Therapy dogs waiting for Parkland students

Photo cropped for size from the original at the Aww subreddit

Warren Buffett prefers monopolies

When I was in my thirties, working 55-60 hours/week, I began to have disposable income.  At that time my role models for investing were Peter Lynch and Warren Buffett.  Both of them were stock-pickers rather than market timers, and both have achieved legendary status in the financial world.

Warren Buffett is often cited as a prime example of the wonders of free-market capitalism and the potential for "everyman" to roll modest investments into enormous wealth.  A recent article in The Nation offers quite a different perspective:

This Nation investigation documents how Buffett’s massive wealth has actually been built: on monopoly power and the unfair advantages it provides. Companies in Buffett’s portfolio have extorted windfall profits, evaded US taxes, and abused customers. In the two specific cases discussed below, in the banking and high-tech industries, Buffett’s investments have prompted federal investigations for anticompetitive or other illegal practices...

Buffett makes no secret of his fondness for monopoly. He repeatedly highlights the key to his personal fortune: finding businesses surrounded by a monopoly moat, keeping competitors at bay. “[W]e think in terms of that moat and the ability to keep its width and its impossibility of being crossed,” Buffett told the annual Berkshire Hathaway meeting in 2000. “We tell our managers we want the moat widened every year.”

America isn’t supposed to allow moats, much less reward them. Our economic system, we claim, is founded on free and fair competition. We have laws over a century old designed to break up concentrated industries, encouraging innovation and risk-taking. In other words, Buffett’s investment strategy should not legally be available, to him or anyone else.

Over the past 40 years, however, the United States has not only failed to build bridges across monopoly moats; it has stocked those moats with alligators. Two-thirds of all US industries were more concentrated in 2012 than in 1997, The Economist has documented. Since the Reagan era, the federal government has abandoned antitrust enforcement, with markets for products like eyeglasses, toothpaste, beef, and beer whittled down to a few suppliers. This consolidation has vastly inflated corporate profits, damaged workers and consumers, stunted economic growth, and supercharged economic inequality.  

It's a well-researched indictment, and worth the read.  For relevant background, see Investopedia's What is an economic moat?

Vincent Van Gogh action figure

Image (and title) from Madam Jujujive's incomparable Everlasting Blort.

Cobra vs. python

One of the combatants, a king cobra, lay strangled. The second, a reticulated python, was also dead. Bitten behind its head by the cobra and suffering from the hooded snake’s deadly venom, the python attempted to defend its life by squeezing its attacker to death. It succeeded.

But neither survived.

Image cropped for size from the original at National Geographic, where the encounter is discussed.

Ocean tides as evolutionary triggers

New calculations suggest that, around 400 million years ago, many coastlines experienced two-week tidal cycles that varied in height by four metres or more. Such a huge range could have stranded fish in tidal pools for a couple of weeks. Only the ones with fins strong enough to muscle themselves out would have been able to journey back into the ocean and survive. Fossil evidence for the earliest known land vertebrates comes from places that had such wide tidal ranges...

Hundreds of millions of years ago, the Moon was much closer to Earth than it is now. Steven Balbus, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford, UK, has explored how the Moon’s proximity to Earth might have affected its gravitational pull and influenced life on the planet. In 2014, he suggested that Earth’s tidal ranges would have been greater around the time the first four-limbed vertebrates, or tetrapods, appeared on land...

More information at Nature.

When you're too ignorant to draw a swastika

Probably drawn by the same type of people who claim to be "Natzis."

Image cropped for size from the original posted at the BBC, credit Reuters.

This one, however, I have mixed feelings about...

It's called a "filter sock"

For the last decade or so I've been seeing these boom-like structures deployed at construction sites and other locations where sediment runoff needs to be controlled.  They are particularly abundant at road construction sites in the vicinity of rivers and waterways, and seem to have replaced the older method of staking straw bales ("wattles") to the ground.

I never gave any thought to what might be inside them until I encountered one (in the subdivision being built next to our neighborhood) that had been installed last year and is now breaking down:

Wood mulch.  Heavy enough to restrain runoff, lighter than sand, biodegradable.  Very clever.  In our fairly-woodsy part of the country, wood mulch is abundant.  Arborists will virtually give it away, and our town has immense piles that are free to any gardener who wants to truck it away.  A quick Google of key words yielded the term "filter sock."

Now I know "the rest of the story."  You learn something every day.

"Team Minnesota" did extremely well in this Olympics

From the Star Tribune:

As the Pyeongchang Olympics close out a 17-day run Sunday, Minnesota athletes have collected three gold medals and a bronze... The count included unprecedented golds by cross-country skier Jessie Diggins of Afton and curling skip John Shuster, a Chisholm native. The U.S. never had won a gold medal in either sport and had only one medal of any color in each.

The U.S. women’s hockey team, whose eight Minnesota-linked players include seven natives, beat Canada to win its first Olympic gold medal in 20 years. Alpine skier Lindsey Vonn — who still lists Buck Hill Ski Team as her home club, along with the slightly more glamorous Ski & Snowboard Club Vail — earned bronze in the downhill, in what is likely to be her final Olympics...

Minnesota, with 5.5 million people, put 22 natives or residents on the U.S. team and earned a third of the country’s golds... 

And the New York Times:

That Minnesotans are leading American success in these sports should not be surprising. Minnesota produces more girls and women hockey players than any other state by far, according to U.S.A. Hockey, and the second-most curlers after Wisconsin, per U.S.A. Curling. And Minnesota, with a thriving cross-country community, is one of the few states where Nordic skiing is a varsity sport...

The women’s hockey victory likewise thrilled folks in Warroad, a town of about 1,700 that has put eight hockey players on Olympic teams since 1960, including Gigi Marvin on the last three women’s teams. All but T.J. Oshie, in 2014, brought home medals. (Oshie can be forgiven; his four goals on six shots in an opening-round shootout against Russia still inspires awe.)

My old high school now offers Nordic skiing and Alpine skiing as winter sports options.  In my era you had to choose either basketball, ice hockey, or wrestling (I see the latter is not available nowadays, replaced by... yoga). 

It has been said that no state's residents brag more about the accomplishment of their fellow residents than Minnesotans do.  That's why I was required to write this post.

More about curling at The Bemidji Pioneer.  Photo of Kikkan Randall and Jessie Diggins via Washington Post.

Why microwaved food tastes different

To understand why, it helps to get to grips with the queen of chemical reactions, the Maillard reaction. First discovered by the French chemist, Louis-Camille Maillard, back in 1912, it’s the most widely practiced chemical reaction on the planet. It happens in millions of kitchens every day, though very few people have heard of it.

Essentially, something delicious happens when you mix amino acids with certain kinds of sugars, then heat them up. New compounds begin to form, which turn the food brown and contribute to its flavour...

These Maillard by-products are responsible for the earthy sweetness of coffee and the malty, caramel notes in beer, as well as the appetising aroma of baked bread, chips, fried onions, barbecued meat, biscuits, toasted marshmallows, and most other foods that we find irresistible. It’s one reason spices are fried or toasted before they’re used, and why there’s no comparison between roasted and boiled potatoes...

The problem is, the reaction can’t happen if the food is too wet. “If you’ve got a raw potato in the oven, it’s got around 80% moisture,” says Elmore. Once it gets to boiling point, water starts to evaporate and its surface begins to dry. “You need to get the water content down to about 5% before the Maillard reaction will take place and you get all the nice cooked flavours and brown colour.” This is why roast potatoes are usually brown on the outside and white on the inside...

This also means that ready meals tend to taste a bit bland. One early study found that beef cooked in the microwave had just a third of the scrumptious aromatic chemicals of meat that was cooked conventionally, while another found that microwave-baked bread was, frankly, disgusting.

Interesting science and culinary art at the BBC article, including new developments in packaging that partially overcome the limitations of microwaving.

Housekeeping/editorial note

At the suggestion of my longest and most-faithful reader, I've made an adjustment to the layout of TYWKIWDBI.

The list of "Categories" in the right sidebar (below the Archive access) is now arranged in alphabetical order.  I had originally set it up with the categories listed in descending order of number of entries, but I agree that this new arrangement makes more sense logistically and will help new readers find an appropriate section of the blog to explore.

Wonder Woman's invisible jet plane

Awesome baloon art, made of clear latex balloons (not condoms, as some might assume).

A strange sound in the night

YouTube link. 

For the past week, a most unusual sound has been emanating from the woods behind our house.  It was so monotonously repetitive, so mechanical-sounding, that I had doubts about it having a biological origin and initially suspected some equipment malfunction at a neighbor's house. 

Today a quick web search yielded the answer.  I've lived near woods for much of my life and have heard all sorts of owls, but didn't recognize this one.  Saw-whets are native to the boreal forests of Canada, but often winter further south in deciduous forests of the northern U.S.

The nocturnal call has been likened to the sound of a saw being whetted - thus the name.

(educational video here)

100,000,000 books donated

Founded by Dolly Parton, the Imagination Library sends free books to children from birth until their start of school, regardless of their parents' income.

Parton started the program in 1995. Less than 10 years later, Parton had donated a million books. After the singer launched operations in Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom, donations started running into the tens of millions.

Parton says her father's illiteracy initially inspired her to take action. 

More at Mashable.

Imagination Library home.  Discussion thread here.

See also: Dolly Parton - Coat of Many Colors  and "I Will Always Love You."

24-hour daycare centers are now a thing

They serve an ever-expanding number of children whose parents work non-standard and unpredictable hours. The parents might be working two service or retail jobs or they may be night nurses. According to the National Women’s Law Center, 9% of daycare center care is now provided during evenings or weekends...

Nearly 40% of Americans now work non-traditional employment hours. Almost two-thirds (64.2%) of women with children under age six are working, and one in five working moms of small children work at low-wage jobs that typically pay $10.50 an hour. They all need to earn more if they are to truly be able to afford daycare, and in a cruel twist, many must work more and stranger hours to do so...

Diana’s mother works two jobs because neither employer will give her more than 29 hours of work. By keeping her hours down, the companies can avoid offering benefits that come with full-time employment...

The rest of the story is at The Guardian.

Lachryphagous moths drink tears - updated

Tear-drinking moths have been known since at least 1928, when Time magazine reported the work of a scientist working in Argentina who observed nocturnal moths sucking the tears of horses. Similar reports have come from Southeast Asia (water buffalo tears) and from Madagascar (birds' tears).

"They prefer the tears of large hoofed mammals, elephants, and on occasion people, whose eyes will often be visited at night while asleep...

The highly specialized Lobocraspis griseifusa does not wait for an animal’s eyes to moisten. When it has landed, it sweeps its proboscis across the eye of its unfortunate host, irritating the eyeball, encouraging it to produce tears. It can even insert its proboscis between the eyelids, ensuring it can feed even while its host is sleeping. Whereas a moth of the genus Poncetia goes to the opposite extreme. It’s proboscis is so short it must cling to the eyeball itself to drink. But it must be careful. If its weeping host blinks, the moth is often crushed to death.”

Text from Matt Walker's Fish That Fake Orgasms and Other Zoological Curiosities, via Uncertain Times. Photo created by The Nonist.

BoingBoing has blogged an article from the Journal of the Kansas Entomological Society about bees that drink human tears.

Reposted from 2009 to add this photo of a caiman:

Photo credit Mark Cowan (location: Los Amigos River, southeastern Peru).