Let's just love each other.................

..............................................the stakes are too high.  Do watch.

LBJ's famous Daisy ad from the 1964 presidential campaign:

Ok, so what is going on here......................?

Careful readers of this blog will note that nothing has been posted this week (life has intervened), and yet.........according to the statistics-keeper, 9,749 computers in Russia have visited the blog this week; 2,745 in the past twenty-four hours alone.  Trust me when I tell you that is not typical.  Unless someone has a better idea, I'm going to assume the statistics-keeper thing is just confused and move on with my day.

Ouch..............................

.......................................................Seriously, this has to sting:

"Ted Cruz is Mathematically Eliminated from winning the GOP nomination outright and has fewer wins than Bernie Sanders."

via

According to the mathematicians at..................

.......Blogger Central, we have crossed over the 15,000 post line.

Once again, we apologize for littering all over the Intertunnel floor.  We clearly subscribe to the quantity, not quality, school of blogging.  It is our deepest hope that, occasionally, you have found something of value here.

On the home stretch................................

Only very rarely does this blog play music that has 177,462,523 YouTube views. After this......I believe we will keep it that way.

Cold Play.........................................................Viva La Vida

Archbishop Ussher..................call your office

The age of rocks:

The age of the Earth is 4.54 ± 0.05 billion years  (4.54 × 10⁹ years ± 1%).^[1][2][3]
-Wikipedia,   more on the story here

As we first learned from Frederic March in Inherit the Wind, Archbishop James Ussher calculated, in the mid-1600's, that the earth was approximately 4,000 years old.  It is an interesting story.  Ussher's wiki is here.  A few excerpts here:

"Ussher now concentrated on his research and writing and returned to the study of chronology and the church fathers. After a 1647 work on the origin of the Creeds, Ussher published a treatise on the calendar in 1648. This was a warm-up for his most famous work, the Annales veteris testamenti, a prima mundi origine deducti("Annals of the Old Testament, deduced from the first origins of the world"), which appeared in 1650, and its continuation,  Annalium pars postierior, published in 1654. In this work, he calculated the date of the Creation to have been nightfall preceding 23 October 4004 BC." 

"Ussher's work is sometimes associated with Young Earth Creationism, which holds that the universe was created, not billions of years ago, but thousands. But while calculating the date of the Creation is today considered a controversial activity, in Ussher's time such a calculation was still regarded as an important task, one previously attempted by many Post-Reformation scholars, such as Joseph Justus Scaliger and physicist Isaac Newton."

"Ussher's chronology represented a considerable feat of scholarship: it demanded great depth of learning in what was then known of ancient history, including the rise of the Persians, Greeks and Romans, as well as expertise in the Bible, biblical languages, astronomy, ancient calendars and chronology. Ussher's account of historical events for which he had multiple sources other than the Bible is usually in close agreement with modern accounts – for example, he placed the death of Alexander in 323 BC and that of Julius Caesar in 44 BC."

Well, there is that....................................

"People who count their chickens before they are hatched act very wisely because chickens run about so absurdly that it's impossible to count them accurately."
-Oscar Wilde

My apologies.......................

According the the countie thing Blogger provides, this blog has now hit 10,000 posts.  We have clearly opted for the quantity over quality model and have littered all over the Intertunnel floor.  Mea culpa, but..... it has been fun and your friendly neighborhood blogger considers himself well amused.  Hopefully you too have occasionally found something of value among the clutter.

Traffic is down.....................

Well, it was never really traffic to begin with.  Google seems determined to make life difficult for spammers and other assorted bots clogging up the passageways of the Intertunnel.  Good for Google.  Long version of the tale is here.  Wee excerpt here:

"They now spend their lives on the run, Google nipping at their heels."

That vision thing.............................

thanks jonco

The 1850 census.........................

...for the Village of Homer and Burlington Township, Licking County Ohio.  The Claflin clan makes the cut.

source is here

Coolest chart ever............................

Moving population chart.  Actual data 1900 through 2010, projected data 2015 through 2060.  I'm liking the growth at the far right hand bottom of the chart.  Looks like they are projecting no shortage of youngsters either.

chart via the wonder that is Calculated Risk

Things you need to know..............

For writers using the English language, and for devotees of the "hangman" game, here are the letters of the alphabet in order of frequency of use:

E T A O I N S H R D L U C M F G Y P W B V K X J Q Z

Life is like.....................

"Life is like an unassembled abacus.  It's what you make of it that counts."
-Roger von Oech

photo courtesy of

GIGO..........

"We're capturing some new home data that should have been
filtered out and we also discovered that some properties were
being listed in more than one list."

The National Association of Realtors overstates the number of
houses sold since 2007?   Imagine my surprise.  Story here

My favorite National Association gets schooled on the art of
presenting accurate statistics.  You'd think they were bloggers
or something.