Emo Cow...

Emo Cow ... is photo of the day.  Debbie and I had no idea what the “Emo” was referring to, so we googled it.  I'll just say this about that: sometimes it's better not to exercise your right to search the Inter-tubes...

A delicate mix of quantum and classical...

A delicate mix of quantum and classical...  This is the answer to the riddle of photosynthesis' high efficiency – and just maybe a pathway to practical quantum computers.  I never thought I'd see botany and computational hardware in the same study!

Ok, the Internet is finished...

Ok, the Internet is finished...  Developers, you'd better find a new line of work.  The “Fluffington Post” is the last web site anyone will ever need...

Sometimes I want to resign from the human race...

Sometimes I want to resign from the human race ... because I don't want to be associated with its behaviors.  Someone – no suspect yet – shot and killed a horse pulling an Amish buggy near Lancaster, Pennsylvania.  What punishment would be sufficient for such a cruel and senseless act?

Arab welfare states...

Arab welfare states...  Strategy Page has a good summary of how Saudi Arabia and other Arab states have become utterly dependent on foreign workers to keep their countries running.  The confluence of oil wealth, dictatorships (sometimes, as in Saudi Arabia, falsely dressed as monarchies), and a population trained to believe themselves superior has put them in a position where the loss of oil revenues would likely lead to the implosion of their political systems – and there's no obvious solution in sight.

As I've frequently told a friend of mine who's interested in the Middle East: it's a far more complex situation over there than most Americans have any inkling of.  There are no easy answers to the awful tensions there – and there may not be any non-military answers, either...

Here's one place I'm never going to shop...

Here's one place I'm never going to shop...  KlearGear pulled off an epic Bozo maneuver: they “fined” a customer $3,500 for the sin of writing a bad review.  Never mind that the review was completely justified.  Never mind that we live in an age of social media wherein an act like this is practically guaranteed to go viral in a bad, bad way.  Never mind that even my dogs would know better.

They did it anyway.

Bye, bye, KlearGear.  I'm glad I never new ye...

Resonant plate meets salt...

Resonant plate meets salt...

Second life for the Kepler telescope...

Second life for the Kepler telescope...  Using the miniscule pressure of the sunlight on its solar panels.  Awesome!

Pater: The loan...

Pater: The loan...  The photo at right is from July, 2005, at Clear Lake in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado.  This was the first trip I'd been on with my dad where I could out-hike him, and that was quite a shock for me.  His age and chronic lymphatic leukemia had tremendously sapped his physicality, but not his spirit, not even in the slightest degree.  He was just as eager to see the trees, flowers, and scenery as he ever was – he just couldn't walk as far to do it.  We made very good use of our LandCruiser's offroad capability to help mitigate this – I was able to get my dad into all sorts of places that would ordinarily require a rugged hike, and he was really happy about that.  In the beginning of that trip, he was frequently expressing his amazement about where we could go in the LandCruiser.  By the end of the trip, he just assumed we could go anywhere at all :)

The loan...

This is a story I only know second-hand, and now the only two people who could elaborate on it are gone.  But I do know the essentials, though some details may be missing or wrong, and the story nicely illustrates another aspect of my dad's personality.  I'll relate it as I found out about it.

The first I found out about the loan was on a warm summer day when I was 11 or 12 years old – '63 give or take a year or two.  My dad had given me the job of cleaning up some brush and trash up on top of an old concrete truck loading apron.  I'd driven our tractor with a utility cart up there, and I was loading it up with junk – hot and sweaty work, and I wasn't happy about it.  I muttered some unkind and irritated things about my dad as I worked away.

Nearby, Julius Mate sat on a chair in front of the little cottage that he and his wife lived in, puffing away on his pipe, watching me intently.  Julius was a Hungarian immigrant whom my dad employed as general help on the nursery, mostly in our greenhouse.  He was, I'm guessing, about 60 years old at the time – short, thickset, weathered face, and always smelling of beer and tobacco.  He spoke English poorly, with a very thick accent.  We kids thought of him as a kind of odd, grumpy old man who never hesitated to holler at us if he didn't like what we were doing.  Sometimes we could understand what he was saying, sometimes not – but we had zero trouble understanding that he wasn't happy with us.

So I wasn't surprised that day when Julius wandered over to where I was working.  I expected him to start hollering at me, but instead, he beckoned me (he used a lot of non-verbal communications) to come over to where he'd been sitting.  He wanted me to sit down, because he wanted to talk with me.  Through the nearly impenetrable accent, I eventually figured out that he wanted to tell me a story.  What follows in italics is what I understood the story to be, but without the accent and hand-waving...

My dad hired Julius sometime before I was born, and (I believe) before he was married to my mom.  Julius was a refugee from then-Communist Hungary; he had been a member of the resistance in WWII, and was well-known as being anti-Communist, and was afraid for his life if he stayed in Hungary – so he left, but his wife and two sons stayed behind.  Eventually Julius made it to the U.S., and then found a job with my father, who valued his knowledge of greenhouse horticulture.  He was glad to be safe, glad to have a job, and thought of himself as being nearly in heaven, in America.

But always he dreamed of bringing his family here, to join him in this heaven on earth.  To fulfill this dream, he needed money – not only for the travel, but for bribing the Hungarian officials and border guards, for otherwise there was no hope of his family emigrating.  He also needed an American sponsor to sign a document promising to provide work, a place to live, and so on – to guarantee that the immigrant wouldn't become a burden to the community.  So Julius scrimped and saved, but knew it would be years before he could save enough money.  He thought my dad might be willing to be the sponsor, though, and he resolved to sound my dad out on that idea.  He figured my dad probably wouldn't mind, as he had already allowed Julius to live in (by Julius' standards) a fine house that his family could also live in.

One day, when he and my dad were working together in our greenhouse culling holly cuttings, Julius broached the subject with my dad.  This led to many questions, as my dad knew vaguely that Julius had a family in Hungary, but didn't know any of the details.  My dad asked where exactly they lived, what it would take to get them to the U.S., etc.  Then when Julius told my dad about the need to bribe officials, my dad's attitude changed – he was, apparently, quite angry that Julius' family might be kept in Hungary by such cruel people.  He then asked Julius how much money the bribes and travel would take?  Julius told him: about $800.

I don't know exactly when that conversation happened, but my best guess is 1949 or 1950 – after the war, after my dad was demobilized, but before he and my mom were married.  At that time, $800 would have been a great deal of money to my dad – probably close to a year's income – and even more to Julius...

What happened next just stunned Julius: my dad offered to lend him the $800, right then.  He also agreed to be his family's official sponsor.  Julius told my father than he didn't know when he could repay him, and he certainly had no assets to offer as security.  My dad told him – on this point Julius was adamant, and all choked up, near tears – that Julius' word was good enough for him, and that all my dad expected was to be paid when Julius could do so.  

This was the last thing Julius had expected, and he had no plans in place to get his family here, thinking it would be years and years before he could do so.  The next day, my dad went to the bank and got the money for Julius, and then Julius set things in motion.  He had a way to get letters and money secretly to relatives in Hungary, and they arranged the travel and the bribes to get his family out of the country, to Vienna, in Austria.  From there they traveled commercially to Philadelphia, where Julius met them and brought them home, to his cottage on our farm.  Julius' dream was fulfilled.

Julius related this story to me because he'd heard me saying something angry about my dad, and wanted me to know how wrong I was, and how good a man my father was.  Julius said he didn't know any man who would have done what my dad did for him.  I should respect and honor that, he told me.  My dad deserved no less.

Well, that was quite a story.  I believed him at the time; it didn't occur to me to question any of it then.  My anger and irritation had dissipated long before Julius finished his story, and I thought about his loan many times over the years.  It always gave me a warm feeling about my dad.  As I got older, though, a little doubt started to edge in.  Did I actually understand Julius correctly, or had I imagined parts of that story?  Or did Julius perhaps think I needed to hear a fable, even if it wasn't strictly that actually happened?

On one of our many trips together – this time, along the Big Sur coast to Monterey – I asked my dad about it.  He was quite taken aback to have that subject raised after so many years.  He was also a bit embarrassed to talk about it.  After all that time had passed, my dad couldn't remember all the details, but he verified the general outline of Julius' story: yes, he had lent Julius the money – a lot of money.  The money was used for both travel and bribes, and it worked: it got his family here.  It was done just on Julius' word that he'd repay it.  And yes, Julius had paid it all back.  And my dad was embarrassed that his generosity and trust had been discovered by his son.

Well, I've got some bad news for you, Pater: your son knows quite a few stories like that.  But this is one of the best ones...

ObamaCare debacle update...

ObamaCare debacle update...  Because we should be thankful for such debacles!

Doctors don't want ObamaCare patients.  More hassle, more paperwork, less money.  Who would have suspected doctors would look out for their own interests?

If you like your plan, you can keep it!  Well, not so much...

In shocking news, ObamaCare continues to flounder.

Five Republican predictions that turned out to be true.  Who'd a thunk that Republicans would ever get something right?

Positive stories about ObamaCare are so rare that ... when there are some, that simple fact is newsworthy!

“Periods of suboptimal performance”  Ace lays into the bureaucracy's multiple and manifest ineptitudes.  It's a target-rich environment...

“Epic failure”  Oregon healthcare exchange signs up zero people.  Oh, my – hard to go down from there.  But I'm confident they'll try!

Democrats fear that ObamaCare will cost them the Senate.  The schadenfreude runs deep in this one.  Just the thought of Harry Reid being relegated to the minority, or even not winning re-election, brings tears of joy to my eyes even now...

Insurers smell trouble with ObamaCare.  No, really?

Tippy's last leap...

Tippy's last leap...  Yesterday evening we decided that it was time to say goodby to our little Tippy, seen in these photos in happier days.  He was part of our life and our household since 1994, over 19 years – and we got him as a young adult, rescuing him from some abusive kids in our (then) Chula Vista neighborhood.

Tippy was a notable cat for several reasons.  Probably what we'll remember most is his remarkable ability to make vertical leaps – he was way better at this than any other cat we've ever owned.  We could frequently find him in the most unlikely places, like the tops of kitchen cabinets seven feet high, or on top of very high bookshelves.  Watching him make these leaps, we figured out that it wasn't so much that he had levitation superpowers – it was more that he was very skilled at finding the tiniest of paw-holds that would let him push higher and faster in mid-leap.  If you watched him make a leap, say, to the top of a kitchen cabinet, at first blush it looked like one fluid and seamless leap straight from the floor.  But if you watched him very carefully, you'd see that part way up he'd get a little boost by pushing down on a cabinet handle or a counter top.  The other cats just never figured out how to do this.

This ability suited Tippy's personality to a tee, because he really was the epitome of a curmudgeonly cat.  Most of the time, he really didn't care for the company of other cats or the dogs.  Being alone was what he wanted, and his ability to get to perches the other cats couldn't reach was his means to that end.  Every once in a while Tippy would come out and socialize, or even play – but those were rare occasions.

Tippy had another unique skill, too: he was really good at getting into drawers, especially those that he knew were filled with something soft and fuzzy – clothes or towels, for example.  He'd dangle himself from the drawer he wanted to get into (with his front paws), then kick with his hind feet to pull it out.  All he needed was a few inches of opening, then he'd hop in, curl up, and go to sleep.  We had to be careful when we saw partially-opened drawers – if we shut them, we might be trapping him inside.  Sometimes he'd be far back inside the drawer, too, so we had to search thoroughly.  Sometimes it would be subtler – he'd pull out one drawer, then go in through it, climb over the back of it and down into the next drawer below!

With us, his fully-owned humans, things were different – especially when he was younger.  He was then a serious “lap kitty”, and would stay with us for hours on end.  I spent many an hour working in my office with Tippy perched on my lap, purring softly... 

For the past couple of months he's been in decline from a combination of just plain old age and pancreatitis.  We fed him “chicken smoothies” (roast chicken blended with chicken broth), made sure he wasn't in pain, and showered him with attention and affection.  In the past five weeks that Debbie's been gone, caring for Tippy has been a big part of my days.  Making his smoothies, keeping him and his pen clean, administering his medications, giving him sub-cutaneous fluids, and just giving him some attention and affection occupied several hours daily.  He and I were a team.  Then in the last few days, other organs started to fail, he caught a cold, and stopped eating.  Dr. Christine Wilson, our wonderful Jamul veterinarian, kept us well-informed about the options, his condition, and prognosis.  Yesterday afternoon it became clear that no miracles were going to occur, and our first priority was no suffering for Tippy – so we decided it was time.  Debbie couldn't be here, as she's back in Indiana taking care of her mom.  I stayed with him, held his head and caressed him as he went peacefully.

It's so hard to make these decisions, even with a great vet like Dr. C. to guide us ... but I am very grateful that we have the option to allow our pets a painless end that is as comfortable as such a thing could possibly be.

I buried Tippy this morning, out under the pine trees with the other cats we've lost over the years.  It was sad and a bit lonely, but in a strange way, a cathartic ritual...

Persian ponders...

Persian ponders...  I'm not liking the looks of this...

Ted Cruz: Historic Mistake.

Reason has a brief analysis.

Will Israel and Saudi Arabia become allies?  Maybe.  It's especially interesting that the Saudis have not responded at all to the rampant rumors of their cooperation with Israel...

Worse than Munich.  Bret Stephens in a good piece in today's Wall Street Journal.  The lede:

Never in the field of global diplomacy has so much been given away by so many for so little.

ObamaCare debacle update...

ObamaCare debacle update...  Because, schadenfreude!

Virginia cancer patient loses her coverage because of ObamaCare.

A cheat sheet for the ObamaCare hearings.  Pro Publica has a good roundup...

The Great Destroyer.

Covered California bogusness.  James Taranto is singing the same song...

Democrats set to turn on Obama if healthcare.gov isn't ready next week.  Oh, I'd better stock up on popcorn!

Man, the number of ObamaCare losers really seems to be piling up, doesn't it?  So says the Chicago Tribune, aka That One's home town newspaper.

ObamaCare is no Starship Enterprise.  Megan McArdle, with this bonus passage:

Tech people tend to regard their end-users as a sort of intermediate form of life between chimps and information-technology staffers: They’ve stopped throwing around their feces, but they can’t really be said to know how to use tools. 

Megan is a geekly treasure.

The next ObamaCare mirage.  The cost curve going to bend, all right.  But the wrong way...

Geek humor: the etymology of “foo”...

Geek humor: the etymology of “foo”...  RFC 3092 - seriously!

Voting with his feet...

Voting with his feet...  This guy left the U.S. to avoid onerous taxes.  The same thing is happening more frequently on a state level – I know at least a half dozen people who have left California who cited taxes as one of the reasons (not always the main reason, though).  We're joining them soon, and high taxes (along with other political insanities) are what's motivating us...

Bureaucracy running amok alert!

Bureaucracy running amok alert!  GM is recalling almost 20,000 Camaros because a sticker might peel.  Seriously.  Diane Katz says that “regulators should come with a warning label” – she's right!

Pater: Where there's a will, there's a way...

Pater: Where there's a will, there's a way...  The terrible photo at right is of my dad in our cabin in Chester, California on our trip to Lassen National Park in 2007.  Family and friends won't be surprised when I tell them it wasn't particularly cold that day – my dad liked his rooms hot.  This is in June, and he's under a good blanket, has a jacket and thermal underwear on, and a hot oak fire is roaring.  I was in the kitchen of our cabin with the door wide open to avoid terminal overheating :)

The print shop...

In the early '60s, my dad was trying to get his mail-order plant business going.  As anyone who has run a business can tell you, there are a lot of “moving parts” to any business, and this one was no exception.  One particular challenge my dad had was marketing: how to let people know what plants he had, how to order them, etc.  He ran ads in some magazines, and the nursery showed in the Philadelphia Flower Show (that was an exciting event for a kid to behind the scenes of!).  When inquiries came in from these sources, my dad wanted to have a catalog and some booklets about the plants to send in response – the sort of bog-standard direct mail campaign any business might run, but with some class and personal touches.

That sounds straightforward, and it probably would be so today.  But back then, short-run printing was quite expensive.  The costs through a printer for what my dad wanted to do were prohibitive.  Now, if you knew my dad, you wouldn't be surprised at what happened next – is this was just the sort of thing to get his dander up.  He had a darned good idea of what paper cost, and how much could a little ink and some staples cost?  If he couldn't get the printer to do the job for a reasonable price, why, then, he'd just do it himself!

When he started this project, my dad knew next to nothing about printing – but he did know some people connected to the business.  He spent some evenings studying up on the process of printing, and quickly concluded that he needed offset printing capability (the most common commercial printing technology) to do what he needed to do: one and two color materials, with black-and-white photos.  He bought a text book on offset printing, and read it cover-to-cover.  He found sources for getting offset printing aluminum “plates” made, and for ink and paper.  Finally, he figured out that he needed a few machines: an offset printing press, a folding frame, and a long-arm stapler.

Somewhere he found a used Multilith 1250 offset press for sale at a good price.  The photo at right isn't the one he bought, but it could be its twin.  I spent many, many hours operating and cleaning that machine – seeing this photo instantly brought back its sounds and smells.  The big roller on the left holds the printing plate; the other rollers spread the ink and water evenly (both are used in the printing process) over the plate.  Blank paper is loaded on the chute on the right, and put in position with that big crank.  The hoses you see are vacuum hoses for the paper handling system; they made a distinctive sound when the machine was running.

The press was installed in our basement, in the area my dad used as his office.  He also bought a folding frame (a simple machine that let you manually fold many sheets of paper exactly the same way, one at a time, while making very sharp creases) and a manual long-arm stapler (for stapling multiple pages of a catalog together).  He taught himself how to operate the press, often with me watching, as I was fascinated by this new and (to me, anyway) awesomely complicated and sophisticated piece of machinery.  There were so many ways that printing could go wrong!  Not enough ink, too much ink, second color not “registered” correctly with the first color, skewed printing, paper jams, and on and on.  Each time my dad first encountered one of these problems, he'd figure out how to fix it, keeping notes in a little black notebook.  After a while, these accumulated into a sort of home-grown “Printing for Dummies” kind of book, one that came in very handy for the next step: teaching me how to run that press!  My dad had noted my interest, and I'm sure he was quite happy to let someone else do that work :)

On the printing my dad was a perfectionist.  If a run didn't come out just right, it got thrown away and done over.  Often – probably most often – the problem required tearing down and cleaning the press.  All those rollers had to come off and be cleaned thoroughly with solvent.  Paper dust had to be cleaned out of every nook and cranny of the press, which conveniently came apart rather easily.  Then we'd put it all back together, do some trial runs, and then try again.

The mail-order business didn't last all that long.  By the late '60s our nursery was morphing into a different kind of business, and we didn't do any more mail order.  Somewhere along the line the printing press and other equipment were no longer needed and they disappeared; I don't recall what happened to it all.

The entire episode with the printing press nicely illustrates a facet of my dad's personality: his stubborn refusal to let the world stop him from doing something he set his mind to do.  I'm actually not sure whether it was a good business decision for him to buy the printing press – I don't know what it cost, all in, compared to having a printer do it.  Nor do I know if there was actually a return (in orders) on his investment of money and time.  But I do know this: my dad decided that he needed catalogs and booklets, and he wasn't going to let the expense of them stop him from having them.  No matter what it took, he was going to figure out how to get the kind of printed material he wanted to have.  He'd find a way to do it that he could afford – even if he had to learn a new craft, and invest entire winters, to do it.

That's a valuable lesson for any kid.  In my later ventures, perhaps you won't be surprised that I often remembered and reflected upon my dad and his printing.  In fact, I did more than just remember it: I actually did precisely the same thing, in a business I had in the '80s that sold practice management software to optometrists, we bought an offset press and associated equipment for exactly the same reasons my father did.  Recently I was privately quite amused when my youngest brother (Mark), in his business, did exactly the same thing yet again, albeit on a much larger scale: in his business, they built an entire printing “factory” in Phoenix.   Mark was just an infant when my dad had the printing press, so I'm sure he never even knew about it.  Maybe printing is in our genes...

Coin-operated symphony...

Coin-operated symphony...  A Beethoven flash mob.  Kids dancing.  People singing along with the chorus.  Awesome!  Full screen this one, folks...

Pater: American Conifer Society...

Pater: American Conifer Society...  My dad was a founding member of the American Conifer Society.  Today they posted a remembrance of him.  You may recognize bits and pieces of this...

Iran deal...

Iran deal...  I'm not entirely sure what to think about this deal, though I'm inclined to think that it's a really bad idea.  With That One leading the Brigade of Bozos, I'm automatically suspicious – all the more so when I read it's his personal initiative and that he personally signed off on the final terms.  A strong argument against any weak deal like this, in my book, is the effectiveness of the Iran sanctions – by all accounts, they were squeezing the Mad Mullahs very hard.  Some observers are talking of this in apocalyptic terms, and they make some good points.  Israel, in particular, is hung out to dry on this – and I think it's telling that they weren't involved in the negotiations, and that they vehemently object.  On the other hand, reading the Joint Plan of Action, I see that (unsurprisingly) some of the objections appear to be overblown and overstated.  If the P5+1 actually designs and executes an effective verification regime, there's some hope of pulling a peaceful solution out of the hat.  That's a mighty big if, though, given the long list of self-absorbed players, some of whom bear a distinct resemblance to Neville Chamberlain.  So I'm reading and learning before I reach a final conclusion.  Here are some of the things I've been reading:

Israelis inspect potential forward bases in Saudi Arabia.  Zowies!

Inside the deal.

The text of the Joint Plan of Action.

Our new ally Iran, and our new enemy, Israel.

At least Syria is happy.  Ace says: well, isn't that precious...

Arab states mostly silent.  These countries, in general, are terrified of the idea that Iran might get nuclear weapons.  With very good reason.

Iran's nuclear triumph.  The Wall Street Journal's editorial board is not with That One on this one.

A bad agreement likely to get worse.  How's that for optimism?

Speaking to a nearly empty room.  That One addresses the Iranian deal.

Obama faces skeptics in Congress.  Well, not just in Congress...

Iran pact faces stiff opposition from Congress.  Since when does that count for anything?

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei claims victory for nuclear program.  Well, of course he does.  He's a politician!  But maybe he's right...