Yes: Wish I could be at IWC Dusseldorf in person, but remote will have to do.
@ChrisWiegman Strange you should say that. The protocols I use are alive and well, and they give me part of what I need from a community. I do feel good too, and that is part of the story, but to dismiss something you personally don't care for or use seems uncalled for.
Intrigued by a new role-playing board game called Rulal Commerce, based on China's demand for tea and what it is doing to Laos. Can't find any explanation of the significance of the name, though. Does it, I wonder, mean anything?
https://pim.cgiar.org/2021/10/25/rulal-commerce-boardgame/
Part 1: It will think you are crunching bones
Always readable.
Strangeness for #WorldPastaDay
TIL
1. You can buy broken bits of leftover pasta.
2. It costs exactly the same as uniform, whole pasta.
3. Why?
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/
Huge congratulations to Chris Otter, whose fascinating book Diet for a Large Planet has just won the AHA Bentley Prize in World History. We had a great chat about how the British created global food outsourcing and made it was it is today.
https://www.eatthispodcast.com/large-planet/
19.10.40 | Orwell Diaries 1938-1942
Thought for the Day
The unspeakable depression of lighting the fires every morning with papers of a year ago, and getting glimpses of optimistic headlines as they go up in smoke.
Pig apples: or, why small farmsteads are efficient and effective | Small Farm Future
[W]hile it’s feasible to wander around a smallholding with a trug looking for apples to feed two pigs, it probably isn’t feasible to wander around a largeholding with a trug looking for apples to feed two hundred or two thousand pigs. So there are diseconomies of large scale to the ecological efficiency of the farm’s unbidden bounty.
That doesn't mean it isn't worthwhile