Rain Break Links

We got the planting started last weekend, and I didn't bother posting for a while.  I've got a decent stash of links I've come across, so I'll throw some up here:

Steve Kerr has suffered more than you will ever know - ESPN

The Man Restaging an Evel Knievel Jump to Vindicate His Father - The Sporting Scene

The Secret History of Tiger Woods - ESPN

The History of the Amesbury Maples, America's Oldest Amateur Hockey Club - VICE Sports

Successful Land Sale: Blockbuster Sale in Sioux County, Iowa, Nets $17,100 an Acre - Successful Farming.  Not too surprising for the Iowa Dutch Reformed version of Ohio's German Catholic Mercer County. 

APNewsBreak: Thieves Targeting California Almonds and Walnuts - Associated Press

Taking Cues From Human Nutrition To Reduce Antibiotic Use In Livestock - The Salt

Can Ocean Spray CEO Randy Papadellis Save the Cranberry Business? - Boston Magazine

How Warren Buffett's Son Would Feed the World - The Atlantic and  Why Luck Matters More Than You Might Think - The Atlantic

Developers are Turning Rust Belt Hulks Into Luxury Hotels - Bloomberg.  Hmmm....

Great monarch butterfly migration mystery solved - BBC and Half Your Brain Stands Guard While Sleeping In A New Place - All Things Considered

The Dark Secret of the MIT Science Club for Children - Priceonomics

Earth is Tipping Because of Climate Change - Scientific American

Earth's Temperature Just Shattered the Thermometer - Bloomberg

Unnatural Selection - The New Yorker

China report sounds alarm on groundwater pollution - Associated Press

How Prescription Drugs Sparked America's Heroin Epidemic - Bloomberg

The Stone Mirror of War - The American Conservative

Friendly Fire in the American Patriot Death Cult - Gawker

Paul Ryan's House of woes - Politico.  Leading a cult full of idiots and simpletons.

Light-driven dinitrogen reduction: Scientists shed new light on global energy, food supply challenge - Phys.org.  I'll believe it when I see it fully-scaled.  Sounds even less likely than cellulosic ethanol.

Spring Forward Weekend Links

"The Guv'mint" is shorting you an hour this weekend, but if you get a little free time, here are some things to read:

The Man in the Van - ESPN

One Nerd To Rule Them All (with a lot of Kate Upton) - Bloomberg

Ghosts of North Wilkesboro - SBNation

Fake Snow, Real Money: The High-Tech Fight to Save California Skiing - Bloomberg

Limits Sought on GMO Corn as Pest Resistance Grows - Wall Street Journal

Long-term nitrogen fertilizer use disrupts plant-microbe mutualisms - Science Daily (via Big Picture Agriculture).  In other words, legumes done react as well with rhizobia when artificial N is added to the system.

Marine Le Pen lays out radical vision to govern France - Financial Times.  The article is interesting based on how Europe is changing, but I highlighted it because of how huge the bull is in the image of her and him on the video at the French agricultural show.  Holy shit.

Big Corn Butters Up the 2016 Presidential Hopefuls - Bloomberg.  Also see, 5 top issues at Iowa Ag Summit - Des Moines Register

From Our Prison To Your Dinner Table - Pacific Standard

The Gospel of Bockfest - Cincinnati Magazine.  I love me some bock beer.

El Nino Has Arrived, and It Could Produce the Warmest Year on Record - Slate.  Usually, that leads to a bumper crop in the Midwest, so crop prices have the potential to crater.

How luck works - Aeon

A Map of the First Proposed U.S. Highway System - io9

Death on Sevenmile Road - Texas Observer

The MIT Science Club for Disabled Children - priceonomics

The Gangsters of Ferguson - Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ferguson's Conspiracy Against Black Citizens - Conor Friedersdorf.  Ferguson may be an extreme example, but it is far from the only place to abuse minorities like this.

Scott Walker loves Ronald Reagan more than seems humanly possible - Vox.  Not only is Scott Walker a jackass, but he's a weirdo, too.  "Happy anniversary, honey, have some jellybeans to celebrate Ronald Reagan's birthday."

The College Basketball Capital of the World - Wall Street Journal.  Louisville

Columbus Tunnel Project Sees Unexpected Challenges

Dispatch:

Water and a giant hunk of bedrock 200 feet beneath Columbus has bogged down the city’s giant boring machine, leading to a two-year delay and a $29.5 million cost overrun.
The machine, nicknamed “Marsha,” is boring a 4.5-mile, 23-foot-wide tunnel that was originally to be completed this month. The tunnel is supposed to catch sewer overflows that would otherwise spill into the Scioto River during storms. The project was originally estimated to cost $342 million....
The $26 million custom machine, like something out of science fiction, was built to drill through mostly dry bedrock. But city engineers’ estimate of water levels didn’t account for millions of gallons of water that travel underground, below the Scioto River.
Instead of grinding through dry rock, Marsha was choking on a water/rock/mud mixture called slurry, which is kind of like wet concrete.
The 500-foot-long drilling machine is a cross between a submarine and a huge mechanical worm with a 95-ton cutting wheel on the front. The machine was built in Germany to digest dry rock by sending it back through a crushing screw shaft in its belly, depositing the crushed rock on conveyers that take it to the surface.
The Kenny Construction Co., based in Illinois, and the Japanese-based Obayashi group designed Marsha based on specifications provided by the city....
Marsha was to be able to drill through and remove about 68 feet of dry rock a day, or about 40 feet a day if there was water. The steel cutters on the machine have to be replaced about every 500 feet.
But the unexpected amount of water in the ground forced it to remain closed. The pipes weren’t big enough to handle the slurry because large chunks of rock would make it through the grinder.
For much of the past two years, Marsha has drilled about 25 feet per day.
At one point when the cutters needed to be replaced, the city had to hire expert divers for $1 million. The divers could work only for minutes at a time in the high-pressure underground water to replace the cutting wheels.
Davies said engineers then spent nearly a year reconfiguring Marsha with new, larger pipes and ripping out the conveyer system to add another large screw that would break down the rock even more.
Dax Blake, an engineer and the city’s sewers and drains administrator, said the city had drilled about 200 holes to test the ground before the project began.
“You never really know what’s that far underground, so all we could do was take those samples and calculate out what was down there,” he said.

 Wow, 200 test holes is a bunch.  I bet some engineer is feeling pretty bad about this project.

Late July Weekend Links

Here are some interesting stories to check out over the weekend:

From YMCA Flying Fish to France: My English Channel Swim - Bloomberg

Research supports the notion of the 'hot hand'; baseball players always believed in it - Washington Post.  I was always a believer.  Whether it was baseball, golf, cornhole, darts or any other semi-athletic competition which required some motor skills, I was either on or off (generally off).

 Lessons From America's War for the Greater Middle East - Andrew Bacevich

The intellectual cess pool of the inflation truthers - Wonkblog.  Amity Shlaes being an intellectually-bankrupt faux-economist faux-historian hack isn't exactly noteworthy.  The truthers are way wrong about hyperinflation, but considering the steep rise in health care, education and energy costs (and the trickle-down into food costs thanks to ethanol policy) combined with pay growing slower than inflation, this article may be a little too dismissive of the squeeze the former middle class is under.

Inflation is always and everywhere a political phenomenon - Pieria

Evaluating the Benefits and Costs of Patents - Morning Edition.  The fact that this is even being discussed shows how badly the patent system is in need of reforms.  Until the last few years, questioning the patent system was beyond the pale.

Cheap at sea, pricey on the plate: The voodoo of lobster economics - Globe and Mail

How to Ignore a Plague - Medium

Give Us This Day The Bread Wheat Genome - Scientific American

Farming the apocalypse - Aeon

A disturbing glimpse into the shrouded world of the Texas grand jury system - Houston Chronicle.  I don't think abuse of the grand jury system is limited to Texas.  But like in other bad categories, Texas is amongst the leaders nationally.

So Sue Me: Republicans Learn To Love Litigation - The New Yorker.  Republicans desperately try to maintain ruling power and privilege despite being a minority (numerically, not ethnically, yet) party.  Note: you shouldn't attack other minorities when you are one. That will be a lesson which takes Republicans a long time to learn.  They're a bit on the slow side.

 Quiz: Which Of These State Fair Foods Are Faux - The Salt.  Mmmmmm.

Corporate America Is Enriching Shareholders at the Expense of the Economy - FiveThirtyEight.  Somehow, an accounting professor wrote an article that mentioned dividend payments to shareholders increased in the last decade without mentioning that the tax rate on dividends was cut from ordinary income rate to 15%.  He even appears to not even realize that the tax rate was cut. WTF?

America's Move to Soy Hobbles Dairy - Wall Street Journal.

Getting a Little Superstitious

NYT:

Between 1919 and 1978, 11 horses that won both the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness went on to win the Belmont Stakes. In the 36 years since then, though, the 12 horses that won the first two legs of racing’s Triple Crown faltered before they got to the finish line — or even the starting gate — at Belmont Park.

Some superstitious New Yorkers say the recent record losing streak is not coincidental. They attribute it to a discordant break with tradition in 1997, one that might have California Chrome listening with a cocked ear on June 7 as he struts out of the tunnel leading to the track for the 146th running of the Belmont Stakes.

Call it the curse of Mamie O’Rourke — she is a character who pops up in “Sidewalks of New York,” a century-old song that had been considered the city’s anthem and that had been played at Belmont for decades as the horses made their way to the starting gate.

But in 1997, after racing officials deemed it too fusty, the song was replaced with “New York, New York,” which Frank Sinatra Jr. is scheduled to sing at Belmont this year. In 2010, hoping to appeal to an even hipper audience, officials experimented with Jay Z and Alicia Keys’s “Empire State of Mind,” but that proved too cutting-edge for the crowd.....

Belmont officials, bereft of a Triple Crown winner since 1978, are taking no chances and are resurrecting Mamie. After questions were raised, they said they would ask Sam (Sammy the Bugler) Grossman to play “Sidewalks” on his herald trumpet just before the Stakes, instead of before the Manhattan Handicap, an earlier race, as he usually does.

Good luck to California Chrome in his dash for immortality a week from Saturday.  

California Farmers Turn to Dowsers in Drought

Farmer voodoo:

"It's kind of bizarre. Scientists don't believe in it, but I do and most of the farmers in the Valley do," said Marc Mondavi, a vineyard owner whose family has been growing grapes and making wine since the mid-20th century in the Napa Valley.
Mondavi doesn't just believe in dowsing, he practices it.
On a recent afternoon, standing in this family's Charles Krug vineyard holding two copper divining rods, Mondavi walked slowly forward through the dormant vines.
After about 40 feet, the rods quickly crossed and Mondavi — a popular dowser in the world famous wine region— stopped. "This is the edge of our underground stream," he said during the demonstration. Mondavi said he was introduced to "witching" by the father of an old girlfriend, and realized he had a proclivity for the practice.
After the valley's most popular dowser died in recent years, Mondavi has become the go-to water witch in Napa Valley. He charges about $500 per site visit, and more, if a well he discovers ends up pumping more than 50 gallons per minute.
With more farmers relying on groundwater to irrigate crops, Mondavi's phone has been ringing often as growers worry about extended years of dryness.
He had six witching jobs lined up over a recent weekend, three homes whose springs were running dry and three vineyards. It's so popular that he's even created a line of wines called "The Divining Rod" that will be sold nationwide this year.
While popular, scientists say dowsers are often just lucky, looking for water in places where it's already known to likely exist.
"There's no scientific basis to dowsing. If you want to go to a palm reader or a mentalist, then you're the same person who's going to go out and hire a dowser," said Tom Ballard, a hydrogeologist with Taber Consultants, a geological engineering firm based in West Sacramento.

I don't believe in it, but I know plenty of people who do.  I think people subconsciously move the rods, and if water's there, it's luck.  May as well plant by the almanac and do rain dances while they're at it.

Hot Hand, Or Hot Hand Fallacy?

WSJ:

It was a shooting performance so incredible, even veteran basketball experts had never seen anything like it.
In a game last month at then-No. 4-ranked Villanova, Creighton senior Ethan Wragge swished a three-pointer on his team's opening possession. The next time down the court, he hit a deeper shot. At that point, Wragge wanted a third "because I feel like it's going in no matter what." He was right. Wragge's next four shots didn't miss, either. He scored 21 of his team's first 27 points in the Bluejays' 96-68 rout.
He also became the latest example of a phenomenon that many people say doesn't exist: the hot hand.
This sensation is familiar to anyone who has ever played or watched basketball. A player with the hot shooting hand seems to enter an ethereal zone, an inexplicably heightened state of ability in which he is unstoppable.
For years, though, academics have dismissed the hot-hand theory as basketball's version of Bigfoot. Almost everyone in the last three decades who had hunted for hard evidence of streakiness had come up empty. Instead, they say, belief in the hot hand is a case of people mistakenly seeing patterns in randomness.
But new research using previously unavailable data is heating up the debate. It turns out that popular intuition about the hot hand may have been right all along.

Count me as a believer in the hot hand.  It is probably just statistical anomaly, but as a very unathletic individual, I always seemed to be very streaky.  Whether it is baseball or bowling or darts or cornhole, I can be very consistently terrible, but then I'll get in a run where I'm dead-on.  It may last for a game, or a series, but then it is gone just as quickly as it had come.  This works to my advantage when playing folks who have seen me suck every time I've played them, and suddenly I'm kicking their ass. 

Another area where I've noticed it is playing cards.  That obviously is randomness, but I still pay attention to it.  I've just adapted by quitting to minimize my losses when things aren't going my way (I know, if I kept playing, it is likely I would even out).  Considering that sports typically involve repetitive motion, I can see how somebody might get into a groove for a little while where everything is going right.  I think that since I generally lacked the ability to consistently succeed in sports, the few times when I started doing things right stood out to me. 

For better athletes, the hot hand might not be as significant statistically because they generally succeed.  That's why I'd think it might be more noticeable in baseball, where hitters go on tremendous hitting streaks followed by epic slumps.  I'm looking at Paul O'Neill in his days with the Reds.  It was nothing for him to go 2 for 50.  Then, after he was traded to the Yankees, he started out the season hitting like .438. 

Rich Folks and Lottery Winners

Charles Kenny considers billionaire Tom Perkins' recent notorious remarks speculating that talk of increasing taxes on the wealthy is comparable to Kristallnacht in Nazi Germany, and that votes in elections should be determined by wealth (he claimed that was a joke).  He says Perkins' luck in getting wealthy is comparable to winning the lottery:

Perkins had a successful career as a corporate executive before he co-founded his VC firm. Given that he made the bulk of his money gambling on startups, he should understand the role that luck plays in wealth accumulation. For example, what if Kleiner Perkins’s first investment had been to plow $38 million into Segway, the personal transportation flop? Or $100 million in Fisker Automotive, which recently laid off most of its staff? What if the firm had backed solar panel manufacturer MiaSolé, sold to a Chinese clean-energy company at a huge loss? The venture fund did make all those investments—and, as a result, has had lackluster returns over the last decade (although Perkins hasn’t been involved in investment picks for a while). Indeed, Perkins wouldn’t have his soapbox today if his VC firm had been similarly unlucky in its early years—it probably wouldn’t have survived that long.
And, of course, Perkins had the chance to be a successful executive in the first place because he was born privileged enough to enter the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an undergraduate in 1953, when a little more than 5 percent of Americans aged 25 to 29 had a bachelor’s degree. If he had been born in Liberia, perhaps to a single mother, all bets of billionaire status would be completely off. He surely worked hard, and took risks informed by smarts and insight, but he was incredibly lucky to start where he did and end up where he is now, with enough money for a classic car collection and a massive yacht....A
study by British economists Nattavudh Powdthavee and Andrew Oswald released last week looked at lottery winners involved in a general survey of attitudes in the U.K. Comparing views before and after lottery wins, the economists looked at winners’ political allegiances and views toward income distribution. Those surveyed were asked if they agreed or disagreed with the statement “ordinary people get a fair share of the nation’s wealth,” and if they supported the (more right-wing) Conservative Party or the (left-leaning) Labour Party.
A win of just £500 (about $840) made survey respondents 5 percent more likely to change their vote to Conservative from Labour and significantly more likely to think that the current distribution of income was fair. The larger the lottery win, the bigger the impact on the respondents’ beliefs—even though their income rankings rose purely by chance. Considering that Perkins’s earnings from betting on tech startups are more than 1 million times the £500 that Powdthavee and Oswald found sufficient to shift attitudes, and since he did far more to earn his wealth than the lottery winners did, his views on redistribution aren’t surprising.

I think if you talked to some of these folks, they'll say they got where they are because of being smart and working hard.  Perkins is almost certainly very intelligent, as the MIT reference on his resume would tend to indicate.  I'm probably not quite as dumb as my writing would indicate (some folks might even refer to me as somewhat intelligent), but I can tell you that I never really worked hard at school or at work.  Most of that stuff came pretty naturally to me, and the vast majority of folks out there could attend the best schools and work 20 hours a day and never be able to do things that seem second nature to the really smart folks like Perkins.  I'm pretty sure that if he was born with somebody else's genes and environment he wouldn't be where he is today.  It would be nice if he were to realize that being born on third base doesn't mean he hit a triple.

I have a hard time believing that winning $1000 makes somebody markedly more conservative, politically, but I do think that becoming a billionaire might.  As the article says, though, making a fortune at venture capital is a hell of a lot like winning the Mega Millions, except one takes somebody else's product, funds it, then take a massive slice of the windfall if there is one.  That seems like a high-risk, high-reward gamble, with more than it's share of luck.  As the article points out, the system Mr. Perkins has flourished in is especially kind to entrepreneurs, who can walk away from bad debts and failed ideas, and not be saddled with paying them off forever.  Likewise, massive amounts of public expenditures, funded by previous generations of wealthy taxpayers, went into the infrastructure that made Mr. Perkins success possible.  He wasn't operating in a vacuum, separated from the rest of society.  While his time, money and effort paid off in a massive windfall, many other as worthy, or maybe more worthy folks saw watched as the figurative dice of their lives hit craps.  Maybe he ought to shut the hell up and appreciate how lucky he has been.

Ray Mancini on the Duk Koo Kim Fight

The BBC interviews Ray Mancini on the fateful fight 31 years ago this week:

On 13 November 1982, reigning WBA lightweight world champion, Ray 'Boom Boom' Mancini was due to defend his title against challenger, the South Korean Kim Deuk-koo.
In Mancini's words it was going to be an "action fight" in front of a 15,000-strong crowd at Las Vegas's fabled Caesar's Palace venue. Millions more were tuning in at home on TV.
It was a fight that Mancini went on to win but his opponent suffered fatal injuries that would cause great controversy and change the sport.
Thirty-one years on from that fateful night, Ray Mancini talks about the fight.

The video is at the link (no embed feature).  More on the fight and its impact here.

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:

Don't Give Up The Ship

Jeff St. Clair visits a bicentennial re-enactment of the Battle of Lake Erie at Put-in-Bay, and remembers Oliver Hazard Perry:

Two hundred years ago today, a young U.S. naval captain named Oliver Hazard Perry penned the words, "We have met the enemy and they are ours ..."
Perry's remarkable victory over the British changed the course of the War of 1812, and a full-scale re-enactment — the largest sailing re-enactment ever attempted in the U.S. — recently commemorated the anniversary of the win in the Battle of Lake Erie.

America had brashly declared war in 1812 to stop the British from kidnapping U.S. sailors to man the Royal Navy and to settle trade issues. A year later, the war against the world's leading superpower wasn't going well.
It was from Put-in-Bay on Lake Erie's South Bass Island that Perry sailed out to meet the British on Sept. 10, 1813.
Historian Walter Rybka — one of the planners of the re-enactment — says the 28-year-old Perry threw himself into battle. "Perry was, first off, phenomenally brave and determined, but he was damn lucky," Rybka says.
Somehow Perry survived two hours of hellacious fire that killed or maimed 75 percent of the crew on his ship, the Lawrence.
"His last gun had been knocked out of action on the starboard side, his rigging was cut to pieces, he could not maneuver, he could no longer fight. There was no point in maintaining an action because his men were just going to get slaughtered the rest of the way," Rybka says. "Right at the moment the wind fills in ..."
And that's when Perry hopped into his longboat and under heavy fire, rowed to the Niagara, a Great Lakes warship. Rybka says Perry brought along his battle flag, emblazoned with the words, "Don't Give Up The Ship."
"But the only way to do that was to give up the ship and go to the next one," Rybka says. "The real motto was, 'Don't Give Up.' "
The battle was a turning point in the War of 1812. America had lost Detroit and much of the Northwest Territory. Rybka says if Perry had given up the ship, the Canadian border would have been much farther south.
"I think Michigan probably would have been lost to us and maybe Wisconsin as well," Rybka says.

More on the battle here.

The Day A Fan Got Put In A Soocer Game

The Guardian  (h/t Ritholtz):

Harry Redknapp delights in telling this particular yarn. Last time he told the story it was on TV show A League of Their Own, at Christmas last year. "There's a guy next to the dug-out," Harry told the host, "and he's got West Ham tattooed all over his arms and neck, he's got the earrings … After two minutes, he started on me." Today, speaking to me in his third one-on-one interview since taking over as QPR boss, he slips into storytelling mode.
"'We ain't got that Lee Chapman up front do we – I ain't coming every week if he's playing,'" says Harry, doing his impression of Steve. "Half-time I made five substitutions, and we only had the bare 11 out – I was running out of players. Then we got another injury, so I said to this guy in the crowd, 'Oi, can you play as good as you talk?'"
The rest of the tale is hallowed football folklore. "I slung a leg over the barrier and Harry walked me down the tunnel," says Steve. "What's your name, son?" Harry asked, sizing up this apparent hooligan. "I couldn't believe it. Inside the dressing room, the players were sat down resting at half-time." West Ham were two-nil up, but the team was carrying injuries. "Then Harry and says, 'Lee you're off; Steve you're on.'"

Even more amazing:

Half an hour previously, he had been sucking on a cigarette in the away supporters' end, swigging from a bottle, and considering a third beer. Now he's taken the pass in stride and is in front of goal; City's veteran keeper Colin Fleet is bearing down on him, palms out, head down. The summer sun has dropped low beneath the bare trees on the horizon, painting the entire scene gold and casting long shadows.
"I just hit it," he says with a shrug. "I hit it like nothing else. Know what I mean? I belted it." The ball whistled low, past the outstretched hand of the Oxford goalkeeper, and ran into the bottom corner of the goal. Steve says he wheeled away in celebration, arms extended, head bent with disbelief. On the side of the field, Redknapp turned around and looked briefly to the heavens.
"It was like time stopped still – it was the greatest moment of my life," says Steve. Somewhere in the crowd, Bazza and Chunk were losing their minds. Steve Davies had scored on his West Ham debut.
"After that, I was exhausted. I was on 30 cigarettes a day back then," Steve admits. "I wouldn't condone it. I had a couple of cigs and a couple of beers in the first half, didn't I?" He admits his goal was not spectacular: "I'm not gonna butter myself up, but they all count." And when the full-time whistle blew, West Ham had won 4–0. Steve walked down the tunnel with the rest of his team-mates, jubilant.

I don't think there is a fan alive who at some point in their life didn't dream about something like that happening to them.  That it actually did happen to somebody is incredible.

The Origin of Ritual

Jim Davies, via the Dish:

n 1948 the Polish born British anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski published a book on a study he conducted of the fishermen of the Trobriand Islands. Sometimes they fished in an inner lagoon, where fishing was pretty predictable. Every time they fished there, they got pretty much the same kind of catch. But they also fished in the open ocean, where the fish were bigger and harder to catch. Sometimes people would get great catches, and other times, terrible ones.  The lure of the very rare great catch proved too tempting for the Trobrianders, so they ventured into the open ocean despite the odds—and developed a set of superstitions. These included rituals performed during fishing and the casting of magic spells.
The circumstance dictated the explosion of rituals. We might think this is a completely human adaptation.  But it turns out that the tendency to resort to ritual in an effort to manage a challenging situation isn’t exclusive to humans. In the same year that Malinowski published his experiment, American psychologist B. F. Skinner found that he could generate superstitious behavior in pigeons. He taught pigeons to press down on a bar in exchange for food. All animals can learn to do this, and this learning process is called reinforcement. But an interesting thing happens if the food is given at random intervals—that is, pressing the bar sometimes does, and sometimes does not, produce a treat, with no discernable pattern. Under these conditions, but not under reliable conditions, the pigeon will start repeating arbitrary, idiosyncratic behaviors before pressing the bar. It might bob its head, or turn around twice. The pigeon becomes superstitious.
It’s as though the pigeon believes, at some level, that there is a reliable way to get a food pellet. It is the pigeon’s experience that pressing on the bar isn’t enough, because that doesn’t always work. So when the food actually comes, the pigeon looks at what it was doing before and wonders if those arbitrary actions—turning the head, making a noise—had something to do with the food delivery. The pigeon tries those things, and sometimes the food does indeed come. But sometimes the pigeon performs the ritual and the food still doesn’t come.
One would think that this would convince the pigeon that getting or not getting the treat has nothing to do with behavior. Similarly, in baseball, the batter can’t point to a direct correlation between tapping their foot on home plate and batting a double. The brave Trobriand fisherman who ventures out into the open sea after practicing a particular ritual can’t rely on the spirits’ goodwill. Voltaire and the philosophers from the Age of Reason would want us to apply rational tools and to understand that there is no connection between cause and effect.
Yet—whether for humans or pigeons—the opposite turns out to be true. There seems to be something in the brain that, when confronted with no easily discernable pattern between one’s action and the outcome, seeks to forge a bridge and create a story that unites the two events—one an action that you can take, and therefore a reliable bet, and two, an event with a low probability of occurrence.

The pigeon shit is fascinating.  One thing I appreciate from being raised in Catholicism is the appreciation of ritual.  I remember the comfort I gained from the familiar rhythms of mass as I was mourning one of my best friends who was killed in a car wreck back when I was 20.  At that time, I gained some appreciation for the value of ritual to deal with the highs and lows of life.  Like the pigeons, we are all comforted by these actions.

When it Rains...

Actually, it probably ought to say, when it doesn't rain, because we're getting pretty dry right now.  The best year ever is starting to look like the best corn crop with an average bean crop.  But to go back to the title of the post, things have seemed to be falling apart the last few weeks.  Not only with the weather, but with work.  We've lost two folks in our engineering department, in which I do some work.  Then, today was the last day for my immediate boss in the environmental and safety side of things.  He handled all of the safety for three companies while I helped him out with the environmental side of things.  I've tried to let people know that I am not qualified to handle any of his duties, but I haven't really heard how they plan on taking care of things while they work to find a replacement.  Probably some of that work will devolve to me.  And I won't even get into where I really am killing myself.  Anyway, under normal circumstances I'd say that the sun will shine again, but right now, I'm looking for a rain cloud as a positive outcome.  Actually, for the vast swath of humanity, I'm still sitting pretty good.

The Most Important Driver of History

Via Ritholtz:

The big ball could say luck, also.

Is American Exceptionalism A Historical Quirk?

New York Magazine:

If you buy Gordon’s story, then the effect of the second industrial revolution was to replace the specific entitlement of the Gilded Age (of family, of place of birth) with a powerful general entitlement, earned simply through citizenship. “Just the fact of being an American male and graduating from high school meant you could have a good-paying job and expect that you could have children who would double your own standard of living,” Gordon says. This certainty, that the future would be so much better than the past that it could be detected in the space of a generation, is what we call the American Dream. The phrase itself was coined only in 1931, once the gains of the second industrial revolution had dispersed and inequality had begun to dissipate. There is a whole set of manners, which we have come to think of as part of our national identity, that depends upon this expectation that things will always get better: Our laissez-faire-ism; our can-do-ism; the optimistic cast of our religiosity, which persisted even when other Western nations turned toward atheism; our cult of the individual. We think of the darkening social turn that happened around 1972 as having something to do with the energies of the sixties collapsing in on themselves, but in Gordon’s description something more mechanistic was happening. “The second industrial revolution had run its course,” he says, and so, in many ways, had its social implications.

What happened around 1972 (actually 1971)?   U.S. oil production peaked.  The days of easy energy are over, and we'll pay an economic cost for that going forward.  For all our productivity gains with technology, the drag of lowered return on investment for energy production will be a drain on our economy.  A lot of other things also figure into our stagnation, including a reversion to mean for our standard of living.  Right now the folks at the top are improving their standard of living at the expense of everyone else, while the rest of us slowly start to slide toward the rest of the world population.  I don't think that arrangement can continue for long.  Like Gordon, I do believe that our post-war prosperity was a fluke event.  How we handle the implications of that will be very interesting.

How an American Manufacturer Succeeds

Fast Company features Marlin Steel:

Speed is part of the moat, the willingness to do a job as quickly as a customer needs it. Quality is part of the moat too. Scattered around the factory floor are "check fixtures"--simple wooden boards with the outline of a wire part etched into the surface. To see if the part is made correctly, a worker slots it into the outline on the board. If it's made right, it fits.
Often three nearly identical images of a part are etched into the same check fixture. The one on the right is the customer's requirement--say, a tolerance of 0.12 inches. The one in the center is Marlin's "okay to ship" standard, always better than the customer request--say, a tolerance of 0.06 inches. The one on the left is the "Drew" standard--perhaps a tolerance of 0.03 inches--four times the precision of the customer's spec. "If we send them that left one, they will never leave," Greenblatt says. Toyota--legendary for its obsession with quality--was so impressed with Marlin's exactitude that in addition to baskets, it also buys check fixtures from Marlin.
But for Greenblatt, the most important element of the moat is what Marlin didn't have before Boeing called: engineering and design. No one at Marlin designs baskets on slips of notepaper today. Five of 28 employees are degreed mechanical engineers. "We give people slick, elegant designs that make it worthwhile to use us rather than a commodity-part supplier from China," says Greenblatt. More to the point, says designer Alur, "people come to us with a problem and we try to solve it." Marlin has taken something utterly pedestrian and turned it into a tool of innovation--for its customers.

I highly recommend anybody in manufacturing reads this article.  It is fascinating.  The dude did good with his company, but he also got really lucky.

Trapped in an Air Bubble For 60 Hours

This is crazy:

The story began on May 26 at about 4:30 a.m., when Okene got up to use the restroom. His vessel, a Chevron oil service tugboat called the AHT Jascon-4, swayed in the choppy Atlantic waters just off the coast of Nigeria. What caused the tugboat to capsize remains a mystery, though a Chevron official later blamed a “sudden ocean swell.”

Okene was thrown from the crew restroom as the ship turned over. Water streamed in and swept him through the vessel’s bowels until he found himself in the toilet of an officer’s cabin. As the ship settled on the ocean floor, the water stopped rising. For the next 60 hours, Okene—who was without food, water, or light—listened to the sounds of ocean creatures scavenging through the ship on his dead crewmates. Like a living Phlebas the Phoenician, he recounted his life’s events while growing more resigned to his fate.....

How did it work?

Long Shot Bet Pays Off Big

NYT:

Last spring, Conor Murphy was a hired hand who spent his days galloping racehorses, combing knotted manes and shoveling manure in a stable in Berkshire, England.

Mr. Murphy, 29, knew his horses well. He was able to tell which ones were on their toes and which ones needed a little more care. He also knew his way around a betting window. On a hunch, he bet $75 on five of his favorites. It was the sort of desperate stab that only a man who loves horses would make.

But he won — big. His $75 bet paid more than $1.5 million, enough for him to put down the shovel and become his own boss.

Now Mr. Murphy lives in Kentucky, training horses for some of the most prominent figures in racing. On Saturday, he will be at the Kentucky Derby, rooting for Lines of Battle, a horse owned by one of his clients.

“Pure luck,” Mr. Murphy said of his life-changing wager...

Trying not to let his fondness for the horses cloud his judgment, he played a five-horse accumulator through his online betting account.

Then he forgot about it.

The odds at the time of the bet were long on each horse: Sprinter Sacre (10-1), Simonsig (14-1), Bobs Worth (10-1), Finian’s Rainbow (8-1) and Riverside Theatre (9-1). That all five would win was, well, nearly impossible — about 163,350 to 1, said a spokesman for Paddy Power, an Irish bookmaking firm.

That is a great story. My derby picks: Verrazano, Overanalyze and Revolutionary, win, place and show.

91 Wins

That's what the Reds should manage, since I made my annual over-under bet on wins, and took the under on 90.5.  Back in 2011, I took the over, and the team played like shit.  So now I just try to get the highest number possible and take the under.  Consider it my effort to give them luck.