Radishrain

Things pertaining to life: plants and animals, gardening, cooking, food, botany, zoology, farming, ranching, wildlife, genetics, plant breeding, software, media, etc.

Changes

by Radishrain @ in Announcements

• I got rid of the domain name that I was using. So, we're back to full Nabble URLs.
• I changed the site name to Radishrain.
• I merged and deleted a lot of stuff.
• The HymnWiki forum is closer to the top.
• The site's pretty much a blog, now.

When can who get the updated COVID-19 boosters (in the USA)?

by Radishrain @ in Life

So, I've been in the dark about whether/when second boosters would come out and be available to the public (especially for free) for a while now. It's kind of hard to find information about it, even when you're specifically looking for it.

However, I have the answer for you, so fear not. Apparently, the updated boosters are already out! They have been since late August. They're for Omicron BA.5, and some other variant (not just the original Omicron). Why have I not heard about this? Probably because I got so tired of waiting for the second boosters to be available for my age-group that I stopped checking for information as often (and because there doesn't seem to be all that much news about it).

The spiritual pandemic

by Radishrain @ in Life

https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/1993/10/combatting-spiritual-drift-our-global-pandemic?lang=eng

This religious address by Russell M. Nelson, from 1993, is fascinating, in light of the current physical and spiritual situations.

religious_

Forum colors inverted

by Radishrain @ in Announcements

I made the forum colors white on black instead of the opposite, today—because I invert my colors, and I have to uninvert them every time I go to my site for it to be dark. I figure other people might have the same problem.

Getting newer Bluetooth adapters to work for Linux

by Radishrain @ in Software

https://medium.com/nerd-for-tech/how-to-install-unsupported-bluetooth-5-0-dongle-on-linux-4bf34aa99fed

The above link might be insightful in getting newer adapters to work for Linux.

Be careful when picking an adapter--not just because they're not all advertised for Linux use, but because some of them aren't particularly for computers; they're just for transmitting/receiving audio from 3.5mm audio jacks and stuff. Even some of the ones with male USB ports on seem to be like that. Try searching for one with no buttons that works with a mouse or keyboard, or try searching for one that is integrated with a Wi-Fi card.

I ordered one of the day I wrote this post (I'm editing the next day), which has the same chipset mentioned in that link. My computer (which currently has Xubuntu 22.04.1 on it) appears to already have the driver for that chipset, however (that's why I ordered this particular device); it uses Bluetooth 5.1. Here's a link to the product:

https://www.walmart.com/ip/USB-Bluetooth-5-1-Adapter-Bluetooth-USB-Transmitter-Speakers-Keyboard-Mouse-Printer-Receiver-for-PC-Win-7-8-10-11/1425764465

I'm hoping to let you know if it works.

If the links are broken, check them on archive.org.

Python list comprehensions

by Radishrain @ in Software

https://docs.python.org/3.10/tutorial/datastructures.html

Here's a link where it talks about list comprehensions.

List comprehensions are when you do such as `myList=[v+2 for v in anotherList]`. What this does is make `myList` equal to a new list wherein every item of `anotherList` has been incremented by two.

List comprehensions must be contained within a list, a set, or some such, or Python won't recognize the syntax.

You can replace `anotherList` with such as `range(5)`. However, ranges seem to be special in that the first item of the newly created list will be 0 instead of 2 (if you did `[v+2 for v in range(5)]`; I suppose that's for convenience, since that's probably what people want.

The first part, (where I put `v+2` in the initial example) doesn't actually need to include `v` (it can be something like 55); no, you can't assign values in that place; so, this is invalid: `[v+=2 for v in range(5)]`.

What list comprehensions do is iterate through the loop (`for v in anotherList`) much as usual, and then assign the value placed before it to each iteration (so, `[55 for v in anotherList]` will just replace every value (in the new list) with `55`.

If this whole list comprehension thing seems strange to you, apparently it's very much like something done in mathematics. So, that's probably why they do it like this in Python. However, I found it to be very confusing for many years, personally, and just wished people would write out the full thing. Speaking of that, here's what the full thing looks like (for `myList=[v+2 for v in anotherList]`):

v=0
myList=[]
for v in anotherList:
    myList.append(v+2)
del v #Either that, or the scope of v just ends

Anyway, for me, for a long time, it seemed a rarely enough used feature that when I needed to remember what it did, I had forgotten (and I didn't remember they were called list comprehensions to look them up). However, just about everyone else who programmed in Python did it a lot; so, it was kind of frustrating. I considered it a short way of obfuscating code for programmers of other languages.

Oh, just for the record, you can use strings, and probably other stuff instead of integers:

>>> l=["hello", "Earth is a"]
>>>[s+" world" for s in l]
['hello world', 'Earth is a world']

Tales of trying to update Python3 on Xubuntu

by Radishrain @ in Software

Today, I learned the hard way that it really isn't a good idea to type the following, and say yes to the prompt that follows without paying much attention to what it says it's going to uninstall along with it (I knew better, a lot better, but I was irritated, and was in a risk-taking mood):

sudo apt-get remove python3

Apparently, it'll uninstall basically your whole computer, and take a long time doing it (and it won't let you stop it so you can collect your losses with ctrl+c; even if you close the terminal window, it still keeps on doing it, somehow keeping the resource lock on the package manager--and then if you manually turn your computer off and turn it on again, somehow XFCE has been replaced with Kodi, and there's no way to change it). At least it lets you log in (to Kodi) with different users, though.

Anyway, so, as a result of that, I'm downloading the latest version of Xubuntu (I had an older version anyway--hence trying to update my Python version--so . . .)

And the next time I compile the latest Python version, I'm not planning to do a sudo make install unless I make it rename the command to something besides python3. Yikes. I figured there'd be an option on update-alternatives --config python3 where I could change it back to the old one before it did much damage (but nope--the old one was just plain gone). So, that's why I uninstalled python3 (because I was just going to reinstall it to see if it put the command back).

At least I got to eat some good pizza while all this was going on.

Fascinating stuff about viruses

by Radishrain @ in Life

https://medium.com/medical-myths-and-models/the-human-genome-is-full-of-viruses-c18ba52ac195

This link has some cool stuff to say about viruses.

Hallmark movies with clean language

by Radishrain @ in Movie

Tomatoes and skin cancer

by Radishrain @ in Life

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5506060/

This talks about how consuming tomatoes reduces indicence of tumors from a certain kind of skin cancer, or some such. They only tested red and tangerine tomatoes (tangerine is a color gene for one of the orange kinds of tomatoes, which is high in tetra-cis lycopene; the other kind of orange tomato is high in beta carotene).

It says red tomatoes were more effective than controls, but it says that tangerine tomatoes caused significantly more lycopene to be absorbed into the skin than red tomatoes. Here's what it says about red tomatoes:

"Tumor number was significantly lower in male mice consuming red tomato diets (1.73 ± 0.50, P = 0.015) or pooled tomato diets (2.03 ± 0.45, P = 0.017) compared to controls (4.04 ± 0.65)."

It doesn't mention how the results varied between red and tangerine tomatoes, with regard to tumors, but it did mention the fact that tangerine tomatoes caused more lycopene to be accumulated in the skin.

It did not directly say how tangerine tomatoes compared to controls. However, it inferred that they had tumor-suppressive properties (but not to what degree).

Some tomatoes high in tetra-cis lycopene include Olga's Yellow Chicken Egg, and Moonglow, among others.

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