Saturday, January 18. 2014
As is well-known, at least in New England, the Austrian von Trapp family (they dropped the von in the US) settled in Stowe, VT, where they opened the Trapp Family Lodge in 1950. The family, whose story is that of The Sound of Music, still owns and operates the Lodge.
There was a recent cast reunion in Stowe.
Here's the Trapp Family Lodge website. My family enjoyed this place very much in the winter when I was young. That was before all of the condos.
I'm going between two superb Christmas books right now:
The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape
Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven
I am happy to have a tall stack left to go. I feel lost without a stack of books to read.
Friday, January 17. 2014
My photo of one of the busy shoe stations came out too blurry to post, but here's a tip: The next time you're in Grand Central Station (Terminal, to be accurate) in NY, and have a spare 15 minutes, indulge yourself in a shoe-shine. It's a strangely-luxurious thing to sit up in the incredibly-comfy leather high chairs - they hand you the day's NY Post to read - to let those guys do a real professional spit shine on your good shoes.
You can even bring them a bag of shoes, and pick them up later. It's not just for guys - the gals do it too.
$4.00 per pair. Given how carefully and how hard these guys work, I usually figure a $4 tip too. It's never wrong to tip them before you pay, not after. Being capitalists, they will do one heck of a job for you. I hate to shine my shoes.
The Station, late-morning after rush hour. How many towns would love to have a grand, busy and fun place like this? Fun food joints on the lower level. They don't make 'em like this anymore.
Tegmark:
Galileo famously stated that our Universe is a “grand book” written in the language of mathematics. So why does our universe seem so mathematical, and what does it mean? In my new book “Our Mathematical Universe”, I argue that it means that our universe isn’t just described by math, but that it is math in the sense that we’re all parts of a giant mathematical object, which in turn is part of a multiverse so huge that it makes the other multiverses debated in recent years seem puny in comparison.
and
My starting assumption, the external reality hypothesis, states that there exists an external physical reality completely independent of us humans. When we derive the consequences of a theory, we introduce new concepts and words for them, such as “protons”, “atoms”, “molecules”, “cells” and “stars”, because they're convenient. It's important to remember, however, that it's we humans who create these concepts; in principle, everything could be calculated without this baggage.
But if we assume that reality exists independently of humans, then for a description to be complete, it must also be well-defined according to non-human entities – aliens or supercomputers, say – that lack any understanding of human concepts. That brings us to the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis, which states that our external physical reality is a mathematical structure.
Thursday, January 16. 2014
He begins:
A colleague who teaches in the humanities at the state college where I work also teaches at a nearby private college. In the colleague’s description, the private college is perpetually in the grip of a panic over the prospect of a drop in enrollment. The college’s administration has therefore instituted an unwritten but implacable policy the upshot of which is that the student is always right, no matter how absurd his complaint, and the consequence of which is that instructors must never tax students beyond an infantile minimum of scholarly exertion. Among the consequences of the consequence are that students refuse to undertake out-of-class reading assignments, fail quizzes related to those assignments, and then lodge complaints with chairs and deans against the instructor.
 JFK drove the nail in the coffin of mens' hats. Trouble is, hats are a good way to stay warm in winter. They say that, if your head and feet are warm, you're warm.
Unless you are bald or wear a crew-cut, hats give you hat hair and you look like a dork when you take it off.
It's a dilemma: comfort vs. vanity.
Do you guys wear hats when it's cold? If so, what hat?
Wednesday, January 15. 2014
"Science has become an international bully." I doubt that I will change my mind about this being the best essay of 2014, by Yale's computer scientist David Gelernter: The Closing of the Scientific Mind.
It's about subjectivity, mainly - being human, and a defense of Nagel in part. The essay is so rich and deadly-serious that it cannot really be taken in in one reading, and it is difficult to select a representative quote so I'll post a random one:
The dominant, mainstream view of mind nowadays among philosophers and many scientists is computationalism, also known as cognitivism. This view is inspired by the idea that minds are to brains as software is to computers. “Think of the brain,” writes Daniel Dennett of Tufts University in his influential 1991 Consciousness Explained, “as a computer.” In some ways this is an apt analogy. In others, it is crazy. At any rate, it is one of the intellectual milestones of modern times.
How did this “master analogy” become so influential?
Well, because we derive our metaphors from the world around us. Freud's first metapsychology was modeled on the steam engine. The essay deserves study. Take a Ritalin and dig into it.
Another:
Many scientists are proud of having booted man off his throne at the center of the universe and reduced him to just one more creature—an especially annoying one—in the great intergalactic zoo. That is their right. But when scientists use this locker-room braggadocio to belittle the human viewpoint, to belittle human life and values and virtues and civilization and moral, spiritual, and religious discoveries, which is all we human beings possess or ever will, they have outrun their own empiricism. They are abusing their cultural standing. Science has become an international bully.
Nowhere is its bullying more outrageous than in its assault on the phenomenon known as subjectivity...
In Search of Time’s Origin
Physicists are not certain that time exists:
Maldacena’s model provides more support than ever for the claim that, when it comes to cosmic ingredients, entanglement is more fundamental than space and time. Time, it turns out, is not present at the most basic layer of reality; it springs from fundamental seeds. But while emerging physics suggests time is an illusion, the forces that conjure it remain at large. “My intuition is that it will take more than just a re-working of quantum physics, it will require a breakthrough that will come totally out of left field,” Seiberg says. “Only time will tell what that revolution will be.”
Tuesday, January 14. 2014
 This was my high chair when I was a kid, used for all of my younger sibs too. My parents had gotten it from their grandparents and kept on using it, and I have no idea how old it is. It has survived many generations of use.
Maybe somebody like Sipp can date it.
It's one of the many items I retrieved from my parents' house. One cool thing about it is that you can climb up it to get into it.
Could this be manufactured today as child furniture? I doubt it. Too dangerous, vulnerable to lawsuits, etc. However, this fine thing will have a long future unless the Feds arrive to charge me with child endangerment.
If a dopey kid falls out of this chair and cracks its head open, it's just Darwinian, isn't it?
Nobody will save your stainless steel and plastic high chairs for posterity, but I think this one has a long future somewhere in the Bird Dog family.
 An amusing exchange
Lots of things are "natural." That's why we need the Ten Commandments - to be more than natural. Any animal can be natural.
Monday, January 13. 2014
Teaching Social Decorum in the US Air Force
"Arms off the table; Sit up straight; Don't talk with food in your mouth; Don't pick your teeth; Don't touch your face or your hair; Don't start before others; You're not a pig at the trough - converse and eat slowly; Don't slurp your soup; Ask people about themselves and don't talk about yourself; Look people in the eye and give a firm handshake; Don't bring up religion or politics, etc., etc." I have it all memorized.
Word to the wise: Please don't tell me about your kids. I only asked out of politeness, not interest. Tell me jokes and lies, be entertaining, and tell me something interesting.
Sunday, January 12. 2014
Samizdata found this gem by Rauch in The Atlantic. A couple of quotes:
"Introverts may be common, but they are also among the most misunderstood and aggrieved groups in America, possibly the world."
and
"Do you know someone who needs hours alone every day? Who loves quiet conversations about feelings or ideas, and can give a dynamite presentation to a big audience, but seems awkward in groups and maladroit at small talk? Who has to be dragged to parties and then needs the rest of the day to recuperate? Who growls or scowls or grunts or winces when accosted with pleasantries by people who are just trying to be nice? "
Read entire.
The Writing Life: Structure.
McPhee is near the top of my favorite non-fiction author list, so it's a treat to see him explain how he does it. One quote:
Showing in class the structural diagrams of “Travels in Georgia,” I used to recite, more or less, “It’s the story of a journey, and hence it represents a form of chronological structure, following that journey as it was made through space and time. There are structural alternatives, but for the story of a journey they can be unpromising and confusing when compared with a structure that is chronologically controlled.” Et cetera. Et cetera, in an annual mantra about what I thought to be axiomatic: journeys demand chronological structures. That was before 2002, when I went from a truck stop in Georgia to a product delivery elsewhere in Georgia to an interior wash in South Carolina to a hazmat manufacturer in North Carolina and on across the country to the state of Washington in a sixty-five-foot chemical tanker owned and driven by a guy named Don Ainsworth.
Think about it. Think how it appeared to the writer when it was still a mass of notes. The story goes from the East Coast to the West Coast of the United States. Has any other writer ever done that? Has any other writer ever not done that? Even I had done something like it in discussing North American geology in “Annals of the Former World.” You don’t need to remember much past Meriwether Lewis, George R. Stewart, John Steinbeck, Bernard DeVoto, Wallace Stegner, and William Least Heat-Moon in order to discern a beaten path. If you are starting a westbound piece in, say, Savannah, can you get past Biloxi without caffeinating the prose? If Baltimore—who is going to care if you get through Cumberland Gap? New York? The Hackensack River. If you start in Boston, turn around. In a structural sense, I turned around—once again reversing a prejudice. In telling this story, the chronology of the trip would not only be awkward but would also be a liability.
Ainsworth and I started in Bankhead, Georgia, where I joined him, and, as it happened, met him, after five years of correspondence. He had read my “Looking for a Ship,” and had written to me saying that if I was going to go out on the ocean with people like that I should go out on the road with people like him...
Saturday, January 11. 2014
Here's the Russian Folktale.
Why is it always a frog?
Wednesday, January 8. 2014
 Re-posted
This is just one small example of why these intertunnels, as Sipp terms them, are so cool.
I posted a pic of a nice oil lamp I picked up at a junk shop in Ohio. An alert reader promptly identified it as a Rayo lamp made by Bradley and Hubbard in Meriden, CT., around or before the turn of the century.
Apparently The Standard Oil Company (it was pure coincidence that I mentioned Rockefeller in my post) was pushing Bradley and Hubbard lamps to sell kerosene.
When I was a kid we had a barrel of kerosene with a spigot on a stand in the garage. Kerosene was useful for all sorts of things, including burning the garbage and for taking paint off your hands. Also, to make torches to burn the tent caterpillar things out of the fruit trees. Funny, haven't seen many of those lately. Kerosene has a good garage smell.
Then I learned this at Ebay:
Bradley & Hubbard was one of the inspirational leaders of the Roycroft movement in New York, well known for their arts and crafts industry. Walter Hubbard and his brother-in-law Nathaniel Lyman Bradley, started making cast iron clocks,tables,frames,andirons,chandlers and lamps. The company became Bradley and Hubbard manufacturing co in 1875. They turned out some of the most outstanding leaded glass lamps you'll find.
So they manufactured all sorts of lamps back when CT was a manufacturing center. There are all sorts of old Bradley and Hubbard lamps for sale online.
I also learned that Mr. Hubbard funded and helped design the 1800-acre Hubbard Park in Meriden, CT. He hired the great Frederick Law Olmstead to work on that park. And in the process of the above, readers informed me about Lehman's store in Kidron, Ohio. Kidron was settled in 1819 by Swiss Mennonites. Rural Ohio has lots of Amish and Mennonite communities.
What a cool world we live in.
Sunday, January 5. 2014
I really disliked this snotty article: An America That Never Was: Norman Rockwell's Vision
For one thing, he did paint "an America that was." I lived it, it was my growing-up world. Not everybody's, but mine for sure in New England. Church, barber shop, the town drunk, the town meeting, teasing the girls, backyard baseball, the classrooms, all of it. Call it fine art, pop-art, illustration, whatever. Was Watteau a "fine artist" or an interior decorator? I'd say the latter. Picasso? No and yes.
Rockwell documented the small, mundane moments of ordinary life. His pictures are great fun to look at in the same way that Breughel's are. Paint can accomplish much more than a camera ever can, but it's all either for religious or secular entertainment.
The Rockwell Museum is in Stockbridge, MA, if you are ever passing through there. Same town as Alice's Restaurant.
Saturday, January 4. 2014
Did Inequality Make Dasani Homeless? - The New York Times takes the wrong lesson from a real problem.
Why aren't these kids in foster homes?
Tuesday, December 31. 2013
It is true. Docs who use electronic records spend more time on the computer than with their patients. Even worse, the treatments are increasingly done by prescribed protocols instead of designed for the individual situation. Case in point: When treating a patient with dementia, electronic health records fall short.
Furthermore, those records are not private. This is what you get when government gets more involved with medical care - and anything else.
My patients know that they are not on an assembly line, and I'll keep it that way until they make it illegal. Doing things my way, however, requires that I take no government insurances. Just pay me for my time at around the same fee as a master electrician and below the rate of a fancy lawyer.
For Fitness, Intensity Matters
Almost everybody wants to stay strong, fit, attractive, and ready for life. Avoiding carbs can keep you shapely, but it won't keep you fit. Walking is fine for the elderly for whom a long walk can constitute "exertion," but, otherwise, keeping one's muscles alive doesn't need to take very much time if done right.
The government should provide all of us sedentary cubicle-monkeys and couch-sitters with trainers for a half-hour daily, just as North Korea does. Daily government monitoring of our life-styles via in-home NSA-supplied video systems would be a good start. We all need more free services and more help from our moral and intellectual superiors.
Monday, December 30. 2013
I was looking to see who builds the Shields 30. Turns out it's Cape Cod Shipbuilding.
It turns out that, among a number of other designs, they make the classic Cape Cod Catboat
and this classic Herreshoff:
As someone who worked for a firm for many years, I have been self-employed for a while. The costs of self-employment are high:
- office space, maintenance, and insurances, including buying your own Disability
- work insecurity, erratic income, and no unemployment
- no paid vacations
- no splitting Social Sec and Medicare taxes with an employer - I pay 100% of it
- I find my own medical insurance and pay 100% of it
- Nobody contributes to my IRA except me
- no collegiality
With all that, it's understandable that most people prefer being employees. So what's the benefit?
Freedom. But freedom takes guts.
Saturday, December 28. 2013
From Rudyard Kipling Was a Great American:
Kipling, who turned thirty in 1895, would likely have stayed in Brattleboro had not a bitter quarrel with his drunken lout of a brother-in-law put an abrupt end to his New England idyll. The Kiplings had built a beautiful Indian-style bungalow high above the Connecticut River (it is still there), and had hired Carrie’s boorish brother, Beatty Balestier, to care for the meadows and build a tennis court (also still there). Their quarrel over money ended in physical threats and a histrionic court hearing attended by so many spectators and reporters that the proceedings were moved to the largest assembly room in the town hall.
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