Instapaper has been a life saver for me. ¹ It offers me several pleasures. I don't have to wade through horrible, garish web pages to get to words I am interested in. There is almost always something to read on my phone in the event of an emergency. It stores what I've saved and makes it easy to annotate and share.

As I say, a life saver.

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Publishing to this site from more than one machine had been a bit daunting. Not so.¹ All I had to do was add MAMP and the Github desktop client to this here MBA and everything seems to be hunky dory. I'm going to backdate this post, though, so it doesn't linger on the home page.

So, no excuses ....

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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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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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