Dan Barber’s story (embedded above) is one of my favourite kinds of stories. He begins with something that seems unethical, tells the story of an unlikely maverick who challenges the status quo and wins (a contest). All the while, it turns out that our maverick’s approach involves some down home ingenuity and hands on sustainability. In the end, it turns out that we get to have our cake and eat it to. There is a method for producing foie gras ethically that’s also sustainable (AND DELICIOUS). (If only we didn’t have those evil unsustainable, unethical factory farms that gave us slightly inferior foie gras (and strawberries and mangoes and whatever) year-round.)

At about 8:15 in, Barber unwittingly raises the first issue that will cause massive problems for this kind of farming. He approvingly mentions that the farmer is taking a loss on feeding these geese figs and olives. “The doubly irony is that on the figs and olives, Eduardo could make more money selling those than he can on the foie gras.”

At which point the economist in me asks, “then why does he bother with the foie gras?”

Eduardo is an artisan farmer, he doesn’t need to be profit maximizing, just profitable. So if he wants to take some extra time and effort, he’s welcome to destroy value in the goods he produces as a kind of hobbyist craftsman. That’s fine for him, but does it work on a world-wide scale?

The reason that Eduardo could make more on the figs and olives than he does on the foie gras is that someone has figured out how to make the delicacy more cheaply. It’s far from ethical - it requires factory farming and force feeding - but when it comes to foie gras, people don’t seem to care.

The pricing of foie gras really doesn’t matter to most people, but the same story plays out over and over again in the world of farming. Factory farms produce food more cheaply, with less labour and at a higher density than most organic farms. They also produce the food people want year-round instead of seasonally. They do it at massive environmental and ethical cost, but until there is a price on these things, it is unlikely that entreating people to only eat what is in season will see a shift in the way food is produced.

There’s two ways this story can get better. Either factory food becomes more expensive or sustainable food becomes cheaper.

Eliminating the massive subsidies paid to factory farmers would be a big step in doing both at once. If oil continues to climb, factory farm prices will tend to rise (a lot of oil goes into the machinery and pesticides used on larger farms) making less oil-dependent farming more viable.

The labour issue is a bigger one, which must be solved either by automating organic farming practices, killing western subsidies which will make farming profitable for developing countries (they have a surplus of labour, but ultra cheap grain and dairy from subsidized OECD farmers often forces them out of business), or convincing more OECD citizens to go back to the land.

The last question, to which I don’t know the answer, is: Will organic farming produce enough food to feed everyone? The technologies that underlie the Green Revolution allowed the human population to triple in less than 70 years with very few major famines. Advocates of alternative farming need to account for whether their methods will sustain the human population (or who should die).

They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things.

–Norman Borlaug

I was reading this article on Slate.com about a number of subprime mortgage holders who are weathering the financial storm just fine. They have delinquency rates of around 3% in an area of finance where the national average is closer to 19%.

How is this possible?

The explanation that stuck with me came from Mark Pinsky, president and CEO of of the Opportunity Finance Network. “We have to be profitable, just not profit-maximizing.”

What sets the “good” subprime lenders apart is that they never bought into all the perverse incentives and “innovations” of the bad subprime lending system—the fees paid to mortgage brokers, the fancy offices, and the reliance on securitization. Like a bunch of present-day George Baileys, ethical subprime lenders evaluate applications carefully, don’t pay brokers big fees to rope customers into high-interest loans, and mostly hold onto the loans they make rather than reselling them. They focus less on quantity than on quality.

And in a world where Neil Cavuto is saying that “loaning to minorities and risky folks is a disaster,” minorities with tiny savings accounts are being served and are paying back their debts. The profits for these companies weren’t as high as they were for the big lenders (one CEO earns a “mere” $190,000/yr), but on the other hand, they are still running.

Compare this to the story that Nassim Nicholas Taleb tells about the wider financial markets (skip to 4:20). “We don’t have slack, it’s over-optimized.”

I keep thinking about the impending extinction of the Cavendish Banana a worldwide mono-culture that was propelled to the #1 spot when the previous favourite, the Gros Michel Banana was wiped out, also by disease. And of the injuries (careful about clicking that link) sustained by Super-G skiers when their highly optimized gear turns against them during a crash. And of Koalas which have evolved to eat a tree no one else eats and who will die off when the trees do.

Then I think about apples which come in a variety of types, casual skiers who make it to the bottom of the hill eventually and raccoons who will eat just about anything. These are all generalists that manage to thrive in a variety of areas, and seem to be pretty good at adapting to massive changes to their environments.

We’re in the midst of the 6th mass extinction in earth’s history and it’s the specialists, with their highly optimized, fragile ecological niches that are going to go first. Cockroaches will still be here when it’s all over, I imagine.

The rule is clear. When things are stable, specialization and optimization is the recipe for success. When things are bumpy, allowing some of the inefficiency that comes from flexibility is probably the thing that will let you survive.

The mistake of the latest market crash seems to be that all the incentives and all the players were aligned to act as if the boom in housing prices was a stable situation that would last and last. You’d think that by now, the financial markets would have learned their lesson.

photo credit: a virtual unknown

Oh man, this is pretty much everything that this blog is about in one place.

This is a piece of brilliant design, for an excellent presentation about a critical problem, backed up by a raft of interesting statistics relating to the impact and efficacy of helping girls vs helping other groups.

(via Presentation Zen)

photo credit: vgm8383

In 1990, Neil Postman gave a talk at a meeting of the German Informatics Society called Informing Ourselves to Death.

The speech has been held up as an important counterpoint to the general technological gee-whizzardry of publications like Wired. I bring it up now, because 18 years after the speech was given, we have some hindsight.

It’s worth remembering what was happening in 1990. Computers were on the rise, but there wasn’t much of an Internet to speak of. The first version of the World Wide Web would not go public until 1991. Windows 3.0 had just been released in May. Apple was on System 6.0.5 for the Mac. Laptops and desktops looked like this.

It is in this context that Postman says:

In the case of computer technology, there can be no disputing that the computer has increased the power of large-scale organizations like military establishments or airline companies or banks or tax collecting agencies. And it is equally clear that the computer is now indispensable to high-level researchers in physics and other natural sciences. But to what extent has computer technology been an advantage to the masses of people? To steel workers, vegetable store owners, teachers, automobile mechanics, musicians, bakers, brick layers, dentists and most of the rest into whose lives the computer now intrudes?

And why are computers failing to offer advantages to regular people? There is so much information that regular people no longer find the world comprehensible. This, says Postman, began in medieval times.

There was a time when information was a resource that helped human beings to solve specific and urgent problems of their environment. It is true enough that in the Middle Ages, there was a scarcity of information but its very scarcity made it both important and usable. This began to change, as everyone knows, in the late 15th century when a goldsmith named Gutenberg, from Mainz, converted an old wine press into a printing machine, and in so doing, created what we now call an information explosion … The printing press began that age, and we have not been free of it since.

But what started out as a liberating stream has turned into a deluge of chaos. … Everything from telegraphy and photography in the 19th century to the silicon chip in the twentieth has amplified the din of information, until matters have reached such proportions today that for the average person, information no longer has any relation to the solution of problems.

Whether you accept his understanding of medieval history, there is merit in his concern that there can be too much information. That is to say: too much information all at once.

Consider the failure of US intelligence to predict the September 11th. When it was over and they were sifting through the material, all the information that they needed to figure out what was happening was available. It was hidden in plain sight by being part of an insanely enormous field of data. The issue was not a lack of information, it was a lack of the right kind of organization and perspective.

The term that geek workers use for this is “the firehose”.

Postman recalls fondly the time before the information age, when people were blessed with certainty.

There existed an ordered, comprehensible world-view, beginning with the idea that all knowledge and goodness come from God. What the priests had to say about the world was derived from the logic of their theology. There was nothing arbitrary about the things people were asked to believe, including the fact that the world itself was created at 9 AM on October 23 in the year 4004 B.C.

Pay special attention to this next bit:

The medieval world was, to be sure, mysterious and filled with wonder, but it was not without a sense of order. Ordinary men and women might not clearly grasp how the harsh realities of their lives fit into the grand and benevolent design, but they had no doubt that there was such a design, and their priests were well able, by deduction from a handful of principles, to make it, if not rational, at least coherent.

The argument here is that if the information available in the middle ages was wrong, at least there wasn’t too much of it. With no conception of a way that we could better organize information and the fear that computers will be hard for regular people to use and you can see his concern. It’s at this point that his talk falls flat on its face.

Certainty is NOT a good if you are WRONG.

Postman should have been calling on the people making computers to make them better at processing, sorting and handling information. In a world with an abundance of information the solution is not wishing there was less, it’s in wishing that there were better ways to organize it.

Postman seems to miss this entirely.

Luckily, others did not. Instead of a firehouse, we have Digg, Yahoo! and Google. Instead of ivory towers of data for the few, we have Wikipedia and Gapminder. Instead of top down news organs, we have Ushahidi and IMC. As time went on the trend moved towards more powerful and more accessible tools for dealing with the deluge.

The critical lesson here is that in 1990, most people still didn’t have a faint fucking clue about what computers would mean in a mere 10 years. The consequences of Moore’s Law (coined in 1970) were not being taken on board. This is Postman’s biggest failure, the failure of imagination to understand what it could mean to common people that computers would double in power every 2 years, effectively driving the price of processing power down to free ($100 Laptop!).

I have a printing press in my bedroom (when I had a bedroom)! I have a AV broadcast station on my lap. I can MAKE MOVIES with about $3000 worth of equipment (and next year it’ll be cheaper). I can do my own accounting and I have screen savers, SCREEN SAVERS, that process vast amounts of data in an effort to fold proteins!

The saddest thing about Postman is that he approaches the whole question of human history as an endless conflict between winners and losers as a result of each technological change. It’s as if I showed him an automatic drilling machine and he complained that all the people who used to dig mines were losers because they were out of a job, instead of winners because they no longer had to GO DOWN INTO A MINE.

I would MUCH rather be middle class in modern times (or even lower class) than ruling class in the 1400s and I say this knowing that on my Grandmother’s side of the family, there’s a castle somewhere. I am literally wealthier than the wealthiest medieval king across almost every measurement of wealth that you can think of. I will live longer, I can travel further, I can remember more, I eat better food (and have access to more of it), my house is more comfortable, and I have access to equipment and abilities far beyond his wildest dreams.

When Postman tells the story of the Benedictine monks and their devotional clocks, he anticipates his own failure of imagination. The point of his story is that with technological changes come unintended consequences. And there he is in 1990, looking at computers, seeing only benefits for large institutions, projecting forwards only benefits for large institutions, missing the possibility of unexpected changes for everyone else.

I’m glad he was wrong.

Michale Pollan tells stories about nature so that we can begin to FEEL the reality of science, rather than just “know”. It’s been 150 years since Darwin, he says, and we are still all Cartesians. “We still think it’s human vs nature.”

The most important point in the talk: We are just as sophisticated as rice, because WE HAVE BEEN EVOLVING FOR THE SAME LENGTH OF TIME (rice actually hare more genes than humans).

The future of gay marriage in California. - By Kenji Yoshino - Slate Magazine.

Finally, the effects of Prop 8 on the national movement for same-sex marriage are significant but not devastating. Before Tuesday, court opinions legalizing same-sex marriage in Massachusetts, California, and Connecticut suggested that the right was gaining traction. The passage today of constitutional bans on same-sex marriage not just in California but also in Arizona and Florida provides a counterpoint.

Nonetheless, generational and global trends both ultimately favor full marriage equality in this country. The situation here is similar to the two-steps-forward, one-step-back trajectory that led to the legalization of interracial marriage. To be sure, Prop 8 represents a large step back. But the nation’s march toward marriage equality won’t stop.

I agree with the last paragraph. The march of the history of western civilization is the march of recognizing more and more entities as human beings and broadening the rights granted to them. It’s a messy process, but I think that it’s inevitable.

In this sense, the social conservatives are right. It is a slippery slope. I just think that the slope is in the right direction.

Fight on.

photo credit: JasonJT

This is very exciting.

After 8 years of development, the Rosetta Project has released the 1st edition of their Rosetta disks, which have the text of Genesis 1-3 translated into over 1,500 languages, etched in micro text (you need about 1000x magnification to read it all). The idea is that, unlike the single Rosetta stone, these will eventually be mass produced, with the idea that at least SOME of the very durable copies will survive into the distant future when most or all of these languages are dead.

There are so many interesting things going on here.

They chose optical engraving because, presumably, humans will always be able to see while it’s far less certain that we’ll be able to read digital media, even a few decades from now (an enormous problem for historians - it’s easier to read Da Vinci’s notes than those of scientists working on computers in the 1960s).

They chose small but durable mass-production technology because even when some of the copies get destroyed, there will be more. These will be heirlooms handed down from generation to generation, perhaps spread across the solar system or galaxy as we spread out from the surface of the planet (assuming we make it that far).

And as for Genesis?

Alexander Rose Says:
Regarding Genesis… yes we get this a lot. We had a ton of debate about it. It came down to a totally mechanical reason, the bible is the most translated text and it starts with Genesis. Finding John 3:16 in languages you dont know or scripts you dont recognize while scanning documents from a shoebox out of a closet in Papua New Ginea is really hard it turns out. Here is the question I always ask, “Without looking it up, can you tell me what was on the original Rosetta Stone?” It was a bunch of boring tax stuff, but we dont judge those cultures by that material. We are smart enough to know that this was just one piece of text that randomly survived and we are thankful to have it.

This speech by Clay Shirky is really, really good.

I was being interviewed by a TV producer to see whether I should be on their show, and she asked me, “What are you seeing out there that’s interesting?”

I started telling her about the Wikipedia article on Pluto. You may remember that Pluto got kicked out of the planet club a couple of years ago, so all of a sudden there was all of this activity on Wikipedia. The talk pages light up, people are editing the article like mad, and the whole community is in an ruckus–”How should we characterize this change in Pluto’s status?” And a little bit at a time they move the article–fighting offstage all the while–from, “Pluto is the ninth planet,” to “Pluto is an odd-shaped rock with an odd-shaped orbit at the edge of the solar system.”

So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, “Okay, we’re going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever.” That wasn’t her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, “Where do people find the time?” That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, “No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you’ve been masking for 50 years.”