And What Were We Saying Yesterday?

A headline today at PJ Media, Ohio Town Rolls Out Red Carpet for Homeless. Is Shocked When Stream of Homeless Show Up.

They just wanted to do the right thing. The small town of Middletown, Ohio, a town of 49,000 people, has opened all manner of homeless services. There is everything from soup kitchens and shelters that allow you to be high and drunk to rehab facilities to sober up.

And that's the problem. You can come to Middletown to stay drunk and high and get three hots and a cot without having to do much.

It turns out that since their initiatives were put in place, the homeless are swamping the town and residents are shocked - shocked I say! - to find that many aren't even from their town!

Seriously, they're that naive.

Middletown is learning the lesson that when they incentivize something, they get more of it.  Some of it is voluntary migration of the homeless, but some of the homeless they've added have been dumped by other cities.  It's not just New York City that gives homeless a one-way bus ticket to somewhere out of town (it's reported that NYFC spends more than half a million bucks on tickets every year), it's a widespread practice.

Listen, Middletown, I'll let you in on the secret.  It's not a new secret; it's been known for millennia.  Benjamin Franklin, put it this way:

“I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I traveled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.”  

The author of that PJ Media piece is Victoria Taft, who is also a radio and TV personality with talk radio show in California and TV appearances on One America News Network, OANN.  She has some interesting anecdotes from covering the California homeless situation, but concludes with the bottom line:

Helping the homeless requires a delicate balance. This is a fragile population of people. But there's one thing you can bet on: if there's free stuff and if it's easy to get, they will come.

I wonder how long until Middleton needs the street cleaning treatments for human waste, like this one in Seattle?  (Getty Images, Yuri Kadobnov) 

B.F. Skinner And A Million After Him Said

In plain English (translated to Redneck), you get more of behaviors you reward and less of behaviors you punish.  B.F. Skinner, of course, was the preeminent behavioral psychologist of his day. 

Charlie Martin at PJ Media provides an otherwise unremarkable article but makes it clear that what we're seeing from Iran is exactly the kind of responses expected when training a lab animal.  On a night (east coast time) when missiles are raining down on Iraqi air bases that are home to American troops, it's helpful to remember the setup for this goes back a long way, not just to last Thursday.

I think there's a larger point here, something that BF Skinner showed with pigeons but that goes for people too: when you reward a behavior, you get more of it.

Looking back over the last 10 years, we've seen the Obama Administration ignoring Iranian provocation to get the "Nuclear Deal", sending them billions of dollars in cash — and releasing this same Soleimani from previous sanctions, something John Kerry tried to explain by saying it wasn't this Soleimani, but another guy of the same name (which was a lie by the way), and then ignoring blatant violations of the agreement they were so proud of making, while Iran continued to attack the Iraqi government and kill civilians.

When you reward a behavior, you get more of it. And we have: since the Obama deal, Iran has increased its military budget using the money the Obama deal supplied; support for terrorism has actually increased.

Of course, this is what we'd expect: we keep rewarding the Iranian government, they keep doing what gets them rewarded.

Skinner noted that negative reinforcement (punishment) would work to discourage a behavior but it has to hurt, or at least be unpleasant.  The US in particular and the international community in general has been rather weak at administering negative reinforcement.  From stories in the media, Soleimani had grown accustomed to doing anything he wanted.  He was the Instagram Selfie terrorist leader.  He fully believed either we couldn't or wouldn't do anything to him; in a word, complacent.  There's a story that a recent defector from his Quds force (Quds is their word for Jerusalem) brought piles of documents on what he was up to.  While they say surveillance went up, intelligence probably knew his location at all times for a while.

Twitter user TheLastRefuge tweets the following picture which might help explain things - if true.  (Found on Rantingly)

I only know three are true off the top of my head: the ones involving Obama, Valeri Jarrett, and John Kerry.  Lisa Page, Peter Strozk, and Huma Abedin are new to me. 


 

The Other Kitchen Exeriments Going on Here

Besides the barbecue stuff I wrote about Saturday.

Two words: ice cream.

Exactly why I'm experimenting with ice cream probably needs a little explanation, but as little as possible.  For the last five years, I've been following a ketogenic diet.  Much like Denninger talks about, but I talk about it much less than Karl Does.  A quick search of the term says I've mentioned it once. 

The essential requirement of a ketogenic diet is eating few enough grams of carbohydrate to enter a state of benign dietary ketosis, where your body is primarily burning fat for fuel and producing a few different ketones that circulate in our blood.  For most people, a carb intake guaranteed to get you into ketosis is 20 grams per day.  Many of us can handle more, some require virtually zero.  If you're not used to counting grams of carbohydrate 20g won't mean much, but a single apple or single slice of bread usually gets you close to or over 20g. 

I don't want to get into details on that - there are plenty of useful sites (professionals 1 and professionals 2) to help if you really want to understand it - just know that essentially zero sugar is going to fit in 20g/day so my ice cream has to be zero sugar and close to zero carbohydrates.  This matters because sugar molecules affect the way the ice cream freezes and the resulting textures. 

Several months ago (September?) the nearby Publix started carrying ice cream from a startup specializing in keto ice cream.  It had been years (six? eight?) since I'd had ice cream, it was hot enough to melt aluminum on the sidewalk, so I bought a pint.  Suffice it to say it was a good treat, but eventually I decided it wasn't exactly what I liked. For example, they have a "cherry chip" flavor, but frozen chocolate chips feel like almost like shards of ceramic.  I thought $6/pt for ice cream I'm not that wild about is silly but it was a starting point that got me thinking of trying to make my own.  I stopped buying a pint every week.

Then came Christmas and while shopping for family, we decided to gift ourselves one of these ice cream makers.  Ice cream makers have changed a lot since I last looked at them.  When I was a kid, my parents had a maker that we'd fill with ice layered with salt and crank and handle to spin a container of ingredients.  This one I got operates completely differently; there's a container inside that has a gel you freeze by leaving it in a freezer for 12 hours before using it - or all the time when you're not using it.  There's a paddle assembly in it and a motor spins the frozen container with the mixture you're making.  The mix in contact with the walls freezes instantly, it's scraped off and replaced, and eventually turns into something with the texture of soft-serve ice cream.  My first batch was plain vanilla, here. 

This is literally four ingredients:

1 cup half and half
2 cups heavy whipping cream
3/4 cup Splenda or something that measures as sugar does
1-2 tsp vanilla extract

Shortly after this picture was taken, the soft serve was put into a plastic container and frozen overnight.  Taste-wise, it was fine, but the texture left a little to be desired.  It was a little hard, but even the store-bought ice cream was a bit hard.

Last weekend, we did a batch of coffee ice cream, one of Mrs. Graybeard's favorite flavors.  That had more of an ice texture; it felt like larger ice crystal than I'd like.  Like the vanilla, the taste was fine.  I think the water in the coffee (more than one 8oz cup) is what caused the ice crystal sensations.

This weekend, I tried a cherry vanilla recipe and it came out great.  This is the batch after coming out of the Cuisinart and packed to put in the freezer.  It needed to freeze overnight.

This is a little more involved. 

2 large eggs, whole
1 cup half and half
2 cups heavy cream
3/4 cup Swerve Confectioner's Sugar 
1/2 tsp xanthan gum
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 tsp cherry extract

added after ice cream maker, before freezer
1/2 cup frozen cherries, no sugar, diced

The preparation is more involved than the other two, and consists of whisking the eggs a couple of minutes and then whisking in the other ingredients.  In return, the texture is much better.  The only ingredients in there a non-keto person probably doesn't recognize are Swerve brand artificial sweetener (which is mostly the sugar alcohol erythritol) and xanthan gum, which is typically used to thicken gravy.

In comparison, here's the ingredients for the Rebel Creamery cherry chip:

Ingredients: Cream, Water, Erythritol, Sour Cherries, Chocolate Flakes (Coconut Oil, Cocoa, Erythritol, Sunflower Lecithin, Salt, Dutched Cocoa, Natural Vanilla Flavor, Monk Fruit), Chicory Root Fiber, Egg Yolks, Vegetable Glycerin, Milk Protein Isolate, Natural Cherry Flavor, Salt, Peruvian Carob Gum, Guar Gum, Monk Fruit, Citric Acid, Carob Gum.

Ignoring the ingredients for the chocolate flakes, there are 15 ingredients in there.  There are eight in mine.  From what I know, the chicory root fiber, glycerin, two carob gums, and guar gum are all used to help the texture. 

I literally had something like this in mind when I thought of getting the ice cream maker.  Instead of their chocolate shards, bits of frozen cherries.  I'm not sure what the next mix will be, but a similar vanilla base with raspberries (lower sugar than cherries) or some other flavor highlights seems likely, along with a bit more research into how to get the coffee ice cream smoother. 

SpaceX Kicking of 2020 Tomorrow

Tomorrow night will be the first launch of the year for SpaceX in what observers are saying may be a “transcendent year” for the company.  The next batch of 60 Starlink Satellites is scheduled for launch Monday night at 9:19 PM, or 0219 UTC on the January 7th.  The company did their normal prelaunch test firing of the Falcon 9 on the pad Saturday and pronounced it ready to go.

What stands to make this year stand out for SpaceX is the convergence of several lines.  Starting with this mission the first of these lines is their launches for themselves, not contracted to some another entity.  Ars Technica reports that the company will be launching many of these 60 satellite deployment missions for their Starlink internet satellite service; possibly as many as a dozen of those 60-satellite deployment missions this year. 

SpaceX has now launched two batches of 60 Starlink Internet satellites—one of which was experimental, and the second of which is expected to be operational as part of a low-Earth-orbit constellation. As early as January 6, the company anticipates launching its second batch of operational satellites, known as the Starlink-2 mission. The Starlink-3 and Starlink-4 missions may also launch in January.

At this kind of launch cadence, SpaceX should be ready to offer an initial, "bumpy" service by the middle of 2020, the company's president and chief operating officer, Gwynne Shotwell, said in December. The company plans to offer "mature" service in 2021.

As a revenue stream, that's important for SpaceX as a business, but obviously isn't the most important thing to NASA.  The agency wants them to launch American astronauts to the ISS from American soil.  This year will mark nine years of relying on the Russians for a lift to the ISS, since the shuttles was last launched in 2011.  As you know, NASA has contracted both Boeing and SpaceX to provide launch services.  NASA apparently prefers for both companies to get their vehicles flying this year, but neither company has a perfect record.  SpaceX had a successful robotically controlled mission of their Crew Dragon to the ISS last March, but that capsule exploded a month later during an abort thruster test, leading them to redesign a system that had never failed before.  Boeing has had success in their emergency escape system test but failed in their mission to the ISS in December.  This is the second line converging for SpaceX this year.

The third line that's converging for SpaceX is their Starship.  Rumors are flying of a first flight in the next few months.  Maybe pencil-in June on your “keep an eye out” calendar? 

SpaceX had some success in 2019 with its Starship program as it built the stubby "Starhopper" prototype to test the performance of its new Raptor rocket engine. The vehicle made controlled flights, first of 20 meters and then 150 meters, before SpaceX moved on to build full-scale prototypes of the Starship vehicle.

This process has not been without some issues, but now SpaceX appears to be closer to a final design. According to Paul Wooster, the principal Mars development engineer at SpaceX, the company has spent a little more than four years working on optimizing the shape, materials, and performance of the Starship vehicle. It would be no small feat to build this fully reusable second stage for both cargo and, eventually, humans. So it has taken time, and a lot of testing, to get to even this point.

SpaceX engineers have been working rapidly to bring a flight-worthy model of Starship to the launch pad near Boca Chica Beach in South Texas. Company founder and chief technical designer Elon Musk spent the day (and night) after Christmas working with his team on pressurized fuel tank domes for the next iteration of the vehicle, now called SN1. Although Musk's timelines are not particularly reliable, he said this vehicle may be ready for test flights in two or three months.

A launch of the full-scale Starship vehicle — which one day may ferry humans to the Moon or Mars — would represent a key step toward SpaceX's ultimate goal of settling Mars. It might also convince policymakers in Washington, DC, that the vehicle could play a role in the Artemis Moon Program plans.

The fourth and final converging line is their core business as a launch services provider, launching satellites for any customer. 

After 2018's 22 total launches, the company had a much quieter 2019 with only 13 orbital launches — 11 by the Falcon 9 rocket and two by the Falcon Heavy launch vehicle.  Barring anything catastrophic, it seems they should easily exceed their 22 mission record this year.  Ars space reporter Eric Berger notes:

With missions planned for commercial satellite customers, NASA, and Starlink, it seems possible that SpaceX could launch 30 or more Falcon 9 rockets in 2020. This would easily make the Falcon 9 rocket the most experienced active US rocket—surpassing the Atlas V vehicle. 

The limiting factor for Falcon 9 launches appears to be how many upper stages they can produce for the vehicle.  The company has already shown customers that recovering the first stage isn't a circus trick, I believe the current count is 47 successful recoveries of a first stage, and they've flown boosters as many as four times.  Now think of the Starlink program again.  SpaceX can demonstrate that proposals for launch cost reduction are not empty promises by testing the reuse approaches on their own launches.  They've already flown a recovered fairing, on a booster that reached four flights during their November Starlink launch.  In the coverage of that Starlink launch, it was mentioned that they seem to be moving toward learning how to recover upper stages. That would impact that problem of how fast they can produce upper stages, wouldn't it? 

The Starship depicted next to a Saturn V and a Falcon 9.  I believe that the portion that Musk is saying may be “ready for test flights in two or three months” is the upper stage of Starship, not the entire vehicle.  Credit to Kimi_Talvitie on Instagram.

Other Activities Around Here

So I hear you asking, “so SiG, what adventures with barbecue and cooking have you had lately?”  Yeah, alright.  Nobody asked that, but I'll tell you anyway.

I've been experimenting with smoking more foods in my Weber Kettle grill that I talked about last summer. After Thanksgiving's turkey, Mrs. Graybeard suggested I do something for Christmas.  Just at that time, the email barbecue group newsletter I get was talking about prime rib roasts, and literally within an hour of that email we saw an ad from Publix saying they had those on sale at about 30% off.  Clearly a message we should smoke a prime rib roast and we found a smaller one (3-1/2 pounds) that came home with us.  That was cooked sous vide style (see my Barbecue 401 post) at 132 for 7 hours on Christmas eve, chilled overnight, and then smoked for 3 hours Christmas afternoon.  I wasn't very happy with the looks of the bark, but it tasted wonderful, it was incredibly tender, and we got three dinners out of it.

For New Year's she suggested I go to something more conventional and suggested pulled pork from a shoulder we've had in the freezer for a long time.  Again, sous vide, this time cooked at 160 for 22 hours and then smoked for another four.  This time, I made a more concerted effort to heat the chamber hotter, measuring the temperature near the hunk of pork, and trying to keep it in the range of 280 to 300 because this helps get a better bark.  I've been unable to recreate the dark mahogany to black bark I've gotten when not preparing the meats by sous vide, and I'm starting to think it relies on cooking chemistry that the sous vide preparation destroys.  Compare this side by side of the virtually black bark on a pork shoulder cooked in my Masterbuilt Electric Smoker, right, with the almost cherry colored bark of Wednesday's sous vide pulled pork on the left.

A complicating fact is that there's also an internal sign of being cooked properly in a smoker, a pink smoke ring within the first quarter inch of the surface.  The one on the left has a smoke ring, the one on the right doesn't.  Taste wise, the sous vide pork butt is great, but I like that dark bark better.  Look at all the pink in this one, once it's shredded a bit.  I want both the dark, flavorful bark and the pink smoke ring.  As they used to say, I want it all and I want it now. 

There's another big set of culinary experiments going on, but I'll have to get to that some other day. 

Glass Half Full or Glass Half Empty - the Other Side

As counterpoint to yesterday's piece with an optimistic tone about the coming year and next decade, you really don't have to look very far.  Frankly, you have to look harder to find optimism than pessimism.

Let's start with the big one; the one on everybody's mind: Virginia. This is where people most think that our cold civil war is most likely to go hot.

• For the Slow Learners at Aesop's Raconteur Report
• The Virginia Flashpoint: a clear and present danger? at Bayou Renaissance Man
• How Virginia Democrats would destroy the USA  by Don Surber
• The 2020 Virginia Showdown by Matt Bracken on American Partisan

That's plenty of reading.  It's hard not to notice while reading the comments that, to quote Peter (Bayou Renaissance Man):

It worries me more than words can say that we've got people not merely casually tossing around the idea of civil war, but actively trying to foment it, on both sides of the political aisle. 

When both sides refuse to back down, that's the definition of conflict.  It's hard not to conclude the Republic is irreparably broken, and the next step is dissolution into open warfare.  It doesn't have to be but if both sides keep pushing for it, it will happen.

Back on my New Year's eve piece, I like to Borepatch's Thoughts on what's past, and what's ahead. Borepatch doesn't even mention Virginia until nearly the end, but brings up lots of the things on my mind.  Here, he's quoting from Free-Man's Perspective in a piece, “Government Against the People: It Gets Worse In the Late Stages.”

Let me be clear on this: Once ruling hierarchies get beyond a certain point, they cannot be reformed. And I am sure that the modern West is beyond that point.

• Do we really believe that central bankers will just lay down their monopolies?
• Can we seriously expect a hundred trillion dollars of debt to be liquidated without any consequences?
• Do we actually believe that politicians will walk away from their power and apologize for abusing us?
• Do we really think that the corporations who own Congress will just give up the game that is enriching them?
• Does anyone seriously believe that the NSA is going to say, “Gee, that Fourth Amendment really is kind of clear, and everything we do violates it… so, everyone here is fired and the last person out will please turn off the lights”?

All of this, and more, has been regular blog fodder around here.  Looking at the first two, I've been saying that I can see an economic collapse coming literally since the first post on this blog - almost 10 years ago.  I've advocated for a return to a gold standard - or at least one based on real commodities that can't be created in virtually infinite amounts on a whim.

So where are we?  What are these things saying?  I sure don't know.  Will Virginia turn into the shooting match that appears to be coming?  Don't know.  Will the US exist in 2030?  All I know is that with 100% certainty is that if the country is gone in 2030 the cause will absolutely have nothing to do with climate change.  Given the absolute truth that nobody can predict the future with absolute accuracy, I think you could do worse than listen to (read) Raconteur Report's “The 2019 Quincy Adams Wagstaff Lecture”

Wherever you're reading this, you've had unmistakable evidence that things aren't going to go all rosy. Perhaps ever again. Perhaps just for a long dark winter of the soul, and/or of the entire civilization. There has been more than one Dark Age period in human history, and they will happen again. You may very well get to see this firsthand, and experience life amidst it. Howsoever long or briefly.

Aesop goes on to talk about the value of trying to prepare for the variety of things that are coming.  Switching over to John Wilder, he points out:

Aesop mentions mental readiness, and that’s key.  The last 37 months have been, to put it mildly, an indication that we are headed towards a very uncertain future as the culture around us continues to polarize, as the monetary debt we face (all over the world) continues to mount, as soccer is still taken seriously as an international sport rather than a game for attention challenged three-year-olds, and as the international stability that was so hard won with the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War dissolves.

 

Glass Half Full or Glass Half Empty

I don't have to explain that; everyone knows the half glass of water witticism.  As a teen I would always frustrate the questioner by saying “it's just half a glass; you don't know if it's being filled or emptied so you can't know which one you're halfway to.”

What I'm referring to is the coming decade (pedants note: I didn't say we've started a new decade, yet), of course.  Is 2020 going to kick off the coming spicy time (horrible name, BTW, spicy food is good so spicy times ought to be good), or is it going to be the continuation of the way the world has gotten continuously better?  The last decade has seen a dramatic continuation of things getting better and the next decade should continue to see it as well.

Writing for Britain's Spectator magazine, Matt Ridley explained that the 2010s have seen "the greatest improvement in human living standards in history. Extreme poverty has fallen below 10 per cent of the world’s population for the first time. It was 60 per cent when I was born. Global inequality has been plunging as Africa and Asia experience faster economic growth than Europe and North America; child mortality has fallen to record low levels; famine virtually went extinct; malaria, polio and heart disease are all in decline." [Bold added:  SiG]

Ridley is a good guy to write a piece like this, published in the Spectator and excerpted at PJ Media because of a book he wrote about decade ago, The Rational Optimist.  Released in 2011, that was while the world was still in the depths of the 2008 crash, although starting to recover.  Reviewers thought he was crazy to be optimistic but many of his central claims have come to be the case.

Perhaps one of the least fashionable predictions I made nine years ago was that ‘the ecological footprint of human activity is probably shrinking’ and ‘we are getting more sustainable, not less, in the way we use the planet’. That is to say: our population and economy would grow, but we’d learn how to reduce what we take from the planet. And so it has proved. An MIT scientist, Andrew McAfee, recently documented this in a book called More from Less, showing how some nations are beginning to use less stuff: less metal, less water, less land. Not just in proportion to productivity: less stuff overall.

Doesn't quite fit in with what little Snippi Longstocking, Extinction Rebellion, and the other disaster-pr0n promoters tell us; but it's true.  In Ridely's native UK, their consumption of resources peaked around the turn of the century, Y2K, and has been in decline since.

The quantity of all resources consumed per person in Britain (domestic extraction of biomass, metals, minerals and fossil fuels, plus imports minus exports) fell by a third between 2000 and 2017, from 12.5 tonnes to 8.5 tonnes. That’s a faster decline than the increase in the number of people, so it means fewer resources consumed overall.

The most important progress was in the cost of production and delivery of energy, the lifeblood of pretty much everything.

The shale oil revolution from horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, which started in 2006 but peaked in the past decade, nearly helped make the United States a net energy exporter for the first time since 1953.
...
Before the shale oil boom, the U.S. was expected to become a big importer of liquified natural gas, but America now exports LNG to 36 countries, double the 18 countries at the beginning of the Trump administration. Shipping the gas to Europe has reduced the continent's dependence on Russia.

Not that I think CO2 emission are important, but Ridley points out that U.S. carbon emissions have declined this past decade, defying predictions that they would continue to increase.  Remember the Hoopla around Trump pulling the US out of the Paris Climate Accords - and now we're virtually the only nation actually meeting those targets?  It's that natural gas production.  Natural gas emits half as much carbon as coal, and it generated 35 percent of U.S. power in 2018, the most of any source. Coal, meanwhile, dropped from 45 percent in 2010 to 25 percent in 2019 — and it is projected to drop still farther to 22 percent next year.

Turning back to the reduction in use of resources:

If this doesn’t seem to make sense, then think about your own home. Mobile phones have the computing power of room-sized computers of the 1970s. I use mine instead of a camera, radio, torch, compass, map, calendar, watch, CD player, newspaper and pack of cards. LED light bulbs consume about a quarter as much electricity as incandescent bulbs for the same light. Modern buildings generally contain less steel and more of it is recycled. Offices are not yet paperless, but they use much less paper.

I think a clue to the decline in use of resources is the collapse of the recycling movements.  First off, as I've said many times, it's not possible to create a market for something by fiat.  Someone can't just say those empty food cans in the garbage stream can be used to make something, and create a market for it.  A resource is worth exactly what a willing buyer will pay for it and the reality is that most cities, counties and other government levels are finding they get far less for recyclables than collecting and processing them costs.  More is being dumped in the landfills.  When resources are in short supply, companies will be mining in the landfills; as the richest mines for iron, copper and other metals.  That's recycling running at full speed - for certain materials.  The fact that no mining company wants to mine in old landfills says that there's plenty of resources available and recycled garbage is more expensive than mining and refining ores.

The article at the Spectator or the excerpting at PJ Media are worth reading.  The obvious thing I see no mention of is personal freedom and liberty, a topic he's strangely quiet about.  What I'm doing here - and I suspect some of you realize this - is setting a table.  Tonight's buffet is optimistic; tomorrow's will be more toward the pessimistic side.  I think that our brains are hardwired to consider coming problems, simply from a survival advantage standpoint.  Reacting to a saber tooth tiger is easier and more successful when you're preventing or avoiding an attack than when the tiger has jumped you.  When everything is good, we look for those things that are out of place; the things that might go bad tomorrow and tend to focus on them.  

Final words to Tyler O'Neill at PJ Media.

This remarkable progress has not come equally, even though it has benefitted nearly everyone in the world. Millennials enjoy pervasive entertainment, fresh food, and many new kinds of job opportunities, but we struggle to achieve homeownership. High immigration levels, radical liberal policies, and the push toward identity politics have increased political tensions, just as prosperity has deepened and widened.

The 2010s were an objectively great decade, but they may not have felt like it. Whatever their political persuasions, however, Americans should look back on the past decade and appreciate the progress. They should also reject radical proposals that would reverse these heartening trends.

Happy New Year 2020 - and the Optometrists Rejoice

Have you ever noticed how many optometrists, eyeglass places, one-stop eyeglass shops have 2020 in their phone number, if not their name? 

They'll be having a field day with this. 

New Year is the time for lots of retrospective big-picture posts about the Best or Worst of 2019.  The alternative is the What to Expect Next Year line.  If you want to read those, go read Borepatch or Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise.  Mine will be personally retrospective.  For what to expect in the coming year, I come down near those two, perhaps closer to Borepatch, perhaps a bit naively thinking that events rarely unfold linearly, and the unpredicted; the black swan is what gets you.  As the wise man said, “life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.”

Like I've said before, there are plenty of ways to delineate time and it's only New Year's Eve 2020 in the one the Western world generally follows.  2019 was a sufficiently crappy year for us that I'm going to pretend that opening a new year's calendar really does fundamentally change things in a way that flipping a one-page-per-day calendar doesn't.  Tomorrow will be a fresh start.

On the positive side, 2019 was my fourth full year of retirement; I turned the page into my fifth year on Friday the 20th.  With the exception I'll get to in a moment, everyone's health is good.  My brother and the extended family on that side are all well as are Dear Son, Daughter In Law and Precious Granddaughter.  My little niece (who's 27) announced her engagement and plans to get married early next year.  Yeah, it's hard not to think of her as a school girl, highschool cheerleader, or pre-school.  Kind of like when your own kid announces something like this except with much less anguish.  Personally, I've gone through a year of getting off several prescriptions and OTC stuff I took too often, and all my lab tests have been improving - a trend going on for several years. 

The first bad event of the year was early March, when Mrs. Graybeard fell and broke a bony prominence at the top of her thigh bone (she broke two pieces off the greater trochanter for you medical folks who visit) as we were starting to wash our cars.  That was a total reset of life.  She was on a walker until the middle of April, only able to do the most basic essentials of life for herself.  It was weekly x-rays and doctor checks until mid-April.  Then a short period on a cane and finally walking uncomfortably by mid-May.  There were some setbacks in rehab and I can't pick out a point when she was back to normal, but it was after the summer.  I think being unable to put any weight on that limb for six weeks was probably more damaging to her health than the break itself.  On the other hand, the orthopedic surgeon made it clear it was a bitchy surgery to go through, as well as for him to do, and it was best considered a last resort.  Metabolically and other health-wise though, the most important stuff, she's fine.  One can recover from an injury better if they're otherwise healthy and don't have the chronic diseases so common in our society.

Because of the accident, we didn't take any vacations or go anywhere.  On the day she fell, I had made a note to myself to make reservations (once we were done washing the cars) to go to one of the big model engineering shows, NAMES Expo (the North American  Model Engineering Society), held annually outside Detroit (Wyandotte, Michigan).  We went to one Expo in 2008, in Toledo, Ohio that year.  (Note the NAMES Expo website is still for the 2019 show, last April!  I've seen an article saying there will be a show this year, but they're a bit slow to update.) 

The next major bad was our lightning strike that I've posted lots about since the first posting here. There's little to say at this point except that the rate of things failing has been going down and it may have gotten to background failure rates.  The last major expense was that my wife's computer died the week before Thanksgiving which made the thoughts about upgrading our two desktops a bit more prominent.  We eventually bought a pair of identical Dell desktops.  Probably a bit more than we'd like to have spent on them, but amortized over another 8 to 10 year lifetime, probably not bad.  Not counting the new computers, and my radio repairs, the lightning strike cost us right around $3000 in damages. Not related to lightning, we also ran about $3000 in car repairs.

In the last year, I've moved my general interest of stuff to blog on to that big pile of interesting, newsy stuff that's 45 miles up the road, the burgeoning space industry; both private and NASA.  Along the way, I've subscribed to newsletters to read, even one that I have to pay for (and possibly more coming).  I figure my proximity gives me a bit of an advantage, and being able to go outside to watch launches from the side yard is part of that.  I haven't gone full Everyday Astronaut or Scott Manley, but they're trying to make money at this, while I'm just trying to be an interesting, full-service blog. 

Guaranteed to be worth what you paid. 

I wish you all a happy, prosperous, safe and free New Year!  Remember, as Matt Groening says, drinking and power tools don't mix, so if you drink don't drill!  And if you drill don't drink?  Something like that.

Here Be Gremlins

After the old nautical charts that would have the legend "Here Be Dragons" over unexplored waters.

Since we put in our shop in '14, I've been plagued by random triggering of my ground fault interrupter outlets.  Long time readers with extra sharp memory will know that I've talked about this before, and did one long post about it.  The bottom line about this is that it has never gone away.  Our electric utility replaced the last transformer in the distribution we're on - the one for us and our three closest neighbors - in the last year and the problem became more intermittent.  When they replaced it we were having our lights flicker or pulsate randomly, and when the flickering was bad, the GFI would pop.  We'd get the outlet popping once a day or a couple of times in a day, and then not again for a month or six weeks.  We've thought that it correlated best to rain and then seen driving rain not matter.  This fall/winter it has seemed to correlate to strong winds.  We have underground utilities, so there are no wires moving in the breeze in the last mile to us.  We've thought it was caused by the surge protected AC strips I was using, but those have all been replaced with only one being surge protected.

Last week, I finally decided to replace the GFI outlet itself.  It was originally the less likely of our two GFI outlets to trip, but I pulled that outlet put a non-protected outlet in its place, and moved it from our east wall to our west wall.  Briefly, the west wall has all of my machine tools plugged into it except one - my air compressor - and the place where AC-powered machinery and water meet is the cooling system on my milling machine.  The east wall has far less plugged in.

Saturday, I'm making some sanding passes on the cylinder in the big lathe and cranked the RPMs up from its minimum (100 RPM) up toward 200.  The GFI pops!  Coincidence?  Random event?  So I reset the GFI and try again.  Slower this time and by 170 RPM it pops again.  Now I've run that lathe at higher RPM many times before and it never popped while using the outlet I replaced because I thought it might be bad.  I tried the experiment a few more times (Goldfinger's law) and it was completely repeatable.

I open the junction box and pull the outlet out.  It's a 120V 15 A GFI just like the circuit, I tell Mrs. Graybeard.  See that breaker in the box right there?  It's clearly marked ... 20A.  Oops.  Bought the wrong size GFI.  OK, put back the old one, try it again, up to 250 RPM with no hassles.   Never pops the GFI.  Then I look up the spec on the lathe: that motor is never supposed to need more than 12A so unless there was a short transient over 15A, it should have been OK.

Regardless, I tell myself, I should replace the one I'm suspicious of with another 120V 20A GFI and resume the experiment of seeing if it pops randomly (not related to the lathe).  We waited for today because it was the weekend and picked up the third GFI outlet for that spot (True Value hardware is starting to love me).  Put in the new outlet today, now it's time to test it with the lathe.

Sure as Schiff it pops when I get above 150 RPM!

I realize this gets confusing - it gets confusing for me.  I find myself with two different, brand new GFIs, different brands, a 15 A and 20 A that do the same thing - the lathe makes them pop open when I go above about 150 RPM.  I have one, old GFI that's also a 20 A that the lathe never pops.  It's not really easy to make sense of that. It seems to me that the lathe speed controller is probably doing something wrong during the transients while speeding up. The "good" two see that while the possibly "bad" one doesn't.  I'm not even sure the lathe is doing something wrong, although it looks that way.

I'm in that awkward position of not knowing quite what to do.  No schematics, no manual besides the lathe's operator's manual.  There are relatively few of these compared to the 7x12 mini lathes. 

It's an Old Story, But It's an Interesting Story

The story first surfaced a couple of weeks ago, got picked up by Zero Hedge, and then got picked up somewhere I saw it (I thought it was Bayou Renaissance Man, but can't find it in a few searches).

Earth's Magnetic North Pole is Moving Faster Than Ever, Leaving Scientists Baffled.

This didn't happen in the last six months or couple of years, but started in the 1990s.  My first piece on this was August of '16, but the north magnetic pole has been moving faster than ever in recorded history.  Frankly, nobody knows quite what it means.  The sheer speed at which it's happening has never been seen before.

The latest report from NOAA, the “World Magnetic Model” for 2020, shows the pole rapidly speeding in the direction of Siberia. However, the trajectory of the pole will likely change.

They don't say why they believe the trajectory is going to change, though.

NOAA’s National Centres for Environmental Information explained:

“Since its first formal discovery in 1831, the north magnetic pole has travelled around 1,400 miles (2,250 km).
This wandering has been generally quite slow, allowing scientists to keep track of its position fairly easily.”

As recently as 2000, the magnetic North Pole was clocked at moving 6.2 miles per year toward Northern Russia, but data for the next two decades shows the average rate suddenly increasing to roughly 34 miles per year in the same direction, while the latest readings in 2019 show it slightly decreasing to about 31 miles per year.

The World Magnetic Model predicts the average speed will slow down to roughly 25 miles per year from 2020 to 2025.

The path the magnetic pole has taken since 1900 is interesting. 

Take a look near the center of the semicircle; note that the pole has moved through the prime meridian of longitude, 0 and 180, through Greenwich in the UK. This is the first time in recorded history that the magnetic pole has moved from the Western to the Eastern hemisphere. 

Geomagnetic specialist Ciaran Beggan from the British Geological Survey (BGS) told the Financial Times:

“The movement since the 1990s is much faster than at any time for at least four centuries.

We really don’t know much about the changes in the core that’s driving it.”

The more important thing, to me (and I don't even pretend to know anything) is that field is continuing to weaken.  In that 2016 article, that source mentioned that the Earth’s magnetic field is weakening 10 times faster than previously thought, decreasing in strength about 5 percent a decade rather than 5 percent a century.  This article mentions that the field continues to weaken.

“The decrease in geomagnetic field is much more important and dramatic than the reversal,” said Dr. Nicolas Thouveny from the European Centre for Research and Teaching of Environmental Geosciences (CEREGE) in Aix-en-Provence, France.

“It is very important to understand if the present field will decay to zero in the next century, because we will have to prepare.”

This Phys.org website article talks about the possibility of the magnetic field getting weak enough to collapse and the poles to flip, which has happened 100 times in the last 20 million years.

The last reversal occurred between 772,000 and 774,000 years ago. Since then, the field has almost reversed 15 times, called an excursion, dropping in strength significantly but not quite reaching the threshold needed before rising again. This is when we are most at risk—as the field decays and then recovers its strength. The last excursion occurred 40,000 years ago, and evidence suggests we are heading in that direction again.

'The geomagnetic field has been losing 30 percent of its intensity in the last 3,000 years,' said Dr. Thouveny. 'From this value, we predict it will drop to near zero in a few centuries or a millennia.'

Yes, that's the same Dr. Thouveny saying it will drop to near zero in a few centuries to a millennia as who talked about the possibility  it could collapse to zero in the next century two paragraphs up.

I always caution that when people are making predictions about things that haven't been measured with modern instruments, predictions are more like educated guesses.  The fact that the poles flipped 773,000 years ago is based on the best measurements with techniques that are self-consistent and thought to be good.  In my mind, that's still not as good as an ancient scroll or diary that says, "this year, compasses stopped working" followed by an entry some time later saying, "those ancient compasses are consistently pointing somewhere again, but somewhere very different from the hand made signs from before they stopped working."

It Has Been A Long Time Since A Shop Update

Because it has been a long time since I got anything done in my shop.  The lightning strike and repairs that followed just sucked up lots of time.  Add in that I did work in my ham shack to improve it should I ever have to work on a backup radio again, my attempts to contact that "other side of the world" island on the radio, and lots of other interruptions and I'm just getting back to my Webster engine.  I had to spend at least a day looking at it and trying to remember where I was.

My last post was back in September, and about finishing the flywheel for the engine.  The next part to do was the piston.  The piston and cylinder fit is one of the most critical parts of building these small engines; in my steam engine, I ended up making three pistons out of different materials (two graphite and one cold rolled steel).  It's hard to say which method is most common, but it seems to me more people seem to make the cylinder first and fit the piston to it.  I had made the cylinder some time ago and that was my intention.

Sometime in October, I put the cylinder back in the lathe's chuck intending to hone it to a constant diameter and smoothness.  To my fingertip, the cylinder wall felt like it had ridges on it down toward the left end in this view, so I was sure it needed to be smoothed.  To accomplish that, I bought a brake cylinder hone. 

I need to talk some numbers here.  The cylinder is supposed to be 0.875" diameter - lapped smooth.  The piston is supposed to be turned to 0.873 and takes two cast iron piston rings that give that 0.875 but have some compliance.  I bought those from a guy who specializes in them.

Measuring the inside diameter of that cylinder isn't as easy as measuring the outside diameter.  A common method is to use telescopic gauges like these.  Note they all have separate knurled knob at the long end of the “T” shape.  The crossbar of the T is spring loaded and that knob locks them in the desired position.  They're locked at their minimum span, inserted to depth in the bore, then the knob is released allowing the spring to drive the measuring points to the diameter, and then the knob is tightened again locking the measurement in place.  It's tedious to measure diameter and taper this way because it requires multiple measurements and each measurement is subject to errors if the measuring points aren't exactly perpendicular to the walls, and the long part of the handle parallel to the axis of the cylinder.

I honed the cylinder for a while with the three abrasive stones on that brake cylinder hone but it didn't seem to be smoothing the cylinder.  The cylinder is curved and the stones are rectangles, so they only rub on their edges.  I wrapped the three stones with 150 grit sandpaper and that seemed to smooth the cylinder faster.  I spent a minute or two working 150 up and down the bore, then switched to 220 and repeated.  Likewise with 320 and 440.  The cylinder feels quite a bit smoother but I can still feel the roughness.  I tried taking a photo of it; easier said than done.

You're looking into the lathe chuck in this view (from the right looking left in that photo at top).  The light colored circle at the top is the bore through the chuck.  Just to the left of that circle's bottom center is a large bump - that's one of the chuck's jaws.  I stretched the contrast and sharpness a bit, so those light and dark rings aren't that obvious looking in there

The measurements I'm getting make it seem the cylinder is already oversized - around 0.878" - so I'm hesitant to smooth it more.  A particle of 400 grit abrasive is 1/400" or .0025 (though that much doesn't stick above the paper).  If I took off that much in diameter, it would definitely be too big.  The piston is a piece of 0.875 stock which measures around 0.874".  I haven't machined the features and details into the piston, yet.  Yeah, I could get a 1" aluminum bar and turn it down to something that's a tighter fit in the cylinder, but I have those piston rings to consider.  I have enough steel bar to make another cylinder if I had to, but I'd rather only do that if I had to. 

As it so often does, it looks like I'm going to have to build it to find out if it works. 

About that AI Apocalypse

Well, about AI taking all the jobs and why I don't really buy into that idea.

The simplest explanation is in an observation by Wernher Von Braun, the German rocket scientist who came to the US after WWII and essentially birthed the space program of the '60s.  Von Braun was once questioned about the '50s version of the “AI is going to take all the jobs” idea; just substitute the word computers for AI in that phrase. Von Braun said,

The best computer is a man, and it’s the only one that can be mass-produced by unskilled labor.

We already have an existing equivalent of Artificial General Intelligence.  We just call it Natural Intelligence because it's found in some humans, and as Von Braun noted, it's the only kind that can be mass produced by unskilled labor.

What got me thinking along these lines was an article on Cafe Hyak called, “I'm Still Not the Least Worried About AI Causing Lasting Unemployment.”  Long time readers might remember this, but I'm influenced by the companies that manufacture robots.  Three years ago, I posted an article about the sales of industrial robots and how the relationship between robots and employment isn't what most people think it is.  If robots were replacing workers on massive scales, employment would be going down as robot sales were going up.  In fact, the trend is that robot sales go up in step with employment.  Allow me to reprise the relevant graph:

Although it's a busy plot, the most important parts are the two lines: linearized (smoothed) trends in both US nonfarm employment  (orange) and robot shipments (green).  They're not crossing at all; in fact, they're almost parallel, with a weak tendency to converge.  As employment goes up, robot sales go up.  The irregular red curve and the gray bars represent the raw data series, without smoothing.  When looking at the raw data, there only seems to be only one period when employment behaved the way we thought, when robot sales went up as jobs went down, (2003) but the rest of the time, robot sales go up as employment goes up.

Looked at this way, robots are just another tool in the race for companies to remain competitive.  Sure, as other labor costs go up it shifts the incentive to robotize different jobs, but that applies to any shortage and any other manipulation in the market.  The mandate for a $15/hr minimum wage is guaranteed to push the economic incentives for companies to replace humans with robots or other mechanized tools.  The government interference in setting the wage instead of the market setting wages is what pushes the economic incentives to robots.

It turns out that author Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hyak sees things much the same way as I do.

First, robots are tools that conserve human labor. As Deirdre McCloskey notes, by using robots today we humans do nothing that differs fundamentally from what we’ve done for millennia; conserving scarce labor by using robots is economically no different than conserving scarce labor by using the likes of levers, pulleys, ropes, and buckets. If the adoption of labor-saving tools 10,000 years ago, or 1,000 years ago, or 100 years ago, or 10 years ago caused no lasting unemployment, I see no reason to worry that such adoption today and tomorrow will do so.

Second, as George Selgin points out, labor-saving tools and techniques are not adopted until there’s an economic impetus for doing so. And the principal economic impetus for saving labor is a rise in the cost of labor. Because in markets a rise in the cost of labor – that is, a rise in real wage rates – is itself evidence of an expansion and improvement in labors’ opportunities relative to the supply of labor, the adoption of robots and other labor-saving techniques is a result of labors’ increasing scarcity rather than a cause of its superabundance.

Third, as I myself have somewhere observed, no robot is more human-like than an actual human. Therefore, each and every one-person increase in the labor force is akin to the introduction into the labor force of one robot brilliantly engineered to possess all the dexterity, flexibility, and intelligence of a human worker. And so because the huge increase in the human labor force over the past few centuries has caused no lasting unemployment, I’m confident that the ‘birth’ of human-like robots will have no such baneful consequence.

The bane of prediction is that we base prediction on what we already have observed.  The slide rule industry thought they had a nice, secure little market of new students going into college and some upgrades or replacements, until the electronic calculator came along.  They're both tools but the new one was dramatically better and replaced all previous tools.  The same has happened in other industries.  The wild card in this prediction is that the new AI might be so much more capable than humans that we're all obsoleted - if not hunted down by Skynet for termination.  Based on how well autonomous cars drive, I don't see that happening anytime soon. 

The War on Men in One Chart

It's a cliche' of these times that men are privileged and don't have to do anything to make money and get more perks in society.   Men are inherently given more social, economic, and political advantages or rights based on their sex.  The myth that women with equal backgrounds earn “77% of what men earn” gets repeated all the time.  To quote from that 2015 piece:

Maybe it's only in companies that have some government contract hiring, but every Technology company I know wants the diversity points so badly they would hire a woman over a marginally more qualified man any day of the week.  I get both Electrical and Mechanical engineering news magazines and the annual salary surveys in both fields have said for years that when adjusted for age and experience, there is no wage gap between men and women.  In general, when pay rates are looked at in any field, this is the case. 

The public education establishment has been deferring to girls on virtually everything since the 90s or earlier and I can't recall how long ago it was that I first read a woman (columnist in the newspaper) talking about trying to keep her son from giving up on school because he could see boys never got called on. 

Mark Perry at the American Enterprise Institute put together some rather illustrative research in a piece based on the concept “For every 100 girls/women ...” it gives the numbers of boys/men equaling that 100.

The data in the table show that on many, many measures of: a) educational, behavioral and mental health outcomes, b) alcohol, drug addiction, and drug overdoses, c) suicide, murder, violent crimes, and incarceration, d) job fatalities and e) homelessness, boys and men are faring much worse than girls and women. And yet despite the fact that boys and men are at so much greater risk than girls and women on so many different measures, those significant gender disparities that disproportionately and adversely affect men get almost no attention.

For example, take the second line and read it as “For every 100 girls or women who earn an associates degree, there are 63 boys or men.”   The chart is rather stunning.  For every 100 women in graduate school in the US there are 73 men.  For every 100 girls who take Advanced Placement or Honors classes in natural sciences, there are 79 boys.  For every 100 homeless women there are 154 homeless men.

Look at the bottom; for every 100 women in adult correctional facility (prison) there are 1,000 men.  For every 100 women who die on the job, 1,294 men do - almost 13 times as many.

You don't have to look very long or hard to find backing for these things.  When you listen to NASA's public relations talk about the Artemis program and going back to the moon, they're rather up front about saying that the point of the first mission is to put the first woman on the moon.  NASA made a Big Deal out of the “first all-woman spacewalk” earlier this year.  In both cases: why?  I guess I never identified with the idea that if the person in any position of fame isn't just like me and my background (ethnic background, height, weight, sex or whatever) then the mission isn't valid or interesting.

Nobody should be excluded and nobody should be included because of those things.  What should matter is how well they can do the job.  Meritocracy, not identity.  I don't want my granddaughter being excluded because she's a girl any more than I want my grandson excluded because he's a boy.  Why is it that institutions can't try to include more girls without excluding more boys?  In my view, this anti-male activism that gets pushed on boys from the moment they enter grade school and persists throughout their early adulthood is what causes the bad social statistics in that table.  It leads to the formation of things like Men Going Their Own Way movement and essentially withdrawing from society. 

According to Perry, the data in the table show that based on a large number of measures, "boys and men are faring much worse than girls and women." Perry explains, "Despite the fact that boys and men are at so much greater risk than girls and women on so many different measures, those significant gender disparities that disproportionately and adversely affect men get almost no attention." He added, "It’s girls and women who get a disproportionate amount of attention, resources, and financial support." He cited some examples of the wide availability of women's centers and commissions on college campuses, and the lack of men's equivalents; the disproportionately high number of women-only scholarships, fellowships, awards and initiatives for female students and faculty; girls-only STEM programs and organizations, many of which, interestingly enough, are being challenged for violating Title IX.

Multiple single-sex, girl-only computer science and STEM organizations that exclude boys including Girls Who Code, Latina Girls Code, Black Girls Code, Techbridge Girls, and Project Scientist. Some of those programs are currently being legally challenged with complaints to the Office for Civil Rights when those programs are hosted on the campus of a university that receives federal financial assistance and is therefore required to enforce Title IX’s prohibition of sex discrimination.

There are Women in Science and Engineering (WiSE and similar names) departments or units at most major universities like the University of Michigan, Rochester Institute of Technology, Syracuse University. and Georgia Tech. There isn’t a single “Men in Science and Engineering” program in the country, and there are no “Men in Nursing” or “Men in Education” programs that address the under-representation of men in those academic fields.

Go read.

From 2015 - original source linked to this is gone. 

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah

Along with being the Eve of Christmas Eve, today is the second day of Hanukkah.  Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah or or whatever you choose to celebrate.  You can change the words, but you can't change my warmest wishes for everything good for you and those you cherish.

I always say that churches, like all groups, have personalities, and in the one I attend, it would be remarkable to toss a wadded up paper ball and not hit an engineer, nurse, doctor, or a tech professional.  It's not news to this bunch that Jesus was probably born in the spring or fall rather than in the dead of winter, nor is it news that the December 25th date probably comes from adapting to the Roman Saturnalia or other pagan holidays; nor would they be shocked if you told them Christmas has more secular than holy traditions associated with it and many things that are totally ingrained in the holiday traditions started out as advertising gimmicks.  There was no little drummer boy when the events we portray as the nativity happened; in fact, the scene we call the nativity is a conglomeration of bits and pieces mostly from the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, and certainly did not happen within the first couple of days of Jesus' life.  Nobody knows how many magi (“wise men”) came to visit the child; we say three because of the three gifts listed, but it could have been almost any number.  Furthermore, it wasn't at his birth with Jesus in a manger; it was when Jesus was old enough to be called a child.  The scene was at his parents' home and not at an inn. 

A friend sent me this contribution on the question of the exact date.

The truth is we simply don’t know the exact date of our Savior’s birth. In fact, we don’t even know for sure the year in which He was born. Scholars believe it was somewhere between 6 B.C. and 4 B.C. One thing is clear: if God felt it was important for us to know the exact date of the Savior’s birth, He certainly would have told us in His Word. The Gospel of Luke gives very specific details about the event, even down to what the baby was wearing – “swaddling clothes”—and where he slept—“in a manger” (Luke 2:12). These details are important because they speak of His nature and character, meek and lowly. But the exact date of His birth has no significance whatsoever, which may be why God chose not to mention it.

I've heard another explanation for why December 25th was chosen.  It's close to the solstice, the longest night of the year - which made it the darkest night of the year in those days. Jesus was the light of the world, and the symbolism of bringing light when things are at their darkest fits perfectly with the story.  If someone came out with a convincing line of evidence that Jesus really was born on December 25th, I'd be surprised... but not very.  We use a different calendar today than was used in those days, and I'm not sure today's December 25th is the same day as that era's December 25th.  To paraphrase that previous quote, not that it matters. 

While going through my mom's things after she passed away six years ago, we found this picture.  This is my brother (on the right) and me visiting Santa.  He looks a bit more skeptical than me, but he is my older brother.  While I'm not sure of the date, my guess is it would have been around 1960, plus or minus a year or two. 

Christmas Music Post Expanded

Regulars here know that I'm somewhat of a blues fan.  I've introduced the outrageously talented Joanne Shaw Taylor, and the late country blues master (and songwriting partner to Eric Clapton) JJ Cale; more appropriate to the day, every year around this time, I comment on my favorite bluesy Christmas song, “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas.”

The song dates from 1944, is credited to Hugh Martin and Ralph Blaine for Judy Garland's 1944 movie, Meet Me in St. Louis, but it's generally acknowledged to be Hugh Martin's writing.  The somber tone is understandable; Christmas of 1944 was three years into World War II, and many people had undergone the hardship of long separations from or the loss of family members. The war was wearing on the national psyche; the death toll was the highest seen since the Civil War.  They were dark days.  It's interesting, then, that Martin has said he wasn’t consciously writing about wartime separations.



You'll note that at the end of the song, the line isn't “hang a shining star upon the highest bough”, it's the more subdued “until then, we'll have to muddle through somehow.” Much more fitting to a more somber song written during WWII. The change to “...highest bough” (which seems to be the last) was prompted by Frank Sinatra in 1957. According to Entertainment Weekly in 2007,

Then, in 1957, Frank Sinatra — who'd already cut a lovely version with the movie's bittersweet lyrics in 1947 — came to Martin with a request for yet another pick-me-up. “He called to ask if I would rewrite the 'muddle through somehow' line,” says the songwriter. “He said, 'The name of my album is A Jolly Christmas. Do you think you could jolly up that line for me?' ”

That request led to the line we hear most often, although Martin says he thinks the original line is more “down-to-earth.”  “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” has become one of the most popular songs year after year.  EW says it's second only to the Nat King Cole-popularized “The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire).”  It has been covered by a gamut of artists from Sinatra to Connie Stephens, to James Taylor (who sings something closer to the '40s, Judy Garland version) to '80s metal band Twisted Sister, and many, many more.

I'm not so one-dimensional that this is the only song I can live with for the month, though.  When I play them myself, I tend to start by playing “O Holy Night” although I can't hope to get within a light year of this order of ability - or hit that vocal range under any circumstances.



Still, a fingerstyle guitar can approach the sound of the piano in the mix here.  I can't really link to a video that sounds like what I attempt to play because I sit with a piano song book and work from that sheet music. 

And there are more.  If asked to pick my one most favorite Christmas song, as if I could, I'd probably pick one of these two.   There are lots that are fun to listen to once or twice a year, even the cliche' “Jingle Bell Rock” is fun a few times. There are fewer that I could listen to lots throughout this month.

What are yours?

Happy Winter Solstice

Today is the day of the Winter Solstice - which is the moment the sun stands still at the southernmost point on its north/south cycle.  To be more specific, the moment the sun stands still is 11:19 PM EST according to the website Time and Date (dot com!)  From this day on, every sunrise will be a little farther north and a little earlier until June's summer solstice (ignoring DST).

How about a couple of solstice fun facts?

The motion of the sun in the sky traces out a curve called an analemma, and this is usually printed on globes.   You can photograph one of these yourself if you care to dedicate a camera to doing nothing else for a year as photographer István Mátis did using the view from a window in his apartment in Romania.

The trick is to start about now when the sun is as low on the analemma as it will get.  That sets the lower right end of the analemma.  Set up a camera on a tripod pointing out a window with a good view of the southeast and use a normal focal length lens.  You take a photo at the same time every few days (or once a week) - it doesn't have to be sunrise - and you'll get something like this, if you're good ... or lucky.  Once a week is a good, round number and you pretty much can't make the weekly exposures too short.  You expose very short exposures so it just captures the sun and one day out of the year that you think looks pretty enough, take a longer exposure to capture the sky.  This is probably a good use for a film camera that can do multiple exposures and an old roll of film that will only get the one picture on it.  

Mátis writes,

The discs of the Sun are taken between 11/6/2012 and 1/19/2014 at 7:00 UT, which is 9 o'clock in the morning local time during winter and 10 o'clock during daylight saving time. The background is made on 1/14/2014 at 7:55 local time, from the original location of the analemma.

More details here.  My guess is that the gaps in the pattern were caused by cloudy days.

The other fun fact is that while this is the shortest day of the year, it is neither the earliest sunset or latest sunrise.  The earliest sunset is generally during the first week of December and the latest sunrise is in the first week of January.  The converse is true for the summer solstice in June.  The earliest sunrise is at the start of June and the latest sunset is in early July.  I've never checked those times extensively for other locations, so yours may vary.