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Ongaonga are grown especially as fodder for the NZ admiral butterfly, there's at least one patch hidden in central Auckland for the butterflies.

My guess is a Euphorbia too, that's been cut back maybe to explain the giant tuber/root.

I still have those guys I'll take a photo right now of some plants. But they actually came from a small-scale supplier to certain NZ gardening stores, who had relatives travel to South America and collect seed. Plants from centipede What I think is a Candicans What could also be a Candicans A Chiloensis for good meash A Werdermannius A Taquimbalensis (many of the spines were clipped off to allow it to be moved in a sedan) In light of the spine color, I don't think bit's plant is archetypal Taq or Werd as the new growth is yellow coloured spines, not red coloured. But it does look fairly unique, which I suppose can be expected from how rare these plants tend to be. My new growth spines on the Chiloensis are actually greenish-yellow (the brown is an aging effect). So it's quite possibly another Knize cuzco mutt! >_<

I think it looks most like a Candicans, but that's partially based off my own potentially mis-IDed juvenile plants.

I'd just kinda assumed that I'd have enough magnesium because I make a point of eating green leaves and vegetables fairly often. But I just realized (more strongly than before) that that's irrelevant - it depends entirely on your sodium intake. Too much sodium means you don't have enough magnesium to balance things. I don't get cramps or anything, but I sure as heck eat a lot of sodium.

Well I managed to make the first batch. I did a final re-plan, and guesstimated some ratios, and changed a few on the fly as I was doing it. Here's what I ended up using: Frankincense 3 drops Cinnamon 3 drops Vanilla 3 drops Ylang-ylang 2 drops Elemi 6 drops Tea-tree 2 drops Rosewood 5 drops Grapefruit 3 drops Lime 3 drops Mixed this with a small amount of ethanol (ended up finding a perfumer's alcohol (almost all ethanol, with a token amount of methanol to denature) for a cheap price). It smells amazing in my opinion. However it's a bit too heavy on the cinnamon (it's a really strong scent, had no idea it was this strong though). The vanilla and frankincense are also noticeable sometimes (the vanilla seems to blend in perfectly with the cinnamon). Sometimes I think I can get a sense of the elemi, but not it's direct smell. Otherwise that's about all I can smell. So next time I will increase the top notes by 2 drops each, the middle notes by 2 drops each, and the frankincense and ylang-ylang by one drop each. I realized that as much as I hated ylang-ylang, I kept wanting to smell it - so for this effect alone I put it in. Hahaha. I'd like to have a more cedary/minty/eucalyptusy scent for work, that smells very fresh. Believe it or not this first scent was for work, but it smells like a perfect going-out scent. The method: 1) Have two containers of ethanol as wash vessels (ideally three if you're anal) 2) Get a dripper (squeezy bulb) 3) Open your bottle you will put the cologne into 4) Get the first base note bottle open, and collect a few drips via the dripper (don't suck quick or rashly, or you'll get oil in the bulb, and it will dissolve the rubber and ruin everything by putting rubber in your perfume) 5) Drop the correct amounts of drops into the bottle 6) Close essential oil container 7) Suck up wash alcohol repeatedly from wash vessel #1 until sufficiently clearn, then get as much out as possible. 8) Suck up wash alcohol repeatedly from wash vessel #2 (always use the same order), then get as much out as possible, and dry on tissue. The reason for two vessels is that you get much higher dilution (=removing way more of the last-used essential oil from the dripper) than a single vessel with double the volume. 9) Repeat steps 4-9 for all essential oils necessary 10) Top up the bottle with ethanol - using thrice the volume of essential oil you get perfume grade, and the strength weakens as the dilution increases (obviously). 11) Resist the urge to test the cologne/perfume immediately (I couldn't ) - store the bottle in a dark place. It will age over the next few weeks as the essential oils react and settle down.

DMT is metabolized extremely quickly to almost nothing (the pathways to metabolize serotonin do most of the work). Also from memory there are metabolites of DMT that are in trace quantities in some people's urine anyway. Probably on the order of hours from memory. Mescaline (since it's such a huge quantity) will probably take a lot longer to reduce down to insignificant levels. Probably on the order of a few days for most significant tests. Mushrooms probably in between both, so a few days and it will be undetectable. Again the structure is similar to serotonin, but I think the molecule is a lot more 'sticky' than the DMT molecule, and this increases the time to eliminate it. I'll try and check at some point. Are the trials known in advance? Are the tests the piss on the strip tests, or sent to the lab tests? Or both? NOT MEDICAL ADVICE - JUST OPINION.

I've noticed something similar with my SS02 x Bridgesii seedlings. The few I have seem to be bimodally distributed. The first is basically just what appears to be a normal bridgesii, albeit with impressive spines. The second is almost like a Pachanoi/Peruvianus - very small spines, usually not as blue, and with somewhat of a sinuous rib margin. I don't have a big sample size, so I'd be interested to see more plants. I should take photos. I wish I was more organized. :S

Today I bought 8 bits of wood (for the corners; I'll use some leftover decking timber for the rest of it) from the lumber yard / timber merchant (I prefer the sound of timber merchant), for my big potting mix bin. The dimensions will be about 1.2m wide, 0.8m deep and the height will start off at ~0.7m (but could go up to 1.2m high if I was psycho enough). It'll go under the house, so the potting mix will remain dry. Now that I think about it, I should probably attach some plastic to the inside of it to stop the potting mix from contacting the wood too much, even though it'll be dry. Once that's done (probably a few weeks away), I can buy potting mix ingredients by the trailerload (no more expensive bags for me), and then I can pot all my seedlings into 2.5L pots. Then once they have grown nice and big, they can be for sale. Now I need to find/buy some g-clamps, and then I can drill and screw together the corners, and then I just need to cut the decking timber to length, and using trusty clamps - drill and screw these into place too. Part of the slats on the front will be removable (cheers Nemisty for the suggestion), to make access easy for when the level gets low.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minced_oath#Examples Bahahahahaha! XD I don't know why I found this so funny, maybe it was because I was saying them in my head: mother-father, melon-farmer, monkey-fighter, mussel-shucker, muzzafuzza, fuhther-mucker, mothertrucker, mothersucker motherlover, mofo, mother effer

The biggest thing we can do now, is to preserve exactly existing data, and not corrupt it further. It's emphatically useless to give a South American location name to a plant you got from the garden centre. Record which garden centre it came from, but don't trade it saying that you IDed it as 'Rimac' from how it looks. There's no shame in not knowing the exact ancestral history of a clone - in fact it's preferable than a false one. Here's my approach to taxonomy: If any of you guys know anything about maths, you'll know that if you have a N dimensions of Reals, then there are spanning vectors that can span the entire space. For example, if you have 2d space, the vectors x:= (1,0) & y:= (0,1) in any linear combination are enough to span the space. This is a cartesian grid. A linear combination that spans the space means you if you have a*x + b*y, then there exists a choice of a and b that add up to any point on the cartesian grid. So you can pick a point, and there exists a single combination of a and b that specify that point. The vectors x1:= (1,0) x2:= (2,0) are not enough to space 2d space. In linear combination, they can make any point on a vertical line from the origin, but nothing else. They are not a spanning set of vectors (of 2d space). What on Earth does this have to do with cacti? -Just hold up a bit more. So there's another way (among infinity more) to map 2d space. It's called an isometric grid: Here, there are three vectors. They are (the names don't matter): y:= (0,1) - the lines going straight up, u:= (-cos(30),sin(30)) - the lines going to the top left, and v:= (cos(30),sin(30)) - the lines going to the top right. If the numbers don't mean anything then don't worry. Just look at the picture. Now the entire point of this excursion into maths is to notice that if you pick any point on this grid, there's multiple ways to get there. If you just pick the point straight above the one you start at, there's two unique ways to get there (if you allow for combinations of each of the vector y's to sum up to one y, u's to sum up to one u and v to sum up to one v) which are: 1) Take a vector y (go straight up one) 2) Take a vector u and v (go left-up and right up [in any order]) So the key thing to notice from this isometric grid, is there is not just a single way to get to a certain point. What we've actually found out, is that there are redundant vectors. The vector y can be made by any combination of u and v. We can remove it, and still get to any point on the grid with just u and v. What about the cacti? -Almost there So the space we are interested in, is the space of all possible Trichocereus. The spanning vectors we have chosen are the species of Trichocereus (Peruvianus, Pachanoi, Bridgesii, Scopulicola, Terscheckii, etc). So what originally was thought, is that we thought we had a cartesian grid (in a higher dimension) and the species were basis vectors - this implied than any particular Trichocereus hybrid could be made by only one single combination of parents. But, as we are beginning to find out, the "Trichocereus space" is not quite like this, the peruvianus and pachanoi are a lot more similar to eachother than first thought (this implies they're almost parallel lines in some dimensioned space). This further implies that a particular hybrid could theoretically be made by many different combinations of the original species identified. So what does this mean? It means that it is still possible to cover the entire space (= make any hybrid) using the original species (if they were indeed a spanning set), it's just there are more than one ways to get there (= make a hybrid). If there are multiple ways of getting somewhere, it's better to choose one, rather than to give up entirely. So what I'm sort of alluding to, is that we can understand hybrids in terms of the archetypal species we have identified even if they are not perfect (i.e. the set of species is redundant, that even if peruvianus and scop could make a bridgesii (a la the vectors u and v make y, making y redundant)) we can still use them to understand the hybrids in terms of them.

In my own experience (we all seem to frame experiences in our own language), mushrooms create a strong immune response. I'm unsure if it's the psilocybin, or the fruiting body itself - but one or both seems to ramp up my immune system heavily, and misdirects its energy away from the usual defence (your immune system is working constantly to stop rogue bacteria [by number, you are made up of 91% bacteria] and keep you alive, it's not 'activated' once a blue moon when you get a cold). In the ensuing confusion, existing bacteria are left unchecked, and can do almost what they like for a few hours (On many occasions I've noticed my teeth feel under siege from plaque, my existing wounds are rapidly infected and more painful, as well as my skin becoming puffy, and my joints feel weird too). This effect is most strong from mushrooms, probably absent from LSD (from memory), and probably quite a lot weaker with cacti if it was there at all. I cannot prove this is exactly what's happening (I would need to research how to measure immune system activity), but I think it could be proved/disproved if one had the means. My guess is that your immune system as well as general metabolism needs to be strengthened, which you seem to agree to as well. I think that's your only problem. Luckily the body is insanely good at healing itself, and the mind is pretty good too.

http://educlera.blogspot.co.nz/2011/09/bryophyta-hepaticae-jungermanniales.html Possibly the densest wall of text I've ever forced myself to read in a while, but actually got some good knowledge out of it. Sexual reproduction might actually be an option after reading this page. The spores take months to develop for this related species (thought it would be a lot shorter), but the spores contain chlorophyll and begin growing as soon as they are released. If this is the case, then preparing a spore solution and then inoculating a growing media could give excellent results in the long term. I had discounted spores because I thought they were quite difficult to grow from plants (I have fuzzy memories of collecting fern spores when I was a wee lad... certainly don't remember getting any ferns growing from that way).

To play the devil's lawyer: There are other bases implicated in these conspiracies, and even if all the information was supposedly declassified - is that any more trustworthy than the same government denying the vast global spying network? Secondly, lack of evidence does not preclude its existence, although it certainly does reduce its possibility from this vantage point in time. There's also orders of magnitudes more money in military and "national security" than alien and conspiracy theories. If I had more time, I'd like to know how the scientific development of 'memory alloys' happened. This was one of the technologies that supposedly aliens came up with, and one that would be relatively easy to reverse engineer. <checks> Hehe - "I'm just going to randomly whip out my lighter and burn this piece of metal at a meeting full of my fellow bigwigs, don't mind me". ;)

The question itself is incompletely-defined. Excluded in the original post, are further rules to define the mathematics at hand (there are probably infinite mathematic rulesets). Is the set of numbers being constructed cyclic, or unbounded? If they're cyclic, then it's a simple matter to show that the cyclic group of numbers with modulus 2.5, and the construction N(n+1) = N(n) + 1 leads to a number between 0 and 1. 1, 2, 0.5 (=3 - 2.5) This is not a contrived example, as much as it may seem. We use this type of modular arithmetic to tell the time. Once a time reaches 11:59, it wraps around to 0 again (0 being denoted by the number 12). Now let's assume that we're not using a cyclic group - the group is unbounded. Then in this case, perhaps with a few additional rules (such as to define the notion of 'betweenness'), it is possible to prove there is no natural number between 0 and 1. Making a slapdash definition of betweeness as "A number X is between two other numbers Y and Z, if it greater than only one of Y and Z, and smaller than only the other". X is smaller than Y if X-Y is negative, and X is greater than Y if X-Y is positive. Going by a mathematical induction route: n = 2 2 - 1 = 1 => 2 is greater than one, 2 is not less than one 2 - 0 = 2 => 2 is greater than zero, 2 is not less than zero Thus 2 is not between 0 and 1. Assume that this is true for all positive n. Let's try and prove it for n + 1 n + 1 - 1 = n => n + 1 is greater than one, n + 1 is not less than one (as the remainder is n, and n is positive by definition) n + 1 - 0 = n + 1 => n + 1 is greater than zero, n + 1 is not less than zero (as the remainder is n + 1, and it can be shown that n + 1 is positive too, due to the set being unbounded) Thus for all positive integers >= 2, none are between 0 and 1. It can be shown in a similar manner that going to negative numbers will not provide a solution either. So it we can then prove that the set of integers is all the numbers there are in such a system, then we have proved that there is no number between 0 and 1, in this particular system. I think it can be proven that the integers are all the numbers there are with a few more axioms that are usually implicit anyway. So in short, it is the rules of the particular mathematic that determine whether such a question is true or not. There is no one mathematics, but a possibly infinite set of mathematical rulesets, some of which will contain a number between 0 and 1, and others which will not. It is similar to asking "does there exist a penis between the legs of humans" - for some humans it will be true, and for others it will not - we can't provide a binary answer to the question without further specifications.

<takes photo> (About 2/3 of these are zelly's crosses, and 1/3 nitrogen's crosses). Can't remember exactly when I sowed these guys, but probably in Jan/Feb I should think. Mine seem fairly spiny - they're growing in a windowsill that's north-west facing, so probably just the more sun doing that. I'm wondering what I'll do with all these bazillions of seedlings as they get bigger...

Just a text update for now. The seed which I planted is growing pretty well. Some better than others. I prefer to grow conventionally (isn't growing cacti meant to teach one the art of patience anyway? ). Traits are starting to show (the Psycho0 x has long spines already), but so far no mutants (maybe my style of growing, which is to acclimate them to no humidity as soon as possible, picks them off relatively early on?). Once the cold nights are over, then the spring fertilization will begin, and they will get pumped and hopefully they'll be a few centimetres big by the beginning of Autumn. At which point traits are beginning to become apparent.