The Cat Lady's Memoir

No, not Eartha Kitt's, but Laura Bush's "Spoken from the Heart".  Somehow she reminds me of a cat, self-contained, attractive, and mysterious.  As some reviews have suggested, the first part of the book is interesting: her parents and grandparents, her early life in Texas, the car accident, etc. The second part not so much: mostly a recitation of her activities as first lady of Texas and the U.S.  Some things which struck me:

• the security scares, not only on 9/11 but the recurrent alarms.  I don't mean she was unduly worried, but she does pay attention to threats and scares which I don't remember in other memoirs.  I wonder how the Obamas are handling their scares. It must be draining, even if you know the odds are the scare is a false alarm, adrenaline must be racing.
• alcohol.  She makes a point of the extensive use of alcohol in the Texas culture, even though Midland was technically dry it was routinely used and abused.  She doesn't say her father was an alcoholic, but in today's more puritanical times he might have qualified, at least as a heavy drinker.
• friendship. She obviously has a gift for making and maintaining friendships.
• a couple anecdotes about her in-laws: George H.W. in his bathrobe undoing the plumbing to retrieve the contact she'd lost down the sink (George wasn't much good at mechanical stuff, apparently); Barbara being sharp-tongued with her friends (Laura treats her very gingerly).

Hypocrisy Among the Scholars

From the American Historical Association blog, discussing university pressesr:

Almost all authors want to see their books published in print, but as consumers (both in the libraries and off-site in their research and reading) they are clearly gravitating toward the consumption of electronic publications. So how long can these two patterns coexist?

Technology Marches Onward: Inseminating Queens

No, I'm not talking of the crowned heads of Europe, but of the instrumental insemination of honey bee queens. Artificial insemination of dairy cows was a big advance, but bees?  I'm awestruck.

Humongous Farms?

Marcia Taylor at  DTN has a post on really big (where's Ed Sullivan when you need him) farms:

Giant farming companies--those with 250,000 acre scale and up--may be a new phenomenon to us, but they already are changing the competitiveness of global agriculture. Whether such scale can succeed here is still a big question, but it's becoming the norm in the former Soviet Union, Brazil and Argentina.

The current setup of the farm programs is something of a handicap to such large farms in the US, but as a commenter notes, changing over to crop insurance with no payment limitations would change the parameters. If such farms do come to the U.S., there won't be many towns left west of the Mississippi, at least not farming towns.

On Naming

Hat tip to Tyler Cowen--having tried to deal with a few of the issues with names in my prior live, only to discover after 9/11 my efforts were quite inadequate, I really liked this list of Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names.

I wonder how long it will be before we all get email addresses at birth?  Of course, the younger generation no longer uses email, just Twitter and Facebook.

How Bureaucracies Work--The Case of the "Wall"

Stewart Baker at Volokh Conspiracy has a long post, excerpted from his book, describing some of the background of the "wall", the barrier between criminal investigations and intelligence investigations in the late 1990's  up to 9/11.

The right blamed Jamie Gorelick, Reno's deputy AG, but it seems to have been a more bureaucratic story than that.  The wall was installed, but was permeable, because FBI agents shared information even though they had different missions (criminal versus intelligence).  In other words, their bureaucratic loyalties outweighed paper edicts.  But through a sequence of events, Judge Lamberth, Jesse Helms nominee to the appellate court and the head of the FISA court, essentially ended the career of a promising FBI agent who had signed an affidavit, falsely asserting the wall had been observed.  That got the attention of the FBI agents.  And it meant, as Baker tells it, that the last best chance to uncover the 9/11 plot failed because the agents in position of authority feared for their careers more than they feared the consequences of failure.

NO Pay Database?

That's the word from the Post on a Friday Obama memo:

A memo Obama is set to sign Friday instructs the Treasury Department, Office of Management and Budget and General Services Administration to establish a government-wide database to ensure agencies no longer send government checks to dead people, delinquent or jailed contractors and other debarred or suspended firms, said officials familiar with the memo and not authorized to speak on the record. About 20,000 separate payments totaling $182 million were sent to dead people in the last three years, according to OMB.

If we were implementing this back in FSA in the 1990's (back in the day, my children, back in the day), we'd probably like to submit a file containing a tax id number(s) to someone, who would return a code saying whether the id was eligible for payment, and if not, why not.  That would hide the database and give everyone one interface routine to write to. The timing of the interface is going to be a problem, I'd suspect. FSA is probably one of the few agencies which would have several hundred thousand payments being processed at the same time; that is, unless they bounce payrolls against the database.

Non Organic Means to Organic Ends?

Here's a report from Iowa State on experiments growing corn with perennial ground cover.

After the first two years of the study, researchers have already discovered a system that allows for removal of up to 95 percent of the corn stover, increases the amount of carbon kept in the soil, increases water use efficiency in corn and also maintains corn yield.

Someone familiar with the arguments of organic advocates will see a lot of overlap in the experiment, yet the experimenters are not trying to be "organic" by USDA standards.  It's obvious they're open to chemical treatments and presumably genetically modified organisms so their inputs can differ from organic ones.  But the goal is close to the organic goal, conserving soil, building carbon, etc. 

Seems to me this sort of thing is likely to become more prevalent than strictly organic farming. We'll see.

If Google Says So It Must Be Right

On explaining why they don't recognize feeds in Google Chrome:

"Given that most people are not familiar with and don't consume RSS feeds, we thought that RSS support would be a better fit as an extension, at least to begin with."

I guess it's just another example of how nerds don't talk to humans.  Nerds come up with these great ideas, the usefulness of which is self-evident, at least to the inventor.  They forget someone has to explain to the rest of us the benefits and get us over the learning curve, all of which can be a drag.  I'm saying "us", but at least with regards to RSS feeds, I'm an explainer and an adopter, not an "us".

Subsidized Agriculture Is Inefficient?

Kevin Drum has a post on healthcare costs and productivity, citing some studies.  As usual, he's good.  But what interested me was a chart comparing the annual increases in productivity for different industries in the  10 years. 1995-2005  There were surprises: I would have thought IT would have been the best. It's good, increasing productivity roughly 6 percent a year, but it's only second to durable goods, which is roughly 7 percent.  That may be one reason for the rust belt--we're just getting more productive.

What was the third ranking industry: agriculture, at a bit over 5 percent increase per year. Presumably a lot of that is attributable to the use of GMO seeds and increased yields.  If I remember correctly, I read a history of US agriculture in the 20th century which cited the argument that government programs essentially provided the capital to invest in improved productivity.  Don't remember if the history confirmed the idea, but it would work in recently--farmers who have to cut corners would choose less expensive seed, those with the cash from subsidy payments could pay the more higher seed bill.