Mar 18 2025 - White Farm Houses

 

I remember a garden friend giving me directions to a plant pop-up stand.  She said it is the white house on Fourth Avenue.  Driving west on Fourth Avenue out of St. Catharines, one will find dozens off white farm houses.  Most of the old houses are white.  Only newer houses are brick.  Recent new houses are "stone" - the grand mansion type that seems to be the trend on rural roads. The story of white farmhouses is the story of whitewash which is a lime paint. It prevented mildew, was a disinfectant, odour disguiser and insect repellent.  It was an easy material to work with and dried quickly.  No expertise was needed to apply - consider Tom Sawyer. So then why weren't barns white?  Why were they red? The answer is that farmers used a cost-effective and readily available mixture of linseed oil  with rust added, to protect the wood from decay and weathering.  The rust - ferrous oxide - prevented the growth of mould and fungi. So there were we are with white houses, red barns and, of course, black cars.

I forgot about horses and buggies.  Here's one in Niagara-on-the-Lake.    Read more daily posts here: marilyncornwellblogspot.com Purchase works here: Fine Art America- marilyncornwell.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

Stupid Bets

I was looking forward to researching stories of stupid bets.  However, they are what they say they are - people losing millions and billions of dollars at gambling and poker tables, etc in stupid ways. These stories are all told in a similar writing style that relies on swearing as an ingredient. It took some work to find stories which were intriguing and interesting.   Here are the ones I enjoyed about novels and movies: Dr. Seuss wrote Green Eggs and Ham on a bet with his publisher that he could write a decent story using 50 different words or fewer. It turned out to be the fourth best-selling children's book of all time.   Ernest Hemingway bet that he could write a story using six words.  He wrote: For sale: Baby shoes, never worn. George Lucas made a bet about the Star Wars movie.  Lucas visited the set of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  He was whining about how Star Wars was not living up the vision hat he originally had, and was not going to do well at the box office. He made a bet that if Star Wars made more money, Spielberg would get 2.5 percent of Lucas' movie's profits for all eternity. Supposedly Spielberg says he still gets begrudging cheques in the mail.  The dollar value of the bet is $40 million.  The story HERE.  Now for two scientific wagers: Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman issued a pair of famous challenges to the scientific community in 1959. One required construction of a working motor no larger than 1/64th of an inch square; the second posed the challenge of shrinking the page of a book to 1/25,000th in scale so that it remained legible to an electron microscope. The prize for solving either of the two challenges: $1,000. Electrical engineer William McLellan claimed the first prize in 1960 after constructing a 250-microgram motor. The second reward wasn’t claimed until 1985 when a Stanford graduate student named Tom Newman inscribed the first page of A Tale of Two Cities literally on the head of a pin. Many physicists credit Feynman’s 1959 lecture, entitled “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” with inspiring the field of nanotechnology that emerged decades later. And how far has nanotech come? In 2007, Israeli scientists etched the 300,000-plus words of the Bible onto an area the size of a grain of sugar. Stephen Hawking is one of the greatest astrophysicists of the 20th century, and placed a pair of high-profile bets as a sort of insurance policy against his own discoveries. He made the first wager with physicist Kip Thorne concerning the existence of black holes. Hawking bet Thorne in 1975 that the well-known X-ray source known as Cygnus X-1 did not harbor a black hole; Thorne disagreed.  After evidence mounted that the system had a black hole, Hawking finally conceded the bet in 1990, giving Thorne his “prize,” a subscription to a popular porn magazine — much to the consternation of Thorne’s wife. Hawking, however, was pleased to have lost, as his research was based on the premise that black holes were indeed real. Hawking lost a similar hedge bet against his own theory in 2004 with physicist John Preskill and Thorne on whether information can escape from a black hole, a phenomenon that scientists now term Hawking radiation. Hawking settled the bet by giving Preskill a copy of a sports encyclopedia. More famous scientific bets HERE.  I took the barn picture on Saturday - a lucky moment to have a clothesline display.  Where would one guess this barn is located?  I know this house and barn will be gone soon as it is located near the hospital in St. Catharines, and the street is being developed with fast food restaurants and commercial businesses.  On one side is a vineyard and new houses in the distance.  Back away for a wider view and there's a tourist information booth parked beside the house.

Brainstorm Betterment

What did people do before 1953 when brainstorming was popularized by Alex F. Osborn in several books in the 1940's.  He wanted creative ideas for ad campaigns and founded the two principles of  defer judgement, and reach for quantity. He founded 4 general rules 1. Go for quantity 2. Withhold criticism 3 Welcome wild ideas 4. Combine and improve ideas The first empirical test of Osborn’s brainstorming technique was performed at Yale University, in 1958. Forty-eight male undergraduates were divided into twelve groups and given a series of creative puzzles. The groups were instructed to follow Osborn’s guidelines. As a control sample, the scientists gave the same puzzles to forty-eight students working by themselves. The results were a sobering refutation of Osborn. The solo students came up with roughly twice as many solutions as the brainstorming groups, and a panel of judges deemed their solutions more “feasible” and “effective.” Brainstorming didn’t unleash the potential of the group, but rather made each individual less creative. Although the findings did nothing to hurt brainstorming’s popularity, numerous follow-up studies have come to the same conclusion. Keith Sawyer, a psychologist at Washington University, has summarized the science: “Decades of research have consistently shown that brainstorming groups think of far fewer ideas than the same number of people who work alone and later pool their ideas.” A search to find the most famous brainstorming session produces no results.  The search on myths about brainstorming produces many hits.  And there are many articles denouncing the 'groupthink' approach that has momentum.  View this email in your browser

Fetch of the Lake

I've commented on the lake-effects light recently.  So I checked out the Weather Network to find out more.  Our headline includes a phrase that is new to me - fetch of the lake.  Here's the November warning about storms because the average surface water temperature is at least 3 C above normal.  "Lake-effect snow is particularly common throughout the months of November and December because it is normally the time of year when the temperature difference between the air over the Great Lakes and the air over land is greatest. Empirical evidence shows us that a difference in temperature between these two locations must be at or exceed 13 C in order for lake-effect snow to become a real concern. Given this, if the lakes are a few degrees warmer than they usually are this time of year, it will be that much easier for the temperature difference to attain or exceed that important 13 C threshold when a cold airmass eventually moves in, which it invariably will. Once that threshold is attained, if the prevailing winds blow consistently along the greatest fetch of the lake, you’ve got yourself a perfect set-up for particularly impactful lake-effect snow event for those downwind." The historic snowfall in Buffalo was at the end of November, and dropped 6 feet of snow two years ago. It received the name 'November.'

This Old House

We return to the scene of the sagging barn/shed.  I thought I'd show you the story from all of its angles.  The road view is what you see in the first two pictures. The surprise back is the third picture.  Then we met the second urprise of the old car.  Every old car has a story, so there's an abstract grunge photo to complete our trip around this old house. Today is the last day we can declare  "Until the end of August".  Other than that there doesn't seem to be a lot of significance to the last day of August.  It is tomorrow that has significance!

The What's and How's of that Sunrise Colour

There is a house on Mountain Street in Beamsville with a sagging porch.  In comparison, this whole building near Napanee is sagging. I was wondering about the sunrise colours at various times of year.  The sky has been  turquoise and pink at sunrise recently.  Here's a site posting by Robert Bowen that takes the photographs of sunrise colours and shows the colour palette. So I scrolled down and found the match-up. We've been seeing teknorat's sunrise the last few days.   Science sites tell us that it is molecules and small particles in the atmosphere that change the direction of light rays, causing them to scatter in various ways, resulting in colourful sunsets.  I found a great little chart that shows this.  It is at the physics classroom site.

Catching Up with Niagara's Harvest

It's a short drive from Toronto to the vineyards of Niagara.  They start in the Grimsby area and continue right to the Niagara River.  These shots were taken in the Grimsby area at Hidden Bench and Angle's Gate wineries.