March 28, 2026 work report

 

A peony starting to push buds. 

Three hours time-on-task

• Cutting brush
• Dragging brush
• Digging holes
• Planting six gooseberry bushes

• Looking at dead trees

24" diameter at the butt. 30' from roots to where it is hung up in two Wild Black Cherry trees

I think my only real option is to pack 20 pounds of tannerite around the trunk of the cherry tree in the foreground and to touch it off from 100 yards away.

• Appreciating the signs of spring

Vernal Witchhazel (maybe)

A branch on a gooseberry bush

Willow catkins in the light of the rising sun

Fantasy destroys marriages

"...As of 2024, the refined divorce rate is approximately 2.4 divorces per 1,000 married women per year.."    -according to "Search Assistant"

Apparently the standard metric for measuring "divorce rates" in the United States is "number of divorced WOMEN" per 1000. 

That makes sense from one perspective. Every divorce produces two newly divorced people. So, if you are only counting the number of unions that dissolved, then you need to divide the total number of newly divorced people by two.

The focus on women is probably driven by the fact that divorced women are much more likely to demand "services" from the state than divorced men. Money makes the world turn and it is important to anticipate future demand for financial resources.

Hypothesis testing

Suppose it were possible to test the hypothesis that divorces almost always due to men oppressing women. That is, women are always the passive victims and men are always the active oppressor. That seems to be the foundational assumption by the judges and social workers who guide the divorce process in most states*.

If that is the case then the only way to "fix" the divorce rate is to improve men. 

It also suggests that marriages between two victims would have much better success rates marriages between victims and oppressors.

If only it were possible for two women to get married to each other...Hmmm...

Hey, wait a minute...they can.

Does anybody want to hazard a guess for the divorce rate for lesbian marriages? Answer below the fold....

Grab-bag and Danish Art

One of the bonuses of watching Quicksilver and seeing Southern Belle twice a day is that I have an outlet for food when I get carried away in the kitchen.

As a working woman, Southern Belle is delighted to take 2/3 of a pan of lemon bars off our hands. Ditto for a pot of beans or a pan of cornbread. That saves Mrs ERJ and I from eating cornbread and beans for seven days straight and gives her a break.

Data

I am officially throwing up my hands in disgust over "data". Politics and the fog-of-war triumphed, at least temporarily, over data-integrity.

I "get" that public figures must deliberately obfuscate their intentions during times of war. Biden screwed up when he allowed the actual time-table for the withdrawal from Afghanistan to be made public. U.S. military suffered 13 KIA in August of 2021 due to that "honesty".

Russian demographic pyramid. "Excess" males in the circled area is likely over-stated. Data from 2025.

Russian and Chinese data is always suspect. Russian data even more-so since the Ukrainian war. For instance, their demographic pyramid (Christmas tree, if you prefer) shows no indication of any casualties of young men. That is highly suspect.

With regard to the interesting comments that appeared in an earlier post, it was reported circa 2022 (and might even be true) that something on the order of 150,000 "Russian prisoners" were "recruited" and sent to the front-lines in Ukraine. It is speculated that the recidivism rate for those prisoners who volunteered will be very, very low.

A conversation with a baker

I had a conversation with a person who runs a bakery. I brought up the possibility of a spike in the price of sugar and asked if he had ever considered "options" or buying ahead.

He said they had done that several years ago but it didn't work out. Sugar storage requires temperature and humidity (especially humidity) control or the bags of sugar turn in to rocks.

Many of his products require dusting with sugar or measuring out precise amounts. Lack of precision in measuring results in runny glazes or sugar crystalizing out of the frosting. He paid more in labor and still got poor results...so he is back to 2x a week deliveries at whatever the spot prices are. 

Danish Art

I had a request from a reader to feature some Danish Art on the blog. I am happy to oblige:

 Random photos

A large chicken egg, top-center, bracketed by duck eggs. Duck eggs weigh about 80 grams vs about 55 grams for chicken eggs.

 

Every day is an Easter Egg hunt in some places

Presented with little comment

 

Global distribution of Tuberculosis. TB is endemic in countries in bright green, yellow, orange and red 

It is a safe bet that nearly every outbreak of TB in schools and nursing homes is due to a recent immigrant from a country where TB is endemic. In the case of the nursing homes, it is likely a worker.

Many non-Western countries take pride in owning dogs that have not been spayed. Their dogs are projections of their machismo and virility.

It is also a point of pride that their dogs can fend for themselves and are not "in prison" all day long.

Just a reminder

"Some of you will die. But that is a sacrifice I am willing to make."

The politicians who are fighting against the SAVE Act are the same ones who think it is peachy-keen to expose your school-aged children and senior citizens to medieval diseases and think that having a certain percentage of little, old ladies torn to death by feral dogs is an acceptable price to pay for their getting reelected.

Time-on-Task

My dad introduced me to the concept of time-on-task.

He was the principal of a "Junior High School" as they were called back-in-the-day.

One of his jobs was to evaluate every instructor once a year. Many of them failed his evaluation and were put on improvement plans.

Two "high runners" for failure were "Failure to write a lesson-plan" (i.e. they were winging it) and "Low time-on-Task". 

As my dad explained it to me, the low time-on-task instructors dilly-dallied at the start of the session. They chit-chatted about what they had done on the weekend or their plans for the evening. Or they might let the kids horseplay or have conversations...waiting for them to calm down before starting instruction.

Kids adapt to the teachers' styles. My dad was very much in favor of giving them enough time to pull out a note-book and turn to a blank page before starting instruction. What is that? Maybe 30 seconds after the second bell rings.

Some instructors NEVER got to the required material before the end of the class session.

My dad deviated from the minimum requirements for the teachers who he judged to be inadequate. He demanded copies of daily lesson from those who did not use them. He was shocked to learn that some universities were teaching education majors that lesson plans were OPTIONAL. Many of the students who had attended those universities did not have a clue about how to organize and document an effective lesson plan. My dad had to teach those teachers what a functional plan looked like.

For the teachers who failed time-on-task, he typically moved them down a grade and "partnered" them with a good teacher who was in the grade they left. My dad coached the senior partner to remind the slacker that he was screwing the team if he did not deliver students who had mastered the skills and knowledge required to be successful the next year. Peer pressure can be a wonderful thing.

Later in life

Later in life I was given a lesson on time-on-task by a third-shift, alternate Committee Man (a Union Steward).

He was explaining why management was lucky to get five hours of work from a tradesman in an eight-hour work day. That is kind of a big deal on a Sunday when they are getting paid double-time, i.e. sixteen hours worth of wages. Five hours of work for sixteen hours of pay isn't a great investment.

"Look here, Joe. Right off the top you lose ten-percent for breaks. Contractually, you have to give them 0.8 hours of breaks. There is nothing you can do about that."

"Then you look at the goat festival (not his actual wording) in the mornings. You have them stand around waiting for their work-tickets. Doug (the planner) is still making changes to the tickets after the starting bell and the first electrician might get his work-ticket a half hour after he punches in. The last one waits an hour."

"Then the tradesmen have to go to the parts-crib to get any special parts they need. They stand-in-line until it is their turn."

"Then they go stand in line at the tool crib and pick up special tools."

"By then, it is time for first break. So they don't turn a wrench until 9:30 and two-and-a-half hours have gone by."

"Then, at the end of the work-day they have to return the special tools and any of the unused special parts, so they start standing-in-line right after last-break. You easily lose another hour there."

"It only gets worse from there. If they get into the middle of the job and they were given the wrong part or if they discover that then need a different special tool...the have to make another trip to the cribs."

"And it is MANAGEMENT failures that prevent you from getting 7.2 hours  of work out of your people." 

Things were much more organized by the time I left that company. They had a skilled tradesman with restrictions "kit" the jobs. The special parts and tools were put into snap-top bins and prepositioned those bins the job-site. The bins had a printed "manifest" taped to the lid listing what was included in them with boxes to check-off when the parts/tools went in and when they were returned. 

The tradesmen were informed of their weekend jobs late in the shift on Friday. That is something management had resisted because they were concerned that some tradesmen would be no-shows if they were assigned to unpopular jobs.

 

Presented without comment

 

Sexy voices

Recent research has documented a variety of ovulatory cues in humans, and in many nonhuman species, the vocal channel provides cues of reproductive state. We collected two sets of vocal samples from 69 normally ovulating women: one set during the follicular (high-fertility) phase of the cycle and one set during the luteal (low-fertility) phase, with ovulation confirmed by luteinizing hormone tests. In these samples we measured fundamental frequency (pitch), formant dispersion, jitter, shimmer, harmonics-to-noise ratio and speech rate. When speaking a simple introductory sentence, women's pitch increased during high- as compared with low-fertility, and this difference was the greatest for women whose voices were recorded on the two highest fertility days within the fertile window (the 2 days just before ovulation). This pattern did not occur when the same women produced vowels. The high- versus low-fertility difference in pitch was associated with the approach of ovulation and not menstrual onset, thus representing, to our knowledge, the first research to show a specific cyclic fertility cue in the human voice. We interpret this finding as evidence of a fertility-related enhancement of femininity consistent with other research documenting attractiveness-related changes associated with ovulation.   Source   (Note: small sample size)

So, from a biological, evolutionary standpoint, men would find women whose voices had the greatest pitch disparity between vowels and consonants the "most sexy".

I suppose the AI content creators are already aware of this and are exploiting it.