gregladen | April 29, 2016
This is a guest posts by Claire Cohen Cortright.
Claire Cohen Cortright is a mother, climate activist, and biology teacher living in upstate New York. She
is an active member of Citizens Climate Lobby and moderator at Global Warming Fact of the Day.
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It is time, now, for climate activists to get vocal.
As it becomes more clear that Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic Party’s nominee for President, there is increasing talk about the importance of unifying the party. Negotiations are on the horizon … for Vice President and for the Party’s…
gregladen | April 28, 2016Voting is not party involvement.
We hear a lot of talk these days about "voters" being repressed in their attempt to be involved in the Democratic primary process. There may be something to that, and it might be nice to make it easier for people to wake up on some (usually) Tuesday morning and go and vote in a Democratic or Republican primary or visit a caucus. But there is a difference between a desire for a reform and the meaningful understanding of that reform -- why we want it, how to do it, and what it will get us -- that makes it important to do what we Anthropologists sometimes call…
gregladen | April 27, 2016I recently noted that a reasonable prediction indicates that Trump could enter the Republican National Convention a mere 8 delegates short of a lock. (See this.)
But now, Ted Cruz may have changed that math a bit, by announcing that Carly Fiorina as his vice presidential running mate. She was one of the least popular of the candidates when she was running as one of the clowns in the GOP clown car earlier this year. One could even argue that she wasn't merely unpopular, but did so much damage to her own credibility among the Republican voters that she left the race in the negative popularity…
gregladen | April 26, 2016Reports are just coming in, and as if often the case, Trump is already being declared winner in some states. But the Democratic primaries are different ... there are actually two candidates who get delegates instead of just one ... so it takes a little longer to count up the votes.
As a reminder, these are my predictions for today's primaries. I predict a Clinton win in Delaware, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, but a Sanders win in Connecticut and Rhode Island.
However, I have less confidence in these predictions than usual because I think something is happening in the campaign. I think, given…
gregladen | April 26, 2016Silent Sparks: The Wondrous World of Fireflies is about fireflies.
How do they light up? Why do they light up?
It is axiomatic in nature that flashy displays are related to mating. Among the flashy displays various animals have come up with, a few actually flash, and among those, the flashing of the firefly is probably the most well known. And, yes, it is a mating strategy.
There are almost 2,000 species of fireflies and they live around the world. Not all flash, but they are phylogenetically related to those that do so we use the vernacular term "firefly" to refer to all of them. (The…
gregladen | April 24, 2016There is little that is cooler than robots on mars doing science. Human space agencies have been sending probes to the surface of various planets (and the Moon) for years now, with the full range of failure and success. But the last decade or so has seen space robots such as Mars Curiosity Rover sciencing the shit, as they say, out of the planet Mars.
Emily Lakdawala, of the Planetary Society, is a planetary geologist and science communicator who knows a lot about driving rovers. It turns out that this is all very complicated, and when science gets big, expensive, high stakes, and…
gregladen | April 23, 2016His death is unexplained. He was 42. Foul play is not suspected. He was one of those interviewed by the Attorney General in the ongoing criminal investigation. This is probably nothing. Or maybe not.
See also this.
gregladen | April 22, 2016Between now and the end of the primary season, I expect Sanders to pick up more delegates than Clinton, in total, by a very small margin.
On Tuesday, April 26th, there will be primaries in Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island. That's 384 pledged delegates at stake.
Polls put Clinton ahead in all these states, but not all the polls are current and not all the Clinton leads are strong.
Added Note:
I noticed some very strong reactions in the comments section from people apparently (but not very clearly) accusing me of making up numbers to make it look like Sanders…
gregladen | April 21, 2016We hear a lot about how the system is rigged against Sanders and in favor of Clinton. Such yammering is normal for a political campaign, but if you believe it, I'd love to sell you a nice bridge down near New York City.
There are two things you need to know.
First, the Sanders campaign, according to senior Sanders campaign advisor Ted Devine, does not regard the system as rigged against them. Here's what he said (see below for full video):
I don't think there is. Unlike the Republicans Trump in particular, we are not going around saying everything is rigged. The rules are as the are. We may…
gregladen | April 21, 2016Somebody just sent me this lyme disease infographic. It is too big to just display on a blog post, so here is the link to the full size graphic. It may come in handy this Spring/Summer!
gregladen | April 20, 2016DN Lee used to be a mere human, a biologist and a great person, but still, just a human. But now she is a book!
Urban Biologist Danielle Lee (Stem Trailblazer Bios) is part of a series exploring, well, STEM trailblazers.
You Probably know of DN Lee from her famous blog now at Scientific American but formerly at Scienceblogs, The Urban Scientist.
After earning degrees studying animal behavior, Danielle Lee wanted to share her love of science with young people. Through urban outreach she has brought budding scientists into professional labs. She's walked them through the steps of the…
gregladen | April 20, 2016Mike Haubrich and I just taped an interview with space-robot expert and planetary geologist Emily Lakdawalla. Emily writes a blog at the Planetary Society, where she goes in depth on stuff that is happening in space, focusing on human-controlled robots on Mars, but covering a lot of other stuff too. The interview will be on Ikonokast in a day or two.
And we've arranged to interview Ethan Siegal of Starts with a Bang blog on Scienceblogs, and author of Beyond the Galaxy: How Humanity Looked Beyond Our Milky Way and Discovered the Entire Universe, in which I hope to ask him about this crazy…
gregladen | April 20, 2016UPDATE May 26th 2016
Moments ago, Donald Trump's delegate count effectively went above the number needed to guarantee the nomination at this summer's Republican National Convention.
As reported by NBC, "Donald Trump now has the support of 1,238 delegates — just a hair above the 1,237 threshold needed to clinch the Republican presidential nomination"
UPDATED
The update includes adding actual delegate counts for races so far, recognizing that for Pennsylvania this means only 17 delegates out of 54, even though he won there, because Pennsylvania is strange. Also, some other revisions.
This…
gregladen | April 20, 2016Corals are ocean-dwelling invertebrates in the same phylum as jellyfish. Corals are tiny and create an exoskeleton that is fixed to something hard, like the remains of previously existing corals. So these organisms build up a geological stratum, a reef, beneath the surface of the sea, often close enough that parts of the reef are exposed at the lowest water level. The coral reef system is the substrate for one of the Earth's major ecological zones.
Corals are symbiotic with a single celled dinoflagellate, a kind of algae that combines available nutrients such as ammonia and the…
gregladen | April 19, 2016I don't know yet, but as soon as I do, I'll post that below.
With 98.5% of the delegates counted, Clinton won 57.9% of the vote, Sanders 42.1%. This puts Clinton at 139 delegates, very close to my prediction of 137.
Clinton closing in on 57%, or about 140 delegates.
If that holds, this is pretty much of a shellacking for Sanders. Sanders out spent Clinton on ad buys, has campaigned heavily, and has set the expectations as a definitive win. This is Sanders home state (of birth, not representation). Yet he seems to have definitively lost. This will put Sanders even more behind in the…
gregladen | April 18, 2016EDITED AFTER NEW YORK PRIMARY
NOTE: UPDATED AND IMPROVED VERSION OF THIS ANALYSIS IS HERE
There is almost no way that Donald trump will get to the Republican National Convention with anything less than a fairly strong majority of pledged delegates. But can he get there with the 1237 delegates needed to lock the nomination on the first ballot?
I made a list of upcoming contests and initially estimated Trump's delegate take using the oversimplified method of multiplying the percentage of available delegates with Trump's percentage according to the most recent available polls. This slightly…
gregladen | April 18, 2016As you know, I've been applying a model to predict the outcome of each of the Democratic Primary contests, and have done pretty well at predicting results.
All of the future contests are primaries, not caucuses. It turns out that the two modes have very different patterns. Many have suggested that this has to do with how the process works, and somehow caucuses, or open contests, favor Sanders, who has won several. However, it also turns out that caucusing is a northern thing (and Sanders does somewhat better in the north, or more accurately perhaps, rarely wins in the south). Caucusing is…
gregladen | April 15, 2016How does the "southernness" of a state affect the Democratic Primary?
Clinton has been doing well in "The South." Of course, defining what "The South" is is pretty tricky. I divided up the states by "Deep South" vs. Other, so all the usual orginal deep south states count as "southern" except Florida. You know what they say about Florida. "The farther south you go, the farther north you get." Also, Texas is not deep south in the traditional sense.
Using this rough division, Clinton wins all the time in the "Deep South" and Sanders wins some and loses some in the other states, as shown in…
gregladen | April 15, 2016When either candidate wins a state, that candidate's supporters celebrate and underscore the significance of that win. The other candidate's supporters generally proceed to explain how it was not a significant win, or in some cases, come up with conspiracy theories about how the election was stolen.
So, here is an interesting question: Does one candidate or another, between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, tend to win bigger states more, or smaller states more? This is important because next Tuesday is the New York Primary, and New York is huge. Of course, state size is not the only…