Good morning all,
it's also a beautiful sunny day here. not warm enough to melt the snow but I'll take the sunshine :)

My DH is a mechanic, and he loves to talk about his job just as much as I love to talk about my gardens. lol
I know the answer, so will be silent and enjoy the game
:) Laura

Hi Nancy, sunny here today too, though ice is predicted for tonight. I don't like that.

Banning leaded fuel has taken away the quantities of lead that used to drift down on us day after day, especially in cities, but I suspect you are going for something more specific than that. I'll have to put on my thinking cap. Again.

TM

I'm thinking it has something to do with lead too, but what???

Annette who is about to hit the gravel pile again.

Tote that barge, lift that bale, Annette. 'Ethyl' was introduced in the 40's, I am told. The use from then to the millennium created a U-shaped graph of air-borne lead. In 2000, an economist made a correlation to another U-shaped graph, which had nothing, on the surface, to do with gasoline. Makes me mad as a hatter, when I think of the damage done!!

Nancy.

Late to the party, but that is probably good. When I read the question, my head was spinning with lots of possibilities. You narrowed it down with your last post, though!

The thermometer has really dropped here today. Brrrr. Still, no snow...boo.

We do seem to have a mind-meld quite often. Fun!

Cynthia

I'm pondering two directions with this. One has to do with another airborne pollutant and the other with an animal affected by the lead. Need more clues!

Laura, you can continue to play by indirectly giving clues in your comments.
This helps determine if you have the correct answer and also helps those of us who haven't gotten the answer. Finding the clues and figuring out the answer is often more fun than knowing the answer.

I think the journey is often more fun than the destination. Then again I am a travel junky!! lol.

I love watching this old house!! It's available on YouTube, if you research the episodes first, and then request the specific episode. I'm not so keen on the newer 'make-over' ones, but the ones where they take historic houses down to their bones. There was a great post-Katrina makeover of a 'shotgun' style house. They were originally made from the barge-boards that goods came down the Mississippi on.....really interesting. They take safety very seriously, and lead is one of the paint ingredients they worry about - they wear Hasmat-like suits to remove those boards. I guess everyone breathes easier and is much happier to have it gone!! When they were done with that house, it wasn't really a shotgun anymore!!

Nancy.

Ok I'll try to give clues that are not dead give aways.
Did you know that diesel trucks have urea injectors built right into their exhaust streams? The new models coming out this year will have 2 catalytic converters place behind the diesel converter exhaust system. Not sure if I worded all this right. My mind tends to drift away when he gets too technical.
He's been installing a lot of ridesmart computers lately. Takes him about 3-4 hrs each to install.
:)Laura
p.s.
I think I know more about his job than a wife should know.lol

Here's a quote from Mother Jones: Some 167,000 piston engine aircraft - about three-quarters of private planes in the United States - are still spewing lead into our air. That's because their fuel, known as avgas, uses the same tetraethyl lead addictive since banned in automobile gas, making it the No. 1 source of lead emissions in America. (The jet fuel used in big passenger planes does not contain lead.) Lead-free alternatives are available for most piston engine aircraft, but the phaseout of leaded fuel has been slow. Last June, the FAA finally created the Fuels Program Office to replace leaded avgas by 2018-24 years after it was banned in automobiles.

Leaded avgas emits only a small fraction of the lead once coughed out by cars, but it disproportionately affects people living near the 20,000 airports where it's used. The EPA estimates (PDF) there are 16 million people living within one kilometer of those airports, and 3 million children attend schools in the same radius. According to a 2011 study by Duke University researchers, kids who live near airports have elevated levels of lead in their blood.

Now that just gives me air-rage!!

Nancy.

The wild one is here (Laura, that is our grandpup Koda who comes on weekends to run with our two crazy dogs). He is just amazing. I always thought Clouseau was fast, but Koda seems to have wings on his feet. When the mongrel horde goes after an invading squirrel, he practically climbs the tree to chase the tree rat. Annabelle may not be quite as fast, but she can turn on a dime when she is after something! They have been in and out all day. I will be glad when Kelly picks him up in a bit.

Cynthia

Hmmm...not seeing any good guesses here. Laura, I'm not sure you are on the right track. Some people credited some of these drops, the bottom end of the inverted U-shape to Mayor Julliani, or to the results of Roe vs. Wade, incorrectly it seems.

Nancy.

I don't have any grand pups, but my neighbor's dog has adopted us. The dog thinks he's lassie and twice had to be rescued from the pound by my son. The poor thing was so traumatized he refuses to leave.
He's a big white husky mix with blue eyes. I'm constantly covered with white dog air.
Fall of 2011 we chopped down trees and now have such an amazing view. Especially at night. We can see 2 different ski places that are so lit up, they look like distant bridges.
During the day we can see this cute little barn in a giant hay field...I think it's a hay field.
I'm so glad we finally chopped down those trees.
:) Laura

Could it have something to do with our health, I know someone who ate a LOT of tuna and his doctor was alarmed with the amount of lead he had in his system.

Annette

ok, Nancy. I guess I need to be more obvious about my guess. Let's see. Not thinking lead, but definitely thinking fish!

Anyone familiar with older U.S. currency? I think some of those old coins were so much prettier than today's coins. One in particular was always a favorite of mine. Small (smallest of current coins in fact), but it had a wonderful image. Of course, I was always fascinated as a child by mythology.

Cynthia

Cold fish, guys!!!

Clues are:
mad as a hatter
shotgun
rage

Any help?

Nancy.

Cold fish, guys!!!

Clues are:
mad as a hatter
shotgun
rage

Any help?

Nancy.

Mad hatter and shotgun have me thinking rabbits but not sure where rage is coming from, Elmer Fudd?

lol, Bobbie, made me laugh. OK, didn't think this would be easy, but I didn't think it would this hard, either. Obviously my clues were not great.

To quote the Mother Jones article: In 1994, Rick Nevin was a consultant working for the US Department of Housing and Urban Development on the costs and benefits of removing lead paint from old houses. This has been a topic of intense study because of the growing body of research linking lead exposure in small children with a whole raft of complications later in life, including lower IQ, hyperactivity, behavioral problems, and learning disabilities.
But as Nevin was working on that assignment, his client suggested they might be missing something. A recent study had suggested a link between childhood lead exposure and juvenile delinquency later on. Maybe reducing lead exposure had an effect on violent crime too?
That tip took Nevin in a different direction. The biggest source of lead in the postwar era, it turns out, wasn't paint. It was leaded gasoline. And if you chart the rise and fall of atmospheric lead caused by the rise and fall of leaded gasoline consumption, you get a pretty simple upside-down U: Lead emissions from tailpipes rose steadily from the early '40s through the early '70s, nearly quadrupling over that period. Then, as unleaded gasoline began to replace leaded gasoline, emissions plummeted.
Gasoline lead may explain as much as 90 percent of the rise and fall of violent crime over the past half century.
Intriguingly, violent crime rates followed the same upside-down U pattern. The only thing different was the time period: Crime rates rose dramatically in the '60s through the '80s, and then began dropping steadily starting in the early '90s. The two curves looked eerily identical, but were offset by about 20 years.
It was an exciting conjecture, and it prompted an immediate wave of - nothing. Nevin's paper was almost completely ignored, and in one sense it's easy to see why - Nevin is an economist, not a criminologist, and his paper was published in Environmental Research, not a journal with a big readership in the criminology community. What's more, a single correlation between two curves isn't all that impressive, econometrically speaking. Sales of vinyl LPs rose in the postwar period too, and then declined in the '80s and '90s.
A few hundred miles north someone was making the link. In the late '90s, Jessica Wolpaw Reyes was a graduate student at Harvard casting around for a dissertation topic that eventually became a study she published in 2007 as a public health policy professor at Amherst. "I learned about lead because I was pregnant and living in old housing in Harvard Square," she told me, and after attending a talk where future Freakonomics star Levitt outlined his abortion/crime theory, she started thinking about lead and crime. Although the association seemed plausible, she wanted to find out whether increased lead exposure caused increases in crime. But how?
Use of leaded gasoline varied widely among states, and this gave Reyes the opening she needed. If childhood lead exposure really did produce criminal behavior in adults, you'd expect that in states where consumption of leaded gasoline declined slowly, crime would decline slowly too. Conversely, in states where it declined quickly, crime would decline quickly. And that's exactly what she found.
Long story short, between Reyes and Nevin continued independent research, shoring up the theory.
Nevin collected lead data and crime data for Australia and found a close match. Ditto for Canada. And Great Britain and Finland and France and Italy and New Zealand and West Germany. Every time, the two curves fit each other astonishingly well. When I spoke to Nevin about this, I asked him if he had ever found a country that didn't fit the theory. "No," he replied. "Not one."

So, there you go, every once in a while we do something right and reap even more benefits than expected!! I remember the wailing and the knashing of teeth when unleaded gas came into being. I remember old car guys saying vehicles would never run properly, and being able to buy tetraethylead additives at the auto shops. Now, even race cars no longer run on leaded gas, because of the high exposures to the pit crews. And we need to work on those small private planes, for the sakes of the children who live and go to school near these airports. But pat yourselves on the back, cause we did good!!

Thanks for playing, no stars, right? See you next week - geez, I really didn't think this was a stumper!!

Nancy.

Here is a link that might be useful: Nevin's 2007 Paper

Wow!
I didn't follow the rabbit hole far enough. I thought you were just going for the clean air act. Like I was rambling about My DH's job. He install computers to trucks, so if the emissions don't meet EPA standards, the truck will essentially shut down. The add bonus to the clean air act didn't just clean the air but reduced pollutants from effecting plants,pond life, animals and just made everything more beautiful.

Thanks, Nancy, for the question. Interesting paper.

Interesting, Nancy. Your "mad as a hatter" clue had me thinking mercury. Didn't pick up on the other clues at all!

Yep, no stars for me. Lots of fun though.

Cynthia

I wasn't headed there at all, but I like it a lot. Pretty cool. Usually the Law of Unintended Consequences seems to produce bad things, but not this time. Very cheerful.

Thanks, Nancy.

TM

'Mad as a Hatter' refers to the mercury that was once used in the felting of wool to make the hats - sorry, I was trying to make reference to the fact that the lead also made people 'mad'. My apologies for the misdirection!

Nancy.

No need to apologize! I missed the other clues since I was thinking you wanted something other than lead and I wasn't even thinking f behavior. Really, really interesting, I think!

Cynthia