whole mapping thing, and some input from some other people who are involved in this sort of thing.

On Monday I came across a link to a presentation Clay Shirky gave at the Web 2.0 conference last week (transcript of the speech) (video of the speech). In it he talks about the idea of a “cognitive surplus”, and what that could mean for the world in the upcoming years. The idea, brutally simplified, is that as we cease indulging in passive entertainment and begin involving ourselves more and more in interactive pursuits, the amount of available brain-power in the world will increase dramatically. Not that the brains haven’t always been there; they have been turned down to a flicker by being pure consumers of ideas rather than producers.

Shirky brought up the common comment about people who do things like create the Wikipedia: “Where do they find the time?” Simple. They are actively exercising their imaginations, rather than passively absorbing someone else’s output.

The comments and compliments my co-workers offered me about the crime map, combined with the Shirky talk, got me to thinking. The crime map was a simple project. Other than gathering the crime data, it really represented about five hours of work. An afternoon. The length of two of the Matrix movies. If everyone who sat through the Matrix movies more than once, decided instead to exercise their imaginations for that time instead, how many more wonderful things would there be in the world?