Category Archives: Announcements

Why read about plants?

Who in their right mind would ever take time from their very short lives to read about green organisms that can’t walk, talk or do cool tricks? Well, you did when you came here but should you read on?

Yes.

Here is something to think about: As I write this I am in the middle of drinking a can of plant (wheat, hops,barley) to wash down the bowl of plant (lettuce, wheat, potato and more). I am wearing a shirt made from 80% recently deceased plant with 20% coming from plants whose lives ended a few hundred million years ago. The same ancient plants get me to work and make the electricity that powers my computer…

You see, we interact with plants all the time and never even notice it! Everything you do can be traced back to a plant from your first breath of air to your last.

That’s not enough to convince you to read on? Oh, hung up on the cool tricks thing… right..

Actually plants do a lot of wicked sweet stuff.

This sundew has uses bio potentials (nerve-like impulses) to sense when insects get trapped in the goo laden hairs of their leaves.

This Dodder plant can “smell” another plant and latch onto another plant like a vampire, sucking the sweet, sweet plant juices out for it’s own use.

How about this sweet robotically enhanced ficus created by Japanese researchers? They made a plant cyborg by hooking the plant to actuators, causing it respond to touch.

If that doesn’t convince you that plants are worth another look, I don’t know what else to tell you…

Sorry to pull you away from Honey Boo Boo and whatever.

Coming up in future blogs I’ll be showing that plants are everywhere and have been an inextricable part of our lives through the entire journey from Savannah to suburb. Also, I plan on demonstrating how people are finding new uses for plants, new ways of interacting with plants as well as how plants are being used in some amazing works of art.

Plants kick ass. I hope you will want to know more about them and that you’ll be back here in the future.

I Kill Plants Update

ikillplants

Over the Xmas and New Year’s break from my regular job I worked on ikillplants.com for a while. Originally I was going to do the entire site from scratch so I could make it look exactly the way I wanted it to look but seeing as how I don’t have too much time on my hands I opted to use WordPress for that site too. It will have the same functionality of the site I wanted but now I will have time to focus on getting my other projects done. The banner was made using a font called Shithead that I downloaded from dafont.com and the dead plant I sketched using gimp. The next step is letting everyone know that it exists, getting some content up and polishing the CSS file a bit to get the look just right.

If you have any submissions you should go to the Submit an Obit page and tell the world how you killed your green buddy.

Another plant blog…

This is going to be a blog about plants for plant people and non plant people alike. Besides talking about plants in general I will also write about some of the projects I’m working on in and outside of my day job at “the greenhouse”. Why quotes? I don’t have permission to use the business name until they’ve had time to review the content of this page. I don’t blame them.

If you have any recommendations for posts, questions about plants, or know of a neat plant related article I should read send it my way through the suggestions page. Here is a list of some of the topics coming up in the next few months…

  • Plant machine interface
  • Future gardening
  • Robots and Gardens
  • Rosarians vs Potheads
  • Drink Botany
  • Plant history
  • Plant Question of the week
  • Plant ID Mystery of the week
  • and more…