Pine_Mushroom

I lost a successful ecommerce domain to what seemed like a GoDaddy inside job. Now it points to an offshore casino...

I had a very similar situation happen to me with a ~12 year old domain; michiganmushrooms.net. The particulars are slightly different than this case, but the totally unhelpful support team is exactly what I experienced too. Unfortunately I was never able to recover the domain and more or less had to shudder the business that was associated with it.

One big reason I got out of mushroom farming was a great big mushroom 'factory' was set up not too far from me. They produced literal tons more than we could have ever dreamed, at a much lower cost. They are a highly technical, industrial enterprise. For a while one of their selling points was: 'mushrooms never touched by human hands', to emphasize how automated their system was. I felt like John Henry against the steam shovel.

They were a hot seller for us, but they had some notable downsides compared to other oyster varieties. Their self life in particular is quite short, and they tended to bruise black, which really kills the aesthetic value.

Michigan already has a pretty great environment for agriculture. I used to always hear we were second only to California in terms of output. If current climate disruptions continue(we've had two "once in a lifetime" catastrophic ice storms just this past year in my area) I may searching for 'greener pastures' myself.

I had a mushroom farm in Northern Michigan some years ago and we grew Golden Oysters, among other species. I think our winters are too cold for them to really establish themselves, but I was hearing reports of them 'going native' in Southern Michigan as long ago as 15 years.

Like the farmer in the article, I also wondered about the apparent lack of effort in growing native species. My area has a wonderful native oyster Pleurotus populinus; exceptional in taste compared to other oysters, but I have never heard of anyone cultivating them.

I think a big part is the name. Like we are the sheep for the shearing.

Years ago I ran an ecommerce site for gourmet and medicinal mushrooms. We certainly had nothing to do with illegal mushrooms, but I liberally sprinkled the word 'magic' where ever possible. Also the words 'Ann+Arbor'... It seemed to drive some traffic.

True enough. I had been pretty well established in my little niche too.

Well it was partly my fault for letting a seperate domain expire: someone grabbed it up and started an email with my old address. That old email was the contact for the stolen domain-they seem to have used it to have the password reset, locking me out. I still have the phone I used for 2FA and Godaddy is supposedly investigating, but it's been months and I've pretty much given up hope. They email every 3 days to tell me they haven't got a chance to look into it yet...

Feel for the guy. I had a couple of long owned domains stolen recently. They were so low value to anyone but me though, it makes me wonder why someone would bother.

Per the article: “made mostly or entirely from substances derived from foods and additives, with little if any intact [unprocessed] foods.”

I've dabbled in digital production since the late 90s and the state of the art is very impressive now compared to back then. U-he in particular really made some fine products, but there are many others too that I'm sure would pass blind tests against the originals they are emulating. I don't follow that world as closely anymore, but it seems there has been some stagnation in advancements over the past 5-10 years?

Great version of his tune 'Shine' performed by Dick Hyman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1nAPI23iRQ

Just to be contrarian: 'Alone Together' and 'You and the Night and the Music' by Dietz and Schwartz, as well as 'Yesterdays' by Jerome Kern, feature similar harmony, just to name a few popular jazz standards. I'm looking at an original sheet of 'Nature Boy' now and see 1 diminished chord, a couple #5's and a couple b9's: not that unusual really, certainly not in jazz.

The article suggests this is unique to opera, and classical music in general has not suffered as badly. I ran across this very interesting discussion today arguing that concert pianists of modern times measure very poorly with the greats of the early 20th century: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osdiIVaqg_M

I feel like I might have a few million dollar prompts in me. Are they so desperate for people to use this service they must incentivize like this?

Couldn't agree more! Her collaborations with Joe Pass on guitar are also sublime.

App is a dealbreaker for me also. Neat idea though.

Hymns. Three new ones a week. Started a gig as accompanist at a local church.

Alan is quite well known and respected in the field. Fair enough pointing out he has no experience with mycoremediation, but I still find his opinion worth considering.

I'm not really a Sonny Rollins 'completest'. The biography I mentioned above has a special place in my personal library; something I expect to revist or lend to a friend. This new book seems a little niche, even for me.

I'm not saying I won't buy it ultimately, but it's not a 'insta-buy'.

Absolutely. I meant that he has a great life story, even if he had been a visual artist or an engineer, he is just such a unique character. The book is also an interesting examination of history, the culture in Harlem when Sonny was growing up, and the evolution of popular culture generally. I guess I found it had a certain anthropological value, beyond your run of the mill jazz biography.

I'm a huge Sonny Rollins fan, but admit I'll probably just check this one out at the library. His 2022 biography 'Saxophone Colossus: The Life and Music of Sonny Rollins' is really excellent though and I would recommend it even to a non-jazz fan.

This is beyond my expertise, but here is a quote from a paper on the subject:

"Bacteria have several methods of processing heavy metals through general resistance mechanisms, biosorption, adsorption, and efflux mechanisms. Bacillus spp. are model Gram-positive bacteria that have been studied extensively for their biosorption abilities and molecular mechanisms that enable their survival as well as their ability to remove and detoxify heavy metals. This review aims to highlight the molecular methods of Bacillus spp. in removing various heavy metals ions from contaminated environments."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8402239/

I would think maybe this is a 'hack' to avoid bots that scan for copyrighted material?

As a musician and arranger this does not impress me much. Everything it spits out has a 'Top 40' kind of flavor.

I would be interested in a tool that was trained exclusively on higher quality material, like a Richard Rodgers or Cole Porter AI...

Chord sequences are not subject to copyright.

For a contrarian take on mycoremediation here is a quote from noted mycologist Alan Rockefeller:

"Mycoremediation barely works, most times I think it is better to save the time and energy and let nature do the remediation. Particularly with regards to mycofiltration, eating oil and heavy metal removal. If you do nothing at all, natural bacteria and fungi in the environment will do the remediation - so maybe just mix in some substrate, turn the soil and let nature do the rest.

Regarding mycofiltration, doesn't really work and even if it did, wouldn't take long for the mycelium to go anarobic and die. One idea I heard is to just dump a truck load of wood chips in the stream, and let nature do the rest. At least that way you are not wasting energy making spawn. No idea if this works at all.

You can eat oil with oyster mushrooms, but it has to be at really low concentrations, and you probably burn more oil than you eat making the spawn. Natural bacterias eat oil too and they are everywhere.

Regarding Paul, he is a great salesman and ambassador, and he has gotten a lot of people into mushrooms. For that he deserves to be held in high regard. He is pretty cool in person. I do think he probably oversells his products, and that medicinal mushrooms shouldn't be sold as medicine until they are proven to work. Turkey tails have been proven to work (but not very much), and the rest of them are pretty much untested in large clinical trials. Mushrooms do make excellent placebos.

If you ask professional mycologists about Stamets or mycoremediation or medicinal mushrooms, they typically change the subject pretty quick, if they are feeling polite.

There are a ton of people doing mycoremediation trials, but almost no one scaling it up to solve real world problems. Every idealistic first year college mycology student wants to save the world with mushrooms, but by the time they get a PhD they are thinking very differently.

Tradd Cotter and Peter Mccoy are doing a lot of work with mycoremediation, but I notice that they are mostly making their money writing books and giving workshops/lectures rather than actually doing it. But they probably answer their emails and would be excellent people to talk to about details and new ideas."

I'd argue taste is what made Miles so great, it was exceptional in all things.