Woodstock CT Café

From JTO

LIBOR is the acronym for London Interbank Offered Rate. It is the interest rate established periodically by a committee of banks under the auspices of the Bank of England, the UK central bank, and is the estimated interest rate that top banks would charge each other for short term I.e. overnight loans. LIBOR is established for multiple currencies including UK, all of Europe, Japan and the U.S.

This is similar to the functioning of the U.S. Federal Reserve Open Markets Committee, which, similarly, is staffed by Fed officials and prominent bank heads, and set U.S. Treasury Note sales and purchases by the Fed, which effectively establish core interest rates in the U.S.

LIBOR and U.S. Treasuries are both used worldwide as a baseline risk-free interest rate over which interest rates are calculated for all forms of debt in the global credit markets including $350 trillion (yes, trillion) in derivative securities.

What has been discovered is that the bankers were setting LIBOR not based on its intended purpose, but in order to benefit their massive bets made by their institutions on derivatives related to interest rates and currency values. This went on for a period of years.

This scandal is so massive and so corrupt that it makes the last crisis look small. Putting it in perspective, U.S. GDP is about $13 trillion, China/Japan are tied for second at about $4 trillion; Germany and UK are $3-3.5 trillion. Derivatives outstanding at the beginning of the financial crisis were Bout $60 trillion, or equivalent to World GDP. Derivatives outstanding today are about $350 Trillion, or 6 years of world GDP. Read the rest of this entry »

From John

I’ve been interacting with a reporter from the Salt Lake Tribune over an article he is writing on a lawsuit from University of Utah against the Max-Planck Institute, MIT, UMass, the Whitehead Institute, and Alnylam Pharmaceuticals (see link at the bottom of the right sidebar). Because of this I began looking at the Salt Lake Tribune to see how they covered the news on Romney. It’s also interesting to see the novel stories that they cover having to do with Mormonism in Utah. It’s a pretty good rag.

Here are some of the recent articles they have covered that hints of an undercurrent of lack of respect for their Mormon brother.

Romney Insults the British Prime Minister…and all of England

Romney blesses a community with his presence and asks for wedding present money to be donated to his campaign

Jon Stewart takes on Romney’s Park City bash

Romney involved in Bain affairs after exit

And one interesting article posted a few days ago that now cannot be found at the Tribune. One wonders if there was pressure to take it down.

Missing Salt Lake Olympic Committee Records

“Did you know that the Academy now has a Woodstock Academy Athletic Hall of Fame? Where is the Woodstock Academy Academic Hall of Fame for students who graduate and go on to do great things? ”

From John

It will be interesting to see how the punishment of Penn State for the Sandusky situation plays out over the coming years. I may start watching their games to follow this. For years I have been saying (to myself and Becki) that Paterno needed to be retired. His behavior in recent years on and off the field had become more and more erratic. The swiftness of his firing last November indicated to me that Penn State was tired of the Paterno thing even before the Sandusky situation. Let’s face it – age diminishes judgment and this starts in the elderly long before it becomes recognized. Paterno was 85 and scheduled to continue coaching this year if the scandal hadn’t developed and he hadn’t died. Paterno could have avoided much of this scandal if he had retired or had been forced to retire at a reasonable age – let’s say 75 or earlier. Nevertheless, it’s hard for me to believe that Sandusky’s pedophilia first surfaced at Penn State in 1998.

I confess that I enjoy watching college football. This all started when my father took me to Yale games in the 1950s. Since then I have attended college football games at, yes, Penn State, Ohio State, all Univ. of Pittsburgh games for four years, Annapolis, Stanford, all home games at the Air Force Academy in 1994, and games at UConn’s Rentschler Field. Becki, Mariah, and I took Ernie and Zack Wetzel to the first game there in 2003 when UConn embarrassed the Big 10 Indiana. We sat on the 40 yard line on a clear day behind the Hoosier bench and joined the chorus chanting “Hooooosier, Hooooosier…” as their rattled quarterback started shouting at his own players for dropping his wobbly passes.

In the fall of 1969, I went with a couple of guys from my lab at Pitt Medical School to take in a Penn State game. Guess who had been their coach since 1966, and guess who was there in his first year as assistant coach – Paterno and Sandusky. It was another beautiful day for football. The signal for the Penn State players to run onto the field was the deafening roar of the Nittany Lion over the loud speaker. The team that year may have been the greatest team in Penn State history with Lydell Mitchell at halfback (later with the Baltimore Colts), Franco Harris at fullback (later with the Pittsburgh Steelers) and concert pianist Mike Reid at Defensive Tackle (later with the Cincinnati Bengals). Some years later I watched Franco Harris catch the Immaculate Reception from Quarterback Terry Bradshaw to beat the Raiders in the playoffs in Pittsburgh.

It’s sad that there is a seamy side of football on the school side, the spectator side, and the athletic booster side that should be obvious to all who follow football and other sports; just follow the sports news for a year and you’ll know what I am talking about. Did you know that the Academy now has a Woodstock Academy Athletic Hall of Fame? Where is the Woodstock Academy Academic Hall of Fame for students who graduate and go on to do great things? Buzz Bissinger at the Daily Beast, who wrote “Friday Night Lights” about a high school team in Odessa (where two of my daughters graduated), feels that there is an insidious culture in high powered sports that explains the Penn State mess and cover-up. I would agree with him and this is why the NCAA penalties against Penn State were appropriate, if not enough. I don’t think it would diminish the excitement of college football if the NCAA limited scholarships to just 22 players for every team. Of course they would not do this because it would diminish their empire.

I have mentioned this before, but Becki and I stopped going to Rentschler Field after a while because we got tired of rubbing elbows with the drunks in the stands and stepping around steaming puddles of barf as we left the stadium. I almost wrote the governor about this but then just let it go. One of my daughters and her husband went to Texas A&M and they pointed out to me that there is no sale of beer or other alcoholic beverages there. Why can’t UConn do the same? I will still go to a game once in a while because I enjoy the spectacle. Maybe I’ll try out the spectacle of the Academy’s new football field this fall.

From John

100,000 years ago there were as many as six different kinds of humans – only one survived, us Woodstockers and the rest of the people on Earth. All of these human species are related to a common ancestor homo erectus migrating out of Africa about 200,000 to 250,000 years ago. It’s just that the other five species became extinct as homo sapiens flourished. There was rare interbreeding between some of these species especially Neandertals and homo sapiens. Today we humans have about 2.5% of our DNA that flowed from Neandertals as the result of interbreeding which probably took place in western Asia around Israel and in Europe.

Neandertals evolved in Europe and/or western Asia about 600,000 years ago and became extinct about 30,000 years ago. From fossils it has been determined that our Neandertal brothers average height was 5 foot 4 inches and weight was around a stocky 176 pounds. Estimates of the Neandertal population in Europe are between 140,000 and 350,000 at any one time. Homo sapiens outnumbered the Neandertal population in Europe by 10:1 at this time. Four hundred partial Neandertal specimens are known.

Twenty partial and 7 complete mitochondrial DNA sequences inherited from females have been published that correspond to 27 Neanderthal individuals from 12 archaeological sites. It’s the mitochondrial DNA sequence that allows us to link the original Africans to all human species whereever they ended up. Well preserved genomic DNA of the nuclear 46 chromosomes of Neandertals and Denisovans (cave dwellers in Siberia) were sequenced in 2006 and 2011, respectively, and compared with our human genomic DNA sequence determined by the Human Genome Project in 2001.

Most genes between these three species of hominoids are identical and unchanged by the human evolutionary and natural selection process, including the human beta-actin encoding gene that I cloned. Another interesting example is the FOXP2 gene, a gene putatively associated with the human ability to speak. This gene was found to be identical in Neandertals and modern humans so the Neandertals could probably speak but not necessarily using the same language. Analysis of the pigmentation gene MC1R provided evidence that some Neandertals were red-haired and had fair skin. By contrast two analyses identified 78 and 83 genes that differed on the amino acid level between the modern humans and Neandertals. This list comprises genes associated with various functions, including metabolism, cranial development, pigmentation, skin physiology, cognition and even sperm movement. Read the rest of this entry »

From John

The word “liberal” as in “you liberal(s)” has become a way to belittle and defame individuals with what are called “liberal views.” By contrast, being called a “conservative” does not hold as much weight as a disparaging word. “Left wing” may be equally disparaging and “right wing” is equally disparaging from my point of view. Because of these pejoratives, people have looked for other words to describe their political position such as libertarian – “…a belief in liberty (positions on the issues are not “left” or “right” or a combination of the two)” and “…true conservatives tend to be libertarian on economic issues, and true liberals tend to be libertarian on social issues,” (libertarianism.com). Another label used to describe a political position is “moderate” – not excessive or extreme on any issue. In England back in the first half of the 19th century aside from whether you were a Tory or a Whig, “materialist” was the pejorative of the day. A “materialist” was/is used to describe an individual who believes that “physical matter is the only reality and that everything, including thought, feeling, mind, and will, can be explained in terms of matter and physical phenomena.” If you openly espoused this blasphemic view you could have been thrown in jail because Anglican Christianity was the law of the land and to speak against it would lead to ruin if you were a member of the gentry.

I’m not sure how I became a “liberal.” This is not to say that I don’t value some conservative positions. Being a geneticist of some sort, I have often wondered if there is a genetic basis governing my liberalism or perhaps my libertarianism… and the same for right-wing conservatives. I doubt that these characteristics are determined by our liver which secretes bile and regulates stasis in our blood … or our musculoskeleton for that matter. Predisposition for either view must be a secretion of the brain and these thoughts seem to be passed down from generation to generation accept when there is intermarriage between two with opposing philosophies. But obviously, acquiring these views may also be epigenetic and developed in early childhood as we learn the views of our parents.

During the final years of their lives I filled in some detail on my parents early life that shows a pattern consistent with my own outlook. My mother and father often talked fondly about Margaret DeSilver and her partner, Carlo, who became close friends when my parents lived in Greenwich Village in the early 1940s. My father, unbeknownst to others, had aspired to be a writer and my mother throughout her life was a talented artist. While travelling through life my parents rubbed shoulders by chance with noteable lumenaries like Margaret DeSilver and Carlo Tresca (I have MD’s letters to my mother), architect Frank Lloyd Wright while he was building the Guggenheim (I have FLW’s notes to my father), Rowayton friend Andy Rooney (gave one of his signed books to Sarah Froehlich) and his colleagues at CBS, Dick Bissell (Pajama Game), Stefan Schnabel (son of Artur, Plain and Fancy, Three Penny Opera, many movies including Eastwood’s Firefox),  and numerous artists and writers including those that failed to produce the great American novel like my father and Rowaytonite Boyce Eakin. Even here in Woodstock my parents became good friends with Diane and Rodney Whitaker. I have several letters from Diane after my parents’ passed and I sent her one of my mother’s floral watercolors for safe keeping. Few in Woodstock knew that Rodney was the successful author, whose pen name was Trevanian (Eiger Sanction). Dad would stumble over successful artists here and there like the time he took a taxi in Manhatten and found Margaret Mead’s notebook (corrected) in the back seat .

From Andy Leavitt – The story is this: Dad found a 3 ring spiral notebook. Now what is the most remarkable thing about this is that there were no identifying names or addresses on the notebook, just what that person had written in the notebook. How many of the 8 million New Yorkers would open the notebook and instantly be able to redirect the cab to the New York Museum of Natural History. This is where Margaret Mead had her office. Dad went to the office and they were overjoyed because this notebook contained one of the last chapters of her autobiography (and Mead was not in good health at this time and the book was at the publishers)! They said to Dad, “You know there is a reward for this!!!” and Dad said, “Yes I would like these two books signed by Miss Mead please” (he bought them in the museum bookstore on the way up to her office). The person again said, “Yes but You know there is a reward for this!!!”and Dad was able to make them understand that her signing of the books would be his reward.

Read the rest of this entry »

http://www.woodstockrepublicans.com/
http://www.woodstockdemocratictowncommittee.org/

DTC and RTC (left and right, respectively):
continuing members of the DTC are denoted with an * plus Mitch Eaffy

From Rich Dempsey

This fire station was founded in 1937. See this Video for the history.

From Newcomer

There is some background about the Catholic Church in the U.S. that you may or may not be aware of.

The same polarization that we see in present-day politics between Democrats and Republicans is occuring in the Catholic Church in the U.S. It has been going on in the Church in American since the 1940?s and I note with interest how the timing of this division in the Church seems to coincide with the era of the New Deal. I don’t know enough about political history to know if my hunch may be correct or not. But since the timing is so coincidental, and so many Catholic immimgrants(and their descendants) in America in the 1940?s were a significant number in the population, I wonder if when the Catholics divided, as a result, the political parties that they belonged to consequently did the same.

Whatever the causes, it is what it is. The Magisterium of nuns known as the LCWR has been lined up with the liberals (doctrinally and politically) since the early 1970?s. The Vatican has been concerned about this since that time. This is not new. The Vatican has been trying to dialogue with them and has given them decades of chances to reconcile their positions with the Church. Afterall, they did take vows to their CATHOLIC communities once upon a time.

The whole purpose of the Church is to preach the Gospel. If someone, anyone, thinks the Church is not doing that, they have a couple of options. They can work with their proper Church authorities to come to some reconciliation or they can leave. No one puts a gun to anyone’s head and forces them to be Catholic. Tons of folks have left. Of course, those who remain feel that those who leave put their own soul in jeopardy when they do so, but the fact remains that no one is forced to remain in the Church against their will. What is not allowed is to openly and actively dissent from Church teaching and continue to call yourself a Catholic, when in fact, you have already excommunicated yourself by your actions/words. The Magisterium of nuns have been doing this for many decades and the Vatican has been way more tolerant and lenient in trying to work with them than the Vatican of a few generations ago. Read the rest of this entry »

From John

When I wrote “Darwin Had It Right” two weeks ago, I was waxing euphoric that Darwin recognized that “life (had) originated only once.”  I thought that this was a profound, incredibly lucid moment given that Darwin did not have the evidence that we have now – mainly the genetic code. This revelation comes from the heavily footnoted “Darwin” by Adrian Desmond and James Moore first published in the UK in 1991. These are two acclaimed historians and their book is viewed as a definitive biography of Darwin’s life. Moore has degrees in Science, Divinity and History with a Ph.D. from Manchester University. Desmond studied at London University and Harvard and has higher degrees in paleotology and history of science, and a Ph.D. for his work on “Victorian evolution.” He is currently at the University College London. I had no idea that making the statement “life (had)originated only once” would create such a firestorm at the Cafe.

I finally had a chance to go back and re-read the passage where this quote from memory came from and the context of the statement from Darwin’s diary. Here’s the relevant passage on pages 230 to 231:

“The blitz of his (Darwin’s) thoughts continued as he squared up to extinction (of species) in his notebook. He kept recycling Qwen’s idea that the complexity of a species was inversely related to its lifespan. He sketched an ‘irregularly branched’ tree to convey the geneological history of animals and plants. If life was like a huge old oak, growing through the ages, the fossils were the ‘terminal buds of dying,’ their life-force decayed. The trunk symbolized the ancient common ancestor, the stock from which all animals sprang. And the single trunk must have had a single origin. Darwin realized that life’s initial spontaneous appearance from inorganic matter on the earth must have been a one-off affair, buried in the dim, distant past. Living molecules cannot be emerging constantly, everywhere, or millions of unrelated trees of life would be springing up, making the whole image excessively complicated. The origin of life was a once-only event, lost somewhere in pre-Silerian times (a primordial time when higher plants evolved).
…
Life had originated only once, then ramified through history an endless growth, terminal buds dying as others appeared. No revitalizing was necessary, no creative re-energizing.”

From John

I was curious about how common my surname (Leavitt) is. So I put “surname” into Google and found MongaBay.com . I’m not sure of the origin of the name “Leavitt” but I was told in early life before computerized geneology that it may be derived from a French Canadian name like “Lafayette;” but maybe not. An English “John Leavitt” landed in Dorchester MA in 1634 (according to houseofnames.com). The name tends to show up most in New England in geneology records in Google. The name is also found among Mormons because a Leavitt from northern Vermont went west with Joseph Smith originally from Royalton VT in 1831. So at best I can say that “Leavitt” is an old New England name coming from the English or French during colonization in the first two centuries.  Three quarters of my grandparents are early New England (one Scottish) in origin and one quarter is English.

Becki’s maiden name is “Calkins” which is a British name from her father’s father. Becki is a quarter Danish and a quarter Norwegian, and the rest is English and Irish. There’s a Calkins Road and a Leavitt Road in Woodstock. 

Monga says that the surname “Leavitt” is ranked #2702 (12,223 individuals with Social Security numbers) in the USA from US Census records, and “Calkins” is ranked #3711 (8,673 individuals). The two names are individuals that are 95% and 96% “white, non-hispanic” respectively.

Below is a list of the 20 most common surnames in the USA.

From LibDem

Kevin makes an astute remark when he claims the brain’s propensity to look for patterns. I am reminded of Joseph Campbell’s book The Power of Myth where, amongst many themes, he notes that there is a universal propensity amongst cultures to try and make sense of this capricious world, to explain nature, to explain suffering, often in the form of stories, or myths. Campbell does not try to undermine religion or faith, but instead ties them to this universal need. Most interestingly, he notes the common and recurrent myths that prevail in most cultures (and very often pre-date Christianity) -creation, serpents, virgin births, resurrections, ascensions, the hero’s adventure, predetermination, gods/saints working behind the scenes, etc.

So when I read about a family’s belief that their prayers to Bishop Fulton Sheen saved their baby, I am reminded of man’s need to explain the inexplicable. To inject the supernatural into something that can be explained by science, if we had all of the facts. This reinforces for me the importance of teaching our children critical thinking skills in order to discern claims, to evaluate the science and to question the myths. Read the rest of this entry »

Prior to the progress outlined in the NYTimes article Dr. Tara Shears at the University of Liverpool gave this fascinating lecture on the elusive Higgs Particle first named “that Goddamn particle.” This is explained in her lecture in Manchester. We think this lecture was given in April. Becki

From the New York Times

excerpts from the NYTimes article:

• …the new particle, which weighs in at 125 billion electron volts, one of the heaviest subatomic particles yet, fits the simplest description given by the Standard Model, the theory that has ruled physics for the last half century, or whether it is an imposter, a single particle or even the first of many particles yet to be discovered . The latter possibilities are particularly exciting to physicists since they could point the way to new deeper ideas, beyond the Standard Model, about the nature of reality.
• [B]leary-eyed physicists (at the Aspen Center for Physics) watched their colleagues read off the results in a Webcast from CERN. It was a scene duplicated in Melbourne, Australia, where physicists had gathered for a major conference, as well as in Los Angeles, Chicago, Princeton, New York, London, and beyond — everywhere that members of a curious species have dedicated their lives and fortunes to the search for their origins in a dark universe.
• [I]t reaffirms a grand view of a universe ruled by simple and elegant and symmetrical laws, but in which everything interesting in it, such as ourselves, is due to flaws or breaks in that symmetry.
• [A] cosmic molasses that permeates space and imbues elementary particles that would otherwise be massless with mass.
• Without this Higgs field…There would be neither atoms nor life.
  the discovery, “very, very significant. It’s something that may, in the end, be one of the biggest observations of any new phenomena in our field in the last 30 or 40 years, going way back to the discovery of quarks, for example.”
• Questions that could be answered by understanding the boson What, for example, is the dark matter that provides the gravitational scaffolding of galaxies? And why is the universe made of matter instead of antimatter?
• The new particle has a mass of about 125.3 billion electron volts, in the units of mass and energy —Einstein showed they are the same
• In quantum theory, which is the language of particle physicists, elementary particles are divided into two rough categories: fermions, which are bits of matter like electrons; and bosons, which are bits of energy and can transmit forces, like the photon that transmits light.
• Dr. Higgs of the University of Edinburgh, was one of six physicists, working in three independent groups, who in 1964 invented the notion of the cosmic molasses, or Higgs field. The others were Tom Kibble of Imperial College, London, Carl Hagen of University of Rochester, Dr. Guralnik of Brown University, and Francois Englert and the late Robert Brout, both of Université Libre de Bruxelles.
• [Understanding this particle could reveal] the secret of the dark energy that now seems to be speeding up the expansion of the universe.

From Loadstar

Rivers: $38,161.00
Walker: $60,231.00

Pomfret population: 4247
Woodstock population: 7964

See the Norwich Bull article.

Selectman Maureen Nicholson (D) said that she would “love” to fill the vacancy.

Becki reminded me that Jim was grossly underpaid as First Selectman with a salary far below that of Woodstock First Selectman, Alan Walker.

A day later in the Norwich Bull:

“I will not be seeking a fifth term and am looking at whether I’ll be resigning at some point before that,” Rivers said Tuesday. “There’s been no date set, nothing nailed down yet concerning my exit. This is something I’ve talked about for months.”

Rick Green from the Courant and I met at my parents farm on Barber Road in the May of 2009. Conversation with Rick Green.

Rick mentioned that blog visitation had diminished noticably at the Courant blogs. At that time the Cafe hadn’t seen much of a slow down. If you look at the graphs of annual visits (blue bars) and page turns (green bars) on the next page you can see that our activity didn’t diminish significantly until 2010 and went slightly lower in 2011. Since we are half way through 2012, I extrapolated both numbers to see where we are headed in 2012. It looks as though we are on the rebound. Perhaps this is due to JTO’s informative contributions and Diane’s insightful comments. This revival is refreshing in light of the demise of all eastern CT blogs that I was aware of and the leading CT blog CTLocalPolitics which bit the dirt under the pressure of litigation. CTLP was sued but the judge ruled in favor of the blog with a Summary Judgement. Now for the most part we are joined by newspaper blogging and the blogs of newspaper reporters who get paid to blog. Last week I actually posted a comment at USAToday telling the world that, like Ann Curry, we were leaving the NBC Nightly and Today show. I’m sure this sent shock-waves through NBC. I personally have been disgusted by their morning stories which ain’t news except for perhaps the first five minutes. CBS isn’t much better. Fire the person who lines up the stories; don’t blame Ann Curry.

I attribute the Cafe’s slowdown to the rise of Facebook. Read the rest of this entry »

From John

 I like to talk about impressive things that people I know have done and are doing. Here’s a message to me from Diane. I’m her biggest fan east of the Rockies.

“Well it is official. I have received notice from the Western States Trail Foundation that my entry into the Western States 100 Miles in One Day Trail Ride, aka, the Tevis Cup, has been accepted.”

This is August 4th - 100 miles from Robie Park east of Squaw Valley down the Sierras to Auburn, CA.

“Boo is in great shape. Me? Well, not so much so. He’s the equivalent of a 20-25 yr old man while I haven’t seen 20 in darn near a half century. If he doesn’t exercise for a couple of weeks, it’s no big deal. If I don’t ride for a couple of days, I lose enough conditioning that I can really feel it. Although I think we could do well, the truth is that the completion rate runs around 50% of all starters and the rate is LOT lower for first timers like me. Sobering.”

Here is Diane winning the 50-mile race in Santa Cruz CA on Arabian Peekaboo last August and two scenes of the Tevis 100-mile route. (Click to enlarge)