Publishing to this site from more than one machine had been a bit daunting. Not so.¹ All I had to do was add MAMP and the Github desktop client to this here MBA and everything seems to be hunky dory. I'm going to backdate this post, though, so it doesn't linger on the home page.

So, no excuses ....

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Italian bureaucracy seems designed to sap the will and break the spirit. You would think that, being a bureaucracy of long standing, there would be a process, a correct way of doing things, that, no matter how complex the labyrinth, there would be a path through it and the bureaucrats would know the One True Way.

But no.

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Just a quick note to thank the people who develop the content management system that brings you these pages: Grav. I had some problems late on Friday, asked for help on the forum and got it over the weekend. Very slick. And although the problem was of my own making, it also did result in a little change to the way Grav looks for specific filenames.

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It would be easy enough to look at this website and conclude that I have been no more present here than I was on the old set-up. That would be wrong. For one thing, there have been quite a few tweaks under the hood that aren't visible but that do make a difference to what is visible. For another, there's the somewhat daunting task of bringing over the ±1400 posts from the old site and trying to make sure that links from the old site end up on the correct page here.

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A couple of days ago I wrote a bit about how confused I am by the arguments around low agricultural prices and high food prices. I cited, as I often do under these circumstances, the Shakesperean observation that what farmers decide to do depends crucially on what their neighbour farmers have decided.

Biologists call that density-dependent selection, and it's a well-known version of the Prisoner's Dilemma game. A new paper in PLOS Computational Biology by Alice Milne and her colleagues shows that it applies beautifully to pest management, at least in a model of how maize farmers in the US might respond to the threat of European corn borer (Ostrinia nubilalis). ¹ It's a great story.

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