Sesquicentennial, Part XXII: The Bloodiest Day

--FIRST -PREV NEXT-

It's extremely hard to adjust to having the rules changed on you in mid-play.

That's really the thing you see when you study the Civil War close-up. These men trained extensively in Napoleon's tactics. It's axiomatic that you train for the last war, because for so very long, things didn't change much, if they changed at all. And many of the most important things don't change. That's why we still read Sun Tzu's Art of War, Miyamoto Musashi's A Book of Five Rings, and Clausewitz's On War. (Although I'd advise finding a Cliff's Notes version of the latter.) But with every change of technology, what a commander can do on the battlefield changes with it, and the Civil War brought with it a fairly broad range of new technologies that had never been seen before on such scale. And the learning curve was fairly horrifying.

As I said last time, I'm finding it difficult to come down too hard on most Civil War commanders as a result. Most did the best they could with what they had. It was mostly no fault of their own that they were found wanting. But only mostly. There were still a few good old-fashioned character flaws that came boiling to the fore. And our man George McClellan wasn't immune.

If the spring and summer of 1861 were the apex of McClellan's career, the spring and summer of 1862 were the nadir. I've said before that I excuse what some would call McClellan's temerity, because he was acting fairly reasonably given the information he thought he had. If he'd attacked in the face of those odds, he'd have been reckless, and it wasn't necessarily his fault that Pinkerton was giving him bad information. But I refuse to excuse his overweening pride, and stubborn refusal to allow another general to take any credit for victory. This is what turned the Second Battle of Bull Run into the debacle that it was.

It all began after the collapse of McClellan's Peninsular Campaign in June. With Johnston's death at Shiloh, Robert E. Lee was advanced to command in the field, and he was able to push McClellan's Army of the Potomac back to the James River. With the threat against Richmond removed, Lee was able to turn his attentions back to the north. This caused Lincoln to appoint John Pope as commander of the newly-formed Army of Virginia, with the mission of finding and engaging Lee's army. Pope requested reinforcements from McClellan, who refused. The reason McClellan gave was that he didn't want to leave Washington unguarded. It's widely suspected that the real reason was that McClellan didn't want Pope to succeed where he had failed.

The result was that the Union and Confederate forces met for a second time at Bull Run, on nearly even numerical terms. In such an engagement, what counts more than anything else is leadership and coordination. And as I've said before, the Confederacy still enjoyed an advantage. Not as much as the first time around, but still enough to win victory on that day. The defeated Union forces were able to retire in good order, though, so the humiliation of another rout was avoided.

Now, this left Lee with a bit of a problem. What to do next? His basic problem was always one of supply. The Confederacy's basic problem in general was always one of supply. This is because the Confederacy could raise an army, and it could equip an army, but it really couldn't do both of those at the same time. Part of the problem was finding trained, skilled men: machinists and mechanics. Those men were needed with equal urgency in the factories, and on the firing line. But there was also a material problem. The Union blockade was hurting, and severely. The "King Cotton" strategy had failed. Europe, far from being destitute without Southern cotton, had found other sources. And England wasn't going to risk war with the Union over those supplies in any event. The Confederacy got dribbles of supplies in via blockade runners, but this was never going to be enough to supply whole armies in the field. But Lee found a radical solution to his supply problem.

For the same reason that bank robbers rob banks, Lee went north: because that's where the supplies were.

But that wasn't the only reason. There were two other goals. First, he wanted to attack the North's will to fight, by showing that their armies couldn't keep him out. This might have a salubrious effect on the upcoming mid-term elections in November. Second, he wanted to show the Europeans, and England in particular, that the Union army couldn't keep him out. If he was able to demonstrate the Confederacy's military viability with major victories on Union soil, maybe they'd weigh in to stop the bloodshed as a humanitarian gesture. It was a long shot. But it was the best shot the Confederacy had at that point.

And so it was that Lee drafted Special Order 191, detailing his plans for the invasion. Copies were made for each of his senior commanders. Most of them safeguarded those orders closely. One, Major General D.H. Hill, wrapped them around a couple of cigars and forgetfully left them behind at a campsite.

You know, I think my first impression was actually correct. They really hadn't invented operational security yet.

This was like McClellan getting the Prima Strategy Guide to the Civil War. If you ask how he knew that the order was genuine, you have to remember, back in those days orders weren't typewritten. Orders were written by hand, and the veteran officers of the Union army generally knew one another's handwriting. It wouldn't have been hard to find an officer who'd served under Lee. It took maybe five minutes to assess the authenticity, and maybe five minutes more for McClellan to figure out what needed to be done. You see, the order not only gave him an idea of where Lee's army was headed, it also gave him for the very first time a truly accurate idea of its strength.

Knowing Lee's target let McClellan get there first, and dig in. It also let him get some forces in place to exploit Lee's flank. When Lee got to Sharpsburg on September 17th, McClellan was there waiting for him.

This time, McClellan had a decisive advantage, nearly two to one. This time, he held a clearly superior position. This time, he knew precisely what Lee had in mind. And still, he was mortally fearful of what Lee might do to him.

Yes, I mostly don't hold McClellan's timidity against him, except for this. When you have your enemy in a vise, you spin it down and squeeze. You lay to with every tool and weapon at your disposal. You do your damnedest to break him utterly. But McClellan? Fully a third of his men at Sharpsburg never fired a shot.

And for all that, it was still the bloodiest day in American military history. Commanders still hadn't come to terms yet with what rifled muskets could do. Companies marching to attack a prepared defensive position quite often simply ceased to exist, withered away by a veritable rain of steel. And this went back and forth on the field for most of the day. Until, finally, a Union attack managed to break the Confederate center. This forced Lee to withdraw, as his position was no longer tenable. A more alert, more vigorous commander might have pursued. McClellan ... didn't.

I still think that commanders were shell-shocked to some extent by the numbers of casualties. This was something beyond anything they could ever have imagined. It was, and still is, the bloodiest day in American military history. Some 23,000 men had fallen, on both sides.

Nevertheless, it seemed as if an opportunity had been squandered. Lee was allowed to escape. His army would live to fight again another day, having seized enough supplies from Maryland farmers to keep on going.

But for all that, it was still a victory. The Confederates had been beaten in open battle, and sent packing. That was good enough for what Lincoln had in mind.

Lincoln had drafted a proclamation regularizing what Union armies had already been doing. If you'll recall, Union armies had been confiscating slaves in Confederate territory, mainly to deny their labor to their masters. Emancipation began as an economic measure, designed to hurt the finances of the Union's enemies. Lincoln merely took that one step further. His proclamation summarily dispossessed all slave-owners of their property, in all territories then in rebellion. He had drawn this up shortly after learning of what his field commanders had already been doing, but didn't release it immediately. It would have sounded like a measure of desperation. He needed a victory, in order to give the order authenticity. The Battle of Antietam gave him that victory.

And at a stroke, any real possibility of foreign intervention died. Because whether or not it began that way, the war was now becoming one of liberation. It was becoming a war to settle the slavery issue once and for all. And now that this was out in the open, the odds that England would weigh in publicly for slavery and against emancipation were as near to zero as made no difference. If the Confederacy were to win, they'd have to win with whatever they had on hand. And much of what came in from abroad had to come in through Mexico, then through Texas and Arkansas, and across the Mississippi. And that was beginning to be a real problem.

It took a few months after the Battle of Shiloh to realize what would eventually become an important fact: with the fall of New Orleans, the Confederacy's only stronghold on the entire Mississippi River was the city of Vicksburg. While this is obvious in hindsight, it went essentially unnoticed for several months, while the other battles of the summer of 1862 played themselves out. But realize it they did, the Union with anticipation and the Confederacy with dread. This would be the hinge on which the whole thing swung.

Chasing the Dragon, Revisited

Mark your calendars, ladies and gentlemen. October 7th, at about 7PM EDT, the first of 12 regular cargo deliveries to the International Space Station will get underway. That is, if everything goes according to plan. Those of you who were here last time may remember that the launch window is pretty damned short. (I don't think I'll live-blog this one.) Still ... even with all of our problems, some pretty great things are happening. Despair is a sin. Here's how it finally went down last time:



And again, some music while we wait:



By the way, here's another date to mark down on your calendars: October 16th. Our man Donald has a new album coming out called Sunken Condos. He's been kind enough to put a preview out there for us:



This is good stuff, it really is, but I'd kind of like to see him get together with Mr. Becker again. It's been too long since Everything Must Go.

Election 2012: Post-DNC Update

Now, it's all official. The two parties have confirmed in convention what we've all known for months. The Obama/Biden ticket has been officially nominated by the Democratic Party to face the Romney/Ryan ticket of the Republican Party in November's Presidential election. The conventions have been illuminating. Not always in the ways that the parties expected, but illuminating nevertheless.

For one, Peter Beinart noted at the Daily Beast that the Democrats have acquired the knack for message discipline. Once upon a time, that was a Republican knack. Under Reagan, the Republicans reliably fell in line, heeding his half-joking commandment that Thou Shalt Not Speak Ill Of A Fellow Republican. It's almost impossible to imagine anyone at the 1984 Republican convention going rogue. The 2012 convention, on the other hand, consisted of almost nothing else, with the possible exceptions of Ryan and Romney themselves. The Democrats, on the other hand, all looked like they were pulling in the same direction. Sure, they were interested in making themselves look good. The Democratic National Convention has, historically, been the debut venue for the party's rising stars. The last two Democratic Presidents, after all, used their keynote addresses as springboards to launch their national presences. But their speeches were primarily touting the virtues of their ticket, as opposed to polishing their resumes for 2016. I don't know that it means anything in particular, but I just find it curious that the characteristically disorganized Democrats have discovered unity of message at the same time that the characteristically regimented Republicans seem to have lost it.

The other interesting difference, and one that I did not anticipate, was that Biden and Obama gave their speeches on the same night. Which is why I said last week that I'd be missing Biden's address. Instead, I missed Bill Clinton's. This leads to an interesting national variation in television ratings. Bill Clinton's speech won the ratings battle in most markets, with the exception of Texas. It's not that Texas hates Bill Clinton. It's that the Dallas Cowboys were playing the New York Giants. We'd probably skip a live broadcast of the Second Coming if the Cowboys were on the other channel. So, while most of the nation was watching Bill Clinton do what he does best, most of us were watching Tony Romo tear the Giants' secondary a new one. While I'd make that choice again with no regrets, I do kind of wish I'd seen it. Clinton was in rare form. He showed his skill, not just at communicating but at connecting, and reminded us how he won two terms.

Speaking of sports, James Fallows did a compare and contrast between political reporters and sports reporters. And he's right. You know who's brutally honest? Who tells it like it is, no matter if he's talking about friend or foe? The guy on your local sports radio station. You do find the occasional "homer", who finds no fault with his favorites, but they get no respect and hardly ever last long. People complain about our reporters covering elections like they were sporting events. Oh, would that this were actually true. Journalism would be better for it. We need for our political reporters to be more like sportscasters, not less.

Another interesting compare-and-contrast data point has come out of the conventions: the Romney campaign's heavy investment in air time versus the Obama campaign's heavy investment in the ground game. Romney's Super-PACs are producing ads and buying time like there's no tomorrow. Obama's campaign has far more local offices and workers in the swing states. It will be interesting to see how these divergent strategies play out against one another.

And now, let's have a look at the numbers. As usual, I'm drawing my information from Intrade, FiveThirtyEight, and Pollster. The data are current as of Friday evening.

From Intrade:

Barack Obama (D): 57.9%, 285 EV (+0.5%, +4 EV)

Mitt Romney (R): 41.9%, 247 EV (-0.7%, +15 EV)

From FiveThirtyEight:

Barack Obama (D): 78.1%, 314.2 EV (+6.5%, +11.8 EV)

Mitt Romney (R): 21.9%, 223.8 EV (-6.5%, -11.8 EV)

From Pollster:

Strong D: 211 (+/- 0)

Lean D: 36 (+16)

Tossup: 100 (-16)

Lean R: 16 (+/- 0)

Strong R: 175 (+/- 0)

I wish now that I'd pulled a set of numbers immediately prior to the RNC. Then, we'd have a better idea of exactly what the effect of each convention was. Obama has definitely gotten a poll boost, as seen in the Pollster data, but the Intrade numbers haven't moved much. Granted, Intrade is still giving him 3-2 odds for re-election. But FiveThirtyEight is quoting 3-1 odds at this point, with the convention giving Obama a quick +6.5% jolt. Another interesting point is what Pollster seems to be telling us this week: that Obama has picked up sixteen electoral votes from toss-up states as part of this boost. Even with a relatively lackluster economy, he's still chugging along.

What Romney Must Do: He basically has to run the table in the toss-up states. Add his "strong" and "lean" votes together, and he's still eighty electoral votes short, with only 100 on the table. Which is to say, all of them but Ohio. That's a pretty tall order. Not impossible, but he's got to run a flawless, error-free campaign from here on in. There's no margin for error. And one of the go-to tropes for Republicans, weakness on national security, is simply laughable now. Obama hasn't exactly been shy about handing out the explodium Candygrams and bullet fiestas for people he thinks need killing. They might try painting him as a weakling pacifist ... but Osama bin Laden and Moammar Gadhafi would probably disagree. If they could, which they can't. So, Team Romney has to hit the economic message hard. Without reminding the voting public that he looks like the guy who fired them.

What Obama Must Do: But this is no time for Team Obama to be complacent. If the electorate gets sufficiently discontented, they may well give Mr. Romney a tryout. And he's facing a pretty steep differential in available cash for advertisements. But he's got a few things that Romney doesn't. For one, he's got the Oval Office, and Air Force One. All the advantages of incumbency. And the public's deep distrust of Mitt Romney, the man. He's also got to run a fairly error-free campaign, but he's got more of a margin for error than Team Romney does. While Romney has to win 80 out of 100 toss-ups, Obama only has to win twenty-one. That's Florida, by itself. Or Ohio, plus any one other state. He's betting on his superior ground game to even out Romney's money advantage. That may prove the way to bet.

And The Winner Is: Obama still enjoys 3-2 odds on Intrade, much like most of the last year and a half. The next month bears watching. By the end of September, we should have a pretty good idea of how the air-versus-ground strategies are working. By the middle of October, we should have a really good idea. But for now, I'd take 3-2 odds on Obama/Biden for the win, and I'd still take 290 electoral votes for the over/under.

Remember, vote early, and vote often!

Election 2012: Post-RNC Update

Well ... that was certainly interesting. Given what went down last night, I think it would be appropriate to recap the Republican National Convention with the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

The Good: I have been saying for some time that Mitt Romney's Vice-Presidential pick would give us a bit of a window into his decision-making. It's the first Presidential decision that the nominee makes. What, why and how gives you the template for their decision-making, and some idea of how their Administration would go. We saw Reagan and Clinton both pick former rivals as running mates. We saw Bush the Elder pick a non-entity. Bush the Younger picked Dick Cheney, who was the chair of the search committee, and who became a virtual shadow President. And do we need to rehash McCain's choice? Mitt Romney ended up picking Paul Ryan. And yes, I think that's a good thing. And yes, I think that reflects credit upon Romney as a candidate. He didn't pick someone to be a media-wowing "game changer". He picked someone with serious policy cred. Even if you don't agree with him (and in a lot of ways I don't) you can't dismiss him out of hand. Not only does he have some policy chops, and some legislative experience, he also comes from a swing state. That's a pretty canny choice. It brings me a bit of relief. The world probably won't end if Romney were to win.

The Bad: But ... what on God's green earth was Team Romney smoking last night? I mean, I like Eastwood as an actor. I like him as a director. But dear Lord, improv is not his form. And that was a huge speed bump in what could have been a perfectly stellar nomination night. The video got rave reviews, and was a great starting piece. If they'd slid from that into Rubio's speech, and if Rubio's speech has been more about Romney than about Rubio, then the lead-up to Romney's acceptance speech would have been an ascending crescendo of splendor. But no. Which makes you ask, who's driving this bus, anyway?

The Ugly: The purified, distilled crazy at the bottom of the pot, that would be my suspicion. The incident with the CNN camera operator -- you know, the one where they threw peanuts at an African-American and said "this is how we feed animals" -- tells you just about all you need to know about the sorry state of the GOP today. This is why I can't be a Republican. They can claim they were just random guys, but you know that they had to have been either delegates or alternates, which means that their home state party vetted them and sent them as their representatives. No one gets out on the convention floor that's not a delegate or an alternate. This is distilled, concentrated ugliness. The very idea of an African-American President utterly unhinges them. Republicans don't like it when people say this, but... Pray tell, where was the Tea Party, alleged "libertarians" that they claim to be, when the Patriot Act was being passed? Where was the Tea Party when Bush was spending like a drunken sailor on shore leave? Nowhere, that's where. They didn't show up until November 5, 2008. I find the timing suspicious.

And now, the numbers. As usual, my data sources are Intrade, FiveThirtyEight, and Pollster. Information is current as of Friday afternoon.

From Intrade:

Barack Obama (D): 57.4%, 281  EV (-0.4%, -6 EV)
Mitt Romney (R): 42.6%, 232 EV (+2.8%, -18 EV)

From FiveThirtyEight:

Barack Obama (D): 71.6%, 302.4 EV (+0.5%, +2.8 EV)
Mitt Romney(R): 28.4%, 235.6 EV (-0.5%, -2.8 EV)

From Pollster:

Strong D: 211 (+20)
Lean D: 20 (-79)
Tossup: 116 (+59)
Lean R: 16 (+16)
Strong R: 175 (-16)

The Pollster map is fascinating, as always, but I'm not really sure what it means. Both sides' support is softening in the negativity of the campaign. But the negativity is hurting Romney far more than it's hurting Obama. Romney is softening in places he can't afford to, and still has to clean up all but one of the toss-ups. Obama only has to pick up two or three of the toss-ups, so long as he can hold onto his "lean" states.

And I'm still curious about the divergence between the gambling public and the pollsters. I'm pretty sure it comes down to the fact that a man might lie to a pollster, but won't lie to a bookie.

What Romney Must Do: That last-day bobble at the convention was unfortunate. They needed a more coherent message. They're going to have to go at it hammer-and-tongs over Labor Day weekend, then there's a week-long blackout while all eyes are on Charlotte. There's really no option for them but the nuclear option: go negative, and go big. Negative advertising sickens independents and rallies the base, at least in theory. It probably won't work. But that's about the only card they have to play.

What Obama Must Do: Avoid major screw-ups in their own convention. Draw the public's attention to their accomplishments in domestic and foreign policy, such as they are. Obama never did a very good job of selling health care reform, this is his chance for a do-over. And Biden's idea for a slogan is still a pretty good one: "General Motors is alive, and Bin Laden is dead." (But sorry, Joe, I won't be watching your speech. You're on opposite Cowboys/Giants. I'll read the transcript later.)

And The Winner Is: Odds are holding steady at 3-2, as they have for months. I don't expect much movement in the next two weeks. I'd take Obama/Biden at 3-2 for the win, and I'd probably take 290 EVs for the over/under.

Remember, vote early, and vote often!

Enter Robespierre

If Lance Armstrong was the King, then Travis Tygart is his Robespierre.

The thunderbolt that struck the cycling community yesterday was the news that Lance Armstrong was, for possibly the first time in his life, giving up. He would not take the USADA's case against him to arbitration. He still maintains his innocence, but no longer wishes to contest the matter.

The evidence will come out, sooner or later. There are other tightly coupled cases coming forward. For example, Armstrong's long-time team director, Johan Bruyneel, will be taking his defense forward. In this matter, the two are practically joined at the hip. But...

But in the back of our minds, many of us always knew. Or at least suspected.

For over a decade, from 1996 to 2007, every winner of the Tour de France was either found guilty of doping offenses, or admitted to doping offenses. Bjarne Riis admitted to taking EPO during his 1996 Tour victory. Jan Ullrich's career ended in disgrace after Operacion Puerto. Marco Pantani was expelled from the 1999 Giro d'Italia, ostensibly for "health reasons". In 2006, Floyd Landis' title was stripped after he tested positive for testosterone, and the 2007 winner Alberto Contador has just finished serving a two-year ban. What were the odds that Lance Armstrong would be the only clean one?

But even so, his achievements were singular. No one disputes the fact that he contracted near-fatal cancer. And no one disputes that he clawed his way back to the top of his chosen profession. In a strange way, this may have been his key advantage. From the wastage of chemotherapy, he was able to forge for himself the ideal cyclist's physique. For most of a decade, he prepared himself monomanaically for those three weeks each summer. No one worked harder, or longer, or suffered more deeply. Whatever other pro cyclists were doing, Armstrong turned it up to eleven: training, diet, equipment, he was an innovator in all these areas. It stands to reason that if he was using performance-enhancing drugs, he'd be using the very latest and the very best.

And that's the last bit I'm still curious about. How did they manage to hide it for so long? How did they skirt the testing protocols? It's telling that so many of his former colleagues fell afoul of the tests after leaving his team. They tried to repeat the doping program, but failed to keep the parts that helped them evade detection.

That's why the case is still important. We need to know how. We need to know how, so that the testing protocols can be updated to account for it.

There's reason to think that some of the "how" has already been discovered. The new "biological passport" program has made large-scale cheating much harder to accomplish. And if you've watched the races year by year, you can tell that the riders are having a much harder time on the climbs now than six or eight years ago. It's a much cleaner sport now than it was then.

There are no winners here. The closest anyone comes to having "won" here is Greg LeMond. LeMond was one of the first to raise the flag of suspicion, and he was a virtual pariah for years as a consequence. But he was right. He was right, all along. So far as I know, he's said nothing in public. He probably isn't overjoyed at having been found to be correct.

The King, after all, has been found guilty of treason.

Election 2012: Let The Games Begin

A man who's legally blind, who can barely read the morning paper, has recently set a new world record in archery. Another man, born with no feet, is competing as a sprinter. For only the fifth time in history, a weightlifter has cleaned three times his own weight. I love the Olympics. You see the very best of humanity on display, and you see the barriers of the impossible pushed a little farther back each time. But, as awesome as those Games are, those aren't the ones I'm talking about today.

In just over three weeks, the Republican National Convention gets underway in Tampa, Florida. In just about a month, the Democratic National Convention kicks off in Charlotte, North Carolina. And in 95 days, just over three months, we go to the polls to elect the next President of the United States.

The so-called "Silly Season" is just about over. The fall campaign is about to commence for real. Ladies and gentlemen, it's on like Donkey Kong.

As always, our numbers come courtesy of Intrade, from Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight, and from Pollster.

From Intrade:

Barack Obama (D) 57.8%, 287 EV (+1.9%, +/- 0 EV)
Mitt Romney (R) 39.8%, 250 EV (-1.2%, -9 EV)

From FiveThirtyEight:

Barack Obama (D) 71.1%, 299.6 EV (+2.8%, +/- 0 EV)
Mitt Romney (R) 28.9%, 238.4 EV (-2.8%, +/- 0 EV)

From Pollster:

Strong D: 191 (-30)
Lean D: 99 (+80)
Tossup: 57 (-50)
Lean R: 0 (-10)
Strong R: 191 (+10)

General Impressions: Pollster tells a fascinating story here. Obama and Romney have exactly the same amount of "strong" support in the Electoral College, but Obama has a ton more "leaning" states. Romney has none. That's an interesting point -- Romney goes straight from "strong" to "toss-up", with no states leaning in his direction. I don't know what that means yet. One thing it could mean is that the Bain attacks, and the mess with the tax returns, seems to be getting some traction. But it also shows a vulnerability in the Obama camp, his "strong" support has softened considerably since the last time we looked at the figures. One way to read this is that Romney has firmed up his soft support, while Obama's firm support has slipped. But, how does that scan when stacked up to the fact that the tossups seem to have broken all one way?

It's a confusing picture, but a very interesting one. It may well be that the people who like Romney really like him, but there's an awfully wide canyon between that and the undecideds.

I'm also curious as to the reason between the wide gulf between Intrade's percentages and Nate Silver's. Mind you, they both predict the same result. But the gambling public is giving Romney more love than the pollsters are, just right now. It'll be curious to see how closely these two sets of data converge, as we get closer to the big day. And, it'll be very interesting to see what the overnight trade volume does, the night before Election Day.

What Obama Must Do: His "You Didn't Build That" remark was a huge unforced error. He can't afford too many of those. The economic recovery is still very weak. Unemployment is still fairly high. The relatively good news is that gas prices aren't sky-high, and home prices seem to have bottomed out, and are on the rise again. What he needs to do at this point is sell the idea that he's on the side of the middle class, and also sell an agenda for sustainable economic growth. At the same time, he also has to convince the public that the Republicans either can't or won't do a better job. He's got a considerable advantage, even with the relatively soft economy. But the race is going to tighten, depending on how Romney plays the next three weeks.

What Romney Must Do: Diplomacy, not to put too fine a point on it, isn't his strong suit. Fortunately for him, though, the election isn't being held in London. Irritating foreigners not only isn't something that's likely to offend his base, it's liable to be something that endears him to his base. Which is helpful, since Romney is still running for the whole-hearted support of the hard right. If I were one of his advisers, the Pollster data above would be very troubling to me. With his "strong" and "leaning" support, Obama has enough EVs to win re-election. Romney simply must run the table in the toss-up states, and pull at least 21 EVs of Obama's current support. That may well be doable. Hell, it is doable. But it's going to be hard sledding for this particular candidate, who isn't overly blessed with warmth. I'm not saying he's a bad man, but he's got a fairly stiff public demeanor. For all his faults, George Bush was someone a lot of people could have a backyard BBQ with. But Romney looks more like the guy who just fired you. That's when he's not looking like a collaboration between the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab and Disney's Animatronics. And I'm not sure we've seen the real Mitt Romney stand up yet. But in three weeks' time, we'll get an unparalleled glimpse into his thought processes. As I've said before, the VP selection will speak volumes for the man's judgement, and how he goes about making decisions.

The VP pick is absolutely vital for Romney. His best option is someone personable, who's also palatable to the centrist voters out there. But he may feel stampeded into going hard-right, to cement the support of his base. If he does the former, we'll have a real race on our hands. If the latter, he's probably toast.

And The Winner Is... Intrade is back to giving 3-2 odds in favor of re-election. Nate Silver's numbers work out to 7-3 in favor, just shy of 2-1, but as I said last time, I'm not comfortable jumping into 2-1 territory yet. I want to see how the conventions go, and how the economy's shaking out come Labor Day.

Remember, vote early, and vote often!

Watch That First Step...

If plummeting were an Olympic sport, Felix  Baumgartner would be a leading contender for a gold medal. On July 25th, he made the second test jump for the Red Bull Stratos project. He rode a balloon up to 96,640 feet, and jumped. Several minutes later, he popped his chute and floated down to a safe landing. Next up: the free-fall record.

I couldn't find an embeddable video, but here is the clip they posted on their own site. This is what they're aiming for, though:



But, I have to give an honorable mention to a man whose story I read about earlier this week. Cliff Judkins was a U.S. Marine Corps pilot, ferrying an F-8 Crusader fighter across the Pacific. What should have been a routine tanker rendezvous went horribly wrong. In short order, he experienced just about every kind of mishap you can have in an airplane. First, his engine failed. Then, it caught fire. If that weren't bad enough, his primary ejection handle failed, as did the backup. The manual canopy jettison worked, though. But his parachute didn't. Amazingly enough, he lived to tell the tale. Yes, you heard that right, he fell FIFTEEN THOUSAND FEET with NO PARACHUTE, and ... well, you don't exactly walk away from that, but after six months he was flying again.

Go here to read it. It's an amazing story.

The Real Space Age

Forty-three years ago today, we saw one of those moments that are true watersheds in history. Before July 20, 1969, humanity had only known one world; afterwards, it would forever know two. That said, for all its accomplishments, Project Apollo was always going to be a dead end. It was never going to lead to a long-term human presence on the Moon. There were a number of good reasons to go. One was the fact that no one had ever been, another was the fact that we didn't want the Soviets to get there first. But there just weren't very many good reasons in the early 1970s to stay.

One day, perhaps one day soon, that will change. The problem was always that there wasn't a clear way for anyone to make a profit out of it. Or if there was, the operating costs were so absurdly high that it just wasn't feasible. That's changing, slowly but inexorably. I've been saying for a while now that the center of gravity of the American space effort was shifting towards private industry. The successful mission in late May was an important signpost on that path. There will be more to come.



A while back, I made the statement that the real Space Age had just begun. Now, I'd like to take a few minutes to expand on why I think that's the case. SpaceX and companies like it are going to bend the cost curve to the point that proposals that were once ludicrously ambitious will become feasible. By way of example, let's look at two different proposals, one from about twenty years ago, and another more recent.

It's been speculated for a long time that ice could be hiding out in craters near the Moon's poles that never see sunlight. Vacuum is a very good insulator, and polar craters that are never sunlit can be very cold indeed. Water vapor that finds its way there somehow or other will freeze out, and never escape. The speculation was fanned to high heat by results from the Clementine probe in 1994, when a radar experiment returned reflections from polar craters that were consistent with ice sheets. Within the space enthusiast community, this solved one of the big problems attending lunar habitation: water. Hauling enough water up from Earth to sustain a settlement is hideously expensive. If there's a significant amount of water already up there, it simplifies things tremendously. But the problem remained, how do you finance the voyage to begin with?

Someone hit on the idea of financing it as an entertainment venture, at least initially. Sell the film rights. There'd be plenty of gripping, exciting footage from the mission. Then, once you're there, you can start up a mining operation. This was the beginnings of the Artemis Project, and of the Lunar Resources Company. I was never directly involved, as I was up to my earlobes in grad school at the time, but I kibbitzed on the discussion boards they had on GEnie. One suggestion was fairly well-received: I said that they should time the first mission to coincide with a lunar eclipse. I still think that's worth doing. It's a perspective no one's ever seen before. And, I think it'd be awesome to be able to see every sunset and every sunrise on Earth, all in once glance. They got an impressive amount of planning and preliminary design work done. That's about as far as they got.

What killed them, in the end, was transportation costs. With high-lift launches costing upwards of a quarter-billion dollars, there was no way on (or off) Earth that they were going to be able to drum up that kind of money. This is the same wall that every effort has run up against to date. Every time you have a plan that requires the fabrication of a lot of equipment down here that needs to be put up there, you run up against the fact that the cost of moving it from here to there puts the cost out of reach.

And that's the thing that's changing. New entrants into the launch market are going to bend the cost curve down to the point where ambitious projects become practical.

Earlier this year, a company calling itself Planetary Resources unveiled their plan to mine nearby asteroids for both metals and for water. They're not going to jump right into it, of course. First, they have to be able to spot likely candidates for exploration. Then, they have to get a close-up look. Finally, they have to develop an automated mining and processing unit. Accordingly, their first product is a small space-based telescope. It can be used to look both ways, down towards Earth and up towards space. That's their first revenue stream: people will pay to look at stuff. Universities will pay for telescope time for a variety of reasons. Not just astronomy departments, you can do a surprising amount of archaeology work from a high vantage point. But what Planetary Resources actually intends to use the Arkyd-100 for is to find and prospect likely mining targets. Then, the next step is to fit a small engine to such a telescope, and maneuver it towards such a target for a more detailed look. The last step is obvious: land, and begin digging up goodies. Metal for sale Earthside, and water for fuel.

The reason that they haven't been laughed out of the room yet is that the Arkyd-100 is small enough that it's going to be damn cheap to put one into orbit. They're piggybacking on Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic project for their initial launches, from what I hear, and even if they weren't the Arkyd-100 doesn't weigh a whole lot. Maybe 100 kilograms. They can ride along on just about any satellite launch, for a relatively tiny fee. Eventually, they'll have to be the primary customer, because the mining plant isn't going to be especially small. But by then they'll have a nice bankroll to work with. And they'll have a choice of powerful and relatively inexpensive rockets to choose from.

If successful, they'll attract investors to the market looking for other angles to exploit. That's where things will get really interesting. Because many of our problems are problems of scarcity: not enough materials, not enough energy. There's plenty of both out there, once we learn how to get at it.

Forty years ago, we crawled out of our cradle. Now, we're learning to walk. Soon, we'll learn to run. I wonder what kind of adults we'll be, when we've grown up?

The Last One

The Universe is a very weird place. But one of the weirdest things is also one of the most subtle.

Mathematics is a thing of pure logic, something that people built up over the centuries by deducing its principles starting from a handful of axioms. It is pure abstraction. Ostensibly, it has no actual connection to the real world. Teachers of geometry in ancient Greece were actively offended if their students suggested that their studies might have practical benefit.

How very odd, then, that mathematics should be so very useful for describing the world we live in.

Isomorphism is the word for it: if two systems are sufficiently similar to one another, then insights gained in one can be applied to the other. Gradually, natural philosophers came to understand that for reasons that no one adequately understood, mathematics and physics were isomorphic. The first fruit of this insight was Isaac Newton's masterwork, Philosophiae Naturalis Prinicipia Mathematica, which laid the groundwork for both differential calculus and the science of physics as we know it today. Ever since then, advances in physics have always been preceded by advances in mathematics. Before physicists could find the words to describe new phenomena, they had to learn nature's syntax in its own native tongue.

No one knows why the Universe works this way. It just does, and we go along for the ride.

The latest stop on this road began with Einstein's discovery of Special Relativity in 1905 and his discovery of General Relativity in 1916. It continued with the development of Quantum Mechanics by Max Planck and others, in parallel with Einstein's work on Relativity. The mathematics got more and more complex, but the predictions kept bearing fruit. Scientists began to plumb the secrets first of the atoms, then of their nuclei, and at last of the protons and neutrons themselves. They began to see clues that these weren't fundamental particles after all, but were themselves made up of smaller parts.

Then, in the 1960s, Sheldon Glashow discovered an internally-consistent way to describe a unification between the electromagnetic force and the weak nuclear force. The only problem was that this method predicted that all of the particles would have zero mass. This was obviously not true, so the problem was then to figure out how to get around that issue. Later on in the decade, Steven Weinberg and Abdus Salam found a way to apply the Higgs mechanism to Glashow's theory, which then allowed the particles to gain mass. This paved the way for what we now call the Standard Model: a list of all of the Universe's fundamental parts. The Standard Model, as of 1967, was able to describe all of the sub-atomic particles then known. But it predicted a whole bunch of particles that hadn't been seen yet. Theoretical physicists then settled in for a long wait, while experimental physicists worked feverishly at ever-larger atom smashers to discover them.

Most of the quarks were found fairly early. The heavier ones took longer. The bottom quark was discovered in 1977, but the top quark wasn't discovered until 1995. By then, only a handful of holdouts remained. In 2000, the tau neutrino was discovered at Fermilab. That left one last piece to find.

Leon Lederman wrote a book about it in 1993, with the famous title The God Particle. His original manuscript had another four letters in the title, but of course they'd never publish it that way. He never meant to imply that the search for the Higgs boson was akin to finding God. He meant that it would be excruciatingly hard to find. And he was right. It would take an absurdly powerful scientific machine, straddling several national borders, to reach the staggering energies required to summon it out of its hiding place. A machine so mind-meltingly powerful that some people were afraid that if it ever ran at full power, it would mean the end of the world.

Nonsense on stilts, of course. The Large Hadron Collider is an incredibly powerful instrument, but it won't bring about the end of everything. Except, that is, for the end of the hiding place of that most elusive of particles. On July 4th, the announcement confirmed the rumors that had been flying around for a while. Not quite four years after it had been first turned on, instruments in the LHC had detected the prey for which it had been built.

Mind you, they're not quite calling it a capital-D discovery just yet. They need to do some confirmation tests, and comb over the results to be absolutely, totally sure. But they did call it a five-sigma result. To me, that says that unless someone on their team has discovered a brand-new way to screw up experiments, they've got the sucker dead to rights.

So, does this mean the end of physics? Not hardly. There's still a rather impressive list of unsolved problems in physics. They've found the Higgs boson, they still don't necessarily know why it works. And there's also dark matter and dark energy, about which we know next to nothing. What this probably does mean, though, is an end to new particle discoveries for a while. Quite probably a very long while. Unless the Standard Model is incomplete, and quarks themselves have constituent parts, that was the last one.

Election 2012: RNC Minus 52 Days And Counting

The summer doldrums are upon us. Genuine news items are few and far between, so the silly stuff gets amped up to eleven, and passed off as real news. This is a direct consequence of modern cable news. They have twenty-four hours a day to fill, regardless of whether or not anything truly interesting is happening. If no real news is available, they have to invent it.

The biggest news of the last week was less interesting than it might have been. The most interesting story was always, "What will Obama do if his signature domestic policy initiative is overturned by the Supreme Court?" But we'll never know, since the Supreme Court upheld the ACA. There's an untold story there that's probably pretty fascinating. Justice Scalia's dissent actually reads as if it were written for the majority, which means that Chief Justice Roberts jumped sides at some point, probably fairly late in the game. We may never know exactly how or even why Scalia peed in Roberts' Wheaties ... but the result is purely status quo ante. It might become an issue for the fall campaign. It might prove to be an energizing factor for the Tea Party fanatics. But in the end, it will probably mean far less than the unemployment rate, gasoline prices, and overall consumer and business confidence. Those will be the telling figures of merit this fall.

And now, with fifty-two days until the Republican convention kicks off in Tampa, we'll take another look at the numbers. As always, our figures are from Intrade, from Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight, and from Pollster.

From Intrade:

Barack Obama (D) 55.9%, 287 EV (+2.4%, N/A)

Mitt Romney (R) 41.0%, 259 EV (-2.1%, N/A)

From FiveThirtyEight:

Barack Obama (D) 68.3%, 299.6 EV (+5.5%, +7.8 EV)

Mitt Romney (R) 31.7%, 238.4 EV (-5.5%, -7.8 EV)

From Pollster:

Strong D: 221 (-4)

Lean D: 19 (-26)

Tossup: 107 (+30)

Lean R: 10 (-11)

Strong R: 181 (+11)

General Impressions: There's a new market on Intrade for predicting the Electoral Vote count. It was not available last time, so we don't have any deltas yet. Speaking of Intrade, there's a potentially interesting story regarding the ACA decision. I was checking the market early Thursday morning before the decision was announced, and saw that prices for the "Overturn" contract had fallen from 80% to 67% in fairly heavy overnight trading. Maybe someone in the know unloaded their positions? Suffice to say I was rather less than astonished when the decision came down. I'm thinking someone blabbed, but there's no way to prove it.

FiveThirtyEight is showing a fairly substantial improvement for President Obama's re-election bid, though the reason why is not so easy to determine. He may be getting a small bounce from the Court's affirmation of his key domestic policy initiative. It's a sure thing he'd have taken a huge hit if it had been overturned. But I'm not sure how durable such a bump is. Economic conditions are far more important ... and they're not all that bad. They're not all that good, either. Things will be far clearer come September.

Pollster tells an interesting tale. The race is tightening, somewhat. Pollster tells us that Obama's support has softened slightly since we last looked, but Romney's support hasn't improved. It's firmed up, but he's not expanded into the middle. And that's a problem for Team Romney going forward. If he's still running for the support of his base going into the convention, he's got some really hard sledding ahead of him.

What Obama Must Do: I could almost cut-and-paste my last entry. He has to remind the public that while things aren't as good as they could be, they're nowhere near as bad as they might be. But he can't lean too hard on what the previous Administration did or did not do. The Court decision gives him an opening to run on the ACA's more popular provisions -- no more pre-existing conditions, less people uninsured, and the ability to keep dependents on a parent's policy until age 26. And the Court's decision in regard to the Arizona immigration law gives him an opening to highlight the Tea Party's aversion to people of the wrong color. Tea Party supporters hate it when people say this, but I've said before that the Tea Party was originally going to call themselves the "White Guys Hopping Mad That A Black Guy Got Elected President" Party, but that wouldn't fit on their business cards. I think it's a fair criticism. Where was the Tea Party when President Bush enacted Medicare Part D? Where was the Tea Party when President Bush signed the Patriot Act? Where were they on issues where serious libertarians had serious problems with President Bush? Nowhere, that's where. But the day after Obama's election... Yeah. I find it really hard to take their libertarian posturings seriously. They give us a bad name.

What Romney Must Do: Hang the current economic woes around Obama's neck like an albatross. He can use the Right's anger at the ACA to keep the troops excited, but I'm convinced that the economy is the real swing issue this cycle. But he's got to be careful, very careful, using the ACA as a wedge issue. It's the sweatiest of sweaty dynamite in his hands. It was his baby, after all. Deny it as he might, its paternity is a matter of public record. Rarely was a more apt slogan coined when Pawlenty called it "Obamneycare." Every time he mentions it, he raises the dread possibility that people will remember whose idea it was in the first place.

And The Winner Is... Nothing important has changed, so I'd still take 3-2 odds on re-election. If you use Nate Silver's numbers, the odds are closer to 2-1, but I'm not sure I'd go that far yet. We need to see how the conventions go, first, and what the economy's doing.

Remember, vote early, and vote often!