I was in Vegas this past week, visiting the Land of the Surreal. Every time I go there it just feels like a strange land. You have the downtown and strip casinos that are outlandish and huge, and at times make the city look more like a fake movie set or “to scale” model. Then when you drive around the greater Vegas area, you see a ton of housing developments. I was up in North Las Vegas, and driving by housing development after housing development after housing development. Most of them looked new, some under construction and others done within the last year or so. I think the housing bust is starting to take its toll, as an awful lot of houses appeared to be empty.

I talked to a few of the security guards at a construction site opposite my hotel. They told me some facts and war stories. Vegas has more private guards than police, and Vegas has more security guards than any other city in the US. Some of this is due to the casinos, but also there are guards at every construction site in Vegas. This is in contrast to the San Francisco area, where some sites have guards but not all. In Vegas, if you don’t have a guard you are guaranteed to lose something. The thieves will not only steal, but also vandalize.

One of the guards had a friend that was at a site of one of the big casinos. As he was making his rounds, a dump truck came through the fence at about 40 miles an hour, right where his chair was. If he wasn’t walking around, he would have died. On another job, thieves ran a line from the upper floor of the building down to the ground, and slid the copper pipe along it. In another case, they took over $200,000 worth of computer and construction equipment in one night.

I ran across one article on the web that mentions some theft:
VegasTheft

On the plane back, I was reading an interesting article in The Atlantic magazine, not sure if it was August or September issue. It discussed the disappearance of the buffalo from America. The greatest decline occurred in a 10 year period around 1880 or 1890. Although some hunting was due to Americans hunting and to hunting to deprive Indians of food, a Canadian researcher presented a paper recently that indicates a good part of that decline was due to European demand. Europeans had apparently perfected processes to use the hides, and there was a large European demand after the Franco Prussian war. So over a 10 year period, massive numbers of buffaloes were killed for their hides. In contrast to earlier hunting where both the hides and meat were used, the hunting in this period focused on only taking the hides, leaving large amounts of meat rotting on the prairie.

The link to his paper is below, although it’s only a summary link:
Buffalo paper:
Buffalo

His summary of his paper is as follows:
This paper examines the slaughter using theory, empirics, and first person accounts from diaries and other historical documents. It argues that the story of the buffalo slaughter is surprisingly not, at bottom, an American one. Instead I argue that the slaughter on the plains was initiated by a tanning innovation created in Europe, and maintained by a robust European demand for buffalo hides. These market forces overwhelmed the ability of a young and still expanding nation, just out of a bloody civil war, to carefully steward its natural resources.
Specifically, I argue that three conditions are jointly necessary and sufficient to explain the time pattern of buffalo destruction witnessed in the nineteenth century. These are: (1) a price for buffalo products that was largely invariant to changes in supply; (2) open access conditions with no regulation of the buffalo kill; and (3), a newly invented tanning process that made buffalo hides into valuable commercial leather."

I also found a blog that talks about the buffalo and this study:
BuffaloBlog

There was a story in the paper about California ground squirrels and rattlesnakes. Researchers at UC Davis were studying how squirrels reacted to various predators. They noticed that squirrels waved their tails even more in the dark than in the light. So then they watched using an infrared camera and saw that the squirrels’ tails were much warmer than normal when dealing with rattlesnakes. It turns out that the squirrels can heat up their tails, and the waving hot tails are more likely to be picked up by the rattlesnakes, who can sense infrared radiation. For other snakes like gopher snakes, which can’t sense heat, the squirrels shake their tails but do not bother to heat them up.

Now, you may be asking why the squirrels would heat the tails, as if rattlesnakes can sense the heat, it would just signal the rattlesnakes that “Hey, dinner is over here.” Turns out to be the opposite. The heated tail is to let the snake know that it has been discovered and the squirrel may attack or harass it. Snakes do not go after adult squirrels, only immature squirrels, because adult squirrels have a protein in their blood that allows them to survive snake venom. Squirrels have been known to attack and injure snakes, biting and kicking gravel at them.

So the next time you’re out in snake country, forget about the dog, knife, or gun. Just bring a couple of squirrels on a leash.

I saw an ad in the paper last week for Z Coil shoes. They are the weirdest looking things - have a spring under the heel. At first glance it looks like some kind of joke product you'd see on David Letterman (like toast on a stick... a classic). However, they apparently are the real deal. Some people swear by them. I did a Google search and found various postings, mostly positive or okay, no real scam posting alerts.

Their website is:

ZCoilShoes

I am posting this more as a piece of interest in something that looks completely out of the norm. I have no idea what percentage of people like them versus think they're just okay versus don't like them. So consider this post not a recommendation or advertising, just a note of interest. If you are considering buying it's up to you to check out the product and company yourself.
(That's my official legal disclaimer)


Last five or ten years I seem to have gotten more comfortable wearing boots,whereas when I was in my teens and 20's I wore tennis shoes / running shoes whenever I could. I guess my feet are getting soft in their old age. I don't know if I'd buy something like the Z coil, but I admit to wondering what it would feel like.

A friend of mine sent me the link below. It goes to an article by Gene Gables, one of the contributing editors on www.creativepro.com. The article is about the history of scuba diving and his thoughts. Sort of like the same thing I sometimes try to do here. Anyway, it's an interesting history lesson. The link is below:

ScubaDiving

I'll let his article suffice for today, as I had one of those weekends where you didn't get as much done as you had hoped. Four loads of laundry yesterday, a hike today, and some computer time in between. Where's one of those 3 day weekends when you need them?

I was reading one of the other blogs (Simpleandquiet) that I like and I noticed the July 30 post about workers comp. If you haven’t seen it, check it out. The info is good to know.

Here in California, I remember all the hoopla when the workers comp “reforms” were signed into law a year or two ago by our Governator Arnold. While there have been some minor reductions in insurance costs, the reductions seem to be slow in coming (Big surprise, huh?) What has occurred is that employees are being deterred from getting second opinions, are limited in who they can see, are seeing benefits either dry up or delayed for months or more, and are generally not getting many benefits. The insurance companies I think have dropped compensation levels significantly, and dropped prices much less significantly. Sort of like when the gas companies raise prices quickly but drop prices just a bit slower.

If Arnold truly had some guts and wasn’t prostituting himself to big campaign donors, it might be different.
Unfortunately it’s not. He has been mostly flash and sound bytes, with very little substance.

I finally read the directions about posting links to things, so will put actual links in this blog below. Amazing what you learn when you read the directions...

On a side note, to see a funny video of Arnold that was put together by an opponent in the past governor’s race, click onto the following website link:
Arnold

When the page opens up, click on the “Arnolds Neighborhood” clip, I think it was on the right about 2 or 3 spots from the top.

One other video (not related to politics) is the Trunk Monkey Compilation video. If you go to YouTube and search for “Trunk Monkey Compilation”, then click on the video that is from “frice2000” and is 5:35 minutes long, you’ll see a collection of funny and clever car ads. I will also put the link below:
TrunkMonkey

Lastlly, on the subject of government’s failings, I’ll just mention one headline this week:
GUNS GIVEN TO IRAQ FORCES ARE MISSING
“Pentagon can’t find 190,000 rifles and pistols”.

Now I can see losing a few, but losing track of 190,000? Just how do you manage to do that?
Do you set up soup kitchens, and tell people “Hello, here’s a bowl of soup, some bread, a blanket, and in case you need it, an AK-47”.
Unbelievable.