We never plant them, but they come up everywhere, particularly under the redwoods. If we like where they are, we let them be. If not... well nasturtium blossoms are tasty in a salad.

I liked this one in particular both because of its will to live, even in a bucket of rocks, and because it looks like it has teeth.

Thanks for looking, Dixiegirl.

Language changes. Ask any linguist. We may appreciate the changes or bemoan them and it makes no difference. We can teach 'correct' grammar in school, but it won't reflect how people actually use the language. The French have an Academy to preserver the 'purity' of the French language, but it doesn't work. Language is what it is.

In linguistics, a distinction is made between prescriptive grammars and descriptive ones. Prescriptive grammars are the ones we learned in school (or not). Someone who has been set up as an authority tells us how we should use the language. Descriptive grammars tell us how people actually use the language. They can be very different.

Sometimes it is a vocabulary change. Enormity used to mean something egregiously bad. Now it just means something that is enormous.

Sometimes the change is more fundamental. Over the last thirty or forty years, adverbs are increasingly being replaced by adjectives. Something is real bad, instead of really bad.

You can like or dislike the changes, but they will happen anyway.

Or, "People be like sheeps"

Thanks, Greg.

You can't get much lower nitrogen than a bucket of rocks, so this thing should be bursting with flowers! Thanks for looking.

Last fall as I was doing garden clean-up, I filled a five-gallon pail with stones and similar debris. That section of the garden was a rubbish heap in the distant past, so we find a lot of bits of glass, ceramics, old marbles, and unidentifiable rusty bits. Anyway, I put the pail to one side instead of disposing of its contents, and there it has sat ever since. I came across it the other day and a nasturtium has volunteered in the bucket. What it found to live on, I'll never know. Anyway, here it is.

(Download)

Language always changes, and rarely in rational ways. When I was young, those who didn't get it were square. Now, when I bemoan the abuse of language I hear, I realize I'm getting old.

The first one is stunning. Absolutely outstanding.

I get a flu shot every year, because immunity to a flu does not last all year. The flu shot (a vaccine) gives me that immunity (at least, to those strains included in the shot) for the coming flu season.

There are coronoviruses (virii?) where immunity lasts a very short period. The common cold is one of them. A vaccine, if developed, wouldn't get you through the cold season.

No one yet knows how long the immunity conferred by Covid-19 will last. It's a close relative to SARS, so there is some hope it will be permanent. In that case a vaccine, once developed, would be needed once. But it might be like the flu, and be needed periodically. People's best guess today is that it will likely last longer than the cold, but no one yet knows for sure.

If it's like polio or SARS, or even the flu, a vaccine is possible and useful. If it's like the common cold, we're in deep doo-doo.

There are reports of a small number of people who appear to have become reinfected with Covid-19 after having been cleared of it. We don't know enough to evaluate this group, but there may be several possibilities, any or all of which may apply:
- It could be a testing failure. Tests, properly conducted, may have false positives and false negatives. And human error could mean that some individual tests weren't valid at all.
- It could be you need a minimum viral load to develop immunity. It is worth noting that those who appear reinfected also seem to have had light or asymptomatic cases. But the sample size it too small to know if that will hold true over time.
- Some individuals may not develop immunity as readily as others. As a personal example, my brother had measles three times as a boy. Most of us got it once and developed an immunity, but he did not.

You can download CR2 codecs for free from M$

It was a novel, but it was about a real event in the nineteen forties.

A great read is "The Coming Plague." There will be more pandemics, and we are lucky this one is relatively mild.

When AF is on, your camera will give you a signal when it's focused. My Canon XSi, older than yours by a fair bit, has boxes that light up around the focal points and an audible beep when focus is attained. It may be possible to turn them on and off in the menu somewhere, so you can check for that. Watch for those signals, and if you don't get them, you can check your focus settings on the spot. My eyes are bad enough I almost always use AF, but occasionally use MF for something particular. When I don't hear my beep, I know something is up.

Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose

Thanks, Swamp-Cork