The economics of trees

On Nov 19, 6:30*pm, Dan O wrote:
On Nov 19, 7:21 am, Peter Cole wrote:



Andre Jute wrote:
There is no difficulty reconciling the two small walled plots,
referred to in my post that set this thread going, and the sizes of
conacres (tenant acreage). One of Bourke's tables clearly tells us
that around 60 per cent (the argument is so overwhelming, I'm not even
bothering with precise mental arithmetic) of all farm holdings were
from "less than 1 acre to 10 acres". Within that 60 per cent it is in
the nature of statistics, and in human nature, that the median size
would be pretty near the low edge. That is why people starved: on
insufficient landholdings, with monoculture, living on the edge
already -- the potatoes only fed them for ten and a half months every
year and the other six weeks was called the "starvation season" -- the
smallest disturbance in the monocrop would kill them.

I still think your idea of the plots you described being for total
subsistence is impossible. Simple arithmetic demonstrates that a plot
that size (~1/8 acre) wouldn't support a single adult, even if sown with
potatoes, despite that crop having the greatest nutritional yield per area.

Oh, but "Nobody presents as dramatic, as overwhelming an example as
Andre
does every time. In less than a minute, between jokes, he gave us
centuries of Irish history, cause and effect, the pitiful dead, the
lingering resentment, even deforestation and global warming."

No one has time for a petulant teenager, so grow up, Danno. -- Andre
Jute

On 2008-11-19, wrote:
On Wed, 19 Nov 2008 08:07:39 -0700, slide
wrote:

wrote:

[snip]

If you are game, I'd be interested in how many kg of potatoes you'd eat.
I can honestly see eating 2 kg of potatoes three times a day given that
regimen.

-paul

Dear Paul,

I'm not trying to support the claim.

Think about that.

Peter Cole just volunteered that he doubts that I'd be convinced if
someone ate a hundred-pound sack of potatoes in eight days.

Do you think that he'd change his mind if I tried but failed to eat
twelve pounds of potatoes in a day?

Let us know how you do trying to eat 2 kg potatoes three times a day,
not whether you can believe it. The claim seems to be that most men in
Ireland did this routinely.

It's odd that so many posters are willing to "see" something, but not
willing to test it themselves.

Usually when you say that it's followed up a couple of days later with
detailed photographs of brinelled bearings or bent spokes or whatever we
were discussing.

That is all good but please don't go and eat a hundred pound sack of
potatoes in eight days!

Potatoes are fairly cheap. and there's a handy scale at the grocery
store.

You're scaring me.

So far, no one has even reported choking down a single 4-pound meal of
potatoes, much less twelve pounds in a day.

The closest we've come is Ben's mention of an eating-contest
preliminary, where people willing to do lots of things rarely
mentioned managed only three pounds.

To be fair, the contestants that Ben cited were gobbling to beat a
12-minute time limit.

Yes, although if you look down the records linked from that page
(http://www.ifoce.com/news.php?action=detail&sn=246), Takeru Kobayashi
also ate 20 pounds of rice balls in 30 minutes and 17.7 pounds of cow
brains in 15.

Potatoes are just difficult to eat fast. The stomach capacity of these
people is at least 20 pounds and about that many litres. It's just a
question of how quickly you can get it down.

But eating-contests involve a great deal of unpleasantness behind the
scenes. Some eaters gobble naturally, but many use artificial tactics
involving fasting, enemas, lubricants, laxatives, anti-gas liquids,
and anti-nausea drugs.

And they're exceptional athletes. I could no more eat brains at that
rate than I could ride a 55km time trial in one hour. But it does give
you an upper bound for what the human body is capable of.

The Wikipedia article on competitive eating says vomiting is rare among
"gurgitators". They just undereat when not competing to avoid weight
gain [citation needed].

Andre Jute wrote:


Your objection to those plots is of the same class: It's impossible on
common sense, therefore it didn't happen. The Famine happened because
common sense and the wisdom of the ages -- and human goodwill --
failed first.


Well, is is possible that this was the limit of a household's farm but
the household got food from other sources? If 5,000 feet was the size of
a farm, that left the family with a lot of spare labor as a 5,000 foot
farm, even manually worked, isn't going to absorb the entire time of
even a single individual.

Perhaps the head of house had an outside job and got paid little in cash
but much in potatoes or other foodstuffs.

-paul

On Nov 20, 1:01*am, slide wrote:
Andre Jute wrote:

Your objection to those plots is of the same class: It's impossible on
common sense, therefore it didn't happen. The Famine happened because
common sense and the wisdom of the ages -- and human goodwill --
failed first.

Well, is is possible that this was the limit of a household's farm but
the household got food from other sources? If 5,000 feet was the size of
a farm, that left the family with a lot of spare labor as a 5,000 foot
farm, even manually worked, isn't going to absorb the entire time of
even a single individual.

Perhaps the head of house had an outside job and got paid little in cash
but much in potatoes or other foodstuffs.

-paul

The possibilities are endless, as I explained. I don't have time for
the necessary, and very likely fruitless, research to pin this down
(1). But I do remember that Hubert Butler, a very clever Anglo-Irish
essayist (he predicted the fate of the erswhile Yugoslav member states
with uncanny precision before Yugolsvia was even formed, merely from a
study of Christian and Muslim enmities in the area in the 1920s when
he passed through there), once said that there was more of a cash
economy among the peasants at the time of the famine than is generally
admitted. Bourke makes reference to a cash economy too.

Andre Jute
Not slack, busy choosing a new bike

(1) Relevant materials in the nearest likely library are organized not
according to the Dewey Decimal System but according to the O'Rahilly
Classification, devised by an otherwise distinguished scholar who
deserves to have a stake driven through his heart for this alone.

Ben C wrote:
On 2008-11-19, wrote:
On Wed, 19 Nov 2008 08:07:39 -0700, slide
wrote:

wrote:
[snip]

If you are game, I'd be interested in how many kg of potatoes you'd eat.
I can honestly see eating 2 kg of potatoes three times a day given that
regimen.

-paul
Dear Paul,

I'm not trying to support the claim.

Think about that.

Peter Cole just volunteered that he doubts that I'd be convinced if
someone ate a hundred-pound sack of potatoes in eight days.

Do you think that he'd change his mind if I tried but failed to eat
twelve pounds of potatoes in a day?

Let us know how you do trying to eat 2 kg potatoes three times a day,
not whether you can believe it. The claim seems to be that most men in
Ireland did this routinely.

It's odd that so many posters are willing to "see" something, but not
willing to test it themselves.

Usually when you say that it's followed up a couple of days later with
detailed photographs of brinelled bearings or bent spokes or whatever we
were discussing.

That is all good but please don't go and eat a hundred pound sack of
potatoes in eight days!

Potatoes are fairly cheap. and there's a handy scale at the grocery
store.

You're scaring me.

So far, no one has even reported choking down a single 4-pound meal of
potatoes, much less twelve pounds in a day.

The closest we've come is Ben's mention of an eating-contest
preliminary, where people willing to do lots of things rarely
mentioned managed only three pounds.

To be fair, the contestants that Ben cited were gobbling to beat a
12-minute time limit.

Yes, although if you look down the records linked from that page
(http://www.ifoce.com/news.php?action=detail&sn=246), Takeru Kobayashi
also ate 20 pounds of rice balls in 30 minutes and 17.7 pounds of cow
brains in 15.

Potatoes are just difficult to eat fast. The stomach capacity of these
people is at least 20 pounds and about that many litres. It's just a
question of how quickly you can get it down.

But eating-contests involve a great deal of unpleasantness behind the
scenes. Some eaters gobble naturally, but many use artificial tactics
involving fasting, enemas, lubricants, laxatives, anti-gas liquids,
and anti-nausea drugs.

And they're exceptional athletes. I could no more eat brains at that
rate than I could ride a 55km time trial in one hour. But it does give
you an upper bound for what the human body is capable of.

The Wikipedia article on competitive eating says vomiting is rare among
"gurgitators". They just undereat when not competing to avoid weight
gain [citation needed].

I think that about covers it. I would point out that a lot of the eating
contests involve things a lot less digestible than boiled potatoes.
Another factor is the issue of adaptation. I doubt that many of us could
tolerate such a bulky diet without giving a fair amount of time to adapt
to it. Potatoes are 80% water, so the actual amount of nutritive food
processed is proportionally modest. Absent the water, they have roughly
the same nutritive mass as cereals. When grains are made into porridges
or gruels, they approach the nutritional density of potatoes. Non-potato
eating people have a long history of subsisting on mostly porridges &
gruels (rice, maize, etc.).

Dan Overman wrote:
[...]
Oh, but "Nobody presents as dramatic, as overwhelming an example as
Andre
does every time. In less than a minute, between jokes, he gave us
centuries of Irish history, cause and effect, the pitiful dead, the
lingering resentment, even deforestation and global warming."

All hail THE ANDRÉ JUTE!!!

--
Tom Sherman - 42.435731,-83.985007
If you are not a part of the solution, you are a part of the precipitate.

The André Jute wrote:
On Nov 19, 6:30 pm, Dan O wrote:
On Nov 19, 7:21 am, Peter Cole wrote:



Andre Jute wrote:
There is no difficulty reconciling the two small walled plots,
referred to in my post that set this thread going, and the sizes of
conacres (tenant acreage). One of Bourke's tables clearly tells us
that around 60 per cent (the argument is so overwhelming, I'm not even
bothering with precise mental arithmetic) of all farm holdings were
from "less than 1 acre to 10 acres". Within that 60 per cent it is in
the nature of statistics, and in human nature, that the median size
would be pretty near the low edge. That is why people starved: on
insufficient landholdings, with monoculture, living on the edge
already -- the potatoes only fed them for ten and a half months every
year and the other six weeks was called the "starvation season" -- the
smallest disturbance in the monocrop would kill them.
I still think your idea of the plots you described being for total
subsistence is impossible. Simple arithmetic demonstrates that a plot
that size (~1/8 acre) wouldn't support a single adult, even if sown with
potatoes, despite that crop having the greatest nutritional yield per area.
Oh, but "Nobody presents as dramatic, as overwhelming an example as
Andre
does every time. In less than a minute, between jokes, he gave us
centuries of Irish history, cause and effect, the pitiful dead, the
lingering resentment, even deforestation and global warming."

No one has time for a petulant teenager, so grow up, Danno. -- Andre
Jute

Petulance is preferable to making ridiculous false claims about what
other people post.

--
Tom Sherman - 42.435731,-83.985007
If you are not a part of the solution, you are a part of the precipitate.

Andre Jute wrote:

Andre Jute
Not slack, busy choosing a new bike

COMPLETELY OFF-TOPIC IN THIS NEWSGROUP!!!

(Whaddya gettin'?)

BS (bike stuff)

On Nov 19, 7:07 am, slide wrote:
wrote:



... I... doubt that you'll find any modern doctors who credit claims
of ordinary people routinely eating the 7 pounds of food at a sitting
... (or the slightly lower figure of 4 pounds per meal,
three times per day).


snip


I'd say we could settle this if one of us volunteered to eat ONLY
potatoes for a while. No butter or sour cream or other dressings. Just
the dry potato maybe with a bit of 'new' or butter milk added. Just
potatoes and either doing field work or maybe riding 50 - 75 miles per day.

If you are game, I'd be interested in how many kg of potatoes you'd eat.
I can honestly see eating 2 kg of potatoes three times a day given that
regimen.


Hmmmmm... I *love* whole Russet potatoes (never seem to get enough
whenever I cook them), and I ride 50 miles a day (and always find
myself eating everything I can get my hands on)... Hmmm...