New blog added to the blog-roll

 

Terrierman's Daily Dose

I can not resist a blogger who considers the rare, Boney-eared Assfish newsworthy.

Mostly, he talks about dogs.  Not the ornamental kind.  The kind that are man's partner.  Working dogs.

Take a look at his blog if you are snowed in.

Hip Dysplasia in Dogs

Data was downloaded from the Orthopedic Foundation for Animals.  The percentage of animals tested that were judged to have "Excellent hips" was ordered from low to high and charted.

...the breeds where more than 20% of the animals tested had "Excellent" hips.

One hypothesis is that larger dogs might be more susceptible to hip dysplasia.  Perhaps evolution gave them the chassis for a 40 pound coyote and then we put a 90 pound dog on top of that.  You would expect trouble with the ball joints.

Good guess, but wrong.  The horizontal axis is the weight for a high-end-of-standard, male dog for each breed.  There is no correlation.

So, what are the two low performers and the eighteen super-stars?

The two worst performers are the Pug and the Bulldog.  Both breeds are contorted by the kind of style that flaunts nonfunctionality.

What would it take to bring German Shepherds into this elite group?

Lots of selection pressure.  The current plan, the one that was politically palatable to the dog breeders and the show industry, was to agree to not breed the very worst end of the spectrum.

Economics come into play.  The breeding industry would not exist if it not create an artificial scarcity of puppies via "responsible breeding" and the huge push to neuter.

They also work hand-in-glove with the show industry to create the perception of value-added.

One of the challenges of improving hips is that the trait does not manifest for several years.  Before the advent of artificial insemination, improving hips would mean keeping +25 studs around to ensure the likelihood of having one with excellent hips.  And the breeders would have to feed those dogs for 5+ years...the age at which a definitive determination can be made...before they could start recouping their costs with breeding fees or salable puppies.

Of course, this is all blown away with Artificial Insemination.  Every male German Shepherd could be "milked" for three sessions before being neutered.  Those straws can be stored in liquid nitrogen for decades.  At the age of five years the surviving dogs can be assessed for hip dysplasia.  The semen of any dog that died before the assessment age would be discarded as would the semen of any dog that did not have "Excellent" hips.

Why three "collections"

A quick scan of the internet suggests that one "collection" produces enough material to inseminate three dams.  Three collections wold be good for nine dams.  Given an average litter size of six, that extrapolates to 54 pups or 28 male pups.  Our 4.1% base rate for German Shepherds means one-in-twenty-five.  Our scheme generates 28 male pups....At least one of those males should be excellent considering the breeding.  The scheme should be close to self-sustaining.

The heritability of hip dysplasia is pretty low, between 0.14 and 0.25, but I have to imaging that three generations of "only excellent", 5+ year old sires would really move the needle.  And the frozen semen scheme would do it without creating any inbreeding depression choke points.  It would not take long to create three generations.  The first generation would take slightly longer than 5 years.  The first flight of dams would be whelping two years after that.  Second flight of dams would be another two years, as would the third.  I ran out of fingers but that looks like eleven years to me.

All it would take is the registering agency to start retroactively revoking the registrations of any dogs if the sire failed the "hip check" at age five.  The only way to stay in the business of selling registered dogs would be to buy into a scheme as described above.  Of course, the stakes are so high that hair samples should also be taken of the semen donor so there is a way to check if the dog whose hips are being X-Rayed are the same dog with the stored semen.

There would be winners and losers.  The winners would be breeders with +5 year old sires with magic hips.  They would be in very high demand.  The losers would be breeders who had dumped many, many thousands of dollars in sires with hips that did not make the grade.  Ultimately, the winners would be the breed and those who chose to make one of those Gen +3 a member of their family.

The man with the gold makes the rules

From a comment written by pixelpattern  pixelpattern:

Exactly who is giving away the $10K? What this seems like to me is a theft from somebody. There is an old saying about playing poker with a sucker or mark; and if you don't know who the sucker is, it's you. Help me understand.

This is a game played on many levels.

At the simplest level, one might think that States could regain autonomy by manning up, repudiating IRS over-reach and taxing residents without involving the Feds as the middle man.

The narrative holds that politicians are spineless.  No politician every got elected by raising taxes.  They do get re-elected, however, by bringing home bacon from Washington.  It becomes very easy to let the IRS be the "heavy" in taxation and then to recover revenue via revenue sharing.  The State of Michigan, for instance, receives about 35% of its budget via Federal grants and revenue sharing schemes.

Everything comes with a price.  The price for this charade is often called J.P. Morgan's Golden Rule, "The man with the gold makes the rules."

So what happens if you think seat belt usage is a personal choice?  Wrong answer.  No money.  Do not pass go.  Do not collect $200.

Peeling a little deeper

In fact, the revenue supplied by the Feds does not originate in taxes.  It originates in debt.

Taxes are collected to pay the interest on the debt.  It is a show of good faith.

The real action is in the issuing of bonds...of debt.

When you appear to be a good risk, investors want to push money onto you.  And laws can be written to refract reality into creating that appearance.

Slipping a few words into the fine print regarding how banks must calculate loan-loss-reserves can force them to become love-slaves to certain types of debt issues.

Money is just a promise

In the end, money is just a promise.  A promise that that particular cowrie shell, bead, ounce of silver, piece of paper, collection of bytes can be redeemed for something else that is tangible...something of value.

Modern society is entirely dependent upon this mass psychosis.  It cannot function otherwise.  It is a bit like the "energy approach" to deriving descriptive equations for physical systems.  Energy is "allowed" to phase between various forms: Kinetic, Potential, Inductive, Capacitive, Gravitational...with "imaginary numbers" being the conduit between forms of energy.  The numbers may be imaginary but, in the real world, the elevator moves upward rather than plunging into the abyss.

The "Fed" is a semi-private banking entity is tasked with managing the United States money supply.  Imagine the US Postal Service subcontracting out parcel delivery to the UPS.  To all appearances the venture might appear to be entirely "Federal" but the folks walking up your drive way might find themselves conflicted.

So it is with the Fed.  They are conflicted.

The Fed has taken upon itself to optimize several arch metrics.  These metrics often work at cross purposes and optimizing them involves trade-offs.  It is a systems thing.  Full employment is at odds with low inflation.  Growth in stock prices is at odds with full domestic employment.  High home ownership is at odds with....

One way the Fed accomplishes "grow stock prices" is to inject money into the economy.  One robust way to do this is to buy US government bonds.  The logic is a bit convoluted.  If all money that went into funding the Federal budget came out of private funding, there would be a drought of capital for loans.  Further, the interest rates would be crushing.  Since money is fungible, the Fed can swish their wand through the air and buy enough US bonds to create whatever interest rate profile they deem fashionable.  "Would you like that with a twist, sir?"

So, in this scenario where $10,000 is beamed into your checking account....the plain truth is that the money is created by magic, the magic of mass-hypnosis/psychosis.

There are other ways to give you $10,000 (or any other number) other than depositing it into your checking account.  You could receive a one-time tax credit.  You could receive Federal Student Loan forgiveness.  You might get cash-for-clunkers or cash-for-non-energystar appliances.  You might receive a $100 carbon credit for planting a tree....the list is endless.

The Trees of Eaton Rapids, Part 1

Some trees just make you go "Wow!"  All pictures can be clicked on to embiggen.

I intend for this to be the first of a series of essays on the trees growing in, and near, the city of Eaton Rapids. These essays will be picture heavy.

White Oak (Quercus alba)

227 State Street, the house is bracketed by a couple of White Oak trees.

Plains Highway, just east of the high school.  Want to leave a legacy?  Plant a White Oak.  These are probably about 150 years old.  Quercus alba does not like sites that flood.  Q. macrocarpa and Q. bicolor are better choices for those sites.

Eaton Rapids was originally Oak Savanna.  White Oak was one of the major components of that habitat.  White Oak is very comfortable and happy in Eaton Rapids.  To minimize risk of Oak Wilt and other diseases that might spread via root grafts, it is best to limit oak's total share of the canopy to 20%.  In general, "White Oaks" are more resistant to diseases than "Red Oaks", so they can be planted closer to that 20% number.  The "Red Oaks" should probably top out at 10%.

One easy rule of thumb is to NOT plant an oak tree if there is another oak tree within 100 paces of where you want to plant.  Landscape architects dislike this approach because it does not meet their aesthetic standards.  They snidely comment that this approach produces a random "bowl full of jelly beans" look.  That is, as if the planting was not designed by somebody who was trained in aesthetics.

Frankly, I am fond of good jelly beans.

American Sycamore (Plantus occidentalis)

Sycamore is a "Hey, look at me!" tree due to its interesting bark.  These trees are next to the spillway at the mouth of Springbrook creek.

Miller Dairy on East State street.  The drive is lined with sycamore. They are very tall, lithe and slender.  They remind me of a family of tennis players.

Sycamore comes in two flavors:  American and "London".  Both quickly grow to be massive trees.  Continued plantings of Sycamore have a place in Eaton Rapids if not done with a heavy hand.  Sycamore (also called "Plane trees") like moist, fertile soil.

Twin exclamation points

This is what you will see if you enter Eaton Rapids from the North.

Same trees, slightly different angle.  The tree on the right, the one with the "Hallelujah arms" is an Eastern White Pine (Pinus strobus).  The slightly taller one on the left with the flabby arms is a Norway Spruce (Picea abies).  Both trees are probably over 100 feet tall.

Bill Botti told me that nurseries used to send traveling salesmen door-to-door in the early 1900s.  They often threw in a couple of bonus evergreens with each order of fruit trees.  That may account for the many, old farm houses with a Norway Spruce and an Eastern White Pine growing side-by-side.  The fruit trees are long gone.

Bald Cypress (Taxodium distichum)

On the floodplains behind the old, Horner Woolen Mill.

 

107 King Street.  This tree looks splendid next to this style of house.

Bald Cypress gets two thumbs up from ERJ.  This is on my OK to plant list.

 American Elm (Ulmus americana)

517 McArthur River Drive.

Shingle Oak (Quercus imbricaria)

221 McArthur River Drive.  Oak trees that retain their leaves can provide "white noise" all winter long.  The downside is that retained leaves makes them more vulnerable to ice damage.

Three nice specimens in somebody's back yard on Marilin Drive across from Family Fare.

Shingle Oak is in the "Red Oak" family.  The leaves do not look much like Oak leaves.  They have no lobes or sinuses.

Shingle Oak appears to be one of those species that does well growing in very moist spots and very, very dry spots.  It is a shy producer of acorns which is important to some people.

Cottonwood (Populus deltoides)

Cottonwoods have reverse snob appeal.  They come in both male and female versions.  The male versions produce pollen.  The females produce seeds that can clog air conditioners.  On the plus side, they grow like a house afire, are surprisingly ice resistant and produce a light shade that gardeners can work with.  This tree can be found at 411 West Broad Street.

Most Cottonwood trees are volunteers.  They were allowed to live because they were in the right place to solve a problem and they had good enough form to be attractive.  I think there is nothing wrong with 1%-to-5% of the trees in Eaton Rapids be Cottonwood.

Catalpa (Catalpa speciosa)

I am not an accomplished enough of a photographer to capture the three dimensionality of this old Catalpa tree trunk.  Therefore, I shot some video of a walk around.

This tree makes me think of book covers for novels by Ursula Le Guin and Anne McCaffery.  Frothy surf crashing into sheer cliffs.  Caves with hooded entrances.  Castles.  Dragons.  Treasure.

Not bad for one tree.

This tree lives at 416 Broad Street.

Accountability report

Me

I am still on track for a thousand miles.  I logged 69.5 to a goal, at this point, of 57.5 miles.  1000 miles may have not had enough reach.

Mrs ERJ

Mrs ERJ is starting a new diet.  She does not need to, but there are some places where brave men do not tread.

The diet has an unfortunate name. The basic plan it to remove high risk food groups from one's diet and to slowly reintroduce them.  It is NOT named after food that can be very difficult to find or identify.

The Hawthorne Effect suggests that one's health and feelings of fitness should improve simply due to the attention.  If Mrs ERJ wants to eat a highly limited diet for a while, I am good with that.

Belladonna

As reported earlier, Bella fell in with a great bunch of students at college. One of the things they do together is lift weights.

I asked Belladonna how much weight she had lifted since going off to college.  After talking to one of her buddies I was under the impression that they charted the sum of every Weight X number of reps.  Example, if I bench pressed 70 pounds 30 times that would add 2100 pounds to my running total.

Bella dutifully reported back that she had lifted 68,933 pounds.  That did not make sense to me because that seemed like what she was lifting in two weeks.

I asked her to recheck.

Today she told me that she had lifted something north of one million pounds since September 1.  She had forgotten to multiply by the number of repetitions.

Thats my girl!

Kubota

We went to Kubota's mid-term conferences.

His grades are surprisingly good.  He has three "A"s,  one "for credit, no grade" and one "not-A".

Socially, things are getting exciting.  He is exquisitely, painfully, exhilaratingly aware of girls.  And so are a couple of his closest friends.  It is almost laughable.  There are about 350 girls at the high school and they are all invisible until one of his posse expresses the merest whisper of interest in her.  Then she is the only one.  They make  monkeys of themselves attempting to impress her and putting each other down.

Three boys, half a functioning brain between them.

It is interesting looking at it from this end of life.  Perhaps a third of those 350 girls will become stunningly beautiful.  I can see it in the sparkle of their eyes, their facial bones, the muscular grace catching up to the crazy things puberty did to their skeleton.

Most of the rest of the girls will become wholesomely beautiful.  Splendid specimens of womanhood.  My brother, the progressive, has three daughters and spends more time thinking about this kind of thing.  His take is that young men turn women into objects or prizes because boys are not ready for the kinds of complicated interactions that women, who tend to be more social, demand.  Boys can barely tolerate manual chokes and shifting on dirt bikes.

The best thing about Barbie is not her dimensions, it is that she is not Chatty Cathy.

Dogs

It was with a sad and heavy heart that we discovered the inert Boston Terrier in his crate.  Temperatures had been in the low, single digits.  He seemed fine the night before.  Kubota was pretty torqued about it and got a bit loud.

The inert lump stirred and then slunk out of his crate toward the door.  He walked with that "Damn.  Busted." gait that dog owners know so very well.  $%^&* cold weather is hard on puny dogs with smooth coats.

I could empathize with the little blighter.  There were days I wanted to call in "dead" to work as well.

Iowa Gov villifies Cruz

It is getting very real now.

Cruz is anti-subsidy and anti-mandate.  Subsidies warp the market.  Mandates divert product.  Iowa is a corn and soybean state.  Subsidies and mandates result in paying more for chicken, pork, beef.  We get fewer miles-per-gallon. We suffer the effects of debased currency as the give-aways are financed by running more debt.

The farmers have more money passing through their checking accounts but no more sticking around long enough to end up in savings.  The environment takes a beating as farmers are compelled to plow and plant right up to the center of the gravel road.

The middlemen and the suppliers of ag chemicals, seeds and equipment are making bank.  And so are the politicians who benefit from the suppliers' good fortune.

It really does not matter which state holds the primaries first.  Everybody has skin in some game.  Modern politicians cannot get elected without big money behind them.  Only people who can be bought can play the game at the higher levels.  Cruz threatens everybody's rice bowl.

And that is why he has a chance.

The Chrysler loan/rescue in the very early 1980s succeeded because it was "everybody in".  It did not matter if you had loaned a plant in rural Illinois $5000 to repaint the lines in the parking lot.  The deal was off until EVERYBODY agreed to the same hair cut.  As a bank president, you might drag your feet wondering why you should disadvantage your shareholders and customers.  You wondered until the president of Manufacturers Hanover called you up and reminded you that your bank could not function if you were frozen out of the credit markets.  Every once in a while even the best run banks need a few dollars to cover a shortfall until a deal goes through.

Cruz's theme is to peel all the subsidies and mandates away.  Cherry-picking is doomed to fail because it is business as usual; Picking winners and rewarding them, picking losers (typically industries that did not support your party according to the levy) and punishing them.  Nope.  Kill them all and let the market demand the ones that really make sense.  It is a very short list.  Perhaps some preventative health measures (neonatal, vaccinations) heavy infrastructure and the military.

The fact that Iowa Governor Terry Branstad considers Ted Cruz a disaster is evidence that Senator Cruz will not roll over and "deal".

The psychology of deflation

Everyday you drive past 2, maybe 3, maybe 15 gas stations.  They advertise their price-per-gallon on large, very visible marques.

When prices are volatile, you try to buy on the bounce.

When prices are rising, you keep the tank full.

When prices are dropping....you wait until the needle is below "E".

Gas

Nothing is more in-our-face than the price of fuel.  Quickly, tell me the price of a gallon of milk.  Duh!  How about a pound of pinto beans? Double Duh?  Gas?  Well, it is $1.53 at Quality Dairy, $1.47 at Admiral (but you have to go inside to pay) and $1.50 at Speedway if you have a Customer Perks card.

So why are economists petrified by deflation?

Economic activity is crudely defined as the number of dollars in circulation .Multiplied. by the speed with which they are spent.  The precipitous drop in the price of fuel bends the way we think.

Deflation causes the velocity of money, the speed with which it is spent, to fall into the cellar.  Why buy today what might be 3% cheaper tomorrow?

Economists are already talking about "direct injection", the gifting of every man, woman, child, dog, cyborg, vampire, zombie, Chicago voter....a stipend of up to $10,000 to reverse deflation.

It begs the question, what would you do with a windfall of $10,000?  Would you be one of the wise ones where your actions would produce long term benefits one month, one year, five years afterward?

Fence?  Locks? Food producing trees?  Solar cells?  A still to produce ethanol?  A wood stove?  Chimney pipe?  Equity shares in local businesses?  A new roof on the house?  A used truck?  The possibilities are endless.