The Aimless Surf (w/ picture)
In my time surfing the internet, I began by typing in one simple word… “banana”. This led me to an article that informed me of the possible epidemic of the banana as a whole in the world. This was an interesting read touching on how diseases could affect one harvest of bananas and end up spreading around the world after extraction and export. There are two different methods at work to save it, one being bioengineering to change the genome structure of the fruit while another is trying to raise experimental breeds in the fields trying to create a replacement plant that looks and tastes the same but will be tougher. I spent about 8 minutes on this read and decided to see what else there was, which brought me to how NASA is trying to learn how to grow food in space (Shout out to The Martian). The main problem they were encountering in space was the growing of mold, making it impossible to grow certain foods like tomatoes hindering their nutritional values. This article went on to talk about how they eventually grew some lettuce in the space station that they were allowed to eat safely until they started trying to grow more intricate plants that needed more nutrition. So far the things I’ve been reading have been about science and although it had been interesting, I don’t want to read any more about that, so I decided to take a turn and find a different genre. I came upon “The Pirate Latitudes” about a French cruise ship that was captured by a band of Somali pirates. The pirates wanted one thing and that was money, so they put out a $3 million demand hoping that they could scare their way into money. Sure enough they did, but it wasn’t as much as they thought. They end up with a $2.15 million settlement, but not until after they all spend a couple of days with the crew, drinking and not exactly bonding but a funny excerpt from this states they learned the good from the bad and “they relaxed enough to laugh about the pirate teetotalers suffering hangovers for the first time”. Searching the internet without a means to an end is fun to some extent, and you experience and learn things that you wouldn’t have thought about looking up or learning about unless you randomly stumble upon them. I think the flaneurs had a good idea about just experiencing things and observing but I also believe this was completely time wasting because when will I ever need to know about banana’s being grown with different genetics and I don’t plan on being an astronaut so understanding how food grows in space is beyond my scope. I enjoyed this but I don’t know if I got any useful information other than if we were playing some kind of trivia game one day in class. Still wasn’t boring though so I’ll give them that.
