Entries by Sam Chapman Jr.

For dinner this evening I ate a pastrami sandwich. It wasn't on rye, but it did have Swiss cheese. I don't know why I ordered such a large one, I was full with just half of it. Afterwards I wondered, just what exactly did I eat? I mean, was it beef, pork, veal. . . Kitty didn't know either, so it was a trip to the Internet.

Pastrami is an eastern European recipe. Originally it probably was veal, but today could as easily be pork or beef. In the United States, it's almost always beef, though recently a turkey pastrami has been marketed.

Given it's March, Kitty's favorite month, Kitty wondered about the difference between corned beef and pastrami. The following excerpts are from the Wikipedia articles. See if you can identify which is which.

is a popular deli meat made from (chiefly red) meat. The raw meat is salted (infused in a thick brine), then dried, seasoned with various herbs and spices (such as garlic, black pepper, marjoram, basil) and smoked. In the United Kingdom and United States beef is used and the meat is boiled after the salting stage.

is beef that is first pickled in brine and then cooked by boiling. Usually, cuts of meat are used that feature long muscle grain, such as the brisket.

Pretty similar processes, the single difference is that one is dried and smoked, but that's not always the way it's produced in the United States. The corned beef article states that a smoked corned beef is called a pastrami!

Of interest in the article about corned beef was the description of the origin of the name. "Corn" refers to a coarse salt used in the brine. The salt comes from a process developed around 700 A.D., a process that greatly increased the amount of salt that could rapidly be produced.

And just to be thorough. . . Pastrami is derivative from a Romanian verb meaing "to preserve, to keep." The word pastrami has been traced to a Jewish store in New York City in 1887.

So now we know, and can wonder about something else tomorrow.

Mari did a book report on Abraham Lincoln. In the course of her reading, she came across a reference to Lincoln's Mother dying of the "milk sick." I Googled the phrase, and found the following quote:

a grim mystery that went by various names, from “puking fever” to “river sickness” to “fall
poison.” Later, it became known as the “milk sick.”

In short, it's a condition brought on by livestock eating white snakeroot plants, which then creates a toxin that can have dire effects on humans. It can kill a previously healthy adult in as little as three days, or as long as two weeks. Cattle affected by the toxin are known to have the trembles. The toxin can be carried in milk, butter, cheese, or meat.

A physician described the course of the illness: “When the individual is about to be taken down, he feels weary, trembles more or less under exertion, and often experiences pain, numbness and slight cramps.” Nausea soon follows, then “a feeling of depression and burning at the pit of the stomach,” then retching, twitching, and tossing side to side. Before long, the patient becomes “deathly pale and shrunk up,” listless and indifferent, and lies, between fits of retching, in a “mild coma.”

Each perennial herb is about 2-4 feet tall; the leaves are opposite, simple, toothed, three-nerved; the heads have 8-30 small white flowers without ray flowers

The plant grows throughout the east central and northeastern United States, occuring primarily in rich, well-shaded forest soils or at the interface between forests and croplands.

I found references on the web to white snake root being used as a medicinal herb and used for tea in the late 19th century!

I found on the web a document written in 1906 which described how the milk sick affected settlers in northern Ohio in the second half of the 19th century. It mentions how people recognized that it most affected livestock allowed to roam in the woods, but not all woods, and some people thought it was caused by water.

The 1906 document mentions a northern Ohio sheep herder who discovered that when sheep new to the region were released in his pasture, they grazed on the white snake root, developed the trembles and died. Other sheep which he had owned for some time and which were used to the region, avoided the white snake root plants. The sheep herder then embarked on a campaign to destroy the noxious plant.

In another time, the story of the white snakeroot could only be explained as a curse or blight on a region. - something akin to magic. Some time ago Arthur C. Clarke made the observation that any sufficiently advanced technology will be explained as magic by those less technologically advanced.

This evening I picked up volume 56 of Britannica's Great Books of the Western World, Natural Science: Selections from the Twentieth Century and was presented with this list of names:

• Henri Poincare
• Max Planck
• Alfred North Whitehead
• Albert Einstein
• Sir Arthur Eddington
• Niels Bohr
• G. H. Hardy
• Werner heisenberg
• Erwin Schrodinger
• Theoddosius Dobzhansky
• C. H. Waddington

I was shamed to realize I couldn't form even as much as a single sentence about more than half the names on this list! How many names do you recognize? Can you even identify the areas in which they worked?

How can it be that we daily use the fruits of the technologies made possible by the work of these guys, and we can't even name the fields in which they worked. The Nobel prize winners were announced in October, and are you able to name even one. I can't. Kitty couldn't give me a name, but she could identify the research which was honored with an award.

We live in a country that is prosperous, has universal education, and more media outlets than can be counted, yet I doubt even 10% of the US population knows what the Bessemer process does. And yet that process is integral to materials that are fundamental to our quality of life. Fundamental, yet unrecognized.

The Federal Communications Commission requires TV stations to broadcast a minimum amount of programming for children, yet doesn't address adult educational needs. The History Channel, Discovery Channel, and National Geographic channels do a great job with presenting program length educational materials. But adult curiosity could be stimulated by 1 or 2 minutes spots about science, people, or history on other, entertainment oriented channels. Where is that programming? I know some public radio and TV stations air such items. But every station should as well.

As a society we too often communicate to kids that school is something you have to attend rather than assuming kids want to. Too often we celebrate graduating high school with the feeling that you're now out of school, rather than now being able to learn different materials. And too often a college education is pursued for its vocational benefit rather than furthering the development of a human being!

There are bright spots of information. The previously mentioned Discovery, History, and National Geographic channels. Wikipedia. But much more needs to be done.

I'm reading a little of Horace Greeley's book "An Overland Journey from New York to San Francisco in the Summer of 1859" every time I visit the Johnson County Public Library. The book consists of letters he wrote to friends back East as he travelled across the country. My reading today was from letters he wrote from Kansas. I was struck by this passage.

Topeka was one of the strongholds of the free-state cause throughout the dark days of Kansas. Here assembled the first convention chosen by the people to frame a state constitution as a rallying point for defense and mutual protection against the border-ruffian usurpation of 1855; here the free-state legislature, peacefully assembled in 1856 to devise and adopt measures looking to a redress of the unparalledled wrongs and outrages under which Kansas was then writhing, was dispersed by federal bayonets and cannon; here the guns of the U.S. troops were pointed agains a mass meeting of the people of Kansas, assembled in the open air to devise and adopt measures for the redress of the intolerable grievances, and that meeting compelled to disperse under penalty of military execution. And here I renew my vows of hostility to that federal standing army until it shall have been disbanded. It is utterly at war with the genius and perilous to the existence of Republican institutions. The regular soldier is of necessity the blind, passive, mechanical instrument of power. If ordered to shoot his own father, he must obey or be shot himself.

Of course what I thought of was President Bush's suggestion we modify the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 to be able to use the US military to provide disaster relief here in the United States. This Washington University Law Quarterly article from the summer of 1997 is a good review of the Act.

And so I'm left with the contrast between Horace Greeley's indignation concerning the use of US troops before the Civil War, and the passage of the PCA in 1878, after the country had endured a military occupation for 13 years, and the modern era's slow forgetting of what earlier generations painfully learned.

The US Senate passed a $50 billion military appropriation bill this week. It differs from the one passed by the House, so it's headed to a reconciliation committee. President Bush has announced that if the Senate version makes it to his desk, he'll veto it.

Since the Senate is Republican controlled, it makes you wonder what could possibly have made it into the appropriation that would make the President react so.

Well it seems the legislation also requires us to treat prisoners of war in accordance with the code of conduct already detailed in the Army's Code of Conduct manual. What liberal, bleeding heart Democrat got that inserted into the bill? Well it wasn't a Democrat, it was a decorated, Republican war hero.

When the President of the United States won't stand up and say the US is going to fairly and humanely treat prisoners of war, then there's something wrong with the way the war is being conducted.

How can we possibly differentiate ourselves from the terrorists?

So let's say a parent takes pictures at their child's sporting events. And then later posts those pictures on a web site such as September 10th, September 24th, or September 25th. There is no identifying information about where the games were played, or about the kids or coaches. And the web site is not financially motivated. Do you think a release needs to be obtained from the pictured individuals?

My favorite web site, NASA's Astronomical Picture of the Day, had this picture of the huricane Katrina. Here's the lowdown on this picture. Explanation: Where will Hurricane Katrina go? One of the stronger storm systems of modern times appears headed for landfall somewhere in the southern USA sometime today. Katrina was designated yesterday a rare Category 5 Hurricane, the strongest designation for a storm on Earth, and one that indicates sustained winds greater than 250 kilometers per hour. Pictured above is a digitally processed image from the orbiting GOES-12 weather satellite that shows the massive storm system yesterday in the Gulf of Mexico. Starting as a slight pressure difference, hurricanes grow into large spiraling storm systems of low pressure, complete with high winds and driving rain. A hurricane is powered by evaporating ocean water, and so typically gains strength over warm water and loses strength over land. Much remains unknown about hurricanes and cyclones, including how they are formed and the exact path they will take.

I found this picture on NASA's Astronomical Picture of the Day website. One of the best things about this site is the explanatory material that accompanies each picture. Here's the lowdown on this picture:
Explanation: So far, the Aurora Borealis or Northern Lights have made some remarkable visits to September's skies. The reason, of course, is the not-so-quiet Sun. In particular, a large solar active region now crossing the Sun's disk has produced multiple, intense flares and a large coronal mass ejection (CME) that triggered wide spread auroral activity just last weekend. This colorful example of spectacular curtains of aurora was captured with a fish-eye lens in skies over Quebec, Canada on September 11. Also featured is the planet Mars, the brightest object above and left of center. Seen near Mars (just below and to the right) is the tightly knit Pleiades star cluster. Although they can appear to be quite close, the northern lights actually originate at extreme altitudes, 100 kilometers or so above the Earth's surface.

On the way home from Mari's first soccer game a couple of weeks ago we were in the van when Mari started naming all the American Presidents. In short order this morphed into trying to name them in order, then that morphed into naming the Presidents who had the same last name as other Presidents. It is embarrassing to admit how few Presidents I can name.

Once we got home I started reading some encyclopedia articles about Adams, Madison, Monroe, and JQ Adams. This prompted me to make a list of all the Presidents, and then calculate the length of their lives, their lifespan after being President, and their age when they became President. I turned this info into a chart.

A tidbit I picked up was that one of the Adams had a wife who developed breast cancer. Her treatment included a mastectomy, performed without the aid of anesthesia! Her cancer later reappeared and she died.

Another tidbit I picked up was that the description of the Louisianna area that Jefferson's representatives negotiated to buy from France included this phrase, "the island of New Orleans."

A few days later I bought a book written by Max Skidmore, a UMKC professor, about the lives of the Presidents after they left office. While I haven't finished it yet, it is proving very interesting. Skidmore makes the point, that my Presidents' chart supports, that our current Presidents are surviving much longer after their term in office than most of the 19th century Presidents. Because this is a relatively recent phenomonon, these Presidents don't have many examples of what they should be/could be doing with the rest of their lives.

Project Gutenberg is a fabulous project that actually delivers on the promise of computers and digitalization. Thousands of books are available, and they're books you want to read. I've found many authors, Isabella Bird and Theodore Roosevelt to name two, that I enjoy reading or want to read.

Check out this web site: Votergate.

Even without considering the voter frauds that have and will occur, I think there's a dirty little secret nobody really wants to say outloud that it's impossible to accurately count votes. And it seems impossible to build a system that can be audited. How else can you explain the different results that come from successive recounts.

Over the past several days there has been considerable discussion and work related to our Houston office and its continued operations. At the end of an email this morning a writer appended this comment:

By the way, panic has taken over Houston - grocery stores have been stripped clean and almost all gas stations are out of gas, traffic is in gridlock in many places. Unbelievable.

When huricane Katrina slashed the Gulf coast across Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisianna the world was presented with the sorry sight of people being their most vicious and miserable. Some of this terrible behaviour might have been explained by how unprepared and surprised everyone was for the extent of the devastation. But we've had two weeks to think and prepare for such extreme disasters, and yet we haven't learned much.