Ramps on Droop Mountain

This is my favorite stage of development for ramps. Some people dig them in January, before they have sprouted green tops above the ground. I like the tops as well as the underground bulbs, so we usually wait until now to dig ramps. If you wait a few more weeks, until the tops are full-sized, they become very tough, although they still taste good. Several bloggers I follow, including Reya and Angelena, have mentioned spring tonics and purification practices. Ramps must be West Virginians' favorite spring tonic. I know I felt better after my first dish of ramps and eggs this season.

We only have a few small ramp patches on our property, and they're not spreading at all, so we leave them alone (except for one or two for scrambled eggs now and then). If we want a pan full, we go to the national forest. Local people tell me that there aren't as many ramps as there used to be. Some think it's from over-harvesting, others think it's an increase in forest density. Whatever the cause, folks are worried that the Forest Service soon will start issuing permits to dig ramps, the way they have in other states.

Bird Blogging--An Alternative to Cat Blogging

I'm using the old Web designer's fall-back: When you don't have anything to say, put up photos of the family pets. I thought these guys would, at least, be a change from the obligatory cat blogging.

Two Skunks, Black and White

In addition to our small, mostly-black skunk, we have been seeing a mostly-white skunk off and on since last summer. Before I moved here, I had not seen this much individual variation in skunk coat color.

How to Assemble My Denim Patchwork Coverlet

I cut the strips and pieced the seven-inch squares for this denim patchwork cover last summer, and I'd been trying to decide how to arrange them ever since. The squares are "Rail Fence-Inspired:" Three-strip squares with dark borders and a central pale or bright-colored strip. As I pieced the squares, I thought I was making five different kinds of patches, and that I had a complex assembly process before me. However, my digital camera set me straight with these two sample layouts.

Layout 1

Layout 2

After looking at these pictures side by side, I could see that I only had two types of blocks--high contrast and low-contrast. I think this arrangement, below, with alternating high and low contrast, will work well, and it certainly simplifies assembly

Layout 3

First Mosquito Bite of the Season

I don't usually document my mosquito bites, but I wanted to see if I could get a decent digital photo without a macro lens. The answer is, "no, not really." Still, while I didn't capture the beautiful silvery scales on this newly-hatched female's abdomen, I think you can see the dark spots on the wings, which make me think this is an Anopheles mosquito. And of course, I have links.

• Discover Life's Culicidae page
• Iowa State University's mosquito image gallery
• South Dakota Mosquitoes

Trout Lilies In Bud and In Bloom

I was looking for the pretty, mottled leaves of Trout Lily yesterday, and was surprised to find some flowers already open. I have always thought these leaves should have been part of the list of dappled things in Hopkins' Pied Beauty, especially given the homely names this flower bears--Trout Lily, Yellow Adder's Tongue, Dogtooth Violet.

My Genealogy in Peonies

This is a bloom from my grandmother's peony, taken last June. When my grandmother left the farm where she was raised (near Prescott, Iowa), she took her peony bushes with her. I helped my mother move the peonies to our farm after Grandma died. Later, I moved this peony from Iowa to Maryland, and from Maryland to West Virginia. My mother believed that her own grandmother had planted the peonies when her children were young, in the 1890's. I guess that makes them my heirloom variety.

Planting Peonies On the Vernal Equinox

I planted my new peonies yesterday. We had a lovely, warm spring day. I've never had success with store-bought peonies before, but I bought these two varieties at KMart anyway. (Triumph of Hope over Experience.)

Finding the Knotty Bits

I hope you can forgive that title--the Washington Post essayist couldn't select between three punning titles for this article on knots in Washington-Baltimore area museums: In the Loop: What Goes Around Comes Around, All Tied Up in Knots By Paul Richard Special to The Washington Post, Monday, March 19, 2007; Page C01. Eight years after leaving their local delivery area, I still miss my hard copy of the Post. Their RSS feeds are working better, and I have broadband now, so I can follow the news on line, but this is the sort of article I used to cut out and paste in my journal. I could have used this wonderful article as a guide on where to visit distinguished knots in area museums.

The Cone sisters of Baltimore, though better known for buying Picassos and Matisses, also brought together the 400-piece collection of Belgian, Parisian and old Venetian lace at the Baltimore Museum of Art.

....At the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and Freer Gallery of Art, ornately knotted necklaces are draped around the necks of Chinese bodhisattvas. The Japanese tied knots shaped like turtles and like cranes. By how he tied his knots the tea master kept track of whether his containers were full of tea or empty. You can't rightly show a hanging scroll unless you have been taught how to tie the proper knots.

There's a great knot from the Renaissance in the National Gallery of Art. "The Sixth Knot" is a woodcut printed from a block that Durer cut in Venice or in Nuremberg 500 years ago.

Richard also rhapsodizes about knots in books, from the Book of Kells to The Ashley Book of Knots

Published in 1944 and still in print, the "Ashley" is a marvel. Its thousands of line drawings are so clear in execution, so mentally demanding, so full of lore and learning and intricate ideas, you would have to say that they qualify as a major piece of early American conceptual art.

Clifford W. Ashley was born in 1881 in New Bedford, Mass., as in "Moby-Dick." Young Ashley served what he would call his "apprenticeship in knots" aboard the whaling bark Sunbeam, "probably the last merchant square-rigger to put to sea with hemp standing rigging." Then he turned to art. He went to school with N.C. Wyeth, studied with Howard Pyle and earned his living painting swashbuckling illustrations (he always got the rigging right) of hard men out at sea.

But then he got consumed by knots.

In the 619 pages of "The Ashley Book of Knots," each knot gets a paragraph, a number and a how-to drawing. Some specialists contend his book has duplications, but I have yet to find them. His black-and-white line drawings number 3,854.

Richard winds up with some interesting mathematical implications of knots, including topics discussed in the annual "Knots in Washington", a conference held every year since 1995 at the George Washington University, and a pdf file of a crocheted Lorenz manifold.

As an additional treat, Richard passes along this link, to the KnotPlot site, where you will find a collection of knots and links, viewed from a (mostly) mathematical perspective. Nearly all of the images here were created with KnotPlot, a fairly elaborate program to visualize and manipulate mathematical knots in three and four dimensions. You can download KnotPlot and try it on your computer (see the link below), but first you may want to look at some of the images in the picture gallery.

Sock Patterns--Swatching and Searching

I'm experimenting with some fine-gauge machine-knitting wool. Holding two strands at once, it gives a gauge similar to fingering weight yarn. For fingering weight wool, I always turn to my knitting inheritance, in this case, the 1947 Columbia Knitting Manual (a bargain at 75 cents!). The sock pattern below works for my 10 stitches/inch gauge on 000 needles. I'm knitting the top ribbing right now, and I hope inspiration will strike for an interesting twist-stitch pattern to spice up the rather plain ribs on the printed pattern.

Caesar Mountain, 1960, Boy and Dog

Here you see the Director of our Research Department, Automotive Division. He is collecting data on the patience of hound dogs, and the feasability of aluminum pots as headgear. Caesar Mountain, Spring, 1960.

Caesar Mountain, February, 1958

It's snowing again, and that made us think of this photograph, taken after a mid-February snowstorm in 1958. The location is Caesar Mountain, and the car is either a 1949 or 1950 Ford. (Our research department is working on a more exact identification.)

Update:The Research Department reports that the car in question was a 1949 Ford sedan.

Why Be Nice To Skiers?

Last week, the Pocahontas Times published a long letter to the editor sent by four young women skiers from Tennessee. They had experienced car trouble going up Droop Mountain, and wanted to thank all the people who helped them. It was thoughtful of them to write, and it is clear they found their rescuers charming. Here's an excerpt from the letter.

Dear Editor:

I am writing on behalf of my friends to thank some of the great townspeople of Hillsboro. Sunday, February 25, my friends and I were driving back from a ski weekend at Snowshoe....Our second rescuer arrived unexpectedly....G*.....was a mix of Grizzly Adams and Clint Eastwood (man of nature, rugged and salt of the Earth soul) and he had an automatic car jack. G* was such a good sport and even played along with my friend, Julie, as she interviewed and chronographed the entire event for her My Space page.

As G* was trying to jack up the car, his friend, C*, drove by and stopped to help. C*...reminded me a little of Santa Claus and Uncle Jesse from the Dukes of Hazzard with his white beard, warm heart, and problem solving intuition that assured you no matter what happened everything would work out in the end....I don't think anyone who ever finds themselves in a jam in Hillsboro will ever have anything to worry about. We would like to express our deepest gratitude and appreciation for all they did....

Although I used initials here, in the interest of anonymity, the letter writers used first names, allowing all of us to enjoy hearing G* compared to "Clint Eastwood and Grizzly Adams" and C* compared to "Santa Claus and Uncle Jesse." Would that be the Denver Pyle/Uncle Jesse, or the Willie Nelson/Uncle Jesse? I will be strongly tempted to ask C* the next time I see him. These young ladies have provided teasing fodder for a good while, and I know we all appreciate that.

Nevertheless, I consider the letter a mixed blessing. What about all the hard work we've gone to trying to scare skiers away? What about the primates who stayed up all night to throw rocks at Bigfoot researchers? What about the inbred hillbilly cannibals of the Greenbrier back country?. What about James Dickey?

Outsider Views of Appalachia

I found this article reprinted on the West Virginia Culture and History Web site. Appalachia's Civil War Genesis: Southwest Virginia as Depicted by Northern and European Writers, 1825-1865. by Kenneth Noe, in West Virginia History, Volume 50 (1991), pp. 91-108. It's posted in its entirety, and provides an interesting and balanced look at past and current ideas about the "nature of Appalachia and Appalachians."

A persistent theme among historians of the American South has been the disagreement between those who stress continuity and homogeneity and those who see discontinuity and diversity in the region's past. Historians of the Appalachian region are no exception. For nearly a hundred years, interpretations emphasizing stasis held sway. Scholars described the southern mountains as an area increasingly separated from a developing United States after 1800 by physical and cultural barriers. Isolated mountain settlers maintained pioneer ways at best, and retrograded into poverty, ignorance, and degradation at worst. Negative stereotypes abounded, but the portrait was not completely dark. One positive characteristic writers pointed to was the mountaineer's individualism and love of liberty, which translated during the antebellum and Civil War years into an abhorrence of slavery and loyalty to the union. These qualities were seen as setting the region off as distinct from the South.

Dissenters like John C. Campbell occasionally challenged part of the orthodoxy, but only since the late 1970s has an alternative interpretation found acceptance. Using the methods and concerns of the "new history," revisionists began to argue that discontinuity was the central theme of Appalachian history. Specifically, proponents maintained that two distinct periods could be discerned in the region's past, a "preindustrial" era dominated by yeoman farmers with agrarian, Jeffersonian values, and an "industrial" period where the hallmarks of wage labor and a loss of individual liberty shifted control of the mountaineer's life to hostile, outside interests. Revisionists claimed earlier historians and writers essentially blamed the victim by cataloging the results of unbridled capitalism -- poverty, ignorance, violence, pessimism -- and projecting them into the past as innate characteristics of the "peculiar" if not "inbred" mountaineer. On the contrary, revisionists believed antebellum Appalachia, of all American regions, came closest to exemplifying the Jeffersonian ideal....the roads negated the isolation created by rugged terrain. Ties to the South were close, and slavery occupied an important place in the mountain psyche despite the smaller percentage of slaves in the population. Few mountaineers advocated abolition and many fought for the Confederacy when the Civil War began.

Debian Fonts and Foxe's Book of Martyrs

A couple of weeks ago I dropped by a favorite Web site, and was redirected to it's updated version: Welcome to the second edition of Foxe's Book of Martyrs Variorum Edition Online (version 1.1 - summer 2006). I only have an abridged edition of Foxe here at the house, and it's not on the shelf at the Pocahontas County Free Libraries, so it's clear why I need the online edition. This new version of Foxe's Book of Martyrs uses Unicode character coding, and this was a problem for me. For some reason, the last few times I've installed the "Desktop" set of programs for Debian Stable (that's my current favorite Linux flavor), the defoma packages have failed to install. Everything still worked, but I wasn't seeing all the different fonts and non-Roman characters on the Web.

Not being able to display the second edition of Foxe's Book of Martyrs was the inconvenience that pushed me into fixing the font situation. It wasn't too difficult, and here are the references I used. Debian Font Configuration gave step-by-step directions which worked on the first try for me.

• Debian Font Configuration
• Fonts in the X Window System
• Unicode fonts and tools for X11

Spring Fever

I'm having spring fever symptoms--can't finish a blog entry, can't finish grading chemistry exams, can't focus on anything that needs to be done. Princess has the right idea here.

Swinging Bridge Across the Greenbrier

This bridge spanned the Greenbrier River at Denmar. The 1985 flood damaged the piers, which later fell over. The 1995 flood took out the cable anchors and anything that was left by that time.

Marlinton's Oldest House Discovered During Demolition

There was an interesting article in our local weekly newspaper, The Pocahontas Times March 1, 2007. During the demolition of an old Marlinton house, the workers discovered that part of the structure was built of logs. Local genealogy enthusiasts Sandy McLaughlin and Ginger Must researched and wrote a history of the structure. Because Pocahontas Times articles disappear into their unsearchable paid-subscription archives after a week, I'm posting some excerpts here, along with Drew Tanner's photo. This local history lesson is just too valuable to bury.

....Hidden for over a century, and currently being exposed is a hand-hewn pioneer log cabin built by "Squire" Hugh McGlaughlin....He was one of the early settlers of Marlin's Bottom. McGlaughlin built the cabin about 1850 and [it] is the oldest existing house in Marlinton.

Hugh was a timber cutter who in 1829 moved with his first wife Nancy Gwin from Bath County to Pocahontas County. They came with five children (William Jacob, John Calvin, George Henry, Elizabeth,and Margaret) and little else. Hugh was 28....The family first lived near Dunmore and then moved to the Huntersville area. In 1849 he purchased his first land in the Marlin's Bottom area and made another move. Over the next few years he acquired a total of about 1600 acres on the east side of the Greenbrier River, north of Knapps Creek. Hugh was called "squire" because he was a member of the Pocahontas County Court for a number of years.

Hugh died in 1870. Twenty years later, under pressure from developers, his son sold the family home and the family's land, now grown to 2000 acres, for the formation of a new town and county seat. The son, Andrew McLaughlin....relocated to Maxwelton. (The land was sold to John McGraw and John Marshall. Out of the total, 640 acres were transferred to the Pocahontas Development Company for the proposed town.)

You've driven by it a dozen times... a ramshackle old house full of porches and odd additions, one block north of the courthouse....For decades it was covered by tar paper siding that faded with the years. None of us knew at the heart of this rambling home was a pioneer cabin built in 1850....Hugh built the cabin on a well-traveled dirt road (now Route 39) that connected to the "Huntersville-Warm Springs Turnpike." Perpendicular to it - about twenty feet away - he added a second house, also prior to the Civil War....an 1854 reference in County Court records of Hugh getting a license to turn his home into a "house of private entertainment...."

Mary Davis wrote in a 1949 issue of The Pocahontas Times about the McLaughlin house "generally known as the first home in Marlinton...the building best known as the old McLaughlin Hotel was the Andrew McLaughlin home until 1890."

Troy Wilson - along with J.P. Duncan - is painstakingly disassembling the rambling, run-down home, and he noted that "All the nails used in this part [the second section] are square nails, which were only used before 1890." Wilson also said that the second section of the McGlaughlin home is constructed in the old fashioned, post-and-beam method.

"When we removed soffit and trim, we found one big main beam with holes notched along it. One-inch round wooden dowels were used to put in the posts," Wilson added with admiration. "I'd heard of this type of construction in old houses, but had not seen it til now."A third section was eventually built to connect the other two sections to each other. Wilson notes that older siding found on an inside wall of this part indicates it was added last.

Other artifacts Wilson found there are an old 1885 children's grammar book, some old lathe-and-plaster walls covered by newer sheetrock, and a board on the reverse of which is written "Buck Irvine, August 1961."

....Squire Hugh was the son of a Revolutionary War soldier. Moving to Pocahontas with Hugh in 1829 were his siblings Nancy, Jane, John and William. Already in Huntersville were their cousin Hugh and his father Irish John McLaughlin. Considering these three brothers and Hugh's five McLaughlin sons (by the two wives) plus the McLaughlins already in Huntersville - all here by 1849 when Harper was born....

Anitoxidants Can Kill (Maybe Not)

I've been extra-sensitive to the poor quality of science reporting on the TV news since I started preparing lectures for a statistics course. That's why I pricked up my ears when I heard a news reader announce that "vitamins can kill you." The same message turned up on many news programs I heard in the next few days. Taking vitamins, they said, won't help you live longer--in fact they can increase your "risk of death."

Now, I had always thought that everyone's risk of death was exactly 100% (excluding the possibility of the Rapture, surely a singular exception), so I was curious about an increase in it. Here's the abstract of the Journal of the American Medical Association article: Mortality in Randomized Trials of Antioxidant Supplements for Primary and Secondary Prevention: Systematic Review and Meta-analysis. (I'm quoting it below in case it goes behind a firewall someday.) It's a literature review with a statistical analysis of statistical analyses (meta-analysis). Apparently, many studies on antioxidants such as vitamins A and E, and beta-carotene show no positive effects on longevity, instead showing "increased mortality" during the trials.

The full text of the article is available only by paid subscription, so I didn't bother to follow up. The fact that the results are based on 68 trials with different methodologies, on five different compounds, on a variety of populations, tells me that the small increase for in-trial mortality may be an artifact. The real take-home message is that antioxidants aren't showing the promise that has been claimed for them.

So, antioxidants don't raise your chance of dying above 100%. They were associated with slightly increased in-trial mortality by 4%. I guess I should feel relieved.

Mortality in Randomized Trials of Antioxidant Supplements for Primary and Secondary Prevention: Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

Goran Bjelakovic, MD, DrMedSci; Dimitrinka Nikolova, MA; Lise Lotte Gluud, MD, DrMedSci; Rosa G. Simonetti, MD; Christian Gluud, MD, DrMedSci, JAMA. 2007;297:842-857.

Context. Antioxidant supplements are used for prevention of several diseases. Objective. To assess the effect of antioxidant supplements on mortality in randomized primary and secondary prevention trials.

Data Sources and Trial Selection. We searched electronic databases and bibliographies published by October 2005. All randomized trials involving adults comparing beta carotene, vitamin A, vitamin C (ascorbic acid), vitamin E, and selenium either singly or combined vs placebo or vs no intervention were included in our analysis. Randomization, blinding, and follow-up were considered markers of bias in the included trials. The effect of antioxidant supplements on all-cause mortality was analyzed with random-effects meta-analyses and reported as relative risk (RR) with 95% confidence intervals (CIs). Meta-regression was used to assess the effect of covariates across the trials.

Data Extraction. We included 68 randomized trials with 232 606 participants (385 publications).

Data Synthesis. When all low- and high-bias risk trials of antioxidant supplements were pooled together there was no significant effect on mortality (RR, 1.02; 95% CI, 0.98-1.06). Multivariate meta-regression analyses showed that low-bias risk trials (RR, 1.16; 95% CI, 1.05-1.29) and selenium (RR, 0.998; 95% CI, 0.997-0.9995) were significantly associated with mortality. In 47 low-bias trials with 180 938 participants, the antioxidant supplements significantly increased mortality (RR, 1.05; 95% CI, 1.02-1.08). In low-bias risk trials, after exclusion of selenium trials, beta carotene (RR, 1.07; 95% CI, 1.02-1.11), vitamin A (RR, 1.16; 95% CI, 1.10-1.24), and vitamin E (RR, 1.04; 95% CI, 1.01-1.07), singly or combined, significantly increased mortality. Vitamin C and selenium had no significant effect on mortality.

Conclusions. Treatment with beta carotene, vitamin A, and vitamin E may increase mortality. The potential roles of vitamin C and selenium on mortality need further study.

Skunk

In the interest of providing equal time for different points of view, here's the skunk. You saw the possum last week.

Silkscreening--Tutorial and Inspiration

You find fiber arts tutorials in the oddest places. This excellent tutorial, "How to Silkscreen Posters and Shirts" comes from No Media Kings, aka Jim Munroe, "a novelist who left HarperCollins to showcase and propagate indie press alternatives to Rupert Murdoch-style consolidation." He connects silkscreening to these topics thus:

Silkscreening is such a great happy medium--nestled comfortably half-way between hand-drawn and mass production, more colourful than photocopying and with an aesthetic all its own. Artist Shannon Gerard broke out her silkscreening gear to make cool shirts and posters for her upcoming comic launch, and despite being crazy busy has shared her skills in this funny and detailed tutorial

The comments section is also instructive--don't skip them. Silkscreening has been "on my list" of must-try activities for years. I hope this will push me into action this year.

Burdock

It's the bane of my wool-spinning existence, but burdock seed heads are really rather pretty when they're intact.

Studying Statistics with Internet Resources

I'm currently teaching a beginning statistics class, and I've collected these references. It's amazing how much high quality material is available for free on the Internet!

• HyperStat Online Statistics Textbook from Rice Virtual Lab in Statistics.
• Textbook Revolution: Taking the Bite out of Textbooks The free textbooks here are mostly science and engineering topics, but they welcome all sorts of texts.

  Textbook Revolution is the web's source for free educational materials. This is a student-run, volunteer-operated website started in response to the textbook industry's constant drive to maximize profits instead of educational value. TBR...offers one-stop shopping for students and teachers looking for free textbooks and related materials.

• Electronic Statistics Textbook.

  This Electronic Statistics Textbook offers training in the understanding and application of statistics. The material was developed at the StatSoft R&D department based on many years of teaching undergraduate and graduate statistics courses and covers a wide variety of applications, including laboratory research (biomedical, agricultural, etc.), business statistics and forecasting, social science statistics and survey research, data mining, engineering and quality control applications, and many others.

• Statistics Internet Library

  Free Internet Statistics Books From Quick Notes--Our Internet Statistics book is free for for students. Instructions for MiniTab, SPSS, and Stata Quest are provided. Excel Statistics Lab Manual is also free for students. Our Statistics Learning Center has material for students, teachers and professionals.

• The MacTutor History of Mathematics archive. A little off-topic, perhaps, but this is a fascinating resource.
• Programmers Need To Learn Statistics Or I Will Kill Them All. I don't usually approve of rants, but this made me laugh for a long time.
• University of Auckland's Internet Gateway Statistics from the library of the University of Auckland. This page contains links to online dictionaries and the like of potential use. See also databases; web resources; etc.

Recipes--Rasins and/or Jell-o

I've taken a lot of grief about my "Midwestern" cooking over the years, especially when I lived in New England, "Land of Hippie Neo-Puritans Who Would Sooner Die Than Eat Jell-o." These days, I probably cook "from scratch" more than most Americans, and we're fortunate to have local eggs, meat, and garden produce. There just aren't a lot of opportunities for us to eat away from home or buy processed grocery store dinners. That's why, if I want cake-mix cakes or Jell-o, by golly, I'm going to have them.

An important advantage to these packaged foods is the space they provide for printing recipes. Lately I've noticed the boxes often have URL's where you can find huge repositories of free recipes. Here are some recipe repositories I've visited recently.

• Jell-o Product Recipes. Interesting ways to combine and enhance packaged gelatin and pudding products. This is for you, food snobs!
• Sunmaid Recipes. Raisins, dried fruits, lots of tasty things. Often, more calorie-dense than the recipes above, but with more fiber.
• History of Raisins. Know your dried fruit.

Dr. Bootsie Learns Excel

I've recently started teaching a beginner's class in Excel spreadsheets. Because my data-handling days were spent in Unix-land, I'm not all that fluent myself, so it was fortuitous that The Stingy Scholar posted on Juiced Excel. The weblog Juice Analytics presents interesting things you can do with your data, and includes some useful worksheets for Excel learners. Here are some Excel tips and suggestions I enjoyed.

• Essential Excel Skills, or What is the Core Knowledge Pack for Data Analysts?
• Instant Shopping Lists, or How Excel Can Improve Your Marriage
• Excel Training Worksheet