Jeremy Cherfas

Does anyone know what is happening with vanilla prices? I see reports of steep rises, precipitous falls and boring plateaux, and I am not equipped to sift out any kind of overview.

History is not destiny, and yet a little understand of history can help to make sense of things. I am grateful to Alan Jacobs for surfacing this enlightening account of the history of an area called Palestine. And if I remember correctly, in 1948 Jordan could have accepted Arabs from Western Palestine who wanted to resettle, but feared that their presence would upset the Hashemite  kingdom.

I am really grateful that I can follow people who post calm and reflective pieces despite being in the middle of frantic turmoil.

I asked a colleague for evidence that an intervention was associated with changes in behaviour.

We don’t know. It’s more about awareness.

M’kay.

Awareness may be a precursor of behavioural change, but on its own it offers me nothing of value.

“You could literally take a hungry climate refugee and put them in the middle of a field of food, and they’d still starve to death.” Interesting take, with which I fully agree. I wonder how the writer might feel about Chris Smaje’s Small Farm Future?

”Plants are energised by zero-carbon, zero-cost sunlight, whereas factory-produced microbial biomass is energised by generated electricity at an energetic cost amounting to at least an order of magnitude more.”Not going to quibble about that order of magnitude greater than zero. The point is very well made: Proposed ecomodernist solutions to future food supply are not solutions at all.

And it’s out, the latest issue of Eat This Newsletter buttondown.email/jeremyche…

A slew of stories from around the web, each of them connected to at least one of the others because that’s the way of the food and agriculture system.

buttondown.email/jeremyche…

I was wrong about Healthkit not exporting distance data. The data are there with distance in a cycling workout recorded as km between records, which are 1 or 2 seconds apart. The numbers are there, obscured by being of the order of 0.007 km. Solved at www.jeremycherfas.net/blog/tran…

Just finished the draft of the latest Eat This Newsletter, which goes out tomorrow at around 13:00 CEST.

One thing I was especially grateful for was @mastoreaderio@mastodon.social from @badlogic@mastodon.gamedev.place

Decided to take up Datasette again to look at Activity data in Health.app. Turns out that the Health export does not include distance for several workouts, even though I can see distance in both Health and Fitness. No idea why this is. Anyone have a clue?

The photo challenge was at micro.blog which is also federated. I post on my own site, which feeds to micro.blog via RSS. There is a different sort of challenge for October, called Inktober, for drawings, but I don’t do that.