Pre-Convention Update (E-72)

Instead of waiting for the sixty-day mark, I decided to pull numbers right before and right after both parties' conventions. Without further ado, the numbers:

Strong D: 214 (-17)
Lead D: 46 (-7)
Toss-up: 102 (+5)
Lean R: 64 (+19)
Strong R: 112 (-10)

Total D: 260
Total R: 176

The major change from last time: McCain came out swinging. It was risky, inherently risky, but so far it looks like it's paying dividends. He's put Ohio back in the toss-up column, which makes it a real race again, at least potentially. He retains the problem that he absolutely has to run the table on the toss-ups to win, but it's mathematically possible now. It wasn't, before.

Now, the weekend's big news is that Barack Obama has picked Joe Biden as his running mate. The announcement has pretty much sucked all the oxygen out of the room, and no one on the news channels can talk about anything else. He's not my favorite guy in all the world, but was there another choice? Biden brings experience, and a bit of gravitas. He's got as much foreign policy experience as anyone in his party at this point. He's got some experience with economic issues as well. Mostly, this kicks off their convention spiel two days early. That puts some pressure on McCain's campaign to drop a bombshell late Friday or early Saturday.

Now, we're going to look at each of the toss-ups, and see who'd win if the election were today. Caveat Emptor: I'm awarding the votes to whoever has a plurality. Almost by definition, nobody has cleared 50% support in a toss-up state.

Alaska: D +3
Nevada: D +5
Montana: D +3
Colorado: D +9
Ohio: D +20
Virginia: D +13
New Hampshire: D +4

Total D: +57

North Dakota: R +3
North Carolina: R +15
Florida: R +27

Total R: +45

Projected D: 317
Projected R: 221

This projection is worth exactly as much as you have paid for it. But the polling data, in aggregate, tells a sad story for Republicans.

What John McCain must do: McCain is going to have to endure a week-long media blackout, unless something really interesting happens at the Democratic convention, and all Hell breaks loose. He's going to have to ruthlessly exploit any mistakes the Democrats make during their own convention, while simultaneously batting it out of the park during his own. He's had a good run these last few weeks, pulling 24 EVs from the Democrats while adding 9 net EVs to his own tally. He's got to keep that train rolling. He has to win all but eight of the EVs on the toss-up list. Which is to say, he can live without Nevada and Montana, but has to have all of the rest.

What Barack Obama must do: Obama has lost the initiative. This isn't an existential crisis for his campaign, not yet, given the size of his EV lead. He only needs to pull ten EVs from the toss-up list to win. That's Ohio or Virginia. But it's still troubling. He can't continue to sail above the fray. He's got to engage McCain's campaign head-to-head. He knows how -- anyone who matriculated through the Chicago school of politics knows every dirty trick ever invented, and then some -- but has chosen not to respond in kind so far. He, or someone from his campaign, has got to get in the pit and start swinging. Otherwise, they may yet snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

The Way to Bet: Obama still owns a substantial lead, but has lost the initiative. I'm hesitant to call it, but I still think Obama wins. It's not a landslide, but not a squeaker, either. And if McCain continues to chip away at the middle, it'll get tighter yet.

Thoughts on Miranda

Not too long ago, while convalescing from an illness, I found myself watching an episode of COPS. Why, I'm not entirely sure, since it's not something I ordinarily seek out. Near as I can tell, I fell asleep watching Ninja Warrior, and that happened to be the next thing on the schedule.

You learn all kinds of interesting things from COPS.

For instance, it always pays to stay sober and to keep your shirt on. The dudes on COPS that are drunk and shirtless almost always get a free ride downtown. "What'd this one do, Leroy?" "Dunno, Bob. But he was drunk, and wasn't wearing a shirt. Hadda be doin' something." "Works for me. Book 'em!"

What it really got me thinking about, though, was the Miranda warning. Based on what I saw, Miranda is in sore need of an update.

Here's a boilerplate version of the Miranda warning:

You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to have an attorney present during questioning. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you.

Now, here's my new and improved version:

You have the right to remain silent. Oh please, dear sweet Jesus, remain silent! But no. You'll rant, and rave, and make pronouncements. You'll make all kinds of bold statements that we'll record for the DA's amusement. He'll take those statements, fold them 'till they're all corners, and ram them home where the Sun don't shine. When they're replayed in court, your attorney -- and you can have an attorney whenever you want, whether you can afford it or not -- your attorney will groan, hide his face in his hands, and bitterly curse the day he gave up hanging sheet rock for the study of law. But for now, for right now, you have a golden opportunity to shut the hell up. Please, for all our sakes, take it!

I don't expect it to catch on. But it probably accurately reflects what a lot of officers really feel...

National Aviation Day

According to Wikipedia, August 19 is National Aviation Day. In honor of the event, I would like to present a few of my favorite "aviation oddity" photos.

(1) Adventures in Traffic Enforcement. Please, oh please, tell me this fool wasn't trying to pull a fighter jet over for speeding...

(2) Tail Number of the Beast. Apparently, Satan used to fly a Starfighter for the Japan Air Self-Defense Force. Who knew?

(3) The Things You Find on Google Earth. Methinks some poor Lieutenant got lost trying to park his Eagle at Elmendorf AFB in Alaska.

MEMO

FROM: Gen. Anger
TO: Lt. Fumducker
RE: Parking at Elmendorf AFB

Be advised that you turn LEFT off the runway to get to USAF Base Ops, and RIGHT to get to General Aviation. LEFT, not RIGHT. LEFT. Next time you do this, your ass is PUSHING that damn jet back.

(Note: I actually met a Major Anger once, call sign "Rage". He's actually a really nice guy.)

(4) Learning to Fly. Learning to fly is good. Learning to land? Even better!

These are my current favorites. More to come, infrequently, as I find them.

Ninety Days and Counting

Ninety days from today, we go to the polls to elect the next President of the United States. While Wikipedia lists ten parties and two independent bids, for all practical intents and purposes we know that the two real contenders are the presumptive nominees for the Democratic and Republican parties, Barack Obama and John McCain, respectively. No one knows who's going to win yet. Three months is an eternity in national politics. But we can look at trends, and that's what I'm going to do in the first week of each month between now and November.

Data Source

I will be using the website pollster.com for my data. Why this site? Simple. Polls can be misleading, sometimes deliberately so. What these guys do, they take all the polling data available, and and then do some statistical jiggery-pokery to arrive at a best estimate of what the data really say. Which is to say, an individual poll might be full of skew and spin, but taking all of them together averages out any polling bias there may be.

Electoral College Estimates as of 8/6/2008

Strong D: 231
Lean D: 53
Toss-up: 97
Lean R: 35
Strong R: 122

Total D: 284
Total R: 157

Bear in mind that the magic number is 270. The first man past that post on Election Night takes it all. Also, bear in mind that the national trend poll is virtually meaningless. We do not elect the President by national plebiscite, at least not yet. The real election for President still takes place when the Electoral College meets. With this in mind, and looking at the map, some obvious facts present themselves.

What John McCain must do: McCain must win every toss-up state, and also win one of Michigan or Ohio. Look for McCain's campaign to begin targeting one or both of those states, to try to calve it off of Obama's "lean"list. If he doesn't, he's toast; there just aren't enough toss-up states on the table to put him over the top.

What Barack Obama must do: Obama must hold on to all of his "lean" states, as well as all of the states where he enjoys a strong lead. Just that. If he can pull that off, he'll come away with 284 EC votes plus whatever of the toss-up states fall his way.

The way to bet: As of this writing, it's looking like Obama takes it in a not particularly close election. McCain will have to turn up the heat, big-time, and that's a risky thing to do; while Obama simply has to avoid unforced errors. If McCain can carve off either Michigan or Ohio, it's a real race again.

To be continued, sometime in early September...

Christmas in July!

Truly, we live in an age of wonders.

A few months ago, I wrote about these news items, about a couple of (ahem) personal vehicles that I really, really want in my garage. Well, according to this article from the New York Times, I can add one more to my Christmas wish list.

A real, honest-to-God jet-pack that actually works!

Well, to be picky, it's not a jet-pack as much as it's a ducted-fan-pack, but I still want one.

(Hat tip: Instapundit)

NASA at 50

Fifty years ago today, President Dwight Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act into law, creating NASA. The agency thus created has led the American space effort, and has had its share of both triumph and tragedy. To mark the day, I'm hashing out a quick review of NASA's record: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

The Good

Without doubt, NASA's signature triumph was putting an American on the Moon, and bringing him back safely. I think a good argument could be made that this was our finest hour. We built the most powerful machines in history, not for conquest, not for destruction, but for exploration ... to go somewhere we'd never been, and to learn something we didn't know before. And they answered the challenge head-on: between the day Kennedy laid the challenge down on May 25, 1961 and the day Columbia splashed down in the Pacific on July 24, 1969 was a span of only 8 years, 1 month, and 29 days. (Fun trivia fact: both dates were Thursdays, so the span was exactly 426 weeks.) Only eight years to invent procedures and spacecraft that had never existed before, to accomplish a task they weren't sure was even possible when they started. And they haven't slacked off on the unmanned exploration front: NASA's robots have visited every planet in the Solar System, saving only Pluto (which was a planet, at the time of NASA's inception). To this we can add Hubble, which has revolutionized our understanding of astronomy. Neither has aeronautics been forgotten: the laboratories continue to forge ahead with propulsion research, test-flying a Mach 8 scramjet for the first time last year. We have much to be proud of, for our paltry expenditures.

The Bad

There have been a few miscues, some would even say more than a few. The Block I Apollo spacecraft was a total goat-rope that ended up costing the lives of three good men in the Apollo 1 fire. A stem-to-stern redesign resulted in a pretty good spacecraft, but still. Your design process really ought not involve smoking a crew if you can help it. This is a pattern that seems to repeat itself every 15-20 years. Good engineering practice gets overtaken by hasty dumb-ass, and the predictable thing happens. Mind you, flight test is a dangerous business. Back in the late 50s and early 60s, when the early astronauts were cutting their teeth in the flight test business, you'd expect to lose several pilots during a test program. Losses incurred while you're pressing the outside of the envelope are one thing. Losses incurred through complacent inattention are another thing entirely. The former is a cost of doing business, the latter is entirely avoidable. And we've lost seventeen good men and women to the latter, seventeen too many. Let's hope the lessons stay learned this time, and we don't have a repeat in the 2016-2020 time-frame.

The Ugly

When you compare the agency in its early years to what you see today, you wonder why it only took a little more than eight years to go from a President's say-so to landing on the Moon, and today we'll spin our wheels for at least ten more years and still be a year or two away. The answer is really quite simple. It's a fully-matured bureaucracy now, in a way that it wasn't, back in the day. Young organizations travel light and move fast, everyone's focused on the mission like a laser beam. Nothing else mattered. Today, it's very much a 9-to-5 outfit ... and really, is that such a bad thing? When I think of all the wrecked families that littered the roadside on the way to Tranquility Base, maybe not. That's a bit of history we need not repeat. Still, they've developed a very strict, very rigid way of doing business that they will not depart from. That makes it hard to innovate. It makes for a slow-moving organization, one that people will begin to lose patience with, by and by.

The Future

They will continue to do their work, be it good, bad, or indifferent. It's a Federal bureaucracy, and therefore very unlikely to be shut down anytime real soon. And their best work is quite good indeed, even today. But what I do see happening, is that they'll lose the initiative in the American space effort. Maybe in fifteen years, twenty at the most, the center of gravity of the American space effort will be firmly in private industry, in places like SpaceX and Virgin Galactic. They're stalking the wild greenback, and won't let ceremony stand in their way. Which is fine. It may even allow NASA to rediscover what I think is, at bottom, its real mission.

You see, in my opinion, NASA's job isn't really to put a person on Mars. NASA's real job is to figure out the technology to let the National Geographic Society put some people on Mars. Or how about Survivor: Olympus Mons? Now, wouldn't that be a sight to see?

It's Always April Fool's Day...

It never ceases to amaze me what can arouse fear and trembling here in the Land of the Tiny-Brained Folk. Just when I thought we'd put millennial madness behind us with the non-event that was Y2K, Lo! it just begins again. Case in point: this piece from the world-famous AOL newsroom about a bunch of mystics that have their shorts in a wad over the Long Count.

I've had a long-standing interest in calendars of all kinds. I think they're cool. I came to the study of calendars from my long-time interest in astronomy, and eventually got interested in them in their own right. It's a fascinating business, how people choose to mark time. Do they mark the passing of the Sun, or the Moon, or some combination of the two? What do they use for their epoch date, and why? That choice alone tells you a lot about the mind-set of the calendar maker.

The modern Julian Day calendar, for example, is in broad use by those of us who study the motion of the planets for both fun and profit. Its epoch was chosen purely arbitrarily. The Julian Day is the number of days that have elapsed since January 1, 1950, UTC. It's not a whole number, but a decimal, so that you can get as precise as you need to. Interesting factoid, useless to most people. But I find it curious.

The Byzantine calendar, now... They date their calendar from when they believe the world was created in Genesis, some 7500-odd years ago. The year 2000 AD, for example, would have been
Etos Kosmou 7508 on January 1, rolling over to 7509 on September 1, which was their New Year. Neat, but again, mostly useless.

Our calendar dates from the estimated birth of Christ ... but they got the year wrong. Whoops. The really funny thing about people getting their shorts in a knot about the passing of the 2000th year since the birth of Christ? They were getting excited about four years late. Maybe. We just don't know for sure. (I suppose I could ask when I get there... Provided that I still give a rip.)

And then there's the Hebrew Calendar, a combination lunar/solar calendar that I've never entirely understood. Their epoch date is a year before Creation. I find that slightly nuts. What, it took the Almighty most of a year to get His blueprints past peer review? But it's best not to consider such things too deeply. That way lay madness.

The point is, all calendars are arbitrary. They're tools for marking the passing of years, no more, no less. By far, their most important role in ancient societies was telling people when they should plant crops. That's serious business, because if you plant too early or too late, you go hungry. But aside from that, their use is purely ceremonial, and the Universe at large simply does not care how we measure time, or for that matter, if we measure it at all.

Which brings us to this barge of fools crying "Doom! Doom!" for 2012, because the Mayan calendar is running out. Why, pray tell, do they think the Mayans have a unique groove? Personally, I find it hard to take their word on the date of Doomsday if they never got around to inventing the freaking wheel. The second simplest machine of all time, and it never once occurred to them? Not one of them looked at the round calendar carved into the side of a temple and mused to themselves that something roundish might make hauling fifty-ton stone blocks easier?

You have to admit, failing to invent the wheel kind of disqualifies you from the leader-board of History's Cleverest People.

Besides, it's not as if they have the only cyclical calendar. The Hindu calendar, for example, will trundle merrily along for another 420,000 years give or take before its current age ends. But we don't see anyone getting excited about that bit of prophecy, do we?

Well, that's partly because no one seriously expects to be around then. But that's beside the point.

Or is it? After all, 2012 is tantalizingly close. Most anyone alive today can seriously expect to be around then. Whatever happens then, they'll be here to see it. There are always people just chomping at the bit to see Armageddon in their time. Some of them, I expect, bounce from one round of "Doom!" to another like Tarzan swinging through the Jungle of Life. Y2K proved a bust, and this was the next one to come along.

Me, not so much. I take great confidence in the fact that mystics have predicted 10 of the last 0 ends of the world. I expect December 21, 2012 to come and go just like any other day. No one from Galactic Utilities is going to come by and tell us that we haven't paid our calendar bill.

You won't get off that easy, guys. You'll have to wake up the next morning and go to work, just like the rest of us. Get used to it.

Faster Than Light?

And now for something completely different ...

A long time ago, I read a compilation of Fred Saberhagen's Berserker short stories. The first one, I think, was a piece about the final battle between the Berserker fleet, and the humans that had united to resist them. One of the stranger things in the story was a weapon Saberhagen called the "C-Plus Cannon", a gun that launched its projectiles faster than light. There's an unfriendly weapon for you: first you get the kaboom that comes with getting hit, then you see a missile flying backwards to the ship that fired it. Weird.

But would it really work that way? Let's think about that for a moment.

Let's try a thought experiment. We're going to visit our experimental station on Eris, way the heck out in the Kuiper Belt. We're going to watch a demonstration flight of a prototype vessel capable of flying twice the speed of light. (Yes, this "experiment" contains a fatal flaw ... but bear with me, we'll come around to it presently.)

The flight plan is that it'll fly out twelve light-seconds, do a flip-turn, and fly back to base. At T=0, it begins to fly away. The image begins to fly off in the direction of the target, but not as fast as we'd expect. After three seconds, the image has only receded by two light-seconds. Huh? That doesn't seem right ... At six seconds, it's at the four light-second mark. It continues to crawl into the distance, reaching eight light-seconds away at the twelve-second mark. We're about ready to call it a bust, when BLAM! The vehicle suddenly re-appears at the dock! And, its image begins to shoot backwards at what appears to be twice the speed of light. We watch, boggled, as the two images converge on either side of the flip-turn, when they both vanish.

Weird enough for you? Except for one problem ... It could never actually happen that way. We'll show that by doing another thought-experiment. But we're going to lay down a few simple rules first. They're based on some simple principles that describe the way we think the world works.

One: It's a property of photons that they can only travel at one speed in a particular medium. That's to say, light always moves at the speed of light. It can't accelerate or decelerate, it can only gain or lose energy in frequency.

Two: There's no such thing as a universally-preferred frame of reference. Which is to say, there's no such thing as absolute motion. Motion is always relative to something else you can see.

Three: If you're way, way out in deep space, there's no way to tell if you're at rest, or if you're moving at a constant speed, in a straight line. That's a subset of the principle above. Absent a reference to the contrary, you may as well be standing still.

Four: The speed of light is the same in every inertial frame of reference. That means it doesn't matter who's looking at it, they all clock a beam of light at the same speed.

Bearing those four things in mind, let's imagine two ships out in deep space. Both are moving at a constant speed in straight lines. One of them is charged up to several million volts relative to the other, and they're going to pass very close to one another.

Let's look at the encounter from the first ship's point of view. Your instruments can't tell if you're moving or not, so you're perfectly justified in saying that you're sitting still while this other fool zips past you. At closest approach, a spark jumps between the ships, causing a flash. ZAP! You're now at the center of an expanding shell of photons, racing away at the speed of light in all directions.

The interesting thing is that we can make the exact same observation from the point of view of the second ship. You're minding your own business when this other guy flashes past, then ZAP! You're at the center of an expanding shell of photons.

Notice that we haven't said anything about the relative speed of the "moving" ship. It can be arbitrarily large, up to a point ... But do notice that from either point of view, both ships are within the expanding shell of photons!

Therefore, both ships must be traveling slower than the speed of light. However fast we imagine either ship moving, we cannot imagine a situation that places either ship outside of the flash zone, unless one of our four assumptions is incorrect.

Now, if we go back and look at our first experiment, we see that the way it's set up does violate the assumptions. It assumes a preferred, God's eye frame of reference that can't exist. And it ignores the fact that light always moves the same speed in every frame of reference. There are probably other problems too, but those are the major deal-breakers.

The sad and sorry fact is that faster-than-light travel does not appear to be possible within our space-time. There may be ways to cheat, by bending or folding space, but that's a story for another day.

It's Over (We Think)

The long and sometimes extremely bizarre travail of Floyd Landis appears to have come to an end, of sorts. The decision handed down by the CAS in Switzerland was much harsher in tone than the that from the Pepperdine proceedings, but the end result is much the same. The adverse decision has been upheld. (More discussion here, from TBV, elsewhere on Blogspot.)

Some observations follow:

One, I doubt that this is really and truly over. Legal matters are rarely over so long as there's a lawyer somewhere who hasn't got paid yet. Expect this to wend its way through someone's court system like a gut-shot mule for another year, at least. But at this point, Landis stands a better chance of drawing to an inside straight than winning vindication.

Two, the truly disappointing thing about this decision is its affirmation of the "competence" of the LNDD laboratory whose clown-tastic inability to follow procedures started this whole farce in the first place. Apparently, CAS looks at the officially-sanctioned labs and says, "Men of my stamp commit no crimes."

Mind you, I don't care enough to be really outraged. But it does stick in my craw to see shoddy work rewarded. What incentive does the Chatenay-Malabry lab have to improve its procedures, if even the most craptacular monkey-work passes international muster?

Maybe they've addressed their deficiencies, maybe not. Maybe the decision from Pepperdine was enough of a rap on the nose to set them straight, but I doubt it. No, the only rebuke strong enough is if a panel outright declares that their work isn't to be trusted, and overturns their result. That absolutely forces them to review how they keep records, run tests, and otherwise armor-plate their lab work with solid paperwork. As it stands, I wouldn't trust that lot to do a store-bought pregnancy test properly. I've seen no evidence that their standards have improved. I'm prepared to say otherwise, pending evidence to the contrary. I shan't hold my breath.

Meanwhile, it's almost time for the 2008 Tour to start ... and for the second year running, there's no returning champion riding to defend his title. And that's just sad. It's possibly the saddest thing about this entire sorry spectacle.

Maybe the worst is over, and we'll have a good, clean race this year. Maybe we'll see a race decided on the road, not in a test tube or a courtroom.

Wouldn't that be something?

Primary 2008 Post-Mortem

"If God is merciful, we'll get to choose between John McCain and Barack Obama in November." -- Me, 27Jan08

Well, I got the match-up I wanted, but how the heck did we get here?

It's easy to forget the Republican race, since it ended so long ago. But it's especially hard to remember that only a year ago, John McCain was politically DOA. His campaign practically disintegrated last summer. He scraped through the fall on a shoestring budget. Here's the thing, though: John McCain didn't need to tell anyone who he was. They already knew that. He just had to hang around long enough to capitalize on an opportunity. That opportunity came with Mike Huckabee's surprise win in Iowa. I remarked at the time that this would cause the antibodies to come out with a vengeance ... The Republican electorate felt the blitz coming, and like a quarterback, ran through their check-down. Romney? No. Giuliani? No. Both looked OK earlier, but now? Well, looky here, guess who's still around? And lo, John McCain surged in the polls. Really, he was the only sane choice out of that lot.

Now we get to the interesting bit ... The Democratic Primary, which seemed to go on for-freaking-ever. And I do have to say that the campaign really highlighted Hillary Clinton's unfitness for the Presidency in a way that I didn't clearly understand before. Why do I say that? Because she failed spectacularly at a relatively simple exercise in contingency planning.

Looking back to the campaign's beginnings, she started with a massive lead in the polls, and a seemingly insurmountable lead in name recognition. She and her staff took one look at the calendar, much like I did, and made the mental calculation that it'd be in the bag after Super Tuesday. All she had to do was win the first primaries, carry the momentum into February, and there you are ...

To all appearances, the following question was never floated at a Clinton strategy meeting: "What if we're wrong? What if the race goes on into March and April?"

Barack Obama's campaign, on the other hand, had a full-court press planned from the beginning. Superior organization and fundraising gave him advantages in the early races that didn't show until it was go-time. This allowed him to build momentum going into February. A split decision on Super Tuesday didn't seal the deal for him, of course, but it gave him a springboard to launch into the March primaries, for which his team was already well-prepared.

Clinton's team, on the other hand, didn't even know how Texas' split election-caucus system worked. That hurt them in Texas. Clinton won the vote part, but lost so dramatically on the caucus side that Obama ended up winning a majority of Texas' delegates.

Clinton's campaign recovered better than I thought they would. They managed to scramble, and cobble up organizations in states they never expected to matter ... but too late, really, to do any good. The damage was done. Obama gained a lead in March that he never relinquished.

There were a lot of other factors at play, of course. But the lack of planning was the killer. Failing to plan is the same as planning to fail.

And now, it's time to start looking forward towards November. As I said earlier, this is the match-up I really wanted to see. Now, I'll tell you why I say that.

Each party rejected something nasty and caustic from its past. The Republicans had an opportunity to choose a candidate who was a lite theocrat (Huckabee) or a full-time security nut (Giuliani), and rejected both. They chose a candidate who understands morality, and understands national security, but blends both with a real respect for America's finest traditions. The Democrats had a chance to nominate a real class-warfare candidate (Edwards) or a divisive culture-warrior (Clinton), but again refused to do so. They've picked a candidate who represents what's still right about America: if you come here and play by the rules, there's no job your sons can't aspire to. That's as powerful an advertisement for the dream that is America as damn near anything else I can think of.

I think each man brings real strengths to the table, that could serve them well as President. Now, it's up to both men to sell themselves to the American electorate, and it's our responsibility to listen to them very carefully in the next few months. And maybe, just maybe, we can have an honest national discussion on where we really need to go from here.

Let's have a good, clean fight, gentlemen. Let the best man win!