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Monthly Archives: April 2016
Daily Bread
Daily Bread for 4.30.16
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning, Whitewater.
Saturday in town will be rainy with a high of forty-nine. Sunrise is 5:48 AM and sunset 7:55 PM, for 14h 07m 12s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 46.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1803, a deal is reached to add a huge expanse to the United States:
On April 30, 1803, representatives of the United States and Napoleonic France conclude negotiations for the Louisiana Purchase, a massive land sale that doubles the size of the young American republic. What was known as Louisiana Territory comprised most of modern-day United States between the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains, with the exceptions of Texas, parts of New Mexico, and other pockets of land already controlled by the United States. A formal treaty for the Louisiana Purchase, antedated to April 30, was signed two days later.
On this day in 1845, Wisconsin adopts public education:
On this date, under the leadership of Michael Frank, Wisconsin adopted “free” education for its residents. Frank’s plan narrowly passed the legislature by a vote of 90 to 79. Frank’s motivation for free education in Wisconsin was partially inspired by a similar campaign, promoted by Horace Mann in Massachusetts. On June 16, 1845 the first free school opened in Wisconsin. It was one of only three free schools in the country, outside the New England states. By August 1845, Wisconsin had five free schools in operation. [Source: Badger Saints and Sinners, Fred L. Holmes, pg 78-92]
Cats
Friday Catblogging: At the Richmond Zoo, Three Cheetahs and Thirteen Cubs in Two Weeks
by JOHN ADAMS •
In a two week period 3 pregnant cheetahs gave birth at the Metro Richmond Zoo!
On March 21,2016, Milani, a second time mom, gave birth to 3 cubs (2 males and 1 female), sired by Hatari.
On April 1, 2016 Vaila, a first time mom gave birth to 7 cubs (this number only happens 1% of the time in cheetah births) sired by Hatari. Unfortunately, Vaila’s inexperience as a mom showed when she did not clean the birth sac surrounding one cub and it did not survive. Also, one was born with a deformity and only lived a few hours. The remaining 5 are doing well.
On April 2, 2016 Wiay, a first time mom gave birth to 6 cubs (only happens 8% of the time) sired by Kitu. Because of her inexperience, she accidentally laid on one of the cubs shortly after birth and it did not survive. Initially Wiay’s cubs did not gain weight and thrive as well as they should. We weighed them every day, sometimes twice a day, and gave them medical attention as needed. The 5 are now all doing well with mom.
Watch the Cubs live here:
http://metrorichmondzoo.com/cheetah-cam/
Poll
Friday Poll: A Capsule on Mars This Decade
by JOHN ADAMS •
Let’s say, rather than 2018, SpaceX had until the end of the decade to do so – do you think that they could?
Here’s a video of a SpaceX test of a Dragon capsule’s ability to hover, from a test in January:
Daily Bread
Daily Bread for 4.29.16
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning, Whitewater.
Friday in town will be cloudy with a high of fifty-four. Sunrise is 5:49 AM and sunset 7:54 PM, for 14h 04m 41s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 57.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1974, the president announces the release of audio recordings:
…President Richard Nixon announces to the public that he will release transcripts of 46 taped White House conversations in response to a Watergate trial subpoena issued in July 1973. The House Judiciary committee accepted 1,200 pages of transcripts the next day, but insisted that the tapes themselves be turned over as well.
On this day in 1862, U.S. Marines take the Confederate flag from the New Orleans city hall, after a successful naval campaign against that city:
From April 18 to April 28, Farragut bombarded and then fought his way past the forts in the Battle of Forts Jackson and St. Philip, managing to get thirteen ships up river on April 24. Historian John D. Winters in The Civil War in Louisiana (1963) noted that with few exceptions the Confederate fleet at New Orleans had “made a sorry showing. Self-destruction, lack of co-operation, cowardice of untrained officers, and the murderous fire of the Federal gunboats reduced the fleet to a demoralized shambles.”[10]
….Despite the complete vulnerability of the city, the citizens along with military and civil authorities remained defiant. At 2:00 p.m. on 25 April, Admiral Farragut sent Captain Bailey, First Division Commander from the USS Cayuga, to accept the surrender of the city. Armed mobs within the city defied the Union officers and marines sent to city hall. General Lovell refused to surrender the city, along with Mayor Monroe. William B. Mumford pulled down a Union flag raised over the former U.S. mint by marines of the USS Pensacola and the mob destroyed it. Farragut did not destroy the city in response, but moved upriver to subdue fortifications north of the city. On April 29, Farragut and 250 marines from the USS Hartfordremoved the Louisiana State flag from the City Hall.[13] By May 2, US Secretary of State, William H. Seward, declared New Orleans “recovered” and “mails are allowed to pass”.[14]
Here’s the Friday JigZone puzzle:
Food
Food: Beer-Brined Roast Chicken
by JOHN ADAMS •
Daily Bread
Daily Bread for 4.28.16
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning, Whitewater.
Thursday will be rainy, and colder than yesterday, with a high temperature of forty-five. Sunrise is 5:51 AM and sunset 7:53 PM, for 14h 02m 10s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 67.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
There will be a meeting of the Downton Whitewater Board this morning at 8 AM, and of the Community Development Authority this afternoon at 5 PM.
On this day in 1947, Thor Heyerdahl begins an ocean voyage in the Kon-Tiki expedition:
Heyerdahl believed that people from South America could have settled Polynesia in pre-Columbian times. Although most anthropologists as of 2010 had come to the conclusion they did not,[1][2][3] in 2011, new genetic evidence was uncovered by Erik Thorsby that Easter Island inhabitants in fact do have some South American DNA,[4] lending credence to at least some of Heyerdahl’s theses. His aim in mounting the Kon-Tiki expedition was to show, by using only the materials and technologies available to those people at the time, that there were no technical reasons to prevent them from having done so. Although the expedition carried some modern equipment, such as a radio, watches, charts, sextant, and metal knives, Heyerdahl argued they were incidental to the purpose of proving that the raft itself could make the journey.
The Kon-Tiki expedition was funded by private loans, along with donations of equipment from the United States Army. Heyerdahl and a small team went to Peru, where, with the help of dockyard facilities provided by the Peruvian authorities, they constructed the raft out of balsa logs and other native materials in an indigenous style as recorded in illustrations by Spanish conquistadores. The trip began on April 28, 1947. Heyerdahl and five companions sailed the raft for 101 days over 6900 km (4,300 miles) across the Pacific Ocean before smashing into a reef at Raroia in the Tuamotu Islands on August 7, 1947. The crew made successful landfall and all returned safely.
Here’s Thursday’s puzzle from JigZone:
Film
Film: A Real Life Indiana Jones
by JOHN ADAMS •
Daily Bread
Daily Bread for 4.27.16
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning, Whitewater.
Wednesday in town will be mostly cloudy and windy with a high of fifty-four. Sunrise is 5:52 AM and sunset is 7:52 PM, for 13h 59m 37s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 76.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Tech Park Board meets today at 8 AM.
On this day in 1667, John Milton sells for a bargain:
Blind poet John Milton sells the copyright to his masterpiece Paradise Lost (1667) for a mere 10 pounds.
Milton was born and raised the indulged son of a prosperous London businessman. He excelled at languages in grammar school and at Christ’s College, Cambridge, where he took a bachelor’s and a master’s, which he completed in 1632. He then decided to continue his own education, spending six years reading every major work of literature in several languages. He published an elegy for a college classmate, Lycidas, in 1637 and went abroad in 1638 to continue his studies.
In 1642, Milton married 17-year-old Mary Powell, who left him just weeks later. Milton wrote a series of pamphlets arguing for the institution of divorce based on incompatibility. The idea, however mild it seems today, was scandalous at the time, and Milton experienced a vehement backlash for his writing.
Milton’s wife returned to him in 1645, and the pair had three daughters. However, he continued espousing controversial views. He supported the execution of Charles I, he railed against the control of the church by bishops, and he upheld the institution of Cromwell’s commonwealth, for which he became secretary of foreign languages.
In 1651, he lost his sight but fulfilled his government duties with the help of assistants, including poet Andrew Marvell. His wife died the following year. He remarried in 1656, but his second wife died in childbirth. Four years later, the commonwealth was overturned, and Milton was thrown in jail, saved only by the intervention of friends. The blind man lost his position and property.
He remarried in 1663. Blind, impoverished, and jobless, he began to dictate his poem Paradise Lost to his family. When the poem was ready for publication, he sold it for 10 pounds. Once printed, the poem was immediately hailed as a masterpiece of the English language. In 1671, he wrote Paradise Regained, followed by Samson Agonistes. He died in 1674.
Here’s Wednesday’s JigZone puzzle:
Science/Nature
Touring an Experimental Fusion Reactor
by JOHN ADAMS •
Education, School District
Variations in Spending
by JOHN ADAMS •
National Public Radio, and twenty of its radio stations, have completed a project to see how much each public school district in America spends, per pupil on education. See, Why America’s Schools Have A Money Problem @ NPR.
The study focused on spending per pupil, and found wide disparities, even when adjusted for regional cost differences. Two school districts in Illinois are an example:
…$9,794 is how much money the Chicago Ridge School District in Illinois spent per child in 2013 (the number has been adjusted by Education Week to account for regional cost differences). It’s well below that year’s national average of $11,841.
Ridge’s two elementary campuses and one middle school sit along Chicago’s southern edge. Roughly two-thirds of its students come from low-income families, and a third are learning English as a second language….
“We don’t have a lot of the extra things that other districts may have, simply because we can’t afford them,” says Ridge Superintendent Kevin Russell.
One of those other districts sits less than an hour north, in Chicago’s affluent suburbs, nestled into a warren of corporate offices: Rondout School, the only campus in Rondout District 72.
It has 22 teachers and 145 students, and spent $28,639 on each one of them.
But there’s another variation that the study does not consider: among districts with roughly the same level of spending, how much variation is there in curriculum and programming? Admittedly, a study like that would be far larger even than a study of variations in per pupil spending.
Still, I wonder: do districts with the similar spending levels look the same substantively, and if not, how many variations of programming and method are possible within a given range of spending. Understandably, richer districts will look different from poorer ones.
Within the same spending range, however, how much variation exists within districts? This presents a follow-up question: if there are variations (including significant ones), are some more effective than others?
I don’t know of a study that possibly captures so much detail about so many places, but the question still lingers: how different are some districts in curriculum, programming, and method from others of similar resources?
(About the picture for this series – it’s a screenshot of a calculator app for Android phones that emulates a Hewlett Packard 33C. I used an HP calculator in school, and they were amazing machines. My phone’s calculator app pays tribute to a fine machine of yore.)
Daily Bread
Daily Bread for 4.26.16
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning, Whitewater.
Tuesday will be significantly cooler than yesterday, with a high of fifty-seven under mostly cloudy skies. Sunrise is 5:53 AM and sunset 7:50 PM, for 13h 57m 02s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 84.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission meets at 4:30 PM, and Police and Fire Commission at 7 PM.
On this day in 1954, significant medial trials begin:
…the Salk polio vaccine field trials, involving 1.8 million children, begin at the Franklin Sherman Elementary School in McLean, Virginia. Children in the United States, Canada and Finland participated in the trials, which used for the first time the now-standard double-blind method, whereby neither the patient nor attending doctor knew if the inoculation was the vaccine or a placebo. On April 12, 1955, researchers announced the vaccine was safe and effective and it quickly became a standard part of childhood immunizations in America. In the ensuing decades, polio vaccines would all but wipe out the highly contagious disease in the Western Hemisphere….
Today is the anniversary, from 4.26.1986, of the Chernobyl Disaster:
The Chernobyl disaster … Chornobylska Katastrofa – Chornobyl Catastrophe; also referred to as Chernobyl or the Chornobyl accident) was a catastrophic nuclear accident that occurred on 26 April 1986 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine (then officially the Ukrainian SSR), which was under the direct jurisdiction of the central authorities of the Soviet Union. An explosion and fire released large quantities of radioactive particles into the atmosphere, which spread over much of the western USSR and Europe.
The Chernobyl disaster was the worst nuclear power plant accident in history in terms of cost and casualties.[1] It is one of only two classified as a level 7 event (the maximum classification) on the International Nuclear Event Scale, the other being the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in 2011.[2] The battle to contain the contamination and avert a greater catastrophe ultimately involved over 500,000 workers and cost an estimated 18 billion rubles.[3] During the accident itself, 31 people died, and long-term effects such as cancers are still being investigated….
The disaster began during a systems test on Saturday, 26 April 1986 at reactor number four of the Chernobyl plant, which is near the city of Pripyat and in proximity to the administrative border with Belarus and the Dnieper River. There was a sudden and unexpected power surge, and when an emergency shutdown was attempted, an exponentially larger spike in power output occurred, which led to a reactor vessel rupture and a series of steam explosions. These events exposed the graphite moderator of the reactor to air, causing it to ignite.[4] The resulting fire sent a plume of highly radioactive fallout into the atmosphere and over an extensive geographical area, including Pripyat. The plume drifted over large parts of the western Soviet Union and Europe. From 1986 to 2000, 350,400 people were evacuated and resettled from the most severely contaminated areas of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine.[5][6] According to official post-Soviet data,[7][8] about 60% of the fallout landed in Belarus.
JigZone‘s puzzle of the day is of a fish:
Faraway Places, Nature
The Milky Seas
by JOHN ADAMS •
Environment, Health, Water, WGTB, WHEN GREEN TURNS BROWN
Waukesha’s Water
by JOHN ADAMS •
Waukesha is a large suburban city, of about seventy-thousand, in a prosperous suburban county, of about four-hundred thousand. By ordinary estimation, the residents of the city and county should have no difficulties with basic utilities and infrastructure.
And yet, Waukesha has a water supply problem:
Waukesha does not have an adequate supply of water that is fit to drink, due to radium contamination of deep groundwater supplies; and all the city’s water supply options outside the Great Lakes basin would have adverse effects on wetlands, streams and inland lakes.
To remedy this problem Waukesha is seeking water from the Great Lakes, but that request is controversial (as it’s a diversion of supplies there), and Waukesha’s request has thus far been granted only in part:
The City of Waukesha’s request for more than 10 million gallons a day of Lake Michigan water was cut substantially by representatives of Great Lakes states and provinces meeting Friday in Chicago.
Waukesha’s plan to pump up to an average of 10.1 million gallons a day by midcentury will be trimmed to an average of 8.2 million gallons a day after the Great Lakes officials removed portions of three neighboring communities from a future water service area to receive lake water, as a condition of the regional group’s acceptance of the request.
See, Great Lakes officials trim Waukesha’s water request @ Journal Sentinel.
That a growing population will need more water is unsurprising; that’s not, however, the full cause of Waukesha’s need. It’s that some of her existing supplies are no longer suitable for human consumption. One might have expected that more people would require more water. What’s unexpected is that, in a prosperous county, with a prosperous county seat, in the most developed part of the state, parts of the water supply might be contaminated, and therefore unusable to the county’s residents.
If someone has said the same about a distant and impoverished place, on the other side of the world, the claim might have been more predictable (if no less unfortunate for those involved).
Yet, it’s here, in a developed, advanced place, that these inadequacies are present. (The only advantage in this is that we have the wealth and technology to identify health hazards more easily than many societies.)
We think, often rightly, that we live in robust and safe conditions. That’s often true, but less true than we might like: damage to the natural environment is easier to bring about than we might think (or wish).
It’s a mistake – and concerning water an expensive one – to overlook the risks to the environment that may develop even in the most prosperous places.