Category: Culture and Arts
-
How grasses created traditional gender roles in human societies
In a post last year, we looked at how grasses shaped human evolution, which included changing the shape of our skulls and perhaps even the color of our skin. But the tight partnership between people and grains that started with the advent of agriculture, affected many things beyond just the human phenotype. There have been…
-
The Spread of Rust (A Slight Detour into the Foundational Language Wars)
I’ve been busy the last week or two learning a new computer language. At first glance, this might seem to have nothing at all to do with the natural world, and specifically with the Poaceae. But first some background. In addition to being a biologist and a scholar of the grasses, I am a software…
-
Admiration for an invasive plant
In the ecological sciences, the worst adjective that can be attached to a plant species is the term “invasive”. In fact, I’ve even heard some people call these plants “evil”, and the hatred directed at them is sometimes all out of proportion to their effect on the environment. The reality of course is that there…
-
Golden Barley is Wicked in the Land of Oz
Images not marked by Sejarah Poaceae are screenshots from the film Wicked by Universal Pictures. A vast open field of grass is frequently used as metaphor in cinema, whether it’s a field of wheat in Gladiator, a reed field in Marvel’s Moon Knight, or the corn fields in Interstellar. During a recent trip to the…
-
Dr. Seuss’ Grickle Grass: A Pernicious Mindset and a Paean to the Tenacity of the Poaceae
I’ve been watching and rewatching the movie adaptation of Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax, and enjoying myself. It’s a fairly extreme pro-environment film, with the usual greedy businessman as the very obvious villain. There is also a questionable “co-hero” in the story who ends up destroying an environment and making it a “barren wasteland” after cutting…
-
Weirdest looking grass ever (“AI” blooper)
I was doing some research on the Poaceae of Svalbard, a Norwegian-owned archipelago near or in the Arctic-circle that holds the distinction of having the northernmost town in the world (Longyearbyen). We are planning a cruise trip to the area later this year, and I wanted to get an idea about any interesting grasses in…
-
Have rice cooker…will travel
I chanced upon a youtube video about some guy who married his rice cooker. This was of course a stunt that was pulled in order to attract eyeballs, but it did remind me how important these appliances are to many people. It is of course possible to cook rice without rice cookers, but the quality…
-
Chhorii: Horror in the Canes
Forests have traditionally been the go-to location when horror movies want to add suspense, but there has been a rise in the use of grass fields as the scene of horror movies, and this trend has not been confined to Hollywood. Most American films use maize fields as the usual staple, but Stephen King’s venue…