bogen.org

Why must everyone describe the size of any given area in acres? Is everyone supposed to be born with a innate feel for exactly how large an acre is?If I had a used car for every time that someone described the area of something in terms of acres, I’d have the largest collection of used cars ever assembled.

Something is “forty acres” in size. That forest covers “four hundred acres.” Their yard is “half-an-acre” in size.

Here’s the deal. I don’t have the slightest idea of how big an acre is. Sure, it might be 4046.85642 meters squared, but how big is that? I can picture a square mile (this is America after all, and we use miles, damnit!). Why can’t people say that such and such is “forty square miles” in size. That I can understand.

A mile can be driven in a car. It can be walked on foot. It can be biked. How does one bike an acre? Does your car’s odometer register the number of acres traveled since it was assembled? Perhaps you step out for an evening walk of ten acres?

Of course not. You step out for a walk of a half-mile or a mile. You bike miles. Your car travels three thousand miles or more between oil changes. We all understand miles. Hence, to square those miles is no great intuitive leap. Heck, if you grew up in a state like South Dakota where there are section line roads, and each section is a square mile, it would seem almost easier to talk about area in terms of miles instead of acres.

Now, most of the people reading this essay are saying, “Dummy. You’re comparing acres with miles. That’s an area measurement and a distance measurement. Why don’t you compare grape jelly with sirloin steaks next?!” Unfortunately, that is false reasoning.

The acre has an interesting history. Originally, it was the area of land a yoke of oxen could plow in one day. So, he of the stronger, faster oxen had larger acres than he of the lazy, weak oxen. This meant that the acre was just as precise a unit of measurement as cubits were (the length of your forearm).

So, an acre was fixed to be 10 sqare chains (tangentially: a chain’s length is either 66 feet or 100 feet, depending on whose chain is used). But, it still doesn’t correspond neatly to meters or hectares, nor does it correspond to feet (in most instances; remember the chain dependancy mentioned above), yards, or miles. Sure, an acre can be expressed in squared terms of all those measurements, but not neatly like meters and hectares (1 hectare = 10,000 sq. meters).

An acre is nothing more than a shorthand way of compressing a squared distance measurement in conversation and writing. Rather than saying, “Well, I live on 43,560 sq. ft. or 10 square chains” someone might say, “I live on an acre.”

So, why don’t we simply invent other terms to express oddball squared distance values? Let’s term 4 square miles a “rorvak” and 16 square miles a “frindorg.” Then, we could talk about owning a farm with 2 rorvaks of land someday while cities could express their metropolitan size in frindorgs.

Ultimately, those terms are no different than acre. My made up terms just happen to be unfamiliar.

Another argument for using acres is that they are a convenient way of expressing area measurements that everyone uses. That argument doesn’t hold water at all. I would challange anyone to tell me the area of my monitor screen (it’s a 15″ LCD) in acres. Need me to scale up a bit? How about the size of my living room in acres? Still too small? How about the size of my house in acres?

About the only thing ever measured in acres is land or very large areas. If we’re measuring land or very large areas, why not use square miles and be done with it? Why use a word that doesn’t make communication any easier?

To further cloud the issue of acres, there are different acre measurements in different parts of the world. The international acre is 0.0162 square meters smaller than the American acre.

So, if folks in the US expressed areas in square miles or yards (remember, this is America, damnit! We don’t use the metric system) and those so inclined to use the heretical metric system used square meters or hectares, acres could go the way of polio or smallpox.

The other incredibly useless way to talk about the size of an area is to translate the size of an area into football fields.

• “An asteroid the size of a football field…”
• “Multiple Launch Rocket Systems, or MLRS, which can shoot up to 12 rockets in one minute and destroy an area the size of a football field”
• “…USS Abraham Lincoln dimensions are usually given in football fields…” Really? Dimensions on the Abe are giving in football fields?
  • “Can I get a nut 1/7000th of a football field in diameter?”
  • “How tall are you sailor?”
    “I’m 1/60th of a football field tall, sir!”
  • “The printer needs some more paper that measures 0.0019 football fields by 0.0025 football fields before our orders from the Pentagon will finish printing.”
• “This National Landmark vessel, nearly the size of a football field,
  was…”

Etc., Etc., Etc.

There are several problems with this stupd linguistic crutch.

1. A football field means different things to different people. In America, a football field is used by the NFL. In England, a football field is used by soccer teams like Manchester United. The two field sizes are different. So, to describe something in terms of a football field can only lead to confusion. Is that a British football field, or an American football field? To make thing even murkier, the Canadian Football League plays a game closely related to American football, but on a field that has different dimensions.

   Before anyone claims that such confusion could never happen, allow me to present Exhibit A: a page about pyroclastic flows. This page describes uses a wonderful smashing of mental orientation when it describes the width of a (round) lava dome formed on Mount St. Helens in lengths of a football field (don’t even get me started on how a round object apparently has a width. Maybe the writer of the page could tell me the round object’s length next?). Now, you might think that the page is clearly referencing American football fields, as it discusses an American volcano. Until you realize that the page is served off of a server in the United Kingdom with no mention of American authors. Now, are the football fields in question American or British?

2. People who don’t spend much time on football fields, generallly don’t know or care how big such a field is. Sure, they might be able to say, “It’s one hundred yards long; one hundred and twenty yards long if you include both end zones” but intellectually knowing how big something is doesn’t mean that you can picture it in your minds eye. For instance, if I told you that Lake Superior holds 12,100 cubic km of fresh water, that wouldn’t mean much to most people. However, if I told you that Lake Superior contains more water than all the other Great Lakes combined and then some, that is a useful comparison, something with which your mind can be comfortable.

Finally, the newest entry in my “I Couldn’t Make This Stuff Up” gallery is a page that explains how an acre is about the size of a football field.

Some good, some bad, some truly awful. Read on if you want to hear more about “Hulk”, “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen”, “Matchstick Men”, “School of Rock”, and “Band of Brothers.”

• Hulk: The fact that this movie was based on a comic book was my primary motivation for seeing this one. Fortunately, I did not pay to see it in a theatre, nor did I pay the slightly higher price to see it when it was a “New Release” at the video store. Ang Lee came up with some nifty camera effects to simulate comic book illustration, but beyond that, there isn’t much to recommend this film. The action is predictable. The characters are extremely shallow. The plot…uh…the plot… There was something like a plot, but I wouldn’t call it a plot. The special effects were nothing special. If the folks at ILM didn’t have the Star Wars films on their resume, and if Hulk was all I knew of their work, I would not feel uneasy or unfair describing their special effects work as second rate.

• The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: When a movie that initially looks like it has some interesting qualities is panned, and hard, by everyone who sees it, I’m always a bit curious about when, where, and how such a great idea went so horribly wrong. Such is the case with this movie. A great book turned into a complete trainwreck of a movie. There is a character that was so obviously added just to satisfy shallow American audience members that I experienced profound disappointment everytime that character was on the screen. The special effects were remarkably pedestrian (how do you skimp on special effects when adapting a comic book to the big screen?!?). The characters weren’t even shallow; they were completely two dimensional. The plot…uhh…The plot of this movie made Hulk appear complex and compelling by comparison.
• Matchstick Men: The plot here is interesting and has several twists. Overall, the characters have some depth and we can understand what drives them. Nicholas Cage, who I generally feel cannot act, does a decent job in this film. The film didn’t leave me feeling like I had just wasted a good portion of my life, so I would recommend it.
• Band of Brothers: Not a movie, per se, but a mini-series originally aired on HBO. It can be rented or purchased on DVD. I just happened to watch it on the History Channel. This series was incredibly compelling and interesting. The characters have depth and actually seem to be real people. The plot of each episode is different, but all fit within the Allied march towards Berlin in WWII. Even Sarah, who isn’t much for war movies, found herself drawn in to the series and compelled to watch. If you see only ten hours of movie/video this year, seeing all ten episodes of Band of Brothers would be a worthy use of those hours.
• School of Rock: This film was entertaining, but not very compelling. If you want to see Jack Black at his finest, and a more compelling storyline to boot see High Fidelity.

This morning I walked around the Dane County Farmer’s Market. I was looking for some early spring salad greens and, perhaps, a hydroponic/greenhouse tomato or two.

While I didn’t find much in the way of early spring vegetables, I saw a table for the Madison Area Peace Coalition set up at the base of a statue. The statue was of Civil War leader Colonel Hans C. Heg.

Apparently the irony of a group devoted to peace setting up shop in the shadow of a statue dedicated to a war hero completely escaped the members of the Peace Coalition.

Tonight I made a hot and spicy blackened chicken on the stove. Well, that’s what I intended to make, anyway.The recipe wanted a heavy, large skillet heated over high heat for five to eight minutes. So, my twelve-inch cast-iron skillet went onto a large burner over high heat for five minutes.

Meanwhile, I dusted up some unfortunate chicken’s muscles with a potent mixture of cayenne pepper, cumin, black pepper, onion powder, garlic powder, salt, paprika, and thyme. Then, I applied a drizzle of butter onto the spice-encrusted chicken breasts before putting them in the smoking pan.

As soon as the chicken hit the pan, smoke billowed out of the pan and started to replace all the breathable air in the kitchen. I started to cough because this wasn’t just regular smoke, it was a thick smoke filled with cayenne pepper and black pepper. Whee!

Sarah’s wildfire fighter training kicked in, and she ventured through the smokey haze to see which national forest I had trundled into the kitchen and set ablaze. She, of course, was immediately overcome by the pepper smoke and started to sneeze and cough. Dalla was also sneezing madly as the pepper smoke has reached her level, as well.

At that point, we ran around and opened windows and doors and activated vent fans in a vain attempt to vent the house of the acrid smoke. After ten minutes, we were able to breathe without coughing, even though our nasal passages still burned from the pepper impacted in them and we started sneezing and coughing again every time we took a deep breath.

Fortunately, the net result of all that smokey mess was a flavorful, hot and spicy blackened chicken. However, if I were to cook that dish again, I’d probably use the grill because we obviously don’t have the right air moving/purification equipment to cook the meal indoors.

Front page news reported above the fold in today’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

Mall to build parking ramps

From our “Books Too Awful To Finish Because Life Is Too Short Department”: Eastern Standard Tribe by Cory Doctorow.

This book was so awful I barely made it halfway through before returning it to the library.

The book isn’t particularly visionary, interesting, or even well written. Given all the glowing quotes printed on the book jacket and Doctorow’s website, I wonder if those quoted read a different version of the book than the one I tried to read.

Tonight I attended a presentation by a local technology consulting company, and Novell to a local Linux user group. After the conclusion of the sordid affair, I was left with one overriding question:

How do so many people survive when they leave home without their critical thinking skills?Nearly everyone there was completely caught up in the Novell marketdroid’s spiel, which was frustrating.

The marketdroid showed a slide, and then showed another slide with information that completely contradicted the first slide. What happened when I call him on this? I was made out to be the bad guy. Marketdroid showed contradictory slides time after time after time.

Of course, the presenters (who tried really hard to take boring to places it has never been and has no business ever going), were well trained in Pavlovian techniques. Those who asked questions friendly to the presenters were presented with Novell swag, while those who asked probing, critical questions were showered in scorn.

To make the evening even more entertaining, not one person (other than myself) ever asked the presenters why we should care about what they are saying. It seemed to be assumed by all that the Novell clowns were bringing the Word down from the mountain (or Utah, such as the case might be).

To make matters even worse, why on Earth didn’t anyone else call the presenters on the fact that they showed up with Windows laptops to demo Linux products to a Linux user group?!? That’s like driving up a convention of Ford truck dealers in a Chevrolet.

What ever happened to Linux users possessing a sense of the cynic, the skeptic? If I wanted to hang out with a bunch of marketdroid believers, I’d find a Windows user group.

Businesses almost always want more parking. They can never demonstrate why they want more parking, but they’re dead set on getting it.

Madison’s main walking corridor, State St., currently has three parking garages and one parking lot within one block of State St. There are eight parking garages within three blocks of State St. All of this for a street that is six blocks long.

So, naturally, the city government is constantly looking for an excuse to turn the little parking lot into a monstrous parking garage. Since the 1970′s that idea has refused to die.Within the last two years, a special committee was appointed to deal with this issue once and for all. After eighteen months(!), the committee formulated what it felt was the best possible path forward for putting a parking garage on the lot where the parking lot currently sits.

Naturally, the committee voted down its own report before disbanding.

Now, the mayor and a local alderman have decided to go forward with putting a parking garage on the parking lot anyway. They didn’t like the committee’s report or vote, so they simply ignored them, and pushed on by hiring consultants to figure out the best way to put a parking garage where very few people (except State St. business owners) want it.

The city is now spending tax dollars on an idea that has no clear majority of support. While some people certainly get excited anytime someone puts the word “more” in front of the word “parking”, an equal number of people point to the fact that many, if not most, parking garages operate at half-capacity. Also, parking spots in a garage are not cheap. It costs something on the order of $20,000 per parking space to open a new parking garage. Since the city is talking about 300+ parking spots in this new garage, that tallies up to $6 million.

So, while we’re cutting programs in schools and raising already high property taxes, the city is going to spend $6 million dollars on a giant concrete structure very few people want, and that its own special committee already voted down.

Isn’t politics wonderful?

With the ballooning federal budget deficit in the news, and with tax season fresh in most Americans’ minds, ideas on how to “fix” America’s system of taxation are getting plenty of play.One idea tossed around with some frequency these days is that of a national sales tax. Believers in a national sales tax claim that 45 states already have a sales tax, so retailers will now just collect an additional 23% on top of any state and local sales taxes.

There are numerous problems with this idea:

• Not every state taxes the same retail goods. For instance, Massachusetts has a list of items that are not taxed at the checkout that varies from that of Wisconsin and California. So, while Massachusetts may not tax breath mints, diapers, boat shoes, or prescription drugs, the federal government may. Deciphering that mess certainly sounds like fun at the cash register. The national sales tax would supposedly not affect so-called necessities, but who decides what is a necessity without creating a sales tax with all manner of odd exceptions and loopholes (just like the current system)?
• Sales-taxers claim that a simplified tax code (i.e., the national sales tax) will reduce prices because the cost of the current taxation scheme will no longer be built into goods. True. The current scheme’s costs will just be replaced by the new scheme’s cost. Given how disparate taxation laws are across the nation, retailers will have to build in the costs of rationalizing state, local, and federal tax schemes at the register. This will not lead to the promised 20-30% drop in prices.
• While forty-five states already collect sales tax, many states also collect income tax. Why not just flip the argument and say that since those states are collecting an income tax, let’s just make them collect the federal income tax as well, and just have the states forward checks to the federal government? The argument is no weaker than that of the sales-taxers.
• Sure, eliminating the income tax will eliminate the IRS, but the sales-taxers will create a completely different government agency to send checks out to Americans every month. So, the only big change will be the government workers’ mission and sponsoring agency, not the total number of workers employed.

Perhaps an even more radical idea is required. One that even respects states’ rights and the original ideas of federalism.

Since we know the population of the USA every ten years within some reasonable margin of error, and can estimate the population growth and migration of people even in non-census years, why not use that information to our advantage?

Let’s take the federal budget, and come up with a per-head figure. So, if the federal budget is $3 trillion (I’m generally pulling that figure out of the air), and if the population of the United States is 290 million, then each person in the US would have to dig deep for just shy of $10,500 each year to meet our fiscal obligations.

Now, let’s assume that Wisconsin has 5 million residents. That would mean Wisconsin residents need to pony up $52,500,000,000 ($52 billion) anually to keep the federal government in business.

Now that we Wisconsin residents know what figure we’re shooting for as a state, let us figure out how to get there. If we want to have a large sales tax, then so be it. If we want to have a massive income tax, that’s our business. As long as we make our payments to the federal government on time, who cares how we, the citizens of Wisconsin, choose to raise the funds. It’s generally none of the federal government’s business, as long as we dont’ break any federal laws regarding interstate commerce and the like.

This setup would let people have a louder, clearer voice in how taxes are collected and who is burdened most heavily by them. State governments are much more responsive to citizens, and much more nimble than the federal government.

Citizens who didn’t want to pay an income tax could either move to a state that doesn’t have one, or lobby their state to eliminate the income tax. Those who were not comfortable with a high sales tax could move to a state that favored income or property taxes.

As populations ebbed and flowed around the nation, tax burdens for states would change to reflect these changes. So, if Utah created a tax scheme that many people loved, and if those people all moved to Utah, Utah’s tax burden would be increased proportionate to the number of new residents it gained. Similarly, as residents left other states to move to Utah, the tax burderns of the other states would decline proportionate to the number of residents lost.

Such a system would remove the burden of federal tax collection from employers and businesses, and allow them a greater voice in what taxes they must collect.

A system like I’ve described above would also allow states to easily incentivize certain behaviors (like buying a hybrid car, for instance) or to penalize other behaviors (like operating a coal electricity generating facility) with tax breaks and penalties. Such carrots and sticks could then be used to lure desirable businesses and industries to states with favorable tax codes.

Those who favor states rights and a true sense of federalism would also have to favor such a system as it would give states great leeway to decide just how they are going to collect taxes from their citizens.

Had Lenin and Marx been able to observe the modern office, neither one would have been comfortable advancing the theory of communism.The office break room or kitchen offers the clearest evidence that communism cannot function. In corporate break rooms all across America, coffee pots go un-refilled, microwaves go uncleaned, and refridgerators go unpurged.

All of that because people feel that doing any of that work is someone else’s job.

Most people will do anything to avoid having to make another pot of coffee. They’ll go out and buy coffe rather than make another pot of free coffee; they’ll pour just enough coffee out of the pot to slake their thirst, but not so much as to empty the pot to the unspoken level at which the pot must be emptied and another pot brewed.

Microwaves are routinely filled with numerous food splatters. People heat up their lunches, and just walk away from the greasy mess they created in the microwave because they feel it isn’t their job to clean the microwave.

Water coolers will sit for hours or days with an empty water bottle on top until some desperate soul comes along and places another bottle on top.

Refridgerators are often filled to the brim with forgotten lunches, snacks, leftovers, and condiments. Whose job is it to ferret out the good food from the bad? "Not mine," is always the answer.

So, communal property goes untended and unmaintained. We’re all too busy to even bother to clean up after ourselves or to refill any sort of vessel we empty.

Marx and Lenin would surely have seen how most people living in a modern society generally believe that someone else (who that someone else is, no one can say, but they’re sure they exist, even when presented daily with evidence to the contrary) will take care of communal property for little to no reward so that those who don’t care for the community’s resources can prosper.

April 16th is Poop for Peace Day. You’ll want to check out the Poop For Peace website from which the following excerpt was lifted:

On April 16, take some time to think when you take your time to stink. Think of yourself on your toilet, and George W. Bush on his, and Saddam and Osama on theirs. Think about the children of Iraq and the children of America, and realize that while their skins are different colors and their gods have different names, their daily ritual is exactly the same. We all poop, which means we’re all human, which means we’re all brothers and sisters. Any other differences are arbitrary — we are all united in the daily struggle against the tyranny of the bowel.

Sarah is basing her Master’s thesis work around a wetland located inside Effigy Mounds National Monument. Tuesday, I went there with her to help with some preliminary data collection.Effigy Mounds is approximately two hours from Madison, in northeastern Iowa. The park itself is right on the Mississippi River.

My duties on our mission were to help paddle, portage, and stabilize the canoe while Sarah performed her data collection. We put the canoe into the Yellow River (which was anything but yellow) about a 1/3 mile west of the pond and paddled downstream. Just before the river emptied into the Mississippi, we pulled the canoe out of the river, and up a small slope onto a strip of land that separated the river from the pond. A portage of roughly thirty yards later, we put the canoe into the pond.

The pond itself was relatively shallow, probably less than ten feet deep at its deepest location. Beavers built a lodge near the center of the lake and numerous wetlands surrounded the pond proper. On top of the beaver lodge were a handful of duck eggs.

We paddled around the pond while Sarah measured the depth of the silt on the pond’s bottom using a series of fiberglass rods. A stiff breeze came up occasionally, but for the most part, we had clear skies, temperatures in the high fifties, and flat water.

In the distance, three bald eagles circled, while nearby several groups of ducks quacked at us. Red-winged blackbirds were numerous; a woodpecker could be heard working away at trees the beavers had girdled; a few dragonflies skimmed the water’s surface; swallows swooped and dove in the air above the dragonflies. All in all, it was a very pleasant way to spend an afternoon.

For the last few days, I’ve been using KDE 3.2.1 on my home computer. Since I’ve been using KDE 3.1 for the better part of a year, I was quite interested to see the changes in the new version of the software.My primary home computer is a Dell that is probably five years old. Not necessarily the newest kid on the block. It is currently running SuSE Linux 8.2.

Since the 3.2 branch of KDE was released, I’ve been watching various corners of the Internet to get an idea of just how mature and buggy it was. It seemed that there were several real problems with 3.2, but 3.2.1 had gotten generally good reviews, so I decided to upgrade.

The most obvious difference between 3.1 and 3.2.1 is the speed with which things seem to happen. The software is much snappier overall and several GUI effects I didn’t use in 3.1 because they seemed CPU pigs, have slimmed down noticeably in 3.2.1.

Konqueror has several new features, and perhaps the best one is spell-checking of HTML form input. For a blogging system like GeekLog that lacks a spellchecker, that sort of system is a life-saver.

Most of the mutlimedia apps. have been significantly upgraded, as well. Kscd has a new interface. Noatun has several new features.

There are certainly bugs to be found in the various apps, but for the most part, they aren’t critical.

One notable exception is Kopete. It still needs a great deal of work before it can compete with Gaim.

It’s almost full-on gardening season here in Wisconsin. We’ve been busy gearing up to do some real hard-core gardening this summer.This weekend, we dug a new bed in the back yard and populated it with eight bare-root raspberry bushes. Unfortunately, we won’t get much benefit from those bushes as they aren’t supposed to produce a good sized crop until next summer and fall.

We also assembled a potting bench that we’ll use to transplant various plants throughout the season. Unfortunately, it was too cold to stain the potting bench today, so we’ll have to do that some time this week.

A little over one week ago, we started some seeds indoors. Tomatoes, hot peppers, and delphiniums went into the little peat moss cells. Currently, we have several little tomato plants, as well some hot pepper plants. The delphiniums have yet to sprout, however.

We’ve also been debating the best way to start a vegetable garden in our backyard. The soil here in Madison has more clay than you might like for gardening, so we’ve been seriously considering some raised beds. Unfortunately, installing raised beds is much more expensive and complex than simply renting a roto-tiller for a few hours and laying waste to our grassy friends out the back door. However, if we can get past the initial hassle and expense of installing raised beds, the payoff in easier weed control and a longer growing season should be worth it.

We also have a wide variety of native plants to get into the ground this summer. We’re trying to decide how much of the turf in the front yard to rip up and replace with natives like big bluestem, purple coneflowers, little bluestem, asters, black-eyed susans and the like. To get those plants successfully installed in our yard is going to mean killing all the turf in one area, letting the weeds grow, and then killing everything again with RoundUp. Only then can we get the native species into the ground. After all that, the best we can hope to see this year is a cover crop included with the seeds. We won’t see flowering native plants until next summer.

If you’re a WWII, history, or aviation buff, you’ll get a kick out of the photos I just posted in the Photo Gallery. The photos in question were originally seen on alt.binaries.pictures.aviation.

Has anyone else noticed the decline of Cracker Jack? There are now very few peanuts in a box. I counted seven the other day.

Beyond the lesser number of peanuts, the prizes these days are worthless. It wasn’t very long ago that one could get plastic trinkets inside a box of Cracker Jack. I remember getting jumping frogs, little kaleidoscopes, and the like in the not very distant past.

Now, all the “prizes” are lame little puzzles printed on pieces of paper.

None of this is incredibly surprising when you consider that Cracker Jack is now owned by Frito-Lays. Frito-Lays is the largest, most profitable subsidiary of the $27 billion food industry leviathon, PepsiCo. And, if you’re a food industry leviathon, cutting out a few peanuts and plastic gee-gaws for the sake of short-term profitabilty only makes sense, no matter how much the change cheapens the product’s image in the long run.

Omega by Jack McDevitt is decent SciFi, but nothing special. The reviews on Amazon.com lead one to believe that this book is quite polarizing: either you love it or you hate it.In reality, the reviews on Amazon.com tell us more about the reviewers and the review process, than about the book.

It seems that most of the reviews written on Amazon.com (and other sites), are penned by those who either cheerlead for a product, or those who revile it. Very few reviews are written that place a product solidly in the middle of its category. That is, the product is neither awful nor wonderful, but rather, it is serviceable.

That is the case with McDevitt’s Omega. The book is none too deep, nor is it too challenging. The science is certainly less than complex. The characters are generally believable, but I could never shake the impression that they were somewhat shallow character sketches.

Having said all of that, I did finish the book, and did generally enjoy it.