Oct 122021
 

MAD MADaaS has a very redundant name, but it’s for a good reason.

For the unfamiliar MADaaS is Mutually Assured Destruction as a Service. MAD MADaaS’s marketing pitch is that they provide containerized annihilation and extinction services on galaxy scale cloud native infrastructure for a fraction of the cost of on-prem MAD.

MADaaS makes a lot of sense, a lot more than MAD itself really. But if you have an arrangement with another group that if you die, they die- outsourcing the assurance of destruction to a third party is the most reasonable option. Of course most MAD subscribers are primitive cultures unaware of galactic cloud technology services, but there are enough advanced civilized grudges to maintain a thriving MADaaS marketplace.

MAD MADaaS has legacy dominance in the MADaaS market because they really are innately innovative in the field and have reinvented the industry several times across the eons. MAD MADaaS is headquartered on MAD planet. The MAD people are inscrutable in many ways, only the MAD people understand their internal cultural values and practices and they don’t communicate with offworlders about anything but setting up MADaaS contracts, it’s their primary export.

What is known about the MAD planet is mainly biological. It’s called MAD planet because the planet’s entire ecosystem seems to have evolved in accordance with MAD doctrine. Most biological systems on MAD possess the ability to cause extreme damage to their environment on demise.

There’s a wide range of destructive mechanisms. The semi-intelligent fruiting body of the MAD Worm-Tree can force its pulmonary organ through its digestive organ. This pumps digestive fluid though its optical cavity where catalytic enzymes decompose the digestive fluid into a toxic gas that can destroy any MAD life in the vicinity. Some creatures can emit death-cry like signals which strongly attract dangerous creatures to the area, or even release other biological infestations.

It’s pretty insane by Darwinian standards, though it is still Darwinian. The big difference is the evolutionary pressure of direct predation is pretty rare. That’s not to say things don’t eat each other, they just can’t take any risks that their prey will know you’re about to eat them

So there’s no hunting, not exactly. Even ambush predation is rare because mistakes are just too destructive. There’s an extraordinary amount of camouflage and deceptive markings. Pretty much every creature looks like a few other creatures and can imitate a natural phenomenon or two. In the MAD ecosystem the practice of acquiring another creature’s biological material for consumption looks a lot more like a cross between farming and seduction than the classic hunting or foraging you see on most worlds.

For instance MAD Swift-Bats eat the young of the MAD Mushmouse because infant Mushmouse have not developed the Mushmouse’s ability to violently dissolve into a thick fluid which quickly cures rock hard to permanently immobilize or smother predators. They avoid the parent Mushmouses ire by feeding them and living among the Mushmouse colonies, assuming the role of midwife and caretaker of the young. The mice reproduce prodigiously, and the bats evolved to maintain balance with the Mushmice population so a few young mice aren’t missed. The balance is pretty important because if a bat gets too hungry and tries to eat a grown mouse, or if the mice attack the bat, triggering the bats MAD-reflexive hypergolic chemical explosion, everyone loses.

There’s a lot of that kind of warped harvester-ant kind of interaction going on with MAD planet. A lot of interspecies sexual and reproductive deception too. Lot of things eat each other’s babies, some semi-voluntarily. Of course a lot of that is like seeds and fruits and such because those kind of count as something’s baby especially in ecosystems where things that look like plants also have lungs and stuff, but there’s also a lot of eating eggs and regular babies. That sounds a lot like regular nature, but it works out pretty differently with MAD.

The direct predation that does exist is necessarily based on defeating the other creatures MAD-reflex. Reliance on killing a creature before the reflex can be triggered is still too risky, so the only effective predation adapts to the reflex.

The MAD Tentaclepede’s MAD-reflex involves spontaneous cartilization of its hundreds of tentacled feet into needle sharp protrusions laced with a paralytic neurotoxin, which burst from the body after a final muscular spasm. The MAD Horned-Wheel-Scorpions evolved a hunting technique whereby they roll over a Tentaclepede, puncturing it with its horns, but rolling on to a safe distance to wait for the Tentaclepede to die and expend its legmunition.

An intelligent, generalist species eventually evolved that could take advantage of several different survival strategies. Despite, or perhaps because of their MAD tendencies, they managed to develop a thriving technological civilization. The MAD people are sort of bipeds, but have a couple of long vestigial wings they hop around on sometimes. They might have two heads, or a head and a bulb that looks like a head. Little is certain about their physiology because if you piss one off enough it goes nuclear, very literally. Their thermonuclear-MAD capabilities are due to implanted technology, not biological. It’s unclear what their natural MAD defence is but it’s presumed to be statistically less destructive than their nukes, but probably a worse way to die. The absence of regular nuclear detonations detected on their planet suggests they’re smart enough to stick to their natural MAD at home.

Apparently they started developing an implantable nuclear device alongside their first attempts at spaceflight. It was just assumed they might meet other species and if so they’d need a reliable deterrent. It took a while to develop anything like normal interstellar trade relations. At first nobody even knew there was a new space-capable species around, they just thought there’d been a spate of unfortunate reactor meltdowns in sectors near the MAD planet lately. 

Eventually they learned to chill out long enough to not blow everything up long enough to have a dialog, but they also learned they didn’t have much in common with most space-capable species. But they did see a potential market for something they were really good at.

The MAD people’s first interstellar export was the iMAD. It was just a mass-produced version of their implantable thermonuclear devices tailored for various other species physiology. It was an instant hit. It wasn’t the first implantable nuke on the market by any means. But implantable nukes were always sold alongside novelty cyanide teeth and tachyon foil hats and such, they were associated with flat-universe conspiracy nuts and the like. The MAD people found a way to market personal mutually assured destruction as both a cool and responsible lifestyle choice. 

iMAD devices became as fashionable as they were functional. Some custom luxury models could even leave the owner’s monogram in the blast crater. But iMAD had trouble breaking into industrial, military, and government markets. Even for totalitarian regimes willing to implement forced adoption, the relatively small yield of an implantable device just wasn’t enough to move tyrants to commit to large contracts.

Perhaps surprisingly the MAD people didn’t invent MADaaS, that honor goes to a sentient nanite swarm left over from a planet that let their nanotech get away from them and became a planet sized sentient nanite swarm. The nanite swarm started a cottage MADaaS industry, serving only the surviving offworld colonies from its original planet. When the MAD people found out about the idea they committed all their resources to expanding the market potential of MADaaS.

And I think that’s about as far as I can stretch that idea. I could go on about how the MAD people engage in political intrigue to start a bunch of conflict to create a demand for their services but that seems kinda tedious, and obvious, so I guess I’ll just stop here- but I do want to say the MADaaS tagline again in a used car salesman tone so here’s that- 

MAD MADaaS’s provide containerized annihilation and extinction services on galaxy scale cloud native infrastructure for a fraction of the cost of on-prem MAD.

May 032021
 

The boxes have evolved again. I extended one to 600mm high so I can move the light further away to test levels a bit. Also got some coroplast and lined them with aluminum foil for the side panels but still using pizza box cardboard for the top.

I also got a peristaltic pump to test moving fluid around because I think the main problem I’m having is the water is too stagnant. At some point I read that duckweed likes stagnant water, but I think ‘stagnant’ in nature is still a lot more dynamic than a gallon of water in a pan in a box my kitchen. So I’m trying to figure out how to move nutrients around and keep the surface from filming up without disturbing the wolffia too much.

I’ve got a really rudimentary filter system with an acrylic pipe hanging from the basin in the water so I can drop in a tube to pump water from the bottom without sucking anything up from the surface layer. If I stir the water up a little it slowly pulls any algae to the tube and I can pull it up. That seems to be helping keep the algae growth a little bit in check but I need to make a less manual system.

The ‘sugar press mud’ trials have been interesting if not productive. I don’t think it provides enough nutrition for wolffia alone with or without light. But mixed with a little regular dirt it seems to increase growth above just regular dirt. Unfortunately the growth it increases is more than just the wolffia. It turns things into an algae soup faster than regular dirt and kills off the wolffia.

That seems to be the big trick here- limiting algae growth to give the wolffia a chance because everything I do do far that helps the wolffia helps algae a lot more.

I also tried a different species of duckweed called ‘Lemna Minor’ just because. It’s not ‘mixotrophic’ and doesn’t really fit my whole ‘space grits’ concept but I’m still just throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks. I don’t think I like Lemna Minor much so I think I’ll try to find another wolffia variant to play with rather than a whole other species.

I think the next phase of this will be all about not growing algae, which if funny to me considering I wanted to grow algae before wolffia, but this experience is reinforcing the apprehension that kept from actually doing it. Algae is insane. I’m starting to wonder if I should get some little aquarium shrimp because apparently they help with that. I’d rather not because I’ll probably kill them and I want to learn to grow wolffia without critter assistance, but the more I read the more I think that’s probably the way to go at least until I get a better grip on what I’m doing.

Also I’ve moved away from my earlier obsession with time-lapses and microscopy. If I need to keep the water moving to grow them I’ll never get useful time-lapses so I need to rethink my ideas about using computer vision to characterize growth. I’d like to say I could try to ‘train’ a neural network to visually extract growth information from video, but if I was ever smart enough to figure that out I’m way too lazy now.

I have to give a nod to MakersLED t-slot LED heatsink housings. It just comes with the sink parts and fan, you supply the LED, power, and wiring. Really decent little kit here and works great with the 80/20 frame. I put a little thermal paste on, screwed down a COB LED, wired in an AC-DC converter for the fan and voila- a nice, modular little LED lamp and I can swap in whatever chip I want. I like these a lot. I got two of them running 50W LEDs.

Apr 022021
 

So this is a bucket of ‘sugar press mud’ or ‘belt press mud’. Provided courtesy of Louisiana Sugar Refinery in Gramercy, LA. They also provided a PDF with a chemical analysis but I’m not sure if it’s okay to post that and nobody but me reads this anyway so I didn’t.

It’s a byproduct of sugar cane processing. My understanding is it’s what came from bagasse but just wasn’t awesome enough to become molasses. It looks, smells, and sounds indistinguishable from dirt. I haven’t tasted it but I can guess. It feels almost like very rich topsoil, but disturbingly sticky. Like dirt sprayed with watered down syrup. My keen scientific intuition tells me that is probably related to the fact that sugary things tend to be sticky and this is made from the thing that makes sugary things sugary.

The first thing I did was roll up a little ball of it an drop it in a watermeal jar. I admit I was slightly disappointed it didn’t immediately overflow with watermeal growth like mentos and diet coke, but if it actually had that would have been weirder. It does roll up pretty nicely- kind of of a crumbly, semi-chunky dough.

So this is short post because I have no idea what’s next with this stuff. I’m not really in control, some force is making me want to grow watermeal and it made me think sugar press mud was how to do it so I got some. Weirdest psychosis ever, but it’s pretty innocuous and distracts me from the old familiar ‘existential paralysis’ brand of psychosis so I’m just going with it.

I’ll probably freeze some because it’s definitely going to become a fungus\mold extravaganza soon. I’m not really into growing mushrooms but I can’t help but wonder if there’s an opportunity there too. But unless\until some force makes me want to grow mushrooms too I’ll just keep wondering.

Mar 282021
 

I’ve tried a few more nutrient cocktails and so far the clear winner seems to be boiled dirt. Just dirt works too but then you have little critters zooming around eating the watermeal, boiling first puts a stop to all the zooming. I’ve tried most of the easy DIY fertilizer suggestions I’ve found online plus some additives to try to capitalize on the mixotrophy, not that I know how to do that or anything, by why not. I can’t tell if adding sugar helps the watermeal any yet since mold seems to eat it all first. Still really curious about the sucrose angle and I’m supposed to pick up a bucket of ‘sugar press mud’ from a sugar mill next week so we’ll see how that goes.

Since a lot of learning to grow watermeal means leaving it alone I’m spending a lot of time thinking about and fussing with the little grow boxes. That’s probably become the real reason for all this. I’ve had a bizarre affinity for boxes since I was a child and somehow making and fussing with these is just tremendously satisfying.

So I got some more 80\20 and built a second one and I have most of a third but ran out of parts to attach the light. I removed the pi controls for now since I’ve already decided that needs an overhaul. For now it’s all just on a power strip toggle.

The cardboard panels leak light quite a bit but I’m going to add some foil baffles at some point. The foil lining on the inside probably helps a lot with the light but I haven’t metered it yet. One box has a 50W and the other has a 20W LED.

This is the kitchen-lab-garden at present. You’ll notice one box has actual potted plants- those are two jimacas and something that’s growing where I planted a muscodine seed, but doesn’t really look like what I thought a muscodine looked like. I have two more jimacas outside. Of 20 jimaca beans only 4 germinated so I’m pretty proud of these little guys. Not sure what’s up with muscodine guy but we’ll see. Since there are 4 jimacas and another thing I’ve named them Terry, Korvo, Yumulack, Jesse, and Pupa.

I switched up the BlueBox to be sort of a macro-time-lapse thing to give me imaging data to figure out how to maybe visually quantify growth.

Mar 142021
 

The watermeal stuff made me want to zoom in so I got a $15 USB ‘microscope’ off eBay. It says it’s 50x-1600x but I don’t really know or care enough to check them on optics but it zooms pretty hard so I was pleased with the purchase.

Before long the frustrations of focusing and moving at tiny scales made me wonder how hard it would be to motorize it. Seen a lot of DIY builds with the DVD drive steppers and I had a couple and drivers so I started soldering wires onto those annoyingly tiny flexible pcb leads. Naturally the frustration of that process made me question my whole existence and I stopped long enough to remember I have a perfectly functional motorized XYZ in the form of a MP Select Mini v1 that I got tired of replacing the heater block and fan on. It’s always amusing and infuriating to me how long it takes me to get to the most painfully obvious solution even when it’s sitting in my closet.

I had a couple of bad ideas on how to fix the scope to the heatsink but eventually I settled on a 1/2″ square dowel drilled to hold zip ties. Then zip tie the dowel to the scope and to a machine screw held in the sink with washers and nuts. It’s rigid enough to manually adjust the zoom on the scope without bumping the frame so that works for me. I forgot to home the Z axis before I strapped on the scope so I’m not 100% sure I won’t crash it into the bed, but this is for moving around in spaces of a couple of centimeters so this works. A less lazy person would have used their perfectly functional MP v2 to make a neat little fitting, but I am lazy so when a drill and zip ties can get me there the printer stays off.

The scope has a built in LED but I added a 12LED RGB ring for more control of the light. The separate RGB channels does make some weird effects at this scale, but I think it makes everything look kind of like a nebula with space monsters and this isn’t about real science so I’m good with it. I should have wired the LED for gpio control but I’m lazy and I already made a bunch of ESP-LED things so I just velcrowed one on.

I actually haven’t done much to justify motorizing the scope yet. It lets me get some super sharp focus by adjusting the Z though. Also for what I’m doing I probably can only use the X and Z since Y would jiggle the water. I’m just doing stationary timelapses for now because I’m pretty far from coding anything that could help the camera follow a pod, but it’s a start.

The motors and camera are easy to control with python, fswebcam and gcode. I could probably send packets to control the LED from the same script but not sure I need that. And the original MP select box with a door cut in the front made a perfect housing for the whole thing.

Mar 132021
 

So new theory- Wolffia Arrhiza aren’t just people-free soylent-green… they’re also teeny-tiny Audrey II’s.

I didn’t get what mixotroph meant at first and I still probably don’t, but apparently it means they can eat sugar and grow in the dark. That seems distinctly unplantlike to me, but plants eat bugs and sadistic dentists- so why not? Anyway it’s pretty freaking amazing. I was thinking these things were just solar powered but turns out you can run them on gas in a pinch. Not that you’d want to carry a big supply of sugar to space to feed to your plants but I’m guessing there are other organic carbon sources it can use. Guessing is definitely the word though.

So I’m still getting my head wrapped around the sugar thing but I played with a few other nutrient combos and let them grow for a week in the light cube 12on/12off. Here’s the super-scientific recipies:

Cocktail-A – 1 cup H20, 1tsp white vinegar, pinch epsom salt, pinch baking soda, pinch gelatin.
Cocktail-B – 1 cup H20, green tea, coffee grounds
Cocktail-C – 1 cup H20, 1 pump miracle grow indoor plant food
JAR5 – 1/4Cup Cocktail-A + 2 drops glycerine
JAR6 – 1/2Cup Cocktail-A + 2 drops glycerine
JAR7 – 1/4Cup Cocktail-A
JAR8 – Cocktail-B less
JAR9 – Cocktail-B more
JAR10 – 1/4Cup Cocktail-C
JAR11 – 1/4Cup Cocktail-C + pinch hydroxyethyl cellulose
JAR12 – 1/2Cup Cocktail-C
*filled all jars to flange with H20 and dropped ~20-30 watermeal pods in. Refilled about 50ml H20 per jar twice over 7 days.

Yeah- I don’t know what I was thinking with the cellulose and glycerine, but I had some left from LED\Silicone projects so somehow that justifies poisoning a bunch of plants?

TOP – 9-10-11-12 | BOTTOM 5-6-7-8

JAR5 – No growth, few survivors, crusty maybe mold or something on top.
JAR6 – No growth, fewer survivors, definitely mold on top.
JAR7 – Probably some growth.
JAR8 – No survivors, gross swamp.
JAR9 – No survivors, grosser swamp.
JAR10 – Maybe some growth.
JAR11 – Maybe some growth, but probably not.
JAR12 – Probably no growth.

The results were kind of nasty, lot of dead plants and funk. My takeaway is very no on the glycerine and cellulose. But possibly yes on cocktail-A, and sort of yes on cocktail-C. And hold-up on the green tea and coffee, but still curious. I suspect the green tea has eggs in it. I think that may actually be how those critters from chapter 2 got in there, not dirt like I thought. I left the light cube alone most of the week so I didn’t see the hellscape form again, but the aftermath in J8-9 looks very similar. So I may try that again after boiling the tea.

I think the small containers are their own problem. Too deep for their opening so it’s really stagnant and not much gas exchange maybe. Nutrient levels varying wildly with evaporation. Also I’m not sterilizing anything so life is finding ways. Still thinking about how I’m going to manage all that.

So I’d like to say I’m slowly learning to grow watermeal, but I think all I can really claim is that I’m slowly learning how to do less watermeal mass-murder. But considering this is widely regarded as a weed to be controlled or eradicated- I think starting from mass-murder and working backwards might actually make sense.

I reached out the LSU AgCenter and got pointed towards ‘Azolla’, which was an excellent hint for finding how people actually grow little alien plants like this. And Azolla actually shares a lot of watermeal’s awesomeness. I’m especially curious about how Azolla restricts mosquito breeding- which I thought would be a challenge to growing watermeal outdoors, so I wonder if watermeal can do that too or maybe growing it with Azolla could protect the watermeal.

Also want to give a shout out to the little jimaca and muscodine seeds- they’re trying their best to germinate despite me not knowing what I’m doing so I just want to show them some love. Also big ups to turnip and onion- those are some champs.

Mar 112021
 

So I recently googled funkboxing because I forgot how to spell .com and I found the top search results redirect to online pharmacy’s hocking dick pills. So… not sure what that’s about but… I’d like to say I fully endorse every brand of dick pills and you should definitely buy all the dick pills you find on the internet because if you don’t it means you don’t really care about dick.

If a person doesn’t care about dick- what do they care about- vagina? It’s either or… there’s no middle ground. It’s either dick pills or vagina pills and apparently you’re anti-vagina because you won’t buy the goddamn dick pills Google is trying to sell you when you search for funkboxing- so just buy the goddamn dick pills already!

I admit had a soft spot for Google about 8 years ago before they abandoned their ‘don’t be evil’ directive in favor of China’s money… but hey- evil is just backwards smoke going into a toaster in a classic Terry Gilliam film so who cares… buy dick pills or get bent- those are your options.

Mar 062021
 

So very predictably I’m discovering that I’ve been doing everything completely wrong. I vastly overestimated the light requirements and I think I sort of bleached a lot of them to death with 50W 24/7. I changed to a 20W LED about 6 hours a day and they seem to like that a lot more. Also I’ve been reading more about what nutrients they need and a little bottle of miracle grow seems to keep them happy for now. At this point I’m still just trying to make sure I can maintain a population of these things at all- then I can get into testing out some variations.

Also apparently I introduced pests in one jar by dropping some dirt in it. Turned into a delightful little hellscape of micro monsters eating each other and the pods and then everything died. I took some video in a USB microscope because it was interesting but not sure what exactly happened there. I like to think it was the plot of Pacific Rim but the trans-dimensional aliens are bacteria and a Class-5 Kaiju is about 2mm tall.

And I got enough 80/20 parts in to put together an aluminum frame box so I can get rid of the wood frame monstrosity. I ordered a MakersLED fixture but it’s been stuck in transit for a few weeks so I just used another heatsink I had and it does okay with a fan on it.

The raspi just controls a relay for the light and a USB webcam for now. Apparently I’m too dumb to correctly wire a dallas 1-wire module so not taking temperature readings yet.

I’ve been doing more causal ‘research’ and I’m pleased to find out I’m way, way behind on discovering how awesome this plant is. And though my assumptions on how to grow it were painfully misguided- apparently my assumptions about its potential value are shared- and actually pretty well proven.

http://cfb.unh.edu/phycokey/Choices/Anomalous_Items/Aquatic_macrophytes/floating_leaves/WOLFFIA/Wolffia_key.html

This article in particular says “A closed plant and animal system has been tested with Wolffia Arhiza because of its rapid rate of biomass production. The system is designed to function for a period of two years” which basically says everything I wanted to do with this plant has already been done. But- if some goon with no expertise in any relevant field can do some of it in their apartment- that’s probably a positive step too so I’ll just do that. I actually haven’t looked up the reference for that claim yet- but I’ll probably get to it eventually after enough failures.

Here are some other links I’ve found about watermeal that I only vaguely understand but seem cool and interesting.

FEED\FOODSOURCE
https://www.nature.com/articles/232495a0
https://scialert.net/abstract/?doi=pjbs.2001.618.620
https://www.entomoljournal.com/archives/2018/vol6issue3/PartB/6-2-286-965.pdf

TOXIC ABSORBTION
https://hero.epa.gov/hero/index.cfm/reference/details/reference_id/510993

SOMETHING ABOUT USING WA AS A GENETIC FACTORY THING – BIOPHARMA STUFF
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fchem.2018.00304/full
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11240-015-0834-z
https://www.longdom.org/proceedings/callus-induction-regeneration-and-agrobacteriummediated-transformation-of-wolffia-arrhiza-to-obtain-plantproducer-of-therapeutic-proteins-4740.html

ALL KINDS OF SCIENCEY ARTICLES
https://www.science.gov/topicpages/p/plant+wolffia+arrhiza

UNDER A SCANNING ELECTRON MICROSCOPE
https://ejournal.sinica.edu.tw/bbas/content/1979/2/bot202-01.PDF

GAS CHROMATOGRAPH
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.2478/s13545-013-0072-0/html

NITRATE AND NITRITE REDUCTION
http://www.plantphysiol.org/content/47/2/189

PATENT FOR CULTIVATION MEDIUM
https://patents.google.com/patent/RU2472338C1/en
https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/d3/bb/e8/997bb1b065efda/RU2472338C1.pdf (MOSTLY RUSSIAN)

Feb 282021
 

80\20 T-slotted aluminum hardware rules, but it’s kind of expensive and even the 20-series is just a little too big to make sense for a lot of electronics DIY stuff.

Makerbeam is a 1cm profile series that should be the perfect compliment to 80\20, and at first glance it’s great and seems semi-affordable even for small amounts, but that’s just looking at the extrusions.

I got 4 sticks of 300mm MakerBeam for $18 to try out and thought- hey, this isn’t too bad. Way more than wood but this is reusable foreverish. But I mistakenly thought that a standard M2 nut could work in the slot. I was wrong. Pan head M3 bolt wont fit either, you need a square head bolt or a flat nut… no big deal, right? The M3-5 hammer nuts for 80\20 are like $10 for 50 so I can deal with that.

Nope- the makerbeam M3 flat nuts are freaking outrageous- like a buck each for about .01 cents worth of stamped metal with an M3 hole… freaking infuriating.

The whole point of getting this stuff is that I’m not a machinist, so if I have to start making my own fasteners this goes sideways fast. But… I figured out you don’t have to be a machinist to make something workable.

Just needed snips, drill, screwdriver, and a little file helped. A sane person that owned a functioning drill press would do even better.

Started with scrap copper sheet I’d pulled out of a laptop heatsink years ago (Hoarding heatsink materials pays off very occasionally). Cut off a strip thin enough to slide in the MakerBeam slot and drilled some M3ish sized holes. I don’t have an M3 tap so I just filed out a little and turned an M3 through it.

The surprisingly cool part is that even if the hole is off- when you put it in the slot and screw it down it does sort of a brake press action on the nut and it trues up in the slot. They’re not as strong obviously but if you’ve got loads that can tear copper I guess just pay the buck. I figure this could also be a decent alternative the brackets which are also outrageously priced, but actually I’ll probably just use 80\20 for most stuff because this isn’t trivial enough to make dozens of nuts whenever I need them so it’s actually not all that workable, just more so than paying $1 per nut.

Feb 262021
 

I’m having a lot of fun with my new watermeal obsession and I’m going to use it as an excuse to pontificate on all kinds of topics that are only vaguely related to trying to grow watermeal. So here’s some of that.

I’m not really a plant person. I used to say I had a ‘black thumb’ because things I grow tend to die. But I don’t really have a large enough dataset to say even that. I grew corn and tomatoes once. I’ve thought about growing algae for a long time. And I couldn’t keep a peace lily that my grandmother gave me alive even though I really tried. Those three sentences are pretty much my entire horticultural resume. So it should probably be odd that I’ve decided that it’s my duty and pleasure to unravel the mystery of ‘least duckweed’, but it makes sense if you’re me.

I’m a life-long technology geek. Anything from a steam-engine to a space-ship is worth knowing about. Not that I ever thought that plants were outside the realm of technology- agriculture was humanity’s earliest and most important technological masteries . But me and plants never really made friends. I get them from a molecular-engine kind of perspective, but they have a shit-load of inputs and variables I have no man-made analogy to help me understand. They’re kind of black-box, proprietary hardware and software with no documentation. All you can do is try different inputs and log the output. Also they’re just kind of slow.

But I want to know about duckweed, and it seems like more people want to kill it than grow it, so I’m running into a newish situation where I want understand something that there’s not much information on, but it’s way outside my experience of how you go about understanding a new thing. I’m used to the limited information part- but only in areas where I have extensive context to figure out the information I need.

I can’t take watermeal apart or examine its source or logs. I can’t compare its function to something I already understand, there are no schematics or pinouts, and I can’t take a snapshot before I try something crazy and then rollback when everything blows up. It’s like someone handed me a completely alien technology that creates food from nothing and I’m not even sure which side is the front.

Of course I’m exaggerating, I know some basic biology and I read so it’s an ‘alien technology’ that humans have been studying for thousands of years, but I’m not those humans right now so it’s still kind of new to me.

I thought I had a pretty good understanding of scientific methodology and sort of practiced it in problem solving for work and DIY projects and whatnot. But messing with alien plant technology has forced me to face the fact that I’ve never actually employed the scientific method on nature, only on human devices. What that means is I’ve never really employed the scientific method at all. I’ve employed intuition and deduction in a context where I had sufficient knowledge that I didn’t really need to be all that scientific to find the solutions I needed. I can’t rely on any of that to figure out how a plant works.

So what do I do to prepare for this new challenge? Do I try to become the rigorously methodical scientist that I like to imagine I could have been if I wasn’t a lunatic? Sure… maybe while I’m at it I’ll become an unflappable, cool-headed operator who can pilot a lawnmower through a hurricane. I’ll get right on that. No- I think I have to do this the way I do everything that I’m not paid to do- with no regard for anything except whatever I feel like doing. It’s a sort of casually-aggressive dilettante-ology style of learning. It may or may not accomplish anything useful, but it keeps me entertained.

It is kind of fun to keep looking at this as a technology problem- the alien black box thing. So I have this device, but I don’t know anything about the designer’s intent or record… or do I? Actually- in a lot of ways evolution is a far more consistent and reliable designer to make assumptions about. I know evolution only cares about what works- literally nothing else matters. Path dependency adds a potential weirdness factor, but other than that I can safely assume if something works a certain way, it’s because it worked that way when it really, really had to for a bunch of millions of years. That’s actually pretty liberating from a technology analysis standpoint. I don’t have to consider any human stupidity, arrogance, or greed at all, none of that even existed when these devices were designed.

I find myself asking questions like “was watermeal designed to adjust its reproductive activity in response to evaporation?”. And of course nature’s response is “wtf does evaporation mean?” So I have to consider what inputs watermeal would have available to ‘know’ that evaporation was happening or what to do about it. I figure it might ‘sense’ that slowly increasing concentrations of nutrients might indicate evaporation. And maybe that causes it to adjust its reproduction energy. But the ‘meaning’ of those changes in concentration would depend on the volume of water, so maybe it derives even more complex situational awareness with a ‘memory’ of the state and rate of change of nutrients. And now I get to figure out how to design an experiment to test that. This is fun.

I’m personifying watermeal and implying it has ‘intent’ out of literary habit, I should probably stop that- but I wont. But I like that this is still just inputs and outputs, just like technology should be.

But with technology the default state is non-functionality. If a technology works it’s because somebody made it work. If it breaks- well, that just happens eventually unless you keep preventing it. Plants are kind of the opposite. Their default state is functionality- otherwise they wouldn’t exist. So if a plant breaks- it means I broke it, but if it grows, all I did was not screw something up.

With technology that sort of justifies perpetually checking and poking at things a little bit. If it ain’t broke- don’t fix it, but you can still poke at it a little to understand it better for when have to fix it eventually.

With plants I’m pretty sure the poking really, really doesn’t help and that’s a tough adjustment for me. The idea that these fascinating little machines are furiously replicating themselves and I’m just supposed to pop some lights and sensors on and walk away for days at a time is just bananas to me. But I think that’s how this works.

You’d think with all this pontificating I would have something tangible to share that I’ve learned about watermeal, but I don’t think I do, but since I have been messing around with it for a couple of weeks I’ll try to write down a few things about the actual plant instead of making it all about me and what I think about stuff, but that’ll probably creep in anyway.

~Apparently they are pretty hard to kill from neglect, which is great. I put some in clear water with no nutrients and left it in a corner with barely any light and they’re still about half green after 3 weeks. The rest have turned white and sunk to the bottom, which I’m assuming is death- but actually it may not be because apparently they can overwinter as a ‘turion’ thing so maybe they’re doing that but they look kind of dead to me.

~I don’t think they like light 24/7. I’ve only just started to learn about horticultural lighting and spectrums plants care about, but I’ve got a full-spectrum LED that at 6″ gives me the same lux reading as sunlight on a clear day. I’m just using a TSL2561 lux sensor but I figure it’s close enough for now. But at first I was leaving it on 24/7 and quite a few started to turn white and sink. I started turning the light off at night and they seem to be doing better, but all this is anecdotal. I haven’t quite figured out how I’m going to quantify their growth yet but I’m thinking it’ll probably involve learning some more computer vision stuff.

~I still don’t know what nutrients to use, but I’m trying a few things I’ve found online for DIY miracle grow types of cocktails. White vinegar, ammonia, baking soda, epsom salt, coffee grounds, and green tea are what I’ve tried so far. Ultimately I’d want to know how to integrate watermeal into a more complex life-support chemical-cylce but that’s way, way off so I’m just looking for whatever works and is easy.

~Evaporation control is going to be an issue. I’m using fairly small containers and I’m concerned evaporation will make the nutrient levels fluxuate way more than they would in nature and that might not be good for the watermeal and will be very bad for getting consistent data. Fortunately peristaltic pumps are pretty cheap and I can rig up some pi\arduino controls. Also I like that the peristaltic pumps won’t disturb the water that much- at the moment adding water stirs up the surface a bit and makes the timelapses kind of useless for seeing if it’s actually growing. Might be another computer vision opportunity to detect water levels too. Seems cleaner than a bunch of level sensors.

So I’m still waiting on some 80\20 parts for the next testing rig but I soldered up a little raspberry pi ‘hat’ for the temperature sensors, a luminance sensor, and a relay to control the LED, it’ll also have a USB webcam. The plan is to just crontab everything- schedule the light timing, and take sensor readings and photos. I can’t just close it up and leave it for too long because of the evaporation issue, but for now I have a decent workaround for adding water without disturbing the surface much.

No pictures or videos with this post, just a bunch of words. I do have a few weeks of various time-lapses but I’ve been using an ESP32CAM and it’s not great for close up imaging like this so they’re pretty useless. I was surprised I had to use an ND filter in the light box, but fortunately I have an old lighting gel sample pack- it took 6 stops worth, that 50W LED really belts light.