...though the more I think about it, the more skeptical I am about Aiko in any event. As I said, a long history.
Le Trung, 33, from Toronto in Canada, says Aiko can do the cleaning, mix his favorite drink and read him newspaper headlines.
His actual website indicates that the "do the cleaning" bit is aspirational, not actual. Had he'd said otherwise I'd have bet against Aiko actually existing as described.
This sentence pinged my baloney meter because there's a long history of hoaxes and bluster about vaguely humanoid robots soon to enter the market that can do household chores. One of the most famous ones, the Quasar hoax of the late 1970s, was exposed by robotics experts who chatted about it on ARPANET and got into an early argument about free speech and defamation in online fora.
This one, though, just seems to be a case of imprecise reporting.
Ken Brown @38: That hypothesis, it seems to me, was already tested and rejected in the primaries. In that case, almost everyone was voting for candidates of the party they'd normally vote for.
I seem to recall that, to the extent there was any pattern, Obama did better in states with either very many or very few black people, and worse in states that had a medium number of black people (it was hypothesized that this was because racial divisions were more raw there).
But this tended to show up in the polls; it wasn't some secret systematic Bradley Effect thing. Obama was as likely to outperform as to underperform his polls. As it happened, one state where he underperformed the polls somewhat was New Hampshire, site of the famous early primary, and this was why the Bradley Effect became a huge media narrative through the whole campaign.
In a previous election, there was a ballot question in Massachusetts proposing to bring New York-style fusion voting here. I voted no mostly because I was worried about confused voters and also about various ways somebody might abuse such a system, such as spamming the ballot with dozens of parties running one's favored candidate.
It's possible that NY has adequate safeguards against the latter abuse, but it does sound as if people are sometimes puzzled about the fusion parties. On the other hand, I do like the idea of giving the voters that extra channel of information about what they're really voting for. Do New Yorkers have opinions as to whether it's all worth it?
Bob @36:
Yeah, that reminds me of the obvious rejoinder to the people who say they hope the Republicans aren't destroyed utterly because the US needs a sensible right-wing party: "The US already has one, and they're called the Democrats."
If today's Republicans are someday completely banished from national power (which won't happen any time soon--I guess better than even odds of a midterm resurgence in 2010 if the economy isn't miraculously healed), the Democrats will likely split into two parties: perhaps a culturally liberal, economically corporatist, quasi-libertarian party and a social-democratic left party. One of those parties might be called "the Republican Party," but I wouldn't deign to guess which one.
Reagan's 1984 landslide was about 60/40 in the popular vote. That's what it takes to get you almost the whole map; it's about as extreme as presidential elections get.
Reagan was also running against an uncharismatic challenger at a high point in his popularity, after the recession of his first term had given way to a boom, and before the second-term scandals that broke around '86.
Over his whole administration, Reagan was about as popular as Bill Clinton, maybe a little less so in the second term--he was loved by many but was also a polarizing figure, deeply loathed on the left. But timing counts for a lot, and the landslides in both 1980 and 1984 contribute to the mythmaking.
If there had been a presidential election in November 2001, I expect George W. Bush would have gotten 538 electoral votes.
there simply aren't enough presidential elections, and too many factors go into deciding them, to fairly draw Meacham's kind of conclusions from it
Whenever you study patterns in presidential elections, this is the big problem; data sets are small, because the elections happen infrequently enough that major historical changes happen before the sample size becomees large. Counting up R vs. D victories over decades is kind of nonsensical, because the parties now are not what they were then.
The silliest analyses (well, maybe not the silliest, but they're silly) are the ones about "bellwether states" that reliably vote with the winner over some vast stretch of time; they remind me of the pointless stats that sports announcers use to fill time.
Yeah, red state/blue state didn't really start to emerge until about 1992, though the underlying cultural patterns were there.
The main reason was that through most of the 20th century, the parties had ideological and regional alignments that pulled in sometimes orthogonal, sometimes conflicting directions. Democrats had Northern liberals, the labor vote, and also Southern white supremacists. Republicans had Northern rich people but, early on, also poor Southern blacks.
That pattern started to break as the black vote moved to the Democrats sometime in the 1940s, but what really changed things was the civil rights movement, Nixon's Southern Strategy and the defection of the white Dixiecrats to the Republican party, nationally culminating with Reagan's landslides of the 1980s. (On the local level, there are still remnants of the old order here and there, areas of the South where everyone is a registered Democrat and always votes Republican in national elections.)
You can't see much of a pattern in presidential elections of the Eighties because the pattern then was just that Republicans won everything. But when geographic variation emerged again, it was more like what we know today.
Linkmeister at #11: Yes, but the scenario really under consideration here isn't just that Republicans will use violence. We know they will; on the agitated-punk level, they already have.
It's that police departments in major cities across America, some of them Democratic-controlled, are in on preparations to rig a massively Democratic-favored election for the Republicans, against a candidate who in several cases has been endorsed by the mayor, involving electoral boards which in some cases are under a Democratic state secretary of state. I don't believe that Democratic officials all the way down to the local level are involved in a plot to make their party lose. That's further through the looking glass than I'm currently willing to go.
The reason that article is stressing rioting black Democrats over the obviously greater danger of rioting white Republicans is, I think, just that it's written by people thinking within an old conventional-wisdom frame according to which rioting blacks are your main source of major civil unrest. (Shaped by things like the Watts and South Central riots, but ignoring things like Chicago in the 1960s or 1990s domestic terrorism.)
Republicans make a lot of the fact that no Democrat has won with a popular-vote majority since Carter. That's mostly because Clinton's elections, which were much more solid electoral wins than George W. Bush's, both involved a substantial popular vote for H. Ross Perot.
The lore is that Perot's spoiler effect threw it to Clinton, though in fact there is no evidence that this is the case and some evidence that it didn't. Some Republicans spent the 1990s insisting that this circumstance made Clinton in some sense illegitimate, which is pretty funny in hindsight.
(I'd thought that no Republican had since GHWB, but actually George W. Bush got 50.73% in 2004, officially at least. Personally I suspect he actually did get a popular majority, but these sub-1% distinctions make it pretty hard to claim overwhelming mandates.)
If Republicans are going to try to start riots to suppress the vote, ground zero is Philadelphia. Reports are that McCain's going to go heavily into Pennsylvania, in a last-ditch effort to flip a Kerry state (and desperately hope that everything else goes his way). It's all he's got left as an even vaguely viable strategy, and even that is pretty much hopeless; PA's trending further and further toward Obama and shows no sign of stopping. And, of course, even if by some miracle or catastrophe McCain gets PA he could still lose, because of the opportunity cost of the PA push to the efforts in other states.
But the thing about Pennsylvania is that the Democratic vote there is heavily concentrated around Philadelphia. In 2004, practically the whole state was red or purple except for that one corner, and Kerry took the state. So the only way Republicans can possibly take Pennsylvania is massive suppression of the Democratic vote in and around Philadelphia.
But... I don't think it's going to work. And I do have to say that reading this blog makes me think that (even after 2006) Democrats have forgotten even how to feel like they're winning something. We've been reduced to dreading the Monster at the End of This Book.
Trurl labored for five days and nights, scribbling diagrams all over the walls, scratching at his brow until sparks flew, stopping only for an occasional pull on the Leyden jar in the corner, despite the best efforts to distract him of the double and triple agents among Torturon's palace guards.
"No ordinary box will suffice for the Helical Plumbobs of Grrh," Trurl occasionally mumbled to himself. "It must be a Box subtle and configurational, algorithmical and possibly egotistical. King Plonk's sticky fingers are legendary, and if any of his brigands steals Torturon's plums, the old coot will have my hide, fair and square under the terms of the contract!! Still, the pay's good, if only he holds up his end of the bargain. Hmm, how to make sure of that?!"
Torturon's men couldn't make head or tail of it. Still, one day they heard him chuckling to himself and singing the old coders' chantey "Consider Me Harmful." In they rushed, to see him sitting there with nothing but a nearly featureless gray box, cool to the touch, with an open door on the front and a curious appendage on top that looked like a colander on a jointed arm.
"Here you go," Trurl said, "the Box is done. Put the plums in here, close the door and Bob's your uncle. Nobody's getting them out unless they have the key."
They dragged him and the Box into Torturon the Tyrant's royal kitchens, where Torturon's head cook deposited the plums and shut the door. Only then did anyone think to ask Trurl about the key.
"I'm the key, you numbskulls! The scanning device on top is keyed to the very patterns of thought in my titanic mind. Only a possessor of my genius, or one greater, can possibly open it. And my genius is unparalleled across the Cosmos entire!! Since no such individual can possibly exist in the pay of King Plonk, your Helical Plumbobs are safe for as long as you please. ...Of course, I'll require payment upon opening."
When Torturon heard of this, he immediately had Trurl clapped in irons and tossed in the lowermost dungeon of the palace, for safekeeping. Laboriously pulling the dents out of his shoulders, Trurl admitted to himself that he hadn't thought this through as well as he'd have liked; but as he shivered in the dungeon muck, he consoled himself at the thought of the piles of loot from the Royal Treasury that he'd had written into the contract, particularly the cyberstogies of Smulp, of vanadium leaf grown in the radiance of a neutron star near the Great Shroud Wastes, that were said to be without equal.
One day, he was summoned to the throne room. There Torturon himself sat, resplendent in a robe of cybermine festooned with memristors, cathodes and nuggets of enriched plutonium. The Chief Cook stood by him, with the Box, wheeled in on a ruby-encrusted dolly.
"So, genius Key!" he thundered. "Have at it, will you? I fancy a plum!"
Groaning with the corrosion in his joints, Trurl hauled himself over to the provided stool, lowered the colander onto his head, and thought the code-phrase: "Neutrons, protons, mumbledy-peg, a wind-up pig with a wooden leg!" Soon the force of his genius took hold on the mechanism within, and the door clicked open.
To reveal nothing but a note:
"The plums, needless to say, are not here, regardless of your plans. King Plonk required them, and his pay for my services is stupendous! Regards to your unparalleled genius. Apologies, K."
Trurl was filled with rage. Klapaucius, his dearest friend! Working for Plonk!...
I'm embarrassed to say that, without looking it up, I've forgotten which thing about integral calculus is called the Fundamental Theorem of it. Is it that when you take the derivative of an integral you get the original function back?
...OK, just looked it up and that's in fact the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus. There's also a Second Part, which is that you can calculate definite integrals by subtracting values of the antiderivative.
Which makes more sense, since the "Integral" was making me unconfident--it seemed to be about both integration and differentiation.
I do think that undergrad quantum mechanics classes could ditch the month they spend on teaching physics as it was understood in 1899 and trying to convince the students that they should find the stuff they're going to learn in the rest of the semester so very surprising. Just teach it! I'd rather start with something simple, like the two-state system, than with complicated stuff like black body radiation that just happened to come first historically.
That's the Feynman Lectures on Physics, volume III approach, also used in Sakurai's intro-graduate textbook Modern Quantum Mechanics. I like it, but it does have the problem of starting out a bit dry and abstract.
Start with nonrelativistic QM? Nonsense--they'll just have to unlearn it when they hit quantum field theory. Obviously the first class around about junior high should be about renormalization schemes, dimensional regularization and the Standard Model Lagrangian. In graduate school they can gradually work up to pulleys and inclined planes.
I remember reading that Lensmen book and being amazed that Kinnison was actually supposed to be the good guy--his campaign came across to me as bullying demagoguery, and the Galactic Patrol's involvement as deeply creepy. And it certainly made me wonder about Doc Smith's politics, though I know worse things were in the air at the time.
The problem is not just that elections here are handled at the state level. It's that, in most states, they're specifically the responsibility of the state secretary of state, who is an openly partisan, elected official with an obvious conflict of interest. This was a large part of the problem in Florida in 2000, and definitely in Ohio in 2004.
The story about Free Aquatica of Pinta is from The Star Diaries. It was a not-that-veiled satire on New Soviet Man, but it's of more general applicability.
This chain of reasoning:
1. Republicans screwed up.
2. Republicans run the government.
3. Big government screwed up.
4. Republicans are against big government.
5. Vote Republican.
is a remarkably effective one, given that it essentially amounts to an admonition to reward failure.
In the aftermath of Katrina, over on Mark Schmitt's old blog, I said once that this notion of running against the government when you control the government couldn't work for long because you can't have a one-party state with nothing but an opposition party. Then somebody brought up the USSR as a counterexample. But I guess it didn't work forever for them.
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