Non-athletic stuff: August 8, 2008

Man makes threat on Obama. The Wall Street Journal reports

A Florida man is being held without bond, accused of threatening to shoot Sen. Barack Obama if the Democrat from Illinois wins the presidential election.

David Weinstein, speaking for the U.S. attorney’s office in Miami, said prosecutors thought the case was serious enough to take forward. It is the first such publicly announced arrest for threats against Sen. Obama.

According to the affidavit made to support the complaint, Raymond Hunter Geisel, 22 years old, made the threats against Sen. Obama while attending a bail-bondsman training class in Miami that ran July 21 through Aug. 1.

According to Secret Service Special Agent Paul Adie, a fellow student in the class said she heard Mr. Geisel say of Sen. Obama “that n-, if he gets elected, I’ll assassinate him myself.”

A second student interviewed told the agent that she heard Mr. Geisel say he hated George W. Bush and that he wanted to put a bullet in the president’s head.

This clown sounds a lot like many White Supremacists: of course they hate racial minorities but they, by and large, don’t like Bush and are anti-Iraq war.

One moral is to NOT blindly ally yourself with someone or a group just because you agree on a couple of issues.

More election stuff. I had commented on the Tennessee 9′th Congressional district Democratic primary. Cohen (the incumbent) won easily; the ugly campaigner got blown out by 60 points. Yes, the incumbent is white and the challenger is African American and the district is 60 percent African American. I was troubled that so many didn’t seem to put much confidence in the voters, yet they had no trouble at all in seeing through the negative smoke screens.

Hey Redstate.com: sorry it didn’t work out for you! Maybe this is why that race didn’t get national coverage; the media realized that this race was never close to begin with.

Not that those morons (at Redstate) learned anything from this. Look at the stuff that they are selling.

If they keep this up they will drive away every intelligent person that is left there.

Presidential Race McCain is green with envy over the attention that Obama is getting.

Now John McCain is pea-green with envy. That’s the only explanation for why a man who prides himself on honor, a man who vowed not to take the low road in the campaign, having been mugged by W. and Rove in South Carolina in 2000, is engaging in a festival of juvenilia.

The Arizona senator who built his reputation on being a brave proponent of big solutions is running a schoolyard campaign about tire gauges and Paris Hilton, childishly accusing his opponent of being too serious, too popular and not patriotic enough.

Even his own mother, the magical 96-year-old Roberta McCain, let slip that she thought the Paris Hilton-Britney Spears ad was “kinda stupid.”

McCain’s 2000 strategist, John Weaver, was equally blunt with Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter: “It’s hard to imagine America responding to ‘small ball’ when we have all these problems.”

Some of McCain’s old pals in the Senate are cringing at what they see as his soulless transformation into what he once scorned.

“John’s eaten up with envy,” said one. “His image of himself was always the handsome, celebrity flyboy.

“Now somebody else is the celebrity,” the colleague continued, while John looks in the mirror and sees his face marred by skin cancer and looks at the TV and sees his dashing self-image replaced by visions of William Frawley, with Letterman jokes about his membership in the ham radio club and adventures with wagon trains.

For McCain, being cool meant being a rogue, not a policy wonk; but Obama manages to be a cool College Bowl type, which must irk McCain, who liked to play up his bad-boy cool. Now the guy in the back of the class is shooting spitballs at the class pet and is coming off as more juvenile than daring.

[...]

McCain could dismiss W. as a lightweight, but he knows Obama’s smart. Obama wrote his own books, while McCain’s were written by Salter. McCain knows he’s the affirmative action scion of admirals who might not have gotten through Annapolis without being a legacy. Obama didn’t even tell Harvard Law School that he was black on his application.

McCain upbraids Obama for being a poppet, while he’s becoming a puppet. His mouth is moving but the words coming out belong to his new hard-boiled strategist, Steve Schmidt, a Rove protégé, nicknamed “The Bullet” for his bald pate.

OUCH!!!!!!!

Mathematics: Good Math/Bad Math is starting a series on the mathematics of codes and ciphers. The first installment is elementary, but these should be very, very interesting, especially if you are at all acquainted with group theory (or at least know what a permutation group is).

Introduction to Simplexity: how small events can lead to huge changes down the road.

The way small causes yield huge effects is itself only one piece of the much grander idea of simplexity, a science that is increasingly being studied at universities and institutes around the world, but nowhere more intensely than at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. The institute was created in 1984 with Murray Gell-Mann — the winner of the 1969 Nobel Prize in physics — as its founding director. It’s grown into a multidisciplinary think tank where dozens of researchers from fields as diverse as economics, chemistry, physics, sociology and neuroscience study the simple rules that undergird pretty much everything.

It’s there that investigators are discovering how individual investors in a millions-strong stock market mirror the behavior of individual particles in an atomic collider, allowing software designers to write better programs that can help us understand both. It’s there that scientists are exploring how cars on a highway or people fleeing a burning building mimic the motion of flowing water, and seeing if that can lead to safer roads or more evacuation-friendly office towers.

No single unified rule governs all complex or simple systems, but there are a few big ones. There’s the concept of phase changes: In the same way that water flips its state from liquid to vapor at 212 degrees Fahrenheit, so too does a stressed geological fault flip from quiescence to quake when it shifts one centimeter too far, or a crowd explodes into a riot when a single bottle is thrown. There’s the concept of relaxation pathways, which models the way rivulets become rivers simply by flowing downhill, or how oceans give up their excess heat by blasting it into the sky as fuel for a hurricane. Understand these simple concepts and you understand the foundations of the larger sciences.

The most powerful of the simplexity concepts, however, is choke points — the keyholes in complex systems that can sometimes shut them down entirely. The London cholera epidemic of 1854, which could have claimed thousands of lives, was stopped cold when physician John Snow traced the contagion to a single contaminated water pump on Broad Street. The complex epidemic collided with the simple fix of shutting down the pump, and the simple fix won.

The streets of New York City are nothing if not a web of choke points. New York urban planner Sam Schwartz likes to point out that although about 1 million cars enter and leave Manhattan every day, only about 8,000 are in use in Midtown at any one moment. It takes just a few hundred extra cars to gridlock the 8,000, and the 8,000 in turn bring the 1 million to a halt. Astronauts, too, talk about “single-point failures,” the one small breakdown in a massively sophisticated spacecraft that can cause the machine to fail. Engineers are pretty good at anticipating these things, and create backup systems that allow, say, a frozen guidance computer to be fixed with a little troubleshooting and software fiddling. A few millimeters of frayed wire in an Apollo 13 oxygen tank, however, were not so easily worked around.

The author of this article (Jeffrey Kluger) wrote a book on this subject; it looks as if my reading list got one book longer.

Freethinking Michael Shermer (an avid long distance bicyclist) wrote a book Why People Believe Weird Things. Here is a part of a lecture of his:

A previous post brought out a discussion about belief in what “we can’t see”. This video talks about the sorts of evidence that would convince me to change my mind about things:

Here is another post by the same author which clears up a common misconception (one that I use in one of my polls) about the term “agnostic”.