Neshobe Vistas

This week last year, Hurricane Irene left a $15.8 billion trail of devastation from the Caribbean to Canada. The rains that fell in Vermont washed out countless roads and bridges, including those along the Neshobe River in Brandon.

After awaking early Sunday morning at the historic Brandon Inn, I walked to the river's edge and found these stone piles. Sculptor unknown but much appreciated.

One Giant Leap

From The Wall Street Journal

Astronaut Neil Armstrong, who died on Saturday at age 82, speaking about the 1969 Apollo 11 mission to the moon, from NASA'S Johnson Space Center Oral History Project:

"I was certainly aware that this was a culmination of the work of 300,000 or 400,000 people over a decade and that the nation's hopes and outward appearance largely rested on how the results came out. With those pressures, it seemed the most important thing to do was focus on our job as best we were able to and try to allow nothing to distract us from doing the very best job we could.

"Each of the components of our hardware were designed to certain reliability specifications, and far the majority, to my recollection, had a reliability requirement of 0.99996, which means that you have four failures in 100,000 operations. I've been told that if every component met its reliability specifications precisely, that a typical Apollo flight would have about [1,000] separate identifiable failures.

"In fact, we had more like 150 failures per flight, [substantially] better than statistical methods would tell you that you might have. I can only attribute that to the fact that every guy in the project, every guy at the bench building something, every assembler, every inspector, every guy that's setting up the tests, cranking the torque wrench, and so on, is saying, man or woman, "If anything goes wrong here, it's not going to be my fault, because my part is going to be better than I have to make it." And when you have hundreds of thousands of people all doing their job a little better than they have to, you get an improvement in performance. And that's the only reason we could have pulled this whole thing off.

"When I was working here at the Johnson Space Center, then the Manned Spacecraft Center, you could stand across the street and you could not tell when quitting time was, because people didn't leave at quitting time in those days. People just worked, and they worked until whatever their job was done, and if they had to be there until five o'clock or seven o'clock or nine-thirty or whatever it was, they were just there. They did it, and then they went home. So four o'clock or four-thirty, whenever the bell rings, you didn't see anybody leaving. Everybody was still working.

"The way that happens and the way that made it different from other sectors of the government to which some people are sometimes properly critical is that this was a project in which everybody involved was, one, interested, two, dedicated, and, three, fascinated by the job they were doing. And whenever you have those ingredients, whether it be government or private industry or a retail store, you're going to win."

Obama's Gotta Go

 

Something's going on when a publication with an historical liberal bias like Newsweek runs a cover story that says Obama's broken his promises and that it's time for him to go. Maybe the magazine's precipitously declining readership and fortunes over the past four years finally changed its thinking and reporting?

September 3 update: Ad Age reports this issue's newsstand sales doubled, and tablet iPad sales were up four times the average. Go figure.

Will it run on Windows?

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has announced a new $42 million initiative to invent the "toilet of the future" to enable people to poop "with dignity" and not foul water supplies.

According to Fast Company:

"The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced on Tuesday that they are giving away more than $42 million to develop new, innovative toilets for use in the world's poorest regions. Many of the scientists working on these projects have science-fictiony proposals such as transforming human feces into charcoal and microwave-powered toilets that can generate electricity from gasified human waste.

"But while poo-charcoal and power-generating waste might like sound weird ideas, they could revolutionize daily life for millions. 'The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation believes in the power of innovation, and we focus our funding where we can have the biggest impact in helping people lead healthy, productive lives. No innovation has saved more lives in the last 200 years than the flush toilet and sewer system,' said Frank Rijsberman, director of water, sanitation and hygiene for the Gates Foundation. 'But we need new approaches to ensure that the 40 percent of humanity without access to improved sanitation has a safe and affordable way to go.' "

Tick-tocking for 200 years

One of our Benson family grandfather clocks turned 200 the other day. There are others as old or older, but this one, a New Jersey Tall Case, is unique because its pendulum bob is engraved and dated by the clockmaker. 

 

Inside the door are lead pencil notes and labels signed and dated by clock repairers over the years, the oldest from 1868.

Exclusive! 2012 Olympics Sailing

NBC doesn't cover the sailing events to my knowledge. This clip on LiveLeak more than makes up for that.



Bonus shots

Westport Beaches Closed

Westport Connecticut residents, one percenters all, "paid their fair share" yesterday as their beaches were closed in sunny 90 degree weather so the President could chopper in on Marine One for another campaign fundraiser.

The President came for a $35,800 a plate dinner at Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein's home near Westport's Burying Hill Beach.

Westport is my former hometown. I enjoyed its town beaches for nearly 20 years but don't ever recall their being closed on a hot summer day (or on any day for that matter) to accommodate a fundraiser, for a President or anyone else.

According to the Westport News, an optimistic town First Selectman, Gordon Joseloff, a Democrat, is looking for someone to pay for the local police and firemen's $15,000 in overtime:

" 'While we welcome the president visiting us, incurring unbudgeted costs are not welcome,' said Joseloff, a Democrat, like Obama, but who was not among the attendees at the $35,800-a-head fundraiser. 'Westport may be more affluent than some other towns, but we watch over our taxpayer dollars very carefully.'

"Westport tried unsuccessfully to recover similar costs when President Bill Clinton visited town three times between March 1998 and June 1999 for fundraising events.

" 'I'm not optimistic we will be successful, but I need to make the effort,' Joseloff added."

One would think the Obama campaign could share the night's $2 million in spoils to cover such incidentals, especially since the expense comes to less than half of what donors paid for a single plate. Think again.

After both Romney and Obama fundraisers in Newport Beach California last month, the Romney campaign paid the city's security bill but the Obama campaign didn't.  The Obama Campaign said to talk to the Secret Service. In response, the Secret Service said to talk to the Obama Campaign. Westport's getting the same run-around.

Life on Mars!

The first pictures beamed back from the Mars rover Curiousity . . .

Live from Mars!

Mars continues to fascinate.

nasa.gov will live stream the landing of Curiosity, the latest rover built to explore the surface of Mars. Images will be delayed about 14 minutes, allowing the signal to travel 154 millions miles.

Curiousity will land in the planet's Gale Cater at 1:31 am EDT on Monday, August 6.

According to NASA:

"Gale Crater is 96 miles (154 kilometers) in diameter. Mount Sharp rises about 3.4 miles (5.5 kilometers) above the floor of Gale Crater.

"Stratification on Mount Sharp suggests the mountain is a surviving remnant of an extensive series of deposits that were laid down after a massive impact that excavated Gale Crater more than 3 billion years ago.

"During a prime mission lasting nearly two years after landing, Curiosity will use 10 instruments to investigate whether this area of Mars has ever offered conditions favorable for life, including the chemical ingredients for life."

Curiousity is tricked out with a range of sophisticated gear to search for signs of life and to record and transmit images.

"During a prime mission lasting nearly two years after landing, Curiosity will use 10 instruments to investigate whether this area of Mars has ever offered conditions favorable for life, including the chemical ingredients for life.

"Two pairs of Navigation cameras (Navcams), among the rover's 12 engineering cameras, are the small circular apertures on either side of the head. On the top are the optics of the Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) investigation, which includes a laser and a telescopic camera. The Mast Camera (MastCam) instrument includes a 100-millimeter-focal-length camera called MastCam-100 or M-100, and a 34-millimeter-focal-length camera called the MastCam-34 or M-34. The two cameras of the MastCam are both scientific and natural color imaging systems. The M-100 looks through a 1.2-inch (3-centimeter) baffle aperture, and the M-34 looks through a 2.1-inch (5.3-centimete) baffle aperture."

$92 million for Big Homer's Pond

At $92 million, the real estate listing for a 266-acre Atlantic Ocean property is the most expensive ever on Martha's Vineyard.

According to the Vineyard Gazette:

"The 266 acres include Big Homer’s Pond, a secluded, pristine Great Pond that lies along the Atlantic-facing shoreline in the rural reaches of West Tisbury. The property has more than 1,000 feet of beachfront and abuts Long Point Wildlife Reservation, a 500-acre property owned by The Trustees of Reservations with another 2,900 feet of beachfront. The Big Homer’s Pond property is largely undeveloped land that includes five parcels. Mr. Gerald DeBlois bought the property in the early 1990s. A conservation restriction has been placed on much of the northern portion of the land; the restriction is held by The Nature Conservancy, an international land trust devoted to researching and protecting rare and endangered ecosystems."

With unprecedented beach erosion over the past few years along the Vineyard's southern shore, especially at Norton Point and Wasque Point, perhaps Mr DeBlois' desire to sell now is spurred by The Commonwealth of Massachusetts House Bill 254, currently stalled, which seeks to undo existing private property law.  The bill reads:

"Where sea level rise, storms, or other natural processes have caused the landward or lateral movement of a barrier beach into an area which was previously occupied by the bottom of any Great Pond or onto any other public land, the portion of the barrier beach relocated into the former bottom of the Great pond or onto other public land shall be and remain in public ownership."

According to the Vineyard Gazette:

"A controversial bill that could dramatically affect property rights for some of the Vineyard’s barrier beaches was left stalled as the state legislature wrapped up its session Tuesday.

"As Beacon Hill lawmakers began their summer recess on Wednesday, there had been no progress on house bill 254, which relates to barrier beaches that divide Great Ponds from the ocean. The one-paragraph bill would stipulate that as storms and rising sea levels erode the barrier beaches, ownership would not move with the sand. A barrier beach that moved to a place that was once the bottom of the pond would become a public beach, instead of transferring to the abutting landowner.

"While the legislation has not moved in the last year, there has been lobbying by those on both sides of the legislation. A Vineyard group called the Great Ponds Coalition, which opposes the bill because it would be “reversing centuries of settled property law and potentially costing the state and local communities millions of dollars,” according to its website, paid lobbyists $70,000 to oppose the bill from Jan. 1 through June 30 of this year, according to filings with the Massachusetts Secretary of State."

If the Bill passes, the property's owner should seek an abatement on the current annual property taxes of $218,585.00.