Salzburg: Untersbergbahn and some more Hellbrunn

One of Joy's favorite things from our honeymoon was a trip up a mountain in a two-person cable car (and back down in one-person ski lifts). So when we saw they had something similar at Untersberg (Under the Mountain), we had to try it out.

It takes you, relatively slowly, up not quite 1 mile in the air to the top of Untersberg. Because it's nice and slow, you really get the chance to watch the house next to you fade into nothingness and realize just how bad your vertigo is.

"It was really a different experience from our honeymoon because it wasn't in the open air. The honeymoon was funner even if we weren't on the same ski lifts going down." Agreed - too many people in the cable car.

The Austrian Alps.

And on the other side ... Mordor.

Gorgeous.




They have a nice little shop at the top where Joy got a coin purse in the shape of lederhosen. The view of Salzburg, the Alps, and rustic Alpen cottages was thrilling. A little dizzying too. They give you some good time to stretch your legs before the cablecar is ready to take you back down the mountain.




Palace Hellbrunn is in between Salzburg and Untersberg, so we caught it on the way there. I already told you about the trick fountains. You leave the trick fountains into his other gardens, across the pond from the palace. Why are all these palaces yellow?

Down the walk was a playground where children were happily occupied and the Sound of Music gazebo I posted earlier.

The palace is now, what else, a museum. The Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg, Markus Sittikus von Hohenems, was a great collector of rarities, with many of the rooms decorated with pictures of the strange and unusual animals and plants he claimed to have amassed.




There were the usual South American birds, sunflowers, and white stags.







He also owned an eight-hoofed horse from Arabia and a unicorn.

Interestingly enough, since the palace was only a summer palace and quite close to the real castle in Salzburg, there are no bedrooms in Hellbrunn.








But they do have an oven. Joy really liked the oven at Hellbrunn. There was another like this we saw at the castle in Salzburg, done up in guadier, brighter colors. Joy likes this one better.

"I think it would be cool to cook in an oven like that. I mean, I'd probably prefer if somebody else was putting the wood in it, but... I'd really feel like I was doing something artful. People would say, 'Look at this great pastry!' and I'd say, 'Yeah, do you want to see the oven?'" *lol*





Then there were the muraled galleries for dining and concerts. Goddesses, nymphs, courtesans, and other noble and decorative ones are depicted on the ceiling, visiting the company.




In the "music room" - which is an octagon with amazing echoes - he has painted a number of virtues representing or paying homage to himself. This one on the left includes him courting a fair maiden. Now, this is still an archbishop of the Catholic church we're talking about here.

Joy and I each did a little solo in the music room to test out the acoustics. I sang The Music of the Night, while Joy favored us with Miracle of Miracles, both of us slowing it down to relish the bathroom-squared effect. The various statues painted in the ceiling in the video represent his virtues.

Hyrum's second Halloween

Hi there. Hy here. For Halloween, I was a horse!

Horses say ppppppppth. 


I even had a tail and everything.

I got to play with Uncle "Stee"ve and Aunt "Emomilee." ... but not much. Really they played board games with Ma and Da while I ran around their apartment like a maniac, throwing balls, conducting John Williams movie music, and watching Book of Mormon stories on the TV.


I'm not just any horse. I'm Heber J. Grant's horse. I helped Heber's family cross the plains when he was a little bitty boy, like me! Me and Heber look a lot alike when we smile.

Most of the time, I rode on Heber. We tried it the other way, too, but it didn't work as well.

 Hey, you guys, cut that out!

You don't want people to see that!

Oh well. Happy Halloween from Hyrum the Heber Horse!

The other Halloween post

I was standing there, changing Hyrum's diaper and asking him to identify the pictures of the latter-day prophets we have on the wall there when I was struck by the thought that my beard looked a little bit like Heber J. Grant's. I'd always liked Pres. Grant - the stories I'd heard of him anyway - and I decided it might be fun to go as him for Halloween.

There was just one problem: Heber was largely bald even as a young man. That seemed to imply that if I was going to do this properly, something had to go.

I had intended to get my hairs cut [yes, I'm anticipating your age old joke] before we left for Italy in early September. Here it was mid-October and I still hadn't gotten around to it. My hair was simply unmanageable and it was bugging me no end at night as it bunched up behind my ears. While it wasn't the longest I'd ever let the hairs on the top of my head get, it was definitely the longest I'd gone between haircuts - something like 3 months.

Wouldn't it be nice to just get rid of it all?

I got out my beard trimmer and whacked the whole thing down to a semi-manageable size... and prepared for the worst.

That's why we're hosting this pledge drive! If we receive pledges of at least $1000 by October 30, we will not make Derrill shave his head. And you'll get a free tote bag, paid for out of the funds you donated to us, making your gift of $20 really only a gift of $10 and that's not very efficient is it, but we're smooth and smarmy public radio. Paid for by suckers like you.

Will he do it? Can we show you such carnage? More after the fold:

Salzburg cont.: Hellbrunn Trick Fountains

Just a little south of Salzburg is the palace Hellbrunn (Clear Spring), owned by the Prince Archbishop Markus Sittikus von Hohenems, a fellow with a sense of humor. He installed a set of trick fountains in his gardens so he could soak his guests for laughs. I gotta say, after touring king's castles and archbishops' places, I think by and large the archbishops had a lot more flair and taste and sense of decoration.

"We were a wee bit tardy for the tour. But had Hy been with us, we would have been tardier."

The tour starts at a stone table with stone seats all around it, all of which get thoroughly soaked by some water jets except the head of the table, where the archbishop would have sat. Oddly enough, though, the controls for the fountain are not at the head of the table, but at the side where a lackey would turn it on or off. The table is surrounded by an alcove full of Greekish statues. The archbishop was very keen on Greco/Roman mythology, and there are scenes from it throughout the garden.

"They were fun, and our guide obviously had a good time getting people wet."

He had a nice, mischevious smile on his face most of the time.

"He was kind enough to warn people when they were about to get wet, but there was always water on the ground too."

Water would hit you from deer statues, from water fountains pointing the wrong way, "from above and below," from the sides, from stairs, "through the grates on the ground." You name it.

He had also had them carve an intricate miniatures scene with over 200 figurines, most of which move, all powered by water. "It was an impressive sight." Then there were smaller water-powered tableus along the way, with scenes from mythology.







We can highly recommend the attraction. "I was kind of sad when it was over."









The mask in the center of this picture was one of the archbishop's favorites. Every few seconds, the tongue sticks out and up as the eyes roll back. The archbishop would greet his guests in the same manner.






In the castle, they show you a copy of the mechanism, which is your basic Japanese relaxation fountain. Water pours into a weight, and when enough has pooled, it pulls the levers to move everything else.






Slaying Medusa

More paganism.
A little paganism is a good thing in an archbishop, right?

As always in this tour of Italy, more pictures and videos are available of everything. If you'd like to see more or have a request, post it. We like comments!

Economics is ... romantic

I had a professor and mentor at BYU (James McDonald*) who tried to convince us that

Economics is Fun.
Economics is Easy.
Economics is Your Friend.

One of his classes made a bronze plaque out of it for him. He also tried to convince us that Economics is Romantic because this one guy took a girl to his class on a date and she married him anyway. Because he was one of the economists I've tried to model my life after, I've always been on the lookout for ways to convince people that economics is, in fact, fun, friendly, easy, and romantic.

Here is Bill Easterly today [actually, last week - dunno why this post didn't get posted earlier] blogging about how marriage search is like development, and in the process talking about how unromantic economists can be.

I recently helped one of my single male graduate students in his search for a spouse.

First, I suggested he conduct a randomized controlled trial of potential mates to identify the one with the best benefit/cost ratio. Unfortunately, all the women randomly selected for the study refused assignment to either the treatment or control groups, using language that does not usually enter academic discourse.

With the “gold standard” methods unavailable, I next recommended an econometric regression approach. He looked for data on a large sample of married women on various inputs (intelligence, beauty, education, family background, did they take a bath every day), as well as on output: marital happiness. Then he ran an econometric regression of output on inputs. Finally, he gathered data on available single women on all the characteristics in the econometric study. He made an out-of-sample prediction of predicted marital happiness. He visited the lucky woman who had the best predicted value in the entire singles sample, explained to her how he calculated her nuptial fitness, and suggested they get married. She called the police.

He goes on from there to describe how he eventually did find a mate and makes the comparison with development. But this is where my comments pick up as I discussed the problem of ignoring the incentives women have and their corresponding actions:

1 – He ignored the self-selection bias. Regressions only tell us what the 'average' effects are, that is the effect for the 'average' person. It’s only about qualities that make the average guy happy if he is the average guy. Economists being the strange lot we are, it is likely that it takes a special kind of woman to marry one of us. He needed to find a bunch of guys very similar to himself and examine the qualities that made a difference from among (and this is key) the population of women willing to marry guys like him - the women who self-select themselves into our group. If he then approached a women who was not in that group, no wonder he was rejected. Speaking as a Mormon economist-in-embryo who read Shakespeare in the original Klingon as it were, who carried a briefcase in junior high, who preferred slacks to jeans, and who felt the downfall of music began with the electric guitar, I knew I had my work cut out for me when I was only 13. Small sample sizes indeed.

2 – He ignored endogeneity. Instead of trying to convince her that research showed she would make him happy, he needed to present research that demonstrated he would make her happy, and that’s the other half of the regression: male qualities on marital happiness. No wonder she rejected him: his regressions didn’t answer her question!

Personally, I took more of a Bayesian approach. Bayesians believe that a lot of things in life [like regression coefficients] are random and over time we get better and better signals about where the truth is, but we only ever approach it by degrees. First, by trying to become a friend, I identified if she was in the group of people who might marry someone like me. Each interaction gave me more information about the error term and the regression coefficients about fostering a happy, loving friendship that could endure. After any failed relationship, I had a new variable or two to add to my equations and I understood the ‘relationships’ between relationship variables better. That might be about finding out more or different things I needed [hunh, so her political affiliation isn't as important as I thought and her willingness to smile at me is vital] or about learning more and better policies over time that I could enact to make her happier [tips for being a better listener or learn to identify her love languages and feed them to her, instead of your own, regularly].

In the end, I’ve married someone who has all the good qualities in the best people I dated and avoids all of the relationship-ending problems, and I’ve learned how to promote her happiness so I can keep her. It's so wonderful. Thank you, Joy, for saying yes.

* - Actually, the quote is about Econometrics, his specialty within economics, but I trust he wouldn't object to my making the model more general.

Zombie Politics

I'd been planning this post for a couple months now, but my Halloween post is nonetheless late. The question was asked on a blog somewhere out there last year - why are zombies popular, recurring monsters? Of the various top monsters (vampires certainly are winning this year), zombies have the least personality, least variation, least ... everything. So why do we keep coming out with zombie movies and books (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, for instance)?

The best answer in the comments section was that zombies scale. There's a natural predator/prey limit to the number of vampires you can have running around; at some point your society is so full of werewolves or mutants that it becomes normal and a story of civil rights; as soon as you have enough aliens to cover 51% of the population, we become the 'other' to them and it doesn't make much difference how many more aliens there are ... but zombies just keep getting more terrifying the more of them there are. Indeed, it is the very notion of their expanding without limit that brings on the terror.

My first thought was that it's easy for us to 'empathize' with zombies since most of us wake up each morning feeling just a little bit undead. (Insert comic about a zombie office entitled "Night of the Just-Trying-to-Make-a-Living-Dead") While some of us enjoy putting on the vampire (I have a cape, myself) or the alien masks, the notion of waking up one day as a zombie has no fun in it. We've heard the zombies moan, and it doesn't sound like they're having a good time.

Then I had another idea: zombies are the ideal representation of our political opponents. Few things are as frightening as having a bunch of them running things and you being the last sensible person in a country gone mad. So we work out our political angst on a few million zombies and everything returns to normal.

For the conservative: Nothing says socialist-totalitarian rule of society like mindless zombies. No individuality, no moral restraint, no family - the religious conservative can be comfortable calling them evil. (insert comic from Zombies Anonymous: "Hello, my name is Gary and I'm an abomination to life and the natural order.") What anti-zombie strategy in its initial stages doesn't involve containment, the classic political conservative reaction to communism? Zombies do not understand diplomacy, only force, so military conservatives can have a field day. ... I'm not sure how fiscal conservatives get in on the act, but I'm working on it. Maybe zombies are too egalitarian or something, with hard-working, faster zombies only being the first to get mowed down, I dunno. Every home needs excess guns and ammunition to fight them off: zombies are WHY the 2nd amendment is in the Constitution (Insert instructions for surviving the zombie apocalypse). It should also be mentioned that zombie prevention/eradication requires a strong military presence in every city, particularly those with trailer parks. This creates jobs and is one of the listed purposes of government in the Constitution.

For the liberal: Nothing says predatory capitalist imperialism like mindless zombies. All they do is consume, their need for it is insatiable! They are anti-self-styled-intellectual, devouring brains (insert Zombie food pyramid here: brains, 6-11 servings daily; bones and gristle, gnaw sparingly). Zombies are bad for the environment, with explosively unsustainable population growth - there are even serious biology papers on the expansion of zombie epidemics. Zombie epidemics often start near nuclear plants and military bases, so we need to avoid nuclear energy and shut down the military. Zombies do not understand diplomacy, refuse to give peace a chance, and are violent in all their interactions (this one cuts both ways, you see). Zombies are not tolerant of alternative lifestyles and wipe out cultural diversity. It should also be mentioned that zombies are victims of their own society and their prevention/eradication represents an important public good that we need taxation and government oversight to prevent.

Normally I would post a few good zombie pics to go with this (insert a couple McCain-zombie pics), but I know Joy wouldn't approve. I thank her for her good graces in letting me post this in the first place. She disavows any association with this post.

Brilliant ideas

The average person in Sub-Saharan Africa uses 4 gallons of water a day*. That isn't even how much they would like to use if it flowed freely and cheaply through a tap, but how much is used. Y'see, only 56% of SS Africans have access to an "improved" water source within a kilometer of their home (World Bank, 2008). So 44% have to travel over half a mile, and in some cases much much more, to find water that may or may not be of good quality.

How do they do this? Mostly the women and children carry the water by hand, and mostly that means in 5-gallon, 40-pound drums balanced on their heads. This is hard work (try carrying two gallons of milk around with you on a lap around the store and think of doing 2-3 times that weight for up to 5 hours a day).

Well, at least two projects have addressed this by going back to that most basic of inventions: The Wheel. Why rectangular drums? Make them big round drums and they can be rolled, pushed, or pulled by rope and put much less strain on head, neck, shoulders, arms, and back. It makes the work safer and easier, and reduces the time because they aren't as burdened. One project is called Hippo Roller (left) and another is the Q Drum (right, hat tip Chris Blattman). Pres. Obama's stepmother is even seen supporting the initiatives.

I have mentioned the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' efforts to bring improved water sources to the DR Congo here.




* - I have to wonder if that includes South Africa in the estimate and what the difference is between the arid Sahel and the tropic regions: Africa is not a country.

A little philosophy: what is truth?

1 - Frederick Hayek's 1974 Nobel Prize (Econ) lecture: "I prefer true but imperfect knowledge, even if it leaves much indetermined and unpredictable, to a pretence of exact knowledge that is likely to be false." Hayek was speaking about the great unknowns in economics and political science, pointing out the hubris in assuming away the things we cannot measure in order to come up with estimates to the third decimal point of the effects of, say, government spending on unemployment. It works equally well in discussing spiritual truth. It is the humility to say, "I know that [God] loveth his children; nevertheless, I do not know the meaning of all things" and avoiding the pride that says my model proves there is no God because He does not show up in my experiments.

2 - An economist who writes philosophy (Steve Landsburg) just started blogging, and he argued that 1) the evolutionist who says "Evolution proves there is no God" is missing the point. It's not explaining life that's challenging, but why is there anything? and that 2) since mathematics and other extremely complex things are eternal and self-existent, there is no need for a Creator to create them. I responded thusly:

Y'see, part of the problem both you and he are bringing up is what we mean by "create." There is stuck in Western thought since the councils that create must mean "ex nihilo." But there is no Biblical support for that. The better term for what Gensis speaks of is "organize" rather than "produce from nothing." That is, in fact, the sense we usually mean when we talk of creating anything: we take the parts that are already there, physical and mental, and combine them to form a new thing. "In the beginning ... the earth was without form" not "In the beginning there was no matter."

Joseph Smith, some one hundred years before Einstein said the same thing, claimed that matter "was not created or made, neither indeed can be" (Doctrine and Covenants 93:29). Mormon/LDS theology has long accepted the eternal, 'independent existence' of God, the universe with all its matter, mathematics, and all of us. It's still not proof there is no God. Its eternal, self-existent nature is in fact one more type and shadow of Him.

There is much of that I do not understand. ... That may be a good thing.

3 - On the lighter side, Chris Blattman links us to three questions: Truth is a number? Truth is art? Art is numbers? A Chinese firm that sells art around the world produces composite pictures of the most and least desired art in various countries to show us what we want. For Americans, it appears to be George Washington by a lake. Kenya has remarkably similar taste. One of the artists explained:

"In a way it was a traditional idea, because a faith in numbers is fundamental to people, starting with Plato’s idea of a world which is based on numbers. ... we believe in numbers, and numbers never lie. Numbers are innocent. It’s absolutely true data. ... That’s really the truth, as much as we can get to the truth. Truth is a number."

Oy, my head!

Two fun links

An open letter, or what not to get your kid for Christmas, chemistry edition. Incredibly hilarious. "The time has come to ... allow your daughter to enjoy her happy intellectual incuriosity..." Hat tip: an old Wronging Rights post.

McDonald's is throwing in the towel in Iceland. What's the fun part, you ask? The opponents of American neo-imperialism (I work with some of them) cheer because Mickey D's has "terrorized food culture all over the world." If you buy that Big Mac... the terrorists win. (Hat tip: Marginal Revolution).

Salzburger Dom (Cathedral)

The Salzburg Cathedral is a magnificent monument to Christ and to the archbishops who have worked and served there. A number of them are entombed underneath and two of the wing-side altars are dedicated to their memories and service with large than life-sized portraits of them surrounding the altars.

This is the door to a smaller chapel underneath the cathedral in the crypt.







One of the principal altars.







The top of an arch-bishop altar.









The grand organ. There are I think 4 other organs in the main hall as well. The organist doth covet.








The paintings on the ceilings depict scenes from the crucifixion, resurrection, judgment, and stories from the Old Testament. Probably stories from the Catholic saints as well, but I wouldn't recognize them. It's really worth it to click on the ceiling pictures in the post to see them enlarged.



In this video, I walk from one side of the cathedral to the other, starting at the baptismal font (surrounded by a group of happy grandparents). The place is really huge.


Some more gorgeous ceiling work. There's actually relatively little on the walls. The altars and paintings in the alcoves are beautiful, but the pillars and walls themselves are noticeably blank. Clearly the intention is to get one to look up in wonder at God.


Outside the cathedral is a large statue of Mary. One of the cooler parts I learned about online before we went was that if you start from the passageway and walk forward, it looks like the angels on the cathedral lower to crown the virgin Mary. My videos seem a lot shakier than I remember being.