We knew it would. "To monitor compliance with these rules, the IRS and HHS are now building the largest personal information database the government has ever attempted. Known as the Federal Data Services Hub, the project is taking the IRS's own records (for income and employment status) and centralizing them with informatio

My mother-in-law Carolyn celebrated her ninetieth birthday this weekend with a big party on Saturday and a family get-together on Sunday. Here she stands surrounded by all her children and most of her grand-children and great-grand-children.

We went by the old railroad bridge just as the sun went down. The light was perfect, but all I had was my phone oh well.

I was doing some work in the garden yesterday afternoon that involveed two shovels, a sledgehammer, and a twenty pound, six foot long, steel pry bar. Really stupid work obviously. At one point I pulled the top of the pry bar toward me really hard and the bottom slipped and I cracked myself smartly on the forehead. With a

In 1877 four hundred Chinamen dug a 26 mile long ditch to bring water from the Little Applegate River to the Sterling Mine. We hiked about three miles along that ditch today. At one point, just to save time, they dug a 100-foot tunnel through a ridge. Naturally, we had to crawl through it. On the way back we saw some fai

A few bits of bright news that got drowned out by the stupid news about the stupid Chechens in the stupid city of Boston. On Monday morning Lisa Fabrizio penned a brief but brilliant screed which deserves more attention than it got. Tuesday The New York Sun explained why the phrase "value of gold" sounds like the screech

If you don't get audited now and then you're not really trying.

Boris Johnson taunts the taunters. "Ding dong, the Soviet Union is dead! Ding dong, communism is dead! ... Ding dong! Old Labours dead! The Labour Party has given up its ridiculous belief in the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange the slogan that used to be printed on the back of every

More from Alina Ibragimova. Nikolay Roslavets: Violin Concertos. I already have most of the well-known concertos: a half dozen Sibeliuses, three or four Beethovens, Mendelssohns, Tchaikovsky, etc.... From now on I will be going further and further afield. Roslavets I hadn't heard of before now, and I was prepared to be u

This is just plain weird. "Indian textile manufacturer Alok Industries is planning to open its first textile mill in the U.S., in an effort to save money on energy costs, a company executive said.... The mill, which would spin U.S.-grown cotton into yarn or thread, would be a major shift in the textile industry. For years

Peter Robinson has a nice little essay on Margaret and Ron. And in the blogosphere Stoaty Weasel has some thoughts on "the very public ugliness triggered by Maggies death. Out of all proportion to anything she actually did."Read it all, and maybe buy a coffee cup. Others in my corner who noted her passing include Port Sw

1925-2013 We will post a link to a suitable obituary when we find one. In the meantime, you could do worse than read Claire Berlinski's There Is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters.

For the side by side.

It was an odd year. We began it so desperately deep in economic depression that we couldn't bring ourselves to recap the previous year. And yet by the end of the year we had, if not begun to dig ourselves out, at least found shovels and determined which way was up. The change was so profound that in our more unguarded momen

The Sixth Blogiversary post, which went missing last March, has mysteriously reappeared. Sorry about that. These things happen.

"An examination of the writing of a British 18th Century author such as Dr. Johnson, and a writer from 100 years later, such as Charles Dickens, reveals that there was no increase in that time in the cost of a loaf of bread or the rental of a simple but respectable residential room in London. There were soaring economic bub

It could happen here, too, but I think it would be a little messier. In addition to tar, feathers pitchforks, we have assault weapons. And tanks.

Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the 76-year-old archbishop of Buenos Aires. Lots to read in The Wall Street Journal.

Finish juggling the books, fill out Federal Form 1120S, including Schedules B and K, and K-1s for all the shareholders (both of us), then Oregon Form 20-S, then on to Form 1040, Schedules A and E, and Form 8917, then Oregon Form 40, then write checks, hunt down stamps, address envelopes, four copies of everything... Done y

What the Russians are up to. "The far-ranging survivability of these extremophiles was tested in 2011 outside an orbiting space shuttle. Tardigrades are so durable partly because they can repair their own DNA and reduce their body water content to a few percent. Some of these miniature water-bears almost became extraterrest

Beethoven: Complete Piano Sonatas by HJ Lim. It's very different.

Last fall we had a little election to choose our district's congers man. There were three people running [Brit. standing], one for the Democrat and Working Families Party, one for the Republican Party, and one for the Libertarian Party. (Yawn.) In Eastleigh, UK, this last week, in an election of no more national signific

In The Wall Street Journal. "Earlier this month, Mr. Bauer, the Texas banker, took his Chaffee out for a spin in his warehouse parking lot. He had rigged the .50-caliber machine gun on the turret with a propane system that generates the noise and muzzle flash of gunfire, without the bullets. He fired off several bursts. M

What's all this noise I keep hearing about some kind of squeakster in Washington D.C. on Friday? They make it sound like it's the end of the world. Or the second coming of Ronald W. Reagan. Somehow I don't think it will quite live up to its billing.

A little over six years to go... It must have looked wonderful back in 1935. Finally, something you could count on. What they didn't count on was the constant devaluation of the dollar. We'll be lucky now if we recover even the nominal investment. (As Greg likes to say, I want my money back.) As for the actual value? Pf

A couple months ago I volunteered to send round the invitations for the monthly get-together of the lower Rogue detachment of the Southern Oregon Geek Group (SOGGy for short). This month I suggested The Laughing Clam in beautiful downtown Grants Pass. I arrived a few minutes early and secured a table in the back. No one s

If there are any, BGI's going to find them. "The roots of intelligence are a mystery. Studies show that at least half of the variation in intelligence quotient, or IQ, is inherited. But while scientists have identified some genes that can significantly lower IQin people afflicted with mental retardation, for exampletruly im

Apparently so, as quoted in The Wall Street Journal today: "The receipts into the treasury from all sources, including loans and balance from the preceding year, for the fiscal year ending on the 30th June, 1862, were 583,885,247.06, of which sum 49,056,397.62 were derived from customs; 1,795,331.73 from the direct tax; fro

Maybe the batteries had something evil growing inside them. "Aviation safety investigators are examining whether the formation of microscopic structures known as dendrites inside the Boeing 787's lithium-ion batteries played a role in twin incidents that prompted the fleet to be grounded nearly a month ago.... Dendrites a

Marielle Durand Crater Renaissance Academy Valedictorian 2013What does it mean? "Latin valedicere bid farewell, from vale, imperative of valere be well + dicere to say."It means you get to give a speech!