I see this morning that Trump is now encouraging the House to vote to release the Epstein files. I've gotten really paranoid over the last 10 months, so I simply assume that's posturing, and Pam Bondi has already told him that her response will be, "There's an ongoing investigation and the DOJ never releases evidence in an ongoing investigation, not even to Congress."
Demonstrating my own biases, Klobuchar wouldn't have a chance. The BosWash urban corridor Democratic mafia hated that Reid and Pelosi attained the top positions in each chamber. They're not going to allow that to happen again.
Manchin screwed his own party not long before deciding not to run for another term and his senate seat is now held by a Republican. How is that supposed to be good for Democrats?
The man would have been 77 on election day if he had run again. Can't we let the olds retire? The fact that no Democrat who doesn't have the sort of name recognition that Manchin had in WV (his uncle held statewide office for years; Joe was WV Secretary of State and Governor before he was a Senator) can win is a different problem.
Manchin voted for every nomination Obama and Biden sent to the Senate. While Biden was in office, Manchin eventually voted for every major bill. Sometimes he needed an earmark: the price for his vote on the infrastructure bill was to approve a NG pipeline that ran from the gas fields in WV to a market hub in Virginia. He wasn't nearly as bad as, eg, Joe Lieberman from Connecticut.
My next thought was that lots (most?) pop stars are performers, and their songs are generally written by someone else.
Linda Ronstadt always maintained that she had no talent as a songwriter. Lots of very good songwriters wrote material with her specifically in mind, though.
The election I was watching was the Public Services Commission elections in Georgia. No Democrat has won a PSC election since 2020. The two Dems both won yesterday, by a bit better than 60/40 margins. What I don't know is whether this was a local kitchen table issue (six Georgia Power rate hikes approved in the last two years), a broader direction issue (the Commission has been pro nuclear and fossil fuels, anti renewables), or a continued red-to-blue shift in Georgia generally (like some western states, Georgia has a lot of younger educated adults moving in, which eventually matters).
The people who advocate private charity replacing government payments usually have no real idea of the relative scales of what the government does, and what private charity could do. Ignore Social Security on the (incorrect) theory that it's a mandated savings program. Medicare and Medicaid combined are more than four times the size of all charitable giving each year. Private charity could cover income support spending in normal years, but would be bankrupted trying to cover the surge that happens during a recession.
I was in the high school band, and we did everything from marching to concerts of all sorts to pep band to classical ensembles to the music when the drama people did a musical. The band director was a retired master sergeant from one of the US Army bands. In addition to teaching us a lot about music, he also instilled things like "excellence is a habit", "if we all succeed, I've succeeded", and an understated "we're just that damned good". When he retired hundreds of former band members from all over the country went to the picnic.
The only insurrection I know about is when I was a senior, and he was out of town so a couple of us were running the pep band for the Friday night basketball game, and the cheerleaders got to do the only performance of their dance/cheer routine for the "Jeremiah Was a Bullfrog Polka". The backstory to that might be worth a post :^)
My favorite of the projects took a problem from telephony switching, multiple pieces from computer science (a very peculiar virtual machine and a bunch of compiler theory), and some odd math to prove a couple of critical conditions actually held. I did get to publish a paper in a special topics issue of an IEEE journal. And present at a small conference, where one of the computer science demi-gods of that era stopped me and told me it was by far the most interesting paper at the conference. I never did find out why he was there.
A friend said it would take more than a minor miracle to find a school that (a) had a telephony group that would vouch for the difficulty of the problem, (b) a CS department that would accept the odd virtual machine as legitimate, and (c) math and CS departments that were on speaking terms.
By the time I did that work I had come to grips with the fact that I'd never be more than a pseudo-academic.
Wu, as spoken in Shanghai, has five tones. Standard Mandarin has four. Cantonese has six. In each case there are dialects which differ.
I remember reading once that Vietnamese was a seven-tone language, and the reason French had been quickly adopted and hung on so long was that little kids could use that while they were figuring out Vietnamese. I have no idea if any of that's true.
If we had more cross-disciplinary appointments and more interdisciplinary collaboration, we’d probably have better structures in place for working through these sorts of blind spots and assumptions.... Alas, that is not the model on which academia currently runs.
My last position during my technical career was a research job where everyone just assumed I must have a PhD. Occasionally this came up at lunchtime discussions. At one of those, one of the people who did have a doctorate made the observation that yes, Mike had done multiple projects that would easily qualify for a PhD in terms of originality and impact, but all cut across multiple disciplines so no department would ever accept them.
Latest birthday doodle using some of the "little monster" characters from the fairy tale. These have a family business as "The World's Greatest Spies." They all wear an eye patch over their left eye whether they need it or not.
I had a cavity filled today. Four hours on from when they started, my upper lip on that side is still numb. Ah, the joys of trying to drink from a glass when you can only feel it on one side.
Speaking of high-definition scans of old art, has anyone else looked at the varnish crackle in the scan of Rembrandt's Night Watch? Literally, you can look down into the cracks. The resolution is 200 dots per millimeter, or about 5100 dpi. They used a $48,000 Hasselblad 100MP camera and a $6,000 macro lens. The museum doesn't talk about how much the positioning framework cost to build, or how long to write the software that checked the focus on every one of the ~8,500 individual photos that were pieced together to make the final image.
Ya know, it was really handy to be able to preview comments. Just to keep control over italics.
At least in my browser, the comment edit box properly shows me all of the text formatting. Preview would seem to be redundant, at least for that purpose.
The writer’s thesis was that the US would get better quality presidents if we had a powerless monarchy to be the focus for the people who are attracted by shiny object, which would make a president’s role more that of a policy wonk.
I don't want a President who is a policy wonk. I want a President who's good at administering policy set by Congress. A policy wonk President who doesn't get what he wants from Congress is tempted to find ways around them. Trump has yielded to that temptation, bigly.
Look at how the majority of the most geographically racially segregated cities in the US are Northern – Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis,…
The Black population in all of those arrived as part of the two Great Migrations between 1910 and 1970. Millions of Black people moved out of the South looking for opportunities in the growing industrial cities in northern states. Unsurprisingly, they established neighborhoods and communities of their own. The patterns set then continue today.
When I was in high school I poked through some of the historical patterns in Omaha, NE. Successive waves of immigration each started in South Omaha, centered on the large stockyards: Irish, Black, Italian, and Central/Eastern Europeans. As second- and third-generation kids left that area, they scattered all over Omaha. Except Blacks, who stuck together in the Near North Side.
My main criticism of the (D)’s over the last, say, 40 years is that they’ve neglected the areas that aren’t what they see as their places of strength. Rural areas, much of the south, much of the mountain west, to some degree the industrial midwest.
The two big political geography stories of the last 35 years are the huge swing from blue to red in the Midwest, and the corresponding swing from red to blue in the West. The 8-state Mountain West now has one more blue US Senator than the 13-state Midwest. The entire 13-state West has nine more than the Midwest. 35 years ago -- 1990 -- Republicans in California were competitive: legislative seats at the state and national level were close to equally divided, and that year Feinstein lost the election for governor.
Somewhat related to the grain thing was the difference in public opinion about the war in Iowa as you went from SE (the longest settled) to the NW (still very much frontier). The last Indian raid in Iowa occurred in 1861. Eastern Iowa sent a high per-capita number of Union soldiers. The prevailing attitude in NW Iowa was that the war was a distraction and we should let the Confederacy go so the Army could get back to its real job of exterminating the Indians.
Mrs. Helkins' 5th-grade Iowa history class was... unusual.
Trump goes online and runs his mouth (fingers?) about make coal great again. The MSM covers his orders to keep a big coal-fired power plant in Michigan running. How do you get coverage, online or otherwise, for the other side of that story? (1) The Dept of the Interior tried to auction rights to 167M tons of coal on federal lands in Montana last week. The only bid was for $185,000 -- yes, less than a penny per ton -- and was rejected. As a result, the follow-on auction for land in Wyoming was postponed indefinitely. (2) The LA Dept of Water and Power announced they would retire their last coal-fired generation in Utah next month, as scheduled. (3) My little local power authority has days like the one shown in this figure.
I don't know why they run the trucks-in-the-mountains ads in the rest of the country. In the 11-state contiguous western states, the vast majority of the population lives in urban/suburban areas but can drive to the mountains in less than an hour.
I've long said that the proper picture to represent the modern West should look like this. In this case San Francisco, and the snow is rarer in Las Vegas and Phoenix, but it still happens occasionally even there. Now that the Census Bureau has admitted it's the 21st century and we can do density based on actual built area rather than county area, the western region is very narrowly denser than the Northeast, and both are much denser than the Midwest and South.
The question would seem to be: why is it Southern rural culture which is the model? Why not the Midwest? Or the Mountain West?
The South put enormous effort into creating the whole Lost Cause myth, and as part of that emphasized lots of cultural signals: the accent, the cuisine, the whole "southern hospitality" thing. Outside of some cities, the Midwest "accent" is all about not being able to tell where someone is from. The Mountain West is even more so. Southern fried chicken. BBQ. Grits. Greens. Black-eyed peas. All sorts of Cajun. Wash day beans. Buttermilk biscuits. Cornbread as a routine thing.
One piece of economics related to the Civil War, and being from Illinois Lincoln was very much aware of it, was shipping on the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. By 1860, farmers from Ohio through the eastern parts of Iowa produced large amounts of excess grain. The bulk of the excess went down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to the ports around New Orleans, and by ship from there. Those farmers were very much afraid a separate Confederacy would impose large transit fees and ruin their business.
During the debates in Parliament on whether Britain should enter the American Civil War -- and on which side -- much was made of exactly how dependent Britain was on grain imported from those states, and that there were no alternate sources.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Your quest begins now!”
I see this morning that Trump is now encouraging the House to vote to release the Epstein files. I've gotten really paranoid over the last 10 months, so I simply assume that's posturing, and Pam Bondi has already told him that her response will be, "There's an ongoing investigation and the DOJ never releases evidence in an ongoing investigation, not even to Congress."
On “Spelunking for fun and profit”
Demonstrating my own biases, Klobuchar wouldn't have a chance. The BosWash urban corridor Democratic mafia hated that Reid and Pelosi attained the top positions in each chamber. They're not going to allow that to happen again.
"
Manchin screwed his own party not long before deciding not to run for another term and his senate seat is now held by a Republican. How is that supposed to be good for Democrats?
The man would have been 77 on election day if he had run again. Can't we let the olds retire? The fact that no Democrat who doesn't have the sort of name recognition that Manchin had in WV (his uncle held statewide office for years; Joe was WV Secretary of State and Governor before he was a Senator) can win is a different problem.
Manchin voted for every nomination Obama and Biden sent to the Senate. While Biden was in office, Manchin eventually voted for every major bill. Sometimes he needed an earmark: the price for his vote on the infrastructure bill was to approve a NG pipeline that ran from the gas fields in WV to a market hub in Virginia. He wasn't nearly as bad as, eg, Joe Lieberman from Connecticut.
On “Weekend Music Thread #04 John Mackey”
My next thought was that lots (most?) pop stars are performers, and their songs are generally written by someone else.
Linda Ronstadt always maintained that she had no talent as a songwriter. Lots of very good songwriters wrote material with her specifically in mind, though.
On “Still I Rise”
The election I was watching was the Public Services Commission elections in Georgia. No Democrat has won a PSC election since 2020. The two Dems both won yesterday, by a bit better than 60/40 margins. What I don't know is whether this was a local kitchen table issue (six Georgia Power rate hikes approved in the last two years), a broader direction issue (the Commission has been pro nuclear and fossil fuels, anti renewables), or a continued red-to-blue shift in Georgia generally (like some western states, Georgia has a lot of younger educated adults moving in, which eventually matters).
On “People and poliltics”
The people who advocate private charity replacing government payments usually have no real idea of the relative scales of what the government does, and what private charity could do. Ignore Social Security on the (incorrect) theory that it's a mandated savings program. Medicare and Medicaid combined are more than four times the size of all charitable giving each year. Private charity could cover income support spending in normal years, but would be bankrupted trying to cover the surge that happens during a recession.
On “Horrifying stuff”
Core Tenets of American Culture
The "rugged individualist" myth has been the source of more suffering in America than almost anything else.
On “Weekend Music Thread #04 John Mackey”
I was in the high school band, and we did everything from marching to concerts of all sorts to pep band to classical ensembles to the music when the drama people did a musical. The band director was a retired master sergeant from one of the US Army bands. In addition to teaching us a lot about music, he also instilled things like "excellence is a habit", "if we all succeed, I've succeeded", and an understated "we're just that damned good". When he retired hundreds of former band members from all over the country went to the picnic.
The only insurrection I know about is when I was a senior, and he was out of town so a couple of us were running the pep band for the Friday night basketball game, and the cheerleaders got to do the only performance of their dance/cheer routine for the "Jeremiah Was a Bullfrog Polka". The backstory to that might be worth a post :^)
On “Ramsayer, Korea and me”
My favorite of the projects took a problem from telephony switching, multiple pieces from computer science (a very peculiar virtual machine and a bunch of compiler theory), and some odd math to prove a couple of critical conditions actually held. I did get to publish a paper in a special topics issue of an IEEE journal. And present at a small conference, where one of the computer science demi-gods of that era stopped me and told me it was by far the most interesting paper at the conference. I never did find out why he was there.
A friend said it would take more than a minor miracle to find a school that (a) had a telephony group that would vouch for the difficulty of the problem, (b) a CS department that would accept the odd virtual machine as legitimate, and (c) math and CS departments that were on speaking terms.
By the time I did that work I had come to grips with the fact that I'd never be more than a pseudo-academic.
"
Wu, as spoken in Shanghai, has five tones. Standard Mandarin has four. Cantonese has six. In each case there are dialects which differ.
I remember reading once that Vietnamese was a seven-tone language, and the reason French had been quickly adopted and hung on so long was that little kids could use that while they were figuring out Vietnamese. I have no idea if any of that's true.
"
If we had more cross-disciplinary appointments and more interdisciplinary collaboration, we’d probably have better structures in place for working through these sorts of blind spots and assumptions.... Alas, that is not the model on which academia currently runs.
My last position during my technical career was a research job where everyone just assumed I must have a PhD. Occasionally this came up at lunchtime discussions. At one of those, one of the people who did have a doctorate made the observation that yes, Mike had done multiple projects that would easily qualify for a PhD in terms of originality and impact, but all cut across multiple disciplines so no department would ever accept them.
On “I got depressed so I bought hydrangeas”
Latest birthday doodle using some of the "little monster" characters from the fairy tale. These have a family business as "The World's Greatest Spies." They all wear an eye patch over their left eye whether they need it or not.
"
...going numb...
I had a cavity filled today. Four hours on from when they started, my upper lip on that side is still numb. Ah, the joys of trying to drink from a glass when you can only feel it on one side.
On “Something Different”
Speaking of high-definition scans of old art, has anyone else looked at the varnish crackle in the scan of Rembrandt's Night Watch? Literally, you can look down into the cracks. The resolution is 200 dots per millimeter, or about 5100 dpi. They used a $48,000 Hasselblad 100MP camera and a $6,000 macro lens. The museum doesn't talk about how much the positioning framework cost to build, or how long to write the software that checked the focus on every one of the ~8,500 individual photos that were pieced together to make the final image.
"
Yes, the base iPhone 17.
On “Monarchy in the UK”
Ya know, it was really handy to be able to preview comments. Just to keep control over italics.
At least in my browser, the comment edit box properly shows me all of the text formatting. Preview would seem to be redundant, at least for that purpose.
"
The writer’s thesis was that the US would get better quality presidents if we had a powerless monarchy to be the focus for the people who are attracted by shiny object, which would make a president’s role more that of a policy wonk.
I don't want a President who is a policy wonk. I want a President who's good at administering policy set by Congress. A policy wonk President who doesn't get what he wants from Congress is tempted to find ways around them. Trump has yielded to that temptation, bigly.
"
I expect the monarchy to survive as long as it's a big tourist draw for Americans.
On “The South shall writhe again”
Look at how the majority of the most geographically racially segregated cities in the US are Northern – Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis,…
The Black population in all of those arrived as part of the two Great Migrations between 1910 and 1970. Millions of Black people moved out of the South looking for opportunities in the growing industrial cities in northern states. Unsurprisingly, they established neighborhoods and communities of their own. The patterns set then continue today.
When I was in high school I poked through some of the historical patterns in Omaha, NE. Successive waves of immigration each started in South Omaha, centered on the large stockyards: Irish, Black, Italian, and Central/Eastern Europeans. As second- and third-generation kids left that area, they scattered all over Omaha. Except Blacks, who stuck together in the Near North Side.
On “Politics thread”
My main criticism of the (D)’s over the last, say, 40 years is that they’ve neglected the areas that aren’t what they see as their places of strength. Rural areas, much of the south, much of the mountain west, to some degree the industrial midwest.
The two big political geography stories of the last 35 years are the huge swing from blue to red in the Midwest, and the corresponding swing from red to blue in the West. The 8-state Mountain West now has one more blue US Senator than the 13-state Midwest. The entire 13-state West has nine more than the Midwest. 35 years ago -- 1990 -- Republicans in California were competitive: legislative seats at the state and national level were close to equally divided, and that year Feinstein lost the election for governor.
On “The South shall writhe again”
Somewhat related to the grain thing was the difference in public opinion about the war in Iowa as you went from SE (the longest settled) to the NW (still very much frontier). The last Indian raid in Iowa occurred in 1861. Eastern Iowa sent a high per-capita number of Union soldiers. The prevailing attitude in NW Iowa was that the war was a distraction and we should let the Confederacy go so the Army could get back to its real job of exterminating the Indians.
Mrs. Helkins' 5th-grade Iowa history class was... unusual.
On “Politics thread”
Trump goes online and runs his mouth (fingers?) about make coal great again. The MSM covers his orders to keep a big coal-fired power plant in Michigan running. How do you get coverage, online or otherwise, for the other side of that story? (1) The Dept of the Interior tried to auction rights to 167M tons of coal on federal lands in Montana last week. The only bid was for $185,000 -- yes, less than a penny per ton -- and was rejected. As a result, the follow-on auction for land in Wyoming was postponed indefinitely. (2) The LA Dept of Water and Power announced they would retire their last coal-fired generation in Utah next month, as scheduled. (3) My little local power authority has days like the one shown in this figure.
On “The South shall writhe again”
I don't know why they run the trucks-in-the-mountains ads in the rest of the country. In the 11-state contiguous western states, the vast majority of the population lives in urban/suburban areas but can drive to the mountains in less than an hour.
I've long said that the proper picture to represent the modern West should look like this. In this case San Francisco, and the snow is rarer in Las Vegas and Phoenix, but it still happens occasionally even there. Now that the Census Bureau has admitted it's the 21st century and we can do density based on actual built area rather than county area, the western region is very narrowly denser than the Northeast, and both are much denser than the Midwest and South.
"
The question would seem to be: why is it Southern rural culture which is the model? Why not the Midwest? Or the Mountain West?
The South put enormous effort into creating the whole Lost Cause myth, and as part of that emphasized lots of cultural signals: the accent, the cuisine, the whole "southern hospitality" thing. Outside of some cities, the Midwest "accent" is all about not being able to tell where someone is from. The Mountain West is even more so. Southern fried chicken. BBQ. Grits. Greens. Black-eyed peas. All sorts of Cajun. Wash day beans. Buttermilk biscuits. Cornbread as a routine thing.
"
One piece of economics related to the Civil War, and being from Illinois Lincoln was very much aware of it, was shipping on the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. By 1860, farmers from Ohio through the eastern parts of Iowa produced large amounts of excess grain. The bulk of the excess went down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to the ports around New Orleans, and by ship from there. Those farmers were very much afraid a separate Confederacy would impose large transit fees and ruin their business.
During the debates in Parliament on whether Britain should enter the American Civil War -- and on which side -- much was made of exactly how dependent Britain was on grain imported from those states, and that there were no alternate sources.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.