BY BILL VOSSLER for Elk Magazine
FEBRUARY 2010

Adolph Ronning earned his first patent while still in high school and went on to receive hundreds of other patents for items ranging from ensilage harvesters to explosive underwater mines.

ONE EVENING IN THE 1990s, Adair Kelley was watching a TV special about the exploration of the wreck of the Titanic. The Montevideo, Minnesota, woman watched as an underwater exploration vehicle glided around the wreck in the gloom, 12,467 feet below the surface of the North Atlantic Ocean, and found herself looking at something she hadn’t expected to see. “I looked at the exploration vehicle,” Adair Kelley recalls, “and I said, ‘That’s dad’s propeller!” It wasn’t her father’s actual propeller, of course, but a propeller built using a non-snarl design he had invented. She was very moved by the episode and amazed that her father’s propeller design was still being used.
It’s not surprising that Kelley encountered one of her father’s inventions the way she did. If you have ever ridden in a powerboat, used a steam iron or a magnetic door latch, dimmed your car lights, or added a gasket to a lawn hose, you, too, have probably been in the presence of inventions conceived by the fertile mind of Adair Kelley’s father. His name was Adolph Ronning, and he was a member of the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks.

During his prolific inventing career, Adolph Ronning, of the Phoenix, Arizona, Lodge, was awarded patents or had patents pending virtually every week for fifty-five straight years, and many of these patents involved items Americans still use today, like the sewer gas trap, the window stay, or the motorcycle. “He was always working on something,” Adair Kelley says, and this may have been very close to the literal truth. While stuck in an elevator one time in 1976, Ronning decided to use his live hours of captivity to sketch out an idea for which he later received a patent. It was a design for a manual elevator escape hatch.

Early Days

Adolph Ronning was born in 1893 and grew up on a farm near Boyd, Minnesota. His father died when he was seven years old, leaving him, his mother, and eight brothers and sisters to work the family farm. At this time, only a few of the children were old enough to do work around the farm, and because Adolph was one of them, his earliest inventions were designed to make agricultural work easier. According to Adair Kelley, who is his youngest daughter, “He was a typical kid on a farm figuring ‘There’s got to be an easier way to do this.’” In his early quest to simplilr agricultural work that was based on horse power, Ronning worked with his brothers to construct a tractor using an assortment of spare parts they found around the farm. This was quite a feat for a boy who was not yet ten years old, and there was still a great deal more to come. The only problem was funding.

During those early years, proceeds from the Ronning family farm were needed to support the family. There was little money left over with which to buy the expensive engines and parts Ronning needed to construct his inventions, so to earn the money he needed for his projects, he sold frozen fish out of a railroad boxcar, worked as a handyman painting silos for neighbors, and gave violin lessons. In this way, before he was even fully grown, he had begun working toward his first patent, which was a design for a horse-drawn ensilage harvester. The patent for the harvester was issued in April 1912, while the young inventor was still in high school, but feeling sorry for his family’s hardworking farm horses, which got hot and sweaty pulling a traditional harvester all day long, Ronning went to his drawing board and redesigned the harvester so that it could be pulled by a tractor and powered by the tractor’s power take-off. This change brought him one step closer to the realization of a goal Adair Kelley describes as “horseless farming.” The next step was raising the money needed to manufacture the harvester. After graduating from high school in 1912, Ronning became a country school teacher and taught for two years to make enough money to move to Minneapolis and begin manufacturing his redesigned harvester. Then, in the 1920s, he licensed the manufacture of the harvester to the International Harvester Company.
Ronning’s dedication to his chosen profession quickly became evident in the time he spent working on his inventions. He was known to work through the night, and his long hours of intense application resulted in numerous patents for important earthmoving and agricultural equipment, like the one-man power road grader (a device still in use today), an improved pneumatic elevator for loading silage into silos or bins, tractor implements, and a front wheel design for tractors that made it possible for them to negotiate rocks and potholes.
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With the advent of Mechanical ensilaqe harvesters, like this Ronning single- machines like Adolph row harvester manufactured around 1923, helped take Ronning’s mechanical much of the manual labor out of the silaging process.
ensilage harvester, however, much of this manual labor was eliminated. Ronning’s harvester mechanically harvested the cornstalks, chopped them up, and transferred them and the grain from the stalks to an accompanying wagon, right in the field. When the wagon became full, it was replaced by an empty wagon while the full wagon was driven to the storage location, where its contents were unloaded. Ronning eventually developed an improved pneumatic elevator to more effectively move chopped silage from transport wagons to silos or bins. When used in combination with each other, his mechanical ensilage harvester and pneumatic elevator increased efficiency and helped
ensure that the harvesting and silaging processes could be conducted virtually without interruption.
RONNING ENSILAGE HARVESTER
SILAGE is a fermented animal feed made from chopped up cereal crops such as corn or sorghum. The process of creating silage is known as ensilage, or silaging, and prior to the invention of the mechanical ensilage harvester, making silage was highly labor-intensive work. Silage crops such as corn had to be harvested manually and removed from the fields before being hand chopped and fermented in silos, bins, or on the ground under covers.

LIMON CO (IFS) – It’s a great thing when you donate your time to giving a little sunshine to the lives of our seniors who are shut-ins and something just forgotten, as most of them are just “warehoused” in these nursing homes. Chaya and Kenny Finton have dedicated their lives to singing and playing for these wonderful poineers that have given so much and who now needs a little entertainment and appreciation in this fast paced world of ours.

Published June 12, 2010
Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — As an aide in the Clinton White House, Elena Kagan steeped herself in details of the Ruby Ridge controversy, an issue that Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania had zeroed in on as he sought the Republican presidential nomination.

Kagan’s handwritten notes from 1995 track Specter’s hearings, according to some of the Supreme Court nominee’s records released Friday from her days as a White House lawyer.

The wife and son of family man Randy Weaver had been shot to death in Idaho at the hands of federal law enforcement agents and Specter was looking into a possible FBI coverup of who gave the orders that led to the August 1992 tragedy, which also claimed the life of a deputy U.S. marshal who was shot to death.

Among the Ruby Ridge-related documents in Kagan’s files was a preparatory question-and-answer session with President Bill Clinton in which the president called for a “full accounting” on Ruby Ridge, adding that he had not been in office when the shootings took place.

By 1995, it was the alleged FBI coverup following the shootings that became the consuming issue.

“Dispute btw Hatch and Specter — when to finish up? latter wants to get into coverup,” state handwritten notes in Kagan’s files.

Following a GOP takeover of the Senate as well as the House in 1994, Orrin Hatch of Utah took over the chairmanship of the judiciary committee and Specter chaired the terrorism subcommittee.

Facing fundraising woes and trailing Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas for the GOP nomination, Specter dropped out of the race toward the end of 1995, and Ruby Ridge didn’t became a campaign issue.

But earlier in 1995, Kagan’s files reflect the importance that the issue of Ruby Ridge held for the president and his top aides.

In July 1995, a news article on a possible FBI coverup of the events surrounding Ruby Ridge was stamped “the president has seen.”

The news article focused on the possible shredding of an FBI document that could have shed light on law enforcement decisions during the siege at Ruby Ridge. The bureau had laid down permissive rules for the use of deadly force.

In releasing Kagan’s files Friday, the Clinton presidential library kept under wraps for now a five-page Justice Department memo on the coverup allegations. The memo was faxed to the White House in early September 1995.

Releasing it would disclose confidential advice involving the president and his advisers or between his advisers, according to a notice in the Kagan records explaining why the memo is being withheld from public view 15 years after the events.

Remembering Randy Weaver
by Wally Conger

Big Media is all abuzz right now. “How shall we commemorate the first anniversary of 9/11?” they ask. “Where do you draw the line between a tasteful memorial and too much?”

It’s a safe bet that politicians and pundits will err on the side of “too much.”

Meanwhile, another significant anniversary will likely go forgotten by CNN, Donahue, Brocaw, and others.

August 21 marks ten years since the federal government’s siege on the home of Randy Weaver and his family at Ruby Ridge in Idaho.

The Weavers have disappeared down an Orwellian memory hole for most Americans. You see, their story doesn’t offer an occasion for waving flags and singing patriotic songs. In fact, despite the tragedy that befell the Weaver family, Randy Weaver is still vilified by major media and so-called liberals for his “crimes and strange beliefs.” Those crimes and strange beliefs include distrust of your government.

Randy Weaver had reason to distrust his government. In 1991, an agent of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF) entrapped Weaver by hiring him to cut off the barrels of two shotguns illegally. Once Weaver was arrested, BATF tried to force him to inform on the Aryan Nation group, with which he was affiliated, but he refused. Weaver also refused to appear in court for the minor firearms charge. For the next 18 months, the U.S. Marshals Service spied on the Weavers’ isolated mountain cabin, where Randy lived with his wife Vicki, son Sammy (14), daughters Sara (16), Rachel (10), and Elisheba (10 months), and a young friend named Kevin Harris.

Then came August 21, 1992. On that morning, six trained government marksmen wearing ski masks and camouflage and armed with automatic weapons equipped with silencers, crept up on the Weaver cabin without warning or warrant and without identifying themselves. First they shot and killed the family’s yellow Labrador, Striker, who had been barking at the intruders. When young Sammy witnessed this, he fired a .223 mini-14 in the direction from which the shots had come, then ran back toward the cabin. Agents shot Sammy in the arm, knocking him down. The youngster got back to his feet and began running again. Moments later, a second gunshot caught Sammy in the back, killing him.

Within 24 hours, one Deputy U.S. Marshal was dead and some 400 federal agents were arriving at the scene, along with a helicopter, “humvees,” and armored transport vehicles and personnel carriers. The Weavers’ dead dog was left in the road and repeatedly run over by government vehicles. On the afternoon of August 22, Vicki Weaver, standing at the cabin’s kitchen door and armed with nothing more lethal than baby Elisheba, was shot in the head by a government sniper. The round hit Vicki in the temple, traveled through her mouth, tongue, and jawbone, then severed her carotid artery. Kneeling on the floor and still clutching her baby, Vicki bled to death.

Nine days later, Weaver, a badly wounded Harris, and the surviving kids surrendered to federal agents. Eleven months after that, a jury in Boise, Idaho, acquitted Weaver and Harris of murder and conspiracy charges stemming from the government assault.

When the jury came back with its not-guilty verdict, Randy Weaver turned to his lawyer, Gerry Spence. “I’ve learned something about the system,” he told Spence. “This is a good system. This system will work.”

Weaver was more optimistic than I am. More forgiving, too. In 1995, Congressional hearings into the Weaver tragedy revealed a cover-up, but the feds refused to prosecute the killers of Sammy and Vicki Weaver. Case closed. And despite all the evidence of government wrongdoing, those of us who now mention the name Randy Weaver are generally dismissed as “right-wing, gun-toting, conspiracy nuts.”

Today, while the Weaver story is falling through the cracks of history, most Americans look toward the anniversary of 9/11 and demand that the government “do something, anything” to protect them from foreign terrorists — highly trained assassins wearing ski masks and camouflage and armed with automatic weapons equipped with silencers.

As for me, I will respectfully observe the 9/11 memorials. But I also intend to take a few minutes on August 21, the tenth anniversary of the Siege at Ruby Ridge, to ponder how best to tell the Bad Guys from the Good Guys during these difficult times. And to wonder how wise it is to demand that one band of murderous thugs protect us from another.

Published June 12, 2010
| Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — As an aide in the Clinton White House, Elena Kagan steeped herself in details of the Ruby Ridge controversy, an issue that Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania had zeroed in on as he sought the Republican presidential nomination.

Kagan’s handwritten notes from 1995 track Specter’s hearings, according to some of the Supreme Court nominee’s records released Friday from her days as a White House lawyer.

The wife and son of white separatist Randy Weaver had been shot to death in Idaho at the hands of federal law enforcement agents and Specter was looking into a possible FBI coverup of who gave the orders that led to the August 1992 tragedy, which also claimed the life of a deputy U.S. marshal who was shot to death.

Among the Ruby Ridge-related documents in Kagan’s files was a preparatory question-and-answer session with President Bill Clinton in which the president called for a “full accounting” on Ruby Ridge, adding that he had not been in office when the shootings took place.

By 1995, it was the alleged FBI coverup following the shootings that became the consuming issue.

“Dispute btw Hatch and Specter — when to finish up? latter wants to get into coverup,” state handwritten notes in Kagan’s files.

Following a GOP takeover of the Senate as well as the House in 1994, Orrin Hatch of Utah took over the chairmanship of the judiciary committee and Specter chaired the terrorism subcommittee.

Facing fundraising woes and trailing Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas for the GOP nomination, Specter dropped out of the race toward the end of 1995, and Ruby Ridge didn’t became a campaign issue.

But earlier in 1995, Kagan’s files reflect the importance that the issue of Ruby Ridge held for the president and his top aides.

In July 1995, a news article on a possible FBI coverup of the events surrounding Ruby Ridge was stamped “the president has seen.”

The news article focused on the possible shredding of an FBI document that could have shed light on law enforcement decisions during the siege at Ruby Ridge. The bureau had laid down permissive rules for the use of deadly force.

In releasing Kagan’s files Friday, the Clinton presidential library kept under wraps for now a five-page Justice Department memo on the coverup allegations. The memo was faxed to the White House in early September 1995.

Releasing it would disclose confidential advice involving the president and his advisers or between his advisers, according to a notice in the Kagan records explaining why the memo is being withheld from public view 15 years after the events.

SACRAMENTO CA (IFS) – Clyde Edgar Smith – Cooking with Poke Salad – Cooking with Clyde. A plant that is both nutritious and deadly. Tony Joe White recorded a song that made this plant really famous. “Poke Salad Annie” climbed the charts in the late 1960-70′s. But cooking with Poke Salad is nothing to take lightly. It is a cousin to the deadly “Night Shade” plant family, and if you eat this plant after May, is will be poisonous and will cause you great harm.

Watch the full episode. See more Secrets of the Dead.

Byte Radiation Technology Institute of America Station ID from BRTIAmerica on Vimeo.

LIMON CO (IFS) – A special thanks to the many students that participated in this study of music and learning quiz. The responses were unique and are written below as follows. “…As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.” — Albert Einstein

Music and Study: Whats the deal with that?

Several students pondered why is it that sometimes they can be listening to dance music and it will really help them to focus on, say, reading, but on other days and they won’t be able to concentrate if one hears the slightest noise.

Even more strange, sometimes a bit of rock will help me do maths, but another time it’ll be country, and another just absolutely no noise at all.

Have there been any studies done in psychology regarding music and concentration, and how it can change?

It comes down to learning styles.

When I was training to be a teacher, we got taught about learning styles, there are generally defined as being three kinds. Visual, Aural, and Kinesthetic.

Visual learners don’t cope well with background noise, and learn by reading.

Aural learners learn best by hearing, or listening to things, but, they generally can’t study without some form of background noise – the background noise is crucial in the learning process, without the information get’s lost.

Kinesthetic learners need to do things, and tend to fidget or fiddle with their hands while reading.

Now, I don’t remember which behavior is more prevalent, but I believe people tend to settle into one predominant learning style, and I think that is the prevalent behavior.

However, I know that for myself, while I’m predominantly visual, I tend to swing between all three styles, depending on mood, tiredness, stress levels, what have you.

As I’m typing this I’m also getting the distinct impression that most people tend to be predominantly one, but, like everything else, have… Traits from other styles.

Well, according to that, I’m mostly a Visual learner, sometimes an Aural learner, and occasionally a Kinesthetic learner.

Hmm… when I’m actually learning something new, like a new concept or analyzing an argument for example, I generally require absolute science to concentrate.

But when I’m studying something which I know well, like actually doing the equations in maths rather than trying to comprehend them, or just reading a book which has nothing terribly complicated in it, then listening to music is actually a massive help… so much so that if it stops or breaks, I lose my rhythm and my concentration goes with it.

Is Kinesthetic learning a real style of learning like the other two? It seems to be the odd one out of the three, more like it describes boredom than learning style… but that could just be my biased opinion.

My Math teacher back in high school always complained about me listening to my headphones in class while doing the exercises. She said that whilst it probably did help me to focus my thoughts, it will actually lessen my ability to focus on it without the music playing, because “neurons which fire together, wire together”… I wonder how true this is as well, though it does sound plausible enough.

Oh, and is there anything which backs up this particular theory of learning styles…? I’ve actually heard quite a few different ‘theories’ while I was in high school about different methods of learning, and few were substantiated.

Yes, there seems to be a lot of stuff.

Bare in mind, I’m a predominantly visual learner, I suppose and easier way of explaining it would be.

Visual Learners make good scientists.
Aural Learners make good musicians.
Kinesthetic Learners tend to make good PhysEd types.

http://www.agelesslearner.com/intros/lstyleintro.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_styles
http://www.inspiringlearningforall.gov.uk/uploads/Current%20thinking%20-%20learnin.doc

There’s probably a bunch of other stuff. I found these by doing a Google search for “VAK Learning Theory”

The three learning styles are distinctly different.

Well, from a very quick read through one of the links and a few of it’s references, it seems that this is actually quite a controversial topic (I am extremely tired though, and not concentrating properly, so I could be mistaken… will read again tomorrow).

I particularly liked this: A literature review carried out in 2004 in the UK by a team from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne identified 71 different theories of learning style. (I couldn’t download the file yet, bloody thing wouldn’t work without 35 mb of updates)

As I said above, it is something which everyone seems to have their own theories of which all seem plausible enough; which is pretty common in psychology.

anyway, I read this specifically:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_styles#Criticisms
http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~dlk/Learn.styles.html

Well, for me it appears that I am visual and aural type.
I love science and music. I study chemical technology and play guitar and amuse myself by DJ-ing! While studying, I think that house, rave, ambient and that sort of music helps me. But not all the time. But it is vital for me to listen to some music while studying. When there is no music, I cannot concentrate on what am I reading. I agree that there are more then just three types of people (when it comes to studying).
So, in which group am I?

Actually, there have been several studies of the phenomenon. They have found that sounds at certain frequencies have a beneficial effect on concentration. The band Psychic TV have done extensive research on the subject and even released albums using the beneficial ones.

Sounds like an ad for them but it’s actually true.

Check out Thee Temple Of Psychic Youth.

I think I’d be too embarrassed simply to type “Thee Temple Of Psychic Youth” into a search engine. I couldn’t even type it into this box, I had to copy/paste.

Yeah, it’s one of those ‘grey areas’ in science.

But for my experience, both when I was training to be a teacher, and elsewhere, the VAK/VARK model seems to be the most effective description/model.

And yes, most people fall into more then one category although they tend to be more one then the other two, but then again, is that really that much of a surprise? I mean, lets think about it in relation to almost every other part of Human biology/psychology, and, I suppose, let’s assume that it has at least some dance on how strongly groups of genes are turned on.

Let’s also compare this to left side/right side dominance most people seem to fall into the category of ‘Mostly one, with subtleties of the other’.

And yes, Kinesthetic is a real style, although many teachers to mistake it for boredom or simple bad behavior. There’s a lot of behaviors that generally get lumped into that category that really should not be there. Generally they’re put there because teachers are too lazy to deal with them.

A perfect example of people who are wired towards the Kinesthetic side of things tend to be good at sports. I think.

I’m a musician. I listen to music more as a composer (since that’s what I do). I analyze what I hear in terms of structure, harmony etc. So for me it is generally more difficult to do anything while something is playing in the background. However i can choose not to hear the music IF I PUT MY MIND TO IT. I heard that classical music helps to keep focused when you do math. Tried it myself and it does! Maybe because it’s basic and not over-complicated. As for a change in the effect music has, well it’s all about your state of mind. Or if your heart rate is up, you will feel more comfortable listening to upbeat music for instance. In general choose music without lyrics or as little lyrics as possible since speech is recognizable by your brain and it’s hard not to listen to someone speak… You’ll loose focus. Just try listening to the music in any movie while two characters are having a heated conversation!