5 (More) Ways to Make Cut Flowers Last

If you’ve been reading Apartment Therapy for a while, you know we’re big advocates of keeping fresh flowers in your home. Here are few more tips for making them last, whether they’re freshly picked or a favorite flower that you buy all the time.
4.  If you have a favorite flower you use often, look online for a flower-specific tips. For example, hydrangeas last longer if you gently smash the end of each stem and immerse them in ice water before arranging. Hollow-stemmed flowers like delphiniums do well if you turn the flowers upside down, fill the stems with water, and seal them with a wet cotton ball before arranging. Poppies, and other flowers that ooze sap, last longer if you first immerse the bottom 2 inches of their stems in boiling water for 10 seconds.  

wow. that is way more effort than I will EVER make, but it’s kinda interesting.

Peggy Olson, former secretary/creative underling/protege to Draper and Pete Campbell, former account underling/current partner to Draper have in their own way become something of Don Draper horcruxes. Part of Don’s soul is in each of them, though it hasn’t really manifested itself fully in either. I’m not saying to kill Peggy and Pete would bring you one step closer to killing Don (but there’s some Fan Fiction in there somewhere).

The Two Dons by Jordan Rabinowitz

also

“Each is under the illusion they are on their way towards Donphoria (could Trudi’s dismissal of Pete and their marriage as he knew it push him even closer to Don-like happiness?), but the joke — the long-con — is squarely on them: There is no happiness in being Don Draper.”

 

jtotheizzoe:

Meet Ronan, a 3-year-old sea lion that loves disco and the Backstreet Boys, and is the first non-human mammal able to keep the beat to music. 

Previously, birds like parrots (like this parrot, and this parrot, and this parrot, and these parrots) were the prime head-bobbers of nature. And it’s not tied to vocals, like the way that parrots mimic human speech (since sea lions don’t do that). It seems like rhythm is a natural part of biology.

So next time you move, feel the beat in your evolution, man.

(via The Two-Way : NPR)

Excellent follow up for my day at the Prospect Park Zoo.

thereconstructionists: English mathematician and writer Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (December 10, 1815–November 27, 1852), born Augusta Ada Byron as the only legitimate child to the poet Lord Byron and better-known as Ada Lovelace, is commonly considered the world’s first computer programmer — a title she earned by writing the very first algorithm designed to be processed by a machine during her work on Charles Babbage’s seminal Analytical Engine, the early theoretical general-purpose computer that laid the foundation of modern computing. Abandoned by her father when she was barely a few months old and half-orphaned by Lord Byron’s death when Ada was only eight, Lovelace was led to mathematics and logic by her mother, who saw these strictly rational disciplines as an antidote to the madness she feared Ada had inherited from her father. But even as Lovelace came to indulge her mathematical mind, she insisted on referring to herself as a “poetical scientist.” Still in her twenties, she was enlisted by Babbage in translating Italian mathematician Louis Menebrea’s memoir of the Analytical Engine, originally published in French. It was in the elaborate notes on the book, which she penned during a nine-month period in 1842-1843, that Lovelace wrote the algorithm which staked out her corner of history. Lovelace was in many ways a rebel of her era: Though she and her mother inhabited the upper echelons of London society, women’s participation in intellectual affairs was both uncommon and discouraged. Even among the gentlemen who pursued such disciplines as geology, astronomy, and botany, there were no professional scientists per se — in fact, the very word “scientist” didn’t exist until William Whewell coined it in 1836. And yet Lovelace, a woman, was very much a scientist — in addition to being the mother of three children — and an intellectual peer of Babbage’s. But besides a pioneer of computer science, Lovelace, whose eclectic interests spanned from music to mesmerism, was also in a way one of the world’s first neuroscientists — at least a theoretical one. In 1844, she grew intensely interested in creating “a calculus of the nervous system,” confiding in her friend Woronzow Greig a desire to develop a mathematical model for consciousness that would explain how nerve signals give rise to thoughts and feelings in the brain. But, largely due to her mother’s instilled admonitions about Ada’s inherited capacity for madness, she eventually abandoned the quest. Lovelace died of uterine cancer, after a short battle terribly managed by her physicians, two weeks short of her thirty-seventh birthday. She is commemorated with one of London’s famous blue plates, located at St. James’s Square and inscribed “Ada Countess of Lovelace 1815-1852 Pioneer of Computing lived here.” Her contribution to modern life is imprinted on every interaction we have with a machine on any given day. Learn more: Wikipedia | The Bride of Science (2000 biography) The more you know…
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thereconstructionists:

English mathematician and writer Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (December 10, 1815–November 27, 1852), born Augusta Ada Byron as the only legitimate child to the poet Lord Byron and better-known as Ada Lovelace, is commonly considered the world’s first computer programmer — a title she earned by writing the very first algorithm designed to be processed by a machine during her work on Charles Babbage’s seminal Analytical Engine, the early theoretical general-purpose computer that laid the foundation of modern computing.

Abandoned by her father when she was barely a few months old and half-orphaned by Lord Byron’s death when Ada was only eight, Lovelace was led to mathematics and logic by her mother, who saw these strictly rational disciplines as an antidote to the madness she feared Ada had inherited from her father. But even as Lovelace came to indulge her mathematical mind, she insisted on referring to herself as a “poetical scientist.”

Still in her twenties, she was enlisted by Babbage in translating Italian mathematician Louis Menebrea’s memoir of the Analytical Engine, originally published in French. It was in the elaborate notes on the book, which she penned during a nine-month period in 1842-1843, that Lovelace wrote the algorithm which staked out her corner of history.

Lovelace was in many ways a rebel of her era: Though she and her mother inhabited the upper echelons of London society, women’s participation in intellectual affairs was both uncommon and discouraged. Even among the gentlemen who pursued such disciplines as geology, astronomy, and botany, there were no professional scientists per se — in fact, the very word “scientist” didn’t exist until William Whewell coined it in 1836. And yet Lovelace, a woman, was very much a scientist — in addition to being the mother of three children — and an intellectual peer of Babbage’s.

But besides a pioneer of computer science, Lovelace, whose eclectic interests spanned from music to mesmerism, was also in a way one of the world’s first neuroscientists — at least a theoretical one. In 1844, she grew intensely interested in creating “a calculus of the nervous system,” confiding in her friend Woronzow Greig a desire to develop a mathematical model for consciousness that would explain how nerve signals give rise to thoughts and feelings in the brain. But, largely due to her mother’s instilled admonitions about Ada’s inherited capacity for madness, she eventually abandoned the quest.

Lovelace died of uterine cancer, after a short battle terribly managed by her physicians, two weeks short of her thirty-seventh birthday. She is commemorated with one of London’s famous blue plates, located at St. James’s Square and inscribed “Ada Countess of Lovelace 1815-1852 Pioneer of Computing lived here.” Her contribution to modern life is imprinted on every interaction we have with a machine on any given day.

Learn more: Wikipedia | The Bride of Science (2000 biography)

The more you know…

This apple cake is the only Passover dessert my mom will let me make.

Ever since I made it a few years ago, she requests it, and basically forbids me from making anything else. I can’t deny that it’s really great and that previously, I had some Passover dessert missteps.

Via Arthur Schwartz, who I grew up listening to on the radio.