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Monthly Archives: September 2014

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 9.25.14

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Good morning, Whitewater.

Thursday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of seventy-seven. Sunrise is 6:46 AM and sunset is 6:47 PM. The moon is a waxing crescent with two percent of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Tech Park Board meets at 8 AM and the Community Development Authority at 5 PM.

On this day in 1957, integration of Central High School in Little Rock begins following the arrival of federal paratroopers:

Under escort from the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division, nine black students enter all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Three weeks earlier, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus had surrounded the school with National Guard troops to prevent its federal court-ordered racial integration. After a tense standoff, President Dwight D. Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard and sent 1,000 army paratroopers to Little Rock to enforce the court order….

Troops remained at Central High School throughout the school year, but still the black students were subjected to verbal and physical assaults from a faction of white students. Melba Patillo, one of the nine, had acid thrown in her eyes, and Elizabeth Eckford was pushed down a flight of stairs. The three male students in the group were subjected to more conventional beatings. Minnijean Brown was suspended after dumping a bowl of chili over the head of a taunting white student. She was later suspended for the rest of the year after continuing to fight back. The other eight students consistently turned the other cheek. On May 27, 1958, Ernest Green, the only senior in the group, became the first black to graduate from Central High School.

Governor Faubus continued to fight the school board’s integration plan, and in September 1958 he ordered Little Rock’s three high schools closed rather than permit integration. Many Little Rock students lost a year of education as the legal fight over desegregation continued. In 1959, a federal court struck down Faubus’ school-closing law, and in August 1959 Little Rock’s white high schools opened a month early with black students in attendance. All grades in Little Rock public schools were finally integrated in 1972.

On 9.25.1961, Wisconsin Gov. Gaylord Nelson signed a bill requiring seatbelts:

1961 – Law Requires Seatbelts in Wisconsin Cars
On this date Wisconsin Governor Gaylord Nelson signed into law a bill that required all 1962 cars sold in Wisconsin to be equipped with seat belts. [Source: Janesville Gazette]

Google-a-Day asks a football question:

What NFL player (Redskins and Vikings) held onto his record as the all-time interception leader until he retired?

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 9.24.14

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Good morning, Whitewater.

Midweek in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of seventy-four.

The Wall Street Journal published a quiz matching respondents’ answers with different drawings (and the personalities those drawings are meant to represent). Which drawing are you?

India is now the fourth nation to send a probe to Mars:

The Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM), also called Mangalyaan “Mars-craft” (Sanskrit … ma?gala “Mars” + … y?na “craft”),[8][9] is a Mars orbiter launched into Earth orbit on 5 November 2013 by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).[10][11][12][13] It was successfully inserted into orbit of Mars on 24 September 2014, making India the first country in the World to successfully send a spacecraft to Mars on its very first attempt.[14][15][16]

The mission is a “technology demonstrator” project aiming to develop the technologies required for design, planning, management, and operations of an interplanetary mission.[17]

The Mars Orbiter Mission probe lifted-off from the First Launch Pad at Satish Dhawan Space Centre SHAR, Sriharikota, Andhra Pradesh, using a Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) rocket C25 at 09:08 UTC (14:38 IST) on 5 November 2013.[18] The launch window was approximately 20 days long and started on 28 October 2013.[4] The MOM probe spent about a month in Earth orbit, where it made a series of seven altitude-raising orbital manoeuvres before trans-Mars injection on 30 November 2013 (UTC).[19]

It is India’s first interplanetary mission and ISRO has become the fourth space agency to reach Mars, after the Soviet space program, NASA, and the European Space Agency.[20][21] The spacecraft is currently being monitored from the Spacecraft Control Centre at ISRO Telemetry, Tracking and Command Network (ISTRAC) in Bangalore with support from Indian Deep Space Network (IDSN) antennae at Byalalu.[22]

The Curious Engineer describes the MOM project:

Google-a-Day asks a question about boxing:

The first fight ever held in the Madison Square Garden ring was lost by what former and future champ?

Business, Marketing, Politics

Roger Goodell could swing a gig in Wisconsin

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Over at Esquire, Ben Collins writes (accurately) about Roger Goodell as “a visual representation of everything wrong with corporate America squeezed into one empty suit made of blood and money.”   See, Roger Goodell, World Class Client of Crisis Communications Experts, Still Needs to Resign.”

Collins can be confident because he saw Goodell’s 9.19.14 news conference. 

Collins wasn’t writing about anyone in Wisconsin, or Walworth County, or Whitewater, but his critique of Commissioner Goodell could apply to more than one official in the Badger State: 

Roger Goodell’s latest trainwreck was a Friday afternoon hour of buckpassing under the increasingly transparent guise of “crisis management.” He littered a 3 p.m. press conference with the same sort of faux MBA talk that has reaffirmed a corporate American culture wherein all problems can be coached away if the bottom line is unaffected….

It would’ve been great, say, five years ago. It might have even passed for leadership….

This is see-through public relations, and the jig is up. Americans can now imagine the board room in which “I GOT IT WRONG: 4X” was scrawled in perfect cursive upon a white board. They know it’s happening, and they know it’s subhuman, and they’re a little appalled by it..

The tired phrases, the tropes, clichés, jargon, argot, buzzwords, etc.: they’ve been used too often, and at the wrong times, to persuade any longer. 

The national press will battle, and likely vanquish, an NFL commissioner who has it coming. 

Meanwhile, in Wisconsin, others will do their part against those small, but equally disappointing, closer-at-hand versions of Roger Goodell. 

Video clips —

Roger Goodell spoke for forty-three minutes on Friday:

Keith Olbermann finished him off in six:

Culture, Film, Food

Film: Ethiopia

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Ethiopia! from The Perennial Plate on Vimeo.

We travelled to Ethiopia for two weeks and filmed the making of injera, false banana and coffee as well as everything else we saw. Please watch, enjoy and visit this amazing country!

Created by: www.theperennialplate.com
In Partnership with Intrepid Travel: http://www.intrepidtravel.com/foood/
Filmed & edited by:
Daniel Klein ( twitter.com/perennialplate/ )
Mirra Fine ( twitter.com/kaleandcola/)

Music: "Eshururu" by Dereb The Ambassador: http://derebtheambassador.com/

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 9.23.14

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Good morning, Whitewater.

It’s the first day of autumn. Google has a doodle to mark the change of season —

Tuesday will be sunny in Whitewater, with a high of seventy-four. Sunrise is 6:43 AM and sunset is 6:50 PM. We’ll have a new moon early tomorrow morning.

Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission meets this afternoon at 4:30 PM.

On this day in 1952, Sen. Richard Nixon, candidate for vice president, delivers his Checkers speech:

Los Angeles, Sept. 23–Senator Richard M. Nixon, in a nation-wide television and radio broadcast tonight, defended his $18,235 “supplementary expenditures” fund as legally and morally beyond reproach.

He laid before the Republican National Committee and the American people the question of whether he should remain on the Republican party’s November election ticket as the candidate for Vice President.

Rising, near the end of his talk, from the desk at which he had sat, Senator Nixon urged his auditors to “wire and write” the Republican National Committee whether they thought his explanation of the circumstances surrounding the fund was adequate.

“I know that you wonder whether or not I am going to stay on the Republican ticket or resign,” he said. “I don’t believe that I ought to quit, because I’m not a quitter….”

Nixon remained on the ticket; as expected, Dwight Eisenhower won easily over Adlai Stevenson.

Google-a-Day has a question about literature and history:

What Tom Wolfe novel is named after a 1497 ritual that Savonarola led involving mirrors?

Press

About the Editorialist’s Call for Others to ‘Do Better’

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Over at the Janesville Gazette, they’ve an editorial stance occasionally focused on telling common people in that city to sit down, stop questioning, and just shut up.

Where once one heard that the proper use of the press was about speaking truth to power, what’s left of the Janesville press is about speaking half-truths to the powerless.

Still, I’m a free speech advocate, and that paper’s free to take whatever position it wants. 

It’s odd, though, that a paper whose Saturday editorial decries poor quality (“Our Views: City’s critics should get informed, do better”) can’t seem to write an editorial on the subject without committing a garden-variety error of reasoning. 

Consider this erroneous defense of Janesville’s new, multi-million-dollar municipal bus garage:

Simply stated, many of the critics are ill informed.

Some labeled the new bus garage a “Taj Mahal” as they saw it going up, but the majority of people who took the time to tour the facility and learn about it during an open house came away convinced it was a wise investment.

That’s a joke, right?

Does the Gazette‘s editorialist not understand that relying on the opinions of those who voluntarily attended an open house for a bus terminal is a reliance on a self-selected sample, and so commits the error of self-selection bias? 

It’s a self-chosen pool of those who attended, for goodness’ sake.  

Those who show up at an opera house are not an unbiased sample of an entire community’s views of Don Giovanni, after all.

Candidly, self-selection – because it produces a sample formed by its own members’ intentions – is an even more obvious statistical error than selection bias by researchers’ sloppy sampling (which might involve accident and so be harder to spot). 

It’s fair to call for being better informed. 

It’s even the paper’s right to call for being better informed while the editorial board carries water for government, businesses, and insiders against ordinary people. 

But it’s simply laughable for the Gazette‘s editorialist to a call for ordinary people to be better informed while committing basic errors of reasoning. 

Planning, Politics, Press, Wisconsin

Goat-Level’s Not Enough

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Political bloggers – left, right, libertarian, etc. – often find themselves critiquing the ill-considered proposals that government, business, labor groups, and a fawning press insist are for everyone’s good. 

That’s certainly true in Wisconsin – we have an active blogosphere running the whole political spectrum, and united (if in little else) at least in a commitment to something of better quality than what self-serving officials and their press pals say. 

For years, serious bloggers across this state have rebutted countless flimsy schemes of state and local governments, of the misuse of data and distortion of information, against a shifting clique of glad-handing boosters.  Come on kids, let’s put on a show is not a suitable justification for policy.

It’s not just a Wisconsin problem. Writing in The Altantic, Conor Friedersdorf quotes Ezra Klein (a policy analyst and journalist) on the scourge of poor analysis in the capital:

….are Washington, D.C., political journalists excessively beholden to so-called experts and their impenetrable jargon, people with no understanding of America beyond an insular bubble, whose track record of awful recommendations includes the Vietnam War, a conflict run by “the best and the brightest”?

….Drawing on nine years in the nation’s capital, Klein acknowledges one class of obstacles. “Washington is a cesspool of faux-experts who do bad research (or no research),” he explained, “but retain their standing by dint of affiliations, connections, or charisma.” Sweet validation! I’ve often suspected that official Washington is populated by enough disingenuous, misinformation-spreading hucksters to fill an underground container of organic waste. No one has better standing to render this judgment than Klein, whose earnest, tireless embrace of deep-in-the-weeds wonkery is unsurpassed in his generation. He wouldn’t assert a whole cesspool of intellectual waste product without having seen plenty of specific examples.

His jaded view is widely held, too.

Yet it’s rare for individual faux-experts who are getting by in Washington on affiliations, connections, or charisma to be identified and called out. Surely news consumers would benefit from a rigorous jeremiad demonstrating that particular people are trafficking in misinformation. In time, their influence would wane….

See, “Washington Is a Cesspool of Faux-Experts Who Do Bad Research.”

The bloggers in our state have not held themselves out as experts.  (I certainly never have.) On the contrary, they’ve battled and won debates against self-declared experts who are actually hucksters excelling mostly in grandiose statements and mediocre (or dishonest) work. 

In this regard, these bloggers are simply like so very many ordinary people who can see through goat-level contentions & claims. 

There may always be a few who won’t stop pitching poop; they’re not entitled to do so without encountering a rigorous critique, in Whitewater, in Wisconsin, or in Washington.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 9.22.14

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Good morning, Whitewater.

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Monday will be sunny and mild, with a high of sixty-nine. Sunrise is 6:42 AM and sunset is 6:52 PM. The moon is a waning crescent with just two percent of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1862, Pres. Lincoln first publicly announces the Emancipation Proclamation:

In September 1862, the Battle of Antietam gave Lincoln the victory he needed to issue the Emancipation. In the battle, though General McClellan allowed the escape of Robert E. Lee’s retreating troops, Union forces turned back a Confederate invasion of Maryland. On September 22, 1862, five days after Antietam occurred, Lincoln called his cabinet into session and issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.[54] According to Civil War historian James M. McPherson, Lincoln told Cabinet members that he had made a covenant with God, that if the Union drove the Confederacy out of Maryland, he would issue the Emancipation Proclamation.[55][56] Lincoln had first shown an early draft of the proclamation to Vice President Hannibal Hamlin,[57] an ardent abolitionist, who was more often kept in the dark on presidential decisions. The final proclamation was issued January 1, 1863. Although implicitly granted authority by Congress, Lincoln used his powers as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy, “as a necessary war measure” as the basis of the proclamation, rather than the equivalent of a statute enacted by Congress or a constitutional amendment. Some days after issuing the final Proclamation, Lincoln wrote to Major General John McClernand: “After the commencement of hostilities I struggled nearly a year and a half to get along without touching the “institution”; and when finally I conditionally determined to touch it, I gave a hundred days fair notice of my purpose, to all the States and people, within which time they could have turned it wholly aside, by simply again becoming good citizens of the United States. They chose to disregard it, and I made the peremptory proclamation on what appeared to me to be a military necessity. And being made, it must stand.”[58]

Initially, the Emancipation Proclamation effectively freed only a small percentage of the slaves, those who were behind Union lines in areas not exempted. Most slaves were still behind Confederate lines or in exempted Union-occupied areas. Secretary of State William H. Seward commented, “We show our sympathy with slavery by emancipating slaves where we cannot reach them and holding them in bondage where we can set them free.” Had any slave state ended its secession attempt before January 1, 1863, it could have kept slavery, at least temporarily. The Proclamation only gave Lincoln the legal basis to free the slaves in the areas of the South that were still in rebellion. However, it also took effect as the Union armies advanced into the Confederacy.

The Emancipation Proclamation also allowed for the enrollment of freed slaves into the United States military. During the war nearly 200,000 blacks, most of them ex-slaves, joined the Union Army.[59] Their contributions gave the North additional manpower that was significant in winning the war. The Confederacy did not allow slaves in their army as soldiers until the last month before its defeat.[60]

Google-a-Day asks a question about a sports games:

The basis of modern Fantasy Football was developed by Wilfred Winkenbach in 1962, laying the blueprint for a League that was known by what acronym?

Animation, Film

Sunday Animation: Butter Fingers

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Butter Fingers from J-Scott on Vimeo.

“Butter Fingers” explores some of the more unique items you might not want to let slip through your fingers. Let’s face it, if you can’t relate to dropping at least a handful of the items pictured, then you’re either utilizing duct-tape to it’s fullest potential or it was you who dropped the grenade. Condolences.