Cabinets work ever so much better...

Cabinets work ever so much better ... when the drawers and doors have handles!  We had our island cabinet (at right) refinished to match our kitchen color scheme.  The original cabinet was cherry, or possibly maple stained cherry color: a bright red that clashed with both the kitchen as we bought it, and the kitchen as we remodeled it :)  As if that wasn't bad enough, the drawer pulls and cabinet knobs were horrible, cheap things that were different than all the other cabinet hardware in the kitchen.

So I located a source for “basket” handles that match the rest of our kitchen cabinet hardware.  These aren't the handles we'd have chosen, but they're ok – and for now it's simpler to match them than to try to replace them.  Naturally the holes for the new hardware didn't match the holes for the old hardware – so when the cabinet was refinished, we had them fill in the old holes for us, with plastic wood.

For a few weeks now, I've had a box full of cabinet handles that needed to be installed.  Today was a good day for it :)

The doors were easy for me to decide where to mount the handles: I just matched what the rest of the cabinets did.  For the drawers, it's a little more complicated.  I discovered (with a little googling) that there are three schools of thought about how high to mount drawer pulls:

1. Find the shortest (height-wise) drawer and center its pull – then mount all the rest of the pulls the same distance down from the top of the drawer.
2. Mount each drawer's pull vertically in the center of the drawer.
3. Mount each drawer's pull about one third of the drawer's height from the top.

Who knew that mounting a damned handle could be so complicated?  I looked at pictures of all three styles, and they all looked fine to me.  Then it occurred to me to see what our cabinet maker did, in our bathroom vanity and in the cattery.  He chose method number 1, so I copied him :)

To reduce the chance of making an ugly mistake (by drilling a hole in the wrong place), I built a couple of simple jigs (photo at right).  The left hand one is for the drawer pulls, the right hand one for the door handles.  Each jig has two holes in it, in exactly the right place for the screws that hold the handles on.  All I had to do for each drawer and door was to mark where the center of the handle would be; the jig did all the rest.  I just clamped the jig into position for each drawer and door, drilled the two holes, and installed the handle.  Eleven jig positionings, twenty two holes, and twenty two screws later, it's all done – and without any embarrassing mistakes :)

We are flagpole-ready!

We are flagpole-ready!  Now we just need the flagpole!!  This little project got delayed by the 2.5" of rain we had earlier in the week.  The rain hit while the concrete was curing (that's actually good!) and I had large piles of the excavated soil next to the concrete.  The rain turned the soil into glop that formed itself all around the underlying grass – and then turned into something approaching the hardness of concrete when it dried out.  It took me about eight hours of hard work with a garden rake to break up all that hardened clay and get it up and out of there.  That'll learn me – if I ever do something like this again, I'm putting a piece of plastic under the dirt pile!

You can see some roughly laid sod around the concrete.  I'm not concerned with that, because in the spring I'm going to do something that my brother Scott thought up: plant red, white, and blue clematis around the concrete and train it up a to-be-designed arbor.  That will not only add some nice color to the otherwise plain green grass, it will also hide the concrete – and the lights I'm planning to put there (to illuminate the flag at night)...

Blooming right now...

Blooming right now ... in our front yard.  I think they're very confused crocuses (croci?); my mom thinks there some kind of fake crocus.  Whatever they are, they're a welcome spot of color this time of year!

Workforce participation down...

Workforce participation down...  In an article primarily about other things, I ran across the graph at right (click to embiggen).  It's a graph of “workforce participation” for men, from 1948 through today.  Workforce participation is one of those rare, raw, unadjusted numbers provided by the government – it's simply the percentage of all men who are employed (whether full- or part-time).  There are no adjustments, as there are with the unemployment numbers, for things like people who have given up looking for a job.

Elsewhere I have read that the workforce participation rate is highly correlated with growth in GDP.  This makes intuitive sense, as you'd expect that if more people are working, they'd produce more.  The converse must also be true: if there are less people working, then they'd produce less – and the GDP growth rate would be slower.

I entered the workforce in the late '60s, when the workforce participation rate for men was around 78%.  Today it's around 65%.  Given that there are about 158 million men in the U.S. today, the difference between 78% and 65% is about 21 million men.  If the workforce participation rate was still 78% today, there would be about 21 million more men working.  That's an astonishingly large number.

Why has the workforce participation rate gone down?  I can think of several contributing factors, but I really have no idea about their relative size:

• More women are in the workforce today (proportionally), and surely some of them have displaced men.
• The rise of the welfare state has reduced the incentive (and need) to be employed.
• More men (proportionally) are going to college, and are therefore entering the workforce later.
• Men are living longer after retirement, when they are not part of the workforce.
• Possibly there is some measurement error, with older data not including illegal or migratory immigrants.

“…it’s going to do more harm than good...”

“…it’s going to do more harm than good...”  A medical student takes on the uber-quack Dr. Oz...

Bardabunga Volcano...

Bardabunga Volcano...

My mom sends me things...

My mom sends me things...  Most recently this one, with the comment “This observation should have been made eons ago!”

Thought from the Greatest Living Scottish Thinker – Billy Connolly:

“If women are so bloody perfect at multitasking, how come they can't have a headache and sex at the same time?”

My mom's ancestors were Scots...

Utah isn't much different ...

Utah isn't much different ... especially near the Idaho border where I live.  Sent along by friend, former colleague, and Idaho mogul-of-everything Doug S., who says:

Sure it's a juvenile internet meme. But I can say in talking with an Ada County (Boise) Deputy friend of mine, there are 'registered' 9 guns for every individual in the State of Idaho and >26% of the population have a CCW (Concealed carry) permits ... of course no measure of us that actually carry...

Which all equates to us here dealing with bike thefts and kids breaking into unlocked cars ... Oh the humanity... Now if only we could get rid of those troublesome plastic bags...  Heh!

Anyone who owns a border collie ...

Anyone who owns a border collie ... will look at this video and say “Of course!  What else would you expect?”

Then and now...

Then and now...  Here's a very cool site forwarded to me by Jim and Cathy J.  The site shows photographs from WWII that you can fade into photographs of the same exact place as it appears today.  There are no directions on it, but here's how to use it:

When you first go to the site, you'll see a WWII photograph of Weymouth harbor, in England.  You can scroll up and down to see more photos.  If you click on any photo, it will fade gradually into a photo of the same spot, taken recently.  Clicking again will put it back to WWII.  You can also point to any photo, click and hold down, then "swipe" from left-to-right to fade into the modern photo, or right-to-left to fade into the WWII photo.  Very nicely done!

Odd bump on a Mars rock...

Odd bump on a Mars rock...  I spotted this in the latest download of Curiosity photos.  It appears to have been brushed off (with Curiosity's handy-dandy rotating rock brush).  I've no idea what it is, and I don't see any commentary on the Curiosity site about it yet...

3D model of Comet 67P...

3D model of Comet 67P...  This model was inferred from the images taken by the Rosetta robotic explorer.  Click to embiggen...

You don't want to meet this guy in a dark alley...

You don't want to meet this guy in a dark alley ... 'cause he beats the living crap out of anything that comes along.  It's a steamer duck, and you should be very afraid...

Ten recipes that even I can't screw up...

Ten recipes that even I can't screw up...  So promises Megan McArdle, the world's tallest female econoblogger, who also happens to be a culinary geekette.  Some of these recipes look pretty darned good...

The President...

The President...  No, I don't mean Obama – I mean the giant sequoia in the photo at right (click to embiggen).  That tree is 247 feet high, and is part of a grove.  There is no place one can stand to take a photo like this, so the National Geographic folks took hundreds of photos of different pieces of the tree, then picked 127 of them to stitch together to show what you see here.  Note the tiny little person at the bottom – that will give you a sense of just how big this monster tree is...

Barn: delays and trusses arrived...

Barn: delays and trusses arrived...  This week has seen little work done on the barn, mainly because of rain and mud.  Over the past weekend and into the early week, we had intermittent rain and overcast days (so no drying out).  The storm total was well over 2 inches of rain, and the fields are gloppy muddy.  Yesterday (Friday) was the first entire day that we had sunshine, clear skies, and low humidity, so the drying process could begin.  Hopefully by Monday conditions will be good again.

The builders did get some work done this week: they sheathed the last wall on the second floor, and did some layout work in anticipation of the arrival of the factory-built trusses.  These trusses were engineered for this building, and built in a factory near Salt Lake City.  Yesterday afternoon the truck with our piles of trusses arrived – but unloading that truck proved much more challenging than we expected.

The challenge came from the combination of mud and subtle topology.  The access road through our property to the barn is very slightly lower in elevation (about 8") in a spot near the paved road.  In the middle photo below, you can see the truss delivery truck sitting in exactly this spot.  Between where I stood to take that photo, and the spot where the truck is, there is a very gentle slope – nearly imperceptible to the eye.  In that low spot, naturally, the rainwater collected into a nice big mud-puddle.  And the surface of the road was nice and muddy – and as slick as ice.  When the truck backed in off the paved road, it got stuck in that low spot – if it tried to go forward or backward, it could only move a few feet before its tires started spinning futilely.  Our builder saved the day by using his loader to scoop up about a cubic yard of gravel (from a pile scavenged from our driveway) and scattering it under the wheels of the truck.  With that assistance, the truck was able to back in to deliver our trusses (last photo), and zipped right back out to the paved road.  The driver looked quite relieved at this bit of success :)

The weather has also kept me from working outside.  My flagpole base still needs a bit of work, restoring the soil and turf around the giant concrete cube I now have in my back yard.  I've been working mostly indoors, putting up the last of the fixtures in our bathroom (meaning that I spent a lot of time drilling holes through porcelain tiles).  The paving crew and the roofers were both delayed, most likely at least through the middle of next week.  Our flagpole didn't arrive on time, though I don't know if that's because of the weather or for some other reason.  And the rock for our fireplace was also delayed, as their production was delayed by the rain...

“That's not 'armed', that's 'dressed', you island-dwelling herbivore!”

“That's not 'armed', that's 'dressed', you island-dwelling herbivore!”  So says Tam, upon discovering that the tiny Spyderco knife at right is what the recent White House intruder (who is from Texas) was “armed” with.  It's a fine rant...

Interesting political ad...

Interesting political ad...  The speaker is Elbert Guillory, a state Senator from Louisiana.  Guillory is a Republican today, but has been a Democrat in the past.  The ad's message, basically, is “Don’t vote for Mary Landrieu, because she hasn’t kept her promise to help blacks in Louisiana.” 

What makes this most interesting is that it soberly makes a point that many conservatives have made: Democrats (like Mary Landrieu) take black votes for granted, because no matter how poorly the Democrats perform, blacks overwhelmingly vote for them.  Guillory urges black voters to reconsider that reflexive support for Democrats.

Landrieu is currently lagging behind her Republican challenger in the polls.  Black voters could make or break her, so this ad is well-targeted.  It will be interesting to see if the ad appears to make any difference in the choices black voters make...

Travel bans and involuntary travelers' quarantines...

Travel bans and involuntary travelers' quarantines...  Given the news and fear of Ebola recently, it's entirely predictable that there would be a rash of support for what seems like an “easy fix”, or at least, as sensible precaution: outright bans of travel to and from the three countries with significant Ebola outbreaks, and authority for the CDC to involuntarily quarantine travelers they suspect might be carriers.  Articles like this one abound.

There are significant problems with these approaches though, starting with the fact that they are completely ineffective.  “What?”, say ye – how can a ban on travel from, say, Liberia be ineffective? 

Let's start with this little inconvenient fact: there is no direct air travel between Liberia and the United States.  Anyone who wants to travel from Liberia to the United States must change planes (and usually airlines).  Most frequently this change occurs in Europe (it was Brussels for Thomas Duncan), but it could also happen in South Africa, India, or a number of other countries.  When a passenger arrives in the United States from (say) London, we don't know whether his travels originated in England, Germany, Russia, Liberia, Australia, or Japan.  You can't tell, and there are no records, unless that traveler happened to use the same airline for all the legs of his trip – and you can't even tell that.  The only travel ban that would actually work would be to close our borders to all travelers other than those explicitly tested for Ebola and found clear.  Can you imagine the impact such a total travel ban would have on the country?

Well, then, ok – how about the involuntary quarantine bit?  Surely that would help?  Consider this: Thomas Duncan was asymptomatic when he entered the U.S.  He would not have been quarantined unless it was by accident.  Then consider this: the vast majority of people quarantined under such a regime would be false positives – that is, they would be quarantined because (say) they had a high temperature, but the vast majority would have a high temperature for some reason other than Ebola.  They might have a cold, or the flu, or any one of hundreds of other illnesses – but not Ebola.  The situation would be different if there was some quick test for Ebola that could be administered at the airport – but there is no such quick test.  Millions of airline passengers would be greatly inconvenienced, and very few actual Ebola patients would be detected.  Is that a good idea?  I think not.  It smacks of security theater.

Expending effort and attention to ineffective policies like this is a waste of time and money that could be much better spent on efforts that actually work – like those currently taking place in Texas to contain the potential outbreak resulting from Thomas Duncan's unfortunate choice to travel here knowing that he'd had contact with an Ebola victim...

I want this in my front yard!

I want this in my front yard!