It was with great nostolgia I read this posting describing the farming in Delaware. As a child many of our neighbors in northeastern Conneticut would grow the occational well concealed vine of mallows. Moving them every year. As a kid it was fun to try and find them out.

I do have one minor point of disagreement though. If dried approprately the light dusting of powder he describes is entirely unnecessary. Some people believe the only reason for that step was some sort of a quid-pro-quo to the sugar industry.

The brain is such a packrat. I sometimes wonder if other people’s brains are as cluttered as mine. I doubt you can tell by looking at their houses. My poor house is full of stuff; just like my poor brain. It would be bleak to discover that people with empty houses have matching empty brains.

HA! Cool, look! I seem to actually have some of those marshmallow extruders from my childhood. All this junk is going to get me into trouble some day. I really ought to toss some of this lumber!

Many believe that intermediaries are sinful.

I had the pleasure of crossing paths with Kieran Healy on Thursday. He’s much less sanserif than he appears in his blog.

Pennsylvania State Law prohibits Servers…

… in the cage

I was awoken this morning by a phone call from a Surgeon. Most surgeons are not very strong on people skills. People say: “Your not hiring them for their personality, your hiring them for their hands.” I entirely appreciate this. Some – most? – of the the very best software engineers I know have a similar profile. The person who dives into your innards with a knife and rearranges things, well, you want him to be really confident, really sure, of what he’s doing. People that sure of how to draw the knife thru the inside of a complex system ought to be experts in those kinds of systems, and that might not leave time for becoming skilled at people skills.

The surgeon was calling to get my permission to operate on a relative. I figure the medical industry makes them do this just out of spite. The poor guys are paid to be absolutely sure that they are doing the absolutely right thing; and then they make them call up complete strangers and nicely ask permission to do it using the people skills that are almost fundamentally contrary to craft skill. I suspect the nursing staff enjoys observing these little morality plays.

He poured a torrent of words over the phone to describe the procedure. After a few minutes he paused to take a breath. I informed him that he really needed to speak with my sibling who has taken this responsiblity. He then launched into another torrent of words. Toward the end of that round paused and he said “Did you say I should call your sibling?”

One of my relatives used to have a poster on his icebox enumerating a master list of things to worry about. Global Warming, Nuclear War, Killer Bees and many other examples. People love to worry about these. Some people pick one and adopt it. Like a pet.

In some circles your not pulling your conversational weight if you don’t have a pet worry to talk about – over beer and such.

Silly guy that I am I adopted a somewhat essoteric pet worry some years ago.
Missing Neutrinos.

Now I’m sure you all know that the sun ought to collapse, but it doesn’t because the nuclear furnace at the center is throwing up a torrent of neutrinos, and these rattle around and keep the shell of the thing from imploding.

The models of how the thing works implies that the neutrinos rattle around for quite a few years before they finally manage to dig their way out to the surface.

Which brings us to the problem. Apparently the Sun isn’t leaking enough neutrinos! One possible explanation would be that the reaction at the center has stopped and in a few years the thing will implode. Pretty good thing to worry about don’t you think?

Well those darn physicists have changed their minds. Apparently the sun is just fine, but the standard model looks like it is in trouble. People at cocktail parties care if the Sun might implode, they just don’t really care if the standard model is going implode. I’ll need to find another pet worry.

No child left behind!

Thanks Brian!

These folks at Ryan Air seem to be testing the most outragous boundries of differential pricing. They are giving the flights away for free! On the flight I took yesterday America West was selling access to the previously free movie for 5$. This seemed to trigger a small reduction in of cooperation. People asked to lower their shades seemed less likely to help. I used to joke that the airlines would fill empty seats on some
planes for $30 by selling you a round trip with a meal and a movie, but you wouldn’t be allowed to get off the plane.

The question of the day is if I can experiance schadenfreude by denying another the dose of schadenfreude he was looking forward to?

– ps … every blog should have a posting entitled Schadenfreude.