FREE WHITEWATER

Holiday

Happy Thanksgiving

by  • 

From among the many presidential proclamations of Thanksgiving, here is the first, from Pres. Washington in 1789:

By the President of the United States of America
A Proclamation

Whereas it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favor; and

Whereas both Houses of Congress have, by their joint committee, requested me “to recommend to the people of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer, to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness:”

Now, therefore, I do recommend and assign Thursday, the 26th day of November next, to be devoted by the people of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being who is the beneficent author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be; that we may then all unite in rendering unto Him our sincere and humble thanks for His kind care and protection of the people of this country previous to their becoming a nation; for the signal and manifold mercies and the favorable interpositions of His providence in the course and conclusion of the late war; for the great degree of tranquillity, union, and plenty which we have since enjoyed; for the peaceable and rational manner in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national one now lately instituted; for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed, and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge; and, in general, for all the great and various favors which He has been pleased to confer upon us.

And also that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations, and beseech Him to pardon our national and other trangressions; to enable us all, whether in public or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually; to render our National Government a blessing to all the people by constantly being a Government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed; to protect and guide all sovereigns and nations (especially such as have shown kindness to us), and to bless them with good governments, peace, and concord; to promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the increase of science among them and us; and, generally, to grant unto all mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as He alone knows to be best.

Given under my hand, at the city of New York, the 3d day of October, A. D. 1789.

GO. WASHINGTON.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 11.27.14

by  • 

Good morning.

Thanksgiving in Whitewater will be cloudy in the morning, then sunny in the afternoon, with a high of twenty-one. Sunrise is 7:02 AM, sunset 4:23 PM, for 9h 21m of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 29.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

Millions of Americans will have turkey today, and some of us will puzzle over how to carve that delicious meal. Here’s Ray Venezia, master butcher showing how to carve a turkey easily:

On this day in 1903, a famous Green Bay Packer is born:

1903 – Green Bay Packer Johnny Blood Born
On this date Johnny Blood (aka John McNally) was born in New Richmond. Blood was an early NFL halfback playing for Green Bay from 1929 to 1933 and 1935 to 1936. He also played for the Milwaukee Badgers, Duluth Eskimos, Pottsville Maroons, and the Pittsburgh Pirates. An elusive runner and gifted pass receiver, he played a major role in the Packers’ drive to the first three championships in 1929, 1930 and 1931. Johnny Blood died on November 28, 1985, at the age of 82. Titletown Brewing Co. in Green Bay named their brew Johnny “Blood” Red Ale after the famed halfback. [Source: Packers.com]

Google-a-Day has a question about popular music:

The Curatorial Director of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum authored a book describing 50 years of what rock band?

Animals, Birds, Science/Nature

Turkey on a Treadmill

by  • 

Not every turkey winds up sharing part of a plate with some cranberry sauce. A few turkeys, including the one below, play a role in scientific research.

Here’s the description accompanying the YouTube video from The Roberts Lab at Brown University:

This turkey is one of Dr. Thomas Roberts’ research subjects at Brown University. Dr. Roberts studies biomechanics (how animals move) and his research on running turkeys is being used to help build better prosthetics, treat neuromuscular diseases, and design new robots. Also, it just looks awesome. This turkey is running about 4 meters/second.

For more on Dr. Roberts’ research, listen to his episode of “You’re the Expert,” where three comedians interview him about his research and findings at http://www.theexpertshow.com/listen/

Video courtesy of The Roberts Lab at Brown University: http://brown.edu/research/labs/robertslab

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 11.26.14

by  • 

Good morning, Whitewater.

Midweek in the Whippet City will be mostly cloudy, with a high of thirty-one. Sunrise is 7:01 AM and sunset 4:23 PM, for 9h 22m 36s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 19.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

So what’s it like inside our planet? Talk Nerdy to Me has the answer:

On this day in 1931, America’s first cloverleaf hits a magazine cover:

The first cloverleaf interchange to be built in the United States, at the junction of NJ Rt. 25 (now U.S. Rt. 1) and NJ Rt. 4 (now NJ Rt. 35) in Woodbridge, New Jersey, is featured on the cover of this week’s issue of the Engineering News-Record. (By contrast, a piece on the under-construction Hoover Dam was relegated to the journal’s back pages.)

With their four circular ramps, cloverleaf interchanges were designed to let motorists merge from one road to another without braking. They worked well enough—and became so ubiquitous as a result—that writer Lewis Mumford once declared that “our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.” But many of the older cloverleaves were not built to handle the volume and speed of traffic they now receive, and many have been demolished and rebuilt.

For more on the history of the Woodbridge Cloverleaf, see A Cloverleaf That Made History Will Soon Be History Itself (after modifications in the interchange’s shape). There’s also a thirty-minute video entitled – really – The Woodbridge Cloverleaf: Onramps to Innovation that describes the interchange.

On this day in 1838, Wisconsin’s territorial legislature first meets in Madison:

On this date, after moving from the temporary capital in Burlington, Iowa, the Wisconsin Territorial Legislature assembled in Madison for the first time. Two years earlier, when the territorial legislature had met for the first time in Belmont, many cities were mentioned as possibilities for the permanent capital — Cassville, Fond du Lac, Milwaukee, Platteville, Mineral Point, Racine, Belmont, Koshkonong, Wisconsinapolis, Peru, and Wisconsin City. Madison won the vote, and funds were authorized to erect a suitable building in which lawmakers would conduct the people’s business. Progress went so slowly, however, that some lawmakers wanted to relocate the seat of government to Milwaukee, where they also thought they would find better accommodations than in the wilds of Dane Co. When the legislature finally met in Madison in November 1838 there was only an outside shell to the new Capitol. The interior was not completed until 1845, more than six years after it was supposed to be finished. On November 26, 1838, Governor Henry Dodge delivered his first speech in the new seat of government. [Source: Wiskonsan Enquirer, Nov. 24 and Dec. 8, 1838]

Google-a-Day asks a question of science and politics:

What cabinet position had been held by the head of the commission that investigated the STS-51L disaster?

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 11.25.14

by  • 

Good morning, Whitewater.

We had a good bit of snow last night, but Tuesday will be mostly sunny with a high of twenty-six. Sunrise is 7:00 AM and sunset 4:24 PM, for 9h 24m 15s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 10.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Commission meets at 4:30 PM today, and her parks and Rec Board at 5:30 PM.

On this day in 1783, the last Redcoats leave New York:

…nearly three months after the Treaty of Paris was signed ending the American Revolution, the last British soldiers withdraw from New York City, the last British military position in the United States. After the last Redcoat departed New York, U.S. General George Washington entered the city in triumph to the cheers of New Yorkers. The city had remained in British hands since its capture in September 1776.

Four months after New York was returned to the victorious Patriots, the city was declared to be the capital of the United States. In 1789, it was the site of Washington’s inauguration as the first U.S. president and remained the nation’s capital until 1790, when Philadelphia became the second capital of the United States under the U.S. Constitution….

On this day in 1863, fourteen Wisconsin regiments are among others breaking a siege during the Chattanooga Campaign:

1863 – (Civil War) Battle of Missionary Ridge at Chattanooga, Tennessee
Fourteen Wisconsin units — seven Wisconsin Infantry regiments and seven Wisconsin Light Artillery batteries participated in breaking the siege at Chattanooga. The 15th and 24th Wisconsin Infantry regiments were among the forces that charged up Missionary Ridge, broke through the Confederate ranks, and seized the strategic location on November 25.

Google a Day asks a question of geography and history:

Who was the wife of the president whose legacy lives on through a famous landmark on the Colorado River?

Agriculture, Business, Food, Law, Press

Gazette Thinks Janesvillians Are Too Stupid to Buy Milk of Their Own Choice

by  • 

image

Among the items in its ‘Monday Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down’ editorial, the Gazette argues against allowing Wisconsinites to drink organic milk (subscription req’d). 

It’s not merely that the paper’s editorial board thinks that drinking raw imprudent (pointing to illness from a recent incident), it’s that the board thinks sales should remain illegal.  

Without a law, the paper frets that some people might choose raw milk, and a fraction of those people would get sick, and that would sink Wisconsin’s dairy industry:

Thumbs down to consuming raw milk. There’s a good reason to use pasteurization, which kills pathogens by heating milk to high temperatures, a process named for the scientist who discovered it, Louis Pasteur. In Durand, 38 people, including many players, were stricken after drinking raw milk at a football team potluck Sept. 18. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that nine people were hospitalized and racked up thousands of dollars in care expenses. The team had to forfeit a game because so many players were ill. Except for limited, incidental sales, state law prohibits sales of unpasteurized milk. Still, advocates claim the law should change to give people access to fresh, unprocessed milk direct from farms. Nonsense. In America’s Dairyland, the reputation of our agriculture products is crucial. This Durand incident should dispel any notion of changing state law

This argument assumes that consumers in Wisconsin or elsewhere would not adequately distinguish between organic and raw milk from our state, and would – generally – shun all milk produced here. 

I’m not in the least persuaded that consumers locally or in other states are so undiscriminating: it’s as though consumers would be too dense or too panicked to tell whether a carton’s label said pasteurized or organic. 

Big Dairy often presents an argument of this sort: we can’t risk the reputation of Wisconsin’s pasteurized milk – but what they really mean is that they think (or want you to think) that consumers are incapable of reading a label well enough to distinguish between one that says PASTEURIZED and one that says ORGANIC.

On the contrary, shoppers are more than capable of reading a label, as they do each day when choosing between items.  Believing people little more than unthinking, this brings the editorialist to contend that regulation of a simple product, easily labeled, is vital to protect people from themselves.  

We’ve no need to ban organic milk to protect Big Dairy any more than we have to ban motorcycles on the theory that motorcycle accidents might give highway driving a bad name. If motorcycles should be riskier, that’s a choice for motorists to make when picking a vehicle.  In any event, the presence of motorcycles on the road hasn’t stopped people from buying cars & trucks. 

As has been true so many times before, the Gazette‘s editorial board erroneously writes about people as though they were dim and dull. America would not have advanced across a vast continent, and developed a modern technological society, if people were even half so dull as they Gazette depicts them.

Honest to goodness, does the Gazette‘s editorialist think that Janesville’s residents have not even advanced beyond elementary school?  He must have doubts, as he pedantically reminds the paper’s readers that pasteurization is a process that Louis Pasteur first developed.

Next he’ll remind readers that Washington, D.C. is named for George Washington, and Ford automobiles come from a company that Henry Ford founded. 

In a free marketplace of ideas and news, even the supposedly worst rumors quickly dissipate when confronted with sound analysis.  Initial concerns about infectious diseases (far different & worse than occasional nausea from milk) quickly fade when people correctly report the genuine difficulty of those diseases spreading in our society. 

People are more than capable, for themselves, of deciding which kind of milk, if any, to drink. They’re equally capable of forming an opinion about the risks from different kinds of milk without attributing the same reputation to each kind.   Government’s prohibitions aren’t required.   

That’s not nonsense; it’s the reasonableness abounding within ordinary life.

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 11.24.14

by  • 

Good morning, Whitewater.

Monday in Whitewater will begin with rain, turning over into snow later in the day. We can expect about three inches before accumulation overall. Our high temperature will be about forty-three, falling throughout the day. Sunrise is 6:58 AM and sunset 4:24 PM, with 9h 25m 58s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 4.9% of its visible disk illuminated.

Small, commercially-available drones offer filmmakers shots that would have been impossible, or nearly so, only a few years ago. In Holland, Jelte Keur and Reinout van Schie waited ten months for conditions in which the Dom Tower in Utrecht would be just above the clouds. When it was, they used a DJI Phantom 2 to record the scene:

Via Gorgeous Drone Video of the Tallest Church Tower in the Netherlands Bursting Through a Sea of Fog @ PetaPixel.

On this day in 1944, America bombs Tokyo using B-29s:

…111 U.S. B-29 Superfortress bombers raid Tokyo for the first time since Capt. Jimmy Doolittle’s raid in 1942. Their target: the Nakajima aircraft engine works.

Fall 1944 saw the sustained strategic bombing of Japan. It began with a reconnaissance flight over Tokyo by Tokyo Rose, a Superfortress B-29 bomber piloted by Capt. Ralph D. Steakley, who grabbed over 700 photographs of the bomb sites in 35 minutes. Next, starting the first week of November, came a string of B-29 raids, dropping hundreds of tons of high explosives on Iwo Jima, in order to keep the Japanese fighters stationed there on the ground and useless for a counteroffensive. Then came Tokyo.

The awesome raid, composed of 111 Superfortress four-engine bombers, was led by Gen. Emmett “Rosie” O’Donnell, piloting Dauntless Dotty. Press cameramen on site captured the takeoffs of the first mass raid on the Japanese capital ever for posterity. Unfortunately, even with the use of radar, overcast skies and bad weather proved an insurmountable obstacle at 30,000 feet: Despite the barrage of bombs that were dropped, fewer than 50 hit the main target, the Nakajima Aircraft Works, doing little damage. The upside was that at such a great height, the B-29s were protected from counter-attack; only one was shot down.

One Distinguished Flying Cross was awarded as a result of the raid. It went to Captain Steakley.

By chance, Google-a-Day has a question about Holland’s geography:

The cities of Amsterdam, including Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht make up what area that is home to more than 40% of the population of The Netherlands?

Animation, Film

Sunday Animation: A Tax on Bunny Rabbits

by  • 

A Tax on Bunny Rabbits from Nathaniel Akin on Vimeo.

Description from Nathaniel Akin: "A Tax on Bunny Rabbits" premiered at the 2011 Ottawa International Animation Festival. This short film is all text animation, ascii style! No bunnies were harmed in the making of this film. See more of my work at http://oxen.tv and http://riotsquad.tv

Festivals & stuff:
2011 Ottawa International Animation Festival (premiere)
2011 Cutout Fest Queretaro Mexico
2012 Reel 2 Real Festival Youth Jury Most Innovative Film Award!
2012 Nashville International Film Festival
2012 Scratch Film Festival
2012 London International Animation Festival
2012 Film Leben Festival Berlin
2012 Festival Off-courts Trouville
2012 Anibar International Animation Fest Kosovo
2012 Seoul International Extreme Short Image & Film Festival
2012 Going Underground Subway Festival Seoul & Berlin

Daily Bread

Daily Bread for 11.23.14

by  • 

Good morning, Whitewater.

There’s a mild November day ahead for us, with a high of fifty-one and cloudy skies. Sunrise is 6:57 AM and sunset 4:25 PM, with 9h 27m 43s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with only 1.3% of its visible disk illuminated.

Friday’s FW poll asked respondents for their favorite Thanksgiving foods. Turkey topped the list, followed in order by Other, Stuffing, Cranberries, Pumpkin Pie, Mashed Potatoes, Sweet Rolls, Green Beans, and Ham.

On this day in 1943, news came from both Europe and the Pacific of Allied victories. Here’s the headline and report in the New York Times of that day:

Ruined Berlin Afire After 2d Bombing; U. S. Planes Smash At Toulon and Sofia; 4 Japanese Destroyers Sunk In Battle

Foe Driven Into Sea By Marines on Betio
By WILLIAM L. WORDEN

With the Seventh Army Air Force in the Central Pacific, Nov. 22 (Delayed)–United States Marine assault battalions today conquered the west end of Betio Island, on Tarawa atoll, driving the defenders into the sea and others onto the eastern open flat sections where they became excellent targets for dive-bombing and strafing attacks.

The vicious air attacks were made by Navy planes operating from carriers in this area. The air assault was timed with our artillery fire, which pounded the fleeing Japanese almost at will once they had abandoned their prepared defense positions. Only a few isolated strong Japanese points remain intact.

On the east side of the island some of the enemy attempted to escape by boat, but our patrol aircraft spotted them, sinking some and damaging others.

In our state’s history, from 1909, a Janesville man gets eighteen months for selling margarine:

1909 – Janesville Man Convicted for Selling Oleo
On this date A.E. Graham of Janesville was put on trial for selling oleo as butter. Oleo, an early form of margarine, was outlawed in the dairy state of Wisconsin. On January 27, 1910, he was found guilty in federal court and sentenced to 18 months in Fort Leavenworth Prison. [Source: Janesville Gazette]

Graham shouldn’t have been passing margarine off as butter, yet it’s hard to believe, then or now, that scores of other Janesvillians would not be more deserving of prison time. If in your travels you run into any Federal agents, feel free to give them my contact information (www.freewhitewater.com, adams@freewhitewater.com). I’d be happy to offer a list of contemporary Janesville ‘movers and shakers’ more deserving of incarceration than any oleo salesman.