“...Taliban planners may now have come to recognise that time is on their side – indeed the massive increases in US forces in Afghanistan should best be seen as indicators of Taliban prowess.”
Just as I posted "Less food for more future", a new VIVID post popped up.
Whether you see the connection will depend on where you're coming from; to me it's clear and present, but that's not essential to my point. That point is: read "Divided and resolved" and think about what it says to you. What that might be will be different for everyone; but if its self questioning doesn't say anything ... well, I'll be surprised.
In a comment to my Food for a future post (and the article from which it is extracted), Geoff Powell comments that “Eating less would help”.
He's right, of course.
So would discarding less. In Eire, more than a third of a tonne of edible food is thrown away per person per year; in the UK, more than one tonne; in the US, over a hundred tonnes.
Reduction in both consumption and waste fall into what I called in the article "the blue corner". Taken together, blue corner strategies in the developed world could reduce global food requirements by 40-90% (depending on definitions and assumptions) . Even just halving waste and overconsumption in the US and EU would significantly increase the net food supply in a world where one in three go hungry.
It’s fashionable to scoff at Thomas Robert Malthus’ predictions, two hundred years ago, that human populations would grow until stopped by famine, disease or ‘moral restraint’. He wrote before the arrival of modern scientific crop research or contraception, and it’s unfair to blame Malthus for not foreseeing those breakthroughs. However, he was essentially right: the food supply expanded but remains finite, and contraception has not fundamentally disrupted the shape of the population growth curve, which is asymptotically approaching the vertical.
What to do about it is a matter of vigorous debate. To simplify: in the red corner are those who focus on means of increasing supply; in the blue, those who emphasise a dietary shift away from inefficient use of that supply. An Isaac Asimov short story[1] did suggest exploiting the ‘many worlds’ view of quantum physics to disperse a trillion-strong population by placing every family on its own otherwise uninhabited Earth, but that one is a little beyond the reach of even today’s scientific computing power. In the long run, if the upward population curve continues, neither red approach nor blue will do more than defer the problem; in the meantime, pragmatically, both are needed. [More]
1. Isaac Asimov, “Living space”, in Science Fiction. 1956, New York (NY, USA): Columbia Publications.
Systat continues to evolve in both capability and usability. It was never short of the former, always occupying an undisputed slot in the top rank of statistical software systems, but the past half-dozen versions have wrought a sea change in its user interface, which continues to develop.
In the latest release (the 13th), the headline news is... [more]
In my "other voices" list are three blogs which, to me if not to their authors, have something in common.
AcerOne and Slinkachu both describe their work as street art. Martin Sobey does not, but putting his work out in the urban environment to erode gives him a link in my own taxonomy of perception. I'm not much one for labels; but if pushed, I would describe all three as "intervention artists" .
I'll come back to this (unless I forget, or get swept along by the rush of life...) in other posts. For now, I'll just say that I'm delighted to have been given a copy of Slinkachu's book Little people in the city.
Following on from my "Joy of cabbage" post, last month, Martin Brown has not taken up any of my requests but he has targeted another staple of my primary school memories: John Masefield's Sea fever.
Next stop Cargoes? I lack Mr Brown's talent, but I'll have a low-rent stab at the third stanza:
The first and second stanzas, of course, would be much more salubrious ... I can see those glossy, proud "cabbages of Nineveh" and "stately Spanish cabbages" in my minds eye...Over cooked cabbage in a school-dinners kitchen,
Shunted round the plate in the dire lunch hours,
With a backwash of swede mush,
Turnip, gristle,
Gravy, parsnip, and glum small boys.
Today I had a delightful morning: I went as a guest, with my partner, to an art appreciation group.
I live in a world where everything is professionally academic. I use the word "professionally" in both good and bad senses: professional approach, but also the putting and defending of a professional view and principle ... not to mention maintaining and defending position and politics within a profession. Art history is a serious business.
This was completely different: a speaker who talked about her subject simply out of love (an "amateur" in the literal and best sense), to an audience who were there because they were interested and wanted to hear about it. The group is facilitated by an art historian, but he used his knowledge and understanding only to support, always sparingly with a light touch. It was like clear pure cold water; I hope I shall go again.
The subject was Lyonel Feininger, of Bauhaus and Blau Vier fame, and the talk grew from the speaker's first encounter with two paintings in her twenties.
I, too, first discovered Lyonel Feininger in my twenties. In my case, first and foremost, as a knock on consequence of my much earlier hero worship of his Life photographer son Andreas (whose iconic image The photojournalist had been a holy relic throughout my teens).
A lovely morning, one to treasure.
Nature reports, today, the first "near complete" genome sequence of an "ancient human" from a lock of frozen hair. Ancient is a relative term, here, since the individual concerned dates from about four thousand years ago (8000HY, or 2000BCE) but it's far enough back to offer new insights into human history – indicators for a previously unevidenced migration from Siberia to Greenland in approximately 6500HY, for instance. A PNAS article last month indicated that biological diversity in much older human populations was greater than now, on a par with current great apes.
Divining the possible strands of our unwritten past is done, and has always been done, in many ways. I wrote, three years ago, about a statistical study of how the skull has evolved. Involvement in a combined aid/research project at a central African site, last summer, brought me the payoff of new insights emerging from dust and data analysis. But I find the new genetic searchlight on human prehistories particularly exciting. Perhaps I should get out more...
Most new research doesn't make it to the general news media. This week's publication of a paper describing two-way communication with patients who had been believed to be in a persistent vegetative state, via functional magnetic resonance imaging, is an exception: it captures the imagination and horrifies to an irresistible extent.
As part of the spill-over from that story I overheard, on a passing radio in a crowded place, fragments of an account by someone who had been in this locked-in state for more than two years. (I can't, unfortunately, locate a reference for the radio programme.) As I listened to the bits I could hear, I was most struck not by the science or technology involved but by the calm, rational phrasing of the interviewee.
I am a person who considers myself able to cope well with isolation. I have, on occasion, spent weeks or even months on end without human company and (so far as I know; perhaps I delude myself and others think differently) suffered no ill effects. But I cannot imagine that, after two years in which I was fully aware of the world but unable to communicate with it, I would still be in any sense sane – never mind able to construct rational discussion of the experience. I know, from experience, that human beings are incredibly tough ... but thinking about this situation raises my amazement at the degree of that toughness by several orders of magnitude.
M M Monti et al., "Willful Modulation of Brain Activity in Disorders of Consciousness" in New England Journal of Medicine, 2010: p. NEJMoa0905370. Available from: http://content.nejm.org/cgi/reprint/NEJMoa0905370v1.pdf. (accessed 2010-02-05)
A TTMF post sent me to a Santa Fe Reporter article which is interesting to a European reader for the unusually European (as opposed to USAmerican) cast of its analysis. That's not why I mention it, however. What made be stop and think was the following interesting and thought provoking para in relation to a textbook:
“Should she get it from Amazon or download the Kindle version? Bowles quickly rules out the Kindle because it makes the text impossible to share. Reading between the lines, Bowles’ choice reveals the hidden symbolism of each medium: If the paperback is Karl Marx, the Kindle is Ayn Rand.”
I've always made my book format selections on personal and/or practical bases. I generally prefer paperbacks to hardbacks because they are lighter, more compact, easier to use on the fly. I æsthetially enjoy reading paper books more than electronic ones, which is important to me. Electronic text offers mass portability, instant access, powerful searching, so has the edge for reference. Though I have a Kindle, I never use it; other electronic platforms work better for me.
I've not considered, before, the impact of electronic texts on inequality of access to literacy (I use the word literacy, rather than literature, deliberately). I shall, in future, do so. The advantages of electronic access remain and, in the case of (for example) Gutenberg Project texts, sharing is in many important ways enhanced; but the restrictive downside will from now on be a factor on the other side of the scales.
