The tasteless American tomato

He was aiming for a compromise—a tomato that grew well and tasted good. What he got shocked him. Like its commercial parent, Klee’s new tomato boasted excellent shelf life, disease resistance, and productivity. But by some miracle, it tasted so good that its flavor scores were statistically identical to its heirloom parent. Klee dubbed his miracle fruit the Garden Gem. 
 

The rest of the story, you would think, would go something like this: Supermarkets clamor for exclusive rights to sell the Garden Gem. Growers from Florida to California to New Jersey engage in a historic bidding war for Garden Gem seeds. And consumers at last experience the fantasy of walking into a supermarket and buying tomatoes that cause tears of joy to slide down their cheeks as the juice slides down their chins.
 

Here’s what actually happened: Klee offered the tomato to commercial seed companies. They said no thanks. There has been, according to Klee, “zero interest” in the Garden Gem.
 

The tragic tale of the Garden Gem tomato, which can't find a spot at U.S. grocery stores because, well, we've put up with lousy, bland tomatoes for so long that the industrial food chain feels little pressure to innovate. We get the tomatoes we deserve.

We demanded better coffee, we got it. We demanded better apples, and we no longer have to put up with mealy Red Delicious. So I'm hopeful we'll see the light on our tomatoes.

Having just returned from a month of travel in Italy, I'm spoiled on amazing tomatoes. Italy did not invent the tomato, it came over from the New World, but Italy's soil, rich in volcanic minerals, is the perfect home to grow the most flavorful tomatoes I've ever eaten. The same goes for Italy's potatoes.

So much produce at U.S. grocery stores is so old, has spent so long in transit, that all flavor is gone. It's the danger of refrigeration and preservation technology that is too good. You can find an edible tomato in the Bay Area, it will just cost you $5.

Of course, there may be one place you can find the Garden Gem tomato in the future.

There’s even hope for the Garden Gem. Klee did receive one extremely enthusiastic response from a seed company—in Italy. “They loved it,” he says. “They asked for 10,000 more seeds.” One day soon, it may well be possible to walk into your local supermarket and buy a basket of Garden Gems. You’ll just have to move to Rome.
 

Of course. This is a sign I need to move to Italy. Garden Gem tomato inventor, call me.

Amateur drone operators as the new ambulance chasers

In at least five fires over the last month, including one over the weekend, fire aircraft dispatched to drop chemicals or water had to pull back after crews on the ground spotted drones, fearing a collision. On Friday, officials said, five drones hovering in the area delayed firefighters from dropping water buckets from helicopters onto a fast-moving wildfire that crossed a freeway between Los Angeles and Las Vegas.
 

Two California lawmakers are pushing legislation that would increase fines and allow for criminal prosecutions of people caught using a drone during a fire, and federal officials are considering new rules that would require all drones to be marked with registration numbers, which could help the authorities track down their owners.
 

This seemed inevitable, but more and more seems to happen as soon as you think of it these days. When they make a sequel to Nightcrawler, Jake Gyllenhaal will have transitioned to a fleet of drones for his tabloid footage empire.

Airports have drone no-fly zones that the drone software is programmed to respect. I imagine they will quickly begin selling tech to throw up similar digital no-fly zones around fires and other accidents in the future. To deal with those who hack their way around these digital fences, some sort of anti-drone tech seems inevitable. Fly a hacked DJI Phantom over a fire in the future and prepare for a weaponized drone to knock it out of the sky.

Small talk

Small talk falls on the other end of the continuum; it is speech that prioritizes social function. Think of this exchange: "How's it going?" "Oh, pretty good." There's not zerosemantic content in there — presumably "pretty good" excludes "dying at this exact moment," so that's some information. But the primary function of those speech acts is social, not to say something but to do something, i.e., make contact, reaffirm shared membership in a common tribe (whatever it may be), express positive feelings (and thus lack of threat), show concern, and so forth. These are not unimportant things, not "small" at all, really, but they are different from communicating semantic content.
 

Small talk — particularly in its purest form, phatic communion — is a context in which language has an almost ritualistic quality. The communication of ideas or information is secondary, almost incidental; the speech is mainly meant to serve the purpose of social bonding. It asks and answers familiar questions, dwells of topics of reliable comity, and stresses fellow feeling rather than sources of disagreement.
 

This helps explain the ubiquity of sports in small talk, especially male small talk. Sporting events are a simulation of conflict with no serious consequences, yet they generate enormous amounts of specific information. They are a content generator for small talk, easing the work of communion.
 

David Roberts on why he finds small talk so excruciating.

There is friction anytime there is a mismatch between how two people use a communications medium (in this case, face-to-face conversation). It's strange to me when people use Twitter to post photos of their family, but that's largely because I use Facebook or Instagram for that.

My issue with small talk is its information scarcity. Brian Christian's brilliant book The Most Human Human helped me realize the critical role of conversational entropy in the human experience. Small talk rates very low on entropy, so not surprisingly, it's the type of conversation A.I. can most easily imitate.

Still, in the ebb and flow of a conversation, chasing after too much entropy or novelty, pursuing an unbroken line of odd or probing questions and thoughts, can be its own faux pas. Your conversation partner may feel they're being assaulted. Managing that delicate balance, knowing when to push, when to pull back, that is the art of social grace and charisma.

Prosopagnosia

Prosopagnosia is an impairment of one's ability to recognize faces. This interview with one person with face-blindness is fascinating top to bottom.

What problems does it cause?
The issue is how I remember faces. It doesn’t matter if I know the person: I’ve walked right past my husband, my own mother, my daughter, my son, without being able to recognize them.
 

It can be very embarrassing, and it can offend people. I once had to drop a sociology class, because I told the professor, to her face, that she was a horrible lecturer. I thought I was complaining to a fellow student! It’s as if I have a missing chip — you feel like you’re just not trying hard enough. Faces are so important to humans that we have a special part of our brain dedicated to recognizing them. Most people remember them as a whole piece, but I don’t.
 

...
 

To tell people apart I have to find a distinguishing feature. And context is huge. If I’m expecting to see somebody, I’ll figure out who they are by observing their body language, listening to their voice. Good-looking people are the most difficult to recognize.
 

Is that because their faces are symmetrical?
Yes! Straight teeth, noses within regular limits … everything is so … normal! It’s like a flock of chickens. So what I do is look for specific features. I have one friend who’s average height, middle aged, and white, and she works in an office full of average middle-aged white ladies. And even worse, it’s a doctor’s office, so they are all wearing scrubs. If I meet her at work, I can only recognize her if she smiles — it’s very specific. But these are the things I look for: Some people have a distinctive nose; some people have two different-colored eyes.
 

I had no idea Chuck Close suffered from prosopagnosia, and now I see so much of his work in a new light.

This is one area where some technology like Google Glasses could really help.

I have problems watching a lot of films and TV shows because everyone looks so perfect I can’t follow the plot. I have a face-blind friend who used to work at the Beverly Hills Whole Foods. His employers loved him because he never recognized the famous customers.
 

...
 

Can you recognize yourself?
Not always. I’ve had to say to friends of mine, “Is that a picture of me? Who is that?” If I unexpectedly see myself in a mirror, I might think it's somebody else. It's like, Why is that woman staring at me? Those times, I’ve been struck by how serious I look.
 

One of the many interesting ideas to come from this piece is that prosopagnosia can also be seen as a positive, as immunity against our obsession with symmetry as an indicator of attractiveness, or to unconscious racism.

What attracts you to people?
I have a thing for voices and intelligence. While I can appreciate that someone is attractive on an aesthetic level, I don't feel it on that visceral, "Whoa! They're hot!" way. At least not when I first meet them. I really only become sexually interested when I have talked to someone long enough to know them. I would be hard work to date. I met my husband at the university science fiction club. He has an incredible voice — he’s a public speaker, his grandfather was a radio announcer, and his father works in television. And he’s the smartest person I know — he used to teach English literature.

Payroll matters in MLB

FiveThirtyEight notes that despite some small budget successes in MLB like the Houston Astros or Kansas City Royals, money correlates as strongly to winning as ever.

J.C. Bradbury, an economics professor at Kennesaw State University, found that winning more increases revenue exponentially. “Going from 85 wins to 90 is worth more than 80 wins to 85,” he says. As a result, while it might cost more per win for a team that wins 90 games than 85, it makes financial sense because the revenue reward will be higher as well. This leads to a self-perpetuating cycle. Additionally, fans of teams that win frequently expect them to continue winning, and management pays more to do so. For a team like the New York Yankees, paying 10 percent more than anyone else for a second baseman who is only 5 percent better than his closest peer is worth the money (and they can afford it).
 

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Perhaps one reason for the renewed focus on the success of small-budget teams is the importance of playoff success versus the regular season. Postseasons in American sports offer a smaller sample size than, say, soccer’s English Premier League, where the winner is determined by 38 games. In baseball, the better team (the one with the higher payroll) is less likely to prevail over the course of a short playoff series than they would be over an entire season. That, combined with the expansion of the playoffs, means it’s easier for a small-budget team to reach the World Series, as the Kansas City Royals did in 2014, losing to the San Francisco Giants in Game 7. Winning a playoff series can come down to a few factors — a couple of good pitchers and luck — that are less important during the regular season. “The formula seems to be: limp through regular season, get into playoffs, then win,” said Rodney Fort, professor of sport management in the School of Kinesiology at the University of Michigan.
 

That's the compromise at the design of MLB. It's harder for a small-budget team to make the playoffs, but once they're there, the odds of them winning it all are better than they are in, say, the NBA. Much of the design of sports is arbitrary, you can have set things up to increase or decrease the role of randomness for your own narrative goals. If you're uncomfortable with the idea that you can just buy wins, you're not going to root for teams like the Dodgers, Yankees, or Red Sox.

I'm not a huge soccer fan, but it seems there are no salary caps for UEFA teams in Europe. Do fans there feel similar reservations about the effective monopoly on success for those with deep pockets?

I'm of mixed emotions on the topic. On the one hand, a salary cap that puts all teams on on equal footing seems equitable. On the other hand, its larger effect is to suppress player salaries, shifting those dollars into owners' pockets. Oddly, most sports fans I know seem more sympathetic to owners than players, not what you'd expect from people who are themselves laborers. That is, if their team gets a bargain on a star player, they're happy.

I generally side with players, even if their salaries are already high, because I like seeing people achieve fair market value for their contributions. I wonder if the prevalence of fantasy sports has made more fans more sympathetic to ownership than players since such games generally put fans in the position of being a general manager.