Saccharin Radishes

August 23rd, 2010
experiment, sweetradish
I'm going to test the feeding plants artificial sweeteners thing. One friend suggested using saccharin as the sweetener because its chemical structure is pretty different from that of plants (unlike sucralose or aspartame maybe) which would make it harder for the plants to process and more likely for them to store away the sweetener somewhere. Another friend suggested using radishes because the flavor change would be quite clear and they grow quickly. Checking dates, radishes take 20 to 30 days to mature while the first boston frost probably isn't until october 5th, which means I still have leeway.

I planted raidishes yesterday in one long pot divided in half down the middle. I'll start adding saccharin (sweet-n-low from the grocery store) to the right side once they've germinated; no point in adding any before they're working on creating a big tasty root.

Comment via: facebook, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Effective altruism and PR

I. The “effective altruists should be more concerned about PR” brigade has been out in full force on X recently.

via Thing of Things October 8, 2026

There's no point at which turning your brain off will work

In early 2025, I started seeing people turn off their brain as they use LLMs1. They would have an LLM take an action (summarize text, write some code, etc.), and just assume that it worked2. This generally didn't work in early 2025 and the result was …

via Posts on September 18, 2026

My Weirdy Creatures

Over the last few days, I've been working on some little creatres. But they're very weird. I call them "weirdy creatures". I've made quite a lot of them, I think maybe 5-6, not sure. Weirdy Predator This is a weirdy predator. They'…

via Anna Wise's Blog Posts September 13, 2026

more     (via openring)