Does anyone know what is happening with vanilla prices? I see reports of steep rises, precipitous falls and boring plateaux, and I am not equipped to sift out any kind of overview.
History is not destiny, and yet a little understand of history can help to make sense of things. I am grateful to Alan Jacobs for surfacing this enlightening account of the history of an area called Palestine. And if I remember correctly, in 1948 Jordan could have accepted Arabs from Western Palestine who wanted to resettle, but feared that their presence would upset the Hashemite kingdom.
I am really grateful that I can follow people who post calm and reflective pieces despite being in the middle of frantic turmoil.
I asked a colleague for evidence that an intervention was associated with changes in behaviour.
We don’t know. It’s more about awareness.
M’kay.
Awareness may be a precursor of behavioural change, but on its own it offers me nothing of value.
"You could literally take a hungry climate refugee and put them in the middle of a field of food, and they’d still starve to death." Interesting take, with which I fully agree. I wonder how the writer might feel about Chris Smaje's Small Farm Future?
”Plants are energised by zero-carbon, zero-cost sunlight, whereas factory-produced microbial biomass is energised by generated electricity at an energetic cost amounting to at least an order of magnitude more.”
Not going to quibble about that order of magnitude greater than zero. The point is very well made: Proposed ecomodernist solutions to future food supply are not solutions at all.
And it's out, the latest issue of Eat This Newsletter https://buttondown.email/jeremycherfas/archive/linked/
A slew of stories from around the web, each of them connected to at least one of the others because that's the way of the food and agriculture system.
https://buttondown.email/jeremycherfas/archive/linked/
I was wrong about Healthkit not exporting distance data. The data are there with distance in a cycling workout recorded as km between records, which are 1 or 2 seconds apart. The numbers are there, obscured by being of the order of 0.007 km. Solved at https://www.jeremycherfas.net/blog/transport-summary-q3-2023
Just finished the draft of the latest Eat This Newsletter, which goes out tomorrow at around 13:00 CEST.
One thing I was especially grateful for was @mastoreaderio@mastodon.social from @badlogic@mastodon.gamedev.place
Decided to take up Datasette again to look at Activity data in Health.app. Turns out that the Health export does not include distance for several workouts, even though I can see distance in both Health and Fitness. No idea why this is. Anyone have a clue?
The photo challenge was at micro.blog which is also federated. I post on my own site, which feeds to micro.blog via RSS. There is a different sort of challenge for October, called Inktober, for drawings, but I don't do that.
Of course InternationalCoffeeOutside Day and Coffeeneuring are full of flim-flam, but still, might be fun to attempt one or both, even though I will probably be on my own throughout.
https://coffeeoutside.ridewithgps.com/
https://chasingmailboxes.com/2023/09/24/coffeeneuring-challenge-2023-lucky-13/
I wish there were a way to really edit geojson online. I know there are sites where you can tweak a linestring, add a marker and other little bits. I'd love to be able to colour segments of the linestring differently, add markers with popups, etc. Does such a thing exist?
Sometimes a big story seems to have been everywhere I look, and I wonder whether it is worth including in my newsletter. So I ask people not quite as nerdy as me, and they say “what big story?”, which is why I do include it.
https://buttondown.email/jeremycherfas/archive/mischief/
Always feels good to finish tomorrow's Eat This Newsletter a little early. Sign up at https://buttondown.email/jeremycherfas/ if you would like my take on nice rice, Big Food, gin, tomatoes and brassicas.
"the very nature of social media discourse requires you to stand your ground like Jeremy Vine behind that truck and die with your metaphorical Brompton of Righteousness rather than acknowledge that someone with an opposing view may very well have a valid point."
I couldn't stand him on the radio either.
Please give me what Monbiot calls ‘bucolic fairytales’ or ‘neo-peasant bullshit’ and what I call agrarian localism, agrarian populism or a small farm future over this sad dualism.
Glad to see that Chris Smaje has embarked on a series of articles about his new book: Saying NO to a Farm Free Future.
Ischia is absolutely glorious and full of interesting places. There's William Walton's garden, if you are into that sort of thing, not to mention the hot baths.