The end of the penny

Last Friday, the one-cent coin, better known as the penny, met its end. After 232 years of production, the final penny coins were struck at the US Mint in Philadelphia.

In its prime, the penny wielded outsize influence: Tossed into fountains, it could answer unrealized wishes. A penny saved was a penny earned; it was pinched, pressed into loafers and placed on graves as a way of honoring the dead. Offered for one’s thoughts, it could elicit two cents, doubling its return.

Caroline Turco, assistant curator of the American Numismatic Association’s Money Museum in Colorado Springs, Colorado, said that whenever she spies a penny on the street, she still thinks of the rhyme, “Find a penny, pick it up, all day long you’ll have good luck.”

So mighty was the penny’s sway that legions of sales pitches would rely on marketing psychology built upon its mere absence. Why shell out 10 dollars when you can pay $9.99?

The penny had remade itself multiple times over the years, succeeding a one-cent predecessor authorized by the Continental Congress in 1787 and designed by Benjamin Franklin until the mint's creation in 1792. Made of pure copper, it featured a woman with flowing hair, symbolizing liberty.

Its name reflected the country’s colonial roots, a derivation of the British word “pence,” which the American founding fathers disposed of along with the English monarchy. 

The one-cent coin is the oldest coin minted in the United States, having been in circulation since 1793.  But they've increasingly become worthless over time. Nowadays, you can't buy anything with less than a heavy sackful of them, and if you show up at McDonalds with said sackful to pay for your Big Mac you're likely to be kicked out of the restaurant. Given that fact, as well as it cost almost four cents to mint each one-cent coin, it was well past time for its demise.

This isn't to say I don't understand the nostalgia involved; I'm old enough to remember penny gumball machines, which is to say I'm pretty old. But I can't say I've had any use for the coin since my childhood. For as long as I can remember, any pennies I've come across during the course of the day - received as change, or found lying about - would end up in a big jar that would later be dumped into the Coinstar machine at the local grocery store. These days, I hardly come across pennies at all, simply because I rarely engage in cash transactions anymore. A friend of mine said on Facebook better than I could: "bye bye, coin I have not used in decades."

The penny is not going to disappear - there are still something like 300 billion of them currently in circulation. The problem is, most of them are in coin jars, under couch cushions, or in your car's cupholder - not in your local retailer's cash register, which is where they need to be. One-cent coins, in fact, continued to be manufactured for as long as they did because of what The Atlantic's Caity Weaver calls the "Perpetual Penny Paradox:"

Most pennies produced by the U.S. Mint are given out as change but never spent; this creates an incessant demand for new pennies to replace them, so that cash transactions that necessitate pennies (i.e., any concluding with a sum whose final digit is 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8 or 9) can be settled. Because these replacement pennies will themselves not be spent, they will need to be replaced with new pennies that will also not be spent, and so will have to be replaced with new pennies that will not be spent, which will have to be replaced by new pennies (that will not be spent, and so will have to be replaced). In other words, we keep minting pennies because no one uses the pennies we mint.

It wouldn't surprise me if, over the course of a given year, millions of dollars worth of pennies are cumulatively thrown in the trash by people who simply don't want to deal with them. Which, if true, is just another reason to stop producing them. 

Kuff has more, as does the NPR's L. Carol Ritchie. 

Half a cookie

Walking around the bakery at my local H-E-B, I noticed these delicious-looking oatmeal raisin walnut cookies:

I love oatmeal raisin cookies, and at 150 calories per serving, these didn't seem too fattening. Should I buy them?

Then I took a closer look at the serving size:

Seriously? Who only eats half a cookie at a time?

Weak, H-E-B. Very weak.

On coffee

The Atlantic's Ellen Cushing explains why, in spite of its ever-increasing cost and the availability of any number of caffeine-delivering alternatives, coffee is "the drink that Americans won't give up without a fight:"

Coffee is fixed in our culture, our economy, our rituals, and our brain chemistry. It is the country’s most consumed beverage aside from water, and its psychoactive ingredient, caffeine, is by far the most popular drug on Earth. On any given day, an American is likelier to drink coffee than they are to exercise, pray, or read for pleasure. The U.S. has more Starbucks locations than public libraries. Coffee gave us the Enlightenment, and insurance, and the most puissant bop of summer 2024. It is so crucial to the machinery of capitalism that many employers give it away, like pens or any other essential office supply. It is the only consumable I can think of that people regularly joke about dying without (which is funny because, again, it provides nothing our bodies actually need to live). It is the thing in a big carafe at every meeting, and on the menu at nearly every restaurant, and built into our language as a widely understood shorthand for “having a conversation with another person.”

Due to a variety of factors - chief among them, the Trump administration's tariffs on coffee-producing countries such as Brazil and Vietnam - American coffee drinkers are paying about 40 percent more for their cup of joe than they were a year ago. Congress recently introduced a bill to exempt coffee from Trump's tariffs, but it remains to be seen if it will go anywhere, even if and when the current government shutdown ends. 

It is also a fascinating symbol of the interdependence, and the limitations, of an internationalized food system and the free-trading global order. “Coffee is a good way to think about how the world works,” the author and food historian Augustine Sedgewick told me when I called him to chat about it. Aside from on a few comparatively tiny farms in Hawaii, California, and Puerto Rico, coffee doesn’t grow in the United States: We cannot make the drink that we cannot live without. And though we expect coffee to be cheaply and abundantly available, its production is tremendously costly and difficult, even before tariffs.

Coffee is a strange crop because it only grows in particular altitudes and soils, and is rather complicated to procure and prepare. Its harvesting, cleaning and roasting requires a great deal of manual labor - and that all happens before the barista grinds the beans and makes your latte. Honestly, it seems weird that we drink it at all. 

Yet we can't seem to live without it, and we intimately feel the pain when we have to pay more for it.

The Great College Crunch

Get ready to see a lot of colleges close their doors in the coming years:

A dwindling number of prospective students will drive as many as 370 private colleges in the US to shutter or merge with another institution in the next decade, according to a major higher-education consulting firm. 

Huron Consulting Group’s prediction is more than triple the total amount of private, nonprofit two- and four-year college closures that the National Center for Education Statistics calculated in the 10 years leading up to 2020.

The shrinking supply of students stems from a falling national birth rate that started in 2007 and hasn’t recovered. The Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education estimates that the graduating class of 2041 will be about 13% smaller than the 2025 cohort. 

“Essentially the problem is we have too many seats in too many classrooms and not enough prospective students to fill them,” said Peter Stokes, a managing director at Huron. “Over the next decade, we’re going through a very painful but necessary re-balancing in supply and demand.” 

Since March 2020, at least 83 public or nonprofit colleges have either closed or merged, or have announced plans to do so. A lot of these are smaller religiously-affiliated colleges with enrollments in the hundreds. Some were founded as recently as the 1990s; others, such as Limestone College in South Carolina- my cousin's alma mater - were established back in the mid-1800s. Earlier today, in fact, two universities in North Carolina - Elon University and Queens University - announced their merger. 

As noted in the quote text above, birthrates in the United States peaked in 2007 and have steadily declined since. There are many reasons for this, but the end result is that fewer babies today means fewer college students tomorrow. 

There's an enormous crisis looming for US colleges. pic.twitter.com/xAB7XtyPug

— Hunter📈🌈📊 (@StatisticUrban) September 2, 2025

This decline in native-born enrollment will, furthermore, be accompanied by a decline in international enrollment. The current administration's growing restrictions on international students are already making American schools less attractive (and in many cases completely off limits) to college students abroad. Even if they are reversed by a future administration, they will nevertheless create a chilling effect on international enrollment that may well be permanent. 

Stokes said that schools need to come up with an early game plan to meet enrollment challenges. Colleges can consider diversifying their student populations by growing graduate, professional and part-time programs, for example. 

“If you aren’t thinking five years ahead, you’re at a significant disadvantage,” he said. “If you only have three years of runway, your chances of survival are less than 50%. If you call us when you’ve got nine months of cash, you’re dead in the water and it’s too late.” 

Some schools think that they can attract more students, especially young men, by adding sports programs:

Roanoke is one of about a dozen schools that have added football programs in the last two years, with several more set to do so in 2026. Administrators hope that having a team will increase enrollment, especially of men, whose ranks in college have been falling.

Yet research consistently finds that while enrollment may spike initially, adding football does not produce long-term enrollment gains.

Roanoke's president, Frank Shushok Jr., nonetheless believes that bringing back football — and the various spirit-raising activities that go with it — will attract more students, especially male students.

The small liberal arts college lost nearly 300 students between 2019 and 2022. And things were likely to get worse; the country's population of 18-year-olds is about to decline and colleges everywhere are competing for students from a smaller pool. 

"Do I think adding sports strategically is helping the college maintain its enrollment base? It absolutely has for us," said Shushok.  "And it has in a time when men in particular aren't going to college."

I'm a bit skeptical of this strategy. A lot of those 83 schools I mentioned did have athletics programs, even if at the Division III or NAIA level. Birmingham-Southern University's baseball team famously played in the Division III College World Series after their school had officially shut down. 

A 2024 University of Georgia study examined the effects of adding football on a school's enrollment. It found modest early enrollment spikes compared with comparable colleges that didn't.

"What you see is basically a one-year spike in male enrollment around guys who come to that school to help be part of starting up a team," said Welch Suggs, an associate professor there and the study's lead author. "But then that effect fades out over the next couple of years."

After two years, the researchers found "statistically indistinguishable" differences.

I don't think there's any easy fix to the problem that the nation's colleges and universities are facing because the demographic trends behind it are probably permanent. Administrators simply need to maintain their focus on providing a quality experience (e.g. safe campus, knowledgable faculty, marketable degrees) to their students, ensure that their schools' financials are sound, and accept that not every school is going to make it.

Conspiracy theorists upset that serial killer doesn't exist

Even though I don't live in Austin, I'm in regular contact with a large number of people who do. So I'm surprised I hadn't heard about the "Rainy Street Ripper" before I read this article:

After years of speculation and international headlines, a new study by Texas State University criminologists and the Austin Police Department has concluded the “Rainey Street Ripper” — a purported serial killer targeting Austin men on the edges of Lady Bird Lake — isn’t real.

Since 2018, at least 21 bodies have been pulled from Lady Bird Lake, which was still known as "Town Lake" when I lived in Austin and is basically a wide part of the Colorado River near downtown. A certain segment of the population believes these drownings are the result of a serial killer; naturally, they've used social media to express and promote this supposition.

Despite the spread of the theory online, Austin police have for years remained consistent that there was no evidence of a serial killer. Now, Texas State’s study has concluded the same — that there is “neither direct evidence nor indirect warning signs of a serial murderer.” 

Texas State’s Center for Geospatial Intelligence and Investigation analyzed 189 drowning cases from 2004 to 2025, and the report found they match historical patterns and the average risk of drowning in a growing city the size of Austin.

“The theory that a serial killer is drowning men from Austin’s Rainey Street District has been advanced by social and mainstream media for over two years now,” the study’s authors wrote. “Much of this coverage has criticized the failure of authorities to recognize the threat of a violent offender. But while police must properly respond to the risk of a predator, it is also important they not waste limited resources pursuing a criminal who does not exist.”

To nobody's surprise, Rainy Street Ripper true believers weren't having it:

In the comments section for the Statesman’s story on Instagram, dozens of people remained unconvinced. In fact, the majority of the nearly 100 comments expressed an unwillingness to believe the new study — and a reassertion of the conspiracy that police might themselves be involved.

“That’s because it’s a cop,” wrote @lamandamb. In just five hours, more than 200 people had liked her comment.

“We have investigated ourselves and determined we’ve done nothing wrong,” wrote @3lucyd. 

“That’s because the call is coming from inside the house,” wrote @justbaugh. 

On X, @BaronVnOttomatc wrote, “Of course, that’s what they want you to believe.”

Others wrote “Sure, Jan…” or posted the meme from “The Brady Bunch.”

In KXAN’s Instagram comments, the tone was much the same.

“I’m not saying this doesn’t make sense, but I am saying that throughout history, police and city officials have deliberately lied about a serial killer in order to not cause a panic,” wrote @mr.silveira98.

“I’m not buying what you’re sellin sir,” wrote @csnively. Others referenced the show “Dexter,” the series about a blood splatter expert who solves murders — and also commits them.

These commenters didn't just direct their ire at the Austin Police Department; they also accused the Texas State researchers of a cover-up or, worse yet, being in on the murders:

As @JeffOnVacation wrote on Blue Sky, “So, the ‘Rainey Street Ripper’ works at Texas State.” That same sentiment was shared by @wise_sarcasm on Threads, who wrote, “Murderer must have just started classes at Texas state this fall.”

It's impossible to know how many of these comments were made by Rainy Street Ripper true believers and how many came from trolls and bots; in fact, I'm not sure it even matters. It's just more evidence of the jaw-droppingly stupid era we currently live in, where mistrust in institutions such as law enforcement and academia is at an all-time low, and misinformation and public anxiety can be effortlessly spread by social media. It also doesn't help that tabloids and propaganda networks help spread this nonsense:

The authors also noted that news reporting on the story, particularly by Fox News and The Daily Mail, had been both sensational and reliant upon “the opinions of unqualified experts and others who ignored due diligence,” with too little attention paid “to the dangers of revictimization of family members” of the people killed in the drownings.

“These fabrications have costs in the real world, wasting valuable resources that could be deployed to help solve actual crimes,” said the study. “To provide perspective, the cost of a serial murder investigation is typically in the tens of millions of dollars. Currently, Texas has 23,000 cold case homicides — actual crimes that have not been solved.”

The cost of this conspiracy theory isn't only in the law enforcement resources being dedicated to investigate it; it's also the very real possibility that a Rainy Street Ripper true believer might decide to become a vigilante, harassing anybody around Lady Bird Lake they think might be the murderer (and potentially causing violence, à la the Comet Ping Pong shooter, in the process) or, worse yet, that a lonely, mentally disturbed person sitting in their apartment might consume this bullshit and be inspired to become the Rainy Street Ripper themselves.

But none of these potential consequences matter to conspiracy theorists; they cling to their delusions because they think it's what makes them different than the rest of us "sheeple." Which is why the Rainy Street Ripper will continue to be invoked every time some dumbass gets drunk on Sixth Street, decides to go for a swim in the wee hours of the morning, and drowns.

A suggested corporate resolution for 2025

 Shamelessly stolen from a friend’s Facebook page:

Seriously: it’s annoying, over-hyped and it doesn’t work right. So stop cramming it down our throats.

I'm especially looking at you, Google.

Bluesky

I've joined the migration! I'm @indotav.bsky.social on that platform, in case anybody is interested. When I do post (and re-post) there, it will mostly be about transportation, urbanism, politics and sports (kinda like here). I'll post links there to articles I've written here as well.

In the month-and-a-half I've been on Bluesky, I've already gained more (actual) followers than I ever accumulated on Twitter (I will never refer to it as "X"). The conversations in the comments are much less noxious (i.e., no "blue check" trolls spewing hate and misinformation), and I've yet to be followed by a single porn bot. It really is a breath of fresh air when compared to Twitter's increasingly-toxic ecosystem, and I'm not enriching Elon fucking Musk every time I use it, either.

I'm not leaving Twitter yet - there are still a lot of people and entities I follow there that have not made the jump to Bluesky yet - but as the platform continues to gain members I'm hoping that in the coming months I can make the switch entirely.

An unsettling thought

Though now mostly forgotten, Nazi Germany's U-boat campaign targeting the United States and its allies in the early days of World War II was Pearl Harbor-level catastrophe. U-boats operated along the Atlantic Coast, in the Caribbean and in the Gulf of Mexico and torpedoed freighters, tankers and transports with impunity. Between January and August of 1942, when the Allies were finally able to deploy effective countermeasures, the Nazis were able to sink 609 ships, destroy millions of tons of vital shipping, and claim the lives of thousands of sailors, both military and civilian. The operation also caused Mexico to enter the war on the side of the Allies.

This chron.com article about the now-almost-forgotten campaign and Galveston's role in defense against it contained this tidbit:

Rumors flew wildly, of secret German submarine bases in Mexico and crewmen coming ashore to go shopping or to the movies in Houston or New Orleans.

Which got me to thinking: if we had the same vectors of misinformation and conspiracy theories in the early 1940s as we do today - namely, social media - would the United States even had won World War II? One can only imagine the discord, disunity and chaos that Imperial Japan or Nazi Germany would have been able to sow had such technologies existed at the time.

It's unsettling to think about, especially since entities that wish to do harm to the United States are employing these exact practices today. 

Opponents of science aren't as smart as they think they are

Probably one of the least surprising studies ever:

People with the greatest opposition to the scientific consensus tend to have the lowest levels of objective science knowledge but the highest levels of self-rated knowledge, according to new research published in Science Advances. The findings are in line with the Dunning-Kruger effect, a well-documented phenomenon in which people who are lacking in skills or knowledge tend to overestimate their abilities.

“I am interested in the public’s understanding of science because it is hugely important for societal and environmental wellbeing,” said study author Nick Light, an assistant professor of marketing at Portland State University. “When people act in ways that go against good science, people get sick, lose their homes, lose money, are displaced, or even die (as is the case with COVID, natural disasters, etc.). The better we can understand why people hold attitudes that run counter to scientific consensus, the better scientists or policymakers can design interventions to help people.”

Two initial studies tested almost 3,250 people on their support or opposition to scientific concepts such as climate change, vaccines, or evolution. They were then asked to self-evaluate their level of understanding of these topics. Finally, they were given a questionnaire to assess their actual scientific knowledge of the topics in question.

Light and his research team found that people who were more opposed to the scientific consensus on their given topic were more likely to claim to have a “thorough understanding” of it. But those who were more opposed to the scientific consensus tended to score worse on the test of objective science knowledge.

“Scientists are constantly debating the best ways to explain the world around us,” Light told PsyPost. “Sometimes, however, the evidence is so strong or consistent that most of them agree on something. That’s what we call scientific consensus. In this paper we find that the people who have attitudes that are more extremely against the scientific consensus think they know the most about the scientific issues, but actually know the least.”

The research team also conducted studies focused specifically on the COVID-19 vaccine: 

In a fourth study, which included 501 participants, the researchers examined whether knowledge overconfidence was related to the willingness to receive a COVID-19 vaccine. The study was conducted in July 2020, before a vaccine was publicly available. The participants were asked their willingness to receive a vaccination in the future and then rated their understanding of how a COVID-19 vaccine would work.

The participants then completed a 23-question test of scientific knowledge, which included six items about COVID-19, such as “True or false? COVID-19 is a kind of bacteria” and “True or false? COVID-19 can be transmitted through houseflies.”

Light and his colleagues found that participants who were more opposed to receiving a vaccine tended to report having a greater understanding of how a COVID-19 vaccine would work, but their general knowledge of science and COVID-19 tended to be worse.

Websites such as sorryantivaxxer.com and the r/HermanCainAward Subreddit are full of stories of people who felt they were smarter than the countless scientific and medical professionals who developed and promoted the COVID-19 vaccines and refused to "get jabbed." Their stories generally end with their death due to COVID-related complications. Were it not for their hubris, they might still be here today.

The study's authors note that "given that the most extreme opponents of the scientific consensus tend to be those who are most overconfident in their knowledge, fact-based educational interventions are less likely to be effective for this audience." This, in turn, has serious practical implications for scientists and policymakers alike, because it is difficult to overcome the Dunning-Kruger Effect with standard educational campaigns or appeals to reason. 

Which should come as no surprise to anyone who ever tried to argue about science with somebody on the internet.

Vladimir Putin is Adolf Hitler with nukes

I was working on a post about the 2022 Winter Olympics, complete with my latest diatribe on NBC's lousy coverage (which nobody seems to have watched anyway). I was also going to write a post about how College Football Playoff expansion is not happening anytime soon, and why that is not good for the sport. There are also other topics that I might normally be writing about right now, such as the postponement of the start of baseball season, or an interesting new airline service coming to Houston.

But after the events of the last week, I've lost interest in starting and/or completing those posts. They seem rather trivial. 

Make no mistake: with his messianic ambition for a new Russian empire and his paranoid disdain of the west, Vladimir Putin has brought the world closer to annihilation than it's been in decades.

A week ago, the Russian dictator invaded Ukraine with the goal of overthrowing that country's democratically-elected government and reclaiming it as a Soviet-era satellite state, if not annexing it entirely. His invasion of Ukraine was reckless and poorly-planned. The Ukrainians are fighting back. But sooner or later, Russia's strength in numbers is likely to overwhelm the Ukrainian defenders. Devastating urban warfare is already underway, as is a refugee crisis. 

Putin will not stop with Ukraine. In his quest to re-create the Russian empire, he will try to slice off some or all of Georgia, Armenia, Moldova, the former Soviet republics in central Asia. And at some point he will likely go after the Baltics: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania. All formerly part of the Soviet Union, and all current NATO members that the United States has an obligation to protect militarily. 

He may wait to bring the fight to NATO until after the 2024 presidential election (which he will try to influence in order to get his most valuable American asset, Donald Trump, elected to second term). But he is almost certainly going to do it, because of the Russian irredentist philosophy that drives him. He's willing to bet that we won't have the courage to come to Europe's defense because we don't want to start a nuclear conflict. In fact, he's already threatening Finland and Sweden against joining NATO.

Comparisons between Vladimir Putin and Adolf Hitler are apt. While Putin might not have the same lust for genocide that Hitler possessed - he hasn't singled out an entire people for extermination - he does have the same megalomanic territorial ambitions, and the same indifference to the amount of life lost to achieve it. He also has something that Hitler did not have: nuclear weapons. Do not think for a moment that he won't use them.

And that's the problem: if he threatens to "push the button" anytime the west tries to oppose his neo-imperialist ambitions, where does he stop? Where do we stop him? Do we risk a nuclear exchange in order to do so?

I grew up towards the end of the Cold War, where the threat of nuclear annihilation was distant but real. We might have thought that the threat of nuclear armageddon ended with the Soviet Union. Turns out, it was only taking a break.

This is likely going to be last post here at MGCR for awhile, if not forever. This is normally the time of year when I reduce activity on this blog anyway, but I'm seriously thinking about bringing this blog to a more-or-less permanent close. Posting about trivial shit that hardly anybody reads isn't a good use of my time, and given the events of the past week, I'm not sure how much time I have left as it is.

By the way, fuck Putin for destroying one of my favorite aircraft.

What's the big deal about hatch chiles?

The Chron's Abigail Rosenthal considers the much-hyped pepper:

There are a few particular agricultural seasons Texans always look forward to: pecan season, peach season, grapefruit season, and, of course, hatch chile season. 

And judging by H-E-B's display, hatch chile season is a marquee event.

Hatch chiles are specifically grown in the Hatch Valley in New Mexico—it's not really a hatch chile unless it was grown there, much like a sparkling wine isn't champagne unless it was produced in the Champagne province of France. Their season is relatively short too, only occurring in August and September each year.  

But some don't buy into the hype. One Chron editor, in particular, has said hatch chiles are basically just poblanos and not worth all the banners and specially made products. We collectively scoffed and shook our heads, tuning out this blasphemy.  

Every August, when I walk into an HEB, I am so inundated by hatch chile products that I feel I'm in a scene from Forrest Gump: “Well, let’s see... There’s hatch chile cheese, hatch chile chicken, hatch chile sausage, hatch chile chips, hatch chile shrimp, hatch chile pasta, hatch chile salsa, hatch chile bacon, hatch chile beer...” While I do enjoy some of the hatch chile products that appear in HEB during that month, it also strikes me as a bit over the top. Are these chiles really that special?

                                                                                                                 Fresh hatch chiles at Central Market on Westheimer

The hatch chile is simply a type of New Mexico Chile, which itself is a cultivar of Capiscum annuum. This species of chile pepper includes the anaheim, cayenne, jalapeño, poblano, and serrano. There are multiple types of New Mexico Chile, varying in size, color and amount of Scoville Heat Units they contain. As Rosenthal notes, the "hatch chile" is specific to chiles grown in the Hatch Valley, which is located along the Rio Grande north of Las Cruces. 

Perhaps that valley possesses a "terroir" - the amount of sun it gets, the composition of the soil there - that imbues a specific flavor to the hatch chile. I'm admittedly not a chile pepper connoisseur, so I may be missing out on the subtleties and nuances of the hatch that makes it so distinctive and deserving of the marketing hype bestowed upon it by HEB and other grocers.

Rosenthal put the hatch chile to a (taste) test, creating one salsa with it and and another salsa with its cousin, the poblano pepper:

The salsas had subtle differences, but among the Chron staff tasters, they were almost indiscernible (and in need of some jalapeños). Our social media editor Sarah Pearce summed it up best: "If I was given the salsas separately at a taco truck, I wouldn't be able to tell the difference."

The hatch chile salsa was a bit sweeter, brighter and had a little more zing, while the poblano salsa was earthier. Both were delicious, but our two blind taste testers couldn't correctly guess which salsa was made with hatch chiles. 

Rosenthal concludes that the poblano is a perfectly acceptable, year-round substitute for the hatch. Which is good, because it - and its hype - won't be back for another year.

No more Fucking in Austria

No, that doesn't mean that people in Vienna or Innsbruck can't have sex anymore. It means that a small village in the corner of Austria is changing its, eh, peculiar name:

Residents of an Austrian village will ring in the new year under a new name – Fugging – after ridicule and repeated theft of their signposts became too much to bear.

They finally grew weary of Fucking, its current name, which some experts say dates back to the 11th century.

Minutes from a municipal council meeting published on Thursday showed that the village of about 100 people will be named Fugging from 1 January 2021.

Located 260km (161 miles) west of Vienna, Fucking has in recent years become a popular stop-off point for tourists, particularly from English-speaking countries, who snap pictures of themselves by the signposts at the entrance and exit to the village and post them on social media.

Dozens of signposts have been stolen, forcing the local authorities to put up the sign at a 2m height and embed it in theft-resistant concrete when putting up replacements.

Finally, the villagers, known as Fuckingers, “had enough of visitors and their bad jokes”, wrote Austrian daily Die Prese.

Legend has it that the village, pronounced "foo-king," was founded in the sixth century by a Bavarian nobleman named Focko.

The village isn't too far north of Salzburg, and Corinne and I had always joked about visiting this village during one of our trips there just to say that we had "been to Fucking, Austria." But that's exactly the problem: too many English speakers were inundating the tiny village, taking pictures, stealing signs, and giggling about the town's name, even though it doesn't mean in German what it means in English.

Villagers had simply gotten tired of Fucking.

The end of the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico

The iconic radio telescope is no more:

On Monday night, the enormous instrument platform that hung over the Arecibo radio telescope's big dish collapsed due to the failure of the remaining cables supporting it. The risk of this sort of failure was the key motivation behind the National Science Foundation's recent decision to shut down the observatory, as the potential for collapse made any attempt to repair the battered scope too dangerous for the people who would do the repairs.

The Arecibo Radio Observatory was built in the jungles of Puerto Rico in 1963. It consisted of an aluminum dish 1,000 feet in diameter that reflected incoming radio signals to receivers hanging from a massive, 900-ton instrument package that was suspended almost 500 feet above it. The steel cable suspension system was supported by three reinforced concrete towers. When these cables failed and snapped, the instrument platform crashed into the dish below it, destroying the apparatus. The concrete support towers themselves were damaged, as well.

The NSF has released rather dramatic stationary and drone camera footage of last week's collapse:

Fortunately, nobody was injured by the collapse.

Just two weeks earlier, the NSF determined that the aging telescope was too dangerous to repair and would be decommissioned:

Since its commissioning in the 1960s, the observatory has played a role in many discoveries, primarily in the field of pulsars, a class of radio-emitting neutron stars. It has also been involved with SETI searches, and it transmitted an image to a star cluster under the assumption that any intelligent life there might be partaking in its own SETI program. But over the last 15 years or so the NSF, Arecibo's primary means of support, has cut its funding for the observatory, which has struggled to maintain full operations over this period.

But it wasn't money that eventually doomed Arecibo; instead, it was the instrument platform. In August of this year, one of the auxiliary cables that help support the platform snapped, creating a gash in the radio-reflective dish below. While plans were being made to replace that cable and repair the dish—replacement cables were already on order—one of the 7.5cm main cables on the same tower snapped on November 6.

An engineering analysis subsequently determined that this cable failure happened despite the fact that the strain on it was only about 60 percent of what should be its minimum breaking strength. This raised serious questions about the stability of the remaining cables, and thus the ability of the structure to support its instrument platform. The analysis concluded that it was unsafe to find out; the platform could collapse without warning, and any snapped cables would present a danger to any workers on the towers, as the large cables would move at very high speeds following a break. Of the three additional engineering firms consulted by NSF and the University of Central Florida, two agreed with this assessment.

"Until these assessments came in, our question was not if the observatory should be repaired but how," said the NSF's Ralph Gaume. "But in the end, a preponderance of data showed that we simply could not do this safely. And that is a line we cannot cross."

I'm thankful that I got to visit the Arecibo telescope during a trip to the Eastern Caribbean five years ago. It was definitely an impressive sight:

Kirby's grown a bit since this picture was taken.

The Arecibo facility will remain open, as a 12-meter radio dish, a lidar for atmospheric observations and the visitor's center were all undamaged by the collapse. But the prospects for a replacing the massive telescope itself are unclear:  

With repair no longer an option, the debate now turns to whether the radio telescope should be rebuilt. At the briefing, NSF’s Gaume said it was too soon to evaluate if the telescope will be rebuilt.

“With regards to replacement, NSF has a very well-defined process for funding and constructing large-scale infrastructure, including telescopes,” he said. “It’s a multi-year process that involves congressional appropriations and the assessment and needs of the scientific community. So, it’s very early for us to comment on the replacement.”

Adventures in vexillological illiteracy

This is facepalm-worthy:

A couple who came under attack for displaying the Norwegian flag outside their mid-Michigan inn because some observers mistook it for a Confederate flag have found another way to show their Scandinavian pride. 

Greg and Kjersten Offenbecker, who own The Nordic Pineapple in St. Johns, outside Lansing, took Norway's flag down last month after being accused of promoting racism, the Lansing State Journal reported.

Apparently, people were confused because both flags feature a blue cross on a red background. The two flags are otherwise completely different; one cross is diagonal while the other is orthogonal, and one has stars while the other does not:

                        
Flag of a failed, racist, treasonous cause* on the left; flag of a modern, successful OECD member and NATO ally on the right. Images: Wikipedia

The owners of the inn think they've found a workaround: they'll use a different style of the Norwegian flag that should reduce potential confusion:

They are replacing it with a vimple, a type of long, pennant-shaped flag that can be seen displaying various designs across Scandinavia. The Offenbecker’s vimple will have the colors of the Norwegian flag — a red background with a blue cross superimposed on a white cross — in a nod to Kjersten Offenbecker’s grandfather who was born in Norway.

These pennant-shaped flags are apparently very common in Norway, since the use of the official flag is highly regulated.

While the Offenbeckers' solution is actually rather ingenious, it's honestly not something that they should have been forced to do in the first place. While the public display of racist symbols such as the Confederate flag should obviously be challenged, that's not what was happening here. This family should not be accused of racism or be forced to modify the perfectly legitimate flag they fly on their property just because some people are too ignorant to tell the difference between two clearly dissimilar flags.

*This was never the official flag of the Confederacy, and I'll probably get criticized for even displaying it on my blog.

When local personal injury attorneys make ASMR videos

(If you don't understand why this is so funny, see this and this)

Defining a decade

Today is the last day of 2019, meaning that the argument we have every ten years is back again:

As January 1, 2020, approaches, everyone is reflecting about the past decade and the new one that awaits. "Best of the decade" lists are everywhere. #10YearChallenges are all over social media. And people are eagerly gearing up to celebrate the end of the 2010s. 

But there's a slight problem. 

We might be celebrating a year too early, at least according to some people. 

The question of when exactly the current decade ends and the new one begins seems to come up every time the year on the calendar moves from ending in 9 to ending in 0. It came up in 1989. And in 1999. Then again in 2009. And now. 

So is January 1, 2020, really the beginning of the decade? Or does it, in fact, begin a year later, on January 1, 2021?

From a mathematical standpoint, it is correct that the next decade does not begin until 2021. The Gregorian calendar does not have a "Year Zero." The Common Era (Anno Domini) begins with Year 1. Therefore, the first decade of the calendar runs from 1 CE through 10 CE, and all subsequent ten-year spans start with 1 and end with 0, as well.

That being said, from a cultural standpoint, we prefer to group decades by the tens digit, so that they start with 0 and end with 9. It's just easier to categorize years in this manner.

When we think of the 90s, we think of the period from 1990-1999. It just doesn't make sense that the year 1990 would be considered part of the 80s.

Plus, it's more satisfying to celebrate big occasions like the start of a new decade in an even-numbered year, a phenomenon that psychologists call "round number bias." Waiting until 2021 to celebrate the new decade would feel anticlimactic.

That's why Konstantin Bikos, lead editor of TimeandDate.com, says that both definitions of when the new decade begins are correct. No need to cancel your end-of-the-decade party. 

"There's two different ways of categorizing 10 years," he told CNN. "It could be from the year ending in 0 to the year ending in 9, or the year ending in 1 to the year ending in 0."

It comes down to how we talk about time spans. 

Bikos agrees that centuries and millennia always start with years ending in 1. Those time spans are typically referred to as numbered entities counted up from the year 1 AD, as in the "21st century" or the "third millennium." 

Decades are categorized by year numbers. Even though the 2020s will be the 203rd decade, no one ever calls it that. It's just called the 2020s, or the 20s.

Truth be told, this is all very arbitrary. A "decade" could be any ten consecutive orbits of the earth around the sun. 1995 through 2004 is a “decade." Our culture has simply selected years ending 0-9 to be grouped as a decade because it's easier to remember and talk about them that way.

So you will be mathematically correct if you wanted to celebrate the beginning of the 203rd decade, CE, on January 1, 2021. But the "twenties," as they will be known in popular culture, begin at midnight tonight.

Vox reviews the decade just past - what it calls the "tumultuous 2010s" - here.

The countercultural cartoons of Sesame Street

A few weeks ago, venerable children's television program Sesame Street turned 50 years old. And although we might not have realized it as children, there's an awful lot about that show that reflects the time period in which it was incubated in; namely, the drug-infused counterculture late '60s and early '70s. Mike McPadden, writing in the cannabis-oriented website Merry Jane, explains:

In 1969, society’s counterculture upheaval and a drive to expand cosmic consciousness resulted in the psychedelic convergence of Woodstock and the literally spaced-out giant leap of the moon landing. 

Less audacious, but perhaps even more revolutionary, another monumental undertaking from that year channeled the era’s turned-on vibes and anything-is-possible ambitions into an ongoing source of uplift, wisdom, and inspiration for young people and, as such, humanity’s future.  

On November 9, 1969, Sesame Street debuted on PBS. Yes, the show has been on the air for exactly half a century now!

To be technical, Sesame Street didn't even premier on PBS. It premiered on NET, which was PBS's predecessor. PBS itself came into existence one year later. The entire first episode is available here (spoiler alert: Oscar the Grouch was originally orangish-brown, not green).

Unlike previous children’s TV, Sesame Street showcased a diverse array of kids, adults and, of course, Muppets in funny, heartfelt, and believable situations. It also took place in an urban setting that reflected the communities of most of the show’s audience.  

In addition, fueled by the desire to educate and enlighten in the most effective way possible, Sesame Street tapped into 1969’s heady, funky, freewheeling zeitgeist. The show empowered cutting-edge artists, writers, and musicians to create its cartoons, short films, sketches, and sing-alongs. Awash over every element of Sesame Street, as well, were the intrinsic values of love, acceptance, kindness, and inclusion.  

All that’s to say, if Sesame Street’s creators weren’t potheads themselves — although just look at Muppet-master Jim Henson; how could he not have been? — the show positively incorporated the most inspired and inspirational aspects of late-60s drug culture. 

Sesame Street, in other words, happened because the hippies of the 60s got jobs in the entertainment industry and created countercultural and psychedelic imagery under the guise of "children's television." Looking back, it was pretty obvious: would any straight-laced, sober television producer of that era really envision a children's show with a puppet cast that featured a giant canary, an orange woolly mammoth only visible to said giant canary, a green monster living in a garbage can, a blue monster with an addiction problem, and an ambiguously gay couple? The cartoons and animations interspersed between the antics of said cast only further argue the point.

The Merry Jane list features "tripped-out moments that have delighted tokers and children alike" from the entire fifty-year span of Sesame Street and is worth a full perusal.  I've limited my own trippy favorites to the 1970s, when I watched the show as a small child and well before I understood Sesame Street's peace, love and drugs provenance.

E-Imagination: this cartoon appeared in the very first episode in 1969. The watercolor animation and sitar-inflected music are transparently psychedelic. Riding an eagle, following a beagle? Far out, man! Also, the Land of Steam sounds pretty cool.



Counting Raga: Speaking of tripped-out sitar chords, how about Ravi Shankar himself providing the music for this kaleidoscopic counting animation from 1971? This cartoon was likely the first exposure many young children had to the Indian aesthetic so beloved by hippie culture.

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Lost Boy Remembers His Way Home - This is what happens when a hallucination becomes a cartoon. One of the comments on this video's YouTube page says it all: "if you are a member of Generation X, your childhood entertainment was created by people who were tripping balls."



Daddy Dear - Every letter of the alphabet got its own animation on Sesame Street, and this ode to the letter "D" from 1972 is, well, delightfully druggy. Do dandelions roar? Well, maybe when you're on DMT!



Pinball Number Count - this series of cartoons (one for every number between two and twelve; all segments can be seen here) made its debut in the mid-70s; the tune, sung by the Pointers Sisters, is something any Gen-Xer living today can easily recite. As cool as the music was, the animation of a pinball rolling through a series of trippy landscapes was positively sublime. It's what happens when a pinball eats a mushroom and enters a multilevel, Alice-In-Wonderland pinball machine.




Geometry of Circles - Animated by Cathryn Aison and featuring music by composer Philip Glass, this engaging series of cartoons first appeared in 1979. The abstract, vivid mix of sound, color and geometry was as mesmerizing to elementary students getting ready for school as it was to college students coming down from an all-night LSD trip. This particular video stitches all four of the cartoons from the series into one.




New Ball in Town - This stop-motion animation of one ball trying to play with three others was supposed to teach kids the importance of inclusivity. While not as psychedelic as some of these other cartoons, the jarring red-and-purple patterns of the balls and the awesome riffs of the Moog synthesizer nevertheless produce an effect that may be especially pleasant if you're high.



The Yip Yips - While not an animation, these Martian Muppet characters were surely envisioned by Jim Henson when he was baked out of his gourd. Which is why their signature "yip yip yip yipyipyipyipyip uh-huh" dialogue is just as hilarious after a hit of the bong today as it was when you were four. When they weren't engaging in stoner antics like mistaking a clock for a human, the Yip Yips were also trying to communicate with telephones, searching for tunes on a 1930's era radio, trying to operate a fan, or visiting Ernie and Bert.

The best Saturday Night Live skits

The 45th season of Saturday Night Live starts this weekend (alas, it will not include Leslie Jones).

A few weeks ago stacker.com put up this slideshow (which was republished by the Houston Chronicle's website, because the dying newspaper relies on slideshows to inflate its pageview count) that lists fifty of the greatest Saturday Night Live skits in the 44-year history of the late-night comedy show. Stacker identifies these sketches as those "that have had the largest cultural comedic impact, those that bring humor to more serious social issues, and political satire at its finest. Added to that are skits that generated Emmy awards for the actors, and several funny pieces that have become a historic part of our social fabric."

To be fair, most of the "sketches" listed in this slideshow are actually recurring characters, but a lot of the classics are nevertheless acknowledged: the Coneheads, Gumby, Buckwheat, Wayne's World, the Church Lady, the Chippendales Audition, Schweddy Balls, Dick in A Box, More Cowbell, and, of course, Matt Foley.

But there are a handful of great SNL sketches missing from this list - wither Stuart Smalley's Affirmations or the Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer? - including several that I've always thought to be among SNL's best (a handful of these skits do appear on other greatest SNL skits lists). Here are some of my favorites:

White Like Me (1984): Eddie Murphy discovers what it is like to be white in this take on race relations that is just as hilarious - and, sadly, relevant - today as it was back in 1984.



President Reagan, Mastermind (1986): At the height of the Iran-Contra scandal, Phil Hartman plays a Ronald Reagan who knew a lot more than he led on to the public.



Happy Fun Ball (1991): This long list of dangerous side effects of an apparently innocuous toy is reminiscent of your standard pharmaceutical commercial listing the myriad side effects, which I guess is the point. As far as I we know, Happy Fun Ball is still legal in 16 states!



Schiller Visions: Hidden Camera Commercials (1991): What happens when you inform somebody that the coffee they've been drinking is made from freeze-dried crystals, rather than freshly ground, and record their reaction on hidden camera? Most people might be good-natured about it, but Chris Farley's character was not.



Wake Up and Smile (1995): The teleprompter malfunctions, and a pair of blow-dried morning talk show hosts quickly lose their bearings. This TV studio - meets - Lord of The Flies sketch is Will Farrell at his best.




Neurotology (2015): This pitch-perfect parody of a 1990 promotional video by a certain religious organization founded by a science fiction writer that shall not be named (I don't want to get sued) came out right after HBO aired a documentary about said religious organization.



Black Jeopardy with Tom Hanks (2016): This one is relatively recent, which is why it might not appear on many lists. As the 2016 presidential election tossed America's racial tensions into the foreground, a MAGA-hat-wearing blue collar white guy discovers that has a lot in common with black people. Maybe race doesn't divide us as much as economic status unites us.



What are some of your all-time favorite sketches from Saturday Night Live?

Half a century ago last Saturday

Yes, I posted this a decade ago. And no, it never gets old:

The joys of writing on a 30-year old computer

The Atlantic’s Ian Bogost contemplates computing from an earlier time:

Everything about this computer is loud: The groan of the power supply is loud. The hum of the cooling fan is loud. The whir of the hard disk is loud. The clack of the mechanical keyboard is loud. It’s so loud I can barely think, the kind of noise I usually associate with an airline cabin: whoom, whoom, whoom, whoom.

This is the experience a computer user would have had every time she booted up her Macintosh SE, a popular all-in-one computer sold by Apple from 1987 to 1990. By today’s standards the machine is a dinosaur. It boasts a nine-inch black-and-white display. Mine came with a hard disk that offers 20 megabytes of storage, but some lacked even that luxury. And the computer still would have cost a fortune: The version I have retailed for $3,900, or about $8,400 in 2019 dollars. 

That’s a lot of money. It’s one of the reasons why computers weren’t as universal three decades ago as they are today, especially at home. In 1984, when the Macintosh first appeared, about 8 percent of U.S. homes had a computer; five years later, when the computer I’m writing on was sold, that figure had risen to a whopping 15 percent. 

That made for a totally different relationship to the machine than we have today. Nobody used one every hour—many people wouldn’t boot them up for days at a time if the need didn’t arise. They were modest in power and application, clunking and grinding their way through family-budget spreadsheets, school papers, and games.

My family's first home computer was a Macintosh, which we acquired in the spring of 1985. The machine wasn't nearly as powerful as Bogost's SE: our Mac had 512k of RAM and no hard drive; everything was run from 3.5” floppy disks with 400k of storage. It was ridiculously primitive by today's standards, but its mouse-operated graphical user interface was an amazing upgrade from the Apple IIs we used at school. Friends and classmates alike would come over to my house just to marvel at the machine; we drew pictures with the MacPaint graphics software that came with the computer, played games, and drew primitive animations and created musical compositions with MacroMind's VideoWorks/MusicWorks suite. The word processing program, MacWrite, was originally only used by my father to write letters; eventually, I would start to use it to complete school assignments; which would be printed from a loud and bulky dot matrix printer.

There aren’t many programs worth running on this old machine, anyway. I installed Pyro, a popular screen saver of the era, and Klondike solitaire, as if I couldn’t distract myself with my iPhone instead. Even within the programs that made people spend money on computers, simplicity reigns. I’m writing in Microsoft Word 4.0, which was released for this platform in 1990. More sophisticated than MacWrite, Apple’s word processor, the program is still extremely basic—the only reason I chose Word was so I could open the file on my modern Mac to edit and file it. 

There’s not much to report; it’s a word processor. A window displays the text I am typing, whose fonts and paragraphs I can style in a manner that was still novel in the 1980s. Footnotes, tables, and graphics are possible, but all I really need to do is produce words in order, a cruel reality that has plagued writers for millennia. Any program of this era would have afforded me the important changes computers added: moving an insertion point with the mouse, and seeing the text on-screen in a manner reasonably commensurate with how it would appear in print or online. 

In fact, the only feature that’s missing, from a contemporary writer’s perspective, is the capacity to add hyperlinks. That idea had been around for a couple of decades by the time the Macintosh SE came out, but Tim Berners-Lee wouldn’t develop the first web browser until 1989, a year after this computer was manufactured and a year before this copy of Word was released. Of course, it doesn’t matter much, since I can’t go online with this machine (at least, not without adding a modem, and software that wouldn’t become available for another half decade or so).

Next to the overall lack of computing power compared to today's technology, the biggest difference between using a computer three decades ago and using a computer today is the lack of internet connectivity. It may have been possible to access some internet-related functions back in the 1980s, such as email, usenet groups or ftp sites, if one had the proper dial-up modem and provider; we certainly had no such connection. There was, therefore, no World Wide Web to browse, no messages to send and receive, no social media to obsessively check. The ubiquitous time suck that is today's internet connectivity - through our desktops, our laptops and our phones - simply did not exist. Quite frankly we were probably better of for it!

Even bracketing the welcome absence of the internet, with its hurtling notices and demands, the speed of this machine’s operation changes the tenor of my work. Computers used to be slow as hell. When I first got a 386 PC in the early 1990s, I would switch it on and leave the room for a while, so it could load the BIOS, then DOS, then Windows 3.1 atop it—hard disk grinding the whole time—until finally it was ready to respond to my keystrokes and mouse clicks. 

The Macintosh SE I’m writing on now boots much faster than Windows ever did, but everything here is slow too. When I open a folder, the file icons all take shape like a color squad entering formation. Loading a program like Word issues a long pause, giving me enough time to view and read the splash screen—a lost software art that provided entertainment as much as feedback. Saving a file grinds the hard disk for noticeable moments, stopping me in my tracks while the cute watch icon spins.

Honestly, I had all but forgotten about the sound of the floppy disks grinding in their drives while I opened or saved a file until I read this passage. It was an omnipresent noise: the lack of available RAM mean that whatever program I was using oftentimes had to pause while it read operating instructions off the floppy disk. Using a computer definitely a more time-consuming undertaking back then, but I doubt I even noticed. Today's computing speeds were unthinkable back then, and the slower boot-ups and the constant grinding of the disks were just part of the experience.

The high-tech industry would characterize that act as an inconvenience, probably, imposed by the primitive technology of the past. Inevitably, in the hands of engineers and investors, the machines were bound to become faster, more powerful, more influential, more ubiquitous. And indeed they did, and now they are everywhere. My laptop is always on; my tablet is ever at the ready; my smartphone is literally in my actual hand except when I’m sleeping, if indeed I ever sleep instead of staring at it.

As I flick off the power switch on the back of the Macintosh, the whine retreats in a gentle diminuendo, until it finally gives way to silence. I have accomplished a feat that is no longer possible: My computing session has ended.