Monday, August 23. 2010
My photo uploading system is testing my patience today. Thus some totally random and disorganized trip pics, beginning with this Bavarian farm scene near the hamlet of Baernzell, not far from Deggendorf on the Danube, with the great Bavarian Forest in the background (which is now part of a giant Czech-German wilderness park system). From hilltops here you can see the Czech Rep. (which I still call Czechoslovakia).
More pics below the fold. I'll try to get better organized soon.
Continue reading "A few totally random trip pics"
Health insurance agents are the canary in the mine of ObamaCare.
Having been a heavily credentialed health and other benefits broker for the past two decades, and working on the corporate buyer side of the relationship for 15-years before that, I will say – strongly – we have been worth it. I described why and how in this earlier post, “In Defense of Health Insurance Agents, and You.”
A health insurance agent is required to complete initial and regular formal training courses in the subject (including ethics), pass initial and periodic tests, and are screened by their state and by insurance companies for criminal or personal conduct (including declaring bankruptcy) that may negatively affect their reliability to be licensed to provide agent services. In addition, through professional associations, through insurer education programs, through self-study, and through competitive pressures, health agents stay current on the latest laws and offerings from various insurers. Furthermore, almost all health insurance agents are independent businesses or work for independent agencies, not beholden to the insurers but to their customers. Importantly, individuals, small and larger businesses have priorities more important and pressing than becoming experts in health insurance or its interactions with other laws or aspects of their primary concerns, and heavily depend upon qualified, trusted health insurance agents. Lastly, many health insurance agents have extensive credentials and experience….
But, the unfolding of ObamaCare raises the question of whether health insurance brokers will continue to be of value, or able to be.
Continue reading "Are Health Insurance Agents Worth It? The Canaries In ObamaCare Mine"
"The world is a book and those who do not travel only read the first page."
Attributed to many, including St. Augustine, Theodore Roosevelt, and Eleanor Roosevelt. This, however, is pure Teddy:
"Life is a great adventure…accept it in such a spirit."
Cornell today?
One student is quoted as saying, "I wish my classes were more supportive instead of being so difficult."
Houston, we have a problem. Somehow along the way the kids got the idea that higher edumacation was a Montessori nursery school.
I am back in ye olde saddle early this AM from Austria and Bavaria, and the Danube and Main-Danube Canal. I will provide some photo travelogues if and when I can get my pics organized - and also when I can persuade our website to upload my photos properly.
Special kudos to my in-laws who arranged and hosted this family trip as a celebration of their 60th wedding anniversary. A wonderful, elegant treat indeed, especially with the entire BD gang of adventurous, high-energy, and curious travellers. For us, vacation travel is a physical sport. We specialize in "run for your life" vacations. Relaxation is for home. On further thought, not for home either. I guess we believe that relaxation is for after you die...Carpe diem, etc. Plenty of time to relax when dead.
Just one link this morning: How Winston Churchill Stopped the Nazis.
 However, I will share a few of my general cultural observations from our trip:
- These folks seem to live a cafe culture, but it's more about beer than coffee. The Romans brought vineyards up to their northern frontier, but the climate changes after the Medieval Warm Period limited wine grapes only to specific microclimate areas, so they turned to beer brewing. Wine grape-growing in northern Euroland remains limited to those specific areas today, but we are all hoping climate change will correct that problem someday soon...
- There is no litter. Everything is clean and neat. There is almost no graffiti and what little there is, under bridges for example, is, as my daughter observed, "lame." When a bus driver is waiting for a group pick up, he uses his time to clean the windows, the tires and the hubcaps.
- We saw very few obvious Moslems, and they were all in Vienna. Yes, finally inside the gates of Vienna and on the subways. Vienna has a great subway system, and so simple you can figure out how to use it to go anywhere in about two minutes.
- Everybody still smokes cigarettes.
- All taxis are Mercedes-Benzes
- They are prompt, like the Swiss. You are expected to be prompt. One of our tour buses in Nuremburg waited 7 minutes for 3 or 4 missing American riders, then just left without them. "Seven minutes. OK, we go now."
- Their farms are impeccable.
- Austria and Germany feel quite prosperous. Nice big new cars unlike France, Italy, and Spain. No old cars. People well-dressed, and clearly in possession of beer money.
- Bikes are more for transportation than for recreation.
- Fresh, unfiltered beer is good. All of the local beer is terrific, and each has a unique flavor. I developed a taste for the fresh Weissbrau (and possibly enjoyed to very slight excess maybe once due to being overserved by zealous bier-frauleins). They do not sell old beer. Many of the beer joints and biergardens we tried make their beer on Tuesdays, begin selling it on Friday, then toss out any left-over and begin selling the next batch.
- "Burg" or ...-burg means castle or fortified city, not town
- No cops. You never see any police. People seem quite well-self-regulated. I did see one cop car in Vienna. My father-in-law counted three officers on the entire trip.
- They all seem proud of their sausages. Towns seem to compete. We tried lots of them. They are all OK, but not great cuisine. I began to call them all "hot dogs," but they call them wieners (after Vienna: "Wien") or "wursts." That weisswurst they make looks like an unappetizing giant beetle larva. Excellent sauerkraut and mustards, though. Americans are the ones who came up with putting sausages in a bun so you could eat them with your hands. The Euros never do that.
-Un-American as it may sound, I came away with a respect for European land-use laws (same as I did with trips to the UK). Perhaps we can debate this on a post sometime.
- Plenty of Medieval, but Baroque is growing on us. Mrs. BD even ventured to indicate some appreciation for rococo. Just like Bauhaus, it had a point and a purpose for its time. Things go to excess, then snap back.
- Germans and Austrians are a lot like native (I mean native, not Indians) Americans, but more blond, thinner, more quiet, and better-dressed.
- You make friends on boats. It is quite a remarkable thing the way it happens. We were mostly Aussies, Kiwis, Brits, and Americans.
- The Chef on board was excellent. A Croatian, Paris-trained. Our river boat was perfect. A Dutch Captain: aren't ship Captains always Dutchmen? Some sort of affirmative action, no doubt, for Dutchmen in the merchant marine.
- Small World story: Mrs. BD and a BD daughter decided to check out the Vienna Opera House. For amusement while waiting for the next guide through the place, they let people try on opera costumes and take photos. Mrs. BD sees a face poking through an elaborate opera costume and thinks "Holy mackeral - that's John." Yes, a dear friend and neighbor (and hunting buddy) in Vienna with wife and all four of their daughters. She snuck up behind him and said "Hey, John. You look great in that outfit." Seeing people you know, out of context, is always momentarily bewildering.
More thoughts and observations later...and pics too.
From The Union:
Planning continues for the restoration of a long-shuttered fire lookout in the Tahoe National Forest.
This fall, volunteers met with Forest Service staff to discuss fixing up the historic Grouse Ridge lookout for use as a rental facility. The circa-1923 tower near Washington sports a spectacular, 360-degree view and a fantastic location near a series of alpine lakes that are extremely popular with outdoor enthusiasts.
But the lookout off Bowman Lake Road has suffered quite a bit of damage over the years and includes an outhouse perched precariously on a cliff. One of the goals of the renovation is to maintain the historic nature of the facility, while still providing some amenities.
Contractor volunteers have met with Forest Service archeologist Bill Slater at the lookout to review restoration needs, said Public Affairs Officer Ann Westling.
“We're still putting together the work plan in terms of what needs to be done and the cost — and how it's going to get done,” she said.
The plans will deal with the needed restoration, health and safety repairs, and historical requirements. Because the lookout is a historic structure, the plans will need to be sent to the California State Historic Preservation Office for approval.
Grouse Ridge will be the third lookout on the Tahoe National Forest to undergo restoration.
The first two include Calpine Lookout, which has been available for rent for five years, and Sardine Lookout, which is expected to be available this year. The facilities are rented through the National Reservation System for about $45 per night.
Grouse Ridge Lookout with outhouse to right (my photos from this summer):
View from the top:
Sunday, August 22. 2010
 The Berkshire Hills, once snow-capped mountains and, in recent millennia, glacier-covered and glacier-scoured, run from northwestern CT up through western MA. They are contiguous with the Green Mountains of Vermont.
Today, tourism, skiing, and second homes form the economic foundation of this chronically economically-depressed but charming rural region which was once dynamic with farming, lumbering, paper mills, woolen mills, and quarries. It has become the sort of area now where locals cannot afford to dine in the upscale restaurants filled with Bostonians and New Yorkers.
Image is the Hoosac Tunnel, about which Walking the Berkshires has written, and which first connected western and eastern MA by rail.
Just east of Berkshire County are the Hidden Hills.
Check out this nice affable ticket seller in the 1989 movie ‘Let It Ride’. Doesn’t he seem kind of familiar? I can almost guarantee you’ve seen a very popular movie he was in later on, and I can definitely guarantee you’ve seen pictures and posters of him in the role he plays in the aforementioned famous movie.
Answer below the fold.
Continue reading "Guess the celebrity"
(Surnames Part 1 here)
Your surname means next to nothing genetically or geneologically. Furthermore, if you are of English or French descent, you are almost certainly some sort of relative of Charlemagne.
Taking our surname topic this week a bit further into the math of geneology, one quickly realizes that the surname or family name one ended up with is close to random. After all, how many c. 1500 AD ancestors do you have (around the time when surnames became fixed and inherited), each one an equal contributor to your genetics?
Well, just four generations ago, you had 32 living great-great-great grandparents (2 to the 4th power), all probably with different surnames. If you have a Mayflower ancestor, they were one of your mathematical 65,000 great-something grandparents 15 generations ago. The simple math, depending on the areas in which your 1500 AD ancestors lived, (your ancestry pool at a given time), indicates that I have up to a theoretical 4 million great-something grandparents who were living in 1500 (with ancestors doubling each generation of 25 years).
But, beyond the 4-10 generations back, those large numbers aren't possible, given the population pools in different local areas and the lack of mobility for most people at the time. (The population of London was around 50,000 in 1500. It is thought that the global population in 1500 was only around 300 million.)
Thus there must be abundant redundancy in our geneologies and tons of marriage and child production among cousins, in-laws, and other family members. This site, Redundancy in Geneology, takes a clear look at that subject.
 The technical term for this is "pedigree collapse," wherein our ancestral cone has a narrowing due to various forms of inbreeding, as it were. That collapse may have peaked around the year 1200, and in New England, there probably was another mini-pedigree collapse due to the small size of the population in the 16-1700s:
Colonial Anglo Population of New England through 1700
1650: 33,000
1678: 60,000
1706: 120,000
1734: 250,000
1762: 500,000
1790: 1,000,000
Population growth after 1640 was largely internal, not immigration.
It's still safe to say that I had thousands of c. 1500 ancestor great-something grandparents, and I happened to end up with just one of their recently-given surnames. Luck of the draw.
(If you are from England, you are still probably in some way related to almost everybody else in England. That's why we call our Brit fellow bloggers "cousin".)
Ultimately, of course, we all trace back to Mitochondrial Eve. She was certainly a cutie pie, and she must have had lots of kids.
Photos:
Upper: Holy Trinity Church, Long Medford, c. 1450.
Lower: Church of St. Peter in Great Haseley, Oxfordshire, c. 1200
 No (real) links today. Here are a few from my own site that might be of interest:
— My tribute to the TV show House MD
— If you were a big, big fan of the original 'Shrek' movie, you might like this
— If you play a musical instrument, or want to hear your MP3s as you've never heard them before, check this out
— Three very cool remote-controlled airplanes here
— For a perfect example of the typical rude, coarse, base, vile, mentally-degenerative claptrap that I wouldn't dare port over to Maggie's, try this
— Ditto
— If you ever had any interest in the Flowbee haircutting device (the one that attaches to the vacuum cleaner), check this out
— Someone in the comments mentioned that great comeback from GM to Bill Gates a few years ago. It's here. Another cruel Bill Gates story here.
Well, I'd like to continue, but I have a tough HTML coding problem I need to sink my teeth into.
Saturday, August 21. 2010
One of the great songs of all time, but this time with Cab Calloway as Keko the Clown:
The story behind this: There's this nutball who digs things up in his back yard and sends the stuff he finds to the Smithsonian Institute, labeling them with scientific names and insisting that they're actual archeological finds.
So, here's how his latest submission was received.
Paleoanthropology Division
Smithsonian Institute
207 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, DC 20078
Dear Sir:
Thank you for your latest submission to the Institute, labeled "211-D, layer seven, next to the clothesline post. Hominid skull." We have given this specimen a careful and detailed examination, and regret to inform you that we disagree with your theory that it represents "conclusive proof of the presence of Early Man in Charleston County two million years ago." Rather, it appears that what you have found is the head of a Barbie doll, of the variety one of our staff, who has small children, believes to be the "Malibu Barbie". It is evident that you have given a great deal of thought to the analysis of this specimen, and you may be quite certain that those of us who are familiar with your prior work in the field were loathe to come to contradiction with your findings.
However, we do feel that there are a number of physical attributes of the specimen which might have tipped you off to its modern origin:
1. The material is molded plastic. Ancient hominid remains are typically fossilized bone.
2. The cranial capacity of the specimen is approximately 9 cubic centimeters, well below the threshold of even the earliest identified proto-hominids.
3. The dentition pattern evident on the "skull" is more consistent with the common domesticated dog than it is with the "ravenous man-eating Pliocene clams" you speculate roamed the wetlands during that time. This latter finding is certainly one of the most intriguing hypotheses you have submitted in your history with this institution, but the evidence seems to weigh rather heavily against it. Without going into too much detail, let us simply say that:
A. The specimen looks like the head of a Barbie doll that a dog has chewed on.
B. Clams don't have teeth.
It is with feelings tinged with melancholy that we must deny your request to have the specimen carbon-dated. This is partially due to the heavy load our lab must bear in its normal operation, and partly due to carbon dating's notorious inaccuracy in fossils of recent geologic record. To the best of our knowledge, no Barbie dolls were produced prior to 1956 AD, and carbon dating is likely to produce wildly inaccurate results.
Sadly, we must also deny your request that we approach the National Science Foundation's Phylogeny Department with the concept of assigning your specimen the scientific name "Australopithecus spiff-arino." Speaking personally, I, for one, fought tenaciously for the acceptance of your proposed taxonomy, but was ultimately voted down because the species name you selected was hyphenated, and didn't really sound like it might be Latin.
However, we gladly accept your generous donation of this fascinating specimen to the museum. While it is undoubtedly not a hominid fossil, it is, nonetheless, yet another riveting example of the great body of work you seem to accumulate here so effortlessly. You should know that our Director has reserved a special shelf in his own office for the display of the specimens you have previously submitted to the Institution, and the entire staff speculates daily on what you will happen upon next in your digs at the site you have discovered in your back yard.
We eagerly anticipate your trip to our nation's capital that you proposed in your last letter, and several of us are pressing the Director to pay for it. We are particularly interested in hearing you expand on your theories surrounding the "trans-positating fillifitation of ferrous ions in a structural matrix" that makes the excellent juvenile Tyrannosaurus Rex femur you recently discovered take on the deceptive appearance of a rusty 9-mm Sears Craftsman automotive wrench.
Yours in Science,
Harvey Rowe, Curator, Antiquities
A re-post from our archives -
I was amused to see Megan McArdle having problems positioning her stereo speakers because I once spent a frustrating year fiddling with that issue in our parlor with my ridiculously high quality but handsome 5 1/2', 175 lb. Legacy Focus speakers, which would be better suited for an auditorium, a barn - or outdoors. You cannot crank them up or it could remove my house from its foundation.
Good stereo speakers need to be at least 3' from the wall, away from direct sunlight, and 6-10' apart, depending on room size. Even so, there will only be one relatively small area in the room where the sound will converge properly. What if you want to sit somewhere else? You cannot sit in front of one speaker. (And don't even talk to me about that stupid "surround sound" fad of the 1980s.)
I finally gave up on doing it right, because it wouldn't work in the room, given the windows, fireplace, piano, and other necessary furniture. I even called Legacy and sent them a floor plan, and they were kind and helpful, but it just didn't work for the space. That marked the end of my pursuit of maximum recorded sound. It's a fool's errand unless you have a dedicated "listening room" like fanatic audiophiles do. Now, I'd just rather spend my money on hearing live music, and I mostly listen to music via my crummy old computer speakers.
My big Focus speakers ended up 24' apart, in corners, about 18" from the wall. Totally wrong, unless you are listening from the adjacent room. Makes me want to return to good old monaural and to heck with this stereo nonsense. I remember when my Dad bought our first mono cabinet "record player." Man, did that sound good. I even remember my kid sister playing "Meet the Beatles" on the thing, when the record came out. (I thought it was dumb music...at first.)
Here's a good how-to on speaker placement.
Photo is a Legacy Focus speaker with the cover off to show the components. Mine are with the gleaming Rosewood.
Weighing in at a bruising 11 minutes, this is the longest movie clip in my online collection, but also one of my favorites. It's from the movie The Pentagon Wars, a great story of bureaucratic corruption, ineptitude and inertia.
It's based on a true story.
One cringes to think how much.
Grab a munchie, pop this puppy open to full-screen size, kick back and enjoy.
I was curious about when English surnames became fixed in time by inheritance rather than being individual descriptors of convenience which were only used for one's lifetime.
First, we have to go back to the pre-surname era. In pre-medieval England, the population was so small, and most villages so tiny, that, if your name was Merthin, everybody around knew who you were. Then the Norman Conquest Frenchified England. Many or most of the colorful old Anglo-Saxon given names (like Aldwyn and Odelia and Theomund) disappeared and were replaced with names of French origin like these four:
It has been estimated that almost 50% of the male babies born by 1200 A.D. were using just four common first names: William (15%), Robert (12%), Richard (11%) and Henry (10%). Such percentages show the need, even by the Middle Ages, for a second name of identification. As a result, patronymic naming conventions came into play whereby sons were named after their fathers, and sometimes even after their mothers.
As with traditional Scandinavian names, patronymic surnames are not fixed but are labels of convenience: they change with each generation. "Which John do you mean?" "Oh, John Robert's son.") Robert Richardson's son John becomes John Robertson. (Shifting surnames, of course, persists with women still generally taking on their husband's surname.)
The Medieval Warm Period saw a rapid growth in the English population, with the growth of market towns and cathedral towns, often with thousands in population. Descriptors became necessary: John (who lives on the) Hill, William (the) Carpenter, Jack (who came here from) Aisnley, Roger (the) Knight. By late Medieval times, descriptive (but not fixed) surnames were fairly universal except in small farming villages. These were, generally speaking,
Place names
Occupation names
Patronyms
Descriptive or nicknames
Thus we had Christian (given) names, and descriptive, non-hereditary surnames. As best I can tell, literacy and record-keeping led the way towards fixed surnames around or slightly before 1500 (although they were probably implied before that among the land-owning aristocracy: eg William, Lord of Westmoreland's sons were probably forever Westmoreland in some way unless the King punished you by taking your land away, or cutting your head off.) As Wiki says:
In Britain, hereditary surnames were adopted in the 13th and 14th centuries, initially by the aristocracy but eventually by everyone. By 1400, most English and Scottish people had acquired surnames, but many Scottish and Welsh people did not adopt surnames until the 17th century, or even later. Henry VIII (1509 - 1547) ordered that marital births be recorded under the surname of the father.
Ah yes, there's the answer: government edict, no doubt for control and taxation purposes.
Because of this, it is difficult or impossible to trace non-aristocratic English geneologies much further back than 1500, when John Miller's son Jack the carpenter was named Jack Miller instead of Jack the Carpenter. Before that, there were minimal church records and either no surnames, or no consistency in them if there were any. Furthermore, it did not take long for every town to be filled with unrelated Smiths, Carpenters, Millers, Weavers, Masons, Brewers, Bakers, Hills, Fields, and Rivers. And Bankers (lived near a riverbank - there were no "banks") and Farmers (farm tax-collectors, not tillers of the soil). It's funny, but although they made up the bulk of the population at one time, Serf never became popular as a surname while Freeman did...
Perhaps serfdom isn't all it's cracked up to be, despite its European and maybe North American comeback these days.
More tomorrow, including why, if you are of English or French ancestry, you are almost certainly related to Charlemagne -
 Regular News
Well, it's been a couple of days since we had any of that good old-fashioned Maggie's Farm-style California bashin', so let's git right to it!
Pictured: average California highway after the daily earthquake
How bad is it in California?
How bad are the budget problems in California?
Besides foreclosures, California faces bad mosquito season
California's bad chemistry
California's bad karma
California's 'bad girls' now have triple the nation's fat rate
Wow, this schadenfreude stuff is great! And let me give you folks a little search engine tip: You type in the words "california bad", you hit the jackpot!
Turning our attention to Dr. Mercury's prestigious "Most Insipid Article of the Week" award, it wasn't even close:
Star Wars fans ask NASA to build a hyperdrive
Seriously.
Uh, that's why it's filed under 'Science Fiction', fellas.
Because even a...
Trip to Mars Would Turn Astronauts Into Weaklings
This does raise one, probably naive, question, however. What about that big "rotating drum" idea, as portrayed in '2010' and other space flicks, where centrifugal force creates an artificial gravity. Does centrifugal force not work in space? Sorry for my ignorance, but we didn't do any space projects in shop class and my parents couldn't afford to send me to space camp.
Unbelievable! A murder takes place on live camera, everyone knows who the likely suspect is, and the police do... nothing?
Eagle Gang Allegedly Kills Sibling on Web Cam
Officials have not said conclusively what happened, but all signs point to murder. Based on their notes, the likely suspect is the biggest and most aggressive of the Eagles, although there are no plans at this time to press charges.
What a disgrace!
So, time to flip on my headline time machine. I'll set it to grab a New York Times article ten years in the future. Let's hope it's some good news this time!
BRZZATZHTKTZZT!!
Breaking: Radioactive Boars on the rise in Germany, climate change to blame
Just Rewards Dept.
A week ago I linked to an article about a news corporation called Stephens Media that had hired a hit man to go after bloggers quoting articles from their newspapers and sue them for copyright infringement. Hey, anything to make a buck, right?
Under the heading "turnabout's fair play", here's a site that offers a Firefox "boycott" add-on that bars the browser from going to any Stephens Media site. There's also info for Chrome in the comments, and IE can do it, although (as I recall) it's a painful site-by-site process, whereas the other two can use the pasted list of sites. Kudos to you guys.
Political News
Obama battles dark lord, terrorists, Dick Cheney
Transit
A woman I have never seen before
Steps from the darkness of her town-house door
Just at that crux of time when she is made
So beautiful that she or time must fade.
What use to claim that as she tugs her gloves
A phantom heraldry of all the loves
Blares from the lintel? That the staggered sun
Forgets, in his confusion, how to run?
Still, nothing changes as her perfect feet
Click down the walk that issues in the street,
Leaving the stations of her body there
Like whips that map the countries of the air.
A re-post from last summer -
The old town of Lucca, still circled by the medieval defensive walls, is like a Disney Medieval Italy. Like San Gimignano but with many fewer tourists (they all go to Pisa instead, to see that dumb church tower, or to Siena or Firenze for the 10th time). Plenty of towers - if not as many as San G. but who cares? A tower is a tower.
The modern city surrounds the old town which is now preserved in amber (heavily regulated re historical preservation - and rightly so, I think).
This lovely Italian gal ducked, as if I had not wanted her in my photo. She was wrong. Her gladiator sandals are perfect for the location: this is an entry to the Roman arena in Lucca. Its walls are integrated with the walls of medieval houses built into and against the Roman ruins. (Lucca is full of charming northern Italian women. All of them know how to dress, and many of them are blondes.)
More doors and entries below -
Continue reading "My last summer vacation: Doors and entryways of old Lucca"
Abrash is a good thing in a hand-knotted rug.
Friday, August 20. 2010
At least it is never "Mommy."
I have always wondered why pop music, blues, and folk music so often refer to a female beloved or a female object of desire in those terms. Terms of endearment. I don't want to go all Pomo on our readers, but it's sort of interesting, isn't it?
I like this, even though I enjoy any silly terms of endearment or desire:
|
Anchoress: 