farming
An information service society
Auditory Hallucinations from Offworld Megafarms
Quaker Square Inn
The modernist architect Le Corbusier was an admirer of American grain elevators, suggesting that their regularity and modularity could serve as a model for other kinds of buildings. At least one later architect took the suggestion seriously. The Quaker Square Inn in Akron, Ohio, occupies the shell of a former elevator. If you're in town for the night, you can rent a round room in one of the silos.
Introduction to Permaculture
A Book by Bill MollisonThe conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally productive systems which have the diversity, stability, and resilience of natural ecosystems. It is the harmonious integration of the landscape with people providing their food, energy, shelter and other material and non-material needs in a sustainable way.
In Search of Organic Software
An Article by Pirijan KetheswaranTwo different kinds of farms can grow vegetables. One is a factory farm built for scale, and the other takes the time to grow more expensive but healthier plants without pesticides.
Will everyone appreciate the difference? Of course not, but the latter plants are labelled ‘organic’ to give us the information and the choice, so that those of us who do care can make better decisions.
So maybe we should have ‘organic’ software as well, made by companies that:
- Are not funded in such a way where the primary obligation of the company is to 🎡 chase funding rounds or get acquired (so bootstrapping, crowdfunding, grants, and angel investment are okay)
- Have a clear pricing page
- Disclose their sources of funding and sources of revenue
The Sheaves
A Poem by Edwin Arlington RobinsonWhere long the shadows of the wind had rolled,
Green wheat was yielding to the change assigned;
And as by some vast magic undivined
The world was turning slowly into gold.
Like nothing that was ever bought or sold
It waited there, the body and the mind;
And with a mighty meaning of a kind
That tells the more the more it is not told.So in a land where all days are not fair,
Fair days went on till on another day
A thousand golden sheaves were lying there,
Shining and still, but not for long to stay—
As if a thousand girls with golden hair
Might rise from where they slept and go away.Data Farming
A Research PaperMiners seek valuable nuggets of ore buried in the earth, but have no control over what is out there or how hard it is to extract the nuggets from their surroundings. ... Similarly, data miners seek to uncover valuable nuggets of information buried within massive amounts of data.
Farmers cultivate the land to maximize their yield. They manipulate the environment to their advantage using irrigation, pest control, crop rotation, fertilizer, and more. Small-scale designed experiments let them determine whether these treatments are effective. Similarly, data farmers manipulate simulation models to their advantage, using large-scale designed experimentation to grow data from their models in a manner that easily lets them extract useful information.
One and a Half Cheers for List-Keeping
I don't need that bird
I worked for several years as a leader of birding tours, and I have met a few sad individuals who were so focused on adding to their life lists that they would refuse to look at a bird species that they had seen before, no matter how spectacular the view or how fascinating its behavior of the moment might be. “I don’t need that bird” was their standard reply.
List-chasing
For a person just getting started in some area of natural history, and unabashed focus on list-chasing is a good thing, at least for a while. The trick is knowing when to stop.
The maximization method
Keith Brown described how he got the idea “that the maximization of daily species lists of butterflies, a seemingly unscientific goal (though much employed in a sister area, ornithology), could give a large scientific fallout."
For example, he described how six weeks’ effort in the Brazilian central plateau had turned up twenty-five species previously unknown for the area—but then he had adopted the “maximization” method, and in another six weeks, he had found nearly three hundred more species.