Conventional vs. Organic

For the week of July 21, 2014, here’s a four-city comparison of conventional and certified organic carrot prices (premium quality, 24×2#) from Rodale:

  Organic Conventional
Boston $ 41.50  $ 20.00
Los Angeles $ 40.75 $ 15.50
Philadelphia $ 41.50 $ 18.00
San Francisco $ 35.00 $ 18.50

The biggest gap is in Los Angeles, which has the lowest conventional carrot prices.  The smallest gap is in San Francisco, which has the lowest organic carrot prices.  Why, I wonder, are conventional carrots $2/unit more in Boston than Philadelphia?

Brothers?

2012_TerracottaWarriors_181 iStock_221_Gallery_n0sy5 LL_C0043075

Chinese: http://archive.artsmia.org/terracotta-warriors/

Gandharan: http://www.ajspeelman.co.uk/gallery.php?sid=221

Khotanese: http://www.tnm.jp/uploads/r_collection/LL_C0043075.jpg

 

Khotanese Maitreya head

There’s a beautiful Khotanese Buddha (or bodhisattva) piece at the Tokyo Museum, presumably from one of the Otani expeditions, dated to the 3rd-4th century. If that dating is accurate, it would be very old, especially for a metal work. I don’t recognize it as similar to anything I know about from Khotan.

Head_of_Buddha

 

The cord around the topknot is distinctive: it looks like Gandharan bodhisattva hairdos to me, perhaps representing Maitreya. The urna with the eight (presumably) jewels is likewise distinctive. More than anything, to me it looks like someone’s portrait, with the prominent nose and the jutting chin.

5102 BC: Carpentry and sorcery, also something about loess

From this article, news of a fascinating archaeological find near Leipzig, Germany from the Linear Band Ware (aka LBK) period of the Early Neolithic.  The find can be dated exactly because the site includes — besides nearly 100 LBK longhouses and two dozen graves — four wells lined with oak wood with known tree ring series. The wood comes from thirteen individual oak trees, with 1m DBH, felled in 5102 BC.

The excavation report itself (and details, .pdf) are worth reading.  Besides the spectacular wooden wells (the excavation of which is really exemplary), the sites yielded the usual LBK pottery and cultivated crops.  These include emmer and einkorn wheat, lentils, and peas; but also plenty of poisonous black henbane, a nasty plant which was either used in small quantities as a psychoactive agent (Germans were putting witches to death up until the middle ages for using henbane in gruit for flavoring beer) or as a medicine.

German Archaeologists Discover World’s Oldest Wooden Wells

This map is a little bit confusing, but worth the effort.  The four time bands are an attempt to date the spread of the LBK toolkit.  The coloring is an attempt to illustrate one of the prevalent theories about the spread of the LBK — their association with a particular landscape, fertile loess, a type of rich, dust-like soil composed of wind-blown sand and silt.  The sites referred to in the article are numbers 5,6,8, and 9 on the map.  The general aim, then, is to show the spread from east to west on a particular soil type, of this LBK material culture.