Germans Tip?

Now I'm a good tipper.  I worked in a dormitory cafeteria for 4 years in college to help pay my way, so I identify with servers, and by extension others who are tippable. 

My mother was of German descent, and somehow I always thought of Germans as tight, organized, methodical, but not good tippers. 

That's why this piece on NBCnews is surprising.

My Relative, the Zombie

A relative of mine is engaged in selling a house and buying a condo, so called the electric utility to arrange the transfer of billing, and had major problems getting it done..  The third person my relative dealt with finally figured out the problem: relative was dead.

Apparently when the spouse died some years back, the person who handled the update of records then added my relative's name to the account, but then recorded the relative as dead, rather than the spouse.

On Public Service, Bureaucrats and Libraries

Neil Irwin at Wonkblog has an interview with Paul Volcker on his new ideas for governance. 

One exchange led me to do a Google ngram, comparing the occurrences of "public service" and "bureaucrat".  In American books the frequency for the two started out with "public service" more frequent and "bureaucrat" less, but the two lines cross about 1976 so we now think more of "bureaucrats" and less of "public service".  "Public service" peaked in 1920 or so.

That's bad.


But I'd like to recognize a very good bureaucrat, Ginny Cooper, the retiring head of the DC public libraries.  Among other things, in 7 years she tripled the number of books checked out.  I remember using first the Mt. Vernon building, then the MLK building on G street a lot in my years in the city.  Libraries to my mind are more important than schools--you know some of the students in the school are not interested, but you know all of the people in the library are interested.  (Except for the homeless, which is a problem in Reston as well as DC.)

Fading Titans

First Eastman Kodak went bankrupt, now Sony's electronics business is their Achilles heel.

What's the quote from Ecclesiastes?

Harvesting the White House Garden

This week, they had a harvest event--inviting the kids who planted in April to harvest in late May.  More and more the garden becomes a publicity event, because a true garden would be harvested (and planted) right along, in succession.  Radishes, lettuce, scallions, peas, etc. grow on their own schedule, not the convenience of a PR event.  I'm not writing to criticize Mrs. Obama and her staff. It's just a matter of fact you can't live real life in the White House, at least not if you invite the cameras in.

As a followup to a previous post which I can't find so may not have completed, despite my skepticism their spring wheat is heading out and seems to be filling the rows pretty well.  Just a reminder I sometimes (often?) don't know what I'm talking about.

Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny: the Case of Drones

The "ontogeny" bit is a stray factoid from my 55+ years old high school biology class.  I assume it's been invalidated by now, but the idea was that looking at the progress of the human embryo you could see the progress of the phylla (i.e. single-cell through gills to lungs, etc.)

Anyhow, on a completely different subject, here's a piece on the arms race in drones.  Every country with a military seems to want to add armed drones to their arsenal.  Now the evolution of aircraft went from reconnaissance and artillery spotting  to bombing to hand guns and rifles to machine guns.  So far drones have gone through the first two stages.  I'm waiting for a drone-destroyer aircraft/drone that will seek to regain dominance over the airspace.  (That's what happened on the sea when torpedoes arrived: first you had torpedo boats, then you had torpedo boat destroyers, which became just destroyers.) 

On Giving Up Books

Stanley Fish, a famous and controversial professor of literature (I think that's right), writes a blog for the NYTimes.  In this post, he writes about getting rid of most of his books, what he feels about it (not much), and his qualms about possibly retiring.

For someone who's been reading avidly since an early age it's a melancholy piece.  But I'm afraid my attitude towards my books is more like one of his commenters: "you'll have to pry them from my cold dead hands".  But in reality I read very little literature these days, mostly biographies and histories, and I could and should clean out the house.  (But see my previous post on hoarding.)

No GMO Organisms

The Times has an article today on the search for supplies of commodities which aren't GMO.  Seems to be particularly inspired by Whole Foods decision to emphasize such products.  (I own some stock in Whole Foods.)  It cites a premium of $1.50 to $2 per bushel for grain, and discusses the difficulty in doing a dual-track supply system.   It also includes this, which I found astonishing:

And farmers cannot simply replace genetically engineered seeds with conventional ones, because soil in which genetically modified crops have been grown may not be immediately suitable for conventional crops.

“There’s a transition period required,” said Richard Kamolvathin, senior vice president at Verity Farms, which sells meats, grains and other products derived from conventional crops, as well as natural soil amendments. “You don’t just stop growing G.M.O. seed and then start growing non-G.M.O. seed.”

 Now I understand moving from conventional to organic production requires a 3-year phase in, but just switching seed?  I suppose there might be herbicide/pesticide residues, but how long do they last?

Andy Warhol, Hoarder

I didn't know Warhol was a hoarder, nor did I know psychologists are reconsidering their categorization of hoarders as suffering from OCD.  See this article.

(I'm a hoarding fellow-traveler, as we used to say in the '50's.)

Discovered: The Undetectable Extension Charm and Rolling Thunder

Wife and I recently watched Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part I, on DVD in which Hermione's handbag with its inexhaustible contents plays a key role.  Turns out it's because she applied the "Undetectable Extension Charm" to it, making it capable of infinite expansion.

According to this Washington Times article, there were 750,000 motorcycle riders in last year's Rolling Thunder. And this says 500,000 are expected for this years.  Apparently someone will apply the charm to the Pentagon parking lots, which are the staging area for the riders. 

Why do I say this?  Well, lets say 4 motorcycles can fit in the space for one car.  Most of the cycles I see on TV have only one rider, so lets say 500,000 divided by 4 = 125,000 car equivalents, but take off 25,000 to allow for double riders.  Assume that all the people at the Pentagon drive to work with no car pooling (not true--car pooling and subway and bus all serve the building), so there must be 100,000 people working there?

Not so, it's more like 30,000.   Bottom line is, the organizers of all demonstrations in DC claim numbers which are too high, including even the vets, but the media never scrutinize the vets.  That would be politically incorrect.

(Wiki answers says the Pentagon has 8,000 parking spots.)