Category Archives: Uncategorized

The Electric Car/Hybrid Car Lottery

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I would like to propose a lottery.

Cost of ticket: $10.00

Prize: The winner’s choice of an American-made electric car or hybrid car off of an approved list.

The cars would be provided at discount from them manufacturer. The manufacturer benefits from the publicity (free-ish advertising) and from having more of their cars on the road in communities where they might otherwise be very rare.

This would act like a Rotating Savings and Credit Association (ROSCA). A ROSCA is a way that a group of people can obtain a costly item with little available cash and low or zero interest loan. Every member of the ROSCA puts a set amount of money into the fund on a periodic basis, and one at a time each ROSCA member gets access to the entire pool, usually in random order.

The lottery would be run as a government project attached to an existing agency that covers the cost of operation so that all of the money acquired through lottery ticket sales goes into the car purchase. The ticket purchasers benefit from the excitement of a lottery produced by the thrill of possibly winning, and occasionally, by actually winning a new car.

The most expensive car out there that fits the criteria for inclusion on the approved list is probably a Tesla, but not everyone will want a Tesla; some people will want a much less expensive hybrid because the hybrid will not be tethered to charging between uses. So, each winner gets to chose the car they prefer, and if less expensive cars are chosen, then more individuals win on each drawing. It would be required that the winner keep possession of the car for one year or more in order for it to be free, which would discourage people from simply re-selling the car. However, if winners do manage to simply pass the car they’ve won on (in order to get the cash) the objective of the lottery is still met. There will be more cars of this type on the road either way.

I suppose this could be done by a state or a collection of states, but also, why not by a commission set up by the Federal Government?

Why Was Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda So Powerful, and is this a trend?

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I’m sure the measurements are still being checked and adjusted but it is clear that Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda was one of the most powerful tropical cyclones (termed “Typhoon” in the western Pacific) ever recorded. There are several ways to measure how big and bad a tropical cyclone is including it’s overall size from end to end, how low the barometric pressure gets, how high the sustained wind speed is, and how wide that wind field is. In addition, when a typhoon hits land details matter. The front right quadrant of a counter-clockwise spinning typhoon packs the maximum punch and if that part of the storm enters an embayment during high tide the storm surge can be immense. It seems that the storm surge for Haiyan/Yolanda was in the many tens of feet range, and quite possibly will be found responsible for the largest part of the still uncalculated death toll.

But here I want to look at one single factor that almost certainly contributed to the growth of Haiyan/Yolanda into a very powerful storm, a factor that probably doesn’t usually play into a storm’s strength. I refer to an anomaly in sea surface temperatures that was almost certainly caused by global warming, as part of a general warming of the ocean. But first a bit of background on the link between sea surface temperature and hurricanes. This is one of several factors that may be involved in climate change related effects on tropical storm intensity, a situation with which we should be concerned.

Tropical cyclones run on heat, and much of that heat comes from the sea surface. If the surface of the ocean is below a certain temperature, about 82 degrees F, about 28 degrees C, a hurricane or typhoon is very unlikely to form. Above that temperature, if other conditions are right, it may form. Warmer seas can make bigger or stronger storms, and as the storm passes over the ocean, the temperature of the sea surface has a strong influence on whether the storm increases or decreases in strength . As the storm moves over the sea, the interface between the windy storm and the roiling ocean becomes something of a mess, as though the surface of the ocean was in a blender, and there is a lot of exchange of heat across that interface. Also, deeper, cooler water is mixed with warmer surface water. A powerful storm moving across the ocean will leave in its wake a strip of cooler water. This sometimes causes subsequent storms moving along the same path to be weaker or to downgrade in strength more quickly.

This should indicate, one would think, that as sea surface temperatures (SST) have gone up with global warming, there should be more “hurricane” out there on the oceans. It has been hard to make the link between global warming and frequency of hurricanes, however. This may be because of the nature of hurricane formation. Once a hurricane forms in a given spot and gets big, it may reduce the chance of the next hurricane forming. Also, hurricanes are usually born as waves in a very large scale pattern of air masses. The total number of waves that form may not change with global warming, and the hurricane season is only a part of the year, and other factors have to come into play that are also ponderous in their timing to turn a wave into a major storm. An analogy might be this: Imagine that everyone in the working population of a downtown neighborhood becomes hungrier, perhaps because all the companies they work for insist on a two hour high intensity exercise program for everyone to lower their health insurance costs. Will this increase in hunger mean more lunches, snacks, and dinners consumed in the local restaurants? Or will the lunches, snacks, and dinners become larger, with people ordering more food with each sitting? Since there are only so many opportunities to go grab a bite to eat, there will probably be very few additional visits to the local eateries, but more food may well be consumed per event. Increased SST may be like increased hunger. There may not be very many more hurricanes, but among those that occur, some may be much stronger.

There is evidence for this. Kerry Emanuel did a study several years ago that linked sea surface temperatures in the Pacific with an index called PDI, which measures the overall energy involved in typhoon/hurricane activity. (Emanuel, K. (2005). Increasing destructiveness of tropical cyclones over the past 30 years, 436(August), 686–688. doi:10.1038/nature03906.) He came up with this graph:

Emanuel_2005_hurricane_sst_link

The graph shows that hurricanosity, as it were, goes up and down with sea surface temperature more or less. And, SST goes up and down with decadal oscillations like ENSO (El Nino) but with an overall upward trend caused by global warming.

Here’s the new part. If you look at a map of Sea Surface Temperature you are seeing a measurement of, well, the surface of the sea … the top of the water. As a hurricane chugs along on the surface of the sea, turning the top meter or so of ocean into spray and creating a very wavy situation, that heat is certainly directly affecting the storm, but the temperature of the water several meters down also matters. It turns out that sometimes this shallow-deep water (as opposed to deep deep water, way down farther) can be quite warm. When that happens, the dissipation of SST does not occur to the same degree. The leading edge of the hurricane gets a good dose of heat from the surface, but instead of the SST dropping as the top warm water is mixed with somewhat deeper cooler water, the heat supply is not attenuated, or at least not by much, as the massive storm moves along. More of the storm gets more heat, and the storm as a whole gets more heat. And there’s more heat left over for the next storm.

We think this happened with Haiyan. Have a look at the following map. It is sea surface temperature anomaly (how much more or less than expected the SST is) for the top 50 meters for the western Pacific at the time of the typhoon. The Philippines is down near the bottom of the map straddling the 10 and 15 degree N lines. (Maps are from here) Notice that the surface is not unusually warm.

PacificSST-top-50-meters-Anomoly

This does not mean that the sea surface was not warm. It was plenty warm as it is this time of year i that part of the ocean, just not warmer than expected. Here is the raw temperature (not anomaly) map so you can see that the tropical ocean is, well, tropically warm:

PacificSST-to-50-meters-TEMP

The purple area along the south is sufficiently warm to form typhoons. The ocean to the east of the Philippines is warm enough to form typhoons, but is there any source of extra heat to form a super typhoon? Have a look at this map. This is the water temperature at depth, here at 100 meters. This is an anomaly map, so its shows if the temperature is more (or less) than expected. Notice that east-west band of red indicating several degrees warmer than it usually is, at depth.

PacificSST-100_meters_ANOMALY

[Updated:] Here’s the same map with Haiyan/Yolanda’s track and history, graphic generated by Jeff Masters.

Haiyan_Path

So, it would appear that Haiyan/Yolanda passed over the usual very warm waters that allow the formation of typhoons, but also, over water that was warm at depth so as the top of the sea is churned up by the growing storm, there would be extra heat to feed that storm.

One final map. This is the actual temperature (not anomaly) at the 100 meter level. Notice the purple area.

Pacific_sst_100m_TEMP

At 100 meters depth, the sea was warm enough to form a typhoon. That, dear reader, is extreme.

The same thing happened with Katrina. According to a report from NOAA:

A number of factors contributed to making Katrina a strong Category 5 hurricane…Sea surface temperatures (SST) in the Gulf of Mexico were one to two degrees Celsius above normal …, and the warm temperatures extended to a considerable depth through the upper ocean layer. Also, Katrina
crossed the “loop current” (belt of even warmer water), during which time explosive
intensification occurred. The temperature of the ocean surface is a critical element in the
formation and strength of hurricanes.

We know that the ocean is absorbing a lot of the extra heat caused by global warming. Well, this is some of that heat, causing megastorms.

I’ve noticed that climate science denialists are very adamant about two things: Denying the importance of major storms like Haiyan, and denying the fact that heat is going into the oceans. Perhaps they see the link, and are frightened that people will believe that anthropogenic changes to our climate can kill thousands of people at a time, in a few hours, through the mechanism of anomalously high temperature at modest depth below the surface of the already tepid tropical sea.

It is time for action.

Church Resembles Human Male Sex Organ. Beavis and Butt-Head Convert.

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I think it was Johan Huizinga, who noted so many things about the Middle Ages, who noted that more than one Christian architect, captured by muslims during the crusades, was put to death for insolence after put to service to design a mosque and making it appear as a holy cross from the sky. If I recall correctly (and this was all before the Internet so nobody is going to check) the idea was this: If you build a church the way your daddy, the architect before you in your lineage of architects, built it, you don’t necessarily think of why you are doing what you are doing. Way back in the early days of churchy architecture, they started building churches to be in the shape of a cross (this is commonly known fact). This tradition was passed on and the details forgotten; churches kept being built like crosses but many of the builders didn’t really notice what they were doing. These captured individuals pressed into service to design and supervise the construction of the temple of a different religion appeared to be thumbing their noses at their islamic overlords, when really, they were just trying to get by without being noticed.

But then, hundreds of years later, an architect, for some reason or another, designed a Christian Science church to look like a dick from outer space.

One thing that is funny about this is the simple fact that you can’t possibly design a church that looks like a human phallus from the sky and not know it. This is what architects do. They design things that look a certain way from the sky. Or at least, several gazillion times, and for the vast majority of time they spend on a given project, they have in view, look at, show off to others, and dare I say, generally fiddle with the view of the building they are designing from above.

Hehe_hesaidpenisHave you ever been to an architect’s office? Have you ever been to an architect’s office that did not have current and past designs hanging everywhere like laundry?

Also note, a key motto used by the Christian Science church is “Rise Up.”

Also note, this is the Dixon Christian Science church. Enter Beavis and Butt-head stage left. Thank you very much.

The Dixon Christian Science Church has a sense of humor. It has fixed the view of their church from space using an age-old technique invented around the same time those Christian archetects were getting beheaded in Jerusalem by stodgy old fuddy duddies in Europe. They did this:

539643_274762142648692_1716868699_n

It is not helpful to elaborate the important stories of women talking about harassment to generate lies

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It is not helpful to elaborate the important stories of women talking about harassment to generate lies. Nor is it respectful to those women. So don’t do that.

This:

Bora and I were walking in the same direction and chatting, a bit tipsy, when he asked me if I would walk him back to his hotel. I lost my breath for a second. I froze and stuttered, “No, I have to go.”

does not equal this:

So we start by getting the facts straight. The facts are fine the way they are, the story stands on its own without the middle school antics.

Scientific American Blogs Responds

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UPDATE:

This just in…

A Message from Mariette DiChristina, Editor in Chief

Scientific American bloggers lie at the heart of the SA website, pumping vitality, experience and broad insight around the community. Unfortunately our poor communication with this valuable part of the SA network over the recent days has led to concerns, misunderstandings and ill feelings, and we are committed to working to try to put this right as best we can.

We know that there are real and important issues regarding the treatment of women in science and women of color in science, both historically and currently, and are dismayed at the far too frequent cases in which women face prejudice and suffer inappropriate treatment as they strive for equality and respect. We recently removed a blog post by Dr. Danielle Lee that alleged a personal experience of this nature….

CLICK HERE to read the entire post.

Key points: “Unfortunately, we could not quickly verify the facts of the blog post and consequently for legal reasons we had to remove the post….In removing the post, we were in no way commenting upon the substance of the post, but reflecting that the underlying facts were not confirmed.”

I have a problem with this because it seems to say that DN Lee was not being trusted as truthful. But, lawyers will be lawyers, I suppose. But still, it feels a bit icky.

“Biology-Online is neither a part of Scientific American, nor a “content partner.” We are investigating what links we currently have with Biology-Online. ”

This does not surprise me, as the links seemed rather tenuous to begin with. Good to hear, though, even aside from the present maneno. Biology-Online seems a bit questionable.

“Juggling holiday-weekend commitments with family, lack of signal and a dying phone, alongside the challenges of reaching colleagues over a holiday weekend, I attempted to at least address initial social-media queries about the matter with a tweet yesterday: “Re blog inquiry: @sciam is a publication for discovering science. The post was not appropriate for this area & was therefore removed.” I acknowledge that microblogs are not the ideal medium for such an important explanation to our audiences and regret the delay in providing a fuller response. My brief attempt to clarify, posted with the belief that “saying something is better than saying nothing,” clearly had the opposite effect. With 20/20 hindsight, I wish I had simply promised a fuller reply when I was able to be better connected and more thorough.”

(Emphasis added wherever you see it, by the way)

Yes, I agree with the final statement here. That was a goof.

“…we intend to discuss how we can better investigate and publicize such problems in general and search for solutions with Dr. Lee and with the wider scientific community. With the help of Dr. Lee as an author, Scientific American plans to provide a thoroughly reported feature article about the current issues facing women in science and the related research in the coming weeks.”

Mariette does not seem to say if Danielle’s post is back up. BRB…

No, I don’t see it.

Well, this is a start, anyway. Hopefully with this post the conversation will shift to where DN Lee has said she’d like it to shift, towards the underlying problem. This post is a bit unsatisfying but it does explain some things. I think it would be a really good idea for Scientific American Blogs to re-post DN Lee’s post as a matter of faith and good will.

I look forward to seeing a long and thoughtful post on all of this by Bora!

Will Sciam’s Response to DN Lee’s post deletion mean anything if it happens Monday? UPDATED

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UPDATED:

This is a very interesting and important question, and it probably requires more context than I have the ability or time to give, but I think it is worth putting on the table.

If you look at the twitter hashtags #standingwithDNLee and #IstandwithDNLee (which, interestingly, have distinctly different groups of people using them, which itself is worthy of study … perhaps an example of Tweet Drift?) you’ll be able to catch up if Twitter does not drive you crazy. Looking at the early moments of each thread, we see these two tweets:

and

So that was Friday Evening.

(I’ve described the incident in more detail here.)

Here is what happened.

1) Some jerk at an annoying aggregation site that exploits biology bloggers and writers asked scientist and blogger DN Lee if she was some sort of whore because she declined to provide him with some of her stuff for free. Her stuff being, in this case, blog posts. (unlike)

2) DN Lee wrote about this incident, and for this I and I’m sure the entire community of science communicators thank her. She could have just ignore this, absorbed it, let it pass without comment, but this was a situation where the right thing to do really was, I think, to write about it. Anyway, she did that on her blog at Scientific American. (like)

3) Scientific American Blogs deleted Danielle’s post at first without comment. (unlike)

4) Several blogs (including here but there are many) reposted DN Lee’s original post. (like)

5) A slurry of invective over the deletion of DN Lee’s post began to gush from the intertubes. (like)

6) In response to this response, Mariette DiChristina, a senior administrator with Scientific American and executive editor, placed her foot directly on the poo and went in knee deep with these two tweets:

(unlike*2)

That second tweet is in reference to the apparent fact that there is some sort of affiliation between Scientific American and the lame-ass blog aggregator site that employs the sexist, misogynist, racist jerk that insulted DN Lee

As I write this, it is Sunday morning. An entire evening, followed by an entire day (Saturday) followed by several hours of night and morning have passed and there has been very little, almost nothing, in the way of response by Scientific American. Bora Zivkovic is the Blog Editor for Scientific American, so he is really the person who needs to address this. Bora is, as you probably know, one of the people who helped build, shape, and define the science communication on line community over the last several years, and is one of the key movers and shakers of Science Online, an important annual gathering of science communicators. Bora also, or at least this is my impression, is mainly responsible for building the Scientific American Blogs entity, and it is widely acknowledged that Scientific American Blogs is the top science blog network out there. And now, there is widespread hate raining down on that network. This morning’s twitter feeds on those two hashtags are stating, in the main, that Scientific American’s failure to respond to the removal of DN Lee’s post equals boycott, canceling of subscriptions to the magazine, etc.

The response from Bora as of this writing has been only this:

There is a great irony here. Just prior to the creation of Scientific American Blogs, was Pepsigate. Pepsigate happened at Scienceblogs.com. Scienceblogs administration decided to create a blog run by the research unit at Pepsi. This made sense to some people because this was a group of scientists working on food and stuff, so why not have them blog at a science blogging network? The problem was that this would be a corporate blog sitting like a wolf in sheep’s clothing among regular science blogs that were written mainly by individuals scientists with mainly academic, not corporate, affiliations.

Bloggers were enraged. Within a short time Scienceblogs.com announced that they had been stupid, apologized, nixed the Pepsi blog, and set up an internal system to help avoid being so boneheaded in the future. But, many bloggers including Bora and a handful of others who are now at Scientific American quit scienceblogs.com anyway. Some even said that bloggers who did not quit scienceblogs.com were doing it wrong. At the time I felt that the exodus was overly dramatic, that scienceblogs.com had handled the problem (eventually) as well as we might expect any institution or company to handle it, and I felt no desire to mess around with moving my blog. There were a few weeks there when I felt compelled to privately contact friends and colleagues after they publicly implied that the hangers-on at Scienceblogs.com were bad, asking them if this is really what they felt and if they were really prepared to defend that position. In all cases, I think, people realized that they were being overly judgmental. The irony is, of course, that Scientific American Blogs was built in part on the basis of a kind of restructuring of the science blogosphere that came out of Pepsigate, and the PepsiExodus was fully (and skillfully) exploited to create an excellent stable of bloggers at Scientific American. But the culture of Trial by Tweet, in part embolded by things like Pepsigate and in part shaped, one way or another, by movers and shakers such as Bora (who has written eloquently many times about the increasing power of the social networks over old fashioned blogging and commenting, etc.) is now looking a lot like a huge flock of chickens. Coming home. To roost.

So, here are the main questions.

First, did Scientific American Blogs do something wrong by taking down DN Lee’s post? Answer: No doubt, yes.

Second, did Scientific American Blogs mess up by ignoring this problem over a weekend (so far)? Answer: I don’t know. Maybe an entity with employees who work Monday though Friday should be forgiven for ignoring a problem over the weekend and dealing with it on Monday (we assume they will do this, yes?)

Third, is there anything Scientific American can say or do to fix this, and..

Fourth, is it the case that failure to address the problem for 36-48 hours is itself so offensive that no matter what they do they can’t fix it?

Answer: Who the heck knows? I would hope the twittersphere would separate the two different issues of removing the post (which was totally wrong) and not responding for several hours. I tend to prefer that we not try and convict others on the internet for delays in addressing things. The rate at which a couple of thousand observers can produce tweets about something, any time of day or night, is high. The rate at which a handful of people with responsibility for a certain important decision can make and put into effect that decision is low, and slower on weekends because weekends are for tweeting, not work. Indeed, the rate of response of the twittersphere may be higher on weekends! In other words, people tweeting about this should ask themselves if they want to be judged regarding something they’ve done on the internet mainly by how long it takes them to respond to someone tweeting about it. This means your level of guilt is tied to the inverse of the rate at which you check your twitter account. That seems wrong. unlike.

Fifth, jut for fun, if we compare Pepsigate and DN Lee’s post removal, is one worse than the other? What is the difference in response by the blogospehere to the two? Will people who stormed off from scienceblogs.com now be required to storm off from Scientific American Blogs or risk being thought of as misogynist sexist racist creeps because they failed to take extreme action?

Word on the street is that Bora will fix all of this using his intertubual magic. The fact that Mr. Internet has not responded (other than one tweet) for so many hours suggests to me that he is stuck between a rock (a centuries old institution that still has not replaced board meetings and face to face conversations with tweets!) and a hard place (the world that he himself has been so influential in creating).

I hope that everyone who has said that they are boycotting Scientific American or otherwise materially responding to this realizes that the speed with which you respond to this problem is not a virtue. Responding correctly is important. Responding rapidly is not. Wait to see what Bora says, or others at Scientific American. Also, listen to what DN Lee says, and give her time to say it.

Then, of course, feel free to fall upon the perpetrators, rend limb from limb, and toss them off the island, if you must.

Linux Shell Scripting

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I just finished Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook – Third Edition by Shantanu Tushar and Sarath Lakshman. This is a beginner’s guide to using shell scripting (bash) on linux.

Usually, a “cookbook” is set up more like a series of projects organized around a set of themes, and is usually less introductory than this book. “Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook” might be better titled “Introduction to Linux Shell Scripting” because it is more like a tutorial and a how too book than like a cookbook. Nonetheless, it is an excellent tutorial that includes over 100 “recipes” that address a diversity of applications. It’s just that they are organized more like a tutorial. What this means is that a beginner can use only the resources in this book and get results. The various recipes are organized in an order that brings the reader through basics (like how to use the terminal, how to mess with environment variables, etc.) then on to more complex topics such as regular expressions, manipulating text, accessing web pages, and archiving. One very nice set of scripts that is not often found in intro books addresses networking. The book also covers MySQL database use.

All of the scripts are available from the publisher in a well organized zip archive.

I read the e-version of the book, in iBooks, but the PDF version is very nice as well. I don’t know how this would translate as at Kindle book. But, importantly (and this may be more common now than not) the ebook uses all text, unlike some earlier versions of ebooks that used photographs of key text snippets as graphics which essentially renders them useless. Of course, copy and paste from a ebook is difficult, and that is where the zip file of scrips comes in. You can open the PDF file, get the zip archive, and as you read through examples simply open up (or copy and paste) the scripts from the zip archive and modify or run them. Also, the ebook is cheaper than a paper edition and clearly takes up way less space!

If I was going to recommend a starting out guide to shell scripting this is the book I’d recommend right now. It is well organized and well executed.

I do have a small rant that applies to virtually ALL tech-related books I’ve seen. There is an old tradition in *nix style documentation of putting certain information in the front matter. Books always have front matter, of course, but computer documents tend to have more front matter than usual. A typical example is this reference resource for Debian.

Notice all that stuff in the beginning. Like anybody reads any of that, especially the “conventions” section. Proper typography in a code-rich book does not have to be explained in detail. You can see what is code, what are comments, etc. etc. Most of this information should be added as an appendix at the end of the book where it is out of the way and can be ignored.

On a web page like the one shown here all you have to do is scan down, but in a book you have to leaf (virtually or meatspacelly) past all that stuff to get to the actual book contents. The Linux Shell Scripting book being discussed here has the first actual text on actual page 25 or so (though it is numbered page 8). I recommend moving as much of this front matter as possible to the back.

But that is a general rant about all books of this sort, which I happen to think of while reviewing this book.

Some Linux/Ubuntu related books:
Ubuntu Unleashed 2016 Edition: Covering 15.10 and 16.04 (11th Edition)
Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Desktop: Applications and Administration
The Linux Command Line: A Complete Introduction

A Short List of Candidates for Mayor of Minneapolis

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A few days ago I wrote a note to each of several trusted fellow political activists asking them to provide me with a short list of which of the many candidates running for Mayor of Minneapolis they would feel comfortable with winning this important race. I did not ask for their number one choice, but rather, which of the candidates they would be reasonably comfortable with if they won. These fellow travelers in local politics were assured that I would include any and all names they gave me on the list, the list would be alphabetical and not ranked, there would be no indication as to who listed what candidate, and the names of the individuals I asked for this advice would be confidential. (I actually promised to destroy the replies.)


The reason I did this should be obvious to anyone following the Minneapolis Mayoral race. At present there are 35 candidates running for mayor. This includes a number of individuals who currently or have held public office in the area, or are otherwise politically involved, and are clearly serious candidates. It also includes a number of individuals whom it is hard to take seriously, such as the person who named himself after a well known movie pirate and one person running under the “Last Minneapolis Mayor” ticket. (I’m not sure if that candidate expect to be the last mayor of Minneapolis, or is making a statement that we’d like to keep the last mayor in office.) Many other candidates, perhaps most, are serious candidates (though often, it seems, with very narrow agendas). The problem is, there is no such thing as a serious candidate if the following two things are true: 1) There are dozens of candidates; and 2) a particular voter is not savvy to the local politics and is thus faced with a huge list of seemingly random names among which it is expected that the voter makes an informed choice.


One can get mad at individual voters for not paying enough attention to be able to vote responsibly in the election for their own mayor. But one can absolutely not expect a citizen to have a cue as to what to do when faced with this absurdly long list. Also given the large number of candidness and the fact that Minneapolis has a ranked-vote system, it is quite possible that a candidate with a funny name (such as the afore mentioned pirate) would be added as third choice by a lot of voters just for fun. And then get elected. Such a thing would not really be democracy in action. It would be something else.


I don’t vote in this election; I live in a different city. But I hold Minneapolis to be a “third home town” because my time spent living in that city is important to me. Also, Minneapolis is a big important city in my larger community. So that’s one reason I’m doing this. The other reason is that Julia just moved to the city and this is her first year ever being able to vote. That made me think of all the other first-time voters in the city, and the possible cynical (and very appropriately so) they may develop when approached with the problem of ranked voting (which is already a complication, though not much of one) and a multi-page ballot (I assume) because so many people simply signed up to be mayor.


The current situation with the Minneapolis mayor race is a joke. Minneapolis, however, is not a joke. It is a wonderful and important city. Clearly, the process has failed and needs to be revised.

My noting that the process has failed, by the way, is not a negative comment on the endorsement system itself. I do have some negative comments on that, but I am not dismayed that the DFL caucus system did not produce a candidate. That actually happens every time there is an open seat for Mayor, it seems. For what it is worth, I do have a few reform suggestions for the caucus. First, make the caucus about the caucus, not about the “very important business” of the party. A typical caucus involves hours of messing around with party business followed by the endorsement of a candidate, and if there is not enough time for that, or everyone is exhausted, that part is shortened. It should be the other way around. The caucus should involve ONLY the endorsement, and a separate meeting held later (or earlier) should address party business. Second, the mayor race appears to have no primary step. There should be one, perhaps. That might involve a third reform, that is, making the race partisan, which it currently is not. I have no useful opinion on whether or not that should be changed.


In any event, here is my list. This is, to reiterate, a list of candidates that people I trust, who are generally politically progressive Democrats, can live with. There is actually quite a bit of political diversity on this list. It happens to include the list I myself would have made.



votemgnA Short List of Candidates for Mayor of Minneapolis:


A Short List of Candidates for Mayor of Minneapolis:

  • Betsy Hodges
  • Bob Fine
  • Don Samuels
  • Jackie Cherryholmes
  • Jeffrey Wagner
  • Mark Andrew