Song of the Day - The Higgs Boson Blues

Oca

This year, for the first time, I tried growing Oca. I had read about it before, especially in Martin Crawford's books, but until I saw it for sale at Thompson and Morgan I never really got around to trying it. 10 Tubers cost me less than £10 including delivery, so I thought it'd be worth giving them a try.

A bowl of Oca tubers harvested today

I put the tubers in 3 big pots, with 3 tubers in each and 1 left over tuber given to someone in my team at work who shares my interest in trying new fruits and vegetables. The plants themselves are very attractive through the summer, and basically look like a giant vine-like clover plant. The leaves are edible with an extremely lemony taste due to the Oxalic acid, but I found them a bit much to eat in bulk. The odd nibble was OK though.

In terms of the main edible part, the tubers, I guess my review would be a bit mixed. Firstly, I think the yield was a little disappointing - each of my big pots with three tubers in yielded about two bowls of tubers as shown in the picture above. While this is probably about 10x as many tubers as I originally planted, I think that the yield is probably not as good as I would have got from potatoes.

The yields might have been suppressed a bit because we moved house in September, and because I had so many other things to do the Oca ended up being left in a slightly shady corner for a long time. Since Oca mostly forms its tubers late in the year, a reduction in sunshine might have hit yields. On the other hand, frosts came very late this year in Nottingham - I don't recall seeing any ground frost until late November, thanks to such a warm late Summer and Autumn. In a normal year the Oca would have died back probably a month earlier I guess, which I've read would probably also reduce the yield.

In terms of taste, I've tried the tubers raw and boiled. Raw, I wouldn't bother - there isn't much of a taste, although the tubers do have a crunchy texture. Boiled, they were much nicer - the skin tastes lemony, and the inside becomes very soft and floury with a taste mostly like a potato but slightly less sweet. I would say that the hint of lemon from the skin was quite a nice contrast to the flesh.

So far we have:

- attractive plant
- yield probably not as good as potatoes
- taste similar to potato but slightly less sweet, with a lemony skin

I guess Oca has one more benefit, which is that most of its diseases aren't common currently in the UK. I believe that it's immune to diseases like potato blight, and since no-one else nearby is likely to be growing it, the chance of infection with its own pests and diseases should be low. This means that saving and replanting tubers is likely to be less risky than for potatoes.

So will I grow it again next year? I think I will try, using some of the tubers I've dug up this year. There is very little cost to me of doing so, and it is quite a nice looking plant. The main reason not to bother is the yield - I don't think it was amazing this year, and that was after a long warm Autumn. If we have more typical weather next year, I'll be looking to see if the yield is about the same or significantly worse before deciding whether it will make it to year 3 in the garden.

Babylon 5

I recently started re-watching season 2 of Babylon 5, and it made me remember why I liked the series so much when I first watched it about a decade ago. Season 2 was, I think, by far the best season of Babylon 5, as it contained the least of the bad and the most of the good.

The bad of Babylon 5 for me are as follows:

1. Michael O'Hare

This is the guy who played Commander Jeffrey Sinclair in season 1 before being relegated to a bit part in later seasons. The quality of the acting on B5 was always a bit mixed, because SF shows generally don't have massive budgets to throw at talent, but he was by far the most wooden actor. His departure alone made season 2 better than season 1.

2. Cheese

B5 always had a certain amount of cheese, but it was worst in the beginning and the end, and less bad in the middle.

3. Descent into militarism for conflict resolution

Later on, the removal of the dictatorship on Earth and then the resolution of various disputes within the Interstellar Alliance show a gradual slide towards militarism as the solution to conflicts. Earlier in the series there was more of an emphasis on diplomacy and negotiation, whereas later in the series the primary mechanism for resolving conflict is Sheridan turning up with high-tech ships and threatening people (and basically always winning). I think this was a disappointing simplification into the typical action movie 2D world-view from something a bit more interesting.

4. Season 5

This season was truly terrible, mostly because they thought the show was going to get cancelled after season 4 so they prematurely resolved all the open plot lines. After they unexpectedly got renewed for a final season, they had to cobble together a selection of mostly bad ideas to fill up the season.

Having got that out of the way, the things that made earlier B5 good were:

1. Mystery

Earlier on, there was a lot to learn about what was actually going on, especially who the Shadows were and the motivations of the Vorlons. Obviously, those mysteries had to be dissolved during the course of the series, but I think they were a very appealing part of the series while they lasted.

2. An attempt at complex intra- and inter-species relationships

A lot of SF has somewhat simplistic politics. Star Trek, for example, favoured Cold or Hot War style relationships between the Federation and most other major races / polities for most of its run. Other states were either subsumed into the Federation, at which point they lost much of their distinctiveness, or there were tense highly militarised relations between them and the Federation. The Romulan and Klingon empires are both good examples of this.

This wasn't the case with Babylon 5. Yes, there was war, but the series attempted to make the relationships between the races more complex than just war versus perfect unity. Babylon 5, the focus of the show, was at least partly a diplomatic hub, and was presented as being a much bigger and more diverse place than a star ship or the space station Deep Space 9.

3. A comparative lack of techno-babble handwaving

Star Trek is justifiably famous for inventing random rubbish to achieve resolution to their plots, but B5 for the most part tried to avoid this. Advancements in technology were rare, and typically occurred via transfer from an alien race that had a well-established history of using the technology in question.

I'm going to try blogging again

I've tried hosting blogs from a VPS or from home several times in the past, but usually the blogs eventually fail because to be honest doing the maintenance is hard work. On the other hand, when I hosted the blog myself I could easily add support for anything I wanted, such as LaTeX formulas. I'm not sure if that's possible on Blogger, although I should probably Google it...