Wednesday, December 31, 2014

High Paid Teachers

In the US our highest paid teachers are college football coaches (a coach is a teacher right).  Jim Harbaugh just signed a contract with a $5 million base salary, with incentives and raises. 

In South Korea, the highest paid teachers are math coaches, also being paid millions of dollars.


Bureaucratic Meetings and Science Fiction

My employees thought I was bad when I held weekly staff meeting, which over time turned very boring.  I would have loved to tell them about the International Space Station meetings, once a day.
And five sets of bosses.  And a a schedule in a spreadsheet.  

I read a good amount of science fiction back in the 1950's and I don't remember any meetings or bureaucratic rules in those novels. 

Tuesday, December 30, 2014

How Fast Things Change

From a Vox post on Rep. Scalise:
Let's be as generous as we can to House Majority Whip Steve Scalise. Let's say he spoke to the European-American Unity and Rights Organization but had no idea it was a white supremacy group backed by David Duke. Let's say the name didn't raise any red flags for Scalise, or if it did, he didn't follow up on them. Let's take him at his word that, in 2002, he didn't know there was such a thing as Google (or any of its competitors), and neither he nor his staff even cursorily vetted the groups he accepted speaking invitations from. [emphasis added]
Looking at the history of Google, I suspect very few people were automatically checking Google in 2002. Amazing how fast things change, and how quickly we assume the past and the present are similar.

Best Pun of the Day

In this paragraph from Sugar Mountain Farm, accompanying a picture of a mended boot.
Boots wear out. Sometimes we wear out our souls. Sometimes we get punctures in the sides from projections like sticks or rocks. Even the best boots we’ve found to date wear out. If a boot lasts a year we’re doing well. Wet feet are no fun. Especially in the winter.

Monday, December 29, 2014

F35 and the A10

James Fallows has a long article on the military in the Atlantic.  Part of it is a discussion of the F-35 and A-10.  He doesn't like the F-35 and does like the A-10.  The logic is that the F-35 tries to meet too many goals, do too many functions for all our military air forces, and is essentially political, with subcontractors spread across many congressional districts.  Conversely, the A-10 is single purpose and cheap.

There may be a couple parallels here:
  • Robert McNamara's F111 fighter bomber which was initially designed for multiple services.
  • Efforts to rationalize bureaucracy by combining organizations, like the USDA Infoshare effort which aborted.
I'm not sure whether it's always the case that working across organizations fails, but it's certainly difficult.  I believe some of the big car companies have tried, sometimes with success, to build different cars using the same chassis/drive train.  So maybe it's a matter of judgment--picking one's shots.

Tuesday, December 23, 2014

Refining Algorithms and Systems, Help Systems, Driverless Cars and Obamacare

I had occasion yesterday to call the Verizon help line for assistance on installing a new router.  It has been 2 or more years since I've made a similar call, so I was struck by the significant improvement in their system.  I think there were at least 2 aspects:
  • improving the logic of the automated decision tree.  I got to the applicable problem-solver much faster, and when there it was quite logical.
  • linking the automated phone system with databases.  It wasn't new that the system knew my phone number.  It was new that it confirmed my identity.  It was new that it knew that they had just shipped a new router, so logically my call would most likely relate to that.
What's nice about software is that improvements, once made, tend to last.  If you fix a problem or made an enhancement, it's done forever, or at least for as long as the organization behind the system lasts. The critical factor is the organization is working to improve the system, as opposed to letting it survive on inertia.  But this ratchet effect for improving algorithms means that Google's driverless car can handle increasingly unusual traffic situations.  It also means that Obamacare's website can continue to improve. 

Monday, December 22, 2014

"Egg Famines"

Via The Way of Improvement Leads Home, this post on the blog of the Massachusetts Historical Society describes egg production and marketing from an early 20th century farm.  The big take-away is the "egg famine"--no eggs in winter, an abundance in summer.  These days of course we turn on the electric lights in winter so no more egg famines, when the price of eggs hits $15 a dozen (inflation adjusted).

We were using electric lights back in the 40's.  My mother recalled with rare bitterness that neighbors thought they were a signal to Germans to bomb (my maternal grandparents were German immigrants)--an example of the sort of popular panic and ignorance we've never outgrown.

Monday, December 15, 2014

FSA IT Crimped

On page 29 and 30 of the Cromnibus, FSA IT is somewhat crimped: half the $132 mill is withheld pending a detailed analysis/report on projects over $25K.  (Copy and paste from GPO documents is unsatisfactory, so read yourself, if interested.  Everything has to fit the "Farm Service Agency Information Technology Roadmap", which sounds like something which should be available on the internet?

FSA Offices Are Frozen

No, they didn't lose their heating system, but the cromnibus apparently had language in it, via Chris Clayton at DTN

Under the funding provision approved by the House, Farm Service Agency would be blocked from cutting staff or offices.
The bill blocks the Farm Service Agency from closing 250 county offices or eliminating 815 staff. The budget agreement actually puts a "temporary moratorium" on closing FSA offices or relocating employees" until a comprehensive assessment of FSA workload is completed by USDA. "This agreement reiterates dissatisfaction with the agency's budget submission. The budget request did not provide a rationale for the proposed office closures and staffing changes, did not clearly describe the effect of the proposed actions, and did not include a timeline for implementation that demonstrates how savings could be achieved."

Saturday, December 13, 2014

A Good Day for Engineers

Eugene Volokh praises the Kipling poem "Sons of Martha", which he sees as an ode to engineers, and Lynn Beiser thanks the engineers at Honda for saving her son's life and body.


Thursday, December 11, 2014

The Return of the Schizophrenic Congress

The "Cromnibus" bill funding the government for FY15 is being worked on today.  As usual with big pieces of appropriations, there's some policy riders included, often riders which reverse or bar the agencies from doing what legislation says they should.  And there's cuts for the IRS, making it harder to enforce tax laws.  I'd call those Republicans who vote for the bill hypocrites if they also criticized Obama for failing to enforce immigration laws, but once we start identifying hypocrisy among Washington politicians we embark on a never-ending task. 

Wednesday, December 10, 2014

Modern Health Care: Dentistry

I know I've been lucky with my teeth, very few problems, certainly mainly less than I deserved considering the care I've given them.

I hate dentists.  When and where I grew up, one went to the dentist only when there was a big problem.  I think I went once in my teens.  Then came the Army and I had 2-3 small cavities filled. There was one trip to a dentist in my 40's, ruined by a young know-it-all hygenist who lectured me on tooth care. Sometimes I'm humble, but not that humble.

Finally in my 60's I finally had a crisis--bad wisdom tooth which had to come out.  After that I started seeing a dentist every 6 months.  He was my ideal dentist: had no hygenist, did his own cleaning, silent, we exchanged no more than a couple sentences each visit.   He retired, right when my other wisdom tooth started acting up.  After a couple years I finally arranged to see a new dentist.  On the morning of my appointment, half the wisdom tooth fell out.

I was impressed by my dentist's setup--the x-rays were displayed on a tablet computer, as was each procedure with its (high) cost. Though I didn't like the switch from taking a sip of water to rinse one's mouth to having a suction tube setup.  Anyhow, I got a referral to a specialist for the wisdom tooth, which I used this morning.  My dentist's office was able to email the xrays to the specialist's office, so they were able to extract what was left of the tooth without a prior appointment; total elapsed time maybe 40 minutes from the time I walked in the door.  That's impressive.  Perhaps less impressive is the multiplication of jobs in the field of dentistry, but that's looking a gift horse in the mouth.


Tuesday, December 09, 2014

Networks and Agricultural Economics

This is a Politico article from a while back, describing the competition between agricultural economists at different universities for the 3 million dollars to pay for helping farmers understand their options under the farm bill.

Call me old-fashioned, call me stick-in-the mud, but isn't helping farmers understand the world the whole raison d'etre of the extension service? 

Anyhow, David Rogers tells a good story of how government works, particularly the linkages among Congress, the bureaucracy and the private/nonprofit/educational world.

Saturday, December 06, 2014

Revkin on Technology and Small Farms and "Factory Man"

Here's a post at the Times covering meetings on technology and small farms.

Just finished reading the book "Factory Man", on the history of the rise and fall and persistence of the furniture industry in Henry County, VA.  The factory man is John Douglas Bassett III, who's able to compete with Asian furniture makers, not on cost but on customization and speed.  So, as of now, the US factory can use automation to be more responsive to customer desires because the Asian makers are limited by the time it takes to move a container across the Pacific.  (Not sure why a manufacturer in Mexico or Central America couldn't do better than the Asians.)  So the bottom line is the mass of furniture is made in Asia, but the niche markets which require customization can still be served by US manufacturers.

I see a possible parallel with American agriculture.

Weird Fact of the Day: B-52s Versus Cruisers

The B-52 goes back to my childhood, and is still around.  From an article arguing that the Air Force should have replaced its engines with more fuel-efficient modern ones, comes this fact:
Since today’s B-52s rolled off the Wichita production line, the Navy has launched and scrapped two classes of destroyer and four cruiser classes, and that comparison makes a $550 million Long Range Strike Bomber look a little more digestible.
 Back in WWII the cost relationship and the longevity comparison between a bomber and a destroyer or cruiser would be one-sided in favor of the ship.  I suppose that's an indirect measure of the cost of electronics  versus the cost of people.

Friday, December 05, 2014

Memory and "Hang Separately"

I posted earlier   about how memory distorts historical reality.  Boston 1775 offers another instance, where the quote usually attributed to Ben Franklin about the need for rebels to hang together else they would hang separately was much earlier attributed to Richard Penn.

Wednesday, December 03, 2014

Hans Rosling Is a Bureaucrat

Via Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution, I got to this profile of Hans Rosling.which raised my respect for him considerably.  Rosling is famous for his presentations on world health, economic, and wellbeing statistics.  He comes off very well, and upsets many of my preconceptions.  So I already respected him

What's new from the article?  He's volunteered to go to Liberia and help on Ebola statistics.  My knee-jerk reaction (I'm a liberal so my knee jerks) is that someone so good at the big picture is likely to be inept at the nitty-gritty which bureaucrats worry about.  Not in the case of Rosling.  For example, there's a difference between showing "blank" for a county's Ebola cases and "0", a big difference. 

Tuesday, December 02, 2014

Farming and Consolidation, Continued

Yesterday's post included an argument that technology would not help smaller farmers compete in producing generic commodities.  As a followup, this from an Amber Waves article:
Production has shifted to larger farms in most agricultural commodity sectors over the last two decades. This consolidation has contributed to productivity growth in agriculture, leading to lower commodity and food prices and reducing total resource use in food and fiber production. As consolidation reduces the farm population, it also makes starting small and mid-sized farming operations more difficult. This is especially true for dairy farms, where a major transformation of the sector has reduced the number of dairy farms by nearly 60 percent over the past 20 years, even as total milk production increased by one-third. Recent results from the Census of Agriculture and the Agricultural Resource Management Survey (ARMS) detail how and why the structure of dairy production has changed.

The "midpoint" herd size is now at 900 cows.

Monday, December 01, 2014

Farming and IT (and a Very Bad Headline)

The NYTimes has an article today on the topic of information technology and farming, focusing on an Indiana farmer, Kip Tom, who handles 20,000 acres, up from 700 acres in the 1970's. The article is not bad, hitting the big data involved in precision farming, the use of drones, the rising status of women, etc. etc.  It includes a quote from a former farmer who now is one of the 25 employees of the Tom operation, which includes 6 Tom family members.

It's titled: "Working the Land and the Data, Technology Offers Some Family Owned Farms a Chance To Thrive and Compete With Giant Agribusinesses".  While the headline is fine, the subhead is worst one I can remember in a good while.  It's based on this sentence in the article, a line which is undermined by the rest of the article: "It [technology] is also helping them grow to compete with giant agribusinesses].  The truth, more clear in the accompanying video, is that by going heavily into technology, and being smart enough to pick up land in the 1980's, when values had crashed, the Tom family were able to expand and thrive, when their neighbors went broke and sold their own operations.

Consider just the data in the article: the 20,000 acres of the current operation represents the equivalent of 28 farms in the 700 acre range from the 1970's.  And those 700 acre farms in themselves probably represented several smaller farms from the era of horsepower (which Tom's father remembers his father plowing with). Leesburg, IN, by the way, has lost about 10 percent of its population since 2000.

At the risk of over-analyzing, I suspect the writer was impressed with Mr. Tom, considered him one of the good guys.  Logically then, if he's a good guy, he must be competing with bigger operations, those soulless agribusinesses.  A good guy can't be someone who succeeds by driving others out of business.  Yes, "succeeds by driving...." is harsh, and not the way we usually think about individuals.  Because of the invisible hand of the market, it's not any one individual/enterprise bankrupting others, it's just the way things are; some people win and some people don't. 

Friday, November 28, 2014

Memory and Reality

Saw somewhere a description of a study of how well Americans remember their Presidents.  The bottom line was that we remembered the first 4, Lincoln/Johnson/Grant; FDR and not the ones in between.  The explanation was that memory is refreshed by usage--if we don't have occasion to recal Polk, we won't remember him.

That makes sense I guess, but there's also another phenomenon going on; the accumulation of true and not so true memories around certain figures.  It's something of a geological provision, some figures are built up and some torn down.

As it happens, there seems to me to be an example in A.O. Scott's review today of the new biopic on Alan Turing.  Turing is a figure who is becoming more and more prominent, partially for good reasons--his contributions to the theory of computing and to British code-breaking in WWII--and partially for understandable reasons: his homosexuality and tragic fate.  But IMHO he's getting props which are undeserved as well.  Scott writes:
" There are lines of dialogue that sound either anachronistic or — it may amount to the same thing — prophetic. It is thrilling and strange to hear the words “digital computer” uttered a half-century before any such thing existed,.... [emphasis added]
This puts him 50 years ahead of the game which isn't true.  The first mention of "digital computer" in Google ngrams is in 1940, which  is roughly when the first digital computers were being built, perhaps 4 years after Turing's big publication. There's controversy over the definitions here, but the bottomline is several people were working in the field.  But 100 years from now Turing will be remembered as the inventor of the computer just as Edison is remembered as the inventor of the light bulb.

Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Population Growth Versus Food Growth

According to wikipedia the average rate of growth of world population is 1.1 percent annually.  According to this farmdoc post the big US food crops have increased yield by 1.2 percent (wheat) to 2.0 percent (corn) and 2.4 percent (peanuts) over the last 40+ years.

Persnickety Grump Today

A Ph.D. does not know the difference between "cache" and "cachet":

"that Ph.D. cache..."  from a blog post on Ferguson.

Tuesday, November 25, 2014

Is Crop Insurance Too Inefficient?

Someone called the Landstewardship Project (seems to be based in MN/WI) put out a study attacking crop insurance as highly subsidized and highly profitable.  According to today's Farm Policy, the crop insurance industry responded by saying the figures in the report end 5 years ago, before a set of administrative changes by USDA and legislative changes in the farm bill which cut subsidies and costs.

See the article at Agriculture.com

Monday, November 24, 2014

Does Our Racism Extend to Pets?

The Fairfax Animal Shelter needs special incentives to get black pets adopted.

McArdle on Barry

Megan McArdle has a good post on Marion Barry, a post to which I made this comment:
Fascinating--a relative, a WASP living outside Boston in the 40-70's time frame, amazed me as a boy with his violent opinions against Catholics and mayor Curley, while I grew up to become one of the white liberals who helped elect Barry to the school board before leaving DC for the burbs.
Maybe the Chinese proverb should read: "may you have interesting politicians"

Comments

I've been remiss in paying attention to the structure and settings of this blog, meaning comments have been disfunctional for a good while.  Hopefully I've fixed that.

Saturday, November 22, 2014

Bureaucrats Get Some Attention

Politico has an article on the challenge facing the USCIS bureaucrats who have to implement President Obama's executive order on immigration.  It's divided between emphasizing the size of the challenge (4 million applications) and the lessons learned from handling Obama's 2012 order for the "Dreamers") which was about a tenth of the size.

One thing Politico doesn't mention that Vox has a piece  which mentions the role of intermediaries, those who claim to be able to get people what they want from an impenetrable federal bureaucracy.  There's some evidence that 40 percent of the immigration "experts" are con-people.

The holy grail for bureaucrats is to design and implement a process which works the first time, which handles almost all the situations, and which doesn't require intermediaries.  It's a dream, not a reality.

Rugby and "Swing Low..."

Who knew?

There's a strong association between British rugby and the song "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" per wikipedia.

This comes from an Ann Althouse link to a Brit article on a Labor politician getting canned for tweeting a picture of a house covered by St George's flags, which led to the wikipedia article on St George's flag, a flag which has some connection in Britain with racism which led to a discussion of patriotism and the possibility of selecting an anthem for the English, one of the options mentioned was "Swing Low..."

Friday, November 21, 2014

Great Sentence of the Day

From Northview  Diary:
If turkeys have the reputation for not being likely candidates for Mensa, it is guinea fowl which come right for the factory devoid of anybody home upstairs but a rapidly whirling hamster on crack.

Thursday, November 20, 2014

We're Losing Trees?

The  Boston 775 blog has a post on identifying the location of a Revolutionary war site in New York City.  There's a drawing by a British officer done from a specific spot which a researcher is now trying to identify.

The big challenge, it turned out, was that these parts of New York have many more thick trees than they did back in 1776, after over a century of farming.
That's true in  many areas: old photos of the area in which I grew up show the hills almost treeless, my memories are of some wooded areas plus trees in hedgerows, in the current century trees probably cover 50 percent or more of the area.

New Military Leaders: Utter Goofballs?

From a Dan Drezner ode to the West Point cadets: [Warning: quote out of context]
" many of the cadets were utter goofballs"

His next paragraph:
"No, two qualities impress about the West Point cadets. First, the one value they all share is a genuine commitment to national service. Not all of them plan to be career Army, but they were all very determined to do their part while they were in the service.
The second thing that impressed about the cadets was their diversity, and their recognition and appreciation of that diversity. .."

Wednesday, November 19, 2014

Second Childhood Time: Paper Airplanes

Technology has advanced in all fields, including that of making paper airplanes, a subject which brings my childhood to mind.

Kottke links to a video on how to fold the world record airplane.

Tuesday, November 18, 2014

Latest Euphemism: "Sidestepped"

From a NYTimes article on Al Sharpton:
"Mr. Sharpton has regularly sidestepped the sorts of obligations most people see as inevitable, like taxes, rent and other bills. Records reviewed by The New York Times show more than $4.5 million in current state and federal tax liens against him and his for-profit businesses. And though he said in recent interviews that he was paying both down, his balance with the state, at least, has actually grown in recent years. His National Action Network appears to have been sustained for years by not paying federal payroll taxes on its employees.
I can't stand tax cheats--one of my first posts was on the subject (Richard Hatch).

An Exercise Bordering on Sadism: John McPhee

John McPhee is one of America's great writers, and apparently teachers, as one can gather from this piece in the Princeton Alumni mag by Joel Achenbach.  To understand the following, "greening" is McPhee's word meaning the excision of words from a piece as needed to fit space, etc. but without damage to the author's content and style.

"He made us green a couple of lines from the famously lean Gettysburg Address, an assignment bordering on sadism."

[corrected spelling in heading]

Friday, November 14, 2014

What Low-Tax Advocates Gave Us

I like John Oliver.  Here he is on lotteries.  A factoid--the first (modern) public lottery was in New Hampshire in 1964, sold as a way to support education.  Now back in the day, NH was a low tax state, ruled by the editor of the Manchester newspaper, who was far right.  NH still doesn't have an income tax, although it's elected some Democrats recently.

Thursday, November 13, 2014

Pollan, Bittman, et. al Play Fast and Loose

Michael Pollan dusts off his 2008 appeal to President Obama and updates it with help from Mark Bittman and others, calling for a "national food policy".  Along the way he touches on his lame history (Nixon did not change food policy in the 70's) and makes projections which are dubious (to me).

An example of their playing fast and loose with facts:
"Today’s children are expected to live shorter lives than their parents."
What does the link tie to?  An academic article which pushes the importance of obesity and challenges SSA's projections of steadily increasing lifespan.  But it says, in the last paragraph:
"Unless effective population-level interventions to reduce obesity are developed, the steady rise in life expectancy observed in the modern era may soon come to an end and the youth of today may, on average, live less healthy and possibly even shorter lives than their parents."
Emphasis added--there's no way a college professor like Pollan should create a flat statement from such a carefully hedged sentence.
 
They come up with a $243 billion cost of diabetes in a context which implies out-of-pocket costs, but don't mention that a quarter of that is not healthcare costs, but estimates of loss of productivity. 

While they concede that Congress is responsible for agricultural policy, they ask for an administration food policy, unsupported by Congress, without any discussion of how their proposal would change the position of Congress or last beyond this administration.

Note: Although I'm crediting Pollan with the piece, it's possible one of the others is responsible for the problem.

Mark Bittman, Farmers and Markets

The NYTimes is running a Food Conference, which means Mark Bittman is again writing on food.

He gets one thing half right:
The difference between you and the hungry is not production levels; it’s money. There are no hungry people with money; there isn’t a shortage of food, nor is there a distribution problem. There is an I-don’t-have-the-land-and-resources-to-produce-my-own-food, nor-can-I-afford-to-buy-food problem.
I agree it's a poverty problem, but he goes on to say that poverty often comes from people displacing traditional farmers. The rest is a mish-mash, mostly attacking "industrial model of food production".

IMHO China is simply the latest and most dramatic example of the truth.  Allow private possession of land and provide incentives to increase production  by having a market for agricultural products and to increase productivity by using modern "industrial" methods.  That correlates with agricultural labor moving to cities for higher wages/better living conditions, allowing greater returns to the farmers who remain.  In other words, the city workers get money and the non-traditional farmers get money; money means markets.  The traditional agriculture model has failed to provide people what they want, as shown by what they'll pay for and what they'll move for.

Now having said all that by definition the market doesn't handle bad externalities, it doesn't enforce standards (witness Chinese baby formula) and the structure of the market with multiple producers with no pricing power and few buyers with much power leads to boom and bust. So there's many problems with industrial agriculture, but producing enough food to feed the world is not one of them.

Wednesday, November 12, 2014

The Only ASCS Employee To Become President

Historian Ted Widmer lists five great Presidential memoirs, starting with Jefferson and ending with the only ASCS employee* to ever become President.  Most of his appreciation"
An Hour Before Daylight returns to the tiny town where he famously grew up—Plains, Georgia—and vividly recaptures the rhythms and moods of Depression-era America. Like Jefferson, Carter begins with simple geography. Plains was a stark and simple place—a reader almost feels as if he is re-entering Biblical times, a comparison that might have occurred to the former president. Electricity is scarce, and animals important, and small-town trust even more so. The cumulative effect is one of considerable artistry, taking the reader into a distant place that is gone forever, but lingers in the imagination—not just as an elegy but also as a kind of warning as well. An Hour reads almost like a Frank Capra movie, with Jimmy Carter playing the role that would inevitably have been assigned to Jimmy Stewart. Like Capra’s films, there is darkness mingled with the light—haunted houses, racial hatreds and a South that is still not all that reconstructed. But a hometown romance turns into a long and happy marriage; some modest political ambitions turn into a governorship and then a presidency (neither of which are described in the book, which adds to its appeal); and one puts the book down having been somewhere real. There is wistfulness near the end, as an older Carter wanders a depopulated Plains like a ghost, wondering where all the people have gone. In the end, he finds solace in the land itself, which will continue “to shape the lives of its owners, for good or ill, as it has for millennia.” In other words, Washington doesn’t matter at all, because the earth will eventually swallow up everyone.
 *  Carter was a summer employee measuring acreage for compliance.

Tuesday, November 11, 2014

Forbidden Words

The Post has had some articles discussing the status of the "n-word".  Their piece today found 4 football coaches: the white head coach at 40 had prohibited the word in the past, but reluctantly gave up on his prohibition.  The older black assistant coach (60's and black) absolutely forbade it, the young black assistant coach was mostly okay with it--lots of nuance in the article so I may be missummarizing. 

While reading the articles I thought of other words which once were lightning and now have loss their meaning.  For example: "God damn" used to be full of meaning; not so now.  Lots of ethnic slurs are just ancient these days, dusty from being kept in the attic.

Saturday, November 08, 2014

The Ebola Panic

A couple weeks ago I posted a comment on a blog saying I'd bet that the Washington NFL Skins would win more games than the number of deaths of Americans from Ebola contracted on US soil.  I think I'll win the bet. :-)

Friday, November 07, 2014

A Magazine for Fake Farmers*

That's the title the New Yorker magazine puts on its article on Modern Farmer. 

I'm not sure New Yorker is in any position to judge which farmers are fake and which authentic. My impression of the magazine, based on its RSS feed, is that it's aimed at what we used to call "hobby farmers", or rather maybe those people who dream of being hobby farmers.  I mean the people who have income or assets from outside farming which might enable them to try various niches in the world of food and agriculture.  It's rather like the knitting magazines someone near and dear to me subscribes to, presenting lots of projects and ideas and news, very little of which is in any danger of being knitted.  Or maybe closer to home it's like all the unread books in the house, a sign of my interests and affiliations, but few of which will actually be read before I die.

[* That's the title on their website, the one in the printed magazine is "Read It and Reap."  Added in edit.]

Thursday, November 06, 2014

Growing Corn in the Movies

I enjoy Matthew McConaughy--first saw him in Lone Star, which is a very good movie by John Sayles, who was a very good filmmaker, for a while at least.

I understand from reviews that in his new movie, Interstellar, disaster has hit the world, requiring people to venture out through wormholes to other planets.  Sounds like a story I might have enjoyed growing up, when I was reading Asimov and Anderson, Heinlein and Clarke. 

But my point: apparently corn is the only crop which can be grown now. I understand corn has some movie magic which other crops don't--you can hide in corn, famous ballplayers can emerge from corn, "corn" has multiple meanings, etc. etc.  But corn, really?  The moviemaker is misleading a bunch of people who've no understanding of agriculture in the first place.  Why not sorghum in a world of dust storms?

Wednesday, November 05, 2014

Common Enemy Eases Bigotry: the Case of the Revolution

Protestants used to hate the Pope--they even had a holiday celebration of their hatred: Pope Night (Nov. 5).  But as Boston 1775 describes when the Revolution tried to turn the French Canadians against Britain, and then allied with Catholic France, that demonstration of bigotry got suppressed.

Friday, October 31, 2014

Red Tape: Private Versus Public

In the case of adopting cats, I can say that the red tape involved in an adoption from a private NGO (SPCA) significantly exceeds that involved in an adoption from a public agency (county animal shelter).

Thursday, October 30, 2014

A Canticle for Leibowitz

One of the best science fiction novels of my youth was Miller's "Canticle for Leibowitz".  Via Brad DeLong, here's the New Yorker's nice appreciation of it.

Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Historians: Move to Mexico

Although I failed to become a historian, I've kept up my subscriptions to the main journals over the years, meaning I see the articles and data where American historians obsess over the fate of their profession, or more accurately their careers as professors.

This isn't conclusive, of course, but maybe they should look South:

"On the love of history: My kids go to a local Mexican school, and it seems like they perform in a special history program almost every month. Children dress up in traditional garb or as political revolutionaries, and they enthusiastically sing, dance, recite poetry and perform plays depicting important historical events. I was once talking with a fellow mom about how my husband and I were trying to understand our children’s interests so that we could help them find a job they would love as adults. I jokingly moaned that my son only liked history but that he could never make a living off of that. My friend looked at me, shocked! "No!" she cried. "In Mexico, historians are highly valued and never have a hard time finding a job!"
 That's from a blog running a series on childrearing in various countries, focusing on the cultural differences among them. It's interesting.

Tuesday, October 28, 2014

The Advantages of Diversity--US and Pets

There's one subtle advantage to a diverse nation which James Madison never realized, but I'm discovering as relatives adopt dogs and we adopt cats.

What is it?  Apparently the effete blue areas, like Reston and MA, believe in neutering their cats and dogs. The virile read areas, like the rest of VA and the South, believe in nature and what happens naturally.  The result: one area has a surplus of dogs and cats and the other area has a deficit, which any economist, and even someone like me without any ecoomics, realies will result in trading, exporting the surplus to the deficit areas to the greater benefit of all.

Monday, October 27, 2014

Obama As Hands-Off Executive: The Case of Dreamers

The Post had an article this morning previewing a speech by Janet Napolitano, who's describing the inside story behind the Administration's delay of deportation for the "Dreamers".

What struck me was, after DHS had developed a proposal:
"She pushed ahead anyway and took the proposal to the White House. Though she never met with Obama about it, Napolitano recalled in the interview how other top officials — especially then-White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler — grilled her about the challenges of implementation and the legal issues of acting without Congress."[emphasis added]
 While I think I've a realistic grasp of the limits of personal Presidential power (having read Neustadt many decades ago), I find this amazing.  Here's a major use of executive power, arguably stretching beyond the limits (though I think not), sure to be a political hot potato, winning plaudits from the Latino community and condemnation from the right and Dems running in red states, and the President never meets with the Cabinet Secretary on it!!

I assume after the White House staff vetted it, they gave a paper to the President and he signed it, but IMHO that's not the way to run the railroad.  Trying to be fair to Obama he probably trusted his staff and liked the policy paper, so why bother meeting with Napolitano?  My answer: even if all that's true, the more involvement DHS feels from the big boss, the more enthusiasm they can muster to handle the nuts and bolts and go out and defend the policy.  If Napolitano can't come back from the White House saying "the President looked me in the eye and said you've got to make this work, it's only fair", her staff has to wonder about her clout and the Prez's commitment.   And so do I.

Thursday, October 23, 2014

Maiden Blush

Google "Maiden Blush" and you get some hits, but not what I'm looking for--an apple. I'm inspired by this article in the NYTimes on an obsessive who's documented 17,000 varieties of apple, few of which are commercially grown today.  He's going to have a book out shortly, a book which started as a file under MS-DOS and for which he's still using WordPerfect 7.  I tip my hat to him, at least I would if JFK hadn't eliminated hats.

There were a few old apple trees on the farm where I grew up.  I only know two names: Yellow Transparent and Maiden Blush.  The Transparent was a good cooking/sauce apple, early maturing and close to the house, so we made fair use of it.  The tree was easy to climb, though the best apples were always beyond one's reach.  The Maiden Blush was in the "orchard" proper, the group of four or five tree slowly mouldering away.  The trees themselves weren't productive, so I visited them only a couple times a summer, occasionally tasting the odd apple.  Presumably my family knew the names of the other trees, but if I ever knew them I've long forgotten.  "Maiden Blush" sticks in my mind.