Modern Plant Breeding
One of the major paradigm shifts of "modern plant breeding" was to view the venture from an economic standpoint.
Breeding has two components. One is the selection of parents and the other is the culling of sub-standard offspring.
Most people inevitably focus on the selection of parents and pay little attention to the economics of culling.
The economics of culling? What is that?
Suppose you collected 100,000 apple seeds and planted them. Furthermore, suppose that fifty percent of them survived long enough to bear fruit. At 5' by 10' spacing that would consume 60 acres of orchard land and take six years for most of the seedlings to come into bearing. You would also be placed in the position of tasting 50,000 samples over two months time and make quality decisions.
Then, after whittling it down to 1000 selections, you would begin the arduous process of culling them for issues like poor disease resistance and being susceptible to winter-kill or late frosts.
So...you might be looking at a team of 10 horticulturists pinned down for fifteen years to sort through the progeny from that original cross.
On the other hand
Suppose there was a relationship between how quickly apple seeds germinate and how late the tree breaks dormancy in the springtime. In that case, the breeders could start with 1,000,000 seeds (ten times the previous example) and whittle it down to 100,000 simply based on when the seeds germinated. That is, every few days after the seeds have been stratified for 60 days, sift through them and remove the ones that are pushing roots. Repeat until you only have 10% of the seeds left.
Then suppose that the young seedlings can be subjected to disease pressure starting at two-weeks of age. The seeds are broadcast thickly in flats and then shoved into the little-house-of-horrors. Any seedling that shows symptoms of disease are ruthlessly culled. Good-bye to 99% or more of the seedlings. Total time elapsed: Four weeks after germinating. So you are already down to less than 1000 seedlings.
Because each tray only has one or two survivors, they are consolidated into trays and grown aggressively for a few months. Any off-types are culled. Day length is shortened, temperature dropped to 30F for four days with a tiny bit of bottom heat to keep the soil from freezing. Then the seedlings (which might be 15" at that time) are uprooted and banded into bundles. The "tops" of the bundles are dipped into an alcohol-water solution kept at -35F and swished around for about twenty seconds. Then the abused seedlings are repotted and put back into the greenhouse.
All seedlings that show "winter-kill" to any portion of the top are summarily culled.
So there may be as many as 100 seedlings or as few as 10 seedlings left from the original 1,000,000 seeds. Buds are removed from each of those seedlings and are grafted into a dwarf apple-tree which are planted on 3' centers. Within two years, there are 100 samples of fruit to evaluate for quality.
The kill-em-as-quick-as-you-can method results in 10 times as many seeds being evaluated using only 1/2600th as much land and 1/3 the amount of time.
Kamala Harris's communication patterns
It occurred to me that much of the dissonance VP Harris generates while speaking might be due to the fact that she didn't have to endure time in the little-house-of-horrors, that is, grinding her way up through the ranks. The rough-and-tumble of the real-world is what knocks off edges and corners and where we hone our ability to communicate effectively.
Alarm-bells go off in our heads, as listeners, when the words, the tone/cadence, the facial expressions and the body-language are not in harmony. Our instinctive reaction is "That person is lying and cannot be trusted".
It seems to me that having a POTUS who radiates those vibes puts the US into a perilous position. Surely Putin, Xi and all of the legitimate world leaders are masters of reading body language. I have grave reservations about her ability to be taken seriously on the world stage.
