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I'm in Norman, OK for a meeting, and a front blew in last night and deposited ice all over. The picture is of the National Weather Center, which is across the street from the Stephenson Genome Center at OU, where we're meeting to plan the next stage of the E. coli model organism data resource. KOTV reports: OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) -- Heavy snow moved into Oklahoma Thursday morning after sleet and freezing rain left roads across Oklahoma slick and hazardous and shut down schools and many government offices.Getting out through of DFW should be fun. update: so..I'm sitting in OKC deciding where I want to get stuck...here or Dallas. another update: Dallas. I'm in a hotel near DFW...I was surprised they weren't all full, but I was able to reserve one online using the paid wireless in the Oklahoma City airport. While I was online, there was a brownout, which knocked out all sorts of stuff. Not only were all the computers displaying flight info offline, but also the jetways and even the photoelectric faucets in the restrooms were out. We went down the emergency exit from the terminal and walked around the plane to the rear stairs. Then we sat on the tarmac for a while because the power to run the luggage handling system was also out. Once we got airborne it was a short and uneventful flight to DFW, where it seemed like there were an unusually large number of planes on the ground around midnight.
...during the Queens 50-shot incident, according to the NYT. Some policies appear to have been violated in the shooting, which occurred when, according to the police, undercover officers fired 50 bullets at Mr. Bell's car after he drove into one of the officers and an unmarked police van.I wonder that "largely prohibits" means.
The NYT has more details on what happened in last night's shooting incident, noted below. ...As an undercover detective who had been following the group on foot approached the vehicle, Mr. Bell drove into him, striking his leg, before plowing into a minivan carrying two backup officers, the commissioner said.This is from the cops version. We'll never know if the driver heard the ID or believed that the guy coming at him with a gun was a police officer. In the ensuing barrage, one shot struck the window of a house, another a window at an AirTrain platform, injuring two Port Authority police officers with flying glass. It appeared that the Altima was struck by 21 shots, fewer than half of the number fired, the police said.The Times experts describe this as a rare but troubling phenomenon called contagious shooting. The article reviews past examples, and describes the psychology "He shoots, and you shoot, and the assumption is he has a good reason for shooting. You saw it in Diallo. You see it in a lot of shootings," the official said. "You just chime in. I don't mean the term loosely. But you see your partner, and your reflexes take over."Once the car accelerated into the officer, you can see how this would happen. It's hard to not have some sympathy for the cops when the car is going wild. But it's also easy for me to imagine that Mr. Bell panicked when approached by an nonuniformed guy with a gun. Although this is different from the SWAT style raids described by Radley Balko, it makes me wonder if there's a problem with the rules of engagement and tactical training here. If they couldn't intercept the group before they got in the car (or just let them go, or keep an eye on them), would it be better to pull them over with a regular unit, complete with flashers and uniformed officers? Surely the possibility that an arresting officer on foot might be attacked by a moving car is foreseeable, right? It's hard to believe that the standard response is to spray the neighborhood with bullets. I'm also wondering - is 7 cops on a stakeout due to "frequent drug, weapon and prostitution complaints" routine, or were they on a hair trigger because they were expecting something specific?
The new BCS rankings are out and both LSU and Louisville jumped over the Badgers. Notre Dame dropped to 10, which means that they are eligible but not automatic for a BCS bowl. As expected USC is #2 and Michigan #3. The Aggies reappeared in the BCS top 25 at #23. Interestingly, the much maligned computers like ND slightly more than the human polls. Brendan Loy explains: Since the computers have generally liked them better than the human pollsters all season, and since the computers don't consider margin of victory (a fact which hurt the Irish last year, but helps them this year because of the lopsided losses to Michigan and now USC, and the too-close wins against Michigan State and UCLA), I assume ND won't plummet far enough in the computers to fall out of the top 14 in the BCS.It will be interesting to see what happens if Louisville and Rutgers both win next week. Rutgers wins the Big East and the automatic spot, and Louisville might get left out of the BCS with one close loss and a BCS ranking in the top 6...or a second SEC team or ND would have to go. In the comments at Irish Trojan, CT even comes up with a way in which there would be no at-large bids. It requires Arkansas to beat Florida, Rutgers to beat W. Virginia, and UCLA to beat USC, and the BCS standings to come out with LSU and Louisville in the 3 and 4 slots after Michigan. This would require two teams from the Big East (Louisville at 3 or 4 and Rutgers), two from the SEC (LSU at 3 or 4 and Arkansas), OSU, Michigan, USC, the ACC champ, the Big 12 Champ, and Boise State. Not likely, but it would be interesting.
What to do with post-Thanksgiving leftover sweet potatos? Make sweet potato pie. A lot of recipes call for sweetened condensed milk. Being lactose intolerant, and not having a can of milk around, I wondered if there were recipe's for condensing your own milk. Most substitution tips involve powdered milk, which we didn't have either. But this site confirmed my suspicion that it could be made by just reducing milk+sugar. We used lactaid nonfat milk, and simmered 2 cups down to about a cup with stirring in a saucepan. Update: added photo, now that it's out of the oven. Update 2: now we've eaten it and it's good! So here's the recipe, inspired by Alton Brown's sweet potato show on the food network Filling: 2 cups sweet potato flesh from a baked sweet potato, mashed (AB uses steamed) 2 eggs 1 cup homemade condensed lactaid milk (see above; AB uses yogurt; all we had in the house had fruit mixed in) .75 c brown sugar 0.5 t vanilla (not in AB's) cinnamon nutmeg pinch of salt. Mix. Pour into pie shell. Top with toasted walnuts or pecans. Drizzle with maple syrup. Bake at 350 for about 50 minutes. Would be good with some ginger, probably.
Tyler Cowen points to how one can buy Polonium 210. Steinn Sigurđsson, among others, points out that the amount you can buy is way below the lethal dose. I'm curious about how much Litvinenko was actually given. It was not only enough to kill him pretty quickly (it seems), but also enough to leave traces all over the places he went. As I noted before, the the NYT reported ...the police found traces of radiation in three places the former spy had been: a sushi bar, a hotel and his North London home.The Independent reports It takes 138 days for polonium-210 to decay to half of its activity levels. Once in the body, however, the biological half-life of polonium-210 is about 50 days. This suggests that the body of Alexander Litvinenko should still contain some amounts of the element. However, the bulk of the dose will have been excreted.Excreted how? A lot would have gone into urine, since polonium is detected in the urine of smokers. Was the polonium found in the bathrooms of the places he went (I hope the majority was washed down the drains). Was he leaving hot fingerprints on the furniture? Cases of radioactive sweat have been reported. I can easily imagine that Litvinenko's sweat and urine were hot. But to detect it after he'd been in the hospital means that the traces survived all the activity in those places after he left them. This pdf describes measuring pCi amounts of Po-210 in rainwater samples. That's on the order of a billionth of the lethal dose, so very small amounts can be detected. But if Litvinenko was on the order of 100 kg, that's about 100 liters. Let's guestimate a drop of sweat on the sushi bar generously at 100 microliters. So that drop would contain very roughly a millionth of the polonium from his body. We still have 1000X what is detectable. But when the bar is wiped down, more than once (I hope!), how much survives each time? And yet is removable by the wipe test for radioactivity? This suggests either un-sushi bar-like hygenic practices (call the sushi police!), my guesstimates of detection limits are way off, or that he might have gotten a lot more than the minimum lethal dose. I don't think my sensitivity estimates are that far off. 1 pCi is on the order of 2 disintegrations per minute. Update 2: dps vs dpm. Doh!
The WaPo reports on an incident in NYC. Police fired 50 shots at a car full of men leaving a bachelor party at a strip club early Saturday, killing a bridegroom hours before his wedding, after an undercover officer was rammed with the car.Five officers were involved in the shooting. The occupants of the car were unarmed (not counting the car itself as a weapon). A veteran officer fired his weapon 31 times, emptying two full magazines, Kelly said.According to this site, NYPD uses 15 round magazines. 2 clips + a round chambered = 31. So...if 5 officers where involved in the shooting, 21 rounds hit the car, and one shot 31 times. Either the AP undercounted the hits (should have been "hit the car at least 21 times") or the one veteran officer missed the car completely with 10 of his shots. If it was only 10 misses, the other 4 officers all missed the car with all of their shots. This suggests a lot of misses. The gunfire also hit nearby homes and a train station, though no residents were injured.
Since Glenn Reynolds is blogging about digital cameras, here's an interesting accessory for those of us who like the pocket-sized ones. 
Saw this in an airline magazine and picked it up at the Best Buy in E. Palo Alto, after reading this review. In the photo, the gorillapod is holding my Canon SD450 on the edge of the mirrored door to the medicine cabinet in the second bathroom in my mom's house, where I'm staying while on sabbatical at Stanford. The top toe of the tripod is hooked over the latch to keep it from sliding down. The camera is facing a second mirror on the opposite wall, and I used the self-timer with the flash suppressed, and the exposure adjusted manually. The posted image is cropped in iPhoto.
Assuming USC can maintain focus and beat UCLA, the conventional wisdom is USC-Ohio State in the BCS championship. The Aggies blew up one of my earlier BCS predictions by knocking Texas out of a BCS bowl (probably). Losses by W. Virginia, Georgia Tech and Arkansas will drop them, probably not out of BCS qualifying... but perhaps enough to keep them from being picked as at large teams if they don't win their conferences. W. Virginia and Rutgers still have to play. While I am not interested in a ND Michigan rematch, ABC might be, and the blather on tonight's USC-ND game made it sound like ABC may be pushing the Rose Bowl for the national ratings bump they think ND will give them. If they fall below #8 based on two losses and a weak schedule, is there a chance that they might not get a BCS bowl at all? I don't think that's likely, especially with the losses by Arkansas and W. Virginia, the two teams below them in the previous BCS rankings. But would this be out of line? 1. Ohio State 2. USC 3. Michigan 4. Florida 5. Wisconsin 6. Louisville 7. LSU 8. Boise State 9. Auburn 10. Notre Dame 11. Arkansas 12. West Virginia 13. Oklahoma 14. Rutgers All I did here is move the three teams that lost down below Auburn, move everyone between up (Wisconsin is too high, probably but they were the next team in the last rankings) and give Oklahoma an extra bump up. Would ND be more deserving than the 2-loss teams in the SEC? Here's another interesting thought. Wisconsin is too high, IMO, but I don't if the teams below them can't overtake them...what if the Razorbacks win the SEC? Could the Badgers climb all the way to 4th in the BCS? If any of the 10 slots remain open after application of provisions 1 through 5, and if no team qualifies under paragraph No. 5 and an at-large team from a conference with an annual automatic berth for its champion is ranked No. 4 in the final BCS Standings, that team will become an automatic qualifier provided that no at-large team from the same conference qualifies for the national championship game.But the Badgers have already committed to the Capitol One Bowl. Oh by the way...
"Now it looks like the road to Glendale is paved with Trojans" Ugh. Is that putting the rubber to the road? Earlier, Debby asked: "Does anyone actually like Brent Musberger?"
Radley Balko on no-knock raids )Comment thread at Volokh). Read the whole thing. Update: Orin Kerr and Balko exchange arguments. Ilya Somin links both. Balko points out that it's not just the war on drugs. By the way, Kerr might also want to take note -- as I've been tracking on this site, SWAT teams are increasingly being used for white collar crimes too. Just a few months ago, a SWAT team deployed flash grenades and broke into the home of a man suspected of mortgage fraud. A couple of years ago, two middle-aged women were subjected to the SWAT treatment for suspicion of defrauding the Small Business Administration (the two were later exonerated -- the fraud turned out to be a clerical error). And of course, we shouldn't forget about Sal Culosi, the Fairfax optometrist shot and killed by a SWAT team sent to his home after an undercover detective caught him gambling on football games with a few friends.
My initial reaction to the dioxin and Viktor Yushchenko case was that dioxin was a very strange choice of poisons, so alternative hypotheses were more likely. I was wrong. Apparently assasins from the former Soviet bloc, like to use exotic chemicals. As in the case of the late Alexander V. Litvinenko who was apparently poisoned with Polonium. Outside the hospital where he died late Thursday, alarm spread across London after the police found traces of radiation in three places the former spy had been: a sushi bar, a hotel and his North London home.Yup. I'm a scientist. I'm astounded. I would think that a lethal dose of polonium would be hard to get, expensive, and hard to move safely to the victim. Perhaps the last problem is surmountable. According to Wikipedia, Polonium as a solid is volatile. But Polonium is described as soluble in weak acids, which means that it could probably be dissolved and transported in solution. As an alpha emitter, it's radioactivity would be blocked by the container. The liquid could be added to an acidic drink or foodstuff. Polonium does occur in the bodies and urine of smokers. This site describes how increased radioactivity in US tobacco came to pass: But during the same period 1930-1980], the level of polonium -210 in American tobacco had tripled. This coincided with the increase in the use of phosphate fertilizers by tobacco growers - calcium phosphate ore accumulates uranium and slowly releases radon gas.Lest one think that smoking can account for a lethal short-term dose of polonium, the lethal dose by my back of the envelope calculations* would be equivalent to smoking something like 500 packs of cigarettes per day for a year. The problem for Russian apologists who argue that Russia is being set up here is that the perpetrators have to have access to the exotic poison. Using unusual materials looks like a form of bragging. You can't prove the source, but its suggestive enough to intimidate. Disclaimer: I know Alex Goldfarb, who is mentioned in the article as a friend of Litvinenko. He used to study E. coli RNA polymerase, and I used to see him at meetings. Haven't seen him in years, except occsasionally on TV. *lethal dose ~ 1.2 x 10-7 g x 4.5 x 109 μCi/g = ~ 5 x 102 = 500 μCi x 2000 mrem/μCi = 106 mrem/(1300 mrem/(2 packs day for a year)) ~ 1000/2 packs/day/year]
but this kind of misses the point, I think FORT WORTH -- A bloody brawl erupted outside a tavern after one customer thought another failed to wash his hands after using the bathroom, police said. One man was hospitalized with stab wounds. Another was arrested on suspicion of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon after the fight at the Tumbleweeds Sports Bar.
The Texas fans are blaming :
Why they're wrong, after the jump. The allegedly biased refs penalized the Aggies 10 times for 83 yards and the Horns 3 times for 41. The offensive pass interference call on Sweed was legit, even if a no-call would have been unremarkable as well. In Hindsight they're saying it's clear McCoy wasn't sharp. But let's look at the play by play.
Was the INT an arm problem? I'm not buying. McCoy threw into double coverage. My take is that like all the other Texas players, coaches, and fans, he was hot about the PI call on Sweed and tried to force the issue.
For the season, McCoy hit 69.6% of his passes. Today he hit 60.7...and before the Aggies scored the go-ahead TD, he was at 63.6. USC's John David Booty is at 62.3% for the year. The last INT to Dodge was not thrown badly. It was just thrown as if he didn't see the LB there...and anyone who has watched much football knows that those kinds of things happen not just in college, but in the pros, especially on final desparation drives. As for the "dirty" players on the Ags. The hits by Heard and Bennett on McCoy were after the game was effectively over. Heard was tossed, but I'd like to see the replay on how long the play was dead when he took the shot. While I wish Bennet had not hit McCoy with his helmet, I don't think he was aiming for McCoy's head. As I saw it, McCoy was falling backward as Bennett leapt at him, aiming chest-high. The vast majority of Aggies will be pleased to hear that McCoy was able to walk out of the hospital earlier tonight. So, why did the Aggies pull off the upset? The biggest reasons, of course, were turnovers and that A&M was able to run on the #1 rush defense. But there was also a confluence of a bunch of reasons:
The teams go into the half with the Aggies up 6-0. 150 yards rushing in the first half. The bad news is that it's only 6-0 and Texas has threatened twice and barely been turned away. The offensive interference call was a good call IMO, due to the hand in the face. This could go back to a Texas lead very quickly. Ags start from the 20. Run, incomplete, 3rd and 6. Flags. False start. 3rd and 11. Taylor drops the first down. 3 and out, alas. Punt from the 18 goes 26 yards to the TAMU 45. First play is a turnover! Ags pressured McCoy and the ball popped up and was picked. Could be either an INT or a fumble. Goodson takes the option to the 48. Lane loses 1. Injury timeout as a Texas player is shaken up. Screen blows up. 4th down again. Punt goes deep and Ross almost breaks it. But there's a clip. Texas starts on their own 10. Young gets a good 9. Young breaks a tackle and gets much more than the first down. Charles stopped for a short gain. Play action...sack! 3rd and long. Incomplete...or is it? Replay looks like a catch. Cosby got his hands under it. The ball was juggled after, but never hit the ground. Wow. They don't reverse it. Texas has to punt. Schroeder takes it back to the 34. They're saying the ball hit the ground as Cosby rolled over. Goodson goes around the left for a good gain after a great fake to Lane. But did he fumble? Holding, no fumble. Ball came out due to the ground. Schroeder catches one for a first down at the 47. No gain on the option. Fumble on a reverse. Texas gets it. Pass to Sweed goes to the 24. Young runs to the 22. What is the crowd booing? Broken up. Pass interference. First and goal. Charles untouched up the middle for the TD. 7-6 Texas at 4:20 in the 3rd. Kick through the endzone. Ags start from the 20. McGee takes a broken play for 4. McGee scrambles for a first down. Goodson loses on the delay. Taylor grabs a pass for 4. 3rd and 9. False start. 3rd and 14. McGee scrambles and is stopped. Ags have to punt to start the final quarter. I worry that the Ags are reeling a bit right now. Will the quarter break allow the D to step up? Great kick. Ross is stopped short of the 20 Texas is getting yards on the run now. Young gets the first down with 2 runs. Offside again. Good stop on Charles, but the penalty means that it's 2nd and 3. Missed tackle...Charles gets 7 and the first down. Pass is tipped and incomplete. Draw stopped for a short gain. Swing pass is overthrown. 4th down. Punt. Fair catch at the 12. Goodson slips tackles and gets a first down on the option. McGee gets close on an interesting play. Empty backfield, Lane comes in motion for a fake, and McGee goes into the vacated area. Goodson stopped short. Lane gets it. QB draw gets slammed. Bennett gets a catch but is shaken up. 3rd and 6. McGee looks like he's going to run, stops and throws to Taylor. First down. McGee gets into Texas territory. McGee fakes the pitch and gets close. McGee keeps on the option and gets the first down. Down to 6 minutes. Lane goes to the 33. Lane to the 29. McGee keeps on the option and gets to the 15. Lane to the 8. No gain. Under 3 minutes to go. McGee scores! Whoop! I confess that I'm almost wishing he had fallen down after getting the first down to run more clock. Ags go for 2. Texas stops Goodson on the option. 12-7 Aggies. Texas starts from the 20 with 2:28 to go. Whatever happens, we're beating the spread! Short completion. Incomplete. 1:47. First down to Cosby at the 35. McCoy throws to Young to get out of bounds. 1:31. Texas has all 3 TOs. Picked off!!! By Mark Dodge!!! One of the Ags takes a cheap shot on McCoy and is kicked out of the game. Dumb. But could Heard argue that he was blocking on the INT return? Lane gets 2 and it's down to 0.53. Timeout. Lane again. Timeout again. 47 seconds to go. McGee runs right. Short. Down to 41 seconds. 4th down and 2. Punt into the endzone. 33 to go with no timeouts. Incomplete. 25 to go. Incomplete. McCoy is hurt. 20 seconds left. Ouch. Bennett hit McCoy helmet to chin as he was falling backward. He's being taken off on a cart. Snead comes in. McCoy isn't moving on the cart. He's pointing his right arm up now. Whew. Snead is picked off by Brown. Aggies win! Huge win on the road. Only the 9th win ever in Austin in this stadium. Aggie fans are wondering where that commitment to the run was against OU and Nebraska. Aggie fans who want to gloat can read the t-sips blaming the refs at burntorangenation.com. I switched to the LSU-Arkansas game before the post-game analysis, but from an "I hate Craig James" comment, I'm guessing that he agreed with me on the offensive interference call on Sweed. In the halftime show his mike was cut off as they went to commercial but he was gesturing a shot to the face after the other studio guy was complaining about that call. I suspect we'll see it on SportsCenter several times. I thought the replay showed the pass to Cosby was complete, but the announcers seemed to agree with the ultimate call that the ball hit the ground as he rolled over while juggling it. I'd like to see that one again too. The extent of McCoy's injury going into the game is hard to guage. In the first half he was hitting the out patterns and he finished 17-28. It's possible that he aggrevated the shoulder on the second INT, where he was grabbed as he was going into his throwing motion. Texas also didn't try to go deep, which could either be due to coverage or due to questions about McCoy's arm. In the end, the ball game was won on that almost 9 minute drive in the 4th quarter...but that required the excellent play by the defense to keep the game close. The stop on the first drive and the subsequent Goodson TD seemed to take the crowd out of the game...as if they knew, even when Texas had the lead, that they weren't going to beat the spread. They, and the Texas players, didn't just expect to win, they expected to win big. Heck, I expected them to win and wouldn't have been surprised if they won big. I thought that the week off and the loss to K-State would have had them coming out angry enough for both lines to be exploding off the ball. Congrats to the team and the coaches. Despite the rivalry, here's hoping Colt McCoy gets well soon.
OK, it's 9AM here on the Left Coast and it's time for football! Let's get ready for live TV-blogging! The Ags have not beaten Texas since Fran took over. Weather looks good. Texas gets the ball first starting from the 20. McCoy's first pass on 2nd down gets a first down. Next play goes to the 50. Ags string out Young. Cosby gets a catch to the Ag 30. Ags are doing OK on the run, but getting no pressure on the pass. Cosby again...first down. Charles up the middle to the 10. Dodge blitzes and stoppes Charles for a loss. Time for the bend don't break to not break. False start. 3rd and 11. Finley stretched but he stepped out. Mack goes for it. Aggies hold!!!! Dodge again. Ags take over on their 8. Lane is stopped. Play action complete to Schroeder. First down! No. Chad was juggling it. 3rd and 9 from the 9. Goodson runs for a first down from a passing set! Lane stopped at the line again. Gotta keep hitting them. Incomplete. McGee pulls it down and runs to the 50. Whoop! McGee loses 5 trying to go left. Schroeder gains 12 on the reverse. McGee pitches to Goodson on the option and he takes it to the house! TD Aggies! Whoop!! Yanked the PAT Ouch.. 6-0 Ags. On that drive, I'm thinking that Texas is so concerned with Lane that they're leaving the edges more open than you'd expect for the top run D in the country. But being the top run D may be (slightly) distorted by playing most games with a big lead. Kick goes through the end zone again. Texas starts from the 20 again. Texas converts as Newton misses the knockdown. Another first down on another pass. Good stop on Young on first down. McCoy avoids the rush...incomplete. 3rd and 13. Incomplete. Ags decline double chop block penalty. 4th down. Punt goes out at the 30. Option for 5. Texas was talking all week about how they would be prepped for the option. QB draw close to the first down. Got it. No gain on the option the next time. McGee throws it away after the play fake doesn't work. 3rd and 8. Swing pass to Goodson gets 13 and a first down. Option right again. Late hit on the Ags. 2nd and 20. Swing pass to Lane goes to the Texas 44. 3rd and 9. McGee has to throw it away. Punt gets a short return. Texas starts on the 13. WR screen gets a good gain. Ags jump. Off sides gets the first down. End of the quarter. McCoy to Finley to start the 2nd. Charles gets the first down. Cosby gets a catch to the Texas 45. Charles stopped for a short gain. Sack! Texas has to punt again. Schroeder lets it go out at the 11 McGee keeps for 4. McGee keeps on the option and gets a first down. Nothing on first down. Lane runs for 12 and a first. McGee loses 1 on the option. Land for 3. 3rd and long. Big Alexander gain on a pass wiped out by a holding call. Sack. Ags have to punt. Punt only gets to the A&M 49 Texas gets a free 5 on another offsides. Finley again..first down. On 2nd, Shipley takes an out to the 12. Charles stopped. D-fense! Cosby again, stopped sort of the first down. 3rd and 3. Sweed..TD...flag. Offensive interference! Yes!! The announcers are saying it's a bad call, but Sweed had his hands on the DBs face mask. Intercepted! Ags start on their own 1. J-Train to th 7. No hole for Goodson. 3rd and 2. Ags call time out. Lane gets the first down. 2:05 left. Lane again for 8. Lane gets a first down. Draw loses 1. Ags run out the clock.
Larry Coker has been fired after an upset win against BC to become bowl eligble.
The WaPo: A fast-growing list of gastronomic indignities -- from sham sake in Paris to shoddy sashimi in Bangkok -- has prompted Japanese authorities to launch a counterattack in defense of this nation's celebrated food culture. With restaurants around the globe describing themselves as Japanese while actually serving food that is Asian fusion, or just plain bad, the government here announced a plan this month to offer official seals of approval to overseas eateries deemed to be "pure Japanese."
Reuters, via HNN ISTANBUL (Reuters) - A lavishly illustrated "Atlas of Creation" is mysteriously turning up at schools and libraries in Turkey, proclaiming that Charles Darwin's theory of evolution is the real root of terrorism.Another thing to be thankful for. It could be worse.
From the Telegraph: The Pope has been transformed. Not only is the role of the pontiff being played, Doctor Who-style, by another man...and there's this: Clergymen spend a lot of time on the internet, mostly for innocent purposes, such as following ecclesiastical backstabbing. The "Anglican blogosphere" is a rich source of speculationI don't know what else I've been missing by being an atheist. "Anglican blogosphere" gives 1150 Google hits.
The NYT covers the parade and has a slideshow. Man, those balloons are really low, due to the weather. Super Grover's nose nearly grazed the asphalt on Broadway. Garfield got caught in a gust of damp wind on Columbus Circle. And Dora the Explorer's left foot rested uncomfortably on the head of a 43-year-old man from Staten Island.
Ed Brayton touched a nerve within the Science blogosphere with his critique of this post by biochemist Larry Moran. Moran: I agree with the Dembski sycophants that UCSD should not have required their uneducated students to attend remedial classes. Instead, they should never have admitted them in the first place. Having made that mistake, it's hopeless to expect that a single lecture—even one by a distinguished scholar like Robert Pennock—will have any effect. The University should just flunk the lot of them and make room for smart students who have a chance of benefiting from a high quality education. Brayton To be honest, I'm rapidly becoming convinced that there are two very different groups involved in fighting against the ID public relations campaign to distort science education. The distinction between the two groups is that one is fighting to prevent ID creationism from weakening science education while the other is fighting, at least in their minds, to eliminate all religious belief of any kind, even those perspectives that have no quarrel with evolution specifically or science in general, from society.Moran replies that he was joking...sort of. PZ embraces the shamelessly Godless team, and links to others taking sides. The discussion degenerates into who is accusing whom of what. For me, Brayton's point is summed up in a response to a comment on John Lynch's entry on the contretemps. The comment was from Rob Knop, who, if he ever advocated lobotomizing atheists, didn't leave a record of it that I can find. And even if he did, the point is that PZ's blog paints a pretty clear picture of someone who thinks that anyone who is not an atheist must be brain damaged. One also gets the impression that being an atheist is not sufficient demonstration of neurological function, you also have to see that other political beliefs are self-evident.PZ, you shoud, sometime, somehow, try reading your blog and the virulent commenters you get as a person who is not an atheistHow? By clubbing myself over the head until I'm woozy and confused? PZ assures us that Tattoos and concentration camps and guillotines are not part of the planSomething to be thankful for, I guess. PZ and Moran seem to have a particular problem with Ken Miller (See here for example), who makes an interesting argument for compatibility of religion and science in this excerpt from his book, which I haven't read. Other parts may be more objectionable, so I may pick up a copy. But since I don't feel a need to reconcile science with my own religious views (atheist), I may not. In the excerpt Miller makes a case for how science is compatible with his religious faith, and makes a good argument (it seems to me) for why other believers should adopt his point of view. What he doesn't do is show that this is any reason for nonbelievers to become believers. To some, the murderous reality of human nature is proof that God is absent or dead. The same reasoning would find God missing from the unpredictable branchings of an evolutionary tree. But the truth is deeper. In each case, a deity determined to establish a world that was truly independent of his whims, a world in which intelligent creatures would face authentic choices between good and evil, would have to fashion a distinct, material reality and then let his creation run. Neither the self-sufficiency of nature nor the reality of evil in the world mean God is absent. To a religious person, both signify something quite different - the strength of God's love and the reality of our freedom as his creatures.My own atheism is not the rejection of an earlier religious upbringing, so proof of the nonexistence of God is not required. As I recognize that such a nonexistence proof is impossible, for God as it is for Brahma or the FSM, I don't feel that believers in those or other deities have to justify their beliefs to me or anyone else. With respect to science education, I believe (based on faith, not data) that it works better when you don't think your students, their parents, their families, and members of their communities are mental defectives if they don't come into your classroom sharing your assumptions. Heck, I don't even think they're mental defectives if they leave my class not sharing my worldview.
John Hawks has a long, very good post on the two Neandertal genome papers I noted a week ago. In addition to a lot of good science, he notes the kinds of things journalists have been asking him: They're already making plans to clone Neandertal super-soldiers, aren't they?
The Sydney Morning Herald updates the gold in space stunt. Instead of going in a line opposite to the flight path of the international space station, the ball swerved unexpectedly to the side. "OK, there it goes. It went pretty far. It was an excellent shot," the cosmonaut announced. "I can still see it as a little dot moving away from us."
Driving into work today, I was listening to a holiday recipe show on KQED, the San Francisco NPR station. A listener email asked about how to make a family favorite gelatin dish now that her daughter had become a vegetarian. While there are vegetable-derived gelling agents, such as agar, gelatin is mostly collagen. Collagen, a structural protein that is important for connective tissue, extracellular matrix, skin, and other structures in animals. Gelatin Manufactuers Association of Asia Pacific say: There are no plant sources of collagen, and as gelatin is derived from collagen, it follows that there are no plant source of gelatin either. Thus, there is no chemical relationship between gelatin and other materials often referred to as 'vegetable gelatins', such as seaweed extracts or gums like carrageen or guar.Plants use cellulose and lignin among other things, to stiffen their structures. But this should really be qualified as saying that there are no natural plant sources of gelatin. Fibrogen is a company that is working on, among other things, making synthetic/recombinant gelatin. And they've claimed that they can express it in tobacco. The reason to make recombinant gelatin is not for vegan Jello; gelatin has lots of industrial uses, including in the capsules drugs are packed into. I wonder if hardcore vegans avoid gelcaps. This site discusses some of the challenges faced by vegans including some I didn't know about Why won't some vegans eat sugar?It would be sad to go out and find alternative gelling agents only to find that your vegan guest won't eat the gel dessert because of the sugar. This 2003 C&E News piece has some fun facts about Jell-O, including these two:
Reflecting on what we have to be thankful for isn't just for Thanksgiving, but it's nice to have a time of year dedicated to reminding us to take the time to think about how fortunate we are. One thing that I'm very thankful for is that my friend Alan Grossman is hosting his family for Thanksgiving dinner this year. Alan had a heart transplant earlier this year after a long struggle with an unusual autoimmune heart condition that came out of nowhere a few years ago. We went to visit him last summer after the transplant and it is great to see him doing well and planning to cook too much food. Spending the first part of my sabbatical at Stanford, and staying with my mom, I'm thankful for all the things that meant I was born and raised in the US instead of the PRC. I'm thankful for all my friends, colleagues, students, and mentors...and, of course, I'm thankful for my wife who seems to like being married to me despite my oddities. It's also time for the annual claims and counterclaims about what the Pilgrims ate at the first Thanksgiving, if there was one. Be thankful that whether or not the Pilgrims had turkey doesn't really matter for how you enjoy yours (or whatever alternative you have).
Nature notes a plan to use the International Space Station as the most expensive driving range not in the world. The stunt is a promotional gimmic for Canadian club maker Element 21 Golf, which is paying the Russian space agency for Tyurin's time. Unlike most commercial gimics, this one has caused massive debate about safety within government agencies — NASA has spent months deciding whether or not to agree to the ploy.What if he hits it fat? What if he takes a divot? I'm thinking the ball will be teed up to avoid this. Element 21 has a video that includes footage of Alan Shepard's golf on the moon. Shepard actually took three shots and hit at least one fat. Marketwire posts: Eurovision, the world's largest provider of international transmission services of live sports and news events, will provide a Worldwide Satellite live feed of the E21 Golf shot from the International Space Station this evening by cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin.The shot is planned for between 6-7PM EST. Update: I can't figure out how the link is connected to online viewing.
In the NYT via link, an AP story about the conviction of the proprietors of a series of Chinese porn sites. Xinhua News Agency said judges at the Taiyuan Intermediate People's Court in Shanxi province gave the life sentence to Chen Hui and handed down terms of 13 months to 10 years to eight others after they were convicted of profiting from pornographic dissemination.Harsh! And how much profiteering was involved? Xinhua reported that police said it was difficult to know the exact amount of profits the Web site earned. Police found about 200,000 yuan ($25,000) in the bank accounts of the nine.That's less than $3K apiece. I wonder how hard it is to hide money offshore from China.
The NYT profiles Sen. Dodd, the new chair of the Banking Committee. This caught my eye: In a recent interview, Mr. Dodd said that he had hoped to be seen as unpredictably independent and willing to listen to both corporate interests and consumers.Elaborating, later in the piece He said he wants to always be known for "maintaining independence in terms of approach."Weird. I suppose he uses predictable as meaning always taking the side of one special interest or another, and not doing that is fine. But is unpredictability per se something we really want in lawmaking? Unpredicatability is something I want in a football coach. It's useful for keeping the other side off guard and unsettled... for making it harder for them to do their assigned tasks. Whose plans does Dodd want to upset? Maybe we want unpredictability in how the Feds cooperate with banks in the war on Terror. Maybe...I'm not even sure about that. But not wanting to ever be predictable? Of course, I confidently predict that he won't achieve that goal. Update: This is likely to land in the Senator's committee.
Coverage of the upcoming game between the Aggies and Longhorns (on at an uncivilized 9AM here on the West Coast on Friday) has focused on the A&M offense Here's the dilemma for Texas A&M: Everyone is getting rich throwing the ball against Texas.Coach Fran was certainly quick to abandon the run against Nebraska. Although the Ags got a decent amount of yardage out of Goodson, Lane got a shockingly low number of carries. With Colt McCoy back, the larger question in my mind is the Aggie D. In the games against OU and Nebraska, there were times when the defense looked lost, and other times when they were steadfast. The Ags have avoided the defensive meltdowns of last year... so far. Better, they've made adjustments in the past two games to allow them to stay close. But can they stay with the Horns? Texas is favored by 12.5 and coming off a loss and an extra week of rest and recovery. Last year's game was closer than expected. Is McCoy fully recovered? Can the Ag offensive line handle the Texas D? I haven't a clue. All of this means that the only result that would be surprising to me is if we blow out the Horns. Upset, close loss, and blowout loss all look possible to me. What the heck. Gig 'Em!
While reading up on sausages wrapped in bacon, I stumbled onto this story A Welsh food firm last night hit out at bizarre rules that have forced it to explain that its 'dragon sausages' do not really contain dragons.The warning comes from the Powys County Council's Trading Standards Department. The consumer watchdogs swooped after being tipped off that the sausages were in breach of the 1996 Food Labelling Act of misleading description on their Welsh Dragon Sausage.I wonder what kind of person is a sausage meat snitch. How do you test is for dragon meat. Do you assume that dragons will share DNA markers with reptiles? Dragon meat reminds me of this movie and this dish, which apparently can't be on menus Chinese Restaurants in Powys County. The Council apparently has a low opinion of the intelligence of vegetarians. A Powys County Council spokesman said, 'The product 'Welsh Dragon Sausage' was not sufficiently precise to inform a purchaser of the true nature of the food. I don't think anyone would imagine that dragon meat was being used but we would not want vegetarians to buy the sausages believing they were meat free. The Black Mountains Smokery gave in and changed the name of the sausages to Smoked Welsh Dragon Sausage - Pork: We have complied but it has led us to wonder what "Farmhouse Sausages," and "Toad in the Hole," might possibly contain? What a worry!The warning letter included this line: It is recommended that you include the type of meat eg pork/beef in the name of the food.'My wife, Debby, asks if you did that would anyone still eat sausage?
Americans are still preparing their Thanksgiving feasts, but Xmas is coming up fast. There was a controversy about Xmas meals in Britain recently: PARENTS expressed outrage last night over a school's plans to serve pupils a Muslim Christmas dinner.This seemed odd. How does eating chicken undermine the Christian faith? This article says of British Xmas dinner: Christmas dinner consists traditionally of a roast turkey, goose or chicken with stuffing and roast potatoes. This is followed by mince pies and Christmas pudding flaming with brandy, which might contain coins or lucky charms for children.The brandy is right out for the Muslims, but I don't know if they'd have it in schools meals anyway. But it suggests that chicken is OK as an alternative to turkey, along with goose or swan. Moreover, Halal turkey is available. Perhaps the parents didn't understand all the options that were part of the plan Under her plan pupils would have had the option of a sausage rolled in bacon served with the chicken, but parents objected to the scheme claiming it would undermine the traditional British Christmas.Yes, the kids were going to have an option to include that British Xmas favorite, sausage wrapped in bacon. A recipe is provided by the Guardian. Sausages wrapped in baconMore about chipolatas here. Chicken is a big part of Xmas dinner elsewhere In Japan, Christmas has been celebrated since the 1930s but with a distinctly Western feel to the proceedings in recent decades. Parents and children have been known to queue for hours outside the local Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise for a bucket of chicken for their Christmas dinner. This practice is due to the apparent similarity between Colonel Sanders and St. Nicholas! The dinner is usually rounded off with the older tradition of eating strawberry shortcake.
The NYT updates events in Mexico: The losing leftist candidate for president swore himself in on Monday as "the legitimate president of Mexico" before a huge crowd of his avid fans, ignoring rulings by federal electoral authorities and the courts that he narrowly lost the election last July.The article is suprisingly positive about this event. It remained to be seen if Monday's political theater was a graceful exit for a candidate who could never acknowledge defeat, or truly the start of a unified left-wing movement to challenge the oligarchy of politicians and business executives who have controlled the country for a century.How about "none of the above"? When I saw some colleagues from Mexico at meetings last summer, they were already shaking their heads about Lopez-Obrador, aka AMLO, as something of a national embarassment. They were saying that his support was already dropping after his hissy fit. The NYT's James McKinley doesn't seem to put dos y dos together as he notes: The crowd was smaller than at Mr. López Obrador's previous rallies, and divisions have appeared in his party.
Here via Tyler Cowen. Excerpts: Becker After my first class with him a half-century ago, I recognized that I was fortunate to have an extraordinary economist as a teacher. During that class he asked a question, and I shot up my hand and was called on to provide an answer. I still remember what he said, "That is no answer, for you are only restating the question in other words." I sat down humiliated, but I knew he was right. Posner The other essay of Friedman's that struck me was an essay on taxation in which he argued, contrary to the conventional view at the time (though I gather the argument was not original with him), that there was no theoretical reason for supposing income taxes superior in point of efficient resource allocation to excise taxes. An excise tax--say, a 10 percent tax on yachts--drives a wedge between cost and price and so deflects buyers to substitutes that may cost more to produce but look cheaper because they are not taxed at so high a rate. (The effect is the same as monopoly pricing.) But Friedman argued that income taxes have the same effect, by driving a wedge between the cost of work and the wage (price) received by the worker, thus deflecting him to untaxed substitutes, such as leisure, or to jobs that generate untaxed benefits, including leisure in the case of teaching (for example), but also prestige, amenities, tax-favored fringe benefits, and job security. This idea of the parity of excise and income taxes has wide-ranging implications for public policy, since the tendency (still) is to neglect the misallocative effects of income taxation--a neglect of which I think even Friedman was sometimes guilty... And Becker quotes this key line from Capitalism and Freedom The kind of economic organization that provides economic freedom directly, namely, competitive capitalism, also promotes political freedom because it separates economic power from political power and in this way enables the one to offset the other
Wolf Blitzer has Ken Adelman, David Frum, and Michael Rubin on to find out if they regret "cakewalk", "axis of evil", and lower risk than expected. Adelman: the part he was talking about was a cakewalk Frum: what I regret is that we didn't follow through. Blitzer keeps trying to force Frum to admit that lack of progress on NoKo and Iran are due to being "bogged down" in Iraq. Frum demurs. Rubin also stands by what he said, but that we "fumbled the honeymoon", and that we put too much trust in Iran to not meddle in Iraq. Blitzer goes on to the quotes from Vanity Fair from the three. Frum and Rubin wanted the Iraqi resistance to be the provisional government instead of Bremer as a proconsul. Rubin blames Rice and Hadley for not transferring power to the Iraqis and becoming an occupying power. Does he mean Chalabi? Hmm... The panel seems to think the Baker-Hamilton commission is looking to sell out the Iraqis to the Iranians. They don't like the idea. On MTP, new Senator Webb says that we can't solve the problem without Iran and Syria. But what does that actually mean? Blitzer seems to want the neocons to endorse bombing Iran. One of the AEI guys, Joshua Muravchik, said this in the LAT: WE MUST bomb Iran.Eeek! None of the panelists agree, fortunately. Is there something in the American psyche that makes us think the alternatives are either Give Up or Bomb Someone back to the Stone Age?
...when bizarre BCS scenarios come up. In the wake of an excellent game where Ohio State edged Michigan, there's talk of whether the BCS championship should be a rematch. Even if they're the best two teams I hope this doesn't happen. They can't play 2 out of 3, and today's game loses significance if they play again. And suppose Ohio State and Michigan played again and Ohio State won again in a similar close game. Does that mean Michigan will still be #2 over all the other 1-loss (and in the case of Boise State, possibly unbeaten) teams? Head to head, Michigan was better than Notre Dame and Wisconsin, which each currently have only one loss. The Badgers are done, while the Irish have to play USC next week. So...the following teams currently are unbeaten or have one loss: done
with games remaining
If ND beats USC, they'll be lobbying for the championship game, and their case would be strengthened if the SEC champ loses another game, which is certainly imaginable. But the Michigan rematch supporters will have a point based on ND losing badly at home to Michigan. What if USC beats ND and loses to UCLA? Unlikely of course, but it could be interesting if this is coupled to the SEC champ finishing with two losses. The BCS setup would favor a rematch, I'm guessing. Bowl outlookWhat would all of this do to the BCS bowls? Based on my reading of the selection rules, assuming ND finishes in the top 8 even if they lose to USC, and Boise State finishes in the top 12 or in the top 16 and higher than the ACC champ, both would get BCS slots. Michigan will get a slot by finishing somewhere between 2-4 in the BCS. That would mean 9 of the 10 slots would go to:
How would various alternatives affect things? What if USC loses a game and Florida wins out?
This morning I spotted an item saying that Bo Schembechler had collapsed. A spokesman said it didn't look good...and it turns out he didn't make it. Schembechler died today of heart failure, one day before the big game between Michigan and Ohio State...and he gets one of the oddest tributes in sports history: COLUMBUS, Ohio -- The singer of the pro-Buckeyes punk-rock band the Dead Schembechlers said all proceeds from a show scheduled for Friday night would be donated to a charity chosen by the family of late Michigan coach Bo Schembechler.I was fortunate enough to have seen Schembechler's previously unbeaten 1971-72 team lose the Rose Bowl to Stanford...the last time Stanford has won the Tournament of Roses. Back then, we loved to hate Schembechler and Woody Hayes, who lost to Stanford's 1970-71 team. It was the first Rose Bowl that Schembechler coached...he missed the 1970 game with the first of his heart problems. All these years later...Schembechler will be remembered for the consistent excellence of his Michigan teams. Two coaches later, he's the heart of Michigan football, which is why the band's schtick was a tribute, not an attack. Schembechler was good-natured about the odd tribute, smiling as he told The Columbus Dispatch earlier this month, "Holy smokes, I couldn't believe it. They're all dressed like Woody. I think it's crazy."
Obits in the NYT and the WaPo, links at Instapundit, and Reason Several posts at Marginal Revolution (follow the nav links), and Greg Mankiw writes: We lost a great human being today. In a post about something else, I recalled watching Free to Choose Back in 1980, long before TiVo or our even our first VCR, my friend Chip Morris1 and I would arrange our grad student schedules to make sure we were home to watch the PBS series2 based on Milton Friedman's Free to Choose. One of our favorite parts was the discussions Friedman would lead after each episode - which was the first time I heard of Thomas Sowell, btw. In these panels, Friedman would regularly demolish a liberal economist or political scientist by pointing out that he was comparing an idealized world on the socialist/statist side of an argument with the real world on the market/libertarian side... this often involved pointing out how regulatory mechanisms tend to be captured by the regulated industry to exclude competitors. At these moments, when the advocate of some regulation or other would bluster ineffectually, Chip and I would look at each other and say:As Mankiw writes: Milton and Rose were libertarians--aggressively vocal libertarians--before libertarians were cool.Friedman's libertarianism was both idealistic and practical. I recall him saying something to the effect that while he deeply believed that liberty was the best economic policy, he would err on the side of liberty even if it wasn't. I also fondly recall his response to an interviewer who commented on how his ideas were not very popular back in 1980... he said something to the effect of "that's why it's important to advertise!"
Heard it on the radio a few minutes ago and CNN confirms: House Democrats on Thursday chose Maryland Rep. Steny Hoyer to be House majority leader over Rep. John Murtha, the choice of Rep. Nancy Pelosi, in line to become speaker.
Gay Patriot makes an interesting point about recently defeated Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum When I read two years ago that outgoing Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum had compared homosexuality to bestiality, I knew that he would not win reelection. It's not that I thought the people of Pennsylvania were particularly pro-gay, but figured than they, like most Americans, are anti-anti-gay.Santorum's apologists argue that his point was not to equate homosexuality with bestiality and pedophilia, and technically they may be right. And Santorum may truly be in the "love the sinner, hate the sin" group. This Philadelphia Inquirer piece includes some things that go against the caricature: "I would suggest that Rick Santorum has a kind of Tourette's disease - he will always say the most unpopular thing," said Bono, the U2 lead singer, who has worked with Santorum on debt relief and AIDS since 2001, in an interview Friday. "But on our issues, he has been a defender of the most vulnerable. . . . He was ready to stand up on Capitol Hill and say, 'This is important for America.' "But even if he didn't equate homosexuality and bestiality, he placed homosexuality on the downward side of his slippery slope. And he did in the context of sodomy laws, not just in the context of gay marriage. Even if he isn't as anti-gay as people think....that's what they were voting against if GP is right. I think he's onto something, and I hope that thought is not just wishful thinking.
The San Francisco 49ers and the Oakland A's are both moving south...but not too far; Bay Area fans are not losing either team. The 49ers announced that they are moving to Santa Clara, while the A's will move down the other side of the bay to Fremont. The reaction in San Francisco has been pretty hysterical, as the city blames the 49ers for the collapse of SFs bid for the 2016 Olympics. This has led to threats at the local and federal level: In San Francisco, Mayor Gavin Newsom said the city might withdraw financial support for police overtime and city traffic control for 49ers games on Candlestick Point, and suggested other punitive steps, such as refusing to run city buses to the stadium. Newsom plans to meet with 49ers owner John York today to restart talks on a new stadium deal for San Francisco, a week after York suddenly declared Santa Clara the team's destination.I'm sure making Candlestick Point inaccessible and unsafe will be a great way to make SF attractive to the Niners. But it gets worse n Washington, sounding very much like the former mayor of the City by the Bay, Sen. Dianne Feinstein said her staff is researching a bill that would allow a jurisdiction to prevent a major league franchise from taking a team name when it moves.John Ryan in the San Jose Mercury News asks; Think she's as funny when attending fundraisers given by The Chipmakers?That the Senator's reaction was to get the Feds involved speaks volumes about how our elective officials view the idea of limited government. That Feinstein's rant even gives the rest of us the slightest pause to wonder whether the Feds really could do that speaks volumes about how inured we are to government meddling in everything. Less visibly, Janet Stemwedel is upset about the A's. I have begrudged no one his or her opportunity to enjoy the game.Stemwedel is upset that the A's are moving from a site where there is a BART stop to one that is not currently served by mass transit. Also, has a new baseball stadium ever been a good deal, economically, for the city in which it's built? Again, I don't usually follow such things, but my sense is that the people take one for the team in deals like these.This used to be universally true...when teams were able to get taxpayers to pick up the lion's share of the tab. The citizenry still subsidizes the privately funded stadia, but it's not as bad a deal, and the positive economic impact arguments are less strained. In the case of the A's In the past, Wolff has said a major housing development was a vital component of his financing idea for the ballpark. His theory has been that he could use the lure of a ballpark to persuade a city to change the zoning of a property and make it more valuable. In this case, Cisco's land is currently zoned for industrial purposes. If Fremont agrees to allow housing, the property would be worth more than Wolff would pay Cisco for it.More housing in the Bay Area sounds like a good idea to me, and to the extent that people who work in the Bay Area don't have to commute from places like Tracy (I know people who commute from there to Palo Alto) it seems like an environmental and traffic win to me. With respect to traffic and mass transit for A's games, Marine Layer has some thoughts, but doesn't seem to be factoring in whether extending either BART or rail into the development might be driven by population growth in the housing part of the development. People who live there will use transit, either new or Park-n-ride from one of the Fremont stations, more often than other transit users will go to A's games. It should also be noted that fans coming from the South Bay already drive to A's games. These will contribute less to the traffic snarls on 880 between Fremont and Oakland, while fans going the other way will add to it. Could be a wash. The 15-30% of the A's fans who take BART will not all drive to the games. Some will stay home. All of which means that there is probably an escape clause in the deal if the city of Fremont refuses to rezone the property.
Science and Nature (subscription required) both have articles on sequencing pieces of the Neandertal genome. The key technical breakthrough is in using the new massively parallel sequencing machines from 454. The sequencing of the human genome, and most of the genomes currently available was done using variations on the chain termination method developed by Fred Sanger, for which he got his second Nobel prize in 1980. Sanger sequencing has improved over the years to the point where it's normal to get about 1000 bases of high quality sequence from each of 96 capillary lanes on a sequencing machine. 454 uses a different technology to get much shorter sequences from very large numbers of DNA molecules, each amplified by PCR and attached to a microbead. A single machine gives hundreds of thousands of individual sequences, each of which is maybe a hundred bases long. In the sequencing of ancient DNA samples, you rarely get unbroken molecules longer than a couple of hundred bp. Moreover, the DNA is usually contaminated with DNA from other organisms, from bacteria to humans, that have contacted the sample over thousands of years. With the 454 technology, the two groups reporting Neandertal sequencing were able to sequence massive numbers of DNA molecules, and then used computational analyses to figure out which were Neandertal and which were contaminants. From the Science paper, from a group at Lawrence Berkeley (LBL): We generated 1.47 million pyrosequencing reads, compared each to the human genome sequence with MEGABLAST, and obtained 7880 hits. Assembly of these reads and reanalysis of the resulting scaffolds by BLASTN produced 1126 unique Neanderthal loci, yielding 54,302 bp of Neanderthal genomic sequenceThe LBL group cloned their Neandertal DNA before sequencing. The group from the Max Planck Institute, which published in Nature, went straight from DNA samples to the 454 machine, and got about a megabase worth of Neandertal DNA to analyze. Both groups got some data from every chromosome. As would be expected, the Neandertal sequences are closer to human than either human or Neandertal are to chimpanzee sequences. An interesting point from the Nature paper. As a control, they used the 454 technology to get sequences from a modern human who was presumably unrelated to the source of the reference sequence. As expected, this estimate of the average human diversity is less than the divergence seen between the human and the Neanderthal sequences, but constitutes a large fraction of it because much of the human sequence diversity is expected to predate the human-Neanderthal split25. Neanderthal genetic differences to humans must therefore be interpreted within the context of human diversity.There's been some controversy about the extent to which humans and Neandertals interbred in the areas where they were both present. The LBL group writes If Neanderthal admixture did indeed occur, then this could manifest in our data as an abundance of low-frequency derived alleles in Europeans where the derived allele matches Neanderthal. No site in the data set appears to be of this type. In order to formally evaluate this hypothesis, we extended our composite likelihood simulations to include a single admixture event 40,000 years ago in which a fraction p of the European gene pool was derived from Neanderthals. We fixed the human-Neanderthal split at 440,000 years ago (the split time estimate for Europeans).With these assumptions, the maximum likelihood estimate for the Neanderthal contribution to modern genetic diversity is zero. However, the 95% CI for this estimate ranges from 0 to 20%, so a definitive answer to the admixture question will require additional Neanderthal sequence data (Fig. 5D).In other words, little or no Neandertal contribution to our genomes after the split from a common ancestor. But the Max Planck group writes this in Nature: Another question that can be addressed with these data is how often the Neanderthal has the ancestral allele (that is, the same allele seen in the chimpanzee) versus the derived (or novel) allele at sites where humans carry a single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP). The latter case identifies SNPs that were present in the common ancestor of Neanderthals and present-day humans. Using the SNPs that overlap with our data from two large genome-wide data sets (HapMap49, 786 SNPs and Perlegen50, 318 SNPs), we find that the Neanderthal sample has the derived allele in 30% of all SNPs. This number is presumably an overestimate since the SNPs analysed were ascertained to be of high frequency in present-day humans and hence are more likely to be old. Nevertheless, this high level of derived alleles in the Neanderthal is incompatible with the simple population split model estimated in the previous section, given split times inferred from the fossil record. This may suggest gene flow between modern humans and Neanderthals. Given that the Neanderthal X chromosome shows a higher level of divergence than the autosomes (R.E.G., unpublished observation), gene flow may have occurred predominantly from modern human males into Neanderthals[emph added]. More extensive sequencing of the Neanderthal genome is necessary to address this possibility. Update: expect more on this from John Hawks, Gene Expression, and others. See also the NYT coverage
No coincidence, I'm sure that Apple announced this on the same day that the Zune rolled out. To say that reviews are mixed is generous. Brian Tiemann has thoughts and links, but last I looked hadn't picked up this story "This operating system is currently not supported by Zune," reads an error message when trying to install Zune software on the latest versions of Microsoft's own Windows Vista operating system.Yes, it's Apple schadenfreude. So what?
Stephen Karlson notes three stories about efforts at Illinois to get the trustees to raise faculty salaries. Without higher pay and better perks, the University of Illinois will continue to lose talented faculty to other institutions, officials say.Stephen: Trigg replies in the comments and Stephen ripostes (scroll up). The basic problem is that the State wants the first rate university at below-market prices. There are ways to do this, which are imperfectly analogous to the Moneyball approach used by the Oakland A's. The similarity lies in the focus on developing young talent below the top recruits, who go to the Harvards and MITs, and using them to continuously replace the stars who leave for the academic versions of the Yankees and the Red Sox. Illinois would lose talented faculty to other institutions even with higher pay and better perks...after all:Some questioned whether professors living in the relatively affordable Champaign-Urbana community should be paid the same as professors at expensive private schools or in bigger cities like Chicago or New York.First, there's the little problem of a compensating differential. Sure, Urbana probably has cheaper housing than Palo Alto or Greater Boston, but faculty members have neither the view of Lake Mendota or the cachet of a Stanford or MIT affiliation. Second, there's the incentive Mr Trigg's attitude sets up (which is depressingly common among college administrators as well.) If faculty members have to demonstrate their marketability in order to elicit better offers, they're halfway out the door already. Not only that, department chairmen, deans, and provosts have to spend time working out counter-offers and setting up searches they might otherwise avoid having to carry out had the university's policy been to treat productive people decently. Third, there's a difference between refusing to pay $150 for a pair of sneakers just because other people have them, and refusing to pay the going rate for a resource that has opportunity costs. I'd like to see Mr Trigg negotiating with a gas station. "I don't want to pay $2.25 for gasoline just because everybody else does." OK, you don't pay it and I won't sell it. Tenure-track faculty at the flagship campus earn an average of $92,900 a year, making them the best-paid public university professors in the state and near the top in the Big Ten.Money matters, but there are other things that go into treating productive people decently. From the Texas Monthly profile of our outgoing President, Robert Gates: The moment when Gates signaled his intentions was the graduation ceremony in December 2002. The traditional seating arrangement was for attending faculty members to be seated almost out of sight, on the arena floor, with the vice presidents onstage, in the front row, and the deans seated behind them. One of Gates' stated goals for A&M was to "elevate the faculty," but no one knew he meant it physically as well as conceptually. Early arrivals at the ceremony were startled to see that new construction had expanded the stage, allowing the faculty to sit on the same level as the rest of the A&M leadership. The front row was now occupied by the deans, with the vice presidents seated behind them. Coming from a former Sovietologist, who had made a career of noticing who was standing next to whom at Kremlin events, the message was unmistakable: The new arrangements represented a revolutionary transfer of power, from administrators to the faculty and deans. When I went to A&M in 2004 to write about the university's growing pains as it wrestled with change, many of the people I interviewed brought up the ceremony as the signature moment of Gates's presidency.Indeed it was...but it is also a work in progress, and it will be interesting to see how the TAMU culture goes after Gates goes to Defense. Then again, other actions send different messages. Academics do care about money, but they also care a lot about status in their fields...and yes, we do often actually care about our fields even factoring out the status and glory. Note that some of the perks mentioned, like research assistants and improved facilities, are about making it easier to be productive and competitive. There are some very inexpensive ways to do this, such as insulating your faculty from pointless meetings, memos, and surveys as much as possible, so they can actually think about teaching and research. But the other things you need to have high-end university - facilities, staff, colleagues - are much more expensive than raising the salaries of the faculty you already have...and more important, IMHO, once you've raised the faculty pay above the embarassment level. Of course, that's easy for me to say with two faculty incomes, no kids, and the house paid off. It's not just more expensive. It's also much harder, since money is necessary but not sufficient.
Odd juxtaposition today as Ann Althouse links approvingly (I think) to this NY Sun article about bloggers debating by video instead of in print. So it's your chance to study the bloggers, to get them out from behind the written word, to see them in raw action. I can't help but compare that to the law school class -- the law school class at its Socratic best, anyway.Meanwhile Helen Reynolds frets that Now that tvs are getting cheaper and cheaper as well as bigger and clearer, will the emotions of viewers become even easier to manipulate? And if so, how will that play out in a medium that is captured by the liberal media?The idea of hiding behind the written word strikes me as odd. And even the article admits that the idea that being live promotes civility is oversold: Mr. Wright said it is harder to be snide when talking with someone than when responding to them in print. That doesn't mean there can't be anger: One debate between David Corn and Byron York was so heated, Mr. Kaus said, that it had to be handled with tongs.Didn't see it, but TV hasn't exactly promoted civil discourse with the proliferation of shows consisting of spinmeisters yelling at each other. I haven't looked at any of the blogger video debates because by and large I read much faster than I watch, and reading a passage engages the analytical part of my brain more than watching. I'm more likely to stop and reread a passage...or skim...in text than in video. Dr. Helen's fears that big-screen high-def TV will move the country leftward are probably overwrought. Her fear that it will amplify the triumph of emotion over reason is more interesting....but it will be hard to disentangle the effect of high definition from longer term trends in dysfunctional public education. I'm not so worried about the ascendency of the left due to style winning over substance. I'm more worried about how all sides will adapt to increasing importance of style over substance. I don't think the left has a monopoly on telegenic candidates and spokespeople. Coincidentally, I recently reread some of Orson Scott Card's Ender novels: the Shadow series that focuses on events on Earth after the Formic Wars. One of the main characters is a teenager who shapes world opinion on the internet - I think Card came up with this before the age of blogs. His anonymity allows the power of his ideas to win despite his youth.
 In the Clark Center.The comment reads: Fantastic. I've found that a single shot espresso is far superior to the ensemble averaging of a cup of coffeeAh, geek humor!
The WaPo House Speaker-to-be Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) endorsed Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.) yesterday as the next House majority leader, thereby stepping into a contentious intraparty fight between Murtha and her current deputy, Maryland's Steny H. Hoyer.Dave Kopel, noting a coverage in the Hill describes the contenders as follows: Murtha is, of course, known as a prime advocate of cut-and-run in Iraq, whereas Hoyer is merely a supporter of cut-and-run.Byron York posts that Hoyer claims to have a majority of the caucus.
Sighted in Germany
Some interesting views from Tom Barnett distributed over a couple of posts. Here he discusses the question of whether the Baker commission is the right direction: As I've written many times: all of the long-term trends favor us WRT globalization's inevitable penetration and "perversion" of the Middle East. Done right, Iraq could have served as a huge accelerant, triggering a 1989-like collapse of several nasty regimes in the region. But our incompetence there on the postwar comes back to haunt us, delaying the inevitable for far longer than it should, given our sacrifices and the boldness of the Saddam takedown.Although I don't think I agree...and don't know if I'll agree until I see what Baker et al. come up with, it's always interesting to see Barnett's reasoning. More interesting is his take on Rumsfeld/Gates otten off the phone with Hammes, who offered some optimism on Gates (not for me to relay here). My point on Gates was that much depends on how he views China. Rummy never got off China, and that was the great failure of his SECDEF role as far as I was concerned: he created much change and reform in the institutional military, making the SysAdmin's emergence both possible and setting it somewhat in motion among especially the Army, Marines, and SOCOM, but he never shifted funds or priority enough to those non-Leviathan roles, thus the continuing struggle and material hardship for the ground pounders in Iraq. He held back primarily because he wanted his Leviathan as geared up as possible for his preferred near-peer.Barnett, of course, has long advocated thinking of the future in terms of needing two kinds of military: a Leviathan and a Sysadmin. This can be thought of in terms of the difference between the kinds of forces needed to break things and the kind needed to fix things. Both parties don't really want to do the latter, and said so in the 2000 elections. Barnett's larger point is that we really don't have a choice. A few realized this before 9/11; for others, including me, 9/11 highlighted that painful reality. I have not kept up enough with Barnett's writing, but in general I find his larger ideas attractive or at least thought provoking, but find that he doesn't analyze how to get there from here in terms of the constraints of domestic politics. The recent elections are a sign that the W did not lead the GOP to bring the US to understand and support what is needed in the GWOT. The harder question is whether the domestic front was the unwinnable one, not the Iraqi front.
The problem with throwing the rascals out, is that you have to replace them with someone. More cause to be unhappy about last Tuesday's results in this analysis from Jacob Weisberg (via Virginia Postrel) Democrats made their most-impressive inroads this year, one heard a distinctly different message of economic nationalism. Nationalism begins from the populist premise that working people aren't doing so well. But instead of blaming the rich at home, it focuses its energy on the poor abroadMeanwhile, divided government advocate Megan McArdle starts to feel some buyer's remorse and points to calls to socialize medicine now. The NYT highlights the populism of the new members who won in swing or R districts. I confess that I have trouble distinguishing populism and demogoguery.
Virginia Postrel notes that the profile of SecDef nominee and Texas A&M President Bob Gates in the Texas Monthly is available online.
I see by my clock that it's after midnight and I'm late in noting Veteran's Day on the blog (other than by noting that Aggie linebacker Mark Dodge is a veteran). But while I didn't blog it, I didn't forget it. Nov 11 is also my mother's birthday, and of late the two together remind me of how lucky I've been, and how much that luck is a function of the courage of my parents and of those who fought to make this country the place they decided to stay after coming to the US as foreign grad students in 1945. Being a veteran does not mean someone gets absolute moral authority or that they have special claim on political power, or even that they have a monopoly on insights about the horror of war. For example, part of what I learned from my parents is that war is also hell for those who are too weak to effectively resist, as when the Japanese overran China. What the veteran does deserve, whether we agree with them or not, and whether we agreed with the war in which they fought or not, and whether they are upstanding citizens or convicted felons, is thanks for service itself. And remembrance.
Kansas State knocked Colt McCoy out of the game, and then got 3 TDs ahead of Texas in the 3rd quarter during a wild flurry, taking advantage of 2 Longhorn fumbles and a blocked punt. Texas got all 3 TDs back, but not before K State managed a FG in the 4th quarter. Texas 42, Kansas State 45. So...the 4 Texas schools in the Big 12 went 0-4, as K State upset Texas, OU beat Tech, the Aggies lost a heartbreaker to Nebraska, and Baylor was crushed by OSU. Based on looking through the College Football Data Warehouse the last time all four lost was on Oct 18, 1997 when the RC Slocum's Aggies lost to Kansas State, John Mackovic's Horns lost to Missou, Spike Dykes' Red Raiders lost to Nebraska, and Dave Roberts' hapless Bears lost to OU. This may sound like a long string, but let's look for comparables. The Pac-10 and ACC also have four schools from a single state. The last time the four California schools in the Pac-10 all lost on the same day was Oct 19, 1996.
Elsewhere in college football, there were some important upsets. One that won't get a lot of attention: Stanford 20, Washington 3. Stanford sealed the victory on the first possession of the fourth quarter, when Ostrander threw a wide receiver screen to Sherman, who sprinted untouched in front of the Huskies' bench for Stanford's first offensive score since the fourth quarter of its 31-10 loss to Notre Dame on Oct. 7.Before the game, this is what the Washington papers were saying. The Everett Herald: So just how bad is this Stanford football team? Well, Washington has lost five games in a row and is still a 19-point favorite over the Cardinal.The Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Washington losing to Stanford today would throw a bucket of excrement onto the limited but significant accomplishments attained in Year Two of the Tyrone Willingham Era. Stanford's win meant that my teams went 2-1 again, as Wisconsin held off Iowa. The Badgers are likely to finish the regular season with just one loss, assuming they take care of lowly Buffalo. Their only loss was to Michigan. But their nonconference schedule against Bowling Green, San Diego State, and Buffalo isn't very impressive. And Ohio State was not on the schedule this year. So it's hard to know how good the Badgers are. OK, onto the more significant upsets. First, Thursday night we were dining with a good friend instead of watching Todays big results in the national picture so far are losses by Auburn and Cal. Florida dodged a bullet. Kansas State knocked Colt McCoy out of the game and leads in the first half...stay tuned.
Oops..missed the start of the second half as we were looking at possible repairs around the house. Alexander gets a first down on a swing pass from McGee. McGee scramble nullified by a holding call. Bad pass on first and 20. Bennett gets 10 back. Great scramble by McGee and a completion to Goodson for a first down. Goodson runs for 7. Goodson loses a couple on a pitch. Batted down. 4th down. Ags fake going for it and McGee pooch kicks to put Nebraska inside the 5. Swing pass. Short run. 3rd and 5. Crowd gets loud. Taylor completes for a first down. A couple of plays and another 3rd down and 3. Pitch. It will be close. Ags hold. Bennett gains 25 on a pass in the middle..gain to the Nebraska 41. Drive bogs down and the Ags punt into the end zone. These announcers are not good. Just called a loss of 2 a gain of 3. Taylor sacked on 2nd down. 3rd and 14. Taylor flushed and tackled for a short gain. 3 and out. Kick rolls to the TAMU 35 Lane for now gain. That's just his 3rd carry. Too high to Taylor. Amazing play by Goodson. Looked like he was going to be stopped short, but goes for 54 yards. First down at the 12. Lane stopped at the 10. Alexander catches a pass and gets to the 4. Incomplete on 3rd and 2. Lane not even in position to be a decoy. The crowd is not happy. FG. 21-13. What the heck is going on. Is Fran trying to prove that he isn't a slave to the conventional wisdom? End of the quarter after the kickoff is taken in the end zone for the touchback. Huskers go from the 20. Glenn gets 1 or 2 up the middle. Incomplete. Incomplete. This week and last, Darnell seems to be making good adjustments after periods when the Ags looked bad. Punt. Fair catch. Ags start with pretty good field position. McGee gets 1 yard. Horrible play where it was great that Schroeder dropped a WR screen that would have lost yards. McGee scores a TD on the option!!!!! 57 yard run around the left end. The contain guy went straight for the pitch without even trying to force McGee. 2 pt attempt blows up. 21-19 Nebraska. Nebraska gets a first down on a couple of runs, but the D is still doing better than in the 2nd quarter. 3rd and 5 coming. Blitz, pass to Purify is broken up by Peterson again. This time Purify was running an out to the left. Punt. Schroeder stopped at the 15. Lane gets 4. McGee misses Riley. 3rd and 6. Empty backfield. McGee hits Riley on a slant to get a big gain. Lane passes to Schroeder. First and goal from the 4. Alexander to the 1. Lane scores! Ags lead!! Bennett gets the 2 pt PAT. The color announcer is an idiot - the same guy who think Knight coaches here questions the decision to go for 2. Up 6 vs 5 means 2 FGs don't beat you. Up 5 is not better than up 4 at this point. Callahan seems to be calling runs on 1st and 2nd down in the second half. Now the pass is obvious. Nebraska gets the first down, barely. The crowd is very loud. Taylor flushed and dropped for a loss. 5:12 to go. Short completion. 3rd and 5. Pass to Peterson again. That was well done. Taylor rolled, forcing Peterson's cover to go after the QB. First down. Blitz. Sack by Michael Bennett. Holding. 2nd and 26. Intercepted by Dodge. Appropriate for Veterans Day. Goodson and Lane don't get much. 3rd down at the Nebraska 26. McGee reverses but is stopped at about the 25. Nebraska burns their last time out. The two idiots on TV are talking like there's a question about going for the FG. The kick is blocked. Taylor flushed again and has to throw it away. 1:43 to go. Complete short of the first down. Dropped by Peterson. 4th down and 3. Taylor rolls right and throws. Complete to Peterson. Big play, and out of bounds. First down to the Aggie 45. Incomplete. Throw for a first down to the 30. Incomplete as Taylor feels pressure. Peterson complete to the 18. 38 seconds to go. No time outs. Spiked to stop the clock. Incomplete. 3rd and 10. Dee-fense!! Incomplete in the endzone as our Peterson defends. Oh no!!! Roughing the passer. Purify on the lob. TD Nebraska. Noooooooo! PAT good 28-27 Nebraska. 20 seconds to go. Kickoff returned to the 20. 11 seconds to go. Pass to Goodson...he goes into the middle? Timeout with 1 second to go. McGee is sacked. Game over. Two weeks in a row, tough, tough losses at home. The blocked FG was huge, obviously. The replay showed a ridiculous push up the middle before the block. Nebraska gets a lot of credit for that last drive....which illustrated why it was so weird that Callahan tried to run so much earlier in the half. With a new university president likely, there's the question of whether Fran will be replaced. I think it's fair to say that last year was horrid and this year's rebound is inflated by the tin cans in the early schedule. But the improvement is not so much in the W-L record as in the way the Ags have played in their 3 losses. It has to be remembered that the reason the losses are frustrating is that the games were all very close...because on average the team is playing better. This team has a lot of potential for next year, and personally I'd like to see what Fran can do with this group next year. The team is still pretty young. McGee and Lane are sophs, Goodson is a true freshman. In general, I don't like the idea of colleges firing coaches in mid contract when their teams are competitive, showing improvement, and aren't getting the school in the national news for scandals. Maybe the top schools - and A&M thinks of itself as a top football school - shouldn't be satisfied with just winning seasons and non-BCS bowl games. But musical chairs doesn't strike me as the way to get there.
Texas A&M plays Nebraska in Kyle Field. Despite the comeback to being bowl-eligible, there is still a lot of skepticism among Aggie fans. They're not happy about the loss to OU last week. Nebraska clinches the Big 12 North with a win and the announcers are saying they're pretty cocky on the sidelines. Nebraska takes the opening kickoff and is stuck deep in their own territory by a holding call on the return, which didn't make the 20. 3 and out on 3 runs. Ags get the ball back woth good field position. Ags get a first down on a pass to Taylor. A few downs later Riley can't hold on as the Ags go for it on 4th down. Huskers get the ball back around their own 35 Taylor overthrows Purify. No gain. Complete on 3rd and 8 to Purify on a slant for 20. First down. Big run. Huskers are down to the A&M 26. Another run for a first down at the 12. Lucky to the 10. Timeout. It looks like the completion to Purify loosened up the A&M D. Back from commercials. Lucky to the 8. 3rd and 5. Need to hold them to 3 pts. Taylor flushed - and gets the first down. Argh! First and goal. Incomplete. 2nd and goal. TD Nebraska on a run up the middle. 7-0 Nebraska. Ags get the ball on the 20 after the kickoff. Lane is hit at the 20 but gets a couple. Big pass to Franks after the fake to J-train! 47 yards. Ball was actually a bit underthrown or it might have been 6. Complete to Brown for 8 or 9. Goodson scores on the option from the 21! 7-7. Whoop! The 12th man gets called for a late hit after a good return. Nebraska starts from near midfield. First down on a run to the TAMU 38. No gain up the middle. Incomplete as Peterson breaks up the slant to Purify. Complete on the left for another first down. Another pass out to the right flat. The run after catch gets to first and goal, but there's a flag on the play. Against Nebraska after the play. First and goal from the 20. Ags flush Taylor but he still gains 2. Timeout Nebraska. Purify finds a gap in the zone to get back to the 5. Ack! Ags fail to defend the obvious play. End of the quarter. On that last play, Taylor was locked in on the right side. Purify is the same general area he's been working all day. In a perfect world the Ags accept the telegraph and run an INT back 95 yards. But no...too much slack in the zone. Can't complain too much. Last year, that play probably goes for a TD. Nebraska runs over the right side and scores. At least two missed tackles, but the Ags also got away with a minor face mask. 14-7 Huskers Touchback on the kickoff. McGee follows Lane up the middle for 4. Goodson loses yards. McGee sacked. 3 and out. Right now both the offensive and defensive lines are losing the trenches to Nebraska. Nebraska gets the ball back and strikes quickly on a West Coast short pass YAC drive. 21-7. 3 and out. 50 yard punt is the best thing so far in the quarter. Complete for 8. Complete for 26. Another missed tackle after the catch. Run for 10. Michael Bennett makes a good play to stop a run for -2. Complete to Lucky - runs to the TAMU 27. Good downfield block. 3rd and 6. Broken up! Good play by Peteson to prevent the TD. They go for it. Sack by Warren! The Aggies really needed that stop. Bennett gets 5. Incomplete. Idiot announcer thinks Bobby Knight is here at TAMU. Timeout. Sack. Punt puts NU back deep...will it be enough for another hold? Run for a good gain on first down nullified by a penalty before second down. Complete on an escape valve. 3rd down and 4 from the 16. Goes to Purify again as predicted. Broken up. by Brown. Punt. Ags get the ball back on their own 45. Gig Em Ags!!! Let's go offense! Short gain on the option. Lane is not getting carries for some reason. Fake to Lane and McGee runs for the first down. Bennett gets a catch after McGee is flushed. Short gain, and time is running down. Bennet gets a longer gain and goes out of bounds to stop the clock. 1:05 left. First down from the 23. Schroeder gets 9. Incomplete to Taylor. 30 seconds left in the half. Timeout? After an incompletion. Ags are messed up. Motion penalty. 3rd and 7. Pass knocked down.Nebraska calls timeout. FG good. 21-10. Nebraska takes a knee. End of the half
Ann Althouse admits she's depressed about Tuesday's results: What is it, exactly?Not forever, Ann. This happens before forever. Warren "Coyote" Meyer finds more bleakness in the results, unrelated to the war. I agree with both, but Ann's reason is dominant for me. Then there's this by Michael Kinsley from right before the election. And this, from the NYT Respondents were given a choice between a candidate with a history of corruption, facing possible indictment, versus a candidate who supported the war. Each received 40 percent, a sobering finding for Republicans.
I was somewhat surprised that pundits were right, and W replaced Donald Rumsfeld today. The reason I was surprised is that I didn't think the punditocracy was taking the likely shape of the confirmation hearings into account. But W decided a new SecDef was needed to have any chance of working with the new Congress...which may reflect one of W's weaknesses: the triumph of hope over experience. The spillover for Aggies is that we're losing the President of our University. I've met Bob Gates a couple of times, including one meeting where I told him I thought a proposed policy was not being handled properly. I have a lot of respect for the guy and I think he's the real deal in terms of someone who answers the call of duty. I wish him the best of luck in what will be a difficult job. But part of me wonders... maybe running the Pentagon looks easier than running a university. Update: Byron York at the Corner notes some clouds on the horizon for the Gates confirmation hearings.
With Virginia going down to the wire, the new Ralph Nader may be Green Party candidate Gail Parker, who seems to be a candidate who wants expanded rail service in Virginia - to the point where her nickname is Gail "for Rail" Parker. Update: After trailing most of the night, Webb seems to have taken a narrow lead in the last 1% of the count...so far.
I've been a Mac user since the days of the 512 "Fat Mac", and I've generally purchased my computers via Apple's academic online store. I wonder if I'd still be buying Macs if I had to buy them at the Apple Store in downtown Palo Alto. This evening, I went shopping at Borders, Circuit City, Radio Shack, the Apple Store and Home Depot. The Apple Store and Home Depot were the worst for service, and the only other time I've been to the one on University Drive, it struck me as being similar. Unhelpful bored looking employees who don't know the answers to your questions, and who don't care that they don't know. it might be nice if someone in the store knew something about where to recycle your used-up batteries. Like what it says on the Apple website You can recycle Apple product batteries at any of our US retail locations.Sheesh.
Amusing story in the WaPo about three prominent Washingtonians, all named Mark Plotkin iven their differences, the men's paths might never have crossed were it not for the mix-ups caused by their names. In the 1970s, when the ethnobotanist was about to receive a master's degree from Yale University, the Office of Student Affairs presented him with a bill for $22,000.Apparently Mark Plotkin is not a common name. 3/28 in the US live in DC and are prominent in their respective fields. Given how relatively few there are in the country, it's remarkable not only that three live in Washington, but that there were once four. Mark A. Plotkin eventually decamped for Miami, feeling vaguely embarrassed that he was "just" a librarian.
Via Cafe Hayek, Princeton Prof Uwe Reinhardt makes this claim in the WaPo Small wonder, then, that even college students who ardently supported the invasion of Iraq and just as ardently favor "staying the course" in Iraq argue smugly that, instead of serving their country in uniform, they can serve it so much better in law school or by trading bonds for Goldman Sachs. I personally have heard this argument many times from hawkish undergraduates at Princeton University who would never dream of fighting in uniform for the nation they profess to love.Arguing that they would serve their country better? Really? I wonder what counts as "many times" and how many times translates into numbers of actual Princeton students. I can imagine that Prof. Reinhardt is not making this up...but barely. While it may be literally true, his claim reads as a broader slander of those who support the war at Princeton. I also find his wonderings about the children of war supporters to be contemptible. The military age offspring of politicians are individuals who have no special obligations to volunteer to serve in the military based on the positions of their parents. Prof. Reinhardt, an economist, fails to recognize the selection bias in his sample. Those who are serving are not in his classes. And he isn't in their class either.
While I was in DC, I picked up a pair of Apple's lanyard earbuds for my iPod. So far they're pretty useless...they won't stay in my ears. Apparently others have had this problem. See the Amazon reviews. Even this doesn't work: If you are trying to insert the RIGHT headphone, use your LEFT arm and put it over your shoulder, behind your head, and grab the top of your right ear. Pull your ear upward so as to "straighten" out your ear canal. Then insert the headphone and swivel it in a circular motion to slide it into your ear.This reminds me of the scene in Wrath of Khan where they put the parasite in Chekov's ear. The other thing I didn't realize - because I guess I wasn't paying attention - is that the lanyard is designed not just to hold the headphones around your neck (which is all I want). They're set up to hold the whole iPod. Which is fine except that they won't work with my iPod radio remote, which people keep mistaking for the new shuffle. I'd still like to salvage the earbuds for when I fly. Don't need the FM reception then anyway, and I'd like the extra noise isolation. One possibility is to find different tips (see comment 21) to replace the soft and slippery rubber cups Apple supplies. Update: Found another eartip replacement suggestion. The suggested sleeves are here
Andrew has had two major themes with respect to the administration and the war in Iraq:
If the Dems win and get their way, fewer Americans will die in Iraq. But what about Iraqis? And what will happen in the small relatively moderate Arab states that have supported us? Saddam's conviction and sentence today remind us that thngs can be worse. Perhaps the Republicans can't do better, but as Orson Scott Card writes (via Instapundit) ...if the Republican Party remains in control of both houses of Congress there is no guarantee that the outcome of the present war will be favorable for us or anyone else.With respect to Rumsfeld, even if the Republicans hold onto the Senate, firing the SecDef, or accepting his resignation, would mean confirming a replacement. If you thought the fights over federal judges were ugly, imagine what that confirmation fight would be like. Would the Dems block any nominee who would not set a hard timetable? I wouldn't bet against it.
Being here in Palo Alto, the OU-A&M game wasn't on. Also, even though USC-Stanford was on Fox Sports, it was blacked out on my mom's cable. So I went to The Old Pro sports bar, which people at Stanford told me was a good bet for a place to see the game. The Old Pro advertises that it has every college and pro game. Inside there is a bar area and a back room. Both have lots of TVs. A few large flat screen models and many older CRT models. When I got there, USC-Stanford was on several screens, with the Cardinal already down by 28 points in the first half, and the Texas-OSU game was on another big screen. As OU-TAMU came on one pretty bad TV in the corner, others were tuned to Miami-VT, UCLA-Cal, Arkansas-S. Carolina, and possibly others that I don't recall. The crowd was friendly, and included several expat Texans rooting for the Horns or Ags. Even though you don't find very many fans like this in Texas, several were rooting for both A&M and Texas. After the game got going I sat with a nice couple who had done their undergrad at Texas and at A&M, and then met in grad school at Notre Dame. Earlier in the day, Wisconsin disposed of Penn State 13-3. JoPa's injury in a sideline collision is the big story, overshadowing a minor controversy where the septaguenarian leader of the Nittany Lions got mad at the end of the first half when Wisconsin went offsides deliberately twice on a kickoff to run out the clock. As predicted, the Stanford game was ugly. Stanford's deepest possesion in USC territory resulted in a blocked FG for a second-half USC touchdown. Bizarre quotation of the day: "People thought that after that loss to Oregon State we'd just tumble and fall," linebacker Rey Mauluga said. "I feel like we came out and made a statement. We're coming and we're hungry.What people thought that? And who thought that USC would struggle with the winless, injury-depleted Cardinal? Maybe we need to start drug testing the USC defense. The A&M game started off with OU running all over the Ags. Tailback Allen Patrick had 100 yards in the 1st quarter. The Ags moved on offense too, but self-destructed on holding calls so that at the end of the first quarter the score was 14-3. A power failure plunged the bar into darkness in the first half, so I missed OU mysteriously trying an onside kick after their second touchdown. That was the first of the Sooner's attempts to give the game to the Ags. Just to make sure, OU gave TAMU another 30 yards on personal fouls before surrendering the only Aggie TD of the day. It was 14-10 going into halftime. McGee threw an INT on the second drive of the second half, after neither team moved the ball on their first tries. The pick was returned to the A&M 6, but the defense rose to the occasion and yielded only a FG. 17-10 OU. From that point, A&M mostly stuffed the Sooners. The next four OU drives were:
The third drive was especially frustrating. Goodson and Lane rumbled for 27 and 18 yards respectively. Lane lost 2 when the Ags tried the same side for the third time in a row, but McGee hit Chris Alexander to gain first and goal at the 7. And they tried to score by passing. FG, 17-13. In what turned out to be the Ags final possession of the game, Goodson ran for 31 yards, but the drive ground to a halt giving 4th and 6 at the Sooner 22. The people I sat with thought Fran should have gone for it. With just under 3 minutes to go, the risk was that after a FG, the Sooners would be able to run out the clock...which they did. The argument is that if you make it on 4th down and score the TD, Ags win. If not, OU gets the ball at about the same place they would get it after a FG, and if you hold, there's another chance at the go ahead TD. The counter-argument is that you would still need at TD instead of a FG to win. After the kickoff, the Sooners faced 4th and 1 on their own 29 with 1:29 to play. And they made the first down. Twice, actually...the first time Stoops called a timeout before the snap. The second time OU got it on second effort but didn't need the yard, since the Ags had 12 men on the field. A tough loss in a game that looked winnable. But it was a good game and the Ags have shown tremendous progress from last year. Nebraska and Texas are up next. Elsewhere, several ranked teams won by narrower than expected margins. Upsets:
USC vs. Stanford later today. Stanford is winless, has lost several players to injury, including their starting QB, and now has a problem with Junior linebacker Pat Maynor is the latest casualty and will likely miss tomorrow's matchup against USC. Maynor, who was diagnosed with a staph infection in his leg, is the third Stanford starter to miss time due to such an infection.USC, of course, is coming in angry after dropping a game to Oregon State. The Cardinal's best hope before last week was for USC to be looking past them. To top it off, the university still won't let the Band play a halftime show. That's right. Stanford, at home, playing USC, gets the Trojan band for halftime. Could a winless season be the curse of the LSJUMB?
Trackback spams blocked by month:
There were a small number that snuck through last month in one or two bursts. Fortunately, in Simplog it's very easy to trap and delete these.
Michael Rubin is one of the neocons quoted as having remorse in the recent Vanity Fair piece making the news. Rubin clarifies at the Corner Too many people in Washington treat foreign policy as a game. Many Washington-types who speak about Iraq care not about the US servicemen or about the Iraqis, but rather focus on US electoral politics. I am a Republican, but whether the Republicans or Democrats are in power, Washington's word must mean something. Leadership is about responsibility, not just politics. We cannot go around the world betraying our allies—in this case Iraqis who believed in us or allied with us—just because of short-term political expediency. This is not just about Iraq: If we abandon Iraq, we will not only prove correct all of Usama Bin Laden's rhetoric about the US being a paper tiger, but we will also demonstrate—as James Baker and George H.W. Bush did in 1991—that listening to the White House and alliance with the United States is a fool's decision. We can expect no allies anywhere, be they in Asia, Africa, or Latin America, if we continue to sacrifice principles to short-term realist calculations. It's not enough to have an attention span of two years, when the rest of the world thinks in decades if not centuries.
Jonathan Rauch makes an odd variant of the case for divided government. Back in the 1980s and early 1990s, a lot of people worried that divided control (one party controls the White House, the other all or part of Congress) caused "gridlock." Unified command, these people speculated, would deliver something more like parliamentary government. The president would have political leeway to grasp the nettle of necessary but controversial reforms, and a Congress of the same party would have political leeway to pass them. The hypothesis was plausible on paper. But after four years of Republican rule, it is horse meat.What is odd about this is that the traditional argument for divided government, especially from those with libertarian leanings, is that division is good precisely because it creates gridlock. The less government does, the less it can screw up. What the last 6 years have shown us is that we can get a good approximation of gridlock with single-party dominance as long as a) the dominant party doesn't have enough votes to force cloture in the Senate and b) obstruction is not punished at the polls. Rauch makes a different argument that division is good because it drives politics back to the center, leading to things that he approves of. Politicians compromise because they have to, not because they like to. Divided government forces them to compromise as a fact of daily life. Although compromise does not guarantee sound or successful policy-making, it does draw both parties toward the center and produce bipartisan buy-in. It's no coincidence that divided government produced the 1986 tax reform and the 1996 welfare reform, the great reforms of their respective eras.Not so fast. From 1954-1994, divided government basically meant Republican Presidents and Democratic Congress. From 1994-2000, Clinton had a Republican Congress, and divided government produced not only welfare reform but also a government shutdown and an impeachment. Single-party dominance was the rule when a lot of the major civil rights legislation was passed; divided government during the Nixon administration was a mixed bag at best from the point of view of the conservatives and libertarians who are arguing for divided government. Rauch is correct that divided government is not a guarantee of gridlock, just as single-party control doesn't guarantee its absence. What this means is that those voting for divided government need to think about what specific items a Democratic Congress and the Bush administration are likely to compromise on and where the partisan bitterness will just get worse. If, as seems likely, the Dems take one or both sides of Congress, we will see some of each. From my POV, I'm not seeing a lot of positive outcomes, with the possible exception of some kind of immigration bill with a guest worker program. This is something most of those seeking to punish the GOP for insufficient ideological purity will not be happy about. But it's unlikely that division will lead to progress on entitlement reform, or the war in Iraq, or the war on terror, or campaign or electoral reform. Will it lead to better candidates in 08 and beyond? It seems unlikely to me that either party will read a Dem landslide as a sign that they should nominate better candidates on any of the issues listed above, at least from where I stand. Then again, I'm not sure what positive message would come from the GOP hanging on, either.
My local NPR station in Texas regularly gets some of my pledge money, but it's a pretty pathetic operation. It always struck me as odd that a university-run station would provide virtually no opportunities for actual students to be involved in programming. The most recent example was their decision to censor Anthro Prof. Michael Alvard for trying to interview candidates for the State Board of Education (SBOE). Alvard has resigned and discontinued his show, Peoples and Cultures. My favorite lame excuse they gave him: The station already offer all candidates an opportunity to express their thoughtsHe was already set up to interview both candidates for the position. There were no other candidates for that SBOE slot. I never heard Alvard's program - he took over a slot that used to be covered by a chirpy parenting show, and it looks like he and I probably would have lots of disagreements on all kinds of things political. But KAMU could use more local content that isn't just what's up with the arts council. There are local controversies that don't get enough coverage from any side, as far as I can tell. If you don't like his views, the remedy is more speech, not suppression of speech...especially when he was already giving a platform for both candidates to express their views, and was taking listener calls. Incumbent McLeroy's creationist views are a concern for someone on the SBOE, and Alvard was planning to ask about them. Now KAMU listeners won't get to hear either the questions or the responses. Might have to remind KAMU that a lot of the national NPR programming people pledge for is now available as podcasts.
Ann Althouse: Lowry's bottom line is a warning that the attitude Kerry "seemed to be" expressing really does represent the mainstream of the Democratic Party and that voters shouldn't fall for the moderate Democratic candidates because they are a device to leverage that Party into the majority. But what if you would like to see the Democratic Party renewed? I'd like to see a more moderate Democratic Party that is committed to national security. The only way for that to happen is if these attractive, new candidates win. They may have been put forward as a device to gain majority power, but once there, are they going to let themselves be treated as mere devices? Won't they hold great power from the center? Why wouldn't that work out quite well and hasten the obsolescence of guys like Kerry?If only. Commenter Bruce Hayden adds: I think that there are a lot of former staunch Democrats here in this forum longing to go home, and finding that they can't.In addition to the former Dems who want to go home, there are those who'd like to vote for staying the course (even if W isn't calling it that anymore, that's what it is) without the extra baggage that comes with the Republicans. I grew up in a family of independent first-generation immigrants, but my parents leaned toward HHH Dem liberalism. We were all Keynesians then, after all. I suspect something is going on that is similar to Posner's analysis of what drives polarization in the media. In fact, I suspect that they are linked via the notion that bad publicity is better than being invisible. So, I fear that a Dem takeover will not lead to the revival of the moderate Democrat, no matter how many moderates take over swing districts, as long as the leadership views the election as being a referendum on W's war policy being too steadfast. From my POV, the main problem with the Republicans on Iraq is that they have not been steadfast enough...and that they set themselves up by being too optimistic. Way back when I started blogging, I wrote Democracy would be great, but avoiding/eliminating widespread corruption will be hard. From the selfish US strategic interests, even a friendly semi-authoritarian government with imperfect democratic institutions involved in a 40-year civil war is probably better than the plausible trajectories of decaying containment with Saddam still in power and his sons as heirs apparent.
The NYT reports A substantial majority of Americans expect Democrats to reduce or end American military involvement in Iraq if they win control of Congress next Tuesday, and say Republicans would maintain or increase troop levels to try to win the war if they hold on to power on Capitol Hill, according to the final New York Times/CBS News poll before the midterm election.Despite all the attempts by both parties to frame the election as being about all kinds of other things, it is not surprising that Americans are not distracted from the main question. So...majorities want a change in the government's approach to the war. But in the end, is any change better than the current approach? I think not. Under what circumstances is reducing or ending the involvement in Iraq a good choice? Chemo can be lethal, but there are three scenarios when one withdraws treatment:
There are lots of differences between Iraq and Vietnam but it seems that people are forgetting one of the biggest. Back in the 60s, there was a lot of romanticization of the Viet Cong, and Communism in general. When I was younger, before I met my relatives who lived through the Cultural Revolution, before I met emigres from the former Soviet bloc, and before the boat people and the Cambodian killing fields, a lot of us viewed Viet Nam as US imperialism and Cold War conflict standing in the way of a popular revolution for self-determination, led by an avuncular Ho Chi Min. The way the US conducted the war, from promoting both the ascention of Diem and the coup that led to his death, to the questionable Gulf of Tonkin incident, to not very secret bombing, didn't help with hearts and minds either over there or here at home. In other words, we thought the VC deserved to win. We didn't just think the US couldn't win...we thought the US shouldn't win. Was our thinking colored by our own fears of being drafted and killed? Perhaps. But the sense that death in Vietnam would be for an ignoble cause was also there. Do the opponents of the war in Iraq go that far? By and large, I think not...at least to the extent that this feeling was widespread in the antiwar movement of the 1960s and 1970s. But to me, this makes the bizarre dogs breakfast of Democratic ideas on Iraq even worse. In hindsight, opponents of the Vietnam war were right on some things and very wrong on others. The conflicts among Vietnam, China, and Cambodia showed that international Communism wasn't quite so monolithic. The dominoes didn't fall beyond Cambodia. But the bloodbaths were worse than anyone imagined. We don't have that excuse anymore...what will happen in Iraq if we "redeploy" is not hard to imagine. Via Ann Althouse, Christopher Hitchens writes of ...a responsibility that is either insufficiently stressed or else passed over entirely: What is to become, in the event of a withdrawal, of the many Arab and Kurdish Iraqis who do want to live in a secular and democratic and federal country?
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Went for a walk in the wetlands in Palo Alto this afternoon instead of being a couch potato. The little Canon SD450 does a nice job with landscapes and is not bad for macro shots...but birds are just too much to ask, I guess. There's only so much one can do by cropping out 90% of the image, even at 5 megapixels. I may not be using all of the Canon's available resolution, though, as I don't have it set to take full size photos. I'll have to remember to reset it when I want to try birds or other situations where I want to get a digital zoom beyond the 3X optical.
