How on earth would you feed a city of over 200,000 people when the land around you was a swampy lake? Seems like an impossible task, but the Aztec managed it by creating floating gardens known as chinampas, then they farmed them intensively.
These ingenious creations were built up from the lake bed by piling layers of mud, decaying vegetation and reeds. This was a great way of recycling waste from the capital city Tenochtitlan. Each garden was framed and held together by wooden poles bound by reeds and then anchored to the lake floor with finely pruned willow trees. The Aztecs also dredged mud from the base of the canals which both kept the waterways clear and rejuvenate the nutrient levels in the gardens.
A variety of crops were grown, most commonly maize or corn, beans, chillies, squash, tomatoes, edible greens such as quelite and amaranth. Colourful flowers were also grown, essential produce for religious festivals and ceremonies. Each plot was systematically planned, the effective use of seedbeds allowed continuous planting and harvesting of crops.
Between each garden was a canal which enabled canoe transport. Fish and birds populated the water and were an additional source of food. [x]
This is literally so cool. Not only does it contribute to spacial efficiency, but the canals would easily keep pests, weeds, and possibly even diseases out of the respective plots. Companion planting and bio-intensive planting would be so much easier. Water-wise systems would be inherently present. Plus it looks so super neat aesthetically. I am just all about this.
Indigenous civilizations invented sustainable development way before there was a term for it.
How to hack any hospital computer (L337 version for advanced security systems)
-Use the password taped to the back of the monitor
As a computer guy: This is what happens when you have too much security. It reaches a tipping point and then suddenly you have none.
Security at the cost of convenience comes at the cost of security.
This is true of so many things in healthcare. Example: our software is designed to automatically alert the doctor if a patient’s vital signs are critically out of range. If someone has a blood pressure of 200/130, the doc gets a pop-up box that they have to acknowledge before doing anything else. It makes sense, in our setting.
But then some mega-genius upstairs realized something: the system was only alerting for critical vital signs, but not for all vital signs that could possibly be bad. Like, yeah, 200/130 is potentially life-threatening, but 130/90 is above ideal and can have negative effects on health. Should the doctors be allowed to just ignore something that could negatively affect a patient’s health? Heavens no!
So now the system generates a pop-up for any vital signs that are even slightly abnormal. A pressure of 120/80 (once considered textbook normal, now considered slightly high) will create the pop-up. We have increased our vigilance!
Well, no, what we’ve actually done is train doctors to click through a constant bombardment of pop-ups without looking. We’ve destroyed their vigilance and made it much easier for them to accidentally skim past life-threatening vital signs.
But you can’t tell that to management, because you’d have to confess that you are a flawed human with limited attention resources. They’d tell you “well, all the other doctors take every abnormal vital sign seriously, it sounds like you’re being negligent.” And if you’re smart, you back down before you start telling the big boss all about your habit of ignoring critical safety alerts.
The end result is exactly the same as if we had no alerts at all, except with more annoying clicking.
Seems a new trend this year is various towns making it officially illegal, with possible fines or jail time, for kids over twelve years old to go Trick-or-Treating.
First of all you can’t tell by looking if a given kid is exactly twelve and under. They can be anywhere from ten to fifteen and look alike.
Second, why do I suspect that this just gives people a new excuse to call the cops on kids they “don’t like the look of”
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