Happy Halloween

We had fun carving pumpkins again this year. My sister-in-law gave us a Martha Stewart pumpking carving kit a couple of years ago, and I gotta confess, having the right tools makes the job a whole lot easier. The keyhole saw, linoleum cutter, and scraper are the three essential items to make the job easy.

I experimented using my electric jig saw to carve the pumpkin (as recommended by the Extreme Pumpkins web site), and it worked great for cutting out the tops-- but probably only a little bit better than the good-old-fashioned keyhole saw. And for carving the face, the hand-held saw is defintely better. Unlike the folks at Extreme Pumpkins, I'm going to refrain from participating in any pumpkin pyrotechnics...

Map Geek

I'm a computer geek. And a map geek. So I guess it's no surprise that I spent several hours playing with Amherst's spiffy-cool online map of the town while half-watching the Red Sox game last Saturday.

Nifty feature number one: anybody can mark-up a map with text, lines, and so on. You just poke the Markup tab (in the upper-right corner of the viewer), then either select markup that somebody else has created or poke the New link to create a new set of markup that anybody can look at.

I've created markup groups for this Town Meeting's articles 7, 15, and 16. Zooming out with the Zoning tab selected gives a good overview of how the proposed changes fit into their surrounding neighborhoods.

Nifty feature number two: you can create hyperlinks that will bring up the viewer with one or more parcels selected; for example, the URL for Article 7's parcels would be:

http://gis.amherstma.gov/public/Viewer.aspx?maptab=ParcelMap&Application=ParcelApp&targetids=3B-7,3B-8,3B-9,3B-10,3B-11,3B-12,3B-13

Phew! Try these links: Article 7. Article 15. Article 16.

Thanks Amherst GIS/IT folks for giving us such a great tool!

I'm Allergic to Guinea Pigs

I'm allergic to guinea pigs. Also dogs, dust mites, ragweed, English plantain (which is a weed, not a type of banana), two kinds of mold and birch trees.

I know this because a few weeks ago I was allergy tested. It's a pretty simple medical procedure-- they dip teeny-tiny needles into purified allergens, then poke them into your back or arm and wait to see if you get what looks like a mosquito bite.

It's a nice application of scientific testing and controls-- they also poke you with a needle dipped in NOTHING to make sure it's not the needles causing the bumps, and a needle dipped in pure histamine to make sure you're reactive-- histamine is actually the stuff your body makes in reaction to an allergen like mosquito spit, and which causes the allergic welts.

Happily, there's a 93%-effective cure for allergies. Unhappily, the cure involves getting increasingly concentrated injections of the stuff to which you're allergic. For me, that translates into around 300 shots in my arms over the next two years.

I'd actually visited with a doctor at the Northampton Wellness Associates; they treat allergies both using the traditional shot-in-the-arm method and with a newfangled drops-under-the-tongue method that sounds less painful. But I just couldn't bring myself to support a place that promotes chelation therapy. Besides, the shots have more solid medical evidence that they're effective, and Dr. Bayuk's office is right next to the bike path in Florence so I go to try out the new bike path extension under Hwy. 91 (it's very nice).

So, if all goes well, next allergy season I'll be breathing easy. I'll still be allergic to guinea pigs, though-- they only test for that allergy, they don't give shots for it. I think I can live with that.

Random thought: Wildfires and Blizzards

Half a million people in California have been evacuated because of wildfires. Wow!

I wonder: which costs more, the wildfires that happen out West every couple of years, or the snowstorms (both blizzards and garden-variety) that the East deals with every year? I bet most of the cost is paid in property taxes (for snow removal out east) and home insurance (against fire or snow/wind damage), but I wonder who gets more FEMA money after these predictable disasters...

Organic Food Versus Homeopathy

One of the main arguments for buying and eating "organic" food is that it has less pesticide residue than non-organic food.

The main claim for homeopathy is, basically, "that which does not kill us makes us stronger." It looks like that might be true, in some cases (see this Scientific American article for examples, and see the Wikipedia article on homeopathy for why that doesn't actually apply to homeopathic remedies).

So I find it odd that so many people who take homeopathic remedies also religiously shop for organic food. If you believe that taking a teeny-tiny bit of something bad is good for you... then shouldn't you be eating non-organic foods?

Confession: I don't buy organic, but I do always wash my produce. Not because I'm worried about pesticides, but because I'm worried about E.coli.

Our kids are gonna be rich

That's a graph of how much "stuff" an average person created in a year, from 1790 to 2005 (measured in inflation-adjusted dollars). Our economy has been growing at somewhere between 2 and 5 percent a year.

If our economy continues growing at an average 2% per year (after-inflation) rate, then in 40 years the average family in America will make over $100,000 per year.

If our economy grows at an average 3% per year, then they'll make over $150,000 per year (again, measured in "2007 dollars").

What will our kids do with all that extra money? They'll be making between two and three times what we do! (2006 median household income is $48,000/year)

I predict that they'll be spending money on:

• Private schooling for their kids. With more disposable income, I think people will send their kids to better schools. I really hope education policy catches up with that trend so public schools don't become a place where only poor kids go.
• Services like housecleaning, catered parties and personal chefs will all be booming businesses.
• Donations to charity will increase. I'm actually hopeful that we'll move from a culture of "my car is bigger than your car" to "I gave more last year than you did."

How do you think they'll spend all that extra cash? Or do you think economic growth won't continue to grow as it has for the last 50 years?

Fair Trade sounds nice...

Article 9 on the Fall Town Meeting Warrant is all about Fair Trade.

I'm flip-flopping between feeling indifferent and feeling slightly annoyed by it.

If it mandated that the Town Manager buy only Fair Trade Certified coffee and chocolate, or that stores in Amherst sell only Fair Trade Certified coffee and chocolate then I'd be Very Upset Indeed. But it doesn't, it just suggests that the Select Board promote Fair Trade and that the Town Manager ensure that Fair Trade goods get proper consideration in the normal Town Chocolate Procurement Process (for the humor-impaired-- just kidding, I'm sure the Town does NOT have a separate process just for buying chocolate).

I get slightly annoyed when I imagine how this will play out at Town Meeting. There will be pretty pictures of coffee plantations and happy, smiling Fair Trade plantation workers. And then the Grumpy Curmudgeons will stand up and say that it's dumb for the Town Manager to spend Precious Taxpayer Money thinking about Fair Trade, and what is Town Hall doing buying coffee and chocolate anyway when the employees could just bring their own from home or buy some from Amherst Coffee and save the Town some money?

Overall, I'm very skeptical of the whole Fair Trade movement. If you want to really help people overseas or help the environment, then switch from drinking $3 cups of coffee to taking a 10-cent caffeine pill every morning with some water.

Then send the $2.90 you saved to your favorite organization trying to make other countries as nice as this one (I like the Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity) or your favorite environmental non-profit (I like The Nature Conservancy).