Slashdot Mirror
Wisconsin Corpse Plant To Bloom Again
V_IL_Len writes "The University of Wisconsin's original Amorphophallus titanum, or 'corpse plant' known as Big Bucky is ready to bloom and emit its intensely malodorous stench. The plant only blooms a few times in its 40 year life span and each bloom lasts only 2-3 days. Its stench attracts carrion beetles and flesh flies to pollinate it. See this link for photos and live stream of the bloom."
Unfortunately the best i can do at home is A. Paeonifolius
Software Freedom Day!.
No really, I got them de-clawed.
Does the "It's funny, laugh" category on this one have anything to do with Amorphophallus meaning "malformed penis"? Penis... hehehehehehehehe.
Anybody care to guess at the Latin translation of this word?
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
My first thought was "Some new and macabre kind of bio diesel production facility?"
Software Freedom Day!.
It also attracts Nerds...
I spent an inordinate amount of time watching that live stream last time this thing was blooming.
3AM drunk frat boys trying to compare "equipment" with the flower is something that is burned into my brain forever.
And I love it!
We have a plant conservatory here in Cincinnati that has one of these (or something like it). It bloomed a few years ago. It was awful.
- Violent Femmes :/ ) :)
- Steve Miller of the Steve Miller Band
- Summerfest
- Willem Dafoe (spelling?)
- Apostle Island National Lakeshore
- lots of beer & cheese
- polka music
- Green Bay Packers
- Ben Sheets
- 1st NBA pick
- lake effect snow
- UW halloween party
- Milwaukee Art Museum
- more lakes than Minnesota
- Bodeans (you know.. the Friends theme?
- me
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
Hey, that guy doesn't even look like Mr. Wilson...
IMHO, corpse plant is the best argument against "intelligent design". :)
One of these just bloomed in SF - I wasn't able to make it, but apparently it was interesting (if you're into that sort of thing). Read about it here
There's always ebaya tegory=42207&item=4386828334 a tegory=20524&item=4387196761
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&c
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&c
Software Freedom Day!.
An Amorphophallus titanum named "Tabitha the Titan" bloomed last August at University of California, Davis. Two more, "Ted" & "Tammy," are expected to bloom again this summer. That's a whole lot of stink.
Good Scientist:
Change the scent to a fragrant one and make it bloom more often.
Evil Scientist:
Cross it with a venus flytrap and consume the passersby too stupid to watch it bloom.
Instead of a body count and a titilating expose into Britney's Spears choice of toothpaste, THIS is what SHOULD make news! Imagine how cool it would be if we lived in a country full of intelligent, interesting people who thought that this was real news. That professor explaining the situation was awesome!!
That thing is straight out of nightmares. Seriously, it scares the fuck out of me... I want one.
My sig is blank, I typed this by hand.
I don't think I geeky enough just yet to watch a live stream of a flower blooming. You may call me an insensitive clod now.
Me watching a live feed of it on a Friday night, or people actually going there to see it..
Am I the only one who thinks of Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors ?
"Plans are for fools! Oglethorpe, the plutonian (Aqua Teen Hunger Force)
There is a chemical in the plant odor that causes hallucinations. Two of them bloomed at the same time, and it caused some of my neighbors to seek psychological counsel because of hearing whispers and seeing shadows. I collected them full-grown when I was in Bio Tech school, about 3 years ago.
One neighbor I am a great friend with, said that whenever they bloom it releases demons looking for people that bet against John Carmack releasing Doom3 AFTER Duke Nukem Forever. Silly, good-hearted man, but it is a great stench to host a Doom3 LAN party with; the game of a lifetime -- You can smell the hell and see it on-screen and with Creative Labs 3D sound!
Soylent green is... people?!?!
Geez. All the effort of hype and PR, and these State-employed lifers can't open the greenhouse on a Saturday.
Curator of the Jefferson Computer Museum http://www.threedee.com/jcm
somebody recently pointed out to me that 95% of the humor on the simpsons is not original, but simply a reference to something else, be it another TV show/movie, literature, history, or some sort of real-life phenomenon --- regardless of wether or not this is where the comedic value of the gag lies.
I'm saying this all with the highest respect, of course -- the scriptwriters for the simpsons are unbelievably intelligent compared to most. there are hidden references EVERYWHERE -- that I think takes skill.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
It's simpler than that, this is a nerd thing, plant nerds rather than computer nerds, but still.
Software Freedom Day!.
But wow, check out the mullet on the guy here! :)
If you can think of a better way to produce corpses, I'd like to hear it.
--
RumorsDaily
for Aroma over IP
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Of course, I'd rather all the attention be paid to this stinky plant, than have those same people paying attention to my young son's stinky gym shoes.
Such a plant could cease to exist and cause no crises whatsoever, just going to show, if something is rare enough, maybe nothing else will depend on it for food!
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
To put it another way...
SIMPSONS DID IT!!!
Several universities across the country have many of these plants - the University of Washington has several, such that there's a bloom at least every year or two.
that stinks.
Yeah, well at least the nickname 'Cowboy Neal' doesn't sound like Hairy Vagina! I hope to God that's not your real name....
So, what happens when they reference Slashdot in a story line? What will they be modded as, Hmmmmm?
(-1, Not Futurama)
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
Virginia Tech has the same thing, and I'm sure many more do as well.
And the masses cried out, "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0!"
But is it edible? mmmmm, salad!
C|N>K
It is. What makes this one particularly interesting though is it seems to be singing "feed me seamore!!"
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
after blooming the plant says in a baritone male voice "feed me, seymour, feed me!" and then goes to broadway to do a song and dance number and eat a dentist
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Feed Me, Seymour!
Any of Dubya's speeches, for example.
And people complain that Marigolds stink.
I'm somebody so feel free to quote me. I would like to point out that 95% of everything creative is not original, but simply a reference to something else. It's the other 5% that makes it interesting (or not).
Have I said too much?
KOA
Giant Missile Defense Radar Sails
Namaste
A friend of mine in Oregon has voodoo lilies (Amorphophallus) bordering his driveway every spring and summer. Stinky, nasty skanky huge disgusting flowers. They serve a purpose, of course; they attract pollinators and deter varmints.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Err, the last time it bloomed was in 2001, and the news item on ./ even said "only a few times in it's 40 year life span". How that equates to "most every every year" is beyond me, but there ya go.
Its stench attracts carrion beetles and flesh flies to pollinate it.
Is this a plant or a politician?
If there weren't so many damn idiots in this world, I'd just be average.
have you tried just opening that XML file with VLC? or pointing mplayer at the url you get from inside the XML(asx) file?
Software Freedom Day!.
YES!!!, I must grow one in my cubicle. Hmmm...I just need to be sure to take vacation right before it blooms.
Life is not for the lazy.
forward-looking article published friday.
does not compute.
sum.zero
The one in the Sydney Botanical Gardens already did this last year.
If my call is important, why am I talking to a recording?
One bloomed in san francisco a few weeks ago. There are a lot of these plants at this point and there seems to be one blooming all over.
This is Slashdot, not MichaelMoore.com. My first thought was *BSD.
Hear recorded Slashdot headlines on your phone! New service beta testing. Just call (248) 434-5508
My thought was, maybe that Swedish woman that Mary Roach wrote about in her book, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, who developed a way to turn a corpse into compost as an alternative to burial, had opened up an American facility. :-)
After seeing far too many posts asking why this is news considering their local arboretum has had one bloom, too, and not seeing it properly explained in the links, I thought I'd explain.
Big Bucky is special because it may very well set a new world's record for largest flower (inflorescence, actually). When it last bloomed in 2001, it fell just a few inches shy of the then record which had stood since 1932 (though the record now is held by a 2003 plant in Bonn) and as of a week ago was well on its way to challenging the record.
So while it is true that a few bloom in the U.S. every year now since botanists have found them to really draw a crowd (and donations), that doesn't mean this one isn't special. The bottom line is that my corpse plant can beat up your corpse plant. So there!
I saw a Titan Arum flower at the Sydney Botanic Gardens last year. The stench isn't what I'd describe as overpowering - it's actually a quite faint odour. I thought I reminiscent of old, dried-out roadkill.
The plant is quite weird. Even when not in flower, it looks strange - kindof fleshy and too symmetrical.
Once the flower opens, it fades very quickly, so you have to be quick.
My first though was, "I know what Phalus is and its not 'corpse' or 'plant'" And now that I look at the plant itself, I am convince that I have been lied to about the translation of its Latin name!?
Its similar to a nicname I have used on my starships and other things over the years.
Metallic Phalic, Ferrous Phalus, Iron Phalus, etc.
or Italian Arum live in my Atlanta GA back yard. They have already bloomed, lost most of leaves, and are showing seeds. They make good winter foliage plants and do well in well drained rocky soil (old cementatious roofing shingles here). It will pretty much become invisible in another month and not show again until fall.
Wisconsin corpse-proccesing plant (as in factory) to start operating again?
"Simpsons dit it!"
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
(no/text)
philovivero wrote:
>
> I've got mplayer set up with all the right
> plugins to watch just about any sort of media
> file, but I can never figure out how to get the
> file *OFF* their servers and *ONTO* my desktop.
Try: "mplayer -playlist URL" or better yet: "mplayer -nocache -playlist URL"
This particular flower bloomed last year too.
The guys they have running the gardens at the UW are some of the best in the world. That place is amazing.
Anyway, it was all over the news then too. Blah. Local news sucks.
The tree is unfortunately a female one (yes, there are males too), so it produces fruit. The fruit smells like vomit, and in fact has the same "simpathy puking" effect on people as any normal pool of vomit would. The smell ginko fruit has made a number of students sick, and quite a few people actually avoid that area of campus when there's fruit on the ground--classes be damned.
"With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not necessarily a good idea...."
RFC 1925
use mplayerplug-in. the streams work fine for me:
http://mplayerplug-in.sourceforge.net/
But with a nick like yours...
"Our interests are to see if we can't scale it up to something more exciting," he said.
Has there been any study of the molecules being emitted from this plant?
The infrared is sure interesting.
The Simpsons did have original humor, it's just that it's satire, so it naturally refers to other things.
For those of you who can't stand your piddly little 384 kbps stream
...and are feeling unfulfilled by your 1.5 Mbps stream
...Don't worry. They have set up an experimental 30 Mbps DV multicast stream , complete with it's own free DVTS player so you can catch all this incredibly FAST paced action, as it happens!
OK, well, sounds like you know better than I. TFA said last time was in 2001, hence my comment. =/ As you say, local news sucks. =)
There's a great picture of a corpse plant here. It's in 3D, so you'll need red/cyan glasses to view it. (Image was processed with the Callipygian 3D software that was featured on TechTV.
Best Buy can have you arrested
You know, I hate to say it, but even the 384kbps stream looks pretty damn good. I'm watching leaves fluttering around in the wind and it's not dropping any frames.
The graduate students explaining the environment the flower is found in, as well as the amazing way in which it attracts and traps flies/carrion beetles to reproduce and the 10-foot tall tree-like leaf (!) make me truly appreciate how amazing the spectrum of life we have here on Earth is. It's certainly above my head -- that's why I can stick to relatively simple things, like working on a plasma confinement device. ;)
No offense to the plant but it is like watching paint dry.
At first i wondered if the corpse plant was where they made soylent green...I need coffee...
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
WHAT the F*** is THAT! I just wanted to know about the birds and the bees you blundering idiot!
Scientists now speculate the blooming of the plant is directly correlated to the farting of Saturn's moon Titan!
Thermal images.
Okay, so where have they been hybridizing tomatoes and tobacco? Can't all be referential.
Prepare your bladder for imminent release!
"Ted The Titan", an A. titanum grown by University of California at Davis, bloomed just a couple weeks ago. The UCD greenhouses were needed for coursework purposes, so they loaned "him" to the Conservatory of Flowers at the Golden Gate State Park in San Francisco. It only bloomed for a short two days or so. UCD seems to have one ready to bloom just about every year around May (they have a collection of them).
Odd... I've seen them in several locations in Kentucky including at my grandparents. Yes, the one on their property is male, but I'm suspecting they're not as rare as one might think.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.