Love to see that calculation done showing the amount government subsidies affect the size of the farm. As I understand it, subsidies disproportionally flow to the largest farms.

Here’s are the head-banging parts of this presentation:

Well, in base 10 math, I can get to 46:

Biocontrol certainly has caused some major disasters, yes. The reason I’m not so upset about introducing fungi to control insects is that a lot of the fungi are species specific on which host they will infect. Indeed, if we don’t do it to the argentine ants, I suspect some pathogen will get to them sooner or later.…

The chytrid problem for amphibians is horrifying. Thing is, insects, like fungi, use chitin in their bodies. As a result, there are a lot of fungi that specifically target insects. But I agree: if there’s a fungus that kills argentine ants and only argentine ants, then I’d like to see it released. The problem is, that…

We’re more like an outbreak than a super-colony, since we’re not all clones. We’ve had all these incredibly cool medical workers, public health workers, plant pathology workers, and veterinary science workers doing their darnedest to make sure that neither we nor our symbiotes (aka domesticated species) can have our…

Well, Paul Stamets holds the patent for using fungi for controlling ants. If we can just help him to a) find a fungus that kills argentine ants (it’s probably in Argentina if it exists) and b) that there’s money to be made releasing this fungus into the super-colonies, then we’re golden. Argentine ants have enormous…

Gotta love the Whipple shields in all their diversity: it’s what keeps things safer in orbit. Too bad the text didn’t spend much time on them, because they’re a fascinating technology. It also makes me wonder about the overlaps between this technology and modern body armor.

You only now noticed the 23rd? A couple of years ago, there was a great PBS documentary called the Ghost Army. Well worth watching, because a lot of well-known artists and fashionistas served in that group. They were pretty brave, because they were lightly armed, and if they did their jobs right, they took incoming…

Zebras, antelope, and some random scenery? What do they think they’re traversing, Miocene California? Some non-existent place in Africa?

If you want a non-car themed answer, try “10.” After all, if we’re counting in base 6, the numbers are 1,2,3,4,5,10.

I’ve got mixed feelings about this one, and the big problem is that it’s not going to just get the plastic. Even those damned microbeads reportedly have a lot of bacteria growing on them, so a trash collector is going to collect a lot of sea life with it. Since it’s concentrating sea life, it’s also likely to…

So leave the gate open on the inside pen. It’s still a pen, even with its gate open. Otherwise, you couldn’t get the pigs into or out of their pens.

Well, I think this is good evidence that said mother really shouldn’t take the class.

Tacking with a solar sail... There’s at least one java-based simulator out there if you want to learn how to fly one of these things in 2 dimensions. In any case, if you want to go inward, remember that you’re in orbit around the sun. Turn your sail so that it’s facing 45 degrees forward, so that light bounces off the…

Workers are females. If they can become sexually mature enough to lay eggs, they’ll produce drones. IIRC, this happens in some ant species. When the queen has died, one result is that some of the workers start laying eggs (their sexual maturity was being suppressed by hormones secreted by the queen) and there are a…

Why go after the mosquitos, when you can go after malaria? After all, mosquitoes pollinate a lot of plants (that’s what the males eat), so if you go about wholesale elimination of mosquitoes, you’re probably going to mess up a bunch of plants too. It’s far better to go after the plasmodia.

Where did you get the “indicator plants” list? California poppies are weeds in something like 18 US states, so they’re a better indicator of where people have scattered wildflower seeds than copper deposits. Juniper is similarly far more widespread than uranium, and horsetails occasionally grow in water, which is a…

I’m a little confused. I thought the desert sand verbena had purple flowers. The orange sphagetti lying across the bushes sounds a lot more like dodder.

Hmm. And when NSA (and other hacker agency) technology filters out to the streets, think of all the different ways this kind of system could be hacked. Lovely. If it takes long enough for the technology to get loose, our military could be so totally invested in this kind of thing that the soldiers are blind without…