A Bit of Politics

From Bernstein's blog at Bloomberg:

"4. We’ve known this was coming, but worth marking it anyway: The Benghazi committee is now the longest-lasting special investigative panel in congressional history. Julian Hattem reports for The Hill. Might as well just admit it and rename the thing the Permanent Hillary Clinton Opposition Research Committee."

Let's be fair to the Republicans.  Could be they're just terribly inefficient.

[Updated-- Kevin Drum offers a third position. ]

ARRA and MIDAS

This piece on the ending of the Recovery Act database reminded me--MIDAS got $50 million if I remember correctly.  Maybe not, maybe the $50 mill was partly to upgrade the creaky technology at the time.

I do wish they'd included some usage figures on the website--how much did the media and others actually use the site?  I know while I checked it a few times early on, I never did go back to see what if any updates for MIDAS had been added.  It may well be the best contribution of the effort was to establish a precedent, to teach people what was involved so the next try can be more useful.

Design the World for Robots or Design Robots for the World

That was the question I had when reading this piece  in Technology Review.  The bottom line is that it's very hard for a robot to assemble an Ikea chair--inserting a dowel into a hole is right at the edge of perception.  Robotics is getting there, but it's a pain.  The logical answer is to redesign the world so robots can handle things.  Unfortunately, that limits the available market for robots. 

I assume we'll reach a point where new processes are designed for robots.  (Maybe we've already done that with the chip industry? :-)

The Sinister Side

My father was left-handed, though he wrote with his right, having grown up in the time when children were forced to change to the majority standard.  That's why this Post piece was interesting, looking at the distribution of lefties over time and modern lefties geographically.  But the best writing on the subject I've read is still "Right Hand, Left Hand", a book by Chris McManus, who runs a blog here.

McManus in his book gets into some basic things, like how do we determine handedness at the most elemental level, molecules and atoms.  (Left-handed sugar isn't absorbed by the body.)  I won't pretend to have followed all the explanations, but he also gets into driving on the left versus driving on the right, and the genetic and environmental influences on fetal development.

I

FSA's Dolcini on IT, Personnel, etc.

Mr. Dolcini has an interview with Agri-Pulse.

Quote:  

He's working on another nationwide rollout for next year: the Acreage Crop Reporting Streamlining Initiative (ACRSI) that's designed to give farmers and ranchers just one stop for reporting acreage numbers for both FSA and the Risk Management Agency (RMA).
The ACRSI project started as a pilot in 30 Iowa and Illinois counties and is opening up slowly to more areas of the country.

I wonder how well the pilot has gone. The tag "ACRSI" shows a gap between 2011, when there was a request for comments in the Federal Register, and 2014, when the farm bill required implementation.  Google shows few hits.  (ACRSI also stands for "Associated Colon and Rectal Surgeons of India".  I hope the pilot testers of the new system didn't feel any need for the tender attentions of that association.) 

Weight of the Past

The NY Times casually mentioned yesterday that while digging for the foundations for a refugee center in Germany they found five unexploded bombs from WWII.

Government as Affirming Congressional Identities

Politico has a nice long piece on the many many programs run by the Education Department.  A few excerpts:

"WHAT MAKES IT so difficult to eliminate ineffective and duplicative programs? Politics, mostly. Creating a program can leave a lasting legacy for a lawmaker, something they won’t give up even in the face of evidence that the program doesn’t work. Often times, Congress can’t defund the program until that lawmaker retires.

 It's bipartisan--Obama has tried to consolidate but:

The Senate’s bill[redoing No Child Left Behind], on the other hand, was a compromise between Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and Patty Murray (D-Wash.), the chair and ranking member, respectively, of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. The GOP draft bill consolidated or eliminated 21 different programs. But lawmakers effectively renewed most of them during the amendment process, including Physical Education and Ready-to-Learn Television.
They also brought back the Jacob K. Javits Gifted and Talented Students Education Program—renewed thanks to an amendment offered by Barbara Mikulski. It passed unanimously.

On Overalls, Coveralls, and Jeans

Freakonomics has a piece on why suspenders are better than belts (belts are tourniquets) but belts still rule.

As the son of a farmer who wore overalls all his life, I noted the total absence of overalls in the discussion.  According to wikipedia I should really say "bib overalls" (look at the "talk" page for some of the UK/US distinctions, including coveralls and boiler suits).

Turns out Modern Farmer has a piece with a little history.  It seems that the farmers in the food movement are proud of their bib overalls. I'd had the impression that professional farmers in production agriculture were wearing them less these days, but that's only an impression.  I doubt if there's any statistics on their production over the years.



It's odd--dad would usually change to khaki worksheet and pants when going to town on the weekly trip (for animal feed and people food) and dress in a suit for his school board meetings or meetings of the GLF (the ag co-op).  So to me bib overalls are associated with manual work one has to do.  In contrast I wore jeans (stiff as a board when first bought from Monkey Wards) for work.  I still retain that association and don't wear bib overalls (though my wife wears them for her work in the garden).

Cryonics

Technology Review has a takedown of the recent cryonics story.  An ancient Greek pointed out you never stepped in the same river twice and this is similar.  Living is a flow, not something which can be freeze-framed. Or maybe it's an over-simplified Heisenberg principle--the process must change what it's operating on.

Robert Simon, Reston, VW, and Blacks

When I was in the Army, I was stationed for a while at Ft. Belvoir, which is south of DC. I was there long enough that I used the money I'd saved for graduate school (a long story) to buy a gray market VW bug, a 66 with a 1300 cc engine.  (Mine was white, but this picture is correct.)

On weekends friends and I would drive to tourist sites in the DC area: Gettysburg, Fredricksburg, Antietam, etc.

One such weekend jaunt was to the wilds of Fairfax county where Robert Simon's Reston had just opened.  I think we had trouble locating it, and the spring weather was cool and it had rained, so the sightseeing wasn't the best.  Why were we there?  I had the car, so my friends put up with my choices just to get away from the barracks. And I had read something about the "new town" somewhere, perhaps in the Post article mentioned in the wikipedia entry, and was intrigued.

As a good liberal I had followed the stories in the NYTimes and other media about discrimination in housing, redlining, and blockbusting.  I had also imbibed the popular liberal disdain for the way suburbs were developing, for Levittown, and strip malls.  So the whole idea of a planned "town" where the inhabitants could walk to work, where housing was open to all, where the design included European style urban amenities, was very attractive to me.

After I got out of the Army and got the job with USDA/ASCS I lived downtown for 8 years. But then the idea of investing in a house made sense.  So I ended up looking for houses in Reston, finally buying the townhouse we live in now.

Reston has grown and changed over the years.  According to wikipedia it's now about 70 percent white, with the remainder about evenly split among black, Hispanic, and Asian Americans. 

I've always wondered why Reston wasn't more attractive to black Washingtonians,  most of whom when they left the city behind seem to have moved to Prince George's county (now 64 percent black) in Maryland.   One of life's mysteries.  As is whatever happened to my VW, which was stolen from my Reston parking space in 1978.  I hope it's still chugging away somewhere.