Bouncy Bouncy

As a physicist, I can't resist the analytical approach of the work of baseball analyst Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com. Below is a graph of data from his projections from mid July through Thursday, October 30, five days before the vote. Although this might pass as his "prediction" of the outcome, my interest today is in the dynamics of this function. We can all look at the last few days of polling and the final - actual - poll about a week from now.


The curves indicate the projected electoral vote count from his analysis (more on that below the fold) with a few key dates flagged on the graph. The red arrow near the middle is the day Sarah Palin was announced as McCain's VP choice. The green brackets on either side span the Democratic and Republican conventions, respectively, while the green band with red lines indicates when the four debates took place. The VP debate (2nd of the four) is shown with a longer line.

You can clearly see the "bounce" from some of those events, but it seems to be delayed by a week or two. I don't know how much of this is the time it takes to execute a poll, how much is due to the damping factors Nate has in his model, and how much is due to the time it takes human beings to process information.

By the way, the now-infamous Katie Couric interviews started airing on September 24, just a few days before the first Presidential debate, so it really can't be separated from those other events.

What interests me is that large delay between what have been identified so far as 'critical' events and the response of the dynamical system. An engineer would probably say there is a lot of 'lash' in the system. If so, is there really any justification for all of the money spent on insta-polling right after a debate or a convention? Doesn't look like it to me.

The "bounce" that Obama got from his convention started before the convention (all that lead-up talk?) and continued on for at least two weeks, right through the Republican convention and beyond. The short-lived bounce that McCain got from his VP pick and his convention (one week going up and then one week going down) was also delayed by at least one and maybe two weeks. (For reference, the tick marks on my X axis are 14 days apart.)

You can certainly see that the electorate has settled in after the last debate, with only small statistical fluctuations over the last month. Of course, these are people, not a mechanical system, so only time will tell what they will actually do and what changes might occur between now an election day. However, it is also true that a lot of those people have already voted.

Nate Silver's analysis

Read his FAQ for details.

I've been following Nate's work with great interest. His Monte Carlo technique for simulating the results of an election are common in the world of physics, where they are used to simulate physical systems ranging from quark-gluon interactions to atoms in a lattice (such as a silicon chip) to the flow of radiation during the explosion of a nuclear weapon. His maps (see below for a sample) are based on the analysis of individual states, but his overall prediction of the electoral vote count summarized above comes from a simulation. He produces 10,000 "elections" by a Monte Carlo process, picking a possible result for each state based on the odds that it will vote for a particular candidate (as determined by his analysis of all polls in that state, their interaction with national polls, and a projection toward election day). This incorporates the inherent "fuzziness" of the poll numbers, which each come with a substantial sampling uncertainty.

This is a very powerful technique, since it replaces individual interpretation of those uncertainties on a state-by-state basis with the blind sledgehammer of massive statistical sampling. This method has proved extremely effective in experimental physics, particularly experimental high energy physics, for predicting what reactions will look like in a new detector and determining if the needle of a new particle can be found within the haystack of normal events.

The one caveat, of course, is GIGO. Nate is not a pollster, he is an analyst of polls. His results are only as good as the polls themselves, despite his attempts to have his model learn about and account for the individual characteristics of those polls. But how can he (or even a pollster) account for my decision this evening to blow off someone from the U of Iowa polling about my attitudes about the election because I didn't feel like giving them a quarter hour of my time? Must drive them nuts.

Techy detail update:

• Explanation of the trend-line adjustment from 6/28
• Correcting for the "house effect" from 8/25
• Changing the "half life" of a poll from 11/1

My quick guess is that his half life is responsible for some of the 'lash' in the response of his model to the driving force of various campaign effects, but that the rest is due to processing time by the electorate. Even with the trend-line adjustment of a given pollster's data, his model requires some some time to reflect sudden changes in the views of voters. Although this might hide last-minute changes, all of the raw poll data are shown for any given state along with his model's analysis of those data, so you can draw your own conclusions about, say, Pennsylvania.

Finally, for reference, the projected electoral map from Thursday is shown below.


This projection, and all of the data in the graph at the top, comes before his final fine-tuning of the model to include a 2-week half life.

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Bless her Heart

Thanks to The Thomas for this one ...

In amongst a lot of political blather, 'Rachel' writes about her First Chemistry Exam Results. This is quite long, so it all goes below the fold.

Some may say a B is not bad, but it is bad when you should have had an A and the reason you don’t have an A is because you are a pathetic, ridiculous, quantum singularity of a dumbass.

Two of the three questions I missed? Want to know what they were? Do ya? Ready to lose every shred of respect you may possibly have had for me? SIGNIFICANT FIGURES. ....

But like I said, it’s all relative. They say this is a weed-out course and they ain’t kidding. Professor gave us the scoring breakdown, and dude. Kids. Put down the bong and hit the books.

Total number of students: 192.
Average test score: 61.2%.

There were 25 A’s, 31 B’s, 20 C’s, 37 D’s, and 79 F’s.

Observation 1: Sig figs.
If you get the significant figures wrong, the patient dies or the bridge falls down. However, if that is all you get wrong under test conditions, you'll probably get an A once the HW and other exams are all taken into consideration and do just fine in your eventual career.

Observation 2: Grade distribution.
That failure rate is a pretty familiar situation. [I think I've mentioned before that 30 to 40% of my students fail intro physics, mostly for the reasons related to study habits and basic math skills.] Their previous classes, either basic college courses or high school classes, did not require any independent study because they had lots of homework time in class plus extra credit opportunities and a curve. Much of this is due to the fact that HS teachers are simply not allowed to fail more than a few students, if that, so any kid smart enough to go to college has never been at risk of failure in HS. The standards in college are different, however, once you get past the HS courses we teach in college. See my blog about what needs to be said during Orientation.

Observation 3: Political intro.
Rachel carries on at length wondering, among other things, why David Letterman thought that a badly run campaign might be warning us of a badly run government: "is he actually comparing a campaign to the presidency?" Sure. A campaign is a lot easier than the Presidency. If your management skills can't handle that part (and managing their respective campaigns is the only major management experience either McCain or Obama have had), it is sort of like not being able to handle intro chemistry when you want to be a Physician. Weed them out, sooner rather than later. If Snowflake (see below) can only resort to attacking the other kids (say by spoiling their lab experiments, as sometimes happens) rather than improving her own performance, we really don't want her as our doctor. Or President.

More recently, 'Rachel' writes about the Second Chemistry Exam Results

That’s not a typo. MORE THAN HALF THE STUDENTS FAILED THE TEST. And yet a score of 88 is not an A. Boo!

I understand the concept of a weed-out course, I really do. I understand that if you curve it, people will stay in who maybe shouldn’t stay in. I get it. But for the pity of St. Pete! I still am annoyed! Mostly at self but whatever.

I still have an A in the course overall because each test is only 10% of the total grade, and I’m averaging high 90’s in homework and lab. So I’m kinda making chem my bitch. She’s coy, though. Elusive yet attainable.

But these kids in my class, good Lord, these kids. I pity whoever is paying their tuition. In lab Friday, they were all discussing the test scores. None of them got higher than a 70 on the test. One girl said she got a 49, and she was all kinds of distressed. I shit you not, here is an actual quote from this girl, which she said with a truly flabbergasted look on her face:

“I don’t understand it! I studied for four hours!!!! God, what does it take to get a passing grade?”

Oh, honey. You adorable little snowflake, try four solid days, 8 hours each. This isn’t high school, in case you haven’t noticed. I bet your Daddy noticed when he paid your tuition bill, and I bet he’ll be very excited when he sees your grades. What a sound investment you are.

Observation 0:
I also quickly learned that whenever I was annoyed at a particular class or instructor, I was really annoyed at myself.

Observation 1: Weed out course.
If you curve it, people will stay in who will end up standing over you in the Emergency Room wearing a name tag that says "MD" on it that only know half of what a doctor is supposed to know. Or you will end up driving over a bridge that was designed by someone who needed extra credit or curved grades to become an engineer. (Since the failure of the I-35 bridge in Minnesota was due to a design error, this last possibility might hit closer to home for some people.)

Observation 2: Studying for a week.
The correct approach is neither cramming for four hours [?!?!] the night before the test or 32 hours over a week, it is to study regularly and diligently for 1 to 2 hours every night, including weekends, every week for that 3 credit class. The key is retention of this prerequisite material, both for the long term (years) and so that you don't have to cram for three weeks for the final exam because you forgot everything from exam 1 and exam 2 in the meantime.

Observation 3: Lots more politics.
But then Rachel tries to assign motives to these rich kids who don't have to work their way through school, or even work to pay for their car or phone, as if the majority of parents/voters from wealthy suburbs are all liberal Democrats - and misquoting Sen. Obama along the way.

I told her I’m the youngest of four and my parents started with nothing themselves and that I never expected them to pay for my education or anything else once I turned 18, and she gazed at me like I was speaking Chinese.

What the hell? Have 18-year-olds these days never heard of “a job”? Or of “taking night classes for 10 years”? Or of “going into assloads of debt because no one’s holding your hand but it’s worth it because then you are the boss of your own self which is pretty awesome”?

Gah. Honestly, it just boggles my mind, how much people take it for granted that someone else is going to take care of the hard stuff for you, not to mention why you’d want them to. I’ve been on my own since the day I graduated from high school and frankly, this is the main reason I get so magnificently resentful of shit like what Obama said about “spreading the wealth”, and about how so many liberals think that anyone who’s against spreading the wealth is just a greedy fucker who wants to hold on to the things he or she was “given”.

First, Obama was talking about cutting your taxes, Rachel, so you would have more money to spend (spread around) on things like your education. You should read what he actually said, which is quite different from what various prevaricators and spin-meisters have implied that he said. [You can read it at the bottom of this article.] Less in taxes from working families means more money in the consumption part of the economy, so more money that can flow into the hands of self-employed small business owners like yourself. The argument is not about whether there should be a tax cut, it is about whether the tax cut should go to millionaires or to the middle class. The argument is not about whether government should redistribute wealth, it is about whether it should transfer it from poor to rich (as has been the case recently) or from rich to poor - or from future taxpayers to today's taxpayers. It is about whether "supporting the troops" means buying a yellow magnetic ribbon while borrowing money from your grandkids, or paying taxes to pay for their well-earned benefits.

Second, the entitlement mentality you write about is, in my experience, most common among wealthy students from the (mostly) Republican suburbs. They are the ones who talk about supporting our troops but scream if someone asks them to pay even one more dollar in taxes to actually support those troops, and then call it Socialism when you "give" those veterans a bigger GI Bill package to "spread the wealth". I never see it among the working class students at my CC. They are too busy working and studying to get ahead to whine like Ms. Snowflake. Too much to even figure out if FICA plus income plus sales plus property taxes adds up to a larger fraction of their income than it does for Donald Trump.

You see a very different picture at a community college, with a mix of suburbanites and working students and returning students, than at a university where they teach chemistry to 200 students at a time. It might seem odd, but the guy who works a full time job before coming to my class is always wide awake, prepared, and fully engaged. The guy who can't quite get out of bed for a class at noon, coming in a half-hour late and sometimes falling asleep in his afternoon class, isn't working nights. No, he lives at home in Exclusive Suburb and doesn't have a job.

Finally, read what Obama actually said rather than the sentence fragment that made it into the news:

The correct, complete quotation from Obama regarding "share the wealth" is

"But what’s happened is that we end up – we’ve cut taxes a lot for folks like me who make a lot more than 250. We haven’t given a break to folks who make less, and as a consequence, the average wage and income for ordinary folks, the vast majority of Americans, has actually gone down over the last eight years. .... I just want you to be clear – it’s not that I want to punish your success – I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind you – that they’ve got a chance at success too.”

... snippage ...

“And I do believe for folks like me who have worked hard, but frankly also been lucky, I don’t mind paying just a little bit more than the waitress that I just met over there who’s things are slow and she can barely make the rent."

Obama said, "My attitude is that if the economy’s good for folks from the bottom up, it’s gonna be good for everybody. If you’ve got a plumbing business, you’re gonna be better off if you’re gonna be better off if you’ve got a whole bunch of customers who can afford to hire you, and right now everybody’s so pinched that business is bad for everybody and I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody."

Emphasis added. Notice that he is saying that giving an N billion dollar tax cut to 5% of Americans is unlikely to generate as much business for someone like Joe the Unlicensed Plumber as giving that N billion dollar tax cut to 95% of Americans. More money for small business owners rather than more money for a few CEOs.

Anyone who thinks the few persons whose business profit (not revenue, not the value of the business, profit) exceeds a quarter million dollars a year are fellow members of the working class is getting conned, big time.

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Holiday Catalogs!

Monday, Oct 21, marked the arrival of the first Holiday Catalog of the season ... that I noticed.

Today, three more arrived. I sense a trend.

Remember last year?

Should I repeat the exercise this year?

I'm worried that I missed some earlier this fall, messing up the data collection process, but it could be that they held off because of (a) the massive election mailings or (b) the economy or (c) I did not notice the first ones because of the massive election mailings.

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But the Answer was Right!

The cry of the Lucky Equation Grabber.

Not a relevant issue when the solution was wrong.

I grade the solution, not the answer.

This is a physics class, not a lucky guess class.

You can imagine the wailing and gnashing of teeth, but (as I wrote in the comments in a related thread over at Becky Hirta's) if you wanted to take the class from someone who doesn't care if you learn the physics, you went to the wrong place.

You need to be over at Wannabe Flagship where they give multiple choice tests and let kids use a crib sheet for F=ma and the other 100 equations you can derive from it, one for each possible problem on the exam.

They also don't notice that two algebra errors resulting in a correct answer equals two errors, not zero errors. I do.

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Paying for College - An Anecdote

Dr. Crazy wrote a fantastic article Friday on Paying for College. Her comments on a NYTimes article about some poor family struggling to put two kids through private schools after losing a big part of their 100 k$ income. [At least that is what the article implied; it could be that was their post-layoff income.] I'm sure it is a strain on them, but if their two kids actually got a quarter million dollar's worth of education, I'm sure they will pay those extra loans off in no time. Maybe.

But I don't think any of my students would be particularly sympathetic to someone who chooses to pay $32,000 and $29,500, respectively, for each year of college. One, in particular, probably finds these folks to be whiny elitists. Compare the following:

One child is attending a college with only 1000 students, total. Fewer than lived in one dorm where I went to college and got a degree of outstanding qualtiy. Fewer than we admit each year as FTIC freshman college students at Ishkabibble CC. Yet, despite the serious financial load, the article made no mention at all of the kids helping out by working.

Another child is attending my CC. He has a problem, too. He is assigned to me for advising for next semester (his second in college, a critical point in his education) and contacted me about an appointment. I proposed one convenient slot, in the hour before one of his classes meets, but he can't make that one because he works from 6 AM to 2 PM every day, getting off work just before heading to his afternoon class. Yeah, that makes it pretty tight. Fortunately, there is one day when we can get together between his afternoon classes and his evening classes.

I hope the first kid appreciates what he is getting. The second one can only take 9 hours of a classes because of his work schedule, so he doesn't even qualify as a full-time student for financial aid (or as one of our FTIC statistics.)

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Clue for sale

So I teach two main classes: first semester physics and second semester physics. Rather obviously, passing first semester is required before you can take the second semester. Right?

Early registration is starting for the spring semester, and the second semester classes are filling up. So what do I see?

Several students who have registered for the second semester who have yet to pass (even with a D) an exam in the first semester course.

Hello?

Your wonderful optimism is messing with our planning process.

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Quantum Crypto

Nice little article from the BBC today about a practical realization of quantum cryptography.

• Read it here

I particularly liked the line where they conclude that maybe God does play dice!

I don't have the time to write much more, but I will add one thing. Over many years, the most amazing thing about quantum mechanics has been the way it has passed experimental tests of the most arcane predictions. I say that not only because these tests confirm some rather odd physics, but because simply doing them at all has taken truly outstanding skill on the part of experimental physicists.

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10/09/08 07:06:05.04030201

OK, it only works with an American calendar system, but all sorts of fools push numerology of some sort based on some strange premise.

So at a few minutes after 7, when this is scheduled to appear, we'll have a countdown date and time.

Let's just hope the markets don't crash - again - at that moment.

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Take Off Our Shoes - For the Economy!

During tonight's broadcast of "Countdown", Keith Olberman made the following statement during a discussion with Chris Kofinis (at about 2:21 into the 5:43 clip on the MSNBC web site concerning the second half of #5 in the countdown):

Well it's also, it's what do these two things [suspending his campaign and dealing with the economy, when it was as much a crisis last week as this week] have to do with each other. If he'd said "Well, look, to avert any further crisis we need to all take our shoes off" it would have made as much sense as "we're going to postpone a debate"
[my approximate rendering, not an official transcript]

Did you get it? I did.
"Shoes for Industry!" Firesign Theater, circa 1970.

The idea (originally from "Don't Crush that Dwarf, Hand me the Pliers" if I recall correctly, although I'd have to dig out some vinyl to know for sure) is that the only way to improve the economy in the bizarre post-war world inhabited by George Leroy Tirebiter is to take off your shoes and turn them in to the government ... thereby creating jobs to replace those shoes.

Shoes for Industry! Shoes for the Dead! Shoes for Industry!

Hi, I'm Joe Beets.

What chance does a returning deceased war veteran have for that good paying job, more sugar, and the free mule you've been dreaming of? Well, think it over. Then take off your shoes.

(pause)

Now you can see how increased spending opportunities means harder work for everyone, and more of it too. So do your part, Joe. Join with millions of your neighbors and turn in your shoes. For Industry!

This is heard as a radio or TV ad in the background of the story, but is frequently referenced elsewhere -- like when the student at More Science High complains that he would really rather take off his shoes, sit in a tree, and learn to play the flute.

My favorite line from that album concerned Commie Martyrs High School where "there are no classes in our society, or in our school".

"Shoes for Industry" is available on the album "Shoes for Industry!" as track 12 on disc 1.

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Yankee Stadium

Today is the last game at Yankee Stadium. Only time will tell if abandoning that hallowed ground will mean hard times for the NY Yankees. Many of us can but hope that it will! (Has Notre Dame struggled in football because they remodeled their stadium? Only Touchdown Jesus knows that for sure.) Where I grew up, there were two kinds of people: fans of the Detroit Tigers or one of the teams in Chicago, or jerks who were fans of the Yankees just because they won a lot of games.

But this is a time for nostalgia, so here is my contribution. I've never been in the place, but back in the early summer of 1967, on a circuitous return home from Expo 67 in Montreal, my Dad made a point to navigate past various landmarks in NYC. That included driving around Yankee Stadium.

From the outside it was more impressive than Tiger Stadium (originally knows as Briggs Stadium), which looked more like a run-down factory. Yankee Stadium at least looked like an out-of-date office building, if your office building had a giant black sign around the top. Since plenty of NYC buildings did have an ostentatious sign on them (as did the GM building in Detroit), it fit right in.

My other Yankees memory is of going to Detroit for a ball game sometime in the early 60s to see the Tigers play the hated Yankees. To a kid, that shutout loss (1-0? 2-0?) was a boring nightmare. I think I would have appreciated watching masterful pitching (I think it was Whitey Ford on the mound) a bit more if my present-self could have talked to my then-self.

The key bit of trivia during the broadcast of tonight's game (not to mention the all-day pre-game show on ESPN) has been the price of tickets back in 1923 when the stadium opened. I used the info on Robert Sahr's inflation info site to do the conversion: It is a factor of about 12.5.

So that $1.10 paid for a grandstand seat in 1923 should be about $14 today, which is just enough to get into the bleachers at today's prices. You have to more than double that to get into the nosebleed section of the upper grandstand, and fork over about ten times that to get into the "mid priced" grandstand seats.

And that 15 cent program would be $2 in today's money. What a joke! But then I'll bet it wasn't a glossy color production either.

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Arrrrr

Pirated around the office today ...



Gotta love the cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse, conic sections, and his skills in calculus (both differential and integral), but if you need something more sublimely ridiculous:




Nothing quite takes the edge off of Annoying Administrative Actions like the Llama Song.

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Parsing Politics

Yesterday's speech (you can find the text here, as well as many other places) by Gov. Palin contained lots of errors (such as the lie that Obama's 5% tax cut for working families was actually a tax increase rather than almost twice as big as the cut promised by McCain) that were so glaring they were identified in an AP story almost as soon as the speech was given.

But I want to single out something that said more by what was omitted than by what was said - and it goes to the heart of the "Rob America First" energy policy that McCain is promoting. Palin said

We need American energy resources, brought to you by American ingenuity, and produced by American workers.

Notice that she didn't say "American companies" anywhere in there? No? That is because significant amounts of off-shore and Alaskan oil is produced (and thus owned and sold) by foreign companies such as British Petroleum, Royal Dutch Shell, and Statoil (Norway). We might "need" those resources, but those foreign companies will sell our resources to the highest bidder.

The McCain campaign wanted you to think that she was putting America First, but she is really advocating giving away our grandchildren's oil at today's low prices for the short term profit of her state and oil speculators. You can learn a lot if you listen and read carefully.

Here is another example from today's news.

As reported today on CNBC, my home for investment news:

Axelrod told reporters aboard Obama's campaign plane that the Republican National Convention speakers had distorted the Democratic candidate's record and ignored his resume. He also suggested that John McCain's running mate was only parroting what she'd been told.

"There wasn't one thing that she said about Obama or what he's proposing that is true," Axelrod said.

"She tried to attack Sen. Obama by saying he had no significant legislative achievements. Maybe that's what she was told."

That statement drew strong reaction from McCain's headquarters.

"For the Obama campaign to suggest that she is simply being told what to do is offensive and takes our country backward," communications director Jill Hazelbaker said.

So Jill is implying to us that Palin knowingly made false statements about Obama's legislative achievements, one of which was an extremely significant bill to limit the spread of nuclear weapons that he pushed through in a bipartisan effort with Indiana Senator Richard Lugar? Knowingly making false statements is what is known as LYING, so did McCain's spokesman decide that it was better to have Palin be known as a liar than as a parrot? Not really. Jill didn't actually say that Palin was not being told what to do, she only said that suggesting it is offensive to her as the communications director.

Yeah, it was a strong "reaction", but don't ever confuse a "reaction" with a "denial". Since the McCain campaign did not actually DENY that Palin was told what to say (which would be odd given all of the stories yesterday about how she was being coached and prepared for the speech), we can take this non-denial as proof that Palin was told what to say and someone else (maybe the communications director?) was responsible for those lies.

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Thoughts on the Palin Speeches

The Highlight:
As they all gathered on stage after the speech, particularly an uncomfortable looking Levi and his preggers GF, all I could think was "biggest shotgun wedding ever". Man that guy looked like a moose caught in headlights. A million tabloid dollars for his thoughts! (And that might be his best job opportunity right now.)

The other highlight was reminding us of Harry Truman. Truman was VP for less than three months before the President died and put him the position of negotiating the partition of Europe, where many still argue that he gave away 1/4 of Germany by splitting it in half rather than quarters. But, oddly enough, she forgot to mention that the "haberdasher from Missouri" had been a US Senator from Missouri for a decade before he became VP. That national experience was crucial when he had to step onto the world stage without even knowing the US had an atomic bomb that was almost ready to be used. Even with all that, Sarah Palin is no Harry Truman. She didn't even have a passport until last year? Sheesh.

But I really liked how she spent more than 10 minutes talking about her family and only a few minutes lying about Obama's strong position in favor of going after Al Qaeda rather than fighting someone else's civil war as McCain preferred to do while bin Laden rebuilt his organization, and a few more lying about his tax plan and tap dancing around McCain's massive deficit plan. Others spent much more time lying about the Democratic ticket, so that was a plus. Otherwise, it was strong on insult and weak on specifics. It seemed like her only comment on foreign policy was that we should "Drill Baby Drill" so it would not matter if Russia captured the pipeline in Georgia.

Russia: We're going to invade the Ukraine.
Palin: We'll drill for oil off of Florida. Fixed you!

But the highlight was talking about bring back small government. Based on her huge goverment in Alaska? And not raising taxes? Gov. Palin pushed through a HUGE TAX INCREASE on oil that all of us are paying at the gas pump. That windfall is why her state has a budget surplus, not vetoes or good management.

You see, I have a good ear for numbers and order of magnitude. Last night I heard something about her executive experience that just did not make sense for a state with less than 700,000 residents. Their budget is what? They have how many state employees? The state budget of the state of Alaska totals more than $16,000 per person. The US budget is almost half that, only about $9100 per person, and that is while supporting an army fighting a war in Iraq! Even the most bloated "elite eastern government" like the one Rudy Guiliani ran is a fraction of that. Delaware? Delaware has 25% more people than Alaska, but only 30% of its budget. Delaware spends less than $4000 per person, less than a quarter of the gargantuan, bloated budget Palin brags is "limited".

How can the residents of Alaska afford the taxes to pay for all of that government? They don't have to. We pay the taxes down in the lower 48, and Alaskans each get $1500 of it, in cash, to spend as they wish.

Once the media get past the hypocrisy of family values that saw John McCain "forget" about his adopted child when posing for a family portrait on the People magazine cover and Lieberman tap dancing as fast as he can to avoid answering a question about Palin being ready to deal with Russia on Day One, maybe they will get to pocketbook issues like Palin raising the price of our gasoline to pay for the bloated budget in Alaska - and then pretending Alaskans had to sacrifice to pay for the Bridge to Nowhere themselves.

Finally, I'm sure everyone noticed that one of the speakers broke the rule about attacking family members with a snide attack on Michelle Obama's patriotism. So much for that promise of civility from the McCain campaign.

PS -
If you want to see Republicans hoisting themselves on their own petards, be sure to see a rerun of tonight's (Wednesday 9/3) Daily Show. Most. Brilliant. Use. Of. Clips. Ever.

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Storm Surge

UPDATE (9/9/2008):
There is an awesome (silent) video from the BBC showing the storm surge as Ike made landfall in Cuba. It is one thing to read about it, quite another to see the spray from a breaking wave rising above a 5-story apartment building and a half meter ? high wave running down a street and smashing into a house. Also see picture number 6 on this photo page.

The live news coverage of Hurricane Gustav has included video from an NBC affiliate showing waves breaking over a levee on the Industrial Canal, an area where there were failures during Katrina. The MSNBC web site has a Reuters photo showing the area in a viewer that makes a link rather useless, but the BBC has an AP photo showing this area:

• Waves breaking over the flood wall

This is a great picture because it illustrates one of the main improvements made after Katrina. (It also shows that the surge is at treetop level in the canal.)

Analysis of the failures after Katrina by the American Society of Civil Engineers and the US Corps of Engineers showed that many levees failed even though the water level from the storm surge was below the top of the levee. Why?

The surge itself is not much more than a steady rise in the water level, although it can be as rapid as a flash flood on a river. This would be a static equilibrium problem familiar to any student of physics and calculus. [The force on the wall is found by multiplying the water pressure times the area of the wall. Since the water pressure increases with depth, you need to do an integral to add up the forces on the wall that try to push it sideways, or the torque that tries to rotate it about its base.] At least one wall failed during Katrina because its foundation was not strong enough to withstand those static loads even when the water was a foot or so below the top (as it is in this picture).

However, there are also dynamics at work here. The wind produces waves that pound on the wall and break over it. Water landing on the back side of the wall can erode the dirt holding the wall in place. Weaken that foundation, which resists the loads on the wall, and it can slide sideways or tip over, or both. Notice that the wall in this picture has a concrete footing, like a sidewalk, where the water will land if/when waves (or even the storm surge itself) go over the top of the wall. This dissipates the energy of the falling water, which can then run gently off down the sodded levee below rather than erode the base of the wall.

Imagine the difference between running a hose full blast on a sidewalk and running it on your garden or lawn for a day or two. The sidewalk will still be there, the garden will not. Now imagine it was a fire hose rather than a garden hose, and you will see the problem when Katrina drove 6 foot waves over a levee while the storm surge itself was still below the top of the levee.

PS -
Another picture from that same set shows the other side of a Weather Channel standup out in the storm. The secret to getting a steady shot of the reported being buffeted by the wind is to have a small camera man being held by what looks like a retired offensive lineman. I guess if you can bench press 400 pounds, you can hold onto anything in any wind!

Historical Context

Although this NOAA picture is not as clear as the news photo, this photo of a breach of a flood wall due to Katrina shows only grass, rather than a concrete roadway, on the back side of the wall. However, this wall was an outright engineering design failure of the foundation, not a result of overtopping. In the bottom half of the picture, you can still see the levee and floodwall that was pushed, intact, about 30 feet sideways into the Lakeview neighborhood by the water pressure. Metairie (on the left) was dry because water levels never reached the top of the wall.

I thought I should also point out that this famous picture does not show water pouring into the city as was frequently stated in the news. Anyone paying attention will notice that it shows water flowing back out of the city, into the canal! Water was flowing OUT of the flooded areas during the time they were desperately trying to close the breech in the levee with helicopters dropping giant sand bags, not in.

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The Palin Spin

What an inspired choice! As we discussed at work today, Gov. Palin has lots of experience dealing with junior hockey referees as a Hockey Mom, which is perfect preparation for dealing with Putin. Even better, I now learn that she has never thought much about Iran or Iraq (despite the impending deployment of her son), so she can look at it with fresh eyes right after getting brainwashed by Cheney's team.

But that's not why I'm blogging. I'm blogging because Dan Barlett, now paid by CBS to act as a mouthpiece for George Bush and the Republican party, said tonight that Sen. Biden will have to be careful to not be too tough on Gov. Palin in the VP debate because she is a woman.

Apart from being positively insulting to women in general, does Bartlett think that Putin would "play nice" just because our President was a former beauty queen, should she have to take over in January if something happened to McCain's health due to the stress of the coming campaign?

She has a ways to go to prove that she is anything more than an older Paris Hilton with a good campaign slogan, a big hairdo, and an assault rifle. She is certainly no Golda Meir (who was active in national government for decades before becoming Prime Minister) or Margaret Thatcher (ditto), and I can already hear Sen Biden saying "I know Hillary Clinton, and you are no Hillary Clinton".

It was also clear that Bartlett was already concerned about her limited knowledge of world affairs in the way he compared, unfavorably, preparing her for the VP debate to preparing then Gov Bush for his Presidential debates in 2000.

McCain looks as desperate now as Mondale did in 1984.

Notes Added:

Apparently the way she cut taxes on Alaskan citizens was to increase the price of oil to the rest of us by raising the oil extraction tax collected by Alaska. According to this article, Gov Palin's plan transferred SIX BILLION DOLLARS from our gas tanks to Alaskan citizens in just the past year.

Unlike Obama or McCain, she took a publicity photographer along with her when she visited wounded troops overseas: see this photo from the Wiki commons obtained from the state department of military affairs while it is still there.

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What a bunch of whiners

Isn't politics about who is more popular in an election?

Isn't it about being able to excite people and get them to come to a rally and vote for you?

So why is it a bad thing when your ideas can convince 75,000 people to cross the country on their own to attend a political rally, as the Republican "somebody says" folks feeding talking points to the media claim?

Oh, I know why. It's a bad thing because your own candidate can't do it.

The Republican Party is whining about Obama drawing a big crowd because their own candidate can't do it. In fact, lots of party members and elected officials are doing all they can to stay away from him.

And they are muttering about him being a "celebrity" because that is the closest they can get to calling him what is in their Nixon and Karl Rove infested minds: an Uppity N*****. Why do I say this? Because the Republicans thought celebrity was just fine when they picked Ronald Reagan to run for office. And because John Sidney McCain III came home as a huge celebrity (I remember his return from an NV POW camp) and that celebrity status played a huge role in all of his campaigns. Even today he exploits it, playing the POW card whenever he gets in trouble. If being a celebrity actually disqualified you for public office in the Republican Party, they would never have nominated Ronald Reagan and would have dumped McCain back when he became well known as one of the Keating Five - who worked for the fat-cat bankers against the interests of their working-class depositors.

So when they complain about how many people showed up, on their own, for Obama's speech, they are just admitting that he is a great political leader and that they can't even come close to getting that many people to listen to McCain - even when they pay their expenses to go to their own convention.

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Happy Birthday, Bro!

Had a wonderful time celebrating your 55th birthday today.

Sang "Happy Birthday" at about 9:30 and had a fantastic chocolate cake with chocolate frosting - not to mention infused with raspberry liqueur - as part of the long distance celebration. Yummy.

You see, a coworker (and namesake!) shares the same birth date, and we try to do it with style in our part of the building. That goes double when that date falls during the insane, mind-numbing first week of classes, as it does this year.

Oh, and we hope you were amused by the gift and its wrapping. Mrs. Pion was really on the ball when she spotted it at one of many absurdly eclectic shops in town. The wrapping was my idea, but I'm sure you figured that out.

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If I was writing the speech ...

I would have Hillary hold up a coat hanger and ask the PUMAs out in the audience "Is this what you want?"

McCain could not have made it clearer that his vision of the future is a return to illegal and unsafe back-alley abortions, simply to punish young women for their sin. As if he has the right to cast the first stone.

But it is actually worse. If he got his way and made every fetus a protected human life from the moment of conception, every woman who had a miscarriage would be guilty of involuntary manslaughter and those who smoked or drank might be considered guilty of voluntary manslaughter or third degree murder.

With that focus, maybe the PUMAs would no longer be tossed softballs by interviewers when they pretend that a true Hillary Clinton supporter would celebrate a McCain victory. My conclusion is that every last one of them must be a racist.

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Ready to Rock!

So the cycle begins again!

One sign is the release of Beloit College's list of the mindset of the class of 2012, as I was reminded in a recent IHE article that picked off their favorites.

Mine was:
20. The Warsaw Pact is as hazy for them as the League of Nations was for their parents.
because they might get drafted to fight there against Russia.

But the real sign is that I have a tall stack of syllabi ready and other materials ready for Monday, the last pre-semester meeting is over, my adjunct is all set to do a great job this fall, and my only remaining task is to verify rosters one last time before Monday.

Oh, yes, and finish cleaning my office.

I started cleaning my office, so it now looks like someone's front yard when Clean Sweep comes to visit, but never got past stage 1.

But it looks like the semester will be fun. The economy has brought me some really good students (entering physics as a freshman with AP calculus) along with some promising older students, even if one of them last took calculus before the first one was born. Time to get the game face on and remember Jumpin' Jack Flash. I've already put the Basics idea to work, not only in my classes but as a meme for some others. It has been well received, so thanks to everyone who provided feedback on that subject. And I see some academic-politics storm clouds on the horizon. No great year can lack those.

On a closing note, my second fave from Beloit was

34. Pee-Wee has never been in his playhouse during the day.

The one about the Hubble Space Telescope would have been up there if Astroprof hadn't already reminded us that the Hubble has been up there for 18 years and has now completed more than 100,000 orbits

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First Adjunct Job

This is the rather belated completion of a belated posting following up the comments I posted on Dean Dad's blog addressing questions from a poster looking for a first job as an adjunct. (You should also look at the comments on the IHE version.)

I pointed the poster to my "jobs" articles, but I thought I should pull out the ones that I think are of greatest relevance.

1. Part 3, on types of jobs.

You may think you know what academia is all about, but most students (such as the person wrapping up a PhD at Big Name University) have only seen a tiny (and rather elite) slice of it. The starting point is to have a vague idea of the differences between where you went to school and the 4-year or 2-year schools you want to work at.

2. Part 5, on getting a CC job

One of the themes in my article that also showed up in the discussion in Dean Dad's blog is the importance of teaching experience. It's great that this person is thinking about how to get an adjunct job a year before seeking it, but I think that person should get at least a single good class worth of experience before leaving Big Name U to head west for a job.

I mean, the only thing you might need to do to get an adjunct job is call or drop by the relevant department office this week. Seriously. I think we just covered one of the sections for majors a day ago, and I am sure there are still some classes being taught by Professor Staff or Ms TBA. We don't quite go beating the bushes near the homeless shelter (that disheveled teacher in surfer shorts is a fulltimer), but that is a common snarky suggestion directed at the Dean at this time of year.

That said, the time to get your name in the hopper is when the full-time sections are set and the adjuncts are getting lined up. This could be anywhere from late spring to early summer depending on how well managed the college is.

3. An article about my CC students

I'll repeat that my students may not be typical. We are a largish CC that feeds a large university with the sort of programs (such as engineering) that attract a significant number of students to us who need to take calc-based physics or organic chemistry. But our students are different, in aggregate, from the ones who start as freshmen at Wannabe Flagship. The key point is that there are really good reasons for the interview questions about reaching "different types of learners", and that you will be more successful if you know something about the student body of the school you want to work at. More successful at getting the job, but also more successful in the job.

If you want to know more about the CC environment, there promises to be a lot of interesting information in a special report from the National Center for Education Statistics about community colleges. (I have not had time to read it yet, but the Feds collect every bit of statistical data you can imagine.)

Those, and the links in "Part 5" to the resources at the Chronicle and IHE as well as other blogs, should get you started.

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