Jeremy Cherfas

@ChrisWiegman Strange you should say that. The protocols I use are alive and well, and they give me part of what I need from a community. I do feel good too, and that is part of the story, but to dismiss something you personally don’t care for or use seems uncalled for.

Intrigued by a new role-playing board game called Rulal Commerce, based on China’s demand for tea and what it is doing to Laos. Can’t find any explanation of the significance of the name, though. Does it, I wonder, mean anything?

pim.cgiar.org/2021/10/2…

Always readable.

TIL1. You can buy broken bits of leftover pasta.2. It costs exactly the same as uniform, whole pasta.3. Why?

Step aside 75%, which achieved mythic status as the amount of genetic diversity lost since ~1903. The new not number is “almost 80%”, the proportion of studies in a global meta-analysis that found evidence of some genetic erosion. I hope that’s clear.

agro.biodiver.se/2021/10/a…

Huge congratulations to Chris Otter, whose fascinating book Diet for a Large Planet has just won the AHA Bentley Prize in World History. We had a great chat about how the British created global food outsourcing and made it was it is today.

www.eatthispodcast.com/large-pla…

Thought for the DayThe unspeakable depression of lighting the fires every morning with papers of a year ago, and getting glimpses of optimistic headlines as they go up in smoke.

[W]hile it’s feasible to wander around a smallholding with a trug looking for apples to feed two pigs, it probably isn’t feasible to wander around a largeholding with a trug looking for apples to feed two hundred or two thousand pigs. So there are diseconomies of large scale to the ecological efficiency of the farm’s unbidden bounty.That doesn’t mean it isn’t worthwhile

Very interesting long essay about what it is to be unseen, unheard and yet vital. But that professional podcast world? Awful.

15 years ago today I wrote enthusiastically about @Mann_Library @Cornell gathering up great graphics to share and inspire.

The old website remains at web.archive.org/web/20170… but where are the original submissions and what happened to the project?

On this day in 2009, I never thought I would be directing this post to @danielpunkass www.jeremycherfas.net/blog/the-…

Long may it continue.

Hey @marcoarment Overcast.fm still giving errors: ssl3_get_server_certificate:certificate verify failed when I try file_get_contents(overcast_url)

Is this a relic of the big certificate fail a while ago? If not, I wonder what I can do about it.

@AgroBioDiverse You are a star! Manuel Elkin Patarroyo is the man.

“The chemically manufactured vaccine known as SPf66, invented by Patarroyo, had limited results with “only” 55 percent effectiveness. Even so, it was a breakthrough.”

I hope @thedailybeast follows up.

@LSHTM All this talk of a first malaria vaccine … first approved, maybe.

I can’t be the only person who remembers early trials by a Venezuelan whose name, alas, I cannot remember. There was protection, but not enough. Does anyone else remember what I’m talking about?

Very nice idea. @croptrust is offering to help seedbanks in less well-off countries financial help to duplicate their collections and store them safely in Svalbard.

What are you waiting for? Apply now. www.croptrust.org/svalbard-…

I just rediscovered this page, which I first linked to on this day in 2004. Timeless advice that I try to follow when I give and appreciate when I receive.In my ignorance, I didn’t know who Phil Agre was; now that I want to know more, it is hard to do so.

Hey @marcoarment Has something changed in Overcast back end? I am getting errors like file_get_contents(): Failed to enable crypto from my all data XML file. Maybe part of that root certificate thing, which I confess I do not fully understand. #indieweb

  It’s #InternationalCoffeeDay2021, the whole point of which is promotion, right? So here’s a link to all previous episodes of Eat This Podcast on coffee www.eatthispodcast.com/coffee/ 

@Economicbotany This six-week online course on Country Houses and the British Empire looks like it would be great, based on previous lectures from @corinne_fowler. I hope I can make time for it.