"Thanks for the Valentine, kid"

Color adjusted from the original posted here.

Where I fit in the political spectrum - updated

Update January 2009: When I started TYWKIWDBI in December of 2007, the circus carnival known as the "presidential primaries" was in full swing, so I thought it was important for me to "state for the record" what biases I might have. I explained that I was registered as an Independent and was supporting Ron Paul. Then I posted the following three graphs...

(2007 text) There are a number of online websites that allow one to assess one's position by answering a long list of questions. I completed one of these back in 2003, with the following result-



Another assessment site in October of 2005 showed me to be leaning ever so slightly libertarian -



The most recent one was last December, and I was squarely in the center -



So, that's "where I'm coming from." Not unbiased, certainly, but probably as much "in the center" as any person you're likely to meet. If you want to find out how you stand, try the quiz at this link... http://www.politicalcompass.org or at this one - http://www.okcupid.com/politics. It might be an interesting experience.

Update January 2009: I'm amused to note that I was such a "newbie" then that I didn't even post the links in clickable form. I'll correct that now. Here's the one for Political Compass, and here's the OKCupid one.

I'm posting this update today because the Weblog Awards are sending a flurry of new traffic here this week. There seem to be a couple hundred extra visitors per day, most of them wondering what this blog is about, and as a corollary, what this blogger is about. The charts above pretty well define me as a centrist on the political spectrum; I tend to have equal contempt for polticians of both major parties. Now that you know where I stand, I challenge you to go to the links and chart out your own political biases.

Update February 2018:  I decided to take the test again, and found my position on the chart has changed slightly but not fundamentally:

I don't know whether I have changed, or whether the test standard reference points have changed (the questions are the same as in 2003), or in fact whether the repositioning of my dot is statistically significant.

Political Compass now offers a cartoon-amended chart to show where various well-known persons would be (approximately) situated on the chart:

I'm pleased to see that I'm seated right next to Bernie Sanders.

You can take the test here.

The Gilded Age

YouTube link

Yesterday evening I watched the PBS documentary embedded above.  It is part of the "American Experience" series, and as such you can expect it to be superb documentary television programming, but this episode was particularly interesting because of the parallels between America's classic "Gilded Age" with our present circumstances.  I highly recommend this program. 

The Gilded Age in United States history is the late 19th century, from the 1870s to about 1900. The term for this period came into use in the 1920s and 1930s and was derived from writer Mark Twain's 1873 novel The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, which satirized an era of serious social problems masked by a thin gold gilding... The Gilded Age was an era of rapid economic growth, especially in the North and West. As American wages were much higher than those in Europe, especially for skilled workers, the period saw an influx of millions of European immigrants... The political landscape was notable in that despite some corruption, turnout was very high and national elections saw two evenly matched parties. The dominant issues were cultural (especially regarding prohibition, education, and ethnic or racial groups), and economic (tariffs and money supply). With the rapid growth of cities, political machines increasingly took control of urban politics. In business, massive, powerful, and wealthy trusts formed... The point noted as the end of the Gilded Age also varies. It is generally given as the beginning of the Progressive Era in the 1890s...

If you don't enjoy watching your computer monitor for two hours, the program will be available from your local library in DVD format.

Addendum:  The embedded video is now "blocked on copyright grounds."  This link is still working.

Can someone identify vintage children's literature?

I had good success earlier today asking readers to identify an unknown houseplant.  Let's try a literature question.

A lady asked my wife for help identifying the titles/authors of some books she loved in her childhood.  She remembers reading them in the 1960s when she was about 6 years old, but the books were subsequently lost in a home fire.  As an adult she would like to reread the books.

"One book is about a little girl who goes to a nearby carnival and steals the little dancing ballerina on a music box and takes it home. She begins to feel guilty and returns it. The most memorable part of this book is the illustrations; it had beautiful colored pencil illustrations.

The second book was read to students in class and all the person recalls about the plot is that one of the characters could turn invisible and was up in a tree some of the time."

Third book: A giraffe misses its little girl so runs to find her school. On the way there, she stops to help a woman whose clothesline has fallen...by holding it up with her head."

I know the readership of this blog is replete with bibliophiles and especially with librarians.  Can anyone harvest their knowledge base to help this lady?

Triple axel explained

YouTube link.

The axel is a figure skating jump with a forward take off. It is named after Norwegian figure skater Axel Paulsen who, in 1882, was the first skater to perform the jump [cruciverbalists will long ago have learned that this is why it's not spelled "axle."]

The axel jump is considered the most technically difficult jump among six types of jumps in single figure skating. According to ISU judging system, a triple axel jump has a base value of 8.5 points, while a double axel has that of 3.3 points. This makes a triple axel the highest base-valued triple jump, above other triple jumps such as the triple lutz (6 points), triple flip (5.3 points), triple loop (5.1 points), triple salchow (4.2 points), and triple toe loop (4.1 points).

More at Wikipedia (and daily during coverage of the Olympics) 

I can't even offer a comment

The story is at The Washington Post.

(comments are closed.  I'm moving on to other things)

Salp

A salp is a barrel-shaped, planktonic tunicate. It moves by contracting, thus pumping water through its gelatinous body. The most abundant concentrations of salps are in the Southern Ocean (near Antarctica), where they sometimes form enormous swarms, often in deep water, and are sometimes even more abundant than krill...

When food is plentiful, salps can quickly bud off clones, which graze the phytoplankton and can grow at a rate which is probably faster than that of any other multicellular animal, quickly stripping the phytoplankton from the sea. But if the phytoplankton is too dense, the salps can clog and sink to the bottom. During these blooms, beaches can become slimy with mats of salp bodies...

Although salps appear similar to jellyfish because of their simple body form and planktonic behavior, they are chordates: animals with dorsal nerve cords, related to vertebrates, animals with backbones.

You learn something every day. 

Image via Boredom Therapy, where there are more photos.

Can someone identify this plant for me?

One of our neighbors is moving and offered us this plant.  Before bringing it to our house we need to make sure it is not something that would be toxic if the cats eat the leaves.

Thanks in advance.

Remembering the Lincoln Highway

Some years ago I did online research on the "Yellowstone Highway" because of a personal connection to it.  In that process I ran across numerous references to the "Lincoln Highway."  Today is February 12, and it's an appropriate occasion to blog the Lincoln info.  Wikipedia has a comprehensive page on the highway, but I'll start with excerpts from Atlas Obscura.

In 1919, [Colonel Dwight D. Eisenhower] traveled with the military in a motor convoy across the country, from D.C. to San Francisco, in “the largest aggregation of motor vehicles ever started on a trip of such length,” the New York Times reported. This was one of the first major cross-country road trips, and it planted the idea in Eisenhower’s mind that the federal government could and should make improving U.S. highways a priority...

Once the convoy hit the West, the trucks started getting stuck in ditches, sand and mud, for hours at a time. By Utah, the conditions of the roads were so bad, it almost stopped the convoy altogether... In 1919, the military had just returned from the Great War in Europe, where War Department motor units had helped secure victory, and military leaders wanted to show their machines off. But any network of roads that these trucks might travel on was still, for the most part, imaginary...

The route the convoy would take was mostly along the Lincoln Highway, the first major transcontinental motor route. The more than 80 vehicles carried 24 officers and 258 enlisted men, and they left D.C. at 1 p.m., on July 7, 1919. It took the convoy the rest of the day to reach Frederick, Maryland, where Eisenhower joined the group. In seven and a half hours, they had traveled 46 miles... That pace—about 6 miles an hour—is what the convoy would average in its crawl across the country...

When it rained, the vehicles got stuck in soft spots on the roads, up to their hubs, and the men had to push them out... The day after that, it took seven hours to pull all the trucks through 200 yards of quicksand. This, though, was nothing compared to Utah...

But by the end of the trip, the official observer reported later, “the officers of the Convoy were thoroughly convinced that all transcontinental highways should be construed and maintained by the Federal Government.” As Eisenhower put it, “there was a great deal of sentiment for the improving of highways,” and on that point, “the trip was an undoubted success.”

Much more on the Lincoln Highway at its Wikipedia page.  Some readers of this blog will undoubtedly have segments of the Lincoln Highway in their hometowns and/or have seen relevant markers in their  travels.  I hope to get the Yellowstone Highway info assembled and blogged later this year.

The official map of the Lincoln Highway is at this page of the Lincoln Highway Association's website.

Addendum:  Readers interested in this topic will definitely want to read an excellent and well-illlustrated article recently posted at Neatorama.

Geography of Lincoln Island

Do you remember where this is? (image source long since lost)

An excerpt from the Lincoln-Douglas debates

This is Lincoln's opening statement from the fourth debate (Charleston, Illinois, September 18, 1858):

MR. LINCOLN’S SPEECH.

Mr. Lincoln took the stand at a quarter before three, and was greeted with vociferous and protracted applause; after which, he said:

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: It will be very difficult for an audience so large as this to hear distinctly what a speaker says, and consequently it is important that as profound silence be preserved as possible.

While I was at the hotel to—day, an elderly gentleman called upon me to know whether I was really in favor of producing a perfect equality between the negroes and white people. [Great Laughter.] While I had not proposed to myself on this occasion to say much on that subject, yet as the question was asked me I thought I would occupy perhaps five minutes in saying something in regard to it. I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, [applause]—that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race. I say upon this occasion I do not perceive that because the white man is to have the superior position the negro should be denied every thing. I do not understand that because I do not want a negro woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife. [Cheers and laughter.] My understanding is that I can just let her alone. I am now in my fiftieth year, and I certainly never have had a black woman for either a slave or a wife. So it seems to me quite possible for us to get along without making either slaves or wives of negroes. I will add to this that I have never seen, to my knowledge, a man, woman or child who was in favor of producing a perfect equality, social and political, between negroes and white men. I recollect of but one distinguished instance that I ever heard of so frequently as to be entirely satisfied of its correctness—and that is the case of Judge Douglas’s old friend Col. Richard M. Johnson. [Laughter.] I will also add to the remarks I have made (for I am not going to enter at large upon this subject), that I have never had the least apprehension that I or my friends would marry negroes if there was no law to keep them from it, [laughter] but as Judge Douglas and his friends seem to be in great apprehension that they might, if there were no law to keep them from it, [roars of laughter] I give him the most solemn pledge that I will to the very last stand by the law of this State, which forbids the marrying of white people with negroes. [Continued laughter and applause.] I will add one further word, which is this: that I do not understand that there is any place where an alteration of the social and political relations of the negro and the white man can be made except in the State Legislature—not in the Congress of the United States—and as I do not really apprehend the approach of any such thing myself, and as Judge Douglas seems to be in constant horror that some such danger is rapidly approaching, I propose as the best means to prevent it that the Judge be kept at home and placed in the State Legislature to fight the measure. [Uproarious laughter and applause.] I do not propose dwelling longer at this time on this subject.

The fulltext of the entire debate is at Teaching American History.

This is not a subject matter that I was taught in school or have any particular knowledge about, so I can't offer any informed commentary on the context and the question of whether or to what extent President Lincoln amended his opinions after he gained the presidency.  Those with a proper background in history, sociology etc are welcome to clarify matters in the Comments.

Snowfall alters the meaning of a neighborhood sign

The full text of the sign is "Drive Like Your Kids Live Here."

Chandelier made of human bones

Strange Remains has an "almost complete list of human bone chandeliers."  Photo from the Sedlec Ossuary in the Czech Republic.

This guy has nice legs

via

Stock market volatility blamed on "machines"

We've been through this before, but sufficient controls were not instituted.  Here we go again.

As the Dow Jones industrial average collapsed 700 points in 20 minutes Monday afternoon and the stock market jerked from bad to cataclysmic, traders and analysts coalesced around an increasingly routine explanation: Blame the machines.

Lightning-fast trading models, automated sell orders and an arsenal of sophisticated algorithms... are likely to have made a crazy trading day that much crazier, spooking anyone with a retirement fund and sparking an outburst of panic selling...

The market is always “just one step away from massive volatility because of programmed trading,” said Michael Yoshikami, the chief executive of Destination Wealth Management, an investment-management firm in Walnut Creek, Calif. “There’s no way that investors can compete with a computer making 1,000 trades a second. What it does is it ramps up the psychology of fear and greed for individual investors.”..

But Monday’s abrupt fall — which followed months of rising markets and engineered at superhuman speeds — had many analysts remembering the 2010 “flash crash,” another breakneck fall and rebound blamed on the chaos of unchecked automated trades...

The computers react to evidence exponentially faster than any human — think millionths of a second, instead of minutes — and can move en masse, trading at high volumes around the world...

Investment managers say the algorithms’ cold calculations end up sparking hysterical sales among the humans, undermining confidence and feeding a vicious cycle that leads more and more algorithms to do their thing...

And who benefits from this lack of control?  Those with the best computers.

Few analysts expect this new reality of high-speed, high-data trades will change, save for a crackdown from government regulators or the stock exchanges themselves, which make money from fast-paced trading by selling access to by-the-microsecond data feeds of market activity. The Nasdaq exchange made $156 million, or a quarter of its revenue, in the most recent quarter from “information services” including selling trading data.

But critics — including those named in “Flash Boys,” Michael Lewis’s 2014 book on high-frequency trades — say that computerized trading can end up rigging the markets in favor of super-fast trading firms at the expense of everyone else.

More at the Washington Post.