Friday, September 24, 2021

The Sunflower the Birds Planted

 

22 comments:

  1. And ⚡️FWUMP!⚡️Just like that our power is out, this windy night.

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    1. Interesting. The article states that the booster shot is allowed "6 months after getting the second dose." Just wish I could sign up tomorrow with the 80+ year olds. Oh well.

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  3. Thanks to Green Mountain Power, we had lights back within an hour!

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  4. CDC Chief Overrules Agency Panel on Boosters
    September 24, 2021 at 5:04 am EDT By Taegan Goddard

    “The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday overruled a recommendation by an agency advisory panel that had refused to endorse booster shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid vaccine for frontline workers,” the New York Times reports

    “It was a highly unusual move for the director, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, but aligned C.D.C. policy with the Food and Drug Administration’s endorsements over her own agency’s advisers.”

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  5. Early next week we will get our booster shots, probably at the Madera County Public Health Department booster shot walk-in clinic; they are more on the ball than the Fresno County Public Health Department, and the distance is about the same for us.

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  6. Plumbing the depths of WEIRDNESS:

    'Vigilante treatments': Anti-vaccine groups push people to leave ICUs [Click]

    The Conservatives Who’d Rather Die Than Not Own the Libs [Click] “Rarely has so significant a faction in American politics behaved in a way that so directly claims the [lives] of its own supporters.”

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    1. "own the Libs" strikes me as a really strange phrase. I get that ownership does not mean "be responsible for," as it should, but owning people leaves me confuse, unless there is some problem distinguishing between owe and own.. Perhaps they do not get function at all; only nouns and adjectives and possessives? In any case, we should not forget Jones Town.

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  7. ‘Eerie silence’ as Evergrande misses payment deadline [Click]

    A record number of cargo ships are stuck outside LA. What’s happening? [Click] The deregulation of interstate trucking dramatically decreased the incomes of long-haul truck drivers. They used to be “Kings of the Road,” and now very many of them are debt slaves. Think that just might have some role in the shortage of truck transport out of Long Beach? Not that that is the whole story, granted.

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  8. Alan, please remind me of the name of the handwriting style that offers the most relaxed hand position, and all the better if you happen to have a link. A home schooling mom is seeking something like that for her son.

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    1. Coming up shortly--having lunch at the moment.

      --Alan

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    2. The Palmer Method [Click] or its derivatives. When I was in grammar school we were expected to learn Palmer-style handwriting by imitating the letterforms posted above the blackboards in the schoolroom, but that is the least important part. The part we were not taught was how to use the body, full arm, hand AND fingers. As a result we became finger-writers, and that ultimately contributed to the repetitive stress injuries in my hands (decades on). I prefer some of the letterforms in the original C.P.Zaner method, [Click] which uses the same arm movement system as Palmer. (I realized that Zaner was what my mother used). Mr. Palmer wasn’t particular about letterforms. Although the pedagogy of writing instruction a hundred years ago remains effective, it seems rather severe today. Michael Sull’s “American Cursive Handwriting” updates the pedagogy without doing violence to it. It is available from John Neal Books, [Click] Amazon, and other sources (vide Google). It starts out with exercises for beginners young and old, and slowly works up to the accomplished adult level. The loose-leaf format lends itself to copying the worksheets for personal use. Highly recommended.

      I will grant that the method of printing often taught in elementary school these days is much nicer than the block printing we were taught, but it remains unarguable that cursive is WAY faster—a big advantage when taking notes in class (to the extent that still happens).

      —Alan

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    3. Note: I think our elementary school teachers were too young to have been taught how to teach handwriting, and it was being downgraded in the curriculum--perhaps in part due to the advent of ball point pens. We moved over the Easter vacation from where I had a white-haired first grade teacher to another town where the teachers were quite a bit younger. I realized when I took up using a fountain pen to help relieve the pain in my hands that the way my very first teacher taught us to hold a pencil was EXACTLY right for holding a fountain (or dip) pen--very far from the "death grip" one sees so often now.

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    4. I case your questioner can't make use of the links above, I will send a text version by e-mail.

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    5. Improved text version with cut-and-paste links sent.

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  9. From the UK: Supply chain crisis: Tories poised to U-turn on foreign worker visas [Click] I should expect that a great many of the responses from drivers will boil down to “[Fork] off” or “What’s it worth to you?” I rather doubt that Whitehall has ration books ready.

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  10. The Guardian in re Sequoia National Park and the forest fire:

    In the Sequoia national park, officials showed reporters how the park’s famous Giant Forest has been protected from the KNP Complex fire by years of using carefully set and controlled fires to burn away vegetation that can serve as wildfire fuel.

    The bases of some of the most famous giant sequoias were also wrapped in fire-resistant materials. Giant Forest has 2,000 sequoias and includes the General Sherman Tree, the largest tree in the world by volume.

    The fear of catastrophic fire coming through that section of the national park has been greatly reduced because of the combination of the prescribed burns and the low intensity of the fire that moved into part of the forest, said Ed Christopher, deputy fire director for the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

    “And because of that, we feel that the majority of the trees in this Giant Forest area should come out of this event like they have for the past thousands of years,” he said.


    It is interesting to me that they fail to mention giant sequoias require fire to reproduce. When all fires were extinguished, there were no seedlings, because the cones must be heated by fire to burst and expel their seeds. When controlled burns commenced, once again there were plenty of seedlings. BTW, the big black areas on the trunks and inside the hollow parts of the trees are not charred by fire, but oxidized exudate of some sort from the tree itself.

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    1. My pleasure. In addition to bringing back fire to the ecosystem, the park has recently been keeping people farther away from the roots of the big trees, and has stopped the tram tours (which is too bad for the non-athletic). I think they removed the macadam roads the trams ran on, too.

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