The Golden-mean

There is a story that seemed to pop up in many places in the American west at approximately the same time. Whether it was the Texas panhandle or the dry side of the Alberta Rocky mountains, it involves settlers sending for "mail-order brides".

A typical version of the story goes something like this:

The three women showed up at the train station and the three grooms showed up to greet them. Since none of the men had bothered to write letters to them there was confusion as to which bride was to go to which groom.

The oldest settler suggested that each bride peel a potato as the men watched, and then, after drawing lots, the settlers would choose whichever bride most suited him.

The three brides were each given a gnarly, lumpy potato and a paring knife.

The girl from Germany painstakingly peeled her potato and it was as smooth as a hen's egg with virtually zero waste. 

The girl from Ireland had her potato peeled in 15 seconds flat but it was not as finely peeled as the German girl's potato.

The three grooms and the two prospective brides turned to watch the girl from the large, eastern city struggle with her potato. Even though the German girl had taken two full minutes to peel her potato, the city girl was not even half done. After another two minutes the oldest settler said "I think we have seen enough. Time to draw lots."

The oldest settler got the longest straw. The youngest settler got the next longest and the settler who had been born in Norway drew the shortest straw.

The oldest settler didn't waste a second. He grabbed the Irish girl by the wrist and marched her to the church to get married. His figuring was that a farm-wife needed to be able to do more than just cook so a girl who could cook "Good enough, speedy-quick and plenty of it" was what he was looking for.

The youngest settler chose the German girl. He assumed that she would get faster with practice. Those two were married two minutes after the first couple got hitched.

The Norwegian settler looked at the city girl for a few minutes and said "I think I would rather stay single" and put her back on the train back to Chicago.

Being a pragmatic person, the girl went back to Chicago and the story of her humiliation became a part of the family's folk-lore. It doesn't take much to be famous in Chicago, so it should come as no surprise that visitors to Chicago can visit a large sculpture that memorializes the girl's unfortunate potato.

Brass, hurricane responses and other stuff

I sorted some .223 Rem/5.56 NATO brass

Headstamp of the heavy outlier

I sorted some mixed .223 Rem/5.56 NATO brass after tumbling, resizing and trimming. The lightest piece was 87 grains. The heaviest piece was 108 grains. The the ratio of mass density of yellow brass and a dense, spherical powder like H-335 is 8.5:1, so the difference in internal volumes between the two extremes is the equivalent of 2.5 grains of powder.

The vast majority of the pieces ranged between 90.5 grains and 102.9 grains (a difference of 1.3 grains of H-335). I sorted them into < 93 grains, 93-to-95 grains and over 95 grains and the bags were nearly equivalent in weight. The over 95 grains population was evenly distributed between 95.1 grains-to 102.9 grains with a node at 102 grains.

So, the <93gr and 93-95gr group are suitable for what passes as "precision shooting" at Casa ERJ while the 95gr+ group will be downloaded by 1.0 grains of powder and used for "make noise" shooting.

Useful Links:

Volume Mass Density table of common powders

Thread on brass weights by headstamp at Sniper's Hide

Hurricane response

Quite a comparison between the Federal Government's responses to Hurricane Isaias in October 2026 and the response to Hurricane Helene in September 2024. Only 25 months difference. What changed?

It is telling that the mainstream media isn't pointing out the differences.

The leftists like to gaslight the public and claim that "the media has a right-wing bias" because they are owned by large conglomerates. 

You cannot hate these people enough.

What Sixty Million People Learned About Water, Warmth and Medicine During Spain’s Ten-Hour Blackout

 A LONG (5500 words long!) essay on substack about historical grid-down situations. 

A sample of the content:

Survival advice has a poor reputation, partly because it is usually sold rather than explained and partly because it is framed around wilderness scenarios most people never encounter. A grid-down event is a municipal scenario. The environment does not change; the systems do. What a household needs is the ability to substitute, for a fortnight, functions that municipalities and markets normally perform invisibly.

Water. A person can go roughly three weeks without eating and about three days without drinking, and in heat the second figure falls. The planning number is one gallon per person per day for drinking and basic hygiene — twenty-eight gallons for a fortnight — but the figure misleads in both directions, because a domestic hot-water cylinder holds thirty to fifty gallons of drinkable water, a toilet cistern holds another three, and municipal pressure usually persists for a day or two, which is time to fill containers. Water from a hot-water cylinder should be drawn from the drain tap, allowed to cool, and disinfected if there is any doubt. Water in a toilet cistern is usually drinkable provided no chemical cleaner has been added; water in the bowl is not.

Disinfection needs more care than most guides give it. The standard field dose is two drops of plain, unscented household bleach per litre of clear water, or eight drops per gallon, using bleach of about five to six per cent sodium hypochlorite. Double the dose if the water is cloudy, and allow thirty minutes of contact before drinking...

Exercise notes

Yesterday was supposed to be a running day. I pushed a lawn mower for an hour instead. Old puffballs make a big cloud when you hit them with a lawn mower.

Today is supposed to be a lifting day.

Ducks

We are up to three eggs a day from five hens. They are eating more than they were during the summer but I did not increase the calcium. Yesterday, I had my first egg with a dented egg-shell. Therefore, it is time to add FOUR teaspoons of calcium carbonate per feeding rather than three spoons.

Random note

Mrs ERJ likes Melrose apples better than Galarina for eating. Both apples are grower-friendly and the Melrose, being a larger apple, require less labor to pick.

Everybody, remain calm...

 

Bonus video clip

Woman harvesting some green alfalfa to feed to her pig.

According to the internet, which sometimes tells the truth, alfalfa can be fed to pigs to supplement protein, minerals and fiber but there are parameters that must be respected. 

Yesterday was a great day to work .and. unproductive people in positions of authority

Yesterday was a beautiful day to work outside.

I went to The Property and worked on the two (future) Dacha orchards.

I made a 16' "measuring chain" from bailing twine for spacing the T-posts within the row and a 24' "measuring chain" to space the row.

I added one more row of five trees to both future orchards. I cut the weeds that were within 6' of the T-post with a billhook and sprayed the vegetation with herbicide. Now we wait. The herbicide will not act very quickly due to the lower temperatures.

Unproductive people in positions of authority

One conundrum with public, make-work jobs is that they are difficult to eliminate. Since they are hard to eliminate, there is no incentive to streamline processes or consolidate positions. The thinking inside of Dot-gov is "If we lay them off then they will go on welfare and Medicaid and the state will not save a dime." So every employee is given a fraction of a full work-load and everybody is happy.

Except that the under-worked employees make work to signal their importance, often by demanding attention from productive people in the private sector. That is, they deny permits to people until they submit "one more report" or "rewrite their application to explain how they are going to dispose of the sawdust from treated lumber" or some other bit of minutia.

This is not a new phenomena. It is documented in Matthew chapter 23 where Jesus says of the scribes and Pharisees (the clerks and people who interpret the Law)

The scribes and the Pharisees have taken their seat on the chair of Moses.(that is, place of high honor) Therefore, do and observe all things whatsoever they tell you, but do not follow their example. For they preach but they do not practice. They tie up heavy burdens [hard to carry] and lay them on people’s shoulders, but they will not lift a finger to move them. All their works are performed to be seen . They widen their phylacteries and lengthen their tassels (virtue signaling in today's language). They love places of honor at banquets, seats of honor in synagogues, greetings in marketplaces, and the salutation ‘Rabbi.’

Safe water when decomposing bodies are polluting the pond

From the comments on EHD in Eaton County and a previous commenter noting that there were dead deer scattered around a farm-pond:

This makes getting emergency water from surface water very difficult.

Historically polluted water was a battle tactic.

 

A cow that died in a flood. Nobody admits to owning the cow. There it sits.

That is a topic worth discussing because floods often kill livestock and the bodies pollute the water. Sometimes material spills cause massive fish-kills. Even milk will kill fish because it consumes all of the dissolved oxygen and the fish suffocate.

Art Ludwig and Oasis Design

Art is a civil engineer whose expertise is in waste-water. 

He went to Latin American and used his expertise to help them find sources of safe water. He used Petri dishes to get actual bacteria counts of water from various sources.

So...the most challenging time to get safe water in much of the Developing World is at the start of the rainy season. Animals (donkeys, dogs, chickens, cattle, monkeys and "other primates") defecate in the open and the deposits accumulate during the dry season. They all sluice into the streams and rivers during the wet seasons. And during really heavy rains, the sheet of surface water can also run into open wells. An additional source of contamination is from wet clothing (hems of trousers) dripping into the open well.

The following text was written about a sample taken at the start of the rainy season. It was taken next to a river-in-flood and the water was the color of chocolate milk. Quoting from Art's writing:

M35 Well, pit-Freshly re-dug community drinking & cooking

Location, description, sampling technique: New well freshly (<48 hrs) dug next to M1 after it flooded, and used for same purpose. Sample taken from well-rinsed plastic water scoop.

Temperature: Turbidity: Color: Clear Smell: none detectable Taste: didn't try it

Surrounding influences: This well was about 4 m from chocolate river, 3 m from old well, which, when the groundwater level rose, filled with light brown foamy water. People collecting water waded through the river, then stood with dripping legs right by the 2 gal galvanized bottomless bucket which was the water container. This well did not have a fence.

Use of water: Was being collected for drinking (after boiling, they said) by several villagers as the sample was taken.

What do you think of this water? It was 4 m of coarse, highly permeable sand from a river chocolate brown first runoff water containing 20,000 buttwipes per swimming pool of fecal coliforms*. Would you drink it? Make tea with it?

---

What I thought about this water: I felt very leery of this water due proximity to the river and the possibility of contamination from dripping legs and feet during collection.

Test results:(fecal coliforms/100 ml) 0

Other bacteria: (general coliforms) 4,933

Discussion: I was astonished at how clean this water was; I've drank untreated spring water with higher levels, without problems. This result suggests that 1) this amount of sand filtration is extremely effective, and 2), the contamination in all the wells in Maruata comes more from above than with the water from below, and that it increases with the age of the well. This was one of the cleanest wells tested, with the only possible explanation being that it was by far the most freshly dug, this factor overriding the close proximity of a huge quantity of very contaminated water.      Source

How is that possible????

The traditional wisdom is that filters function by having pores that are smaller than the particles that it is filtering out. Coarse sand has open spaces between the grains that are thousands of times larger than bacteria.

The answer is that sand (and soil) are not inert. The grains are covered with a film of microbes that actively feed on the organic matter in the water that percolates through it. Bacteria, virus, amoeba and paramecium are "organic matter" to those films. The filtering media doesn't mechanically filter out microbes. The microbes stick to the film as if it were flypaper and are digested by it...or become part of it. 

With that information, decent water could be obtained by moving 20 feet back from the water's edge and digging a pit to dip water from. It might have a vegetal taste but it would not be unsafe and would be totally bulletproof if boiled. 

* Ludwig uses an unconventional measure to help the regular people get a grip on just how dirty "wild" water can be. He calculated the number of fecal bacteria that would result if one kid who did not wipe his butt one-last-time would leave in a standard sized swimming pool. It was something like 0.1 grams of human feces (a faint smear) in 20,000 gallons of water. This is a level of pollution that rounds-to-zero for most people.

Disability

 

In very round numbers, every year represents about five million people and the number of people between 15 and 64 is about 250 million people who are potentially in the labor pool.

There were 28 million Americans with some form of disability in 2012 and that drifted up to 30 million by 2020. In the last six years it has grown to 36 million. That is 14.5% of the entire labor pool.

Twenty years ago, it was rare for a worker under 30 to be on disability. Disability was generally caused by repetitive motion injuries or work-place accidents and the case-rate climbed with age. It is my impression that there has been a significant number of people in their 20s going on disability for emotional/mental issues compared with decades past.

I know this comes across as cold, but there is a world of difference between somebody in construction tapping-out at 48 because his body gave out and a 24 year-old who goes on disability because of an inability to cope with the work-place. The man in construction worked for 30 years and wore out. The 24 year-old hit-the-silk before contributing virtually anything back to society.

All that said, many people with disabilities are fully employed. Sixty percent of the people with hearing disabilities are fully employed while only seventeen percent with "self-care disabilities" are. In total, the labor participation rate of people with disabilities is half that of people who do not designated as disabled.

EHD in Eaton County?

 

A dead deer in the Upper Orchard. Maybe a couple of weeks old.

Another dead deer. This one in the Hill Orchard. No evidence of an archery wound. The other deer was too-far gone to even look for evidence wounds from a hunter.

Dating corpses is an art and ambient temperatures make a huge difference. My Wild Azz Guess is that this deer has been dead for four days. Extremely bloated. Prolapsing rectum. Rectum? Heck, it killed 'im.

In total, the Upper and Hill Orchards are about an acre. Two dead deer in a single acre doesn't mean EHD is in Eaton County but it doesn't bode well for the 2026 hunting season.

Word on the street is that Jackson and Calhoun Counties, both of them directly south of Eaton County, have been hammered by EHD. 

Lifting and I-hate-fleece for outerwear

I went to the gym yesterday. It has been more than a month since I lifted in the gym.

I was very surprised that I was able to complete my "maintenance" routine with no issues. I even added 10 pounds to the last two sets.

The routine (all dead-lifts):

• One set of six repetitions 135 pounds (a 45 pounds bar + two 45 pounds plates). Lift without straps.
• Five minute recovery
• One set of six repetitions of 185 pounds (same as above + two 25 pound plates). Lift made with straps.
• Five minute recovery
• Four sets of six repetitions of 205 pounds (same as above + two, 10 pound plates) with five minutes of recovery between each set. Lifts made with straps.

I expect to be sore for the next couple of days. I am feeling it most in my trapezius muscles. The right amount of soreness is conducive to a good night's sleep. 

While I was lifting I saw another lifter who reminded me of somebody I hadn't seen in 20 years. When he was taking a break and I was on my five-minute recovery, I walked over and asked "Did you ever work at Fisher Body?"

"Yes. Yes I did..." he replied. And we chatted for about ten minutes before I could pry myself away. He looks healthier now than he did in 2003, primarily in his skin-tones. They were now rosy-pink rather than ashy-gray.

Mistakes were made 

I have about 120 pounds of potatoes that I dug but have not collected.

We had a frost last night. 

I don't know if the potatoes were damaged but we are not going to commingle these potatoes with the others.

Fleece and burs

Fleece and fabrics with a soft surface are almost universal now. You have to look to find outerwear that is suitable for wearing beyond mown surfaces. Fleece outerwear just does not work for me this time of year.