My mother and father were raised on farms. On Mom’s side, there were seven daughters doing what I presume to be sharecropping (a word Mom never used) near Greenbush, Wisconsin. When the farmhouse burned down, 1928 or so as near as I can tell, none were harmed but they were homeless. My grandfather, George Leonard, contacted his brother Mike, who was dryland farming near Ekalaka, Montana. Mike, of course, offered to have him come out and work the farm. As the story goes, George did not tell Mike he was bringing his wife and seven daughters. Mike had a three-room house with an outdoor privy. Mom said Mike was usually in a bad mood, and reflectively said she could see why, having nine people move in on you. Mom said that when Grandma got off the train onto the platform after the long journey, she said “This is it?”

That lasted for a couple of years, I gather, before George and Marie moved their family to nearby Baker, to the spacious house, the front porch of which is seen above. That’s my two older brothers, and in case you lack detective skills I will tell you the day of the week … Saturday. The following day all would ride off to church. Saturday was bath day. (Thanks to my cousin, Eileen, who took photo negatives we found in Mom and Dad’s house after they moved to assisted living, and developed them. My towhead brother Steve has no genitals, so I can run this photo. Early Photoshop, that is.)

Continue reading “Ancestry dot com” →

Case study 1: William Summerlin

In 1974, William Summerlin was conducting research in transplantation immunology in the laboratory of Robert Good at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. The research dermatologist had reported successfully transplanting skin between genetically unrelated animals by culturing the skin in a special laboratory medium. The research had major implications for the field of tissue transplantation, but neither he nor other scientists had been able to reproduce his original results.

When Summerlin used a black pen to alter a patch of black mouse skin transplanted onto a white mouse, animal care technicians quickly discovered the fraud. Subsequent investigation by Memorial Sloan-Kettering revealed poorly conducted experiments and misleading statements about research results made by Summerlin in reports and to colleagues. All of his work was discredited, but the 1973 article in Transplantation Proceedings was never retracted.

Oh, if only such research fraud was so easily uncovered. The book I took this from, Unreliable, by Csaba Szabo, noted that “the most lasting contribution of Summerlin’s career seems to be that the term “painting mice” is still used to describe fraud and deception in research. As the footnote to this paragraph says, however, “Most scientists who use this term don’t even know where it comes from.”

Continue reading “Michael Mann … painting mice?” →

I own a bunch of small overriding royalties in various natural gas wells in Grand County, Utah. I no longer receive revenue from them as the company that operates the wells, ARB Energy of Utah, simply stopped paying me. They cannot relieve me of ownership, and their obligation to pay me is both written in to Utah regulations but is also a legal “fiduciary” responsibility, an obligation of trust.

Its’ not just me, of course. There are scores of others in my shoes. For me, I planned to have the overrides as part of my retirement, but can survive without them. What I have learned from scuttlebutt is that ARB, taking over the properties in 2019, started out with good intentions, and then made a huge and bad investment in a plant that produces helium, that promptly went broke. The company acted in desperation, and the executive in charge, Humberto Sevint, is a resourceful man who manages to come up with stopgap funding to stay afloat.

Continue reading “Quiet desperation except … I don’t know how to keep quiet” →

News from the hearing impaired

I’ve been noticing as I watch TV that I will usually go through the steps to get subtitles. My wife occasionally tells me the TV is too loud. I was wondering, is my hearing degrading?

I have some experience in this area, my Dad, who complained for years that he was losing his hearing before anyone actually believed him. That was the basis for the old joke that married men only suffer partial hearing loss, the one frequency that their wives are on. But Dad finally did get hearing aids. He was constantly having to replace the batteries, and also adjusting the level.  I don’t think they worked very well. However, one of my older brothers kicked in $2,500, directly to an audiologist, and then when Dad came to get his hearing aid replaced, the bill was only $1,000 instead of $3,500. Dad was suspicious about that.

Continue reading “Oddball things from the oddball” →

I’ve lived now near Denver since late 2009. When we first moved here, I cared so little for NFL football that I probably did not even know the team record. I was happy when they won the 2015 Superbowl, even as I took seriously the Miles Mathis suggestion that a fumble by Carolina Panthers quarterback Cam Newton looked staged, and more so by the fact that he stood and watched rather than try to recover it. The fix was on.

Since then I’ve come to expect the fix to be on, especially in the big important games. I miss Jake the Asshole, who had found his voice and is now nowhere to be found. But I can’t help it, I enjoy NFL football. They’ve created a masterpiece of entertainment, dwarfing the old National Pastime, baseball, which since Covid and empty stadiums I came to realize was, all by itself, boring.

Continue reading “Yes, Virginia, Philadelphia really did boo Santa Claus” →

The Joe Rogan Experience #2397: Richard Lindzen and William Happer

Most times when I stop over to listen to Joe Rogan, whom I like, he’s interviewing someone I’ve never heard of. That’s fine, except that each interview is two hours long. How he gets away with challenging short attention spans like mine as he does … it is a tribute to his wide range of experience and ability to keep an interview going. Not everyone can do what he does, and hardly anyone for two hours plus. 

Continue reading “The Joe Rogan Experience #2397, Richard Lindzen and William Happer” →

I’ve done this before, as I just can’t help myself at times. Quora is kind of a running propaganda site, with questions asked and answered, I suspect, by the same people. They do a lot of Apollo stuff, making up questions and then answering them with authority. For instance, why was it so difficult for Neil Armstrong to make his step out on the lunar surface? Some inside jackass asked that question only to reinforce the notion that it really happened. 

I answered to the effect that it’s very hard to set foot on a place when you are 238,000 miles away from it. My answers seldom draw responses, and eventually disappear. Quora, after all, is a SNOPES-like Wikipedia-like AI-like authoritative source, meant to be the final word on subjects. (Back in time, did you ever see someone answer a question with the words “I SNOPED it, and …”. SNOPING something became the nihil obstat or imprimatur* of what is accepted in faith to be true. 

Continue reading “The curious case of the missing brain” →