The World's First Commercial Hydroelectric Generating Plant

The Vulcan Street Plant in Appleton, Wisconsin began operation on September 30, 1882:

The Vulcan Street Plant was the world's first Edison hydroelectric central station. The plant was built on the Fox River in Appleton, Wisconsin and put into operation on September 30, 1882. According to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the Vulcan Street plant is considered to be "the first hydro-electric central station to serve a system of private and commercial customers in North America." It is a National Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark.
The Vulcan Street Plant was housed in the Appleton Paper and Pulp Company building, which burned to the ground in 1891. A replica of the Vulcan Street Plant was later built on South Oneida Street.
The Vulcan Street Plant was conceptualized by H.J. Rogers – who was the president of the Appleton Paper and Pulp Co. and of the Appleton Gas Light Co. during this time. According to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, H. J. Rogers first came up with the idea for a hydro-electric central station after talking with a friend of his, H.E. Jacobs, while they were on a fishing trip.
H. E. Jacobs, who was working for Western Edison Light Company of Chicago as a licensing agent, informed H. J. Rogers about Thomas Edison’s plan for a steam-driven electric power plant in New York City called the Pearl Street Plant. Upon learning about Edison’s advances in electric light technology and electric generators, Rogers worked to bring together a group of investors in an effort to create one of the first hydro-electric central stations in the world. For this reason, the Appleton Edison Electric Light Company was formed and incorporated on May 25, 1882.
While Edison’s Pearl Street Plant was still under construction, the founders of the Appleton Edison Electric Light Company – H.E. Jacobs, A.L. Smith, H.D. Smith, and Charles Beveridge – began planning the Vulcan Street Plant.
In July 1882, an engineer named P.D. Johnston, who worked for Western Edison Light Company of Chicago during this time, visited Appleton to explain the details of Edison’s lighting system to the founders of the Appleton Edison Electric Light Company. After this meeting, the founders decided to test the viability of hydro-electric lighting by first installing it in their homes and mills.
As a result, two Edison “K” type generators were ordered. The first generator was installed in H.J. Roger’s paper mill, the Appleton Paper and Pulp Company, and is the generator that began operation on September 30, 1882. The second generator was installed in its own building on Vulcan Street and began operation on November 25, 1882.On September 27, 1882, the first generator began operation, but without success. For this reason, the man who installed the generator, Edward T. Ames, returned to Appleton in an effort to correct the problem.
After a few days of trial and error troubleshooting, the generator was fixed and successfully put it into operation on September 30, 1882. This was only twenty-six days after Thomas Edison began to successfully operate his steam-driven Pearl Street Plant in New York, which began operation on September 4, 1882. The output of the original generator was about 12.5 kilowatts.
The first buildings to be lit by the Vulcan Street Plant were H.J. Roger’s home, the Appleton Paper and Pulp Company building, and the Vulcan Paper Mill, which were all connected directly to the generator.
Initially, the buildings' direct connection to the generator caused many problems because the generator was directly connected to the waterwheel. The water from the Fox River did not flow at a constant rate, so the lights did not keep a constant brightness and often burnt out.
This problem was resolved by moving the generator to a lean-to off the main building, where it was attached to a separate water wheel that allowed for a more even load distribution.
During the time of the Vulcan Street Plant, voltage regulators did not exist yet. Operators had to look at the light itself to determine if it was at the proper brightness, and they adjusted the voltage according to their observations.
Electricity meters did not exist at this time, so customers were charged a flat monthly fee based on the number of electric lamps installed in their building. For this reason, many people left their lights on all night.
The original electric distribution lines in Appleton were made of bare copper. This posed many challenges in the early development of commercial electricity, because just about everything was made out of wood or other flammable materials. The wiring used in buildings was insulated by a thin layer of cotton and was fastened to walls using wood cleats. Likewise, wood was used for fuse boxes, light sockets, and switch handles.

I really like the details at the end of the article about the bare wires and lack of voltage regulators and such.  God, those had to be interesting days.

Accidental Child Gun Deaths

The NYT did some research and came up with this data:

Compiling a complete census of accidental gun deaths of children is difficult, because most states do not consider death certificate data a matter of public record. In a handful of states, however, the information is publicly available. Using these death records as a guide, along with hundreds of medical examiner and coroner reports and police investigative files, The Times sought to identify every accidental firearm death of a child age 14 and under in Georgia, Minnesota, North Carolina and Ohio dating to 1999, and in California to 2007. Records were also obtained from several county medical examiners’ offices in Florida, Illinois and Texas.

The goal, in the end, was an in-depth portrait of accidental firearm deaths of children, one that would shed light on how such killings occur and might be prevented. In all, The Times cataloged 259 gun accidents that killed children ages 14 and younger. The youngest was just 9 months old, shot in his crib.

In four of the five states — California, Georgia, North Carolina and Ohio — The Times identified roughly twice as many accidental killings as were tallied in the corresponding federal data. In the fifth, Minnesota, there were 50 percent more accidental gun deaths. (The Times excluded some fatal shootings, like pellet gun accidents, that are normally included in the federal statistics.)

The undercount stems from the peculiarities by which medical examiners and coroners make their “manner of death” rulings. These pronouncements, along with other information entered on death certificates, are the basis for the nation’s mortality statistics, which are assembled by the National Center for Health Statistics, a division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Choosing among five options — homicide, accidental, suicide, natural or undetermined — most medical examiners and coroners simply call any death in which one person shoots another a homicide.

“A homicide just means they died at the hands of another,” said Dr. Randy L. Hanzlick, the chief medical examiner for Fulton County, Ga. “It doesn’t really connote there’s an intent to kill.”

There are several really sad stories in the article.  No matter what the NRA says, someone you love is much more likely to die from a gunshot in your home if you have guns than if you don't.  For most families in suburban and rural areas, this is something to keep in mind, even though the total number of deaths is pretty low overall.  I've got several guns sitting around, but I'd have to get a gun safe if there were kids at the house.

Lost To History

I was trying to clean up my house and came across a back issue of The Atlantic and happened to read an article about the farm boom by Chrystia Freeland, who grew up on a farm in Alberta.  At the end of the article, she compares the shrinking of the manufacturing sector and other jobs that can be outsourced to the massive migration from the farms to the cities in the early 20th century.  I had never heard this before:

Of course, that still leaves open the question of what to do about all those jobs being lost. One of the great, and largely forgotten, triumphs of American society and government has been how smoothly U.S. farmers and their communities negotiated the creative destruction of the early 20th century and emerged triumphant when it was over. Lawrence Katz, a Harvard professor who is probably America’s most esteemed labor economist, has, together with his partner and fellow Harvard professor, Claudia Goldin, studied how they did it. The answer, Katz told me, was heavy investment in education: “Iowa, Nebraska, the Dakotas, California—these were the leaders in the high-school movement.”
Katz said this big investment in education was a deliberate response to the rapid technological advances and productivity gains in both agriculture and manufacturing. Farmers could see that machines meant fewer hands would be needed on the land, while new jobs were being created in the cities. So they built schools to educate their children for those new roles. The strategy worked: high school made the children who stayed home better farmers and gave the rest the tools to leave. In fact, the Farm Belt’s high-school movement was so successful that farm children who moved to the big cities soon became the bosses of the native-born urbanites. “They tended to be more educated than the city slickers and move to better jobs in the city than the locals,” Katz said.
The challenge those Midwestern farm communities faced same 100 years ago was remarkably similar to the challenge much of America faces today—an economic transformation that is making the country richer and more productive, but that also means most of our children won’t be able to do the same jobs we do. A high-school education was enough for the children of farmers in the early 20th century. Children today will need college, with an emphasis on quantitative and analytical skills, if they are to thrive.
But while today’s problem would seem familiar to those early-20th-century farmers, today’s response would not. “We did a better job in that period of preparing the next generation for their new context than we are doing today,” Katz said. “These areas made the right level of investment in education. We have not even approached the equivalent today.”
The farming towns of the past saw themselves as true communities, with a collective responsibility to ready their children for the future. That sensibility has broken down. “Areas that had a larger share of older citizens actually were more supportive of education, which is the opposite of today,” Katz told me.

While I know the schools of the Upper Midwest generally kick ass, but I never thought that rural areas would have been the leaders of the high school education movement.  Anyway, I agree with the position that towns back then saw themselves more as communities, although I would suspect that farm towns today see themselves as communities much more than most suburbs do.

What a Contraption!

Modern Farmer highlights 20 photos of horses from the Library of Congress.  This one fascinates me:

Stacking alfalfa on a farm. Buffalo County, Nebraska, ca. 1903.

Instants

Instants from Mustafa Boga on Vimeo.

NASA Photo of the Day

September 25:

M81 versus M82
Image Credit & Copyright: Ivan Eder Explanation: Here in the Milky Way galaxy we have astronomical front row seats as M81 and M82 face-off, a mere 12 million light-years away. Locked in a gravitational struggle for the past billion years or so, the two bright galaxies are captured in this deep telescopic snapshot, constructed from 25 hours of image data. Their most recent close encounter likely resulted in the enhanced spiral arms of M81 (left) and violent star forming regions in M82 so energetic the galaxy glows in X-rays. After repeated passes, in a few billion years only one galaxy will remain. From our perspective, this cosmic moment is seen through a foreground veil of the Milky Way's stars and clouds of dust. Faintly reflecting the foreground starlight, the pervasive dust clouds are relatively unexplored galactic cirrus, or integrated flux nebulae, only a few hundred light-years above the plane of the Milky Way.

What Combat Feels Like

How Smart is Ted Cruz?

 Map of districts of so-called "suicide caucus"

From GQ's recent profile of the Texas Senator:

That may be a problem for Republicans, but not necessarily for Cruz. "We're in a moment when the combination of being hard-core and intelligent is really at a premium," says National Review writer Ramesh Ponnuru, who's been friends with Cruz since they went to Princeton together. "Because the two things that conservatives are tired of are politicians who sell out and politicians who embarrass them by not being able to make an account of themselves." In this arithmetic, Mitt Romney is the sellout and Sarah Palin is the embarrassment—and Cruz is the great new hope who brings the virtues of both without the liabilities of either.
And yet when it comes to policy, the man hailed as the "Tea Party intellectual" has deployed that powerful intellect only sparingly since arriving in Washington. Cruz's most ambitious proposal to date has been his call to abolish the IRS—something that, as one Cruz admirer lamented to me, "he's smart enough to know is an entirely cynical thing to do." Meanwhile, his effort to shut down the federal government (remember how well that worked out for the GOP the last time they tried it?) unless Obamacare is defunded prompted North Carolina Republican senator Richard Burr to call it "the dumbest idea I've ever heard." In multiple conversations with people who know Cruz well, I kept hearing the same refrain: "He's smart enough to know better."
Then again, maybe Cruz does know better. For a party in the midst of some serious soul-searching, Cruz offers a simple, reassuring solution: Forget the blather about demographic tidal waves and pleas for modernization; all Republicans need to do is return to their small-government, anti-tax fundamentals.

This is what really bothers me about these intelligent, but crazily ideological conservatives.  They seem to have such simplistic views about an extremely complex society of over 300 million people when their ideas wouldn't hold up in a society of 100 people.  How can so many extremely smart people buy into utterly idiotic ideas?  How can somebody like John Roberts believe that it is good for giant corporations to be allowed unlimited spending to influence elections?  How can somebody like Ted Cruz attack pollution control laws?  How can Paul Ryan propose getting rid of all taxes on unearned income?  I'd like to believe they are acting in good faith, but I just can't understand how they could be.

Then there are what I would call the "true believers," like Jim Jordan and Tim Huelskamp.  I keep wondering if they are really that dumb, or if they are pretty intelligent and acting in bad faith.  I tend to fall on the side that they are really that dumb.

In other words, I see the Republican party as a combination of really smart folks acting in bad faith, and really dumb folks who just don't know any better.  At this point, most of the real bomb throwers are the really dumb folks (most of the suicide caucus), and Ted Cruz is one of the few intelligent bomb throwers.  I really, really don't trust that fucker.

Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

Well, I really fucked up today.  Last night, the head which connects the sickle bar to the wobble box broke.  So this morning, I got the replacement part put on and fired up the machine.  As I headed across the field to get started, there was a huge boom and really bad sounds started coming out.  I shut it down and went to investigate.  There were chunks of cast iron on the ground behind the combine.  Here I had left the four pound hammer on the platform, and it didn't feed through the machine well.  I found some ground up pieces of handle in the grass waterway beside the field, but I still haven't found the head.  It really worked over the rasp bars on the rotor and took out a couple of chopper knives.  Then, we found some other things that were screwed up previously, so we got absolutely nothing done.

I hadn't heard this song until these guys came to our county seat, but the chorus made me chuckle a bit because I can relate.  I'll send this out to my combine:

The Business of Honeybees

Scientific American, via Big Picture Agriculture:

In all, more than 31 billion honeybees converge on California’s Central Valley each February to pollinate the almond trees. By the end of the bloom, having gathered plenty of nectar and pollen to feed their colonies, the honeybee population in the orchards may exceed 80 billion. These are the kinds of numbers you need when you're dealing with something like 2.5 trillion flowers, each of which likely requires several visits from pollen-laden bees to produce a nut. Each year, California produces between 50 and 80 percent of all the almonds harvested worldwide; this year California’s orchards are expected to yield 1.85 billion pounds of almonds, which works out to about 700 billion individual almonds. Every almond grows from a successfully pollinated flower, but the bees likely pollinated far more than 700 billion flowers this past spring. An almond tree can only support and nourish so many nuts, so in April and May the trees shed as much as 15 percent of their almonds, depending on the year.
After the almond bloom some beekeepers take their honeybees to cherry, plum and avocado orchards in California and apple and cherry orchards in Washington State. Come summer time, many beekeepers head east to fields of alfalfa, sunflowers and clover in North and South Dakota, where the bees produce the bulk of their honey for the year. Other beekeepers visit squashes in Texas, clementines and tangerines in Florida, cranberries in Wisconsin and blueberries in Michigan and Maine. All along the east coast migratory beekeepers pollinate apples, cherries, pumpkins, cranberries and various vegetables. By November, beekeepers begin moving their colonies to warm locales to wait out the winter: California, Texas, Florida and even temperature-controlled potato cellars in Idaho. The bees stay inside their hives, eating the honey they made in the summer and fall. Several decades ago beekeepers could let their colonies overwinter in a place as cold as Minnesota without worrying about too many bees dying. That's no longer true; in the past 10 years, many American beekeepers have lost between 30 and 60 percent or more of their hives each winter.

I knew the bees spent a bunch of time in California pollinating almond trees, but I had no idea of the massive scale of the operation.  I also had no idea where else they went after that.  I can see how the bees would be worn out and beat to hell after all of that, and therefore susceptible to disease and parasites.

Feedlots From the Sky

Wired highlights photos by Mishka Henner:

Tascosa Feedlot, Texas 2013

Seen from a satellite, an industrial feedlot has a sort of abstract beauty. The washes of colors, the juxtaposition of organic and rigid geometries, initially obscure the subject. Then comes the realization: That’s where our food comes from.
Such is the power of “Feedlots,” a new series of images crafted by British artist Mishka Henner from publicly available satellite photographs. Henner does work with the photos, enhancing the colors — the waste lagoons above, for example, are flat green rather than bright — but the physical details are unaltered.
Henner, who noticed the feedlots while scanning for pictures of oil fields in Texas, didn’t at first realize what he was looking at. Factory farms exist in the United Kingdom, but not at landscape scales.

That is a lot of cattle in one place.  The other pictures are pretty cool, too.

Crop Insurance Racket is Pretty Lucrative

It also seems to draw the well-connected:

Former American International Group Inc. chief Maurice “Hank” Greenberg has a new business partner: the U.S. taxpayer.
Greenberg’s Starr Indemnity & Liability Co. is one of 18 companies approved to get federal cash for insuring farmers against loss of crops or income. Wells Fargo & Co. (WFC), the nation’s fourth-largest bank by assets, Zurich-based Ace Ltd. (ACE) and units of American Financial Group Inc. (AFG), Deere & Co. (DE) and Archer-Daniels-Midland Co. (ADM) all enjoy similar public backing.
The government subsidies show how a program created to safeguard the nation’s farmers has evolved into a system that in most years all but guarantees profits for insurers. In 2012, taxpayers spent $14 billion paying more than 60 percent of farmers’ insurance premiums, the companies’ operating costs and the lion’s share of claims triggered by a historic drought, according to the Congressional Research Service.

Also:

Second-ranked Ace’s credit worthiness was raised to “A” in 2010 by analysts at Standard & Poor’s. The insurer, headed by Greenberg’s son Evan, reported $2.7 billion in net income last year.
Other subsidy recipients include Dublin-based XL Group Plc. (XL) In 2006, Chief Executive Officer Mike McGavick, 55, was a Republican Senate candidate in Washington state who inveighed against the “crippling national debt” and was endorsed by the Club for Growth, one of the conservative opponents of the crop insurance program.
McGavick, through XL Group, declined a request for comment.
Likewise, Great American Insurance Group of Cincinnati, a unit of American Financial Group Inc., gets government help. Its corporate parent was founded in 1959 by the late billionaire Carl Lindner whose sons Carl III, 60, and Craig, 58, run the company as co-chief executives. Along with their mother Edyth, the three Lindners own almost $1 billion in American Financial shares, according to the company’s 2012 proxy statement.

Wells Fargo has 22% of the market, and is our policy writer.  The whole story is interesting.  It mentions that Paul Ryan wants to get rid of the government subsidy on farmers' premiums.  That would really cut down on program participation. The article doesn't even get into the deal farmers get on revenue coverage. And with the new farm bill, the program will likely be more lucrative for both farmers and insurers.

Wiedemann's Comeback

I tried my first Wiedemann's Special Lager since its return from the dead.  Not too bad.  Here's a little background:

Heileman later sold the Evansville brewery to a management-led investor group, which acquired the rights to make Wiedemann and other Heileman labels as part of the deal. When the Evansville brewery closed in the 1990s, production of Wiedemann Bohemian Special Beer was shifted to Pittsburgh Brewing Co. But it also ran into financial problems. The company filed for bankruptcy reorganization in late 2006, and it ceased production and distribution of Wiedemann beer.
The brand’s sudden disappearance from store shelves was noticed by Jon Newberry, a local beer enthusiast and former home brewer who managed to save a few remaining Wiedemann bottles and cans for posterity.
By 2007 when Wiedemann Bohemian Special Beer disappeared from the market, other local beers in the Cincinnati area were making a comeback. In 2011, the Newberrys decided it was time for Newport’s famous Wiedemann’s fine beer to make a comeback of its own. The Newberrys enlisted brew master Kevin Moreland at Cincinnati-based Listermann Brewing to develop a new Wiedemann’s recipe that would bridge the gap between George Wiedemann’s fine Bohemian-style beers of old and the new craft beers that were again making a name for Cincinnati beer. The result was Wiedemann’s Special Lager™, a crisp and flavorful lager in the Bohemian tradition. The beer, which is relatively low alcohol compared to heavier craft beers, is brewed with several kinds of barley malt, including specialty pilsner and Munich malts that are used in many craft beers. Aromatic sterling hops provide a zesty punch. It’s a thirst-quenching, light-bodied beer designed to drink when you’re having more than one, maybe more than a few.

Nice work, Mr. Newberry and Mr. Moreland.

Lacking Material

I haven't done too good of a job finding things to go on here, or finding the time to put anything up.  Yesterday, I went down to the Reds game and watched them suck up the joint against the Mets, and then tonight I ran beans until dark.  I'll look around and see if I can find something to post, but even at work I was still too busy to find much.

Did Agriculture or War Lead to Complex Societies?

These data analysts say war probably led to "big government":

Early humans were hunter-gatherers. They had relatively simple social structures, which consisted of perhaps a few dozen people, all of whom knew each other, and they didn’t engage in complex cooperative tasks. But eventually, complex societies evolved — complete with governments, armies, agriculture, education, and other large scale, cooperative projects. With their paper, Turchin and his collaborators analyzed the spread of the social norms that allowed societies to expand across millions of people.
“You cannot have a large state without bureaucrats, but bureaucrats are expensive. You have to pay them,” he says. “So the big question is how do complex societies evolve when they are so expensive?”
The standard theory, which Turchin calls the “bottom up” theory, is that humans invented agriculture around 10,000 years ago, providing resource surpluses that freed people up for other ventures. But what Turchin and his team have found is that the bottom-up theory is wrong, or at least incomplete. “Competitions between societies, which historically took the form of warfare, drive the evolution of complex societies,” he says.
To test the two competing theories, Turchin and company designed two mathematical models for predicting the spread of complex societies. One based only on agriculture, ecology and geography. The other included those three factors, plus warfare. Then, they used data from historical atlases to determine whether these models matched up with the way the different states and empires actually evolved.
The model that included warfare predicted about 65 percent of the historical variance, while the agricultural model explained only about 16 percent, suggesting that warfare was more important in the spread of social norms that lead to complex societies. Turchin admits that the model is far from perfect — it includes no population data, for example — but for the most part, it was able to predict the spread of large-scale states between 1,500 BC to 1,500 AD. He also notes that whether or not simple societies were warlike is hugely controversial, but says that by the time their models start, warfare was widespread.

They may have a point.  War has driven a lot of history.  Plus, how better to get food and resources than taking them from other people?  But, I like to say that ag led to civilization, so I'll wait until they get some better evidence to jump on board.

Big Tex is Back

Dallas Morning News:

Big Tex bootprints have now decided to take a stroll over to Klyde Warren park. Apparently he is into the food trucks, the state fair says. I hope he takes it easy. Wouldn’t want him to bulk up too much before the fair. The bootprints that are making their way around town have fun facts about Tex. Like this one: “It would take more than 2,200 pairs of Big Tex boots to fill Klyde Warren Park.” Good to know. Let us know if you spot Big Tex’s boots somewhere.
Big Tex returns in just 11 days! Follow his journey around the state on the fair’s Facebook page.
Big shoes to fill: As the anticipation to see the new Big Tex reaches a fever pitch, the State Fair offers us one big tease… his “bootprints,” which the fair says will be all over the state in the coming days, but were spotted at the Perot museum today.
According to the fair, “After visiting Victory Park and WFAA’s Daybreak last week, Tex decided to visit old friends at the new Perot Museum of Nature and Science. He visited the T. Boone Pickens Life Then and Now Hall (he felt it would hit close to home) and raced against a Tyrannosaurus Rex in the Sports Hall.”
We hope that unlike Godzilla, Big Tex is careful about where he steps.

Big Tex bootprints in Klyde Warren park. (State Fair of Texas)

Wow, the State Fair of Texas is getting pretty corny.  For those who don't remember, Big Tex burned  up last year in the coolest fire since Big Butter Jesus got struck by lightning. 

One Massive Civil War Chart

Awesome (click on chart for zoomable version):

China Buys Up Ukrainian Ag Production

The Atlantic:

China has inked a deal to farm three million hectares (about 11, 583 square miles) of Ukrainian land over the span of half a century—which means the eastern European country will give up about 5% of its total land, or 9% of its arable farmland to feed China’s burgeoning population.
Under the deal between China’s Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, or XPCC, and KSG Agro, an Ukrainian agricultural company, crops and pigs raised in the eastern region of Dnipropetrovsk will be sold at preferential rates to two Chinese state-owned grain firms. The project will launch with 100,000 hectares and eventually expand to three million. Here’s some context on what that looks like:

 The deal comes after Ukraine lifted a law barring foreigners from buying Ukrainian land last year. As part of the deal, China’s Export-Import bank has given Ukraine a $3 billion loan for agricultural development. In exchange for its produce, Ukraine will receive seeds, equipment, a fertilizer plant (Ukraine imports about $1 billion worth of fertilizer every year), and a plant to produce a crop protection agent. XPCC also says it will help build a highway in Ukraine’s Autonomous Republic of Crimea as well as bridge across the Strait of Kerch, a transport and industrial center for the country.

And here are some other large land deals that have taken place in the last few years:

 Personally, I expect if folks in those countries get short on food, the government will confiscate the land back and the country that purchased the land would have to invade to try to retain the land.  It just doesn't seem like a good risk to me.

NASA Photo of the Day

Today:

Apollo's Analemma
Image Credit & Copyright: Anthony Ayiomamitis(TWAN) Explanation: Today, the Sun crossesthe celestial equator heading south at 20:44 Universal Time. An equinox (equal night), this astronomical event marks the first day of autumn in the northern hemisphere and spring in the south. With the Sun on the celestial equator, Earth dwellers will experience nearly 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of darkness. To celebrate, consider this remarkable record of the Sun's yearly journey through planet Earth's sky, made with planned multiple exposures captured on a single piece of 35 millimeter film. Exposures were made at the same time of day (9:00am local time), capturing the Sun's position on dates from January 7 through December 20, 2003. The multiple suns trace an intersecting curve known as an analemma. A foreground base exposure of the Temple of Apollo in ancient Corinth, Greece, appropriate for an analemma, was digitally merged with the film image. Equinox dates correspond to the middle points (not the intersection point) of the analemma. The curve is oriented at the corresponding direction and altitude for the temple, so the Sun's position for the September equinox is at the upper midpoint near picture center. Summer and winter solstices are at analemma top and bottom.

Today's Boom Towns and Ghost Towns

Job Growth Change, 2009-2013

Richard Florida points out changes in the job market from 2009-2013:

One thing I didn’t foresee in 2009 was the stunning rise of America’s energy belt—a region stretching from Houston to Oklahoma City to New Orleans and their surrounding areas that in 2011, by my estimation, produced some $750 billion in total economic output, more than Switzerland or Sweden. The Sun Belt features two kinds of regional economies: declining real-estate economies and booming energy economies. Energy stands alongside knowledge as the second pillar of America’s recovery.
Cities like Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and Bismarck and Fargo in North Dakota have experienced strong growth since the crisis, and fracking has brought flush times to out-of-the-way places in North Dakota, Wyoming, and other parts of the country. Several commentators have argued that places with energy-based economies or natural-resource-based economies, not knowledge metros, have been the real stars of the recovery. That goes too far. To put things in perspective, the economist Paul Krugman noted in March 2012 that while “employment in oil and gas extraction has risen more than 50 percent since the middle of the last decade … that amounts to only 70,000 jobs, around one-twentieth of one percent of total U.S. employment.”
The metros where low-wage jobs make up the largest share of job growth since 2009 are in the Rust Belt and the Sun Belt: St. Louis (where 90 percent of new jobs are low-wage); California’s so-called Inland Empire of Riverside–San Bernardino (where nearly three-quarters of new jobs are low-wage); New Orleans; Tampa; Orlando; Columbus, Ohio; and Rochester, New York (where more than half of new jobs are low-wage). Temp jobs account for an extraordinarily large share of recent job growth in Memphis, Birmingham, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, and Cleveland.

Not surprisingly, in this era of federal support for the economy, Washington D.C. is seeing a massive increase in high-wage jobs.  I was fascinated that Grand Rapids shows up so big in the map above.  I know they've become a biotech center, but I don't know if that is providing most of the growth there.  I'm also not as encouraged as he is about the potential of the energy sector to provide real growth, because our dependence on oil and gas is a broad tax on the entire economy.

Topping Out?

 Des Moines Register:

Iowa farmland values are beginning to show signs of softening, a new report Thursday showed, fueling concerns that the air is seeping out of the state’s rapidly rising farmland prices.
Iowa cropland values were mostly flat over the past six months, pushing just 1.2 percent higher, according to the Iowa Chapter of the Realtors Land Institute.
Still, Iowa cropland values posted a healthy 10.6 percent average increase in the last year, driven by large gains in the first half of the year, the report showed.
“Are we going to see the bubble burst? No,” said Kyle Hansen, a real estate agent at Hertz Farm Management in Nevada, Ia. More likely, he said, “we’ll see prices slowly deflate. ... It’s not dropping overnight.”
Cropland values increased 18.5 percent in 2012 and 32.6 percent in 2011, according to the group’s reports.
The sluggish growth over the past six months was driven primarily by lower prices for corn and soybeans, rising interest rates and a challenging growing year, the group said. “We’ve lost $2 (a bushel) in the corn market since the beginning of the year,” said Hansen, the group’s president.....
A report from Rabobank AgriFinance, a St. Louis financial services group, said land values could decline 15 to 20 percent over the next three years in the central United States, because of the region’s high dependence on crops like corn and soybeans.
“Corn led the ramp-up in commodity prices and the associated increase in ag land values,” the group said. “As such, if corn were to fall below $4.50 per bushel for an extended period of time, a significant decrease in land values could follow.”

Things may get interesting (read: painful) in the next few years.  I don't expect the funds to be nearly as interested in throwing money at commodities like they were since 2007.  Right now, I think the ethanol mandate is the main thing holding up corn prices right now.

Winners And Losers of the Financial Crisis

The LA Times reports on who came out of the financial disaster of 2008 better off, and who got pummeled.  Not surprisingly, the big winners were banks, giant corporations and the ultra-wealthy, while the big losers were ordinary people with money in bank accounts, low wage and factory workers, and foreclosed and underwater homeowners.  A little bit of their analysis on the banks:

In the second quarter of this year U.S. banks earned a total of $42.2 billion — the biggest industry profit in history, and double the earnings of the same period in 2010.
It's no accident that the banks have prospered mightily since the crash, said Neil Barofsky, who was the watchdog over the U.S. bank bailout program launched in September 2008.
"We turned the entire resources of the nation toward one goal: setting up a situation where the banks could earn their way out of this," said Barofsky, now an attorney at Jenner & Block in New York. The plan was not, he lamented, "about holding institutions accountable" for the debacle.
After brokerage giant Lehman failed Sept. 15, 2008, credit seized up and the financial system became a place of titanic falling dominoes: Merrill Lynch & Co., Wachovia Corp., American International Group Inc., Washington Mutual Inc. Rotten home loans were at the core of it all.
The Bush administration scrambled for a plan to restore confidence in the system. The $700-billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, was created to buy bad loans from banks. But the government quickly switched course and instead used the money to make investments in hundreds of banks, bolstering their capital cushions.
Yet in the longer run, TARP was less significant for many banks than the aid of the Federal Reserve under Chairman Ben S. Bernanke.

And for corporations:

The government's broadest measure of corporate earnings reached an annualized rate of $2.1 trillion in the second quarter, an all-time high and more than double the rate at the end of 2008.
The dramatic rebound in earnings has occurred despite a slow-growing U.S. economy and continued weakness abroad, particularly in Europe.
Corporations' profit success stems in part from the layoffs and other deep cost-cutting many firms undertook in the 2008-09 recession — and their relative lack of domestic hiring since. And, like the banks, companies have reaped the benefits of the Fed's super-low interest rates by refinancing debt.
The surge in earnings has helped buttress stock prices, which are near record highs.

Meanwhile, most Americans are no better off, or worse off than they were before the crisis.  It would be nice if there was a political party who looked out for common folks against the banks, corporations and ultra-wealthy folks who use their wealth and power to secure more for themselves at the expense of everybody else.  However, we don't seem to have one.

Chinese Honey Smuggling

Bloomberg looks at the largest food fraud case ever brought, against a German company that imported Chinese honey to the United States by reprocessing the honey and relabeling it to mask the country of origin.  I found these parts interesting:

Americans consume more honey than anyone else in the world, nearly 400 million pounds every year. About half of that is used by food companies in cereals, bread, cookies, and all sorts of other processed food. Some 60 percent of the honey is imported from Argentina, Brazil, Canada, and other trading partners. Almost none comes from China. After U.S. beekeepers accused Chinese companies of selling their honey at artificially low prices, the government imposed import duties in 2001 that as much as tripled the price of Chinese honey. Since then, little enters from China legally..... The raid on the ALW office on North Wabash Avenue occurred seven months later, after U.S. honey producers had warned Commerce and Homeland Security that companies might be smuggling in cheap Chinese honey. Low prices made them suspicious. So did the large amount of honey suddenly coming from Indonesia, Malaysia, and India—more, in total, than those countries historically produced.....

A second phase of the investigation began in 2011, when Homeland Security agents approached Honey Holding, ALW’s “garbage can,” and one of the biggest suppliers of honey to U.S. food companies. In “Project Honeygate,” as agents called it, Homeland Security had an agent work undercover for a full year as a director of procurement at Honey Holding.

In February 2013, the Department of Justice accused Honey Holding, as well as a company called Groeb Farms and several honey brokers, of evading $180 million in tariffs. Five people pleaded guilty to fraud, including one executive at Honey Holding, who was given a six-month sentence. Honey Holding and Groeb Farms entered into deferred prosecution agreements, which require them to follow a strict code of conduct and to continue cooperating with the investigation.
When it announced the deferred prosecution agreement, Groeb Farms, which is based in Onsted, Mich., said it dismissed two executives who created fake documents and lied to the board of directors even as the company’s own audits raised concerns that honey was being illegally imported.

I'm amazed that the U.S. imports so much honey.  I would have thought we might even export honey, but actually we import a higher percentage of the honey we use than we do with crude oil.  That is a surprise to me.

Portrait of a Metal Worker

PORTRAIT OF A METAL WORKER from Eliu Cornielle on Vimeo.

Searching For The Origins of Baseball

David Block believes both the Doubleday legend and the Alexander Cartwright derived-from-Rounders stories of the origins of baseball are false.  He thinks some game called baseball was being played in the mid 18th century:

In 2007, Block was on a computer terminal in the British Library in London. He came across a comic novel called The Card, by John Kidgell, which was published in 1755. He found this passage:

… the younger Part of the Family, perceiving Papa not inclined to enlarge upon the Matter, retired to an interrupted Party at Base-Ball, (an infant Game which as it advances in its Teens, improves into Fives, and in its State of Manhood, is called Tennis.)

Did you catch that? A mention of baseball nearly a century before Doubleday's "invention"! The problem was, in The Card the precious word baseball ran up against the right-hand margin. Like this:

… Party at Base-

Ball, (an infant Game …)
The OCR software didn't read it in its hyphenated form, base-ball. It read it as a single word, baseball, which had been hyphenated only because it ran off the page. Ask Ken Burns if he ever had to worry about stuff like that.
What was your first reaction when you found the reference in The Card? I asked.
"Wow, 1755, are you kidding me?!" Block recalled. Then his smile disappeared and his modesty returned. "No, of course I was much more restrained, being in the reading room of the British Library."

He searches through diaries and books to find old references to the game.  All I know is that the evidence against the Abner Doubleday legend is immense.

Testing Nuclear Battery Safety

Wired highlights how the Department of Energy tested nuclear batteries used for powering spacecraft to see how well they could prevent radioactive contamination of the environment in the event of an accident:

To explore the solar system’s darkest, deepest, and most frigid territories, nuclear batteries are the best power sources available. There is, however, a downside: The isotope of plutonium inside them (plutonium-238) is some 270 times more radioactive than the isotope of plutonium inside nuclear bombs (plutonium-239).
As a result, anti-nuclear activists consistently protest the launches of NASA’s plutonium-powered probes. They posit that space exploration isn’t worth the risk of catastrophe. But the Department of Energy, which builds the batteries inside NASA’s fleet of deep-space robots, spared no abuses in assessing their safety.
“They wanted proof of the worst that could happen, so we did our best to smash them, blown them up, shoot them and break them,” said Mary Ann Reimus, an impact test engineer at Los Alamos National Laboratory who tested the safety of nuclear batteries throughout the 1980s and 1990s.
Reimus and others carried out most of their tests in remote deserts near Albuquerque, New Mexico while looking on from concrete bunkers.

My favorite test, along with pictures:

A second rocket-sled test sliced a nuclear battery with a thin aluminum plate traveling at 684 mph, nearly the speed of sound.
“That was fun to watch from the TV in the bunker,” Reimus said. “We were several hundred feet away, but you could hear a fsssssh sound, a boom and a heavy thud.”
Remarkably, a GPHS and a fuel capsule sliced edge-on survived the hit with only a small amount of fuel escaping.

That looks like fun.  They also warn that deep-space exploration may be in danger because the country's scientific stockpile of plutonium-238 is running out.  More could be produced, but it doesn't look too likely right now.

The End Is Near

In Geologic Time:

Earth will be able to host life for just another 1.75 billion years or so, according to a study published on 18 September in Astrobiology. The method used to make the calculation can also identify planets outside the Solar System with long ‘habitable periods’, which might be the best places to look for life.
The habitable zone around a star is the area in which an orbiting planet can support liquid water, the perfect solvent for the chemical reactions at the heart of life. Too far from a star and a planet’s water turns to permanent ice and its carbon dioxide condenses; too close, and the heat turns water into vapor that escapes into space.
Habitable zones are not static. The luminosity of a typical star increases as its composition and chemical reactions evolve over billions of years, pushing the habitable zone outward. Researchers reported in March that Earth is closer to the inner edge of the Sun’s habitable zone than previously thought.
The inner edge of the Sun’s habitable zone is moving outwards at a rate of about 1 meter per year. The latest model predicts a total habitable zone lifetime for Earth of 6.3 billion–7.8 billion years, suggesting that life on the planet is already about 70% of the way through its run. Other planets — especially those that form near the outer boundary of a star’s habitable zone or orbit long-lived, low-mass stars — may have habitable-zone lifetimes of 42 billion years or longer.

Stories like that used to freak me out as a kid.  I remember thinking how terrible it was that the Sun would burn out in like 3 billion years, and I wondered what would happen to our farm, and my desccendents.  Now, as I approach middle age and don't have any progeny, I'm not too concerned about anything beyond 50 years from now.  

Kinda Sutra

Folks tell about the outlandish beliefs they held as kids about where babies came from:



The Kinda Sutra from Nonfiction Unlimited on Vimeo.


I don't remember when I understood the mechanics of the baby making process, but I know that by third or fourth grade I was certain about the Insert Tab A into Slot B process. This can be attributed to my best friend watching "The Last American Virgin" on HBO and telling me all about it.

But I'd figured out by about first grade that thinking about girls, especially the parts covered up by bikinis, made my pee-er (the name used at my house when I was a little kid) get a lot bigger, and I was always afraid that my mom would see that if she came into the bathroom while I was taking a bath, and I'd get in trouble for my dirty thoughts.  So by the time I was attending parochial school, I was already doing the Baseball, Margaret Thatcher distraction tricks to try to get the evidence to go away.  I think I had the mechanics understood before my friend regaled me with tales of the movie, but I can't exactly remember when I fully grasped it.  Unlike the one guy in the video, my girls are gross stage went away when I was really young, but the girls' this guy is gross stage pretty much still hasn't gone away.  Damn this cruel world.

Really Rich Welfare Queens

The NFL and NFL owners (along with other professional sports teams):

In Virginia, Republican Governor Bob McDonnell, who styles himself as a budget-slashing conservative crusader, took $4 million from taxpayers’ pockets and handed the money to the Washington Redskins, for the team to upgrade a workout facility. Hoping to avoid scrutiny, McDonnell approved the gift while the state legislature was out of session. The Redskins’ owner, Dan Snyder, has a net worth estimated by Forbes at $1 billion. But even billionaires like to receive expensive gifts.
Taxpayers in Hamilton County, Ohio, which includes Cincinnati, were hit with a bill for $26 million in debt service for the stadiums where the NFL’s Bengals and Major League Baseball’s Reds play, plus another $7 million to cover the direct operating costs for the Bengals’ field. Pro-sports subsidies exceeded the $23.6 million that the county cut from health-and-human-services spending in the current two-year budget (and represent a sizable chunk of the $119 million cut from Hamilton County schools). Press materials distributed by the Bengals declare that the team gives back about $1 million annually to Ohio community groups. Sound generous? That’s about 4 percent of the public subsidy the Bengals receive annually from Ohio taxpayers.
In Minnesota, the Vikings wanted a new stadium, and were vaguely threatening to decamp to another state if they didn’t get it. The Minnesota legislature, facing a $1.1 billion budget deficit, extracted $506 million from taxpayers as a gift to the team, covering roughly half the cost of the new facility. Some legislators argued that the Vikings should reveal their finances: privately held, the team is not required to disclose operating data, despite the public subsidies it receives. In the end, the Minnesota legislature folded, giving away public money without the Vikings’ disclosing information in return. The team’s principal owner, Zygmunt Wilf, had a 2011 net worth estimated at $322 million; with the new stadium deal, the Vikings’ value rose about $200 million, by Forbes’s estimate, further enriching Wilf and his family. They will make a token annual payment of $13 million to use the stadium, keeping the lion’s share of all NFL ticket, concession, parking, and, most important, television revenues.
After approving the $506 million handout, Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton said, “I’m not one to defend the economics of professional sports … Any deal you make in that world doesn’t make sense from the way the rest of us look at it.”

This is a pretty good example of where our priorities are.  Some of the giveaways are just ridiculous:

Though Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal claims to be an anti-spending conservative, each year the state of Louisiana forcibly extracts up to $6 million from its residents’ pockets and gives the cash to Benson as an “inducement payment”—the actual term used—to keep Benson from developing a wandering eye.

Yeah, $6 million could probably be used for, you know, educating kids, or making sure folks have health care.  And how about this:

 Many NFL teams have also cut sweetheart deals to avoid taxes. The futuristic new field where the Dallas Cowboys play, with its 80,000 seats, go-go dancers on upper decks, and built-in nightclubs, has been appraised at nearly $1 billion. At the basic property-tax rate of Arlington, Texas, where the stadium is located, Cowboys owner Jerry Jones would owe at least $6 million a year in property taxes. Instead he receives no property-tax bill, so Tarrant County taxes the property of average people more than it otherwise would.

Yeah, that makes sense.  Seriously, how do politicians give these ridiculously rich folks such crazy deals?  It is absolutely criminal.  But this is the economy of the past 30+ years writ large.  We get less in government services and infrastructure, pay more in taxes, and the folks who have more money than God pay less and less.  If the guys at the top don't come to their senses, I may have to invest in pitchfork and torch companies.

Command and Control

Mother Jones has an excerpt from Eric Schlosser's new book on the various accidents and near misses of our nuclear program over the years, along with an interview.  I've highlighted a few of them, where the U.S. accidentally dropped nuclear bombs or crashed planes carrying the bombs, along with tests and bad ideas the government had about how to beneficially use nuclear bombs, but this story is a new one to me:

Launch Complex 374-7 was involved in two incidents. The first took place on morning of 27 January 1978, at approximately 0915, when the oncoming missile combat crew approaching the launch complex noticed oxidizer vapors rising from the missile complex. They drove to Damascus and contacted the command post, which in turn notified the Missile Potential Hazard Team (MPHT) members. By 0945 the MPHT directed the missile combat crew commander at the complex to turn off the circuit breakers to the heaters on the oxidizer transport trailers. The heaters were used to keep the oxidizer between 42 and 60 F in preparation for flowing into the holding trailer. Meanwhile, a helicopter from the 37th Air Rescue and Recovery Squadron was sent to provide aerial surveillance of the situation. At 1030 the helicopter crew confirmed the presence of oxidizer vapors rising from the trailer and crossing State Highway 65 in a cloud approximately 3,000 feet long, 300 feet wide and 100 feet in height. The MPHT immediately directed the Van Buren County Sheriff's Department to block Highway 65 and requested evacuation of civilians in the path of the oxidizer cloud, including an elementary school 1.5 miles north of the complex. At 1042 a second helicopter with propellant transfer personnel in rocket fuel handlers clothing outfits was dispatched. Upon arrival at the complex, the team reported that the oxidizer trailer tank was at 101 F and leaking around the manhole cover, the safety rupture discs had not yet burst. They sprayed water on the tank to cool it off and tightened the manhole cover bolts, decreasing the amount of vapor considerably. By 1405 Highway 65 was reopened to traffic. By 2120 the oxidizer had been transferred to the holding trailer and the hazard situation was terminated. Four civilians displayed some symptoms of contact with the vapors and were transported to the Little Rock AFB hospital for evaluation. Two were released the same day and two were held overnight for observation, subsequently released, readmitted and released on 4 February 1978.
The second incident, and the one that makes this launch complex exceptionally significant within the context of the entire Titan II program, took place at 1835 hours 20 September 1980, during a routine Stage II oxidizer tank repressurization procedure. An 8.75 pound socket wrench socket was inadvertently dropped from a work platform in the launch duct on Level 2. After a drop of approximately 66 feet, the socket hit the missile thrust mount and bounced in towards the missile, puncturing the Stage I propellant tank, filled with Aerozine 50, a 1:1 mix of unsymmetrical dimethyl hydrazine and hydrazine. A Missile Potential Hazard Team was formed and the surrounding civilian population evacuated as a precautionary measure. A propellant transfer system team was formed to attempt to penetrate into the launch control center and into the launch duct area.
At 0300 hours on 21 September 1980, the accumulated fuel vapors were ignited, causing an explosion that destroyed the missile silo. The silo closure door, which weighed 740 tons, was thrown several hundred feet upwards and landed 625 feet to the northeast of the silo. The W-53 warhead was found damaged but basically intact without a detectable leakage of radioactive material.
Amazingly enough, only one person was fatally injured: Senior Airman David Livingston, one member of a two- man propellant transfer team investigating the status of the silo just prior to the explosion.
A 40-member Eighth Air Force Mishap Investigation Board and a separate Missile Accident Investigation Board evaluated the accident and concluded that the near-disaster was caused by human error and gave high marks to the silo, which largely contained the massive explosion, and the warhead, which was not blown up by its conventional explosive components. In fact, a partial glass of Coca Cola abandoned in the control center did not spill in the massive explosion, a testament to the facility’s shock- absorbent design.

 The book excerpt gives a lot of fascinating information about the Titan II, its propulsion system, the silos and procedures for working with the missiles.  For example:

The missile was designed to launch within a minute and hit a target as far as 6,000 miles away. In order to do that, the Titan II relied upon a pair of liquid propellants—a rocket fuel and an oxidizer—that were "hypergolic." The moment they came into contact with each other, they'd instantly and forcefully ignite. The missile had two stages, and inside both of them, an oxidizer tank rested on top of a fuel tank, with pipes leading down to an engine. Stage 1, which extended about 70 feet upward from the bottom of the missile, contained about 85,000 pounds of fuel and 163,000 pounds of oxidizer.
Stage 2, the upper section where the warhead sat, was smaller and held about one fourth of those amounts. If the missile were launched, fuel and oxidizer would flow through the stage 1 pipes, mix inside the combustion chambers of the engine, catch on fire, emit hot gases, and send almost half a million pounds of thrust through the supersonic convergent-divergent nozzles beneath it. Within a few minutes, the Titan II would be 50 miles off the ground.
The two propellants were extremely efficient—and extremely dangerous. The fuel, Aerozine-50, could spontaneously ignite when it came into contact with everyday things like wool, rags, or rust. As a liquid, Aerozine-50 was clear and colorless. As a vapor, it reacted with the water and the oxygen in the air and became a whitish cloud with a fishy smell. This fuel vapor could be explosive in proportions as low as 2 percent. Inhaling it could cause breathing difficulties, a reduced heart rate, vomiting, convulsions, tremors, and death. The fuel was also highly carcinogenic and easily absorbed through the skin. 
The missile's oxidizer, nitrogen tetroxide, was even more hazardous. Under federal law, it was classified as a "Poison A," the most deadly category of man-made chemicals. In its liquid form, the oxidizer was a translucent, yellowy brown. Although not as flammable as the fuel, it could spontaneously ignite if it touched leather, paper, cloth, or wood. And its boiling point was only 70 degrees Fahrenheit. At temperatures any higher, the liquid oxidizer boiled into a reddish brown vapor that smelled like ammonia. Contact with water turned the vapor into a corrosive acid that could react with the moisture in a person's eyes or skin and cause severe burns. When inhaled, the oxidizer could destroy tissue in the upper respiratory system and the lungs. The damage might not be felt immediately. Six to twelve hours after being inhaled, the stuff could suddenly cause headaches, dizziness, difficulty breathing, pneumonia, and pulmonary edema leading to death.

Sounds like fun to work around.  Apparently, there were hundreds of more accidents and near misses, and it is a real tribute to the scientists and engineers, along with Lady Luck, that we didn't have a massive nuclear accident that killed thousands of people during the Cold War.  And if we had this many fuckups and accidents, I can only imagine how many crazy things happened in the Soviet Union.  Maybe that proves there is a God.

Was The Taper Talk A Miscalculation?

There have been quite a few folks attacking Ben Bernanke for misleading the markets about whether the Fed would taper QE3 bond buying:

Economists and market analysts on Thursday blasted Federal Reserve chief Ben Bernanke after the Fed stunned markets with its unexpected decision to not cut its stimulus.
Bernanke came under fire for having stoked nearly unanimous expectations that the Fed would announce the "taper" of its $85 billion a month bond-buying program after its policy meeting Wednesday.
The decision cost investors who bet on a stimulus cutback hugely, though benefiting many with long positions in global stocks.
Many blamed Bernanke and fellow members of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) for having since May repeatedly suggested a September taper of the quantitative easing (QE) program.
University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers called the surprise "the result of a needless miscommunication.
"This whole taper debate is one that should never have happened," he wrote.
After Bernanke first spoke of a stimulus cut in May and June, "taper-talk came to dominate the financial headlines, and a monetary meme was quickly born. The result... was that markets over-reacted," he said.
"Despite Bernanke's effort yesterday in the press conference to paint the FOMC decision as entirely consistent with earlier communication from the FOMC, it was not," said Chris Low at FTN Financial.
"The Fed may have done the right thing for the economy... but the Fed's communications credibility is shredded."

I've got a question, though.  What if the Federal Reserve wanted to get a feeling for where interest rates would go if they did end their bond purchases, and they wanted to see what kind of effects the higher interest rates would have on the real economy?  What better way to find out than to give the market the impression that the bond buying was coming to an end?  What if May to September was an experiment to see what the post-taper world would look like, and whether it was just too soon to stop?  I would say the Fed got a really good idea of how much the mortgage market would slow down, as Calculated Risk's chart shows:

Also:

But the key is the refinance index is down 65% since early May, we will probably see the refinance index back to 2000 levels soon.The second graph shows the MBA mortgage purchase index.  

The 4-week average of the purchase index was generally been trending up over the last year (but down over the last few months), and the 4-week average of the purchase index is up about 3% from a year ago. 

Not only that, but Bernanke and company were able to see that no matter what the economy is doing, Republicans in Congress are crazy enough to blow it up. They've come to realize that there is no chance of fiscal policy moving in the direction where it is a help to the economy and not a major hindrance.

But back to my question.  What if the telegraphing of September tapering was to see what the post-taper world might look like?  How many people got hurt by it?  Mainly just traders and speculators.  Now sure, some folks got hurt by the higher interest rates the last few months, like home buyers and municipalities issuing debt.  But how many more would have been hurt if the Fed just plowed into ending QE3 for good?  If the folks most hurt were the speculators, I'm not losing much sleep.  But it does explain why so many folks on Wall Street felt so betrayed.  I think that Bernanke and company realize much more than our Wall Street fat cats that most people out there are still suffering from the not-so-booming economy, and definitely unlike the folks on Wall Street, the rest of the country is still poorer than they were five years ago.  So, in the end, I think the Fed was right in postponing the taper.  I just wish they could come up with some ways to help out the common folks, and not just the Wall Street assholes.

Who Is This Guy?

Pope Francis is really getting people talking:

Pope Francis has warned that the Catholic Church's moral structure might "fall like a house of cards" if it doesn't balance its divisive rules about abortion, gays and contraception with the greater need to make it a merciful, more welcoming place for all.
Six months into his papacy, Francis set out his vision for the church and his priorities as pope in a lengthy and remarkably blunt interview with La Civilta Cattolica, the Italian Jesuit magazine. It was published simultaneously Thursday in Jesuit journals in 16 countries, including America magazine in the U.S.
John Allen, a senior correspondent with the National Catholic Reporter, told CBS Radio News the pope is not changing church policy but makes it clear that he wants a less judgmental church.
"I think he is conscious that he's at a sort of make-or-break moment where the kind of pope he wants to be - if he wants to affect real change - he's got to be explicit about it," Allen said.
In the 12,000-word article, Francis expands on his ground-breaking comments over the summer about gays and acknowledges some of his own faults. He sheds light on his favorite composers, artists, authors and films (Mozart, Caravaggio, Dostoevsky and Fellini's "La Strada") and says he prays even while at the dentist's office.
But his vision of what the church should be stands out, primarily because it contrasts so sharply with many of the priorities of his immediate predecessors, John Paul II and Benedict XVI. They were both intellectuals for whom doctrine was paramount, an orientation that guided the selection of a generation of bishops and cardinals around the globe.
Francis said the dogmatic and the moral teachings of the church were not all equivalent.
"The church's pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently," Francis said. "We have to find a new balance; otherwise even the moral edifice of the church is likely to fall like a house of cards, losing the freshness and fragrance of the Gospel."

I really didn't anticipate the Pope saying that the Church harps on gays, abortion and birth control too much.  I'm not going to argue with him, I'm just really, really surprised.  I haven't been hanging out with any Shiite Catholics lately, but it'd be interesting to hear what they have to say about all this stuff.  I'm sure they would point out that the Pope hasn't really changed any teachings, but I would imagine they are kind of taken aback by this Pope's willingness to challenge the conservative direction of the Church over the past 35 years.