Just a quick note to thank the people who develop the content management system that brings you these pages: Grav. I had some problems late on Friday, asked for help on the forum and got it over the weekend. Very slick. And although the problem was of my own making, it also did result in a little change to the way Grav looks for specific filenames.

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It would be easy enough to look at this website and conclude that I have been no more present here than I was on the old set-up. That would be wrong. For one thing, there have been quite a few tweaks under the hood that aren't visible but that do make a difference to what is visible. For another, there's the somewhat daunting task of bringing over the ±1400 posts from the old site and trying to make sure that links from the old site end up on the correct page here.

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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.

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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.

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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.