Leiberman Scenario watch: Lieberman said in an interview: The fastest growing political party in America is no party, which is to say, that the fastest growing group of voters are unaffiliated with either party. That’s a market statement on the two major parties.

I read the declassified portions of the National Intelligence Estimate document. My choice for the key paragraph, capturing both the opportunity and danger of our present course succinctly: If democratic reform efforts in Muslim majority nations progress over the next five years, political participation probably would drive a wedge between intransigent extremists and groups willing to use the political process to achieve their local objectives. Nonetheless, attendant reforms and potentially destabilizing transitions will create new opportunities for jihadists to exploit.

Dear image spammers: If you're going to take the time to convert your text into an image, why oh why do you insist on using the ugliest fonts you own? Unantialiased Courier? Microsoft Terminal? That looked ugly when it came out somewhere around Windows 3.0! You know you're doing badly with your font choice when the grossly-overused Times New Roman would be a step up.

This really struck me. A lot of the truly partisan division could have been avoided if we'd just all started from the premise that by golly, figuring out how to respond to the events of the world is really darned hard, and the fact that somebody disagrees with you is not prima facie proof that they are therefore blackest evil. What would the past five years have been like, I couldn't help wondering, if debate and criticism had proceeded atop the civil platform of agreement that the President was really trying to do his best in a terrible crisis that almost no one had anticipated?

My wife and I have watched every Survivor since the second American one. We TiVo it and tend to concentrate on the challenges over the politics, since the challenges on the show are often creative and unique. (The politics I find somewhat interesting, but I can never quite forget that I'm only seeing the barest fraction of what is actually going on, cherry-picked by the editors. The net effect is much the same as not being able to suspend disbelief while watching science fiction.

In 2004, I asked my readers to consider an alternate universe where a 9/11 scale disaster is averted by Presidential action. Nobody would ever know that 9/11 was averted, either, and even if they did notice the story would be played up as the Adminstration trying to take credit for preventing something that couldn't possibly have happened anyhow. Like I said, you can't win. Today, we get to see that played out in the real world.

den Beste at Chizumatic (likely permalink) is annoyed by this article about linguistics and pronunciation. The researchers took the sounds of more than 3,000 words in English and subdivided each by its phonetic features — in other words, what a person does with his mouth, lungs and vocal cords to produce the sounds of each word.... About 65 percent of all nouns have another noun as its nearest neighbor, and about the same percentage of all verbs have another verb next door, Christiansen said.

Yesterday, an incumbent Democrat Representative was almost certainly ousted (McKinney), an incumbent Republican Representative in my home state of Michigan was beaten in his primary and his opponent is almost certain to win, and Democrat Senator Lieberman faces what promises to be an intense battle after losing his primary. There's an interesting way to interpret this which I haven't seen anyone mention yet. The theory of gerrymandering districts is that if you draw the district to be 60%+ solidly Republican, that the incumbent will basically be assured of re-election.

In physics, there are Conservation Laws, which are among the most important discoveries mankind has ever made. The great-granddaddy is Conservation of Energy, that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. An unexpected energy imbalance has driven a lot of physics; for instance, neutrinos were discovered mathematically long before they were actually detected because of an energy imbalance in beta decay. In the human social world, the conservation laws are not so obvious.

I recently installed Google Analytics on my site, after seeing it in action at work. One of the reasons I installed it is I was interested in seeing what hits were "real" on my site, as a search engine or referrer spammer won't trigger the analytics Javascript code. (Or, at least the spammers don't seem to be doing it yet.) I figured that Google would show fewer hits than my web logging software, but I was unprepared for the magnitude of the difference.