tal

old/medium/new

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Bridge_(disambiguation)

London Bridge, one of several bridges over the River Thames in central London, England

• London Bridge (Roman times)
• London Bridge (Early medieval times)
• London Bridge (1209) (or "Old London Bridge")
• London Bridge (1831) (or "New London Bridge"), the replacement for the 1209 London Bridge (see also Lake Havasu City entry below)
• London Bridge (1973), the present-day London Bridge and replacement for the 1831 bridge

It sounds like there's the old, the very old, the very very old, the new-but-now-old, and the new.

It’s crazy how famous London Bridge is

I grew up hearing "London Bridge Is Falling Down" in the US. My guess is that there isn't an analogous nursery rhyme of comparable fame for London's other bridges.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Bridge_Is_Falling_Down

"London Bridge Is Falling Down" (also known as "My Fair Lady" or "London Bridge") is a traditional English nursery rhyme and singing game, which is found in different versions all over the world. It deals with the dilapidation of London Bridge and attempts, realistic or fanciful, to repair it. It may date back to bridge-related rhymes and games of the Late Middle Ages, but the earliest records of the rhyme in English are from the 17th century. The lyrics were first printed in close to their modern form in the mid-18th century and became popular, particularly in Britain and the United States, during the 19th century.

The rhyme is often used in a children's singing game, which exists in a wide variety of forms, with additional verses. Most versions are similar to the actions used in the rhyme "Oranges and Lemons". The most common is that two players hold hands and make an arch with their arms while the others pass through in single file. The "arch" is then lowered at the song's end to "catch" a player. In the United States, it is common for two teams of those that have been caught to engage in a tug of war.[2]

I remember doing the arch thing.

Canadian approach: build one's own London, own Thames, and own Blackfriars Bridge:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackfriars_Bridge

Blackfriars Bridge is a road and foot traffic bridge over the River Thames in London, between Waterloo Bridge and Blackfriars Railway Bridge, carrying the A201 road.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London,_Ontario

London is a city in southwestern Ontario, Canada, along the Quebec City–Windsor Corridor. The city had a population of 422,324 according to the 2021 Canadian census. London is at the confluence of the Thames River and North Thames River, approximately 200 km (120 mi) from both Toronto and Detroit; and about 230 km (140 mi) from Buffalo, New York.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackfriars_Street_Bridge

Blackfriars Bridge in London, Ontario, Canada is a wrought iron bowstring arch through truss bridge, crossing the North Thames River. The bridge was constructed in 1875 and carries single-lane vehicles, bicycles and pedestrians from Blackfriars Street to Ridout Street North.

American approach:

Buy the actual bridge in London and ship it over.

"I am also having my office produce an 'I did that' sticker for myself by way of totally driving the point home, in case anyone has any doubts."

I do kind of wonder if it's possible to hybridize each with some intermediate relative, and then hybridize the result. Not sure if that's how things work.

Tomatoes are Solanum lycopersicum. Potatoes (the type you eat) are Solanum tuberosum.

According to this, modern tomatoes were probably the result of hybridization between a wild tomato ancestor and a wild potato plant that doesn't grow tubers:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/the-potato-may-have-evolved-from-a-tomato-ancestor-nine-million-years-ago-genetic-study-suggests-180987091/

And potatoes and tomatoes are each other’s closest living relatives.

Zhang and his team found that wild tomato plants bred with a potato-like plant called Etuberosum around nine million years ago. Alone, neither plant had the genes to make tubers—but together, they could grow the feature. That’s because the gene that switches on tuber growth, called SP6A, comes from tomatoes, while the gene controls the growth of the underground stems that turn into tubers, called IT1, comes from Etuberosum.

That fateful hybridization, the authors suggest, occurred in the Andes mountains. At the time the plants developed the ability to make tubers, the Andes mountains were rapidly rising. The tubers allowed the potato to survive in this unforgiving habitat—and spread across the world. Tubers enable plants to reproduce without pollinators or seeds, making them adaptable.

Genetic family tree with all three species:

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Geographical-distribution-and-phylogeny-of-the-Solanum-genus-a-Five-hundred-phylogenetic_fig1_361181892

https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/ca1edae2-11a4-468f-b501-9bceb1338b8f.png

collapsed inline media

It looks like Solanum etuberosum (well, modern forms of it) is still around:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solanum_etuberosum

Solanum etuberosum is a species of wild potato in the family Solanaceae, endemic to central Chile.

So I wonder if maybe it'd be possible to grow a fertile Solanum etuberosum x Solanum tuberosum hybrid and cross it with a fertile Solanum etuberosum x Solanum lycopersicum hybrid.

You can apparently produce a graft of one onto the other, and there's apparently another technique to create a combined plant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomato

The pomato (a portmanteau of potato and tomato), also known as a tomtato, is a hybrid plant that is able to grow both tomatoes and potatoes. The most common method of creating a pomato is grafting together a tomato plant and a potato plant, both of which are members of the Solanum genus in the Solanaceae (nightshade) family. Another method is somatically fusing the two plants together.[1] Cherry tomatoes grow on the vine, while white potatoes grow in the soil from the same plant.[2]

The concept of grafting related potatoes and tomatoes so that both are produced on the same plant dates back to at least 1833.[3]

As with all grafts, this plant will not occur in nature and cannot be grown from seed, because the two parts of the plant remain genetically separate, and only rely on each other for nourishment and growth.

The somatic fusion of potato and tomato cells is also possible, though this plant cannot produce fertile seeds. The first such somatic hybrid was bred in 1978.[1][7]

I've never heard of somatic fusion before now.

Grafted pomato plants were launched in the United Kingdom in September 2013 by the horticultural mail-order company Thompson & Morgan, who sold pre-grafted plants branded as the "TomTato". The Incredible Edible nursery in New Zealand announced a "DoubleUP Potato Tom" in the same month.

then why not write modern software like how that was written?

Well, three reasons that come to mind:

First, because it takes more developer time to write efficient software, so some of what developers have done is used new hardware not to get better performance, but cheaper software. If you want really extreme examples, read about the kind of insanity that went into trying to make video games in the first three generations of video game consoles or so, on extremely limited hardware. I'd say that in most cases, this is the dominant factor.

Second, because to a limited degree, the hardware has changed. For example, I was just talking with someone complaining that Counter-Strike 2 didn't perform well on his system. Most systems today have many CPU cores, and heavyweight video games and some other CPU-intensive software will typically seek to take advantage of those. CS2 apparently only makes much use of one or two cores. Go back to 2005, and the ability to saturate more cores was much less useful.

Third, in some cases, functionality is present that you might not immediately appreciate. For example, when I get a higher-resolution display in 2025, text typically doesn't become tiny

instead, it becomes sharper. In 2005, most of it was rendered to pixel dimensions. Go back earlier, and most text wasn't antialiased, and go back further and fonts seen on the screen were mostly just bitmap fonts, not vector. Those jumps generally made text rendering more-compute-expensive, but also made it look nicer. And that's for something as simple as just drawing "hello world" on the screen.

He might be (if he is, we'll have had five impeachments in the history of the United States Presidency, and Trump will be three of them) but I seriously doubt that it will happen before the midterm elections, when the Democrats have a good chance of taking control of the House. She could have just announced that she wasn't running in those.

I was gonna say that he might simply not have been around when Red Alert 2 came out, but

https://www.whitepages.com/name/Samuel-Sott-Axon/Los-Angeles-CA/Pl8a1drMk8b

40s Age Range

So he's gotta be born no later than 1985.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_%26_Conquer:_Red_Alert_2

Release: NA: October 25, 2000

So he couldn't have been younger than 15 at the game's release (and could have been as old as 25).

That being said, that game came out a quarter-century ago, and there are people in the workforce who won't have been born when it was released. Can't just assume any more.

If one takes her justification at face value, it seems odd. Even if she wanted to avoid the primary, she could simply announce that she's not running in the next election. She didn't need to resign to do that.

Still crazy as a shithouse rat and a true beliver of terrible and stupid things.

My understanding from reading past analysis of things she said is that it's safe to say that she hasn't actually believed everything she's said, but saw it as politically-useful to take those positions.

Which I think is something of a sad statement about the voters in her congressional district (in northwestern Georgia, as I recall). But I don't think that it's necessarily that she personally is uniquely crazy.

EDIT: Yeah, Georgia's 14th district, and it's up in the northwest corner of Georgia. I was originally looking it up because I was commenting on the fact that Georgia has had some of the craziest Republican and Democratic House Representatives that have wound up getting national press time and I was curious how far apart their districts were.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia%27s_14th_congressional_district

It looks like her predecessor, Tom Graves, also resigned and left the seat vacant for some time, rather than just announcing that he wouldn't run in the next election.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loaded_question

A loaded question is a form of complex question that contains a controversial assumption (e.g., a presumption of guilt).[1]

Such questions may be used as a rhetorical tool: the question attempts to limit direct replies to be those that serve the questioner's agenda.[2] The traditional example is the question "Have you stopped beating your wife?" Without further clarification, an answer of either yes or no suggests the respondent has beaten their wife at some time in the past. Thus, these facts are presupposed by the question, and in this case an entrapment, because it narrows the respondent to a single answer, and the fallacy of many questions has been committed.

I think that all sensible people know that the Nacho Cheese Doritos are more addictive than the Cool Ranch Doritos.