A couple of days ago I wrote a bit about how confused I am by the arguments around low agricultural prices and high food prices. I cited, as I often do under these circumstances, the Shakesperean observation that what farmers decide to do depends crucially on what their neighbour farmers have decided.

Biologists call that density-dependent selection, and it's a well-known version of the Prisoner's Dilemma game. A new paper in PLOS Computational Biology by Alice Milne and her colleagues shows that it applies beautifully to pest management, at least in a model of how maize farmers in the US might respond to the threat of European corn borer (Ostrinia nubilalis). ¹ It's a great story.

There’s more ➢

People I follow have singled out poor crop prices as one of the most important agricultural stories in 2015. That specific article is very US-centric; one stub mentions New Zealand recognising animals as "sentient beings,"¹ Canada gets a brief mention, and so does the WHO's meat and cancer warning. I can't fault it for that. Agweek is covering its beat for its readers and their concerns. But whenever agricultural prices are low, farmers everywhere complain that they cannot make a profit, and when they are high, poor people can't afford to eat. Somehow, though, low agricultural prices never seem to compensate for not making much profit by reducing the cost of a farmer's food purchases, and high food prices never seem to result in more profits for farmers.

There’s more ➢

Glenn Greenwald lays it out, in The Intercept:

So now, with yesterday’s WSJ report, we witness the tawdry spectacle of large numbers of people who for years were fine with, and even giddy about, NSA mass surveillance. But now they’ve learned that they themselves, or the officials of the foreign country they most love, have been caught up in this surveillance dragnet, and they can hardly contain their indignation. Suddenly, privacy is of the highest value because now it’s their privacy, rather than just yours, that is invaded.

One of my social-media friends, Chris Krycho, wrote a piece reviewing his 2015 and looking forward to his 2016 that was an interesting read and that inspired this post of mine. Any number of people will tell you that it is a good idea to set yourself some goals and review them from time to time, but I'm crediting Chris with tipping me over the edge. And because I want to get this out sooner rather than later¹ and an arbitrary news peg is better than none, I'm pushing to post this before the end of the day, so it may be a little notesy.

There’s more ➢

We'll be eating a goose tonight with friends, and preparations are well under way. In order to be absolutely ready, though, we needed to be sure that there would be rye bread in the house, for the inevitable leftover goose sandwiches. And that sent me searching for the recipe for Dan Lepard's Black Pepper Rye, one of the best savoury sandwich breads I know.

There’s more ➢