Author Archive for JOHN ADAMS
Daily Bread
Daily Bread for 4.23.15
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning, Whitewater.
Thursday in the Whippet City will be sunny with a high of fifty-two. Sunrise is 5:59 and sunset 7:46, for 13h 47m 12s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 25.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
A canonical playwright and an esteemed physicist are both born on this day (in Shakespeare’s case, this is his traditionally-observed birthday):
William Shakespeare … 26 April 1564 (baptised) – 23 April 1616)[nb 1] was an English poet, playwright, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world’s pre-eminent dramatist.[2] He is often called England’s national poet and the “Bard of Avon”.[3][nb 2] His extant works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays,[nb 3] 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, of which the authorship of some is uncertain. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright.[4]
Shakespeare was born and brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part-owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, later known as the King’s Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613 at age 49, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare’s private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others.[5] Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613.[6][nb 4] His early plays were mainly comedies and histories and these works remain regarded as some of the best work produced in these genres. He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of the finest works in the English language. In his last phase, he wrote tragicomedies, also known as romances, and collaborated with other playwrights.
It’s also Max Planck‘s birthday:
Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck…. April 23, 1858 – October 4, 1947) was a German theoretical physicist who originated quantum theory, which won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918.[3] Planck made many contributions to theoretical physics, but his fame as a physicist rests primarily on his role as an originator of the quantum theory. However, his name is also known on a broader academic basis, through the renaming in 1948 of the German scientific institution, the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (of which he was twice president), as the Max Planck Society (MPS). The MPS now includes 83 institutions representing a wide range of scientific directions.
Max Planck’s quantum theory revolutionized human understanding of atomic and subatomic processes, just as Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity revolutionized the understanding of space and time.
Here’s the Thursday game in Puzzability‘s Breaking the Monopoly series:
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This Week’s Game — April 20-24
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Breaking the Monopoly
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Go to solve. Go directly to solve. For each day this week, we’ll give you a series of clues, each of which leads to a word. You must drop one letter out of each of these answer words and put them together (in order), adding spaces as needed, to get the name of a space on a classic Monopoly board.
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Example:
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Square footage / home run, in slang / bad space in Monopoly / children’s author Dahl
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Answer:
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Reading Railroad (area / dinger / jail / Roald)
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What to Submit:
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Submit the space name and the smaller words (as “Reading Railroad (area / dinger / jail / Roald)” in the example) for your answer.
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Thursday, April 23
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Animals
There’s Only So Much a Chimpanzee Will Tolerate
by JOHN ADAMS •
School District, University
Whitewater YES is Right, for Now
by JOHN ADAMS •
Over at the Whitewater YES for Education Facebook page, they’ve a post describing the WUSD budget proposal in supportive terms.
Here’s part of what they have to say:
….The school board reviewed the District Leadership Team’s (DLT) program and staffing proposal at the April 20 board study session. The DLT created a proposal that aligned with the message shared with the community during the 2014 referendum. Part of the message the district shared with the community was that a passed operational referendum would still result in annual reductions each of the four years of the life of the referendum, with an anticipated reduction for 2015-16 of approximately $300,000. The governor’s proposed cut in categorical aid added an additional $290,000 to the district’s deficit. The DLT proposal delivers on the referendum message by utilizing enrollment-driven reductions and identifying savings through efficiencies, while keeping district programming intact. Although it is accurate that several identified positions will not exist in the district next year, the district is utilizing attrition and reassignment to avoid laying off staff while maintaining targeted class sizes. The district is also utilizing savings from the changes in the employee health insurance plan design to further avoid eliminating programs….
That’s right – the 2014 referendum’s approval was almost certainly a vote to prevent program reductions or increases in class size. This budget proposal does prevent significant cuts to programs or increases in class size.
So why do I say that they’re right ‘for now’? Because the Whitewater Schools operate within a wider labor market, and like the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, their ability to attract competitive employees long-term is uncertain. The WUSD and University of Wisconsin-Whitewater also exist within a competitive market for applicants (newcomer families with children, new college students, respectively). Their ability to attract families and competitive college applicants is uncertain.
There’s no question that district officials, at least, see this problem. They see it so well that they were willing, last year, to tout (absurdly and deceptively) narrow ACT scores as a wide success. The idea was that publishing these scores would inspire people to move here, one supposes.
That’s too funny: no one literate and well-read would be fooled by dodgy data of that kind. Those who pushed it must think people outside the city are jackasses.
(So we’re all clear: people outside the city are not, in fact, jackasses. Town squires should feel free to repeat the preceding sentence until the concept sinks in.)
The problem of advocacy is that it has, in this case, a limit. Competitive families and students will demand a competitive faculty and competitive peers. They won’t settle for bottom-shelf hires to round out a roster, or distorted data to create a false impression of success.
In the same way, young, talented employees entering the job market will look elsewhere.
That’s why the appearance of success is at best short-term. See, from yesterday, Kidney-Selling as a Threat to the City’s Future.
It’s a free market, and no one in Whitewater is more persuasive or influential than the signals that the market (a collection of many) sends for or against a course of action.
The WUSD budget proposal does (for this year) prevent the loss of programs & of greater class size (mostly). The present fix doesn’t come close, however, to solving the kind of competitiveness problems that both the school district and university face.
Anderson, Cartoons & Comics
Don’t Mention Pluto
by JOHN ADAMS •
Daily Bread
Daily Bread for 4.22.15
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning, Whitewater.
Our day will become partly sunny and breezy, with a high of forty-six. Sunrise is 6:00 and sunset 7:45, for 13h 44m 33s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 16.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Tech Park Board meets at 8 AM today, the CDA Capital Screening Committee at 3:30 PM, and the CDA Board at 4:30 PM.
Earth Day was the brainchild of Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, a staunch environmentalist who hoped to provide unity to the grassroots environmental movement and increase ecological awareness. “The objective was to get a nationwide demonstration of concern for the environment so large that it would shake the political establishment out of its lethargy,” Senator Nelson said, “and, finally, force this issue permanently onto the national political agenda.” Earth Day indeed increased environmental awareness in America, and in July of that year the Environmental Protection Agency was established by special executive order to regulate and enforce national pollution legislation.
Here’s Puzzability‘s Wednesday game:
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This Week’s Game — April 20-24
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Breaking the Monopoly
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Go to solve. Go directly to solve. For each day this week, we’ll give you a series of clues, each of which leads to a word. You must drop one letter out of each of these answer words and put them together (in order), adding spaces as needed, to get the name of a space on a classic Monopoly board.
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Example:
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Square footage / home run, in slang / bad space in Monopoly / children’s author Dahl
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Answer:
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Reading Railroad (area / dinger / jail / Roald)
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What to Submit:
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Submit the space name and the smaller words (as “Reading Railroad (area / dinger / jail / Roald)” in the example) for your answer.
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Wednesday, April 22
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Animals, Science/Nature
Hyalinobatrachium dianae, a Kermit-like Glass Frog
by JOHN ADAMS •
City, Government Spending, Local Government, Marketing, School District
Kidney-Selling as a Threat to the City’s Future
by JOHN ADAMS •
In a city where some have had an unfortunate tendency to favor marketing over actual accomplishments, and where ‘Whitewater Advocacy’ often amounts to the laughable exaggerations of a few insiders, loss of funding poses a double risk. First, communities across the state have to make do with less, and Whitewater (with a public campus) will feel those cuts as much as most places, if not more so.
Second, what’s especially hard for this city is that the desire of officials to appear successful is so strong that they’ll make cuts that look less significant, even if they will bring long-term loss of competitiveness and quality.
In this way, they’re like struggling people who would sell a kidney so long as they could continue to buy fine clothes and a nice tan: what’s outside still looks great, but health and vigor is compromised.
Whitewater’s town fathers are particularly reliant on public money, and even more reliant on the idea that outward appearances are almost everything.
Now I’m not a medical doctor, but I did once see an episode of Grey’s Anatomy, and I recall hearing that people naturally have two kidneys, and that it helps to have at least one. (It really does pay to watch a whole program, leaving the room for snacks only during commercials.)
Whitewater’s leaders would have done well to see that same episode – over and over – until its implications became clear. Not only should organ sales be a last resort, but using those sales to persuade others that one is still healthy is likely to be ineffective. Visitors and newcomers can tell the difference between a healthy person and an ailing one.
(The profound economic confusion in Whitewater’s politics, by the way, reaches so far that some key leaders probably wouldn’t be able to determine correctly whether vital organs were more likely to represent capital or labor. Lincoln knew the answer, almost intuitively it seems.)
Whitewater may hollow out the body in a futile effort to preserve outward appearances, at least for a bit.
No matter: in any event, kidney-selling isn’t a long-term health plan.
Film
Film: West Coast
by JOHN ADAMS •
Photographer Thomas Tepstad Berge spent three years capturing footage across the western coast of Norway, traveling between the two cities of Stavanger and Bergen. He paired his final, beautiful collection of time-lapses and hyperlapses with a song by the Norwegian artist Foreground Set.
If you’d like to see more of Berge’s work, visit his Facebook page.
Daily Bread
Daily Bread for 4.21.15
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning, Whitewater.
Tuesday will be breezy, with a high of forty-eight, and a one-in-five chance of afternoon showers. Sunrise is 6:02 and sunset 7:44, for 13h 41m 52s of daytime today. The moon is a waxing crescent with 9.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
Common Council meets tonight at 6:30 PM.
Google has a doodle to commemorate the eighty-first anniversary of a famous photograph, the Surgeon’s Photograph, supposedly of a creature in Loch Ness (but now widely understood to be a hoaxed picture). That old photograph may not have been of an aquatic creature, but Google thinks something even more astonishing might be implicated:
Here’s that original photo from 1934:
It’s John Muir’s birthday:
On this date John Muir was born in Dunbar, Scotland. He immigrated with his family to Wisconsin in 1849 and spent his youth working on his father’s farms in Marquette County, experiences that are recounted inThe Story of My Boyhood and Youth (1913). In 1868 he moved to Yosemite Valley, California, where hebecame a conservationist and leader in the forest preserve movement. His work led to the creation of the first national parks, the saving of California’s redwoods, and the founding of the Sierra Club. [Source: Dictionary of Wisconsin Biography, SHSW 1960, pg. 261]
Puzzability‘s Breaking the Monopoly series continues with Tuesday’s game:
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This Week’s Game — April 20-24
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Breaking the Monopoly
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Go to solve. Go directly to solve. For each day this week, we’ll give you a series of clues, each of which leads to a word. You must drop one letter out of each of these answer words and put them together (in order), adding spaces as needed, to get the name of a space on a classic Monopoly board.
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Example:
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Square footage / home run, in slang / bad space in Monopoly / children’s author Dahl
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Answer:
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Reading Railroad (area / dinger / jail / Roald)
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What to Submit:
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Submit the space name and the smaller words (as “Reading Railroad (area / dinger / jail / Roald)” in the example) for your answer.
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Tuesday, April 21
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Animals
Looking Carefully Before Crossing the Street
by JOHN ADAMS •
WHEN GREEN TURNS BROWN
Preliminary Questions about the Digester Proposal
by JOHN ADAMS •
Post 2 in a series.
Considering what’s been presented about the digester proposal, what preliminary questions come to mind? Not in any particular order, but simply as topics?
I have answers to some of these, I think, but today I’m just listing general questions.
1. For the digester proposal, specifically, who benefits and at what cost? This is the key, compound question about any project. Because this digester proposal is a commercialization proposal (see question two, below) who benefits has more specific relevancy – some private interests stand to gain from a public investment for waste hauling.
2. What kind of digester proposal is this? City Manager Clapper contends, condescendingly, that it’s simply an upgrade of existing digester facilities (“When an issue as complex and technically detailed as the proposed upgrades to the wastewater treatment facility gets in the news, there are bound to be errors and points needing clarification….What is under consideration as part of the project is the installation of additional equipment within the digesters that would increase operational efficiency within the digesters.”)
It seems to me that the clear distinction between existing digester capacity and this proposal is not merely a two-million-dollar upgrade cost but a commercialization proposal: the importation of large quantities waste from other communities into Whitewater, supposedly for some benefit to the city.
There’s a profound difference of kind, for example, between a man who cleans his own dog’s waste and a man who hopes to make a living collecting and disposing of dog feces from other people’s yards.
I’m not sure – truly – why City Manager Clapper would think he needs a clarification of others’ work, when it’s more fitting to contend that his description of the project is misleading by omission.
3. How many broad ways can one look at the proposal? Previously, I’ve contended that there are four broad criteria from which to evaluate a proposal like this: (1) fiscally, (2) economically, (3) environmentally, and of (4) residents’ health.
The fiscal criterion involves the city’s budget and taxpayers’ obligations. The economic criterion considers the the city’s economy, including the perception of a city as a waste importer. The environmental standard involves how, if at all, the project alters the elements in the city’s air, water, or soil. A health criterion would measure how environmental changes, if any, might affect residents’ physical well-being.
There’s a fifth criterion, however, implicated in this new digester proposal: an examination of which private interests benefit from waste hauling to and from the city’s digester.
4. How much is publicly known about the proposal? I’d say a fair amount, but what’s been published by the city must be only a part of all public records available under the law (Wis. Stat. §§ 19.31-19.39). There’s more that’s missing.
5. How many consultant-vendors have been on the city’s payroll? Donohue and Associates is consulting now, but Trane was working on this project previously. Where is all the work from each? Why the handoff from one to the other?
6. How many meetings not publicly announced have city officials held about this project? How many of those meetings, if any, should have been publicly announced?
7. In some settings, City Manager Clapper and Wastewater Superintendent Reel tout possible commercial gains from the project, but in others they’re quiet or vague about those same aspects. What does that say about the nature of their commercial plans?
8. How much trucking of waste in and out of Whitewater will even a minimal commercial program require?
9. Is there a connection between truck traffic that would come from waste hauling and our local big-business lobby’s recent concern about truck routes through the city?
10. The new digester plan includes the commercial importation of waste in, and out, of the city to create an income stream for selected haulers. Who gets that business? How might they be connected to others now in office or in big business in the city?
11. Where would waste trucked from the city go under a commercial program? How would those in the city reliably know where it went?
12. What’s the current state of Whitewater’s drinking water, air, and soil?
13. What’s a good next step? I’d say it makes sense to publish a bibliography of every published, public record from the city on this new digester proposal. One could then assess each of those published, public records to form a list of specific questions, and to prepare a list of what seems missing from the published, public record.
(It’s fair to say that public records under law about this project are greater in number and scope than those few that the city has so far published, that is, placed online or distributed. It’s also true that the city has an obligation to produce unpublished, public records in response to a request even if a few officials may have circulated those records among themselves, or to third parties.)
So that seems the next step – publishing a bibliography of all the available, disclosed public records, from which one could generate direct & detailed questions.
WHEN GREEN TURNS BROWN: Mondays @ 10 AM, here on FREE WHITEWATER.
Next Monday: A Working Bibliography.
Music
Monday Music: Tito Puente, Mambo Birdland
by JOHN ADAMS •
Daily Bread
Daily Bread for 4.20.15
by JOHN ADAMS •
Good morning, Whitewater.
Monday in town will be rainy with a high of fifty-one. Sunrise is 6:04 and sunset 7:43, for 13h 39m 10s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 3.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
It’s Tito Puente’s birthday:
Ernesto Antonio “Tito” Puente (April 20, 1923 – June 1, 2000)[1] was an American salsa musician and Latin jazz composer. The son of native Puerto Ricans, Ernest and Ercilia Puente, living in New York City’s Spanish Harlem community, Puente is often credited as “The Musical Pope”, “El Rey de los Timbales” (The King of theTimbales) and “The King of Latin Music”….
Tito Puente served in the Navy for three years during World War II after being drafted in 1942. He was discharged with a Presidential Unit Citation for serving in nine battles on the escort carrier USS Santee (CVE-29). The GI Bill allowed him to study music at Juilliard School of Music, where he completed a formal education in conducting, orchestration and theory. In 1969, he received the key to the City of New York from former Mayor John Lindsay. In 1992, he was inducted into the National Congressional Record, and in 1993 he received the James Smithson Bicentennial Medal from the Smithsonian.[5]
During the 1950s, Puente was at the height of his popularity, and helped to bring Afro-Cuban and Caribbean sounds, like mambo, son, and cha-cha-cha, to mainstream audiences. Puente was so successful playing popular Afro-Cuban rhythms that many people mistakenly identify him as Cuban. Dance Mania, possibly Puente’s most well known album was released in 1958.[6] Later, he moved into more diverse sounds, including pop music, bossa nova and others, eventually settling down with a fusion of Afro-Cuban and Latin jazz genres that became known as “salsa” (a term that he disliked). In 1979, Puente won the first of five Grammy Awards for the albums A Tribute to Benny Moré, On Broadway, Mambo Diablo, and Goza Mi Timbal. In 1990, Puente was awarded the James Smithson Bicentennial Medal. He was also awarded a Grammy at the first Latin Grammy Awards, winning Best Traditional Tropical Album for Mambo Birdland. In 1995, he appeared as himself on the Simpsons episode “Who Shot Mr. Burns?” In early 2000, he shot the music documentary Calle 54, wearing an all-white outfit with his band.[7] After a show in Puerto Rico on May 31, he suffered a massive heart attack and was flown to New York City for surgery to repair a heart valve, but complications developed and he died during the night of May 31 – June 1, 2000.[8] He was posthumously awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2003.
On this day in 1836, before we are even a state, our territorial legislature founds a library:
1836 – Oldest Library in the State Founded
On this date an Act of Congress created the Territory of Wisconsin and in the sixteenth and final section of that Act appropriated funds for the Wisconsin State Library to support the needs of the fledgling government. The library is still functioning but has been renamed as the Wisconsin State Law Library [Source: Wisconsin State Law Library]
Puzzability has a new weekly series beginning today, entitled, Breaking the Monopoly. Here’s Monday’s game:
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This Week’s Game — April 20-24
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Breaking the Monopoly
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Go to solve. Go directly to solve. For each day this week, we’ll give you a series of clues, each of which leads to a word. You must drop one letter out of each of these answer words and put them together (in order), adding spaces as needed, to get the name of a space on a classic Monopoly board.
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Example:
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Square footage / home run, in slang / bad space in Monopoly / children’s author Dahl
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Answer:
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Reading Railroad (area / dinger / jail / Roald)
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What to Submit:
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Submit the space name and the smaller words (as “Reading Railroad (area / dinger / jail / Roald)” in the example) for your answer.
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Monday, April 20
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