Looks like we'll have to choose, not only between food and fuel but between biofuel and warming. As noted below, schemes to convert to bio fuels not only raise food costs, they increase the release of greenhouse gases. Industry groups disagree, of course, but the guy who did the reasearch says, "The comparison with fossil fuels is going to be adverse for virtually all biofuels on cropland."
My interest in this, by the way, is somewhat personal, since my family actually owns some cropland, here in Michigan, some of which is currently and very unprofitably being used to raise standard food grain crops -- corn and soybeans. Time may come when I have to make a decision about my tenant and what he's growing. I'm thinking white truffles ...
Friday, February 8, 2008
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
News you can use
Just a few things gleaned from the corners of this week's news (which is to say, the news not about the Super Bowl and Super Tuesday.)
The Pope was invited to speak at some event at a Roman University (University of Rome La Sapienza), but cancelled after there were protests from faculty and other academics, based on comments Il Papa made 17 years ago about how the church was right to criticize (and prosecute) Galileo -- 394 years ago.
So tempest in a teakettle, right? Turns out not. 200,000 Italians turned out to protest the protest, and looks as though His Holiness will be back on the agenda. Some of the anti-Papal protesters are facing consequences, too, such as, in one case, withdrawal of a job offer. Forza Italia -- the people of Italy come through when it counts, successfully defending their title as the EU's nuttiest nation.
You will still hear, as part of the obesity epidemic discussion, that "food costs are lower," supposedly leading people to eat more. In fact, food costs, especially for grains, are up all over the world, due to oil prices (takes oil to grow food), population increases, and pressure on available growing land. There will almost certainly not be any big increases in farm land (especially since food production now competes with wild-eyed schemes to grow fuel,) which means that yields need to go up, and we've achieved only marginal improvements in yield over the last decades -- about a percent less then we'd need to achieve per year over the next 40 years. And of course, it's the underdeveloped world that's under the most pressure, since they have the biggest population increases, the least ability to increase acreage and yield, and the largest number of poor folks to feed. None of this will be good for us, but it will be bad, bad, bad for Africa and south Asia.
You probably knew that doctors who perform abortions get death threats. Did you know that people's lives are threatened for doing vaccinations? A small group of truly insane people believes that vaccines "cause" autism, and the fringies from that group are behaving just like PETA members or Klansmen. And the resistance to vaccinations isn't just a fringe-group thing -- entire African governments have halted programs in deference to traditional medicine (i.e., witch doctor) beliefs. Guess what happens, of course, when vaccinations are stopped or slowed? Why, the diseases they would have prevented spike. Meanwhile, Disney's Eli Stone is perpetuating the myth with a story line about vaccinations and autism. At least the protagonist appears to be a loony (disclaimer: I haven't seen this thing and almost certainly won't commit the time to doing so. I'm just parroting the American Academy of Pediatrics, here.)
Wachovia Bank honeys up to telemarketers who defraud the elderly, then charges them for each complaint. Fascinating. You just have to read this one for yourself -- when was the last time you saw the phrase, "Double Yikes! in an internal email message? I'm speechless with amazement.
Seen anything interesting yourself, hidden among the Eli Manning / McCain-Romney slush piles?
The Pope was invited to speak at some event at a Roman University (University of Rome La Sapienza), but cancelled after there were protests from faculty and other academics, based on comments Il Papa made 17 years ago about how the church was right to criticize (and prosecute) Galileo -- 394 years ago.
So tempest in a teakettle, right? Turns out not. 200,000 Italians turned out to protest the protest, and looks as though His Holiness will be back on the agenda. Some of the anti-Papal protesters are facing consequences, too, such as, in one case, withdrawal of a job offer. Forza Italia -- the people of Italy come through when it counts, successfully defending their title as the EU's nuttiest nation.
You will still hear, as part of the obesity epidemic discussion, that "food costs are lower," supposedly leading people to eat more. In fact, food costs, especially for grains, are up all over the world, due to oil prices (takes oil to grow food), population increases, and pressure on available growing land. There will almost certainly not be any big increases in farm land (especially since food production now competes with wild-eyed schemes to grow fuel,) which means that yields need to go up, and we've achieved only marginal improvements in yield over the last decades -- about a percent less then we'd need to achieve per year over the next 40 years. And of course, it's the underdeveloped world that's under the most pressure, since they have the biggest population increases, the least ability to increase acreage and yield, and the largest number of poor folks to feed. None of this will be good for us, but it will be bad, bad, bad for Africa and south Asia.
You probably knew that doctors who perform abortions get death threats. Did you know that people's lives are threatened for doing vaccinations? A small group of truly insane people believes that vaccines "cause" autism, and the fringies from that group are behaving just like PETA members or Klansmen. And the resistance to vaccinations isn't just a fringe-group thing -- entire African governments have halted programs in deference to traditional medicine (i.e., witch doctor) beliefs. Guess what happens, of course, when vaccinations are stopped or slowed? Why, the diseases they would have prevented spike. Meanwhile, Disney's Eli Stone is perpetuating the myth with a story line about vaccinations and autism. At least the protagonist appears to be a loony (disclaimer: I haven't seen this thing and almost certainly won't commit the time to doing so. I'm just parroting the American Academy of Pediatrics, here.)
Wachovia Bank honeys up to telemarketers who defraud the elderly, then charges them for each complaint. Fascinating. You just have to read this one for yourself -- when was the last time you saw the phrase, "Double Yikes! in an internal email message? I'm speechless with amazement.
Seen anything interesting yourself, hidden among the Eli Manning / McCain-Romney slush piles?
Monday, February 4, 2008
Sunday, February 3, 2008
Theology won't stop 'em
Anybody else noticed a trend lately in which news stories use "canon" when they mean "cannon?" Apparently the Chadean rebels are using " pickup trucks mounted with canon and machine guns," according to a Reuters story. This seems like a bad idea to me, in any armed conflict, unless the Vatican is somehow involved.
Saturday, February 2, 2008
Burgers on parade
Incredibly bad taste. I hope you hate the 9/11 reference as much as I did. Jeez.
Also, A great list of vacation spots. You probably knew most of this, but interesting to see it complied in one place.
Also, A great list of vacation spots. You probably knew most of this, but interesting to see it complied in one place.
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Finally some new content on Culinary Intelligence. com
Read our review of the Henckels Four Star II Santoku (an Asian cooking knife shape) on the Culinary Intelligence site.
Monday, January 28, 2008
Reading List, Lately
On the off chance that anyone cares, I thought I'd list a few of the things I've been working my way through (especially since some of them were Christmas presents that I haven't adequately thanked people for.)
A word about these "essential histories;" they come from Osprey Publishing, and are usually well-written, furnished with a small but adequate set of maps and illustrations, and are pretty well-edited (although the Iran-Iraq book transposes "Iraq" for "Iran" in one caption, confusing me mightily for a while until I figured out it was a mistake.) If you want a quick briefing on a war or a campaign and they have a title for it, you could do a lot worse.
Bones: Recipes, History, and Lore; Jennifer Mclagan Nice big cookbook on the topic of, well, bones. Of course, there's roast marrow bones, lots of stock recipes, and more.- Secret Ingredients, The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink, David Remnick This is a lovely compendium of stuff from the whole history of the New Yorker. Note that the the 1939 article about "beefsteaks" cited in this NYT piece is included in the book.
- Cooking for Kings, Ian Kelly. Charming, well researched life of the Mario Batali of the early 19th century.
- The Physiology of Taste, Brillat-Savarin. This link is to a modern version - I read a facimile of the 100-year anniversary (1925) translation of Brillat-Savarin's 1825 original. Chatty, with little "physiology" in it, but still the original, in many ways.
- The Falklands War 1982 (Essential Histories). Quick Survey of the Thatcher/Galtieri war whose most useful outcome was ending Al Haig's career.
The Iran-Iraq War 1980-1988 (Essential Histories). Another quick read, catching up on a conflict that I more or less ignored in the 80's, when it was happening.- The Russo-Japanese War 1904-1905 (Essential Histories) A refresher course, as a run-up to the following.
The Czar's Last Armada, Constantine Pleshakov. Gossipy, Russian - point - of - view tale of the dispatch of the 2nd (and later, 3rd) pacific squadrons of the Czarist Navy from the Baltic, half way around the world to fight the Japanese. Led to the first real naval battle of the 20th century, and marked the emergence of Japan as a naval power.
A word about these "essential histories;" they come from Osprey Publishing, and are usually well-written, furnished with a small but adequate set of maps and illustrations, and are pretty well-edited (although the Iran-Iraq book transposes "Iraq" for "Iran" in one caption, confusing me mightily for a while until I figured out it was a mistake.) If you want a quick briefing on a war or a campaign and they have a title for it, you could do a lot worse.
Thursday, January 24, 2008
From 1998 - Wackier than Tom Cruse
For no good reason, a piece from all of 10 years back, about a I guy I haven't thought of for at least that long.
Ann Arbor: There's a moderately good book out there this Summer (of 1998, that is, Ed),
"Why People Believe Weird Things," by Michael Schermer. It talks about religious and other beliefs, including the bizarre cult surrounding Ayn Rand and her luke-warm libertarianism. It reminded me of a pattern I believe is identifiable in at least western culture: the association, gradual or sudden, of a group of cynical, profit-minded hangers-on with an aging, soft-in-the-head literary figure. Think of L. Ron Hubbard, Ayn Rand in her old age, and now, we find, Carlos Castaneda. The pattern usually includes outsider allegations that the group is imprisoning and controlling the figurehead individual, fights over his or her estate, and astonishingly bald and high-handed financial exploitation. There may even be dark hints of foul play and mysterious lacunae in the facts. Certainly, the case of Castaneda exhibits all of the above.
If you were wise enough to skip reading the pseudo- anthropology of the late 60's and early 70's (think Desmond Morris and Ashley Montague), you may not be familiar with Carlos Castaneda. He was a burnt- out anthro student who almost certainly invented a character named Don Juan Matus; Castaneda claimed that Matus was a Yaqui witch doctor, and chronicled the drug-induced philosophizing of the old man in a series of rambling books, starting with "The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge." What the book demonstrates most clearly is that -- like many academic disciplines -- anthropology in the 60's attracted a subset of intellectual misfits who were unprepared for the reality of social science and were looking for something quite other than what Ewan MacColl calls "... some understanding of all your fellow men." I should know: I went to school with several of these people -- hell, I could have been one, except for being saved by the holy silicon. People like Castaneda and some of my fellow students really thought Anthropology was digging up jade idols and finding lost tribes. When it wasn't -- when it turned out that it meant squabbling sordidly over afine groups or bitter resentment of a colleague's name appearing before yours on a paper about Ojibwa lithics, they either found other toys to play with -- went into business with their roommates, doing something mysterious with these funny new computers that don't need punch cards -- or they just invented their own anthropologies. It's not unlike some kinds of science fiction: you don't need to understand a technology, because you make it up yourself. So it seems to have been with Castaneda: he made up a set of alternate realities, wrote 'em down, and lots of people bought 'em. I read the first one, said, "Another druggie," and went back to whatever it was I was doing. Seems, though, that not everybody was that blase', since people kept on buying his stuff. And then, somehow, he became the primary product of a group called Cleargreen who began marketing him, wrapped up in a package called "Tensegrity."
After Castaneda's death (which may have been kept secret for some time), a member of Cleargreen told a New York Times writer, "Carlos knew exactly what was true and what was not true. But the thing that's missing when people talk about Carlos is not (sic) whether Don Juan lived or not, or who lived in what house. It's about becoming a voyager of awareness, about the 600 locations in the luminous egg of man where the assemblage point can shift, about the process of depersonalization he taught." Oh.
Now, this may be a useful paradigm (at least it keeps people who talk like that off the streets), and I'm seriously considering trying it in the next difficult meeting I'm in ("No, actually, it's not about whether the product is ready or not. It's about becoming a voyager of softwareness, about the 437 pathological couplings of your data model where the entry point can shift in the luminous egg of garbage collection"), but still, like the luminous egg of the Bimota Mantra, we have to ask: who buys this stuff? Who goes to these seminars? And why?
And, as you probably suspected all along, I have a theory. It's part of a larger and increasingly well- documented theory of group dysfunctionality. It hypothesizes a unifying psychological characteristic or complex of characteristics, linking together individuals who exhibit a need to be told, at a large fee, about luminous eggs. It suggests that they're idiots.
--
The WCA News Service has been brought to you by the Odd Town Tavern and by the upcoming bestseller by Carlos McLuggage, "The Teachings of Don Tempeh: A Yucky Way of Knowledge."
Ann Arbor: There's a moderately good book out there this Summer (of 1998, that is, Ed),
"Why People Believe Weird Things," by Michael Schermer. It talks about religious and other beliefs, including the bizarre cult surrounding Ayn Rand and her luke-warm libertarianism. It reminded me of a pattern I believe is identifiable in at least western culture: the association, gradual or sudden, of a group of cynical, profit-minded hangers-on with an aging, soft-in-the-head literary figure. Think of L. Ron Hubbard, Ayn Rand in her old age, and now, we find, Carlos Castaneda. The pattern usually includes outsider allegations that the group is imprisoning and controlling the figurehead individual, fights over his or her estate, and astonishingly bald and high-handed financial exploitation. There may even be dark hints of foul play and mysterious lacunae in the facts. Certainly, the case of Castaneda exhibits all of the above.
If you were wise enough to skip reading the pseudo- anthropology of the late 60's and early 70's (think Desmond Morris and Ashley Montague), you may not be familiar with Carlos Castaneda. He was a burnt- out anthro student who almost certainly invented a character named Don Juan Matus; Castaneda claimed that Matus was a Yaqui witch doctor, and chronicled the drug-induced philosophizing of the old man in a series of rambling books, starting with "The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge." What the book demonstrates most clearly is that -- like many academic disciplines -- anthropology in the 60's attracted a subset of intellectual misfits who were unprepared for the reality of social science and were looking for something quite other than what Ewan MacColl calls "... some understanding of all your fellow men." I should know: I went to school with several of these people -- hell, I could have been one, except for being saved by the holy silicon. People like Castaneda and some of my fellow students really thought Anthropology was digging up jade idols and finding lost tribes. When it wasn't -- when it turned out that it meant squabbling sordidly over afine groups or bitter resentment of a colleague's name appearing before yours on a paper about Ojibwa lithics, they either found other toys to play with -- went into business with their roommates, doing something mysterious with these funny new computers that don't need punch cards -- or they just invented their own anthropologies. It's not unlike some kinds of science fiction: you don't need to understand a technology, because you make it up yourself. So it seems to have been with Castaneda: he made up a set of alternate realities, wrote 'em down, and lots of people bought 'em. I read the first one, said, "Another druggie," and went back to whatever it was I was doing. Seems, though, that not everybody was that blase', since people kept on buying his stuff. And then, somehow, he became the primary product of a group called Cleargreen who began marketing him, wrapped up in a package called "Tensegrity."
After Castaneda's death (which may have been kept secret for some time), a member of Cleargreen told a New York Times writer, "Carlos knew exactly what was true and what was not true. But the thing that's missing when people talk about Carlos is not (sic) whether Don Juan lived or not, or who lived in what house. It's about becoming a voyager of awareness, about the 600 locations in the luminous egg of man where the assemblage point can shift, about the process of depersonalization he taught." Oh.
Now, this may be a useful paradigm (at least it keeps people who talk like that off the streets), and I'm seriously considering trying it in the next difficult meeting I'm in ("No, actually, it's not about whether the product is ready or not. It's about becoming a voyager of softwareness, about the 437 pathological couplings of your data model where the entry point can shift in the luminous egg of garbage collection"), but still, like the luminous egg of the Bimota Mantra, we have to ask: who buys this stuff? Who goes to these seminars? And why?
And, as you probably suspected all along, I have a theory. It's part of a larger and increasingly well- documented theory of group dysfunctionality. It hypothesizes a unifying psychological characteristic or complex of characteristics, linking together individuals who exhibit a need to be told, at a large fee, about luminous eggs. It suggests that they're idiots.
--
The WCA News Service has been brought to you by the Odd Town Tavern and by the upcoming bestseller by Carlos McLuggage, "The Teachings of Don Tempeh: A Yucky Way of Knowledge."
Monday, January 21, 2008
Sunday, January 20, 2008
Betting the farm on India?
It's kind of a toss up, in my opinion, whether China or India are headed for worse social upheaval. The more their disparity in income and opportunity divides them into haves and have-nots, the more the tension builds. For a quick update on the old, old problem of caste, read this story from the Washington Post. I'd think twice before I moved another dime's worth of business off-shore, unless I was damn sure I could pull it back in short order.
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