Mysteries of Annandale Minnesota

Parental anxieties, not without foundation, led me to a secret location a few miles from my eldest son’s overnight camp. I was under cover, he was not to know I was positioned for first night emergency response.

My bolt hole was a very small AmericInn in Annandale, Minnesota, a town of 2,700 white people that’s somewhere southeast of Lake Wobegone …

My home is the “A” in the above, and Annandale is the “B”.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries Annandale was a railway stop that morphed into an agricultural service center and a resort community. It later became a summer lake town and probably struggled economically. Now it’s gradually being absorbed into the monster sprawl between Minneapolis and St. Cloud. If life continues on the current path (unlikely post-Peak Oil) it will be fully exurban within 15 years.

Of course I had to explore. I started with the downtown, which looks like it made a serious effort at being tourist-friendly in the past decade. There’s a genuinely artistic fountain by the library, for example. On a Sunday things are quiet, so I ended up at Tootsie’s Bar and Grill here seen in the Google Street View ..

Yes, the friggin’ Google Street view. Think about it.

I’d had enough sense to put pants on, so they didn’t beat me up. Still, it ain’t the kind of place that sees a lot of strangers on a Sunday night. I made the mistake of sitting at a table. I think I could have died of old age there. I did better at the bar.

The white skin didn’t fool the locals. They could tell I didn’t belong.

I went to check out the library since I’ll need a place to work tomorrow. While I was sitting there the local cops pulled in. Coincidence, I’m sure.

I knew there had to be a mystery in Annandale, so before the cops chased me away I scanned the sat view of the town on my iPhone. Sure enough, this looked odd …

What was laid out in a grid like that, and what were the flat greenish areas? Street view didn’t go in there, and the satellite res was too low. It looks like a big parking lot, but the scale is wrong.

What could all those units be?

Think …

This is what used to be called a “trailer park”, the more correct term is modular home community (See also – a lot of American live in these communities, 10-15% maybe. They’re often hidden just out of sight). I’d guess there are about 300 units, so a good portion of Annandale lives here. These communities are too intimate for me to drive around in, but I did navigate back to check out the green area and I drove by some homes. The community looked more occupied than the rest of the town, with groups of teen and pre-teens in the streets.

The mystery areas, by the way, appear to be a manufactured wetland and the town dump. I think the latter is commonly found by modular home communities.

There are other mysteries near Annandale. One is a sign saying “Big Woods”. I had to chase that down, but the road turned to dirt and I ended up at in farmland. A sat map check didn’t show anything even remotely woody. So that one’s still a mystery.

On the other hand, I did turn up the Minnesota Pioneer Park in Annandale.

An Annandale historian tells the story. The Pioneer Park was built in the 1970s from the remnants of a train depot with the help of a group of reasonably prosperous and well connected summer residents who appeared to have an insane amount of time and energy. Thirty years later the park has seen better times, but I’ll look for a chance to get the kids out when it’s open.

Which led me to Annandale Online, the personal project of a Ms. Jill Bishop (emphases mine) …

Jill Bishop started the Annandale Online Website in 1999 while studying for a Masters of Liberal Studies. She had considered ethnography of the Annandale area for her project when she came across another city’s community website. In March 1999, Annandale Online became part of the internet after the City of Annandale okayed it. Now eight years later, Jill is still the website administrator of the site, which is sponsored by the City of Annandale. The website has grown from 50 pages when it was introduced to 600 pages of information. (A “page” can include many screens of information.)…

…The Annandale Online home page features a picture which is changed every week or two. Currently, it features a 1945 Annandale street scene. The sections include Events, Government, Library, School, Business, History, Advocate, Civic Groups, Religion-Spirituality, Health, Visitors, Other, and Weather.

The Events section includes the what, where and when of what’s going on each month in Annandale…

… There is also a link to a website in Finland listing Annandale area cemeteries and an alphabetical listing of burials in those cemeteries. This is a project completed by Ernest S. Lantto.

Annandale Online includes most everything a person would want to know about Annandale.

Actually, I don’t think it says much about the sociology and history of the modular homes, but it does hold rather a lot of information, including an explanation of how the town came to be (the page counter reads 1,263 today. If you read this, please do visit and kick the counter up a notch).

Mysteries, mostly, resolved.

I’m a great tourist.

Update: A visit to Tootsie’s should be balanced with a cup at In Hot Water on the other side of the tourist area (old main street). Superb organic/free trade coffee, great outdoor seating, small and welcoming indoor seating.

 

Alternative medicine and celebrity illness

Wealthy celebrities seem particularly prone to fantasy cures (see also - the Fall of Oprah). Unfortunately, they encourage others to make the same mistakes ...

What celebrity patients like Farrah Fawcett can teach us about cancer. - By Barron H. Lerner - Slate Magazine

Fawcett's case had another component that potentially sent the wrong message to other patients. In addition to the traditional cancer treatment she was receiving in the United States, the actress traveled to Germany six times to receive a combination of natural supplements and immune treatments not approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. These trips were chronicled in a moving documentary, Farrah's Story, that aired on NBC in mid-May. In seeking this type of therapy, Fawcett mirrored a choice made by actor Steve McQueen, who futilely traveled to Mexico in 1980 in search of a cure for his malignant mesothelioma. McQueen's Mexican doctors treated him with dozens of enzymes and vitamins, coffee enemas, and an anti-cancer drug called Laetrile, which was ultimately shown to be worthless.

Did the alternative treatments help Fawcett? It is unlikely. As Laurence R. Sands, a Florida surgeon who treats anal cancer patients, told WebMD, there is no scientific proof that such immune system stimulants work. Nevertheless, one of the German doctors involved in Fawcett's case claimed that the treatments had shrunk her tumors and substantially prolonged her life.

Once again, media coverage of Fawcett's case, while ostensibly providing useful information, ran the risk of sending the exact wrong message. Thousands of desperate end-stage cancer patients traveled to Mexico upon hearing Steve McQueen's story. The new destination may now become Germany...

Well, maybe not so much to Germany given Fawcett's recent death.

I've written about science-free therapies before.

Health wars: The armies muster

Towards the end of the Lord of the Rings the armies of the West march upon Mordor. In the movie they're dwarfed by the vast hordes of Sauron.

That's how I see Obama's army (link mine, and I corrected the British "organising") ...

Healthcare - it's make or break for Barack Obama | World news | The Observer

... the town hall meeting is just one aspect of the political machine that Obama is deploying in order to force through healthcare reform. Obama's vast network of online supporters built up during his election campaign is now being swung behind the effort. Called Organizing for America, it has got 500,000 people to commit to volunteering for the healthcare cause. It has released its first advertisements and put paid staff in 31 states to organise locally. Another group, Healthcare for America NOW!, has raised $35m. It has 120 staff in more than 40 states and in April alone staged 102 events related to campaigning for change.

Thirty-five million dollars.

That's so sweet.

Sauron must be shaking in his booties.

Oh well. In the Lord of the Rings the point of Aragon's tiny army was to distract Sauron from the real goal -- tossing the Ring into the pit of fire. Maybe Obama has a top secret plan, and our pathetic forces need only distract the Enemies ....

How to choose a city to live in

Imagine you are an active geek, and that you can live in any city on earth.

Where do you go? For that matter, where might you want to visit?

There are all kinds of metrics you might consider, but there’s a single metric that produces this particular list:

1. Copenhagen, Denmark
2. Portland, Oregon
3. Munich, Germany
4. Montreal, Quebec
5. Perth, Australia
6. Amsterdam, Netherlands
7. Seattle, Washington
8. Paris, France
9. Minneapolis, Minnesota
10. Bogota, Columbia (yes)

What does Minneapolis have in common with Paris?! What joins Copenhagan and, yes, Bogota?!

Think ….

Think ….

This list. These are the world’s top 10 cities for bicycling.

I’ve lived most of my life in Montreal and Minneapolis, and I’ve bicycled Munich. It know it’s hard to credit, but there is something similar about those 3. Paris is an outlier, but then there’s no accounting for Paris.

Ok, so Bogota, which people my age associate with drug wars and extreme violence, is another outlier. Until I summarized this list I’d never have considered visiting Bogota. Now I guess I have to.

If you’re a US citizen you might now be considering Portland, Seattle and (yes!) Minneapolis. I know, it’s a bit mind blowing. Now consider this list …

1. Wisconsin
2. Minnesota
3. Massachusetts

These are the top 3 states for health care quality in a the recent NHQR State Snapshot report (I must confess, by the way, that Wisconsin is a better bicycling state than Minnesota, it’s just that it doesn’t have much in the way of an urban life.)

I live in Minnesota’s Twin Cities (St. Paul, the sleepier sib of Minneapolis), which in addition to being the #3 bike city in the USA is also home to the world’s largest and most attractive legal dog park.

Sometimes, you just get lucky.

Update: chrismealy tells us that his Seattle hometown doesn't belong on the list, and that Portland has cyclists but not infrastructure. He writes recommends a terrific bicycle blog (http://hembrow.blogspot.com/, I just subscribed) so I'll take his word for it.

I know Munich is extreme, and Montreal is only very good, so there's clearly a big drop after #3 on the list. That moves Minneapolis even further up.

Incidentally, this update gives me an excuse to post a picture of the bicycle I bought in 1976. My Raleigh International (see Sheldon Brown's page for an original ad photo) is going for the full refurb treatment at the local racing shop in honor of a coming birthday. This is the pre-refurb shop ...

In appreciation of RealClimate

I don't know how the RealClimate crew is able to keep fighting for Reason, but I sure appreciate them.

Today they respond to yet another burst of Reason-free denialism....

RealClimate

.... Some parts of the blogosphere, headed up by CEI ('CO2: They call it pollution, we call it life!'), are all a-twitter over an apparently 'suppressed' document that supposedly undermines the EPA Endangerment finding about human emissions of carbon dioxide and a basket of other greenhouse gases. Well a draft of this 'suppressed' document has been released and we can now all read this allegedly devastating critique of the EPA science...

It's a devastating takedown, but imagine how boring it must be to read this drivel, and how painful it is to regurgitate the same old facts.

We owe these stout warriors a great debt. Beverages are on me if the RealClimate crew should happen to visit the Twin Cities.

Alas, despite their diligence, Reason is losing this battle. Most Americans have checked out on both health care revision and dealing with global climate change.

Sprint while you commute?

If you're under 25 and in reasonably good shape, I suppose you could try this exercise regimen ...

Can You Get Fit in Six Minutes a Week? - Well Blog - NYTimes.com

... In one of the group’s recent studies, Gibala and his colleagues had a group of college students, who were healthy but not athletes, ride a stationary bike at a sustainable pace for between 90 and 120 minutes. Another set of students grunted through a series of short, strenuous intervals: 20 to 30 seconds of cycling at the highest intensity the riders could stand. After resting for four minutes, the students pedaled hard again for another 20 to 30 seconds, repeating the cycle four to six times (depending on how much each person could stand), “for a total of two to three minutes of very intense exercise per training session,” Gibala says.

Each of the two groups exercised three times a week. After two weeks, both groups showed almost identical increases in their endurance (as measured in a stationary bicycle time trial), even though the one group had exercised for six to nine minutes per week, and the other about five hours. Additionally, molecular changes that signal increased fitness were evident equally in both groups. ... In other words, six minutes or so a week of hard exercise (plus the time spent warming up, cooling down, and resting between the bouts of intense work) had proven to be as good as multiple hours of working out for achieving fitness. The short, intense workouts aided in weight loss, too, although Gibala hadn’t been studying that effect.

The response has been found in rat studies, so it's a little bit plausible.

If you're not under 25 several caveats apply

• The study results need to be replicated with larger groups and older participants.
• The news article didn't mention gender. Maybe this only works for young men with lots of testosterone on board.
• The risk of injury with extremely intense workouts is high.
• This is a good way to die if you're over 25 and aren't accustomed to repeated levels of intense exertion.
• I suspect when they say "intense" they mean an intensity level that most older people can't reach (short of death).
• Most Americans are exercising for weight loss.
• Maybe we'll find out it causes accelerate atherosclerosis (you never know ...)

That said, if you're young, healthy and reasonably fit, it would be easy to work this kind of routine into a commonplace 30 minute bicycle commute. Just don't do it on a 10 mph bicycle trail!

Facebook observations

I've been enjoying Facebook, though the iPhone client is overdue for an overhaul. My conclusions about what's interesting with FB are a bit different from what I usually read, so, inevitably, I'm compelled to share:

1. Internal identity - no anonymity. This means control over communications, which means spam is manageable. The FB equivalent of spam is metastatic "apps", but, for the moment, you can opt out of those. Spam free communication environments are worth much more these days than they were 7 years ago.
2. It's AOL 2.0. I remember when AOL was interesting, back when it was a Mac only spinoff of one of Apple's many failed online communities. I'll call that AOL 1.0. Of course in those days there was no spam, no phishing, no viruses -- essentially the proto-Net was risk free. That meant AOL didn't have an enormous amount to offer, but it still did quite well. Now the Net is extremely risky, especially for XP users. AOL 2.0 has a much bigger value proposition than AOL 1.0.
3. I love pub/sub, especially as implemented in feeds and readers. Unfortunately, this technology was a bridge too far for the vast majority of humanity. Only the uber-geeks knowingly use feed readers like Google Reader; all the good desktop XP feed readers have died. Facebook is all about pub/sub, but they've made the technology feel natural to their base. That's a real accomplishment.
4. Facebook has shown (sigh) that logic and usability are not all that important for a social application.

I've never paid much attention to the alleged role Facebook played in electoral politics. I'm still unsure how much of that is real, but there is some potential to gradually encourage specific memes in one's FB network. It has to be done judiciously. I actually streamed my Google Reader "notes/shares" into FB for a while and I think I about vaporized my friends. Now I restrict the meme injections to 1-2 a week.

The dark side of FB, of course, is data lock. (Privacy you say? Surely you've given up on that 20th century dream.) They're providing more APIs and sharing more identity information than they have, but I would never put my photo library on FB. It's a place to put things that are intentionally transient.

Kristof points out the AMA doesn’t represent physicians! (At last)

Congratulations to one of my favorite columnists. He’s the first commentator I’ve read to point out that the AMA doesn’t represent physicians!

Nicholas Kristof The Prescription From Obama’s Own Doctor - NYTimes.com

… the A.M.A. now represents only 19 percent of practicing physicians (that’s my calculation, which the A.M.A. neither confirms nor contests). Its membership has declined in part because of its embarrassing historical record: the A.M.A. supported segregation, opposed President Harry Truman’s plans for national health insurance, backed tobacco, denounced Medicare and opposed President Bill Clinton’s health reform plan…

He only gets partial credit for the explanation however. Membership fell because the AMA was more or less created to represent surgeons in their negotiations for procedural reimbursement. Non-proceduralists have a direct economic conflict with the AMA.

Kristoff continues …

… when the A.M.A. uses its lobbying muscle to oppose major health reform — yet again! — that feels like a betrayal…

… most physicians expect better as well, which is why the A.M.A. is on the decline.

“It’s what has led to the decline of the A.M.A. over the last half century,” said Dr. David Himmelstein, a Massachusetts physician who also teaches at Harvard Medical School. “At this point only one in five practicing doctors are in the A.M.A., and even among its members about half disagree with its policies.” To back that last point, Dr. Himmelstein pointed to surveys showing a surprising number of A.M.A. members who support a single-payer system.

For his part, Dr. Himmelstein co-founded Physicians for a National Health Program, which now has more than 16,000 members. The far larger American College of Physicians, which is composed of internists and is the second-largest organization of doctors, is also open to a single-payer system and a public insurance option. It also quite rightly calls for emphasizing primary care…

Physicians know that real health reform will be a mixed bag for them. Some things will get better, some things will get worse. Proceduralists will lose income, but primary care physicians might disappear. Or they might do relatively well. All physicians know is that the transition is going to hurt like hell.

I think if we could poll physicians (which is very hard to do) we’d find a majority do support major change – even though they’re going to get hurt in the process. Even many of the physicians who are likely to lose income (which translates to losing things like homes) may be more supportive than logic would dictate – especially if the transitions can be staged.

If I’m right, that’s worth of praise.

As for the AMA, please stop paying them so much attention.

Pro wrestling and celebrity tweets

Remember when pro wrestling was big? Some folks really seemed to believe it was all spontaneous.

Reminds me of the belief that wealthy celebrities and politicians actually "tweet" ...

Gail Collins - The Love Party - NYTimes.com

... it is highly unlikely that anybody actually gives a fig about Mark Sanford. (Including, perhaps, his beleaguered staff, which spent the last week fending off calls from the lieutenant governor and diligently filing Sanford’s daily Twitter.)

Tough times are good times for LinkedIn

I just received 40 LinkedIn updates in 24 hours (via Feed) distributed across a fair number of my connections.

I used to get 0-1 a day.

The update volume has been growing exponentially as my friends and colleagues scramble for new jobs.

It’s tough times for many, but good times, so far, for LinkedIn.

Don't forget Iran, but worry about China

Five years ago Iran's government was like that of China of 2006, Putin's Russia or Castro's Cuba. It was a tyranny, but a popular tyranny. It was not East Germany under Soviet occupation.

Now Iran's government is an unpopular tyranny. It's starting to resemble East Germany, but with more public unrest. Truly unpopular tyrannies can endure for ten or fifteen years in isolated nations, but Iran is a highly educated and moderately well informed nation.

Iran's current tyrant will fall within the next four years. He will most likely be replaced by a more popular tyrant, but there's a chance of something better. Tyrants are often surprisingly sensitive to foreign opinion, so we should keep the light on Iran and keep the BBC's Farsi service funded. There's not much else to do though. The Iranian people will have to fix this one.

So don't forget Iran, but we have something much bigger to worry about.

We need to worry about China.

We know world economic output is falling as quickly as in the Great Depression, but America isn't (yet) reliving GD I. So if the mean is bad, and we're above the mean, who's big enough to bring it down?

China.

I've commented on some signs of fear in China's government. Today brings another sign ...

China blocks Google services for an hour | World news | guardian.co.uk

Google suffered intensive disruption in China tonight just days after it was warned by the authorities to scale back its search operations.

Search functions and Gmail were inaccessible for more than an hour in a move seen by web watchers as a warning shot across the bows by China's censors...

This is desperation. China's tyrants are afraid of what China's economic upheaval is going to mean. Their worried about North Korea collapsing, they're worried about the Iranian example and they're trying to turn off news from the world. It's craziness born of panic.

The desperation of China's tyrants is probably not something to celebrate. China's people will eventually demand representative government, but it would be best to have that happen in a setting of economic prosperity -- not depression.

We need to get more Americans buying more Chinese stuff. Now.

The paradox of Amazon's negative reviews: Best material, lowest ratings

Sometimes I despair of mere humanity.

Take Amazon reviews, for example.

I write a fair number of 'em, enough to qualify as a "Vine" candidate. A lot of my reviews are quite positive, but I think some of my most valuable reviews are the negative ones. Curiously, my positive reviews are always well rated, but my negative reviews often receive few and mixed reader ratings.

Of course some of this is fraud -- employees pretending to be customers. I don't think that's all of it though. Humans love to acquire, and they want their acquisitive impulses to be reinforced. A negative review is a buzz kill.

It's not just me. Consider the Hasbro Nerf N-Strike Longshot CS-6. This nerf weapon has a 4+ star review, with lots of keen reviews. It is astonishingly cool looking, and my son yearned for it. He earned it through accomplishing a challenging and important task; it came while I was away on a (infrequent) business trip.

Within a minute of walking in the door I was handed the gun and asked to fix it. The front gun component wouldn't fire its foam dart.

It took a bit of playing around, but I eventually figured out the plastic handgrip interlock was defective. It wasn't a random manufacturing error, the mold was obviously incorrect. With a bit of work with a Dremel and a razor I was able to trim the plastic tabs and allow the grip to lock. At that point the firing tab engaged and my son was quietly pleased.

He was not impressed mind you. He expected that I'd fix it.

Ok, I'm getting to the point.

I returned to Amazon to warn of this manufacturing problem, and this time I read the negative reviews. Most of them mentioned that the pistol grip didn't mount, and most of them were rated "unhelpful" -- if they were rated at all.

The negative reviews have been warning for months of a significant manufacturing error -- one that I'm certain Hasbro knows about even as they continue to sell the unfixed toy. Despite their fundamental value they go unread.

Remember Cassandra? Do you remember that nobody liked her predictions of doom? Most people don't remember she was right.

There's a reason that story resonates.

It's not just the rest of humanity. Even I didn't read the negative reviews -- though I usually do. In my defense, I didn't read any of the reviews. It looks cool, my son wanted it, it was a reward for a task completed, it doesn't cost much -- I didn't do a lot of research.

Sigh.

Happily, in this case, there is a candle you can light. The next time you buy something from Amazon; read the negative reviews. Reward those that describe negative experiences and concrete issues. It's not hard to filter out the nonsensical rants. Strike a blow for Reason!

World industrial output – tracking the first Great Depression

Almost as an aside, Krugman delivers the bad news at the end of a blog post …

Green shoots, 1930 - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com

…I thought everyone paying attention to this stuff was familiar with the Eichengreen-O’Rourke work. EO point out that the original Great Depression was most severe in America, while this one is more severe in a number of other countries. So you want to do a world comparison — and if you do, we’re actually tracking the first year of the GD quite closely. Here’s world industrial production …

Nicely is an understatement. By this chart world output is cloning the first 12 months of the first Great Depression. I really don’t think we’re appreciating how bad things are getting in China.

We should all be very, very nice to China.

It took 3 years for world industrial output to bottom out in GD I, falling about 40% during that time. We’re down about 13% judging from the graph Krugman provides.

I don’t think we should be worrying about the stimulus package being too big. (Not that anyone paying attention is worrying about that.)

The interesting aspects of Steve Job’s alleged liver transplant

A surgeon expresses the thoughts on the mind of every physician who’s heard that Steve Jobs received a liver transplant (per WSJ) for a metastatic neuroendocrine tumor …

What's wrong with Steve Jobs, revisited : Respectful Insolence

… How many people are capable of getting themselves listed for transplant in a state nearly 2,000 miles away from their home? When a liver becomes available, there isn't much time to get to the hospital. That means a person seeking a transplant in another state either has to stay in that state for as long as it takes to get an organ or be within a distance to be able to fly there within a very short period of time. Moreover, organs eligibility and availability are determined by the United Network for Organ Sharing, which maintains the donor lists. When an donor is identified, regional and state organizations (in my home state, for example, Gift of Life, where one of my relatives works), obtain consent, arrange for organ harvest, and decide, based on fairly strict criteria published by UNOS regarding medical need and practical matters like how long it will take to get the organs out and to the hospitals where they are needed, which people on the waiting list for the state will receive each of the organs harvested. If this story is true, what Jobs did is not illegal, but it sure does leave an unpleasant stench of the rich and powerful taking advantage of regional differences in organ availability, perhaps at the expense of a lifelong Tennessee resident who needs a liver…

… Worse, the indication is somewhat shaky. For one thing, as was pointed out in the article, neuroendocrine tumors are generally very slow growing and take a long time to metastasize. One of the more "common" subtypes of the rare neuroendocrine tumor in particular, a carcinoid of the appendix or the rectum, is particularly prone to metastasize to the liver and is notorious for causing carcinoid syndrome, which is due to serotonin secretion by these tumors and causes flushing, diarrhea and other unpleasant symptoms…

In the United States organs are gifts from the dead to strangers. Most of the donors are not wealthy. In this country we don’t, yet, seem to have much of a commercial market in organs – though the organ trade is growing in much of the world (the sale of sperm and eggs, by contrast, is a very active US market, sure to be increasingly global).

The story of Jobs liver transplant has two interesting aspects. Both demonstrate what power can achieve.

One aspect is that it was kept pretty much out of the media, though clearly thousands must have known the details. In this regard it resembles the seven month media silence about the imprisonment of a senior NYT journalist in Taliban-occupied Pakistan . The modern world is better at keeping secrets than many imagine.

The second aspect is that it shows that we need to talk more about organ distribution. The rich will always have access to more health care options – though, as in this case, it may lead them to make medically sub-optimal choices. On the other hand, organs are a gift from people who are usually not themselves powerful. Given two equally appropriate candidates, one powerful and one not, I’d rather my liver go to the less privileged. It’s my way of spitting in the face of a fundamentally unjust universe.

We should be talking about the organ trade.

Neda Soltani - an Iranian student

Neda Soltani - Wikipedia and Facebook.

The Wikipedia article states that her family donated her organs.