How Does It Know?

This map was in the church where I voted today.*

Also, there was a pile of “No on Prop 2″ pamphlets on a table right next to the line, which I thought wasn’t appropriate inside a polling place. There was also a box of Kleenex on the same table, so I put the box on top of the pamphlets. Now I’m thinking I should’ve just taken them all.

*Purely from a cartographic perspective, it’s actually a pretty cool map. Green and dark green denote strong Evangelical Christianity, so you can see where the U.S. stands there… Seems to also be a bit of activity in South America and Australia. Doesn’t seem to have much of a foothold in Europe, Africa or Asia, though.

That last post was pretty ugly, eh? Those images are way too big for my blog format. I am thinking about switching to a theme that’s wider… But I spent so much time customizing this one that that’s a time investment that I’m not sure I’m ready for.

Well, Friday again. My plan is to finish the Marshmallow Mission* 2-song EP this weekend and post that up on Part Time Songs (need to make some cover art too…); other than that, my family will be celebrating a late Diwali by having Indian buffet on Sunday. Other than THAT, I am hoping to get some sleep and hang around the house. I love hanging around the house, lazing about with no agenda. Except that I always seem to give myself an agenda (”record stuff by Sunday”, “vacuum out car”, “read for fun” — yes, I actually have that on a to-do list… what is wrong with me?). I tend to feel a little guilty when I’m not doing SOMETHING. You’d think I’d be more productive.

Happy Halloween.

And please please please make the effort and go vote.

*”Marshmallow Mission” consists of just me and Dan. The idea is to do these songs together where it’s really quick and easy. But it hasn’t been that quick**, due to my time restraints. Anyway, so it’s an easy mission, easy==!hard==soft==Marshmallow. There’s other reasons for the name when it came into my head, but that’s the rational, makes-sense answer.

**Though it’s coming together fairly easily, now that I’m learning/using/exploring Sonar 7 and the workflow is a lot smoother and easier than FL Studio***

***Though I did end up purchasing the VST versions of the FL Parametric EQ2 and other plugins that are built into FL, so I could use them in Sonar, because they are really awesome… I mean, showing a graphical signal analysis in the paraEQ alone is worth the money.

Hi. Been super busy and a lot has been going on in all aspects of my life. Sorry for the lack of content.

Just wanted to make a quick post pointing you to this other blog post that compares the McCain tax plan to the Obama tax plan. It takes the popular diagram made by the Washington Post:

… and pokes holes in the way they chose to lay out the data. I mean, the Post’s chart DOES make Obama’s plan look pretty good, but the way they calculated the average tax cut is faulty (read the post for more).

Anyway, the person at this blog takes the same data and actually charts it out in a fair and mathematically sound way, which shows that Obama’s tax plan is actually EVEN BETTER for those of us who don’t make millions of dollars*:

Sorry for the lack of analysis, but I’m hurrying to get out of here and to go on to enjoy my Friday night. Hope to have more better/faster/stronger/cooler content in the near future!

BTW, all this graphing and analysis is courtesy of:
http://chartjunk.karmanaut.com/taxplans/

* if you do, in fact, make millions of dollars, please post a comment, because damn, a fucking millionaire is reading my blog, and I need to know these things.

I actually hate to keep harping on Sarah Palin and making all my posts here political lately, but the internets just keeps putting fun stuff to read “in front of me”, and of course, I must read “all of them”. First sentence diagrams and now a flowchart!

The following image (found here at BoingBoing, created by Aden Renkai, via Political Wire) shows Palin’s debating flow; I’d say it’s a pretty sound algorithm.

(from Slate)

There’s been a lot of talk about how many of the statements Sarah Palin has been speaking in her interviews are total gibberish.* It’s not hard to hear (and it’s very difficult to follow), but I like this article in Slate by Kitty Burns Florey, where she diagrams some of the particularly winding sentences uttered by Palin. The above image is an example of the diagram for “It’s very important when you consider even national security issues with Russia as Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where—where do they go?”

* Among the things she said that WEREN’T necessarily gibberish, but definitely “non-answers”, my favorite has been where she was asked by Katie Couric about what newspapers and magazines she’s read to keep abreast of the issues in the world. Her answer was that she read “all of them” and that she had a various variety of sources, and that she reads whatever is put in front of her. Really? You read all of them? You read Le Monde? Do you read Playboy for the articles? Do you read Worker’s World? Do you read the Hindustan Times? If so, name one of your favorite columnists.

In high school, my friend James was in Japanese Club. It made sense for him, as he took Japanese as his language (I took Spanish) and had an interest in all things Japanese. I went because I just wanted to hang out and occasionally watch a Japanese movie. I had a position in the club — Ninja Poet. This position entailed me coming up with a haiku before the meetings started and reciting it in front of the small group of members. I only remember one (and I may have only done it once or a couple times), a little ditty about a guy who you think is a dentist, but turns out, he’s not really a dentist:

He’s not a dentist
Dirty guy in a white coat
Open wide for him

But all of that is irrelevant; what’s important here is that YOU can randomly generate great haikus about McCain and Palin by clicking here. Here’s one just generated that I kinda like:

Lipstick on a pig
Meeting new foreign leaders
White House foreclosure

http://politicalirony.com/2008/09/28/mccain-palin-haiku-generator/

My wife and I went to the Detroit Public Library today for the Obama/Biden rally. We got there around 8:15am and stood continuously until about 3:30pm. The rally didn’t begin until 1:30pm, but getting there early allowed us to see stuff being set up, and also (and most importantly), getting a good spot to watch from. We were incredibly close to the stage, perhaps 15 feet away. My lovely wife took some excellent photos, some of which I’ve posted here. The rest of them can be found here.

[sidenote: I will say that the continuous standing in cramped crowded areas for over 7 hours has really worn us out. It was worth it to do it once, but I don’t think we’ll be going to any more political rallies anytime soon.]

Detroit’s new mayor spoke a bit

Joe Biden (who was very energetic and overall a very exciting speaker to watch)

Obama listening to Biden, waiting his turn (and looking sort of like he’s posing for our camera)

Obama himself got off to sort of a slow start, but ended up giving a good speech.

(photo from obamawill.com)

Most of you that know me well will know that I am a fairly left-leaning Democratic Party voting guy. I like the notion of a safety net for society. I like smart thoughtful decision making and inclusion of all sorts of different people. However, people who lean my way politically have a sometimes fatal flaw — they are far, far too idealistic in what they require from a candidate.

One example is the angry people who are still angry that the primary was “stolen” from Hillary Clinton (and who vow to vote for John McCain as a result*). Obama has made some moves that haven’t sat well with me since he all but clinched his party’s nomination, that’s for certain. But the way I see it, for liberals, the Democratic Party is a workaround.

They are one of the big parties that can actually win and they also happen to share a lot of your beliefs and values! Well, they may not be as good on some things you care about as Ralph Nader, or one of the other minor liberal parties. Sure you’d be sending a small message by voting for one of these small party candidates. And yes, you do have some sway. You do have the ability to take away maybe 1 or 2% of the vote and sway the results of an election. But for who’s benefit? What good does it do to cause the guy who’s even less like you and shares less of your beliefs and values to win?

In an ideal world, all those parties would have a larger voice and we’d be more like Canada or European countries… But I suppose this is the way politics is done in America, and we have to go with the workaround. We can’t even completely control our computers, which are (normally) governed by the laws of physics and logic. We use workarounds in code all the time. If we can’t wrangle predictable 1s and 0s with 100% confidence, what chance is there of wrangling millions of intelligent independent humans? None.

Go with the workaround. Put a comment in that says
// ss 8/26/08: this is not ideal, but it works pretty well. think about ways to fix in future.
and move on. Incremental change, with progress made at each step, is what we need. It’s what I’ve come to know from coding, from songwriting and from thinking about politics.

Incidentally, I’m leaving for Washington, D.C. fairly soon, mainly to visit my sister, but also to take in some sights and sounds and smells. See you later.

* There is so much that is wrong with doing that that it’d be too hard to get into, but some major ones would be he’s pro-life and she’s pro-choice, he wants to perhaps stay in Iraq for a 100 years, she wants to get out of Iraq, whereas Obama and Clinton share a good majority of their platforms.