Author Archives: zizroc

Let’s all take a moment, or a little while longer, to remember the mathematical physicist Freeman Dyson, who died on 28 February at age 96. The New York Times has an obituary here. But for the uninitiated, I’d suggest starting at the only TED talk I’ve ever liked, where Dyson gives a master class inContinue reading “Freeman Dyson dead at 96”

This is an enjoyable story about agricultural land management in England. The protagonist is Jake Fiennes, eldest and troublemakerest (I guess) of the famous Fiennes brothers. He now spends his time as the land manager of a large estate in southern England. The land management style he practices is a potential solution to the veryContinue reading “Land sharing, land sparing. For f**k sake.”

We moved back to California from Austria recently and have been digging through stuff we had in storage in LA. (By weight, books must be the biggest component.) Among the books and papers in a box I used to clear out my old office at UCLA was this issue of Bloomberg Businessweek, from Nov. 5-11,Continue reading “Wayback machine, analog”

Google pushes the weirdest stuff to my phone. I happen to be waiting for some climate model data to process, which my janky R scripting has pushed my computer to the limits of its memory. So I pick up my phone and find this turd from the Hoover Institution. I’m open minded, I think, soContinue reading “I see your bet and I’ll call – it’s just dumb”

This unifies two things dear to my heart: Scotch whiskey and radiocarbon. Also there’s really nothing more authentic than scammery at the centre of a story on whiskey. Historically, the control was from government sponsored monopolies, leading to illicit production and smuggling; now it’s greedy people seeking to corner the market on rare old drams,Continue reading “Radionuclides to the rescue”

Trains across Europe seem romantic to me, never mind the carbon costing. Austrian state trains (ÖBB) does it very well, especially by North American standards — in both Canada and the US, our train services are abysmal. So do the French, with their TGV (très grande vitesse) lines. Last spring, we took a TGV trainContinue reading “How not to fly”

At the Global Forum for Innovation in Marginal Environments, put on by the International Centre for Biosaline Agriculture in Dubai, UAE. I presented on FABLE’s project to distribute, support, and build local capacity for global food and land-use system modelling.