About Anything

In Bush’s case, it’s someone with his head buried in an Archer Daniels Midland corn crib.

On Friday, George Bush explained his view of why food prices are going up. During a visit to World Wide Technology, an IT company in Missouri, he laid the blame on increasing world-wide prosperity.

“…the more prosperous the world is, the more opportunity there is. It also, however, increases demand. So, for example, just as an interesting thought for you, there are 350 million people in India who are classified as middle class. That’s bigger than America. Their middle class is larger than our entire population. And when you start getting wealth, you start demanding better nutrition and better food. And so demand is high, and that causes the price to go up”, said Mr Bush.

He went on to defend ethanol, saying, “As you know, I’m a ethanol person. I believe, as I told you, the interim step to getting away from oil and gas is to go to ethanol and battery technologies for your automobiles. I think it makes sense for America to be growing energy. I’d much rather be paying our farmers when we go to the gas pump than paying some nation that may not like us.” (See the Economic Times for more details on the visit.)

In other words, the aspirations of the Indian middle class is the problem. A few readily available numbers show how silly this is. Fortunately the Earth Policy Institute has posted them (the numbers), along with an analysis that clearly explains how ethanol production is is clearly the culprit. See: Why Ethanol Production Will Drive World Food Prices Even Higher in 2008.

The silliness is not hard to debunk.

From 1990 to 2005, world-wide grain consumption grew by 21 million tons per year, driven by population increase and increased consumption of less efficient foods.

Then came Ethanol. Ethanol demand increased by 27 million tons from 2006 to 2007. Based on the projected number of new distilleries coming on line, it will increase by another 35 million tons in 2008. In other word, ethanol usage is tripling the normal yearly increase in demand. To suggest this is not having an effect is ludicrous, even by Bush standards.
And what about the Indian middle class? From 1980 until now, the world-wide consumption of grain has averaged about 300kg per person per year. That means they are consuming about 105 million tons/year. The 114 million tons of grain used to make ethanol in 2008 would easily provide them with “better nutrition and better food”, and since we’ve already counted them in our projections, we’d have a surplus which we could use to feed another few hundred million people.

I’m in Oaxaca, Mexico for a few days — enjoying the weather, the food and the people. It’s one the most beautiful places in the world, but very poor. Like many poor places,  people often deal with daily necessities at the expense of a sustainable environment. In the Mixteca Alto, a 6,000 square kilometer region in northern Oaxaca State, grazing, agriculture and forestry practices focused on short term needs have turned what were once lush forests into eroded fields.

Jesus Leon Santos took on this problem 20 years ago and this week he’ll be recognized as one of the winners of the Goldman Environmental Prize. I don’t know Leon Santos. I only came across his story because I’m in Oaxaca, but I find it instructional and inspirational. Several government programs had failed in the region. Leon Santos took a wholistic approach, involving people in reforestation, changing agricultural practices and even changing their eating habits to emphasize locally grown food. The efforts are paying off — there are over a dozen nurseries in different villages; trees are getting planted; ecologically sound drainage ditches are getting built and people are even shifting from raising goats to sheep to protect the trees.

I did get an offer from T-Mobile today — if I switch to paperless billing they will pay to have a tree planted. I was feeling slightly positive about “my tree” until I read what people can really do to affect their environment.

A much more complete description of what Leon Santos is doing is on the Goldman Prize Website.

Until about two years ago, I backed up important data only if I found myself waking up at night and then I didn’t do a very good job of it. Copying key folders to a file server or burning a DVD were parts of my haphazard solution. When I did need to recover a file, it was always hit-or-miss, digging through the various copies. For some projects, I did use a version control system (subversion), but the overhead and discipline required limited its use to software developments. Everything else, Office files, images, text files and email sat vulnerable to a mistake by me or a disk failure.

Then I installed Carbonite. It’s not free — it costs roughly $50 per year, but it’s so easy to use and provides so much peace of mind  that I don’t give the price a second thought.  It integrates with XP as if it came with it — actually as if someone other the Microsoft designed it. Right click a file or folder to back it up or remove it from the backup and you’re done. To restore a missing file open up the Carbonite directory and select the file — you can restore it, or a previous version.

Restoring a file is not instantaneous — it can take several minutes, or even longer for a big file, but it does come back, usually faster than searching through a bunch of DVD’s or directories on a server for the right copy.

Fortunately, I’ve not yet needed to recover the entire file system ,but I did buy a new laptop and used Carbonite to transfer most of my old files. This was remarkably easy — I uninstalled Carbonite from my old laptop, installed it on the new one, registered my new laptop and the Carbonite directory appeared. It took only a few minutes to select the files I wanted restored and by the end of the day, they were all there, along with easy access to their backups.

It’s available at www.carbonite.com

The earliest use of the tagline “all news is local” that I could find was as the title of an article by Peter Osnos of The Century Foundation. Osnos was writing about the closing of several local news bureaus in Rhode Island (www.tcf.org/list.asp?type=NC&pubid=1220). Osnos freely credits the line to Tip O’Neill who actually said “All politics is local”, pointing out “As Tip framed the notion, politicians and newspapers had best remember that their constituents care above all about what is happening in their lives; the big issues writ small.”

Google has since appropriated the line to describe their ability to customize news feeds based on location. In their words, “we analyze every word in every story to understand what location the news is about and where the source is located” (googlenewsblog.blogspot.com/2008/02/all-news-is-local.html). When I enter my zipcode on the Google News page, I do get a list of stories that are generally about my area. The problem is they are compiled by those same news organizations that, as Osnos points out, have closed their local bureaus and no longer actually report on anything local. Without real local news sources, how can news be local?

EveryBlock really is local. Their sources do include major newspapers but go far beyond them to include community weeklies, government sites listing building permits, crimes, and restaurant inspections as well as local specialty publications and local blogs and even further include sites like Yelp, Craigslist and Flickr. Led by Adrian Holovaty, who developed the ChicagoCrime (which is now part of EveryBlock) the team has integrated it all.

If you’ve ever walked by a work crew in your neighborhood and wondered “are they cutting into a gas line, removing a buried gas tank or or adding fiber?”, it’s here. Just check out the the street use permits. Crimes, photos, public housing, restaurant inspections can be quickly browsed, in map or list form and provide a real feel for what’s happening, where it matters most — in my neighborhood.

All this detail could be uselessly overwhelming if poorly presented. EveryBlock makes it easy to find what you want and fun to explore. One or two clicks click gets you a list of either what you want or where you want. But this is about “local” and “local” means maps. Zoom in to your neighborhood and pick a category — all of the relevant items are there, on the map ready to roll over and read.

There is a small problem, EveryBlock only covers Chicago, New York and San Francisco, so I can’t actually use it for anything that matters to me here in Boston. I eagerly anticipate it’s roll out in my fair city. For those of you in one of the three they currently cover it’s at www.everyblock.com.

Hiawatha Bray raved in the Boston Globe today about newsflashr, a site that ranks newsfeeds transparently. I tried it and left it up in a Firefox tab all day. It’s effectiveness is a direct result of it’s simplicity. Select one of the topics: world, business, elections 08, technology, science, health, showbiz or sports and you get a cloud of “hot news topics” where, according to Gal Arav, the company founder:

- the size of the hot news topics corresponds to the number of news headlines
- the color of the hot news topics corresponds to their freshness

At a glance, you can see what’s going on. Today, under politics, “prostitution ring” was growing larger and staying red. One click and I was reading all about Spitzer (aka Client 9).

I’ve been a fan of Google reader until now, but this wins hands down. The “newsflashr cloud” is a much higher bandwidth way to see what’s happening. For the traditionalists, they have a feeds view, but I can’t see why anyone would use it.
Their site is www.newsflashr.com

The good news is that the Florida state Board of Education approved teaching standards that explicitly include evolution in the science curriculum. The Florida standards were reviewed in December, 2005 by the Fordham Institute and given an “F”, partly because evolution was not even mentioned. (See www.sptimes.com/2005/12/30/State/Florida_gets_an_F_in_.shtml). The new standards explicitly require the teaching of evolution and are supported by the scientific community — which really is good news.

The bad news is that the Board compromised with State Representative Marti Coley (R- Marianna) who pressured them to add the word “theory”. The compromise wording inserted by the Board was “scientific theory”.

Representative Coley tried to spin the compromise with a press release which highlights that “scientific theory” is not “scientific fact” (www.marticoley.com/releases/021908.htm) .

I’m not opposed teaching religion in schools — it should just be taught in courses like “comparative religion” or “religion and society”. It should not be taught as science, or allowed to influence how science is taught. Politicians who try to turn science teaching into religious propagandizing should be removed from office.

I just finished “In Defense of Food”, by Michael Pollan. Everyone who eats should read this book. It’s a refreshing, guilt-free look at how we relate to food. Most books I read, make me think a bit or add a bit of knowledge to how I think about other things. Books on nutrition turn me off. This book provided a completely new perspective on my daily meals. It’s short, easy to read, and often summarized with its openning line: “Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” There are many more memorable rules, phrases and ideas than the opening one, but I found the section “Pay More, Eat Less” the most provocative.  Acknowledging that better food costs more, Pollan suggests that we’ve traded food costs against our health. Since 1960, Americans have gone from spending 17.5% of national income on food and 5.2% on health care to 9.9% on food and 16% on health. I’d rather spend my money on better food.

For a really “big picture” view of how we are impacting the our planet’s oceans, download the KML file from UC Santa Barbara’s National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis: www.nceas.ucsb.edu/GlobalMarine

Load it into Google Earth and circle the planet. The data is the result of a study that concludes “over 40% of the world’s oceans are heavily affected by human activities and few if any areas remain untouched”. Our ecological footprint is not only large, it’s also very wet.

I’m blessed. My local Starbucks (on Charles Street in Boston) is one of six that’s testing Clovers, single-brew machines that let the brewer control all the parameters that matter. I’ve now tried the Aged Sumatra and the Arabian Mocha Sanani. Both were more than worth the extra fifty cents Starbucks is charging — better coffee and, well… very fresh. According to the barista on duty today, there’s two other locations in Boston (Federal Street and Harvard Square) and three in Seattle that are testing the “fresh pressed” coffees.

There’s a discussion with lots more details on Starbucks Gossip at starbucksgossip.typepad.com/_/2008/02/starbucks-tests.html.

The Clover machine is described on the Coffee Equipment Company website at cloverequipment.com/whyclover/why_clover.aspx. They offer a service that gives you web access to your Clovers including what’s brewing on each. One can only imagine the Starbucks control center filled with real-time screens showing thousands of cups of coffee brewing all over the world.

Weather’s important but I avoid using weather.com because of all the ads. Simple Weather is the way to go: www.simpleweather.com. A single page, crystal clear, shows the day and week in a glance. A search box gets you right to the forecast want, or you can add a “/zipcode” to the end of the url. Buttons, current conditions and forecast widgets can be made on the site and added to yours. A single ad is the only distraction — let’s hope they keep it that way.

There’s a wap 2.0/html version at: www.simpw.com.

For complex weather info (in the US anyway), I’ll stick with the National Weather Service (www.weather.gov). The Forecast Discussions show how the art mixes with the scienceto create those simple summary pages.