Politics
drorzel | November 9, 2012In which I use my double license as a physicist and a science fiction fan to engage in some half-assed futurism spinning off Chris Hayes's much-discussed book.
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I don't read a lot of political books, because I tend to find them frustrating. They're usually surprisingly ephemeral, trying to spin Deep Meaning out of a collection of recent events that are highly dependent on short-term context. They also tend to be much better at identifying problems than suggesting plausible solutions, coming off like that famous Sidney Harris cartoon with a bunch of equations on the left side of a…
drorzel | November 8, 2012Now that we've apparently elected Nate Silver the President of Science, this is some predictable grumbling about whether he's been overhyped. If you've somehow missed the whole thing, Jennifer Ouellette offers an excellent summary of the FiveThirtyEight saga, with lots of links, but the Inigo Montoya summing up is that Silver runs a blog predicting election results, which consistently showed Barack Obama with a high probability of winning. This didn't sit well with the pundit class, who mocked Silver in ways that made them look like a pack of ignorant yokels when Silver's projected electoral…
illconsidered | November 8, 2012Via Thngsbreak, we have the charming Lord Monckton back at it with all out Birtherism:
The diligent, unpaid heroes who have been investigating the dodgy document for more than a year on behalf of the people of Maricopa County, Ariz., have found a long list of irregularities in Mr. Obama’s identification documents.
I have used the investigators’ list to draw up a schedule of probabilities – one for each individual irregularity. The probability that the “birth certificate” and other Obama identity documents are genuine is just 1 in 75 sextillion.
Funny, that was just about the same odds I gave…
denialism | November 7, 2012I'm so proud of my home state for affirming equality for all in the ballot box rather than in the courts. I was born and raised in Maryland, although I've spent more of my adult life in Virginia, one of the big things I've noticed in the divide between the two states (and I love both of them) is that Marylanders do a better job at taking care of each other, and running an effective state with high quality services. Marylanders believe government can work, and generally (outside of Baltimore) it does. Marylanders also reject bigotry, and with question 4 (the Maryland Dream act) and question…
stoat | November 7, 2012Obama wins.
As election day drew closer it became clearer to me that, whatever Obama's flaws, I did want him to win. You can't have someone who habitually lies about his marathon times as vice-POTUS, and I agree fairly well with the Economist on Romney, and overall America could do better than Barack Obama; sadly, Mitt Romney does not fit the bill. I don't get the impression that America deserves better than Obama, though: many of the obvious flaws in their politicking system derive directly from the laziness and self-deception of the electorate.
[Update: so, what about GW in the election?…
drorzel | November 6, 2012If you're in the US, it's Election Day, so go vote. I'd like to say something here about how I don't care who you actually vote for, but of course that's not true-- I would strongly prefer it if you were to vote for Barack Obama and other Democrats, and against Mitt Romney and a Republican party that sees sneering contempt for modern science as a path to electoral victory.
But more than that, I prefer to live in the sort of country where people actually exercise their hard-won rights to help determine the future course of the nation. So, go vote. Even if it's for the wrong guy.
And if your…
stoat | October 31, 2012Parochial stuff: I reported before that Axing the British Antarctic Survey would mean the end of Scott’s legacy?, but it looks like MPs say No:
Chair of the Science and Technology Committee, Andrew Miller MP, said:
My Committee has considered the process undertaken to merge British Antarctic Survey and the National Oceanography Centre. What we have concluded is that NERC have not made a proper case for it nor demonstrated political nous on the strong non-science related issues surrounding BAS.
Which is either Hooray for BAS! or Boo for political interference in science! depending on your…
jrosenhouse | October 30, 2012I recently heard a pollster remark, “When you give conservatives bad polling data, they want to kill you. When you give liberals bad polling data, they want to kill themselves.”
That attitude has been well on display recently in the right-wing freak out over Nate Silver's website. Silver currently gives Obama a 72.9 percent chance of winning the electoral college on election day. There is nothing mysterious in how he arrives at that conclusion. He's simply noticed that Obama has a lead in enough states to put him over 270. It's not complicated.
But that's too complicated for right-…
catdynamics | October 30, 2012Schrödinger's Qu'ran - a 2012 thought experiment - in The Conversation, Matthew Bailes updates a classic paradox...
"...a physicist could extend this thought experiment to write a php script that would randomly download one of the Bible, Qur’an or even a classical quantum mechanics textbook to the iPad..."
On the Dispositive Null in the Literature - on an unrelated subject, the AstroWright expounds on a subtle issue.
Trendy Companions - more AstroWright
What do we want graduate school to be?
When do we want it?
Real Soon Now!
I will have a report on a definitive solution to the whole climate…
jrosenhouse | October 29, 2012Here's Mitt Romney, from one of the Republican primary debates (moderated by John King of CNN):
KING: You've been a chief executive of a state. I was just in Joplin, Missouri. I've been in Mississippi and Louisiana and Tennessee and other communities dealing with whether it's the tornadoes, the flooding, and worse. FEMA is about to run out of money, and there are some people who say do it on a case-by-case basis and some people who say, you know, maybe we're learning a lesson here that the states should take on more of this role. How do you deal with something like that?
ROMNEY: Absolutely.…
esiegel | October 26, 2012"Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future." -Niels Bohr
What's going to happen next? It's perhaps the most important thing to know if we want to be prepared for practically anything in our lives. And without even thinking about it, most of us are actually very good at this in a huge number of aspects of our lives. For example...
Image credit: Crazy Adventures in Parenting.
I was hungry at work today, and I was prepared for it. Somehow, I knew that I was going to need food throughout the course of the day, and so I was prepared for it by bringing food from home. This…
drorzel | October 26, 2012In which I discuss the manner in which and the degree to which Twitter is ruining the media.
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Yesterday, Kevin Drum posted saying that Twitter is ruining political journalism, calling out its role in solidifying media groupthink before events are even completed. That seemed like a pretty good criticism to me, but like a true squishy liberal, Kevin later retracted his comments in the face of criticism. I saw the second link come across Kevin's Twitter feed, and responded there, saying:
You were right the first time. But Twitter's only the latest step in the continuing degradation…
oracknows | October 23, 2012Given how many bloggers have already weighed in on the story of an Italian court convicting geologists of manslaughter for failing to issue adequate earthquake warnings before an earthquake that devastated the town of L'Aquila, including Steve Novella, Daniela at Skepchicks, Sharon Hill at Skeptic, and even Instapundit, you'd think that even Orac wouldn't have anything to say about it. You would, of course, be wrong. Orac always has something to say about such things. The question is simply whether he decides he's interested enough in the story to take the time and effort to compose and let…
jrosenhouse | October 23, 2012So, I saw Paranormal Activity 4 on Monday night. Short review: Pretty disappointing, but I'll still go to Paranormal Activity 5 on opening night.
I am happy to report, however, that my skills as a political prognosticator took a big hit from the debate. You see, one reason I was especially unenthusiastic about watching the debate in real time was that I was certain it would be a disaster for Obama. I figured Romney would just fire off the standard Republican talking points. You know the litany. Obama's weakness led to Benghazi and Syria. He threw Israel under the bus. China and…
illconsidered | October 23, 2012So Mitt Romney believes putting more money in the hands of the job creators (aka rich people) will spur economic growth and so he will cut their taxes by 20%. But he also said in the first debate that he will not reduce the tax burden of the wealthy (aka job creators) at all. So...reduce tax rates in such a way that it simultaneously puts more money and no more money in the hands of the wealthy.
How stupid does he think the American voters are? And more importantly: is he right?
jrosenhouse | October 21, 2012You've probably noticed that I haven't been blogging much lately. That's partly because this is an especially busy time of the semester. Try grading a thousand midterm exam problems in a few days and see how many brain cells you have left over for blogging. Mostly, though, it's my general unhappiness with the way the Presidential election is going.
I think it's pretty likely that Romney is going to win. For the moment Obama is still maintaining his firewall in Ohio, but the polls have tightened there considerably. Meanwhile, Florida seems to be solidly red at this point, and the polls in…
jtoney | October 20, 2012This article was written with Corina Hernandez, a Public Administration major at Kean University. The "college student" is fictional.
On Election Day, New Jersey voters will be asked:
Do you approve the "Building Our Future Bond Act?" This bond act authorizes the state to issue bonds in the aggregate principal of $750 million to provide matching grants to New Jersey's colleges and universities. Money from the grants will be used to build, equip and expand higher education facilities for the purpose of increasing academic capacity.
Cranky taxpayer: Are you kidding me? New Jersey is already…
denialism | October 19, 2012This has been a year of some wonderfully crazy new conspiracies. Birtherism is actually looking pretty banal next to the "Obama is gay-married to a Pakistani" conspiracy, the "Obama is a Jihadist sleeper agent conspiracy, the Aurora conspiracies, job numbers conspiracies, polling conspiracy theories from America’s least-accurate pollster Dick Morris, and, my former favorite, the Obama is buying bullets for the Social Security Administration to kill all Americans conspiracy theory.
Now the American Spectator is publishing a new crackpot conspiracy theory that I think rivals my former…
oracknows | October 18, 2012The 2012 election campaign is in full swing, and, for better or worse, health care is one of the major defining issues of the election. How can it not be, given the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), also colloquially known as "Obamacare," was one of the Obama administration's major accomplishments and arguably the largest remaking of the American health care system since Medicare in 1965? It's also been singularly unpopular thus far, contributing to the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives in the 2010 elections, as well as the erosion of…
sa smith | October 15, 2012I get migraine headaches.
They crack me up--
My mom and bro get them too-- but we all have different triggers, different warning signs, different migraine course/severity, different solutions, it doesnt make any sense.
I think mine are pretty funny. I start out by feeling warm. Not 'hot', but like, you know how when you need to turn the air conditioner down like 2 degrees to feel more comfortable? Its just slightly too warm, but enough that you notice?
And then my brain starts to try to figure out what is going on.
Brain: Somethings up. Are you hungry?
Me: I dont think so... but I agree,…