Personal – Page 8 – Walking Contradiction

Day 22: The New Brood

If you’ve been reading this blog, you know that I raise caterpillars. How do you find caterpillars to raise, though? The best way to grow the types of plants that the species of butterfly you are interested in likes to lay her eggs.

For the Eastern Black Swallowtail, which is what I primarily like to raise, the plants include parsley, rue, dill, carrot, fennel, and a few others.

Parsley on the left, and rue plants on the right

Part of my daily routine during the summer is to check these plants for eggs. They’re tiny and hard to see, but when you know what to look for it makes it easier. I found the group of 3 eggs that Lazarus came from a few weeks ago, which was a bit early in the season. Since then, nothing.

Until last Friday.

I began inspecting one of the rue plants, and immediately saw an egg. So I grabbed a scissors and a small container. This way I could trim the part of the leaf with the egg, and save it in the container. I collected that egg, and began checking out the rest of the plant. There’s another one! And another! It seemed that everywhere I looked I found another egg!

After I was sure I got all the eggs from the rue, I moved on to the parsley plants. Sure enough, there were several more on those plants, too. It took some time, but I was finally sure that I had found them all. Back indoors I very carefully arranged the various plant clippings so that the eggs were visible, and took the photo above. Prior to this, the most eggs I had ever found was 6, so finding 29 at once was incredible! Over the next 2 days I found 5 more, bringing the grand total to 34. I’m going to need a bigger housing for them!

Someone asked me why I bring them indoors, where the temperature is much cooler than they would be exposed to outside. There are several reasons, but the primary reason is that it shields them from predators. I did some research online first to make sure that it wouldn’t be harmful to be indoors, and there does not seem to be any problems with it. The results I’ve gotten have borne that out.

This morning the eggs began hatching. As soon as they hatch they start eating the leaf they are on, which is pretty wilted by now, so I add fresh host plant material for them to munch on. Can you find all the caterpillars in the photo above? I can see at least part of 14 caterpillars. There are also 2 unhatched eggs visible, and if you look at them closely, you can see that they are no longer the smooth yellow color of the newly-laid eggs.

Those stripes are the segments of the soon-to-be-hatched caterpillar. I imagine that these are from the 5 eggs that I found after the first batch, as they seem to be a day or two behind in development.

This will certainly be a good test of my caterpillar-raising skills in trying to help 34 different creatures grow to adulthood. I’ll be sure to post about any significant events in that process in the weeks to come.

Day 21: Disc Golf Intro

I am a beginner at disc golf, and am just beginning to understand all the different things you need to know. I thought I’d write some of them down in order to clarify them in my mind.

While I’m new to disc golf, I have been throwing Frisbees since I was in high school. Most of the time we free-styled, where you try to do tricks with your catches and throw with different styles. Here’s a photo of me in college with a disc:

My younger son Dan has been playing disc golf, and gotten pretty good at it. He came to visit us the past January, and took me out to play a few rounds. Disc golf uses very different discs than Frisbees, and they come with all sorts of different characteristics that affect how they fly. Dan gave me a crash course, but it was a lot to keep straight! He let me use some of his discs, but once he went back home I needed some of my own.

I went to a sporting goods store that carried some discs, and more or less blindly picked a couple. I knew that there were drivers for getting distance, and putters for accuracy on the short shots. I bought the Innova Destroyer driver, and the Innova Colt putter.

There is a disc golf course not too far from my house: Pearsall Park. Besides being close by, it’s very hilly, and is a good workout just walking the course! The first hole is pretty open, so I threw my driver. It did not fly like I thought it would; it just turned over quickly to one side and crashed to the ground without going very far. The Colt, though, flew just fine. In fact, it flew straighter and longer than the Destroyer! This made no sense to me: why would a putter fly further than a driver?

Afterwards I texted Dan about this, and he explained that the Speed rating of the Destroyer was too high for me. I didn’t understand: wouldn’t the speed rating mean that it would fly faster?

No, it turns out. It doesn’t mean that at all. What it means is the speed at which the disc must be thrown in order to achieve the flight it was designed for. The Destroyer is Speed: 12, and I’m just not able to throw that hard yet. So when I threw it, it never got into the flight it was designed for. The Colt, though is Speed: 3, which I’m certainly capable of throwing. So I was able to get a good throw (albeit a relatively short one) with the Colt, and couldn’t throw the Destroyer reliably.

Guess I had some reading up to do! I found many good sources online, and soon felt confident enough to order new discs. I say “order” because by now the pandemic had forced businesses to close, so online was the only way to go. They’ve worked out much better for me, and slowly but surely I’m improving.

I’ll try to summarize what I’ve learned about disc flight characteristics in a future post. But for now I’m taking advantage of my unemployed state to practice disc golf as often as I can.

Day 20: Lazarus Update

A couple of days ago I wrote about our miracle caterpillar, which we named Lazarus, due to its ability to come back from the dead. I don’t have much on my mind that I want to write about today, so I thought I’d give you an update.

Lazarus continued eating and pooping, as caterpillars do. Yesterday, though, it reached the transition point in its lifecycle, where it stops being a caterpillar and becomes an adult butterfly. What the caterpillar will do at that point is stop eating, and because it will no longer be able to digest, it “purges” – it vomits up the contents of its digestive system. In the photo above you can see the circular stain with a dark center mass. Well, you can sort of see it; I keep the caterpillars in a collapsible laundry hamper with nylon mesh sides that allow you to see through somewhat, and that makes the image a little unclear.

Once they’ve purged, they begin to wander in search of a place to attach themselves. I created something for them to use, and most of the caterpillars end up pupating on it.

You can see it in the center – it’s just a few sticks glued together. Again, due to the nylon mesh it’s difficult to see clearly, so here’s a photo I took last summer at the peak of pupa season:

So yeah, the caterpillars seem to like this arrangement. But not Lazarus! If you look closely at the top left of the photo of the caterpillar housing, you’ll notice something:

Lazarus wandered all over the enclosure, and then decided to attach to the top panel! It still hasn’t pupated, but I expect that to happen later today. I’ll update this post with an image of that when it happens.

UPDATE:

Two hours later, and Lazarus has shed his caterpillar skin, and become a bona-fide pupa! Now the long wait until the beautiful butterfly emerges.

Day 19: Lotto Logic

There are many, many lotteries available for people to play. They’ve sometimes been called “a tax on people who are bad at math“. That’s amusing enough, but I also see them as a way for the state to prey on poor people by offering them false hope. Go to any corner store in a poor neighborhood, and right in that choice spot right next to the checkout register will be the lottery tickets.

Before lotteries were legal, the numbers game was a big thing. Same basic idea: bet a dollar for a chance to win a jackpot. In New York, the numbers was run by the Mafia, and running around the neighborhood collecting bets was a common first job for wannabe gangsters. The government rarely enforced the laws against gambling for these rackets, but soon figured out that instead of spending money to track down and bust these operations, they could just create a legal lottery and collect the house’s cut for themselves. Of course, they made it more palatable by saying that the money collected would be used for education. Turns out that they cut the budgets for education by the amount that the lotteries generated, so while the lottery money technically did go to education, it didn’t add to the funds for schools.

In recent years the trend has been away from state-run lotteries toward massive multi-state games, such as Mega Millions and Powerball. The reason for this is that the jackpots get absurdly big after only a few draws. It is not uncommon for the jackpots to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. When they get that high, people go crazy buying tickets.

The odds of selecting the right numbers for Mega Millions is 1 in 36,309,042,000. That’s one in 36 BILLION.

You may wonder what is the ideal strategy for playing these games. Many people would argue that the best strategy is not to play at all – and they have a good point. I think, though, that it depends.

If you don’t play, your chances of winning is zero. If you play the smallest amount, a single $2 game, your chance increases from zero to 1 in 36 billion. That’s significant, as it changes your possible result from definitely not winning to having an infinitesimal chance of winning.

So if you play more games per drawing, your chances increase, right. Well, in one sense they do, but in a more practical sense, they are still infinitesimal. But remember that the money you bet comes out of your disposable income. For most people, that much money is much more than one billionth! The lower your income, the more significant a chunk will be (likely) lost to the lottery.

Even if you don’t win, though, playing the lottery buys you something: the chance to dream of winning! From the moment you buy the ticket until you check your numbers, you are in that Schrödinger state of winning and not winning, and can fantasize about luxurious travel, or expensive cars, or whatever else you would do with that much money. That ability to dream is a benefit that many people overlook, but it’s the part that the people running the lottery count on to get you to buy those tickets.

The best strategy, then, is to buy a single ticket, unless that $2 would mean doing without basic necessities. By buying a single ticket you have some chance, albeit minuscule. Buying more than one doesn’t really increase your chances significantly, but takes a bigger and bigger bite out of your disposable income. So buy that one ticket, and dream away!

Day 18: Ethical vs. Legal

Back when he was in college, soon-to-be Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg famously wrote:

You can be unethical and still be legal that’s the way i live my life
Mark Zuckerberg, in an instant message sent to a friend

We’ve seen what Facebook has become, and know now that he really meant it. And it’s just not him; many people feel that as long as there’s no law against it, it’s fine to do. Or even if there’s a way of interpreting an existing law that exempts the particular thing they want to do, it’s OK.

Ideally, laws and regulations exist to codify a society’s sense of what is ethical. When I was growing up, it was perfectly legal for anyone to dump anything into any body of water. And it wasn’t just big factories that were doing this. When I walked to school I crossed the Hackensack River, and just upstream was a car wash. I remember always seeing foamy bubbles floating on the river as I passed. It was not uncommon to see big rainbow-colored oil slicks, too.

The environmental movement of the ’60s led to laws against this and many other types of pollution. These laws represented the sense of people that it was not ethical to pollute, ruining things so that a company can save a few dollars. Fast forward to today to find many of these environmental regulations being loosened or removed, just so the big political donors can make a few more dollars.

Back in the 1920s, there was rampant financial speculation, making a few people rich, but destabilizing the overall financial system. The collapse of that system led to the Great Depression. At that time new laws were enacted to make those shady financial practices illegal. One such law, the Glass-Steagall Act, forced the separation of commercial banks, which regular people and businesses relied upon, and investment banks, which were in the business of underwriting all types of securities. That separation worked well for nearly 70 years.

But then in the 1990s, banks began to clamor for the removal of these restrictions. There was just too much money to be made! So in 1999, Democratic President Bill Clinton signed into law the Gramm‐Leach‐Bliley Act, which essentially repealed Glass-Steagal, and allowed for single corporations to be involved in all kinds of financial services. No longer prohibited from this type of financial intermingling, corporations merged with each other to create financial powerhouses – the so-called Too Big To Fail companies. The financial collapse and subsequent government bailout of these companies was the chief cause of the 2007–8 global financial crisis, and the Great Recession.

After that crisis some laws were enacted to address the shortcomings of the current system, but the lobbying by these companies has made it nearly impossible to enact laws as strict as those from the 1930s. So while the mixing of risky and secured securities is still legal, most people consider it unethical. After all, when those risks pay off, the corporation makes a lot of money. But when they fail, the government (that’s us) picks up the tab.

Another great example of a regulation that was vilified was the FCC Fairness Doctrine, which required that TV and radio stations to devote some of their air time to matters of public interest, and to enable different viewpoints to be heard. This requirement was removed by the Reagan Administration in 1987. Shortly after that, Fox News was born. They are probably the grossest example of what the Fairness Doctrine was designed to prevent: one-sided propaganda that is capable of ill-informing its viewers.

There are laws that govern what you can and cannot do with people seeking asylum at the border. The Trump administration didn’t like those laws, so he issued an executive order that made the image below legal. I’ll leave it up to you to decide if it is ethical to separate children from their parents and keep them in cages.

Immigrant kids seen held in fenced cages at border facility — Children held in cages, McAllen, TX 2018

And remember, Auschwitz and the other camps were also legal, but I can’t think of anything less ethical.

So when you hear politicians, especially conservatives, rail against “regulation”, what it really means is that they want to be able cheat and cut corners in order to make a fast buck. Of course, it isn’t difficult to cite some overzealous regulations that serve no purpose – no system of laws is perfect. But to extrapolate that to the conclusion that all regulations are bad is a clear sign that someone’s trying to get away with something.