The Smart Phone Arms Race

Middle and High school kids seem to be engaged in an arms race.  Instead of missiles and nuclear warheads, this arms race involves ever more expensive and complex smart phones.  It is driving their taxpayers (parents) into penury.

Yes, I am guilty.  I admit to spoiling my yuppy-larvae.  I promised Kubota that he would be the very first kid in the Middle school with an Eye-Phone 6.

And yet, I know in my heart that his joy will end even as he first holds it.  The joy is in the yearning and reaching, not so much the grasping.

Trans fats

Please bear in mind, gentle reader, that I write essays for a blog.  These essays are not news.  I don't compete on timeliness. I compete on content.

Why trans fats? Why now?

I am the only person responsible for what goes into my mouth.

The Food and Drug Administration recently floated a proposal to ban "trans fats".  This baffles me.  My body cannot tell the difference between a stearic acid molecule that originated in a cow's body, atop a palm tree, from a soybean or synthesized across a powdered nickel catalyst.  Stearic acid is stearic acid.

So, are the people at the FDA stoopid, political hacks or economic reconstructionists?  Perhaps "or" is the wrong choice of words.  Maybe I should have used the word "and".

Cynicism

I once had a boss named Ron who made Machiavelli look like a piker.  His directions were veiled, obscure and often contradictory.  His instructions made sense only after you drilled through the micro-tactical-detail and looked at his long term strategic intent.  After you noodled out his long term goals his instructions became transparent and one could operate with more autonomy.  I like to think that we worked well together.

My Pavlovian reaction, when I encounter directions that are veiled, obscure and often contradictory, is to speculate regarding long term, strategic intent.

Who benefits?

So who benefits from a ban on trans fats?  Certainly not me.

One of the more cynical views is that perhaps the Indonesian Oil Palm industry or Montsanto upped the ante to the regulatory "protection racket" and simply out-bid ADM (ADM will be used generically.  There are several suppliers of trans fats.)

Another cynical view is that ADM is looking to dump the cost structure of hydrogenation plants.  They can now achieve acceptable shelf life and product sensory characteristics with palm oils and soybean oil.

Obscure factoid: soybeans have been around for a long time but the oil quickly went rancid.  They did not explode as a US crop until after genetics were integrated into the seedstocks that yielded a lipid profile that had acceptable shelf life.  There is vast amounts of data (much in the public domain) regarding soybean genetics/lipid profiles.  This is where Montsanto comes into play; they are the US's largest supplier of agricultural seed genetics.

The cynic would have ADM looking for a graceful way to dump a high cost segment of their business.  If they can score political points for themselves and their political puppets while doing it...well, they have a fiduciary obligation to orchestrate such theater.

In the end, the cynicism is non-value added.  I am the only person responsible for what I put into my mouth.  I am already a passive victim if I expect the FDA to protect me from "evil" donuts and potato chips.

Sidebar:  One thing I learned from this Administration is that it is impossible to over saturate an audience with repetition.  "If you like your..."  It creates credulous state of mind because the listener/reader subconsciously thinks "It must be true because I know I have heard that before."

Let me know if my new habit of book-ending the take-home makes you nauseous and I will stop.

Storms, Part 2

We were able to tag-team the child who caused issues during the storm and brainstormed a "self-sooth kit".

The unedited list follows:

1. Quad  ****
2. More lights.  Lights on longer  **
3. TV/Videos
4. Pinball arcade.  Hand held games.  See expanded section below.
5. Bounce house
6. Personal Gym
7. Herc (German Shepherd) *
8. Go to restaurant.  (This is what I am trying to avoid) *
9. Pizza, if we can find a place that will deliver.  (Oven will not work without electricity) *
10. Pastaroni.  Stove will work but must be lit with match or lighter
11. Ramen Noodles *
12. Spaghetti  **
13. Corned Beef Hash **
14. Dumplings **
15. Beef Stew
16. Canned creamed corn. **

4a. Wii U
4b. PS 4
4c. PSP
4d. Laptop---not mini---with integral DVD player
4e. I Phone 4 or 5 **
4f. Larger inverter.  Larger than 400W *

Stars were added as we discussed most desirable options.  Of course, the kid has no appreciation for costs.

**********************************************

Food:

I will lay in a supply of canned corned beef hash, dumplings, beef stew and creamed corn.  For various reasons these are comfort foods to the kid.  They are cheap and have a long shelf life.

Power:

I will buy a larger inverter.  I am looking at this one.  Based on the negative review and my other experience with inverters, I will replace the factory supplied leads with longer, heavier gauge leads with serious terminals.  I think the inverter will be happier if I can locate it further from the heat of the car engine.

The plan is to park a vehicle in the garage with door and windows open.  Clip the leads to the battery posts and keep the vehicle idling.  My only concern is potential overheating.  My garage is separated from the house by two sets of doors and a fifteen foot breezeway.  I have a very long extension cord.

One horsepower is 726 Watts.  In-rush at start-up/stall is usually figured to be 3X max power.  A 1/3 hp motor (my sump pump) should have a transient in-rush of.....a little over 700 Watts.  The inverter at the end of the link has a surge capacity of 2200W.

I looked at up-grading from compact fluorescent to LED but only went from 13W to 7W per light.

Entertainment:

We were chill-axin' until the inverter faulted.  We had been watching a movie on DVD on the big, power-sucking TV.  It would be VERY nice to have a stand-alone, low power consumption option to the big TV and X-Box.

I need to confer with my wife and help-mate to see if we go with a laptop like these.  Or if we go with a dedicated, portable DVD player like this.  Any advice from my readers will be appreciated VERY much!

Water:

We usually keep a case of bottled water in each vehicle.  I also have forty-two gallons of stabilized water in the pantry.

My pump is 220V so the inverter will not make that work.

One option is to have a set-up like this ready to plug-and-play.  I did buy a cistern pump but the power kicked on before I needed to mess with it.

I also have one plug on the exterior of my garage that is 220V.  My thinking was that if I ever back-feed with a generator or want to do some serious welding....I will probably want to do it outside.  My garage is 36 feet by 24 feet.  I have two bays inside and one, 12' wide bay that we call "The Overhang" that is outside.  The 220V outlet is in "The Overhang".  While I do not have a generator, I have several family members who do.

Back-feeding into your home circuits is a BIG DEAL.  Make sure you know what you are doing!  It is very easy to kill line-men if you do not dump the circuit breakers that connect you to the grid.  Make sure you know what you are doing (intentionally repeated)!

Storms

Storms

I hope all in the mid-West and Eastern Canada survived the fast moving line of T-storms (in November ?!?) that went through the area last night.

It does not look like we suffered any property damage but I need to walk around in the daylight to really know.

We did lose power for about four hours.

Cat Whiskers

Mrs ERJ once shared with me that I should be very glad that she had "that time of month".  That was a novel concept.  I asked her why.

She told me that every 28 days I was going to know exactly what she was thinking and feeling. That it would be delivered in short, declarative sentences with no filtering or spin.  Then, if I heeded the information I received in those two days, the other twenty six days would be jolly and wonderful.

Yesterday I saw a barn cat thread its way through my raspberry patch.  It was undoubtedly using information from its whiskers to avoid brushing against the thorny stems.  Additionally, the whiskers do not make the stems quiver....which would have resulted in the cat being drenched by the rain saturated canopy.

We can make corrections in our behaviors based on very small amounts of information if it is the right information.  Those changes in behavior can make our lives much better and help us avoid discomfort.

Storms

Storms are little trial runs of when things go Tango Uniform.

I score us a C-

Personal dynamics were our downfall.  There still exists the belief that banging on Mom and Dad will somehow result in their getting more of what they want.

"I wanna go to McDonalds. I wanna go to McDonalds, I wanna go to McDonalds.  I wanna go to McDonalds......"  succeeds often enough to keep the belief alive.

Most of us regress when things get crappy.  A teenager can lose ten years, behavior wise.  It was stressful and distracting.

The other behavior was one of the kids started needling and pushing buttons.  Nobody can climb inside another person's head, but I suspect that they had anxiety and getting a rise out of sibling, Mom and Dad was vastly more entertaining than thinking about werewolves, vampires, ax murderers and other denizens the dark.

C- is not a fail

C- is not a fail.  Mrs ERJ took them to a pizza place for a couple of hours.  Coming back, two of the roads were closed due to downed trees.  She also filled up the minivan so we could run the DC-to-AC converter off of her battery for an extended period.

I stayed home and chilled out, listening to classical music on the battery powered radio that lives in a place of honor on our living room mantle.

We need a better back up plan.  The family should not have been out on the road.

Sunday Thought: The Sign of the Cross

As a Catholic, I have the quaint custom of making the "Sign of the Cross".  I want to share the origin of that custom.

In Matthew's account of the Good News, Jesus's last words are: 

"All power in heaven and earth have been given to me.  Go therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit;  teach them to observe all that I have commanded you.  And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age."

So making the Sign of the Cross is a renewal of our Baptismal promise.

To take on a name is to enter into a family.  In the time of Christ, that engendered a degree of totality that is almost incomprehensible to us today.  There were no social programs that served as safety nets.  There were no Greyhound buses to California.  There was no French Foreign Legion.  Family was life.
 
The closest image I can give of the emotional impact of taking on a name is when the Bride and Groom are at the altar.  The Groom presents the ring to the Bride and holds stationary in space.  The Bride either willingly places it on her finger by pushing her finger through it.  Or she opts to not enter into marriage and take the Groom's name.

When a Catholic (or other Christian) performs the Sign of the Cross and says those words, we are joyfully reaffirming our baptismal promises and acknowledging our privileges and responsibilities as brothers and sisters of Christ.

Grammar Matters

This post is dedicated to Mom in Lansing and to Frank, a retired Language Arts teacher in Battle Creek.

Grammar matters

We are a nation of distracted multi-taskers. 

Multi-tasking is the act of switching attention between many (often five or more) simultaneously occurring events.  It is a bit like speed dating only much, much faster.

Speed reading is the act of skimming written material and "registering" about every fifth word.  Your brain interpolates the meaning of the missing content via context, size and shape of missing words and cognitive magic.  The reader slows down, i.e. more words are registered, when the results of the interpolation starts to contradict.

Holonomic information

Based on this evidence, it seems likely that the human brain can function with very sparse information (one-part-in-five transmitted, just to throw a number out) when the information is holonomic. 

Holonomic is defined as "Every piece of information is distributed over the entire structure so that each part of the network contains information of the whole."  Definition adapted from Wikipedia

That is, the internal consistencies of the sentence regarding tense, gender, passivity, plurality allow the listener or reader to reliably infer the remainder of the message based on a very small sampling of the content.

Grammar matters when your message matters

Ego demands that our listener to pay complete, rapt attention to us.  The reality is that people are addicted to multi-tasking.  Also, we transmit in an environment of background noise,  with radios and cell phones that have static.   Many listeners suffer from hearing loss in some or all of the normal audible range.

Use of standard, proper English ensures that the message you intended to transmit is received with fidelity.

Thanks Mom!

I was blessed with a mother who taught English before becoming Mom.  I grew up submerged in proper, grammatically correct English.  I was lucky.

Country Bass

I received feedback at deer camp that the story about rattlesnakes was decent.  Here is another story told to me by one of the Haley clan.  It is not my story.  I simple wrote it down.  All errors are mine due to the frailty of my memory.

The Pond

Kris and Jerry Haley have a bass pond in their backyard. The pond is right outside their back door. It is about 80 yards long by 30 yards wide and 18 feet deep. The bottom is gravel out to about 4' of depth. Jerry keeps the brush and weeds cleared out except for 15 yards of shore on the south end. 

Kris likes the pond because it is a magnet for the family. She also likes to float in the pond on hot summer afternoons. She paddles around, chasing the shade in her floating lounge chair. A cool drink at one hand, a Debbie Macomber romance in the other.

Jerry likes the pond because he likes to fish and he likes to catch BIG fish. .Jerry raises largemouth bass for the same reason people raise giant pumpkins. He wants to see just how big he can grow them.

Anybody raising trophy bass in Michigan faces an uphill climb. Bass grow best during the long, hot summers of the south. They runt out early in the north. Still, Jerry works at it....except it is more like play when you work at something you enjoy.

Like any farmer, Jerry knows there are two parts to raising critters. You have to start with the right breeding stock. And then you have to feed them right.

Jerry visited Michigan lakes known for giving up lunker bass; lakes with names like Cloverdale, Gun, Morrison, and Coldwater. He made a point of picking lakes that were more than 60 miles apart because inbreeding is the bane of raising healthy animals. He carried them in two 55 gallon barrels in the back of his truck. He put clean, healthy bass in one barrel and clean, healthy bluegills and sunfish in the other. These fish were his seedstock.

Feeding bass right means getting rid of cover that baitfish can hide in. Jerry left 15 yards of the bank in willow, cattails and rushes because he did not want the bass to wipe out all the breeding bluegills. The pond is filled with swarms of 2" and 3" long bluegills. Lots of bass food..but the bass still have to chase them down one at a time, and really big bass are like really big people. They resent having to move unless there is a very big payoff.

Fishing

Jerry used to be very generous about allowing people to fish in his pond. That changed the day the bluegills were on their beds and one of the young men in the neighborhood showed up at the door. Jerry was at work.

"Good morning Mrs. Haley. Mr. Haley said we could fish the pond." Said the young man.

"Go ahead." Kris said. "You know where it is."

The next time she looked out the window she saw six young men with cane-poles catching bluegills. It was like watching wheat fall before a combine. They harvested that pond. They filled five gallon bucket after five gallon bucket with nice, slab-sided fish. That was never going to happen again, not if Kris and Jerry had anything to say about it.

Today, there is a very short list of people who are invited to fish in Jerry's pond. Mostly they are kids and they fish for bluegills. Jerry coaches them on how to catch them. Kids who don't listen or play by the rules don't get invited back. Jerry keeps an eye on them the whole time they fish. Partly, Jerry wants the kids to be successful because he wants everybody to enjoy the outdoors as much as he does. Partly, you don't let kids mess around in an 18' deep pond unless you keep an eye on them.

Jerry tells the kids to wade out into the pond and toss the baited hook into the weeds on the south end of the pond. Then, when you get a bite, to drag it out as quick as you can. Even so, a bass will rip the 'gill off the end of the line more often than not.

Feeding

After a while, Jerry noticed that the bass congregated around them when they waded out into the pond, kind of like Indians circling a particularly prosperous wagon train. The bass anticipated an easy meal. Well, Jerry wanted to get a better look at them. So he caught a frog in the tall grass east of the pond and waded back out into the water. He gripped the frog by the front legs and dangled it in the water out in front of him. It did not take the bass long to become accustomed to this new form of easy meat.

Feeding frogs to the bass became one of Jerry's favorite forms of entertainment. He would catch two or three frogs every night and feed the fish. He even fancied that the bass recognized him personally. The idea is not as farfetched as it seems. The small pond is nestled in a depression and its surface is seldom marred by any ripples or waves. 

Another reason that Jerry liked feeding the bass was because he could monitor how they were growing. He would let a neighbor kid catch a few when it looked like their growth stalled out. They would usually put on a nice growth spurt after being thinned out.

The Boyfriend

Then, one fateful day, his daughter brought a boyfriend home from the Big City. Jerry is a traditional kind of guy and bringing home a boyfriend means something in these parts. He recognized that the boyfriend was a prospective son-in-law and his daughter was trolling him in front of the family to get their read on the situation.

It turns out that the boyfriend was a big-time bass fisherman. He had all the videos and watched all the pros on TV. He had heard stories of the lunker bass in Jerry's pond. He discounted the size of the fish as exaggerations. Bass just don't grow that big in Michigan. But he brought his $500 dollar tackle boxes and $200 fishing rods with him, just in case Jerry invited him fishing.

Kris and Jerry talked it over. Jerry was kind of protective about his bass. He believed in the old adage, "Screw me once, shame on you. Screw me twice, shame on me." Why make yourself vulnerable?

Kris, on the other hand, was getting a little tired of the bass.

Kris belonged to an informal book club. The ladies who patronized Kris's hair stylist all shared books. All you had to do was buy one book a month and then it was leave-one-take-one. 

Kris loved to spend the hottest summer days floating in her recliner and catching up on her reading. The temperature would be in the mid 90s. She would be following the antics of the Debbie Macomber's Christmas angels, Shirley, Goodness and Mercy. Snowflakes would be floating down from the sky. Lost in the story, Kris would forget and let her hand dangle in the water. Hey, it was hot and the water was cool. It feels darned nice to let your fingers play in the water. 

Then, a mega-bass would try to eat her hand. It was becoming awkward trying to explain why so many of the books she brought back had that "sat out in the rain" look.

After much discussion, Jerry and Kris agreed to let the young man fish the pond on a catch-and-release basis. They figured that there is no better way to learn about a man's character than to watch him fish or hunt.

The young man consulted his tarot cards, horoscope, three websites and his stockbroker's recommendation. He selected his portfolio of lures and spent the next two hours beating the water to a froth. He did not get a single rise. It does not take much to put the fish down when you are fishing a half-acre pond. Jerry watched. Jerry was amused.

"There are no fish in this pond." the young man stated after making the 25th cast with the last lure he had selected.

"You are wrong." Jerry replied, "There are bass in there, and some darned good ones, too."

"Nope. If there were any fish in this puddle, I'd have caught them." said the young man.

Millwrights

One thing you need to know about Jerry is that he is a millwright.   Millwrights are the Labrador Retrievers in the universe of skilled trades.  Electricians are poodles; scary smart but some individuals can be temperamental.  PLC programmers are beagles;  they are impervious to heat, cold, hunger, thirst, human voices and #6 shot when on a hot scent.  Small tool repair are dachshunds;  good at what they do but limited.  Tool makers are German Shorthair Pointers;  precise and high-strung.

Labrador Retrievers are a robust breed of dog that is strong and resilient and versatile and plenty smart enough.  Labrador Retrievers are noted for having a "soft mouth" but the term is relative.  It does not seem "soft" to anybody threatening their people.  It is a bit like calling a yellow pine two-by-four "softwood" as it is being vigorously applied to your backside.

The point is that Labs not only can do what needs to be done, they will get it done  without hesitation...even if they give up a few style points.

Millwrights, like Labs, tend to be big dawgs.  There is not much fluff on a Lab.  What you see is meat.  And it is the same with millwrights.

Nobody likes to be called a liar. Especially a millwright, a skilled tradesman, who prides himself on knowing exactly how many fish he has in his pond...and knowing exactly how big they are.

Ego and deceit

"Your problem," Jerry said, "is that you are relying on ego and deceit. These are country fish. Country fish are like country folk.  We like things simple and honest."

"Whaddya mean, 'simple and honest'?" challenged the city slicker.

Jerry is more of a "doer" than a talker.  So Jerry showed him.

Jerry waded out into the water out in front of the city slicker. He made a fist and reached down into the water.  Beneath the water he made a "come hither" motion with his middle and index finger where the city slicker could plainly see what he was doing.

From the depths of the pond Hogzilla herself saw those big, meaty millwright fingers.  These were not lissom leopard frog legs nor petite junior bullfrog legs.  NO!  These were veritable sides of beef beckoning her. And she responded.

The water around Jerry's arm boiled as Hogzilla chomped down on the "frog legs".  Jerry clamped onto the lower jaw with his thumb. Jerry lifted the massive bass out of the water.  It was a bass that would drawn "ooohs and aahs" in Florida.

"That's all you gotta do around here.  Be simple and honest." Jerry said.

The young man never came back.