Friday, October 31, 2008

Quote of the Day

"You don't need to boo, you just need to vote."

- Obama at a campaign rally in Sarasota, FL as the crowd booed at the first mention of John McCain.

Thursday, October 30, 2008

Undecided?

As Election Day approaches, there continues to be discussion about undecided voters. In a piece from last week's New Yorker, David Sedaris asks the question many of us have been asking: how can one be undecided in this election?

To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”

To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.

That's definitely funny, and a big part of me agrees. But perhaps it's also a bit harsh. A recent op-ed in the NY Times adopts a different perspective by articulating the undecided voter phenomenon as a reflection of the neuroscience and psychology of decision-making. It argues that many such voters have actually made a choice that has not yet gained enough confidence to reach the threshold of consciousness.

This might seem to rescue undecided voters from the accusation that they are out-of-touch or foolish. But I must admit, it remains puzzling to me how these "implicit choices" that ultimately mature into votes could be without intensity, force, or passion for so long when there is so much at stake.

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Voted: Yes

I just filled out my absentee ballot—feels really good. Now go get this feeling yourself!

Mass voters: note Question 2.

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Planet Earth cinematographer:
"Nobody should have to live one month in poo."

News, yes--but paper?

The Christian Science Monitor just went totally web-based.  Maybe their new slogan could play subtly off the New York Times': "All the News That Would Be Fit to Print, Except We're So Over That Tired Business Model, Web N3wzP@p3r FTW!!!11"

23/6: Some of the News, Most of the Time

23/6 has done some really funny coverage of the debates using video editing, including their latest video "Synchronized Presidential Debating"

Get the latest news satire and funny videos at 236.com.

If you haven't seen their earlier videos, they're definitely worth watching:
First Presidential Debate in a Minute
Second Presidential Debate in a Minute
Third Presidential Debate in a Minute
VP Debate in a Minute

T Minus 7 Days


Via Andrew Sullivan: Obama at his most electrifying. Compare to any five minutes of McCain

Sunday, October 26, 2008

Of Mice and Memory

There is a lot of interesting work being done on manipulating memory processes in mice. This article recounts effective attempts at restoring memory function in mice with Alzheimer's by increasing the activity of the enzyme Uch-L1.

Research is also being done on mice with the opposite goal in mind: the erasure of uncomfortable memories. Check it out.

Advances in Printing

First of all, props to Johannes Gutenberg, inventor of the mechanical printing press and namesake of an awesome website. A more recent advancement in printing technology is 3-d printing, which is especially interesting because printers are themselves 3-dimensional. Lo and behold: this past May a 3-d printer replicated itself. From RepRap.org
"Not counting nuts and bolts RepRap can make 60% of its parts; the other parts are designed to be cheaply available everywhere. This is an interesting coincidence: we can make 60% of our proteins; the other parts are evolved to be cheaply available everywhere..."
The next version of RepRap will be able to manufacture its own electric circuitry. The Mary Shelleys out there are already picturing a world overrun with Erector sets gone bad; having grown up with a deep knowledge of how easily LEGO robots break, I'm quite optimistic that's a war humanity would win.

Saturday, October 25, 2008

Bachmann's Creepy Non-Apology Apology

In an ad "apologizing" for the egregious interview posted earlier, Rep. Michelle Bachmann draws a stark distinction between government and freedom. This doesn't distance her from earlier comments linking left-wing views and anti-American sentiments; it further paints liberals as anti-freedom, anti-children, and as somehow working against the greatness of America.



"I may not always get my words right, but I know that my heart is right."

Friday, October 24, 2008

Obama-McCain Dance-Off

Enjoi

Promising News from FiveThirtyEight.com

After incorporating recent polling information, FiveThirtyEight.com is putting Obama's chances of victory at 96.3%:
FiveThirtyEight's composites of polling in battleground states:
Colorado: Obama +6.3
Florida: Obama +2.8*
Iowa: Obama +13.7
Indiana: Obama +1.6*
Missouri: Obama +1.7*
North Carolina: Obama +1.7*
Nevada: Obama +2*
Ohio: Obama +3.6*
Pennsylvania: Obama +10.7
Virginia: Obama +6.8
The Bad news: Asterisks mark states where Obama's lead (according to this composite) is within the margin of error.

The Good news: Even if McCain wins every single one of the asterisked states, he won't reach 270 unless he also wins Pennsylvania's 21 EVs.

Thursday, October 23, 2008

Unusual and Cruel

Sarah Palin in a recent interview for People:
Alicia in New York City asks, Do you think about having more children?
SP: No-o-o-o. We got our starting five. That's the final five.

Alicia also wondered if you had any more unique names up your sleeve.
SP: We did. We never got to get our Zamboni in. I always wanted a son named Zamboni.
"Zamboni Palin." It has a nice ring to-oh wait no it doesn't. That's just horrible. Growing up is hard enough without being named after a brandname for a gargantuan machine that smooths ice. "Maybe it has another meaning," I thought. Nope.
Zam•bo•ni
trademark
a brand of machine that smooths the surface of the ice on a rink
As long as you're going for a brandname, why not choose something a little softer, like "Kleenex?"

Confessions of an Ideologue

Alan Greenspan today conceded the limits of his free-market ideology in his testimony before members of the House Committee of Government Oversight and Reform:
“I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such as that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms,” Mr. Greenspan said.

Referring to his free-market ideology, Mr. Greenspan added: “I have found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I have been very distressed by that fact.”

Mr. Waxman pressed the former Fed chair to clarify his words. “In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right, it was not working,” Mr. Waxman said.

“Absolutely, precisely,” Mr. Greenspan replied. “You know, that’s precisely the reason I was shocked, because I have been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.”
This is an impressive acceptance of fallibility from one of the most prominent free-market ideologues of our time. As the article posted below suggests, we shouldn't let the apparent failure of one ideology result in an intensified embrace of its opposite. Greenspan's comments shouldn't fuel a potentially misguided crusade against deregulation in all its forms, but rather invite a more thoughtful consideration of the limits of economic ideology in general.

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

The Problem with Ideology

This post from Megan McArdle is one of the few treatments of the financial crisis that is aware of the general problem of ideology in the face of a complex system.

Some things never change—there will be bubbles and crashes, hindsight will be 20/20, and we will forget lessons hard-learned by our ancestors.

Words of the Day

From wordsmith.org, this week's WotD theme is "Words that appear to have been coined after the 2008 US presidential candidates." So far we have...
The first two are clever, but the third—ah, wonderful. However did I miss the etymological joke of Sarah's last name, as she opposes Change Incarnate?

(N.B. "Change Incarnate" is not Obama's actual slogan, but it should be, clearly.)

Smackdown

There’s nothing like the feeling you get when you’ve got 100 kilos of heroin in the trunk of your car. Just to be near it, to smell it. Driving along at 120 mph in France somewhere and thinking: “I know what I’ve got in the car.” Police stopping beside you. A gun under my seat. Wouldn’t think twice about shooting them. Taking the risk. At the end of the day that’s why I became a drug dealer. Not the money or the power, but the buzz.

That's from an interview with Suleyman Ergun, formerly the "world's most prolific and powerful seller of smack," in Vice Magazine.

Lessons: 1) I think I lack a certain business acumen, 2) we're all just looking for our rush, and 3) "if you don’t have money, you have nothing."

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Enjoy Your Life

Chatlos just pointed me in the right direction. I had been worrying, but now I don't have to!

A Good Read, Mind You

Just read an awesome article in The Atlantic. I don't even know which way to start thinking about it--psychologically, socially, psychologically...

Anyway, maybe you'd better just read it.

Censure Bachmann!

Michele Bachmann's comments on Hardball:

I found a link to Censure Bachmann, an online petition to do just that and collect donations to support her opponent in the congressional race. I put the following in the comment box:

It is appalling that member of Congress could knowingly or unknowingly confound being anti-American with thinking, hoping or believing America could be different—perhaps better—than it is now. What is she doing in Washington? How can she legislate if the only thing she wants is exactly what we have? With what eyes does she view the country and see no flaws nor suspect she's missing them?

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

95.8%

FiveThirtyEight is an excellent site that aggregates polling data from everywhere and uses statistical techniques I wish I understood better to get a high-level and maximally accurate (hopefully) snapshot of the state of the union. Watching the predictions on the site over the past couple weeks has been extremely encouraging and entertaining. Today, Obama's win percentage broke 95%:



GObama! That 4.2% still scares me though, because I see it in terms of Pascal's wager, where the payoff of Obama is some arbitrarily huge n and the payoff of Palin (McCain... whatever) is −∞. We can see then that:

nP (Obama)
.958 • n = m,

where m is some huge number. Call it the risk of Obama, or how optimistic we should be about his presidency. But then compare it to:

(−∞) • P (Palin)
.042 • (−∞) = −∞.

That's how optimistic we should be about the possibility of Palin in the administration—not optimistic at all, the total opposite of optimistic. This means that I can't be at ease until that .042 gets much smaller. Like, zero-small. That would be good.

Twenty-one days of bated breath?

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

House of Cards

I was walking around outside my office today and I spotted an arresting art installation in Fort Point Channel:

A house of cards. Particularly appropriate, I thought, given recent times—the financial crisis, &c. The installation is by Fort-Point-based artist Lisa Greenfield and, it turns out, "when originally conceived, was intended to signify the tentative nature of artists' housing in Fort Point." My office is in Fort Point, so I suppose that, as part of the local commercialization/gentrification, I'm not helping them much. At least I can appreciate their work while helping price them out.

In any case, the work has taken on additional significance since it was conceived, especially because, directly across the channel, just out of frame to the left, towering 600 feet above the water, is the white modernist mass of the Federal Reserve.

Thursday, October 9, 2008

Phallacies

Why are all urinals poorly designed? Why must men develop techniques to use them safely (splashlessly)?

I've been asking this question for years, but I was just reminded of it, and now I have an (in?)appropriate platform to ask it louder.

Also, while we're on topic the topic, a lot of people wonder why everything is or is arguably shaped like a phallus. It's true, of course, but trivially. The deeper truth is that phalluses are everything-shaped—it's such an obvious and effective shape for something to be.

Wednesday, October 8, 2008

Palin's "Patriotism"

Thomas Friedman wrote a great column responding to this quote from Gov. Palin in the VP debate:
“You [Biden] said recently that higher taxes or asking for higher taxes or paying higher taxes is patriotic. In the middle class of America, which is where Todd and I have been all of our lives, that’s not patriotic.”
Friedman's stellar response:
What an awful statement. Palin defended the government’s $700 billion rescue plan. She defended the surge in Iraq, where her own son is now serving. She defended sending more troops to Afghanistan. And yet, at the same time, she declared that Americans who pay their fair share of taxes to support all those government-led endeavors should not be considered patriotic.

I only wish she had been asked: “Governor Palin, if paying taxes is not considered patriotic in your neighborhood, who is going to pay for the body armor that will protect your son in Iraq? Who is going to pay for the bailout you endorsed? If it isn’t from tax revenues, there are only two ways to pay for those big projects — printing more money or borrowing more money. Do you think borrowing money from China is more patriotic than raising it in taxes from Americans?” That is not putting America first. That is selling America first.

Sorry, I grew up in a very middle-class family in a very middle-class suburb of Minneapolis, and my parents taught me that paying taxes, while certainly no fun, was how we paid for the police and the Army, our public universities and local schools, scientific research and Medicare for the elderly. No one said it better than Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: “I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization.”

Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Mail Goggles

This is why Gmail is my preferred free email service. They should offer an alternative for the mathematically inclined, though--a sentence diagramming challenge, maybe...

No, wait. Even better. What if we could create our own Mail Goggles challenges, and then share with others? Mine would require you to diagram a Palin sentence. It would be called Palinguistics.

Ultimatum

Sometime during the '04 election campaign—probably when I was driving back with Jack from an Election Day spent campaigning in Hanover, NH—I announced that if Bush won the election, I would leave the States.

Fate, that slickest of gamblers, called my bluff.

Here we are again, but this time it's for real: If John McCain wins this election, I'm leaving the country. To the spoilers, the spoils.

Unpatriotic? No—surely there's a cure for stupidity, or a talisman against it, out there in the great wide world.

Monday, October 6, 2008

No Such Thing

From "Up, Simba," the late David Foster Wallace's profile for Rolling Stone of the McCain2000 campaign:

If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don't bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible psychological reason to stay at home doing one-hitters and watching MTV on primary day. By all means stay home if you want, but don't bullshit yourself that you're not voting. In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.

Search for Miss Alaska Trumpet Player

We are offering $50.00 to the man responsible for the trumpet accompaniment in this video:



We will pay him $20/hour and a generous stipend to follow Gov. Palin to every campaign stop and play while she's on stage. Because this election is too important not to.

Thursday, October 2, 2008

That's A Fact

Joe Biden: "Dick Cheney has been the most dangerous Vice President in the history of the United States..."

Chatlos: "Just judging by the number of people he's shot!"

Minute 43, Vice Presidential Debate

Sarah Palin, stop ruining my language!