Some commentary on the night just past. This will be somewhat scattered, as I stayed up until 1 to hear Obama and read the celebratory postings at my favorite left-leaning blogs: -- As much as I believed what folks like Nate Silver were saying, I was still afraid that it would somehow all go wrong, and we'd be subjected to another four years of lunatic governance from the right, and lunatic conspiracy theorizing from the left. It's hard to express how happy I am to put all of the lunacy on one side of the political spectrum, the side that's out of power. -- I guess people aren't as down on…

Heart-warming morning thought: SteelyKid is going to grow up in a world where "Can a black man be elected President?" will be considered a stupid question. That's worth a smile: Hell, that's worth some dancing in the streets: In a heavy drizzle shortly after midnight, several thousand people filled the barricaded segment of Pennsylvania Avenue between 15th and 17th streets in front of the White House dancing and chanting "O-ba-ma!" and "Whose house? Obama's house!" Some sang "America the Beautiful" and "Star Spangled Banner." At 14th and U streets NW, hundreds of Sen. Barack Obama's…

The Supreme Court's 100 percent dirt-free exploration of potty words. - By Dahlia Lithwick - Slate Magazine "Perhaps it's true that the Supreme Court can take away our F-bomb. But they cannot touch our dirty, dirty minds." (tags: US politics language law society culture) Watching the election. - By Troy Patterson - Slate Magazine "I should have gone to bed right then to dream cozily of supercompetent election officials and the straight-backed citizens who owe them trust but greedily did not, and so witnessed MSNBC's David Schuster interviewing the bold bald head of Joe the Plumber, that…

It seems like everybody with a blog has put up a live-blogging/ open comment thread about the election. I can't really type fast enough to compete in this sort of thing, and anyway, it seems cruel to leave foreigners and apolitical types out of the fun. So, for the benefit of those who can't vote or don't care, here's a non-election live-blogging/ open thread. 11:12: Put the dog out for "last call." Kate's taken SteelyKid upstairs. This joke has gotten tired, and so have I. G'night, everybody! 9:59: We're going to call it at this time-- SteelyKid is asleep. Time for Comedy Central's election…

There aren't any results yet. Turn off the computer. Go vote. Already voted? Watch some silly videos. Eat a sandwich. Do some freakin' thing. Just stop reloading FiveThirtyEight and Talking Points Memo, already. Your incessant reloading is slowing my reloads, dammit.

As you know, even if you're not Bob, I promised to "dance like a monkey" if my DonorsChoose challenge passed $6,000 in donations, which it did. Thus, I am obliged to dance like a monkey. You might think this would be a simple matter of capering about in a loose-limbed, vaguely simian manner, but it's important to do these things properly, so some thought was required as to what, exactly, would best meet this obligation. As documented in this video: I hope this meets my obligation, and provides three and a half minutes of entertainment to stop you hitting "refresh" on your favorite poll-…

Fafblog! the whole world's only source for Fafblog. ""All we really need is some kind of simple technological solution," says Giblets, "like a garbage-powered weather machine or a synthetic source of God."" (tags: fafblog science environment silly blogs) McCain Refusing To Tell Voters What's In Box Unless Elected | The Onion - America's Finest News Source Don't fall for it-- it's just Joe the Plumber (tags: politics us silly onion) slacktivist: Shine a light "If we were to draw this relationship as a Venn diagram, bigotry would be a smaller circle entirely inside the larger circle of…

Kevin Drum is amused by a historical comparison: THEN AND NOW....In 2004, everyone complained that John Kerry was an old-media plodder who didn't react quickly enough to conservative attacks. What a dunce! In 2008, everyone is praising Barack Obama for keeping his composure and not letting conservative attacks knock him off his message. What a cool customer! It depends a little on which part of 2008 you're talking about, of course. If you troll through the recent archives of liberal political blogs, you won't have any trouble finding dozens of posts wailing and moaning about the fact that…

Continuing the series of descriptions of candidate technologies for making a quantum computer (previous entries covered optical lattices and ion traps), we come to one that's a little controversial. It's the only remaining candidate I can describe off the top of my head without doing some more background reading, though, so I will plunge ahead boldly... Liquid state Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) was first suggested as a technology for quantum information processing in 1997, and some demonstration experiments followed very quickly, as there's relatively little infrastructure required. The…

Is it just me, or is this New York Times article on undecided voters just a more genteel version of this Daily Show segment on undecided voters? (Personally, all the people in the Times sound like they want to vote for McCain, but know there's no good reason to do so. They'll talk themselves into it by Tuesday. But maybe reading too many blogs has made me pessimistic.)

Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Blog posts / World Fantasy Awards Winners! Congratulations to all the winners. (tags: books sf awards literature) CDF Ghost Muons | Cosmic Variance More thoughts on the maybe-a-particle, maybe-a-background-effect news from Fermilab. (tags: science physics experiment particles news blogs) The Happiness Project: Paradoxes of Happinesss: the sadness of a Happiness Project. "One of my Secrets of Adulthood is "You can choose what you do, but you can't choose what you like to do." I have a lot of notions about what I wish I liked to do, of the subjects…

With the election nearly upon us, I've started regularly following Talking Points Memo again. Late last night, Josh Marshall wrote about the early voting results: Among those who've already voted, it's Obama 57%, McCain 38%. And that number is not inconsistent with numbers coming out of a lot of the early voting states. CBS says that "about one in five voters" have voted early. I'm sure I'm just missing it, but I can't find it in the polling document. Meanwhile, Gallup says the number is now 27%, which I find astonishing. Now, there are two ways of looking at these numbers. One possibility is…

Via FriendFeed, an interesting analysis of Internet traffic at compete.com. They set out to test the assertion that the "Long Tail" of low-traffic sites account for more traffic than they used to, and found exactly the opposite-- the share of all pageviews for the top ten domains increased from 29% to 40% between 2001 and 2008. What's really interesting is the reason why: The driver of this Top Domain growth can be summed up in two words "social networks". If you were to remove MySpace and Facebook from consideration in 2006 (also removing their pageviews from the total) top domains would…

It's now November, so the annual DonorsChoose fundraiser is officially over. According to the official leader board, at the time of this writing, ScienceBlogs has raised just under $30,000, from 302 donors, funding projects that will help 9,810 students. Those numbers may increase in the next day or two, as I think a lot of people have yet to allocate their share of Seed's contribution. (The overall total is down a good bit from last year's $69,000, but given the cratering economy and the election sucking all the air out of the room, that's probably to be expected.) Many thanks to everyone…

So, I've recorded a bunch of video for the dance-like-a-monkey thing. I want to edit several of these clips together in order to form a longer clip. I did this once before with video recorded using Kate's camera, to make the Hoops With Moss video, using the Movie Maker program that came with Vista on the tablet PC. Of course, because computers hate me, the webcam I used to record the monkey-dancing clips records in some DIVX format (video uses the DIVX 5.0 codec, audio is PCM audio, if that matters), and while downloading and installing the DIVX codec got Windows Media Player to recognize the…

Via Boing Boing, a "conceptual artist" is selling a make-your-own-universe kit: According to [a slightly garbled explanation of quantum mechanics], any kind of measurement causes the universe to split and this is the basis of Keats' new device. His universe creator uses a piece of uranium-doped glass to create a steam of alpha particles, which are then detected using a thin sliver of scintillating crystal. Each detection causes the creation of a new universe. The kits sell for $20. For a limited time only, though, I'll make you a better offer: if you send me $15, I won't send you an art…

Some time back, the Obama campaign site offered a "check your voter registration" link. This seemed like a good resource to promote, so I checked it out. This required giving them an email address, and since then, I've gotten a flood of fundraising emails purporting to be from significant people within the Democratic party. One from yesterday was particularly noteworthy in its unique incentive offer: I want you to be there with me on Election Night when the results come in. We're planning a big event that will include tens of thousands of supporters in Grant Park in downtown Chicago. We're…

Optics basics: Inverse problems « Skulls in the Stars An advanced value of "basic," but a good post. (tags: physics optics science blogs) Freshman for Life Blotchmen, in which Rorschach tries to find his missing plums. (tags: comics books blogs art internet literature sf) marnanel: And now, today's Blake joke A literary LOLcat (tags: literature poetry humanities silly pictures) The Reality-Based Community: "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor" A good response to a nasty attack. It won't win fans among the "new atheist" crowd, but it doesn't need to. (tags: politics…

Today is Kate's first day back at work (part-time), so I'm home alone with SteelyKid. This doesn't leave me much time or mental energy for blogging, so here's a bonus baby picture for the week: This one's mostly for the grandparents, who bought her the Halloween outfit. You can't see the jack-o-lantern face on the butt of the pants, and I'm not taking a picture of it because I'd like her to still talk to me when she gets old enough to work a web browser.

The high-energy physics blogosphere (well, two blogs worth) is abuzz this morning with the news that the CDF collaboration has seen something in collisions producing multiple muons (a muon is sort of like an electron, only heavier). You can get more from Tommaso Dorigo and Peter Woit. What they're really seeing is not entirely clear. They see more of these collisions that produce multiple muons than they can explain with the Standard Model, but it's not clear what that means at this point. It could be some exotic particle, or it could just be a new and interesting background effect in their…