It's time to get rid of the Electoral College.

Based on the results of state vs. national polls, it's looking increasingly likely that Obama may lose the national popular vote but win in the EC. As a nakedly partisan Democrat, would I be pleased with this outcome? Well, I'd be happier about it than I was when Bush lost the popular vote but managed to finagle an EC win, obviously ... but "happier" does not equate in this case to "happy" by any means. Because having someone against whom the majority of Americans vote become (or remain) President should simply never, ever happen.

The EC hasn't served its ostensible purpose, to protect the interests of smaller states against domination by larger ones, for generations, if ever. All it does is focus an unwarranted amount of attention on a few "swing states" every four years, with the effect that the interests of the residents of states that don't fall into this category get no representation at all at the Presidential level. If you live in Texas or California, you might as well not vote at all in the Presidential election; same if you live in Wyoming or Vermont. And that really sucks.

Even "swing states" don't really matter all that much, most of the time, if they're sparsely populated. New Mexico was just as close in 2000 as Florida was, but nobody cared how it went, because whoever got Florida was going to get the White House. (Gore won NM by some incredibly narrow margin; if you'd forgotten that detail, I don't blame you.) What was that about small states, again? Yeah, that's what I thought.

Get rid of the damned thing. This isn't partisanship. It's an acknowledgement of reality.

I just finished submitting revisions on The Paper. Not, you understand, revisions in response to reviewers' comments--we haven't received those yet--but rather revisions made necessary by my discovery, well after submission, of a bug in the code. Fortunately it didn't substantially affect the main results or the conclusions, but it did require revising some of the numbers.

I've never had to do anything like this before, and sincerely hope I never do again. It was a stupid bug, the kind of mistake that anyone can make coding at 2:00 AM on too much caffeine and way too little sleep, and I should damn well have caught it before sending out a paper which will pretty much define my research career to date.

But I'm glad it's done. Because while everyone makes mistakes, and indeed those mistakes are part of the process of science, you have to be honest about them. If you're not honest, then what you're doing isn't science, it's something else (say, politics or religion). There is no capital-T Truth in science, but there is truth, and we must always tell that truth as best we can.

But here's the thing. When I was born, my father was working for NASA on the Apollo program. You know, "the Eagle has landed", "one small step," all that. He was one of the (many, many) people who made that happen. He was there, as "there" as it's possible to be without feeling Lunar soil under one's own boots.

When we moved to Denver a couple of years later, he worked for what was then Martin Marietta, on the Viking project among other things. IIRC, he also worked on the early design process for the Shuttle. At that time it was supposed to be fully reusuable, the "big bird little bird" idea that was supposed to make flying into space not a whole lot more complicated than flying across the country.

So I grew up in a house full of space stuff. Giant glossy PR posters, mostly, including one incredibly detailed one about the Apollo missions that covered everything from orbital routes to spacesuit design; also unique memorabilia given only to those who actually worked on the Moon landing, prospectus-type brochures from Martin detailing the kind of stuff they seriously expected to be building within a few years, and--of course--Star Trek stuff. Because that was where we were going, sooner or later. That was the goal.

I grew up with this, waiting each year for it to happen, to start moving forward again. Apollo-Soyuz and Skylab were ... well, they were still something. And surely our retreat from the Moon was temporary, a retrenchment, perhaps an opportunity to do it right the next time by laying the groundwork with a permanent Earth-orbital station that would serve as a dock and transfer point for space-only shuttles between Earth and other destinations. But we weren't going to just give up. Surely not that.

Except we did. Every year, we dropped our expectations a little lower. Even our mass media science fiction reflected the change: from Star Trek and 2001, to Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica. From believable visions of a future that we could really build, to heroic fantasy with a technological gloss.

It wasn't until some time in the late 80s, I think, that I finally accepted it wasn't going to happen. We were not, in my adulthood and probably in my entire life, going to be a truly spacefaring species. We could be by now, you know. We could be living on the Moon and Mars, mining the asteroid belt, colonizing Europa and Titan and maybe figuring out, once and for all, if there are any loopholes in our current understanding of physics that might put the stars within reach. And all the work done by Spirit and Opportunity, and that will be done by Curiosity, could be done in a week by a couple of grad students from Areopolis U.

So you'll understand, I hope, if my happiness at seeing Curiosity's success is a little bittersweet. Not because it's not good and satisfying and important, because it is. It's just not enough.

Morford is guilty here of a sin that might be called metaphoricalism--assuming that because he himself often speaks metaphorically, people who insist on literalism must be fools, ignorami, and/or members of a tiny lunatic fringe.

Yes, of course the ability to interpret metaphor is an important characteristic of the intelligent, educated mind. But most of the time, most people mean exactly what they say, and it's a grave mistake to assume otherwise. He really goes off the rails when he insists that mythology must be interpreted in metaphorical terms. There is no reason to believe--no evidence whatsoever--that the people who originally told the stories of Eve, Paris, or the risen Christ thought they were speaking anything other than literal truth; nor were the monsters lurking in the darkness beyond the campfire anything other than our ancestors' attempts to rationalize (not symbolize) the nasty, brutish, and short nature of life throughout most of human history. A metaphorical interpretation of these myths is more reasonable than a literal one, to be sure. It is also, historically and to a large degree in the modern age, a distinctly minority view.

Your terrifying lack of imagination

(Also: âZ"Science is just mysticism disguised as mathematics," says the guy on the internet.)

Kind of lost in the shuffle over the health care ruling (my opinion, FWIW, is that it's a lousy law, but clearly the best we're going to get in the current political climate, so all in all I'm glad it was upheld; perhaps in another couple of decades, we'll be ready to try again) is this piece of news about another Supreme Court ruling: the court voted 6-3 to strike down the Stolen Valor Act.

I admit to mixed feelings about this. It was clearly the right decision -- any law that limits free speech is prima facie a bad law, and the government's argument that it only restricts "false statements (that) have no value and hence no 1st Amendment protection," to quote the LA Times story, is chilling. We cannot outlaw people telling lies. OTOH, there are a hell of a lot of people using lies about their claimed service for personal advantage (up to and including a certain former President) and this is not only disgusting, it's often outright fraud. The SVA was an exceedingly blunt instrument for a problem that called for a scalpel. I guess the solution I'd like to see is the use of existing criminal fraud statutes for cases where it could be shown that the liar is not just telling stories to impress his buddies at the bar, but actually deriving financial or other measurable gain. Oh yeah, also court-martial for deserters (preceded, where necessary, by other measures such as, oh, say, impeachment, for those whose position places them beyond the usual corrective measures.)

I blame Hollywood, really. At this point they've probably given out more Medals of Honor than have actually been awarded in the entire history of the US military. Lesser decorations have been relegated, in this mindset, to something you get just for showing up. It's not just lazy storytelling; it has a real effect on real people who earn real medals. And no, I'm not saying this should be illegal either, but it should certainly be mocked at every opportunity.

More proof, as if any were needed, that modern conservatism is completely insane.

At this point in the conversation, we're usually treated to a chorus of, "Hey, liberals say crazy things too!" And the answer to that is ... well, yeah, kind of. Which is to say, there are plenty of left-wing lunatics out there, and many of them put their lunacy on display at every opportunity.

The difference is that these left-wing lunatics do not have anywhere near the power or prominence of their right-wing counterparts. They're not hosting nationally syndicated talk shows. They're not parlaying famous last names into political careers. And they are sure as hell not running the Democratic Party, as the right-wing lunatics are clearly running the GOP.

Here's the thing, conservatives. We marginalize and trivialize our extremists. Maybe we shouldn't do that; sometimes the extremists have legitimate grievances. But it's better than what you do with yours. You celebrate and lionize them. It's not just Reagan; it's Limbaugh and Coulter and Savage and Hannity -- and yes, Boehner and Cantor and McConnell, and the current version of Romney (which may of course change next week, or an hour from now, but for now ...) We keep our lunatics locked up. You put yours in charge of the asylum.

So here's my challenge. If you are tired of liberals making hay of every crazy thing some conservative pundit or politician says, do something about it. Point and laugh at your own side's lunatics, as we do. Make us believe that common ground is possible, that you have the same ends for the country that we do even if we disagree about the means. Put your racists and fascists in the same room where we keep our communists and anarchists, and keep them decently out of public view.

Or if you're not willing to do this, understand that we have no choice but to consider you just as bad as the worst of your number, and act accordingly.

Note to copywriters working for the DoD, or trying to appeal to a military audience: "soldier," "sailor," and "airman" are not proper nouns. "Marine" is a proper noun, because it happens to be part of the name of the service, United States Marine Corps. (Or, for that matter, the Royal Marine Corps on which the US version was modeled.) This does not mean that Marines are any more special or heroic or elite than members of the other services. (Marines, of course, will disagree, but that's part of their shtick. The rest of us just smile and nod.) It's an accident of language, no more.

Also not proper nouns: "military" and "veteran." Capitalizing any of these words, when they do not appear at the beginning of a sentence, does not emphasize how Special and Heroic and Elite our Brave Fighting Men And Women are for Making Sacrifices to Defend Our Freedom. It just makes you look illiterate. Now, you may not particularly care about literacy -- you're in the advertising business, after all -- but by God and the Constitution, I fought specially and heroically and elitely to defend your right to speak freely, not to sound like a moron doing so!

Thank You, and Have A Nice Day.

A perpetual problem with scientific software is that much of it starts out as one-time scripts written to analyze a specific piece of data, and then it gets released into the wild as The Way To Analyze This Type Of Data. A closely related problem, which affects repositories of scientific software, is that a kind of informal API develops among the developers and users (who are initially the same people) of packages within the repository, without ever being really documented in a way that makes sense to people who have not been involved in the development. What documentation there is tends be rather ... self-referential, shall we say, and assume a whole lot of background knowledge about how the software works which new users will, in almost all cases, not have.

Not to break my arm patting myself on the back, but I have to say that my years of industry experience in writing end-user applications, and managing a development team made up of people who had all joined the team at different times and had to understand what was going on, taught me a lot about how to write good documentation. Industry programmers could learn a lot from academia about how to make software run better, because scientific users have to squeeze every possible bit of performance out of every processor cycle. Academic programmers could learn a lot from industry about how to write documentation that allows people to use that performance without wanting to tear their hair out.

... I have to admire the Republicans for their ability to stick to their predefined narrative, even when it's the exact opposite of reality. The purpose of CISPA is "creating this monster here in Washington to control what we would see and not see on the Internet." Obama's veto threat is aimed at preventing the creation of such a monster. But that doesn't fit with Boehner's definition of The Way Things Are, so ...

Boehner rebukes W. H. on CISPA veto threat

... because you know, James Lovelock. And somebody lost his temper in an e-mail once. And haha, Al Gore is fat.

Antarctic ice melting from below, reveals satellite

This has garnered lots of comments along the lines of "Great, now schoolkids in TN can give answers based on Islam / Buddhism / Hinduism / FSMism and get full credit and there's nothing they can do about it! Be careful what you ask for, fundies! Hah hah hah!"

It does not work that way. Here's how it will work. Religious answers which will be acceptable, and more generally, religious challenges to school authority which will be acceptable, will be those based in Christianity, specifically fundamentalist Protestantism. And students who profess other beliefs will be even more ostracized than they already are. This is what the sponsors of the bill wish to achieve, and if the bill becomes law and survives the inevitable court challenges, it is what they will achieve. To think anything else is naivete of the highest and most dangerous order

You have to read carefully to understand what's really being debated here. Short version: in 2008, Louisiana passed a law which more or less mandated the teaching of creationism, Luddism, and denialism, and now they're trying to repeal it. I don't know enough about the current state of LA politics to know if the repeal effort has a prayer (hah!) of succeeding, but I wish the best of luck to Sen. Peterson, Mr. Kopplin, and their supporters.

What makes this particularly irritating is that the language of the 2008 law is designed to make it hard to challenge; its supporters can ask with wide-eyed innocence, "Who could POSSIBLY object to 'critical thinking skills, logical analysis, and open and objective discussion'?"

The answer, of course, is "nobody but a bunch of creationists, which is why we want to repeal the law." But the wording is an ugly trick, on par with the title of the USA-PATRIOT Act. See also, "But Hussein is his middle name! Why do you have a problem with his name?" and other acts of right-wing disingenuousness.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: the "if we teach Biblical creationism then we have to teach all the other religions' creation myths too" argument is a bad one to use against these loons. They're not interested in "religious freedom" or "equal time" or anything else of the sort; what they want is a Christian (specifically fundamentalist evangelical Protestant) theocracy, and no one should have any illusions about their goals. If they get their way, we will have to teach (their version of) Biblical creationism, and we will not have to, or even be allowed to, teach anything else.

The same goes for the closely related "if we have Christian prayers in schools, then we also have to have Jewish / Muslim / Buddhist / Hindu / Wiccan / Satanist / etc. prayers too" idea. This is an appealing argument to tolerant, open-minded liberals, but it is a dangerous misunderstanding of the thinking of the religious Right.

http://www.addictinginfo.org/2012/01/12/missouri-republicans-introduce-bill-that-forces-educators-to-teach-creationism-in-schools-and-universities/

If the DNC did this, then every Democratic candidate for office, from Obama down to the guy running for county dogcatcher, would be peppered with endless questions about it at every press conference, and would have to issue a statement either endorsing or repudiating the Committee's stance. It would be the greatest campaign issue for the Republicans in recent history, and they wouldn't let it slip by them. It would, more or less, be equivalent to the entire Democratic ticket saying, "You know what, we don't really care about 2012, you guys can have it."

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/01/11/402358/republican-national-committee-files-brief-seeking-to-allow-corporate-funding-of-campaigns/

I will now eagerly await the actions of the Democratic attack machine on this story in 3, 2, 1, ... still counting ..., 0, -1, -2, ... um, guys?

We have already seen that "piracy" (in the IP sense, not in the original meaning of the word) is one of four root passwords to the Constitution. The others are "drugs," "child porn," and "terrorism." It's time to fight fire with fire.

I therefore propose that We the People, in order to secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish these Talking Points:

(1) Lamar Smith gets campaign contributions from drug dealers!

(2) PIPA stands for "Porn Infant Porn for All!" You know it's really bad 'cause it's got "porn" in it twice.

(3) If SOPA passes, the terrorists have won.

None of this actually makes sense, of course, but if we repeat it loudly enough and often enough, it should work.