I admitted once that I had a bad case of Fungi Fear.

Botanists like to do that naming crap.  I avoid it whenever possible.  I start with Oliver Medsger: Edible Wild Plants.  Available used under $10.

For or against? I recently got a bit of itchy toes and applied my old standby, "Dessenex" and put my socks on. 2 days of that and I had white lacy fungi instead. Been fighting that one for a good 3 months now. 

It started a couple years ago when I went to a dermatologist to have a bit of "brown skin" frozen off my elbow. Asked what caused it and he said maybe a fungus and a little later said "you're covered in fungus."  Soooooo I went on a campaign to de-fungufy myself. A couple months later I mentioned it to my NP at my yearly checkup and she said, to paraphrase "You're SUPPOSED to be covered in fungus, it processes dead skin cells and protects you from more aggressive and dangerous fungi and infections."

Now that it's almost cleared up completely I'm hoping MY fungi will reinhabit my feet but not sure how that works. Washing down my hide I hope. 

All the "ists" do that, archeology, botany, biology, paleontology, geology, whatever. Academia is a "Publish or Die" profession so everybody HAS to have their name on something new or different.

You aught to check out the Burgess Shale type Cambrian fossil nomenclature. In 1909 Walcott HAD to make names up, so many of the fossils had no relation to more modern life and now that folk know what to look for there are literally thousands of sites around the world producing this REALLY EARLY life.

So Bull my friend I gift you with this, one of my favorite rabbit holes.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burgess_Shale

Don't hesitate to follow the links. <snicker>

Frosty The Lucky.

 

"So Bull my friend I gift you with this, one of my favorite rabbit holes.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burgess_Shale"

Wild.  I've heard of Burgess Shale because it was used as a challenging matrix for a nutrients digestion method, but I had no idea of the history WRT fossils.  It's a huge world out there.

Yeah, the shales themselves are mined for many different uses.

I had to look up "challenging matrix for a nutrients digestion method," read a few hits and am lost. Why would anyone want to make digest nutrients challenging. Don't get where matrix comes in. 

A digestion sequence is intuitively obvious, sniff bite chew stomach time, intestine time absorbing nutrients as it goes, lastly reabsorbing moisture before excretion, most of what's left are dead bacteria "colloform I believe" that broke much down into absorbable components.  

What is the matrix, what is and how does "challenge" effect the method/process?

Give me a handle on it, I'll take it from there. . . Hopefully.

Frosty The Lucky.

"I had to look up "challenging matrix for a nutrients digestion method," read a few hits and am lost. Why would anyone want to make digest nutrients challenging. Don't get where matrix comes in."

It relates to analysis of nutrients in natural waters, since high levels of nutrients are toxic to bugs and beasts.  Many analytical methods convert similar contaminants to one single compound by a digestion procedure, then analyze for that compound and report a total.  For example, nitrate and nitrite ion are related and can contaminate a river if excess levels of fertilizer are used.  That's a common issue, see "Gulf of America (or Mexico) Hypoxia" in a search.  Some methods convert nitrite to nitrate, then analyze for nitrate.  Waterways with high levels of fine particulate shale can basically swamp the capacity of the analytical method's digestion procedure.

This has definitely been a strange turn of thread.  

On 1/4/2026 at 3:24 PM, Frosty said:

Academia is a "Publish or Die" profession

I once was attending a church where one of the priests was also a professor at a local university. One Sunday, he announced that we wouldn’t be seeing him much, as he’d signed a contract with a major publisher for a significant work of scholarship on church history and was going to be researching and writing every waking moment for the next year and a half. I remarked to him after the service that this was an exceptionally dramatic example of “publish or parish”!

LOL, JHCC.

"This has definitely been a strange turn of thread."

My fault, sorry...

There is a Youtube timber frame builder who uses the handle of Mr. Chickadee and he has a video of building a timber frame smithy.  He builds in the Japanese timber frame style, so that's not what the OP here was looking for, but Mr. Chickadee is an interesting guy that makes lots of cool stuff, so you may enjoy checking it out.

He also has a great video showing him carving a base for his anvil out of a block of sandstone. 

If IFI had a thumbs-up button to click, you'd have many, JHCC.