Jim’s Random Notes

It’s rare that I’m stumped when I try to find something on Google, but this one beat me.  Somebody on the woodcarving forum asked about “dragonwood.”  Always curious, I thought I’d look it up.

Dragonwood appears to be very commonly used for the trunks and larger branches of artificial (silk) trees.  It’s also commonly used to make perches for pet birds, and I gather somewhat less commonly used to make cat trees and cheap furniture.  That’s all interesting, but I couldn’t find a picture of a dragonwood tree or anything that gave me the botanical name of the silly thing.  The best I could find is that it grows in Florida.

Somebody else on the forum posted an answer this afternoon, identifying the wood as Lyonia Ferruginea (rusty staggerbrush), a shrub or small tree that grows in Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina.  In case you’re interested, that person also indicated that it’s good carving wood.

I’m really surprised that this one stumped me.  The common name dragonwood (less often, “dragon wood”) is used in a lot of places, but I was unable to find a any reference that showed its botanical name.  I figured I could find it just like I can type “bottle brush tree” and get the botanical name.  No such luck.

One resource said that “dragonwood” was a corruption of the original “draggin’ wood”, which describes how they get the wood out of the thicket after it’s cut.

Hopefully anybody else looking for a description of dragonwood will find this post and not have to wade through a few dozen pages of links to fake plants and parrot cage goodies.

Update on my removable drive troubles.

I tried drilling holes in the case (after opening it and removing the drive, of course) on one of those Seagate FreeAgent drives.  Getting the thing apart was quite a chore, and I had a fun time making a mess drilling holes in the case.  The unit tested fine afterwards when copying small files to it, but it went unresponsive after about three gigabytes of the large file.  It’s difficult to say what went wrong.  I suspect that the USB-to-SATA electronics, which were marginal to begin with, finally gave up the ghost.  At some point I’ll pull out the 1 TB Seagate drive that’s in there and see if I can use it as a normal SATA drive.

Yesterday I picked up two Antec MX-1 external drive enclosures and fitted them with 500 GB drives.  I got them installed last night, and initial results are positive.  I’ve heard that there have been some fan failures with the Antec enclosures, but a search didn’t reveal an inordinate number.  For the price (about $55 each, with tax), I might pick up a third just to keep on hand in case a fan does fail.

The drive comes with USB and eSATA cables.  I was all ready to go eSATA until I discovered that my server doesn’t appear to have a spare SATA port inside.  I suppose I could go eSATA at the office and USB at the datacenter.  I might still do that, although it’ll have to wait until I can take down that office server.  It serves other important duties here, so I can’t just shut it down without affecting a lot of other things.

In any case, I think (hope) that my removable drive troubles are over, at least for a while.

According to the Reuters article, Tax soda, pizza to cut obesity, researchers say

U.S. researchers estimate that an 18 percent tax on pizza and soda can push down U.S. adults’ calorie intake enough to lower their average weight by 5 pounds (2 kg) per year.

I’m not sure what “average” is supposed to mean here.  What little I can glean from the article indicates that they’re saying that the combined average weight of U.S. adults would drop by five pounds in a year.  That is, if you sum the weight of all the adults and divide by the number of adults, the result will be five pounds less than the previous year’s result.  That’s a pretty astonishing number, especially if they claim that those results will continue for any length of time.  That average five pound loss would be a higher percentage of the total weight every year and as the years go by there would be fewer people contributing to the loss.

I suppose I’ll have to find the actual research paper if I want to make any sense of things.  The reporting in this article is, like most medical or science reporting I see in the mainstream press, chock full of logical holes and “conventional wisdom” presented as fact.  For example, the article repeats the oft-reported statistic that two-thirds of Americans are either overweight or obese.  That statistic is based on a questionable sampling of BMI results, and the BMI standard is the subject of quite some debate.  That said, there does seem to be an overabundance of fat people.

That taxation is successful in changing behavior is no big surprise.  We’ve seen government attempt to limit teen smoking by making it more expensive, and it appears to work.  Although it never works as well as proponents say it will work.  And, if our experience with taxing tobacco is any indication, it’s unlikely that taxing “unhealthful foods” will have anywhere near the effect that these researchers claim.

I can imagine new Food Taxation Boards popping up around the country, contracting with Certified Food Health Consultants whose team of researchers investigate the Healthful Food Score of every type of food imaginable.  They’ll change labeling requirements so that every box of anything you buy at the supermarket, convenience store, or vending machine will have a letter grade indicating its Healthful Food Score.  Of course, due to political considerations (i.e. powerful representatives from states like California), foods made with organic sugar will have a higher score than foods made with plain old sugar.  That’s what we need, another obese bureaucracy whose mandate is to make us healthy.  Oh, the irony.

I wonder if the article’s mention of the estimated $147 billion annual cost of obesity in the same paragraph advocating taxation was meant to imply that taxation could offset those costs by any significant amount.  Probably not, although I suspect a lot of people will read that paragraph and think that the taxes will raise $147 billion per year.  I’d be surprised if the taxes raised even 10% of that.

The researchers did raise an interesting point, though:  government subsidies of the corn industry artificially lower the cost of corn syrup, making sodas and other sweetened foods much less expensive.  But then they make a mistake when they recommend that federal subsidies should go to producers of more healthful foods, rather than suggesting that government eliminate food subsidies altogether.  All too often, as in the case of tobacco, government can’t decide what it wants to do.  It props up the tobacco industry with subsidies and then taxes the heck out of it in order to limit consumption.  Wouldn’t it be more reasonable to just eliminate the subsidy?  Or is that too sensible a thing for a government to do?

I don’t know about anybody else, but I’m more than a little uncomfortable with the idea of yet another corrupt bureaucracy sticking its hand out, this time demanding tribute if I decide to indulge in a bit of junk food.

I still have all 10 fingers, and no major cuts.  I’ve been carving a few things here and there, although other things take precedence.  I haven’t had a lot of time to work on larger and more complex projects, but I’m sure getting an impressive kennel of little dogs.

Cub in a stump is a pattern from Mike Shipley’s Woodcarving the Country Bear and His Friends.  The orange face is a bit brighter than I had planned.  Debra says he looks like a traffic cone.  So I named him T. Cone Bear.

I carved the rabbit one night in a bit of a rush.  I had been invited to an old friend’s birthday party and had two days to come up with something.  She and her husband have rabbits for pets, so I thought this refrigerator magnet would be appropriate.

You might remember the sweet potato I carved over Thanksgiving. Here’s what it looks like after drying and antiquing:

The snake below is carved from a piece of 400 year old mahogany that a friend gave me.  It’s beautiful wood, but the hardest dang stuff I’ve ever carved.  It sure finishes up nice, though.  The snake is seven inches long.

And more little dogs.  In the first picture, the two dogs on the left are carved from spalted maple.  The dog on the right is from a piece of mesquite.  The dog in the middle is two inches tall.  The second picture shows my latest little dog, carved from a piece of Bradford pear, much like the piece shown in the picture.  This one, too, is two inches tall.

This sure would be more convenient if I could just link to the photos I post on Facebook.  For reasons that are unclear to me, I can link to the pictures, but I can’t actually show the pictures from there in my blog.  They must have a block of some kind to prevent image hijacking.  Oh, well.  If you like, you can see the entire photo album.

I’ve mentioned before that we use USB external drives for transportation of data from our colocation facility to the office.  After struggling to find reliable devices, we finally settled on the Seagate FreeAgent 1TB drives.  They’ve served us quite well for over a year now.  But recently it’s been taking a very long time to copy our data.

It used to take about three and a half hours to copy data (a couple hundred gigabytes) from the server to the removable drive.  Recently it’s been taking on the order of 10 to 12 hours.  At first I thought it was another idiotic problem with caching, similar to the problem I had copying large files between servers, except this copy would eventually complete.  The odd thing was that when I started the copy it would proceed at the expected rate and at some point slow to a crawl.

So I wrote my own program that reads a gigabyte at a time from the local drive and then writes it to the USB device, timing each write operation.  Running locally (at the office), the program reported a steady 24 MB/sec write speed, and copied the entire file at that rate.  Run at the data center copying the same file, the program reported the same 24 MB/sec for the first 20 gigabytes or so.  Then it slowed to about 4 MB/sec.

That smacks of a thermal problem.  Either the drive electronics or the server’s USB port was overheating.  I quickly eliminated the server’s USB port as the problem by hooking up a different USB device and checking to see that the server could pass more than 50 gigabytes of data without trouble.

So the problem is with the FreeAgent drive.  If you spend a little time searching online, you’ll see that other people have experienced overheating problems with the FreeAgent drives.  And looking at the design, I can see why:  the only ventilation is at the bottom of the device where the electronics are.

The picture on the left, above, shows the drive as we typically would place it in the rack at the data center.  It sits on top of one of our servers.  The spot where it’s sitting is directly above one of the disk drives.  That spot is cool to the touch when I tested it yesterday.  Note, however, that you can’t see any ventilation holes.  Those are on the other side of the enclosure, as shown by the red arrow in the picture to the right.

Since air enters the cabinet from where I was standing taking this picture, and flows towards the back, mounting the drive as shown on the left doesn’t allow for very good airflow.  So yesterday I placed the drive in the cabinet as shown on the right.  Then I ran my test program.  I was able to write about 90 gigabytes before the drive slowed down.  I’m convinced now that it’s a thermal problem.

I don’t quite know where to go from here, though.  I think the first thing I’ll try is lifting the drive higher off the surface it’s sitting on.  That should allow for better airflow, and perhaps will be enough to keep the electronics cool.  (The problem, according to what I’ve found online, appears to be the USB to SATA conversion electronics at the base of the drive enclosure.)  If changing the drive location doesn’t solve the problem, I’ll have to find a different model of removable drive that has better ventilation or better heat tolerance.  Perhaps it’s time to visit Fry’s and see about buying an enclosure that’s designed for use in the warm environment of a server rack.

Imagine that you have a web site that, among other things, allows your users to search for media (audio and video) using a simple query language.  So, if you want to find Britney Spears videos, you’d just type britney spears in the search box and click the Search button.  Simple, right?

Except it turns out that britney and spears are pretty common spam terms in metadata (the keywords and description fields of YouTube videos, for example).  People will upload all manner of stuff to YouTube and put bogus terms in the description in an attempt to get people to watch the video.  To reduce the number of irrelevant or inappropriate results returned (it’s probably impossible to eliminate irrelevant content), you decide to index the metadata by field and allow the user to say which fields are searched.  So, if they want just those videos that have “Britney” and “Spears” in the title field, they would type britney spears IN Title.  That doesn’t eliminate all of the spam, but it reduces it quite a bit.

It turns out that you have to make the IN case sensitive.  Otherwise you’d never be able to search for the word “in” in any metadata.  The same is true for any word that you use in your query language.  For example, if wanted all the videos that contain “Britney” or “Spears”, we’d write britney OR spears IN Title.

Still, not too hard, right?  But what if you want to search the Title field and the Description field?  At first you’d think you could write:  britney spears IN Title OR Description.  You could make that work until you take into account the possibility of more complex query expressions.  For example, let’s say you wanted a list of all videos that claim to be a Led Zeppelin song, or some version of Stairway to Heaven.  One possible query would be:

led zeppelin IN Artist OR Description OR stairway heaven IN Title

Whereas that query might look reasonable to a non-programmer, writing a computer program to properly handle the general case of queries like that is non-trivial.  The query can be parsed in several different ways.  Three of which are:

(led zeppelin IN Artist OR Description) OR (stairway heaven IN Title)
(led zeppelin IN Artist) OR )(Description OR stairway) heaven IN Title)
(led zeppelin IN Artist) OR (description OR (stairway heaven) IN Title)

All three of those interpretations are perfectly valid.  Applying rules of operator precedence can disambiguate some of the cases, but if you go through the exercise you’ll find out that IN has to have lower precedence than OR, and if you do that, then you end up with:

(led zeppelin IN Artist OR (Description OR stairway heaven)) IN Title

You end up having to either decorate the field names (i.e. “@Artist”) or group them with brackets or parentheses (i.e IN [Artist or Description]).

All of this is doable, and not especially heavy lifting as far as parsing is concerned.  But then you have to explain it to a non-technical user and make it easy for the non-technical user to use.  Otherwise, only programmers will want to (or even be able to) use it.

I’ve heard many a programmer (myself included, come to think of it) complain about a search facility that doesn’t allow complex queries.  We look at it from a programmer’s perspective and think it’d be trivial to implement a comprehensive query facility.  And in most cases they’re probably right.  You could develop a query system that anybody with a couple years’ of programming experience could use without trouble and get exact results.  And when you flipped the switch to turn it on, you’d hear crickets.  Most users don’t understand Boolean algebra or the difference in precedence between AND and OR.  Trust me, people will go somewhere else to get their information rather than have to think of how to ask for it.

What users really want is a DWIM mode:  Do What I Mean.  They want to type word soup into the search and get back exactly what they were looking for, with no false hits (i.e. asking for beatles the music group and getting back something about dung beetles because somebody misspelled “beetle”).

But DWIM doesn’t exist.  Not today, and not for a long time (perhaps ever) in the future.  As a result, we have to restrict what the user can type and very carefully specify how things will be interpreted.  We have to make it easy for the most common cases, but able to do moderately complex and powerful things.  That balance is difficult to achieve, and no matter what you come up with, somebody will complain.  You can only hope that the number of users you delight will vastly outweigh those whom you annoy.

Updates and corrections (full story below):

The pilot’s name is Joseph (Joe) Stack.  He was a software engineer from Austin.  The airplane, a Piper Dakota tail number N2889D, was registered in his name.  He posted a suicide note on his web site at about 9:15, drove to the Georgetown airport and took off about 9:40.  He crashed into the office building shortly thereafter.

The ISP that hosted his web site took the site offline in response to a request by the FBI.  Thanks to the Internet, his suicide note (some are calling it a “manifesto”) will live on.

As of 4:30 PM, there are two reported injured and one still unaccounted for.  I don’t know if that unaccounted-for person is the pilot himself, or somebody who was supposed to be in the building.

My original report:

Around 10:00 this morning, I heard a report on the radio of “something happening” near a major highway intersection here in Austin.  I soon learned that a small plane had hit a building.

The crash started a very big fire, and the building is engulfed in flames.  One report I saw said that the building is likely to be completely destroyed.

It’s been about two hours since the incident.  The NTSB is investigating the it as an intentional act.  Early reports indicate that the pilot set fire to his own house, then stole an airplane and intentionally flew it into the building.  I haven’t yet seen any reports of a motive, and there’s still a lot of speculation.

One person from the building is still unaccounted for.  There are reports of two people being transported to the hospital, the extent of their injuries unknown.  There are no deaths reported.

The conspiracy theorists have already jumped on it.  I’ve seen several posts questioning whether “a little plane” could start such a large fire and cause so much damage to the building.  Another bunch of posters are accusing the Obama administration of leaning on authorities and media to prevent the incident from being described as terrorism.   I’d laugh, but it scares me that there are those who take these guys seriously.

I have other projects on my bench at the moment or I would have tried this one already.  A great beginner project, or a quick and fun little project for the more experienced carver, is Simple Simon the Penguin.

Dave Brock presents a three-part video series that will walk you through it step-by-step.  All you need is a piece of basswood that’s approximately 1″x1″x6″.  The penguin itself is only 2-3/4″ long, but you’ll want the extra length to hold on to.  Carve one, flip the stick over and carve the other, and then cut the two penguins apart.

Simple Simon, Part 1
Simple Simon, Part 2
Simple Simon, Part 3

Spalting is discoloration of wood caused by fungus, most often during decay.  It can happen to diseased or stressed trees, and rarely in live, healthy trees.  Spalting can create some very beautiful colorations in the wood, as it did in the piece of maple where I found this little dog hiding.

As I said, spalting occurs during decay.  Another side effect of decay is that the wood often becomes softer (sometimes a good thing) and more likely to splinter (not a good thing).  This piece was quite prone to splinter, causing me to lose the tail, half of the left foot, and part of an ear.  Still, I love the color and I think this is the best face I’ve done yet.

The President unveiled his new budget today: 3.83 trillion dollars. The numbers fairly boggle the mind. The total budget works out to just about $12,500 per person in the United States, or about $47,500 per family. Or $34,800 for each of the 110 million taxpayers in the country. Of course, 41% (about $1.56 trillion) is deficit spending, meaning that 41 cents of every dollar the government spends in fiscal year 2011 will be paid for (supposedly) in the future. But with an existing debt of $12.5 trillion, this year’s budget will push the accumulated national debt past $14 trillion: about the same as the U.S. Gross Domestic Product. Interest on the debt alone amounts to about $175 billion per year, or about $2,200 per family, 25% of which ends up in the treasuries of other countries that hold U.S. debt securities.

This year, total government debt will exceed total income for the entire country. The White House budget office says that debt will remain at that level through 2019 (that is, debt will roughly equal GDP), but those projections rely on GDP growing faster than most analysts say it can. At $14 trillion, national debt is almost 20% of all household and business assets in the entire country. If government spending continues at this rate, the accumulated federal debt alone will exceed total assets in 20 years or so. That doesn’t include the approximately $40 trillion (currently) in debt owed by local and state governments, corporations, and individuals.

I won’t try to lay the blame for this situation on the President. Not on the current President, and not on the former Presidents. Undoubtedly, they all have contributed to it by proposing budgets that fund pet projects or further their own agendas, but that’s to be expected. No, the real blame lies with Congress for approving such outrageous spending over the decades, and with us–the American voter and taxpayer–for continuing to allow it.

The President on Wednesday announced a proposed spending freeze on domestic discretionary spending as a way of trying to get the deficit under control. As laudable as that is (any freeze or decrease in government spending gets my vote), it’s pretty difficult to take it seriously. He’s talking about a projected “savings” of about $250 billion over the next 10 years. That’s less than 3% of the total debt expected to accumulate over that period, or about 1% of total spending. And it’s highly unlikely that Congress will approve even that miniscule spending reduction.

The President is in a tough spot because there are programs he positively cannot touch. Even if he were willing to forego re-election, there’s no way Congress would approve cuts in those programs. Doing so is tantamount to political suicide. What programs? I’m so glad you asked.

The following numbers are from the FY 2010 budget

• Social Security is 19.63% of the budget. 13% of the people in this country are over 65 years of age, and a very large percentage of them vote. Need I say more?
• Medicare is 12.79% of the budget. See above.
• Unemployment, welfare, and other “mandatory spending” is 16.13% of the budget. Almost untouchable, regardless of which party controls Congress.
• Medicaid and associated programs: 8.19%. Ditto.
• Interest on the national debt: 4.63%.  Can’t have us defaulting on our debt.

When you throw in the Department of Defense share of 18.74%, the total comes to 80.11% of the budget that the President has almost no control over. The budget is 20% over revenue before the President even gets to attempt spending reduction. Think of that: if you cut out military and all government spending other than the programs I mentioned above, we’d still have a budget deficit.

This is nothing new, by the way. I remember the same math being presented to me in 1981 or 1982. If anything, the President has fewer options today than Reagan did back then.

I see three ways out of this mess: Reduce spending, raise taxes, or somehow increase GDP by about 50% so that current tax rates will cover the deficit. In the current climate, spending reductions and tax increases are political suicide, and a 50% increase in GDP is impossible. Tax increases are less suicidal in most cases, and they have the “benefit” (in political terms) of pissing off fewer people, so that’s the route Congress will likely take in an attempt to prevent the inevitable. Even so, there’s no way they can make up a 40% budget deficit (or even a 20% deficit) with tax increases.

No. I guess I don’t see any way out of this mess. Our spending is out of control and there isn’t anybody in a position to slow or stop it.  It’s a frightening thought.

Yesterday, a friend of mine trotted out that old urban legend about using WD-40 to ease the pain of arthritis.  I tried to tell him it was a myth, but he didn’t believe me.  His argument:  fish oil is known to help relieve arthritis pain, and WD-40 contains fish oil.  Oh, boy.

First, the manufacturer of WD-40 recommends against putting their product on your skin.  In addition, WD-40 does not contain fish oil, as you can see by reading their Material Safety Data Sheet.  It’s mostly petroleum distillates, and I certainly wouldn’t want those passing through my skin and into the joints.  Now there’s a thought.  Can they?  We’ll get back to that.

So what about fish oil, anyway?  It turns out that there is some evidence that fish oil can reduce the swelling associated with rheumatoid arthritis.  That is, fish oil that’s taken as a dietary supplement.  There is no evidence that rubbing fish oil on your skin will have any measurable effect other than that provided by the act of massaging.  The fish oil can’t pass through the skin in sufficient quantity to have any effect.

Along the same lines, there are countless sites pushing “natural” skin care products that warn of the dangers your cosmetics pose.  A popular myth seems to be that a woman will absorb between 5 and 20 pounds of skin care chemicals through her skin per year.  If you believe those claims, a woman’s body is a veritable toxic waste dump.  That claim is more absurd than the colon cleansing sites’ claim that I have 5 to 20 pounds of stuff stuck to my colon, “like spackle or paste.”  But I digress.

Back to the point.  Is it even possible for WD-40 to pass through the skin?

There are some chemicals that do pass through the skin very easily.  Probably the best known is DMSO.  Although not toxic itself, DMSO is a very powerful solvent that can carry through the skin the things that it dissolves.  Unfortunately, I’ve not found a list of other chemicals that are as easily absorbed.

The primary ingredients in WD-40 are petroleum distillates, specifically alphatic hydrocarbons and petroleum based oil.  Everything I’ve been able to find shows that the danger of absorbing these chemicals through the skin is very low, provided you don’t have any cuts or open sores.  I suppose if you bathed in it for an hour every day you might get some under the skin.  It’s unlikely, however, that the effects would be good.  It almost certainly wouldn’t relieve the aching joints.

I’ve found it rather difficult to find good information about the permeability of skin to different substances.  What I’d really like to see is a list of chemicals (including common names, where applicable) that gives an indication of the danger of skin absorption.  It’d be difficult to do that in a single list, though.  Some chemicals will pass through the skin readily, but pose no real health hazard.  Others might have more difficulty passing through the skin, but pose an extreme hazard if they get into the bloodstream.

 I did run across a couple of interesting links having to do with the dangers of absorbing jet fuel and gasoline.  The article Assessment of Skin Absorption and Penetration of JP-8 Jet Fuel and Its Components, published in Toxicology Sciences, says in its abstract:

These results suggest: (1) that JP-8 penetration will not cause systemic toxicity because of low fluxes of all the components; and (2) the absorption of aliphatic components into the skin may be a cause of skin irritation.

In other words, you might absorb a bit of it and it might irritate your skin, but it’s unlikely to cause major problems.

According to the Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety’s Health Effects of Gasoline:

When gasoline is NOT trapped against the skin and can freely evaporate, it is probably only mildly irritating or not irritating. However, case reports indicate that when gasoline is trapped against the skin (clothing is soaked in gasoline, skin is in contact with a puddle) for a long period (probably more than 30 minutes), serious burns and skin loss may occur. Absorption through the skin occurs, but is normally not significant.

All the research I’ve found about the dangers of gasoline and diesel indicates that the real dangers are in inhaling, ingesting, or getting it into the body through a tear in the skin.  I wouldn’t soak my hand in gasoline, but I wouldn’t worry too much about a few splashes on the skin.

Some friends who work in auto repair report sometimes using brake fluid as a hand cleaner.  This is probably a bad idea, but not disastrous.  Most brake fluids are glycol-ether based.  I’m not certain, but it looks like all of these solvents are quite toxic if ingested.  There is some evidence of skin absorption through lesions, but I wasn’t able to find any solid information on absorption through intact skin.  Again, I doubt that there’s much danger if you’re not soaking in it.

An interesting resource for the more technically minded is the Skin Permeation Calculator available from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.  You’ll need to know the CAS Number  for a particular chemical, or have its molecular weight and a number called the LOGKOW.  Given those two numbers, the calculator will give you some numbers that indicate how easily the chemical will pass through the skin.  I don’t yet know enough to make good use of that information, though.

You can find the CAS Number for lots of different chemicals from the NIOSH Pocket Guide to Chemical Hazards. Unfortunately, the Skin Permeation Calculator doesn’t recognize all of the CAS Numbers and the NIOSH data lists the molecular weight, but not the log K_OW.  So you end up having to find the CAS and use it to search the LOGKOW database.

I’d be interested in hearing about any list like the one I described above:  substances listed by danger of absorbing them through the skin.  Anybody have a link?  I’d hate to have to download those databases and run the numbers myself.

A lot of wood carvers have tried their hands at Rufus and Sadie from Harold Enlow’s book, Carving Figure Caricatures in the Ozark Style.  This, perhaps, isn’t the best rendition ever, but I had fun with it.  The little dog is from a piece of cedar.

We should see some small measure of sanity emerge from the election of Republican Scott Brown to fill the vacant Senate seat left by the death of Senator Kennedy.  I think it’s dangerous for any single party to control the White House and both houses of Congress.  We only have to go back to the first of G.W. Bush’s terms to see the kind of excesses such power can lead to.

I’m also happy to see that Democrats have decided not to do something rash like try to jam the health care bill through before the new Senator can be seated.  I doubt that they’d have the votes to do it, but just trying would almost certainly lead to a huge defeat for incumbent Democrats in this November’s election, giving Republicans total control of both houses:  another bad thing.  We’re much safer when neither party has an overwhelming majority in Congress.  We’re safest, of course, when Congress is out of session, but if we must have them mucking things up it’s best if we make it difficult for them.

Congress very often makes what amount to irrevocable decisions.  They’re not technically irrevocable, but they’re usually hard enough to change as to be permanent.  Such things should be done judiciously, not primarily to fit the controlling party’s agenda or to garner votes or to show the public that Congress is “Doing Something”, but rather because in the considered opinion of our Senators and Representatives, it’s the right thing to do for the good of the country.  I see very little of that rationality in Washington, and even less when one of the two major parties has a virtual stranglehold on the lawmaking process.

Unfortunately, I fear that both parties will misinterpret the results of yesterday’s election.  Republicans will call it a “mandate for change” (how often have I heard that one?) or a repudiation of the President’s and the Democrats’ agenda.  Democrats will call it reactionary, blame the tea party movement for hijacking the election, or think that the problem is that they haven’t done enough soon enough.

I think the message is quite a bit simpler:  large numbers of people who normally don’t vote are fed up.  They want want smaller and less intrusive government.  This is their first step in making their voices heard.  They’re neither Democrat nor Republican, but rather people who are tired of “business as usual.”  I’d like to think that others will make their voices heard come November, but if incumbents have any brains (and I’ve never accused them of being stupid), they’ll lay low and not make any waves so that 10 months from now people will have forgotten and won’t have anything recent to complain about.

The story is told of a man who becomes convinced that he’s dead.  At first, his family tries to logic:  “Look, you’re walking and breathing and talking.  You can’t possibly be dead!”  Failing that, they referred him to a psychiatrist who tried the same line of reasoning, again to no avail.  The man is eventually committed to a mental institution, still firmly convinced that he is dead, and daily visits with the doctors have no effect on changing his mind.

After some time, a new psychiatrist is assigned his case.  The new doctor has a new idea, and walks his patient through the medical texts to convince the man of one fact:  dead men don’t bleed.  After weeks of poring over the texts and other relevant information, the man concedes the point:  dead men do not bleed.

The doctor then takes a pin and pricks the man’s finger.  As you would expect, a drop of blood begins to well up in the tip of the patient’s finger.  Looking at it, astounded, the man exclaims, “Hey, Doc!  Dead men do bleed!”

How often do you run into people who, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, continue clinging to their own preconceived notions in much the same way as the man who was convinced that he was dead?

Better yet, have you ever found yourself holding tightly to a particular belief long after you have seen sufficient evidence to prove that you’re dead wrong?

The ability to re-examine and modify (or discard) your beliefs in the face of contrary evidence and admit it is perhaps the most important mark of intellectual maturity.

This carving is my rendition of Mike Shipley’s “Barry the Bear” from his book Woodcarving the Country Bear & His Friends.  I deviated from the pattern quite a bit on the details, but it’s pretty clear where the original idea came from.

Barry is about 4 inches tall.  It was another project for my carving class.

Last summer, I signed up to participate in the Christmas ornament swap organized by some members of the Woodcarving Illustrated message board.  I ended up sending out 22 ornaments and getting 16 or 18 back.  The other four went to people who were involved, but not participating.  I didn’t get pictures of all the ornaments I received because I failed to do that before Debra packed them away.  But I did get a pretty good picture of the little tree filled with hand carved ornaments.  A few are mine, but most I received from others.  Click on the image below for a full sized view.

In a thinly reported move the other day, House and Senate Democratic leaders decided to “fast track” coming up with a compromise health care bill.  Rather than forming the usual conference committee that includes members from both parties, the fast track approach will be held behind closed doors and include only the Democratic leadership from both houses, along with representatives from the Obama administration.  The plan is for the House to amend the Senate’s health care bill and then pass the result to the Senate for ratification.

The President, who a year ago said that his approach would involve “bringing all parties together, and broadcasting those negotiations on C-SPAN so that the American people can see what the choices are,”  is now meeting in secret to force through unpopular legislation?  So much for campaign promises, bipartisanship, and open government.

I believe that the proposed health care finance legislation being considered is a bad idea, in large part due to the reasons I pointed out in my January 2003 blog entry, The Fallacy of Affordable Health Insurance.  The Administration and its Democratic lackies pay lip service to those arguments, but there’s little in the way of effective cost containment in the proposed legislation.  There are, however, plenty of instances of filling dissenters’ mouths with gold, the most egregious being the part that has the Federal government pay for the expansion of Medicaid in Nebraska.  Forever.  Funny how Sen. Nelson of Nebraska changed his vote after that bit was added.

The Democratic Congressional leadership and the Obama administration should not be taking this behind closed doors approach to the health care legislation.  Or any legislation, come to think of it.  They promised us open government, only to revert to business as usual whenever it looks like things aren’t going their way.  I know that the President wants health care legislation passed before his State of the Union speech, but doing it this way goes against everything he said he holds dear.

I said that I’d give President Obama a chance to see if he really does live up to the standards that he set forth.  If he continues on this course, I’ll know that he’s no better than any other politician who puts his and his party’s agenda ahead of the good of the nation.  I’m not terribly surprised, and I suppose I shouldn’t be disappointed.

Updated.  See below.

I don’t know how, but I somehow managed to get the Malware Defense “anti-spyware” program on my system at home.  Fortunately for me, it doesn’t do anything malicious like delete files or install botnet sofware.  It just continually pops up virus warnings and giving opportunities to install.  For a price, of course.  If you pay, they go away.

The removal instructions I came across weren’t complete, as I completed those steps, rebooted the system, and the thing came right back.  I finally tracked down and eliminated the richtx64.exe trojan, which I think is what was re-running Malware Defense.

I’ve been running my computer for years without any kind of active anti-virus or such, and this is the first time I’ve ever been infected.  Now I’m not sure what to do.  I certainly won’t go back to Norton after the troubles I’ve had with them, and I don’t hear good reports about McAfee’s offering, either.  Is there a good anti-virus, anti-malware package that works, is inexpensive, and doesn’t take inordinate amounts of CPU time?

Update 12/28:

It took a while, but with some research and downloading and running a few cleanup utilities, it looks like I was successful in disinfecting the computer.  The thing kept getting re-infected whenever I’d reboot, and it would prevent me from installing or running common anti-malware utilities.  I found a program called rkill that kills common malware processes, and then I could install and run cleanup software.  This morning, a complete scan with Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware reported zero problems.  I then installed Microsoft Security Essentials from a file that I downloaded from a different (uninfected) computer.  It reports no problems.

Darrin Chandler brings up an interesting point in the comments:  it’s all a matter of weighing the risks.  I’ve gone years without any kind of malware problems.  Even when I had anti-malware applications installed, they never reported that they’d blocked anything.  And those programs are very quick to notify whenever they see anything even vaguely suspicious.  So, as Darrin points out, my risk of being infected is pretty small.  However, the cost of being infected is fairly high.  It cost me most of a day to get rid of it.  And I was fortunate that it doesn’t seem to have deleted any files.  I have no idea if it copied anything from me.  I’m not too worried since I don’t keep financial information on this machine.

I’m hoping that Microsoft Security Essentials works well and doesn’t cause problems by being too chatty or sucking down too many resources.  We’ll see how it goes.

One of the dubious benefits of owning a swimming pool is that I don’t really have to rake the leaves in my back yard.  I just have to wait for a good wind storm to blow them into the pool, where I can then skim them out.  This convenience doesn’t come for free, though.  They sink if I let them stay in the pool too long, and removing them from the bottom is much more difficult.  Also, they have a tendency to clog up the filter trap, which then causes the pump to suck air.  And, of course, this tends to happen on the coldest night of the year so I can’t just turn off the pump because if I do it might freeze.

Actually, I do rake the leaves.  I cleaned the yard last weekend, but a couple of the oak trees hadn’t yet dropped all their leaves.  They dropped over the week, and Thursday’s cold and high winds put them into the pool.  I spent a cold 30 minutes on Thursday evening cleaning them out.

Debra and I went to an early showing of the movie Avatar yesterday.  I was seriously impressed.  It was somewhat predictable, but other than that I loved it.  Some people I know complained that it was a heavy-handed “tree hugger” movie, but I didn’t see it that way.  I can see where one could make that argument, but then you can make that argument about a large number of movies made over the last 50 years or more.  It’s an underdog movie.  In any event, it’s very well done.  I loved that hammerhead rhino.

While I’m on the subject of Avatar…  The MPAA rating is PG-13 “intense epic battle sequences and warfare, sensuality, language and some smoking.”  There are indeed “intense epic battle sequences and warfare.’  There is vanishingly little sensuality and even less “language.”  Whatever.  But smoking?  What is that all about?  We have to warn parents ’cause their kids might see somebody smoking?

Christmas was relaxing.  Other than going to the movie, Debra and I stayed at home, took Charlie for a walk, and generally just enjoyed time together.  A wonderful way to spend a day off.

Until recently, all of my carving “instruction” was through books, web sites, and YouTube videos.  I guess you could say that I was “self taught” in that I didn’t have the benefit of personal instruction, but I have to give credit for my improvement to the authors and especially those who made the carving videos.

Back in the summer I stumbled across a picture tutorial for carving a hillbilly in the flat plane style.  With step by step instructions and almost 60 pictures, it walks you through turning a 6″x1″x1″ block of wood into this:

I did most of the carving last summer, but hadn’t finished texturing the beard.  Last week I saw it sitting unfinished on my shelf and decided to complete it.

I started taking a beginning carving class from a member of my woodcarving club (Central Texas Woodcarvers Association) about four weeks ago.  The second project we did was a snake, carved from a piece of aromatic cedar:

The primary purpose of the exercise was to introduce the concept of “reading” the wood and working with grain changes.  I sanded it smooth and left it unfinished because I didn’t want to mask that nice cedar smell.

And I keep carving these little dogs.  I carved a dozen or more from basswood, and at least a dozen from other woods:  oak, maple, mesquite, cherry, and walnut.  In the picture below, the small one is cherry and the larger one is walnut.  Both are finished with a mixture of oil and wax.  The only coloring is on the face:  ears, eyes, nose, and mouth.

Several people have commented that it looks like the little dog is leaning away from the big dog, perhaps because the big dog has done something objectionable.  The little dog’s surprised expression and the big dog rolling its eyes as if to say, “It wasn’t me” seem to bear that out.  I wish I could say that I planned it that way.