Friday, December 12. 2008
Thursday, December 11. 2008
 Is a Christmas Tree a fire hazard?
Yes, if it's near flame or frayed wires (as in photo). No, if it's kept watered, and you use common sense.
A commenter let us know about this comprehensive Calvin and Hobbes site. I didn't see the one we were looking for, but I did like this one: 
Christmas Dog 
Hannukah Venison Deer 
Wednesday, December 10. 2008
This is an annual re-posting These wreaths -- some 5,000 -- are donated by the Worcester Wreath Co. of Harrington, Maine. The owner, Merrill Worcester, not only provides the wreaths, but covers the trucking expense as well. He's done this since 1992. A wonderful guy. Also, most years, groups of Maine school kids combine an educational trip to DC with this event to help out. Making this even more remarkable is the fact that Harrington is in one the poorest parts of the state. 
Tuesday, December 9. 2008
Monday, December 8. 2008
A comment from an active-duty SEAL in our comments section, on our post about Jason Redman's Sign on the Door last week: For those of you who don't know Jason Redman, he was shot twice in the face and once in the arm while serving in western Iraq. He is making an amazing recovery undergoing his 4th surgery for facial reconstruction. His arm is slowly returning to full functionality. My name is Carl Higbie. I am a Navy Seal and had the opportunity to serve with Jason and have him as a close friend for the last 5 years. He is a model of how the teams work, and how we WILL NOT fail the American people. All we ask in return is that you support for what we are doing, and spread the support to those around you for that is what makes it worth it for us to hang our ass on the line for those of you how love this great nation. Thank you.
True American
Carl Higbie IV
Thanks for writing, Carl. And God Bless you and your buddies.
Saturday, December 6. 2008
via Dr. X. I'd be more interested in knowing how our American readers' kids do on this test than on how our readers do.
Dino revisits his topic of the "lazy, easy" lives we have been leading in recent years. Can we awaken from the dreams? One quote: “The American boy of 1854 stood closer to the year 1 than to the year 1900.” Soon, almost no one in America will have a visceral understanding of what 1854 was like, and what the heck Henry Adams was talking about.
Another: A typical boy of 1854 knew what farming was like and may well have worked on a farm, knew horses and other animals, and learned how to maintain and fix things, from houses to wagons to furniture. A typical young man of 1947 had been in the army, knew people who lived on farms, could tune and maintain his own car, and could change the fan belt on the refrigerator and refill it with Freon. Both the boy and the young man had some feel for the technologies that were developing and changing around them, since the technologies were often sized on a human scale and involved mechanical processes that they had some acquaintance with. To an important extent, this is no longer true. You can’t fix an iPod the way you can fix a record player; indeed you can’t even easily open up an iPod to understand it, as you could unscrew the turntable cover to figure out how 33 1/3 rpm became 45 rpm. Nor can you fool around with a Toyota Prius the same way you could try to replace a 283 with a 327 in a ‘57 Chevy.
Read the whole thing.
Does the average person really lie three times per ten minutes of conversation? If so, I may too trusting, or too gullible, for this world. Psychologist Paul Ekman studies emotions and deception, and has Evaluating Truth training seminars. He is the expert on micro-expression of emotion. Some of his online training programs are here. Cool stuff. Useful, too. A new FOX TV show based on Ekman's work, Lie to Me, will begin airing in January. From the clip below, it looks to be darn interesting:
Friday, December 5. 2008
I have skied quite a bit and have had my share of fun/dread with some reckless things and silly drops, but never experienced these drops of 210, 230, and 245 feet (h/t, Theo). If I had, I would not be here to post this:
-
 One of my personal rules since my formal education ended has been to make sure I learn a minimum of ten interesting things per day.
I learned about CD rot today. Indeed nothing is permanent except (we, or some of us, believe) God. The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that our whole universe gizmo-thingy is set up that way. As it happened, last night, at a dinner out, a hunting buddy mentioned re-reading St. Augustine's chapter in The Confessions about time. My confession was that I did not remember that chapter at all. I do recall learning that God is a timeless entity and that God's time is not our time - but not in Augustine. And I also confess that the entire subject of time is a mystery to me. Anyway, here's a short essay on Augustine on the subject of time: Time as a Psalm.
Thursday, December 4. 2008
Is "success" luck or pluck? Volokh considers Gladwell's book. Luck or pluck? Well, we all know that we make our own luck...but bad luck is never our fault. I think it's one of those black-and-white pseudo questions, like Nature vs. Nurture. Life is more complicated than that, and everybody has his own definition of success in a free country. And everybody fails, to some degree, in meeting his life goals whatever they may be. (My life goals happen to be to have a relationship with God, to be honest and honest with myself, to be close with my family and to give them a hand when needed, to read lots of books, to pay my hefty bills, to have some pals I can count on, to have a pleasant and civilized environment to live in, to make some efforts for the things I care about, and to have some good recreation - which includes guns, horses, golf, Scotch whiskey, ceegars, and posting on Maggie's - among other things. That's about it. I am a happy and frequently unhappy product of my culture. Saving the world is above my pay grade narcissism quotient.) Some people equate being rich (defined how? Some would term me prosperous, and some not) as success. I do not. Anyway, Wilkinson also takes a look at Gladwell and income inequality. One quote: If you understand that prices convey information about supply and demand, and that a wage is a price, then you understand that differences in wages for different kinds of labor convey information about the supply of different kinds of labor relative to demand. Wage inequalities are how people can know what’s a “high-value profession” and what isn’t. It guides our choices about the kinds of skills to seek. We need that guidance because effort isn’t enough. You can work as hard as you like in a low-wage job, and you’ll still be in a low-wage job.
Wednesday, December 3. 2008
Downtown Manhattan, from the Brooklyn Bridge walkway this weekend. Statue of Liberty in the distance on the left. 
Tuesday, December 2. 2008
It's titled The Superorganism. It's discussed here. (h/t, NRO). Marx and ants. Listen to the interview.
The other day, News Junkie linked (in jest) to the Dyson, a $400 upright vacuum cleaner. From the page:
Dyson Telescopic Reachâ„¢
DC 14 Animal Upright Vacuum
The reason it costs so much is because it also acts as an animal pest control device, hence the name. Stick the long Telescopic Reachâ„¢ tube into a mouse hole and it'll snake along inside the wall, sucking up mice, rats, ticks, termites, and other assorted wall critters. The reviews say it works pretty well although you have to keep the canister emptied or the frantic clawing from the trapped mice tends to get on one's nerves.
However...
If you'd like to buy a normal kickass vacuum cleaner (and not go around killing innocent wall mice in the process), this is the one:
It's a Bissell Lift-Off. As an upright vac, it's got the usual power-mower brush built into the head that combs a carpet clean. 12 amps provides oodles of suction power.
But wait! What about those pesky cobwebs up in the corners of the ceiling?
No problem:
The canister pops off the chassis and becomes a hand-held portable. Pretty slick, eh? How they did it is very clever. It's one of those things that as soon as you see it you think, "How come everybody doesn't do it this way?"
Mine's a few years old and they've updated the line. The new one looks like this. It appears to be identical except for color. If you shop around, search for "Bissell Lift-Off".
More pics & info on this clever appliance below the fold.
Monday, December 1. 2008
Just a few labor charges I noted in my wanderings over the weekend: TV, camera, and electronics repair: $200/hr
Auto repair and maintenance: $125/hr
Gun shop: $90/hr
Computer repair: $225/hr It's a good idea to have a skill. My firm needs to reconsider our fee structure.
Sunday, November 30. 2008
 A sign on the door of wounded SEAL Lieut. Jason Redman at Walter Reid Hospital:
"Attention to all who enter here. If you are coming into this room with sorrow or to feel sorry for my wounds, go elsewhere. The wounds I received I got in a job I love, doing it for people I love, supporting the freedom of a country I deeply love. I am incredibly tough and will make a full recovery. What is full? That is the absolute utmost physically my body has the ability to recover. Then I will push that about 20 percent further through sheer mental tenacity. This room you are about to enter is a room of fun, optimism, and intense rapid regrowth. If you are not prepared for that, go elsewhere."
 "Fresh antiques made daily" by our friend at Sippican Cottage. His biz site is Sippican Furniture.com.
This is serious handmade country furniture made by a Yankee fellow who knows wood inside and out - not department store stuff. Solid wood on antique designs. Scroll down past the Victorian Christmas here at The Denver Post for an appreciation of Sipp's work. Yes, he can deliver before Christmas, and he'll build you anything you want. (He's having lots of fun building me a large Spanish Cedar-lined Tiger Maple humidor.) My next (post-Christmas) project for him may be a round kitchen table to seat 10.
 Many are advising me to buy this camera, or one of their TZ line.
Why do people always want me to buy stuff? I like stuff but, being a stingy Yankee, I hate spending money, and I hate getting onto the mo bigga betta bandwagon. Well, more accurately, I should say that am ambivalent about it. (When it comes to guns, mo is betta until it's time to clean and oil them.) Anyway, I saw they have them at Costco (where the optician is a heck of a nice fellow). I do not need a SLR, because I would never learn how to take advantage of its capacities because I have terminal ADD and, also, was dropped on my head too many times as a kid. Maybe something for my Santa list...unless Obama gives me one first.
Thanks to Vanderleun for pointing out a Captain's blog, Flight Level 390. It gave me a good sense of what pilots are doing up there in the cockpit.
Saturday, November 29. 2008
 Gene Expressions takes another look at Cultural Regions of the United States. One quote:
One of the obvious inferences that can be made from the data is that New Englanders shaped the culture and polities of many regions of the United States where they were a minority. Boston was self-consciously the Athens of America. Not only does this region have many elite universities, but the more prominent state institutions such as the Universities of Michigan and Wisconsin were started in part by Yankees who valued these sorts of public investments. The role of New Englanders in primary education throughout the United States is well known, Puritan America may have been the world's first universally literate society, and they were intent on spreading this trait across every group into the United States.
Though New Englanders were often outnumbered by later waves of immigration from the Upland South (e.g., Scots-Irish), as in the Pacific Northwest's Willamette Valley or Northern California, they were overrepresented among the intelligentsia and captains of industry. In the western Upper Midwest Yankees were absorbed by a sea of Northern European immigration, but for several generations they retained a hold on the cultural and capital classes. One might contend that many of the complaints about the "brainwashing" which occurs at elite universities of bright but impressionable young men and women is simply the latest manifestation of the conflict between numerically superior Middle America and the elitist New England outlook (even outside of New England, see Leland Stanford's biography).
Tuesday, November 25. 2008
 Our occasional commenter "Retriever" has had her own blog up and running for a little while. She writes (and thinks) well.
Check it out: The Retriever. It's about life. Yes, the photo is a tough Chessie, which seemed appropriate.
Monday, November 24. 2008
h/t, Theo. 
This reminds me of the old genie joke: 60 year-old guy tells genie that he wants his wife to be 30 years younger than he is. Genie: OK, Poof - You're 90.
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