[ExI] funny ai story

[spike at rainier66.com]

From: extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> On Behalf Of John Galt via extropy-chat
Subject: Re: [ExI] funny ai story

 

��Pretty funny! But what is your grandmother doing over that cauldron? It doesn't look like food, laundry, or churning butter and that's where my knowledge ends.

 

 

 

It is food.  Granny had apple trees.  The best apples, the ones table-worthy, she sold.  But if they fell before they were marketable size, she gathered them and stewed them down to apple butter, which she preserved in Bell jars, both for her own consumption over the winter and for sale.

 

The day I took this photo was among my earliest memories.  Granny explained to me how she put money in the pot: two new silver dollars went in there with the apples.  She claimed they reduced the apples sticking to the bronze caldron.  She reported having trouble in the last coupla years because the new Kennedy half dollars didn’t seem to work.  So she had to find silver dollars minted in 1964 or before, but they needed to be uncirculated.  This was one time when a six year old child could teach his own great grandmother, for I knew the new coins used no silver: they were nickel clad over copper and that there were no dollar coins minted in 1965.

 

Neither of us knew why that would make a difference, but we didn’t know how a sacrificial anode (the oxidizing silver) could interfere with the weak bonds causing the apples to stick to the copper/zinc caldron.  She knew the silver dollars didn’t come out entirely as they went in: a noticeable amount dissolved in the acidic apple stew.

 

Those apple trees, planted by my great grandfather, are still there, but being aged nearly a century, they are near the end of their lives.  My cousin reported having nailed them last year but it didn’t seem to help much.  Explanation: an old apple tree will decline in productivity, but driving iron nails into its trunk reminds the tree that its job is to produce apples, up to the day it dies.  I don’t know if there is any science at all in the notion that nailing the trunk of an aging apple tree causes it to produce more apples.  Suggestions welcome.

 

spike  

 

 

 

 

 

johngaltbooks at proton.me <mailto:johngaltbooks at proton.me> 

 

Sent with Proton Mail <https://proton.me/mail/home>  secure email. 

 

On Saturday, October 17th, 2026 at 11:08 AM, spike jones via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org <mailto:extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> > wrote:



 

When I was six yrs old, my grandfather took me out to his mother’s farm to visit.  He had a brownie box camera, showed me how to use it.  I took this photo:

 

 



 

 



 

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