Rotundus.com

That's one lesson I drew from Is This Weird Vegetable Part Going To Be The Next Kale?. This proposed "next kale" is actually a byproduct of current brocolli production:

the answer might lie in selling a part of the broccoli plant that would normally be composted, not eaten. They’re calling it BroccoLeaf: The leaves around a broccoli crown that most people have never seen. “Before that crown has even formed, we go in and we harvest some of the younger, less mature leaves,” says Matt Seeley, VP of marketing at The Nunes Company, which sells the new vegetable in its Foxy Organic brand. “And that’s really what the BroccoLeaf is.”

Beyond being reported as less bitter than kale, it may actually be more nutritious:

Like kale, a single serving of broccoli leaves has a full day’s dose of Vitamin A or C. Broccoli leaves also have more calcium, more iron, and more potassium than kale. And arguably it’s also better for the environment—the plant is already growing broccoli crowns, so no more water or other resources are needed to harvest the extra leaves.

I'm a fan of promoting new things as a way of improving eating - e.g. The rise of Africa’s super vegetables and its promotion of not-widely-produced vegetables of African origin - but sometimes new food may already be hidden in plain sight. (It might also be worth noting that cabbage, kale, collards, cauliflower, romanesco broccoli, kohlrabi, and brussels sprouts all seem to originate from the same wild plant.

The drought in California may have more to do mismanagement and inefficient allocation of the state's water supply, but it's led to the land of Hippies adopting some unusual strategies for water preservation. What specifically are they doing? Filling their reservoirs with black plastic balls:

On Monday Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti supervised the latest onslaught of 4-inch black plastic balls, bringing the total count to 96 million in the 175-acre reservoir. Located in Sylmar, the reservoir holds up to 3.3 billion gallons, enough to supply the city with drinking water for up to three weeks. The city says the balls will shade and cool the water, reducing evaporation from the reservoir and making it less susceptible to algae, bacterial growth, and chemical reactions that can produce harmful substances. ... The balls cost 36 cents each, for a total of $34.5 million. The utility has been testing the concept since 2008, reporting that shade balls reduce evaporation by 85 to 90 percent. That should equate to saving nearly 300 million gallons a year, enough to provide drinking water for 8,100 people, said Los Angeles City Council member Mitchell Englander. The balls also inhibit microorganism growth, reducing the treatment the water must undergo through other means. That could save the city $250 million over time, said Garcetti.

I'm a bit surprised as to why they're using black balls specifically, which would seem to absorb more heat than white-coloured balls.

This approach might save them some money, but I wonder if turning to India might provide the state with alternative, even-more-Hippy-compatible approaches to reducing evaporation. What's India doing? It's installing solar panels on top of its canals

Two quantifiable benefits of building solar power plants on canals as against conventional ground-mounted systems were widely reported — the amount of land it would save and also the amount of water it would save, which would have otherwise been lost due to evaporation.

The first project back in 2012 wound up being somewhat more expensive than traditional land-based solar, but at least some of that seems to be due to the small-scale size of the initial project and should diminish as the scale of this goes up.

India has also been building floating solar installations on its lakes, which perhaps more closely approximates California filling its reservoirs with plastic balls. Personally I think, whether you would install solar panels on canals or reservoirs, either would look better than the current approach of dumping those plastic balls on reservoirs.

I finally got around to overhauling this with PHP 5.6 and the latest release of Drupal after it'd fallen rather out of date. Figured I'd still like to keep this site around - more as just a place to collect my thoughts than anything. (As before, the tools installed on various subdomains are what I probably use more than this blog anyways).

One annoyance that I had in the past was with piles and piles of spam comments such that I wound up making it next to impossible for anyone to comment. Now that's gone and replaced with Disqus for commenting on the off-chance that I haven't chased everyone away. For now this site is also using a new theme as the old one no longer works in the latest Drupal release.

As far as some of the recent property damage in Baltimore goes, Slate's article Why the CVS Burned: The rioting in Baltimore wasn’t hooliganism. It was a protest against the depredations of the ghetto economy.. The complaint seems to be basically the following:

... when I look at the Baltimore riots of the past week, I see something more complicated than mere hooliganism. To me, the riots reflect fury not just at the police, but at the constraints of the ghetto’s retail economy, where the poor pay more. As I see it, the indignity of being roughed up by the cops is of a piece with not being able to afford to shop in your own neighborhood. ... Economists have found that prices for consumer goods can be as much as 15 percent higher for the poor.

The article also talked about stores offering credit being amongst the most targeted, with people feeling resentment over high interest rates. And then there was this comment:

Services that might be free for the middle class cost real money for the poor, whittling away at their already low incomes.

Despite being argued as one of the better ways to improve the lives of the poor,
microfinance loans also have quite high interest rates. It's unfortunately difficult to serve the poor without losing money.

The crime associated with ghettos also makes it difficult for businesses to operate there:

Crime prevents businesses from thriving by generating instability and uncertainty (at micro and macroeconomic levels). This is true in markets of all sizes, national, regional, municipal and even neighborhood-al (okay the word doesn’t exist). That's why having a business in a ghetto is rarely a good idea.

Baltimore's mayor spoke in the original article linked above of how hard the city had to work to make CVS willing to invest in a pharmacy in the area, one now looted and destroyed in the rioting. The destruction can't help CVS's future property insurance premiums. In this case rioting to protest higher prices and interest rates demanded by businesses in the area seems likely to make the area an even less compelling location for businesses to invest in in the future. The poverty trap continues.