to your HTML Add class="sortable" to any table you'd like to make sortable Click on the headers to sort Thanks to many, many people for contributions and suggestions. Licenced as X11: http://www.kryogenix.org/code/browser/licence.html This basically means: do what you want with it. */ var stIsIE = /*@cc_on!@*/false; sorttable = { init: function() { // quit if this function has already been called if (arguments.callee.done) return; // flag this function so we don't do the same thing twice arguments.callee.done = true; // kill the timer if (_timer) clearInterval(_timer); if (!document.createElement || !document.getElementsByTagName) return; sorttable.DATE_RE = /^(\d\d?)[\/\.-](\d\d?)[\/\.-]((\d\d)?\d\d)$/; forEach(document.getElementsByTagName('table'), function(table) { if (table.className.search(/\bsortable\b/) != -1) { sorttable.makeSortable(table); } }); }, makeSortable: function(table) { if (table.getElementsByTagName('thead').length == 0) { // table doesn't have a tHead. Since it should have, create one and // put the first table row in it. the = document.createElement('thead'); the.appendChild(table.rows[0]); table.insertBefore(the,table.firstChild); } // Safari doesn't support table.tHead, sigh if (table.tHead == null) table.tHead = table.getElementsByTagName('thead')[0]; if (table.tHead.rows.length != 1) return; // can't cope with two header rows // Sorttable v1 put rows with a class of "sortbottom" at the bottom (as // "total" rows, for example). This is B&R, since what you're supposed // to do is put them in a tfoot. So, if there are sortbottom rows, // for backwards compatibility, move them to tfoot (creating it if needed). sortbottomrows = []; for (var i=0; i
It's Thanksgiving week once again here at Political Calculations, where our tradition calls for us to put aside everything else we're working on and celebrate the most American of all national holidays for an entire week.
We're kicking off this week's holiday festivities by considering just what "Big Turkey", the conglomeration of the biggest turkey producers in the U.S., are seeking to put in the center of every American dining table on this holiday: a big turkey!
But first, let's see just how many turkeys we're talking about. Drawing upon statistics collected and published by the National Turkey Federation, we put together the following chart showing how many turkeys made it from farm to table in each year from 1989 through 2011:
Here, we see after peaking at 303 million birds in 1996, which coincided with the height of the low-fat diet craze, the number of turkeys produced each year fell off to range between 250 million and 275 million through 2008.
However, the aftermath of the Great Recession took a big bite out of U.S. turkey production beginning in 2009, sending annual turkey production below the 250 million mark.
You would think then that America's turkey farmers are producing less turkey today than at any time since 1989, the first year for which we have annual turkey production figures.
You would, of course, be wrong. In reality, 2011 marked the fourth-highest year on record for total amount of turkeys to go to the market, as measured by their live weight:
The only way that mathematically works is for the size of turkeys produced in the U.S. to increase pretty dramatically. Doing the math, we find that's exactly what has happened!
On average, we find that the average live weight of a turkey produced in the United States has risen from 21 pounds per bird in 1989 to reach 29.5 pounds today.
That's a 41% increase in the weight of a live turkey produced for market in the U.S. in the last twenty-three years. To help put that increase in perspective, the largest "heritage" or wild turkeys will weigh in at just 16 pounds per bird.
So that's what "Big Turkey" has been up to over much of the last twenty three years (and longer!) In our next installment, we'll see just how much money "Big Turkey" makes on each one of those birds!
National Turkey Federation. Turkey Statistics. Accessed 12 November 2012.
Labels: food, thanksgiving
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