Your tax money at work

YouTube link. 

Res ipsa loquitur.


Via The Dish.

Help for a babushka

A group of volunteers headed to a village in the Tula Region to visit an elderly lady who they heard needed wood to burn in her stove or in other words were in trouble. Entering her home, they found her sitting next to the stove with tears in her eyes. It was very cold and it smelled like dampness...

This is the first of about twenty images in a photoessay at English Russia.  It does have a happy ending, and raises questions about society's priorites.

Rus. "бабушка" - grandmother, old woman.

1/998001 generates a fascinating series

1/998001 = 0.000001002003004005006007008009010011012013014015016017018019020
0210220230240250260270280290300310320330340350360370380390400410420430440450
4604704804905005105205305405505605705805906006106206306406506606706806907007
1072073074075076077078079080081082083084085086087088089090091092093094095096
0970980991001011021031041051061071081091101111121131141151161171181191201211
2212312412512612712812913013113213313413513613713813914014114214314414514614
7148149150151152153154155156157158159160161162163164165166167168169170171172
1731741751761771781791801811821831841851861871881891901911921931941951961971
9819920020120220320420520620720820921021121221321421521621721821922022122222
3224225226227228229230231232233234235236237238239240241242243244245246247248
2492502512522532542552562572582592602612622632642652662672682692702712722732
7427527627727827928028128228328428528628728828929029129229329429529629729829
9300301302303304305306307308309310311312313314315316317318319320321322323324
3253263273283293303313323333343353363373383393403413423433443453463473483493
5035135235335435535635735835936036136236336436536636736836937037137237337437
5376377378379380381382383384385386387388389390391392393394395396397398399400
4014024034044054064074084094104114124134144154164174184194204214224234244254
2642742842943043143243343443543643743843944044144244344444544644744844945045
1452453454455456457458459460461462463464465466467468469470471472473474475476
4774784794804814824834844854864874884894904914924934944954964974984995005015
0250350450550650750850951051151251351451551651751851952052152252352452552652
7528529530531532533534535536537538539540541542543544545546547548549550551552
5535545555565575585595605615625635645655665675685695705715725735745755765775
7857958058158258358458558658758858959059159259359459559659759859960060160260
3604605606607608609610611612613614615616617618619620621622623624625626627628
6296306316326336346356366376386396406416426436446456466476486496506516526536
5465565665765865966066166266366466566666766866967067167267367467567667767867
9680681682683684685686687688689690691692693694695696697698699700701702703704
7057067077087097107117127137147157167177187197207217227237247257267277287297
3073173273373473573673773873974074174274374474574674774874975075175275375475
5756757758759760761762763764765766767768769770771772773774775776777778779780
7817827837847857867877887897907917927937947957967977987998008018028038048058
0680780880981081181281381481581681781881982082182282382482582682782882983083
1832833834835836837838839840841842843844845846847848849850851852853854855856
8578588598608618628638648658668678688698708718728738748758768778788798808818
8288388488588688788888989089189289389489589689789889990090190290390490590690
7908909910911912913914915916917918919920921922923924925926927928929930931932
9339349359369379389399409419429439449459469479489499509519529539549559569579
5895996096196296396496596696796896997097197297397497597697797897998098198298
3984985986987988989990991992993994995996997999 ...

Start at the beginning, or pick a place in the middle and start reciting the numbers.  Someone out there can probably explain why.  At its extremes, mathematics devolves into a kind of magic...

Found in the Futility Closet, which has an abundance of math-related items.

Increasing fresh water in the Arctic Ocean

As reported by Nature Geoscience and summarized by the BBC:

UK scientists have detected a huge dome of freshwater that is developing in the western Arctic Ocean. The bulge is some 8,000 cubic km in size and has risen by about 15cm since 2002. The team thinks it may be the result of strong winds whipping up a great clockwise current in the northern polar region called the Beaufort Gyre...

Dr Giles and colleagues made their discovery using radar satellites belonging to the European Space Agency (Esa). These spacecraft can measure sea-surface height even when there is widespread ice cover because they are adept at picking out the cracks, or leads, that frequently appear in the frozen floes. The data (1995-2010) indicates a significant swelling of water in the Beaufort Gyre, particularly since the early part of the 2000s. The rising trend has been running at 2cm per year...

If the freshwater were to enter the North Atlantic in large volumes, the concern would be that it might disturb the currents that have such a great influence on European weather patterns. These currents draw warm waters up from the tropics, maintaining milder temperatures in winter than would ordinarily be expected at northern European latitudes.

The embed above is a screencap; to view the animation, go to the BBC link.  The animation ends with this graph of the change over time -

Decrying partisan politics

“I think it would be a great tragedy . . . if we had our two major political parties divide on what we would call a conservative-liberal line...

I think one of the attributes of our political system has been that we have avoided generally violent swings in Administrations from one extreme to the other. And the reason we have avoided that is that in both parties there has been room for a broad spectrum of opinion.”

Therefore, “when your Administrations come to power, they will represent the whole people rather than just one segment of the people.” 

Timely words, uttered over fifty years ago by a famous American politician.  His identity is not as important as the sentiment, but if you need to know, it's in this New Yorker column.

Ever wonder what medieval warfare was like ?

YouTube link. 

Until the invention of firearms, the bow and arrow was the weapon of choice for warfare throughout most of the world.  In Hollywood movies, I think it's crossbows and the longbow that get most of the attention (Braveheart et al), but in this video Iza Privezenceva, a young Russian woman, shows how a shorter bow could be wielded as the forerunner of a machine gun.

Imagine being a peasant pressed into the king's service, being provided with a long pointed stick and perhaps a leather shield, and facing a line of these archers...

Via Blame It On The Voices and Neatorama. 

Question for someone - which arm needs to be stronger in a professional archer - the one holding the bow, or the one drawing the arrow?

Consider Shenzhen

Excerpts from a recent episode of This American Life:

Shenzhen is a city without history. The people who live there will tell you that, because 31 years ago Shenzhen was a small town. It had little reed huts, little reed walkways between the huts. The men would fish in the late afternoon. I hear it was lovely.

Today Shenzhen is a city of 14 million people. It is larger than New York City... And the most amazing thing is, almost no one in America knows its name...

Foxconn, a single company, makes a staggering amount of the electronics you use every day. They make electronics for Apple, Dell, Nokia, Panasonic, HP, Samsung, Sony, Lenovo, a third of all of it... including MacBook Pros and iPhones and iPads...

The Foxconn plant in Shenzhen has 430,000 workers. That can be a difficult number to conceptualize. I find it's useful to instead think about how there are more than 20 cafeterias at the plant. And then you just have to understand that workers told me that these cafeterias can hold up to 10,000 people. So now you just need to visualize a cafeteria that seats 10,000 people. I'll wait...

And along the edges of each enormous building [described earlier as an "arcology" :.) ] are the nets, because right at the time that I am making this visit, there's been an epidemic of suicides at the Foxconn plant. Week after week, worker after worker has been climbing all the way up to the tops of these enormous buildings and then throwing themselves off, killing themselves in a brutal and public manner, not thinking very much about just how bad this makes Foxconn look. Foxconn's response to month after month of suicides has been to put up these nets...

And I say to her, you seem kind of young. How old are you? And she says, I'm 13. And I say, 13? That's young. Is it hard to get work at Foxconn when you're-- and she says oh no. And her friends all agree, they don't really check ages... Do you really think Apple doesn't know? In a company obsessed with the details, with the aluminum being milled just so, with the glass being fitted perfectly into the case, do you really think it's credible that they don't know? Or are they just doing what we are all doing? Do they just see what they want to see?..

It's Mitt Romney's turn...

YouTube link. 

.. to be the victim of Bad Lip Reading.  Michele Bachmann here.  Newt here.  Obama here.

And totally unrelated (but found while searching the previous two), a lip window (a body modification, for those who want a warning...)

How to win money from your rational friends

I found this logic trick at the Futility Closet:

Let’s play a game. We’ll take turns bidding for a dollar bill. Both of us will have to pay our final bids, and the winner gets to keep the dollar.

Not surprisingly, the bidding will soon reach 99 cents. But then I’ll bid $1.00, giving up any hope of profit but getting at least the dollar for my trouble. And then you’ll bid $1.01, with the same idea. And so on indefinitely: First we were bidding for gain, but now we’re trying to minimize our losses.

It sounds absurd, but in principle two sane people could go bankrupt playing this game. Yale economist Martin Shubik invented it to show how an irrational decision can be reached by perfectly rational steps.

The key is that all bidders have to pay the amount of their final bid.  I'm definitely going to try to pull this when my cousins come to visit, and may consider it as a fundraising method at a hobby club I'm a member of...

I'll bet there weren't many mosquitoes around this house

YouTube link.

Via Nothing To Do With Arbroath.

Behold the power of the internet

And in South Carolina  --

At tonight’s debate in South Carolina, the remaining 4 candidates for the Republican nomination for president were asked if they supported the Stop Online Piracy Act. Speaking in turn, they all came out against it, albeit with caveats about its current form...

In answer, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich came out strongly against SOPA. “You’re asking a conservative about the economic interests of Hollywood?” Gingrich said. “I’m weighing it. I’m not rushing in... Well, I favor freedom! ... the idea we’re going to preemptively have the government start censoring the Internet on behalf of giant corporations, economic interests, strikes me as exactly the wrong thing to do.”

“The law as written is far too intrusive, far too expansive,” said former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, who agreed with “everything” Gingrich said...  A very broad law which gives the government the power to start stepping into the Internet and saying who can pass what to whom, I think that’s a mistake. I’d say no, I’m standing for freedom.”

“This bill is not going to pass,” Paul said. “But watch out for the next one! I am pleased that the attitude is sort of mellowed up here, because the Republicans unfortunately have been on the wrong side of this issue...

Former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum said that he doesn’t support SOPA but that more needs to be done to protect intellectual property from offshore pirates. He also observed that he didn’t know where the idea that anything should be free on the Internet came from...

So here’s the question: Now, Santorum, Romney and Gingrich have publicly come out all against these bills. If asked last week, would they have given the same answers? I’ve been frustrated that so few questions about the Internet and technology have been asked. Clearly, the political calculus around supporting them has shifted. At least Ron Paul is consistent; he — and Rep Michele Bachmann — came out against SOPA weeks ago.

More at this link, via The Dish.

The "bloodbath" at Goldman Sachs

Excerpts from a Huffington Post report:

Reports are creeping out that yesterday's bonus day wasn't all fun and games at America's most iconic investment bank...

"It's a bloodbath," a midlevel Goldman Sachs employee said in an interview with CNBC. "One girl was actually crying, I think," another Goldman employee said according to the report. Some first-year Goldman analysts received $40,000 bonuses, and some second-year analysts received bonuses between $40,000 and $56,000, according to Dealbreaker. Business Insider notes that these bonuses can amount to half of these junior bankers' base salaries.

In fact, some Goldman Sachs bankers and traders learned that they were taking home no bonuses at all, the Wall Street Journal reports. And on top of that, the firm halved the total pay of some partners -- the company's highest-level employees -- while some traders got hit even harder.

Volkswagen's Superbowl advertisement

YouTube link.

The barking of the puppies is rather melodious - it reminds me of some famous musical theme. Wait, wait, don't tell me...

This will be posted everywhere, so it's not a "TYWK..." but it's so cute I want to archive it here as well.

Via Copyranter.

Swiss "Verdingkinder" and American "orphan trains"

An exhibit about Swiss "verdingkinder" ("contract children") is presently touring that country, and creating some controversy.  Excerpts from a BBC report:

A dark chapter of Swiss history is getting increased attention, with the release of a feature film about "Verdingkinder" or "contract children" and an exhibition about them which is touring the country. A common feature of Swiss life until the mid-1950s, Verdingkinder were primarily children from poor families in the cities, forcibly removed from their parents by the authorities and sent to work on farms. There, many of them were regularly beaten and even sexually abused. They had little education and consequently, as adults, little chance of making careers for themselves... 

"Up to the 1950s there were regions in Switzerland that were really poor," he explains. "The Verdingkinder were taken from poor families in the cities. "Families were deprived of custody if they didn't live according to a middle-class family model - unmarried mothers, or divorced people, or people who weren't able to keep their money together. "The authorities took away a lot of children and placed them in agricultural environments where they had to work really hard." Some children were lucky enough to stay in farming families who cared for them, but by and large they were used as child labourers, in an era when, as Mr Weidmann points out, Swiss agriculture was not mechanised, and a great deal of work had to be done by hand... 

The exhibition "Verdingkinder Reden" or "Contract Children Speak", contains first-hand testimonies from former Verdingkinder, memories they have now shared with Ruedi Weidmann and his colleagues to draw attention to what happened...

Other rooms show a variety of farm implements - rakes, wooden shoes, leather straps, cast iron pans. These, explains Mr Weidmann, were things the contract children mention regularly because they were used to hit them. Other exhibits include small toys, and letters and postcards sent to the children by their real parents. "These were nearly always taken away - presents for Christmas they were not allowed to have… to interrupt the contact with the real family," says Mr Weidmann...

Meanwhile the feature film Der Verdingbub (The Contract Boy) is bringing what was once a taboo subject to a wider public. The film has been number one at the Swiss box office for weeks. "It's time to talk about it," says Mr Weidmann. "Since we began working on this exhibition we talk about it, we tell our friends, and I would say every third or fourth person we talk to says 'yes, my mother', or 'yes, my grandfather was a Verdingkind'." "It's something that affects a large part of Swiss society in one way or another." 

My wife found this link, and pointed out the many similarities to American "orphan trains," featured on a segment of the American Experience television program (an excellent series, btw...):

Eighty years ago, Elliot Bobo was taken from his alcoholic father's home, given a small cardboard suitcase, and put on board an "orphan train" bound for Arkansas. Bobo never saw his father again...

Between 1854 and 1929, more than 100,000 children were sent, via orphan trains, to new homes in rural America. Recognizing the need for labor in the expanding farm country, Brace believed that farmers would welcome homeless children, take them into their homes and treat them as their own. His program would turn out to be a forerunner of modern foster care...

Placement into new families was casual at best. Handbills heralded the distribution of cargoes of needy children.  As the trains pulled into towns, the youngsters were cleaned up and paraded on makeshift stages before crowds of prospective parents...

The separation from families, the beatings and the abuse were unspeakably cruel, but I have mixed feelings about how the labor aspect per se should be viewed.  In those days children were incorporated into the labor force much more quickly than most people (most first-world people) can imagine nowadays.  I can cite this example from a brief biography I posted about my mom several years ago:

She was born in 1918 to a classic 2nd generation Norwegian immigrant family in southern Minnesota, in an era when children were expected to help work the farm. She wore a huge bonnet in the summer sun, so that neighbors said it looked "like a big hat was driving the rig." She learned to drive that team of horses in a straight line so the cultivating tines wouldn't disturb the planted corn. She was 8 years old at that time.

That wasn't considered either abnormal or unloving at the time; children were expected to assist with the support of the family when they were capable of doing so.  School was closed during key harvest times.

I often think today's youth are actually deprived of the experience of various forms of family-related work.  I see neighborhood children reaching their teen years never having raked a leaf or mowed a lawn because hired crews do that.  Housekeepers do the household cleaning.  A truck with a blade arrives after a snowstorm to clear the driveways.  They don't seem to have summer jobs like I had, selling door-to-door or working in a factory or washing bedpans.  I'm not saying it's a better or worse experience for them, but it's different.

Goodbye to "@ anon 10:14 AM"

This blog is a bit atypical in that comments by readers often contain as much relevant content as the original post.  I was particularly pleased when one reader said he/she read every comment on every post.

Most posts here don't get a lot of comments, but when one does (conspiracy theory, religion, education, politics), it can get confusing trying to sort out who is responding to which comment.

For that reason, today I've implemented a feature just made available by the Blogger host - threaded commenting.  It should now be possible when writing a comment to make a choice between a) commenting on the post in general or b) replying to a previous post.f

It should be an improvement for all involved; we'll see how it goes.

(And the rest of you who have .blogspot.com blogs might want to consider checking the instructions on how to set up this feature).