oliveoily

Isn't it ironic how 'date pit' has two different meanings? The hard little seed inside a date fruit OR A hole in the ground, filled with sweet juicy dates A nasty surprise, a date's pit is a sobering reminder to slow down. Whether in collaboration with - or in rebellion against - nature, this oblong obstacle forces us to reckon with the limitations of our body and the motivations of our appetite. On the other hand, a pit full of dates is serendipitous. A secret universe where living is eating and eating is easy. You probably didn't believe things could be this good, but they can. Critics of the pit call it "overindulgent" and "unsustainable". Perhaps they're right, but from my perspective - they're wrong. The duality of the date pit is true but not inevitable. It is cosmic opposites, conjoined and contrasted by the erratic whims of our vocabulary. One can easily imagine a language where the proto germanic root 'pithan-' and the latin 'puteus-'[1] didn't conspire to become the same word. Dutch[2] makes an uninspired distinction beteen ~pit~ (kernel, core, stone) and ~kuil~ (cavity, crater, ditch), begging no one to consider all the fun and flirty ways in which a germinating seed could be related to the loam hole where it's destined to lay sprout Personally, I love the date pit... unless Oh god I hope the date pit dates are pitted [1] https://www.etymonline.com/word/pit [2] I don't speak Dutch, but I googled this

Summer's gone! Now the weather is distinctly sweater, some nights even sweater+. A few more sleeps and it'll be jacket I love how the skin-feel of the air is cold, but direct sunlight feels warm and affirming. This vibe had me tonguing for a new word yesterday - something like "refreshing" but to describe the respite of hot things in a cold day Turns out that word exists! From Wikitionary.org Noun apricity (uncountable) (obsolete) The warmth of the Sun in winter. Sadly, (obsolete) officially ranks rarest behind (archaic), (dated/unfashionable), and (hip)* in wikitionary.org. Everyone's feeling this but nobody's talking about it! The word has been around for a while, too. Its first recorded appearance is in Henry Cockeram's 1623 "The English Dictionarie: Or, An Interpreter of Hard English Words" Turns out this is the first english dictionary to have ever called itself a dictionary... and it shows! Here are some other great 17th century words / definitions (in no particular order) that I found while leafing through it: Inurgitate - to gormonize Masturpate - dishonestly to touch ones privities Aquation - abundance of rain Essayes - tryals ** Genius - A good angell, or a familiar evill spirit, the soule I'll leave the link to the dictionary here, in case you wanna look through it yourself [https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=wu.89104407572&view=1up&seq=1] I hope y'all get to enjoy what little apricity the fall has left to give us. Much love and keep gormonizing, Me *This one's not real! ;) ** basically still true ayyyy

Today at 4pm, I was jolted out of a numb haze that my phone had been cultivating behind my eyes for the past 5 days. I saw the most beautiful blue color in the world ! It came in a white plastic bottle labeled "vanadyl sulfate hydrate". This blue was meaningful in and of itself. I looked at it, and that was good. I wish more things were this blue, or at least this good. Apparently body builders take vanadyl as a supplement for bulking up, but its effectiveness is unproven. The blue chemical has also seen usage as a treatment for diabetes, but there is no evidence that it actually helps with glycemic control As best I can tell, the only proven physiological effect of eating vanadyl sulfate is diarrhea I kinda get why people want to eat it, though Taking one look at the impossibly blue crystals, it's easy to think that they'd be powerful objects And maybe if you ate them you could absorb that power, giving you huge muscles and healing your pancreas But it actually just makes you toot It's like a loving little reminder from the cosmos that there are things you can enjoy without having to consume them.

Did you know that for the low low price of $1,530 USD you can purchase half a kilogram of “analytical standard” peanut butter from a chemical distributor? [1] Sigma-Aldrich needs to provide a safety data sheet (SDS) for all the compounds they sell. This SDS provides, among other things, safe handling instructions for whatever chemical you just bought. Since no one gets payed enough to write a detailed SDS for peanut butter, they just copy-pasted a generic, non-specific data sheet to hilarious results [2]. If [peanut butter] on skin take off immediately all contaminated clothing. Rinse skin with water/shower. If [peanut butter] inhaled After inhalation: fresh air If [peanut butter] swallowed make victim drink water (two glasses at most). Consult doctor if feeling unwell. 

That last one borders on real advice. I used to live with a dude who ate the brown stuff so fast he routinely semi-asphyxiated. 

Anyways this got me thinking: how expensive would it be to order a PB&J from a chemical distributor? Peanut Butter - $1530 Bread (2 slices) - $480 [3] Grape Jelly* - $250 [4,5]
 TOTAL - $2260 * I couldn’t find an analytical standard grape jelly so I settled for cold water fish skin gelatin and the most common artificial grape flavoring agent, methyl 2-aminobenzoate 
1) https://www.sigmaaldrich.com/US/en/product/sial/nist2387 2) https://www.sigmaaldrich.com/US/en/sds/sial/nist2387 3) https://www.sigmaaldrich.com/US/en/product/sial/ermbd273 4) https://www.sigmaaldrich.com/US/en/substance/gelatinfromcoldwaterfishskin123459000708 5) https://www.sigmaaldrich.com/US/en/product/aldrich/236454

I stepped out of the Winthrop stop on my way to work this morning and felt the rain on my face. A little cold, but not too cold. It was a very nice balance. I walked through the sliding doors, up the stairs and into our primary office space. I made some coffee, ate a Teriyaki beef strip and now it was snowing outside. At 11am it was raining again but by 1pm the snow had returned. It's pretty neat that the temperature of the world was bobbing right around that magic number where rain and snow just turn into each other willy nilly. When I yelled "woa y'all look out the window?!" my coworkers seemed annoyed, though. Maybe it wasn't profound and I was just procrastinating. - During lunch we disagreed on the severity of the number 1 on a warning label. I thought 4 was the worst and 1 was the best; she thought 1 was the worst and 4 was the best. Wikipedia -> "4: Very short exposure could cause death or major residual injury" This sounded like the worst Wikipedia -> "Category 1, the highest toxicity category, has cut off values of 5 mg/kg by the oral route, 50 mg/kg by the dermal route, 100 ppm for gases or gaseous vapours, 0.5 mg/l for vapours, and 0.05 mg/l for dusts and mists." Hmmmm Sometimes we'll accidentally have chemicals shipped to our office and I'll have to carry them outside and down the block to our wet lab. Sometimes those chemicals are labeled with a 4 as well as a strikethrough 'W' to indicate that they "react with water in an unusual or dangerous manner" Sometimes it's raining and snowing outside and I get a bit of a rush.

It's funny how the 8-hour workday and the recommended 8 hours of nightly sleep split our day into even thirds This is true because 8 + 8 + 8 = 24 We know this can't be random. Surely one of the 8s came first and doomed us to contrive a symmetric way to divide our spare time. So which 8 came first? The National Sleep Foundation's most recent recommendation of 7-9 (i.e. 8) hours of sleep comes from a 2014 review paper (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sleh.2014.12.010) written by the National Sleep Foundation and published in the Journal of the National Sleep Foundation. In it, a panel of 18 experts were given 312 (see: 39 x 8) peer-reviewed articles to read and synthesize into a "recommended hours of sleep" for different age groups. Did I mention that 12 of the panel members were chosen by *stakeholder organizations*? Ex-NSF CEO Richard Gelula confessed to the Sacramento Bee in a 2018 interview that "[t]he largest single source of National Sleep Foundation funding is pharmaceutical..." This goes all the way to the top*. American Labor movements in North America were calling for an 8 hour work day as early as 1836. Some of the largest demonstrations in favor of an 8 hour workday were organized by the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor. This is actually what they called themselves and in 1886 they led 350,000 workers in a nationwide strike to bargain for 8 hour workdays. The scale of this demonstration is even more impressive when you consider that Alaska and Hawaii weren't even part of the Union back then. I guess that settles it! *https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Sleep_Foundation#Controversies

There is no direct spanish translation for 'compromise' From 'compromissum', a consent to be arbitrated, the spanish 'compromiso' derives from exactly the same root as its english cognate and yet, 'un compromiso' is a commitment or a marital engagement That's why I've always said that the key to a successful marriage Is being bilingual