Odds And Ends

A car in our work parking lot has a constellation of bumper stickers. And yes, I know; when there are a lot of them it's a sure sign that the owner is a radical of one stripe or another. Still, I couldn't resist looking...

One struck me in a number of ways--risky, wrong-headed, Yes. But mostly it was the kind of thing likely to backfire. I did a Google search and could not find the exact same image but the gist, if I may put it that way, is that if you drive a Hummer you likely have some physical shortcoming.

1. The first thing I thought of was the rejoinder: You, the owner of the sticker, know this because you have seen such vast acreage of these parts? You still invite intimate knowledge of men who own Hummers? Or are the figures so vast that a statistically relevant number of times, after you had "inspected" this part, you came to find out later that they owned a Hummer? There just isn't a way in which the owner of the sticker comes out looking good.

2. Or maybe it is to mean that they suppose it's true on logical grounds even if they have no empiric knowledge. So, manly men stereotypically engage in macho pursuits and so all owners of this kind of vehicle must be trying to seem manly. But if that is a stereotype, then most of the time it must be true (or at least largely thought true) since that is how such notions form. So, technically it is more likely that a guy drives a Hummer because he is macho and is attracted to macho things.

3. I'm just teasing the person in the above two items. I think the real aim is to demean or bully people who make different (wrong) car buying decisions. But the ugliness doesn't end there. What if a guy is not well-endowed? This is hardly something that he could control--you are born with the genes you get. To be proud or ashamed of that which you have no control over is irrational. To tease people over that which they cannot control is someplace between thoughtless and odious.

4. What is so bad about a Hummer? I have had many a left-wing acquaintance blurt-out how they hate them. But I have never heard anyone say the same thing about exotic sports cars. They both get about the same mileage--though the exotics are worse in the sense that they all need premium fuel. The Hummer may never go off road, but it can go on-road when it has snowed and they carry more than two people. They are ostensibly far more practical than sports cars and yet where's the hate for Porsche?

I think that while these "progressives" feel like they are enlightened and the targets of their scorn are Troglodytes: Their moral "superiority" is more akin to the Mrs. Grundys and mutaween of the world than anything approaching enlightenment.

Girlfriend In A Coma

The Basis Of Their Opposition is Morality

One gets an interesting response when the subject of the Keystone XL pipeline is brought-up in the presence of a "progressive". Sometimes they give real reasons to be against it but mostly they try to change the subject. I think that on some level they know that there isn't a rational reason for opposition. Based on the reasons they give, one hopes that they really don't think these things are convincing:

"Oil from tar sands is much worse for the environment than conventional oil" Okay, granted. But do you think the lack of a pipeline will cause the Canadians to just leave the stuff in the ground? This is usually where they try to change the subject. Oil sells for somewhere in the neighborhood of $100/bbl and it costs less than $40/bbl to produce from tar sands--anyone can do the math. If anything, it will get cheaper to produce going forward. Technology constantly improves and natural gas, which is a major input, has just gotten a lot cheaper.

The alternative to the pipeline is that we will buy more oil from overseas, which will come by tanker. The Canadians meanwhile will pipe it to the Pacific, then put it on a tanker to China. All in all, energy will be wasted.

Yet, I do understand the opposition: Imagine a scenario where North of us was not friendly, democratic and (just as, if not more) environmentally conscious Canada, but rather a country like North Korea. They care nothing for the environment, their people are essentially slaves and all the money will be used to build weapons to threaten us. If that were the case, I would be against the pipeline too.

The difference here is what it takes to elicit moral outrage. What is odd is that the left frequently accuses the right of trying to impose their morality on all of us. They don't seem to notice that much of what they are for boils down to imposing their morality on us. And the Canadians.

Compliance Is Voluntary.

It doesn't happen all the time, but every so often while driving down the highway, I will see a car pulled-over by a highway patrolman. Even more rarely, the patrolman has pulled over a motorcycle. Whenever that happens, I think to myself that if I was the cop I would be lenient to the rider of the motorcycle.

It is not like the motorcycle had to stop, at least not in the sense that he would have had to stop if he was driving a car. The fact of the matter is that almost any bike could out-run and evade a patrol car in a way that even an exotic sports car could not do.

So cut the guy some slack. That's all I'm saying here.

Similarly, I feel much the same--only more so--about paying the capital gains tax. Mitt Romney has caught a lot of flak for his average tax rate of about 15%. The rate for him seems low only because almost all of it is not in the form of regular income but rather from long term capital gains, which are taxed at 15%. The thing about it though, is that you don't have to pay any capitol gains tax as long as you keep the assets. Romney sells-off some of his assets each year to fund charities and cover his living expenses and he pays 15% on whatever he takes out.

The important thing to remember is that he hasn't worked (not for the primary purpose of earning money) since 1999. He has been living off of his wealth for more than 20 years! This has given him the freedom to do things like be governor of Massachusetts, run for president a couple of times, volunteer with his church and run the Winter Olympics when they were held in Utah.

Zeke, Movies & Stuff

We saw a couple of movies on-demand in the last few days and they couldn't have been more different from each other. The first was Sucker Punch and was what one might expect from Zack Snyder; very stylized, pretty to look at, images fraught with meaning etc. The other was Arthur, not the original with Dudley Moore but the new one with Russell Brand. This version was like the original in that it was light entertainment and had a main character that you should hate, but is played with such winning whimsey, that you can't help but root for him.

In each of the films, serious commentary could be made, but I am just here to note the trivia...so.

In Sucker Punch, there was a scenario where things needed for an escape were obtained through a series of 'missions' which occurred in a kind of dream-within-a-dream state. Which involved dancing--which we don't get to see. The 'mission' for getting a knife went wrong and yet later, when the knife was needed, the heroine had it stashed away with the other things they had obtained. A second gripe which I feel rather childish in pointing out is that the young women who were working to escape the asylum were all beautiful and wore costumes that were rather slutty, yet they somehow were not as sexy as the preceding two facts would lead one to expect.

In Arthur, there were a couple of food-related things that were funny in the movie, yet still had me wondering about. The father of the girl Arthur loves made a cup of tea for Arthur's fancy older woman servant (played winningly by Helen Mirren). She took a sip of the beverage and confessed to the girl that it "tasted like sewage". Now, making tea consists in pouring hot water over a tea-bag. How wrong can anyone get this? In another two parts of the movie SpaghettiOs® are featured. Arthur is introduced to them by the girl and later, when Arthur is taking care of his sick servant, he serves her some. The servant disparaged the meal, but ate it nonetheless. I figured they could have mined this a bit.

Servant: What is this?

Arthur: SpaghettiOs®

Servant: They really ought to call these Spaghetti-naughts

Or something along those lines--hey, I'm an amateur blogger not a big time comedy writer!

Along the food, pop-culture nexus, now that this post has evolved in that direction. My wife came home the other day with something called Ezekiel 4:9 Sprouted Grain Bread.

Naturally, I took to calling it "Zeke bread", which reminded my wife that people in The Walking Dead had been referring to something as "Zeke". Being up on zombie lore, I knew immediately that they mean Z=Zeke=Zombie. I just read World War Z, so I am an expert.

Health-conscious zombies are quite fond of whole brain foods.

(Nothing But) Flowers

Ships & Feet

More as an illustration that, 'this has been thought of before' than any kind of judgement about the validity of the concept: Supposedly, natives of various exotic climes could not see the large ships anchored off-shore. They had no experience with such things and were therefore blind to them.

There may be something to this, as recently I have found a couple of examples which, though less dramatic, are still telling.

I run, from time-to-time, barefooted. (I won't belabor that subject here, if you are interested there are tons of sites devoted to the subject--you can find them by a simple internet search.) Every once in a while somebody notices the oddness of it and I can tell because of how they react. I don't like it when people notice, because most of the time they are pretty negative about it and sometimes quite rude about how they express their opposition. The nice thing is that hardly anyone notices, or seems to. It is possible that most people do notice and they just don't show any sign of it.

The other kind of situational blindness is more abstract, but in some ways more troubling. I have seen people who are really smart and deal with numbers and statistics for a living, who present obviously flawed data as if they mean something. The latest example is from the recent brouhaha regarding president Obama's "recess" appointments.

Total recess appointments: Obama (29), George W. Bush (171), Clinton (139), George H.W. Bush (77), Reagan (243).

The flaws?

1. They served different lengths of time: George W. Bush, Clinton and Reagan 8 years; H.W. Bush 4 and Obama 3 as of now.

2. The controversy was not over how presidents overused their recess appointment power, it was over making an appointment while the Senate was still in pro-forma session. This is a ripe area for argument and controversy, but the number of recess appointments misses the point.

3. The data are themselves meaningless: Any time there is a recess appointment either of two broad classes of things could be true. The president picked someone who should have been approved and was therefore right to make a recess appointment. OR The president picked a flawed candidate and compounded the error by making a recess appointment. People can (and should) argue the merits of any given appointment, but the numbers of recess appointments are totally meaningless.

Internet Memory Jogger

Yesterday, the whole family went out to a Vietnamese place we had been wanting to try for a while.

While there, one of the kids drew our attention to the music playing over the PA system and noted how hearing ethnic music when at such a place made her think it was more authentic. Another of the girls indicated that the music sounded sad. I thought to myself that the mournful sound was fitting considering South East Asian history over the last several decades. My wife broke my reverie by answering the first girl's comment by saying she judges the authenticity of a place by how many of the customers appear to be of the same ethnic background as the genre of the establishment--they know what it is supposed to taste like and so if they are here, it is good. We then got into a discussion revolving around why Indian places always, whether it is a good place or not, are full of Indians.

Later, I got to listening to the music again and it was really hard to characterize: The most prominent instrument sounded like classical guitar. The music itself sounded like a fusion of East Asian sounds and Calypso music. The song itself sounded like Banana Boat Song which I had always thought of as "Dey Oh!". Here is where I began to rack my brain: Who was the famous American singer who popularized Calypso music? For the life of me, I could not remember! When I got home, quick internet searches revealed the name of Harry Belafonte, which is the guy that I was thinking of.

Along the way, I came across a line from Wikipedia that was perhaps meant to be funny, but I think it was unintentional.

Calypso is part of a spectrum of similar folk and popular Caribbean styles that spans benna and mento, but remains the most prominent genre of Lesser Antillean music.

Added: When we pulled up to the place, our oldest daughter exclaimed, "I thought it was spelled Faux"! In fairness to her, she has been taking French for three years. Also, I may have along the way made a lame joke along the lines of, "It may be called Pho, but it is very authentic"!

Last Day of the Year Breakfast Concoction

Wife ran out early this morning for groceries before the kids got up. She went wild with the baked goods, bringing doughnuts, bagels and croissants.

I didn't really feel like making a whole bagel and while wife and one daughter planned on fried eggs, I was not in the mood for that either: I had ordered steak and eggs on the way home from brother-in-law's on Long Island at the place we often go to--Shoreline Diner & Vegetarian Enclave. It is a great place for us to go to since we often travel with my parents in law, one of which is vegetarian. He is cool though, doesn't mind if I eat steak in his presence.

We had a bit of left-over grilled salmon and so I decided on a split and toasted croissant, with the salmon, egg-white omelette and Hollandaise sauce. I don't normally go for the egg white omelette but the Hollandaise takes three egg yolks and I didn't want to waste the whites. (Just watch, if I ever become a politician "waste the whites" will be quoted out of context and will be used to ruin my chances.)

Anyway, it was very good: Wife had some of the sauce on her fried egg and one daughter had some of the egg white omelette with sauce. Hollendaise sauce is great and can be whipped-up any time since any decent kitchen should always have eggs, butter and fresh lemons.*

*It can not be overemphasized how important it is to use fresh lemon juice. It really is better to just do without than to make Hollendaise sauce with lemon juice from the plastic lemon.

I could have spent all day

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, we saw some amazing and rare pieces.

Three Levels

I am not an anthropologist but supposedly, the counting systems of primitive people often consists of only One, Two, Three and Many. This makes sense in a culture where figuring does not really come up.

Yesterday I had to get a generator out of the back of our truck. A worker at Costco had helped me get the thing in at the store. With a gravity assist, I got the machine out of the Yukon. This set me to thinking though about whether or not I could have gotten it into the truck without assistance. My wife, who is really very strong was with me at the store, so I would have had help, but still I was wondering. I am curious but not so much that I will put the generator back into the truck just to find out if I can. Anyway, it would not be a good test because at this point, it doesn't really matter if I can lift the box three feet into the back of an SUV. It is not like I have paid a bunch of money for this machine and I am in a parking lot with it and the car.

So I got to thinking that there are three categories of things, in terms of my ability to handle them:

1. I can easily pick it up and put it wherever it needs to go.

2. I could lift it, but I will almost certainly injure myself in the process.

3. It is beyond my strength to do.

The generator is probably somewhere between #2 and #3. Though in the past I have attempted a 2-3 task and been happily surprised at it actually being a #1.

Pretty Cool!

There is a little bit of parallax in this view, but even if we grant that the temperature is 45 degrees, this is a lab thermometer and it reads in Celcius. That makes it 113F. Pretty warm considering that the air temperature is right around the freezing point. Also, by the time I took the second shot, the temperature had eased upwards to just below 50C.

All of the excess warmth is from decay of the leaves, but there are a couple of effects which explain why the leaves in my bin are hot while ones on the ground are not. First, insulation; the shredded leaves hold the heat in. Also, there wouldn't be a lot of decay happening at close to zero Celsius, but at elevated temperature the reactions go faster and thus produce more heat. It is a kind of synergistic effect.

I make these leaf storage bins by just cutting a bit of wire fencing and then making a cylinder out of it.

Added: The smell of the decomposing leaves is really nice: Somewhere between the Fall leaf smell and good tobacco and fresh pine. The source material is Oak, maple and pine leaves and branches.

Chasing Eight

For those of you who associate with me on Facebook, you will have noticed that the majority of my posts there are running workouts. This is because I have been using a utility for keeping track of my running and it posts each run to FB.

The utility calculates the minutes per mile for each run as well as giving me an average pace for each week and for the year. The average has been in the low eights all year because while most workouts are done just under eight minutes per mile, there are a lot of really long runs early in the year when I am doing marathon training. Naturally, one cannot expect to put out the same level of intensity for a 21 miler as for five and a half miles, so the average is low early in the year, but then after the marathon is over I focus on speed.

So I have slowly seen the average for the year dwindle from around 8:10 or so down to 8:01 but then the utility I've been using went defunct! So, I went to the website of the utility and it allowed me to download all the data. It took some doing to get it all into a format Excel could digest, but then hey presto! The pace was like 7:40! Not really though. Some of the times were off because I had a bunch of entries that were one hour, no minutes and some seconds and it just truncated out the minutes, so an hour and 20 seconds would show as one minute and twenty seconds. So I fixed all of that and took out the two bike rides and (drum roll) it is still under eight! 7:58/mile for the year on a total of 1,103.17 miles.

Superstar

Chipper/Shredder Repair--3 Step...

1. First, see if the parts are available on-line but do not order them!

2. Make sure that I can disassemble the machine and get the broken parts out.

3. Order the parts.

Breaking And Fixing Things

My wife normally walks the youngest to the bus stop, but since I was home today, it fell to me. As usual when the weather is nice, the dog accompanied us. After the girl got on the bus, I noticed that the dog was limping along next to me. I felt under the paw she seemed to be favoring and there was a little broken acorn stuck in the pads. I cleared it and she immediately started walking normally. She is not the kind of animal who could live on her own in the wild. If she did run away from us, I am pretty sure she would befriend some human, that would take her in and feed her.

The day was perfect for gathering and disposing of leaves and so I set-about that, using a leaf grinder that we have. It works pretty well: You can run it at full power and blow the leaves into a pile and then lower the hopper and rake leaves directly into it. There is even a bag that can be placed over the outlet so that the ground-up leaves can be piled-up for composting. I ran it for only about half an hour before it started making a violent sound and shuddering. I shut it off and investigated the mechanism. It was FUBAR'ed--at least beyond repair until parts could be obtained. The grinding mechanism consists of a bunch of steel flails that can pivot on thick steel posts and the whole thing rotates on a large open drum. At least one post was knocked-out and at least two flails were sheared off. There were no rocks or other damaging materials inside the works, so I can only surmise that parts, weakened over time, finally broke.

There was plenty else to do, so I got cracking on those. A large branch that broke in the recent nor'easter was hanging over part of the driveway. Most cars have either a hard tie-down point or come equipped with a eye bolt that you can screw into your bumper via an access port. So I used that, along with some rope I had, to pull the branch of Damocles down. The chainsaw made the branch into manageable pieces and it all joined the rest of the pile from the snow storm a few weeks ago.

Next, the swing set. A large branch had caused one of the swivels to break-off and so now one of the swings was hanging by only one chain. Even though the swivel had broken off, there was still the top part of that piece of hardware--so a chain could be reattached. I didn't want to do that though because the swivels have a nylon bushing in them which allows for smooth swinging action. Luckily there are other attachments that don't really need to swing and I used the same swivels for everything. I just switched out the swivel from an adjacent trapeze with the one from the swing. It was tedious though--the bolts are threaded for their whole eight inches or so and had to be screwed all the way out and then all the way back in.

Next, wasn't really a repair, but still it was stuff I did: I hauled all of the bikes and a wagon as well as a unicycle from out of the front porch/alcove to a loft in the garage. Now it is nice and neat there. While I was crawling around in the loft, I came across a hand cart that has had a flat tire for years. Today was the day to do something about it. The hub of the wheel was in two parts and held together by four bolts. Once these were off, it was easy to pull out the old inner tube. I took it with me to the hardware store so that I would get the right one. The new one is installed and functioning perfectly.

The Gate

This last week was an odd one in many ways due to the freak Nor'easter we had the Saturday before.  Our home lost power Sunday morning right after breakfast and as would become evident, some of my employer's facilities were also hit.

I got a call on my cellphone Monday letting me know that my office in Billerica was without power and corporate HQ, also in Billerica was in the dark too.  I went to the R & D campus in Bedford where they have "flex work" areas.  These are essentially just a desk with a nice big monitor, a keyboard and mouse that you can plug your laptop into.  Phone works through the PC, so it was really easy.   I kind of liked it.  It was quiet and I got a lot of work done.

I had only ever been to the Bedford campus for meetings and so forth and so had never really explored the surroundings as I would any routine workplace.  The first day, I decided to go to McDonald's for lunch since I knew that there was one within, I thought, walking distance.  It turns out it was "within walking distance" if I ate while walking back.  This was fine:  Two McDoubles and a Dr. Pepper, all off of the Dollar menu.  It satisfied both hunger and the eternal desire to pinch pennies.

The next day I brought lunch and ate it at my "flex work" area and so had a full hour to explore.  I went out the back parking area and came onto a road which contained facilities much like the one I had left--pharmaceutical makers, biotech outfits and companies that make things that help out the first two.  Within about a mile, I came to a bike path.  It was a brilliant Fall day, crisp, with a bright if weak feeling sun.  The path itself was unnervingly straight and seemed to recede to a geometric point someplace off in infinity.  The path was littered with colorful leaves, though there were still an abundance on the trees which lined the path.

Even though the path cut through heavily wooded terrain, one could still see homes and industrial buildings through the foliage.  I was about 40 minutes into my walk and starting to become concerned that a hoped for break in the path would not come in time for me to be back within the hour.  Before panic set-in, I noticed that the buildings I was passing seemed familiar.  I was walking right by the campus I had left from!  Great! Except that there was a 10 foot high fence topped by barbed wire between the path and the campus.  I could climb such a fence if I thought it was really necessary but I was a long way from feeling the need for such extreme measures.  Just as I was musing about climbing and wondering how far the path would go before crossing a road again, I noticed a gate.

The gate clearly had a lock on it, but it was only 10 feet off of the path, so where is the harm in trying it?  It was truly locked, but what is this?  Next to the lock appeared a sensor pad that looked just like the ones at the entrances to all of our buildings.  I didn't want to get my hopes up though:  Your badge only gets you through doors you are authorized to open.  I tried it though and the gate swung easily open.  I was now about 20 minutes early but I had a fine walk.

I am not from New England and even though I have lived here for close to 20 years, it still seems alien in many ways.  This little thing--the gate opening for me, joins the ranks of lots of other little things; which together have made this place seem more like home.  If not quite actual home, yet.

Saturday Of Odds and Ends

The day started early--at least for my wife and eldest daughter--one took the other out to Great Brook Farm for >--CC--> practice at 8:00 AM.

While my wife was out, I got some coffee roasting done--I did about three pounds, which should last a couple of weeks.

My wife tried to do an exercise video in the interregnum, but her laptop ran out of juice mid-way, so she ran out to Great Brook Farm with the dog.  

When I drove out to get them all, I noticed a wet patch all the way across the road.  Sure enough, though I didn't think of it at the time, my wife carried the dog across the wet patch.  She was not spoiling the dog, though she does spoil the little beast, wife just didn't want the dog to get filthy and thus need a bath--which is a hassle.

After the running, we had waffles and coffee and sausage and then got ready to go out apple picking.  I grew up in Washington, of all places and never went apple picking with my family--raiding the WSU orchards is another matter, Our family did go to orchards in Green Bluff for cherry and peach picking though.   My wife and kids have been going apple picking most every Fall for better than a decade now, first in Vermont and now in Massachusetts.

On the way to picking, the eldest had a major gripe about where we planned to pick.  It only had apples and a hay ride.  The other place had all that, plus fresh cider doughnuts and animals.  The problem with the other place is that last time it was a madhouse AND they were all picked-out, so we had to still go to the usual place for apples.  In addition, given the driving, crowds and the time which would be spent in line waiting for the cider doughnuts, we are talking an hour and a half.  We could make our own (superior) doughnuts in that amount of time.  In any case, we had a good time; the dog was welcome there--even on the hayride and they still had plenty of nice apples.

Once home, I mowed the whole lawn--usually I only do one part or another at a time since it is so large.  It took a whole tank of gas and then part of another to complete the task.

Next:  I want to go in search for some nice steaks with bones in them, like T-bone or Porterhouse.  I got steak knives around a month ago and they have been used, but not really put to the test.  The test is carving small morsels of meat from little crevices around the bones.

10 Miler from a couple of weeks ago

There was such a huge delay in the race organizers posting of pictures and results that I forgot all about it.  Here is the finish picture from that race.

The race was October 2nd.

Income Inequality Thought Experiment

Megan McArdle over at The Atlantic has a post which (as always) is thought provoking, but presents data which, once one has thought about it, is pretty obvious.

In economic downturns, such as the one we are in now, income inequality actually becomes less severe.  You can look at the handy charts she provides here, but I will describe a couple of things that are easy to see from the charts:

1.  You can see that in each recession and in the great depression, income inequality falls sharply.  The chart shows the share of total income earned by the top 1% of earners.

Why is it obvious that this would be so?  The income of top earners is tied to capital.  In good times, capital is in high demand and so interest is high.  Businesses are working at higher capacity and so the owners make a lot more profit.  Their fixed costs are what they always were;  The value of the land, machinery, buildings and so forth haven't changed.  They are selling more widgets and so they are using more materials and labor, but these are only a small portion of total costs. 

Workers also improve their income because of two factors:  First, there is more work to be done and so they may go from part time to full, or may gain some overtime hours.  Second, all the added work will create demand for more workers and this should drive up wage rates.

2. The second notable item from the chart is that, in spite of reduction in income disparity during recessions, there are trends which are easy to spot.  From around 1929 until around 1980 the trend was of declining income inequality, after that the trend is in the opposite direction.  I do not have any good hypothesis for why this should be so.

Here is the thought experiment part of the post:

I do not know if the relationship between economic prosperity and income disparity is something that anyone can do anything about.  If someone has ideas on that, I would be open to hearing them.  The thing is that for over 30 years, there has been a clear association between inequality and economic prosperity.  Given two choices which would you choose?

1.  The bottom two quintiles gain a real 10% in income  AND the top quintile doubles their income.

OR

2.  The bottom two quintiles loose 10% of their income  AND the top quintile looses half of their income.

I would choose # 1. because everybody is better off than they otherwise would be.   I didn't want to overcomplicate things, but if you are wondering about the middle two quintiles--they gain or loose in the same direction as the others in their scenario, but by an intermediate amount.  I suspect that people of a more leftward inclination than me would choose # 2.  or would at least be tempted to choose it.