King Coffee Cup

bit the dust revealing surprising double wall construction:

Gunter Glieben Glauchen Globen

This way running in my head this morning, so I played it.



What a minute, I know that intro phrase, it's from this tune.

The Unfairness of Style

Wonderful Art Nouveau Poster

So the Occupy Wall Street folks are griping about the current state of affairs. One of the complaints is that the CEO of Giant Multinational Conglomerate is making a zillion dollars a day while Rupert P. Diddlebums is having to scrounge through the dumpsters to find enough to survive on.

One post I saw had a link to a whole bunch of official government graphs that showed, something. I suppose they were supposed to show how bad the situation is, or how unfair it all is. Whatever. They are a bunch of charts. Pixels on the screen. Not even ink on paper. What does it all mean?

It does not matter how much money those guys are making. It could be a million or a billion or a zillion. It doesn't matter. All that matters is that they are making more money than I am. If the world were fair, all the money would be mine and you all would be doing my bidding. Since that is not the case God must hate me, and since I have done nothing wrong in this life, it must have been a past life, therefor reincarnation is real. QED. Ipso facto whateverium. Sorry, sometimes my tangents lead me astray. Back to our story.

The guys with the money aren't worried about the little people because they have bigger fish to fry. Some of them, it's true, are only interested in shuffling money around so that more of it sticks to them, but they are like the ads in the sidebar of a Google search page: they don't matter. What's really going on is the big guys are deciding whether to spend five billion on a new fab in China or India, or ten billion on a new pipeline across South America or a new coal mine in Manchuria. There's a million decisions like this being made every day. That's what's really going on.

But that's the world, and America is only a small part of the world. We used to be a huge part, but the rest of the world has been catching up. While we may still be the biggest fish, we no longer outweigh everybody else combined.

So what's going on here at home? I am beginning to think the biggest business in the US is arranging financing for projects in other countries. We don't need any big investments, we've done all that, we have all the industrial infrastructure we need. The second part is the computer revolution. Automation has eliminated half of all the jobs. The third thing is attitude. All the people who are making money in the new whiz bang, computerized money changer, US economy think they know what's right. They worked hard and made a ton of money, so everyone else must be a moron and it's their own fault they are stupid and broke. The problem, and this is really the crux of the matter, is that they are not smarter than everybody else, and they did not work any harder. They were simply lucky. Of course you can't tell them that, and even if you did, would it make any difference? Well, maybe.

Wretched Art Deco Poster

The problem is that when you blindly pursue profit and economic growth there are whole groups of people who are getting shoved aside, ignored and downtrodden. If it goes on long enough and hard enough you've got the breeding ground for revolution, or even, gasp, communists! On the other hand, if you find some way to include those people who are out on the fringe in your new world order (like it or not, here it comes), your economy will be that much larger, stronger, more powerful, and less likely to be wasting huge amounts of time and energy quibbling about how unfair it all is.

Back around the turn of the century, the last century that is, i.e. 1900, there was a fad in the art department called Art Nouveau. Pictures from this period are instantly recognizable and are very wonderful. Sometime around 1920, Art Nouveau slipped away and the god-awful Art Deco took off. Then in 1929 we had the crash, followed by the GREAT DEPRESSION. Coincidence? I don't think so. The morons that were screwing the economy were the same ones who were buying all that Art Deco crap.

The moral of this story is that if you like Art Deco you should be confined to your cubicle filling your role as a cog in the great corporate machine, but you should never be promoted to a position where you have any control over anyone else.

If you like Art Nouveau, you should spend your time sitting in cafes and sipping coffee until your funds run out whereupon you will be transplanted to the poor house where you will end your days subsisting on the thin gruel that passes for food in those places.

And who is going to run things? People with no appreciation for art. We're doomed.

Update November 2015. Replace missing Art Deco picture.

Update April 2022. Replace missing Art Nouveau picture.

Style-

Some of my best friends like watching The New Yankee Workshop with Norm Abram. I have watched bits of it, and some parts of it are interesting, but overall I can't stand it and I think the reason  is Norm. I cannot tell you what it is about him that bugs me, but he just drives me nuts.

I just went looking for a link to the show, the search engine selector was set to Wikipedia, and I thought, shoot, let's see what pops up. Well, there's the Wikipedia page, and here's a list of links and one of them goes to the show's website. But what's this? AU, Stop Poisoning Me With Gold? So I have to go look it up, and it turns out to be a "cultural reference" from House:

"It's a complete moron working with power tools. How much more suspenseful can you get?"

 That might explain it.

 I remember talking to a woman I worked with a long time ago, and she was bemoaning the sad state of the dating pool. When I mentioned a man we both worked with, she responded with "Have you ever talked to him? He's a moron", or words to that effect. I never suspected. Of course I hardly ever talked to any of my co-workers anyway.

So maybe it's because my mother taught me to always give people the benefit of the doubt. (Should the last "the" be in there? Should it be just "the benefit of doubt"?) So given enough evidence / rope I will condemn someone for being stupid, but on a short little interaction I won't, except subconciously, I do.

Classifying a stranger's intelligence seems to be something people do almost instinctively. Yet how is it done? How can you judge how smart someone is on a single sentence? And how accurate is it?

Style+

I spend some time on the internet most everyday and my two favorite sites to visit are Dustbury and View From The Porch, but I don't really know why they are my favorites. I could say they are well written, topical, interesting, or demonstrate a dry sense of humor, which are all true, but I'm not sure that's why.

Sometimes I write things and it flows directly from my mind onto the screen, but then I go back and look at it a day or a week or a month later and I trip over the sentence because it doesn't go as I expected. It's like . . . I'm trying to think of an analogy and I'm not getting one. Let's try this: roller chains get used to drive the  rear wheels on bicycles and motorcycles. Bicycles use thin, light chains, Harley's use big heavy thick chains, and all those mopeds and motorcycles in between use in between sizes. So I'm reading along and everything is going smoothly, like a bicycle chain going around the sprocket, and then there is a hiccup and all of sudden everything is different. It's like somebody has just spliced a motorcycle chain onto the bicycle chain and the sprocket doesn't know what to do with it.

So I'm wondering if my two heroes are perhaps just consistently smoother writers than all the other pundits floating around out there in the blogosphere.

The Wild Life of Our Bodies: Predators, Parasites, and Partners That Shape Who We Are Today

The whole cleanliness-is-next-to-godliness thing seems to be one of unspoken underpinnings of modern, Western civilization, and sometimes I wonder whether it is really such a good thing. Then this showed up in my inbox last night:

Publisher Comments:

A biologist shows the influence of wild species on our well-being and the world and how nature still clings to us—and always will. We evolved in a wilderness of parasites, mutualists, and pathogens, but we no longer see ourselves as being part of nature and the broader community of life. In the name of progress and clean living, we scrub much of nature off our bodies and try to remove whole kinds of life—parasites, bacteria, mutualists, and predators—to allow ourselves to live free of wild danger. Nature, in this new world, is the landscape outside, a kind of living painting that is pleasant to contemplate but nice to have escaped.
The truth, though, according to biologist Rob Dunn, is that while "clean living" has benefited us in some ways, it has also made us sicker in others. We are trapped in bodies that evolved to deal with the dependable presence of hundreds of other species. As Dunn reveals, our modern disconnect from the web of life has resulted in unprecedented effects that immunologists, evolutionary biologists, psychologists, and other scientists are only beginning to understand. Diabetes, autism, allergies, many anxiety disorders, autoimmune diseases, and even tooth, jaw, and vision problems are increasingly plaguing bodies that have been removed from the ecological context in which they existed for millennia.
In this eye-opening, thoroughly researched, and well-reasoned book, Dunn considers the crossroads at which we find ourselves. Through the stories of visionaries, Dunn argues that we can create a richer nature, one in which we choose to surround ourselves with species that benefit us, not just those that, despite us, survive.

Taken from the daily email promoting this book.

Piezoelectricity & Politics

Replaced the thermopile in the upstairs gas fireplace this afternoon. Went to test it and the push-button igniter isn't working, which is kind of surpising, so I look on the net for anything that might give me a clue as to why it should have failed. I mean, mechanically they are the simplest thing in the world. The bit that makes them work is pure physics, and that part isn't going to fail. It is high voltage though, and that requires insulation, so if the insulation has broken down, the spark could be leaking out the side of the wire before it gets to its' intended location. I don't find much of anything relating to failures, so I moved the wire around a bit and it started working. Perhaps there was a burnt spot and moving it meant that it was no longer close to the sheet metal box. Perhaps it was karma. Whatever.

Left to right we have the pilot light nozzle, the defunct hazardous mercury safety switch, the old thermopile, and the piezoelectric electrode, reaching back over the top towards the pilot light nozzle. The red stuff at the bottom is special high temperature silicon sealer. It really stinks the first time it gets hot.

While I was looking though, I came across Wikipedia's article about piezoelectricity and it is pretty interesting in its' own right. And then there was this bit:

Development of piezoelectric devices and materials in the United States was kept within the companies doing the development, mostly due to the wartime beginnings of the field, and in the interests of securing profitable patents. New materials were the first to be developed — quartz crystals were the first commercially exploited piezoelectric material, but scientists searched for higher-performance materials. Despite the advances in materials and the maturation of manufacturing processes, the United States market had not grown as quickly. Without many new applications, the growth of the United States' piezoelectric industry suffered.
In contrast, Japanese manufacturers shared their information, quickly overcoming technical and manufacturing challenges and creating new markets. Japanese efforts in materials research created piezoceramic materials competitive to the U.S. materials, but free of expensive patent restrictions.

Sounds kind of like somebody is promoting a political agenda. Then again, it might just be what actually happened.