Oh man, I was just describing how great the half-speed remastering of the Beatles album "Abbey Road" was and missing my records. You could hear the sound the picks made on the strings during "Here comes the sun" like you'd been playing it in your own room.

Of course you can hear the difference, you just don't know how to describe it. Have you ever noticed how when people sing (or play even an electric guitar) along with a reproduced recording, you can hear the live music from a lot further away than the canned music? I think everyone hears that difference & that's why live music is so exciting. Have you ever heard unamplified chamber music in a hall with good acoustics? I heard Kronos Quartet "live" once and everything was amplified &, well, of course it was good, but I might as well have been listening to the stereo.

When we don't have labels for things, we tend to have trouble grasping and talking about them, and remembering them, but I do think people hear the difference when they put things side by side.

So then you have to ask the question, would you be a little happier with good sound, even if you didn't know you were? I know this sounds crazy, but I think I am happier with good sound. Just like I'm happier living in beautiful places even though most of the time I'm not aware of looking up. But I'd still rather hear good music with bad sound quality than bad music with good sound quality. Well, most of the time.

I grew up in Illinois, and we were told in about 1980 (in highschool) that in the century of farming we'd done, we'd gone through six of the twelve feet of topsoil the pioneers had originally found in the prairies. That wasn't growing fuel, just food. But that wasn't taking account of erosion either, which is now mandatory practice.

Still, they used to say that the dust bowl is a natural dessert and that if the climate warms we can write off a lot of the farm land the US has.

Thanks for the article --- people don't think about these issues enough.

I read the most amazing article -- about prison, about the UK, about being gay, about being HIV+, and then I went to read the letters page & I ran into some kind of kangaroo court.

Folks, if he had actually shot someone on the plane it would not have changed this article very much for me. This is not what the prison system should be. Is this what it is like to be stuck in the company of men? Constant brutish short sex & nobody out as gay? Is Islam really the most civilized religion, is that why he could only have interesting conversations & positive exchanges with Muslims?

Where is your intellectual curiosity? Your empathy? How could you read through this whole story if the only thing you care about at the end is being defensive trying to prove it couldn't happen to you? Why do you subscribe to Salon? What would your life be like if you lost two months of it?

I ran to your blog to see what you said about this article, and I'm quite disappointed. What about the fact that the scientists think it might work on males but haven't tried yet? What is up with that? there are plenty of middle-aged fat sexually inactive males out there.

I've never heard of the five second rule. I had an instantaneous non-diffuse model going for the last 42 years.

Thanks for writing another dirt (dust-bowl) article yesterday, incidentally.

Er... berry picking with your family & with no time-limit once a year (followed by a picnic) is fun, and you get cheap berries and no one gets exploited.

I've been told that at least as late as 1990 the kids in Scotland got a week of school for "potato days", which if they were in a rural community they spent digging up seed potatos by hand (since the blight that caused the Irish Potato Famine doesn't grow that far north, they provide seed potatos for the whole area. But seed potatos won't last through the winter if you pick them mechanically as they tend to get scratched.) As I was told it "you got enough money to buy a stereo, which was cool, but then you had to lie on your bed & listen to it for three months while your back recovered." Having schoolchildren do this for one week is certainly an interesting approach.

I can't find any documentation of this on the web though.

Apparently the kids are out of work:

Micropropagation - a scaled-down version of growing new plants from cuttings. In the laboratory over 1 million exact copies of the plant can be generated in one year! SCRI uses micropropagation to speed up breeding programmes. In the potato industry in Scotland, 65% of seed potatoes now originate from test tubes. http://www-saps.plantsci.cam.ac.uk/osmos/os25.htm

third time lucky:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/history/scotlandonfilm/forum/rural/thread27.shtml

Why is Riza just a "girlfriend"? Is it because she's Arab? Why isn't she a partner or lover? I think this universally accepted language is really seriously offensive, esp. for a mature, well-qualified woman. I never saw Lewinsky called Clinton's "girlfriend", and she was a lot more young & junior.

It sounds like she was dead right to think she shouldn't have been moved out of the World Bank. Though she also apparently is one of the people who caused the Iraq invasion, so I can't hold *too* much sympathy for her. Still, clearly the real problem is they (justifiably) want to get rid of Wolf. & found a way.

By the way there should be separate entries for these different topics so we could have a coherent discussion.