sj's Longest Now [v.1]

An amazing recounting of vote recounting, by danny from blogforamerica.  Waiting for his permission to keep this long excerpt up… wish I could link deeply into a list-of-comments.  And more on the odd counting, reporting, and “99%”ing of state delegates.

Getting the news via wikipedia is so rewarding.  I get a paragraph about the recent ricin scares at the white house — both of them — and a page about ricin itself.  Excellent proportions.

So what’s the new news?  Why is it so hard to find steady updates on stories like this?  Should I really have to visit either a lawyer-geek’s site or a FCC-watch site to track the progress of related bills and proposals?

…everything seems ridiculous.  The problems of “Denial of Service” and “spoofing” have been around since long before there was human-generated electricity… now it’s just cheap and easy to carry one out from across a country. 

What prompted this commentary is SCO’s new letter claiming open-source software is a threat to national security.  So:  who’s really behind their current program?  Do they have an arrangement with MS?  Why is this broad extension of their initial lawsuit a profitable foray for them?  [It would seem much more profitable for a larger company with more to gain — MSFT, a thousand times larger than SCO, seems like a more promising suitor] 

And: if people start publishing sincere meaningless letters, and research papers [prompted, say, by business interests, or for personal fame], and books [propaganda, private vendetta, political or financial gain, sincere delusion], and financial reports, historical documents, resumes, instruction manuals, etc — how can the world react in such a way as to efficiently cull truth from fiction?  In which areas of writing/thought is it possible to perform such a separation?

Presumably, in the presence of a quick cheap metric, one could enact spot checks combined with stiff punishments to probabilistically suppress misleading communications.  Else?  How to leverage distributed community efforts, accounting for 2d- and higher-order errors?  This seems to be a significant problem of universal inliquidity.

Gough finished his 7-month naked trek across England on Friday.  He refused to don clothes even as winter came on and he neared the northern extent of his journey.  He was arrested on many occasions, only proving his point that the natural Body had a major image problem to overcome in England.  What a hero!  Also high on my list for the year.

Everyone loves to ignore the delegate count in favor of the ranking of candidates in each state by popular vote… I find the delegate system [and its disappearance from the public mind — how many people do you know who understand how delegates are selected, cast votes, interact with their Party?] fascinating.  This article keeps track of the running delegate count for all candidates…

Collection/archiving:  the national library system, the LOC,

Redundant storage: non-library archives, DARPANet and its spawn and widespread use,

Transmission/accessibility: DARPANet and its spawn, explicit accessibility programs to overcome certain obstacles, etc, etc.

Identific/Categoriz/Contextualiz ation: Official systems [DDS, LOC, etc], librarians, publishers [self-help].

Review/Analysis/Comparison: Critics  |  Professors, assistants in relevant topical Fields  |  Historians  |  Professors, assistants in field devoted to relevant medium (literature, music, video, etc).   Often w/ stark delineation (mutual oblivion?) among the analyses of these four (more?) groups.

There’s not much up there that makes use of, or even allows for, contributions by the vast bulk of people affected by these works; their audiences, readers without time or inclination to polish their reactions to a high sheen and 10 column inches, etc.  Only the second applies, really, and then only the last part of it — the part that was wholly accidental.

Is this foolishness?  Failure of government to adapt to the multiplying ways in which it can be useful?

Not only is the string theory expert and Nobel Laureate a good writer and fine lecturer (finishing a Boston tour this week), but he has a published on his website a guide for the aspiring theoretical physicist which is refreshingly clear, comprehensive, and encouraging. 

Lovely images (though not terribly informative), good review.

I’m not sure how serious a flaw it is to use the Strouhal number to characterize effiiciency, but at first glance it seems the wrong quantity.  A good measure of efficiency should involve the volume of liquid moved, or better yet the work done in a typical stroke (integrating the momentum imparted to the liquid over the stroke duration), not just the amplitude and frequency of strokes used.  No surprise that the Str. number range is different for large birds than for small ones.

Thank you for all the feedback on the orders of magnitude piece. My mind is full of magnitudes, so you can expect more of the same. If you have topics you would like to see addressed in the same vein, let me know.