anthropomorphic automobile antics

Spotted on a couple of different websites:

http://uk.download.yahoo.com/ne/fu/oa/eurcncs185030.mpg

Update: an amateur version, with a "making of" webpage: http://mywebpages.comcast.net/msmith1015/VWVideo.htm

more exit polls and election irregularities

Scoop.co.nz: Complete US Exit Poll Data Confirms Net Suspicions

For those who read my "exit poll redux" post, this article confirms that the CalTech/MIT study had been using the "adjusted" poll results, which means that it basically says nothing useful about the relation between the actual exit polls and the reported tabulated results. The "appendix" down at the bottom covers some of the oft-quoted bugaboos (e.g., the male/female ratio bias) of the exit poll results and debunks their supposed impact.

CommonDreams.org: 'Stinking Evidence' of Possible Election Fraud Found in Florida

In which it is revealed that there really is something rotten in the state of Florida's tabulated results, and that it is almost unquestionably intentional.


You know, while it is still theoretically possible that all these things are unrelated and coincidental and accidental and that there really was not a widespread effort to pervert the election results, I'm now reminded of the phrase "whelk's chance in a supernova". (One of the articles my previous post pointed to observed that the chances of seeing the observed exit poll discrepancies for Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania was 1 in 250 million. And that's just for those three states.)


So, which is scarier: the stealing of an election coordinated from the top by the Bush administration (or perhaps the Republican Party leadership), or a grass-roots, bottom-up, uncoordinated effort towards the same end? The former suggests "regime change" as a possible solution; the latter suggests that the only real option you have left is secession. Except that, well, despite all the words spent discussing that option, we really do live in a purple nation, and most of the blueness is in the major population centers. Which means that secession just doesn't work: you don't have an even vaguely contiguous region.

Science Textbook Disclaimer Stickers

via MetaFilter via Joey:

http://www.swarthmore.edu/NatSci/cpurrin1/textbookdisclaimers/index.htm

which is in response to those wacky Cobb County, Georgia folks having decided to actually require the first one on the web page (see Joey's blog entry, which as a bonus includes a link to (and quote of) M.C. Hawking).

WikiNews

The Wikipedia folks have created an experimental collaborative news site:

http://demo.wikinews.org/wiki/Main_Page

Interesting stuff...although I am concerned that unless stories eventually get locked (such that, for example, addenda are allowed but revision of existing text is not) that the maintenance burden (i.e., making sure that the articles haven't been revised frivolously or maliciously) could become prohibitively large.

This effort also brings up another issue: when does something stop being a news article and start being an encyclopedia article? Is it possible that the continued evolution of information technology will make the distinction unnecessary?

Oregon visit retrospective and related reflections

Megan and I spent the last week in Oregon, mostly around Portland. During that time we attended two baby showers for Megan (one thrown by her family, one thrown by friends), spent Thanksgiving with her family, attended two birthday events (one Megan's, one a friend's), and a bunch of miscellaneous social events and hangings-out.

We now have more onesies than the mind can comfortably encompass. (Registering for stuff for our wedding worked out pretty well; while we did get a number of things we neither wanted nor needed, people generally did pay attention to our registry. Registering for baby stuff resulted in an almost complete no-hitter, although in fairness we did ask for gift certificates so that we wouldn't have to haul or ship a ridiculous amount of stuff back to California: we got three items off the list, out of about 50 or so. Oh, and we had to borrow a giant duffel to get everything that we did get back to CA. *sigh*)

I like going to graduate school at UC Irvine: I have a good--sometimes great--advisor, I get paid decently for a student, I get to work (mostly) on what I want to work on, the intellectual environment is great, and I can work from home. (Which is crucial to our plans as of the end of January...) But I grow increasingly frustrated over the fact that UCI is, well, in Southern California--a place in which I actually have a negative interest in living. Yes, there are lots worse places. But I miss the Pacific Northwest, and Oregon in particular, for a myriad reasons, large and small, and I'd like to be done now, please.

that is, for example...

from The Oregonian's "The Grammar Geek", who quoted The Chicago Sun-Times' Zay N. Smith, responding to a reader who asked, "Have you ever commented on 'e.g.' being used where 'i.e.' is correct?":

You are referring to to a common confusion between two Latin abbreviations, i.e., "e.g.", i.e., "exempli gratia", i.e., "for example", and "i.e.", i.e., "id est", i.e., "that is", e.g., saying "there are two commonly confused Latin abbreviations, e.g., 'i.e.' and 'e.g.'", when it should be "two commonly confused Latin abbreviations, i.e., 'i.e.' and 'e.g.'"

It is hard to say why this confusion exists.

*does little language geeky happy dance*

Incidentally, for the benefit of other language geeks in the audience: the fact that my commas appear outside quoted phrases in the above is intentional. I tend towards the opinion that quotes should not go around things that aren't being quoted.

editorial: an inverted thanksgiving

Thomas Friedman's "In My Next Life"

( the text, since NYT probably won't let you read the article any more )

Not, you know, that Friedman (or I) are bitter or anything. And in fact I have a great deal to be thankful for.