1)     Apples as we know them today were first domesticated in Central Asia.  These, and other apple cultivars, started as small crabapples, and had to be selectively bred via grafting rootstocks.  Apples were spread out of Central Asia to Europe no less than 5500 years ago, but apple breeding didn't become popular until only a few hundred years ago.

2)     Modern apple breeding/domestication starts with a set of cultivars and then selectively breeds for favorable traits, such as flavor, disease resistance, drought tolerance, etc.

3)     Uncertainty in the scientific method forces large sample sizes, many attempts, countless mistakes, and much more upon us.  Without it, we'd only have to do stuff once, ever, to know if and how it worked.

1)     Rule 5, chosen because I've heard it before and already try to implement it; Rule 6, chosen because there are too many edge cases for it to work well; Rule 10, because Beyond Burgers; Rule 35, because I have good memories of eating things I've found (and a friend more versed in these things has identified) on hikes; and Rule 59, because I'm currently in isolation.

2)     I learned how much effort eating healthily would take, and how unhealthily I eat.

3)     The author says that he isn't "ready to let [nutritional scientists] operate on [him]" yet, by which he appears to mean that they can't fully be trusted.  While I do believe that nobody in the world can be fully trusted, I feel that he doesn't give them enough credit.

And Rule 61 has a typo.

Sorry about the (very) late response; scanner probs.

This is a wild potato plant, which has tiny bulbs of farnesene on it, to pretend to be an aphid in distress so it doesn't get eaten.

To even the scales from last week, I'm posting this over 6 hours before the deadline!

While I don't usually love long lectures, I felt that Rem Koolhaas did a good job of keeping things interesting.  I was aware that things like the Tesla Gigafactory were being built in more rural areas, but I was quite taken aback by the sheer scale of other companies' presences in that area.  It makes some sense, given that Nevada is a tax haven, but I'd've guessed they'd be closer to Vegas.

I was also surprised to learn that foreign populations inhabited the countryside so much more so than just those people with second homes there.

According to the lecturer, creative architecture is being increasingly incorporated into cities, leaving less in the countryside and leaving it very Cartesian.

1)  The podcast was pretty good.  I didn't love the cutaways-of-sorts, especially the one with the recipes.  I liked how it was split into the early and late trade eras.

2)  In the early trade, the Jews and Arabians were able to reap huge profits by completely hiding their suppliers from the Europeans.  In the late trade, a sad accident led to Europeans finding "New World Spices", such as chili, and, as part of a long series of events, the Dutch losing a little island near the New Jersey coast.

3)  I feel that the contemporary significance of this, or at least part of it, is to show how history could change based on just one decision, made by just one or a few people.  This is especially apparent in the case of the Chinese not expanding on what could have been a sizable lead in the spice race, and in the Europeans massacring and conquering what could have blossomed into world powers.

And, ya know, that island near New Jersey.