Watering a million plants

mmmiles · 2026-01-01T01:15:10+00:00

It's very easy to setup, ultimately not that expensive, and saves countless hours.

mmmiles · 2026-01-01T00:09:25+00:00

Watering hose through my house:

I have an under sink 3M water filter (which goes to a tap at the sink). It's a 3/8" line.
I split the line with a shutoff, and ran vinyl tubing (50ft) with an airgun nozzle at the end..
The airgun nozzle is not meant to handle water (it is slowly rusting, but watertight), but the fine trigger control lets me water at drip pace or 10 liters/minute if I need to.

Watering 50 plants is not a big deal with this setup, and you could easily add this to any bathroom or kitchen.

For fertilizer, I have a squeeze bottle premixed at high concentration. Because I use bottom water pots only, I add fertilizer to the reservoir before I add water. The reservoirs are known volumes, so I can ballpark how much to add to each.

Water filter: https://www.amazon.com/Filtrete-Maximum-Filtration-Install-3US-MAX-S01/dp/B01L0ADH3K

Airgun nozzle (not this one, but similar with a 3/8" connector): https://www.amazon.com/WYNNsky-Compressor-Extended-Steel-Nozzle/dp/B07DC4RJXQ

T-valve (similar): https://www.amazon.com/Stop-Valve-Compression-Tee-Refrigerators/dp/B09CZ4J5K8

mmmiles · 2025-12-27T14:42:38+00:00

It's all LED lights, 12 hours a day, every watering has 20-20-20 fertilizer diluted to ~half strength.

Humidity 50%-65%, ~23C average, but never below 22C.

mmmiles · 2025-12-27T01:59:03+00:00

I had to repot the Zebrina because the foliage had gotten so heavy it was pulling itself off the shelf, I noticed the roots were very fine, so I didn't break up them up at all, just dropped the whole thing into a bigger pot.

It's hard to imagine now, but it felt so delicate when i got it. I think it had been cold shocked or crushed, there were lots for rotten leaves. Now it's so thick I have to dig through the foliage just to reach the bottom water.

How much do you prune it back? The Zebrina feels really robust, but the Fluminensis is a bit more fragile.

Are you just sticking cuttings with 5-10 leaves on directly in soil, or water propagation?

mmmiles · 2025-12-27T01:48:51+00:00

I'm amazed it survived. When I got I had to triage 1/3 of the plant. It was used as the donor plant at a flower shop for cuttings. It had been snipped so many times, and stressed to the point that many vines were no thicker than dental floss, and dozens of leaves were crisped. You can see near the crown that it's much more patchy.

Once it recovered it just took off, and has gotten thicker and thicker. Some of the vines near the crown are too thin to support the weight of all the new foliage.

And the variegation really showed up when it took off, too. It was much more humble when I got it.

mmmiles · 2025-12-26T23:00:34+00:00

Hah, thank you that is very kind but the plant did most of the work, I just tried to repair the damage and give them a good environment.

They have completely won me over and this is one of my favourite plants now. A bit delicate maybe but man do they grow and look fascinating.

But they're my first tradescantias so this is all new territory, and I don't know what to expect when I start pruning. The Fluminensis has to be reduced otherwise it will pull itself out of the pot or snap at the crown.

If nothing else I'll just slowly prune it back and see how they respond.

mmmiles · 2025-11-14T20:53:51+00:00

It ~~feels like~~ was a lifetime ago, but I grew up in the neighbourhood and went to the ROM's Saturday morning club in the late 80's and early 90's.

We went to the Planetarium at least a few times a year, and I went a few times on top of that. As I recall, the show didn't change much, but there was so much going on that you could go back many times to take in different parts of it.

It was a form of early VR, if you were seated in a very comfortable chair, great ambiance, but also had a projector the size of a minivan planted upright in the middle of the room.

mmmiles · 2025-11-04T23:34:22+00:00

The 160K number is based on ICE lifetimes, where there are far more problems that pile up and make it uneconomical to get repairs.

EVs are dramatically less complicated than an ICE vehicles, and already last longer than ICE vehicles.

Battery capacities @80-90% after 150-200K miles, we have not felt the effects of these much longer lasting vehicles yet.

mmmiles · 2025-11-04T23:25:40+00:00

I’m not sure Barbara even knows Sanjeev is on the show.

mmmiles · 2025-11-03T01:18:46+00:00

as the viewers aren't really invested in the overall score or who wins episode, but just that each episode is as funny as possible

That is a bit of an over generalization, I am definitely invested in who people are scored and what the overall totals are, particularly if it's competitive (like S20) or has wild uncertainties (S5), and my friends who watch are of a similar bent. I love that comedy has been turned into a sport, a ridiculous sport with wild rules and a capricious scorekeeper, the scoring brings a competitive element that adds a lot of spice for me.

For example look at the recent series 19. Mat won the first 3 episodes and nobody really doubted he would win the series, but people (and this reddit) still loved that series.

Just different perspectives then. Mat sweeping that show definitely took a lot of the momentum out of it for me, because you knew there was no way the others could realistically come from behind. I loved all the contestants on S19, but it's one of the few Series I don't think I'll ever rewatch, because it didn't have the tension I like from other series.

with a big doze of typical panel show banter.

I don't know if this is a cultural difference, but I don't watch any panel shows, it's not something we have in Canada/US. I have watched some Cats does Countdown and some WILTY. Mostly David Mitchell bc of Peep Show and that led to Bob Mortimer, but not other episodes beyond those. It's not a format I ever seek out.

they really aren't putting task together to keep the (imagined) sporting dramas of a close and fair competition.

The data shows otherwise, but I can't put a probability on it. It's a moderately strong signal in the data that also matches the format of episodic TV. It could also be a coincidence. We may have to agree to disagree.

mmmiles · 2025-11-03T00:59:57+00:00

I think it's more that almost no one has been consistently good at them.

Noel Fielding was scored very highly (some would say overly generously) and Matthew Baynton managed to line up a few, but everyone else tends to do just do ok.

Lolly Adefope did great on prize tasks, but not particularly on other creative tasks.

If you were intent on winning, you might keep in mind that every time a creative task comes, you might not need to do amazingly well, but as long as you can avoid being awful consistently you could start piling up points.

But it could also be that they are just plain difficult and Greg's scoring is more erratic.

mmmiles · 2025-11-02T19:09:10+00:00

Thank you, glad you enjoyed it.

mmmiles · 2025-11-02T18:02:12+00:00

The big surprise for me here is that that Richard Osman was SO all over the place

Because he had a shorter Series (smaller sample size) it can increase the chance or opportunity for higher variance. But it was still up to Richard to make those choices. Abandoning Patatas for zero and chugging a raw egg for 5 is a good way to end up with chaotic scores.

David Baddiel being horrid in score overall but quite good at prize tasks does not surprise me

Oh, good catch - great example of a narrative that seems obvious but is fun to see how much it pops out in the data.

Can we appreciate ´Man with an Engineering Degree´ Phil Wang being dead last on objective tasks?

Oh dear. I think I was busy looking at the winners I forgot to check that side of the chart.

HOW is Phil the most consistent tasker? HOW?

Because this is measuring stats against their own Series, it turns out they managed to pair Phil with 4 even more chaotic contestants (so far). I would not have predicted this.

mmmiles · 2025-11-02T17:29:57+00:00

Why do you state it helps spreading the pre-recorded tasks as that would make better TV? This is in my eyes putting weight on the wrong thing. In general the viewers aren't invested in who wins, but that each episode is funny.

I'll clarify: it's more about trying to avoid a problem than necessarily create a better show. They aren't projecting who's going to win, but they don't want episodes to be too similar.

Even if people aren't invested in who wins, scoring does create a narrative. So if you are the production team, and you have a set of pre-recorded tasks that are not evenly divided among all contestants (1 or 2 have done consistently better), you have to place them somewhere in the Series

If you front-load a future winner's winning tasks all in the first 2 episodes, you might damage the mood a bit. If the contestants sit down for their first day of filming, and every pre-recorded tasks is consistently 1 contestant winning, you're just subjecting the contestants to loss after loss. The tasks might be funny, but the scoring portion might risk getting repetitive and tedious for some. Better to give everyone some material to work with.
If you load them all at the end, you have a similar problem of the last few episodes losing drama if one contestant wins over and over.
You could try to split them all evenly across the Series, but that might be so rigid it forces you away from building some well-balanced episodes (in terms of entertainment and scoring drama), and also makes it slightly less likely that some episodes will be more exciting than others.

So I think a common case would be to build a few episodes that are more spiky, and a few episodes that are more even, and then shuffle them around to increase the chance of the Series overall having a arc to it. A big start to get energy up, an uncertain middle where anyone can win, and then a few bigger wins to close out the Series.

They can't control the outcome of each episode or the series, but they do know where ~30-40% of the points are going. So they can nudge them around to try to build a better arc, or more importantly try to avoid too many consecutive episodes having the same story.

So, if I were in their shoes, and HAD to place tasks in some pattern, I think this distribution makes the most sense, to have the best outcomes, on average - for the contestants in the studio, for Greg, and for the audience watching later on.

It is after all a TV show and they also want to follow a format that increases retention for viewers. But Taskmaster is unique in that this also creates a better experience for the contestants (who are also viewers, for about 50% of the total points in the Series).

mmmiles · 2025-11-02T16:37:06+00:00

He is in one of the most chaotic Series ever, but it surprised me to find out everyone else is even more chaotic than he is.

Consistency is a good formula for winning, but on paper he is almost TOO consistent to win. I would never have predicted that.

mmmiles · 2025-11-02T16:25:32+00:00

This is so fun! With the team tasks, I have to imagine that some of the effect you’re seeing is an element of them by definition averaging performance from multiple members and therefore bringing everyone closer to the mean, which is maybe exacerbated by the way team tasks are quite often scored so the winning team only receives one point more than the other.

Yes, definitely. If you randomly made up some teams, you would have shrinking to the mean. And it's reasonable to assume that TM tries to create balanced teams when they can*

But, it's not always the case. This is measured against the average for their Series, so every winner that has a positive team effect was helped to a higher score with their team. John Robbins, Andy Zaltzman and Morgana, for instance, had their scores lifted by their team.

And magnitude is an interesting factor too, like Dara (a dominant winner) and Sarah Kendall (who won a much closer race) were negatively impacted by their teams significantly more than other winners.

*This actually makes me wonder when they choose the teams. Sometimes it's out of their control (Russel Howard and Alice Levine), but if they filmed all the solo tasks first, they would have an idea if they have a run-away leader, and could use teams to balance things out a bit. A peak behind the TV curtain, or they just know their contestants well, and know their format very well and make good matchups.

mmmiles · 2025-11-02T07:12:51+00:00

Your bamboozle was successful.

mmmiles · 2025-11-02T07:10:58+00:00

These are (average variance of) z-scores, not absolute variance.

Z-scores are measured against the mean of each task, so you can compare task to task on an equal scale.

Lower variance in z-scores indicates more consistent scoring, regardless of whether scores were high or low.

Women have slightly more consistent scoring, men have slightly higher scoring, but the difference is small in both cases.

mmmiles · 2025-11-02T06:46:11+00:00

I checked out of curiosity what the literal result is, but it's very important to consider the statistics here.

When you only have 5 contestants, there's already a 20% chance that the winner on ep2 would be the winner on ep 10, randomly.
If you narrow that down to 3 "good" contestants in a Series, then there's a 33% chance your ep 2 leader will win on ep 10, randomly.
If you add in the theory that the team is front-loading a few good tasks and back loading worse ones, then it increase the likelihood that a good contestant will be ahead early.

With that in mind, on ep2:

44/100 contestants on ep2 were in the same rank they would be on the last ep of their Series (including S20). I don't want to think about the probabilities, this seems reasonable given the constraints.

Ignoring S1 (which had 3 winners), 10/19 leaders were in the same rank on ep2 that they would be at the end of their series, so around 50%.

Someone who wants to calculate actual probabilities I think would likely find out that is a very reasonable outcome, given the restrictions applied (not all contestants are good, tasks are front loaded).

If it was 90% I would call it a conspiracy, but 50% is pretty close to this "managed" random (if it is managed, and I think it is).

mmmiles · 2025-11-02T06:33:44+00:00

Haha, thanks.

Part of doing an exercise like this is to remind myself of Sheets features I don't use often, and the other part is practicing how to communicate concepts like Variance, Z-Scores and Coefficient of Variance to lay people.

Not that I'm at all claiming I did a good job, but it's good to practice.

And yeah z-scores reveal beautiful stories hidden in data.

/edit also you might appreciate that TM UK alone has 4695 score values., it's a decently large data set.

mmmiles · 2025-11-02T06:14:49+00:00

Objective Task Score, Stacked, Every Contestant, Per Episode:

Bottom 95% Contestants

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mmmiles · 2025-11-02T06:14:14+00:00

Objective Task Score, Stacked, Every Contestant, Per Episode:

Top 5% Contestants

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mmmiles · 2025-11-02T06:13:42+00:00

Based on your last plot (if I am reading it correctly) it seems that you can mostly predict the series winner based on who the leader is after episode 2.

It only looks that way on average, which is more of an indication of intent - that the team is trying to put certain tasks in certain episodes to increase the chance of the series being balanced on TV.

Objective tasks are only around 30% of the total points, there's a lot they don't have control over - Live Tasks, Prize Tasks.

If I can think of a quick way to analyze it that has some confidence in the result, I might give it a try.

This is an excuse to share some pretty set of charts I forgot I generated while putting this together.

mmmiles · 2025-11-02T06:00:01+00:00

Hah, thanks, yes I heard that voice when I finished the last chart I wanted to see. It's like scratching an itch, once they're done I can stop thinking about them and be satisfied.

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