Preserving History--The Brutalists

I've lived in Reston 40 years now.  A hot controversy these days is whether a building from Reston's early days is worth saving.  The arguments for saving it are basically the fame of the architect, a prominent "Brutalist" one.

Given my education, I might be expected to be on the preservationist side.  But no. (I'm stealing the image form a Reston Patch post, linked  to above.)  I see no point in preserving all of mankind's mistakes.  I like some modern architecture, but I don't think this building qualifies as good.  The only valid argument for its preservation I can think of is as an example of how misguided we humans can be, how prone to fads and following the crowd.

Town Folk Taking Over

My mother had her prejudices; one of which was against town or city folk.  She knew they didn't understand farming, and therefore failed to recognize that farming was fundamental in the way that town folk's work was not.

Mom would be unhappy at the trend reported in this article, at least in one African country the available agricultural land is being bought up by townies, who often are adopting modern techniques.

BTW, her father was also a townie, having worked in the Wisconsin woods and New York carpentry after immigrating from Germany, before he moved the family to upstate NY and became one of the founders of the Farm Bureau.  Oh, and my father was also a townie, having been reared in cities and only forced to the farm by lead poisoning in the paint factory he worked in after college.

The Trainable Car

Damn, sometimes I'm good!

A while back I blogged about the virtues of a bottom-up approach to an autonomous vehicle.

The other day I see this piece in Technology Review about a company working on such a car.

Oxbotica’s software gradually acquires data about the routes along which a vehicle is driven and learns how to react by analyzing the way its human driver acts. “When you buy your autonomous car and drive off the (lot), it will know nothing,” says Ingmar Posner, an associate professor at Oxford and another of Oxbotica’s cofounders. “But at some point it will decide that it knows where it is, that its perception system has been trained by the way you’ve been driving, and it can then offer autonomy.”

The result is a vehicle that can gain a deep understanding of the routes it drives regularly. That, Posner says, means that the software isn’t simply trying to do a mediocre job wherever it’s placed—instead, it does an excellent job where it’s learned to drive.

The objection, of course, is this works only repetitive drives over the same route(s).  My answer is that I'll bet most driving fits the 80/20 rule; 80 percent of time spent driving is done on a route you've driven many times before.  People are creatures of habit, mostly, and that means we can train our cars. 

Eggs and Cannibals

NYTimes article on eggs, discussing the trend to cage=free eggs, specifically the replacement of cages by "aviaries".  I must admit I was shocked by the picture of the aviary in the article--while the hens could move freely, it was almost a solid mass of chickens on every flat surface.

For a human parallel, caged hens are like human prisons with no common areas/exercise yard. Hens in aviaries are living perpetually on a New York City sidewalk at the height of rush hour.

The article quotes a report:

Perhaps most troubling, “hen mortality was much higher in the aviary system,” the report said. When hens move around more freely, it is easier for them to spread germs. And hens in cage-free aviaries were also more aggressive than their cage-bound peers, pecking at one another and, in some instances, becoming cannibalistic.

The sight of chickens pecking a hen to death is not a pretty one, take it from experience.

President Trump Is Scary?

Ezra Klein is afeared of the prospect of a Trump presidency.

While I bow to few in my dislike of such a presidency, I also remember being upset at the idea of a Nixon presidency in 1968 and a Reagan presidency in 1980.  I'm pretty sure Trump is smarter than Reagan and perhaps a nicer guy than Nixon, even if he's more egoistic than either, which is a high bar.  In the long run our institutions are stronger than any individual. 

Wolf Trap: Where Elephants and Donkeys Play

Went to Wolf Trap last Sunday for an opera at the Barns*.  It was good, would have been better if I'd roused myself to get my cataracts corrected in time that I could read the supertitles.

Turns out Bill Kristol, the conservative pundit, and wife were there the previous performance.  A couple years past the Notorious RBG was there the same night as we were. That's proof there's no polarization in the DC area, nothing that can't be bridged by enjoying old operas sung by young singers.


* the "barns" are two old New York barns, disassembled and moved to the Virginia suburbs and arranged into a venue seating about 375. The larger barn reminds me of the design of the one on the farm I grew up on.  Get nostalgic every time I go.

"Pudgy Old Man"

Is that what Ann Althouse thinks the next president of the US should be (her reaction to Trump's entry to the convention in silhouette).?  How about a pudgy old woman? (Althouse hasn't discussed her 2016 vote.)

I have to say, our next president is going to be pudgy, which is a good indicator that Michelle Obama's influence does not extend everywhere.

Corn Production Moving North?

Stealing from this site: Schnitkey, G. "Changes in Where Corn Is Grown in the Last Ten Years." farmdoc daily (6):135, Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, July 19, 2016. Permalink: http://farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/2016/07/changes-in-where-corn-is-grown-last-ten-years.html It seems corn production is moving northward.  Can't imagine the reason why.

The End of the GOP?

I think I've seen a little discussion that the Trump candidacy will lead to/means the end of the Republican Party. 

I disagree, based mainly on my memory of the 1964 election and its aftermath.  First I'd like to say there's little evidence that 2016 will be as one-sided as 1964.  While Goldwater was a more attractive personality than Trump, we forget how much LBJ was respected if not loved in 1964.  He had rallied the nation after JFK's death and had accomplished things which seemed unlikely.  So HRC is no LBJ.

After the landslide there was, IIRC, a lot of discussion that it was the end for the GOP,  Areas which had never voted Democratic, like my upstate NY district, had gone for the Democratic candidate, not only for President but for Congress. That's how we got the super-majority in the Senate.  Cointon is not going to beat Trump by upwards of 20 points; more to the point she's going to be very lucky if she even has a bare majority in the Senate and squeaks by the in House. So the Republicans would have a good base to rebuild from, much better than the 1965 Reps.


It's arguable that the divisions in the party are greater and more firmly based now.  It may be true, though I'd bow to the political scientists on that.  Certainly the divisions on free trade and immigration, and between social conservatives and populists seem sharp.  But in the long run, the pursuit of power is a great consolidating force.  So I'd predict the GOP would rebound rather quickly after a Trump defeat, just as it began to in 1966.

Specialization and Taste: Wheat Terroir and Gertrude Stein

Modern Farmer has a long piece about wheat, specifically people trying to de-commoditize it, by creating niche markets.  "Wheat is wheat is wheat" is not true, contra Gertrude Stein's roses, it turns out, if it's a landrace which can carry a certain aura, and which is grown organically.  It's rather like my supermarket's cooler--you wouldn't believe all the different beers now stocked.  It's the "long tail" of the internet, where there's more and more variety available in books, but the average sale per book is smaller and smaller (think of all the self-published books).  It's a reflection of the rise of the upper class, not just the 1 percent but the 5 or 10 percent who have the money to buy the varietals.

I know I've commented before on the amount of differentiation in our consumer society, probably using the example of jeans, but I'm too lazy in the heat to search out my previous words of wisdom.  Trust me--that was a much much better post than this.  :-)