Foggy Morning Walk...

The dogs and I were out as usual at 3 am, but this morning we could only see a few feet, as we were encased in a thick, wet fog.  Race acted as if he didn't notice.  He played with his pine cone exactly as if it had been a sunny afternoon.  That dog is focused!  The three field spaniels immediately went into sniff-everything-quickly-while-conditions-remain-ideal mode.  I could hear all three noses chuffing away like made, extracting every bit of odorant from the moist air.  They were doing important work, classifying all the animals that had passed by during the night. 

It was strangely quiet this morning.  No frogs, no crickets, and not even any coyotes or dogs baying in the distance.  The sky was completely blacked out by the fog.  My world was restricted to that little bit that my tiny one-LED flashlight could illuminate – a cone of light with zillions of particles drifting through it.  It was so quiet that I noticed the sounds from the dog's paws, something I can't recall noticing before. 

When I came back into the house, my beard and moustache were heavy with water deposited from the fog.  I never noticed it accumulating, but by the time I got back inside I had several teaspoons of water on my face...

Where Your Tax Dollars are Going...

Here and here are two web sites that do a great job personalizing the way your tax dollars are spent.  They are both taking the budget and showing how much of the taxes you actually pay get spent on each category of spending.  I know that many of my friends will be surprised how little money is spent on one of their favorite hobby-horses, such as foreign aid or the war on terror.  Me, I remain shocked at just how much of my money the government steals overall, and how much goes for entitlement programs that I believe should just go away...

I wish everyone got a receipt like this.  Better yet, I wish we all had to write a check to the government for our taxes, rather than have it so cleverly “hidden” by the trick of withholding...

Counter-Intuitive Statistics...

Best example I've seen in a long time:

Back during World War II, the RAF lost a lot of planes to German anti-aircraft fire. So they decided to armor them up. But where to put the armor? The obvious answer was to look at planes that returned from missions, count up all the bullet holes in various places, and then put extra armor in the areas that attracted the most fire.


Obvious but wrong.

Go read all about it.