If Babbage HAD built his “Difference Engine”

Here’s a funny comics-version, from 2D goggles. Actually it is about mathematician Ada Byron Lovelace (1815 – 1852), but we all know that women never get top billing!

The comic was made for “Ada Lovelace Day”, to promote a film (to be offered to local stations by PBS) about this remarkable woman, and the film-makers need our help:

letters of support from people who have been influenced in some way by Ada and who are willing to help publicise the film, be a part of the interactive website, perhaps show the film, or contribute in any other way.

Rosemarie says, “I need letters from people stating how important a film like Ada is and how they through their networks can help to publicize the film. It would be great if the women have organizations they work or belong to. If they are software developers or computer experts, this would be great. It would be best if they were Americans, as the NSF (National Science Foundation) is American.”

If you’re not American, letters would still be useful of course! The deadline is the end of October.

Please write to:

Rosemarie Reed
On the Road Productions International, Inc.
310 Greenwich Street, 21F
New York, NY 10013
Or email Rosemarie directly, rreed40148@aol.com.

After some thought, I decided to write a letter based on my experiences giving books to kids at the food pantry, and the unabated gender gap I see in kids’ interest in science and math. Sure, the older kids are computer users, but computers are fun personal devices; they still display an aversion to math and science, especially the non-biological sciences. A few boys get drawn in by technology, but I don’t see it in girls. [I have a small sample size, I admit, and it is a rural area.]

Who was Ada Lovelace?

Ada Byron Lovelace was the daughter of Lord Byron (his only legitimate child); she married a nobleman, and was part of the social whirl of that class, dancing and entertaining. [Photo below from Wikipedia]

Wikipedia tells us that

During a nine-month period in 1842-43, Lovelace translated Italian mathematician Luigi Menabrea’s memoir on Babbage’s newest proposed machine, the Analytical Engine. With the article, she appended a set of notes. The notes are longer than the memoir itself and include (Section G), in complete detail, a method for calculating a sequence of Bernoulli numbers with the Engine, which would have run correctly had the Analytical Engine ever been built. Based on this work, Lovelace is now widely credited with being the first computer programmer and her method is recognised as the world’s first computer program.
However, biographers debate the extent of her original contributions. Dorothy Stein, author of Ada: A Life and a Legacy, contends that the programs were mostly written by Babbage himself. Babbage wrote the following on the subject, in his Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (1846):

I then suggested that she add some notes to Menabrea’s memoir, an idea which was immediately adopted. We discussed together the various illustrations that might be introduced: I suggested several but the selection was entirely her own. So also was the algebraic working out of the different problems, except, indeed, that relating to the numbers of Bernoulli, which I had offered to do to save Lady Lovelace the trouble. This she sent back to me for an amendment, having detected a grave mistake which I had made in the process.

The level of impact of Lovelace on Babbage’s engines is difficult to resolve due to Babbage’s tendency not to acknowledge (either orally or in writing) the influence of other people in his work. However, Lovelace was certainly one of the few people who fully understood Babbage’s ideas and created a program for the Analytical Engine, indeed there are numerous clues that she might also have suggested the usage of punched cards for Babbage’s second machine since her notes in Menabrea’s memoir suggest she deeply understood the Jaquard’s Loom as well as the Analytical Engine. Her prose also acknowledged some possibilities of the machine which Babbage never published, such as speculation that “the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent”.

The Difference Engine becomes reality after 150 years

Babbage never built his mechanical computer, but the London Science Museum did make a working version. It was finished in 1991 for the 200th anniversary of Babbage’s birth.

A view of “some of the number wheels and the sector gears between columns”

Difference Engine model photos source.

Ada Lovelace, “The Right Honourable the Countess of Lovelace”, gave birth to three children (the firstborn was named Byron), and died at 37 of uterine cancer and being bled by her doctors.

Let’s support that film, with letters or emails to demonstrate demand for stations to show it! Here’s the email again, rreed40148@aol.com.

More about girls being turned off to math and science

Feminist Chemists cites a 2008 study by the American Mathematical Society:

In elementary school, girls do as well as or better in math than boys. In middle school, girls with an inclination for math begin to lose interest and fall behind, mostly due to peer pressure and societal expectations. Throughout middle and high school, social stigma and lack of appropriately challenging educational opportunities for the mathematically precocious becomes a hard reality in most American schools. Consequently, gifted girls, even more so than boys, often camouflage their mathematical talent to fit in well with their peers.

A study published in June by the National Academy of Sciences found

“It’s not an innate difference in math ability between males and females,” says Janet Mertz, a UW-Madison professor of oncology and one of the authors of the article that analyzes and summarizes recent data on math performance at all levels in the United States and internationally. “There are countries where the gender disparity in math performance doesn’t exist at either the average or gifted level. These tend to be the same countries that have the greatest gender equality.”

Gender bias and expectations are not the only thing we have to worry about. It’s not just girls––boys are losing interest too, according to the AMS research:

”The U.S. culture that is discouraging girls is also discouraging boys,” says Janet Mertz, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of oncology and the senior author of the study. “The situation is becoming urgent. The data show that a majority of the top young mathematicians in this country were not born here.”

[NOTE: While Janet Mertz was one of the authors on each study, the PNAS and AMS studies are two different projects. The latter, published Oct. 10 in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society, was a comprehensive analysis of decades of data on students identified as having profound ability in math (Science News Oct. 13, 2008). The other study was published June 1, 2009 in the Proceedings of the National Academy. It looked at US and international data on students of all levels of ability, to answer three key questions: "Do gender differences in math performance exist in the general population? Do gender differences exist among the mathematically talented? Do females exist who possess profound mathematical talent? The answers, according to the Wisconsin researchers, are no, no and yes." (Science News June 2, 2009).

You may remember the remarks of Lawrence Summers in 2005 (he was then President of Harvard, and is now an economic adviser to President Obama), to the effect that innate differences between men and women might be one reason fewer women succeed in science and math careers. These two studies would support the conclusion that if innate differences do influence women's lack of success in these fields, the differences are not in mathematical ability. Maybe we should look at “innate differences” in aggressiveness and willingness to withstand unduly competitive or even hostile treatment from colleagues and superiors. Or at insecurity and discomfort, innate or not, which arise in male academics and administrators when females display ability, competence, and promise. A few decades ago women rarely appeared in symphony orchestras unless they played the harp; auditions behind screens changed that! Did our musical ability transform itself overnight? Probably not. ]

[Photo from another good article on the AMS study]

Send an email for Ada and our kids, and consider how you yourself might interact with kids about math and science. Take a trip to the Science Museum if you are fortunate enough to live near one, read a book together, in general don’t act as if math and science are boring geek fare. Even if a lot of it is beyond you, as higher math seems to be beyond me, that doesn’t have to be true for the kids you know. Since I was in college, math has become much more important in biological sciences, ecology, even social sciences like history, so if I were a history major today I would probably need to take at least an introductory statistics class.

We all need to model a respect and interest for learning, to the kids around us. Kids start out as voracious learners: have you tried to learn another language lately? Hard, right? Babies do it, and young kids pick up second languages easily. They’re always learning, not just skills and processes but attitudes too, so let’s not convey bad attitudes about learning, reading, thinking!

Threshing grain at the historic farm

Here’s the old-style threshing of the grain at Hanley Historic Farm, Oregon; the beautiful golden “stooks” of gathered and bundled grain stalks appeared in an earlier post.

These stooks of hand-cut wheat, composed of bundles each tied with a stalk of wheat, sat out for weeks drying, and waiting for the Harvest Day Event on September 4, when the draft horse enthusiasts and old ag machinery collectors would join forces.

First the big placid draft horses made their way down the field, stopping to let workers with hay-rakes pitch (that’s “pitch” as in “pitchfork”) the stooks up onto the wagon, seen in the first picture. Once the wagon’s full, it heads back to the “home” end of the field.

There, the old threshing machine awaits, attended by half a dozen or more other people who will fork the grain from the wagon onto a moving belt.

But first, line up the wagon next to the working area.

Then the horses are unhitched and led away; I thought perhaps this particular team did not like the noise of the machine, which was considerable. In 1900 or whenever this machine was made, a farmer’s team would probably be accustomed to the machine after a couple of acres had been worked, and would wait–––or two wagons could be used, hitching the team to an empty wagon to continue collecting the grain while the full wagon was threshed.

The entire machine is long, with belt-driven parts to move the unthreshed grain into the whirling blades that knock the grain off the stalks. The next step separates grain from chopped straw or chaff.

It may be a machine, but it is fed one fork of grain at a time.

Streams of grain and chaff are blown through long pipes: the chaff into a pile, the grain into heavy cloth bags.

As on every farm in the history of the world, there’s work for kids old enough to know the routine.

The filled bags are hand-sewn shut.

Once these threshing machines came into use, horses provided the power for only some of the work. The thresher itself ran from a steam, or later gasoline, engine powering the main belt. This day, a more modern machine was used for the Power Take-Off (PTO) to the thresher.

Here you can see the power belt, and the chopping teeth that actually do the threshing.

Although the chaff is just being blown onto a pile in the background here, it is not a waste material, but would be used for bedding in stalls during the winter. Mucked-out straw would be used for fertilizing fields or maybe the kitchen garden area. These days, commercially produced wheat straw is used for decorative interior panels, making ethanol, soil amendment, animal feed (treated with urea, and with nutrients added, yuk), paper, and packaging. Many new uses are being examined. And of course, it’s still good for animal bedding.

Our view of early machine threshing on this day didn’t show what hard work it would have been, when many acres of grain had to be gotten in before the weather changed, when teams of horses brought a continuous supply of grain to the people feeding it to the machine, and the labor of bending to sew bags and then tote them away never stopped. But, unlike a lot of physical work in the industrial age, it was not what you did 50 weeks a year. There’s a pride in getting it done

and those too young to take part look on, eager to be old enough.

And when the belt stops moving, the old hands find a spot in the shade.

Stooks and sheaves at an historic farm

At Hanley Historic Farm near Jacksonville, Oregon, we came upon a wheatfield that had been cut and stacked, and it was a beautiful sight.

These aren’t just bunches of cut wheat tossed up into heaps like our idea of a haystack; they’re carefully constructed of sheaves, or bundles,

and each sheaf is self-tied with wheatstraw.

This takes us back a hundred and fifty years or so: before mechanical harvesters and threshers, grain was cut with scythes, made into stacks in the field to dry, heaved up onto wagons with pitchforks, and then threshed and winnowed to separate the wheat (or barley or oats or millet) from the chaff and straw. Hot, dusty, backbreaking work.

Winslow Homer (1836-1910), The Veteran in a New Field, 1865 (source)

(source; artist unknown.)

Think about cutting acres of wheat this way, stopping every 20 minutes or so to sharpen the scythe blade which had to be razor sharp so that the cut wheat would fall neatly.

Heinrich Bürkel (1802-1869), Loading The Hay-Wagon [and hurrying to beat that rainstorm!] (cropped for this use; entire painting here)

I’m curious how this wheat will be threshed and winnowed. Historic methods for threshing included having oxen walk round in circles stepping on the grain to break it (mentioned in the Bible: “You shall not muzzle an ox while it treads out the grain” Deuteronomy 25:4) and using a flail,

Source

I’ll see what I can find out from the farm, which is run by the Southern Oregon Historical Society.

An early warning system for health threats: the invaluable work of ProMED

ProMED Mail is one of the most important information resources on the net, and most of us have never heard of it. It’s an email list which describes itself as a “global electronic reporting system for outbreaks of infectious diseases and acute exposures to toxins that affect human health, including those in animals and in plants grown for food or animal feed”.

Unlike the official clearinghouses run by WHO and CDC, ProMED is, in its own words, “open to all sources” and its reports are freely available to us all. ProMED was first to raise concern about the aggressive respiratory disease spreading in China in 2003, which became known as SARS. Before the Chinese authorities had permitted their officials to report the disease to WHO, Catherine Strommen, an elementary school teacher in Fremont, California, spotted a post in an international teachers’ chat room from a concerned teacher in China describing “an illness that started like a cold, but killed its victims in days”.

Alarmed, Strommen emailed an old neighbor and friend, Stephen Cunnion, M.D., a retired Navy physician and epidemiologist who now lived in Maryland. A practical, no-nonsense man, Cunnion started searching the web. With no success, he tried a new tack—sending an email to ProMED-mail, a global electronic reporting system for outbreaks of emerging infections and toxins. After quoting Strommen’s missive, he asked: “Does anyone know anything about this problem?”

The tiny ProMED staff conducted its own web search. It, too, came up empty-handed. On February 10, it sent out to tens of thousands of subscribers a posting headed: “PNEUMONIA – CHINA (GUANGDONG): RFI,” or Request for Information.

Thus did the world first learn of SARS, the new and deadly infection that would kill 774 people and infect 8,000 in 27 countries.

From an article by Madeline Drexler in The Journal of Life Sciences.

H1N1 Reports (Swine-avian-human Influenza A)

To keep up on H1N1 flu [I agree with the pig farmers, “swine flu” sounds like your big risk is getting it from pigs and pork, not human sneezes and handshakes] check the ProMED main page. While all the media is now frothing over with “news” about this disease, some of it sounds as reliable as alien abduction accounts. ProMED is timely and scientifically accurate but understandable by non-biologists. It includes valuable, and interesting, commentary on reports and questions: “this has been reported, but here’s what we don’t know, or here are local factors that must be considered in evaluating it”.

What ProMED does

ProMED is a program of the International Society for Infectious Diseases which began in 1994. It does not simply print whatever comes in—this is an extremely well-moderated list. A group of specialists checks and filters the reports, seeks more information from local sources and other experts, and provides judicious commentary. This group also “scans newspapers, the internet, health department and government alerts, and other information sources for inklings that an infectious disease, perhaps not yet reported widely, is threatening animal, plant and/or human health.”

I think I first signed up to receive the digests back when “mad cow disease” was emerging, and have since used ProMED to follow diseases such as anthrax and Ebola.
A topic of interest to me recently concerns outbreaks of measles and mumps in Western nations due to falling rates of vaccination. And as a former zookeeper I keep up on diseases of wildlife and zoo animals, including the fungal disease threatening whole populations of wild bats in the Eastern US. ProMED also covers plant diseases (mostly of crops).

All of this, infectious diseases of humans, wildlife, and crops, is of greatly increased urgency because climate change, global transport, and destruction of wild areas all lead to the spread of familiar diseases to new locales and the emergence of “new” diseases previously only found in remote wild areas. With regard to contaminants and toxins, governments are unable to deal with this effectively due to the political power of corporations and lack f oversight in producing countries. ProMED can’t make your food and furniture non-toxic, but it can sound alarms that might otherwise be silenced.References to a topic’s prior appearances on the list are attached to current reports, and archives are easy to access. Editions in French, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish are now available.

“Each posting is limited to 25 KB bandwidth—to ensure that it slips through an old-fashioned dial-up modem in the most remote areas of the world (where new infectious threats tend to smolder). ‘We use technology that was state-of-the-art in 1994. We use email—plain-text email at that. We don’t use fancy fonts,’ Madoff says. ‘The power of the Internet is its ubiquity and speed; it’s not necessarily in all the neat things you can do.’ [from Drexler's article cited above]

You can subscribe here.

Toxins and contaminants

ProMED also collects, evaluates, and disseminates reports of health problems related to toxins and contamination of food and medicines. These can be quite unusual. For example, the case of the toxic leather sofas in Britain:

Photo: Effect on leg of reaction to toxic chemical contained in sofas. From BBC.

A judge [in the UK] is expected to order several retailers to pay millions of
pounds to people who suffered burns and rashes from faulty leather
sofas….

More than 1600 people claim to have been affected by the problem. Tens
of thousands more people could have burns not yet traced to sofas.
The High Street stores, along with 11 others, may have to pay more
than 10 million pounds [USD 14.3 million] in compensation and legal
costs, the shoppers’ lawyers say. They claim that makes it “the
largest group compensation claim ever seen in British Courts.”

The sofas, which were manufactured in China, were packed with sachets
of an anti-mould chemical called dimethyl fumarate to stop them from
going moldy during storage in humid conditions.

Commonly known as DMF, the toxic, fine white powder has been used by
some manufacturers to protect leather goods like furniture and shoes
from mold. Even very small amounts can be harmful.

One sofa customer, who is well aware of the health problems caused by
her purchase, is a customer who bought a leather sofa suite from
Argos in April 2007. Almost a year later, she started to notice a
rash developing on her arms and legs. After a few weeks, her skin
started flaking off. She says the irritation was so bad, she was off
work for 2 months. This customer was seen by more than a dozen
doctors, who couldn’t work out what was causing the rash.

She said: “It was very, very painful; I couldn’t sleep at night; I
couldn’t walk about; I couldn’t drive; every time I did walk about,
the skin would fall off, and I would leave a trail of it, therefore,
I couldn’t go to work.”

Reliable histories of outbreaks/events

ProMED doesn’t just present breaking news and requests for additional reports; it frequently publishes very useful summaries of what’s been learned, and what action governmental agencies have taken. For example, “Melamine contaminated food products – Worldwide ex China” and “Prion disease Update 2009 (01)” (Mad Cow Disease and its human infectious disease, the fatal “variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease”.

Supporting ProMED

Believe it or not, ProMED is supported by individuals, with not a penny of funding from any government. That means they are independent (remember the movie Jaws, where the city council wants to suppress news of the shark attacks?) and fast to react. They sift a lot of news from all sorts of sources, put out calls for more information, and disseminate news in a responsible way.

If the work of this group seems like something you’d like to support, here’s your chance. They’re having a brief Spring fundraising campaign. To quote their email,

Your gift funds quick information every day – The economical, low-tech computer programs we use enable us to speed ProMED to your mailboxes, to post it online where anyone can find it, , and to provide the administrative services (accounting, office space, cell phone connections, etc.) required to support a small, agile worldwide enterprise.

ProMED-mail reaches over 50,000 public health officials, students, journalists, agricultural specialists, infectious disease professionals and others around the globe. Because it is free, subscribers in more than 187 countries have an equal opportunity to know when a disease outbreak occurs — and can spring into action when necessary to prevent or minimize its spread.

If the Spring campaign is past, here’s the main donations page.

“Sweat of the brow” copyright

As a person who enjoys the digitized reproductions, on the web, of old illustrations, I found this interesting reading:

Gutenberg: No Sweat of the Brow Copyright

From Project Gutenberg, the first producer of free electronic books (ebooks).

Work performed on a public domain item, known as sweat of the brow, does not result in a new copyright. This is the judgment of Project Gutenberg’s copyright lawyers, and is founded in a study of case law in the United States. This is founded in the notion of authorship, which is a prerequisite for a new copyright. Non-authorship activities do not create a new copyright.

Some organizations erroneously claim a new copyright when they add value to a public domain item, such as to an old printed book. But despite the difficulty of the work involved, none of these activities result in new copyright protection when performed on a public domain item:

▪ scanning and optical character recognition (OCR)

▪ proofreading and OCR error correction

▪ fixing spelling and typography, including substantial updates to spelling such as changing from American to British English

▪ adding markup (HTML, XML, TeX, etc.)

▪ digitizing, cropping, color-adjusting or other modifications to images

▪ addition of trivial new content, such as images to indicate page breaks in an HTML file, or pictures of gothic letters for the first letter in a chapter, or adding or removing a few words per chapter

▪ substantial reorganization, such as moving footnotes to end-notes, or changing the locations of pictures within the text

▪ recoding to new character sets, such as Unicode, or new formats, such as PDF

There is some value-added content that DOES get a new copyright, but only for the actual new work (that is, it may be possible to remove the new copyrighted content to go back to a public domain document):

▪ translation into another human language

▪ creating a new compilation of existing materials (though the individual items compiled retain their public domain status)

▪ creating new original art work

▪ creating an original derivative work, such as an audio performance, a new chapter, or a set of favorite quotations

▪ adding a new introduction or critical essay

Project Gutenberg is able to utilize any material which is judged to be public domain in the country of use (i.e., the United States). If it is determined that components of an item are public domain, but others are not, then the copyrighted components may be removed without the permission of whoever owns the copyright for the new content.
It is Project Gutenberg’s practice to seek permission of those who distribute materials, including copyright claimants, before harvesting their materials. This is done in order to be polite, and to allow the producer or distributor to request a particular credit be used. But if permission is not given, public domain items can still be used by Project Gutenberg, typically without any attribution. Because Project Gutenberg receives submissions from many different sources, it is not always clear where an item came from. Volunteers who submit content they did not themselves generate should be diligent about reporting sources, even if the source will not be credited in the item as distributed by Project Gutenberg.

Country roads, country people

I was driving home the other night, down our rural road, in the lull between those who go right home after work in town, and those who stop at the tavern; it was moonless, very dark, and there was no traffic. Nonetheless, there are still deer who suddenly appear in the road, so I keep my speed down. Tonight I was to be reminded that there are dumber mammals on the road than deer.

I came around a long curve with a short straightaway ahead before a narrow bridge and another curve. All was darkness. Suddenly I thought I saw a tiny flash of white light––not headlights by any means, just a small quick chip of light like a shard of glass well above ground level. I began to brake and then, as my headlights lit up the straightaway, I saw people in the left lane, and something big and white completely occupying my lane and very close. More pressure on the brakes, thankful for the anti-lock brakes on our new used car, huge white wall ahead closer with people to the left of it, nowhere to go, brake harder, harder. Stop. Two feet max between me and a big old RV parked in my lane.

Three men are in the left lane with flashlights on now, though not all of them could have been on and none pointed up the road when I came around the curve. Even now they are milling about, talking, not pointing the flashlights so as to warn oncoming traffic in either direction.

One walks over to me. I put the hazard lights on, open the car door, and say angrily “You got flares?” I assumed this event, whatever it was, had just happened, no flares out yet, and I carry flares.

“Oh,” says the guy, “uh, I just picked them up, we’ve got it fixed.” Right, I believe you had flares out.

“Then why isn’t it running and showing some lights?”

“The battery was dead, we had to jump it.”

“Why isn’t it running then?”

He turns to a middle-aged woman standing passively near the motor home and tells her to start it up. She doesn’t move, so he tells her again. The other men with flashlights still are not warning traffic. A car rounds the bend behind me, sees my hazard lights, slows down quickly. It occurs to me that I may be the only functioning adult present, though all these people are over 30, and rather than driving on, I get in and back up a few feet so as not to be smashed into the RV if a chain reaction rear-end collision occurs.

The RV starts up. It has only one brake light working and the tail lights are dim. I get out and inform them of this. Throughout the entire time I am there, none of these people seems at all concerned about the danger of this situation. My car could have fishtailed in a panic stop, flailed into the other lane and taken out all three of the guys there. Two cars or trucks could have arrived at once, one around each bend, and been unable to stop safely. These people aren’t just unconcerned, they are unengaged. If they were deer they’d be long dead.

Eventually the RV sputters off, and one of the helper vehicles actually follows it, perhaps to compensate for its inadequate tail lights. I drive off too, keeping my distance, until I turn off and they continue on, perhaps to one of the two very low-end trailer parks a few miles up the road.

I’ve grown to realize, in the 12 years we’ve lived out here, that there are many folks in this area who are not only marginal economically, but mentally and empathetically as well. For them such events as this are the stuff of stories to be told over beer or while fueling the chainsaw or leaning on the fence, along with stories about arrests, fights, narrow scrapes with the law, somebody who totaled their car missing a curve. Even when injury is involved there’s no awareness of consequences or responsibility. A neighbor’s son wrecked three trucks within 2 years; two were single-car accidents but in one he rear-ended someone in town and crippled a woman. No sweat, just something that happened. Alcohol and meth were involved, but to accept that as an explanation is a cop-out. The question to be asked has to do with why, with boredom, and lack of education, and lack of parenting skills. The young man in question now has two children with a young woman from whom he is now separated (both were meth users) and our neighbor’s wife, who finally left her husband because of his irresponsibility and “anger problems” is now raising the children. She has been gathered unto Jesus, acquiring an instant pattern for life, support group, and promise that the next life will be better than this one. But it would have been much better if she had been able to leave earlier before her two sons followed their father’s pattern.

In a positive development relative to this, a representative from the women’s shelter in town (21 miles away) came to the local Food Pantry the last two weeks, doing something new: rural outreach. She’s spreading the word about their shelter and other services including a 24-hour hotline which handles not just domestic abuse calls but suicide and all other forms of distress where someone needs immediate response. The shelter folks will arrange to pick up domestic abuse victims fleeing home, as long as a safe public place can be arranged to meet. This, the hotline, and the publicity, are all very valuable for rural areas where some people are very isolated and transportation is a big issue.

Rural areas don’t exactly have different social problems from those in urban or suburban areas but the setting can really intensify them. The isolation can reduce social contact, remove options, and conceal problems from neighbors, relatives, and law enforcement. It’s legal to fire guns out here, any time. There are fewer options for kids: no neighborhood kids, no places for organized activities within walking or biking distance, schools that struggle to maintain their very existence due to enrollment that is small to begin with and fluctuates. Our area is experiencing a boom in births but a decline in kids 5-8 years old; there may not be a K-8 school closer than 20 miles by the time this year’s babies get to school.

When gas prices go up and town is 20 miles away, the impact is severe on families, school budgets (long bus runs), and the few small local stores and businesses. A couple who run a business installing gutters showed up at the food pantry during the summer; the costs of their materials had gone up so much, while construction and remodelling plummeted, that for the first time in their lives they could not feed their kids without help. We’re seeing a lot of new faces at the food pantry; they’re new to us, and new to the idea of having to ask for help.

And, when somebody parks a disabled vehicle in the road without lights or flares, they can do so in confidence that no sheriff’s deputy will happen on it and no one will see it and report it in time for the understaffed sheriff’s department to respond (no cell phone coverage for miles). It’s just there, and you deal with it. Not long ago my husband came around a sharp turn in the road (this was on the highway) to find two cars facing opposite directions stopped to chat out the driver’s side windows, completely blocking a road that is heavily used by log trucks and delivery trucks as well as by regular traffic. He was quick-witted and lucky, able to squeeze past on the shoulder. A car coming the other way could have hit him or one of the other cars and a four-car pileup would have resulted.

The stupid and careless, like the poor, are believed to be always with us. In fact some of them are “created,” when babies are malnourished, toddlers are neglected, children are uncared for and discouraged from learning and from being responsible. We can have a society with fewer poor people and fewer stupid or ignorant people, if we work at it.

Rural problems are out of sight and therefore out of mind, for most people. These areas may need extra support to keep the institutions critical to their well-being; they may need not just outreach but more decentralization of services: part-time clinics, places that offer parenting classes, bus service to job training, and so on. Some services others take for granted don’t exist here, like cell phone service, cable tv, broadband Internet access, meals on wheels. I know people who’ve had to move to town for the broadband, in order to telecommute or perform high-tech work.

With our economy nationwide staggering from the parasitism of the very rich, it is not likely that rural areas will see much of this sort of investment; indeed, most rural counties today consider themselves lucky to be maintaining minimum levels of law enforcement, road and bridge work, and health services. But what the rural parts of this country need is a national initiative, a new Tennessee Valley Project which would, for example, upgrade schools, provide clinics, and add wireless net access to benefit schools, businesses, and families. Otherwise the current population tendencies will become more pronounced: rural residents are more and more composed of these groups: retirees; those raised here who would leave if they had the education and the gumption; a smattering of “cultural creatives” from elsewhere; and those who move/stay here because they can live under the radar of law enforcement. It doesn’t have to be this way.

Timeline and map of Mumbai terrorist attacks

Anyone who is looking for a concise orderly picture of the multiple terrorist attacks in Mumbai, and timeline of the attacks and response, cannot do better than the UK Guardian’s page by their guy Paddy Allen.

Events have gone on now for 3 days, starting before midnight on the 26th, and the timeline covers all three days (click on “Next” to view successive parts of the timeline, and on the camera symbols on the map to see some still photos). The Guardian also many articles providing good coverage and analysis.

This is the sort of information presentation which television news could do, but never seems to bother with. They have the computer graphics and know-how, they have our visual attention, but they squander our time showing us repeats of a few dramatic scenes or unidentifiable scenes straight from local news channels. For run-of-the-mill stories we have to watch file footage of pills running through a counter while the presenter talks about health care problems, Big Pharma, or the latest drug recall; our eyes could be better occupied watching informational graphics to fill in other aspects of the story. Most of us can take in information a lot faster than a tv anchor talks, so we are left twiddling our mental thumbs. Print media does a much better job with information graphics (and always gives more background and information than tv) but of course cannot compete with the web for timeliness or interactivity. No wonder people turn away from tv news, to web news sites.

Zombies make things better

From Information Design Watch comes a link to a graph showing that the number of zombie movies in the US parallels war and social upheavals.

Makes as much sense as anything. Now a media talking head can look at it and conclude that since spikes in zombie movies precede peace or betterment of social upheaval, the zombie movies must be the curative force. “After this, therefore because of this” (post hoc ergo propter hoc) is the only logic the mass media seem to use.

This is much reduced; take a look at the original where you will also find a long list of the movies they used for the chart, going back to a 1910 version of Frankenstein.

The site of the zombie movie graph, 1o9 Strung out on science fiction, labels it with the category “Chart Porn”. I took this term to be some sort of a spin-off from Edward Tufte’s “chartjunk” (= irrelevant, distorting, or distracting material added to charts) but a search on the term told me that it may mean something different. Another blog that deals with charts, themessthatgreenspanmade, tells us

In case you were wondering, the reason this post is titled “chart porn” (a term shamelessly stolen from Barry Ritholtz at The Big Picture) is that if you open the charts with a Windows Internet Explorer browser using Windows Vista, you get multiple windows opening on a somewhat random basis (at least, that’s what happened to me).

It reminded me of six or eight years ago when a co-worker would come by and say, “Type in www.whitehouse.com” and up would come some porn site that proceeded to open more and more windows faster than you could close them … and then the boss would walk by.

I took a look at chart porn on The Big Picture, where indeed the term is used frequently, but couldn’t decide exactly what it meant. Most of the chart porn posted there, from major media, is what one could call “tarted up”, that is for sure. Looks like a good site for skeptical commentary on current economic authorities and their continually readjusted b.s.

Recent Zombie Appearance in Real Life

These members of an event called “SF Zombie Mob 2007” got a little confused and evidently tried sucking brains out of iMacs––no gratitude, don’t they remember how Apple freed them in the 1984 Mac commercial? Meanwhile the Apple Store employees jostled for position to take the best photos; other stores had no sense of humor and shut the zombies out, according to the source.