[T]oday’s highbrow signifier is tomorrow’s Beanie Baby.

And vice versa, of course.

My old mucker in fine form. To whit:

For in truth, the reasons why so many people in Britain cannot afford food that’s good and fresh has almost nothing to do with the cost of production; and the reasons farmers go bust has almost nothing to do with their supposed “inefficiency”; and the current obsession in high places with robots and GMOs and industrial chemistry is a horrible perversion of science and a huge waste of money which, in the end, is public money. Food is too expensive for more and more people in well-heeled Britain for three main reasons, none of which has anything directly to do with the cost of production, and none of which is alleviated by attempts to make production more “efficient” by sacking people, joining big farms into big estates, or festooning the whole exercize with high-tech. Attempts to mitigate rising prices in the short term by buying more from the world at large will only transfer misery elsewhere, as indigenous agricultures everywhere that evolved to serve the needs of their people are replaced by industrialized monocultures owned by corporates, to provide commodity crops for export.

Not that anyone who needs to is listening.

I know this is all over the place. I want it here, for reference.

George Monbiot in scathing good form. The Lake District is a fantasy that would be much better off with a lot fewer sheep. 

Lovely explanation of ems and ens and other arcana. Not surprisingly, though, no mention of ells.

Scrabblers of the world, unite!

Peter Molnar's excellent guide to why you should keep your comments across the web on your own site and a high-level guide to how to do it. By high level, I mean that he walks you through the steps, not that he gives code to do anything automatically.

If nothing else, this should prompt me to devote real time to bringing all my old, carefully-hoarded entries into my new CMS.

That's the trouble with the internet. You got to a site because somebody smart pointed to something interesting, and bang! There goes the afternoon.

> As is often the case, Dave is focused on RSS rather than the web per se.

> BEIJING, June 20 (Reuters) - China will spend almost twice
as much this year on subsidies to encourage farmers in the
northeast to reduce corn plantings as it intensifies its push to
rebalance grain stocks.

> The country will issue 2.56 billion yuan ($374.95 million)
in funds to pay farmers subsidies to rotate their corn plantings
with other crops every other year as well as to leave some land
fallow, the Ministry of Finance said on Tuesday.

> The funds are 78 percent higher than last year, and the
acreage targeted by the subsidies is double last year's area at
around 800,000 hectares.

> It seems that everyone is surprised to learn that there are two Americas. More surprising is the fact that rural life—idealized for its calming sensitivities and neighborly good-will—is a place of anger, local political conflict, and wide-spread alienation. Many rural residents are mad at each other, and they are mad at those who live in the throbbing metropolitan core of American capitalism. Actually, it is a surprise that everyone is surprised.

Marion Nestle links to Dole's declarations as it prepares to go public. As ever, though, while the company may have to settle lawsuits and what have you, it does not contribute to the costs borne by those who succumb to food poisonning.

In among the firehose of suggestions to someone wanting to know "why #indieweb" was this gem from Matthew Butterick, who sets out, at great but appropriate length, precisely what is wrong with Medium.

I've used his advice on Practical Typography before, on one of my sites; seeing it again, I think I need to spend some time making some more deliberate choices on the site I am currently gussying up.

I did a silly little thing in WordPress that made me inordinately happy and advanced my #indieweb progress.

> There’s probably a piece to be written someday that digs deep into the way liberal podcasts tends to pair well with the open podcast ecosystem and the way conservative podcasts pairs with over-the-top premium subscription models (see also: Glenn Beck and his activities with The Blaze), but this is not that day.

> We tested Lydon against a bunch of other people, and he came out top among Britain's housewives because they felt he was so uncompromising, he'd never just do an ad for the money - he'd only do it if he genuinely believed what he was saying.

> In other words, he was the best person to do what we were paying him to do, because he would never do what we were paying him to do, so if he did that, it's OK.

> So Mastodon is what we don’t need. What do we need right now?

> Decentralized protocols — true distributed social platforms — are very possible. There’s already a chat protocol, called Tox, that leverages a distributed hash table to store information globally across all instances, without permitting anyone to access information they don’t have the key for. It has many different clients, no centralized API with absurd limitations, and no one specially privileged official client. It’s not for persistent messaging and posts, of course, but it’s not terribly difficult to imagine a protocol that could archive content locally, that operates without any central servers or control. If we’re going to allow ourselves to be driven off Twitter, let’s not be lazy about it. Let’s work together and build something no corporation can control, and no one accident — or calculated act of malice — can wipe out.

This is part of an ongoing project, trying to determine algorithmically what constitutes a reliable piece of news online. Good luck with that, although I suspect it will have no impact on people who have no desire to judge accuracy in the first place.

Not going to listen to the podcast; life is way too short for that. But a couple of #indieweb quotes from My WordPress:

> “We’re trying to revitalize the independent web,” Matt Mullenweg said. He’s 33 now. “It’s not like these big sites are going anywhere. They’re fantastic. I use all of them, but you want balance. You need your own site that belongs to you… like your own home on the Internet.”

So, how about total indiewebness in the basic WordPress core and default theme?

> “Other sites provide space,” he said. “They provide distribution in exchange for owning all of your stuff. You can’t leave Facebook or Twitter and take all of your followers with you.”

> That’s why he recommends having your own website. It’s yours. Not Facebook’s. Not Business Insider’s or Huffington Post’s. It’s yours.

But no mention of which comes first? Does it even matter?

Facts about African agriculture. Kudos to @mfbellemare and his coeditor and contributors.

> I may have invented the web, but all of you have helped to create what it is today. All the blogs, posts, tweets, photos, videos, applications, web pages and more represent the contributions of millions of you around the world building our online community.

Tim Berners Lee

There's still life and liberty ... No, wait.

Don't disagree with anything he says, and had not myself fully appreciated that there could have been more on sub-Saharan Africa. No doubt someone is already working on that.

Testing web mention plugin at Grav.

I really love this page, because I wrote it. But I am also out of my depth. Way out.

But I need some data to play with, that's for sure.

Rory Stewart reviews ‘Aleppo Observed’ by Maurits H. van den Boogert · LRB 16 February 2017

Behind a paywall, alas, but trust me, this is a cut-and-paste quotation:

> And although van den Boogert is more disparaging of the Russells’ ichthyology – ‘based almost exclusively on what they were served at the consular table, and possibly what they observed in the stalls of the fish market’ – he cannot fail to be impressed by their catalogue of more than seven hundred Syrian plants, two of which, a sage and a milk-vetch, are now named the Phlomis Russeliana and the Astragalus
Russell.

Which just goes to show. You can walk across Afghanistan, be UK Minister of State for International Development, wear your extensive learning as lightly as you please and still screw up scientific names.

[Scientific names are strong proper names](https://www.jeremycherfas.net/blog/eagles-point-the-way), which take no *the*.

From the abstract:

> Examines critically the origins and basis of 'knowledge management', its components and its development as a field of consultancy practice. Problems in the distinction between 'knowledge' and 'information' are explored, as well as Polanyi's concept of 'tacit knowing'. The concept is examined in the journal literature, the Web sites of consultancy companies, and in the presentation of business schools. The conclusion is reached that 'knowledge management' is an umbrella term for a variety of organizational activities, none of which are concerned with the management of knowledge. Those activities that are not concerned with the management of information are concerned with the management of work practices, in the expectation that changes in such areas as communication practice will enable information sharing.

Going through some very old blog posts, glad to discover this page is still alive.

AoBBlog asks the crucial questions: "what to call scientific binomials". Seems like they've come down in favour of "scientific name" rather than "Latin name". I'm fine with that, as long as people at least try to provide that name, rather than so-called "common" names. I've [ranted about that before](https://www.jeremycherfas.net/blog/i-love-latin), and doubtless will again. All we have to do now is to teach the world that scientific names are [strong proper names](https://www.jeremycherfas.net/blog/eagles-point-the-way)

I didn't understand all of this, but I can celebrate the conclusion.

Via Trivium http://chneukirchen.org/trivium/2017-02-27

> People sometimes ask me what the best method of preserving their pictures is, and my somewhat flip but I believe trenchant answer is, "be famous."

The idea that things are worthless or, worse, actually cost money to hang onto, means things that might be of value some day get discarded. Mike says craftsmanship will also help preserve things, including photographs, but the other thing you need is space, and preferably a permanent home.