Thursday July 9, 2026
Hunting For Apples
I just read the travelogue Apples Are From Kazakhstan: The Land That Disappeared by British journalist Christopher Robbins. The title statement about apples is true, but there is a tragedy around its discovery which has ripples that unfortunately are of great concern today.
The origin of apples was tracked in the 1920s to the Tien Shan mountains which run through northeastern Kazakhstan by a brilliant Russian botanist, geneticist, and geographer named Nikolai Vavilov. Vavilov was highly lauded by the Soviet state for his research on agronomy and the geographical origins of many crops, becoming the youngest member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union.
Vavilov ran afoul of his onetime protegé, the scheming and ambitious agronomist Trofim Lysenko. Lysenko adapted his research so as to align with the Soviet policy of forced agricultural collectivization. To support his claims of making agronomic innovations that radically increased crop yields, he rejected both natural selection and genetics in favor of a modified sort of Lamarkianism. Lysenko became a favorite of Josef Stalin, and genetics research in the Soviet Union was destroyed. Over 3,000 biologists were dismissed from employment, and some were imprisoned and executed. Vavilov was arrested in 1940 and died in prison in 1943. Rather than improving crop yields, Lysenko’s ideas did the opposite, and when implemented in China they would contribute to the famine there between 1959 and 1961.
Lysenkoism is much on my mind because of changes to federal funding administration that are being proposed by the US Office of Management and Budget. These changes are quite lengthy; former National of Institutes of Health program officer Elizabeth Ginexi provides a good summary of them. Her article is subtitled “Russell Vought [the director of OMB] is going to destroy American Science”. Probably the most significant change is that senior political appointees would be mandated to conduct a review of every grant before it is issued. Moreover, these appointees would be under no obligation to defer to the recommendations from peer review.
This proposal is open for public comment through July 13, and there has been a massive campaign to elicit comments opposing the new rules. I am presently working on my own comment. As of this writing 98,973 comments have been received. OMB may well ignore all the comments but such an outpouring provides a strong basis for legal action against any finalized rules.
Searching through the already-submitted comments, Lysenko has been mentioned in several hundred of them. Amusingly, someone has in jest submitted a comment as Trofim Lysenko. It concludes with the following:
I therefore urge OMB to finalize the rule and give America what every great centrally managed scientific system requires: political officers empowered to decide which science may live, which science must wait, and which science must be uprooted before it bears unauthorized fruit.
With ideological warmth and agronomic confidence,
Trofim Lysenko
Dictator Emeritus of Politically Convenient Biology
Former Specialist in the Suppression of Bourgeois Genetics
Wednesday July 8, 2026
Freaking the Cats Out
For reasons that I won’t go into too much here, we feed the cats little and often. Partly to avoid Winston hogging all of Esme’s food, partly to avoid them gorging themselves (and then vomiting): they were picked up as kittens behind a Walmart, scavenging around some pallets. Such a traumatic early start doesn’t naturally lead to moderation in eating.
We recently bought an automatic feeder that will dispense kibble either manually or programmed. Numenius has an app to control it. At the moment they are wary and suspicious of the noise the opening slots make, but we hope this will eventually take away some of the early morning/late night feeding duties.
Tuesday July 7, 2026
Zettlring After Nine Months
Back at the beginning of last October I reported on on how I was experimenting with a notetaking method called Zettelkasten, and had just starting using a software package called Zettlr to do so. I am happy with how this project has gone, and am using the system to store short thoughts, extended notes, and drafts of pieces of writing. As of now I have about 132 entries in my Zettlr workspace. This count may not live up to my hopes from then of one entry a day, but it is continuing to grow in diverse directions.
Each entry in Zettlr is a single markdown file — markdown is a simple structured text format — and a workspace in Zettlr consists of a nested directory of markdown files. I am not at all worried about when I end up having thousands of files instead of hundreds. The Zettlr software seems to scale well, and in addition directories full of markdown files have become a common way to organize information in our brave new world of AI-augmented knowledge management systems.
Monday July 6, 2026
The Ire of the World
I know it’s been said elsewhere, but as soon as I heard about Trump’s interference in the FIFA suspension of Balogun’s red card, I felt Pochettino should just bench him and kill the controversy. After all, the US men’s team had shown it could win without him; why not do it again?
Instead, this talented striker played today (ineffectively) against a well-organized Belgian team that had taken the bit in its teeth to fight back against the injustice of the world’s biggest bully bending the world’s most corrupt organization to his clueless will. The U.S. team fell apart, feeling the antipathy of millions around the globe, which isn’t really fair — I mean it’s not something they asked for, after all — but it felt like setting the football world to rights.
If Belgium plays like this against Spain as it played this morning, I fear for La Roja, but there are many hours between now and Friday. Reset the counter.
Sunday July 5, 2026
Sketching the Criterium
As previously noted there is a bicycle criterium downtown every year here on the Fourth of July. This year I ventured downtown intending to do an urban sketch of some aspect of the criterium and ended up drawing one of the corner marshals.
Saturday July 4, 2026
Here We Go
So not only are we now close to the round of 16 in the World Cup, the Tour de France started today with a team time trial in and around Barcelona. They’ve changed the rules a bit, so now it’s not the fourth cyclist to cross the finish line but the first in each team to set the time. Jonas Vingegaard is now in yellow; not sure how long he’ll keep it.
England-Mexico tomorrow. I think it will be very tough for England, even if they don’t in their own way as usual, because of the altitude and the home crowd. We’ll see.
Friday July 3, 2026
Modelling the World Cup
I watched a YouTube video a couple days ago about developing a probabilistic model on who would win the World Cup. This video was from before the World Cup started, and the modelers have been updating their predictions as the tournament progresses. Right now, as we are about to start the Group of 16 matches, the model gives Spain a 23.6% chance of winning the tournament, and Argentina a 22.9% of winning it all.
One of the principles the modelers point out is that there is no canonical way to build these models. Different models will have different percent likelihoods right now, though I doubt anyone is giving Canada a higher chance to win the tournament right now than Spain. The World Cup is especially difficult to model, because matches between different national teams are few and far between, especially when they are in different football confederations. Take an example from Group L in our 2026 edition of the World Cup, the teams Ghana and Panama. These two teams had never played each other before. Moreover, there are few matches between the confederation Panama is in (CONCACAF) and the confederation Ghana is in (CAF); the network of matches connecting teams Panama with teams Ghana has played is pretty sparse. What is the probability Ghana wins the group match between the two teams, Panama wins the match, or there is a draw? (Ghana ended up winning the match with Panama 1-0 by scoring in the 95th minute.)
The world of football data analytics is vast but patchy at the same time. It is a global game, and consistency in global data does not exist. It is all a bit intimidating.
Thursday July 2, 2026
Where to Watch
One of the cool (and difficult) things about the World Cup this year is that it’s basically taking place in our time zone, even during my normal waking hours. This means I’ve seen a lot of matches and, let’s be honest, it’s too much. Many of them are at home on Telemundo, which is showing all matches in Spanish through Peacock and which has eschewed advertising during the commercial breaks, also known as Hydration Breaks which get booed loudly at every match and which Fox mutes and then jumps to a commercial.
But sometimes I want to be around people other than Numenius and the cats, and watching Spain win today was no exception. I took myself over to the Upper Crust Bakery where they are showing all the matches live during their opening hours (so no Mondays) and ran into some familiar faces. Retired university professors, people taking early or late lunch breaks, that kind of thing. (FIFA’s level of corruption extends to its contract with Fox, where it is stipulated that Gianni Infantino be shown at every match, where he is absorbed by the match and not looking at his phone or picking his nose, I learned today; one of my Upper Crust compadres compared him to a Bond villain; I retorted that he looks more like an Austin Powers one.) There are at least ten venues in town regularly showing matches as well as the huge space on G Street where you bring your own chair — apparently there were about 600 people yesterday to watch the USA vs. Bosnia-Herzegovina fixture. It’s a world party.
I’ve mentioned my personal rules with regard to who I support. Mexico-England on Sunday is going to be a very tough one for me — I think Mexico will win (ecstatic home crowd plus altitude give it the equivalent of two extra players) and I’d like to support them (they’ve never won it) but if England somehow pulls it out I won’t be distraught. There. I’ve said it.
Wednesday July 1, 2026
Local Color
A while back I picked up a copy of the book Local Color: Seeing Place Through Watercolor, by Point Reyes artist Mimi Robinson. The book describes a practice for developing observational skills in landscape art. Robinson’s idea is to paint in watercolor a swatch chart of the key colors seen at a locality. These color palettes can be simply be a visual record of place, or serve as a starting point for a subsequent painting.
Or perhaps they can be used in photography? One of the things I have become sensitive to after years of practice in mixing watercolors is how inaccurate photographs can be in illustrating the colors of the lightfield at a scene. Sometimes this is a result of colors being out of gamut, but more often this is because the photograph’s color rendering is emphasizing the wrong combination of hues with respect to what catches one’s eye. A usual workflow in art is to take a photograph of a scene to use as a reference for a painting. I’m imagining the opposite workflow — paint a local color palette while at the scene, and then use that palette as a guide to color grading the photograph in editing.
A common practice in editing a photograph is to adjust the colors of the image until it is aesthetically pleasing. But if this is done at some remove from when the photograph was taken, it is easy to forget what the scene felt like visually. The paradox is that the photograph itself does not supply enough information to interpret the color relationships during the editing.
At left is a page from my nature journal from yesterday, where I am starting to explore this concept. At this time of year in our neighborhood, the dominant colors are the intense cobalt blue of the sky, and the yellow greens of the urban forest canopy, primarily sycamores.
Tuesday June 30, 2026
Football Affiliations
It’s complicated. Here are my rules when I’m watching the World Cup (and I watch most of the matches, knitting furiously), in order of importance. (There will be rules conflicts of interest, which get resolved before each match, usually; I don’t normally switch sides halfway through if one side is clearly beating the one I’ve rooted for. Case in point: I wanted Japan to beat Brazil yesterday. They were having an off day, which is fatal in the knockout rounds. But I never stopped hoping they’d somehow draw level and go on to beat the five-time world champions.)
1. Support Spain. Always, no matter what.
2. Support the underdog, unless Spain is playing.
3. Support whoever is playing against the Netherlands. Even when Holland is the underdog.
4. No matter what happens, England will steal defeat from the jaws of victory. It’s the rules. It should make them the perennial underdog, but that’s not how they (or their fans) see it; they feel the cup is theirs by birthright. By this logic, rule #2 doesn’t apply to England.
5. Germany, no matter how badly they are playing, will almost always snag a win at the end. It’s the rules. Which makes any other team the underdog.
6. Support any African team, unless Spain is playing.
7. Support any team that has never won the World Cup, unless it’s the Netherlands.
8. If it’s a France-Brazil final, support Brazil. Sticks in my craw but there we are. This year, they are the underdogs.