Category: Politics

Posted on
by

The Los Angeles Times website had an interesting way of describing the results of yesterday’s state election:

No, No, No, No, No, No, No, No

It’s hard to believe that all eight propositions failed. Even the four Orange County measures failed. Every item on the ballot in our district was rejected!

On a related note, I still don’t like the voting machines we have in OC. The interface is cumbersome and the display is godawful slow. The controls consist of a dial, which moves the cursor, and a button, which selects the current item.

The display is so slow you can watch it redrawing the title and summary of a ballot item when it highlights it. First the rectangle turns blue, then it redraws the text, line by line, in white. It’s like watching print preview in Word Perfect 5.1 for DOS on a 386. You just don’t see that kind of performance on modern computers unless they’re massively bogged down.

As for trying to use the machine, it’s kind of like entering your name in the high score list on an arcade video game with only a trackball and a fire button. I’m sure they chose it for durability reasons—a touch screen would be much more usable, but much easier to break—and went with the low-powered processor to keep the costs down.

I actually liked the punchcards we had before. It was so much more satisfying to slam down that lever.

Posted on
by

Woke up early (well, early for me) so we could get out and hit the polls before work. I was amazed that there was only one person in line ahead of us. Not only that, but there was only one line, not three or four broken up by last name.

Well, it’s a mid-term election. Plus it’s morning, and the last few years we’ve gone in the evening. (There was one year that I voted at lunch, but I had to drive Katie to the poll after work anyway, so it’s easier if we just both go at the same time.) It must have been last year that the line was so long that we got there at 6:30 or 7:00 and didn’t finish until after the polls “closed” — meaning they didn’t let anyone else get into line. (Sensibly, they allowed anyone who was in line by 8:00 to vote.) And there were a lot of people waiting behind us!

Now on to programming for a few hours until Microsoft kicks their patches out the door.

Current Music: Gettin’ Ready Rag (in head)

Posted on
by

If you live in California and you’re a registered voter: vote!

If you like the initiatives on the ballot, vote them in.

If you don’t like them, vote them out.

If you’re disgusted with the way the initiative process has been subverted by the very political machines and special interest groups it was supposed to circumvent, protest it by voting them down, not by abstaining.

Posted on
by

Over the last few days, I’ve heard more than one reporter at NPR slip up and refer to Lewis Libby (is it just me, or have people stopped calling him “Scooter” since the indictment?) as Libby Lewis. (On a side note, that name always makes me think of Libby Lawrence.) Well, I think they can be excused given that they work with a reporter by that name! Add in the fact that she’s reporting on the Plame case, and you can see the confusion…

This morning I caught Morning Edition’s listener comments segment, and I’m not the only one who noticed. They signed off as “Edition Morning.”

Posted on
by

According to Marketplace, critics of President Bush’s flu pandemic preparedness proposal contend that it’s too focused on vaccines and antiviral drugs, and that the money would be more effectively used by monitoring outbreaks and trying to stamp out bird flu in the third world.

In other words, they say we should take the fight to the flu abroad so we don’t have to fight it at home. Why does that sound familiar? 😉

Posted on
by

Over the weekend, Something Positive’s Monette met her girlfriend’s half-brother, who wants to write showtunes when he grows up. Friday’s Real Life featured Tony taking Greg to task over singing a song from Monty Python’s Spamalot. Where did the showtunes=gay (or at least effeminate) stereotype come from? While we’re at it, where did the art=gay stereotype come from?

I mean, most of the people who actually write musicals are probably straight. Not all of them, of course, and some of the exceptions (Cole Porter, for instance) are rather prominent. And I would guess that a majority of the actors and audience are probably straight, also.

I have no doubt that the percentage of gays in the arts is higher than in the general population. I studied drama in college—all I had to do was look around to see that. But that’s a far cry from “most.” I mean, to pull some numbers out of thin air, let’s say it’s 20%, or even 30%, instead of the commonly-cited 10%—that would be like saying an industry with 30% women is primarily female. Continue reading →

Posted on
by

A quick question for people who discount the idea that global warming could be caused, in part, by human activities on the basis that we can’t possibly impact the climate as much as natural events and cycles affect it.

Do you also discount the well-documented depletion of the ozone layer by interaction with CFCs and similar chemicals? That seems to be a major environmental impact, and one that clearly has an anthropogenic component.

Nearly two decades after we cut back on CFC use, it looks like the ozone layer is finally starting to recover—or at least it’s stopped shrinking. Of course, it’ll take time. The whole reason we started using CFCs is that they didn’t seem to react with anything, so they’ll stay in the atmosphere for decades. UCI’s Sherwood Roland (who won a Nobel Prize for research on this topic) is quoted as saying, “This problem was a long time in the making, and because of the persistence of these chlorine compounds, there is no short-term fix.”