He had a dream...

He had a dream...  My mom sent me a copy of this photo, which I remembered seeing several years ago.  It was originally posted by Nikolas Schiller on his blog, on September 12, 2009, on the occasion of the Taxpayer's March on Washington.  It's just a pithy a comment on That One today as it was even then...

Look out below!

Look out below!  Mark Steyn, witty-and-depressing on America's future.  His conclusion:

So what does every initiative of the Obama era have in common? Obamacare, Obamaphones, Social Security disability expansion, 50 million people on food stamps . . . The assumption is that mass, multi-generational dependency is now a permanent feature of life. A coastal elite will devise ever smarter and slicker trinkets, and pretty much everyone else will be a member of either the dependency class or the vast bureaucracy that ministers to them. And, if you’re wondering why every Big Government program assumes you’re a feeble child, that’s because a citizenry without “work and purpose” is ultimately incompatible with liberty. The elites think a smart society will be wealthy enough to relieve the masses from the need to work. In reality, it would be neo-feudal, but with fatter, sicker peasants. It wouldn’t just be “economic inequality,” but a far more profound kind, and seething with resentments.

One wouldn’t expect the governing class to be as far-sighted as visionaries like Bezos. But it’s hard to be visionary if you’re pointing in the wrong direction. Which is why the signature achievement of Obama’s “hope and change” combines 1940s British public-health theories with 1970s Soviet supermarket delivery systems. But don’t worry: Maybe one day soon, your needle-exchange clinic will be able to deliver by drone. Look out below.

Flash mob!

Flash mob!  This time, it's the United States Air Force band at the National Air and Space Museum...

On that unemployment report...

On that unemployment report...  Before you get too excited about the unemployment rate dropping to 7%, remember this: that number is thoroughly cooked, in a highly politicized way that is designed to make the administration look good.  The fact that for five years now, the administration has looked quite bad (with respect to unemployment) tells just how awful the situation is.  With actual numbers, so does the graph at right: the uncooked numbers, showing you the percentage of Americans who are working.  That doesn't look quite so good now, does it?

If you look closely at that chart (and you should!), you'll notice that vertical axis is highly “magnified”: it's only showing from 58% to 64%.  Here's a way to think about it: a mere 1% increase in this rate indicates that 3.2 million more Americans have a job.  Ponder that while you watch the self-congratulatory posturings of That One and his minions...

Five fold photographs...

Five fold photographs...  These were new to me, but were apparently quite popular as portraits in the late 1800s.  These are made with a single photograph taken using a pair of mirrors.  This article (PDF) explains in a lot more detail exactly how it was done.  This blog has more many examples...

Medical costs across the U.S...

Medical costs across the U.S...  Now here is a fascinating visualization of data on the cost of over 100 Medicare procedures.  I think of myself as being reasonably well-informed about the U.S. health care system, but the degree of variability in these costs was a big surprise to me.  I'm not surprised that where I live now (near San Diego) has some of the highest costs in the country – but I was very surprised to see that some procedures cost just 15% as much in the area we're most likely to move to (northern Utah)!  Where my mom lives (near Charlottesville, VA), there's a huge difference (over 2:1) in the same town, with the Jefferson Hospital being far cheaper than the nearby UVA Medical Center – but even the most expensive there were half of San Diego's.

Hothouses for socialism...

Hothouses for socialism...  James Taranto tears into a great example of how U.S. universities are prosecuting a war on men, in the name of progressivism (aka “socialism”)...

“Best of 2013”...

“Best of 2013”...  The first of many, I'm sure.  Here's a collection of images from The Wall Street Journal...

Supreme Court to decide in software patent case...

Supreme Court to decide in software patent case...  It's a curious lineup on both sides.  Our software patent system is badly broken, but ... I haven't thought of a solution that I liked, nor have I read any.  I'm not opposed to tinkering with the current system, though, because I don't see any politically-attractive changes that would actually make it worse...

You shall not pass, dog...

You shall not pass, dog...  Pitiful dogs afraid of passing by cute little kitties; very cute and funny.  We don't have this issue in our house :)  Via friend and former colleague Aleck L...

ObamaCare debacle update...

ObamaCare debacle update...  Because I'm retired and I have nothing better to do!

It begins.  One patients experiences with a doctor conscious of what ObamaCare plans will and will not pay for.  This is what Sarah Palin meant with her memorable phrasing: “death panels”...

One in four ObamaCare enrollments affected by technical bugs.  Even the Post Office does better than that!  Oh, our healthcare is in the very best of hands...

Congressional staffers frustrated by ObamaCare signup glitches.  Good.  Let them experience first-hand what it's like for the little people...

Where does the ObamaCare buck stop?  That One has the answer...

NPR reports that Californians are looking for healthcare policies off the exchange.  There are multiple unexpected things in that sentence...

The ObamaCare debacle finally tipped Californians over the edge: support for That One in California is in free-fall...

Seven of every ten California doctors are refusing to participate in ObamaCare.  The reimbursement rates here are insultingly low, and guess what?  The doctors are insulted.  Also, they want to stay in business.  You don't have to have much of an imagination to guess which 30% of the doctors are going to accept ObamaCare reimbursements, do you?  I didn't need any more reasons to get the hell out of this crazy state, but ... ObamaCare has conveniently provided one anyway...

ObamaCare's hidden tax on your health insurance.  This was new to me, but I can't say I'm surprised...

Indemnity!  Whiskey!  Sexy!  Taranto examines the idea that young people will be attracted to ObamaCare.  I love how he can take an infuriating topic and make it into something amusing, however briefly.  Here he is again, on the subject of those supposedly-better ObamaCare-compliant policies...

California leads the way ... in government-sponsored violations of your privacy.  Turns out that if you just visit the state's ObamaCare web site, they'll pass your contact information along to insurance agents.  It's almost like they're trying to provoke me – it's the one thing they're getting right!

Pater: fulgurites and pine nuts...

Pater: fulgurites and pine nuts...  At right is a nice example of “elephant’s head” flower (Pedicularis groenlandica) that my dad, Debbie, and I enjoyed in Corkscrew Gulch, above Silverton in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado, July 2005.  These often could be found in the same wet places that one of his other favorites (Parry's primrose) could be found, so we were always searching for the two of them...

Fulgurites and pine nuts...

On one of my family's epic camping trips “out west” – one of the earlier ones, I think – we stopped to camp in Great Sand Dunes National Park, in south-central Colorado.  The whole family was along: mom and dad, my siblings Holly, Scott, and Mark, and me.  We must have been there at least a couple of days, because we had time for two distinctly different little adventures.

If you've never been to Great Sand Dunes National Park, you might be completely unaware of it, as it doesn't have the popularity or cachet of other great western parks like Yellowstone, Zion, or Yosemite.  It's a weird place, full of things to marvel about, not least of which are the giant sand dunes themselves.  The satellite photo at left shows an area roughly 8 miles wide, with the great dunes in the middle.  To the east (the right) there's a mountain range which is actually the source of the dunes – they form a wall that causes the wind to slow down and drop its load of sand and dust.

In the visitor center for the park, we learned about the existence of fulgurites, something none of us had ever heard of before.  In the great photo at right (not mine!), you see a relatively small one.  They're hollow tubes of fused quartz (sand particles) made when lightning strikes a sand dune.  The park, with its giant sand dunes, has thousands of fulgurites form every year.  We talked with a ranger who encouraged us to look for them, and told us that on the surface they just looked like a little frozen patch of sand – so they were challenging to spot.  Below the surface of the dune they could extend many feet – the biggest ones ever found were something like 40 feet long!

So some of us set out to climb one of the sand dunes and look around on the top of it for evidence of fulgurites.  I remember my dad, Scott and I; it's entirely possible that Holly was along as well.  I think Mark was probably too young.  Climbing those dunes was really tough work, even though we were all hikers – the soft sand made footing challenging, and we'd often slip down almost as far as we climbed.

I have a crystalline memory of that climb: my dad, outlined against the sky above me, on the off-white dunes, laughing and horsing around with us.  We were pushing each other back down (which didn't make the climb any easier!), shouting at each other, and all of us laughing so hard we had trouble getting enough air to breathe.  Pure, simple, and innocent fun...

We finally did get to the top of a dune, and searched around for the top of a fulgurite.  And we found one, albeit a little tiny one, perhaps 10 inches long and a half inch in diameter, a strange and alien-looking thing.  I've no idea what happened to that.

The other adventure we had at Great Sand Dunes was of the botanical kind.  To the east of the road to the campground, the mountains rose quickly.  On the flanks of those mountains the pinyon pines were abundant (my dad knew this from his research).  There are several pinyon species; these were Pinus edulis (the Colorado pinyon), which my dad knew were particularly good eating.

In the years since then, I've collected (and eaten!) pinyon pine nuts (the seeds within the cones) many times; pinyons are very common near where I live.  But that little trip was the first time we kids had ever looked for them or eaten them, and we weren't entirely sure that my dad wasn't playing tricks with us.  Eat a pine cone?  That didn't seem very likely.  But not far into our walk, my dad spotted some specimens, and we went on the hunt for cones that the jays had not yet eaten (large flocks of Pinyon jays, specialists in pinyon nuts, were all around us).  This turned out to be well within the capabilities of little kids like us, and soon we were munching handfuls of pinyon nuts at a time.  We also collected a bag full of them to take back to my mom.

My dad was here, there, and everywhere as we collected those nuts.  Somehow he kept track of us all (I'm pretty sure that Holly, Scott, and I were on that adventure), helped us all identify the right kind of tree, the cones that still had nuts, and how to extract the nuts (the eating part we had under control :).  Somehow he also found moments to gaze around at the beautiful scenery, explain to us about any random thing we asked about (lots!  this was all new to us), and to crawl around looking at the various trees and shrubs there that were interesting to him.  This was actually completely typical for him on one of our hikes, but for whatever reason the memory of it is clearer for me in this instance than in most others.  If I close my eyes, I can still hear the sounds of the pinyon-juniper country (especially those jays!), smell the then-new, now-familiar smells of the American desert (especially sage and pine), and see my dad, shepherding his little flock on another of many little adventures...