Personal Note

In 75 years I can't ever remember seeing another person's genitalia in a bathroom, nor do I think anyone has seen mine.

Monarchs: Planting Milkweed Isn't the Answer?

We Americans like the simple technological solutions to problems.  (We American analysts like to over-generalize.)

Recently people have been planting milkweed to help the endangered monarch butterfly.

Now comes a report (from my alma mater) which says it's not so simple. Looks like the true causes are going to be harder to fix: lack of nectar in fall, weather, fragmentation of habitat.  Can't see a Kickstarter campaign developing around these.

[Hat tip: Tamar Haspel retweet of Brad Plumer.]

Influence of the Past

The Post had  a piece the other day on a school in Alabama with only an aged T-1 line to support their Internet usage.  Upgrading is complicated because two different companies provide service in the area and a river isolates the school.

A Vox report on how Amazon's same-day service  reflects past discrimination.  Its availability is based on the number of Prime customers in an area, which in turn reflects past housing patterns.

These are instances of how the past weighs on the present, or how "them that has gets". 

A Problem of the Small Diverse Farmer

One of the boasts of a farmer is she is a jack [jill?] of all trades.I've seen this a number of times over the years; even used it myself in writing about my father.  It's true enough: being a successful farmer requires a broad spectrum of skills. What's often not considered though is the difficulty a small diverse farmer has.  This thought was triggered by this post on learning to be a stockman.  It's from a blog I just discovered, the Foothill Agrarian blog (mostly sheep), a farmer in California.

He's relatively specialized, compared to some.  The accumulation of knowledge from academic research and the more efficient sharing of knowledge means there's more and more to learn.  It's one of the ways in which the market economy leads to greater specialization.  Not only can a larger more specialized operation cut costs, but the operator can learn more and put it to use more effectively.

There are still people like Walt Jeffries of Sugar Mountain Farm who are able to combine many skills and out-compete the rest.

Walking the Nation and Trolling Comments

NYTimes has a piece today by a guy who walked the route of the Keystone pipeline, which turns out to be the hook for a proposal that people should be able to walk where they please, as they can in the UK and other nations.

I suspect in the UK an etiquette has developed over the years (centuries?) for walking, an etiquette which we would lack in the US.  An etiquette which might include:

• no trash
• no feeding the animals, domestic or wild
• no scaring the animals
• avoid the bulls
• no trash 

 Anytime you open a new frontier, it takes a while for etiquette/manners to develop for it.  That was true when railroads were invented, it would be true for national walking.

Driverless Cars Revisited

Vox describes the detailed mapping Google and others will have to do to support their autonomous cars. And Brad Plumer describes five challenges: mapping; social interactions between car and other people; bad weather; regulations; cybersecurity.

These innovations seem to be coming from different directions: cars which drive themselves on preregistered courses (there was a piece on an outfit in the Netherlands which produces upscale gold carts for such applications); cars with improvements, like today's safety stuff; cars which are as independent of outside help as the old model of human driving car (the Tesla model).  It's partly the old question, which is better distributed intelligence or central guidance.  We shall see.

Locavores Need Wool Suits?

A post here from USDA on the use of sheep to reduce tillage in an organic farming setup.  The idea seems to be to control weeds by grazing sheep on land for a year between row crops.

My comment is, as with other organic rotations like using alfalfa in a rotation, it's fine if you have a market/use for the product.  Sheep herds have declined over the decades as we turned away from wool suits and mutton.  The knitters of the world can absorb only so much wool from small sheep farms (which doesn't mean the prices of skeins of yarn are low). In the old days of horses and dairy grazing you had use for fields of grass; in the days of tractors and barn-housed cows you don't.

Farming like most any human industry is more complex than it looks from the outside.

Coitus Interruptus

Five-thirty-eight has a post on the always interesting subject of penises (actually "wieners" in their terminology), which includes this:

"That’s partly because it’s difficult to study how male and female genitalia interact during sex. For example, Kelly told me that, in order to study fruit flies, scientists drop mating pairs into liquid nitrogen to freeze them mid-flagrante."

Dairy, Grandin and NPR

I seen Prof. Grandin a number of times, including the biopic of her life. I respect the work she's done on animal welfare.  I don't listen much to public radio, using WETA mostly as background, but we're probably generally in tune.  So I'm surprised to find myself generally opposing their take on dairy cows.  Yes, our cows were good producers and probably averaged 12,000 lbs a year.  These days average production is 22,000 lbs.

This Post article quotes these two paragraphs from NPR:

"Since dairy cows were first brought to the United States, their owners have been trying to coax more and more milk out of them. They've done that through dairy parlor design, barn layout, feed rations, milk scheduling and hormone treatments.

Now the focus is on genetics: Cows are being bred to be larger, hungrier, and more productive. But this drive to raise ever-larger, hulking Holsteins has some prominent livestock advocates ringing alarm bells."

That's misleading, if not wrong. Farmers have been breeding cows for greater milk production ever since humans domesticated them.  That's what we do, not only with cows but all our grains, fruits, and vegetables. We had registered Holsteins on the farm, meaning we submitted pictures or drawings of each cow added to the herd to the central registry, along with data on their dam and sire.  When the inseminator came, he and dad consulted over which bull to choose (he carried vials of semen from 3 or 4 bulls with him). That was one of the big advantages of artificial insemination, the choice of bulls, by looking at the production of the bull's offspring.  

Since the Derby is coming along, I can't resist noting that similar efforts have been going on in racing for years, probably earlier than dairy because the potential payout for a great foal is so much greater than a great calf.

So the reality is: breeding has always been there. In the last half of the twentieth century we also started to pay attention to dairy rations,barn/parlor design, etc. Grandin would know this, so the writer has misled by using NPR to lead into her position, which is "[good dairymen] raise smaller cows that tend to be healthier, as well as productive over a longer period, and opting to feed their herds grass as often as possible. The latter [bad dairymen], meanwhile, are driving up the efficiency numbers you see in the chart above, selecting for cows that tend to suffer from a number of adverse health outcomes."

Here I feel only qualified to say:if dairymen have overbred, it's little different than turkey growers raising turkeys which can't reproduce because their breasts are too big or Great Dane breeders raising dogs doomed to hip displasia.

How White Polar Bears Stay Warm

We all know that white reflects the sun's rays and black absorbs it, right?  So how do polar bears stay warm?

I don't guarantee the accuracy of this sentence from a Jstor daily on solar panel improvements:

Polar bears help stay warm using transparent fur (which appears white at a distance) that reflects light onto the bear’s heat-trapping black skin.