History.com explains the phrase “…owes its origin to one legendary night of drunkenness.” The Marquis of Waterford led friends on a night of drinking in the English town of Melton Mowbray in 1837. There was a spree of vandalism, including painting a tollgate, the doors of several homes, and a swan statue red. Another theory about the origin is that it refers to men in the American West behaving badly as if the entire town is a red-light district. One final theory is that it came from the sight of a town being burned by angry Native Americans. I prefer the first theory.
Flood Insurance Needs Tough Love
I’m going to say something that may sound heartless – it’s time to stop insuring properties that repeatedly flood.
This morning I listened to a report on NPR from Marketplace. The Federal flood insurance program is $20 billion in debt and Congress must take up reauthorization next year. It’s time for a change.
A mere 0.6% of properties have received 10% of payouts. These are properties that flood repeatedly – one property had flooded – and received payment – 40 times. It’s insane to keep paying owners to build in high risk flood plains. And taxpayers must also cover the costs of emergency responders and infrastructure repair.
Now I’ll sound a little less callous. There is a proposal for the Federal government to simply buy an insured flooded property at its pre-flood value. Demolish structures, remove expensive utilities, and return it to whatever sort of landscape nature intended – this last bit is from me. This would save money in the long term and keep faith with owners whom we – the government speaks for us – lured into building in flood plains with below-market-priced insurance.
I propose the buy-out and get-out approach be extended to all Federal flood insurance, and I’d include wildfires – allow private insurance companies to charge whatever they want to re-insure properties that burn. I say this as a person and volunteer firefighter living on the edge of the Gila National Forest, in the wildland-urban interface (the WUI or woo-e as it’s called.) I could be one of those people forced out if a wildfire sweeps through my area – though I do practice Defensible Space.
I can hear my liberal friends saying what I propose would destroy neighborhoods – it would be cruel to allow circumstances to force people away from the homes they love. I can hear my right-wing friends, too – the government wants your land – they want to force everyone into high density cities. I hear these concerns and an honest debate can address them. Just keep in mind that at some point nature will win, and it will be better for everyone if we plan ahead of disaster.
As sea levels rise and droughts intensify, marginal locations become more dangerous. Here’s where I’ll claim some moral high ground. Artificially low insurance premiums lure people into harm’s way. Recovering from a flood is painful and stressful as well as expensive. And people die in floods and fires.
We need to find a decent way to back out of the problem we’ve created.
BTW – There’s a second meaning of Defensible Space that has more to do with urban neighborhoods. It’s interesting enough that I have to mention it, even though it’s off topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defensible_space_theory.
Atoms in the Family: My Life with Enrico Fermi
I obtained this book by Laura Fermi published in 1954 by my usual method of interlibrary loan. It is an excellent book that gives personal insights into Enrico and many other of the scientists involved in the Manhattan Project. This is an excellent companion to the book by Leona Woods reviewed last week, and readers shouldn’t become accustomed to having a review posted each week. I’m doing more writing than reading lately. Also, I once again am posting a summary of the book complete with page numbers for reference, which is how I usually save information to be used in my book about the history of the development of nuclear weapons and the Rocky Flats Plant.
The first sections of the book introduce Laura Capon and Enrico Fermi in Italy when they first became acquainted in Italy. It progresses to their wedding and the beginning of the troubles for Jews imposed by Mussolini (Il Duce). Laura was a non-practicing Jew, so she and the children were all at risk. She tells of how their lives became increasingly dangerous until the family left Italy by travelling to Sweden to accept Enrico’s Noble Prize and made it to the United States. The “becoming Americanized” is fascinating reading. Laura’s father, an Italian naval officer, was at first not concerned about the actions that Mussolini took in the early days. “Il Duce knows what he is doing. It is not for us to judge his actions.” 5-6
The book describes the childhoods and families of the Capons and the Fermis. As an example, a traumatic loss struck the Fermis when Giulio, the oldest son, died of complications from an abscess in the throat. (Laura and Enrico would name their son Giulio.) The family moved into a melancholy existence and Enrico filled his life with studying and outdoor activities. It wasn’t long before his teachers declared that he was “exceptional.” His academic achievements and early career are described. 15-32 Much of one chapter is devoted to his yellow Peugeot, which is described as having a top speed of 20 mph. The next chapter describes the Fermi’s early married years 33-68
Fermi began to achieve wide recognition for his brilliance and was named to the Royal Academy of Italy in 1929. Enrico and Laura spent two months of 1930 at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. They also spent some time in New York City, where Laura was astonished to note “…with a shock the existence of tattoos…on the bare arms of summer riders, in the most civilized city in the world.” (What would she think today?) They were often asked what they thought of Mussolini, which was “…indicative of the great interest fascism had aroused in the United States. Those were good times for fascism, which was looked upon with tolerance, often with sympathy, both inside Italy and abroad.” 73-81 Continue reading
Dead Heat
The two words together don’t seem intuitively to result in a meaning that an election or a race has resulted in a tie. Word Wizard says the expression was first used in horse racing. Dead “…means absolute…complete, from the idea of finality of death.” Heat can mean “…a single course or division of a race.” From the fourteenth century heat was taken to mean a “…a single intense effort or bout of action” and the “…single run of a race.” From that explanation, the two words together meaning that something resulted in a virtual tie makes more sense.
ACT Scores Are Even Worse
The posting last week mentioned that about two thirds of high school graduates are ready to succeed in college. An article in the Denver Post indicates that the most recent results show many fewer are ready for college. “In its annual score report…the testing company said only 38 percent of graduating seniors who took the exam hit the college-prepared benchmark in at least four core subjects tested—reading, English, math, and science. That compares with 40 percent last year.” The composite score also declined from 21 to 20.8 (on a scale of 1 to 36). Only 64% of the 2016 graduates took the test, and one would have to guess that the many if not most of the students who weren’t interested in taking the test wouldn’t have improved the results.
For some of the individual test results, 61 percent met the English benchmark, 44 percent reading, 41 percent math, and 36 percent science. The composite result is that 34 percent did not meet any of the four benchmarks. The comparisons by race have not shifted that much from previous years, but they are still depressing. Only 11 percent of African-Americans were able to hit the college-ready benchmarks in three or more of the subjects. There were 23 percent of Hispanic test-takers who achieved college-level in three or more compared to 49 percent of whites.
Should we consider the Chinese model where achievement is the basis for admission and promotion in education? Perhaps only students “graduating” from the eighth grade who test at a certain level should be promoted to high school while the others are given the opportunity to attend trade schools. (An educator friend says this is a really bad idea.) What we are doing now, which costs an enormous amount of money, doesn’t seem to be preparing children for a productive role in society. We are instead encouraging youngsters who aren’t prepared for college to incur enormous amounts of debt to enjoy the college experience.
The Uranium People
This autobiography by Leona (Woods) Marshall Libby is a valuable asset to anyone wanting to learn about the people involved in the Manhattan Project. Leona was the only woman present when Chicago Pile-1 sustained controlled nuclear reaction under the leadership of Enrico Fermi, who had become Leona’s friend. I obtained the book through my local library’s interlibrary loan process, which I recommend for books such as this one that was published in 1979. Leona’s book focuses on the achievements of the Manhattan Project and includes very little personal information. The book often meanders into stories of events involving Leona and other Manhattan Project scientists, but I thought those distractions from the main story were among the most interesting. The front and back covers of the book contain reproductions of the famous letter from Albert Einstein to F. D. Roosevelt outlining why the United States should speed up research on chain reactions and warning that Germany might have embarked on the same effort. I highly recommend this book, and will warn that I’m going to break from my tradition of trying to restrict this review to two pages. Besides, I haven’t posted a review in weeks, so I “owe” a very long review. I’ll let the reader decide how much they want. I often record page numbers for items from the book in what I call my “personal reviews”, and I’ll leave those in the event someone wants to look up the reference. I also left the sections I recorded in bold for my own reference on passages that I wanted to be certain to remember when writing my book about Rocky Flats.
Leona had done her doctoral work as a chemist in the University of Chicago physics department chaired by Nobel laureate Arthur Compton. Her doctoral professor was future Nobel laureate Robert Milliken. She joined the Metallurgical Laboratory in August 1942. She describes details of her work where she was the only woman participating in activating “Fermi’s Pile.” She also was involved in at Argonne, Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, and Lawrence Livermore Laboratories. Her primary role in the operation of the first nuclear reactor was to build boron trifluoride counters to detect neutron flux. 118 She frequently expresses pride in her soldering skills in making the detectors in her autobiography. She was obviously disappointed that, “Laura Fermi, who kindly was going to read the book before its publication, died suddenly December 26, 1977.” Ix-x
There are many stories about Leona’s numerous interactions with Enrico and Laura Fermi. She was clearly an admirer. Chapter 1 begins with the sentence, “Perhaps the most influential person in my life was Enrico Fermi.” She then lists all of his positive attributes and adds, “He managed all of this…without pomposity.” She said even “…he was amazed when he thought how modest he was.” I was also impressed that she said Fermi was influenced by the deterioration of relations between the U.S., Soviet Union, and China and the Soviet detonation of a deliverable hydrogen bomb to lay “…in a store of canned goods and water in his basement.” 1-9 I intend to leave most discussions of how Enrico and his family made it to the United States to escape the Fascism that threatened Laura and their children to a review in another book “Atoms in the Family” authored by Laura Fermi. Continue reading