Sunday, May 18, 2014

Search old newspapers...

Search old newspapers...  Tens of thousands of pages of old newspapers have been digitized on this site, and are searchable.  There is no charge

Just to try it out, I ran a search for my father's name, and found the listing at right in a 1937 edition of a Long Island, NY paper.  In 1937 my father would have been 13 years old – and apparently at that age he collected cigar bands.  There can be no doubt that's my father, as he is the only Dilatush to have had that exact name, and he lived near Robbinsville.  It's very hard for me to imagine my father collecting cigar bands, though :)

Then I found this May 8, 1938 reference in the same paper.  Apparently my dad also collected stamps.  I've heard him poke a great deal of fun at collectors, in particular of stamps – so this greatly surprises me!

In a January 1949 edition of the Pittsburgh Courier, there's an article about the conviction and sentencing to death of 6 black men.  It contains the reference at right.  I know my grandfather grew potatoes at one time (on the farm I grew up on), but I think it was considerably earlier than 1949. 

I also found references to my grandmother, grandfather, my two uncles on my father's side, my sister, and my brother.

I foresee myself spending some hours on this site :)

The warmists down under are misbehaving...

The warmists down under are misbehaving ... and Steve McIntyre takes them to the woodshed.  It feels like an unraveling of the warmist front is underway.  About time!

Ukrainian Easter eggs...

Ukrainian Easter eggs...  When I was a kid, we had an elderly Hungarian lady (Mrs. Mate) living on our farm with her husband.  She painted elaborate Easter eggs, too – but certainly not the equal of these...

Tug of war...

Tug of war ... between an 850 HP modern John Deere tractor and an 18 HP 1904 steam tractor – and the steam tractor wins.  The John Deere's power can't be applied here, because its traction isn't even close to the steam tractor's.  The steam tractor weighs around 12 tons; the John Deere around 3.  Note how the steam tractor isn't shoveling dirt at all, while the John Deere is digging trenches with its spinning tires...

I wonder how he explained this to his boss?

I wonder how he explained this to his boss?

Awesome photo...

Awesome photo...


Healthcare services are scarce goods...

Healthcare services are scarce goods...  To an economist, the term “scarce goods” means something very specific: that there is greater demand for something than can possibly be supplied.  Healthcare is such a thing: it isn't possible for everyone to get the most exotic cancer treatments, nor can everyone be treated at the best hospitals, or by the very best doctors.  So healthcare is a scarce good.

With any scarce good, some means must be found to decide who gets the care, and who doesn't.  For healthcare in the U.S., that used to be decided by who could (and was willing to) pay.  That system is called capitalism, and it's the most efficient means of allocating scarce goods that anyone has ever come up with.  But for healthcare in particular, allocation on the basis of ability to pay seems unfair to the majority of our citizens.  So we've come up with alternatives.

Fast forward to now, and the advent of ObamaCare.  Healthcare is still a scarce good, and ObamaCare – having replaced anything remotely resembling capitalistic allocation – still has to allocate that scarce good.  No matter how much we might wish it were so, there's not enough healthcare to cover everybody for everything.  ObamaCare takes two approaches. 

First, there are the committees of bureaucrats that Sarah Palin so memorably called “death panels”.  These committees are deciding what procedures will be covered by ObamaCare policies, and which will not.  That's a form of allocation: if a procedure you need is covered, your ObamaCare policy will cover it.  If it doesn't cover the procedure, you'll have to pay for it yourself – if you can.  Otherwise, you die or suffer.  Thanks to the ObamaCare health insurance “mandates”, you cannot purchase an old-fashioned major medical policy that will cover such risks.

Secondly, there's a new aspect of the ObamaCare healthcare policies called “reference pricing.”  This article treats reference pricing as though it were just invented, but actually it's been a part of ObamaCare all along (and many opponents of ObamaCare wrote about it during the legislative process).  Fundamentally it is a way to discourage people from choosing the most expensive (i.e., the best) doctors and hospitals.  It accomplishes this by imposing some fairly draconian financial burdens on anyone who chooses to do so – and by making it impossible to insure for such expenses.

There's a third step I expect to hear about very soon: the expansion of ObamaCare allocation steps to MediCare.  It seems almost inevitable...

The end result of this situation is very predictable, thanks to prior experience by two nations we know very well: the United Kingdom and Canada.  In both of those countries the overall quality of healthcare lags that of the U.S. substantially – and only relatively wealthy people can escape the consequences (generally by paying for more advanced treatment in the U.S., India, or China). 

It seems to me that for all their trying, the ObamaCare supporters didn't really accomplish very much in the way of better allocating healthcare.  Now, as then, only the people who can afford to pay can get top notch healthcare.  In one significant way, ObamaCare has made it worse: it used to be true that anyone who desired it could buy simple major medical coverage.  The price might be high (especially if you had pre-existing conditions of some sort), but you could buy it.  Now those policies are illegal.  You cannot have them at any price.  That means if you want top notch healthcare, you have to be wealthy enough to pay for the care directly – not just wealthy enough to pay for the insurance.

I sure hope we can get ObamaCare repealed...

Laundry...

Laundry...  Our new home in Paradise, Utah didn't come with a washer and dryer, so we had to buy new ones.  After a bunch of research, we selected General Electric models, with the washer and dryer designed to go with each other.

In our past purchases of washers and dryers, “go with each other” meant their appearance was compatible.  That's still true today, but there's more: the washer and dryer are connected by an Ethernet cable, and the washer tells the dryer what's coming next – including how much water is in the clothing.  How does the washer know that?  It weighs the clothing before washing and after, and the difference is the water content.  It also tells the dryer what the dry weight of the clothes were, and the dryer watches that to know when its close to being finished.  It also senses the exhaust humidity (which is the only thing older dryers did) to know exactly when all the water is gone.

The washer (a top-loading model) has us ready to believe in magic.  The first thing we noticed is that there is no agitator in the middle, as every other washer we've ever owned has had.  That agitator seems key to getting the clothes clean, but somehow (here's the magic!) this washer gets the clothes nice and clean without one.  That's not the best part, though.  With this washer, we can throw the clothes into the tub without taking any care to balance them.  The washer somehow compensates for this, so that when it starts spinning, the tub remains balanced.  Magic!  This morning I deliberately loaded the tub all on one side, and even with that the tub spun smoothly, without the washer trying to walk across the floor.  There must be a counterweight that moves to offset the load's imbalance, though if there is it is completely hidden.  We can watch the tub turn slowly after we load it, and we can see the imbalance in the beginning of its cycle – but within a few seconds, it's “zeroed out” and spinning as if completely in balance.

Both machines are being run by an embedded computer, of course.  With a few sensors and actuators, these computers are solving problems that have plagued washers and dryers forever.  Even though I have a pretty good idea how these things are working, it still feels like magic to use it...

It's still pitch-black this morning...

It's still pitch-black this morning ... but I'm being serenaded by beautiful birdsong.  I don't recognize the species.  I need a Google search for audio, like their image search :)

Pruning...

Pruning...  That's what I've spent most of the last three days doing.  Our new home is surrounded by a fair number of trees – including over a dozen 30 to 35 foot tall pines of a species I have yet to identify.  Those pines have been neglected for their entire life, which I'm estimating at 25 to 30 years (the house was built 22 years ago, and almost certainly they were planted then).  They appeared to be healthy, but were full of dead wood (normal as lower branches get shaded out) and broken branches (most likely from snow weight).  They also had limbs low enough that their ends touched the ground, and it was difficult to walk under them.

So ... I pruned.  Lots :)  Armed with a 15" pruning saw, a pair of loppers, a pair of hand shears, and an 8' stepladder, I took off all the low-hanging branches and cleaned out all the dead wood I could reach.  Most of the trees had branches that afforded me good (safe) footing, so I climbed to get deadwood up to about 20' up.  The transformation is very satisfying – those pines are now shade trees, covering a nice green lawn and making a park-like atmosphere in the yard immediately surrounding the house.  You can see one bit of it in the photo at right; the field in the background is planted in alfalfa.  In another 5 years or so, they'll need some additional work.  Hopefully I'll still be up to it!

Meanwhile, there are still another 50 or so pines further from the house.  The bulk of those are Ponderosa pines, one of my favorite pine species, planted in a tight grove that desperately needs thinning.  Those pines are 20' to 25' high now, and the ones on the outside of the planting are noticeably more vigorous than the (mostly shaded) ones on the inside.  This fall or next spring, that's going to turn into a big project...

Programming pain...

Programming pain...  An article on a topic I've often pondered myself: why is programming so damned hard for most people?  Some of it is the tools, which is what this article focuses on.  I used to fantasize about a graphical programming environment, in which a user could “draw” their program, much as an electrical engineer used to draw a schematic.  I say “used to”, because much of hardware design (anything but the simplest devices) is designed these days using text-based hardware design languages – even hardware has given up on graphical design.  Why?  In a nut shell, complexity.

The complexity of computer systems (by which I mean both the underlying hardware and the software) have grown many-fold just over the course of my own career.  The Univac mainframe computers I first worked with, back in the '70s, were not the biggest or most complex computers of the day – but they were pretty high on the computing complexity scale.  The ship I was on had 12 interconnected (we didn't use the word “network” back then :) mainframe computers, organized into functional units (radar, tracking, missile control, etc.), each of which had its own program.  Those programs ran directly on the hardware – there was no operating system as we know the notion today.  The sum of all that hardware and its specialized software – which seemed so big and complicated at the time – is downright trivial by comparison with a single cheap smartphone running Android.

I think that complexity is the main reason underlying the difficulty of programming.  While I believe there are many things that could be done to make that programming a bit easier, none of the things I can think of would make a significant dent in the overall complexity of the problem.  Short of actual machine intelligence (something I am highly skeptical of), I don't see any answers other than relying on those weird geeks that know how to program...

Booting up a PDP-11/34...

Booting up a PDP-11/34...  Well, here's a blast from the past!  When I was just getting started programming computers, in the mid-'70s, these DEC machines were what I lusted after.  I got to play with them a few times on consulting jobs, but their price tag put them way out of my reach.  I had to settle for owning microcomputers (and even they were a big strain on my tiny purchasing power).  At the time, that felt like settling for fourth or fifth-best.  The notion that microcomputers would come to dominate computing never occurred to me at the time – I thought of them then as simple, small, and unpowerful cousins of the real computers...