This morning I flew from Paris to Newark. Thanks to physics, I should probably change the spelling to "moooooooooooorrrrrrrrrrrrnnnnnnnnnnniiiiiinnnnnnnngggggggggg".
At that latitude, about 47 degrees north, the airplane's angular velocity (number of degrees longitude crossed per unit of time) is very close to the earth's angular velocity, but in the opposite direction.
One consequence is the apparent fixing of the sun in the sky. In this case, we had an early sunrise that lasted for seven hours.
Another consequence, if you time it just right, is you get to see the International Space Station.
Twice.
Wednesday, July 30, 2014
Friday, July 25, 2014
Hand-Me-Down
And now for something completely different.
The man-child will be turning 20 in a couple months. So I started thinking about what he might like in the way of a birthday present. Since I am a mere guy, my gift ideas are typically late-to-need, and frequently rubbish.
But this time even my dodgy skills were sufficient to grasp the obvious: a car.
He goes to a large college, so getting out to do even simple errands like food shopping are a multi-hour chore involving schlepping groceries on public transport.
And dating. Feminism be damned, there are at least two things young women expect: the guy will drive, and he will be taller. At just a tick shy of six feet and still growing, my son has the latter knocked, but comes up short in the former.
As it happens, deciding on which was just as easy as what: a BMW.
Woah, Piketty fans. Calm down. You bangers on the inequality drum, you reflexive looters, give it a rest for a second.
Born in 1991, it is old enough to drink, which would bring a whole new meaning to DUI. TOSWIPIAW and I bought it before we got married. Both critters came home from the hospital in it. With more than 220,000 miles on the clock, it has traveled nearly the equivalent of going around the world nine times.
This thing is seriously old.
Since it is twice the age of the median US car it is clearly a rare survivor; the vast majority of its peers have long since gone to the knacker's yard. For those that remain, many, perhaps most, have emotionally attached owners.
I'm not one. Really. No, really.
Afflicted with a Mittyesque notion of being, except for profound deficits in bravery and talent, a Grand Prix race car driver, I have always been drawn to cars with sporting pretensions. And possessing a modicum of mechanical aptitude has meant I could make tolerable a series of cars that others with more sense would shy away from. In order, starting when I was in college: MGA, Porsche 911, Alpha Romeo, Mazda RX-7, Triumph TR-6, and another 911.
Average age when they fell into my grease stained mitts, 13 years. I kept most for six to 12 years (I held on to the Alfa for only six months; long enough to have my fun, dumping it before it caught fire.). The second 911 was 27 when I sold it in 2007. The reason in each case was clear: I was various combinations of unable and unwilling to pay for anything newer. (BTW, each was a daily driver.)
So this car, a 1992 325i, the first new car I, 37 at the time, had ever owned, is either another example of thrift, or further manifestation of illness. Also, and I'm not sure which theory this supports most, underneath its commonplace sedan exterior it is seriously fast, with razor sharp handling, brilliant brakes, rear wheel drive, and a manual transmission.
As if that isn't enough for a mere car, it also bears lessons in economics and social inequality. And road trip.
A car, like most material goods, is a wasting asset. Just driving one off the lot will take 10% off its resale value. Within a half dozen years, no matter how delicately driven and meticulously maintained, it will be worth about a third of the gaping hole buying the thing left in your wallet. This is why, in the mere terms of dollars and cents, it saves much more of both to buy a 2-3 yr old car; or, if one must buy new, to keep the thing a bloody long time.
Unfortunately, no matter how pristine even the most fastidious owner keeps a car, its market value will inevitably decline below the cost of a major repair. The critical problem here is that an old car with, say, a newly rebuilt engine is worth scarcely anything more than the same car with an old, but still functioning, engine. Spending $4,000 on rejuvenating that mechanical festival of suck-squeeze-bang-blow will be no help at all should you be rear ended by someone finding out they cannot, in fact, successfully juggle texting and driving. The imprudent juggler's insurance company will pay out the market value of the car, and not a dime for the engine.
And that is in addition to the more obvious accumulation of failures as a car ages. As the miles and years accumulate, decrepitude and increasing unreliability make the sum of remaining market value and ongoing repair costs better spent on selling or knackering the thing and replacing it with something newer.
The market obviously believes this optimum tradeoff to be at 11.4 years, hence the current median age for cars.
So how does keeping a car twice as old make any sense at all?
Without some backstory, it doesn't. When the car was seven years old, a mere child, I heard about premature water pump failures. Uncharacteristically and unfathomably, I didn't jump all over replacing it. I think I convinced myself the pump would give signs of impending failure.
It did. Just like an earthquake.
I paid the price, first with my very annoyed wife stuck on the side of the road. Towing: $60. Water pump: $35. Unfortunately, that isn't the end of it. Beknownst to me, the failure was fairly violent. The bearing had seized, bending the housing, shattering the impeller, derailing the drive belt and running the fan into the radiator. Far less obvious, a piece of the shattered impeller found its way into a water passage, insidiously causing uneven heating between the #2 and #3 cylinders, making them ever so slightly oval. Two years later, at 155,000 miles, and at least 75,000 miles before what should have been its time, the engine was junk. Since cars are designed to last about as long as their most costly component, at the time it still made sense to replace the engine. However, doing so threw a monkey wrench into the car's lifecycle.
Moreover, aside from big ticket items, I almost never have to pay a mechanic. That cuts maintenance costs by more than half. Add to that a reasonably finely tuned eye and ear for things getting dodgy, and a pilot's deeply ingrained preference, reinforced by experience, to replace things before they fail, this car reached its 22nd birthday in unusually good fettle. It wasn't an eyesore, had no accumulation of aggravating gremlins, and depreciation was a done deal.
With the critters gone at school, we had more cars than drivers at home. Rather than sell one just to buy another, I decided to give my son the statistical outlier. Makes sense, right?
Ummmmm, perhaps not.
Being blessed with a spacious garage, a reasonably extensive array of tools, and decades of learning from mistakes, I can take things as they come. However, since my son has none of those things, and goes to school 2200 driving miles from home (a great many bringing "trackless" to "wilderness"), I had to take a rather more comprehensive approach.
Because the engine in these cars has a life expectancy of about 230,000 miles, the rest of the car is designed with that in mind. Among other things, that includes suspension bits that most people never even think about: the bushings and ball joints separating modern cars' ride and handling from that of Conestoga wagons. Beyond that, the car's air conditioning had quit working several years ago. That verges on irrelevance up here in Alaska, but practically constitutes a life support system in eastern Washington, where temps are routinely in the high double digits from late spring to early fall.
The parts list came to $3500. Brakes, struts, shocks, control arms, tie rods, unanticipated drive shafts, bushing sets, and an AC compressor (just to name the big chunks) have a way of adding up. Onto that monetary bonfire that would leave even Congress in awe, toss another $2500 for persuading professionals to dedicate their time, expertise and specialty tools to do things like pressing old bushings and bearings out and new ones in, and a four wheel alignment after it was all said and done.
So how does putting $6,000 into a car worth only $3,000 to begin with make any sense at all, unless prefixed with "non"?
Especially since I have no affection for the thing. Really, I don't.
In pure monetary terms, it is looking stupid-ish. For $9000, there is a decent array of cars with half the mileage to be had. All gutless, mushy, slush box, front-wheel drive econoboxes, to be sure. Against that, all the running gear on this near-antique is now newer than than the econobox alternative. And it's a known quantity. So there's that.
But still, at best the margin is razor thin, and only a fool ignores loss risk. To balance the books, the car has to last 42,000 more miles, and have nothing more than normal operating and maintenance costs along the way. Why? That yields depreciation of 15 cents per mile, which is what it had going in.
Of course, mere dollars and cents are rarely the total measure of economic decisions. The joy of working with my son on an extensive and complex task is impossible to measure. And the knowledge he gained will save him buckets o' bux along the way.
So, (Dodgy Economic Decision) + (Unquantifiable Rationalizations) = TOTAL WIN!
Funny, that's how progressive math works. Start with the desired answer, and mathify as required.
Tying economics into car maintenance is obvious. But how can it possibly bear upon family inequality? That seems an awful lot to ask of wrenches, screwdrivers, and the occasional sledge hammer.
Never mind the money, this project took three solid weeks of physical and mental labor. As well equipped as my garage is by amateur standards, I don't have a lift. Jack stands give enough clearance to work underneath, but no more. Repeatedly getting off the floor, then right back onto it with yet another right tool this time amounts to a day long workout. Hauling on wrenches and twisting screwdrivers all day gives hands every reason they need to ache all night. Sussing a series of unfamiliar mechanical tasks left my brain as fatigued at the end of the day as my body was.
All on something I was going to give away.
There were some ulterior motives here, of course. Besides a chance to teach my son some of the manly arts, there was the pleasure I felt in his pride at making his own, substantial, contributions to the project. More importantly, he now has skin in this game: this car wasn't just something handed to him; rather, it contains a substantial amount of his own labor and ingenuity. As a young man, thoughts of his own mortality rarely, if ever, intrude upon his cortex. However, the thought of rendering pointless all his work just might.
Obviously, this isn't the sort of thing I'd do for just anybody. Certainly not for neighbors, or even very good friends. And while I thankfully don't have the first hand experience, I doubt very much I would do it for a stepson, or even perhaps my own son if I wasn't married to his mother.
In Coming Apart, Charles Murray made the case that America is suffering a moral decline encouraged by intellectual elites, but primarily affecting the less well off. The successful espouse, but do not themselves practice, social libertarianism. In contrast, the poor practice what the successful merely preach.
The consequence in microcosm is this car project. Through it, and other less ambitious examples over the years, my son has a huge head start. Compared to the children of single or remarried mothers, he has received a far more extensive ongoing education in self-discipline, planning, work, pride in a job well done, and an introduction to some very valuable skills that very, very few women alone can provide. Moreover, he knows he got all that because he very specifically matters enough for someone else to make the investment. This is not Julia's World.
The inequality that matters isn't merely, or even mostly, that of income and wealth. Rather, it is the inequality that comes about from the presence, or absence, of things which can't be measured monetarily. The former are ephemeral; the latter gifts that keep giving. To the extent US society is bifurcating economically, it is also doing so culturally. I was brought up by a single mother, and didn't have a dad to teach me what my son takes for granted. However, in the 1960s, single mothers were still a relative rarity, surrounded by intact families. Proximity enabled learning through osmosis: most of my friends had dads in the house.
Two generations later, it looks as if we are running a real risk of "coming apart". Entire zip codes have scarcely an intact family to be found, which means essentially no involved dads to hand down those manly arts. Family advantages my son didn't earn make him a social capital plutocrat. Family disadvantages others didn't deserve make them social capital poor. That's not "fair." Unfortunately, it is hard to think of anything more constructive to do in the face of that unfairness than throwing one's hands up in despair.
And that can mean only one thing: road trip.
Having dismantled and, ideally, reassembled all the bits that hold the car off the ground, and other things besides, it was time to shift the thing from Alaska to Spokane.
Twenty-three hundred some-odd miles of shifting, to be sort of exact.
A few words about maps. We are jiggy with technology. I have an iPad and iPhone; the man-child a Samsung Imitator S3. That said, when it comes to a road trip, I'll take a good paper map any day over the digital version. When trackless meets wilderness, the landscape isn't exactly chock-a-block with cell towers, so forget about updating. Screens are hard to read during the day. And since a mobile screen is so much smaller than a map, it is like looking at the world through a soda straw.
Coincidentally, my son and I drove out of Alaska seven years to the day after first setting foot there. Some things have changed.
When I was a kid, getting driven across country on the actual Route 66, whenever we crossed into another state, I looked for the line the map said should be on the ground. Well, imagine that, here it is. (In the bottom picture, the state line is carved out of the forest all the way to the horizon.)
This is an aerial view of part of our journey (right about where the distance tag is in the map above). No cell phone towers, service stations, cars, towns, people. Instead, nothing but miles and miles of miles and miles and a 22-year old car. What could possibly go wrong?
Midway through the third day, we were reaching southern Canada, which stops being quite so devoid of cell service, service stations, cars, etc. We saw a sign indicating that a road looking like being much less traveled than the one we were on ended up where we wanted to go. Despite not having a map, on the spur of the moment, and spurning mapquest's directions, we took it.
Great choice, as it turned out. Considering the amount of traffic it was an incongruously well paved road winding through the mountains. It was a beautiful drive, open enough to go fast, yet winding enough to give our new brakes and suspension a workout.
As we started on this road, I noticed a car well behind. Despite our brisk pace, it was catching up. Hmmmm. Can't have that. So I went faster. And it kept catching up. And I went a faster. And it still kept catching up. And I went a little faster, then finally ran out of stones. And it still kept catching up, until it got close enough for me to suss the competition. What I assumed had to be a guy driving sports car turned out to be some late model Chevy. With a bike on top. And a blonde behind the wheel. I had a sudden flashback to my childhood.
Unfortunately, as with all good things, this road trip came to an end. Three days of scenery veering between spectacular and merely beautiful, followed by another half day through the wide open countryside of northern Washington took us to Spokane International Airport, and my flight home.
More than the road trip ended there. When my son dropped me at the curb, he said, simply, "Dad, thanks for everything", before sliding back into the car and driving off. That, right there, was the moment his childhood ended.
The man-child will be turning 20 in a couple months. So I started thinking about what he might like in the way of a birthday present. Since I am a mere guy, my gift ideas are typically late-to-need, and frequently rubbish.
But this time even my dodgy skills were sufficient to grasp the obvious: a car.
He goes to a large college, so getting out to do even simple errands like food shopping are a multi-hour chore involving schlepping groceries on public transport.
And dating. Feminism be damned, there are at least two things young women expect: the guy will drive, and he will be taller. At just a tick shy of six feet and still growing, my son has the latter knocked, but comes up short in the former.
As it happens, deciding on which was just as easy as what: a BMW.
Woah, Piketty fans. Calm down. You bangers on the inequality drum, you reflexive looters, give it a rest for a second.
Born in 1991, it is old enough to drink, which would bring a whole new meaning to DUI. TOSWIPIAW and I bought it before we got married. Both critters came home from the hospital in it. With more than 220,000 miles on the clock, it has traveled nearly the equivalent of going around the world nine times.
This thing is seriously old.
Since it is twice the age of the median US car it is clearly a rare survivor; the vast majority of its peers have long since gone to the knacker's yard. For those that remain, many, perhaps most, have emotionally attached owners.
I'm not one. Really. No, really.
Afflicted with a Mittyesque notion of being, except for profound deficits in bravery and talent, a Grand Prix race car driver, I have always been drawn to cars with sporting pretensions. And possessing a modicum of mechanical aptitude has meant I could make tolerable a series of cars that others with more sense would shy away from. In order, starting when I was in college: MGA, Porsche 911, Alpha Romeo, Mazda RX-7, Triumph TR-6, and another 911.
Average age when they fell into my grease stained mitts, 13 years. I kept most for six to 12 years (I held on to the Alfa for only six months; long enough to have my fun, dumping it before it caught fire.). The second 911 was 27 when I sold it in 2007. The reason in each case was clear: I was various combinations of unable and unwilling to pay for anything newer. (BTW, each was a daily driver.)
So this car, a 1992 325i, the first new car I, 37 at the time, had ever owned, is either another example of thrift, or further manifestation of illness. Also, and I'm not sure which theory this supports most, underneath its commonplace sedan exterior it is seriously fast, with razor sharp handling, brilliant brakes, rear wheel drive, and a manual transmission.
As if that isn't enough for a mere car, it also bears lessons in economics and social inequality. And road trip.
A car, like most material goods, is a wasting asset. Just driving one off the lot will take 10% off its resale value. Within a half dozen years, no matter how delicately driven and meticulously maintained, it will be worth about a third of the gaping hole buying the thing left in your wallet. This is why, in the mere terms of dollars and cents, it saves much more of both to buy a 2-3 yr old car; or, if one must buy new, to keep the thing a bloody long time.
Unfortunately, no matter how pristine even the most fastidious owner keeps a car, its market value will inevitably decline below the cost of a major repair. The critical problem here is that an old car with, say, a newly rebuilt engine is worth scarcely anything more than the same car with an old, but still functioning, engine. Spending $4,000 on rejuvenating that mechanical festival of suck-squeeze-bang-blow will be no help at all should you be rear ended by someone finding out they cannot, in fact, successfully juggle texting and driving. The imprudent juggler's insurance company will pay out the market value of the car, and not a dime for the engine.
And that is in addition to the more obvious accumulation of failures as a car ages. As the miles and years accumulate, decrepitude and increasing unreliability make the sum of remaining market value and ongoing repair costs better spent on selling or knackering the thing and replacing it with something newer.
The market obviously believes this optimum tradeoff to be at 11.4 years, hence the current median age for cars.
So how does keeping a car twice as old make any sense at all?
Without some backstory, it doesn't. When the car was seven years old, a mere child, I heard about premature water pump failures. Uncharacteristically and unfathomably, I didn't jump all over replacing it. I think I convinced myself the pump would give signs of impending failure.
It did. Just like an earthquake.
I paid the price, first with my very annoyed wife stuck on the side of the road. Towing: $60. Water pump: $35. Unfortunately, that isn't the end of it. Beknownst to me, the failure was fairly violent. The bearing had seized, bending the housing, shattering the impeller, derailing the drive belt and running the fan into the radiator. Far less obvious, a piece of the shattered impeller found its way into a water passage, insidiously causing uneven heating between the #2 and #3 cylinders, making them ever so slightly oval. Two years later, at 155,000 miles, and at least 75,000 miles before what should have been its time, the engine was junk. Since cars are designed to last about as long as their most costly component, at the time it still made sense to replace the engine. However, doing so threw a monkey wrench into the car's lifecycle.
Moreover, aside from big ticket items, I almost never have to pay a mechanic. That cuts maintenance costs by more than half. Add to that a reasonably finely tuned eye and ear for things getting dodgy, and a pilot's deeply ingrained preference, reinforced by experience, to replace things before they fail, this car reached its 22nd birthday in unusually good fettle. It wasn't an eyesore, had no accumulation of aggravating gremlins, and depreciation was a done deal.
With the critters gone at school, we had more cars than drivers at home. Rather than sell one just to buy another, I decided to give my son the statistical outlier. Makes sense, right?
Ummmmm, perhaps not.
Being blessed with a spacious garage, a reasonably extensive array of tools, and decades of learning from mistakes, I can take things as they come. However, since my son has none of those things, and goes to school 2200 driving miles from home (a great many bringing "trackless" to "wilderness"), I had to take a rather more comprehensive approach.
Because the engine in these cars has a life expectancy of about 230,000 miles, the rest of the car is designed with that in mind. Among other things, that includes suspension bits that most people never even think about: the bushings and ball joints separating modern cars' ride and handling from that of Conestoga wagons. Beyond that, the car's air conditioning had quit working several years ago. That verges on irrelevance up here in Alaska, but practically constitutes a life support system in eastern Washington, where temps are routinely in the high double digits from late spring to early fall.
Almost time to start setting money on fire.
Right about the point where we discover we need new half-shafts. Add 30% to project cost.
The parts list came to $3500. Brakes, struts, shocks, control arms, tie rods, unanticipated drive shafts, bushing sets, and an AC compressor (just to name the big chunks) have a way of adding up. Onto that monetary bonfire that would leave even Congress in awe, toss another $2500 for persuading professionals to dedicate their time, expertise and specialty tools to do things like pressing old bushings and bearings out and new ones in, and a four wheel alignment after it was all said and done.
Back together. All it took was dodgy economics and lavish swearing.
So how does putting $6,000 into a car worth only $3,000 to begin with make any sense at all, unless prefixed with "non"?
Especially since I have no affection for the thing. Really, I don't.
In pure monetary terms, it is looking stupid-ish. For $9000, there is a decent array of cars with half the mileage to be had. All gutless, mushy, slush box, front-wheel drive econoboxes, to be sure. Against that, all the running gear on this near-antique is now newer than than the econobox alternative. And it's a known quantity. So there's that.
But still, at best the margin is razor thin, and only a fool ignores loss risk. To balance the books, the car has to last 42,000 more miles, and have nothing more than normal operating and maintenance costs along the way. Why? That yields depreciation of 15 cents per mile, which is what it had going in.
Of course, mere dollars and cents are rarely the total measure of economic decisions. The joy of working with my son on an extensive and complex task is impossible to measure. And the knowledge he gained will save him buckets o' bux along the way.
So, (Dodgy Economic Decision) + (Unquantifiable Rationalizations) = TOTAL WIN!
Funny, that's how progressive math works. Start with the desired answer, and mathify as required.
Tying economics into car maintenance is obvious. But how can it possibly bear upon family inequality? That seems an awful lot to ask of wrenches, screwdrivers, and the occasional sledge hammer.
Never mind the money, this project took three solid weeks of physical and mental labor. As well equipped as my garage is by amateur standards, I don't have a lift. Jack stands give enough clearance to work underneath, but no more. Repeatedly getting off the floor, then right back onto it with yet another right tool this time amounts to a day long workout. Hauling on wrenches and twisting screwdrivers all day gives hands every reason they need to ache all night. Sussing a series of unfamiliar mechanical tasks left my brain as fatigued at the end of the day as my body was.
All on something I was going to give away.
There were some ulterior motives here, of course. Besides a chance to teach my son some of the manly arts, there was the pleasure I felt in his pride at making his own, substantial, contributions to the project. More importantly, he now has skin in this game: this car wasn't just something handed to him; rather, it contains a substantial amount of his own labor and ingenuity. As a young man, thoughts of his own mortality rarely, if ever, intrude upon his cortex. However, the thought of rendering pointless all his work just might.
Obviously, this isn't the sort of thing I'd do for just anybody. Certainly not for neighbors, or even very good friends. And while I thankfully don't have the first hand experience, I doubt very much I would do it for a stepson, or even perhaps my own son if I wasn't married to his mother.
In Coming Apart, Charles Murray made the case that America is suffering a moral decline encouraged by intellectual elites, but primarily affecting the less well off. The successful espouse, but do not themselves practice, social libertarianism. In contrast, the poor practice what the successful merely preach.
The consequence in microcosm is this car project. Through it, and other less ambitious examples over the years, my son has a huge head start. Compared to the children of single or remarried mothers, he has received a far more extensive ongoing education in self-discipline, planning, work, pride in a job well done, and an introduction to some very valuable skills that very, very few women alone can provide. Moreover, he knows he got all that because he very specifically matters enough for someone else to make the investment. This is not Julia's World.
The inequality that matters isn't merely, or even mostly, that of income and wealth. Rather, it is the inequality that comes about from the presence, or absence, of things which can't be measured monetarily. The former are ephemeral; the latter gifts that keep giving. To the extent US society is bifurcating economically, it is also doing so culturally. I was brought up by a single mother, and didn't have a dad to teach me what my son takes for granted. However, in the 1960s, single mothers were still a relative rarity, surrounded by intact families. Proximity enabled learning through osmosis: most of my friends had dads in the house.
Two generations later, it looks as if we are running a real risk of "coming apart". Entire zip codes have scarcely an intact family to be found, which means essentially no involved dads to hand down those manly arts. Family advantages my son didn't earn make him a social capital plutocrat. Family disadvantages others didn't deserve make them social capital poor. That's not "fair." Unfortunately, it is hard to think of anything more constructive to do in the face of that unfairness than throwing one's hands up in despair.
And that can mean only one thing: road trip.
Having dismantled and, ideally, reassembled all the bits that hold the car off the ground, and other things besides, it was time to shift the thing from Alaska to Spokane.
Where trackless meets wilderness.
Twenty-three hundred some-odd miles of shifting, to be sort of exact.
A few words about maps. We are jiggy with technology. I have an iPad and iPhone; the man-child a Samsung Imitator S3. That said, when it comes to a road trip, I'll take a good paper map any day over the digital version. When trackless meets wilderness, the landscape isn't exactly chock-a-block with cell towers, so forget about updating. Screens are hard to read during the day. And since a mobile screen is so much smaller than a map, it is like looking at the world through a soda straw.
Despite not having a map, we were pretty certain we weren't in Kansas.
Unfortunately, sometimes we ran into heavy traffic.
Mostly not, though.
Coincidentally, my son and I drove out of Alaska seven years to the day after first setting foot there. Some things have changed.
When I was a kid, getting driven across country on the actual Route 66, whenever we crossed into another state, I looked for the line the map said should be on the ground. Well, imagine that, here it is. (In the bottom picture, the state line is carved out of the forest all the way to the horizon.)
This is an aerial view of part of our journey (right about where the distance tag is in the map above). No cell phone towers, service stations, cars, towns, people. Instead, nothing but miles and miles of miles and miles and a 22-year old car. What could possibly go wrong?
Midway through the third day, we were reaching southern Canada, which stops being quite so devoid of cell service, service stations, cars, etc. We saw a sign indicating that a road looking like being much less traveled than the one we were on ended up where we wanted to go. Despite not having a map, on the spur of the moment, and spurning mapquest's directions, we took it.
Great choice, as it turned out. Considering the amount of traffic it was an incongruously well paved road winding through the mountains. It was a beautiful drive, open enough to go fast, yet winding enough to give our new brakes and suspension a workout.
As we started on this road, I noticed a car well behind. Despite our brisk pace, it was catching up. Hmmmm. Can't have that. So I went faster. And it kept catching up. And I went a faster. And it still kept catching up. And I went a little faster, then finally ran out of stones. And it still kept catching up, until it got close enough for me to suss the competition. What I assumed had to be a guy driving sports car turned out to be some late model Chevy. With a bike on top. And a blonde behind the wheel. I had a sudden flashback to my childhood.
Unfortunately, as with all good things, this road trip came to an end. Three days of scenery veering between spectacular and merely beautiful, followed by another half day through the wide open countryside of northern Washington took us to Spokane International Airport, and my flight home.
More than the road trip ended there. When my son dropped me at the curb, he said, simply, "Dad, thanks for everything", before sliding back into the car and driving off. That, right there, was the moment his childhood ended.
Monday, July 21, 2014
Hey Skipper hits the Blogging Big Time
Granted, not very hard or noticeably, but still.
From today's Best of the Web (regrettably, behind a paywall), courtesy of your humble and obedient servant:
When I read the magazine a few days ago, I got to the second mention of mangroves and did a "Wait. Huh? Wot? In the same issue? YGBSM."
For NatGeo, warmenism is a religion. They accept it so thoroughly, so uncritically, that it explains everything. As it is for the vast majority of their readership who — aside from those getting as a gift that which they would never buy — are progressives.
And as good progressives, they no doubt sneer at fundamentalist Christians, while being completely blind to their own fundamentalism: that which explains everything, explains nothing.
From today's Best of the Web (regrettably, behind a paywall), courtesy of your humble and obedient servant:
Two Magazines in One!
"Mangroves are on the march. . . . From 1984 to 2011, mangrove forests doubled in size at the northern end of their Florida range. What's enticing the mangroves north? Fewer cold snaps. These days temperatures rarely dip below 25ºF, a vital threshold for the trees."--Rachel Hartigan Shea, National Geographic, July issue
"The future of goliaths is also tied up in those mangrove nurseries, where the fish live around the trees' tangled roots until they are about five years old. Coastal development, agriculture, and pollutants threaten these shallow-water habitats. The current trajectory suggests 20 percent losses of remaining U.S. mangroves in the next 50 years--devastating for young, developing goliaths, which are already reeling from unusually cold winters that took out thousands of the fish from their juvenile habitat throughout South Florida."--Jennifer Holland, National Geographic, July issue
When I read the magazine a few days ago, I got to the second mention of mangroves and did a "Wait. Huh? Wot? In the same issue? YGBSM."
For NatGeo, warmenism is a religion. They accept it so thoroughly, so uncritically, that it explains everything. As it is for the vast majority of their readership who — aside from those getting as a gift that which they would never buy — are progressives.
And as good progressives, they no doubt sneer at fundamentalist Christians, while being completely blind to their own fundamentalism: that which explains everything, explains nothing.
Criminal Parenting
A number years back, I was sitting on the grass in a park by the boardwalk along Mission Bay in San Diego. I noticed this guy sprinting past me with panic in his eyes. He abruptly changed direction and sprinted the other way. I began wondering what was going on so I observed the scene and began laughing my ass off.
He had two children: one, roughly four years old, was on a big-wheel tricycle and that little boy was riding as fast as he could away from dad in one direction; the other, an approximately six-year-old girl, was clearly just starting to learn how to ride a bicycle and was heading for the water screaming, "help, I don't know how to stop!!!!" I was laughing because there was clearly no real danger in the situation, yet if I was in the dad's shoes, I probably would've been a bit panicked too.
He had two children: one, roughly four years old, was on a big-wheel tricycle and that little boy was riding as fast as he could away from dad in one direction; the other, an approximately six-year-old girl, was clearly just starting to learn how to ride a bicycle and was heading for the water screaming, "help, I don't know how to stop!!!!" I was laughing because there was clearly no real danger in the situation, yet if I was in the dad's shoes, I probably would've been a bit panicked too.
The girl, as was easily predictable, encountered the sand before the water which gently slowed her down and she fell over into the soft sand without a scratch. The mischievous boy kept riding, but was not even a hundred yards away when the girl was safely on the ground, and visibility was probably 5 times that. The dad easily retrieved him and everyone was safe and sound, the dad a little worse off for the wear and tear, and much of the rest of us in the park quite entertained.
That was roughly the same era as when my daughters were two and five years old. I was at a different park with them and was right next to my two-year-old. My five-year-old had somewhat different age-appropriate playground interests and was maybe 30 feet away on the other side of the park. A mother came up to me and scolded me for allowing my five-year-old to be "so far away." She said, "somebody could snatch her, it's very irresponsible of you!" Yes, that's me - Mr. Irresponsible. I apparently should've forced both my children to play within a 3 foot radius of me at all times. And probably bubble wrapped them while I was at it.
It was then that I became increasingly aware of how bizarrely overly concerned with safety society was and is. Unfortunately, it's become far worse in the intervening years and perfectly adequate parenting (in my opinion), is now being criminalized. You know that it's gotten really bad when even the NY Times starts to take notice:
For instance, they might have ended up like the Connecticut mother who earned a misdemeanor for letting her 11-year-old stay in the car while she ran into a store. Or the mother charged with “contributing to the delinquency of a minor” after a bystander snapped a photo of her leaving her 4-year-old in a locked, windows-cracked car for five minutes on a 50 degree day. Or the Ohio father arrested in front of his family for “child endangerment” because — unbeknown to him — his 8-year-old had slipped away from a church service and ended up in a nearby Family Dollar.
Or (I’m just getting warmed up) like the mother of four, recently widowed, who left her children — the oldest 10, the youngest 5 — at home together while she went to a community-college class; her neighbor called the police, protective services took the kids, and it took a two-year legal fight to pry them back from foster care. Or like the parents from two families who were arrested after their girls, two friends who were 5 and 7, cut through a parking lot near their houses — again without the parents’ knowledge — and were spotted by a stranger who immediately called the police.
Or — arriving at this week’s high-profile story — like Debra Harrell, an African-American single mother in Georgia, who let her 9-year-old daughter play in a nearby park while she worked a shift at McDonald’s, and who ended up shamed on local news and jailed.I'm going to focus on this last one a little bit as I actually sent money to a legal fund for Ms. Harrell because I'm so unhappy with her treatment:
Here are the facts: Debra Harrell works at McDonald’s in North Augusta, South Carolina. For most of the summer, her daughter had stayed there with her, playing on a laptop that Harrell had scrounged up the money to purchase. (McDonald’s has free WiFi.) Sadly, the Harrell home was robbed and the laptop stolen, so the girl asked her mother if she could be dropped off at the park to play instead.
Harrell said yes. She gave her daughter a cell phone. The girl went to the park—a place so popular that at any given time there are about 40 kids frolicking—two days in a row. There were swings, a “splash pad,” and shade. On her third day at the park, an adult asked the girl where her mother was. At work, the daughter replied.
The shocked adult called the cops. Authorities declared the girl “abandoned” and proceeded to arrest the mother.I think it was pretty cool of McDonald's to let the daughter hang out and use the WiFi. It was also, I might've thought, pretty cool that there happened to be a park less than half-a-mile from where Ms. Harrell was working that her daughter could hang out at. I might've guessed that that was what parks with playgrounds were for. I, of course, was wrong. I don't know what they're for, but apparently not for children to hang out at.
The "shocked adult" who called the cops explained her reason for contacting the authorities: "this day and time, you never know who's around. Good, bad, it's just not safe." Not quite true. You do indeed know that the government is around. And that they will snatch your kid and arrest you if you let your child go to the park by herself! From Ms. Harrell's point of view, is it really better that the child was basically abducted by the government and is on her way to the foster care system where abuses of all kinds are continually documented, rather than the extraordinarily small chance that someone not from the government might take her instead?
Who's better off here? Certainly not the daughter who now doesn't have access to her mother. Certainly not Ms. Harrell who now has an arrest record and needs to fight felony charges in court. Certainly not society who has to foot the bill now for jail, court costs, foster care costs, and will probably end up with a basket case to deal with when the daughter gets through the foster care system.
Nobody's saying that leaving a nine-year-old at a park every day is the best possible situation. However, given that Ms. Harrell was a low-wage McDonald's worker with limited day care choices, it may not have been a terrible choice, and almost certainly better than the government's choice:
You needn’t approve of the parents’ actions in any of these cases to understand that dumping them into the criminal justice system is a terribly counterproductive way of addressing their mistakes. ... The mere fact that state officials were essentially micromanaging these parents’ decisions is creepy enough. That the consequences for the “wrong” decision are criminal is downright scary.I think that the Ms. Harrell might likely agree with Ronald Reagan that:
The nine most terrifying words in the English language are "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help."She's certainly in a terrifying situation dealing with the government now.
Monday, July 14, 2014
How Many Ethnicities Are There?
The title of this post is a trick question. It depends on the subject. If the subject is culpability in killing people, Richard Fernandez of the Belmont Club claims there are only two ethnicities: poor and non-poor.
Rule 1 is that if poor are killing other poor, nobody much cares:
Rule 1 is that if poor are killing other poor, nobody much cares:
The deep dark secret of media coverage is that poor people killing other poor people is page 20 news.For example, he asks, how much did you hear about the poor-on-poor conflict called the Second Congo Civil war?
The Second Congo Civil war has killed more people than any conflict since World War 2, perhaps five million people, fifty times more than the combined US casualties of the Korean and Vietnam wars. Have you ever heard of the Congo Civil War?I had to go to Wikipedia to refresh my memory. I vaguely remember hearing a little something about it, but I don't recall it being headline news:
By 2008, the war and its aftermath had killed 5.4 million people, mostly from disease and starvation, making the Second Congo War the deadliest conflict worldwide since World War II. Millions more were displaced from their homes or sought asylum in neighbouring countries.
Poor-on-poor killings within rich counties are page 20 news as well. For example, can you remember seeing a news article about even one of the "260 [poor] schoolchildren who were killed in Chicago over a recent three-year period?"
That is in contrast with Rule 2, which is that non-poor-on-non-poor killings are front page news for days on end for each event. Certainly you've heard of Columbine, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, and many other such massacres? Even though the number killed during those events were tiny compared to the number of inner city poor children who were killed during the same period?
Rule 3 is that, at least at the international level, everybody roots for an underdog, so poor can get away with killing non-poor with limited or no condemnation. For example, many twist rationality beyond recognition (to me) justifying Palestinians lobbing rockets from Gaza into Israel:
It’s those Palestinian rockets that that are dominating the headlines, and that cause even normally sympathetic progressives to waffle in their condemnations of Israel’s ongoing collective punishment of the 1.7 million people corralled in Gaza. Yet there is very little direct, probing discussion of the topic. Is the line between provocation and retaliation really that clear? Is the use of violence to fight violence by some Palestinians somehow abnormal or unique? And what proportion of the population in Gaza is actually involved in the rocket attacks or supports the practice?
But Rule 4 is that non-poor countries may not kill, even to defend themselves. When Israel retaliates when rockets rain from the sky on their children, an awful lot of the world is outraged. Yet it's clearly not about merely killing Palestinians as shown by the following graphic from the Belmont Club article:
You've probably at least heard of the recent Syrian conflict. But given the vitriol directed at Israel relative to Syria, would've you guessed that almost 50 times as many people died in the Syrian conflict. It's an easy guess when you remember that Rule 4 is used for the Israeli conflicts while Rule 1 is used for the Syrian conflict. Therefore, the Palestinian deaths at the hands of Israel are intolerably outrageous, while the Syrian deaths are page 20 news.
There are, of course, many exceptions to these very general rules, but I find it interesting just how often they accurately predict the reactions to murder and slaughter.
Wednesday, July 09, 2014
Dust in the Cosmic Wind
In the middle of writing my post Creation Myth, big news was announced regarding the Big Bang Theory:
On March 17th researchers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, led by John Kovac, held a press conference at which they announced that they had discovered interesting patterns in the cosmic microwave background, a type of weak radiation left over from the universe’s earliest moments. They said they had spotted the signatures of primordial gravitational waves, ripples in space formed just after the Big Bang.
The existence of such waves would give strong support for the theory of inflation, which holds that the early universe underwent a brief burst of faster-than-light expansion. Inflation was put forward in the 1980s by theorists as a way to resolve various knotty problems with the standard theory of the Big Bang. But although it is widely assumed to be true, direct evidence that it happened had been lacking.Because of that announcement, I almost didn't bother publishing my post, but since my post was a light and humorous piece (filed under "chocolate" and "humor"), I decided to publish it anyway, even though the Big Bang suddenly had yet more compelling observations matching the theory.
And those observations may still be correct. However, the claim was, according to The Economist, possibly a little premature:
This concluded that Dr Kovac’s data, which came from an Antarctic telescope called BICEP-2, may well have been contaminated by space dust, and that the purported gravitational waves may be much weaker than the team first claimed—if they exist at all.Fortunately, the controversy should be at least partly resolved soon and I will no doubt report on it when the new data becomes available:
New data expected within weeks from the Planck satellite of the European Space Agency and other experiments should help clarify the situation, the authors say.In other words, how much dust, if any, impaired the BICEP-2 observations? It must be a bit of a roller coaster for those working in the dusty field of the Big Bang Theory. One picosecond, compelling evidence is presented regarding inflation of the universe, the next picosecond the evidence deflates, and in the near future it might inflate yet again.
Not that it really matters. Just because a theory can explain what's observed, doesn't mean that the theory does explain what's observed. Turning "can" into "does" requires a leap of faith and there's no reason the Big Bang Theory faith would've been shaken for its adherents by this bit of dust in the cosmic wind.
Wednesday, July 02, 2014
Is that not exquisite writing and insight?
The opening and closing paragraphs of this piece about the Hobby Lobby ruling are just beautiful:
That's a pretty stunning display of sheer ignorance, or more likely deliberate mendacity. The liberal response to Hobby Lobby is all about emotional exhibitionism, going over the top, conjuring a fantasy villain so everyone can join hands and sing "We Shall Overcome." It's a hysterical release of energy, bottled up by frustration at Obama's disastrous second term and the looming midterm-election catastrophe. The Left really needed a win here, but more importantly, they needed emotional validation. They can still get that by squalling like babies with soiled diapers, and taking note of how many fellow travelers are squalling right along with them.
...
Ben Franklin said his colleagues gave us a republic, if we could keep it. A nation of adult babies and shrieking neurotics doesn't have much chance of hanging on to a republic... as you can see from the big push to abandon it, in favor of a benevolent-dictator Sugar Daddy model of the presidency. Followers are encouraged to hold their binkies tightly as Daddy tells them another scary bedtime story about the evil corporations and nasty judgmental Bible-thumpers he protects them from.
Brilliant!
That's a pretty stunning display of sheer ignorance, or more likely deliberate mendacity. The liberal response to Hobby Lobby is all about emotional exhibitionism, going over the top, conjuring a fantasy villain so everyone can join hands and sing "We Shall Overcome." It's a hysterical release of energy, bottled up by frustration at Obama's disastrous second term and the looming midterm-election catastrophe. The Left really needed a win here, but more importantly, they needed emotional validation. They can still get that by squalling like babies with soiled diapers, and taking note of how many fellow travelers are squalling right along with them.
...
Ben Franklin said his colleagues gave us a republic, if we could keep it. A nation of adult babies and shrieking neurotics doesn't have much chance of hanging on to a republic... as you can see from the big push to abandon it, in favor of a benevolent-dictator Sugar Daddy model of the presidency. Followers are encouraged to hold their binkies tightly as Daddy tells them another scary bedtime story about the evil corporations and nasty judgmental Bible-thumpers he protects them from.
Brilliant!
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