In the broadest sense, according to the dictionary, the term vegetable is used to define anything living that isnât animal or mineral â think the vegetable kingdom (which is another term for plant kingdom).
If you ask a cook, a vegetable is also a term used to define the parts of the plant that we eatâ the plant matter on our plates such as salad, braised greens, carrots or potatoes.
But if you ask a botanist, theyâll tell you thereâs no such thing as a vegetable. âThe term vegetable has no meaning in botany,â Amy Litt, director of plant genomics and Cullman curator at The New York Botanical Garden explained to LiveScience.
Why? Because from a biological standpoint, what we call vegetables are really just parts of plants. So botanists just call them by their parts. Asparagus is the stalk of a plant. Broccoli is the flower of a plant. Kale is the leaves of a plant. Onions are the bulb of a plant. Carrots are the root of a plant. Tomatoes are the fruit of a plant.
Linkage
Things Katy is reading.
Botanists Say There's No Such Thing As Vegetables, And We're Shook
in HuffPostWorld Bank Open Data
for World BankThis site is designed to make World Bank data easy to find, download, and use. All of the data found here can be used free of charge with minimal restrictions.
World Bank Group Data Catalog
for World BankThe Data Catalog is designed to make World Bank's development data easy to find, download, use, and share. It includes data from the World Bank's microdata, finances and energy data platforms, as well as datasets from the open data catalog. There are different ways to access and download datasets.
TransWorldExpress
Every fascist movement needs a group of people to blame all the bad things in the world on. Obviously, this is a highly dangerous situation to said people, and they might need to flee the country. This is a small project trying to help them within the bounds of what we can do.
Dumping open source for proprietary rarely pays off: Better to stick a fork in it
in ZDNetAt the UK's State of Open conference, Dawn Foster, director of data science for the CHAOSS Project, unveiled compelling evidence that forks -- community-driven alternatives to proprietary codebases -- are thriving. At the same time, companies that abandoned open-source principles face stagnant growth and disillusioned users.
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At the event in London, James Governor, RedMonk's co-founder, said: "There is neither a share price rise for public companies nor revenue gains. There's no clear, 'Oh, we relicensed and got a hockey stick.' So, I think that if businesses are making these decisions, the expectation is that relicensing will be the special source that takes it to the next level. The numbers do not indicate that."
Simultaneously, Foster noted at the event that when companies closed their code, communities fought back with successful forks.
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Foster's CHAOSS research also revealed that forks under neutral foundations have three times more organizational diversity than their proprietary counterparts. OpenSearch, for example, saw contributions from 45 organizations in its first year -- a stark contrast to Elasticsearch's single-vendor dominance.
In other words, open-source forks are far more popular than their proprietary counterparts. Foster said users flock to forks to avoid vendor lock-in.
Project 2025 Tracker
Project 2025 Tracker began as a humble spreadsheet created by /u/rusticgorilla, combined with /u/mollynaquafina's vision for making this information accessible to everyone through a dedicated website.
What started as a passion project by two Redditors has grown into a community-driven resource, powered by people like you who believe in the importance of transparent, detailed analysis.
LGBTQ Federal Workers Brace for a McCarthyist Purge
in Mother JonesSeventy years ago, at the height of the McCarthy eraâwhen federal employees with left-wing views were routinely interrogated and fired for being suspected communistsâa related purge of queer workers was underway. In 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed an executive order listing âsexual perversionâ as a basis for terminating federal civil service employees, on the theory that gay men and lesbians were susceptible to blackmail by the countryâs enemies. In what became known as the Lavender Scare, at least 5,000 federal workers were fired for suspected homosexuality over the next two decades.
âMore people were targeted during that period for being gay or for engaging in same-sex intimacy than were targeted for being communist,â says San Francisco State University professor Marc Stein. The firings rippled out to state and local governments and the private sector, he adds, âaccompanied by notions that the gay people were weak, were divisive in workplaces, were not strong representatives of a moral United States.â Itâs taken decades since then for LGBTQ people to gain acceptance in public life, including in the federal workforce. Not until the Obama administration was Eisenhowerâs executive order formally rescinded.
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Now, the very programs and support groups that have helped queer folks integrate could create risks for their participants. Employee resource groups like Michaelâs have been shutting down operations and wiping their websites, afraid of putting their members at risk in the openly hostile Trump administration.
âWeâve gone dark,â a former LGBTQ resource group leader in the Department of Agriculture tells Mother Jones. âWe have pulled our contact lists off of government systems. Personally, as someone who has been very involved in queer spaces, I went through and deleted a bunch of emails and contacts, because I have lists of queer employees, and I am afraid if someone in the Trump administration gets their hands on it.â
âIâm scared for the people Iâve been trying to help,â says a trans worker for the Interior Department who is involved in employee resource groups. âPeople came to us because they needed community, needed connection. We were trying to keep each other safe. Now, weâre all just this big target.â
Marco Rubio May Have Just Banned Trans Foreigners Seeking Visas From US Entry
The document, titled âGuidance for Visa Adjudicators on Executive Order 14201: âKeeping Men Out of Womenâs Sports,ââ is ostensibly focused on preventing transgender athletes from traveling to the U.S. However, one section appears to apply far more broadly, targeting all transgender visa applicantsânot just athletes. It mandates that âall visas must reflect an applicantâs sex at birthâ and grants officials the authority to deny visas based on âreasonable suspicionâ of a personâs transgender identity.
âBoth immigrant and nonimmigrant visa applications request that an applicant identify their sex as either male or female. Moreover, all visas must reflect an applicantâs sex at birth,â the cable reads. When verifying an applicantâs sex assigned at birth, it states that the adjudicator can ârely on documents provided by the applicant,â but that âif other evidence casts reasonable doubt on the applicantâs sex, you should refuse the case under 221(g) and request additional evidence to demonstrate sex at birth.â
The memo goes on to state that applicants âmisrepresenting their purpose of travel or sexâ could be targeted for permanent ineligibility. It states that some common scenarios that would trigger this is if the misrepresentation is âmaterial,â which it states would be the case for transgender athletes entering for an athletic competition. However, even this section does not limit it to transgender athletes - many other reasons for entry may be considered âmaterialâ for transgender entrants⊠for instance, transgender activists, immigrants fleeing oppressive regimes, and more could be swept up under this provision.
"A woman is like a child": MAGA quickly turns its sights on stripping Republican women of power
in SalonFor ambitious women who wanted to climb the ranks of Republican politics, anti-feminism has long been the steadiest of ladders. The propaganda value of their gender outweighed their party's larger hostility to women in leadership.
But now that Roe v. Wade has been overturned and Donald Trump is back in the White House, many on the right feel they no longer need to hide the naked sexism fueling their movement or put up with the annoyance of women in even token leadership positions. As Kiera Butler at Mother Jones reports, the anti-abortion movement is embroiled in an escalating civil war right now over these issues. Male leaders of the Christian right have been swarming Kristan Hawkins, the 39-year-old head of a "student" anti-abortion group, demanding her ejection from the movement. It started after she objected to Republican legislators introducing bills to charge women who get abortions with murder, an extreme move she fears will backfire on the movement. But mostly it was about growing male anger on the Christian right that women are allowed leadership positions at all.
"Removed [sic] this woman from public service," declared influential Christian nationalist pastor Joel Webbon, part of the "TheoBros" movement that includes the leadership of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's church. Soon other TheoBros jumped in, declaring "We need Christian men leading the fight against abortion," arguing that women's suffrage was a mistake, and accusing Hawkins of emasculating her husband by being "busy jet-setting."
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Webbon and the TheoBros have been clamoring more loudly in recent months about their wish to strip women, especially their own wives, of the right to vote. "You won't let women vote? Well, our society doesn't let five-year-olds vote," Webbon explained in a May podcast. He added that "a woman is like a child" and that "God has appointed men to protect them." As Sarah Stankorb at the New Republic documented, there has been growing support in Christian nationalist circles "for the repeal of the 19th Amendment and support a 'household vote' system in which men vote on behalf of their families." Hegseth's former sister-in-law reports she heard him echo similar sentiments.