hckrnws

> the apples, including a variety known in the fruit science lexicon as api piccola

I wanted to learn more about this apple, but its name is basically ungooglable. All you get is info on APIs, wind instruments or both.

It's this cultivar:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_apple

But with the italian word for 'small' stuck on the end, which seems kinda redundant, since all 'Api' apples are small.

My parents have a couple of Api trees, they're small, very very tart, and quite a firm bite. Now, I like my apples tart and firm, but they're far too much for me; functionally almost like eating crab apples (it seems 'crab apple' is ambiguous, so I mean the European wild apple, aka Malus Sylvestris, here).

>they're small, very very tart, and quite a firm bite. Now, I like my apples tart and firm, but they're far too much for me

unrelated factoid that might be related, but there is an old American folk hero named Johnny Appleseed who walked around the early republic planting apple seeds wherever he went to promote more apples.

then more recently a book came out about apples and it described that apples don't "breed true" so even if you plant the seeds of sweet apples, you probably will not get sweet child trees. But, sour tart apples are still useful for making cider, and turns out alcoholic beverages was Johnny Appleseed's goal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Appleseed

It also turns out that there are hundreds of local / regional cultivars grown for a variety of specific purposes (way beyond today's mass-marketed four or five varieties). Many farms had an orchard, which consisted of a few to a few dozen trees, each with different cultivars cloned by grafting. Different varieties were good for different purposes, such as eating directly (dessert apples), baking, storing, cider, producing early or late, etc. These varieties really do make a difference. I spent one autumn picking apples and we could take home a bag every day, and it was really interesting as the season went through the varieties. One day, we had a few Wolf River trees to pick; they were huge like coconut-sized (no exaggeration), and bred for baking. Indeed they tasted not good, but I brought three home and my mom made two pies - everyone thought those were amazing.

There are a number of efforts in the US and England, both govt (e.g., USDA) and private, working to preserve these often rare cultivars. One is in Bolton Massachusetts, New England Botanic Garden’s Historic Apple Orchard [0]. They sometimes have to hunt in very obscure places to find just a twig of an old cultivar, bring it back and graft it to a rootstock. They are doing a lot of fascinating DNA analysis and cataloging, and it's a pretty big data management project too, to keep track of who has examples of what cultivars, in what condition, etc..

[0] https://nebg.org/orchard/

There was a robust social effort back then to select and grow the best cider apple trees, but those orchards were cut down during prohibition

https://kagi.com/search?q=fruit+api+piccola

this had many hits for me.

I understand why this happened, but it is funny nonetheless.

https://i.imgur.com/frHAEzn.png

> its name is basically ungooglable

Not any more! It's the first hit on DDG.

Switzerland has an organisation/NGO dedicated to saving rare breeds of farm animals and cultivated varietars:

https://www.prospecierara.ch/

Err “We depend on advertising to fund our services … please disable your adblocker”

The Smithsonian ?!

I do wonder if the ad-driven digital world is simply going to consume itself.

The Guardian newspaper apparently did an internal study pre-covid and found that 1/3 of its content was essentially unread, and that the effort to SEO / promote that 1/3 not only was wasted effort but actually harmed the results of the other 2/3rds.

Google (or rather PageRank) does try to promote what is well read and referenced, but the sludge does drag down everything.

Google tries to promote what generates the most money for Google.

In other words, companies that offer search engine results shouldn't also offer advertisement services.

Search engines have gotten bad, and I feel like LLMs are just making them worse and worse. I am sick of wading through pages of shitty AI generated articles and SEO'd junk articles that may as well have been written by AI to find any actually good information. It's gotten especially bad for really basic science and engineering stuff too. You used to be able to get really quick, reputable information about things like water density tables or unit conversions with a quick Google search, but now the top results are all really shitty websites with dubious info or no actual information, just words.

I agree it's not great, but it seems to be more of a request? I can view the page by closing the popup, without the need to disable my adblocker.

I mean, if you want government to run like a business, and all the businesses are shit, then you want government to run like shit