The Problem With Grain Agriculture While I was still living in Denver, I started to act on my dream of becoming a farmer. My aunt lived nearby and had a large corner lot. I convinced her to let me put in a garden along with raising a few backyard chickens. There was a simple joy in planting a seed, adding water, and seeing it grow. Of course, there were all types of problems with the garden. I learned first-hand how...

This story begins the same way all great stories begin: on Twitter (ha…). Last fall, as my ten-year high school reunion fast was approaching I reached out to one of my classmates on Twitter, which led to a few intriguing phone calls. Long story short, our conversation eventually led us to trade book recommendations. He recommended a few books by Nassim Taleb: a well-known mathematician, author, and "uncertainty" guru. Taleb has a s...

New Jersey's small, networked dairy farms are a model for a more resilient food system Cow’s milk is a major part of many Americans’ diets because it contains key vitamins and calcium. But milk consumption has suffered during the COVID-19 pandemic, along with other foods, including beef, eggs, fruit and vegetables. Economic shutdowns have severely disrupted supply chains that move food from farm to fork. Milk provides a compel...

It’s a common nightmare for programmers to come in late to a project or organization and then have to make sense of a complex "spaghetti mess" of code created over the previous 10 years — a technical debt that takes huge resources in time and money to clean up. Ten years of technical debt is an all-too common headache: Decades of debt were at the root of the Y2K COBOL nightmare. MySpace struggled famously for years with a crippling t...

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a Greek Orthodox Christian from Lebanon; the Levant. In the course of his book Antifragile, he promotes skepticism, theism, tradition, the writings of the stoics and seeks to restrict the claims of theory and "naïve rationalism." Elsewhere I have said that often theory seems to make us stupider than we would be without the theory. This is particularly true when theory says something is not possible. A key phr...

Hormesis is the ability of organisms to become stronger when exposed to low-dose stress. Is hormesis a basic principle of biology — or is it merely a strange but unimportant quirk of nature that only applies in exceptional circumstances? Nassim Nicholas Taleb–the options trader turned philosopher–is intrigued by hormesis, and sees it as but one example of a much broader phenomenon: a fundamental principle he calls "antifragility"....