But what about the polar bears?

The foundation of Science is good measurements that can be independently verified. Consider the following two charts on historical temperatures:

These two charts could hardly be more different and yet both are produced by Climatologists who stand behind their accuracy. The first shows that we have climbed quite a bit since 1600 but that was an extreme cold dip;  AND our current high is less then 1100 BC before the carbon crisis AND we seem to be on a downward dip since 1998.

The second chart is the famous hockey stick graph cited by Al Gore in his documentary as proof of modern global warming. Wikipedia has a detailed discussion on it at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_stick_controversy

Bottom Line

The wiki article cites many recent papers as supporting the hockey stick with results like warmest in the past 400 years or warmest in the past 600 years. But this is only proving that it's warmer than the start of the "Little Ice Age".  Temperature data older than this is still rather fuzzy but getting better with ice cores, etc.

So it may be fair to say the question is still open. What caused the Medieval warming period of 1000 years ago? Why is the modern warming different? or is it?

How long does it take to get Frostbite?

How long does it take to get frostbite? Sounds like an easy question but I find many different answers on the Internet (including one tough old New Englander who answers, "never", with proper clothing). Part of the confusion lies in the definition of "Wind Chill". See http://perpetualpreparedness.blogspot.com/2010/01/wind-chill.html for details. There have been two changes.

1st:  In Nov. 2001 the wind chill values were changed based upon a new equations, see http://www.crh.noaa.gov/ddc/?n=windchill. Whereas 15°F used to be extreme cold in 20mph wind, now it's "safe" at all wind speeds and never drops below -11 wind chill.

2nd: Some revised charts appear to use the new wind chill values but kept the color bands the same for exposure times. See this NOAA chart from 2010 which still has 15°F freezing within 5 minutes with strong wind. http://www.srh.noaa.gov/jetstream//global/chill.htm

A new NOAA chart from 2011 (pictured above) updates the color zones. http://antarcticfudgesicles.wordpress.com/afsa-student-page/how-long-does-it-take-to-get-frostbite/ The exposure time colors don't exactly match the wind chill numbers anymore (for instance -40 wind chill is in two different color zones).
Wind chill of -20°F to -35°F (approx) Frostbite in 30 minutes for exposed face, at night.
Wind chill of -35°F to -50°F (approx) Frostbite in 10 minutes.

There used to be a -30-30-30 rule that -30°F with a 30 mph wind could freeze skin solid in 30 seconds. Under the new chart it's -30 & 30mph & 5 minutes for frostbite.

Bottom Line
So what happened to the NOAA charts? During the fall of 2000, the Office of the Federal Coordinator for Meteorological Services and Supporting Research (OFCM) organized a joint U.S.–Canadian government-sponsored action group to develop, test and implement a new Wind Chill Temperature Index. Human trials were done in Toronto, Canada with 12 volunteers in chilled wind tunnels with thermal transducers stuck to their face while walking on a 3mph treadmill. Brrrrr.

So the new chart is based on solid human evidence of facial skin instead of mathematical modes and time to freeze bottles of water.  See http://www.nws.noaa.gov/om/windchill/images/wind-chill-brochure.pdf for more information.

Things hidden underground

Police Captain Renault: I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!
[a croupier hands Renault a pile of money]
Croupier: Your winnings, sir.
Captain Renault: [sotto voce] Oh, thank you very much.
-Casablanca

There has been much to-do made over the Keystone XL Pipeline project from Canada down to Texas. Even the President has opposed it. But a graphic shows this is much ado about nothing. Closing the barn door after the horse has fled. Etc.

Here's a chart of EXISTING pipelines

Bottom Line

The Canadian pipeline is nothing new. So why all the debate over it? What's the real reason for the opposition?

P.S.
I also want to mention that it is important to know what lies underground at your house. Utility companies warn, call us before you dig. It's way too easy now-a-days to cut through a buried power line or cable.

A co-worker has lost her home due to a hidden surprise. An electrician sank a new grounding rod for an upgrade to her home's electrical system. Problem was, unbeknownst to anyone, the rod cut through the pipe leading from the underground oil tank to the home's furnace. The tank was refilled a few days later and all that oil leaked into the soil under the house. After much wrangling with lawyers and insurance companies, the insurer for the electrician agreed to dig up and rebuild the kitchen over the spill. The kitchen was demolished but further environmental testing showed the oil had spread far under the foundation - the entire house would have to be demolished. At this stage the insurer is negotiating to buy the house and write it off as a complete loss instead of rebuilding.

Spider Man or Santa? What's the Difference?

"With great power, comes great responsibility"
-Uncle Ben to Peter Parker (Spider Man)

This is very clever....

Bottom Line

What a wicked sense of humor. Spanish Inquistion - wears a red suit and knows if you've been naught or nice. LOL!

P.S.

As a mathematician I should point out that the chart above is called a Venn diagram, conceived around 1880 by John Venn. Each circle represents a topic, like "Wears a red suit". Where the circles overlap labels are added to indicate items that belong in both circles (or all three circles with Santa).

A Radiant Story

“Incidentally, disturbance from cosmic background radiation is something we have all experienced. Tune your television to any channel it doesn't receive, and about 1 percent of the dancing static you see is accounted for by this ancient remnant of the Big Bang. The next time you complain that there is nothing on, remember that you can always watch the birth of the universe.”
-Bill Bryson

Flickr.com has a interesting story and graph about radiation. An  executive at a Silicon Valley tech firm (San Francisco) traveled to Japan for business.  One of his destinations was 50 miles from the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant that generated much frantic news after the big earthquake.

"As a precaution, a colleague gave him a Geiger Counter so he could make sure it wasn’t getting dangerous as he approached the plant."

Instead of only running the Geiger Counter near the site of the nuclear meltdown, the executive left it on the entire trip with fascinating results below. The tiny bump near hour 144 is the exposure from the damaged nuclear power plant. The much larger spikes occured while flying. San Francisco to Hong Kong, Hong Kong to Singapore, Singapore to Tokyo, and Tokyo back to San Francisco. This is completely normal - a plane a mile or two up has less atmosphere to block in comming radiation from the sun and from space. The last trip has an extra tall spike because the flight went near the North Pole which blocks even less radiation than other parts of the globe.

Bottom Line

It helps to put things in perspective. Yes the radiation at the plant is bad and a meltdown did occur - BUT the effect is very local and dimishes rapidly. Persons living nearby (50 miles or so) need to be concerned about long-term accumulative risk. Visitors and tourists get greater exposure from the flight to Japan than from the damaged nuclear plant.

Information is Beautiful

Everything is beautiful
In its' own way
- lyrics, Ray Stevens

If you're a regular reader of my blog, you'll know I love graphs and visual representation of data. Today I "discovered" InformationIsBeautiful.net which collects excellent examples of visual displays.

For example:

Which health supplements are backed by scientific evidence?
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/snake-oil-supplements/

A color wheel of emotions
http://www.flickr.com/photos/shellberry/5468624509/in/pool-16135094@N00

Plants that grow well together
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nhawtin/5549980086/

This one I've posted before, The True Size of Africa
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/the-true-size-of-africa/
but this version also shows the US compared to Europe and US compared to Antarctica.

Bottom Line

Numbers by themselves don't say much. A picture makes a huge difference.

Lost Time

"If I could save time in a bottle
The first thing that I'd like to do
Is to save every day
Till Eternity passes away
Just to spend them with you"
- Time In a Bottle by Jim Croce

Today a image from I Love Charts is worth a thousand words...

Bottom Line

"But there never seems to be enough time
To do the things you want to do
Once you find them"
- Time In a Bottle by Jim Croce

One of my favorite sketches from the Muppets Show is this rendition of Time in a Bottle
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvnCKJCgCD8

Africa

"The darkest thing about Africa has always been our ignorance of it."
-George Kimble, Geographer

In a post last year I looked at different ways to flatten the globe onto a flat map in World Maps. The standard Mercator maps that everyone uses exaggerates the size of the Northern Hemisphere so America and Europe look much larger than they really are. So ingrained is the Mercator map in our mental image of the world that we fail to recognize how large Africa is. Here is a great graphic showing Africa's true size - bigger than the US, China, India and Europe combined.

Bottom Line

The full size of the graphic can be found at http://static02.mediaite.com/geekosystem/uploads/2010/10/true-size-of-africa.jpg

World Population

“USA Today has come out with a new survey - apparently, three out of every four people make up 75% of the population.”
- David Letterman

There is a great deal of truth to the adage "a picture is worth a thousand words." A great graph can make a point much better than mere words. For example I know India and China both have over 1 billion people out of a world total of 6.7 billion. But I never visualized this as nearly half of the world's people. The chart below shows how people are distributed throughout the world by latitude and longitude. Note the spikes for India and China.

Bottom Line
The bottom graph sure puts the US in perspective. We use the most resources in the world with the lowest population density. Unless they have traveled to Europe or Asia, most Americans have no appreciation for how land-rich we are; how uncrowded in comparison. We think nothing of large parks, golf courses, giant cemeteries, thousand acre farms, etc. Open land is rare and expensive elsewhere in the world.

Best paying college majors

“The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.”-Thomas Berger

Payscale.com has posted a chart and list of salary expectations for people with a Bachelor's degree in a variety of college majors. The chart shows both starting salary (blue) and mid-career salary (grey). For example economics majors earn less than computer programmers with their first job but will surpass them in 20 years or so. The top jobs are almost entirely engineering and science. The first non-science jobs I saw were Marketing at 21 on the list, and International Relations at number 22. Since this list is Bachelor degrees only - you won't see doctors or lawyers.

Bottom Line

Science pays!

The State of the Internet

“The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn't understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.”-Eric Schmidt, Google CEO

http://www.focus.com/ has published a beautiful series of graphs called the State of the Internet. Here is a summary of the results

- An equal number of men and women use the Internet (74%)

- Age matters. 93% of young adults 18-29 use the Internet while only 38% of senior citizens do.

- Income matters. Those with more money have faster Internet access.

- Education matters. Users without a high school education: only 39% while 94% of college graduates use the Internet.

- The most surprising graphic to me was the frequency of Internet use, pictured above. Only 38% of those surveyed say they use the Internet several times a day. %21 once a day. The majority are infrequent users. This explains my sister who does not check her email very often.

- Laptops are now in 46% of all homes.

- Scandinavia has the best Internet penetration into homes. Nothing else to do in the dark, cold, winter perhaps? The US is #5 after Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Netherlands.

- The US is horribly behind in Internet speed. Appx 5 mbps vs 61 mbps in Japan. (mbps = megabits per second)

Bottom Line

I’ve been an Internet user since the 1980’s when my college, Michigan State, gave everyone access. Then AOL in the early 1990’s, then Netscape and now mostly IE. I consider it one of humankind’s greatest inventions.

I used to buy reference books or seek out information at reference sections of libraries. But informational books can quickly become dated. Now I take for granted the easy access to global information on any subject – for example, yesterday I was looking for vendors of Pinewood Derby tracks for Cub Scouts and the costs. Did you know tracks come in wood, plastic and metal with laser controlled times on the finish line?

For more interesting Internet facts check out http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/02/08/15-fantastic-firsts-on-the-internet/ which describes 15 firsts like the first email, first spam, first web site, etc.

What are your neighbors buying?

"Some couples go over their budgets very carefully every month; others just go over them."-Sally Poplin

If you have a family budget (and you really, really should have a family budget), then you’ll appreciate a new web site that allows you to see what your “neighbors” are spending (in aggregate). The site is at http://www.bundle.com/ and is called EverybodysMoney. The photo at right is a screen shot of the site looking at spending for Stamford, CT, where I work. The values show monthly spending for the “average” neighbor.

$1,668 Family & Health (Pets, Insurance, Healthcare, School, Charity)
$1,139 Shopping (General, Hobbies, Office Supplies, Clothing, Electronics)
$1,022 Food & Drink (Dining out, Groceries)
$ 892 House & Home (Utilities, Phone, Home Improvement, Home Maintenance)
$ 659 Getting Around (Gas, Auto expenses)
$ 455 Travel & Leisure (Commuting trains, air fare, hotels, entertainment & cable TV)

Curiously Rent/Mortgage is not included anywhere.

In each bubble you can hover the mouse and click “Go deep” to get subcategories. Hover over the subcats and you can “See Stats” for greater detail. For example the top Merchant under Dining Out in Stamford is Starbucks! You also have the option of changing the location, looking only at homes with X kids, or only at homes in a particular income bracket.

This site is marked Beta and the data set is skimpy in places. I tried to look at Ossining, NY and could only get results for all of Westchester county.

Bottom Line

A tool like this can help you to discover that your spending is higher than average for your region. If yes, you may want to cut back. But don’t get too smug if all your expenses are “average”. I added $1000 per month to the Stamford numbers above for rent and got $6,835 spent per month. Multiply by 12 and this means $82,000 per year in EXPENSES. Assume 30% for taxes and you have to earn $120,000 per year to be “average” in Stamford.

Where the People Live

"An election cannot give a country a firm sense of direction if it has two or more national parties which merely have different names but are as alike in their principles and aims as two peas in the same pod"-Franklin D. Roosevelt

Years ago I worked with an Irish programmer who could not see the difference between the U.S. Republican and Democratic parties. You're crazy I told him and then pointed out the differences as I saw them. Now a decade later I'm less sure that he was wrong. Regardless of who's in office we see the same behavior of graft, corruption, lobbying, and business as usual. Not much changes.

But that is not what I wanted to talk about today. The site http://www.fakeisthenewreal.org/ has published a map for Electoral College reform to avoid the "bucket effect"; i.e. if you win California by just one vote you get all 55 electoral votes of the state. The reform map creates 50 new electoral districts of equal population (5.6 million) - if you win the district, you get that one vote. I do not see this happening. A much easier system is percentage distribution- if you get 55% of the vote you get 55% of the electoral votes. Of course if this happens then there is not much point to the electoral college and you can just use the popular vote to elect.

But once again, I'm off topic. What impressed me about the map is the population distribution within America. Look at how much land is needed to gather 5 million people in the mid-west and mountain west. While California is chopped into 6 zones . It's hard to see on the map, but cities like LA, and San Francisco are huge population zones onto themselves. FakeIsTheNewReal has another graphic comparing relative populations of states - but with a twist. Metropolitan regions are pulled out of each state and included in the comparison on their own merit. The top three US population areas are NY metro, LA metro, and Chicago metro, with the state of Texas taking fourth (after Houston, Dallas, etc are removed). California is fifth and to my surprise, North Carolina is sixth. There must be a lot of people in NC outside of large cities. Sounds pleasantly bucolic.

Bottom Line

While I live in a crowded region of a blue state (NY metro), my roots come from an uncrowded red state (Idaho), so my conservative views are in the minority here. Ironically my father, who has retired to his Idaho home, has become very liberal - making him a minority view there. I believe the reality of the blue-red political maps (metro areas vote liberal, "country" regions vote conservative). I'm just not convinced that either political party is actually representing the views of either red or blue. I also fear that our electoral college system is biased in favor of metropolitan zones. The upper half of NY state is red/conservative/country but is nearly always overwhelmed in votes by the blue NY city region. So blue takes all and the votes from upstate NY have no influence at all at the national level.

Update

The Amazon book review for "In Search of Self-Governance" by Scott W. Rasmussen shares the notion about our two political parties acting too much alike:

"Today, Americans are united. United in the belief that our political system is broken, that politicians are corrupt, and that neither major political party has the answers. Add to this the growing disdain for the unholy alliance between the largest corporations and our government, and there's a lot of frustration festering in our country."

Two Charts

Today I have two items with nothing in common except both struck me as interesting statistics.

1. Which adult American film actress was the highest paid movie star of the year four times?

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Did you guess Doris Mary Ann Kappelhoff?

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Better known as Doris Day, this actress was a top-ten movie earner in years 1951-1952 and from 1961-1966. She was the highest paid movie star in 1960, 62, 63 and 64. This puts her 6th place overall, tied with John Wayne and Shirley Temple who were also were the top star for four years.

Who's #1 on the list? Another surprise, at least to me. Tom Cruise has 7 years at the top of the pay scale. There is a four-way tie for 2nd place with 5 years as #1: Bing Crosby, Burt Reynolds, Clint Eastwood, & Tom Hanks

'I knew Doris Day before she became a virgin.'- actor Oscar Levant

2. The second statistic is an unusual graph at Axiis (go to the source to see the chart key). It shows the percentage market share of the major Web Browsers from 2002 to 2009. Normally one would show this as a bar graph or multiple pie charts. While this chart is clever I'm leaning towards not liking it. I find it very difficult to "see" the relative size of each browser and it's hard to "see" if a given percentage is 30% or 40%? The original image at Axiis is interactive; as you hover over a band, the percentage is shown.

Bottom Line

I love numbers. This weekend I met a man who does actuary science, the statistics of accidents and mortality. I explained I had a great admiration for statisticians but also a wariness that it was easy to mislead with stats. You can make convincing false arguments by manipulating the data.

For example, the Doris Day numbers cited above are a bit of fluke. She may have been #1 some year by just $1 over the next star or missed being #1 by the same amount. The yearly rankings don't tell us how much she won (or lost) by. It's a classic winner take all scenario much like the electoral college in US presidential elections. A President might have just 50.001% of the vote but take 49 of the 50 states (losing only the home state of his opponent).

How could star power be more accurately measured? Two ideas come to mind.

1. Measure their total earnings in inflation adjusted dollars. Possible problem? Have stars always earned the same percentage of a movie's gross? Like modern free-agent sports stars, did salaries at some point leap upwards (way above inflation) so that modern stars demand a higher share of ticket sales and hence skew the statistics?

2. Assign weights to the top ten rankings. Top Ten is absolute and immune to the salary scale spikes describe above. To avoid the arbitrariness of counting only #1, assign ten points for #1, nine points for #2, and so on down to 1 point for #10. Then add the points and see who comes out on top. This gives 2nd placers a chance to come out on top.

Crayola's Law

“We could learn a lot from crayons; some are sharp, some are pretty, some are dull, while others bright, some have weird names, but they all have learned to live together in the same box.”-unknown

I couldn't resist this charming chart of crayon colors over the years from MarginalRevolution.com. Wonderfully done!

Bottom Line

Crayola's Law: The number of colors doubles every 28 years.

Corollary: The taste however remains the same.

Wind Chill

"I've got to go home - Oh, baby, you'll freeze out there
Say, lend me your coat - It's up to your knees out there"
- song lyrics from Baby It's Cold Outside

Slate.com recently published an article, "It's time to get rid of a meaningless number", that is opposed to the idea of "Wind Chill factor". The columnist believes that "no amount of tweaking will make wind chill more comprehensible."

Let's start at the beginning. In 1945 two Antarctic explorers, Paul Siple and Charles Passel, realized that a bottle of water would freeze faster on a windy day than on a calm day. This is because the wind is more efficient at carrying away the heat in the water. They carefully recorded wind speed and freezing times to create a chart and formula uniting wind and temperature. So given 5 F and a wind speed of X, you could calculate that a bottle would freeze in the same amount of time as a calm day of -40 F.

The concept of wind chill was first used by Canadian Weather men in the 1970s. The Siple-Passel formula was used for 30 years before two researchers, Randall Osczevski in Canada and Maurice Bluestein in the United States, decided to retest the numbers. They found that the Siple-Passel formula was too extreme in its predictions. So instead of -40F above the same 5F and wind would feel more like -19F.

So this is confusion #1 - the system of wind chill was changed at the turn of the century.

Confusion #2 - If it's a windy day at 35F, the wind chill might "feel like" 20F but no bottle of water (or anything else) is going to freeze. The coldest anything can get in this example is 35F - safely above freezing. All wind chill does is tell you how quickly you'll cool down to the outdoor temperature - not how cold you will become. Wind does not make things colder than the air temperature - it just makes them as cold, faster.

Confusion #3 - Your results may vary. The actual rate at which your body cools will depend upon the clouds & sun, how much skin you have exposed, how insulating your coat is, how exposed you are to the wind, and so on. The modern Wind Chill model is based upon people who are 5 feet tall, somewhat portly, and walk at an even clip directly into the wind.

Bottom Line

Wind Chill is useful as a reminder about the dangers of a cold wind but keep in mind the limitations mentioned above. Also remember that wet clothes draw out heat and will cool you down faster than dry clothes. Stay dry and out of the wind.

Check out one of my early blogs for more details on Hypothermia.

Airline Fees

Cause I'm leavin' on a jet plane
Don't know when I'll be back again
Oh babe, I hate to go
- song lyrics

As a child I loved flying. It was an adventure with fun food and friendly attendants. My father was an air traffic controller for the Air Force and he would take the kids to the cockpit to meet the pilot and see the controls.

Now-a-days it is a different story. Take off most of your clothes to be scanned, have your bottled water confiscated, pay for any food on board, etc. Today flying involves lots of add-on fees. Who charges the most fees? The least? The answer can be found on a comparison chart at
http://www.kayak.com/h/airlinefees

Bottom Line

My wife and I fly a lot less today than 15 years ago. This summer we decided to drive halfway cross the country to visit my sister instead of flying. It was far but the driving was part of the adventure with many tourist stops along the way. As a rule we'll drive someplace if we can. There is much much "convenience" in flying.

What does a Trillion dollars buy?

"The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'" - Ronald Reagan

For this post, I'll let a picture be the star. What has the one trillion dollar stimulus package achieved?

Lies, damned lies, and statistics

While the news in this graph is very bad for the US and for Obama, I'll switch hats from government cynic to mathematician for a moment.

I've always associated the phrase, "Lies, damned lies, and statistics" as a favorite quote of Mark Twain but Wikipedia claims it was first used by British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. While the chart above is accurate, it uses three techniques to exaggerate the message and editorialize.

1. This chart does not prove a "swindle". That's just the artist's opinion. I do agree however with the byline, "Reality Trumps White House Promises".

2. I doubt very much that the Obama's sad face is related to the stimulus. The artist wants us to assume that Obama has acknowledged his "guilt" in the "swindle". To my knowledge Obama is still claiming with a smile that the stimulus is a success.

3. The vertical scale of the chart is approximately 7 to 10.5%. By not starting the vertical scale at zero, differences are exaggerated. The White House predicted 8% but got 10%. This is an actual error of 1/4 or 25%. But the graph shows the red line climbing to 4 times higher than the White House "promise" for a perceived error of 400%.

Now here is a more honest graph of the same numbers.

Bottom Line

I'm now putting my government cynic hat back on...

Recall how this stimulus package was passed in Congress. It was urgent to prevent an economic disaster. There was no time to read the details. We were asked to trust our leaders that they knew best how to solve the crisis by throwing lots of money at it. I hope Americans never make that mistake again.

Genealogy

“Other things may change us, but we start and end with family” - Anthony Brandt

Every few years I’m bitten by the genealogy bug and obsessively work on family records for a month or two. When I’ve exhausted the available online records, I set my family tree aside and wait for technology advancements and new records to appear. It is wonderful that people keep scanning state and church records so more and more data are accessible as time goes by. I’m also looking forward to the release of the 1940 census records on April 2 of 2012.

My ancestor hunt was resumed last week when my mother wanted some information on the family of a great-great grandparent. We have some really old family photos that my grandmother collected of her grandparents. Now my mother is scanning these photos and making new albums to pass on to her relatives.

Over the years I’ve used many online forums and genealogy programs. A great free program is Personal Ancestral File (PAF) that was last updated in 2002 but is still available. For $30 you can buy one of the top rated programs like Legacy Family Tree, Family Tree Maker, Roots Magic, and Ancestral Quest.

For ease of use, my favorite program is the online Ancestry.com. It works in a web browser and the data is stored via the Internet. I can access my tree from anywhere in the world and share it with the public or a few private friends. The online research material is amazing but not cheap: $20/month for US or $30/month for World data. Modest discounts are available if you buy 3 months or 1year of access. I typically pay for a few months then cancel. Fortunately I can still read and update my online Tree “for free” after I stop paying. I just cannot access the online historical records.

One very good thing about genealogy programs is that you can share historical data between them. Any decent family tree software will support GEDCOM, GEnealogical Data COMmunication, which was created by the Mormon Church as a genealogy standard. But keep in mind that GEDCOM is “Text Only”; designed for preserving who begat whom, who married whom, years of birth, death, etc. It does not transfer audio files, video, photographs and other new media that enhance the modern family trees.

Bottom Line

Online genealogy is blessing and a curse. There is a lot of BAD genealogy online with parents younger than children, individuals giving birth to themselves, the location Maine, France listed as Maine, USA, and so on. I imported a lot of junk ancestry years ago and am now pruning it back. I would hope by now for one definite source for British royal ancestry but I’m not aware of it. Some people get excited about tracing their line back to Adam and Eve. Frankly this is just as reliable as my British lines linked to the Normans linked to the Vikings which link back to the Norse God Frey.

According to Wikipedia, a bogus genealogy from Charlemagne to Adam & Eve was created for Carl Springer in the mid 19th century and continues to be used online today. But the errors also go further back to European royalty who wanted to show divine descent. Read about the Charte d'Alaon genealogy that is now discredited.

I'm thinking I may have to buy a Family Tree program to edit and correct my Ancestry.com data. I have over 7000 entries in my trees but it badly needs cleaning. Ancestry.com lacks data cleansing tools like duplicate finding/merging, orphan tracking, relationship calculator, etc.

Federal Pay Gap

“That government is best which governs least” – attributed to Thomas Paine but unknown

I’d like to thank Cato-at-Liberty for the charts in today’s blog. The numbers come from the annual report of The Bureau of Economic Analysis showing compensation levels by industry (Tables 6.2D, 6.3D, and 6.6D).

At one time federal employees were underpaid. So in order to attract workers they were offered great benefit packages instead. But a funny thing happened. In order to attract top talent and win the votes of federal employees, congress has been steadily increasing the pay for itself and for all government employees. In 2008, the average wage for 1.9 million federal civilian workers was $79,197. Compare this to an average of only $49,935 for the nation’s 108 million private sector workers (measured in full-time equivalents). As the chart below shows this pay gap is increasing.

If we also measure the always-generous federal benefits the size of the gap is astonishing! Federal worker compensation averaged a remarkable $119,982 in 2008, more than double the private sector average of $59,909.

Bottom Line

Government is a necessary creature but it should not be pampered or overfed. George Washington warned in his farewell address as president of the dangers of "big government". Even a democratic government can become a "despot" if it assumes too much power.

"It is important, likewise, that the habits of thinking in a free country should inspire caution in those entrusted with its administration, to confine themselves within their respective constitutional spheres, avoiding in the exercise of the powers of one department to encroach upon another. The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create, whatever the form of government, a real despotism. A just estimate of that love of power, and proneness to abuse it, which predominates in the human heart, is sufficient to satisfy us of the truth of this position."