When dealing with actual gardens, a walled garden can be useful. I first read about the phrase as a metaphor for a counter productive practice on wikis (and, by extension, the web as a whole).
But nowhere can this counter-productive practice be seen more starkly than in genealogy.
Here’s an example: I discovered an (indirect) ancestor named Mattys Blanchan, in the course of looking for him on WeRelate, I discovered 3 pages for this person (and a bit more digging showed there had been a fourth one). Each one with slightly different names and different lists of children. Each one from a different person’s GEDCOM, each tracing down to different descendants. Each of these GEDCOM files represented a different walled garden, people labouring to put together a tree, not knowing that several other people were doing the exact same work in their own walled garden. Thankfully, by loading their data onto WeRelate, these walls could now be broken down and all these people could see that we are all cousins. But, sadly, that did not happen; in all four cases, the GEDCOM file was uploaded, and then they walked away (what’s known on WeRelate as a “drive-by GEDCOM”), leaving that work to be done by someone else (me, apparently).
That’s the good kind of walled garden: it ended up in a place where the walls could be broken down. But I have happened upon numerous web sites devoted to a particular family; many containing a wealth of information, but I have found few with sources or citations. Just bare, purported, “facts” with no substantiation. A garden full of things which could be healthy or deadly.
I should point out that I am relatively new to genealogy, and most of this is supposition based on what I have seen. But it seems that a tremendous amount of effort must be expended by people researching in their little “walled gardens” not knowing that many others are doing the exact same research, probably on the exact same ancestors. This is why I am doing all my work on WeRelate, it seems to be one of the few places dedicated to collaboration and quality research.
So it all started when I found a great grandmother with the last name “Cheney”. That got me scared. So I tracked down that part of my family tree and found that she, ultimately, descended from John Cheney of Newbury but Dick Cheney descended from William Cheney of Roxbury. There are theories that these two ancestors were related, possibly brothers, but no evidence has been found either way. So I could maintain some plausible deniability that Dick Cheney and I are not 9th cousins 1 time removed. Whew!
But then I found a connection to the Holbrook family, which, ultimately led back to Thomas Holbrook. A note on his page mentioned some U.S. Presidents. I found that James Garfield is my 6th cousin 3 times removed, William Taft is my 5th cousin 3 times removed, and, George W. Bush is my 8th cousin 1 time removed. It is a cruel twist that all of these Presidents were Republicans, though at least two of them had qualifications to actually do the job.
The closest I’ve come to a decent president is Ulysses Grant, but, as near as I can figure out, my connection to that family is via an illegitimate child who was brought up as a Grant.
But, in the end, I’m glad that nobody can prove I’m related to Dick Cheney.
I happened upon this passage on page 906 of the Vital Record of Rehoboth
Lett none marvell att the promiscuous and disorderly setting downe of the names of such they are, or may be married, or doe, or may be born, or may dye; for they are sett as they were brought to mee as disorderly as they are sett downe. If the Courts order had bin minded respecting this matter, they had biue otherwise placed then they are.
The page in question was of records from 1680, clearly some town clerk was frustrated with his job that day. It’s always nice to know that some things are timeless.
In my experience, it is pretty rare to find genealogical information on the internet with any source citations at all. But on one site (which shall remain nameless), I actually found a source listed!
Wilfred ***, firsthand knowledge. ... Entered by Wilfred ***, Jun 21, 2012
Considering the page is about someone who lived in the mid 18th century, it seems unlikely Wilfred has actual “firsthand knowledge”; not unless he’s immortal or has invented a time machine!
Sometime in between 1675 and 1686 my 8th great grandfather re-married after the death of his first wife (my 8th great grandmother). His brother married a few years earlier. Coincidentally, both these women were named Sarah. Soon, they had something else in common.
In the midst of the Salem Witch Trials, John’s wife, Sarah Alsbee, was accused of witchcraft but was acquitted. His brother’s wife, Sarah Davis was also accused, and imprisoned, but was released on bail and never brought to trial.
On the other side of the witch trials, my 8th great uncle testified against Elizabeth Howe, claiming that she cursed his horse and set his barn on fire.
When we first moved to Connecticut, I was doing some yard work in an attempt clean up the years of neglect of the previous owners, and my wife told me to be careful of poison ivy. Being from Oregon, I knew nothing about poison ivy, though I had seen my step-son go through the agony of a severe head-to-toe outbreak some years earlier.
So, I did some reading and and started spotting it growing everywhere in my yard. Up trees, on fences, in flower beds, etc. Everywhere. After years of battling the menace I had it nearly under control. But this year, it started appearing in all kinds of new places, next to garden beds, in walkways, by the deck, in the lawn, etc. Some friends also said it seems much worse this year.
So then I happen upon this article which reported on research which showed that increased CO2 causes poison ivy to out-compete other plants, and to make its poisonous component even more powerful.
Then I remembered some other articles about the effects of climate change: That West Nile Virus was spreading due to climate change as was Lyme Disease
Now every time I go outside, I need to wear long pants, long sleeves and a hat (even in the sweltering heat), douse myself in bug repellent, and still swat away the bugs which try to bite anyway. When I go inside I have to shower to get all the bug repellent off, and do a thorough search for the dreaded deer tick (I found 4 on me in June).
On top of all that, the winters are also going to be worse, thanks to climate change, the few beaches in the area are eroding
The northeast was a pretty inhospitable place even before climate change, I can understand why all my ancestors kept moving west.
Every time I visit my mother, we end up doing a bunch of genealogy work, and then afterwards I continue doing a bunch of research, and our latest visit was no exception. Several months ago I posted lamenting the lack of information about mothers in family trees. After visiting with my mother, I started looking at all the mothers in the family tree, rather than focussing on the difficult one on my matrilineal line, and started doing some searches on each and I turned up a number of books written about the families to which these women belonged.
For example, I found that my great-grandmother Eva Cummings, was part of a long line of Cummings, including a Revolutionary War veteran and leading back to John Cummings who came to America in 1635.
Eva’s mother, Naomi Olcott, led me to the Olcott family which may connect her to one of the founders of Hartford, Connecticut in 1635 (more research needed to find out if that connection can be made).
Naomi’s mother led me to the Holbrook family, which leads back to Thomas Holbrook who came to America in 1635 (more research to be done).
my second great grandmother (via my mother’s mother), Abigail Abbot Harrington led me to the Harrington Family and to a Revolutionary War veteran and, eventually, to Robert Harrington who came to America in 1635.
Abigail’s mother, Isabanda Cole led me to a book about the Cole family. I have yet to investigate that branch, but it seems to lead to another of the founders of Hartford, CT.
My Second great grandmother, Sarah Crose (who I mentioned in my earlier post), led me to another Revolutionary War veteran.
Sarah’s mother-in-law, Elizabeth Gorton led me into the Gorton family where I found another Revolutionary War veteran and back to Samuel Gorton who was the founder of Warwick, Rhode Island, and, in 1652, the author of an act calling for the abolition of slavery in Rhode Island, which was enacted, but was, sadly, totally ignored.
I still need to research many more mothers, including the surnames “Wolf”, “Crouch”, “Grant”, “Hoffman”, “Gates”, and “Cheney” (though I am concerned about connections I may find with the last two).
I guess the main lesson here is: listen to your mother!
Many years ago a friend of mine was telling me about her abusive mother, and about an incident where her little brother got into something poisonous (a cleaning chemical or somesuch). She proceeded to praise her mother for calling poison control. I remember looking at her, stunned, that she was praising her mother for doing something any mother should do. But my friend’s frame of reference was so distorted by the abuses her mother had heaped upon her children that it seemed like a noble act.
That’s about how I feel about Ricky Gervais’ latest condemnation of the hunter who killed a lion. Or more accurately, how I feel about people trumpeting his condemnation. That’s great that he is condeming a murderer. But isn’t that what any halfway decent person would do? Is our frame of reference so skewed by the countless killings, both human and non-human, taking place every day that it takes a particularily sadistic, senseless killing for us to hear it above the noise?
Welcome to my reworked blog. This will mark the third incarnation of this blog. There was a short-lived Drupal based site, then I set up Wordpress 6 years ago.
So what’s that you say? It sounded like you said “so what”, but I know you really meant “how come?”
About a month ago I get an email from the good people at Laughing Squid informed me that I had vastly outstripped my compute cycle quota. I thought this was rather surprising given that few people ever read this blog, let alone comment. There had been a number of attempts by spammers to post comments on the site, but, at worst there were only a dozen or so a day.
My first thought was that someone had broken in and uploaded their own PHP to use my compute cycles for their nefarious purposes (this happened several years ago). But several searches for such things turned up nothing. Unfortunately, there is no way to determine what is consuming the compute cycles, or at least I presume so, as my repeated questions about this went unanswered. Furthermore the apache logs are not provided in real-time nor is the compute cycle accounting, so it was going to take a lot of guesswork to fix this. Poking through the apache logs revealed that thousands of hits every day (99% of my traffic) was to wp-login.php. The only logical conclusion was that somebody was trying to break in, and, in the process, caused wp-login.php to consume a lot of compute cycles encrypting bogus passwords. I tried a plugin to block repeated attempts, but didn’t help all that much (it reduced compute cycles by 50% where my goal was 99%). So, I tried the brute-force method, I renamed the login script so that all such attempts would be immediately refused. Viola! Everything went back to normal.
Now all of this started to make me think: why am I bothering with Wordpress? What does it give me? It lets me edit upcoming posts from anywhere on the internet (though I have rarely taken advantage of that). It lets people comment on my posts (the number of times that has happened can be counted on one hand). But the downside is that I now have to monitor the version of Wordpress and keep updating it to keep up with security fixes (failing to do that several years back earned me a break-in). I have to monitor the comments queue and reject spam. Wordpress uses up a lot of disk space, MySQL is a hassle to maintain, and people with nefarious intent can easily create havok by running me over my quotas. And on top of that there are no tools for diagnosing when this happens.
So, it wasn’t worth it. Static html doesn’t use compute cycles or can it be hacked. I started looking into static blog generators. I had considered Bloxsom many years earlier before settling on Wordpress. Sadly it hasn’t been updated since then, and it seemed that it was going to take a fair bit of programming to get it to do what I wanted. I then looked at various scripts to use Org-Mode files (which I use every day at work) to publish my blog; I tried three of them, but none of them worked: two would not compile and the third one failed later on. So, I had to search anew. I turned up Jekyll and Hugo. I goofed around with both, and I concluded both would require similar levels of effort, but on the list of languages I want to learn, Go is ahead of Ruby, so I went with Hugo.
So here we are. The site is missing a lot of things, but I’ll gradually work on adding them. If you have any experience with Hugo or any other advice to share, let me know.
This is an index of static pages, which, unlike posts, are likely to be slowly updated over time, or are for general reference.
There’s an old saying that I first heard a couple of decades ago:
Good. Fast. Cheap. Pick two.
I was listening to an NPR story about Moore’s Law. At first I was thinking that it gave us computers that are “fast” and “cheap”. But we never got the “fast”. The workstation on my desk 25 years ago was just as fast as the one I’m sitting at now. Ah, but that old Sun 3/50 didn’t have to do nearly as much as my current workstation, which is true. That old workstation didn’t have color, virtual desktops, animated 3d icons, streaming audio and video, bloated web and email programs, etc. But somehow I got my work done just as quickly. What’s happening here is another law is cancelling out the “fast” part of Moore’s Law: Wirth’s Law. That law basically says that software is getting slower faster than hardware is getting faster.
Case in point: 25 years ago, when I fired up Emacs (which served as my text editor, mail and usenet reader, and web browser), the 4 megs of virtual memory it used had a noticeable impact on other users. Nowadays Emacs is a lightweight. Right now my email client (Thunderbird) is taking up 1.2 gigs of virtual memory!
Moore, himself, acknowledged that his law has its limits, and some people place that 10 years in the future. Thus far, Moore’s Law has managed to just barely keep up with Wirth’s law. So what happens when the latter tops out? I seriously doubt the latter has any limits, as I have yet to see a limit on human wastefulness and incompetence.
I guess we’ll need to go back to the trinity listed above. Maybe we need to start doing something toward “good”: stop adding new bells and whistles and go back and fix bugs, make software more reliable and more informative when something does fail, and generally reduce all the frustration that everyone feels when using computers. In other words, do the opposite of what we’ve been doing. It’s a massive challenge, and, by and large, unfamiliar, virgin territory.
I know this is probably another one of my utopian dreams, and will probably never happen, but it would be nice if, for once, I could encounter someone using a computer and not feel the urge to apologize on behalf of my profession.
IBM comes through again! It’s bad enough they replaced the ClearCase installer with their “Installation Manager” (a classic failure to follow the adage “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”). But now we get error messages like this:
The Installc executable launcher was unable to locate its companion shared library.
Very helpful. We don’t know what library it was looking for, or where it was looking. Of course, I guess I should be thankful, as it is unusual to even get error messages from the Installation Manager.
I know I shouldn’t be surprised by such things, but while researching the Dutch portion of my family tree, I ran across an organization, which had this statement on the web site: _“You may be eligible to become a member if you are a descendant in the direct male line of an ancestor who …” _
I have no interest in joining, but if that one word were not in that sentence I would be eligible. But since three women stand between me and the last male in the that line, I am apparently too tainted by the feminine for me to be in their presence. Had those three women been men, I would have no more blood connection to the ancestors in question than I do now, except I would have some remnant of their venerable surname on my driver’s license.
But this brings up an interesting point. Many years ago after reading a book about patriarchal and matriarchal cultures, I wondered what my ancestry would look like from the latter perspective. What if I could make the family retroactively matriarchal? But I quickly ran into a brick wall. I could go back 4 generations to my 2nd great grandmother, but then I had a hard time finding any information. I had a name, a birth year and state. I knew when she married my great great grandfather. That was it. Fortunately, I found a mention of her parents and was able to find a bit more information, but not much. I am again blocked. All I have is a name and a birth place for my 3rd great grandmother. The same brick wall is encountered when researching most every other mother in my family tree.
I am a newcomer to genealogical research, but it didn’t take me long to notice how little information was kept about women. In some cases, only the first name remains in the records; or worse yet, she is only recorded as “and wife”. If it weren’t for her name in the birth records of her children there would be little other trace.
This is truly sad. I never got to meet my maternal grandmother, but from the stories I am told she was a lively, interesting, and loving woman. I wish I could have met her. I’m sure that every other of my grandmothers, great grandmothers, etc, would be equally interesting. But since all that matters is the male line, almost nothing trickles into the present, depriving us all of a half of our heritage.
Imagine, if you will, a teenage boy, a utopian dreamer, always thinking about how to “save the world”, wandering through a county fair. In amongst the usual merchants he spots a booth run by an organization called Technocracy. A book with the title “Is There Intelligent Life on Earth?” catches his eye and draws him in. Being shy, he grabs a few pieces of literature and wanders off. Upon reading these it seems to be the very utopian dreams he has had, and this organization claims to have the “blueprints”. He and his father quickly join the organization and become deeply involved in it.
The boy, of course, was me. After many years I gradually drifted away from the organisation. M. King Hubbert, a co-founder of the organization and author of the “study course” left the organization in the 1940s, reportedly due to dissatisfaction with the way the organization was run, not with the ideas. I would like to think that he and I would have been in agreement on a number of points.
However, my purpose here is not to critique the organization, but rather to focus in on one of the key points the Technocrats made, their idea of “energy accounting”. Essentially they proposed replacing the “price system” (our current money/debt based system) with one which used energy measurements. The Technocrats paired this idea with the “abundance” of available resources, which seems paradoxical, since the idea of measuring energy resources becomes much more relevant in an era where energy is scarce. But when Technocracy’s ideas were put together, the resources available seemed nearly limitless. It took another 40 years for us to get our first taste of energy scarcity (I have vague memories of my parents waiting in long lines to fill up the gas tank) This is the point where we needed to start looking carefully at where our energy is coming from and where it is going. Sadly, this never happened.
The more general lesson of Technocracy is that we need to look for opportunities to apply scientific methods to everything we do. The more we can quantify things with objective measurements (whether energy or otherwise) the less prone we will be to being misled by snake-oil salesmen or vacuous politicians. This also means that if evidence is shown that what we are doing is ineffective or causing harm, we need to re-evaluate what we are doing. Sadly the Technocracy movement never figured this out, and even more tragically, we, as a culture, have veered farther from this ideal than we were when the Technocracy movement first started.
The only good thing that spammers do for us is to give us something to laugh at. The latest case was a comment in my moderation queue which started like this:
{I have|I’ve} been {surfing|browsing} online more than {three|3|2|4} hours today, yet I never found any interesting article like yours.
It continued on for quite a while, but I’ll spare you. Clearly someone screwed up their automation. Just for grins, I wanted to see if I could write a one-liner to process this input, and, viola!
perl -pe 's(\{(.+?)\})(@a=split(/\|/, $1); $a[rand(1+$#a)])ge' < spam
I’ve replaced a spammer with a one liner! If only that meant they’d go away.
I have been involved or witness to a number of debates which have led me to the conclusion that the word “natural” should be considered a weasel word.
Being vegan I have people tell me that it is “natural” to eat animals, and on the other side I see vegans claiming that not eating animals is “natural”. People argue that the paleo diet is “natural”, or that a raw food diet is “natural”. On the civil rights front, people argue that homosexuality is not “natural”, and, in the past, people argued that interracial marriage was not “natural”, or that slavery was “natural”. People arguing against GMOs will say they are not “natural” and people on the other side will say the opposite (I’ll get into that one in a future post). I’m sure everyone can think of other examples of these, possibly coming from one’s own mouth.
Since everyone’s definition of “natural” varies so widely, it is not a useful word and introducing it into a debate simply confuses the issue, and misdirects the debate down a “natural/unnatural” rabbit hole (weasel hole?) and away from the actual issue being debated. We’d all be better off not using the word at all, though I’m sure there are those who would argue that would be unnatural.
I’ve seen an increasing number of articles which make a point to put “vegan” in the headline even when the article is only peripherally related to veganism, or not at all. But regardless, the headline always points out how wrong vegans are. It seems to me that this is a clickbait strategy. The word “vegan” has become clickbait, luring both vegans and anti vegans to click the link. But I am confused, where does that place us on the GandhiCon scale? Are they laughing at us or fighting us?
Case in point, I just ran into this article Can vegans stomach the unpalatable truth about quinoa?. This sad piece of “journalism” goes off the rails very quickly. This could have been an enlightening article about how globalism, and its father colonialism, destroys poor countries by making them produce cash crops for export. Perhaps the author’s next article will be about how vegetarians caused the Irish Potato Famine. One wonders why the author didn’t also point to people following a gluten-free diet as culprits as well. Oh, that’s right, gluten free is trendy right now, and many more people are doing that than going vegan. It’s easier to attack the little guy.
If one carefully reads around the irrelevant vegan bashing, there is an important point being made: we need to be careful to avoid buying products that resulted from exploitive or destructive practices. Unfortunately, this is rather difficult, both because such practices are the basis of global capitalism and attempts to fight that often get co-opted, as can be seen in the case of fair trade or organic food.
The article makes a single reference to a single failed attempt to grow quinoa in the UK, a useless bit of anecdotal evidence to show that the crop is incapable of cultivation anywhere else. This is simply laughable and an insult to clever farmers around the world. It can be cultivated in many places (including the UK) and further breeding can produce varieties which can further expand its range of cultivation as has been done with several other Andean crops. I will be doing my part by growing some myself.
Anyway, I suspect that this is GandhiCon 2, as vegans were pretty much ignored up until recently. I’m looking forward to GandhiCon 4.