The National Nightmare Is Over

National Archives has a document for each day. Today's document is Nixon's resignation letter.

Sharp Phd's

I wonder what went wrong in this quote--it can't be taken literally (from a Treehugger article on how Thai rice farmers preserve genetic diversity):

“They take into consideration [when selecting seed] a multitude of factors which vary annually, including soil type, elevation, and temperature,” according to the study done by Barbara A. Schaal, Ph.D., the Mary-Dell Chilton Distinguished Professor of biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, and her colleagues at Chiang Mai University in Thailand.

How do soil type and elevation vary annually?

Our Entrepreneurial Economy

Is the pride of free marketeers everywhere. That's as compared to the bureaucracy, as described in this quote about the response to an innovative idea:

"“It was just one thing after another,” he recalled. “I don’t want to speak ill of anyone’s [agency or organizational] culture, but the bottom line is that these people are committed to death. They’re encumbered by their own bureaucracy. It’s almost as if you went to the C.D.C. and said, ‘I have a cure for the common cold,’ and they said, ‘Oh, no thanks.’ ”

Of course, those who remember I'm a liberal with a soft spot for government bureaucracy willb suspicious of those brackets. And indeed, you should be. The words inside the brackets were originally: "company or corporate" and the quote is from this NYTimes article on the problems of getting private unemployment insurance or salary gap insurance.

Great News for Chinese Feminists

BBC reports China is instituting a pension system for farmers over age 60. Why is this good for feminists--because the preference for sons is, in part, a reflection of the need for someone to continue farming. Give farmers pensions and they'll accept daughters.

On Having Tomatoes Stolen

There's reasons not to garden (thieves for one) and the deeper reasons cited in this piece (satire of reasons for not gardening as given by different schools of thought).

Plant a Farm in an Hour

My great grandfather did pretty good accumulating land in antebellum Illinois, but I doubt he ever had 60 acres of corn. Turns out John Deere has corn planters in the field which can do that much in an hour, with a new one in the works that can do 90 acres.

That's what John Phipps means by industrial farming. And it's why we have cheap calories.

A Measure of Interconnection

From the News from 1930 blog:

By use of radio links, any Bell system phone can now connect to about 30M of world's 34.5M phones in 25 countries, including most of Europe and parts of South America and Africa, and to several ocean liners at sea. US-Europe are connected by 4 radio channels and so can have 4 simultaneous conversations.

I wouldn't expect a great expansion of phones to have occurred before 1941, so in my lifetime. we've gone from 30,000,000 to at least 3,000,000,000 (this source says there's 2.1 billion cell phones in the world now--add another 900,000,000 for land lines--my guess.)

How Much Does Ag Contribute to Greenhouse Gases

Ezra Klein in the Post last week used 18 percent. Today the Meat Institute wrote a letter to the editor, saying Klein was using a global figure, which didn't apply to US emissions;

The Environmental Protection Agency concluded that in 2007, only 2.8 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions came from animal agriculture.

Meanwhile, at farmgate, I get this:

Agriculture contributes 6.7% of the total greenhouse gases emitted by the US, but the legislation so far does not penalize agriculture.

And Tom Philpott at Grist provides a useful explanation of the discrepancy between Klein and the Meat people (different denominators, different things included) and provides this ending:

So if Boyle’s 2.8 percent figure is off the mark, what percentage of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions does actually stem from meat production? Loglisci of The Center for a Livable Future says it’s hard to pinpoint. “As far as I know, no one has crunched the numbers to determine a comparable GHG emissions number for U.S. livestock,” he writes.

Working with a Johns Hopkins researcher, Loglisci compiled some rough numbers and came out with an estimate of about 9 percent—half of the global FAO number cited by Klein, but three times the figure pushed by Boyle. “And in real numbers, not percentages, U.S. livestock production’s GHG contribution could still be the largest in the world,” Loglisci writes.

Complexity in Governmen

One of the things the right likes to do is create graphics showing the interrelationships of all the pieces of complex legislation, like health care. Fine--a picture is always good.

But here's a link to a post with a picture showing the complexity of the oversight(?) suffered by one department. No one, neither Republican nor Democrat, is pushing to revamp Congressional oversight, yet it's probably the first step to a more effective government.

Tomatoes

Have I mentioned we have fresh tomatoes from the garden? They're 2-3 later than some years, but just as tasty. Of course, we're also feeding Bambi as well. And perhaps suffering some vandalism/theft--not sure about tha.