Mart Laar in the WSJ

Mart Laar is a former prime minister of Estonia, and is widely credited with being the "father" of the flat tax in Estonia. In turn, that flat tax is widely credited (by businessmen and economists) for being one of the primary drivers of Estonia's booming and very healthy post-Soviet economy.

I've known these facts, and some more detail, for quite some time — but then, I have been accused of having an unnatural interest in the country of Estonia, which I have visited many times. Most Americans don't even know that Estonia is a country, much less where it is or what they've accomplished in the past 15 years.

So imagine, if you can, my surprise and delight to discover that in this morning's Wall Street Journal there is a commentary piece by Mart Laar! Titled "A Failure of Leadership", it's about Mr. Laar's promotion of the flat tax for all the European Union members. I hope the WSJ will forgive my extensive excerpting — the full article ($subscription) is here:

While giving a speech this summer at a Center for Policy Studies conference in Copenhagen supporting the introduction of a flat tax in Denmark, I was asked why I would encourage other European countries to adopt a better tax system. Would that not make my home country of Estonia, which already has a flat tax, less competitive?

My answer was short: "I am doing this because I am European." We are all sitting in the same boat now. "New Europe" will not succeed if "Old Europe" isn't competitive enough to meet the challenges of the global economy. It is in the interest of the new European Union member states is to make all of Europe new.

During the recent EU summit, the new member states looked with astonishment at how Old Europe fought each other on the question of the EU budget. It has not been a problem for New Europe to give away part of their financial supports when a compromise has been achieved. They were quite surprised to see how, for Old Europe, national interests were put clearly above European interests.

This is especially sad because Europe is already in the middle of a quite serious crisis. The rejections of the EU constitution by France and the Netherlands sent shockwaves around the Continent. Some people have even declared that the Europe is dead.

The problem for Europe, however, is not the failed referendum but the failure of its leaders to understand why that happened. The people did not vote against the constitution because of Polish plumbers or Estonian gardeners. They voted against their own unpopular governments that haven't created jobs or economic growth. The referendums failed not because there has been too much reform in Europe; they failed because there hasn't been enough of it. European politicians over the years have created bogeymen that guaranteed their success in national politics -- bad Brussels bureaucracy, bad new member states, bad neoliberalism. And during the referendums these ghosts came back to haunt them.

The failure of the French and Dutch referendums showed everyone that, as in the famous fairy tale, the emperor has no clothes. Unfortunately, European leaders are still trying to convince everyone otherwise. They want to continue as if nothing has happened.

It is really time to understand that there is no reason to continue discussing whether the constitution was good or bad. The constitution is dead, and there is no way to revive it. To try to win the referendum, France stopped all necessary but unpopular reforms. When other European leaders try the same, all Europe will fail.

So let's calm down and start to work, because there is enormous amount of work to do. The coming autumn will be crucial for the future of Europe. The people of the Europe are looking to their leaders and asking: Will they deliver? If they don't, the trust will be completely gone.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair has set out a large and bold agenda for his country's EU presidency. It is important that he is not left alone in this work. During the coming year Europe must take real steps at least in four directions:
• Continue European integration. The new constitution is not crucial for this. Existing treaties provide enough latitude for the creation of institutions, such as a common foreign and security policy -- when all member states agree, of course.
• Continue with enlargement. European leaders must not scare their people, but rather explain that the costs of not proceeding with enlargement -- both political and economical -- are actually higher than the possible costs of enlargement. At the same time, real criteria must be followed. Special attention must be given to the Balkans, and the door must be kept open for both Turkey and Ukraine.
• Continue with real reforms and forget the discussion on the "dangers of neoliberalism." It is really interesting to see how the conservative government of France is accusing Britain's Labour government of Britain for being "neoliberal." It must be remembered that some of the most radical labor-market reforms are actually made in social-democratic countries, for example in Denmark. So the question is not whether the governments are on the right or the left -- the only question is whether they are delivering growth and jobs. Europe in the coming months must pass the necessary reforms to open its services market and stop overregulation. Without these steps -- mentioned in Mr. Blair's presidency agenda -- all talks about real reforms will be nonsense.
• Give real attention to Europe. The real test for a united Europe will be the compromise on the budget. When it will be connected with the reform of the Common Agricultural Policy, Europe will take really positive step forward.

In other words, Europe must not stop reforms but start with real reforms; not stop enlargement but speed it up; not disintegrate but integrate; not build integrated Europe over the heads of people but act with the consent of the people. Don't blame Europe for all possible problems; give it a chance. Europeans have for too long asked what Europe can do for them. Now it is time for them to ask themselves what they can do for Europe.

It's very nice to see an Estonian politician occupying this stage...

Some Perspective

Claudia Rossett — investigator, observer, and commentator par excellence — has a new column up on OpinionJournal that's a worthwhile read. In it she talks about the impact of Katrina on America, but with a loftier perspective than most of the stories and commentary currently circulating. An excerpt:

But aid from the state, or even from private charities, is not what's going to rebuild New Orleans. What will bring back the city--or not--is the many decisions people will now make about how to best get on with their lives. Some may not return. Some may go back and build stronger than before. But the promises of politicians and the scenes of survivors on cots in the Astrodome do not begin to sum up the real pool of resources now available to the people of New Orleans.

The most valuable resource of this country is something called human capital, nourished within a framework of liberty and rule of law. The armed thugs who briefly ruled the floodwaters were not the norm. There are countries like Sudan or Zimbabwe where they would have been part of the routine miseries of the average day. New Orleans was a city known both for its high crime rate and its parties, parades and bohemian French Quarter. For three days, in extreme crisis, the balance tipped the wrong way. It was terrible. But by lights of much of the planet, the order that then kicked in for a massive rescue effort was beyond hoping.

Take a moment to read the whole thing...

APOD

APOD brings us...

The tiger stripes on Saturn's moon Enceladus might be active. Even today, they may be spewing ice from the moon's icy interior into space, creating a cloud of fine ice particles over the moon's South Pole and creating Saturn's mysterious E-ring. Recent evidence for this has come from the robot Cassini spacecraft now orbiting Saturn. Cassini detected a marked increase in particle collisions during its July flyby only 270 kilometers over a South Polar region of Enceladus. Pictured above, a high resolution image of Enceladus is shown from the close flyby. The unusual surface features dubbed tiger stripes are visible on the left in false-color blue. Why Enceladus is active remains a mystery, as the neighboring moon Mimas, approximately the same size, appears quite dead.

Click on the picture for a larger view. It's a big file (~1.5MB), but worth the download time — a stunner viewed full size.

Gas Prices

Thanks for the laugh, Tigerhawk!

Blue Marble

MESSENGER (Wikipedia) (seen at right in an artist's impression) is a NASA spacecraft on its way to the planet Mercury for a mission of explanation. Its name is an awkward acronym: MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry and Ranging, but that's a fair description of what it will do. Here is the official MESSENGER website.

In early August, MESSENGER made a swing by the Earth, using our planet as a kind of gravitational slingshot. This swingby maneuver, which is now a common feature of a space probe's trajectory, saves a lot of rocket fuel — but at the cost of taking a lot longer to actually arrive at the destination.

Anyway, MESSENGER happens to be equipped with a good camera, and during this recent swingby maneuver the folks at NASA took pictures at regular intervals — and then strung them all together to make a movie showing what MESSENGER saw as it swung by our humble abode. It's beautiful and spectacular; our blue marble in space. The download is huge (~5MB) but it's worth it...

A New Low

Three percent relative humidity!

This is the lowest I've ever recorded on my weather station (and I've had an electronic weather station going for five years now). The temperature outside is 89F, but you'd never know it — it feels more like about 80F or so with our more usual 10% to 20% relative humidity.

While the low relative humidity makes the heat more bearable, not all of its effects are good. For example, sustained low relative humidity (especially combined with wind) sucks all the moisture from the dead brush and other plant-derived fuels in the chapparal, greatly increasing the danger of wildfire. This phenomenon is why the fall has the greatest fire danger for us, as we generally have low relative humidity most of the summer.

But generally not quite this low! I was a little shocked to see that number on my gauge... BTW, the "37" you see on the gauge is the high value for relative humidity in the 24 hours preceding the snapshot I took showing the "3" reading. That 37% relative humidity occured in the middle of our night last night. Our air cools rapidly in our cloudless nights, and as it does the relative humidity goes up — usually to 100%. So even this "high" reading is quite low!

Hot Chocolate

Some recently declassified documents describing exotic weapons proposed (and possibly actually made) by the Nazis in World War II. Amongst these were exploding chocolate, tinned pea grenades, and shoe bombs. I found quite a few articles, mostly in the U.K. press, including this one from BBC and a more amusing one from The Sun.

I couldn't find any more detailed description or photographs on the web, probably because the documents were so recently declassified.

Strategeric

On the nomination of Roberts to Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court — what she said (Sissy Willis at Sisu):

We knew we loved this Roberts fellow — in Dick Cheney's phrase, "big time" — ever since we read his reply to history-challenged members of the other side of the aisle with a rapier wit that takes no prisoners. In reponse to a House Democrat's proposal that the White House and Congress convene a "conference on power-sharing" to codify the duties of each branch of government, he replied:

"There already has, of course, been a 'Conference on Power Sharing' . . . It took place in Philadelphia's Constitution Hall in 1787, and someone should tell Levitas about it and the 'report' it issued."

Great choice, Dubya, and superbly "strategeric" move.

Now what could I add to that <smile>?

Foreign Aid

The Katrina aftermath includes a phenomenon that I, for one, wasn't expecting: massive reverse foreign aid — many countries offering aid to the U.S. victims of Hurricane Katrina.

The single largest such aid package I've seen announced is from Kuwait: they've offered us $500M in aid, in the form of oil products. That's extremely generous by any measure I can think of, and — considering what the U.S.-led coalition did for Kuwait in 1991 — somehow very fitting and right. But still gratifying, and...somehow, still unexpected. In the words of Kuwaiti Energy Minister Sheikh Ahmad Fahd Al-Sabah:

“We, Kuwaitis, feel it is our duty to stand by our friends to alleviate this humanitarian tragedy and express our gratitude for the support extended to us by Washington throughout the distinguished ties between the two friendly nations … This gives us the opportunity to show our gratitude to our friends and allies who stood by us in the darkest times … They supported us with the blood of their sons.”

The same article in the Arab Times that yielded the above quote also has this list of countries that have so far committed aid for Katrina victims:

Afghanistan, Argentina, Chile, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Nicaragua, Oman, Pakistan, Panama, Peru, Poland, Romania, Tunisia, Armenia, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Belgium, Britain, Canada, China, Colombia, Cuba, Dominica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, France, Germany, Greece, Georgia, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Jordan, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Paraguay, the Philippines, Portugal, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, Venezuela and the United Arab Emirates.

I don't know about you, but I find the list above to be simply stunning. Never mind that in some cases (Cuba!) the offer is a chance to kick W, or that in some cases the amount of aid is relatively small. Just the fact that 78 (if I counted correctly) countries are pledging aid to the U.S. is kind of mind-boggling.

Maybe Americans have made more friends in faraway places than the lefties would have us believe.

A tip 'o the hat to Chrenkoff (whom I will miss very much when he quits blogging to take his new job) for the pointer to the Kuwaiti contribution.

Oil for the Masses

Shell Oil Company believes it has come up with an economically viable (at $30/barrel) way to extract petroleum products from oil shale. If true, this has very large potential consequences, mostly good.

For those of you old enough to remember Jimmy Carter's "Synfuel" disaster, you probably know that the oil shale deposits inside the U.S. were widely seen at the time as the shortest path to energy independence for America. Unfortunately, we let government do it instead of private industry, and the predictable result was billions of dollars spent with utterly no tangible result.

The Shell endeavour, by contrast, was entirely privately funded (with their own money), and very focused on practical results. Rocky Mountain News has a good story about the process, excerpted below (many more details in the linked story):

While we were trying to do the math, O'Connor told us the answers. Upwards of a million barrels an acre, a billion barrels a square mile. And the oil shale formation in the Green River Basin, most of which is in Colorado, covers more than a thousand square miles - the largest fossil fuel deposits in the world.

Wow.

They don't need subsidies; the process should be commercially feasible with world oil prices at $30 a barrel. The energy balance is favorable; under a conservative life-cycle analysis, it should yield 3.5 units of energy for every 1 unit used in production. The process recovers about 10 times as much oil as mining the rock and crushing and cooking it at the surface, and it's a more desirable grade. Reclamation is easier because the only thing that comes to the surface is the oil you want.

Perhaps the key point in this discussion is that America's oil shale fields in the Green River Basin (the blue areas on the map above) form the single largest proven oil deposits in the world. Bigger than Alaska. Bigger than Saudi Arabia. Bigger than Qatar. With Shell's new process, should it prove feasible at large scale (and there's every reason to believe that it will), America could be energy-independent for many decades — long enough to come up with a viable alternative to a hydrocarbon-based energy infrastructure.

Wikipedia has a good introductory article on oil shales. Estonia (a country I know well through my business travels) has the world's largest oil shale production facilities, just west of the city of Narva. These date from the early 1900s, and process the shale in the most intrusive process imaginable: the oil shale is dug up, crushed, cooked (to release the hydrocarbons through vaporization), and dumped in huge ugly piles. This region of Estonia looks like some giant's kid was playing in the sandbox — several-hundred-foot-high piles of gravel dot the landscape, great pits nearby. Left alone, the region is as flat as a billiard table, so the predations of man are all the more obvious. I certainly wouldn't want to see this kind of process applied in the beautiful sections of Utah and Colorado where the richest oil shales in the U.S. are found (see the map above).

But Shell's in situ process has great promise, not only economically, but also in terms of minimizing environmental damage. China has already entered into a major partnership with Shell to exploit its much smaller and much less rich oil shale fields. Estonia has held discussions with Shell, but ironically the miner's unions in Estonia are doing everything they can to derail the talks. In the U.S. there are formidable political obstacles to overcome — the Democrats will surely reflexively oppose this, and the wacko fringe of the environmentalist movement will mobilize.

I suspect that the American public's reaction to higher pump prices (say, $5/gallon) will be more than enough to overcome such opposition. I'd be willing to place a bet that (assuming the processe scales) we'll be seeing American Shale Oil at our pumps within a few years...

...Without Respiration

"No Taxation Without Respiration!" is the rallying cry of the anti-death taxes folks. The Free Enterprise Fund has been playing a new ad on the death tax, featuring this slogan, and it's pretty darned good! You can view it here (from my slow site) or here (from the Free Enterprise Fund's site).

Tip 'o the hat to my mom, who spotted this on TV, and the invaluable Technorati search engine, which found it immediately.

Heaviest Element

A major research institution has recently announced the discovery of the heaviest element yet known to science. The new element has been named Governmentium.

Governmentium has one neutron, 12 assistant neutrons, 75 deputy neutrons, and 11 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312. These 312 particles are held together by forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lepton like particles called peons.

Since Governmentium has no electrons, it is inert. However, it can be detected, because it impedes every action with which it comes into contact. A minute amount of Governmentium causes a reaction to take four days to complete, when it would normally take less than a second.Governmentium has a normal half-life of 4 years. It does not decay, but instead under-goes a reorganization in which a portion of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutrons exchange places. In fact, Governmentium's mass will actually increase over time since each reorganization willcause more morons to become neutrons, forming isodopes.

This characteristic of moron promotion leads some scientists to believe that Governmentium is formed whenever morons reach a certain quantity in concentration. This hypothetical quantity is referred to as "Critical Morass."

When catalyzed with money, Governmentium becomes Administratium - an element which radiates just as much energy as Governmentium since it has half as many peons but twice as many morons.

The best and the worst

The aftermath — the awful aftermath — of hurricane Katrina is being covered from every possible angle by hordes of MSM and bloggers. I don't see much point in rehashing it all, but there is one aspect of this event that drives me to comment...

The MSM is full of stories that basically go along these lines: Federal incompetence caused New Orleans to be vulnerable to storm damage, Federal disaster reaction has been incompetent, there's a racial component to this (New Orleans residents are over 50% black), and all of this is President Bush's fault. The MSM is, of course, simply repeating the liberal's meme here that Bush is to blame for all of this (and everything else they think is wrong with the world).

And it's all poppycock, as even the most casual review of facts would reveal to anyone interested in knowing the truth. I am saddened every time I run into this "ignore the facts" phenomenon. In this case, it doesn't help the Katrina victims (and may hurt, if aid is misdirected in ignorance) and it doesn't help avoid the problem again (if the wrong cause is addressed, how will we ever fix this?). This is one example of a disaster bringing out the worst in people.

The facts I refer to are these:
New Orleans was not ready for a Category 4 hurricane because...they decided not to be. This is a well-documented decision made over 40 years ago and never revisited. The city of New Orleans, the state of Louisiana, and the then-federal administration made this decision together — and they made it against the recommendation of the Army Corps of Engineers. This was a calculated bet that the probability of a Category 4 hurricane was small enough that the very large cost of defending against it simply wasn't worth it. The MSM at the time applauded this decision, most especially the NYT.
The notorious alleged underfunding of the Army Corps of Engineers by the Bush administration...had no effect on the outcome of hurricane Katrina. Read the damage reports from hurricane Katrina carefully, and you will discover an interesting fact (rather shame-facedly verified by the Army Corps of Engineers): the sections of the levee that failed were the ones whose refurbishment had been completed. In other words, the new sections that were "fixed up" were the ones that failed. In the absence of any engineering analysis, one could make the argument that we'd have been better off leaving all the old levees alone.
Primary responsibility for the chaos of the first few days after Katrina hit...belongs to the city and state, not FEMA. FEMA is designed to be a secondary, national-scale emergency relief agency — not a prime agency with local assets and management in every community. In the U.S., emergency response and leadership starts at the local level and works upward to the Feds as a last resort. Therefore the primary responsibility for the lack of effective Katrina response management lies at the local level — and here the leadership was observably lacking. The stories of locally-originated stupidity abound, perhaps best illustrated by the flood-covered schoolbuses above.
Federal response was...faster than it has ever been before in the wake of a natural disaster. This is also a well-documented fact, not that you'd know it from the MSM reports. Less than four days after Katrina hit, the National Guard rolled into downtown New Orleans. After the most recent comparable disaster (hurricane Andrew) it took six days before the Feds mobilized.

Here's a roundup of posts illustrating or expanding on my points:

From CoyoteBlog, this observation (concerning the flooded schoolbusses):

The city declared a mandatory evacuation. Why then did it stick tens of thousands in the Superdome, right in the middle of town, rather than evacuate them with the assets they already owned in quantity?

And the ever-useful, nearly-always-correct Coyote's Law:

When the same set of facts can be explained equally well by
1. A massive conspiracy coordinated without a single leak between hundreds or even thousands of people
-OR -
2. Sustained stupidity and/or incompetence
Assume stupidity.

From Hugh Hewitt, on the moonbat responses to Katrina's aftermath — and on the more constructive response of President Bush:

I understand that an entertainer on the NBC special said some incredibly distasteful stuff about President Bush. No doubt a lot of folks will be pretty upset. I am taking my cue from the president, who spent the day in the company of a lot of folks who seem to have spent the last 48 hours doing nothing but blasting him in an attempt to escape fallout. President Bush said nothing about his critics, but kept the focus on the victims. W is in the business of getting the relief organized and saving lives. He isn't taking political shots, and I doubt he's going to, no matter how great the provocation. He's a good man and a great president, and his example should instruct his supporters to keep the focus on Americans in desperate need of help and hope.

From Chrenkoff, a roundup of the worst moonbat reaction, including this gem on Louis Farrakhan's comments:

Speaking to a large crowd in South Philadelphia last night, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan suggested that the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina was divine punishment for the violence America had inflicted on Iraq.
"New Orleans is the first of the cities going to tumble down... unless America changes its course," Farrakhan said.
"It is the wickedness of the people of America and the government of America that is bringing the wrath of God down," he told several hundred people at Tinsley Temple United Methodist Church.
His remarks were enthusiastically received.

From Kate at Small Dead Animals, this hopeful and illustrative report from someone actually on the scene at the Astrodome:

As you might imagine I wanted to hear what it was like being in the Superdome. One teenage girl told me that it was terrifying when the shooting started. "It was the gangs," she said. Her mother said, "The people found the guy who was shooting and beat his ass and his ass needed beating." I found over and over again that people were as disgusted with the behavior of the thugs as the rest of us. I asked them if they were angry at the government. Not one I spoke to said they were. They were angry at the people who behaved badly. They were angry at the thugs with guns. They were angry with the people who threw trash everywhere and went to bathroom in public places.
In other words, they were mad at the right people, unlike our friends on the left.

From Alenda Lux, some commentary about a wide range of left-leaning responses, including this on Jesse Jackson's complaint about the MSM's emphasis on looters:

Wow, genius. It would be a lot easier if a large number of those people who you say the government has forgotten weren't shooting at military helicopters or killing cops. You'll have to forgive Red Cross officials for not wanting to get themselves killed trying to feed the people shooting at them.

From Shot In The Dark, commenting on the left's condemnation of the neighborhood in New Orleans that organized their own armed self-defense against looters:

The left are trotting out the usual pejoraties to refer to the guys who, under the American flag, secured their homes and families and neighborhoods (even after allowing for the fact that the photo is posed - it's the idea of self-defense that seems to enrage them so). It's all I expect from them anymore - this notion that if government can't provide law and order, then we must accept lawlessness and disorder without question until government gets around to the job; if government can't protect your life, liberty and property, well, you probably don't need any of them all that badly, now, do you?
Bull.

And finally, from Politburo Diktat, a terrific roundup of blogosphere response (just a small sample below):

On the left:
Americablog: Bush talking point: New Orleans deserved it.
Pandagon: Too bad those buses don’t stop in Crawford

On the right:
Bill Quick: Recommends the Salvation Army
Sissy Willis: points out animal relief

As for me, I'm just hoping for these things:
— that the relief workers are as successful as possible, and stay safe
— that President Bush stays focused on the real issues
— that the incompetent, corrupt local pols all get thrown out in the end
— that the U.S. citizenry has the good common sense to ignore the worst of the moonbat ravings
— that the political apparatus, at all levels, can learn some real lessons about the cost-effectiveness of adequate preparation

Martian Spirit

The Spirit and Opportunity rovers on Mars are still — amazingly — going strong. Spirit recently reached its goal of the summit of Husband Hill, in the Columbia Hills, after over 500 days of busy, science-filled trekking. The panorama above is the first taken from the summit in approximately true color. The picture at right is a tiny thumbnail of the enormous, 14,000+ pixel wide real thing. You can get the real thing by clicking on the thumbnail; it's spectacular and fascinating to peruse...

I've posted several times previously about this dynamic duo's outstanding performance, and what a great example they are of bargain-basement space science. Especially when compared to the manned missions...

Home Sweet Home

Ah, I'm finally back home after that loooong (mostly business) trip. It feels so good to be back home with my wife and four-footed and feathered children. Aside from one scare (a wildfire a few miles away), nothing untoward happened at home in my absence. There were even a few very pleasant surprises: our pampas grass has erupted in bloom — many on each of our two plants, our red fountain grass (now that it's protected from rabbits by a fence) has exploded, and our citrus trees are all in great shape. Virtually all our plants are showing very healthy new growth due to the nice rains we had early this year. Our aleppo (Italian Stone) pines have an especially hearty new growth — about eighteen inches of "candlestick" on the most vigorous of them.

Expect some posting to resume immediately...

Tamm

"Tamm" is the Estonian word for an oak tree. It's pronounced almost like my name (Tom), but with an "ah" sound. There is a tradition in Estonia of preserving and naming the biggest trees of each major species, and also for large groves or unusual trees. My map of Estonia contains perhaps two hundred such marked trees, and all the ones I've visited so far (something like 30 or 40 of them) have signs or other markings, and usually some parking and a path to the tree or trees. I have no idea of the origins of this custom, and I have not yet ever found anyone else visiting the trees to ask. But I like it, and I've very much enjoyed finding and visiting various trees.

The tree at right above is called the Mäe-Lehtsoo Tamm, and it's located near the small lake (Punde) pictured at right, near the town of Urväste in south-central Estonia. If I understood the sign correctly, it is the second-largest oak in all of Estonia. The area around the tree had recently been cleared of brush, along with the hillside above it, giving a clear view of the entire tree. This was a nice presentation, but the tree itself looks like it's not in such good shape. There are many large broken branches, and much of the tree looks quite sickly.

This oak tree is the largest one in Estonia — a very famous oak called the Tamme-Lauri Oak. If you enlarge the picture of the sign at right, you can read all about it. A drawing of this particular oak adorns the Estonian ten-kroon note (Estonian currency is denominated in kroons until they adopt the Euro, scheduled in early 2006).

Click on any photo for a larger view.

Where in the world?

I'm leaving tomorrow morning (Thursday, 8/11) for an extended mostly-business trip, to Tallinn, Estonia and St. Petersburg, Russia. Blogging will be intermittent, and probably mainly on the weekends.

Those of you who know me also know that these are places that I have been visiting often (usually at least two or three times a year, sometimes more) since 1994 — Tallinn more often than St. Petersburg. I'll be spending a working week in each city, in my employer's software development facilities.

This coming weekend I'm going to spend a couple of days alone, sightseeing in southeastern Estonia near the towns of Võru and Rouge. With luck, the weather will be good and I'll even have a few photos to post.

The following weekend I'll be traveling by car from Tallinn to St. Petersburg, with two or three of my fellow workers. We'll be taking the long way, down through the same southeastern part of Estonia and then back up through a part of Russia that will be new to all of us.

Then after that second working week (in St. Petersburg), I'll be traveling back to the good old US of A — but not quite back to California. I'll be stopping in to see my folks for a few days, at their home in south-central New Jersey (yes, I'm related to someone who lives in New Jersey — get over it!). This will be both a for-fun visit and an "IT upgrade" visit — my mom's computer is badly in need of an upgrade, and I'm going to be hooking them up to a broadband Internet connection (via Comcast cable).

And then at at long last I'll be heading home. I'll be "boots on" to Jamul late on 8/31...

Mustard

Let me make one thing perfectly clear: I hate mustard. It's the worst weed in my home's environment, by far. There are two common species in my yard, so far as I can tell: black mustard (brassica nigra) and shortpod/mediterranean/hoary mustard (hirschfeldia incana). See this very useful mustard page, from which I shamelessly stole this photo. The photo at right shows both species growing side-by-side, with the h. incana in the foreground.

My mustard hatred is particularly keen at the moment, as I've just come back inside after battling the umpteen million plants in my yard. My current method is very hard work, but quite satisfying, as the mustard plants are mechanically chopped from the ground, pieces flying in all directions. I'm using the top-end Husqvarna weed-whacker, fitted with a three-toothed steel blade (that wimpy plastic cord doesn't work on mustard!). It's quite powerful, with (I believe) a 2.5 horsepower gasoline engine. What makes it hard work is that (a) you have to dig the rotating blade into the ground to get all the leaves chopped off (particularly for the h. incana plants), and (b) it's 90 degrees plus outside. Over the last two mornings, before it got too darned hot, I cleared about an acre and a half of these disgusting, hideous, obnoxious things.

That's the good news. The bad news is that past experience suggests to me that they'll be back, as strong as ever, within a week or two. The mechanical removal method — while satisfying — isn't really very practical, it seems. So this morning I set out to investigate herbicides.

And I discovered almost nothing in the way of advice on what kind of herbicide to use on mustard. I did find a few articles about "broad spectrum" versus "broadleaf" weed killers, but it's not 100% clear to me whether mustard is or is not considered a broadleaf. There was a lot of discussion about h. incana (in particular) and genetic modification; apparently it easily hybridizes with some crops (especialy rapeseed), creating the danger of spreading herbicide-resistance genes to the same species we're trying to control.

So...I'm off to Home Depot to see if they carry any herbicide that specifically targets mustards. I'm not particularly optimistic about this, as I'm beginning to believe that mustard is the one plant that's likely to survive anything up to and including a nuclear holocaust...

As usual, click the photo for a larger view.

APOD

APOD brings us...

Will it be curtains for one of these auroras? A quick inspection indicates that it is curtains for both, as the designation "curtains" well categorizes the type of aurora pattern pictured. Another (informal) type is the corona. The above auroras resulted from outbursts of ionic particles from the Sun during the last week of 2001 September. A polarity change in the solar magnetic field at the Earth then triggered auroras over the next few days. The picture was taken on 2001 October 3 as fleeting space radiation pelted the Earth's atmosphere high above the Yukon in Canada.

Click on the picture for a larger view.

Rescued!

Said Yelena Milashevsky, wife of the trapped Russian mini-sub AS28, about learning that the crew had been rescued safely:

My feelings danced. I was happy. I cried.

What she said.

The news is reporting that the Russians have been very gracious about thanking the international efforts that helped free the mini-sub from its entanglements — most especially, of course, to the British, as their Scorpio remote-controlled submersible was first on the scene and actually cut the cables. Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, who went to Kamchatka to supervise the operation, praised the international efforts. "We have seen in deeds, not in words, what the brotherhood of the sea means."

An altogether joyous ending for something that could have ended in much differently...