http://www.modernwhig.org/

In fact, their meetings are being held today in Texas and Illinois.

In the 1850 federal census for Racine, Racine, Wisconsin, Thaddeus A. Butterfield’s occupation is listed as “printer.”  My goal was to find out what my ancestor was printing and perhaps uncover some interesting personal tidbits along the way.

Rather than typing my query in the usual Google search engine, I typed “‘Thaddeus A Butterfield’, newspaper” in Google’s book search because I was hoping to find reference works or actual copies of newspapers I could look at in a library.  What came up is Wisconsin Newspapers, 1833-1850:  an analytic bibliography by James L. Hansen, State Historical Society of Wisconsin.  The Hansen work provided me with the names of my ancestor’s business partners and the name of the paper they were printing — the Racine Commercial Advertiser.

What did I google next?  The names of my ancestor’s business partners – Ansel Warren and John A. Harrison – and the “Racine Commercial Advertiser.”  The information I gleaned from these searches turned out to be the name of their business (T.A. Butterfield and Co.) and the fact that these gentlemen worked on this paper from October 1849 until December of 1850, when it was sold to Judge William R. Perry.  In addition, I discovered the Racine Commercial Advertiser was an eight column newspaper defending Whig political ideals and candidates.  So it was a safe bet Thaddeus A. Butterfield was a Whig by political persuasion.

In the 1840 U.S. federal census, Thaddeus A. Butterfield was living in Rochester, Monroe County, New York.  Googling “TA Butterfield” led me to the Log Cabin, another Whig newspaper, published by T.A. Butterfield of Rochester from 1840-1841.  Now, this is not The Log Cabin of Horace Greeley fame, but I imagine my ancestor may have been reprinting Horace Greeley’s material for the Rochester crowd.  It gives me another subject for research in any case.

Apparently, the aptly named coffin fly – or at least a particular type of phoridae from South America called the pseudacteon – can turn fire ants into zombies.  How do they do it?  (Those with a weak stomach should stop reading here.)  Well, the tiny pseudacteon attacks the fire ants and lays its eggs in a fire ant’s thorax.  Within 24 hours the larvae emerge and the first of these migrates to the ant’s head, where it begins to feed on the ant’s brain.  The infected ant will get up and start wandering around aimlessly.  In about two weeks, the ant’s head falls off.  A new fly emerges from the decapitated head in another two weeks.

Four species of these flies are being used in Texas and Alabama to control fire ant populations and you can find the story here:  

http://news.yahoo.com/s/mcclatchy/20090512/sc_mcclatchy/3231765

IMG_1182, originally uploaded by DzyD.

California Poppy, our state flower. Popped up in the backyard.

The biggest reason I use Google’s search engine rather than Yahoo’s (or Microsoft’s) search engine?  Google’s front page is its search engine.  Yahoo’s (and Microsoft’s) front page is their news, junk and fluff page with the search engine seemingly projectile vomited towards the top of said “news” page.  It is as if a mad architect decided to place the house’s public entryway inside the ubiquitous catch-all closet we all use to store and pile junk in… and when you open the door, it all comes tumbling to the floor for all to see.  In other words, Yahoo’s front page search engine is hindered by numerous advertisements, news and entertainment fluff, and graphics that must load or crash before the search engine can be used.

My time is valuable.  I have no time to waste waiting patiently for graphics intensive ads to load on the front page of a search engine.  Furthermore, I am less likely to visit a site that does not load instantly, even to read the news.  The worst of these page crashing monstrosities are the new car ads.  You know the ads?  The ads where the car pops out of the ad and drives off, etc?  I have cable internet and even with my high speed connection, these ads will often cause Yahoo’s front page to load slowly, load with tons of errors, or fail to load at all, rendering the site unusable.  Hitting refresh just repeats the problem and wastes more of my time.  These problems occur whether I use my iMac or my PC and it does not seem to matter which internet browser I use either… Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox.  No, it is not an internet connectivity problem either.  I don’t count slow loading pages against a web site if the problem is due to an internet connectivity issue.  Nor do I count slow loading pages against a site if the computer or browser itself is the issue.

To be sure, Yahoo is not the only service that suffers the slow loading page syndrome.  Nor does Yahoo suffer this problem all the time.  I have recently noticed few or no “animated graphics” ads on Yahoo, which has helped tremendously, but I fear their return, which is why I am harping on the issue.  Microsoft’s MSN has suffered from a similar issue in the past and probably will again if it allows “moving graphics” intensive ads and videos on its front page.  I hope those days are over for both Microsoft and Yahoo, but I cannot be certain…

Greater share of the search market for Microsoft’s and Yahoo’s search engines can be had, in my opinion, if and when these services separate their search engines from their “news” pages.  I prefer to call their current front pages fluff pages, because that is what they both look like to me – like pre-teens had a pillow fight with feather pillows at a slumber party and the feathers are still floating in the air.  Maybe “feather page” would be a better term?

I admit I read Yahoo’s news.  However, I would prefer – and I am sure many other users would agree – the so-called news page be relegated to second page status.  All “feather pages” should be secondary to the main page.  The search engine should be primary, page one, and should stand alone, meaning no ads and no slow-loading graphics of any sort.  There should be absolutely no slow-loading materials on the front page.  Links to other pages, yes.  A minimal number of news headlines in the form of links and summaries with no pictures or video, okay.  Photos, videos and advertisements that take forever to load, NO!  Anything that loads swiftly and doesn’t clutter the page is fine.  ”White space” is important!  In other words, some simple graphics and even photos may be okay, maybe even certain videos that require the user to hit play to break up text monotony, so long as they don’t significantly slow loading times or create page errors.  The simple truth of the matter is, if Google’s front page loads quicker, I will use Google.  If another search engine’s front page loads at a similar pace and does not have a lot of clutter, I will use both.  The service with the swiftest loading front page wins.  Always.  That is not to say relevance is not important.  It is.  However, relevance becomes much less important if the search results fail to load or access to the search engine itself is hindered… and no, I am not willing to pay simply to experience an ad-free web site when Google is free.  If you want me to pay for something, you will have to add more value than that – in fact, what I am paying for had better be significantly superior to any free service in existence.  After all, Ancestry.com has a terrible search engine that persists in returning irrelevant results at the top of any search and I pay for Ancestry.  Why?  Ancestry.com adds value to their service by providing access to original documents online that don’t exist free anywhere.  (They are also working to improve their search engine).  This saves me research time because I do not have to wait weeks on end to obtain original documents.  What took years of research in the days B.A. (before Ancestry) now takes mere days, in spite of the search engine.  Hence, I pay.

I do realize that Yahoo is no longer simply a search engine, but a web portal, offering email and other services, and that Yahoo’s web portal is the second most visited web site worldwide, but I still think some of the clutter needs to go.  To be fair, Microsoft’s web portal, MSN appears more cluttered and I despise iGoogle.  However, I am not forced to go through iGoogle to get to Google’s search engine when all I want is the search engine, and that has made all the difference.

Bah!

The open mind is the fraternal twin of the closed mind – both lack capacity for thought and are the hallmarks of a lower intelligence.  It is one thing to entertain an idea, but quite another to accept or reject the same idea without question.  Both such minds are inactive, lazy minds, the couch potatoes of thought.  The sieve of logic, rational thought, and the occasional intuitive insight is a necessity I refuse to cast aside in the name of “keeping an open mind.”

The problem?  Unanswered title questions regarding liens and “other claims,” along with some property owners’ refusal to cooperate in the matter.  In the beginning, property owners were promised eminent domain would not be used… the families of Flight 93 – the plane that crashed – were promised a permanent memorial by the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks.  If the government does not seize the land, the 9/11 memorial will be delayed beyond the ten year anniversary of the attacks. If the government seizes the land, it betrays everything those aboard Flight 93 fought and paid with their lives for… and I doubt those who perished aboard United Flight 93 would have wanted their memorial tainted by the memories of stolen land, land “seized through eminent domain,” especially since at least one landowner claims no negotiations with the National Park Service ever occurred!

The question becomes “Who is telling the truth?”  If the National Park Service did in fact conduct negotiations, where are the records of these negotiations?  I admit my ignorance on the subject of eminent domain, but before seizing land under this precept, the National Park Service should be required to prove negotiations took place and failed!  As for the property owner who claims he intended to donate the property to the memorial “all along” – and we are talking 5 acres here, folks – why did he not do so early in the process?  In other words, why did he wait until after 80 percent  of the needed land had already been acquired and the government sent notice they would be condemning the land not acquired to insist he had planned on donating the land “all along?”  The fact that this parcel of land remains in his hands casts doubts on his intentions and upon his claims that no negotiations ever took place.

How is it possible that no negotiations took place for this parcel of land that the property owner wanted to donate “all along?”  (Why were negotiations necessary at all?)  On the surface, the two ideas appear mutually exclusive.  There should be no need for negotiations if the owner is simply donating the land!  On the other hand, if the property owner perceives a need for negotiations, then he must be exacting a price for his donation or some portion of his donation, in which case he is not donating the land as claimed.  Perhaps he is donating a portion of the five acres in question and expecting payment for the rest.  Where, for that matter, is his lawyer’s draft of the initial offer of donation?  Hiding behind attorney-client privilege?  In fact, why does the property owner need a lawyer if he is simply donating the land?  Assuming no property disputes or liens, there is little need to negotiate in a donation and, hence, little need for lawyers.

Something is rotten in Pennsylvania…

The National Park Service and those owning the last 500 acres the National Park Service needs to build the memorial had best return to the negotiating table and, this time, with a transparent deadline, lest the memory of those who courageously fought and prevented terrorists from crashing a plane into our White House be tainted by the totalitarian and unrighteous theft of land.  I suggest minutes be taken during these last negotiations and published to avert controversy or, at the very least, attain transparency.  Perhaps these minutes should be made available at the memorial itself?

Suppose you know only the death year of your ancestor?  Then, search results will return results 105 years previous to the date of death to 2 years after the date of death, assuming an average human lifespan of 100 years.  The Ancestry Blog goes into more detail should you enter a range of dates or should you use exact dates, or even no dates at all (for which the algorithm will not kick in, so to speak)… but on to the meat and potatoes.

I decided to test the Ancestry search engine with my four times great grandfather, Wilson Parker, a perfect epitome of a genealogical brick wall if there ever was one.  Not that I expected to find any new information.  My goal was to see how well the Ancestry search engine worked with dates.  Wilson Parker was born in 1792, probably in Pennsylvania, although no one knows where in Pennsylvania he was born.  (The only reason we know he may have been born in Pennsylvania is census data from the 1880 U.S. federal census).

In any case, I typed Wilson Parker into the appropriate name fields and 1792, Pennsylvania, USA into the appropriate birthdate fields.  (This test was performed last night, btw.)  I looked at every section, from census results to user submitted photos and the like.  On the whole, the new search was pretty good.  It was a beautiful experience compared to what the old algorithm delivered – results in each category in which 20th century records were listed first and attempting to find relevant 18th and 19th century records was liking searching for a needle in a haystack, as when these results did show up, the results were usually for all the wrong states and countries.  The new search algorithm has results mostly in the correct range of dates (1787-1894 in the case of Wilson Parker), but it is not perfect.  There were some glaring examples of 2oth century records which have no business showing up in my search results, particularly when these are mid to late 20th century records and these records show up pages before more relevant 18th and 19th century results.  There were a slew of 1920 census results, divorce and marriage records from various states for the latter part of the 20th century and early part of the 21st, WWII era and late 2oth century newspapers, etc.  The newspapers I sort of expected, however.  The most glaring eyesore, in my opinion, were the Korean War casualties and Vietnam War Casualties.  However, for the most part, such “errors” appeared either on the second page of search results or much further down (such as the 20th page) in the search results.  It must be remembered that there are pages and pages of results and, to be fair, the so-called “errors” were tiny smatterings spaced throughout the entire set of results, often greater than 30 pages.

Now, I know there will be whining and criticism to the effect that 20th century results should not appear anywhere in search results for the 18th and 19th centuries, but on the whole I think the new search algorithm is a vast improvement over what we had previously.  Most of the results I need are right there!  Go Ancestry!  I can’t wait for the rest of the improvements down the pipeline!

IMG_1391, originally uploaded by DzyD.

Dedicated to those who have been laid off in the econolypse…

This new growth popped up several months after our dwarf peach tree died of shock. The tree was transplanted to make room for a bbq and died within a week. We had planned to uproot it, but never did. Now we’ll leave the dwarf peach tree where it is. I think it’s been through enough trauma, don’t you?