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Jeremy Cherfas"/>

A space for mostly short form stuff and responses to things I see elsewhere.

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Jeremy Cherfas

Does anyone know what happened to The Prince's Charities International Sustainability Unit? Did it turn out to be, er, unsustainable? Or something else?

http://pcfisu.org/

Jeremy Cherfas

Two explainers on tomato colour at

https://frogsleapfarm.blogspot.com/2014/04/genetic-control-of-fruit-color-in.html and

http://www.kdcomm.net/~tomato/Tomato/color.html

I cannot recall anything but red tomatoes from my youth. Yellow was dangerously exotic maybe 30 years ago. All that diversity, hiding out of plain sight!

Jeremy Cherfas

Jeremy Cherfas

Jeremy Cherfas

Step aside 75%, which achieved mythic status as the amount of genetic diversity lost since ~1903. The new not number is "almost 80%", the proportion of studies in a global meta-analysis that found evidence of some genetic erosion. I hope that's clear.

https://agro.biodiver.se/2021/10/almost-80-is-the-new-75/

Jeremy Cherfas

15 years ago today I wrote enthusiastically about @Mann_Library @Cornell gathering up great graphics to share and inspire.

The old website remains at https://web.archive.org/web/20170719024829/http://martha.mannlib.cornell.edu/charts/ but where are the original submissions and what happened to the project?

Jeremy Cherfas

Jeremy Cherfas

Best analysis of US pull-out in Afghanistan

We started the Global War on Terror with a Leviathan force but we're continuing it - forever - with the SysAdmin force that does not wage war on states but on individuals.

Rings true to me.

Jeremy Cherfas

Cereal friends, would you like to create your own evolutionary populations?

Cereal friends, would you like to create your own evolutionary populations?

Cereal friends, would you like to create your own evolutionary populations? </p><p>All it takes is time, ingenuity and land. French researchers Emma Flipon and Véronique Chable have made a handy-dandy poster showing how it is done (with links to lots more detail) The poster is at http://ow.ly/lXhu50F0RV9 </p><p>The work was part of the EU Liveseed project. I'm not part of that, but I think more people should be aware of it.

Jeremy Cherfas

Jeremy Cherfas

Jeremy Cherfas

Jeremy Cherfas

New decade, new theme – Lea Verou

I was hesitating to blog about it because I was embarrassed at how my website looked. This is it, I thought. If it has gotten so bad that I avoid blogging because I don’t want people to be reminded of how old my website looks, I need to get my shit together and fix this, I told myself.

Isn't that the most perfect reason of all?

Jeremy Cherfas

Jeremy Cherfas

Hey, @FAOstatistics! http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#home has been unreachable for more than 24 hours. What's up?

Jeremy Cherfas

Today, in random pieces of delight shared by people I follow:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=108&v=QPKS5ngz01s&feature=emb_logo

Thanks http://www.musicofsound.co.nz/

Jeremy Cherfas

G-FEED: COVID-19 reduces economic activity, which reduces pollution, which saves lives.

"I calculate that the reductions in air pollution in China caused by this economic disruption likely saved 20-times more lives in China than have currently been lost due to the virus in that country"

Oh boy! Data analysis rocks.

Jeremy Cherfas

Tim Harford — Article — Ten years of social media have left us all worse off

Last Christmas I vowed to spend less time on my smartphone. It worked — until a couple of months ago, when I started using Twitter much more. Why? I had something to sell. That seems wretchedly appropriate.

Yup, that seems right. Even when no money actually changes hands.

Jeremy Cherfas

Galileo and failure. Tim Harford, are you listening?

Tim Harford certainly belaboured the point that safety systems may make things more prone to failure, what with the Oscars fiasco (two systems bad; three systems worse). Wheeling out Galileo was a masterstroke. Little could he have anticipated that someone who actually knew about statics would be listening..

Dr. Drang kindly shared his expertise.

I think we can forgive Galileo this lapse. He was creating new knowledge and, given his trouble with the Vatican, was desperate to get it published. Editing was of secondary concern at best.

I’m less forgiving of Tim Harford. Anyone who’s taken a statics class could have told him that the story on which he was basing “Galileo’s Principle” didn’t demonstrate that principle.

I wonder whether Tim Harford will even see that. Probably not; comments are closed.

Jeremy Cherfas

Tim Harford — Hug your enemy rather than wrestling the pig

One starting point is the old proverb, “Don’t wrestle with a pig. You get dirty and the pig enjoys it.” There’s truth in that. We just need to find a version that doesn’t dismiss our opponents as pigs.

And there's the rub, really. You have to get over thinking of them as pigs.

Jeremy Cherfas

Jeremy Cherfas

Paper to Paperless: A Guide to Digitalizing Your Journals with a Scanner App

Very thorough guide that covers both how and why you might want to do this. Most interesting, it links to a Python script for adding a Table of Contents to a PDF, which would be very handy indeed.

But shouldn't it be "digitising"?

Jeremy Cherfas

Jeremy Cherfas

“If you want people do to something, make it easy.” Richard Thaler has Lunch with the FT

Brexit means Brexit — that is one of the dumbest statements that has ever been uttered by a head of state. And I’m aware that there are thousands of tweets one could compare it with. I mean, it’s simultaneously meaningless and wrong.”

Jeremy Cherfas

Salsa in Central Park

I don’t agree with Roger Scruton on much, but I do agree with him that limiting social dance to clubs and EDM festivals where everyone is drunk or high is not good for us. Scruton’s solution is to yearn for the glory days of eighteenth century Europe. My solution is to look to our friends from the African diaspora, whose social norms around music and dance are very different from those of white people, and in a lot of ways, more grown up.

Very well said; one the other hand, there is always Irish, Scottish and English "folk dancing" and its many derivatives, which are so much fun and which I could do, more and more often.

Jeremy Cherfas

Going to extremes

Extreme Economies by Richard Davies, as reviewed by Diane Coyle, does sound like a book I would enjoy reading.

Jeremy Cherfas

Structured Procrastination

via gwern.net

[W]hat could be more noble than using one character flaw to offset the bad effects of another?

Jeremy Cherfas

Thinking about the Land: A Personal Perspective on the Origin of Organic Farming – Rachel Laudan

Rachel Laudan is promising a personal look into some of the history of the organic farming movement in England. Looking forward to the rest of her series.

Jeremy Cherfas

Jeremy Cherfas

Jeremy Cherfas

Really Tonz, you shouldn't be meddling in this stuff. I'm just going to leave this here: https://agro.biodiver.se/2009/05/nix-that-fruit-it-really-is-a-vegetable/

Jeremy Cherfas

Maybe it is because I had already noted a Washington Post piece about "real" food people ignoring the Magnolia cookbook, but I found Grant McCracken's piece about Martha Stewart doing the same so trenchant and also so sad. http://web.archive.org/web/20190514114829/https://medium.com/@grant27/martha-stewart-the-old-guard-d...

Jeremy Cherfas

Hearsay Festival is the Coachella of creative audio

I don't know what Coachella is (well, not directly) but I do know that Hearsay is the business.

Jeremy Cherfas

We Built a (Legal) Facial Recognition Machine for $60 – Theoreti.ca

A particularly interesting take on a topic that most people have mostly reacted to with horror or naivete.

Jeremy Cherfas

What counts? | The Enlightened Economist

Very interesting ideas on how classification systems affect the way we think, rather than vice versa.

"People can’t see what they take for granted until there is an alternative version not taking the same things for granted."

Jeremy Cherfas

Jeremy Cherfas

Jeremy Cherfas

The research agenda we really need

Colin Tudge at the Campaign for Real Farming points up just a few of the ways in which the current approach to research into food and food production lets us all down.

Jeremy Cherfas

Jeremy Cherfas

Jeremy Cherfas

Jeremy Cherfas

Jeremy Cherfas

Kudos to @rosenblawg and Bryce Stucki for prompting the first ever retraction and correction by CDC http://retractionwatch.com/2018/11/15/in-a-first-u-s-cdc-retracts-replaces-study-about-suicide-risk-...





Jeremy Cherfas

Jeremy Cherfas

Jeremy Cherfas

Jeremy Cherfas

Jeremy Cherfas

Jeremy Cherfas

Jeremy Cherfas

Gérard Rubaud has died. A great pioneer baker. Sad news.

http://www.farine-mc.com/2018/10/r-i-p-gerard-rubaud-1941-2018.html