James and the Giant Corn Genetics: Studying the Source Code of Nature

I was originally going to post this yesterday afternoon, but instead I had a crises with my Linux box which I’ve just now resolved. I’m just lucky I bought so many 500 gig hard drives back in undergrad that I had an unused spare on hand when the Operating System drive in my computer suddenly went bad.

Anyway the point of my post was to draw your attention to the new pictures I’ve put up on Flickr of my expeditions into the world of vegetable buying. Be sure to especially check out the purple cauliflower (because that’s intrinsically cool) and the newest entry in the “name that mystery vegetable” contest:

It was actually a lot of fun. I’ve been to the local farmers market a bunch of times. But it’s very expensive, and they’re openly opposed to people like me:

So on Saturday my roommate took me up to the Monterey Market (which is on Monterey Street, not in the city a couple of hours away) which is just amazing.

My only real disappointment was that I finally found papayas from Hawaii (which is where virus resistant papayas were first introduced as a cure for the papaya ring spot virus that was ravaging the papaya farms) and they were organic. Of course it turns out I could have bought it anyway, as many organic papayas are now “contaminated” with the resistance gene (according to wikipedia) allowing organic cultivation to thrive in areas where the virus would otherwise make it unviable.