About 200 years ago in the German city of Koenigsberg, a tree began to grow inside a brick fence. Because the owners never tended to the property, the tree was allowed to take over.

309898_518345471554858_1762377986_n.jpg (700×933).

Carolyn Porco, Cassini Imaging Team Leader and CICLOPS director, writes:

One of the most gorgeous sights we have been privileged to see at Saturn, as the arrival of spring to the northern hemisphere has peeled away the darkness of winter, has been the enormous swirling vortex capping its north pole and ringed by Saturn’s famed hexagonal jet stream.

Today, the Cassini Imaging Team is proud to present to you a set of special views of this phenomenal structure, including a carefully prepared movie showing its circumpolar winds that clock at 330 miles per hour, and false color images that are at once spectacular and informative.

Here are the images, in glorious hi-rez [ciclops.org].

via The Red Rose of Saturn – Boing Boing.

These narratives appeal to our collective sense of nostalgia: pink-cheeked farmwomen kneading homemade bread, mothers and daughters shelling sun-warmed peas on country porches, and multigenerational families gathered happily around the dinner table to tuck into Grandma’s hand-plucked roasted chicken. As the oft-quoted Michael Pollan saying goes, “Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food” (in my case, that would mean a steady diet of pierogies and cabbage).

Unfortunately, this cozy vision obscures the often-grimy truths about what cooking was really like for our foremothers and -fathers in the preindustrial, preconvenience era.

Contrary to the myth of the happy, apple-cheeked great-great-grandmother, cooking has rarely been seen as a source of fulfillment, historically speaking. In Colonial America, kitchen work was viewed as a lowly chore, often farmed out to servants (who, needless to say, did not spend a lot of time exulting in the visceral pleasures of pea shucking). In the 1800s, middle-class women supervised immigrant kitchen maids (or slaves), while pioneer women and rural housewives sweated over wood fires and heavy iron pots.

via Is Michael Pollan a sexist pig? – Salon.com.

In the mid-1800s, there were thousands of unique varieties of apples in the United States, some of the most astounding diversity ever developed in a food crop. Then industrial agriculture crushed that world. The apple industry settled on a handful of varieties to promote worldwide, and the rest were forgotten. They became commercially extinct—but not quite biologically extinct.

Even when abandoned, an apple tree can live more than 200 years, and, like the Giving Tree in Shel Silverstein’s book, it will wait patiently for the boy to return. There is a bent old Black Oxford tree in Hallowell, Maine, that is approximately two centuries old and still gives a crop of midnight-purple apples each fall. In places like northern New England, the Appalachian Mountains, and Johnny Appleseed’s beloved Ohio River Valley—agricultural byways that have escaped the bulldozer—these centenarians hang on, flickering on the edge of existence, their identity often a mystery to the present homeowners. And John Bunker is determined to save as many as he can before they, and he, are gone.

via Why Your Supermarket Only Sells 5 Kinds of Apples | Mother Jones.

Mere contact with M. tuberculosis doesn’t mean that an active case of tuberculosis will follow. After inhalation, the invaders travel until they reach cavities deep within the lungs. There they invade cells involved in immune response; those cells then invite reaction from other types of cells in the immune system, forming clumps in which the infected cells can fall into dormancy, becoming a latent TB infection. Most otherwise healthy people will never develop active disease. But for about one in ten, the infection flares, producing tissue damage around each clump. Sometimes the immune system can mount another counterattack, and the disease may wax and wane. Left untreated, active TB is the stuff of nightmares: up to two-thirds of its victims will die if no help comes to them.

That help has been available for almost sixty years. But not for seventeen desperately ill people in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa whose fate suggests that we may not enjoy our sense of invulnerability in the face of TB—and other infectious diseases we’ve conquered—for that much longer. Those afflicted suffer from a strain of tuberculosis that seems to resist every drug available to treat it. Seventeen is a tiny number, but the question those desperately ill people embody is whether we will do what is necessary to keep their numbers so small.

via New Life for a Deadly Disease: The Threat of Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis : The New Yorker.

[Most convincing tilt-shift video I’ve ever seen. -egg]

Photographer Nathan Kaso spent almost 10 months making this fun tilt-shift video of Melbourne with a special focus on the city’s annual festivals and other outdoor events. This is where I always make some snarky comment about how I’ve seen enough tilt-shift work, but this video proves that when it’s good, it’s good and the manner of shooting or production just doesn’t matter. Music by Tom Day.

via Miniature Melbourne: A Tilt-Shift Video of Melbourne Having Too Much Fun | Colossal.

[If I ever save your dog from drowning or something, and you want to buy me a thank-you gift, you could do a lot worse than that pocket organizer. -egg]

This is a Maxpedition Mini EDC Pocket Organiser.  It fits neatly in my coat pocket.  I’ve always been one of those people who just stuffs their coat pockets with the stuff they might need thirty seconds before I head out of the door.  This means, in practise, that I either overstuff said pockets or that I can’t find one thing I need to stick in there.  Obviously, the older and more senile I get, the more this will become one of those idiot problems that wastes more time and mental energy than it should.  I’m going to need that mental energy for things like remembering where I live.

via Warren Ellis » EDC: What I Carry Every Day.

This is the most interesting new product since the iPhone and I don’t say that lightly.

Yeah, we could say the camera isn’t good in low light. We could say it doesn’t have enough utility. It looks dorky. It freaks some people out (it’s new, that will go away once they are in the market).

But I don’t care. This has changed my life. I will never live a day without it on.

It is that significant.

via Robert Scoble – Google+ – My two-week review of Google Glass: it all depends on the….

[Nice. Thanks, @Brandon.]

Tom Waits – Clap Hands (Circuit Bent Cover feat. Erik Parker) FREE D/L! by Adapted Records on SoundCloud – Hear the world’s sounds.