š ASB Partners Nuggets 5.23.25
This is a short weekly email that covers a few things Iāve found interesting during the week.
Interesting Links/Reads
Many links are sourced from Marginal Revolution (bold and italics are my own to highlight what I found particularly interesting)
1.Your Fingers Wrinkle in the Same Pattern Every Time After Long Exposure to Water
An odd quirk of the avocado, Persea americana to botanists, is the clockwork performed by its blossoms. They undergo a complicated sequence of opening, closing and reopening that keeps each flowerās male and female sex organs from operating on the same day. Among two large categories of cultivated strains, group A trees bear flowers that are functionally female in the morning and male the next afternoon. Meanwhile, group Bās flowers are female in the afternoon and male the next morning.
Unreliable pollination had long baffled commercial avocado growers until, on May 5, 1923, the botanist A.B. Stout had the game-changing idea of setting up cameras in a California orchard. His photographs solved the mystery by capturing the discrepancy between A and Bās blossoming schedules, thus suggesting the wisdom of planting trees from both groups in close proximity.
Amazing story in the Gothamist about a family that has occupied the same rent-controlled apartment for four generations and the last generation is not eager to give up the benefits:
For decades, Vinesā grandmother lived in the rent-stabilized, two-bedroom apartment around the corner from Fort Tryon Park. The unit has housed her family since 1977, Vines said, when her great-grandmother, a Cuban immigrant, moved in. Vines said she started living there part time in August 2021, when she enrolled in college in Westchester.
The buildingās owner, Jesse Deutch, told Gothamist in an email that āan apartment is not an inheritanceā and that Vines has not submitted the necessary documents to prove she has the right to succeed her grandmother as a tenant.
ā¦Family members ā by blood, marriage or emotional and financial dependence ā can claim succession rights for a rent-stabilized apartment, but only if they can prove they lived there with the tenant for at least two years immediately before their death or permanent departure. There are exceptions to the two-year requirement, including for people who are full-time students, like Vines was when she says she was living with her grandmother.
Vines doesnāt contest that she lived part of the week in her dorm. But she said she spent long weekends, holidays and spring break with her grandmother and sometimes slept over when she had time in the middle of the week.
After Digital Trends moved out of the U.S. Bancorp Tower in Portland, Ore., the technology publisher didnāt hold back about why it left.
The property, once a premier address in the city, was afflicted with āvagrants sleeping in hallways of vacant office floors.ā They were āstarting fires in stairwells, smoking fentanyl and defecating in common areas,ā according to papers the company filed in a lease-termination lawsuit.
Five years later, we canāt stop talking about COVID. Remember lockdowns? The conflicting guidelines about masks - donāt wear them! Wear them! Maybe wear them! School closures, remote learning, learning loss, something about teachersā unions. That one Vox article on how worrying about COVID was anti-Chinese racism. The time Trump sort of half-suggested injecting disinfectants. Hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, fluvoxamine, Paxlovid. Those jerks who tried to pressure you into getting vaccines, or those other jerks who wouldnāt get vaccines even though it put everyone else at risk. Anthony Fauci, Pierre Kory, Great Barrington, Tomas Pueyo, Alina Chan. Five years later, you can open up any news site and find continuing debate about all of these things.
The only thing about COVID nobody talks about anymore is the 1.2 million deaths.
Thatās 1.2 million American deaths. Globally itās officially 7 million, unofficially 20 - 30 million. But 1.2 million American deaths is still a lot. Itās more than Vietnam plus 9/11 plus every mass shooting combined - in fact, more than ten times all those things combined. It was the single highest-fatality event in American history, beating the previous record-holder - the US Civil War - by over 50%. All these lives seem to have fallen into oblivion too quietly to be heard over the noise of Lab Leak Debate #35960381.
Podcast/Videos
I hope you enjoyed it.
Adam