The Manlius Formation

Thomas lost his first tooth today. He was very excited. He even called me at work to tell me.

A quick update on the garden as we approach the heart of summer:

Spinach: All the spinach I planted in the spring has finally bolted, so I pulled it. I planted more, but the pole beans are growing slower than expected, so I don’t think the new plantings will have enough shade. Spinach likes to bolt early when it’s warm. Time will tell.

Radishes: We had such a glut of radishes that what remained was giant and woody. I pulled those (and added them to the compost pile) and now have a free spot in the garden. I’ll probably let the squash migrate into that plot.

Tomatoes and Cukes: Going crazy. I have a few small, green tomatoes. No cuke flowers yet.

Beets: We have already had a few sidedishes of beet greens, and we recently began to harvest the roots. Beets are INCREDIBLY easy to grow. And I’m quite partial to sliced beets.^[1]

Corn: Going strong. About 2.5-3 feet tall.

Carrots: Also doing really well. I snuck one to munch on earlier this week. Nice and sweet, but they’ve got a little more growing to do.

The aforementioned Pole Beans: Coming along slowly. We’ve had very wet, cool weather. I wonder if that’s affecting them. The Cornell Cooperative Extension says that bloom time is mid to late summer, so I’m not too worried yet. On the plus side, they’re starting to climb the tent.

That’s all for now.

1. Kathleen’s recipe: a dressing of apple cider vinegar, olive oil, salt, and a pinch of sugar; a little mustard powder keeps it nicely emulsified. I added some sliced onions to a smelly - but tasty - effect. [back]

Haven’t read the Declaration of Independence recently? It’s worth a look. Reading it this year strikes a special chord given the absolutely shameful state of affairs in the New York state senate.

The first six grievances listed in the Declaration deal directly with the fact that there is someone (King George) standing in the way of our legislative bodies to govern. Now we’re standing in our own way.

Our forebears made immeasurable sacrifices to secure the ability of the states to govern themselves. If they saw the goings-on in the NY state senate today I’m not so sure they’d think their sacrifices were worth it.

During the not-short drive home from the North Bay tri Dan remarked that he wanted to work on his swimming so he could improve his swim time. I’ve known from doing tri’s for a few years that it’s better to spend training time improving the run or the bike, but I wanted to do some math to show why. As I often do, I started with the complicated approach and then got more simple.

I wanted to see if an athlete’s swim, bike, or run place could be used as a predictor for his/her overall finish place. In other words: If an athlete comes out of the water in Xth place and finishes in Yth place, how close are X and Y?

Here’s what the data looks like for the North Bay results:

This is a plot of each athlete’s actual swim, bike, and run ranking (the vertical axis) vs. his/her actual finish place. As an example, the lowest reddish box off by itself near the lower left is an athlete who had the third-fastest swim time, but who finished 33rd overall. As such, her swim finish was not a good indicator of her overall finish place. ^[1]

Note that in the middle of the pack there appears to be more scatter for the swim results than for the run and bike. The run and bike seem to follow a similar trend to each other.

I only had 115 points from this small race so I wanted to look at a bigger race. I had the results from the Tupper Lake Tinman 2007 handy, so I looked at that data:

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1. Incidentally, she had the 39th fastest bike time and the 57th fastest run. The bike was a much better predictor of her final position, with the run a little poorer as a predictor. [back]

During my recent trip north I learned a little about Canada Day, which is being celebrated today. I’m embarrassed to say that I didn’t know much about the history of Canada’s origins, but thanks to an article in the paper at the hotel, I learned a little something.

Way back in 1867, the British Parliament passed the British North America Act, which organized the four original provinces into a confederation. This was done mainly to counter the Manifest Destiny practiced by the rabble-rousers to their south.

Over the years, various other acts were passed, granting more and more power to the Canadian parliament, until the 1982 passing of the Canada Act. The Canada Act finally granted Canada full control over its constitution, although Queen Elizabeth II remains the Queen of Canada, and Canada remains part of the commonwealth of nations (UK, Australia, Jamaica, etc) who share the Queen as Head of State.

So on this grand day, I say thank you to the nation that gave us the Ski-Doo (so-named thanks to a typo of the name “Ski-Dog”), the green plastic garbage bag, and Alex Trebek.