We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
Jimmy Buffet, multi-multi-millionaire, once mentioned how rewarding it can be to discover a $5 bill in the pocket of some old jeans. Funny how that works. When my Dad would visit me at college, he would slip me a $50 - "walking around money." Small gestures and unexpected small rewards can mean a lot.
Our early Spring Cleaning has resulted in small hills of those black leaf bags filled with old magazines, old books, old clothing, household clutter, obsolete paperwork, lots of shredded old financial records and tax records, etc etc. Some fairly heavy, some not, but far beyond the usual.
We are required, more or less, to separate bags of theoretically-recyclable garbage from other garbage, but I believe it all ends up in a dump in West Virginia. Regardless, when we have large piles I always scotch-tape a $10 or a $20 to the pile.
To the sorts of people who say "He gets paid to do it anyway," I say "Bullshit." The piles of snow and ice do not make the job any easier. My theory is to always tip people who do personal work for you unless they are the owner of the business. When you give a tip, you make life better for a little while and you feel better too. Even if it's only beer money.
For some very occasional household jobs like rug cleaners, window-washers, or annual barn-cleaning crews, I will tip before the job begins. Try it sometime. I make a point to always have some $5s, $10s, and $20s in my pocket to show gratitude and to create small moments of good cheer and more positive helpers.
"Free market capitalism" is just what trustworthy people naturally do to make stuff, get stuff, and do things without violence or threat of violence: "I'll give you two arrowheads for that nice spearhead." The only "system" in free markets are government constraints to preserve orderly markets, to protect people from fraud, and to reward government friends. Those constraints are sometimes helpful, often destructive.
Other things - not "systems" but really just conditions - which make non-violent interactions possible are free speech, voting, a legal structure, honest people, and property ownership.
Lefties have a knee-jerk suspicion of those fine foundations for civil society.
Side note: I still haven't found a place to live. If you didn't catch my about-to-be-homeless post, it's here. I had a couple of promising leads in the comments, but they both flamed out. I have a couple more I'm still pursuing, but if you have something offer, that would be very appreciated.
First off, for those of you using windows 7, I have a fairly comprehensive Win7 site here. The 'Setup' page is really somethin' else. It solves a number of pesky problems, like those annoying thumbnails that pop up when the pointer's over an entry on the Task Bar.
So, let's start with the Start Menu. If you long for the older style of Windows Start Menu, where everything stays in its proper place and the sub-folders can all be organized by type of program, then grab Classic Shell. The setup page for it is here. He's constantly updating the program, so perhaps not everything will line up with the instructions, but it should be close.
More goodies below the fold, plus some Google tips and some tips for Maggie's commenters.
Well, we're in Day Two of: Gee I miss Bird Dog, and who is this feckless replacement serving up links in his absence? I admit I can't hold a candle to Bird Dog's link output. He reads the whole internet every day, just looking for links for you. Interestingly, he prints the entire internet out on a tractor-feed printer before he reads it. He likes his stories to alternate between white and light green, I guess. I don't know how he does it. I can't manage to read the whole internet every day. My lips get real tired.
For all the Maggie's Farm faithful, I offer that snapshot of Bird Dog relaxing at the day spa while he's away on sabbatical. I hope it tides you over until he returns. I don't want you to get the wrong idea about his reading material, however. He assured me that he was just checking the spelling and grammar for a friend. He's wearing his NSA-proof reading faceguard, of course. He doesn't want the boys at Foggy Bottom, the FBI, the NSA, or Mika Brzkini, er, Brzerker, er, Bazouki, or what ever her name is, knowing what he's thinking while he's reading. Speaking of Mika, I hear she has a tight face and a foggy bottom, too. Normally, Bird Dog wears a tin-foil homburg when he reads instead of the faceguard. Unfortunately, he used the tin foil for cooking during the pig roast, and had to go with his backup.
Anyway, here are the links that Bird Dog would have offered, if he was on duty, and slightly deranged:
The protest, dubbed a 3 p.m. “collective coffee break” by the Guild, began with workers exiting the Times’ Renzo Piano-designed headquarters on Eighth Avenue through a door on 40th Street. The protesters then walked to Eighth Avenue, up to 41st Street and finished the walkout by entering through doors on 41st Street.
But over the last decade a radically different picture of Viking life in Greenland has started to emerge from the remains of the old settlements, and it has received scant coverage outside of academia. “It’s a good thing they can’t make you give your PhD back once you’ve got it,” McGovern jokes. He and the small community of scholars who study the Norse experience in Greenland no longer believe that the Vikings were ever so numerous, or heedlessly despoiled their new home, or failed to adapt when confronted with challenges that threatened them with annihilation.
Conjecture and evidence of Norsemen in the Americas and the North Atlantic keeps piling up, but there's one constant: Jared Diamond is an idiot.
A Viking sword from the 9th or 10th century was discovered in pagan boat grave at Dysnes in Eyjafjörður, North Iceland. It had metal hilts and some organic material such as leather, which has broken down. Boat grave is a burial in which a boat is used either as a container for the dead and the grave goods, or as a part of the grave goods itself. This was common among Vikings but didn’t seem to catch on in Iceland, only around 10 graves of this kind have been found here.
Has anyone asked Jared Diamond to be wrong about this discovery yet?
Less than 24 hours after collecting $300 million in its initial public offering, Blue Apron Holdings Inc. faces the reality of needing more cash -- and soon. The unprofitable meal kit-delivery company, which touted its growth prospects to potential investors on its IPO roadshow, has leaned on its marketing strategy to build a customer base. That outreach eats up a fifth of the company’s total spending.
This tells you all you need to know about the moronic state of IPOs in the "Tech Sector." It's laughable to call a grocery delivery business a tech company just because they have a website, but hey, I don't make the rules. Anyway, "In its IPO prospectus, the company warned that it may never be profitable, adding that it anticipates that “operating expenses and capital expenditures will increase substantially in the foreseeable future.” Got that? In print, it tells you they're not even trying to be a real company. It's free beer tomorrow, forever. Mr. Ponzi to the white phone!
He began his career at Paramount Pictures, serving as production manager on five Hitchcock films: “Rear Window” (1954), “To Catch a Thief” (1955), “The Trouble with Harry” (1955), “The Man Who Knew Too Much” (1956), and “Vertigo” (1958).
An astonishing body of basically anonymous work. There are much worse epitaphs than that in that town. Ask Lupe Velez.
Back in the summer of 1962, the U.S. blew up a hydrogen bomb in outer space, some 250 miles above the Pacific Ocean. It was a weapons test, but one that created a man-made light show that has never been equaled — and hopefully never will.
Good thing that H-Bomb didn't wreck the Earth's Van Allen belt and suspenders.
Despite the embarrassment of rich, beautiful storytelling on TV, many of
us indulge in exactly this sort of time-wasting habit: hate-watching
has reached new heights. Fed by almost endless options for shows to
watch, bolstered by the snark contest that social media has become,
viewers now regularly revel in finding plot holes and analysing
awfulness just as much as they delight in quality programming.
For forty years, I've been listening to people, male and female, highbrow and lowbrow, explaining that they don't really like the soap operas they watch religiously. The author would be happier if she admitted she was shallow and not too bright.
The whole premise of the Internet is the connecting of disparate networks. It started out by only connecting computer networks. But today it connects networks of vastly different sorts: computers, yes, but also financial networks, distribution networks, road networks, water networks, power networks, communication networks, social networks. It truly is “Inter” now. As we rush towards putting more and more things “in the cloud,” as we rush towards an Internet of Things with no governance beyond profit motive and anarchy, what we’re effectively doing is creating a massive single point of failure for every system we put in it.
My experience with computing and the internet is very extensive. I feel as though I have seen enough to form an overall opinion: It was all a big mistake. The entire tech sector should be rolled back to Microsoft Office and land lines. We'd all be happier, and any important stuff would still get done. Of course, a company that occasionally delivers cardboard boxes filled with wilted arugula couldn't IPO for a third of a billion without the internet, but no plan is perfect.
Besides opera tix, the other Christmas present I received (besides stinky cheeses) was an island-hopping rugged hiking trip in the Outer Hebrides. Well, Mrs. BD likes remote rugged places as readers know - as long as there are cozy B&Bs at night.
I checked the weather for our trip: 40s (F) at night, high 50s (F) daytime. Some precipitation 21 out of 30 days/month in summer (more in winter). North Atlantic weather. I've done a few ship crossings in the north Atlantic and know what it's like: cool mist and drizzle, no need for sunscreen.
Gwynnie lent me his waterproof Olympus.
My Mom and Dad were partial to trips to northern climes. Dad wrote the poem below to document the habit (with a photo of the poet at the farm).
Well, Bird Dog is worn out. He's weary of finding fascinating links every day. He's gone off to get his groove back. He's going to get his covfefe sharpened. Er, I mean, he's getting his covefefe trimmed. That is to say, his covfefe needed a world class overhaul. Bigly. He's left me in charge of finding a Yuge set of morning links for the Maggie's Farm morning roundup. I'm Haile Salassie to help out.
I found it amusing that everyone in the reglar media pretended that they didn't know that covfefe was simply a typo of the word coverage. In context, it couldn't mean anything else. They like to cast Trump as a vicious bumpkin, so it had to be gibberish, not fat thumbs. And unlike all the misspelled words I see on the internet, covfefe really was just a typo. Everyone claims that they made a typo when they misspell a word, or more usually, use one word when they mean another. Mis-keyed words you're trying to spell correctly are typos. Misspelled words, because you don't know how to spell, aren't.
Back when I was in school, and Galileo used to cheat off me, the teachers instructed us that if you can't spell a word, then you don't know what it means, and you shouldn't use it. I can spell covfefe. I know what it means. It means you're an idiot if you think a sentence fragment typed with your thumbs delivered via mass email is an actionable piece of information. Covfefe away, you Twits!
Using data from dozens of different sources and techniques from a wide range of technologies and disciplines including computer vision, natural language processing, statistics, machine learning, network science, topology, architecture and urbanism, we constructed a new partitioning of the city that resonates with our contemporary moment — 5 boroughs for the 21st century.
Bird Dog claims to like New York City. Me? I think it's a trailer park with a subway. The yokels there marry their own relatives (Hi Woody!), are all tattooed and drug-addicted (Xanax is a drug), and mostly piss outdoors. They can reassemble their five deck chair burrows, er, boroughs, any way they like. It's their covfefe.
The European Union has decided to fine Google an unprecedented $2.7 billion after a years-long investigation into the company’s comparison-shopping product found that it unfairly favored itself over competitors.
The persons in charge of all large internet companies are idiots. They have no idea how they ended up with all that cash. Not one of them can get a repeat success no matter how hard they try, because they ascribe to genius what was dumb luck. They build up huge cash hoards overseas, occasionally fritter them away on pointless boondoggles, refuse to pay taxes so they can distribute them to shareholders, and then childishly think that socialist governments will let them keep it.
Sleeping on the job is one of those workplace taboos — like leaving your desk for lunch or taking an afternoon walk — that we’re taught to look down on. If someone naps at 2 p.m. while the rest of us furiously write memos and respond to emails, surely it must mean they’re slacking off. Or so the assumption goes.
Yes, by all means, take productivity and career advice from the New York Times. I'm fairly certain that the monthly federal unemployment numbers is no longer issued in percentage form, and consists solely of a list of the names of people laid off from the New York Times, and the occasional FBI director.
Awareness and education are key tactics to protect the public as well as the animals. Research from the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, Atlantic White Shark Conservancy and the National Parks Service about the biology and behavior of these sharks has helped inform seashore staff and beachgoers about best practices to stay safe.
Awareness and education? Look fellas, let's be reasonable, huh? This is not the time or the place to perform some kind of a half-assed autopsy on a fish. And I am not going to stand here and see that thing cut open and see that little Kintner boy spill out all over the dock.
I first learned about Feynman from his Feynman Lectures on Physics.This was, and maybe still is, scripture for undergrads curious about Physics. What undergrad is not?
Nobel prize and all that, but what Feynman could do best was to communicate, and he could communicate in humorous, self-deprecating, and humble ways. I believe that he truly believed that he wasn't too smart, just curious and persistent.
Here's Feynman's speech titled What Is Science? delivered to the National Science Teachers Association, 1966, in New York City. He talks a lot about how his father inspired his curiosity. Read it. One quote:
I listened to a conversation between two girls, and one was explaining that if you want to make a straight line, you see, you go over a certain number to the right for each row you go up--that is, if you go over each time the same amount when you go up a row, you make a straight line--a deep principle of analytic geometry! It went on. I was rather amazed. I didn't realize the female mind was capable of understanding analytic geometry.
She went on and said, "Suppose you have another line coming in from the other side, and you want to figure out where they are going to intersect. Suppose on one line you go over two to the right for every one you go up, and the other line goes over three to the right for every one that it goes up, and they start twenty steps apart," etc.--I was flabbergasted. She figured out where the intersection was. It turned out that one girl was explaining to the other how to knit argyle socks. I, therefore, did learn a lesson.
It is often claimed that the happiest two days for a boat owner are the day they acquire it and the day they sell it.
That is hyperbole of course, but it makes a point about the burdens, expenses, and hassles of ownership. Even having a closet full of firearms means taking them out and cleaning and oiling them once a year. Hassle. New roof for a house or barn? Major.
So our survey question is this: What were you once thrilled to possess and later thrilled to get rid of?
I hope nobody says a spouse, but they probably will. I'll start it off with more than several acres my wife and I inherited on Martha's Vineyard. The old house on the land had been sold decades ago to pay estate taxes, but an elegant family compound could have been built on the land. Just a dream. I never had the spare dough to do that, and, really, I have a perfect set-up now although we are too far from salt water. Sold the land a few years ago, big capital gains and fees, etc., but I got off the hook for the property taxes, maintaining the right of way, and maintaining the fields in the center of the property which we never used. Big relief. Fact is, if we love the Vineyard (it's an ok yuppie place) we can rent a house for ten days and go there whenever we want. We never do. We go to Rhode Island instead, and rent.
In DC, D.C.’s massive Woodner apartment building has lived many lives—from fancy hotel to one of the last bastions of affordable housing in a gentrifying neighborhood. Now, it’s on the brink of another change.
Low wage jobs are not meant to be living wages. They are entry-level. Higher min wage laws drive jobs out of the country, or just close businesses. Wonderful only for unions who peg wages to min wage.
How the media was able in a matter of hours after the election to rebrand Democrats as anti-Russian hawks and Republicans as colluders with Putin is one of the strangest and yet most successful political fabrications in recent history.
...
The media fed off the hysteria. In its fusion role with the Democratic Party to delegitimize Trump, journalists saw collusion as the most effective way to create a sort of national madness directed at the Trump presidency.
American Houses: A Field Guide to the Architecture of the Home 
First off, for those of you using windows 7, I have a fairly comprehensive Win7 site 
I first learned about Feynman from his 
James Beard's