Author: David Faden
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Murdannia audreyae
I’m thinking of my aunt Audrey again today. In my previous post, I talked about a succulent named for both her and my uncle Bob, Kalanchoe fadeniorum. But she also has a plant named by Bob just for her, another one they discovered together: Murdannia audreyae. You can see a couple photos of it on…
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Kalanchoe fadeniorum
My uncle Bob is a botanist. Tonight he told me one small thing I want to remember. He has multiple plants named for him, but of all those, he said, Kalanchoe fadeniorum holds a special place for him because, unlike the others, it is named for both him and his wife Audrey (Archive). The ones…
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Fraction north of Fresno
I had a Google Sheet with data like the following: City Count Los Angeles 10000 San Diego 9000 San Jose 1000 Tiburon 10 Palo Alto 5 I wanted to understand what fraction of the count was in cities lying north of Fresno — “Northern California”. My first thought was to look up latitude using a…
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Sprouts
Two sets of sprouts that have popped in recently in our home nursery, representing extremes of germination times: Telegraph weed (Heterotheca grandiflora), sowed October 28 this year; I noticed the first sprouts on November 1, just four days after sowing. The photo below is from November 5th. I saw them blooming on El Monte on…
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ArcGIS map linking
Something I’ve found frustrating with a few different instances of ArcGIS-based maps is the lack of an easy ability to share or link to a particular location. E.g., one of the water districts shares this map: https://valleywater.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=39632100ff6d48dcab9405ee080b142b. After some fruitless searching in regular search, Gemini helped get me on the right track in response to…
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Fried hummingbird sage
Antonio Sanchez sketches a recipe for fried hummingbird sage (Salvia spathacea) in Eating CA! Using Edible Plants in Your Diet and Garden (2021): “take the bigger leaves and then… for about 20 to 30 seconds… fry them… turn them over a few times… then you can crack a little bit of salt a little bit…
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Comparing nodes
I thought I wanted to compare the DOM trees for a couple of nodes. I ended up putting this together: How would you have done it? (I’d be unsurprised if this has some bugs.) After writing this though, I realized that comparing the HTML from n1.getHTML() vs n2.getHTML() was better for my purposes. (I don’t…
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Los Altos council candidates on native plants in city plantings
I e-mailed the five candidates for Los Altos city council the following question on September 8, 2024: Per Doug Tallamy’s work, using locally native plants in landscaping is important in restoring ecosystem health, rebuilding the food chain. Using natives also reduces the risk of introducing new invasives and diseases into surrounding wild areas. They require less water and…
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white-space: pre-line converts lines into spaces in Safari when pasting into a textarea
In a site I’m helping with, we encountered this weird behavior: users pasting multiline text into a textarea in Safari (but *not* in Chrome) found their newlines replaced with spaces. This was a problem because lines are used to separate items to be processed. Dropping the lines garbled the meaning of the input. My first…
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Got a bike
Today I carried out one small adventure I’ve been thinking about for months: walking to Walmart, buying a bike, and riding it home. I had already walked nearby to Trader Joe’s, hoping to buy a couple mini tote bags for a loved one. The cashier told me they ran out yesterday though and wouldn’t be…