Did you know potatoes and tomatoes are in the same genus? It’s called solanum.

After my carbon sequestering potato plants flowered they produced a fruit that looked like a little tomato.

I had noticed similarities between potato and tomato plants before, but here is another one I had hitherto not seen.

This is what the pedia says about potato fruit:

After potato plants flower, some varieties will produce small green fruits that resemble green cherry tomatoes, each containing up to 300 true seeds.

[...]

Potato fruit contains large amounts of the toxic alkaloid solanine, and is therefore unsuitable for consumption.

Also, I learned that the UN declared this year, 2008, the International Year of the Potato (rice year was 2004).

• Unexpected flowers 15 April 2008

I was at the super store on Wednesday. And went to the drink aisle. What did I find?

No mauby.

Disappointing. What is their problem?

Yeah, that is peardrax in the background.

• Superstore carries Mauby 28 Aug 2007

Facebook now let’s you view the prevalence of words used in wall posts over time and compare them. They call it “lexicon.”

It is like Google trends but for personal public messages. It is more interesting in many ways beacuse it is about the words used in txt interactions between people and not just search words, which are interesting for other reasons.

I tried a few out and found this one. Where I compared happy and day. With spikes at the appropriate holidays.

The one thing that puzzled me was the drop in happys. Eventually I figured it out.

Who searches for Waterloo? — Iran, HK 22 Jun 2006