"/>A space for mostly short form stuff and responses to things I see elsewhere.
I can write Eat This Newsletter while on holiday. Promoting it, however, is another story entirely. BLTN, the latest offers food-borne illness, conspicuous fruit consumption, and plant-based meat ... for pets.
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One of the questions not raised by the latest Eat This Newsletter, which drops tomorrow, is why people who clearly want to subscribe, and are real people, don't activate their accounts? Am I justified in doing it for them? Do people really not check their spam?
Japan did get an increase in Pacific Bluefin Tuna quota, but not as much as it originally wanted. Increase of 50% for big fish and 10% for smaller fish. They originally wanted 230% and 30% respectively, so that really is a win for scientific management.
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2024-07-16
I’m not clever enough
1 min read
From An alarmingly concise and very hinged summary of what it was like to build this site from scratch
“Yes, nearly everything about the platform felt worse than it did when I first started using it over a decade ago. ... Someone with even a modicum of clout should really coin a catchy term that everyone else can repeat ad infinitum until it loses all meaning. I’m not clever enough.”
Like, er, enshittification? Or was this an example of self-deprecating humour designed to flush out a reply guy?
I’m not clever enough to decide.
In the latest Eat This Newsletter, the surprisingly rapid recovery of Pacific Bluefin Tuna, more than 10 years ahead of schedule. Naturally Japan now wants to increase the quotas that enabled that recovery.
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I would have replied to @thesiswhisperer@aus.social directly, but they seem to delete all their posts immediately. I would have said thanks for fixing the coding of your blog post, which I found interesting and thought provoking. Maybe they’ll see this.
My first thought was “false flag”. That’s what these times have done to me.
Yes: Looking forward to a Homebrew Website Club that doesn't interfere with my evenings.
#rabbit_quest #geohashing 20240709-W-B0O8O3
Described in more detail at https://
* On foot
* 42.759728, 12.353907
* Tuesday 9 july 2024
* 421.44 ppm CO2
* OpenStreetMap https://
Interesting article on whether LLMs are writing PubMed articles, that seems to conclude that on balance they aren’t. Yet. Perhaps unsurprisingly for a linguistic analysis, says nothing about the quality of the articles, no matter who might be writing them.
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I wouldn’t be sad if all the mosquitoes in the world went extinct. Does that make me a bad person?
Can Starmer Save Britain? Why Labour’s Sweeping Victory May Not Reverse the Country's Decline
The cold reality is that Brexit has merely shown that the United Kingdom has no one to blame for its problems but itself.
Unmissable analysis from Fintan O’Toole in Foregin Affairs. The UK has a chance at reinvention, and it will not be easy, but it has to try.
Is this the most interesting newsletter ever?
No, of course not. But it does give me the opportunity to pour scorn on sub-editors who question everything.
Say Yes to ETN 242: Ontological uncertainty.
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A nice article extolling the virtues of do-less gardening, both in the garden and on the planet, which I definitely appreciate. I will just say that all this is much more difficult with pots on a terrace, circumstances even less natural than a garden.
First time in my puttering I think I have a need to normalise my CSS. Any hints as to the best of the many options out there gratefully received.
Letters from an American
Just the facts ...
... not that the facts will change those whose minds care nothing for truth of any kind.
Tragically, Emeritus Professor Robert Eric Frykenberg has still not seen fit to correct the egregious howler he perpetrated in 2008, to which I drew attention back then. Talk about being a non-influencer.
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Sail Cargo Resurgence – Lucy Bellwood
Really great to see this little comic from Lucy Bellwood. A couple of panels to update some of the information would be the cherry on the cake.Is Ceiba operational yet? The website doesn't say, but I don't think so.
Latest episode: Palatable is not Potable
Whatever you think about bottled waters, the story of supplying clean, safe water that people actually want to drink is a fascinating one. Christy Spackman talked to me about her new book, The Taste of Water.
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Roman roads visualised as a tube map. I cannot see any possible use for this in my own life, but I am thrilled beyond words that someone saw fit to make it.
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Back in 2008, I asked why organisations don't get rid of people at random when they have to downsize. "Management would not be required to make difficult decisions that are almost certainly wrong in at least some cases". Has any one tried, and if not, why not?
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Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers
Such a great talk and slides from Maggie Appleton. And from my own experience, barefoot developing for myself alone, I think she is absolutely right in her forecast and in the things the future she imagines will need.
rabbit_quest #geohashing 20240604-W-B1N8LG
* On foot
* 43.149186, 11.449313
* Tuesday 4 June, 2024
* 423.81 ppm CO2
* OpenStreetMap
Not quite as close as I could be, but a better view. The quest is somewhere behind the bush on the left.
Latest episode: Women Butchers.
Cheap supermarket meat has made life hard for butchers. At the same time, a few younger people are taking an interest in butchery. I shouldn’t have been surprised that many of them are women, some of whom agreed to tell me their stories. https://
There seems to be a bit of a theme to my morning linkages, with The Luddite making a good case against Substack and all the other so-called tech companies bent on “eventually becoming a pointless middleman in an industry that they’ve now cornered”.
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For Creators, Ad-Blocking Focuses On The Wrong Problem
Google ... is essentially telling people who used their service for decades that they may have believed that the goal of its service was to “find websites,” but Google thinks the actual goal of its website is to “find answers.” Those are two different things, and one ignores the deeply extractive nature of the other.
Who, currently, is still working on the problem of micropayments? Because, optimistic fool that I am, I still believe that whoever succeeds will not only make money, they will enjoy the undying adulation of many millions of people forever and a day.
Stop Press: I just asked specifically, and sardines are different. Unlike anchovies, no need to refrigerate unopened tins.
2024-05-29
rabbit_quest #geohashing 20240529-W-BU4212
1 min read
#rabbit_quest #geohashing 20240529-W-BU4212
* On foot
* 53.360765, -6.253028
* Thursday 18 April, 2024
* 424.03 ppm CO2
* OpenStreetMap
My first ever rabbit quest that involved an actual landmark.
Illuminating talk by Banu Özden about the contribution of minority cultures - Rums, Armenians from Anatolia, and Sephardic Jews - to the food of Istanbul, an amalgamation of so many cuisines, she said, “the name of the city defines the cuisine”.
TIL you and shops ought to keep tinned anchovies in the fridge, even before opening. Who knew? Marcela Garcés knew, in her talk partially about how the anchovy is “misunderstood, underestimated or, worse, discounted entirely” in the US.
Excellent keynote at Dublin Gastronomy Symposium from Brendan Dunford of the Burren Trust about the long history of farming in the Burren and how the landscape is “a book written in stone”. Farming there is now being reimagined to deliver “ nature-based opportunities”.
Binged Rebus on the iPlayer because I had to. Brilliant.
🛫 on my way, eventually, to Dublin and DGS2024. Looking forward to all the talks and friends old and new.