Please Why

What if we forget WMDs and just evaluate Iraq as a humanitarian intervention, the kind some people from both parties would like to see in places like Sudan? The results look pretty good.

Some major advances in mimicking human facial expressions in the form of Jules, the disembodied head robot.

Ray gun debuts in Iraq.

Original Economist story here.

If Bush were hiring his biggest contributors and big time players in lobbying firms and huge corporations, he’d be called corrupt. When Obama does it, he’s just trying to hire the most qualified people and, aww shucks, this is who’s most qualified.

I have no problem with lobbyists or big corporations, but enough of the double standard please.

The pre-recount changes in the Minnesota Senate election tally seem a little fishy. If we assume that typos and other recording errors are random, what are the chances they’d produce a 500-vote swing for Stuart Smalley, most of it from only three precincts, and all of of it way out of step with similar adjustments for other candidates?

Virtually all of Franken’s new votes came from just three out of 4130 precincts, and almost half the gain (246 votes) occurred in one precinct — Two Harbors, a small town north of Duluth along Lake Superior — a heavily Democratic precinct where Obama received 64 percent of the vote. None of the other races had any changes in their vote totals in that precinct.

To put this change in perspective, that single precinct’s corrections accounted for a significantly larger net swing in votes between the parties than occurred for all the precincts in the entire state for the presidential, congressional, or state house races. 

Paul Krugman thinks that Obama should emulate F.D.R., except for the part where F.D.R. wasn’t socialist enough:

Suddenly, everything old is New Deal again. Reagan is out; F.D.R. is in. Still, how much guidance does the Roosevelt era really offer for today’s world?

The answer is, a lot. But Barack Obama should learn from F.D.R.’s failures as well as from his achievements: the truth is that the New Deal wasn’t as successful in the short run as it was in the long run. And the reason for F.D.R.’s limited short-run success, which almost undid his whole program, was the fact that his economic policies were too cautious.

He also adds has a fun little passage that amounts to: “Evil conservatives want to dispute that the New Deal fixed the Great Depression, but the one study I choose to quote supports my point of view.”

Krugman was unbearable even before the Nobel. Now I don’t even know what the word is.

McCain has it.

Counties where McCain did better in 2008 than Bush did in 2004, from the New York Times via Matthew Yglesias:

A commenter points out that this corresponds almost exactly to the Upland South:

That is, the south where there aren’t very many black people.

Missouri has voted for the winner in every presidential election since 1904 except once, when Eisenhower won in 1956. But it looks like it happened again this year, as the count now has McCain winning Missouri by a mere 5868 votes. NBC is the only network that has actually called Missouri for McCain, even though 100% of precincts have reported.

From pollster.com:

I wonder how this election may have turned out if it had been held in August 2007 instead of November 2008.

From Newsweek, by Nate Silver. He agrees with me that wins in Pennsylvania and Virginia for Obama would make this an early night:

Virginia, for my money, is the most important state in this election. If John McCain loses it, his path to victory is exceptionally narrow—he would need to pull out an upset in Pennsylvania, while holding on to Florida and Ohio, and avoiding a sweep out West.

He also reiterates here that Colorado is the other big one right around the tipping point, but since it’s out west, its brothers VA and PA will be much more likely to get the drama:

Colorado, meanwhile, is the last of what I’d characterize as this year’s “Big Three” states (the others are Pennsylvania and Virginia). If Pennsylvania and Virginia have split their votes (and Obama hasn’t picked up Ohio or Florida), then Obama probably wins if he wins Colorado, and loses if he doesn’t.

The opening chord of “Hard Day’s Night” has long been a topic of analysis. Recently, a Dalhousie math professor published what appears to be the final word on the subject, as written up in the Wired blog:

The secret sauce, as it turns out, includes five piano notes apparently played by producer George Martin.

It was already known that the chord included piano, but it was thought that there were three piano notes, not five. A couple things about this:

1) Okay, that’s great. There are five piano notes. Why is this a big deal?

2) How the hell is this just being figured out now? Fourier analysis has been around for centuries, and the FFTs that we use in algorithms to analyze a signal in frequency space have been around for decades. Maybe I’m missing something, but what took so long?

A plot of all the daily trackers throughout the year from pollster.com:

A narrative of the race since Hillary’s concession in mid-June from The Economist:

An animation of the electoral map since June 4 from electoral-vote.com:

It is practically unanimous that Obama has a safe lead in all the Kerry states plus Iowa and New Mexico, which would give him 264 electoral votes. This means that he only needs to carry one of the eight states that are either tossups or lean Obama (FL, VA, NC, OH, IN, MO, CO, NV*) to win the election (*in the highly unlikely event that he carries only NV from that list it would result in a 269-269 tie, which would be an Obama win because of Democrat-led congress).

Via FiveThirtyEight, this lovely map from Swing State Project shows when polls will be closing on election night:

Among those possible Obama clinchers, Indiana and Virginia are the only ones whose polls will all be closed by 7pm eastern. Indiana looks very close right now, probably leaning slightly McCain. Virginia, on the other hand, is right up there with Colorado as the strongest for Obama on the above list. Most of Florida will be closed by 7pm, but it will also probably be much closer than Virginia.

So when Virginia is called for Obama, it’s gonna be over. The networks will say to wait for New Mexico so you keep watching, and they won’t make it official until 11pm when the west coast polls close. But Obama folks can start the party when Virginia gets called.

P.S. If somehow Obama does win all of the swing states in the eastern and central time zones and they get the close ones counted really quickly, they won’t even need to wait for the west coast polls to make it official.

11/2 UPDATE: With all the work McCain has been doing in Pennsylvania in the last couple of weeks, it is now polling similarly as Virginia and Colorado, so perhaps we can no longer include PA on the list of states where Obama has a “safe” lead. As Nate Silver said yesterday:

Tonight on MSNBC with David Shuster, I referred to Pennsylvania as being “in play”. I’ve also implied similar things in the polling threads over the past couple of days. Since we are showing John McCain as having only about a 2% chance to win Pennsylvania, I’ve had a couple of readers write in to ask whether I’m contradicting myself. Certainly we would not ordinarily refer to a state as “in play” when one of the candidates trails by 6 to 10 points, and there but a few days to go until the election.

What I want to make clear is that whenever I refer to Pennsylvania as being “in play”, you should imagine those little quotation marks around my words. You should also imagine that I’m speaking in the conditional tense. Were the national race to tighten by 5 points or so, then Pennsylvania might actually be in play, rather than being “in play”.

In this case, even if VA gets called first (which it probably will since the polls close an hour earlier), PA might really end up being the clincher.

Using the latest polls, the folks at Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State have calculated the probability that a single vote would decide the outcome of the presidential election, i.e.:

… the probability that your vote is decisive is equal to the probability that your state is necessary for an electoral college win, times the probability the vote in your state is tied in that event.

Their result:

The states where a single vote is most likely to matter are New Mexico, Virginia, New Hampshire, and Colorado, where your vote has an approximate 1 in 10 million chance of determining the national election outcome. On average, a voter in America has a 1 in 60 million chance of being decisive in the presidential election.

If you’re lucky enough to be a New Mexico resident, your vote has an approximately 1 in 6 million chance of being the deciding vote.

The question of why we bother voting is endlessly fascinating to me. The Why Vote? article by the Freakonomics guys is great reading on that subject:

Within the economics departments at certain universities, there is a famous but probably apocryphal story about two world-class economists who run into each other at the voting booth.

“What are you doing here?” one asks.

“My wife made me come,” the other says.

The first economist gives a confirming nod. “The same.”

After a mutually sheepish moment, one of them hatches a plan: “If you promise never to tell anyone you saw me here, I’ll never tell anyone I saw you.” They shake hands, finish their polling business and scurry off.

The counterargument is always, “Well, what if everyone thought that way?” The answer to that is, of course, that not everyone thinks that way, so shut up.

But for the sake of argument, what if everyone did have this philosophy? Would it be possible to have effective elections? Maybe some folks would decide it would be worth voting if the turnout were less than 5000 people. Others maybe wouldn’t bother voting if the turnout were 500 or less. Even if that average magic number was something like 1000, that’s still a pretty solid sample size (most pre-election state polls are on the order of a few hundred participants). So in this mystical world of purely selfish people, maybe elections would still be effective.

P.S. At the end of that RSBSRSPS entry, they link to another paper they wrote in which they conclude that for people with “social preferences,” the expected utility of voting is approximately independent of the size of the electorate. I haven’t had a chance to read this yet, but it might be interesting.

Vietnam is considering a ban on small-chested people riding motorbikes:

The ministry of health recently recommended that people whose chests measure less than 28 inches (72cm) would be prohibited, as would those who are too short or too thin.

The proposal is part of an exhaustive list of new criteria the ministry has come up with to ensure that Vietnam’s drivers are in good health.

Apparently if you’re waifish, you’re not healthy enough to be riding a motorbike. According to the Vietnamese government anyway.

Motorbikes account for more than 90% of the vehicles on Vietnam’s roads, and many workers in the nation of 85 million need them to do their jobs.

This is somehow both hilarious and infuriating.

With all the talk about politics and tax plans on here, I finally came across an idea that we can’t possibly argue about.

PItchFX data from Brad Lidge’s two World Series appearances from the wonderful brooksbaseball.net:

Game 1 (2 fastballs, 13 sliders):

Game 5 (4 fastballs, 12 sliders):

31 pitches over two appearances, and only 6 of them were fastballs. That’s just ridiculous, especially for a hard throwing closer. But hey, he can throw it for strikes, so why not?

Lidge has one of those rare sliders that drops straight down and has almost no horizontal movement, as you can see here (you can also follow the links and check out the pitches with vertical movement plotted). It reminds me Scott Williamson in his prime.

Make sure you have the sound on for this.