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Thanks to J.D. and DMarie.

All Peaks, No Valleys

Each state has a place of highest natural elevation, ranging from the piddling 345-foot Britton Hill in Florida to 20,320-foot Mount McKinley in Alaska. Some sites are known as “flip-flop” highpoints because visitors can drive up in a car and hop out in sandals to pose by a marker; others require multi-day mountain climbs involving special gear and training. But all are important for the increasing number of ardent list keepers known as highpointers.

An estimated 10,000 are caught up in the hobby, which blends the rigors of adventure travel with the fastidiousness of stamp collecting. Highpointers hopscotch the country, then go back home where they track their accomplishments on spreadsheets and wall maps bristling with color-coded pushpins, and then plot their next outings. And though highpointing has been associated with single men in their late 40s and retirees, it has lately begun to attract a younger, more mixed crowd. As well as a more competitive one.

There’s more at Journeys – NYTimes.com.

This seems to be the preferred online list of U.S. State Highpoints.

I’m thinking I’ll do all 50 state low points.

How Unlikely Was the Historic 11-10 Score?

The Steelers beat the Chargers Sunday 11-10. It was the first time an NFL game has ended with that score. That and some other numerology from The Numbers Guy including this:

These statistics come courtesy of Doug Drinen, a mathematician at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn., who maintains the Web site Pro Football Reference. Of 13,480 games played in the NFL and its predecessors going back to 1920, through Sunday, 218 ended in scores of 20-17, the most-common final score. The runner-up, 17-14, has occurred 177 times. Five times a team has won by the margin of a single safety, 2-0. No team has ever won with four points — two safeties — and just eight times has a team won with eight points, which is a touchdown and a two-point conversion or two field goals and a safety.

Missing Person

Anybody seen Mrs. A?

Not many winners

Of the 500 stocks that make up the S&P 500 (a better indicator of broad stock market values than the Dow Jones Industrials), only 16 are up for the year to date. They are:

1. Family Dollar, up 40 percent. Cheap goods sell better this year.
2. Rohm & Haas, up 35 percent. All-cash takeover by Dow Chemical is pending. Since the deal was announced in July, Dow is down 40 percent. This may be the worst-timed deal of the year from the buyer’s perspective.
3. Anheuser Busch, up 31 percent. Another cash takeover. That deal was completed today, so Busch won’t be around to help the full-year breadth numbers.
4. Celgene, up 27 percent. A biotechnology stock has been helped by test failure of drug from competitor.
5. UST, up 25 percent. Snuff leader being bought by Altria, the cigarette company, again for cash.
6. Barr Pharmaceutical, up 22 percent. Generic drug maker won patent fight.
7. Amgen, up 21 percent. Drug performs well in tests.
8. Hudson City Bancorp, up 15 percent. A bank is up? This bank, based in New Jersey, kept good underwriting standards and stayed out of the securitization game. It also failed to expand into formerly hot markets like California and Florida. Now it has turned down bailout cash, saying it did not need the money.
9. General Mills, up 15 percent. You have to eat, and Wheaties maker is doing well.
10. Southwestern Energy, up 12 percent. Gas company rode prices up, and has not given up all its gains.

The others that are up are Wal-Mart (9 percent), Campbell Soup (5 percent), Cephalon (3 percent), People’s United (3 percent), Kroger (less than 1 percent), and Baxter International (less than 1 percent).

Some 200 of the 500 stocks have lost half or more of their value since the end of last year.

Source: Floyd Norris Blog – NYTimes.com

Here’s a list of the 500 stocks that make up the index.

Best line last night

“According to literary agents in New York, Sarah Palin is about to sign a $7 million book deal. They didn’t say whether it’s to write one or read one.”

Craig Ferguson

They didn’t just ‘get’ those benefits

This doesn’t change the current discussion about what the country should do about G.M., Chrysler or Ford, but it is perhaps useful to have some background on how autoworkers came to have a decent wage.

“Men with queazy stomachs had no place one afternoon last week on the overpass at the No. 4 gate of Henry Ford’s great River Rouge plant.” So began TIME’s account of the Battle of the Overpass, the confrontation that made May 26, 1937, a red-letter day in labor history and brought to national attention a young United Auto Workers official named Walter P. Reuther.

That morning Reuther and his colleagues suspected the day’s events could escalate into something historic as they prepared to hand out organizing leaflets (slogan: “Unionism, Not Fordism”) to the plant’s 9,000 workers. Reuther had put on his Sunday suit, complete with vest, gold watch and chain. He had invited newspapermen, priests and local officials to be witnesses. When Reuther and three other officials arrived at the gate, Ford company police charged at them and delivered a brutal, prolonged beating. Pictures of the battered victims were published across the U.S., a huge P.R. victory that would slowly but surely lead, several years later, to U.A.W. organization at the plant.

TIME 100: Walter Reuther

From The Henry Ford Museum:

Frankensteen’s coat was pulled over his arms. He was then kicked in the head, kidneys, and groin. Witnesses also testified that as he lay on the ground, the attackers ground their heels in his stomach. Reuther was picked up and thrown down repeatedly and was kicked in the face and body. He was then thrown down the steps of the overpass. Merriweather’s back was broken, and Dunham was also severely injured. The women too were attacked.

Standard Time

At exactly noon on this day [in 1883], American and Canadian railroads begin using four continental time zones to end the confusion of dealing with thousands of local times. The bold move was emblematic of the power shared by the railroad companies.

The need for continental time zones stemmed directly from the problems of moving passengers and freight over the thousands of miles of rail line that covered North America by the 1880s. Since human beings had first begun keeping track of time, they set their clocks to the local movement of the sun. Even as late as the 1880s, most towns in the U.S. had their own local time, generally based on “high noon,” or the time when the sun was at its highest point in the sky. As railroads began to shrink the travel time between cities from days or months to mere hours, however, these local times became a scheduling nightmare. Railroad timetables in major cities listed dozens of different arrival and departure times for the same train, each linked to a different local time zone.

Efficient rail transportation demanded a more uniform time-keeping system. Rather than turning to the federal governments of the United States and Canada to create a North American system of time zones, the powerful railroad companies took it upon themselves to create a new time code system. The companies agreed to divide the continent into four time zones; the dividing lines adopted were very close to the ones we still use today.

Most Americans and Canadians quickly embraced their new time zones, since railroads were often their lifeblood and main link with the rest of the world. However, it was not until 1918 that Congress officially adopted the railroad time zones and put them under the supervision of the Interstate Commerce Commission.

This Day in History

Don’t let Arizonans read about this “sun time” thing; surely they’d want to reinstate it.

The first Thanksgiving and the ‘Made Up Americans’

Reposted from 2006:

This is Mack’s first Thanksgiving in school, so of course he’s hearing the public school version of the First Thanksgiving story. Some teachers don’t use the correct name for the indigenous people near Plymouth — Wampanoags — or even the preferred generic term — American Indians. No, they use the presumed politically correct name — Native Americans.

That’s what the teacher says, but what do the children hear?

Mack’s mother Jill reports:

“At school, Mack is learning about the first Thanksgiving. He came home today with a short story about it, which I asked him to read to me. It went well until he got to the first reference to what he called the ‘Made Up’ Americans.”

Overload!

There are more than 70 million blogs and 150 million Web sites today—a number that is expanding at a rate of approximately ten thousand an hour. Two hundred and ten billion e-mails are sent each day. Say goodbye to the gigabyte and hello to the exabyte, five of which are worth 37,000 Libraries of Congress. In 2006 alone, the world produced 161 exabytes of digital data, the equivalent of three million times the information contained in all the books ever written. By 2010, it is estimated that this number will increase to 988. Pick your metaphor: we’re drowning, buried, snowed under.

From a lengthy piece at Columbia Journalism Review, Overload! Journalism’s battle for relevance in an age of too much information.

Cool new feature

The Google search application for iPhone (and iPod Touch) was updated yesterday. Now you touch the icon to open up the application, hold it up to you ear like you were taking a call, and speak your search request.

I just tried it (with a topic du jour) United Auto Workers. In a few seconds (five) up pops the usual Google list of possible sites.

Recognition isn’t perfect, but it’s a start.

The Bits Blog has some info on why speech recognition is an important breakthrough technology for mobile device manufacturers (because the keyboards are so small and difficult to use).

The Facts

“The New York Times told readers that GM’s autoworkers are paid $70 an hour…. This is not true. The base pay is about $28 an hour.”

Beat the Press

$70 may be the amount if all labor costs including legacy costs (retiree pensions and healthcare) are divided by the current number of workers, but that is a decidedly inaccurate picture of the current workforce.