Sneezeweed (Helenium)

Photo credit to Marcie O'Connor from the September journal entry at the outstanding Prairie Haven blog.

Helenium is a genus of annuals and herbaceous perennial plants in the family Asteraceae, native to the Americas. They bear yellow or orange daisy-like composite flowers. A number of these species (particularly Helenium autumnale) have the common name sneezeweed, based on the former use of their dried leaves in making snuff... The genus is named for Helen of Troy... Numerous cultivars have been developed for garden use - mainly from H. autumnale and H. bigelovii. They are useful for late summer and fall bloom, usually in less formal compositions. They are appropriate for native gardens in areas where they are indigenous, and they look wonderfully in bouquets.

I'll add her photo of a Common Buckeye:

And this chart of their annual Monarch counts - 

Prairie Haven is located in western Wisconsin close enough to the Mississippi River to sample one of the major flyways for migrating Monarchs.  Their experience of seeing fewer Monarchs this summer echoes our much more limited experience here in Madison (and note the chart is on a log scale).

Buzz stop

An article at The Guardian notes that some bus stop shelters are being transformed into gardens for pollinators.

Leicester is leading the charge with 30 bee bus stops installed since 2021. Derby has 18, and there are others in Southhampton, Newcastle, Sunderland, Derby, Oxford, Cardiff and Glasgow. Brighton council installed one last year after a petition was signed by almost 50,000 people...

The average bus shelter has a shelf life of at least 20 years. Ones with living roofs have to be specially designed because the soil is so heavy, especially when it is full of water, and Clear Channel is installing them only where shelters need replacing...

Clear Channel is working with the Wildlife Trusts to maximise the benefit to wildlife. Native flowers such as kidney vetch, thyme, selfheal and wild marjoram have been chosen to attract a range of pollinators including common carder bees, buff-tailed bumblebees, peacock butterflies, small tortoiseshell butterflies and chequered hoverflies. As well as the wildlife benefits, the roofs also absorb rainwater, and make a small contribution to offsetting the urban heat island effect...

Dutch cities have managed to stabilise urban bee populations in recent years, a study found last year, following decades of declines, and bee hotels and bee stops were among their solutions. Utrecht, which was Europe’s first city to get bee bus stops, now has more than 300. It has created a “no roofs unused” policy, in which every roof will now be greened with plants and mosses or have solar panels.

Changing an English football stadium into a stadium for American football

TBH, I never realized it was this complicated; I thought they just had to redraw some lines...

The same people, 14 years later

And the same aggressor.  The five-cross flag you don't recognize is that of Georgia.

Originally a banner of the medieval Kingdom of Georgia, it was repopularised in the late 20th and early 21st centuries during the Georgian national revival... By late 2021, a newly-discovered coin of the King David the Builder with five-cross composition engraving now dates the Georgian flag to the 12th century. According to the State Council of Heraldry, the coin is of greatest importance and is an unmistakable proof for the history of the Georgian national flag being used during the reign of King David IV.

Why cryptocurrencies don't "diversify" your portfolio

 Excerpts from an article at MarketWatch:

"...argument that bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies would somehow “diversify” your 401(k), IRA or other retirement accounts, because they would perform as asset classes differently from stocks, bonds and the like. Such arguments can be dangerously seductive, because they can be technically true without being helpful. For example, lottery tickets are a “diversifying” asset, because the returns on a fistful of lottery tickets have absolutely no correlation with, or connection to, the stock or bond markets. But that doesn’t change the fact that lottery tickets are terrible investments.

So it was timely that not long ago finance professors Luciano Somoza and Antoine Didisheim of the University of Lausanne and the Swiss Finance Institute produced a research paper, “The End of the Crypto-Diversification Myth,” that exploded this fallacy.

“One of the key rationales for the inclusion of cryptocurrencies into long-horizon portfolios is the promise of diversification from the stock market,” they write. “Indeed, since none of the suggested—and much debated—fundamental values behind crypto-assets have a clear relationship with equity returns, it is reasonable to assume that the two asset classes should be uncorrelated.”

Or rather, they add, it was reasonable to think that. Until the last couple of years. Because, they report, “since 2020, the correlation between bitcoin and the S&P 500 has been consistently positive, reaching values as high as 60%.”..

It is hardly a coincidence that bitcoin peaked in November last year—just around the same time as the Nasdaq Composite.  Or that it plunged for the first half of this year, along with the Nasdaq and the S&P 500.  Or that it has rallied somewhat since mid-June—again, with the stock market... Turns out it has behaved just like a tech stock on speed... It’s just been yet another speculative, leveraged gamble on the tech bubble.

More, including reasons for the correlation, at the link.

Why oboes are so expensive

Posted for oboist cousin Karl in Barcelona.

"... if ever..."

"Time" is now a 40-year-old golden oldie from the Alan Parsons Project.  Posted because the words "if ever" in the lyrics take on increasingly meaningful importance as one gets older - worth keeping in mind when one sees friends or family members only occasionally.

Utah landscape

Dawn along Skyline Rim in Factory Butte, Utah.  Photo credit to the red-jacketed Richard C. Brundage.  This was one of 13 winning entries in the Washington Post's annual travel photo contest.

Colors of the medieval world

Credit (for the photo and the craftsmanship) to Rowena Dugdale (@redrubyrose), who notes that these are "Plant dyes - all the colours achievable from leaf, flower and root within around a five mile radius. The red hot poker root was a gift from a friend on Skye but that’s only several miles across the water…"

Via Reddit.

Becoming an Olympic athlete

At the 2003 World Figure Skating Championships, Tim Goebel stood by the ice just before his long program. At the time, people called him the Quad King. In figure skating, competitors gather speed along the ice, leap into the air, spin quickly, and land on a thin blade of steel so sharp it can slice open a skull. Done well, a jump is sublime: a crisp, impossible suspension aloft. Goebel was among the first men to complete four spins before landing, and the first to do so from three different takeoff positions.  He had won bronze at the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics...

The next season, however, his jumps became dicey. A one-hundred-fifty-pound man lands a quad with a force perhaps ten times his body weight, and to make them precise, reliable, and clean, Goebel had been doing eighty a day for several years. His hips had begun to fray...

Eighty quad jumps per day.  For decades I viewed the Olympics as the epitome of sport, but in recent years I've seen news and reports suggesting it has become a perversion of sport. 

Scavenging

Matthew Stohr salvages bottles of vodka from an eddy of containers that settled off the west end of a bridge into Fort Myers Beach on Thursday, Sept. 29, 2022 after Hurricane Ian devastated the area. [ DOUGLAS R. CLIFFORD | Times ]

This photo and caption from a gallery at the Tampa Bay Times brought a variety of thoughts to my mind.  

First, the terminology.  "Salvaging", from an Old French word meaning "to save" is commonly used for maritime rescues of ships, crews, and cargo - but can be used to refer to making good use of damaged material.  I think a better term for the scene depicted here is scavenging - to look through refuse or abandoned items for useful material.

Then the thought that there must be a ton of this going on in Florida these days.  The scene above appears to be of flotsam originating in a liquor store, but the beaches (and streets and properties) of Florida must be covered with all sorts of items washed from fragmented homes and businesses.

What are the rules (written or unwritten) covering this?  Is it up for grabs - first come first serve?  Most material would not be "abandoned" in the traditional sense of owners relinquishing title to it - but in a practical sense owners are unlikely to be reunited with lost items.

The debris on the streets will include jewelry, fine art, money, collectibles and the state is awash in people who have lost much of what they previously owned.  Are they morally justified to scavenge seeking some compensation for their losses?

Deciphering an old photo of Norway

[this post is written for family members and will likely be of little interest to others]

Half of my genes came from Norway, and half of those from the Fjaerland fjord, where the Distad family had its roots.  About fifteen years ago Google Maps showed "Distad" marked on the western side of the fjord, about halfway between Balestrand on the Sognefjord and Fjaerland up at the northern terminus of the fjord.

I visited the Fjaerland fjord in 1982 and met some distant relatives who kindly gave me a chart of family names going back to the 1600s.  One of my cousins had the good fortune to be able to spend a summer there working on a farm.  When it was time for her to return to the United States, the family she was staying with presented her with a gift of the photo embedded at the top, which they thought might show the original Distad homestead.

The photo (image quality impaired by glass frame) shows four timber-framed buildings on stone foundations with what are probably sod roofs.  Behind the buildings is a deep cleft in the mountains, and in front is a flowing stream.  The text at the bottom includes an identification number (8271), the words "suphellerbraen" (in) "Fjaerland", and the photographer's name ("K. Knudsen, Bergen").  

The photo was a duplicate of an original stored in The National Archives of Norway.  I tried to track it down to see if any additional notes associated the name Distad with the photo, but didn't have any success.  Apparently material in the archives is labeled with the photographer's name, but not with info about the subject matter, and a search of Knudsens (and for "Fjaerland" and "Distad") didn't locate the original image.

What puzzled me was the topography in the photo.  The "Distad"-associated region in the mid-portion of the fjord that I had visited (and could now view on Google 3D maps) did not look at all like the landscape behind the four structures in the photo, since that property faced a fjord, not a flowing stream.

This week while "mousing around" tilting and dragging the Google 3D view, my  eye was suddenly caught by the word "suphellebreen"-

- at the far right of the photo, a long distance up the valley from the town of Fjaerland at the head of the fjord (yellow oval).  And suddenly everything made sense.

"Suphellebreen" is "soup-ladle-glacier" - one of the branches of the massive Jostedalsbreen glacier (when I had visited Fjaerland forty years ago, the Distads had driven me up to see the glacier, which I remembered as Jostedalsbreen).  So the snowfield behind the buildings in the heirloom photo is actually the tongue of the glacier (visible more vertically at the top left of the photo), and the stream running in front of the buildings is glacial meltwater heading down to join the fjord near Fjaerland.  The location for the photo of the buildings is probably the other red oval (labeled "glacier viewpoint").

The unanswered question is whether the Distads owned or lived in those buildings.  In more modern times they have clearly been further south, but there's not much tillable farmland along the fjord, where the slope is steep, while up near the glacier there probably has always been better topography for farming.  Maybe someone in the family (someone younger than me) can tackle either the national archives for more details on the photo or can perhaps find records of old land ownership.

FWIW, this entry marks my 18,000th post on TYWKIWDBI in 15 years of maintaining the blog (and those posts have generated about 64,000 comments).

The immense urban/rural divide in modern politics. And some interesting cannabis attitudes.

In 2018 I wrote a post for the blog entitled "Blue dot in a red state," illustrating how the metropolitan areas of Minnesota voted overwhelmingly blue (Democratic), while the rest of the state voted overwhelmingly red (Republican).  The phenomenon clearly exists nationwide.

This week the StarTribune reported the results of a statewide poll that covered a variety of topics, but most importantly the upcoming midterms.  I've embedded one salient chart at the top.  Hennepin and Ramsey counties comprise the bulk of the metropolitan Minneapolis/St. Paul area.  Tim Walz is the currently-seated Democratic governor.  His support is intense in the cities, but not in the rest of the state. 

This is also interesting - and perhaps surprising:

In the past two years, support for legalization of recreational marijuana has increased among Democrats and Independents and fallen among Republicans, which is perhaps not surprising.  But support for legal recreational cannabis has also fallen among those age 18-34 and 35-49 years of age, while rising among older Minnesotans. Not sure how to explain that.  

The forests of Iceland

 

Really? you ask.  Yes, and certainly unexpected by most of us based on our standard perceptions of the country.  This is a ten-minute video with perhaps a bit too many "selfie" camera views, but the narration is very good and the content is interesting just because it is so surprising.

Ambush

There is a patch of ground next to the driveway that used to be planted with a variety of ornamental flowers and foliage plants.  About 5-10 years ago some goldenrod appeared, and was happy with the sun exposure and soil, so it proliferated.  As did the milkweed (which has happily colonized all of our gardening areas).  

Last week as I walked back from the mailbox, my eye noticed something unusual on one of the milkweed leaves (highlighted with the red circle).

It was a Gray Treefrog (Hyla versicolor), which I've noticed previously on other milkweed leaves.  When I went over to take his/her photo, I noticed a second and a third one...

The reason we have allowed the goldenrod to proliferate is that it serves as an absolute magnet for pollinators - bees especially, but also flies, beetles, and some butterflies.  Nectar and pollen sources are particularly valuable at our latitude in late summer/early fall when other flowering plants are subsiding [the goldenrod is already going to seed, but the New England Asters have taken over as nectar and pollen sources].

I postulated that it wasn't a coincidence that these three frogs were on the milkweed plants in the goldenrod patch, so I did a quick survey around the front yard.  It didn't take more than five minutes, because these little guys are not hard to spot when you look for them.  Three frogs on three milkweeds in the goldenrod patch, none on the 75+ other milkweeds scattered around the other flowerbeds.