Taking advantage of the downtime to continue migrating old blog posts, I'm mostly conscious that nobody except me cares whether most of these pieces endure. Some I'm rejecting out of hand, as too ephemeral or unimportant to bother with. The bulk I just process. A few are worth drawing attention to once again.

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A paper just published in Nature Geoscience has terrific news for anyone worried about the sustainability of agriculture.¹ It should be possible to grow 10% more calories and 19% more protein while simultaneously using 14% less rainwater and 12% less irrigation water. And that, the authors say "would feed an additional 825 million people".

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Desktop computer; phone; router; Time Capsule; LEDs; active loudspeakers (x2); audio mixer; external hard drives (x2); fan; desk lamp.

Twelve electrical devices, permanently plugged in just to make my work space work. Two more -- USB charger and audio recorder -- plugged in intermittently, although seldom simultaneously.

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Lucky Peach was a great magazine about food; informative, witty, intelligent and eminently readable when most of the competition was nothing of the sort. But when it died, under slightly mysterious circumstances earlier this year, I didn't think too much about the consequences. I'd never actually been in a position to buy a paper copy, alas, but I very much enjoyed reading it online, which was generally a treat of both words and pictures. ¹ And so I thought, well, that's OK. It'll live forever, digitally.

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The much ballyhooed total eclipse came and it went, more than a third of a world away. I didn't pay it much attention at the time, though I did marvel at some of the photographs of totality, while also staying aware that I had no way of knowing whether they were, in fact, of this totality rather than some previous event. A couple of people I know were there that I know of, and their accounts were terrific in a detached way. I also saved "Annie Dillard's Classic Essay: 'Total Eclipse'", which The Atlantic generously made available "until the end of August". But I didn't read it.

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