Sheering time: Let's go hyper-local Arizona

Original post from 2010. The 2026 update follows below. 

It's that time of year again. In September, Navajo sheep herders will start coming down from the mountains north of Valley of the Sun. No doubt they're psychologically well-prepared for news of the big city:

• a broken dam due to burst bladders at Tempe Town Lake;
• $1,000,000 price on the head of Maricopa County's Sheriff Joe by the usual Mexican cartels/drug lords;
• the ever popular (no, not really, except to me and Sheriff Joe Arpaio!) AZ Senate Bill 1070 also known as Arizona Immigration Reform.

To commemorate sheep-shearing season, I have an extravaganza of gentle sheepy imagery, from a variety of sources. Well, I admit, from two sources: a Zazzle merchant and Amazon.com. The images are so nice, I thought you might enjoy looking at them too. Hmmm... I need to find a better illustration source than re-purposed advertisement images. Until such time arrives, well, if you'd be so kind and not breathe a word of this.

Cute sheep sticker

Consider this a follow-up to my earlier post about the floatingsheep blog.

Coda and update

I was young and foolish in 2010. Those Amazon links broke long ago! Today is July 9, 2026. I shall replace the Amazon ads with the delightful ruminant-themed activity of Matthew Zook. He's webmaster of the floatingsheep blog. 

Professor Zook held a class competition for Best Map featuring sheep in New York City. Very challenging, as there probably weren't any sheep, not even in Sheepshead Bay, in 2010. (Maybe a few can still be found in the most remote and exotic of New York City's five boroughs: Staten Island.)

The contest winner was Team Mutton, for their work, "Sheep of Dreams", depicting:

... the locations of seven deadly plagues affecting sheep according to an ancient prophecy. The map uses kernel density estimation, a type of spatial analysis, to show where high densities of each plague occurred in the past. These indicate the most dangerous areas for sheep! They must try to avoid them in order to survive the same plagues, as foretold, prior to the second appearance of The MUTTON.

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (their motto is "Know the World, Show the Way, From Seabed to Space") could probably keep Professor Zook and his students occupied with many exciting GIS projects.

Vibe coding an IQ test using GPT5

The purpose of IQ tests is to measure cognitive ability NOT knowledge per se. Education should not be about memorizing test answers (even though it often is). The idea of IQ test prep is even worse, as it defeats the entire purpose of psychometrics; yet evidence of efforts to increase one's IQ are everywhere  online. Sometimes, it is unclear whether the goal is increasing intelligence, or just getting better IQ test results! 

After a brief peek into this world, I found myself taking a timed online IQ test developed by GPT5.

reddit brain training

reddit offers multiple subreddits for users who are intent on increasing their IQs. First, I read this morose post in r/cognitiveTesting: I took mensa's online IQ test and got 95 despite thinking all my life that Im smart: (make some allowance for English as a second language... maybe?)

Throughout all my life, I was told i was intelligent and my relatively low grades didnt reflect poor cognition but rather, laziness. In secondary school... I was painfully mediocre, bordeline on below average, though teachers said ''if you specifically study more, you'd excel'' And always coped by saying ''its because im lazy, not because im dumb;;

In reality, i was both.

Dont know how i managed to get into a good uni. At uni, Im not the perfect student and Im a bit dissatisfied that study isnt easy.  I just wish I was more intelligent

I know its mostly biological, but can i naturally increase my IQ?

redditor Yonderboy responded:

Look up quad n-back (QNB). I can’t vouch for it personally, and most people will tell you it’s not possible (without ever having tried it), but there are a few cases of people dramatically improving test scores, school performance, and subjective feelings of cognitive ability after very prolonged (> 6 months) and regular (> 3.5h/wk) QNB training.

What is N-back training?

N-back tasks are often used in psychology and cognitive neuroscience assessments to measure working memory. The n-back task consists of reading a series of letters to the test subject. The subject indicates whenever a letter repeats some number of letters previously. The n in n-back is the number of letters. n = 3 is typical.

Some redditors and, admittedly other, less unhappy people, enjoy doing n-back tasks as a game. The IQ test redditors are interested in them as a means for improving memory, memory capacity, and increasing fluid intelligence. There is scant, if any, evidence that n-back "training" has any such beneficial effects.

Dual n-back is when two n-back tasks (e.g. one auditory and one visual) are administered simultaneously. Of course, there is a subreddit devoted to that, r/DualnBack. It is easy to misread it as Dual In Back. Multiple phone apps are available for dual n-back enthusiasts.

Rare and amusing Saturday Night Live satire of Democrats

It was near the finale of the 2024 U.S. Presidential campaigning. On the last weekend before the general election, Saturday Night Live satirized the media's penchant for the Democratic National Party; or perhaps, the GOP's allegations of such.  

I was delighted that the episode included a faux David Muir, whom I perceive as a thinly-veiled version of MSNBC's Rachael Maddow. (Muir does manage to maintains his composure and admittedly, Rachael's show is intended as commentary not reporting.)  The real Muir's news delivery has a distinctive "the world is ending!" tone, which isn't modulated by the gravity, or relative lack thereof, of the content he reports. I'm not a media professional nor even much of aa viewer, so I was delighted that at least one other person, the ersatz SNL Muir parodied real Muir's genuine anchorman voice with an edge of hysteria!  

A faux Minnesota governor Tim Waltz made multiple appearances. He professed his love of fried foods and dislike for anything spicier than a tomato. 

This doesn't happen very often

The real then-Vice President and DNC general election candidate Kamala Harris made a cameo appearance toward the end. Her SNL counterpart was great, so much so, that the opening of SNL made me laugh outright!

If you pan out, they look remarkably like the real thing. 

SNL viewer reactions

Plenty of people; i.e. the masses including me; were watching by time-delay via YouTube. There were many expressions of grief and anger in the comments. Did I already mention the extreme antipathy toward Donald Trump, regularly on display in his first term?    

In case you've forgotten, or are still trying to forget, Joe Biden had an unsettling tendency to smell women's and young ladies hair.  While visiting YouTube, I realized that this should have been well-known long before Biden's tenure as  President of the United States. 

I found a very brief clip of former U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions. He is being vigilant, shooing Joe Biden away, preventing the VP's attempt to sniff the hair of Sessions' very young granddaughter.  Democrats didn't like Sessions. They didn't like the government waste and corruption that he acted against either

Government opacity or corruption

Sessions was appointed to lead the Department of Justice during the Trump 1.0 administration. He held the position of Attorney General for less than two years. I'm still impressed with one of his lesser-known accomplishments, in support of victim and taxpayer justice. 

Beautiful B-2 Spirit and not-so-beautiful DoD testimony

Let's look at pictures first, before getting into the nitty gritty of U.S. Air Force project management.

Putting a B-2 through its paces at 90° North

This is a beautiful photo of a beautiful B-2 Spirit approaching the North Pole.

Testing B-2 performance at a
geomagnetic extreme point 

The US Air Force provides some details about this test flight:

A B-2 Spirit flies to the North Pole on October 27, 2011, on a test mission from Edwards Air Force Base, California. The polar flight helped ensure that the B-2 maintains its combat capability in all environments...

The North Pole's coordinates are 90° North latitude and 0° East or 0° West longitude, take your pick. (For the sake of notational accuracy, it is usually expressed as 90° North but disregard that for the moment.) Patience, please, as I am going somewhere with this.

Comfortable expedition to the North Pole
thanks to Russian icebreaker (2013)

So, 90°N 0°E is merely a "quarter" rotation of the Earth away from coordinates of  0°N 0°E according to the map projection of the World Geodetic System 1984. WGS84 is an often used global reference system for modeling the Earth. The U.S. Department of Defense and GPS (Global Positioning System) both use WGS84. 

Notably, the DoD developed GPS AND made it freely available to all in the early 1980s.

Null Island is L0L0

If one is doing geocoding with GPS and WGS84, the Library of Congress describes 0°N 0°E as 

"a curious blend of real and imaginary geography, of mathematical certainty and pure fantasy"

Looking backward: Shifting U.S. allegiances in the Middle East

This is a two-page excerpt from a book titled Muslims in Europe: Notes, Comments, Questions by Manfred Wolf, PhD. It comprises several dozen essays, written over the span of a decade. 

I found the following brief section from "Muslims in Europe" of interest because Wolf wrote it in 2015. He had had a run of accurate short-term geopolitical predictions. I was sufficiently impressed, as I read with the benefit of hindsight, to give his longer term prognostications some consideration. 

Some background about the scholar

After 40 or so years as a professor of English literature at San Francisco State University, Manfred Wolf worked part-time as a faculty member at the University of California at Berkeley, teaching Dutch language and literature. 

Wolf also wrote an autobiography of his early life, titled Survival in Paradise.. It details his and his family's journey from pre-WW2 Germany to the Netherlands. A happy childhood was soon interrupted by abrupt departure--as Nazi Germany invaded western Europe--transiting through France to Portugal, then travel by ship across the Atlantic, and finally, adolescence in the Dutch Antilles in Curacao. For many years, Wolf wrote a column in a San Francisco weekly newspaper and many other non-fiction works and literary articles. "Muslims in Europe" is self-published. Wolf is not what I would consider a professional author, although he is a very fine writer!

Be aware that Manfred Wolf was about 80 years old in 2015. He is a liberal non-observant Jew, maybe leftist in his youth, who probably voted Democrat, up and down ballot, for all his years as a naturalized American citizen. He seems to possess a greater propensity for supporting exercise of First Amendment rights than many people of that demographic.

Manfred Wolf's response to Bari Weiss's announcement of
the new University of Austen

Less background about me

Manfred Wolf is the father of my former boyfriend and fiance of many years ago, Michael Wolf. 

EDIT: The website for Manfred Wolf's autobiography, Survival in Paradise is apparently defunct. Perhaps it was due to expire as of 31 Dec 2025. 

The last paragraph of interview of Wolf about the book included Michael's insightful question about his father's trek; I had wondered the same thing for many years. It is rather serendipitous to discover the answer today! Sadly, it is all gone now, but I recall the intent of Michael's (the son's) question and his answer!

To my enduring regret, I broke my engagement with Michael.

OMG Immigration police seen detaining people denied asylum

Deporting illegal aliens

U.S. Customs Enforcement and Immigration officers are caught by the local Phoenix affiliate of ABC News, ABC15, in the act of DOING THEIR JOB! Just look at what is going on in downtown Phoenix today.

This is a Breaking News report. According to the ABC15 live action reporter,

Our crews at the scene on Wednesday morning saw agents waiting outside and detaining people as they exited the building. ABC15 spoke with a few of the people who were being placed in vans, who said they initially came to the courthouse for asylum cases, which they say were then dismissed.

Is case dismissed a good outcome? 

The reporter asked questions of two women being assisted to their seats in one of the white vans. Through the assistance of a Spanish interpreter, both said that they had gone to court for hearings of their request for asylum cases; the immigration judge had "dismissed" both cases. One woman was from Venezuela, another from Mexico. 

Asylum hearings are not like civil lawsuits or non-immigration related criminal charges!  Dismissal of a lawsuit or criminal indictment would be a GOOD thing for a defendant. Dismissal of a request for asylum would NOT be a good thing for an asylum seeker. If dismissal were the outcome of these immigration court hearings, then arrest and deportation would follow. 

ABC15 doesn't seem to realize this, as they "reached out to officials to find out why people were being detained or arrested".

Asylum as shortcut to migration

The consequences of illegal entry (i.e. deportation) are held in abeyance if one claims to be seeking asylum in the U.S. Until the presidential administrations of Obama or maybe, G.W. Bush, this sort of asylum seeking was rare, and mostly sought by citizens of Warsaw Pact countries during the Cold War. 

As of 2018, an estimated 11 million illegal aliens resided in the U.S. including the Obama-declared DACA aka Dreamers. Between 10 and 20 million asylum seekers joined them during the four years of Joe Biden's presidency. Be aware that the entire U.S. population is about 330 million men, women, and children. 

11 + 15 = 26 million illegal non-citizens residing in our country means that 7.9% of the people in our country lack legal status.

Not-so-developing story

Trailer Park Hillbillionaires

For the love of God, PLEASE listen with volume on!

Elon plays a mean banjo. Count how many different versions of the stars-and-bars Zuckerberg wears on his t-shirts!

And yes, this video was created by generative AI but reddit didn't provide any additional details. 

The Trailer Park Hillbillionaires
by u/johnpershing in aivideo

How many hillbillionaires can YOU count?

I'm unsure if the one standing at a distance, toward the end, is Warren Buffet or not. I thought Bill Gates with the jar of bugs is hilarious.

Plane malfunction illusion: Rolling shutter effect

Chris wanted to take a photo while on an airplane flight. The aircraft was a Bombardier Q400. Chris didn't have a camera with him, only his Apple iPhone 3GS. The scanning order of his iPhone sensor combined with the light refracted from the airplane window caused a distinctive "detaching blades" phenomenon in the photo. Rotating the camera warps the blades in different directions.

Edit: Unfortunately for me, Chris is no longer sharing his photos online, but I have found others. Keep reading!

Bombardier Q400 digression

Q400 passenger airplane by The Cranky Flier on Flickr

There have been some serious safety concerns with the Bombardier Dash Q400 Turboprop. Persistent problems with faulty landing gear received plenty of media coverage. Also, landing gear failure is highly noticeable to passengers! Some of the worry is depicted by The Cranky Flyer in the little drawing.

Although there have been no passenger injuries, thanks to pilot skill, multiple instances of left or right wheels failing to extend fully (or at all!) upon landing have occurred in Canada, the United States, and France. Those are the markets for Bombardier's small-to-medium sized commercial and business aircraft.

Engine stalls in very cold weather, due to ice, is another issue with the Q400. Both the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and Canadian air safety regulators launched formal inquiries.

Despite the appearance of Jason's photo below, there have never been any problems with Q400 propellers blades detaching and falling off while in flight!

Blades by Jason Mullins on Flickr

Decline of Web 2.0

In a prior post, I wrote about a whimsical 1870s era cartographic depiction of America as a Young Hog. The source publication from which I first learned of it, University of Michigan's Map Library blog, has since been discontinued. I shouldn't be surprised, even though it makes me feel sad.

Web 2.0 is user-contributed content

Blogs, Huffington Post and Forbes per-pageview paid contributors, BuzzFeed, Second Life, YouTube, image sharing services, question-and-answer sites, and comment sections (for online newspapers as well as blogs) are examples of user-created online content. It is difficult to believe that Technorati tracked millions of active blogs at one point in time. User-contributed content sites seem to have been in decline for years.

Technorati was considered an authoritative source for blog activity. It was before my time, but sounded great, even including a blog search engine that was superior to Google's blog search. Google Blog Search vanished years ago, like many Google services.

Blog growth outpaces Moore's Law?!

That's what Technorati claimed in 2005: Blog growth was frequently doubling. The BBC seemed VERY excited about Technorati, and blogging in general, see "A new blog created every second"! Even though the dot com bubble was years earlier, there was still a lot of Internet hype then.

In August 2005, Technorati was tracking 14.2 million blogs, up from 7.8 million in March of the same year, according to the BBC. New blog count was doubling every six months! That's analogous to the real Moore's Law, applicable to technology, not blogs. 

Moore's Law isn't a law of physical science, but rather, a rule of thumb based on the observation that semiconductor processor speeds double every six months. (Moore's Law hasn't held up so well due to the physical limitations: there are only so many nanometers of room on processor chips.)  There's more to read about Moore's Law here including a link to Gordon Moore's original article about it. 

Technorati landing page

With such amazing growth, it wouldn't be long before blogs outnumbered Earth's adult population! 

Make America Porcine Again

Years ago, I found a post on the University of Michigan's Map Library blog. I consider it evergreen, as it is about two of my favorite things: Piggies and cartography!  Now seems like a good time to write about it. After all, maps were the safest way to travel during the COVID19 pandemic. Old maps even allow one to travel in time, with sufficient imagination.

In lieu of the Map Library blog, I turned to Big Think's Strange Maps. I located this excellent post, National Porcineographic: Portrait of America as a Young Hog.

Helping humans by helping pigs

William E. Baker was a 19th century tailor. He made his fortune thanks to a strategic alliance with what became the Grover & Baker Sewing Machine Company. (It was later acquired by Singer Sewing Machines.) Baker's philanthropy was extensive, but centered on his Hygienic Farming and Sanitary Cookery initiative. He wanted to improve human health by helping pigs.

Unvirtuous circle: Boston was a cesspool

New England rapidly industrialized, and the population grew along with it. An ecosystem evolved but it was of a distinctly pragmatic sort. The City of Boston instituted a garbage pick-up service but then disposed of the garbage anywhere and everywhere possible. Typical locations for garbage dumping were on the outskirts of the city or in neighboring communities. It was NOT environmentally friendly! Town and nearby country dwellers developed a recycling response: They fed the garbage to pigs.

W.E. Baker believed that this practice was the cause of much disease, in both swine and the people who consumed unwholesome pork. In 1875, he introduced a 'Sanitary Piggery' in rural Massachusetts. It was the cornerstone of Baker's contribution to the pure food movement.

"Baker’s Sanitary Piggery involved a clean environment and wholesome food for its porcine residents - it was even rumored they had individual beds, and slept under sheets. That may have been hyperbole, but it underscores Baker’s belief that public health depended greatly on sanitary food production."

He didn't blame pigs for the filth and squalor in which they, um, wallowed.

The world’s finest example of porcineography

The Porcineograph