Interesting twist on web search...

Interesting twist on web search...  This site (which I've now bookmarked) has an interesting thesis: what will happen to your search results if you eliminate the “hits” from the largest web sites?  Might you find new and useful sources that you'd otherwise have missed?  Judging from my results after a few trials, I'd have to say the answer is a resounding “yes”.  Give it a spin!

Water frozen in mid-air...

Water frozen in mid-air...  The water in the photo was extruded from a crack in the pipe, and froze immediately upon contact with the frigid air...

Opportunity is nearing its tenth anniversary on Mars...

Opportunity is nearing its tenth anniversary on Mars...  At right is a photo of the path it's taken on the Martian surface.  It's the little Martian rover that could!

Twenty four of the world's most beautiful trees...

Twenty four of the world's most beautiful trees...  Twenty-three more at the link, of course...

On raising the minimum wage...

On raising the minimum wage...  This is something that has long puzzled me – it seems obvious to me that a minimum wage harms the very people the progressives claim to be wanting to help with it: lower income workers.  You really don't need to be an intellectual giant to realize that the existence of a minimum wage (at any level) for private jobs means fewer jobs (through elimination or automation) and raises prices.  What business is going pay a 70 year old retired guy $15 an hour to sweep the sidewalk in front of their shop?  They'll just eliminate the job.  It follows quite simply that the higher the minimum wage, the more jobs it costs, and the more it raises prices.  Additionally, I have a moral problem with the notion that if a person is willing to work for (say) $3 and hour, and a business is willing to pay for that work – that we, as a society, will say: “No, you can’t do that!”  What right have we to interfere in that private, voluntary business transaction?  Lest you think you're hearing the ravings of a committed curmudgeon, you should know this: economists have broadly agreed that a minimum wage (at any level) is a bad idea for, oh, about 100 years now.  Here's a discussion on this topic from Reason, and another from The Federalist.

Scientists have long suspected the sun had giant convection cells...

Scientists have long suspected the sun had giant convection cells...  Now it appears that they've actually found them...

The immense scale of North Korea's political prison camps...

The immense scale of North Korea's political prison camps...  A new report out from Amnesty International, with links to high-resolution satellite photos like the one at right (click to embiggen).

The human race should be ashamed that we allow political considerations to prevent a concerted, united action to save other humans from things like this.  We've now allowed it to fester for over 60 years, and our collective inaction has doomed millions of people to needlessly suffer and starve...

Mt. Hood's shadow...

Mt. Hood's shadow...  Awesome...

ObamaCare debacle update...

ObamaCare debacle update...  Because you really wouldn't want a stale debacle, would you?

ObamaCare – as if Apollo 11 took off for the moon, but landed in Newfoundland.  Classic Mark Steyn.  His conclusion:

Instead, we have government by people who read Thomas L. Friedman and use words like "interconnectedness" and give commencement addresses where they rave about how our world is changing so fast — and assume that just being glibly au courant is a substitute for being able to do, make, build. There are lessons here beyond the abysmal failure of one misconceived government program, lessons about what our esteemed (if not terminally self-esteemed) elites value as "smart," and about the perils of rule by a poseur technocracy. As for Obama, he's not Jay-Z, nor even Justin Bieber: He can't sing, or dance, or create a government bureaucracy that functions any more efficiently than a Soviet supermarket. He broke the lifelong rule that had served him so well — "Don't just do something. Stand there" — and for the first time in his life did something, terribly. It will bear his name forever.

Now, this is infuriating: IBM offered to build the ObamaCare site for free – and That One turned down the offer.  Instead, they spent nearly a billion dollars of taxpayer money on a disastrous turkey of a web site...

Major Obama “bundler” bets against ObamaCare site.  More precisely, he's short-selling CGI's stock.  That's the company that spent nearly a billion dollars of taxpayer money producing WWW (the World's Worst Website)...

Next ObamaCare horror cued up: “doc shock”.  California is the worst affected state.  Oh, joy.

More fiddling the numbers.  Seriously, you're not surprised by this, are you?  We mere citizens apparently can't handle the truth, so the lies are expected to do...

We may have reason to be grateful to this law professor.  He may have discovered the crucial legal vulnerability in ObamaCare; the cases he inspired are progressing toward a nearly inevitable review by the Supreme Court...

Not only is healthcare.gov a turkey, but we overpaid for it!  I agree with the basic premise of the linked piece: paying nearly a billion dollars for that web site is a ludicrously high figure.  The “experts” they cite contend that $5m to $10m would be the most it should cost.  I don't think that estimate is really quite fair – there are many sites on the Internet today that cost a lot more than $10m to build.  Perhaps a more reasonable estimate might be $20m to $30m – for a complete site, secure, fast, and usable.  But that's still a far, far cry from nearly a billion dollars for something so bad it's likely it needs to be pitched out and redone from scratch...

A doctor sues ObamaCare – wants ObamaCare strictly enforced.  He's not happy with the impact That One's regal actions have had on his business...
Pro Publica explains the “834 problem”.  I still shocked when I visit their site and find articles criticizing That One.  It's as if Jay Carney starting working for Paul Ryan...

ObamaCare's worst case scenario?  Maybe – somehow all those millions of people whose policies have been canceled have to get new insurance coverage in place before January 1st.  That date is not very far away.  Being the cynic that I am, somehow I think that a solution will be found – an expensive, taxpayer-funded, single-payer “solution”...

ObamaCare may wipe out volunteer fire departments.  IRS to decide.  ObamaCare: is there anything it can't do?

Pater: the typewriter...

Pater: the typewriter...  At right is a waterfall along the Big Sur coast that my dad and I enjoyed together in April 2006.

The typewriter...

One thing we could always depend on hearing in the evenings, or all day in the winters, was the sound of my dad typing away on his IBM Selectric typewriter, a prized possession of his.  My memories of it begin when I was quite young (maybe 10), but it was first sold in 1961, so my dad either bought a brand new one or one that hadn't been used very long.  Given the unusual care he took of that typewriter, I suspect he bought it new – something he rarely did with a piece of kit like that.  We kids weren't allowed to touch that typewriter, and when not in use he always had its dust cover in place.  Both of these were unusual habits for my dad; more indication of just how valuable that typewriter was to him.

My dad's typewriter looked exactly like the one in the photo at left (which is not my dad's).  My younger readers will have no idea what a Selectric typewriter was.  For its time, it was a revolutionary piece of machinery.  A skilled typist could type faster on a Selectric than on any other kind of typewriter.  The documents it produced were of very high quality, especially if you used one of the special “high resolution” ink ribbons (which my dad rarely did, as they were expensive).  The first thing, though, that any typist would notice about the Selectric is something it didn't have: a moveable “carriage” to position the paper under the type.  Instead, the Selectric moved a “type ball” across the paper.

Now, one might reasonably ask why a nurseryman who was struggling financially – a man at ease with tractors, shovels, and long days of back-breaking work – would want with a fancy, expensive typewriter.  The reasons why it made sense for him were a mixture of his personal history, his personality, and the times he lived in.

His history came into it because he had, for a male adult of the '60s, an unusual skill: he could type, and very well indeed.  Back in those days, typing was closely associated with secretaries – and secretaries were almost exclusively women.  In fact, becoming a secretary was a major career path for women, and our high schools had classes designed around that need: stenography, typing, transcription, etc.  My dad learned how to type while in the U.S. Army Air Force during WWII, where he operated classified intelligence teletype machines, much like the Model 28 pictured at right.  After doing very well in a stateside typing school, my dad spent many hundreds of hours typing on just such a machine, sending intelligence reports from the bases where he worked (in North Africa and Italy) to all over Europe and the U.S., using special radio systems to transmit the information.  Often what he was sending was encrypted, which meant he was sending endless columns of numbers, all of which had to be absolutely perfectly typed – a single error on a single digit could render the entire message unreadable.  These systems were very widely used by both sides in WWII; they were the closest thing they had to today's Internet.

My dad's personality came into it because he was an introvert (as am I), and much preferred written communications to verbal.  He'd make phone calls when he needed to, but if he had a choice, he'd write.  Back then, long before anything resembling the Internet, writing to someone meant actually putting your writing down onto a piece of paper (pen, pencil, or typewriter), then folding that paper up, putting it into an envelope, addressing it, and putting a stamp on it.  Days or weeks later, if you were lucky, you'd get a response.  My dad had an extensive correspondence with dozens of people all across the U.S., mainly nurserymen, botanists, horticulturists, customers, friends, and arboretums.    It wasn't at all unusual for him to post a dozen letters after an evening of writing, nor was it unusual for him to get a five or six letters in response on one day.  He and his fellow nurserymen or horticulturists had more time in the winter, and the rate of correspondence would go up then.  My dad could write far faster with a typewriter than in longhand, and he already knew how to type – so typing those letters made good sense.

It wasn't until I was in high school that I came to appreciate just how good my dad was at typing.  He made it look very easy – he could whip out a dense one-page letter in just a few minutes, with no mistakes at all.  The reason I discovered this in high school is because I signed up for a typing class (mainly because it was full of girls!), and I went into that expecting that I'd have no trouble excelling.  Hah!  The classroom taught us on manual typewriters, which are far harder to use than an electric model – and even harder than the Selectric.  But I can't blame the challenges on the typewriter, not really – typing 100% error free is really quite hard to do.  “Error-free” would be sort of nonsensical today, as we have that magic backspace key (my favorite key!) on all our keyboards.  Those typewriters had no such thing.  To correct an error was a laborious process involving erasers or “white out” paint – and the finished result with errors would never look as good as an error-free page.  So typing with zero errors was highly prized – and quite difficult to actually accomplish.

In addition to his correspondence, my dad also typed up lots of other things: extensive notes on his horticultural work, articles for magazines, and copy for our catalogs and booklets.  Years later he shifted this work onto a personal computer, where (quite predictably!) the only things he really learned how to use were word processing software (he knew Microsoft Word quite well) and the web (for his plant research).  One thing that always surprised me was that we really never could get him interested in email – given his interest in correspondence, that seemed like it should be a natural for him.  I saved every email I ever received from my dad - all seven of them.  By contrast, I have over 4,000 emails from my mom!

I've no idea what happened to that old Selectric.  I can still remember some details about it, such as the way certain keys (“e”, “t”, the space bar, etc.) had depressions worn into them from the countless times my dad's fingers impacted them.  Sometimes the key's label was no longer legible, though of course for a touch typist like my dad that didn't actually matter...