Good morning,

Today’s Whitewater forecast calls for dense fog, with a high of forty-six degrees.

The City of Whitewater’s Planning Commission will meet at 6 p.m., and our Library Board will meet at 6:30 p.m.

Our public school district’s administrator will hold a two monthly listening sessions today. The English language session will run from 5 to 5:45 p.m., and the Spanish language session from 5:45 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. The sessions will take place at the district’s central office.

Over at the Gazette, there’s a story on a bill that would make legal the selling of raw (unpasteurized) milk. Even in America’s Dairyland, it’s presently illegal to sell raw milk (with minor exceptions that do not cover ordinary consumers).

At Reason, there’s an recent article about raw milk demand, entitled, “A Raw Deal.” The article offers a concise description of the raw milk debate:

Raw milk is simply ordinary milk that hasn’t been pasteurized. Pasteurization—the quick heating and cooling of fresh milk — kills bacteria that can cause food-borne illnesses. When Americans first began pasteurizing milk at the turn of the last century, testing was rudimentary and farms were far less hygienic. Milk quality varied tremendously, transit was slow and the milk that made it into cities often veered into unsafe territory. Pasteurization—which eradicated Salmonella, E. coli and Listeria—saved lives.

Today, the situation is different. Testing for the presence of such pathogens is much more precise, and farms are far cleaner. While processing milk remains a good choice for milk shipped to the population as a whole, there are a group of food rebels who would rather drink their milk straight from the cow. Some say they prefer the taste, calling it richer and more robust. Others say that pasteurization kills beneficial enzymes and helpful bacteria along with the baddies. Whatever their reasons for drinking the raw stuff, the proliferation of raw milk devotees willing to take a small risk for better dairy makes regulators unhappy, and they are looking for ways to crack down on milk speakeasies.

If adults can smoke — and however foolish, it should be legal to do so — then they should be able to drink unpasteurized milk. The truly foolish act, though, is banning a kind of milk in a dairy state.

Good morning,

Today’s forecast calls for patchy fog, later becoming sunny, and a high of forty-three degrees. That’s a forecast, I’d guess, for today’s weather and Whitewater’s future.

On this day in 1770, the Boston Massacre took place, during which British soldiers killed five colonists. Massachusetts attorney John Adams successfully defending the soldiers, leading to their acquittal.

There’s a website from an historical society, the Boston Massacre Historical Society, dedicated to preserving information about the massacre.

They have videos about the event, including historical re-enactments (where the results, of course and fortunately, fall short of the original).

Here’s one:

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=li7fIijSZnY

I find their dedication to history — to remembering the past truthfully — admirable. more >>

Good morning,

Today’s forecast for Whitewater calls for a sunny day, with a high of thirty-seven degrees. Balmy.

There are teacher conferences in our public school district today, so students have no school.

Wired remembers today as a great day in science: March 4, 1877: The Microphone Sounds Much Better. Here’s why microphones started sounding better —

1877: Emile Berliner files a patent caveat for a new kind of microphone. It assures the future of the telephone, but not fame for Berliner.

Alexander Graham Bell had already invented his telephone, but without Berliner’s carbon-disk or carbon-button microphone, telephones would have sounded terrible for decades. And they may not have been capable of surmounting such great distances, hindering one of humanity’s most important advances….

Berliner’s patent application improved on the existing design by adding a layer of carbon particles in between two contacts, one of which acted as a diaphragm for catching sound waves. Movements of the diaphragm created varying pressure on the carbon particles, allowing more or less electricity to pass between the contacts.

Bell paid $50,000 for Berliner’s microphone patent (about $1.1 million in today’s money) and began manufacturing telephones using the technology in 1878. But controversy dogged the patent, which was eventually thrown out, much to Berliner’s dismay. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1892 that Thomas Edison, and not Berliner, invented the carbon microphone.

In truth, neither can claim total credit.

As Bell executive W. Van Benthuysen told The New York Times (.pdf) in December 1891, the idea of transmitting speech by varying the current between two contacts as they are affected by sound waves was common knowledge in some circles, having appeared in published works as early as 1854 — well before either Berliner or Edison (who filed a similar patent) claimed credit for the idea in 1877….

Nonetheless, Berliner reputedly went to his grave in 1929 convinced that Edison had stolen his idea. Before that, he did receive ample credit for another crucial invention: the lateral-cut vinyl-disc record, whose design is still prized by hipsters and purists alike. Before that, everybody was using Edison’s phonograph cylinders, which took up much more space, and were difficult to duplicate.

Berliner’s vinyl records were used in toys from 1888 until 1894, when his company began selling records using a logo of a dog cocking its ear towards a record player. Modified versions of the “His Master’s Voice” logo have been used by record companies around the world, including RCA in the United States. It now forms the retail entertainment chain HMV’s logo….