Trudy Myers's Blog, page 28

OrganPipe Cactus fruit

I have often wondered what kind of food chain there would be in a desert that would allow people to live there. Oh, yes, I’ve heard about certain rats, rabbits, coyotes, snakes, lizards... But the fact is that as you go down the food chain to smaller and smaller creatures, eventually you have to get to plant-life. On Earth, it seems a pretty likely bet, anyway.
I am often disappointed by authors and filmmakers who forget there needs to be some kind of food chain. In my latest viewing of “Dune” - I can’t remember which version of it I was watching - it occurred to me that the people on the planet were apparently colonists, or descendents of colonists. There was much talk about the great worms, with no talk of what they ate. One assumes that there was a mouse species on the planet, but they might have come with the colonists. One assumes there are mice, because the nickname the common people adopt for Paul was the name of a species of mice who fight back. And in one scene, I saw at least 1 beautiful butterfly. Nowhere did I ever see any kind of plantlife out in the wild. So... what did the butterflies, the fierce mice, the worms and the people eat? I don’t know. I don’t remember anything like that being mentioned in the book, either. Sigh.
By comparison, Earth deserts are veritable hotbeds of life. So let’s take a look at another desert food source that I’ve heard about.
The organ-pipe cactus grows in the Sonoran Desert and Baja California. It has a very short trunk, from which dozens of stems grow, producing what one might think of as a bush. Its root system only reaches about 10 cm (4 inches) into the ground, but are sufficient for sucking up monsoon water when it occurs. Otherwise, the plant is pretty water-tight, with a water-proof skin and plenty of thorns to keep from getting eaten. An individual cactus can live 150 years, but doesn’t produce fruit until age 35. Probably because a good growing year will see it add a whopping 2.5 inches a year to its height.
In May and June, the organ-pipe cactus develops white/creamy flowers that only open at night and usually close back up by mid-morning. That doesn’t leave much time for day-time pollinators to get to it, but bats do the job just fine during the night.
Just before the rains come in July and August, the fruit ripens and splits open to reveal bright red flesh surrounding lots of seeds. Or maybe the fruit was red and the inner flesh was purple; I’ve seen it described both ways.
I didn’t find a lot of recipes for preparing organ-pipe cactus fruit. Apparently, you simply mash the fruit flesh and seeds into a sweet paste, which could be eaten as it was. Or you could dry it out to make a spreadable jelly. Another way would be to separate the seeds and place them in storage. Later, you could grind the seeds into a flour to make seed cakes. So, you could have your seed cakes and fruit jelly both!

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stenocereus_thu...http://www.ethnoherbalist.com/southern-california-native-plants-medicinal/pitaya-fruit/

Ironwood Seeds - Sonoran Desert Delicacy

When I researched the Tohono Oodham Nation, one of the foods they foraged in the Sonoran Desert was ironwood seeds, so I decided to find out what I could about this food source.First, about the trees. There are many trees known as ‘ironwood’, so the version found in the Sonoran Desert is often called desert ironwood. The tree itself grows extremely slowly, and can possibly live for centuries. But even after one of them dies, it might remain a landmark for millenia. This is because the heartwood is so full of toxic chemicals that decay is practically eliminated.The seedpods grow from the middle of a stem, not the end, and each pod can hold up to a dozen or so seeds. The pictures I saw depicted a brown pod that reminded me of a cross between a green bean and a smooth-skinned peanut pod. Or possibly a vanilla bean pod. The seeds inside seemed to have a passing resemblance to peanuts, which seems fitting, since both the peanut plant and the desert ironwood are legumes.As with other legumes, the desert ironwood enriches the surrounding soil with nitrogen, so the area immediately surrounding this tree is richer for growing plants than the soil another couple of feet away from the tree. Did the Oodham tend to cultivate their crops by planting them in close proximity to an ironwood? I don’t know, I haven’t found any information on that. But in my mind, it would make sense for them to have done so.Now, about those seeds.Ironwoods generally flower from late April through May and set seed pods a few weeks later, which will dry in June-July. The flowers, fresh seedpods and dried seedpods are edible.The pink flowers can be used in or as a salad. They can also be candied for use as a dessert, but I don’t know if the Oodham did that. Good to add to my basket of knowledge as I look for means to feed an alien culture.The seedpods are apparently beige from the start, so how do you know when to harvest them if you want them fresh? You open up one pod and look for the seeds inside to be green. If the seeds are sweet and taste slightly like a peanut, you are good to harvest. Gently pull whole pods off the tree.However, if that seed tastes chalky, you’ve waited too long to harvest them as fresh. Go away and come back when the pods are fuzzy, dry and dark brown. The seeds inside will now be hard and brown. Don’t bother picking the pods by hand at this point; just put a tarp or blanket on the ground and gently shake free the dry pods. But don’t harvest any dry pods that land on the bare ground.Whether you have harvested your ironwood seeds fresh or dry, they should be cleaned and processed for storage as soon as possible after picking to reduce the chances of spoilage. Now, I got some information from a website (see below) on how to do this, but the instructions as given require things I’m pretty sure the Oodham did not have in yesteryear. Things like ice water, plastic bags and a freezer. Suffice it to say that they suggest you blanche the fresh seeds, package them in bags with as little air enclosed as possible, and throw the bags in the freezer. Even the dry seeds need to be frozen for at least 2 days to avoid bug infestation.So I’m guessing the Oodham didn’t process them that way. I’m guessing they merely cooked them using their favorite method and ate. And the next day, somebody would go and forage again. Maybe they came back with more ironwood seeds, maybe they found something else.All good to know when I’m trying to keep somebody alive on what seems an inhospitable planet.

https://www.desertharvesters.org/native-plant-food-guides-the-desert-can-feed-you/desert-ironwood/#desert-ironwood-harvesting-basics

Gobekli Tepe

Gobekli Tepe is Turkish for “Potbelly Hill”, and refers to an archeological site in the SE Anatolia Region of Turkey. The ‘hill’ is 49 ft tall and about 980 ft in diameter. It is located 2,490 ft above sea level.The construction of this site is believed to date back to the 10th to 8th millenium BC. It was built before pottery was invented in this area, and contains massive T-shaped stone pillars, the world’s oldest known megaliths. Surveys have discovered more than 200 pillars in about 20 circles. Each has a height up to 20 ft and weighs 10 tons. They are fitted into sockets that were hewn out of the bedrock.The 2nd phase of this site was still pre-pottery, but newly erected pillars were smaller and stood in rectangular rooms with floors made of polished lime. The location was abandoned after that.Dating of the site was accomplished by charcoal samples found in the lowest levels of the site. It is likely this charcoal indicates the end of the active phase of occupation, and that the actual structures were older.The site sits on a flat, barren plateau connected on the north to a neighboring mountain range by a narrow promontory that shows evidence of human impact. In all other directions, the ridge descends steeply into slopes and steep cliffs.The pillars were carved from the plateau edges, where several quarries have been identified, and 3 t-pillars found. The largest of these has been severed from the surrounding rock, and the other 2 are identified as t-pillars, but not yet separated.At first I thought the article was talking about something like Stonehenge; monoliths standing on end, some with a cap stone balanced atop 2 of them, but further on, the article had details that belied that thought. A large number of t-pillars were embedded in thick walls made of unworked rock that formed a circle, approximately 8 t-pillars per circle. Four of these circles have been discovered so far, with indications of another 16 not yet uncovered. It is unknown if these walled circles had a roof.But the t-pillars were not just used in walls; in the center of each circle, 2 taller t-pillars faced each other. Stone benches were also found inside the circles. Many of the limestone t-pillars were decorated with symbols or depictions of many animals that may have been present at the time, but which no longer live in the area today. It is likely the area was forested at the time, with a large variety of animals, but millennia of human habitation and cultivation has reduced the area to a dust bowl environment.Some of the floors of the circles were made of burnt lime, while others were bedrock.After 8800 BC, the people stopped making circles and constructed small rectangular rooms. Rectangles are a more efficient use of space than circles, and are often associated with the emergence of the Neolithic age. However, t-pillars are still present, indicating these probably served the same purpose as the earlier circles, perhaps as a sanctuary. Several adjoining doorless and windowless rooms have floors of polished lime.No evidence of domesticated plants or animals have been found at the site. It is assumed the inhabitants were hunters and gatherers who lived in villages part of the year. Still, very little evidence of residential use has been found. It is believed that the locations may have been used as a spiritual center even earlier than the dates given here.So, here is a site that was created before pottery, metallurgy, writing, the wheel, agriculture or even animal husbandry. It would have taken organization of an advanced order, as it is estimated that up to 500 people would have been needed to extract and move the heavy pillars. I don’t know if that number includes the people doing the hunting and gathering to feed the people doing the heavy construction.But around 8000 BC, the site ceased to be a ceremonial center to the people. Instead of simply abandoning the site, they deliberately filled it in with whatever rubble they had at hand, including animal and human bones. It was used for agriculture from then until the present.It has been suggested that Gobekli Tepe was a place for remembering the dead, of putting them to rest in some way. (No obvious graves have yet been found.) It seems fitting, then, that when the Neolithic people ‘moved on’, when they invented pottery, agriculture and animal husbandry, they made an effort to bury their past.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe

Tohono Oʼodham

The Tohono O’odham are a Native American people of the Sonoran Desert, and they are recognized by the US federal government as the Tohono O’odham Nation.After the arrival of the Spanish conquistadores, a competitor people (The Pima) used an insult to refer to the Tohono O’odham, which the Spanish (and later English) mispronounced as ‘papago’, but this term has been rejected by the tribal government and most of the people of the tribe.The Tohono O’odham Nation’s major reservation is located in southern Arizona, and stretches into Sonoma county of Mexico. The Tohono O’odham share roots with the Akimel O’odham (People of the River). Both are descended from the Sobaipuri, who resided along the major rivers of southern Arizona as long ago as the 15th century.The O’odham-speaking people were a settled agricultural people who endured raids from the nomadic Apache when the latter needed food. It wasn’t until European settlers encroached on the O’odham people’s land that the O’odham and Apache found some common ground. It was more traditional that they were at odds, each taking captive woman and children during raids on the other.The music and dance of the O’odham lack any grand paraphernalia or ceremonies. Both the music and the dance is subdued, with the music being ‘swallowed’ by the surrounding desert floor, and the dancing featuring skipping and shuffling quietly in bare feet on dry dirt to raise dust.The traditional O’odham diet consisted of game, insects and plants. They foraged ironwood seed, honey mesquite, hog potato, cholla cactus, acorns and organ-pipe cactus fruit. They cultivated corn, squash, white tepary beans, papago peas and spanish watermelons. They hunted antelope, gathered hornworm larvae and trapped pack rats for meat.The land did not provide ideal conditions for growing crops, but the O’odham developed the ‘mouth of the wash’ farming method. When they detected imminent rainfall, they would quickly prep the ground and seed it as the rain began to flood the area.It is often assumed that the desert people embraced Catholicism, but the Tohono O’odham villages resisted change for hundreds of years. During the 1660s and the 1750s, major rebellions forced the Spanish to retreat, and the desert people preserved their traditions nearly intact for generations.Apparently, the Tohono O’odham never signed a treaty with the Federal Government, so they managed to get a reservation by conducting trades for the land they thought was already theirs. They have retained many of their traditions into the 21st century, and still speak their language. However, US mass culture has started to penetrate and erode their traditions. Diabetes has become a major health problem for the tribe as they shifted away from their traditional food sources. There is a movement to assist the group to return to their more traditional food choices, and they are advocating for access to the rivers so that they can return to growing their own crops.The Tohono O’odham Community Action was founded in 1996 with the intent to restore lost tribal traditions. It started as a community garden and basketweaving classes. It now has 2 farms, a restaurant and an art gallery. It is estimated that the restaurant - opened in 2009, and incorporating traditional foods into each item served - serves over 100,000 meals yearly. That’s a minimum of 274 meals a day! I don’t want to cook for that crowd!The basket weaving classes were held once a week, initially, and a single basket might take an entire year to make! The fibers that were used had to be harvested and prepared, plus they needed to create a design that represented the tribe’s history.Before contact with Europeans, the O’odham migrated north and south with the seasons, and this continued at least until the US-Mexico border cut through their lands. Even then, much of the O’odham continued to move about as they wanted, but efforts were made during the 20th century to ‘close’ this open hole in this border. By 2000, the Mexican census indicated there were no more O’odham to be found in Sonora.Well, as the article got closer and closer to the present, I found myself losing interest, as is often the case when I’m looking at history. Besides, this was already a long episode. And thirdly, it kept mentioning all the ways this tribe has been and still are being treated as less than full citizens, which always pisses me off. I will have to remember that when I create cultures that are not based on US culture. Heck, even if they are based on US culture, from the looks of how things are now.The most interesting things I found were the descriptions of the music and dancing, and the information on their traditional foods. Thisis the kind of stuff I really want to have available in my mind when I’m thinking up new cultures for future stories.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tohono_O%CA%BCodham

The Sky is Falling

If you follow me on facebook, you may have noticed that I have shared many articles on climate change and that I have started using the comment, “The Sky is Falling.”
It seemed more appropriate than saying, “The Boy Cried Wolf.” In that story, the boy is lying, only looking to introduce some excitement into his own life, without regard for the consequences.
Chicken Little, on the other hand, was telling the truth, as best he knew it. Something (a raindrop) had come down from the sky and hit him. He had never experienced anything like that before, so the logical conclusion was that something terrible was happening, the sky was falling! Chicken Little ran around the farmyard squawking his terrible news, trying to warn all the other farm critters.
Even that doesn’t exactly fit the problem of climate change. Chicken Little was very young and inexperienced. But it’s scientists who have been trying to warn the world’s population that the climate was changing far quicker than it should. They have lots of experience at studying climate and how it has changed in the past, and they have a pretty darn good idea where it’s headed.
In the past week, I have read several articles concerning the number and severity of heatwaves that have been happening around the world. Not only has the world been having more of them, not only have they broken records for daytime high temperatures, they’ve broken records for the highest low temperatures as well. That means that after a sweltering day, you don’t get much relief during the night, because the heat that has accumulated all day doesn’t dissipate fast enough.
I think Europe has already broken several summer records during a heatwave in June of this year. There’s no guarantee they won’t have another later this summer. Or this fall, or... whenever. A heatwave can happen at any time on the calendar, because it is a comparison between the present and what has been ‘normal’ previously.
The scientists don’t ‘think’ any particular place will start having a heatwave every year. But it could happen. After all, they wanted us to keep the warming of the Earth to 2°C or less. What are they saying now, that it’s officially reached a warming of 1.8°C? But in Europe, the temperatures reached +4 to +8°C over ‘normal’.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t get much done when the temperature gets to 95°F. I sure don’t want it to consistently reach 123°F. Or higher.
Maybe Chicken Little isn’t the best story for me to quote to try to get my point across, but it’s the one I can remember as the summer heat settles in. So I’ll keep squawking my warning and hope somebody is listening, because...
The sky is falling.

The Castle Cave

Castles can be scary and/or awe-inspiring. Caves can be scary and/or awe-inspiring. So, what do you suppose you get when you combine the two? You get the Predjama Castle of Slovenia.Predjama Castle is a renaissance-style castle built with a cave mouth in South-central Slovenia, an area historically known as Inner Carniola.About 1274, the Patriarch of Aquileia built the first castle at this location, using the Gothic style. At that time, it was known by the German name of Luegg Castle. It was made difficult to access by building it under a natural rocky arch set high in the stone wall below the cave. It was later acquired and expanded by the Luegg noble family, also known as the Knights of Adelsberg.Sir Erasmus of Lueg became lord of the castle in the 15th century. He was the son of the imperial governor, and according to legend, he killed the commander of the imperial army, who had offended the memory of a deceased friend of Erasmus. Lueg fled the wrath of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III, returning to the family fortress at Predjama, where he began to attack estates and villages in the area. Thus he became a robber baron.The emperor ordered Erasmus be captured or killed, but for a long time, the best that could be accomplished was to lay siege to the castle. Surprisingly, that didn’t seem to keep Sir Erasmus from continuing his attacks. It turned out that there was a vertical shaft through the cave roof. Erasmus ordered it enlarged, and that was not a means to allow him to continue robbing his neighbors, but also allowed him to smuggle food into his besieged castle. Eventually, however, he was killed.Apparently, the seige saw the destruction of the original castle. The Oberburg family acquired the ruins. A second castle was built by the Purgstall family early in the 16th century, only to be destroyed in an earthquake in 1511.Better luck next time? It would seem so. In 1570, the current castle was built in the Renaissance style and hugging the vertical cliff. In pictures, you can see the top of the cave mouth hanging just above the tower tops, looking like some huge monster trying vainly to open up enough to swallow it whole.In the 18th century, it was known as a favorite summer residence of the Cobenzl family. I have to wonder about people who enjoy spending their time in a huge castle precariously protruding from the mouth of a cave. Perhaps they were not gifted/cursed with my level of imagination.At the end of World War II, the castle was confiscated, nationalized, and turned into a museum.Have you seen it? Predjama Castle was the castle featured in the 1986 movie Armour of God, starring Jackie Chan. It was also the filming location of Laibach’s Sympathy for the Devil cover’s music video. AND the “Castle” map from the 2014 Counter-Strike: Global Offensive DLC, Operation Breakout, is based on Predjama Castle. So, you might have.There are lots of pieces of the story of Predjama Castle that would lend themselves to a story. I’ll just add them to the ‘pot’ I have brewing in the back of my mind and see where they gravitate to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predjama_Castle

Canada’s Burgess Shale

We’ve researched fossil beds that included depictions of ‘soft parts’ before. One of the most famous places for finding this type of fossil is the Burgess Shale found in the Rocky Mountains of British Columbia, Canada. It is a large deposit of shale, with at least 2 known outcrops, one near the town of Field in Yoho National Park, and another 42 km south, in the Kootenay National Park. This shale bed is 508 million years old, so it contains some of the earliest known soft-part fossils.Charles Walcott discovered one of the Burgess Shale beds late in August 1909, just as the season for such work in Canada was drawing to a close for the year. He returned in 1910 with his wife and children to the area of Fossil Ridge. In fact, he returned almost every year until 1924, when he was 74 years old. In that quarter century, he had collected over 65,000 specimens.He recognized that a huge number of these organisms were unknown to science, and he continued to describe them and attempted to categorise all of them into living taxa until his death in 1927. Unfortunately, most scientists of the time saw the fossils as mere curiosities.In 1962, Alberto Simonetta started a first-hand reinvestigation of these shale fossils and realized that Walcott had barely scratched the surface, so to speak, because it was clear the fossils did not fit into modern groups.The Geological Survey of Canada resumed excavations at the Walcott site, as well as established another side 10 metres high on Fossil Ridge. Trilobite expert Harry Blackmore Whittington and his helpers began a thorough reassessment of the Burgess Shale, discovering that the fauna were much more diverse and unusual than Walcott had recognized. Some had bizarre anatomy, including the Opabinia, which had 5 eyes and a snout like a vacuum cleaner hose, and the Hallucigenia, which was originally reconstructed upside down.Collecting Burgess Shale fossils became more difficult - politically - after the mid-1970’s, when Parks Canada and UNESCO recognized the shale’s significance. Other outcrops have been discovered, and yield new organisms continuously.One thing I reported previously was that soft tissues are fossilized in anoxic conditions, meaning very little oxygen was present. However, mounting research has shown that oxygen was continually present Burgess Shale was deposited. An alternative hypothesis involves brine, rather than a lack of oxygen.Of the organism discovered in Burgess Shale, about 14% have hard parts that are more typically fossilized. It is assumed that the organisms without hard parts are typical for the time and location. Free-swimming creatures are relatively rare, while the majority were bottom dwellers, either moving about in some way or attached to the sea floor. About 2/3 of them fed on organic content of the muddy sea floor, while the rest filtered fine particles from the water. Less than 10% were predators or scavengers, but these were larger than the organisms they ate.If I ever write a story about people who find themselves on a planet during its Cambrian-type age, I’ll have to remember to give my imagination free reign when dreaming up local inhabitants! 5 eyes! A vacuum cleaner nose! Spines on the back that could easily be mistaken for legs. Reality can be so much stranger than fiction!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burgess_Shale

What the heck is Lagerstatte?

When I first read about fossils found in ‘Lagerstatte’, I thought it was the name of a place or region, probably in Germany, that had a plethora of fossils residing there. Everything I assumed was pretty correct, except it’s not a place or region, it is a typeof place. It turns out that in German, ‘lager’ means ‘storage’ and ‘statte’ means ‘place’. What this word indicates these days is a particular type of sedimentary deposit with fossils of exceptional preservation. I mean, sometimes even the soft tissue has been preserved, which is pretty darned exceptional.This may have happened when a carcass was buried in an anoxic (without oxygen) environment with minimal bacteria, which would have delayed the decomposition of all biological features until a durable impression was created in the surrounding mud or whatever.There are 2 types of Lagerstatte beds. The concentration type holds a lot of disarticulated hard parts, such as bones. Invariably, the accumulation of bones without a lot of other sediment takes time, so this type displays a large time period.The 2nd type is conservation Lagerstatte, which hold exceptional preservation of fossilized organism or traces. Each of these sites can provide answers to important moment in the evolution and history of life. It’s like a snapshot, allowing the viewer to see the entire animal, even what the skin was like. Or the texture of a feather or shape of a footprint, in the case of a trace.My first thought after reading about lagerstatte was that the now-fossilized creature must have fallen into water or mud, but there is oxygen in water (and thus in mud also), so that would not necessarily provide an anoxic condition. Still, there were places for them to land in order to be truly well-preserved.Several types of inorganic replacement of the organic remains were mentioned in my reading; phosphorus, silica, pyrite (iron) and microbial mats. But in all these cases, this chemical change happened underwater. And if I read things rightly, under seawater.The articles did have some pictures of these fossils, but they weren’t of T Rexes or stegosaurs, so I didn’t know what to look for. I gather that the large majority of these fossils are from way back when most creatures didn’t have bones, so they weren’t very large, and they hadn’t been well known before Lagerstatte beds were found.I would have preferred to see one of these fossils first hand. Not to touch it, but when you have a picture, you can’t change the angle of how the light hits it and bounces into your eye. Sometimes just changing the angle a little can let you see details you otherwise wouldn’t notice. So I feel like having the item in front of me - even if in a display case - would let me study the tiny nuances that make these discoveries so exciting for those in the field.Now, how could I use this knowledge in my writing? I don’t know. One of the beauties of writing fiction is that you get to use bits and pieces of knowledge in unimagined ways. So now that I have this knowledge, I can look for ways to use it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagerst%C3%A4ttehttp://www.fossilmuseum.net/fossilrecord/Lagerstatte.htm

The Wonders of Math

I love math, from the time I was a small child and it was known as ‘Arithmetic’. The more I used arithmetic to find sums and differences, products and quotients, the more I noticed all the neat little tricks and rules that numbers used.
You know the kind of thing I talking about. 5 times any other number always produces a number where the ‘ones’ digit is either 5 or 0. 9 times any number between (and including) 1 through 10 always equals a number where the separate digits, when added together, equals 9. If you don’t know this little ‘rule’, check it out for yourself. For example 9 X 6 = 63. 6 + 3 = 9. It works until you go past 10, then it gets a little tricky. But I haven’t figured out a rule for 11 through 20, or anything above 10.
And each year, it seemed like arithmetic presented me with new things to play with. Numbers squared and cubed. Square roots. Imaginary numbers!!! Not only would I always do my home work assignments, but I was likely to attempt some of the harder problems that hadn’t been assigned to us, just to see if I could do them.
Eventually, arithmetic became Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II. I still did all my assigned problems, but now I was attempting the harder problems with the encouragement of my teachers. My one regret from that time was that I never managed to prove the Pythagorean Theorem the way Pythagoras did it. Hmmm, that problem has been simmering away on the back burner of my mind for about 50 hears now. Maybe I should take another stab at it.
My senior year in high school, I was the only girl in 4th year math, known as “Trigonometry and Math Analysis.” I’m not sure where the ‘analysis’ came in at. The entire year was like every other year of math: “This is how you do these problems. Now, on page *, do these problems so I can see that you understand what you just learned.” Somehow, I missed the clues that we were now analyzing how anything in the real world worked.
Then I started college. I was assigned to Calculus I, which I had rather expected to happen. It wasn’t like I had flunked any of my math classes. So try to imagine my surprise to overhear one kid from Chicago complain that he had been placed in pre-Calculus, even though he had taken pre-Calculus in high school. “Oh, you poor kid,” my thoughts went. “How disappointing for you.”
Then I started Calc I. Whoa!! I was not used to taking a class in an auditorium packed to the gills. Or even a half-empty auditorium. And no microphone for the teacher, so it was next to impossible to hear him, particularly since he bulled his way through his entire lecture in a monotone, without stopping to ask if there were any questions or offer any examples. The book I had to pay lots of good money for didn’t explain anything in a way I could understand it. On Tuesday and Thursday, I had ‘homework lab’, where I could ask older students for help with my homework. Inevitably, our conversations went something like this:Him: This is how you do this type of problem.Me: But why does that work?Him: It just does.Me: When you do that, what kind of a result are  you looking for?Him: This is how you do this type of problem.
I no longer understood math. It no longer made any sense to me.
To be fair, I was going through some traumatic personal events in my life at that time. So a few years later, I went back to a (different) college to try again. I seemed to make a little headway in Calc I. By which I mean, I caught onto a few references to sines and co-sines during the lectures. The new book - which I again had paid lots of cash for - didn’t seem much better than the first. But mostly I was again just following the ‘rules’ for ‘how to do these problems’, without much understanding of what I was doing, why I was doing it, or what the answer told me.
But I made it through Calc I and Calc II and a couple other math classes. And then... more traumatic life events, and I again dropped school.
I would love to get my degree, just to prove than I can. But I didn’t really want to tackle Calculus again and suffer the same frustration, so I voiced the desire, but never really made any effort to get there.
Have you ever tried one of the ‘For Dummies’ books? My husband and I were recently at our makerspace when my laptop died. Hub wasn’t ready to leave, so I wandered over to see what they had on their reading shelf. And there I found “Calculus for Dummies”.
How hard could it be? Worst case, I wouldn’t understand it, but that was where I was, anyway. So I read the first chapter. And then the 2nd chapter... It made sense! This guy was explaining it in simple terms, reminding his readers of foundation knowledge that they might have forgotten and showing how things fit together.
I had to return the book to the makerspace. Time to get my own copy.
Here I come again, Math!

Trilobite, Do You Bite in Threes?When you spend a lot of ...

Trilobite, Do You Bite in Threes?
When you spend a lot of time as a child/teen/adult reading everything you can find on all those fascinating creatures that inhabited the Earth before Humans came along, you come across a lot of strange names. You aren’t sure what those names mean. You might have a rough idea what that type of creature looked like, and that’s probably about all that you know. Because, really, who cares about an extinct sea creature that looked like some crazy kind of beetle?
So I decided to see what I could find out about trilobites, see if there was something about them that would prove interesting. I headed for Wikipedia to get a smattering of layman information before I looked for more advanced info.
Wow. The first sentence in the Wikipedia article is (basicly) “Trilobites ... are a group of extinct marine arachnomorph arthropods that form the class Trilobita. Guess we’d better put on our thinking caps for this one! Extinct = they are all dead. Marine = lived in the sea. Or maybe lived in water.Arachnomorph = ? Well, arachnid is a type of spider, scorpions and what have you. (Thanks, dictionary.com, but why don’t you have the entire word in your list?) Morph has more than one meaning, but the one I’m most familiar with is “to transform”.Arthropod = an invertebrate with a segmented body, jointed limbs and usually a hard shell that can be molted (discarded) should the creature get too big for it.
So far, what we’ve got is a water creature with a segmented body, limbs with joints and a hard shell. Might have looked vaguely like a spider. What comes to mind is a lobster, but they didn’t really look like that. The most common rendition I’ve seen for a trilobite is an oval shape. The larger ‘end’ is a pretty solid ‘half moon’ shape, with a ‘tail’ that goes down the middle of the oval to the smaller ‘end’. Behind the half moon head and on either side of the tail, filling up all the rest of the oval, are lots of limbs. But other trilobites had much different shapes. Let’s go on; what more can I find?
Trilobites ranged from 1/10 of an inch to about 12 inches. I think that entire range is for adult specimen.
The last of the trilobites died about 252 million years ago. But before that, they were quite a successful species, having spread all around the world and existing for over 300 million years. Scientists believe trilobites started their long journey as much as 700 million years ago, or possibly even further back. And if you think humans have some wildly different lifestyles, you obviously have not met many trilobites. Some were aggressive, and moved over the sea bed as predators, scavengers and/or filter feeders. Others were less aggressive and swam while eating plankton. Scientists are still debating whether or not any trilobites were parasites, while one group of trilobites appear to have had a symbiotic relationship with sulfur-eating bacteria.
Trilobites are thought to have originated in what is now Siberia. But that was over half a billion years ago, and with plate tectonics, who knows where that was actually located? Well, I’m sure there are people who do know, but I don’t. I’m going to have to look it up. Look for it in a later episode.
Anyway, as I said before, the trilobites all died out. Although they seemed to excel in changing shape, habitat and food throughout their long existence, eventually there was only one family left, and when its habitat disappeared, so did they. But while they were here, there were thousands of variations of trilobite. This diversity helped them fill many niches in the cycle of life.
On the other hand, there are some very distant relatives of the trilobites still living on Earth. Think horseshoe crab and others of that ilk.
And that is all I found that I understood in this 29-page article on Wikipedia. Go ahead and read it, if you want, but I warn you, it is FULL of very long words, most of them names of genus, family and specie, but not all. The ones that aren’t are used generously, with no explanation what it refers to, and which may not be in your dictionary. Have fun!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilobite