Partially relevant nominative determinism

Not strictly relevant to our self-imposed beat, of course, but as it already gave my compadre Luigi a quick post I feel I ought to share …

There’s a strange phenomenon (in whose origin, I freely admit, I had some impact) called nominative determinism. Briefly, your name suits your job and, of course, vice versa. Thus Lord Brain was an eminent neurologist before he was ennobled. So at a talk this morning on wise management of water resources, I perked up when I saw that the crucial research on partial rootzone drying was by a man called Peter Dry. Luigi was good enough to check the reference, and indeed, Hormonal changes induced by partial rootzone drying of irrigated grapevine exists and Dry is one of the authors.

All fun aside, it is a valuable technique for reducing water use by up to 50% while still maintaining good grape production and, apparently, a pretty drinkable vintage. No word though of whether the wine was a tad brut too.

Tropical fruit cocktail

They offered us ciruela fruits at coffee break this morning, here at the Centro de Formacion de la Cooperacion EspaƱola in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia. Deliciously tart, but I had no idea what it might be — botanically, I mean — which always annoys me. I asked around, and narrowed it down to a Spondias, probably Spondias mombin. Certainly looks like the photo here. The go-to source for information on tropical New World fruits is, of course, the database put together by my colleagues at Bioversity. In looking around for other photos, I came across a travel site called Dave’s Travel Corner which has a page on tropical fruits and a great photo gallery. Plus a whole bunch of links.