The Rabbit, the Carrot, and a Tail of Locavores

Via Marginal Revolution a fascinating story on carrots.

Now carrots should be one of the quintessential locavore vegetables.  They're easily grown, provided you don't have heavy clay soil and keep the weeds down, they can overwinter in the ground if the frost doesn't go too deep (protect them with leaves), they're nutritious, and furry critters like them.  As I remember, we used to store them in our cold cellar (actually the pump room off our regular cellar).  So under locavore theory it should be possible to raise and sell locally grown carrots in most of the U.S. The food movement also attacks the big industrial farms producing grain and cotton which they claim is founded on the basis of government subsidies. By implication, fruit and vegetable growers are smaller and unsubsidized.

But, as it turns out, two companies grow 80 percent of the carrots in the U.S.  And recent growth in their sales has been, not through flogging organic, naturally grown carrots, but by producing packaged "baby carrots", all clean and ready to eat.  (Disclosure: I buy them regularly.)

Bolthouse Farms sells nearly a billion pounds of carrots a year -- the carrots Farhang kept hearing about -- under a number of different brand names and supermarket labels. Only Grimmway Farms, a few minutes down the road in Bakersfield, California, sells more, just barely. Together, the two companies control more than 80% of the carrot market in the United States

A Doctrine, A Doctrine, Where Is the Doctrine?

Much of the commentariat is asking Obama to declare a "doctrine": a rule which describes when he will use military force and when he won't.  I suspect if he were a Republican in the same circumstances I too would be calling for the President to enunciate some rules.  As he's not, thank goodness, I'm more in favor of the "Pragmatic Rule": if it works, do it; if you can get away with it, do it; if you fail, the decision was wrong.

It's hard for any politician to declare the "pragmatic rule", but they follow it more closely than they do the "Golden Rule".  While most Americans would like us to be idealists, to be the city on the hill, I think even more vote based on the "Pragmatic Rule".  We'll see, both whether Obama's Libyan/Middle East policy works and whether voters reward or punich on that basis.

Government Reform

The White House's "Government Reform for Competitiveness and Innovation Initiative" has, I guess, learned some lessons from the first initiative Obama had to gather input, which was quickly overrun by birthers and assorted crackpots.  This time around they're limiting input to Feds, and this is the beginning of the terms and conditions:

As Federal employees, we want to hear your insights about government reforms that can promote competition and innovation. This invitation is limited to Federal employees.
We hope to receive many diverse ideas and opinions about what works and what we can improve. All contributions will be posted without identifying information. This is designed as a community-moderated event in order to retain focus on the designated topic and to ensure that the event remains appropriate for an audience of all ages. Accordingly, we ask all participants to agree to the following Terms of Participation:
• You agree to post only ideas related to making government more effective and efficient. Our goal is to produce ideas that will improve the way that government operates.
• Because Americans of all ages will be able to view these ideas online, we ask all those who elect to participate to conduct themselves in a civil manner - to refrain from posting threats, obscenity, other material that would violate the law if published here, abusive or racist language, and sexually explicit material.
• This is a forum for federal employees to submit substantive ideas on improving the efficiency and effectiveness of government. This is not a forum for airing grievances against co-workers, supervisors, or anyone else in your organization. We reserve the right to take down any such inappropriate submissions or any other submissions that may compromise the privacy of federal employees or other individuals.
• Do not submit identifying information.

Sorry to say as a taxpayer I'm not really impressed with the ideas submitted.  And it's too bad 2 years into the administration they haven't figured out how to obtain good input.  Maybe they should hold a competition: give cash prizes for the input designs which produce the highest ratio of good input to trash.

Pollan and Fossil Fuels

Pollan claims, according to Tom Philpott's summary on an interview, that we won't have the fossil fuels to keep our current "industrialized agriculture"  going in 30 years or so.  I'm not clear what he means.  If he's assuming "peak oil" so the price of diesel and inputs to fertilizer plants go up, that's likely. My impression, though, is that large diesels are at least as efficient as small diesels, so unless Pollan sees a reversion from tractors to horses/mules/oxen I don't see the problem.  To the extent we replace fossil fuels in our transport, we'll also be able to replace them in agriculture for motive power.  If we go to electric vehicles with the electricity supplied by nuclear, by sunlight, by wind power, by fuel cells, by whatever, we can go to electric tractors. (I'm not sure whether electric motors or diesels generate more torque.) 

Yes, the phasing out of oil might raise the prices for fuel on the farm and possibly the cost of fuel, but I fail to understand how it would force a change in the mode of agriculture.

Social Security Deserves Praise for Missing Goals

Social Security administration hit some performance goals and missed others, according to this Federal Computer Week post. They deserve praise on two counts: first for publicly reporting and publicizing their results which I haven't noticed other agencies doing, second for setting goals ambitious enough they might not make them.  It's good to aim high, even if you fail.

The Definition of "Virgin"

Credit Walter Jeffries for the definition of "virgin", as well as "gilt" and "sow" and the Seven Silly Sisters.

More seriously, a reminder that small farmers have to sacrifice comfort and sleep to tend their animals.

The Unseen Benefits of Technology

Reston Patch has a post on the Fairfax County 9-1-1 Call Center.

“Back in the olden days, 18 months ago, much of the on-site emergency response coordination between departments had to be completed by telephone at the dispatch center,” said Steve Souder, the 9-1-1 Call Center’s director. Sometimes this would require multiple phone calls back and forth.
“Before cell phones, if an accident occurred on a highway, someone would have to drive to the next exit and get off to look for a pay phone,” Souder recalls.  “The caller had to have coins available to place a call and once the 9-1-1 call was placed, hoped they remembered approximately where and in which direction the accident took place.” ....

The call is automatically assigned a code for the type of emergency—police only, fire, basic life service—and as the communicator enters details, that information immediately becomes available to police, fire and rescue dispatchers who place calls to responders.
Since all police, fire and rescue units are equipped with global positioning systems, dispatchers can immediately tell who is closest to the emergency. The police department can immediately pull up a history of responses for a given address. Public safety communicators also have instructions on how to walk the caller through life-saving techniques until responders arrive. 

Answering 9-1-1 calls requires the ability to handle the more than 100 different languages spoken in Fairfax County. The county uses the services of Language Line headquartered in Monterey, CA to assist in taking the call.

The net result of all this should be faster response to emergencies, with long term effects on reduced deaths from accidents, reduced hospital costs from accidents, less property damage from fires, more effective police protection.  Of course none of these gains will show up on the front page of the newspapers, nor will any be credited as more effective government.

Will Christopher Hitchens Go to Heaven?

Reading "American Grace, How Religion Unites Us and Divides Us" by Robert Putnam of "Bowling Alone" fame and David Campbell.  In one section  they cite a poll showing that most people think most people will go to heaven: that is, most Catholics believe Protestants can go to heaven, believe Jews can go to heaven, etc. So Americans mostly are tolerant and don't hold strictly to theological teachings. At least, that's what Putnam and Campbell say.  But I note the survey didn't think to ask whether atheists and agnostics, like maybe Christopher Hitchens or Albert Einstein, could go to heaven.  I wonder what such a survey question would reveal: is entry to heaven based on the life one led or the beliefs one has? I also wonder who will get into the heaven which features 76 virgins?  Is heaven segregated by belief?

In America Mosques Become (Protestant) Churches

One point made in American Grace (a book I've just started reading) is that, in the U.S. the original template in religion is the Protestant congregation(al) church.  That template is very different from the pattern of religion in many other countries.  The evolution of religion in the U.S. has been for other denominations/religions to become more like the Protestant congregational  church. It may be  this is because the U.S. has a competitive religious marketplace, so every religion has had to complete with the original template.  It's the old tale: competing organizations tend to imitate each other

What Wisdom Do Statisticians Have

From a Nate Silver post((on a theory predicting the Republicans are almost sure to maintain control of the House in 2012):

The issue with this model, and some others like it, is what’s known in the statistical business as overfitting. This occurs when the number of variables is large relative to the sample size: in this case, the full version of Mr. Enten’s model contains six variables, but is used to explain only 15 cases (Congressional elections in presidential years since 1952).
A general rule of thumb is that you should have no more than one variable for every 10 or 15 cases in your data set. So a model to explain what happened in 15 elections should ideally contain no more than one or two inputs. By a strict interpretation, in fact, not only should a model like this one not contain more than one or two input variables, but the statistician should not even consider more than one or two variables as candidates for the model, since otherwise he can cherry-pick the ones that happen to fit the data the best (a related problem known as data dredging).
If you ignore these principles, you may wind up with a model that fits the noise in the data rather than the signal.

 Seems to me there's a relationship with our construction of narratives.  The more detail, the more variables, we can stick in and still have a cohesive story the more satisfying it is. So what Silver says is that stories aren't scientific explanations, they're history.