. . . no, of course not

Snopes is all sniffy about the silly story that's circulating claiming that the National Park Service is blocking views of Mt. Rushmore with tarps.

Obviously this picture is photoshopped, you mouth-breathing troglodytes, it explains.  Bad people clearly ginned the story up to create outrage.  Next they'll be saying that NPS personnel put up traffic cones on October 1 to block people from pulling over on the viewing spots on the side of the nearby highways:

OK, admittedly, according to Snopes, that one's sort of true.

The National Park Service placed cones along highway viewing areas outside Mount Rushmore, barring visitors from pulling over and taking pictures of the famed monument. 

The cones first went up Oct. 1, said Dusty Johnson [South Dakota] Gov. Dennis Daugaard's chief of staff.  The state asked that they be taken down, and federal officials did so with some of them.  The state was told the cones were a safety precaution to help channel cars into viewing areas rather than to bar their entrance. 

"I think reasonable people can disagree about that," Johnson said. 

The cones were down again [three days later] as a blizzard hit the Black Hills and plows needed access to the roads, Johnson said.  He said the state would be monitoring to see whether the cones are put back along viewing areas.  "Once the snow's off the ground, we're going to be keeping an eye on how the cones go up," Johnson said.

Breaking the back of summer

Yesterday was in the 90s, but the low this morning dipped in the 50s.  We haven't have lows in the 50's since spring.  Although hot weather surely will return before long, this is the sign that summer doesn't last forever, much as it seems that way after four solid months of opening the front door onto a sauna every morning.

Now we come into the six months of the year that make people want to live here.  A lot of weeding chores have been piling up!  And the neighborhood can resume its spring schedule of outdoor dinners and relaxing on the porch with drinks.

Own goal

It looks as though the Obamacare software simulated a denial-of-service attack on itself, through clumsy architecture.

These are not people we should let creep closer to a monopoly on anything critical to our lives.

An old friend writes . . .

Our esteemed host emailed me to say that his wife is home from the hospital and recovering nicely, though he's still much occupied caring for her.  I know I speak for all of us in expressing my warmest wishes for her speedy return to full health.

Grim also asked me to pass along a request from an old "milblogger" friend of the site that we check out several of her pending projects:

Juliet Akinyi Ochieng author's page

Arlen's Harem:  the second novel

The Kenya Project

Living off the Sea

Whoops, not this week.  You guessed it:  during the shutdown, you won't be allowed to go into some federally controlled waters to fish.  Not, of course, because there's no funding; there's plenty of funding to pay guys to keep you out, even if takes more personnel than letting you in.  Just in hopes that shutting you out will irritate you enough to call your congressman.

What's next:  no breathing, because the EPA has jurisdiction over the air?

Frankly, the whole business underscores what a bad idea it is to get used to freebies from the feds.  Anytime they're in a bad mood, they can restrict access to make a point.  We should be working on making them as unessential as possible.

Mental pretzels

Few subjects stir us to such feats of intellectual gymnastics as explaining how our stereotypes aren't really stereotypes.  This article (via Maggie's Farm) explores how American colleges struggle to explain why an Asian student needs an extra 140 points on his SAT in order to compete effectively with any other race.

Asians are the new Jews.  In the early 20th century, Harvard instituted the revolutionary concept of basing admissions on ethnic-neutral tests.  The result?  Culture shock:

"Naturally, after 25 years, one expects to find many changes, but to find that one’s University had become so Hebrewized was a fearful shock.  There were Jews to the right of me, Jews to the left of me, in fact they were so obviously everywhere that instead of leaving the Yard with pleasant memories of the past I left with a feeling of utter disgust of the present and grave doubts about the future of my Alma Mater."

Naturally, something had to be done.  One approach would have been overt discrimination against Jews.  A more subtle approach was to emphasize "legacy students," which is an easy way to claim you're not basing admissions on race even though you're basing them on family descent.  It's a good trick, and it's still being used today to keep Asians from unfairly swamping the admissions process by kicking everyone's butt academically.  Other useful techniques are to hide the admissions policy altogether, and to refuse to discuss it on the ground that it's a "wedge issue."  (I've always loved the "wedge issue" gambit.  "Unfair!  This issue is so damaging to our position that it's likely to sow internal dissension in our ranks!")

Another approach is to admit that Asians are submitting academically impressive applications, but to observe that the admissions process is "holistic."  Unfortunately, as the article points out, this approach includes the unstated assumption that Asian applications are, on the whole, devastatingly sub-par on every non-academic ground.  And what exactly is wrong with all of them in that respect?  Well, it's hard to put into words, but it's "holistic." It's certainly not their ethnicity!

There's a strong human tendency to approve of meritocracies as long as we're pretty sure that the rules for judging merit focus on whatever our sub-group happens to be good at.  As soon as those other guys start to excel, it turns out that the rules for judging merit are missing the important intangible stuff, the stuff that's so hard to put into words.

Living off the land

Via Maggie's Farm, a sober look at what it would really take to live as a modern hunter and gatherer long-term--not just for a few days when lost in the wilderness.

Enough about Venezuela

Taranto is funny when he stays away from gender politics.  Well, he's funny then, too, but in a different way.   Here he is on the Great Leap Forward to Health and Solvency:

"People complain of having to stand in line for hours, often in vain, and many are losing patience with the government's explanation that unsavory conspirators are to blame for the nation's problems," reports the New York Times.   But enough about Venezuela.  Let's talk about ObamaCare.

All is not lost, however, despite reporters' increasing and almost fruitless urgency to find someone, anyone, who has successfully signed up for Obamacare via a federal exchange.  (Apparently some of the state exchanges are doing rather well.)  As Taranto points out, it should have been more or less a no-brainer that the feds could set up a successful feeding trough.  The real trick will not be getting impoverished people with expensive illnesses to sign up for subsidized coverage.   The real trick will be getting young, healthy people to sign up in droves in order to foot the bill for all the largesse.  Taranto happily points to a Hartford Courant article that's being trumpeted by "a senior ObamaCare publicity agent" as success, in the form of a 30-year-old law student who managed to navigate a website and sign up for health insurance.   Before we get too excited about bringing that federal deficit under control, though, it's helpful to note that the young student was already paying several hundred dollars a month for coverage, and now will pay nothing at all:  the site informed him that he was eligible for Medicaid.

So the great success story of ObamaCare's first day is the transformation of a future lawyer who was already paying for insurance into a welfare case.

Well, I've always said that uninsured people who already have an expensive medical condition don't need what we've traditionally called "insurance."  Their risk is no longer unquantifiable; it is known.  What they need is either income or charity.  Charity's a great thing, when it takes the form of people giving up their own resources to help others in need.  It's an ugly thing when it's merely disguised theft.  It's not just that it's dishonest to arrange things dishonestly, though that's bad enough.  It's that dishonesty, by more or less successfully blinding some or all of us to reality, prevents our doing anything to solve a problem in a sustainable way.  The cost of good things doesn't go away because we rob Peter in order to indulge in unearned self-congratulation for our charity to Paul.  It costs real-world time and resources to provide medical care to people who can't afford it.  If it's our duty and desire to do so anyway, it's time we quit pretending it was somebody else's job to pay for it.

Did he really say that?

No, I'm not referring to Harry Reid's spectactularly tone-deaf "Why would we want to do that?" response to a question about funding NIH programs to help children with cancer.  (Why should we help kids with cancer when some government employees are home and not getting a paycheck?)  This is a new one: our President suddenly realizes that a good analogy to the opposition's stance on the spending resolution is a bunch of crazy workers at a factory who decide that if they don't get what they want, they'll shut the factory down. They'd lose their jobs, right? he asks--and rightly so, he implies.

Apocalypse, part 18

Cassandra has helpful statistics at her place about the last 17 shutdowns. The first 16 didn't attract that much media attention. Three guesses what was different in 1995.

Vindictive theater

I think this privately-funded director of volunteers at a "Williamsburg-style" farm (Claude Moore Colonial Farm) has burned her bridges with the National Park Service.  The Williamsburg farm has been entirely self-sustaining since evil Republicans cut its federal funding in 1980.  It costs the federal government nothing to keep it open, but closing the facility costs it the visitor revenues it needs to operate.

According to Anna Eberly, managing director of the farm, NPS sent law enforcement agents to the park on Tuesday evening to remove staff and volunteers from the property. 

“You do have to wonder about the wisdom of an organization that would use staff they don’t have the money to pay to evict visitors from a park site that operates without costing them any money,” she said.

Ace posted a copy of her letter, which concludes:

In all the years I have worked with the National Park Service, first as a volunteer for 6 years in Richmond where I grew up, then as an NPS employee at the for 8 very long years and now enjoyably as managing director for the last 32 years - I have never worked with a more arrogant, arbitrary and vindictive group representing the NPS. 

I deeply apologize that we have to disappoint you today by being closed but know that we are working while the National Park Service is not--as usual.

As someone else commented today, next they'll be throwing tarps over Mt. Rushmore.

Waiting

I tried out the healthcare.org site and never managed to log in or raise anyone on "Live Chat," but I did get through on the telephone to a reasonably coherent live operator after a wait of about 20 minutes.  My principal question was whether I could qualify for any HHS-approved catastrophic (high-deductible) policies.  The answer, after some prodding, was no:  I'm not under 30 and I wouldn't qualify for the economic-hardship exceptions to the age limit.  I then asked whether I would be subject to the individual-mandate fine/tax/penalty if I kept my current high-deductible policy, and was assured that I would not be.  Apparently all I have to do is claim on my tax return that I have insurance, and the IRS will take my word for it that it's "insurance" within the HHS's view of what appropriate insurance must be.  Frankly, I don't believe a word of it, but we'll see when I file my tax return next year.

Obviously I'd pay the fine/tax/penalty rather than drop my high-deductible insurance.  My bigger concern is that Blue Cross will quit offering it at all, under pressure from regulators.  At that point, Obamacare will have succeeded in making me much more dependent on government largesse, because all my decades-long care to avoid a lapse in coverage will have been undone, leaving me with pre-existing conditions and an inability to find replacement coverage.

If the purpose of the law is to give me more empathy for people in the gut-churning position of losing insurance that, because of pre-existing health conditions, cannot be replaced, it's succeeding admirably.  In fact, Americans in all walks of life are learning what it means to lose health insurance that was serving them fairly well, all because of this brilliant and compassionate law.

Please wait

Maybe for a long time.

Off For A Bit

Contingencies in the real world compel my absence for a while. I leave the Hall to my companions, with the understanding that you will honor its spirit and observe its customs. I will return.

Cruise control and make like a zipper

Again, from Maggie's Farm:  We are our own worst enemies in traffic.  Besides telecommuting more, two of the best things we could do to improve matters are to quit slamming on the brakes and the accelerator for short-term gain, and to stay in our soon-to-be-closed lane until the last minute, when it actually squeezes into the adjacent lane, then to observe a strict alternation of cars in merging.



The video-talk includes a cartoon with a highway sign reading, "Lanes Closed for No Apparent Reason," which reminds me of how a now-departed friend used to described the situation:  either "Shuttle drill" or "buffing the freeway."

There's some fascinating information about optical illusions in driving and the effect of images, particularly of faces or eyes, on behavior.

Marital sabotage

Focus on the Family (via Maggie's Farm) offers what seems like sensible advice for preparation for success in marriage, with five easy  mistakes to avoid:  (1) cohabitation, (2) taking on debt, (3) marrying an unbeliever, (4) avoiding counseling before or after marriage, and (5) dreaming of a soul mate.  I have to say, though, that I broke most of these rules and came out all right.  I obeyed a couple:  We never took on much debt, I guess I can say that for us, and I never really looked at things in terms of a single possible "soul mate" in the sense of one person on the planet who was my "split-apart."  Otherwise, complete failure on (1), (3), and (4).

I suspect you can get away with cohabitation and marrying unbelievers (we both were) as long as you have a deep and abiding faith in pairing up and staying paired up.  I'm not sure where we got that, but it's been a bedrock for us.  As far as counseling goes, however, my husband would be equally likely to take a year off and join and ashram after having his entire body tattooed in paisley.

Color-blindness

Following up on Grim's color test:

Obviously both my husband and I have a good deal of color acuity, but his is on a higher plane than mine.  It's something like tone pitch acuity:   my sense of relative sound pitch is good enough to let me improvise and sing harmony, but my grasp of absolute pitch is fuzzy and intermittent.  People with real absolute pitch simply know what the tone is without hesitation, in or out of context, whether they've heard it recently or not.   My husband's color acuity is like perfect pitch: he knows the color when he sees it and continues to know it when he's not looking at it any more, whereas I have to have the two colors together in order to judge--though if I can see them together, I know the difference with confidence.

Color-blindness is a deficiency in one of the three kinds of cones in the retina, each of which specializes in a particular freqency range.  "Blindness" is perhaps not a very accurate term, because the impairment of cone function can occur all along the spectrum from barely detectable to complete; it's nothing like a simple on/off switch.  The problem with the cones is usually a sex-linked congenital condition, meaning it results from an area on the X-chromosome and therefore manifests more often in men (8% to women's 0.5%) because they haven't got a second X-chromosome to mask it.   Women would have to have the gene on both X-chromosomes in order to manifest the deficit.   Of course, they remain carriers, so a common pattern of inheritance is from grandfather to grandson.

One never knows about the evo-pop explanations for these things, but Wiki has these interesting observations to offer:

Some studies conclude that color blind people are better at penetrating certain color camouflages.  Such findings may give an evolutionary reason for the high prevalence of red–green color blindness.  And there is also a study suggesting that people with some types of color blindness can distinguish colors that people with normal color vision are not able to distinguish.

When I was a child, my sisters and I were fascinated with the little book of Ishihara color-blindness tests that were on my father's shelf.  They're available on the Internet now, of course:

Wiki says that one of the earliest color-blindness tests was created in response to the Lagerlunda train crash of 1875 in Sweden.  Because Physiologist Alarik Frithiof Holmgren suspected that the train engineer's color-blindness caused him to misinterpret a warning signal, he used skeins of dyed wool fiber to test the ability to distinguish colors.  This site discusses even earlier works dating back to the 17th century.

Here's an interesting online test that's like the one Grim posted, but with more specific diagnostic results.  I experimented with this one.   To me, there's only one way to arrange the colors, no matter how many times I do it, and apparently it agrees with the site's notion of the ideal arrangement.   I tried randomly introducing errors to see if I could understand the diagnostic tools, but I guess the errors have to fall into a standard pattern to make it work.

I was taught as a child that red-green color-blindness was just one of the possibilities, which happens to be the most common because of the likely failure of one of the three kinds of rod.  There should be two other theoretical possibilities in addition to [blue/yellow-red] a/k/a [green/red], which are: [yellow/red-blue] a/k/a [orange/blue], and [red/blue-yellow] a/k/a [purple/yellow].   This site assures me that the categories of potential dysfunction are considerably different, and that "red-green color-blindness" is something of a misnomer, though it is in fact the most common type. Taking "red-green colorblindness" as a generic term for protanopia (red-blindness), protanomaly (red- weakness), deuteranopia (green-blindness), and deuteranomaly (green-weakness), it accounts for about 99% of all color-blindness.  This downloadable book is full of interesting facts, such as the following:

-- Approximately every 500st handshake is between two colorblind people. 

-- It is almost sure (probability: 94%) that at least one member of a football team is colorblind. 

-- If you pick out 100 persons, the chance is very low (about 1.5%) that none of them is colorblind.

 If that link doesn't work, the free download can be triggered from here.

There's a possibility of gene-therapy treatment in the works.  It's said to work brilliantly in squirrel monkeys, but is still undergoing safety testing in animals before it can be tried in humans.  What would it be like suddenly to be able to detect a new range of colors?  It's reasonably well established, I take it, that some organisms are tetrachromatic; i.e., distinguish four peaks of color frequency to our three.  Some people think a certain percentage of humans are tetrachromatic.  In addition, although the normal cornea filters out UV light, people lacking a cornea reportedly can perceive the lower ranges of UV light as a separate bluish-white color.  They can see in something like a more full octave, with the frequency of the high-purple color nearly twice that of the lower-purple end of the rainbow.  Do the colors look as similar to them as high- and low-C sound to us?

Gandalf! And Gandalf Means Me!

Since I apparently don't have anything important to say this week, how about another quiz?

All the Colors

...but can you put them into proper order? It's a very difficult test. Lower scores are better.

Mr. Wolf Sends

This guy has an interesting point, which he takes a long time to reach, about the way in which our society has come to run down the dignity of work. Along the way you get to learn two ways to castrate a lamb, which some of you may already know.



He goes on to explain and apologize, sort of, in the recorded remarks here. His account of the conference is not at all flattering, and he wasn't taking it at all seriously, but apparently there was plenty of wine. I think Wolf liked the explanation better than the video.