• New hack by me, worldpieces.
• New Shadertoy hacks brought into the fold: bestill, bubblecolors, darktransit, downfall, driftclouds, goldenapollian, noxfire, prococean, rigrekt, trainmandala, trizm and universeball.

Shadertoys are so wild; you'll see like 30 lines of code, and when it runs it build an entire environment without there being a polygon or a model apparent anywhere. What witchcraft is this?? Well, here's a really good article that explains the techniques used: Painting With Math: A Gentle Study of Raymarching.

I fixed a bunch of Android bullshit, too (some of which meant needing to reimplement glRotatef etc. from first principles). Android's implementation of GLES is a buggy mess. Also I think Android has again lost the ability to ask for permission to load photos. I can't figure it out, so someone who gives a shit will have to send me a patch. I also still can't figure out why transparency doesn't work on Android. This makes Peepers be particularly horrifying.

Map Scroller: I updated the list of available maps, and made it show the name of the nearest city. One of the new map sets that works is the Google Satellite Map, and if you have two monitors, I highly recommend running that map in "Fully random location" mode. It has a habit of picking two places many thousands of miles apart that look surprisingly similar, like Greenland and Syria.

This one took so much time! Most of my screensavers are pretty quick; generally they'll percolate in my head for a while, then I do the first 90% in half a day, and then the second 90% in another half day to two days. But this one was composed entirely of ratholes.

1. Oh, first I have to find some sane way to get the country outlines. That means learning about GeoJSON and getting the proper data set from Natural Earth Data. Then that data has to be massaged and merged, and while there's probably some command-line way to do that, using mapshaper.org was easier.

2. Now I've got a bunch of polylines with weird "hole" rules (not winding-rule!) and I need to triangulate them. Next rathole: learning how to use triangle.c correctly.

3. Then I notice that while the GeoJSON has population data for countries, it does not for states and provinces. Ok, that should be easy to grab from Wikipedia, right? Next rathole: learning about SparQL, the Wikidata query language. It is one of the nastiest and most baffling query languages I've seen. Good job on that.

4. Then I realize that while the GeoJSON contains the names of the countries translated into various languages, it doesn't tell you which ones are the official languages! Next rathole! Ok, surely we can get that from Wikidata too... Nope. While the Wikipedia pages contain the endonyms in the local character set, the Wikidata items only have them transliterated into Latin characters. To fix that, I had to scrape the Wikipedia page and parse the Wiki markup using regexps, dooming us to inhuman toil, etc. etc. Anyway, I got it working so that Japan can be spelled 日本...

5. ...on macOS, iOS and Android. Why doesn't it work on Linux? Oh ho ho ho, another rathole, this one un-solved! So on Linux it notices when all of the characters came out as square boxes and falls back to the transliterated Latin versions. You're welcome.

6. Ok, it's starting to come together. But since I'm zooming in a lot, the Earth imagery is looking a little grainy, since the image I have is 2048x1024. Well let's just go upgrade that. Next rathole! The old images I had were from the public domain 2002 NASA "Blue Marble" images and 2000 "Visible Earth, City Lights" images none of which still exist on NASA's site (all praise archive.org!)

   They seem to have deprecated those data sets in favor of the 2025 "Blue Marble: Next Generation" images and the 2012 "Black Marble" images. But... they're weird. First, both sets of images completely omit the North polar ice. Second, the 2025 daytime oceans are colored completely flat, whereas the 2002 images contained bathymetry details. And third, and worst of all, is no pairing of 2025 day images and 2016 night images where the pair have the same ice extents. This means that when we blend between the day and night images, it looks very weird. It took me days to finally accept that there was nothing that I could do to work around that.

7. So now that those various ratholes are out of the way, it's trigonometry time. The way the countries pop up and face forward toward whereever the camera is a technique called "billboarding" and it's pretty easy. But what's not easy is doing a smooth transition between the object being billboarded, and the object being back in the scene. Especially since it's position in the scene is spinning and wobbling about willy-nilly. (Remember, you can also spin the globe with the mouse, and it has to keep track of that as well!)

8. So the final rathole was finally coming to terms with quaternions. Quaternions and I have had a passing acquaintance for many years, but I finally had to get down and dirty and really understand them to make all of this work.

   Wikipedia describes quaternions as:

   Quaternions form a four-dimensional associative normed division algebra over the real numbers, and therefore a ring, also a division ring and a domain. It is a special case of a Clifford algebra, classified as Cl₀,₂(ℝ)≅Cl⁺₃,₀(ℝ). According to the Frobenius theorem, the algebra ℍ is one of only two finite-dimensional division rings containing a proper subring isomorphic to the real numbers; the other being the complex numbers.

   "I did not understand a math thing, and then I read the Wikipedia article on it, and now I understand the math thing" -- said literally no one ever. As far as I can tell, every math article on Wikipedia is written with the target audience of "person who wrote their grad school thesis on it" and no one else. Wikipedia's math articles are absolutely fucking useless for purposes of, you know, education.

   Anyway, 3Blue1Brown has a good intro video that is not like that!

   By the way, I propose that "Quaternions" should be pronounced like extruded cornmeal toroid "Funyuns".

Previously, previously, previously.]]> https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/2026/03/xscreensaver-6-15/feed/ 91 https://www.jwz.org/blog/2026/03/the-best-privacy-money-can-buy/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2026/03/the-best-privacy-money-can-buy/#comments Thu, 19 Mar 2026 18:09:08 +0000 https://jwz.org/b/yk4s North Oaks, Minnesota is the only city in the United States that is not on Google Maps Street View. YouTube documentarian Chris Parr, who grew up not too far from North Oaks, set out to change that earlier this year. For a brief few days, he literally put North Oaks on the map. And then it was gone again.

"It's known by Minnesotans as a place where executives and CEOs live," Parr told 404 Media. "Famously Walter Mondale is from North Oaks, but also like United Healthcare executives and Target executives."

North Oaks has managed to largely stay unmapped on Street View because of the way the city handles its streets. In almost every city and town in the United States, property owners give an easement to their local government for the roads in front of their homes (or don't have any claim to the roads at all). In North Oaks, homeowners' property extends into the middle of the street, meaning there is literally no "public" property in the city, and the roads are maintained by the North Oaks Homeowners' Association (NOHOA): "the City owns no roads, land, or buildings." [...]

"Technically, if you launch your drone from public property, which anyone can do if you're a registered drone pilot, you can fly it straight up and above private property," Parr said. And so Parr stood at "six or seven different spots" directly outside the boundary of North Oaks and flew his drone around. "I just pulled my car over onto the shoulder and popped my drone up and flew it over," he added. [...]

"According to North Oak's ordinances, you can go like, visit a friend, or if you're a contractor working on a house, you can go into the city, but you have to be an invited guest," Parr said. "I made a Craigslist post asking for somebody to invite me and I got an absolute ton of responses."

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.]]> https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/2026/03/the-best-privacy-money-can-buy/feed/ 12 https://www.jwz.org/blog/2026/03/globes/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2026/03/globes/#comments Tue, 17 Mar 2026 19:14:48 +0000 https://jwz.org/b/yk4k by hand!

The conversion must preserve group names so that I can tell which ones are which.

Bonus level: can you find a similar source map that also has US states? Must be equirectangular.

Previously, previously, previously.]]> https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/2026/02/svg-triangulation/feed/ 27 https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/09/minecraft-model-of-kowloon-walled-city/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/09/minecraft-model-of-kowloon-walled-city/#comments Tue, 02 Sep 2025 08:01:05 +0000 https://jwz.org/b/ykul The detail on this is astounding.

"I didn't even know which agency I was talking to". Whoever it was would communicate with him only through intermediaries at the NSF.[...] All he knew was that they were very security-minded. Also, they seemed to know a great deal about astronomy. [...]

After some back-and-forth, Ivezić said, he and his counterparts came up with a less invasive way to remove secret American assets from the observatory's instant alerts. A government agency -- no one told him which one -- would chip in $5 million for the construction of a dedicated network for moving sensitive data. Each time the telescope were to take one of its 30-second tile images of the sky, the file would be immediately encrypted, without anyone looking at it first, and then sent on to a secure facility in California.

Next, an automated system would compare the image with previous images of the same tile. It would cut out small "postage stamp" pictures of any new objects it finds, be they asteroids, exploding stars, or spy satellites. It would filter out the postage stamps that might depict secret U.S. assets and, one minute later, send all the rest, together with their coordinates, to an alert service available to astronomers worldwide. Three days and eight hours later, the entire tile image would be released to astronomers, untouched by black marker or any other technology of redaction.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, ]]> https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/2024/12/telescope-spooks/feed/ 14 https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/07/null-island/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/07/null-island/#comments Wed, 24 Jul 2024 20:50:37 +0000 https://jwz.org/b/ykW3 Visit Scenic Null Island:

Overall, Biden got 7 million more votes than Trump in 2020 (81,283,501 vs 74,223,975). The most of any President in history. [...]

If we remove just 1 county from each state, Trump would have won.

First up Apache county, Arizona. Total population 66,021 of whom 23,293 voted for Biden and 11,442 voted for Trump for a winning margin of 11,851.

Second, Dougherty county, Georgia. Population 85,790 of whom 24,568 voted for Biden and 10,441 voted for Trump for a winning margin of 14,127.

Finally, Dane county Wisconsin. This is by far the most populous with a population of 561,504 with 260,121 cast for Biden and 78,794 cast for Trump for a margin of victory of 181,327.

In the case of Wisconsin you could actually tally up a few smaller counties (e.g. Rock, La Crosse & Douglas) with a smaller combined population of 328,766 people and who gave a combined winning margin of just 20,977 votes.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.]]> https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/2024/06/fun-with-the-electoral-college/feed/ 23 https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/05/geochron/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/05/geochron/#comments Thu, 30 May 2024 22:59:45 +0000 https://jwz.org/b/ykUR The greatest clock (and map) ever made:

Kazakhstan, which has not observed daylight saving for 20 years, is turning the clocks back at 0:00 on 1 March 2024, to 23:00 on leap day February 29 2024.

Definitely playing time zones on Hard Mode, Kazakhstan. Thanks for doing some QA on stacked edge cases for us all!

chx:

Right but it's not daylight savings, the change is permanent: Kazakhstan will change from using two time zones to observing only one time zone in the entire territory: UTC+5.

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2007:

2010:

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.]]> https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/2023/06/projection/feed/ 6 https://www.jwz.org/blog/2023/04/a-solution-to-the-desantis-problem/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2023/04/a-solution-to-the-desantis-problem/#comments Tue, 04 Apr 2023 19:45:16 +0000 https://jwz.org/b/yj_F Petrofuture Gallery:

Previously, previously, previously, previously.

In this paper we have presented our state-of-the-art model for predicting financial crime. By incorporating public data sources with a random forest classifier, we are able to achieve 90.12% predictive accuracy. We are confident that our model matches or exceeds industry standards for predictive policing tools.

Crucially, our model only provides an estimate of white collar crimes for a particular region. It does not go so far as to identify which individuals within a particular region are likely to commit the financial crime. That is, all entities within high risk zones are treated as uniformly suspicious.

Recently researchers have demonstrated the effectiveness of applying machine learning techniques to facial features to quantify the "criminality" of an individual.

We therefore plan to augment our model with facial analysis and psychometrics to identify potential financial crime at the individual level. As a proof of concept, we have downloaded the pictures of 7000 corporate executives whose LinkedIn profiles suggest they work for financial organizations, and then averaged their faces to produce generalized white collar criminal subjects unique to each high risk zone. Future efforts will allow us to predict white collar criminality through real-time facial analysis.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.]]> https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/2023/02/white-collar-crime-risk-zones/feed/ 16 https://www.jwz.org/blog/2023/02/projection-connections/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2023/02/projection-connections/#comments Sat, 04 Feb 2023 19:15:14 +0000 https://jwz.org/b/yj9h A 16 × 24-inch tangled web showing how 100+ different map projections are all related to each other:

I'm not sure which corner of this image should be labelled "Chaotic Evil".

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.]]> https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/2023/02/the-topologists-world-map/feed/ 18 https://www.jwz.org/blog/2022/08/solving-mazes-with-spring-kinematics/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2022/08/solving-mazes-with-spring-kinematics/#comments Tue, 30 Aug 2022 01:40:16 +0000 https://jwz.org/b/yj4Y jagarikin:

Previously, previously, previously.]]> https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/2022/08/solving-mazes-with-spring-kinematics/feed/ 4 https://www.jwz.org/blog/2022/08/sf-traffic-cops-issue-just-10-citations-a-day/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2022/08/sf-traffic-cops-issue-just-10-citations-a-day/#comments Sat, 06 Aug 2022 19:16:35 +0000 https://jwz.org/b/yj3m What exactly are they doing?

As with so many of its responsibilities, the police force has nearly given up on traffic enforcement, letting speeders, red-light runners and illegal turners run roughshod, endangering pedestrians, bicyclists and other motorists.

A new analysis of every traffic citation issued by San Francisco police over the past 4½ years shows enforcement of the rules of the road has plummeted. Incredibly, the 45 officers working in the department's traffic division have issued a combined 10 citations a day this year.

Yes, in a city with nearly half a million registered vehicles, a ticket is written every 2½ hours, on average. That's a huge drop in just three years: In 2019, the department issued an average of 74 traffic citations per day -- or about one every 20 minutes.

And here's an interactive map of every traffic death, with photos and details.

San Francisco Traffic Fatality Map:

Since San Francisco instituted its Vision Zero program in 2014, 241 people have been killed by car violence on its streets. Despite pouring millions into Vision Zero, San Francisco continues to lose someone to car violence every 13.02 days.

This project is a work in progress to identify the victims of car violence and understand the circumstances surrounding each crash. This information will help us focus our advocacy work and pressure our elected officials to start taking this public health crisis seriously.

If you knew one of these victims, please share what information you can to help us learn about their lives and the circumstances of their crash and if are able to do so, please support this project so we can continue doing this work.

Thread from Stephen Braitsch who did the data mining:

To be clear, the ultimate path to safer streets is not more policing. @LondonBreed must let @SFMTA_Muni redesign our streets to prioritize the safety of people outside of cars. "Transit-First" has been in SF's charter for 50 years & yet cars continue to dominate us everywhere.

However, since prioritizing non-car transport in SF is such a pathetically slow process, we must demand that @SFPD start enforcing our traffic laws in the interim, specifically by "Focusing on the Five" ON the High Injury Network which is currently less than 10% of all citations.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.]]> https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/2022/08/sf-traffic-cops-issue-just-10-citations-a-day/feed/ 5 https://www.jwz.org/blog/2022/03/dst/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2022/03/dst/#comments Tue, 15 Mar 2022 23:14:34 +0000 https://jwz.org/b/yjyi Daylight Saving Time Gripe Assistant Tool

For this map I made up a score to prove that you're right (or wrong) about Daylight Saving Time ruining everything. It's the total number of days with both sunrise and sunset times that satisfy your preferences, minus a penalty for sunrise and sunset times that are too late or early, respectively.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.]]> https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/2022/03/dst/feed/ 15 https://www.jwz.org/blog/2022/03/david-mamet-interested-party/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2022/03/david-mamet-interested-party/#comments Tue, 15 Mar 2022 21:53:12 +0000 https://jwz.org/b/yjyf Pan, God of the Woods.

About the only positive thing you can say about famed play/movie writer David Mamet deciding to file an amicus brief in support of Texas in that state's appeal of a district court correctly tossing the state's social media content moderation bill as unconstitutional is... that it has fewer swear words than your typical Mamet production. [...] Mamet, if you don't know, took a Trumpian turn...

Brief of Amicus Curiae David Mamet In Support Of Defendant-Appellant:

He now looks out, but he can't find the objects the chart informed him he'd see. He concludes that he is lost. How can he determine his location? He has a map, but he's just misused it. How?

The Map is not the territory. The territory is the territory. The pilot's answer to the question "where am I?" lies not on the map, but out the windscreen. That's where he is. It doesn't matter where he calculated he should be, the territory below him is where he is. [...]

I report as an outdoorsman, that Panic is real. It is the loss of the mind and will to Pan, God of the Woods. The affected loses his reason, and runs about unable to recognize those actual signs (a road, his own footprints), which might bring him back to safety.

Previously, previously, previously, previously.]]> https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/2022/03/david-mamet-interested-party/feed/ 3 https://www.jwz.org/blog/2022/03/relativistic-ray-tracing/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2022/03/relativistic-ray-tracing/#comments Mon, 14 Mar 2022 18:47:44 +0000 https://jwz.org/b/yjye

It's a general relativistic ray tracing renderer simulating a Schwarzchild black hole and its accretion disk, written in HLSL shader language and run in Unity with C#. There's that jargon! Let's break down each of these terms: [...]

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.]]> https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/2022/03/relativistic-ray-tracing/feed/ 5 https://www.jwz.org/blog/2022/02/xscreensaver-6-03-out-now/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2022/02/xscreensaver-6-03-out-now/#comments Mon, 28 Feb 2022 17:04:56 +0000 https://jwz.org/b/yjxB

I wrote two new hacks this time:

Squirtorus, which I can't really explain or justify except that it came to me in a dream. The pandemic has been weird, ok?

And also MapScroller, which suggested itself following my investigations of OpenStreetMap while trying to figure out how to plot a heat map of my ticket sales.

MapScroller is not available on iOS or Android because network access happens through a Perl subprocess, since doing HTTPS from C code is untenable.

Also Sphere Eversion has a freaky new mode.

Two years ago I said: "fixed rotation on iOS 13 (Apple incompatibly breaks rotation every two years as a matter of policy)". As it has been two years, they broke it again, and I fixed it again. As foretold by prophecy.

And on X11, by popular demand, holding down backspace in the password entry field will clear it. For some reason the XInput2 extension does not send keyboard auto-repeat events, so I had to special case this in the client, like an animal.

A couple of things I could use some help with:

• Speaking of XInput2, if you are the sort of person who is concerned about the fact that this popular and universally-deployed component of the X server is reproducibly returning uninitialized and/or freed data from server memory to any old client that connects, might I recommend that you build and run "xscreensaver/driver/test-xinput --grab". The logs printed should make the problem extremely clear. Update: I was mistaken, nevermind.

• If you are the sort of person who cares about localization: the eldrich horror known as "intltoolize" has gurgled to the surface again: if you upgrade autoconf beyond 2.69_5, then the po/ directory stops working. Something has angered the many-angled ones who squat and gibber at the bottom of the potfile. So if you could install a recent autoconf, Make It Go, and send me a patch, that would be great.

  I'm sorely tempted to just delete the po/ directory entirely and let each distro figure that shit out on their own. I've just about had it.

  As I said years ago in a comment in configure.ac:

  This IT_PROG_INTLTOOL nonsense has so many self-modifying levels of insanity that it must have been written by RMS, or an equally demented protégé. Why does po/Makefile.in.in exist?? Why does aclocal.m4 exist?? Why can't I ever upgrade it without everything breaking?? Won't someone please have mercy on us all and write a normal po/Makefile.in that uses wildcards, and write a sane set of rules to detect gettext(3) and msgfmt(1) and just do the obviously straightforward thing?

Mapping Crosswalk Coverage via Satellite Imagery in San Francisco.

I particularly commend the absolute grind of the data collection method:

The method was time-consuming, but simple. I manually reviewed satellite imagery at every single intersection citywide. I did this in order to maximize accuracy, and dig deeper than a binary crosswalk vs. no-crosswalk score.

Previously, previously, previously, previously.]]> https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/2022/02/crosswalks/feed/ 3 https://www.jwz.org/blog/2022/01/a-series-of-tubes-2/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2022/01/a-series-of-tubes-2/#comments Tue, 18 Jan 2022 02:53:18 +0000 https://jwz.org/b/yjvU This interactive map of the SF sewer system will come in handy for my next heist.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

Is there a non-crazypants explanation of how to set this crap up?

I seem to have an API key. I think it is restricted in the way they said I should. I still get: "Geocoding Service: This API key is not authorized to use this service or API. For more information on authentication and Google Maps JavaScript API services please see: [utterly unhelpful URL]."

Update: I got it working. The answer is "Fuck Google", and use OpenLayers instead. With that, plus these zip code KML files, I was able to pretty easily build an internal tool that displays our ticket sales on a map, based on billing address. It was like 80 lines of code (plus self-hosting 300 MB of geometry files) and spits out a zoomable map like this:

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.]]> https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/2021/08/cosmic-cartography/feed/ 4 https://www.jwz.org/blog/2021/05/animated-map-projections/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2021/05/animated-map-projections/#comments Wed, 12 May 2021 20:55:20 +0000 https://jwz.org/b/yjny

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.]]> https://cdn.jwz.org/blog/2021/05/animated-map-projections/feed/ 2 https://www.jwz.org/blog/2021/04/earthquake-shacks/ Sun, 18 Apr 2021 18:39:55 +0000 https://jwz.org/b/yjnT San Franciscans still live in 1906 earthquake shacks:

There were once 5,610 refugee shacks in 11 San Francisco parks, assembled with lightning speed in the months after the April 18, 1906, earthquake and fire. Today, there are fewer than 50 identified in the city. But those that remain are a symbol of civic vision, built in a bureaucracy-free utopia that included a partnership among city officials, labor unions and the U.S. Army. They're also a symbol of post-crisis rebirth, designed to house the displaced workers who built back San Francisco better than ever.

And today, 115 years after the disaster, they're the most visible reminder of the city's most defining event -- preserved by a shifting collection of regular citizens and nonprofit history organizations, advocates so dedicated to the shacks that they feel like a religious order. [...]

Half of San Francisco had burned to the ground, and refugees moved to tent cities in Golden Gate Park, the Presidio and other green spots. But the shelters were a ticking clock. Relief leaders feared they would become waterlogged and disease-ridden when heavy rains arrived later in 1906.

Using redwood and fir lumber sent from Washington state and Oregon, the cottages were built in tight clusters in the parks with cooperation among the San Francisco Parks Commission, headed by John McLaren, the San Francisco Relief Corporation and the Army. Tenants paid $2 monthly rent on cottages valued at $50, with the option to own. And in 1907, many shack owners hauled their new property using literal horse power, becoming starter homes in empty lots across San Francisco and beyond.

Map: Where 1906 earthquake shacks live on:

Most of the 5,610 relief cottages built in San Francisco parks have been demolished, but a surprising number -- at least 30 and maybe many more -- still exist in the San Francisco Bay Area. The residents who live in them swear the sturdy redwood frames built in a day could last another 115 years.

We've compiled a list of all the San Francisco shacks that are "certified" by local preservationists, plus some more strongly believed to be earthquake refugee shacks as well. Bernal Heights has the highest concentration, but the petite homes are scattered throughout the region and beyond.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.]]> https://www.jwz.org/blog/2021/04/bill-gates-land-ownership/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2021/04/bill-gates-land-ownership/#comments Tue, 13 Apr 2021 17:39:10 +0000 https://jwz.org/b/yjnM Bill Gates now owns almost 242,000 acres of the continguous USA. This map shows that area as a rectangle that can be dragged.

Lots of articles on this are full of "4D chess" speculations about climate change blah blah, but the real reason for this seems to be very simple: "just to collect rent."

Most of us imagine farmers tilling the soil that has been in their families for generations. But many farmers lease at least some of the land they cultivate. According to Bruce Sherrick, a professor of agricultural economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, about 60 percent of row-crop farmland in the Midwest is leased. The landowners can include investors like Gates.

"Farmland has had a remarkably consistent ability to hedge against inflation," Sherrick says. And it tends to be "negatively correlated" against other investments, he adds: If the stock market is going down, the return on farmland is likely to be going up.

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