I see wonderful things

In late spring, storm frequency decreases, resulting in calmer water. In addition, surface temperatures rise. And the light warm fresh water flowing into the Gulf of Mexico from the Mississippi forms a separate layer above the heavier, colder salt water https://t.co/AVxOkFfVaL pic.twitter.com/3qboB0hrJJ

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) June 22, 2020

Data Talks

Mars is about 50 million miles farther away from the Sun than Earth and also, its atmosphere is about 100 times thinner than Earth's. So if you were standing on the Martian equator at noon, it would feel like summer at your feet, but winter near your head https://t.co/2tLBwqdy1H pic.twitter.com/8TfDI04mbw

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) June 25, 2020

Offbeat Humor

Pretty much sums up the far left's thinking https://t.co/npkk9fBbAm

— Quoth the Raven (@QTRResearch) June 28, 2020

Getting oneself inoculated in agreeable company

If there is one thing genealogy teaches you, it is that there is nothing new under the sun.

From The Reads and their relatives: being an account of Colonel Clement and Madam Read of Bushy Forest, Lunenburg County, Virginia, their eight children, their descendants, and allied families by Alice Read, published in 1930.

This is one of those sprawling family memoirs, popular at a time. The Reads were a family prominent in the area around Prince Edward County in southern Virginia at the time of the American Revolution. A time when my lines of Holcombe, Bibb, Venable, Wyatt, Worthal, etc. were also in the area. I had thought to see if this biographical memoir from a similar family might have some mentions of my family members.

Sure enough.

And, oh is it topical.

It is 1800 and a group of young gentlemen friends go to the hospital for their smallpox inoculation. They made a party of it. Apparently the procedure was to be inoculated and reside at the hospital while the reaction occurred. The group of friends hung out together through the observation period before returning home having safely recovered from the inoculation and confident in their immunity from future infection.

The Thomas Holcombe mentioned is likely, based on presumed age, either my fifth-great uncle or, perhaps more likely, my first cousin five times removed. Among the large families of that era it is not uncommon in a three generation spread for there to be 3-8 individuals with the same name, variously cousins, uncles, and sons.

We are currently, in urban legend, alleged to have Covid-19 parties today. But we are late to the game. Way back in 1800 they were having Smallpox parties. Who knew?

From Ms. Read'

s account:

There are several amusing letters from college friends, which show that the orthography of the college students of a hundred and twenty-five years ago was no better than that of those of today. One is especially interesting as indicating an unusual form of social divertissement which was apparently the mode: that of getting oneself inoculated in agreeable company:

From Thomas S. Moore: "Dublin, June 1, 1800.

Dear Sir,

I last Tuesday returned safe from the hospital and had the smallpox pretty favourably. I had about four hundred pocks and about sixty on my face. Edward Booker and Brother John, and Thomas Holcombe returned also safe and had it but slightly. We left Archibald Taylor, Sam Taylor, and Woodson Miller in the hospital. Samuel Taylor had it pretty bad but is in no danger. The rest had it also favourably. Charles Mills and Edward Mosely both had it pretty bad but are almost well. I think that the smallpox is but trifling compared to the risk of catching it — and I was very sorry to find that you could not make it convenient to come to be inoculated as we had good company and a plenty of fun and I am afraid that you will not get another chance that will be so agreeable to you. I am now at Mr. Booker's and there are a fine parcel of Girls around me. . . ."

An insight

75% of what we think is a difference of political opinion is one side or both being bad at math or bad at comparing things.

— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) June 15, 2020

Beware the man with good intentions of improving your lot

From Walden or, Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau.

There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted. It is human, it is divine, carrion. If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life, as from that dry and parching wind of the African deserts called the simoom, which fills the mouth and nose and ears and eyes with dust till you are suffocated, for fear that I should get some of his good done to me -- some of its virus mingled with my blood. No -- in this case I would rather suffer evil the natural way. A man is not a good man to me because he will feed me if I should be starving, or warm me if I should be freezing, or pull me out of a ditch if I should ever fall into one. I can find you a Newfoundland dog that will do as much. Philanthropy is not love for one's fellow-man in the broadest sense. Howard was no doubt an exceedingly kind and worthy man in his way, and has his reward; but, comparatively speaking, what are a hundred Howards to us, if their philanthropy do not help us in our best estate, when we are most worthy to be helped? I never heard of a philanthropic meeting in which it was sincerely proposed to do any good to me, or the like of me.

The market is not the problem, its people's choices.

I have been skeptical of the food desert movement since 2014. The idea that the poor are obese because they do not have access to good food options. That they live in food deserts where all they can purchase are calorific processed food.

Lots of government money has gone into trying to come up with solutions to this non-problem. Since the very beginning of the effort to get government to solve the proposed problem of food deserts, researchers have been providing evidence that food deserts don't exist. Virtually everyone has access to good food choices.

They also keep providing evidence that obesity rates are not driven by relative access to food choices but are in fact driven by personal choices about food (which foods and how much) in combination with personal choices about exercise.

Here is the most recent research out of the University of Chicago. From Food deserts not to blame for growing nutrition gap between rich and poor, study finds by Sandra M. Jones.

or decades, the conventional wisdom has been that people living in food deserts—defined as areas lacking in supermarkets with fresh produce and other nutritious items—have little choice but to buy unhealthy food at drugstores or convenience stores. But the data tell a different story.

A new Chicago Booth study finds that food deserts have no meaningful effect on eating habits. Exposing low-income households to the same products and prices as those in high-income households reduces nutritional inequality by only 9 percent while the remaining 91 percent of the nutrition gap is driven by difference in what shoppers prefer to buy, according to a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper published recently.

“One of the conclusions in our study is that opening a supermarket in a food desert has very little impact on the nutritional composition of households’ shopping baskets,” said Jean-Pierre Dubé, the Sigmund E. Edelstone Professor of Marketing at Chicago Booth, who co-authored the research along with New York University’s Hung Allcott and Stanford University’s Rebecca Diamond. “People in food deserts shop in supermarkets almost as frequently as people living in higher-income neighborhoods. They just travel longer distances to stores.”

[snip]

Two decades later, with the help of big data, the researchers Allcott, Diamond, and Dubé decided to design a study that relied on actual grocery purchases to determine why the wealthy tend to eat more healthfully than the poor in the U.S.

The researchers worked with data from the Nielsen Datasets at Chicago Booth’s Kilts Center for Marketing, which include grocery purchases by some 60,000 households per year and grocery sales at about 35,000 stores nationwide from 2004 to 2015. They also included the locations of 1,914 supermarkets to study the impact that new supermarkets have on healthy eating in food deserts.

They tested whether a household’s geographic location drives food shopping preferences, to understand whether living in a food desert causes residents to purchase less nutritious food. In fact, they found almost no effect of location on purchases. Then they developed an empirical method to estimate the preferences that the households in the panel had for fruits and vegetables, as well as various nutrients such as saturated fat, sugar and salt.

[snip]

As part of the study, the researchers also developed a health index to measure the nutrition content of households’ grocery purchases. The index improved five times more for high-income households than it did for low-income households between 2012 and 2015, compared to 2004 through 2007—indicating the nutritional gap between the rich and the poor is growing.

The authors also found that education and nutrition knowledge are strongly associated with the differences in preferences across income groups. While these findings are not causal, they may suggest that policies aimed at nutrition education may be more effective at closing the nutrition gap than subsidies and grants meant to encourage building more supermarkets and farmers markets in food deserts.

No, food deserts don't contribute more than 10% to the obesity problem.

Yes, people's personal choices drive their health and obesity outcomes.

It is disheartening that the primary policy tool to address obesity is improved nutrition education and knowledge. Education campaigns can occasionally work. But usually do not.

UPDATE: Henry David Thoreau had something to say about this in Walden.

Be sure that you give the poor the aid they most need, though it be your example which leaves them far behind. If you give money, spend yourself with it, and do not merely abandon it to them. We make curious mistakes sometimes. Often the poor man is not so cold and hungry as he is dirty and ragged and gross. It is partly his taste, and not merely his misfortune. If you give him money, he will perhaps buy more rags with it. I was wont to pity the clumsy Irish laborers who cut ice on the pond, in such mean and ragged clothes, while I shivered in my more tidy and somewhat more fashionable garments, till, one bitter cold day, one who had slipped into the water came to my house to warm him, and I saw him strip off three pairs of pants and two pairs of stockings ere he got down to the skin, though they were dirty and ragged enough, it is true, and that he could afford to refuse the extra garments which I offered him, he had so many intra ones. This ducking was the very thing he needed. Then I began to pity myself, and I saw that it would be a greater charity to bestow on me a flannel shirt than a whole slop-shop on him. There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve.

Express skepticism and internet karma answers back

Just three days ago I expressed my skepticism about international IQ comparisons in a post, Complex Comparisons.

I believe IQ measurements are demonstrably and reliably useful predictors of specified outcomes at a population level. I become much more leery about inter-country comparisons, not because of a distrust in the utility of IQ but a distrust in the reliability and meaningfulness of measurement on a global scale where you are dealing with all the nuance of language and culture.

This morning I see out of Oxford, Cognitive Abilities in Young Lives: An Overview of Results from Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam by Richard Lynn, Helen Cheng, and Gerhard Meisenberg. From the Abstract.

This paper compiles cognitive test results for children in Ethiopia, Andhra Pradesh (India), Peru and Vietnam from multiple rounds of the Young Lives study. In this international project, the same cognitive tests were administered to children of the same age under standardized conditions, allowing comparisons between countries and between social, ethnic, linguistic and religious groups within countries. Comparisons between countries on non-verbal tests show differences that closely resemble those that have been seen in earlier assessments of scholastic achievement and intelligence. Within each of the four countries there are significant differences between social, ethnic, linguistic and in some cases religious groups that are related to socioeconomic conditions. These results have implications for the management of inequalities that have either been present for a long time or that arise in developing countries during the process of modernization.

Much more structured, much more disciplined in their administration of tests. It looks like a sophisticated group being very conscientious about trying to answer a pressing set of development questions.

The key finding is that IQ tests administered in much more consistent and disciplined ways for Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Vietnam return similar IQ results and variances as the tests about which I have expressed skepticism.

I see many fewer obvious potential sources of error in this study than I do in most so I have to take this on board. But I remain cautious. Culture and personal behavior are big mediators in life outcomes and which are much harder to measure consistently over time and in a causal fashion. IQ is an important contributor to life outcomes but by no means the only one.

Criminal threats as evidence of up-and-coming entrepreneurs

Our local newspaper is doing its best to put a good spin on things and to hide bad news.

One of the common complaints is gangs of youths descending upon cars at an intersection, nominally offering to sell bottles of water but actually aggressively panhandling and threatening drivers with guns.

From Cops: 2 teens threatened people with guns for not buying water in Buckhead by Zachary Hansen.

Two teenagers face charges after authorities said they threatened people with guns for not buying water from them in Buckhead.


The separate incidents took place along a half-mile stretch of Peachtree Road on Wednesday and Thursday afternoons, Atlanta police Sgt. John Chafee said Friday in a statement.

About 3:30 p.m. Wednesday, officers were flagged down by a man near Peachtree and Piedmont roads, according to the statement. The man said a group of juveniles who had been selling water at the intersection assaulted him.


When he pointed toward the group, two teenage boys began to run away, Chafee said. Officers were able to catch a 15-year-old, but the other teen got away.

Police found a loaded handgun in the suspect’s bag, but the victim declined to press assault charges against the juvenile. Instead, officers charged the teen with possession of a firearm by a minor and pedestrian in the roadway, Chafee said.

The teen offered officers $300 if they would let him go, which led to an additional charge of bribery.

And here is a common problem that existed before Covid-19 and made now much worse.

According to police, he had been arrested several times before on charges of armed robbery, breaking into a vehicle and theft of a vehicle. The Fulton County Juvenile Intake Unit declined to take the suspect, who was released to his mother later that day.

The police capture the criminal, the Mayor and City Council prevent them from being charged, and the County Jail automatically releases them back into the community to commit more crimes. No wonder they are running armed shakedowns on the busiest roads in the city. No consequences.

This is no kids-will-be-kids matter. The AJC reports on a second similar assault the next day. Then

The incidents are the latest in a string of disputes between children selling water and drivers on Atlanta’s roads. A man was shot Thursday on an I-20 exit ramp after a dispute with a group selling water, AJC.com previously reported.

An 18-year-old was shot and killed late last month during an altercation in Midtown. Surveillance footage from the scene indicated the victim may have been with a group of teens selling water just before he was shot multiple times, police said.

"Children selling water" is a new euphemism for mobile shakedown gangs. This is not you parent's lemonade stand.

And how is our inept Mayor problem solving this plague of armed violence? She reverts to her preferred fantasyland.

Earlier this month, Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms issued an administrative order creating an advisory council tasked with developing strategies to help promote youth entrepreneurship in the city.

“Our youth, including those who take to the streets to sell water and other goods, have shown us how productive and capable they can be as up-and-coming entrepreneurs,” Bottoms said.

People are being threatened, shot and killed by gangs of youth and she takes this as evidence of "how productive and capable they can be as up-and-coming entrepreneurs." It is not even bad comedy. It is the dangerous mental illness or delusion of an incapitated individual without the fortitude or moral compass to serve as Mayor.

I see wonderful things

This documentary from PBS shows an octopus changing colors while sleeping. Marine biologist David Scheel thinks that the sea creature is dreaming about hunting, which sparks the color shift to a camouflaged shade https://t.co/ryjhj9uIUj pic.twitter.com/ndvo1Qf7na

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) June 21, 2020