voluntaryXchange

Loved This

Humans do the best shit:

I’m glad this guy is doing it for a neighborhood kid. I don’t have a handy kid around for this. But here’s my post from 10 years ago about doing something like this with my kids.

Buffalo Gets MLB

The first major league baseball game in Buffalo in decades is on right now.

Here’s coverage from The Beaverton.

FWIW: I have posted about Buffalo’s past attempts to get an MLB team. BUT, you may have noticed that Google sucks these days, and it won’t find a link to it. Long story short, Buffalo was the front runner, until groups in Miami and Denver offered a whole bunch more money in east to carry bags.

UPDATE: Google may suck, but Bing does not suck as much. They found this post about how Buffalo was supposed to get an MLB team in 1969. That team went to Montreal. How’d that work out for you MLB? Still looking for the post about how Buffalo was supposed to get an MLB team all through the late 80’s and early 90’s until that WTF day.

UPDATE 2: Woo hoo. I found it the old-fashioned way: I spent a few minutes looking for what Google took milliseconds to deny the existence of. Here’s the link. Also, the link in the post is being redirected (for who knows what reason), but the original is here. The skinny is that MLB laid out what it wanted in a major league city, Buffalo did it, and then they chose the money.

Some George Will

George Will revisits Jose Ortega y Gasset:

The cancelers are reverse Rumpelstiltskins, spinning problems that merit the gold of complex ideas and nuanced judgments into the straw of slogans. Someone anticipated something like this.

Today’s gruesome irony: A significant portion of the intelligentsia that is churned out by higher education does not acknowledge exacting standards of inquiry that could tug them toward tentativeness and constructive dissatisfaction with themselves. Rather, they come from campuses, cloaked in complacency. Instead of elevating, their education produces only expensively schooled versions of what José Ortega y Gasset called the “mass man.”

In 1932’s “The Revolt of the Masses,” the Spanish philosopher said this creature does not “appeal from his own to any authority outside him. He is satisfied with himself exactly as he is. . . . He will tend to consider and affirm as good everything he finds within himself: opinions, appetites, preferences, tastes.” (Emphasis is Ortega’s.)

Much education now spreads the disease that education should cure, the disease of repudiating, without understanding, the national principles that could pull the nation toward its noble aspirations. The result is barbarism, as Ortega defined it, “the absence of standards to which appeal can be made.” A barbarian is someone whose ideas are “nothing more than appetites in words,” someone exercising “the right not to be reasonable,” who “does not want to give reasons” but simply “to impose his opinions.”

Remove the sexism, and the third paragraph describes a teenager in our family.

Read the whole thing, entitled “Much of today’s intelligentsia cannot think” in The Washington Post. Via Cafe Hayek.

After 20 Years Here I Still Know this Feeling

This appeared on MLTSHP this morning:

I love that caption. I’m amused.

When confronted with something like this for the umpteenth time in the past week, the vXyoungman and I just say to each other “We’ve got shit like this everywhere.” You never get over that feeling: the sky is just better out here.

An Amazing and True Tale for Tolkien Junkies

Maybe Tolkien got the idea for a engraved ring lost for millennia … from actual archaeology in the 1920’s.

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I love Tolkien; maybe almost as much as Stephen Colbert.

Here’s my favorite story.

Tolkien’s son collected and mildly edited all of his father’s unpublished work.

In it is a single usage of the word “ruel”, as in a ruel bone blade.

This word appears essentially nowhere in the English language.

Except for one spot. It is in the Oxford Dictionary of the English Language (the really huge multi-volume one).

One of Tolkien’s first academic jobs was working on this. He did the early part of the coverage of words that begin with w.

Ruel isn’t in the w’s.

It’s in the notes.

For walrus.

Ruel-bones were used to make ceremonial and decorative blades. They’re too fragile for actual work, but they are very rare because descendants of Vikings started trading a few of them in the later Middle Ages. No one else knew where ruel-bones come from. Turns out they are walrus tusks.

What’s the English Word for Horse Served as Dinner?

Many people know the vocabulary: in English our animal words come from Anglo-Saxon, and our food words from Old French. †

So we tend cows, but we eat beef. Same deal with pork, and so on.

The other night while the vXyoungwoman was at work, the rest of us were around the table, and we wondered: if the French eat cheval, there should be an English word for horse served as food.

But there isn’t.

It turns out that eating horse is a culturally newer thing in France, dating back to the early 19th century. So it misses, by several hundred years, the importation of many French words into English.

BTW: English imports from many languages, but French is the predominant contemporary one. Lots of cultures eat horse, but none of their words have snuck into English.

† Interesting trivia on this page: venison is meat from large game (grand gibier), not just deer.

Masks In America

This is the top image on foxnews.com this morning:

Six people, presumably in line for COVID-19 testing, and 2 of the 6 can’t wear the mask properly.

And yeah … I’ll admit partial coverage is better than no coverage.

P.S. Part of me also wants to be ticked about 5 of 6 of them being on their phones … when I’m on mine when in line, I’m typically reading a book. I don’t think all five of them are reading books.

FWIW: About 3 years ago I started taking off points on exams in principles classes for students who were unable to follow directions: a point for each infraction. It’s a pretty bizarre experiment. Many students lose points here and there, some consistently lose several points each time, and whole classes will do worse on this if not reminded often. Directions are, of course, not hidden, and nowhere but the top front of the exam. It has really just amounted to a new way to put distance between the A students and the not-A students.

Not Really Conflicted At All

I'd like to be sympathetic to the good cops out on the streets this week, dealing with demonstrations and rioting.

But someone I know, love, and trust was charged for multiple crimes they didn't commit, and ended up pleading guilty to some to avoid the potential of a worse outcome.

The bad detective responsible is very likely out working the demonstrations in Salt Lake City tonight.

I can only sympathize with the African-American situation, and perhaps have some empathy. But, for my part I know that the cops aren’t on my side either.

Still Here

I have not gone missing. Due to COVID-19, I have been posting like crazy at SUU MacroBlog (over 100 posts there since late January).

SUU MacroBlog is where I cover current events for my advanced macroeconomics class.

I was on top of the pandemic coverage for them from late January; it was obvious to me that it might turn out to be a major macroeconomic event.

That’s an understatement.

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On a related note, f**k the EU.

For year, I have written most of my blog posts in Open Live Writer, and before that Windows Live Writer.

But now, due to EU regulations, Blogger no longer accepts posts containing (potentially copyrighted) images from third party software.

SUU MacroBlog is hosted by Blogger, and has been since 2009.

For my workflows, this means that I now have to write posts in 2 different softwares. That’s not much of a problem, but it makes cross-posting from one blog to the other very difficult.

So, in the past, any of the work over there that I wanted to post here to look current was just a click away. Not anymore.

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So, if you’re interested, head over to SUU MacroBlog. There’s quite a bit there about interpreting the statistics associated with COVID-19.

Contemplating Daylight Savings Time

Most people know when the shortest day of the year is.

But most people don’t know that the earliest sunset and the latest sunrise do not fall on that day.

It turns out, the earliest sunset (December 5th) is about 16 days before the shortest day (December 21st), and the latest sunrise is about 15 days after (January 5th).

So honestly, I started thinking about this in late January. I was noticing the “days getting longer”. By this, most of us mean we notice that it’s light for longer after work.

I did some mental math, and realized that it was about 8 weeks after the earliest sunset.

And so I thought … oh … sunset changes are symmetrical … so late January has the same sunset as mid-October. And I thought about how nice those cold evenings are in mid-October.

I decided quickly that daylight savings was a bad thing, and we should move the clocks back right now, so I could have those cold, beautiful evenings full of light until after 7 in late January.

I have been laughing to myself at how dumb I was for about about a week now.

Moving the clock back also moves the sunrise back. And the sunrise was not 8 weeks into transitioning towards summer, but more like four.

And in Utah, most of us live hard up on the west side of the mountains. Twilight in the morning is long: the sun is up, but it remains blocked by the mountains. On the shortest day, it comes over the mountains about 8:35 (even now on February 20th, I was watching rays of sunshine peek through a canyon at 7:45, 30 minutes after sunrise, but the sun wasn’t visible yet).

Why laugh at myself? If we got rid of daylight savings time here, on January 5th, the sun wouldn’t come over the mountains until 9:35. I think maybe I’d like to keep avoiding that.