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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsNO, NO, NO, AI overview, currants are NOT grapes! I was thinking about
currant jelly and currant bushes, and decided to see if it was feasible to grow them in my area, as I have rarely seen one here. As I started to skim down the page for a good liink, my eye caught "raisins and currants are grapes" in the ai overview. WTAF???
Just to make certain I had not lost my mind, or my memory of currant bushes from my childhood, I found a good nursery link Turns out I can grow them here! They are not grapes, of course, which can also be grown here.
haele
(15,109 posts)But yeah, European black currents and red currents aren't grapes, they're members of the ribes genis, a type of tart small globe type berry. And in the US, they're considered invasive species, they can carry diseases that affect similar native berries.
On edit - I used to do medieval recreation, and the traditional recipes use Corinth grapes for raisin wine and sauces and as "plums" - dried to be used in breads or meats, while the currents were used fresh in jellies and preserves or candied in honey, generally not fermented or dried.
PufPuf23
(9,713 posts)Ribes genus include gooseberries and currants as species in the genera.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribes
Red flowering currant grows in the forest where I live as do several species of gooseberries, with and without spines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribes_sanguineum
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cronartium_ribicola
White pine blister rust spends part of life cycle on Ribes. The disease was introduced to North America on currant nursery stock. White pine blister rust has the range, abundance and commercial viability of the 5-needle pines in North America.
Ms. Toad
(38,327 posts)eppur_se_muova
(41,048 posts)I was looking up the properties of some chemical (as I frequently do) and Google's AI dumped all kinds of stupid-ass useless info I hadn't asked for on me. Unfortunately, I can't remember what the actual search was for -- I wish I did ! But let's say I was searching for the melting point of salt, for example. The easy way to do that would be to type "melting point of sodium chloride" into Google's search field, and expect it to return links to tables or databases that include the melting points of common chemicals, with maybe the actual mp front and center. Instead I got a "summary" that resembled the 'core dump' I've seen students put on chemistry tests when they don't really know what the answer is -- they just write down everything they've memorized on that particular topic (or something resembling it) and expect the grader (me) to piece together the correct answer from bits and pieces in there and give them a high score. In fact, *recognizing* which part of the answer is correct and which is just rote-memorized irrelevant info is how you earn points, and since I'm the one doing the recognizing and they're clearly not, I, the grader, get all the points and they get none. Information on the history of salt, major producers of salt, cultural aspects of salt -- none of which have a damn thing to do with the mp. But right in the middle of all that -- which may have included a fair amount of actual correct facts, for all I know -- was something just totally, completely off -- like "salt is completely insoluble in water" or "salt is highly flammable". Not merely technically wrong, or wrong by degree, but totally counterfactual. Looking in no way distinct from other info that might have been at least partially right. That was not an auspicious debut for Google AI, and I quickly found ways to disable it in searches. Which has saved a lot of energy, just as a bonus -- AI sucks up a lot of electrical power to produce its idiot-savant "answers", which can be pretty heavy on the "idiot" part. So please, Google, stop burning coal to feed me trash "information". Your search engine has gone pretty downhill in recent years, and adding AI was like stepping off a cliff in that regard.