In Defense of Paper Straws

Republicans are mocking Democrats for trying to abandon plastic straws and bring back paper straws.

I don't think the Republicans have a case. 

I grew up with paper straws, which used to come in this thin tissue paper wrapping.  The combination was great, at least for those boys who paid little attention to the rules (unlike me, the future bureaucrat).

Tear off one end of the wrapping and you had a ready made blow gun.  Just blow through the straw at the open end and the wrapping would fly off, hopefully to land on the person or the desk of your neighboring classmate. Or, IIRC, assuming you wanted launch a slightly more obnoxious missile, you could wad up the wrapping with a little spit, stick the wad in one end of the straw and again you blow.

It may be true that a plastic straw is better at being a straw, but my impression is they con't normally come in a wrapper these days, so they aren't as good as enabling boys to be boys.

New Frontiers--of Pot

JFK used "New Frontiers" as the theme for his administration, opposing the idea of new frontiers to to Fredrick Jackson Turner's idea that the frontier had closed in 1890. 

What's interesting to me is the idea of "invasive species" as a metaphor for identifying new ecological niches as the result of innovation.  The easiest example is computers, or perhaps the internet.  But we also have innovation in markets: sometimes they're fads, like emus or bison for meat or bagel shops,  sometimes they're real, like pizza in post-WWII and avocados today.

A current new frontier is legalized marijuana.  What fascinates me is how the industry will develop; will there be parallels with other agricultural commodities or will it be totally unique?
See this post from Colorado.

Vertical Farms and Big Greenhouses

Seems to be a lot of activity with vertical farms (depending on LED lights, not the sun) and big greenhouses.  The initial idea was to grow greens, which made sense because they're quick and easy to grow and reasonably valuable.  With the legalization of marijuana the horizons have expanded in some states. Hydroponic tomatoes have been around for a while.

See this Reuters piece on vertical farms.

See this on an urban farm in Paris.

And this on an aquaponics/greenhouse farm in Maine.

And this NYTimes piece on a big greenhouse in Kentucky.

I'm not convinced that such farms will make a big contribution to the food supply over the next 10 or 20 years, but hope I'm around to see.

The Paths of Hurricanes

No, I'm not going to touch on Trump and Alabama--just some thoughts on using visuals for hurricanes.

Currently we seem to focus on the track of the center of a hurricane over time.  Since uncertainty increases over time, that leads to the cone of uncertainty we're familiar with.  People have pointed out it's misleading, often misinterpreted.  It also seems to me that we'd gain by getting an idea of the strength of the storm and the width of the area affected.

I doubt one static graphic could handle that many variables, but surely an interactive one could do so.

I'm thinking of an app which would show a projected track for x days, with the duration of the projection representing the likelihood of the track.  Say if the likelihood is 40 percent, show it for 20 seconds, likelihood of 20 percent, show for 10 seconds, etc. 

By going to an interactive app, you'd also have a chance to show intensity and size.  Color code the intensity--red for cat 5, yellow for cat 4 down to blue for tropical depression, etc  Instead of a line for the track use a tubular image.  So at the current position, there would be circle, representing area now being affected. The tube for the future would reflect the increasing size of the area affected.

When a hurricane is developing, the circle at the start of the tube would be relatively small and blue.  As time passes and the storm becomes a cat 1, the circle would expand and now have both blue and yellowish shadings. When the storm becomes a cat 5, the circle would be even larger, and have multicolored rings.  With a storm like Dorian, the tube would grow larger as the colors start to fade to blue.

Particular Causes and General Causes

One of the problems in history and social science is distinguishing between what I'll call "particular causes" and "general causes".

Two examples:

• saw a tweet on the idea that black cowboys (and other minorities) were written out of the cowboy narrative. The inference was that writers were prejudiced.  That would be what I'd label a "particular cause".  But I believe there's a general tendency when people make generalizations about a group of people: outliers are ignored,  
• people leaving their farms.  A general cause is well-known--ever since the Industrial Revolution started, or before, people have left the country for the city. A particular cause is people screwing black farmers out of their land.  

In some cases, the "general" versus "particular" may be simply a case of different levels of analysis. No doubt many people left the farm for many different reasons. Many, including my parents, died while their children had a mix of motives to not try to farm.  Dairy farmers these days are leaving the farm because they're losing too much money.  But then the question becomes why?  It could be a black family who was denied the bank loan to expand from 100 cows to 1,000 cows. Or it could be a management decision back in the day not to expand, or a lack of decisions to expand.

Majority Minority World in Future?

This article got me thinking about our future in the US as a majority minority country.  That's inevitable regardless of any government policy.

But then I thought--just looking at the US is limited--the world is already majority minority, and it has been for millennia, likely since humans left Aftrica.

I'm comfortable saying humanity is in the process of reuniting. What will the reunited world look like and act like.  Looks is relatively easy--the majority will be African-Asian.  Acts is hard, but I'd argue that based on the imprints left on former colonies, the European influence on culture and society will remain disproportionate to their descendants representation in the population.

It's More Complicated Than That

That seems to be my standard reaction these days to a lot of current books, articles, and posts which discuss times I've lived through and portions of history I'm reasonably familiar with.  Thinking about the reasons:

• everyone knows, if they look at themselves, they aren't the same person from year to year, nor the same person in different contexts.  
• applying tags to people, organizations, and events, which are at best incomplete, at worst erroneous. 
• treating categories of people as unitary, sharing all characteristics.

All the problems result from our need to tell a story which explains what we experience, a story with little room for luck or variation. 

The Transplant Metaphor

I'd draw some parallels between transplanting plants and transplanting ideas.

This post is triggered by the concerns over Chinese "thefts" of intellectual property, and also by reading a book on the Industrial Revolution in Britain.  The author of The Most Powerful Idea in the World emphasizes the interactions and connections which created the revolution.  

As any gardener knows, it's tricky to transplant a plant. Some are very difficult to transplant; in all cases it has to be the right time of year.  Usually plants need soil and climate in their new location close to those where they originated/  When they don't have the right conditions, they wither and die.

I'd argue similar conditions hold for many ideas. It's more clear when you consider such ideas as democracy, market economy, social and political freedom.  Usually they transfer from one country to another only with considerable modifications.  Consider the operations of democracy in Kenya or India.  When you come to more technological institutions or ideas, we assume they can be transferred easily, but not in many cases.  

Consider history in what we used to call the Third World.  In many cases optimistic first world types financed shiny new things, railroads, roads, bridges.  But without the connections to other parts of society there wasn't the money to maintain them.  In Afghanistan, hurdles to the US training an effective Afghanistan army and air force included the lack of literacy among many recruits and the absence of a mechanism to get salaries from the government treasury to the common soldier without fraud.

I'd argue there are similar problems with science and technology.  Even in the US, lots of cities have aimed to create a new Silicon Valley.  Aimed to, but haven't had major success.  Part of the problem is history, part is the fact of competition--we already have a Silicon Valley, part is the lack of the unique set of conditions.which created Silicon Valley in the first place.

All of the above makes me more relaxed about intellectual property issues than most people.

Drum on Carbon Tax

Kevin Drum has a long post on the carbon tax. 

The Importance of the Senate

The New Yorker and the Post's Dana Milbank both have pieces on the importance of the Senate.

I've been twitting and maybe blogging on this theme for a while.  I'm at the point where the Senate is more important than the Presidency, but I doubt we need to make that choice.  The odds that Dems could take the Senate and not win the Presidency are very very low.