The Legend of Galloping Gertie

Alex Pasternack has a fascinating story at Motherboard about how the explanation of resonance causing the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows bridge isn't accurate.  And there are a ton of cool videos and GIFs:

The wind on November 7, 1940 was possibly the strongest wind the bridge had ever experienced, and it came at a crucial time: the bracing under the deck was likely weakened during a midnight storm several days prior, according to reports at the time.
Just after 10 a.m., as the bridge's undulations reached new heights, causing each side of the bridge’s suspension cables to alternate between taut and slack, one of those cables snapped into two piece of varying lengths. This created an immediate imbalance. Whereas the deck had earlier exhibited an up-and-down “galloping” motion like a roller coaster, now it was lopsided and capable of twisting along its center axis, which it began to do. As it interacted with the wind in this twisting motion—and with gravity, with the cables, and with its two fixed ends—its twisting movement didn’t dampen the effect of the wind as it continued to nudge the bridge: the twisting increased it.
Each time the bridge twisted, that is, it twisted a little bit more, not less, back in the other direction, in a steady buildup of twisting energy that was reinforced by the wind. After an hour or so of this, it finally twisted itself apart.
Gertie's mechanical suicide was the result of feedback—of a structure entering a self-sustaining vibration as it responds to the steady force of the wind, absorbing more energy than it can dissipate in the process. It's also known as aerodynamically-induced self-excitation, or simply, flutter.
"You will find it a challenge to explain!" Donald Olson, a physics professor at Texas State University, warned me. He is the co-author or a new study about the collapse and some problems with the footage that captured it (more on that to come). While he said ninety-nine percent of the physicists reading his study will have been teaching the Tacoma Narrows Bridge as resonance, "subsequent authors have rejected the resonance explanation, and their perspective is gradually spreading to the physics community."
According to the most complete recent research, he and his co-authors write, "the failure of the bridge was related to a wind-driven amplification of the torsional oscillation that, unlike a resonance, increases monotonically with increasing wind speed."...
The bridge responded to each twist with a slightly larger twist, buffeted by the wind and by new, larger vortices shedding off its edges, all of which were helping to nudge the bridge just a little bit further each time it twisted.
While the earlier vortices—the von Karman vortex street—may have led to the initial oscillations, the bridge's new movement was self induced, its new vortices the result of flutter wake. (If the vortex street was in effect, the bridge would have shed vortices at about 1 hertz, or one vortex per second, but this is out of synch with the .2 hertz torsional vibrations that Farquarson observed when the bridge was twisting.)
Each time the deck of the bridge twisted now, it sought to return to its original position (inertial forces). And as it did so, twisting back with a matching speed and direction (elastic forces), the wind and the vortices caught it each time, pushing the deck just a little bit more in that direction (aerodynamic forces). With each twist and each twist back, the size of the twisting slightly increased.
And as the deck flexed slightly higher and higher in its new twisting motion, it released even greater eddies of wind along its sides, which shed larger vortices, further contributing to the deck's instability.

Another interesting fact I didn't know was that some of the footage of the bridge was filmed at a slower speed, making the oscillations of the bridge appear to be faster than they really were.  The whole article is worth reading, especially if you are an engineering nerd.

Change in Voting - 2004 to 2012

patstuart2 via Vox:

In 2004, George W. Bush was reelected president with 51 percent of the vote. Eight years later, Barack Obama was reelected with 51 percent of the vote. But that national 2 percent swing toward the Democrats wasn't distributed evenly across the country. As Patstuart2's fascinating county-by-county swing map shows, there were huge regional variations.
He explains that darker blue means the county got more Democratic between 2004 and 2012, while darker red means it got more Republican. The lightest shade shows a 1 percent swing. A little darker means 5 percent. A little darker than that means 9 percent, and so on up to a 25 percent swing. In sum, it paints a fascinating picture of the changing face of American politics.

Who thinks race played a part in these results, on both sides? This guy [thumbs pointed at chest], for one.

The Big F-150 Gamble on Aluminum

Fortune has an interesting piece on the big F-150 changeover to aluminum:

While a lot of attention has focused on outgoing CEO Alan Mulally’s One Ford plan to unify the global manufacturer, the automaker’s profits largely depend on a beefy truck that is sold only in North America and will never find a market in Asia or Europe. Not that it needs to. The F-series has outsold every other car and truck in the U.S. for more than three decades, a record of longevity that ranks in the hierarchy of superbrands like Coke and Marlboro. Some 33 million have been sold since the F-150 was introduced in 1950, twice as many as the Model T. If the revenue from the nearly 765,000 F-series Fords sold in 2013—$31.1 billion—were that of a standalone business, it would rank around 100 on this year’s Fortune 500 list. Ranked by profits, such an F-series business would place even higher.
The F-series has been the biggest beneficiary of the revolution in the pickup business. The increasing popularity of personal-use trucks has pushed average transaction prices to $40,000, and some high-end models—with luxury touches like stitched leather, heated and cooled seats, and LED interior lights—sell for more than $50,000. Vehicles that are mechanically simple, rarely reengineered, and sold in huge volumes, such as pickups, are automotive cash cows. Analysts figure that F-series trucks, with top-shelf trim lines like King Ranch and Platinum, generate gross profits of 40% per unit, or $12,000.

Trucks are ridiculously overpriced.  $12,000 profit?  People are stupid.  I also thought this piece was interesting:

At the Dearborn Truck Plant, one of two assembly plants where the F-150 will be built—the other one is just outside Kansas City—the company is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to build and install new stamping presses and dies to produce the aluminum panels and replace today’s spot welders with rivet guns, advanced welders, and adhesive machinery in the body shop. With both plants currently producing the 2014 F-150, they will have to be taken down one at a time for a total of 13 weeks for refitting, depriving Ford of perhaps $2 billion in revenue.
Ford has guessed wrong on a new truck before. When the 1997 F-150 was redesigned from the ground up for the first time since 1980, it got uncharacteristic rounded styling—a “jellybean look”—that allowed for improved aerodynamics, a larger interior, and better fuel economy. Designed to “hit the hot buttons” of baby boomers, it sold quickly at first (1.1 million in 2001), but the style didn’t catch on, and Ford retreated back to a chiseled box look in 2004.

The main challenge with the aluminum will be manufacturing quality and durability.  That is a lot more manageable than style.  If they are going to fail with the move to aluminum, it will be because trucks fail structurally.  Otherwise, customers won't know the difference between the aluminum and steel.

Fire, in Slow Motion

Here is some lab work I could get into:

Desalination Projects Underway in California

All Things Considered:

On the coast in Carlsbad, Calif., construction workers are building what will be the largest seawater desalination plant in the Western Hemisphere. When finished in early 2016, it is expected to provide up to 50 million gallons of fresh drinkable water every day.
"That's enough water for 112,000 households here in the region," says Peter MacLaggan with Poseidon Resources, the developer of this $1 billion plant.
The process, MacLaggan explains, involves taking water from the Pacific Ocean, removing the silt, sand and "organics," then pressurizing the water through very fine membranes. The technical name is reverse osmosis. And the result? "Every 2 gallons of seawater that goes in, 1 gallon of high-quality drinking water comes out," he says.
And MacLaggan says the best part is it's droughtproof.
"It's droughtproof because it's not dependent on snowpack in the Sierras, it's not dependent on rainfall here in San Diego," he says. "You're getting water from the Pacific Ocean."
The word "droughtproof" carries a lot of weight in California. That snowpack in the Sierra Nevada he's talking about is still less than half of what it should be for this time of year. Farmers, environmentalists and cities like nearby San Diego have been fighting over what little water there is.
"San Diego currently imports about 70 percent of its water," says Bob Yamada, the water resources manager at the San Diego County Water Authority..... Statewide, 17 desalination plants are in some stage of planning on the California coast.

The program also featured a story about the opportunities for and challenges of rainwater harvesting and wastewater recycling as methods of decreasing dependence on imported water in southern California.

I have to admit that stories like the California drought or large floods on the Mississippi River really intrigue me, since they cover some of my favorite topics: hydrology, hydraulics, infrastructure, agriculture and severe weather.  Yes, I'm a nerd.  But what do you expect from an engineer and a farmer?

Weekend Links

Sinners in the Hands-When is a Church a Cult? - Texas Monthly

The Great Plains Oil Rush - NPR, a series on the impact of the shale oil boom in the Bakken

The new Koch - Fortune (full story behind paywall)

The Day We Lost Atlanta - Politico

Stunning Bubbles Frozen Under Lake Abraham - Smithsonian

America's Shopping Malls Are Dying a Slow, Ugly Death - Business Insider

California Drought Could Force Key Water System To Cut Deliveries - LA Times

Cousin Sal's Super Bowl Prop Bets - Grantland

Sidelined by Brain Injury, Ex-NFL Player Copes With Desperation - NPR

Source: Slate

Between Memory and Reality

Craig Davidson tries to flesh out what of his memories from his youth are real, and what are imagined.  It touches on the shaping of memory with storytelling as he tries to reconstruct what happened at the amusement park he worked at, which is now embroiled in scandal.  His story involved disposing of a dead sea lion:

Matt grabbed one flipper, I the other. The creature possessed the disobliging weight of all dead things—but it was wet, its hide naturally oily, so it glided rather easily across the floor, up a cement ramp, and into the freezer, where we left it among the pallets of frozen fish.
Near the end of our shift, we returned to the freezer and stood around the animal, our breath puffing whitely. It was now encased in ice—the lacy, wafer-thin kind that forms like a crackling skin over winter puddles and shatters under the slightest pressure—and frozen to the smooth concrete. We pushed and shouldered it. No luck. In extremis, Rod put the boots to it, kicking until it came unstuck.
Matt and I laughed—a shameful admission. You know those hysterical giggles you get when a situation is so absurd, shocking, or terrifying that they’re more a form of damage control? The laughter boils up your throat with a fizzy club soda effervescence, impossible to tamp down, intent on releasing the poison inside you.
I truly want to believe that’s what it was. Otherwise, it was just two cruel boys laughing as our supervisor kicked a dead sea lion in the head.
The ice splintered. The sea lion spun on its axis like a compass needle seeking true north. We guided it from the freezer, its body skidding awkwardly down the ramp and onto a concrete platform set above the Barn’s floor. Rod backed up Big Blue, an ancient stake truck retrofitted as a trash hauler, until its bumper nearly touched the platform. Then we slid the sea lion into the bed.

He met with his old friend, to compare whether his friend's memory matched up to his.  His friend remembered how the author got covered in shit from the dead animal as they tried to pry it out of there.  That was a detail the author always left out when recounting the event.

The difference between our narrative of events and the actual event has always intrigued me.

Wanted: Rural Attorneys

NYT:

“A hospital will not last long with no doctors, and a courthouse and judicial system with no lawyers faces the same grim future,” South Dakota’s chief justice, David E. Gilbertson, said. “We face the very real possibility of whole sections of this state being without access to legal services.”

In South Dakota, 65 percent of the lawyers live in four urban areas. In Georgia, 70 percent are in the Atlanta area. In Arizona, 94 percent are in the two largest counties, and in Texas, 83 percent are around Houston, Dallas, Austin and San Antonio. Last summer, the American Bar Association called on federal, state and local governments to stem the decline of lawyers in rural areas.

Last month, South Dakota became the first state to heed the call. It passed a law that offers lawyers an annual subsidy to live and work in rural areas, like the national one that doctors, nurses and dentists have had for decades...

The new law, which will go into effect in June, requires a five-year commitment from the applicant and sets up a pilot program of up to 16 participants. They will receive an annual subsidy of $12,000, 90 percent of the cost of a year at the University of South Dakota Law School.

This compares with a 40-year-old federal medical program, the National Health Service Corps, which offers up to $60,000 in tax-free loan repayment for two years of service in underserved areas and up to $140,000 for five years of service. The program consists of nearly 10,000 medical, dental and mental health professionals serving 10.4 million people, almost half in rural communities.

A spokesman for the federal program said research had shown that residents who train in rural settings are two to three times more likely than urban graduates to practice in rural areas.

Rural areas are struggling to survive, and whether residents want to realize it or not, the rural way of life is subsidized by the government, and has been for most of the history of this country.  Rural Free Delivery, the Rural Electrification Act, the Universal Service Fund, the Federal Aid Road Act, the Rural Development Administration, the various ag programs, state school funding schemes, the list goes on and on.  And yet, rural folks overwhelmingly vote for knaves and buffoons who work to end these very programs, telling us hicks that it is the brown people who get all the help from the government, and it comes out of our pockets.  For whatever reason, folks lap that shit up.  If things continue the way they've been going, rural folks are going to find out the truth very soon.

Return to Labor

Another interesting chart, via nc links:

So all you economists out there, tell me why this doesn’t show what I think it does: whenever labor’s share of income rises a bit, they hold a recession. Which takes care of that problem quite nicely.

I think it is interesting that the chart peaks out in 1980, right as the "Reagan Revolution" took place.  The tech bubble is also pretty interesting.  I think the 2012 bottom is as far down as things can probably go, and we'll eventually have to move back into the 64 to 66% range.  However, productivity investments and robotics may lead us to test the feasibility of staying below that range.  I doubt that that is feasible. 

There Used To Be Something About Mary

The Atlantic features this:

Each year I mark the continued calamitous decline of Mary as a girls' name in the United States. Not to be over-dramatic, but in the recorded history of names, nothing this catastrophic has ever happened before. Mary was the most common name given to girls every year from the beginning of record-keeping (at least back to 1800) through 1961 (except for a six-year dip to #2, behind Linda).
And then it happened. In 2011, according to the latest report from the Social Security Administration (SSA), Mary fell three more places, to 112th. In absolute numbers, the number of girls given the name Mary at birth has fallen 94 percent since 1961. Here is the trend:

My explanation is that for much of our history, Catholics were a growing portion of our population, and naming girls Mary was ridiculously common, and had the added effect of differentiating them from Protestants.  Thr Post-Tridentine Church emphasized Mary seemingly to spite the Calvinists and stake out their differences.  I think this trend fell off with suburbanization moving Catholics out of their ghettos and into neighborhoods with Protestants, and it accelerated after Vatican II with the drop off of many traditional Marian devotions.  Anyway, it is a trend I've paid attention to also, so I found the story interesting.

More Election Analysis

First, Jeff Greenfield puts the Republicans' plight in perspective by reminding us of the Democrats in 1988:

Consider where the Democrats found themselves that November. They had just lost their third straight presidential election, and not to the formidable Ronald Reagan, but to George Herbert Walker Bush, a WASP aristocrat prone to sitting down at a diner and asking for “a splash of coffee.” They’d lost by more than seven points in the popular vote, and by 416-111 in the Electoral College, winning only 10 states.

The most enduring element of their geographic base had vanished. The once-solid Democratic South was now solidly Republican and, for the second straight election, their candidate had not won a single state in the region.

But that was only the start of the wretched geographic picture. Four of the six New England states had gone Republican, and the Plains and the Mountain West were all in the GOP camp. Most daunting, three big states—New Jersey, Illinois and California, with 87 combined electoral votes—had gone Republican for the sixth consecutive election. The weakness of Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis could not explain away a recent political fact: The Republican Party appeared to have “an electoral lock” on the White House.

It is hard to imagine New Jersey, Illinois and California going to the Republicans for six straight elections.  You just forget some things over time.

Also,  Emily Badger highlights why the cities go so heavily Democrat, featuring this map by Chris Howard:

It is an overlay of election results with census population density data.  As she points out, Republicans have a terrible time appealing to city residents:

As the Republican Party has moved further to the right, it has increasingly become the party of fierce individualism, of "I built that" and you take care of yourself. Cities, on the other hand, are fundamentally about the shared commons. If you live in a city and you think government – and other people – should stay out of your life, how will you get to work in the morning? Who will police your neighborhood? Where will you find a public park when your building has no back yard?
In a good piece on the GOP’s problem with geography earlier this week, The New Republic’s Lydia DePillis interviewed Princeton Historian Kevin Kruse, who made this point succinctly: "There are certain things in which the physical nature of a city, the fact the people are piled on top of each other, requires some notion of the public good," he said. “Conservative ideology works beautifully in the suburbs, because it makes sense spatially."
The real urban challenge for conservatives going forward will be to pull back from an ideology that leaves little room for the concept of "public good," and that treats all public spending as if it were equally wasteful. Cities do demand, by definition, a greater role for government than a small rural town on the prairie. But the return on investment can also be much higher (in jobs created through transportation spending, in the number of citizens touched by public expenditures, in patents per capita, in the sheer share of economic growth driven by our metropolises).
Density makes all of these things possible, and it requires its own kind of politics. There’s no reason why the Democratic Party should have an exclusive lock on this idea. Investing government money efficiently – as Republicans want to do – is also about focusing on how it’s spent in cities. While Republicans are mulling this over in the next four years, it may help to look at Howard’s map. What is going on in those dark blue dots? What does it mean to live in those places – and to live there and hear from politicians that “government should get out of the way?”

That has generally been what I've been getting at when I say that population density sways voting patterns.  The Republican message is focused on rural areas to the detriment of cities, and it is no wonder why they are getting their asses kicked there.  They have purposely chosen groups that are shrinking and ignored groups that are growing.  That just isn't wise.

One other thing I thought was interesting from that article was her pointing out the 98th meridian on the map:

 Howard’s map underscores that the massive red block of the Great Plains actually has little political weight at all (curiously, electoral influence appears to dry up along with the rainfall abruptly west of the 98th meridian that commonly defines the Great Plains). Electoral power instead is concentrated in those blue-black patches, one of which strings all the way from southern Connecticut to Washington, D.C.

I used to hear about the 20 inch rainfall line, but it looks like the 98th meridian is a little closer to the population break.  People need the rain to live. (With the exception of California and Arizona, where they dry up the rivers).

Mad Cow Case Appears In California

Wall Street Journal:

The U.S. Department of Agriculture said Tuesday it had confirmed the first new case of mad-cow disease since 2006 after the illness was suspected in a California dairy cow.
The cow was tested as part of the USDA's ongoing surveillance system for the disease. The USDA tests about 40,000 cows per year. This is the fourth case of mad-cow disease reported in the U.S.
Agency officials stressed that no meat from the animal entered the human food supply, though some dairy cows are slaughtered for food. USDA officials said they don't expect any foreign countries to ban U.S. beef because of the new mad-cow case.
USDA Chief Veterinarian John Clifford said scientific studies by the World Health Organization show that humans aren't at risk of contracting the disease through milk consumption. "Milk is safe," he said.

My question about Mad Cow disease is whether it is only transmitted by eating infected brain or nervous system matter?  My understanding is that Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease can be genetic:

 The defective protein can be transmitted by contaminated harvested human brain products, Immunoglobulins (IVIG), corneal grafts, dural grafts or electrode implants (acquired or iatrogenic form: iCJD); it can be inherited (hereditary or familial form: fCJD); or it may appear for the first time in the patient (sporadic form: sCJD). In the hereditary form, a mutation occurs in the gene for PrP, PRNP. Ten to 15 percent of CJD cases are inherited. (CDC)

It would seem to me that there could be two reasons why Mad Cow almost always appears in dairy herds.  One is that they need the cheapest protein sources so they might get contaminated feed.  The other would be that the gene pool is pretty shallow, and it might be an inherited trait.  I would think that is a real possibility in dairy herds.  It still might not rule out the transmissibility to humans, but it is an interesting consideration. 

Well, after looking a little bit, I guess it may be genetic:

Findings published in PLoS Pathogens (September 12, 2008) suggest that mad cow disease also is caused by a genetic mutation within a gene called Prion Protein Gene. The research shows, for the first time, that a 10-year-old cow from Alabama with an atypical form of bovine spongiform encephalopathy had the same type of prion protein gene mutation as found in human patients with the genetic form of Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease, also called genetic CJD for short. Besides having a genetic origin, other human forms of prion diseases can be sporadic, as in sporadic CJD, as well as foodborne. That is, they are contracted when people eat products contaminated with mad cow disease. This form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease is called variant CJD.

Interesting.

RIP Earl Scruggs

Bluegrass legend Earl Scruggs died Wednesday morning:

Banjo player Earl Scruggs, who helped define the sound of bluegrass, died Wednesday morning. Scruggs, who began playing the banjo when he was four years old, just after his father died, and would go on to become a member of some of the most influential groups in bluegrass.
Scruggs died of natural causes in a Nashville hospital, according to his son. He was 88 years old.Scruggs played in Bill Monroe's Blue Grass Boys band, and later led Flatt & Scruggs with guitarist Lester Flatt. But his lifelong affection for the banjo began long before, as a young boy on the North Carolina farm where he grew up. At first, he tried a picking technique using just his thumb and index finger, but he always wanted to poke his middle finger into the mix. The picking technique he developed, using three fingers, revolutionized banjo playing and took on his name: Scruggs style.

American Migration Map

Via Mark Thoma, Forbes has an interactive map of internal migration in the United States.  My county had people moving in from surrounding counties and at least two other counties which have large public universities, while people moved out to Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, Toledo, Chicago, Las Vegas and L.A. 

The New Big 4

A history of railroad mergers at The Big Picture:

and their rail maps:

I am still surprised that Union Pacific and BNSF haven't paired off with CSX and Norfolk Southern.  It wouldn't seem like monopoly if there are two carriers throughout the country.  Maybe it has to do with connections between the systems at St. Louis and Chicago not meshing up well.

Update:  The title referred to this:

The Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago and St. Louis Railway, also known as the Big Four Railroad and commonly abbreviated CCC&StL, was a railroad company in the Midwestern United States.
Its primary routes were located in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio.

1918 map with CCC&St. L routes in red. New York Central in orange.

Mansfield's Shawshank Economy

All Things Considered featured a piece on Thursday about Mansfield, Ohio, and the tourists it draws as the location for the filming of Shawshank Redemption:

The 1994 prison drama The Shawshank Redemption is a Hollywood rarity, in that it wasn't shot in Hollywood. The filmmakers didn't use New York or Toronto either. Instead, Shawshank was filmed almost entirely on location, in and around the Rust Belt city of Mansfield, Ohio, about halfway between Columbus and Cleveland.
This summer, as we explore the places where iconic American movies were filmed for our series "On Location," we've discovered that often, long after the cameras are packed up and the crew goes home, a film can leave an imprint on a town.
In recent decades, Mansfield has fallen on hard times. Westinghouse, the Tappan Stove Co., Ohio Brass, and Mansfield Tire and Rubber have all closed plants in Mansfield since America's heavy manufacturing boom went bust. The latest casualty: the local General Motors plant, which closed just last year. All in a city of fewer than 50,000. But at least one closure has brought with it a strange bounty.
After nearly a century of use, the Ohio State Reformatory closed its doors on New Year's Eve 1990. The massive prison on the outskirts of Mansfield is a combination of three architectural styles: Victorian Gothic, Richardsonian Romanesque and Queen Anne. If that doesn't mean much to you, let me put it this way: It's gorgeous — and terrifying. Which may explain why Hollywood thought it would make a perfect Shawshank Prison.

This is one of my all-time favorite movies.  I can relate how people will visit movie sites, as I have stopped twice at the Dyersville, Iowa location for the movie Field of Dreams.  Mansfield, like any part of Ohio which isn't a bedroom community in a metropolitan area, has struggled with manufacturing job losses.  It's good to see something positive happening there.

Time And Whiskey

Clay Risen looks at the twin challenges of time versus cash flow and time versus taste for startup distillers:

One of the biggest obstacles facing a startup whiskey distiller is time. No matter how quickly you can turn yeast, water, and grains into alcohol, you still need to mature the product in oak barrels to get something you can legally call "whiskey." Most big distillers use 53-gallon charred barrels, which they fill, plug, and stick in an uninsulated warehouse for a few years—or longer, depending on the qualities they're looking for. During that time, the barrels impart color and flavor to the liquid, while absorption and evaporation remove unwanted chemicals. Eventually the distillers decide the whiskey is ready, move it into bottles, and ship them to stores.

All this waiting takes money—a lot of it, and all before you've sold your first bottle. If you're an established distiller, you're covering the upfront costs of your new batches with the profits you're making off the finished ones. But a startup doesn't have that sort of cash flow, which is why many new distillers start with "white" spirits like vodka and gin, then invest in whiskey once the money is flowing.

But the allure of producing brown liquor is a strong one, so for the last few years entrepreneurial types have been looking for ways around the time conundrum. Some have used "tea bags" of wood chips to increase the surface area of wood in contact with the liquid. Others use barrels with honeycomb patterns cut along their insides, to increase the surface area. Tuthilltown, in upstate New York, has even experimented with vibrations from bass-heavy music to agitate the aging whiskey, thus increasing the movement of the liquid against the wood.

The most popular trick, however, is to use smaller barrels—from five to 30 gallons, instead of the standard 53—to speed the aging process. The greater the surface area relative to the volume, the more contact the liquid will have with the wood. The result is, at first glance, impressive: brown color, woody flavor, and less bite than the unaged liquid you started with.

The most striking feature of a distillery tour is seeing the stacks of barrels in the warehouses.  It is a tough concept to understand that this whiskey will generally age at least six years prior to bottling.  That is a long time to wait for a return on investment.  Waiting until October is hard, when you buy inputs for the crop in December.  I can't imagine waiting until October 2017.  The fact that each barrel may age differently just adds to the complexity.  But if it turns out, those barrels are just money in the bank.  Patience is best, but it would be difficult.  Trying to satisfy investors makes it a challenge.  But quality should be the goal, not quick profits.

Foreign Land Grab

graphic from creditsesame, via Ritholtz:

World War II in Pictures-The Battle of Britain

The Atlantic features the Battle of Britain in Part 4 of a 20 Part feature:

Undaunted by a night of German air raids in which his store front was blasted, a shopkeeper opens up the morning after for "business as usual" in London. (AP Photo) #

Womens' Economic Roles and Agricultural Practices

at Naked Capitalism:

A number of scholars have argued that these differences can be explained by cultural values. However this leaves the questions of where these values come from. Ester Boserup (1970) in her path-breaking book Women’s Role in Economic Development argues that gender role differences have their origins in different forms of agriculture practiced traditionally.

In particular, she identifies important differences between shifting and plough cultivation. The former, which uses hand-held tools like the hoe and the digging stick, is labour intensive and women actively participate in farm work. The latter, in contrast, is more capital intensive, using the plough to prepare the soil. Unlike the hoe or digging stick, the plough requires significant upper body strength, grip strength, and burst of power, which are needed to either pull the plough or control the animal that pulls it.

Because of these requirements, when plough agriculture is practiced, men have an advantage in farming relative to women. Also reinforcing this gender-bias in ability is the fact that when the plough is used, there is less need for weeding, a task typically undertaken by women and children. In addition, child-care, a task almost universally performed by women, is most compatible with activities that can be stopped and resumed easily and do not put children in danger. These are characteristics that are satisfied for hoe agriculture, but not for plough agriculture since large animals are typically used to pull the plough.

In a recent study (Alesina et al. 2011) we test Boserup’s hypothesis. The idea is that this division of labour then generated norms about the appropriate role of women in society. Societies characterised by plough agriculture, and a resulting gender-based division of labour, developed the belief that the natural place for women is within the home. These cultural beliefs tend to persist even if the economy moves out of agriculture, affecting the participation of women in activities performed outside of the home, such as market employment, entrepreneurship, and participation in politics.

Interesting.  That isn't something I would have considered.