AnarchistArtificer
Holy shit. 5 years for “conspiracy to cause public nuisance”. Holy shit.
I have a lot of ebooks that I download for university research, hobby learning and friends who ask for help sourcing books. I put everything in my calibre library, which is great for metadata management (tip: I have it set so new books that I’ve just imported get a tag of “new”, which I remove when I have processed their metadata. This allows me to chip away at ensuring the metadata is correct and good, even if I don’t do it at time of import).
Anyway, at one point I found myself at risk of becoming overwhelmed by books, because if I’m wanting to learn some category theory, for example, I’d have multiple books that seem to be relevant. Some of them were recommended by programmers, some of them assume a higher level of maths background knowledge, some of them are more fun to read — once upon a time I might’ve known which was which, but if there’s a significant gap between me downloading stuff and using it (which is often the case, I’m quite opportunistic with book recommendations), I may forget. Making a note of why I downloaded a particular book is something I’ve been trying to do more, so I can identify the useful things at the right time — the calibre notes field can work for that, but I’m still figuring out how to manage this in a wider sense because I do a lot of reading and it’s easy to forget why I’m reading a particular thing. I think I have a calibre plugin to show which things I’ve read also.
Another related thing is that I will take a cursory look over a book when I download it, and I may delete it and not put it into my calibre library. This feels significant because downloading a book doesn’t make it one of my books, ‘taking it home’ and putting it away on my ‘bookshelf’ makes it mine. In short, I try to be mindful in my curation activities, recognising that doing it in big clumps with my whole collection doesn’t really work and that pruning little and often helps more.
A somewhat cheesy quote that helped me a lot is “you can be the juiciest, ripest peach in the world, but some people just don’t like peaches”. I used to try way too hard to be likeable and I agonised over people who didn’t like me.
There was an instance of a colleague being rude and unprofessional to me, and under the framework of “they don’t like me and that’s why they’re being unkind”, it put the onus on me to change, which wasn’t reasonable. It should be possible for people to not like each other in a working relationship while still being respectful and productive.
Okay, well this is actually super cool, thanks for driving my attention there. It seems that the word for this particular behaviour is "Nyctinasty
I think the short answer to your question appears to be “we don’t know”, because nyctinasty has been observed for millennia but there isn’t a clear, conclusive answer. In some plants that are open at night, it may be that they are pollinated by bats or nocturnal insects, but one of the open questions here is “does nocturnal nyctinasty happen via the same mechanism as diurnal nyctinasty?”. By that, I mean “does a nocturnal plant (like moonflower) use the same ‘muscles’ as a plant that’s open during day, like water lily?”.
I don’t recall it mentioning water lilies, but a book that you’d probably enjoy if you’re curious about this stuff is What a Plant Knows by Daniel Chamovitz. I remember there is some really interesting stuff in there about plant circadian rhythms, and the information is presented in an accessible and entertaining manner
A food-for-thought question from a biochemist who doesn’t know much about water lilies specifically: your question assumes that it’s the opening/closing that requires energy, but another possible mechanism might be if the default, relaxed position was closed, and energy needed to be expended during the day to keep the flower open (or the inverse, where the open position is the default, relaxed position, but then at night, energy is continually expended to keep it closed). I suggest this based on how I know many of the molecular mechanisms of plants rely on turgidity (swollenness from water) to evoke structural changes.
It doesn’t change the question materially, it just involves looking at the question from different angles. I don’t know much about water lilies though, I didn’t even know that they close at night. I might report back here if I find anything interesting.
Relevant link: https://www.kesslerrebellion.com/ — Scientists are concerned about space debris and are organising