Standing Rock Chairman: Pipeline Plan Denial ‘A Win For All Of America’ 1:57
The secretary of the Army Corps of Engineers told Standing Rock Sioux Chairman Dave Archambault II Sunday that the current route for the controversial Dakota Access pipeline will be denied.
“Although we have had continuing discussion and exchanges of new information with the Standing Rock Sioux and Dakota Access, it’s clear that there’s more work to do,” the Army’s Assistant Secretary for Civil Works, Jo-Ellen Darcy said in a statement Sunday. “The best way to complete that work responsibly and expeditiously is to explore alternate routes for the pipeline crossing.”
So, this is a win for Standing Rock and the native community there.
It is not yet a win for the climate. The pipeline should not be built at all. But this is still good news.
Time to make sure you are stocked up and up to date on your climate science books. First, you will need reference materials throughout the holiday season, because Uncle Bob is going to challenge you more stridently than usual. Climate change deniers have taken over the US government. You are on the run. Underground. Up against the wall. So, you need to be ready. Uncle Bob is coming for you.
Second, you may want to give a few climate change related books away for the holidays. Know any science or social studies teachers? Maybe a nice book for Uncle Bob’s wife? Ha, that would be funny. Anyway, you’ll want to do that.
There are four books I recommend as gifts for anybody, but also, for your own enjoyment.
The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy by climate scientist Michael Mann and Washington Post political cartoonist Tom Toles is one of the most current, and in many ways, the most fun, of the climate books. The authors go right after the science deniers, but not at the expense of a lot of excellent explanation of the science itself, and the overall political situation. The cartoons are great, the text is engaging.
Also richly illustrated, but in a totally different way, and by one of the same authors, is Dire Predictions, 2nd Edition: Understanding Climate Change. Michael Mann shared a Nobel Prize with the IPCC and the other scientists for their work on climate change. That process involved the production of the Scientific Basis for Climate Change IPCC report, which is redone every several years, and includes all the science behind the broad consensus. Dire Predictions represents that science in a fully understandable way, and adds additional material on the other aspects of the problem: Policy. This is a basic on the shelf text you need in your home, and that your kid’s science teachers need in their classrooms.
Not a climate change book but essential, and that I’ll put right here for you to consider: The War on Science: Who’s Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It, Shawn Otto’s latest popular yet scholarly work on the effort to destroy science, is a must read. Climate science isn’t the only science under attack. This book covers it all.
Caring for Creation: The Evangelical’s Guide to Climate Change and a Healthy Environment by Paul Douglas and Mitch Hescox is specifically written for your Uncle Bob, is Uncle Bob is a conservative Evangelical Christian. Paul is the country’s top meteorologist-communicator who happens to be a conservative (he claims) Evangelical Christian. Paul wrote the science in this book and it is real science, no holding back. Mitch is an Evangelical Christian guy who supplies the scriptural-religious part of the story. The book, obviously, is about how if you are an Evangelical Christian you should not be a dick about climate change.
Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know® by Joe Romm is unique among climate change books. Romm looks at the actual personal impacts of climate change, in the near and longer term future, on typical Americans. Think about it for a second. Many Americans who live in the north plan to eventually retire to warmer, southerly climes. Is that a good idea, with global warming and sea level rise happening? Are you sure that shorefront (or near shorefront) property on the Gulf Coast is a good idea right about now? What about your investment portfolio, what with changes happening in the energy industry and uncertainty in other areas? This is the book that covers that.
Climatology versus Pseudoscience: Exposing the Failed Predictions of Global Warming Skeptics by Dana Nuccitelli attacks climate science denialism by rushing right through the battle lines into enemy territory and deconstructing their bogus tripe. This is like the Guns of Navarone, where the guys sneak pas the Nazis and boow up their stuff, but with models. Just how have those alternative ideas and predictions, made over the last several years by climate change deniers, done, compare to the mainstream science? Well, read the book and find out. But I’ll bet you can guess.
You know that Donald Trump has been claiming very clearly and precisely that he won both the electoral and popular vote, and that it only looks like he did not win the popular vote because of voter fraud, meaning, that a certain number of American citizens voted twice, or otherwise rigged the elections. In fact, he explicitly says that millions of Americans voted illegally, accounting for the >2 million popular vote margin that Secretary Clinton currently holds.
Messing with voting in this manner is a serious crime, perhaps often a felony.
What we have here is Donald Trump accusing a large number of his opponents of being criminals when he doesn’t even have to. More recently, he asserted that American citizens who express their First Amendment constitutional rights should have their citizenship stripped, and should also be jailed.
Trump isn’t even president yet, and he has made the assertion that he would prefer that a very large number of Americans who disagree with him politically should be jailed and/or their citizenship cancelled. He has previously said that many non-citizens should be rounded up. And once rounded up, shipped out of the country.
What happens if there is not a place to send such individuals? Or, if the government insists that people leave, but they don’t have way to do so, or a place to go? Since they are no longer citizens, they can be detained. Where? Well, if there are a few of them, in jails. If there are a lot of them, perhaps work camps along the Mexican border, where they can be pressed into labor building The Yuge Wall. Or, concentration camps.
But a lot of people are going to be expressing their First Amendment rights, and disagreeing with Trump, if that happens. But if he, along with the Congress he will fully control — because Republicans know nothing other than walking in goose step with their party — gets his way, and laws are passed that strip citizenship from Americans who speak their mind, those concentration camps are going to start getting pretty full.
For that, a solution will have to be found.
This is not funny, people. It is extreme sounding, I’ll give you that. Almost impossible to believe. It can’t happen here. .
By the way, if you strip someone of their citizenship, and you do throw them out of the country, it is possible that they will have no way to go or no way to get there. Once they are no longer US citizen, they can be tossed into a special detention facility, and if there are enough of them, well, you’ve got a concentration camp.
The American alligator is found only* in the US, and is widespread in Texas. It is found in both rivers, such as the Rio Grande and Sabine, and along the coast. And, it turns out that the preferred locations for many of the important activities in the day to day live of the American alligator overlap a great deal with humans.
Louise Hayes, biologist, and photographer Philippe Henry have produced, with TAMU Press, have produced Alligators of Texas, a highly accessible, well written, and richly illustrated monograph on these beasts.
LOUISE HAYES has been studying American alligators in Texas since 1985 at sites such as Brazos Bend State Park and the J.D. Murphree Wildlife Management Area. PHILIPPE HENRY is a professional wildlife photographer based in St. Mathieu du Parc. His photographs have been published worldwide.
If you are into Alligators and their relatives, regardless of where you live, this book may be an important addition to your collection. If you live in Texas in any of the Alligator areas (near larger rivers, the coast, etc) then you need this book along side your bird guides and plant ID pocket volumes. Not that you need to know how to identify an Alligator, but rather, to learn all about them.
This is a very nice looking book.
_____________
*Originally, I wrote “only in the US” because the info that came with, and in, the book apparently says this, and there are other sources that say this as well. For example, one distribution map for Mexican relatives of the American Alligator shows no alligators anywhere near the Rio Grande. An interested reader, however, asked how the heck the Alligators stay on only one side of the Rio Grande and avoid Mexico.
It seems that these alligators actually do avoid the main body of the Rio Grande and are simply rare or non existent in Mexico, but at the same time, the ARE in the Rio Grande, but just rare. For example, a small population showed up in Fort Hancock in Hudspeth County in 2009. They must have been able to pass back and forth across the river.
So, it seems that this species of Alligator is an occasional but rare find in Mexico, and presumably not that common in the Rio Grande itself.
Anybody from the region have any local alligator information to add?
Clinton beat Trump by a large margin, by electoral standards. A couple of percent is actually a lot these days. Yet so far it appears that Trump won the electoral vote, even though those votes are not yet cast and who knows what is actually going to happen.
But this year, strange as it it and stranger thought it may become, is not the strangest ever. That goes to 1876.
These are my suggestions, mostly books, for holiday gifts that have some sort of science relevance. See this guide for gift ideas for kids. (There is a pretty good chance that there is an idea or two in the Kids Guide for the adult in your life, depending on the adult.)
For your Uncle Bob
Get ready for your favorite science-denying uncle, whom we all know of as “Uncle Bob” (though he goes by many different names) with these two important books related to climate change.
The book’s structure swaps back and forth between science (the parts written by Paul Douglas) and scripture (the parts written by co-author Mitch Hescox). I don’t know Mitch, but from the blurb I learn: “Mitch Hescox leads the Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN), the largest evangelical group dedicated to creation care (www.creationcare.org). He has testified before Congress, spoken at the White House, and is quoted frequently in national press. Prior to EEN, he pastored a church for 18 years and worked in the coal industry. Mitch and his wife live in Pennsylvania.”
Paul Douglas (www.pauldouglasweather.com) is a respected meteorologist with 35 years of TV and radio experience. A successful entrepreneur, he speaks to community groups and corporations about severe weather and climate trends, and appears regularly on national media outlets. Paul and his wife live in Minnesota.Now, you might think that the chances of an Evangelical Christian reading my blog is about zero. This is not true. Many Christians, ranging from Evangelical to less-than-angelical read this blog, they just don’t say much in the comments section. Except those who do, mainly those denying the science of climate change. Well, this book is for all of you, especially the Evangelical deniers, because here, the case is made on your terms and in your language, in a very convincing way, and, including the science. It turns out that, according to the Bible, you are wrong on the Internet.
Let’s say that you are a fairly active atheist who likes to annoy your Christian relatives at holidays. If that is the case, then this book is for you!! This is the book to give to your Uncle Bob.
I can’t attest to the scriptural parts of this book. This is not because I’m unfamiliar with Scripture or have nothing to say about it. Both assumptions would be highly erroneous. But, in fact, I did not explore those parts of this book in much detail, just a little. But I am very familiar with the science in this book, I’ve delved deeply into it, and I can tell you that Paul has it right, and it is very current.
If Your Uncle Bob is Investment Savvy
Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know® by Joe Romm is the ideal climate change book for the person who is always checking their stock portfolio or watching the real estate market, or, simply, planning on moving or retiring soon. It is is also a very up to date examination of climate change science, the effects of climate change on humans, policy related problems, and energy-related solutions. Everyone should read this book, and if you teach earth system sciences you should consider using this book as a guide in your teaching, or in some cases, assigning it in class. The book is written to be read by general audiences, so it would work well in a high school or college setting.
As Romm points out, climate change will have more of an impact on humans, including you, than even the Internet. It is an existential issue. Romm acknowledges that some of these impacts are already happening, but that future impacts are likely to be very significant. Over the last 10 years or so, we have seen remarkable superstorms, significant drought, notable wildfires, and killer heat waves. These events have made people sit up and take notice. For this reason, more people want to know more about climate change, and indeed, everyone should know something about this problem. Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know® is an effort to provide that information to the average person.
While we are on the subject of Climate Change, here are must have, must read titles that are not necessarily new, but always worth mentioning. I’m giving you links to my reviews so you can find out more.
<li><a href="http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2016/08/24/mad-about-science-denial-this-book-is-for-you-and-your-uncle-bob/">The Madhouse Effect</a>, by Michael Mann and Tom Toles, is an excellent holiday gift. Not only is it a festive red in color, but it is full of cartoons. It is current, forceful, an excellent choice given the current political circumstances. </li>
<li><a href="http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2015/04/30/dire-predictions-understanding-climate-change-must-read-book/">Dire Predictions: Understanding Climate Change</a>, by Michael Mann. This is the IPCCC "Scientific Basis" report converted into a very readable and illustration rich format. This is the book I give to science teachers. </li>
<li><a href="http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2015/03/11/climatology-versus-pseudoscience-exposing-the-failed-predictions-of-global-warming-skeptics/">Climatology Versus Pseudoscience: Exposing the Failed Predictions of Global Warming Skeptics</a>, by Dana Nuccitelli. This book proves that climate skeptics are FOS. </li>
This is not Yet Another Popular Book on how people don’t get science. This is a very well written, accessible, thoughtful analysis of the history of science vs. anti-science from the beginning of modern science itself, but focusing on the recent and current anti-science effort. Why is this happening? Who is doing it? What can be done about it?
This and much more is all covered. Also, since the book has been out for a few months now, the price has dropped so get a copy cheap!
I’ve written a detailed review with extensive commentary HERE.
A second book I’ll mention in this category is “Truth or Turthiness” by Howard Wainer. I wrote a review of that book here. Give this to your favorite skeptic so they can hone their skills.
The giant sloths may be extinct, but Don Prothero himself is a giant of our age among fossil experts. His primary area of expertise includes the fossil mammals (especially but not at all limited to rhinos). I believe it is true that he has personally handled more fossil mammalian material, in terms of taxonomic breath and time depth, across more institutional collections, than anyone.
A typical entry focuses on an order, and the orders are arranged in a taxonomically logical manner. A living or classic fossil representative is depicted, along with some boney material, in the form of drawings. Artist’s reconstructions, photographs, maps, and other material, with phylogenetic charting where appropriate, fills out the overview of that order.
The text is expert and informative, and very interesting. the quality of the presentation is to notch. The format of the book is large enough to let the artistry of the production emerge, but it is not a big too heavy floppy monster like some coffee table books are. This is a very comfortable book to sit and read, or browse.
I should also mention Don Prothero’s other book, just out at the end of last year so maybe you already have this, “The Story of Life in 25 Fossils.” I reviewed it here.
“The Grand Canyon: Monument to an Ancient Earth is an excellent geological overview of that amazing place. But it is also, explicitly, extensively and intensively, an exploration of the creationist view of the Grand Canyon, and the Canyon’s role in proving that evolution is not real.
It turns out that Evolution is real, the canyon is amazing, and this book is another excellent choice of a volume to pass on to a teacher in your local middle school or high school. I review it here.
General Science
Here is a list of general science books that I regard as excellent. Where I’ve written a review, I’ll link you through to that review, where I’ve not yet posted a review, I’ll link you through to the book itself on Amazon.
<li><a href="http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2016/07/15/venomous-how-the-earths-deadliest-creatures-mastered-biochemistry/">Venomous: How the Earth’s Deadliest Creatures Mastered Biochemistry</a>, by Christie Wilcox is just plain fun. And, disturbing at many levels. A great read. You won't be able to put it down, but if you do put it down, check for scorpions first!</li>
<li><a href="http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2016/02/11/the-serengeti-rules-the-quest-to-discover-how-life-works-and-why-it-matters-book-review/">The Serengeti Rules: The Quest to Discover How Life Works and Why It Matters</a> by Sean (The <strong>B</strong>iologist) Carroll uses the key principle of homeostasis to explore complex biological systems. Very readable, fascinating. </li>
<li><a target="_blank" href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0062368591/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0062368591&linkCode=as2&tag=grlasbl0a-20&linkId=ae6dda6c59963fb2a33896f24ee7adcb">I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life</a><img src="//ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=grlasbl0a-20&l=am2&o=1&a=0062368591" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;" /> by Ed Yong is about the gazillion cells that live in and on you, and how they are really, well, you. This book is about what is regarded by many as another revolution in thinking about how life works. Great read. </li>
<li>Do not. I repeat do not. Do not bring this book on your next airplane flight. You will learn things from <a target="_blank" href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0143127322/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0143127322&linkCode=as2&tag=grlasbl0a-20&linkId=f36c25867554f9981edfaa2f5ade91bc">The Crash Detectives: Investigating the World's Most Mysterious Air Disasters</a><img src="//ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=grlasbl0a-20&l=am2&o=1&a=0143127322" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;" /> that will amaze you and, frankly, freak you out. </li>
<li><a target="_blank" href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1623493870/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1623493870&linkCode=as2&tag=grlasbl0a-20&linkId=7a055e283bdd1e4337ab8502a03ff7c9">Alligators of Texas (Gulf Coast Books, sponsored by Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi)</a><img src="//ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=grlasbl0a-20&l=am2&o=1&a=1623493870" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;" /> by Louise Hayes (Photos by Philippe Henry) may be of local interest, but I include it here because it is an excellent monograph on this particular animal. If you live anywhere near the Gulf Coast, but especially Texas, this book needs to be near your back door. </li>
Bird Books
I have a handful of super excellent bird books that are new and should be of interest to anyone with a science bent, not just bird people.
Bird Brain: An Exploration of Avian Intelligence was written by Nathan Emery, who is a Senior Lecturer (that’s like a Professor of some sort, in America) at Queen Mary University, London. He researches the evolution of intelligence in animals, including primates and various birds, and yes, including the crows!
He and his team “…have found striking similarities in the behaviour, ecology, neurobiology and cognitive mechanisms of corvids (crows, rooks, jackdaws and jays) and apes. [Suggesting that] these similarities are adaptations for solving similar social and ecological problems, such as finding, protecting and extracting food and living in a complex social world.”
The book is really great, the best book out there right now on animal intelligence, possibly the best book so far this year on birds. This is the kind of book you want laying around the house or classroom to learn stuff from. If you are writing or teaching about anything in evolution or behavior, this is a great way to key into the current work on bird intelligence.
HERE is my full review of this book, including musings about the subject matter.
Another bird book, that I’ve also labeled as the best bird book of the year, is What the Robin Knows: How Birds Reveal the Secrets of the Natural World by Jon Young. This is an exploration of nature based on this premise: the robin knows everything about its environment, and this information is regularly conveyed via the bird’s call, or its behavior. By observing that behavior or understanding the robin’s vocalizations, you can poach that information and also know a lot about the immediate environment, which may be your own back yard, the area near your camping site, the wooded gully the enemy may approach you by, or a nearby park. (My full review is HERE.)
And, of course, it isn’t just the robin, it is all the animals including birds, insects, and everything else. But Young is talking about birds, and it is certainly true that in most or possibly all habitats, it is the birds that, owing to their diurnal and highly visible and sound oriented nature, are telling you all this information about your mutual surroundings as well as about the bird itself.
To me, birding (and nature watching in general) is not so much about lengthening one’s list (though that is always fun) but, rather, about observing and understanding behavior. Young explores this, teaches a great deal about it, and places this mode of observation in the context of countless stories, or potential stories, about the world you are sharing with the birds you are watching.
This is a four or five dimensional look at a multidimensional world. Lucky for us humans, as primates, we share visual and audio modalities, and mostly ignore odor, and we have overlapping ranges in those modalities (to varying degrees). But birds fly (most of them, anyway) and are small and fast and there are many of them. In many places we live, we are the only diurnal visually-oriented non-bird. Indeed, while I’m sure my cat communes with the rabbits at a level I can’t possibly understand, I’m pretty sure I get the birds in ways she could not possibly get her paws around. (Which is why we don’t let her out of the house. She would prefer to eat them, rather than appreciate them!)
This title is more for those specifically interested in birds. It is one of those books that looks at an entire category of birds over a large area. The title of Waterfowl of North America, Europe, and Asia: An Identification Guide, by Sébastien Reeber could be rewritten to say “Temperate and Subtropical Waterfowl of the Northern Hemisphere,” though that would be a bit misleading because a large percentage of these birds migrate long distances, so really, it is more like “Waterfowl of the world except the ones that stay in the tropics or otherwise don’t migrate north of the tropics,” but that would be a silly title.
Waterfowl of North America, Europe, and Asia: An Identification Guide is large format. The up and down and back and forth dimensions are not as large as Crossley’s bird guides, but it is way bigger than a field guide, and thick … 656 pages. The plates start on page 32 and the detailed text and photograph rich species accounts run from pages 177 to 616, to give you an idea of the balance and expansiveness found in this volume.
This book is organized in a unique way. There are two main parts. First, 72 plates show peterson-style drawings of all of the birds that are covered, with the drawings arranged on the right side, with basic ID information, range maps, and references to other parts of the book on the left side. This allows the user to find a particular bird fairly quickly. Importantly, the pictures cover both sex and age variations.
The second part of the book significantly expands on the plates, and is cross referenced by plate number, with extensive text and multiple photographs to add very rich detail.
So, when it comes to your preference for drawings vs. photographs, you can have your cake and eat it too. Also, when it comes to your need for a basic field guide vs. a more in depth discussion, you can have your cake and eat it too there as well.
This is really an idea gift book for a bird lover. Chances are they don’t have it, chances are, they’ll love it. Write a nice inscription in it.
The most likely way for Hillary Clinton to not win the presidency may be a tie between Secretary Clinton and Donald Trump. This is because, when one looks at the data a number of ways, and makes various adjustments, Clinton wins, often just barely, most of the time, except in what appears to be the worst case scenario. That scenario is Clinton losing most of what are called “Battleground States” — but for the most part, only those that are truly in contention, so it is quite possible — but retaining her “firewall” states, the states she really can not possibly lose. That puts Clinton 3 points ahead of the 270 required to win. But then, in this scenario, the most likely bluish state to switch to red, New Hampshire, goes for Trump. When that happens, the Electoral College Vote becomes 269-269, and the Electoral College becomes the Electoral College Prank.
What happens then? The House attempts to decide who will win. If that happens, each state gets one vote (or zero, if they can’t decide). Even if the Democrats win the house back from the Republicans this election, Republicans will theoretically decide the outcome, because Democrats are concentrated in the more popular states. On a state-by-state basis, most states are Republican.
That does not mean that the Republicans will vote for Trump automatically. They have to chose among the top three Electoral candidates (while the Senate, meanwhile, choses among the top TWO VP candidates). Who knows what will happen?
You might think this is unlikely. Until I did my analysis this morning, I thought it was possible, but unlikely. I now realize that the chances of an electoral tie are pretty darn good. (And by pretty darn good, I do mean probably less than one in ten, but that’s still pretty darn good for something that has only happened once before.)
Let’s look at all the numbers.
As you know I have a model. I mentioned weeks ago that near the end of the election season, my model would converge on the polls, because it is calibrated to the polls, but only uses the better and more recent polling data. Today, I decided to use the final adjusted polling estimate provided by FiveThirtyEight, because, a) they are good at adjusting and evaluating polling data, and b) there is now enough information to use polling data from pretty much any state. Still, there are some weak states, and there are other uncertainties, so feeding polling data into my model provides a semi-independent look across the states (it is quite possible for the polls to put a state in one column but my model to reverse that).
(Note: my model does not use polling data from Utah or Hawaii, because those states are too different from all the other states.)
So, here I’m going to use two separate sets of results, polls and my model. My model’s multiple R-squared value is really high (0.9838) and the polling results and model results are almost identical, but not quite. Given the strength of my model during the primaries, I trust it more than the polling data. Also, my model foretold many things that the polls finally caught up with, over the last several days, such as the weakness of North Carolina as a Clinton state. Well, not many things, but that one thing and maybe a few other things.
This is what the current polls say about Clinton’s chances in the race. If we take all the polls, and assign every state where Clinton beats Trump to Clinton, we get this:
As noted on the map (made using 270 to win’s excellent tool), Clinton, according to the best available analysis of current polls, would win by only 3 electoral votes. I’ve seen this coming for some time, and despite lots of arm waving saying it is not true, this is the most current, scientific, likely most accurate estimate.
The weakest state among the blue states on this map is New Hampshire. Look closely at New Hampshire on election night. If this map is shaping up as indicated here, AND New Hampshire looks weak, like maybe a Trump win, then we may well have the ultimate election night hangover on Wednesday. An electoral tie.
All the nay sayers out there (you know who you are) who have been telling me that my model must be wrong, because the polls show Clinton doing much better than my model, etc. etc., take heed now. That map, above, was from your precious polls. The following map is from my model, and it has a somewhat more secure win for Hillary Clinton.
I’m giving Florida and Nevada to Clinton, and New Hampshire is more secure. Frankly I think the most likely scenario is either one of the above two maps, or something in between, and that’s pretty much what is going to happen on election night. A trivial and incorrect way to calculate the likelihood of a tie is to look at all the different combinations (moving NH, NV, and FL around) but that is dumb, so I’m not going to do it. The extremes are probably less likely than the other combinations.
One prediction comes out of this that is rock solid. Tuesday night and Wednesday morning are going to be nail biters.
But wait, there’s more. Let’s have another look at the map, but applying the uncertainty in my model, in order to get one possible Election Night Bingo Card version. This map shows what states to watch, because they are the ones right in the middle between the two candidates.
By the way, recent information out of Florida seemed very very positive with respect to that state. But that is only one study, using a methodology and a set of data never before used, in a highly dynamic and changing system, in an untrustworthy state. Comment such as “Yeah, but Florida is in the bag for Clinton” will be frowned upon.
Here’s the same deal, but based on polls instead of my model:
Now, lets try some Magical Thinking. From Trump’s perspective, consider that the polls have been shifting by about one percentage point towards Trump or away from Clinton per week over the last few weeks. So, let’s move one percentage point from Clinton to Trump across all the polls and see what we get.
We get this, the Map from Hell, in which Trump does not win, but the rest of us lose anyway.
The second Magical Thinking scenario involves the idea that Clinton, and the Democrats have a real ground game going, and Trump does not. In this scenario, we move 2.5% from Trump to Clinton across the board to reflect this political reality. This may be the case, but it could also be, as noted, wishful magical thinking. And, it looks like this:
A lot of people have been talking about a Clinton Landslide, but this is the best you are likely to get. And, if you want to call this a landslide, feel free, but it isn’t and you would be wrong.
And, finally, your election night watch list. This map shows as blue every state that remained blue in all of the above analyses, and as red every state that remained red in all of the above analyses. The unknown state are, therefore, states that have either moved back and forth depending on how you look at the data, or what are within a short distance, either by polling or by my model, of those states. This is actually a pretty robust list. I don’t expect any state not brown on this map to move, and some of the brown ones won’t either (Colorado will be Clinton, Georgia will be Trump). But, if things are wonkier and wackier than our imaginations even now let us allow, who knows…
The election is one week off. I think I’ve convincingly demonstrated, here, that Clinton is likely but not certain to win, that Trump has something of a chance, but not a great one, and that the swing states, therefore, matter.
There are a lot of states that are called swing states but are not. There are non-swing states that are slowly becoming swing states. For example, Georgia and Texas may well be swing states for the next presidential election. Virginia has been considered a swing state for so long that this now reliably semi-progressive/centrist vote-for-the-Dems-for-POTUS state probably shouldn’t be considered a swing state any more. Of course, once a state is a swing state, it should probably not be trusted for several election cycles thereafter.
And, of course, there are swing states that are currently busy swinging back and forth and must be paid close attention to. Here are a few observations on this subset of swing states, based on this morning’s polling and my previous model. (A LOT, perhaps a record number, of polls came out over the last 36 hours, most of which are fairly low quality, and I’m mostly ignoring them.)
Right now, it looks like Trump will win Arizona. My model puts Arizona in Trump’s column. Before you object, FiveThirtyEight agrees with me.
My model puts Iowa in Clinton’s column, but polls disagree, and it looks like Iowa is going to be Trump. This may be where my model fails (likely, paying too much attention to Iowans of the past?) Or, this could be where I get to say, later, “I told you so.” This contrast has been developing for weeks, but there hasn’t been a lot of poling data.
Proposal: If Iowa votes for Trump, take Iowa out of the first slot for the next primary season. (Unless Trump wins the election, then, move to Iowa.)
Nevada really is very, very, close but all indicators suggest that Clinton will win Nevada. My model says Clinton will win Nevada.
New Hampshire probably is not on the table any more as an unreliable state, or a swing state. Does anyone know if this has anything to do with Massachusetts and New Hampshire cross border commuting and car insurance? Eric?
Even though my model is very iffy about North Carolina, it does give it to Clinton by a very small margin, and polls suggest that North Carolina is firmly Clinton.
My model currently puts Ohio barely in the Clinton column. Previous runs of this model put Ohio in Trump’s column. Polls suggest it is very iffy. FiveThirtyEight puts Trump one percent above Clinton, suggesting a fair sight better than 50-50 chance of Trump winning there.
Verily, Ohio is the swingiest of states.
I think everyone and every poll and every model is agreed: Pennsylvania is Clinton. But, Pennsylvania has pulled surprises in the past, so don’t turn your back on Pennsylvania. If you find yourself in the elevator with Pennsylvania, check your wallet.
People have been talking about Utah like it matters. It does not and never will. But it is interesting. Don’t confuse “interesting” with “matters.” Trump will win in Utah.
Are we done calling Virginia a “swing state” yet? Clinton.
When Secretary Clinton is elected President, barring more shenanigans on the part of Republicans like James Comey, she will take an oath of office, promising to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States of America.
Then, within a few days, she’ll violate that oath by appointing one or more Republicans to important positions in the Federal Government.
(As an aside, I’m wondering, what is the mechanism for paying someone like James Comey for giving a helping hand to his party and violating his constitutional oath? Offshore accounts? Do the payments come later? How does that work? I know how they do it on TV, but how do they do it in real life? But I digress…)
Every now and then, in every Democratic administration, a couple of Republicans are asked to serve. This is a thing both parties do at about equal levels. But what does not appear to be equal is the probability, increasing in recent years, that the cross party appointment will lead to either embarrassment, or serve to plant a time bomb of some sort. A cross party appointee messing with Democracy, or simply screwing up, seems to be more of a Republican thing than a Democratic things. (Though I’m sure there are a few counter examples.) Often, the Republican turns around at some point and sticks it to the Democrats. Sometimes it is just a personal attack that happens after they serve, other times it is a criminal act they carry out while still in their position.
James Comey is an example of this.
There are three truths that must be understood, and I hope Hillary Clinton understands and acts on these truths. But I doubt she will, because she she is a olde timey Democrat, bless her heart, and will likely carry on the tradition of bending over for the Republicans. But, since she should understand this more than anyone, ever, perhaps she will act differently.
Here are the truths:
1) Republicans are, in fact, very bad at certain things, especially national defense and crime. We are faced as a nation with huge problems in both of these areas, and if Secretary Clinton is elected to be President, she will be spending much of her administration dealing with these things. This includes the hatred of America engendered by protracted Republican wars, and the fact that our society is a prison state, and a police state, and other effects of the Patriot Act. These are mostly Republican-caused problems, and where Democrats were involved, they were Blue Dogs or cow towed.
2) Democrats are actually very good at doing these things, at dealing with defense and criminal justice. If Democrats keep putting their token Republicans in those areas, that will simply reinforce the utter falsehood that Democrats are lousy on crime and lousy on defense. This has to stop.
3) Republicans can not be trusted to govern, under any circumstances, in any role, at any level of government, ever. The fundamental philosophy of Republicans is that nothing matters, no ethical considerations or legal restrictions, as long as one ultimately votes against women’s health, for voter suppression, and in favor of unfettered gun ownership and use. Everything else, all other issues, are secondary. Therefore, when a Democratic president puts a Republican in any position of responsibility, knowing this, a deeply cynical and irresponsible act has occurred. The Republican will, eventually, violate the constitution.
To Republicans, the collective rights of all Americans make up the very pavement over which the bus of the Second Amendment, a Religious Republic, and a Police State roll. We don’t get thrown under the bus. We are expected to reside there, under the bus. Their bus.
Dear Secretary Clinton: After you take your oath to defend and protect the Constitution of the United States of America, don’t violate that oath right away by appointing any Republicans to any positions of authority of any kind whatsoever. Please.
There are Republicans who have served in Democratic administrations with honor and dignity, people like Jim Leach. But they are old, they are retired, they represent the GOP before the Republican Revolution. And the good they’ve done is not unique. Those positions could have been covered by Democrats. The Petraeus scandal, Bernanke’s sexism vis-a-vis the $10 bill, Chuck Hagel’s controversy, Bob Gate’s book, all serve as warnings.
But at this state, appointing a Republican to an important position within a Democratic administration carries sufficient risk of unconstitutional behavior that the act of appointment itself should be considered a violation of the oath.
It ain’t over ’till the lady in the pantsuits wins. Or looses.
Imagine Debbie Downer and Chicken Little have an offspring. It would be me. Or at least, that’s how I’ve felt over the last few weeks as the only person in the Free World who seems to have noticed that the gap between Trump and Clinton is closing, and in fact, was never really that large to begin with. It only appeared large because a fluctuation occurred at about the same time everyone was hoping for a fluctuation, so it became more real than it should have been. The race has been close for some time, remains close, and is narrowing.
This morning, the newscaster for NPR introduced a story on the race with “With Hillary Clinton’s lead narrowing …” or words to that effect. The story was about President Obama’s remarks. You think you’re wining, then you miss a couple of free flows, get a penalty or two you weren’t expecting, next thing you know, you wake up the next morning, and you’re the Minnesota Vikings. Or words to that effect.
Let’s look at some tracking polls. Tracking polls may be inaccurate with respect to magnitude (how high or low the candidates are, in relation to each other, but scaled in absolute terms) but they are supposed to be helpful in detecting short term changes. So, for example, if you have good reason to think two candidates are at, say, 60 – 40 in the split among voters, and a tracking poll then tells you that that first candidate has likely lost about 5%, that means that you should take seriously the possibly that it is no longer 60 – 40, but may have moved closer to 50 – 50, without assuming how much closer. That is what tracking polls can give you.
This shows the race narrowing to a near dead heat.
In both of these polls, ignore the absolute value. What these tracking polls are telling you is this: Ten days ago, you were jumping up and down happy because Clinton was so far ahead and her lead was expanding. Today, you need to stop jumping up and down and you have to put your nose the grindstone and work on making sure she wins, because, simply put, Trump has a chance.
A third tracking poll, the IBD/TIPP poll, is considered to be highly accurate (has never been wrong in a presidential race) and has put Clinton and Trump in a near dead head for a long time now. IBD/TIPP shows Clinton’s lead expanding a bit.
So, with two tracking polls showing what looks like an emerging reversal of fortune for the Clinton campaign, and one maintaining as an indicator that things are close, those who wish to not have a Trump Presidency should be concerned about two things.
The first thing to be concerned about is your own personal connection to and understanding of reality. A lot of Americans really like Trump, and you didn’t think that was possible and still don’t understand why. Fail to grasp that at your peril.
The second thing, of course, is an actual Trump presidency.
This is the point where most un-realists, those who simply wish Clinton to win so hard that their eyes have become scaled over, make this argument: “But the Electoral College, bla bla bla.”
So, let’s look at the Electoral College. I recently projected a very close race in the Electoral College, that some said was a crazy outlier. But when I looked at the other projections, I found that mine was similar to many others, with only one difference: I projected win/loss for all states, while the others left a lot of states as unknown. In other words, for states where we know the likely outcome, the race is close.
But how close?
Here is a list of the selected sampling of pundit forecasts listed at 270 to to win.
This represents the range of what people are thinking.
Note that in all cases, a) Clinton has more than 270 electoral votes, BUT, in several cases she is within one state of losing that. Note also that Trump is in every case below 270. But, also notice that in all cases (not shown in this table, but visible on direct inspection) there are plenty of unattributed states for either candidate to draw from.
This is the map that is of most concern:
This is the map 270 provides to represent “contested states.” It is not unreasonable. New Hampshiere, North Carolina, Ohio, Georgia, Florida, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Wisconsin, and Iowa are reasonably thought of as contested. In this scenario, neither candidate has enough to win.
Let’s take this map and give Trump the states he is very likely to win if the wind is blowing softly in his direction. We get this:
Still, neither candidate wins.
I personally have a hard time believing Wisconsin will not be blue. New Hampshire has been trending more and more Blue, so maybe it will be Blue as well. Le’ts assume that Maine goes blue as well. If that all happens, Clinton wins by 3 electoral votes.
But it is also not unreasonable to guess that New Hampshire goes for Trump, or that, say New Mexico ends up going for Trump. In that case, Clinton is just below the 270 mark. If Trump then wins North Carlina and Florida, then hello President Trump.
Indeed, in the Election Year From Hell, we may very well expect this nightmare scenario:
If this happens, the vote on November 8th is thrown out and Congress decides who will be president. The House will decide who will be President, and they will pick Trump. The Senate will decide who is Vice President, and they will pick Kaine.
On Election night, I’ll be watching New Hampshire and North Carolina very closely.
There are some interesting, and in some cases, potentially disturbing, things going on with the state by state numbers in the current election. Most of this has to do with third party candidates, and most of it with Gary Johnson.
First, I’ll note, that despite fears among liberals and progressives that a lot of Bernie Bots would flock to third party candidates and eschew Clinton, there is no strong evidence that Clinton is losing much to any third party candidates. However, in some states, especially those with libertarian tendencies, Gary Johnson is doing fairly well. And, this had been hurting Trump.
However, lately, there has been a shift backwards in at least one state, New Hampshire. Johnson supporters are abandoning Johnson and switching to Trump, as though they were trying to shore up his position there. This has brought the Trump-Clinton numbers to within the margin of error.
In other words, Libertarian White Males in the “Live Free or Die” state are flocking to Misogynist Racist Trump’s aid rather than “voting on principle” which is what, I assume, they were formally pretending to do. And, this could cost Clinton a couple of electoral votes if the trend continues.
Meanwhile, something like this may be happening in Virginia, but in the opposite direction, where Johnson appears to be getting a lot of Trump votes, maybe more as time goes on.
I don’t have time to do any of this right now, but when this is all over, it would be very interesting to look at the third party effects in this race.
OK, now on to the model. Let me explain the basic approach I take, which is different from other predictors (though 538 may have quietly adopted part of my approach for the general, as they’ve added something that looks a lot like my primary methods to their analysis).
Assume that all polls are good, and that all states are recently sampled with high quality polls with good methods and good samples.
OK, after you’ve stopped laughing, work with this assumption for a minutes. If this was the case, then you could use those polls to predict the electoral outcome, and unless the electoral outcome was really close, or something major went wrong, your prediction would be clear as two who won, and very close if not spot on as to how many electoral votes ultimately go to each candidate.
Now assume that we don’t have polls at all, but we have some numbers indicating how people in a given state are likely to vote (like, if they went for Romney, they are likely to go GOP) or numbers indicating how people will vote based on ethnicity (like, African Americans are not likely to vote for any of the candidates other than Clinton, or among whites there is a certain percentage of White Supremacists, so they’ll vote for Johnson or Trump, etc.) If these numbers are accurate, you can predict the state by state outcome.
We don’t have either of these, but we do have a little of each.
My method uses only a subset of polls, hopefully across a range of states (geographically, politically, etc.), that are taken by higher end polling agencies and recently. These are then combined with data on percentage of voters in that state that voted for Romney, and the classically defined ethnic breakdown for that state, to come up with a muliti-variable regression model. This model uses the percent of the vote that Trump gets out of Trump vs Clinton as the dependent variable, and a Romney number, and the ethnic breakdowns, as the independent variables.
I exclude some states that have recent data but that are beating to their own drums. In this case, Iowa is doing something different, and nobody understands it. Also, Virginia is doing something different and has not been analyses yet. So, even though I have recent data from those two states, they are excluded.
The polls need to be mostly or entirely after the famous “bus tape” and most are after the second presidential debate. These polls come from Utah, Wisconsin, Georgia, Missouri, Indiana, Texas, Alaska, Ohio, Colorado, New Hampshire, Florida, North Carolina, Nevada, Maine, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Michigan, and Washington.
So, good polls are assumed to be nearly perfect, and they show the relationship between available prior voting patterns and demographics and the likely outcome. Then, this model is applied to all states (even those with the good polls) to come up with a list of states and their corresponding “Trumposity”
The result of that analysis is this:
State
Trumposity
Utah
0.58063023
Wyoming
0.567768212
Oklahoma
0.549223043
Idaho
0.548614992
Alabama
0.546790641
West Virginia
0.541869467
Arkansas
0.541711727
Louisiana
0.539524138
Tennessee
0.536052614
Kentucky
0.53465294
Mississippi
0.532941927
Nebraska
0.529403232
Kansas
0.527964979
North Dakota
0.524771763
South Carolina
0.522670157
South Dakota
0.519464786
Georgia
0.517394808
Texas
0.513464342
Montana
0.51208424
Missouri
0.509752111
Indiana
0.509722982
Alaska
0.503877982
North Carolina
0.498999354
Arizona
0.494053798
Florida
0.486219535
Ohio
0.485026033
Virginia
0.48473854
Pennsylvania
0.477290142
Michigan
0.472823203
New Hampshire
0.472629126
Iowa
0.472420972
Wisconsin
0.470889284
Minnesota
0.470213444
Colorado
0.46956662
Nevada
0.465734145
Delaware
0.456986898
Oregon
0.454603152
Illinois
0.452734653
Maine
0.45123086
Connecticut
0.450282382
New Jersey
0.448700354
Washington
0.448170787
New Mexico
0.447855158
Maryland
0.445995181
Massachusetts
0.436816062
New York
0.429018521
Rhode Island
0.427783887
California
0.425306503
Vermont
0.411357768
Hawaii
0.371874288
District of Columbia
0.339691168
You can now split the table at the 50-50% mark to decide which states will break for Clinton and which will break for Trump.
(Note: Alaska will always break for Trump. It is located near the 50-50 line because Alaska is a special snowflake state. Ignore it, just keep it red on any map, and that will do.)
The first map I want to show you is the map of states that are in the Clinton Camp that are a) most Clinton leaning in this analysis, and b) sufficient to get Clinton to 270:
I added Virginia and colored it light blue. The reason I did this is that Iowa is a presumed-Clinton state in this mode, but is in fact, polling for Trump, because people in Iowa seem to have a new goal in life: Pissing off the parties and the electorate sufficiently that nobody cares about them any more, and the Iowa Caucus is no longer allowed to take the prominent role it has for all these year. I predict that if Iowa breaks for Trump, in four years, the first contest will not be the Iowa Caucus.
By adding Virginia and thus potentially starting early on the process of regarding Iowa as irrelevant to electoral politics, we have a list of states that is clearly Clinton and sufficient to put the former first lady back in the White House but with a different job.
Now, let’s do the same thing for Trump. What states are required to put him past the 270 line?
In this case, I’ve colored pink the states that my model puts in the Clinton column but that are on the Trump-end of that part of the list (see table above), that are required to give Trump the election.
Ohio is actually possible. My model shows Ohio going to Clinton, but recent polling shows that Ohioans are more white supremacist than we might have thought. So may be Trump gets Ohio, but I don’t think he’g soing to get all those other pink states, or even any of them, likely.
Putting this a slightly different way, the solid Trump states (in my model) plus Ohio is still under 200 electoral points.
The current most likely outcome according to this model is this:
That would be an electoral blowout.
What happens if some of the more suspect states go backwards and vote for Trump? Iowa is threatening its own irrelevance, New Hampshire is acting strange, Ohio is polling towards Trump, and North Carolina, Arizona and Florida are close to the mid point. Change all of those states to Trump, and we get this nailbiter:
The difference between these last two maps is clearly going to be the focus of interest over the next several days.
Colored here in red, for Danger, not for Trump/GOP, are the states that need to be watched closely, for which we eagerly await new polling, because they are either close, near the middle, or acting strange over recent days:
That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. Until at least Tuesday or so.
NaNoWriMo is an international project< involving thousands of writers, or would be writers, who commit to writing an entire novel within the month of November. (I hear that you can finish a work already started, but you have to produce 50K words during the month for the novel to count). Since I’ve written a novel within a month once before, I figure I can do it again, only this time, better. Why will it be better? Because I can take my time, since I have a WHOLE MONTH to do it in. (I only had a few days to finish the last one.)
This post is a modified version of my novel’s page at the NaNoWriMo site, which apparently can’t be public.
Cthulhu Calling
This is H.P. Lovecraft’s story, set in more recent times, without the racism and sexism, and the story is kinda different too. Disclaimer: The Synopsis and Excerpt provided below may or may not survive the writing process.
A timelessly ancient presence lurks deep beneath a cold northern lake, sleeping and dreaming. It has been doing so since eons before the lake itself ever existed, passing time as glaciers came and went, scraping the surface of the planet closer and closer, and ever changing in its appearance.
But the Old One it does not always dream alone. For the Old One, dreaming is sustenance, and those creatures that happen to be about, that happen to have evolved by chance or design of nature to exist at that moment in long and deep time, are recruited to be the chosen with whom the old one dreams. And generally, they are not aware that they are being fed upon.
Thousands of years after the Old One first took to resting on this quiet blue planet, one of the more clever denizens, the humans, happened by chance upon a feast in progress, and became curious. That same species had an expression: “Curiosity killed the cat.” The Old One knew nothing of cats, but felt very uncomfortable with human curiosity.
And so begins the story of Gean and Lacy, two humans not delectable in the usual way, and thus untouched, undemented, by the reaching mind of the ancient sleeper, who would entirely by chance discover at least part of the unthinkable truth, and ultimately step unsafely close to the unearthly creature busily consuming its meal.
This monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, with an octopus-like head and face covered with a mass of tentacles, a scaly, rubbery body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, vestigial wings, and large enough to displace all the waters of a sizable Walleye honey hole, would be the least of Gean and Lacy’s problems. They should really have avoided enraging the Masters of the Universe who ran one of the country’s largest corporations, raising the suspicions of the investigators in charge of a secret bureau of the Department of Homeland Security, or disturbing the troubled harmony of the academic world of anthropologists and other scoundrels.
Excerpt
It turns out that sometimes, when you dream a certain thing, you die.
Had this happened once, it would never have been noticed. Twice, it would have been attributed to coincidence. But it happened three times, and in this case, three times is not a charm. Over 10,000 people had been sleeping while attached to a SleepMeter 2000 during the course of up to four and a half years, nearly 80 million hours of data from their sleep cycles uploaded to the central server. Four of them happened to die during their sleep. One was not dreaming at the time and the cause of death was a heart attack. That’s a coincidence. The other three had died of a brain hemorrhage, and the data from the SleepMeter 2000 indicated not only that they were dreaming at the time, but they were dreaming oddly. The signals picked up by the sensors built into the Sleep Cap that comes with the SleepMeter 2000 clearly indicated dreaming, but along with the dreaming came an additional electronic signature utterly unique compared to all of the other signals stored over the years on the SleepMeter servers.
Also, all three died at the same exact moment in time.
This is what Lacy Edwards, my roommate and nerd-in-chief at SleepMeter Inc, was telling me. Lacy sat across the kitchen table, telling me the story while she typed rapidly on the keyboard of her ubiquitous laptop and I munched on a piece of toast leftover from breakfast. Her long semi-curly red hair was jiggling slightly against her shoulders as she tapped away at the keys. Her pale but very pretty face, punctuated by a sideways colon of sharp green eyes, fragile em-dash nose and, with her intense focus on her keyboard, open-bracket frown tilted down, not looking at me, but only at the screen. Ok, maybe it isn’t fair for me to always think of Lacy as an emoticon, but she seemed to spend her life inside computers so it felt right.
“There were nine other instances of that strange signal coming from people’s heads while they slept,” she said. “Eight in the ones who died, at various times over the previous weeks. One had been picked up from the brain of another individual who seems to be both still alive and still a customer using the SleepMeter 2000 service. But the bosses at work have been totally cagey with me. ‘This is just an anomaly, and has nothing to do with our device,’ they said. They told me to lay off. Hell, they are probably right. The 2000 is safe. It doesn’t DO anything, just reads signals. That’s not the problem.”
“We don’t need to look into safety, I told them. We need to look into these people. I think we might have discovered a new disease or something. And the thing is, we saw it coming in all the cases where they died, and one guy is still alive. For now.”
“And if you really did discover a new disease,” I mentioned through my toast, “you also have the diagnostic tool for it.”
She looked up from her laptop for the first and only time and, giving me a wink (colon to semi-colon and back) said, “… and of course, I thought of that. That’s when I realized the reason they did not want me looking into this.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because I was the inventor of most of the technology that went into making the SleepMeter 2000 work. Therefore, I am the inventor of this possible technology to identify a medical condition that can lead to death from brain hemorrhage. And of course, they want to patent that themselves!”
“Oh. Right.” I poured more milk into my coffee. The coffee was too cool to be considered hot coffee, but maybe with a little more milk it would kinda be ice coffee. “So what are you going to do about that?” I asked, fairly confident that she could not do much about it.
“Well, I’m not going to do nuthin’” Lacy said, saying each of those syllables with grand exaggeration and timing them with hard one-fingered hammering, hand raised dramatically with each strike on her keyboard, in a gesture of over dramatic finality. “Because I just finished doing it. Let’ go eat something, I’m starved.”
“What did you do?” I asked as she slapped the cover of the laptop shut.
“I’ll tell you at dinner. From now on I assume our apartment is bugged,” she said with another semi-colon wink and a closed parenthesis, er, grin, clearly joking about the bugging, but I was pretty sure not about dinner.
UPDATE: October 26th
I’ve been working out the story, and I’m confident I have a good overall plan. I also have a good sense of where the characters will be coming from (and going to), at least the main characters.
I have enough of the plan worked out that I can write backwards, starting with the apex of the story, aka “Act III.”
For reference, Act II is the part to the left of he paper stuck on the white board with the magnet. The sock is for cleaning off the white board. Slightly dampened, it works better than the dry erase erasers.
One of the differences among the current four candidates for POTUS is the recognition, by only one of them, of the great importance of basic research. By that, I mean, give the scientists funding to pursue the questions that interest them. A sort of free market of ideas driven not by profits of the Bayers, Koch Borthers, and Cargils of the world, but rather, by how cool stuff is and how much untethered knowledge is advanced each time something else cool happens.
Tsetse flyTrypanosomiasis is a terrible disease. I know only one person who had it, he was treated, survived, but his brain did get fried, at least for a while, and since that was a key asset for him, that was very sad. I did work extensively in a region that had been made into the world’s largest contiguous parkland, spanning three countries, because much of it had been depopulated due to a major epidemic of trypanosomiasis. And, the insect carrier of the disease, the tsetse fly, was there in abundance.
For those who have not met a tsetse fly, think of it as a tropical version of the Horse Fly, that large black thing that looks like a house fly on steroids with the bite that hurts like hell. They are very distant relatives, but have a similar love of human flesh and similar approaches to getting it.
The disease affects both humans and cattle, and has a very high mortality rate, so cattle keeping people such as the BaHama and others who lived in that area were very seriously affected.
Trypanosomiasis is caused by a protozoan, Trypanosoma, which has phylogenetically obscure associations and is probably polyphyletic. There is almost no recent research on the evolution of this protozoan, that I know of, yet it is probably very interesting, being found in both the old and new world, and probably having differentiated a very long time ago. Given the very interesting ways that protozoans reproduce, this would likely be a massively difficult project, above the PhD level. But if you are interested in making a contribution …
You know of trypanosomiasis as “sleeping sickness.” Africanists, trapped between the silliness of the common name and the tongue twistiness of the scientific name call it “tryps.” You don’t want tryps.
Anyway, here’s the thing. Despite major efforts, the disease was never eradicated. It would be totally gone in a region, impossible to find blood samples with the parasite in the sample, and then suddenly re-emerge. Nobody knew where it was hiding.
It turns out that where it was hiding, just discovered, is in retrospect totally obvious, and the kind of thing that, in my view, would have either been thought up or observed by accident, as happened here, had there been more basic research on all the different elements of this sad story of disease and death.
Annette MacLeod of the University of Glasgow was working on related matters, when (to oversimplify and shorten the story a bit) she discovered that the tryps parasite can hide in the skin, staying out of the blood supply and thus off the blood test radar. This may say something of our heavy reliance on blood tests as a sort of Ultimate Truth when it comes to infectious disease. Anyway, the tryps protozoan can remain in the skin, where, possibly, it gets picked up by a biting tsetse, and the, if all goes well for the protozoan, gets spread into the bloodstream of a downstream victim, and the whole things starts over again.
Will other researches, working on other diseases, even those thought to be entirely blood borne, have a look in alternative tissues from now on? They should. Adding a sort of “look both ways” rule to the study of disease may not be a bad idea. Don’t assume the typically focal tissue is the only place a microbe of some sort carries out its activities. Check around. Look in the closet. Behind the door. Under the bed. You never know what will be lurking.
So, many years ago, Amanda and I got a new car. The first thing we did was to switch get rid of my old Rodeo, and I took her old Subaru sedan, and she drove the new Forrester. So, thereafter I drove her old car, and she drove our new car.
One day I was on my way back home, and I noticed that the gas gauge needle was on E, but the Empty Tank Warning Light was not on. So I figured I’d get gas at the place near home, rather than stopping sooner.
Driving down the highway, the car sputtered and stopped working. I got it over to the side of the highway. Knowing that it was not out of gas, because the warning light was not on, I opted to be towed to the station, just a half mile away (I was almost home!) rather than to try fixing it on the road.
By the end of the day, I learned that the problem with the car, the reason it stopped on the highway, was this: Out of gas!
Later, I mentioned to Amanda that her former car’s gas tank warning light didn’t seem to be working any more, and I thought there was 20 miles or so before it went empty! Her response: “It has never worked, since I bought the car. You are thinking of the other car, dummy!”
Well, she didn’t say “dummy” but she should have. And, the answer to the question at the top of this post, with respect to that particular car, is: Undefined.
Much more recently, we were driving our Prius back from a visit up north. We passed the gas statin in Rice, but shouldn’t have, because we were almost out. Coming down into Saint Cloud, the warning light came on. Then, we hit a major traffic jam. There was no way we were going to make it to the gas station.
But, we were going down hill in stop and go traffic in a Prius. So, we switched to “Battery Mode” and stopped using gas for the next 10 minutes. No problem.
The point is, the answer to the question is necessarily imprecise. The best strategy is to avoid letting the light go on. Which, by the way, brings up an important digression into another myth: How empty should you let your car’s gas tank get?
It has long been thought that letting your car get too empty is a bad thing. For modern cars, this is a myth. It may always have been a myth. But today, all the reasons ever cited to avoid this are wrong except two. So, the rule that you should fill your tank when it is one quarter full is incorrect, ignore that. It doesn’t matter when you fill your tank.
But, this part is true: You don’t want your car to run out of gas. Why? Well because then it won’t go! Obviously. But there is another reason. It is actually possible that parts of your system, such as the catalytic converter, will be damaged or stressed by the process of zero-fuel-engine-stoppage. I’m not sure how that happens, but it can happen.
Also, it is a myth that you should not fill the tank on a hot day. You should, actually, never “top off” the tank. Just fill it until the hose clicks you off and leave it at that. Modern cars are designed to handle gas expansion, modern cars in combination with modern gas, are designed to handle moisture in the tank, etc. etc. These various rules about gas are either no longer valid because of changes in technology, or were never true, and merely part of Car Lore.
Anyway, back to the point. Your Mechanic web site has put together a table showing how long you have to drive, estimated and on average, and depending, for each of several makes and models of car, when the emergency fuel light goes on.
I’ve pasted it below, but first, I am reminded of a second myth. Sometimes the out of fuel light is in the form of a tiny gas tank, with the hose on one side. It is said that the side that has the hose on it (see illustration above) indicates which side of the car your filler hole is, which is handy if you are driving a borrowed or rented car.
It doesn’t. Well, maybe about half the time it does, but no, this is not a thing.
by climate scientist Michael Mann and Washington Post political cartoonist Tom Toles is one of the most current, and in many ways, the most fun, of the climate books. The authors go right after the science deniers, but not at the expense of a lot of excellent explanation of the science itself, and the overall political situation. The cartoons are great, the text is engaging.
. Michael Mann shared a Nobel Prize with the IPCC and the other scientists for their work on climate change. That process involved the production of the Scientific Basis for Climate Change IPCC report, which is redone every several years, and includes all the science behind the broad consensus. Dire Predictions represents that science in a fully understandable way, and adds additional material on the other aspects of the problem: Policy. This is a basic on the shelf text you need in your home, and that your kid’s science teachers need in their classrooms.
, Shawn Otto’s latest popular yet scholarly work on the effort to destroy science, is a must read. Climate science isn’t the only science under attack. This book covers it all.
by Paul Douglas and Mitch Hescox is specifically written for your Uncle Bob, is Uncle Bob is a conservative Evangelical Christian. Paul is the country’s top meteorologist-communicator who happens to be a conservative (he claims) Evangelical Christian. Paul wrote the science in this book and it is real science, no holding back. Mitch is an Evangelical Christian guy who supplies the scriptural-religious part of the story. The book, obviously, is about how if you are an Evangelical Christian you should not be a dick about climate change.
by Joe Romm is unique among climate change books. Romm looks at the actual personal impacts of climate change, in the near and longer term future, on typical Americans. Think about it for a second. Many Americans who live in the north plan to eventually retire to warmer, southerly climes. Is that a good idea, with global warming and sea level rise happening? Are you sure that shorefront (or near shorefront) property on the Gulf Coast is a good idea right about now? What about your investment portfolio, what with changes happening in the energy industry and uncertainty in other areas? This is the book that covers that.
by Dana Nuccitelli attacks climate science denialism by rushing right through the battle lines into enemy territory and deconstructing their bogus tripe. This is like the Guns of Navarone, where the guys sneak pas the Nazis and boow up their stuff, but with models. Just how have those alternative ideas and predictions, made over the last several years by climate change deniers, done, compare to the mainstream science? Well, read the book and find out. But I’ll bet you can guess.
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, a highly accessible, well written, and richly illustrated monograph on these beasts. 
by Joe Romm is the ideal climate change book for the person who is always checking their stock portfolio or watching the real estate market, or, simply, planning on moving or retiring soon. It is is also a very up to date examination of climate change science, the effects of climate change on humans, policy related problems, and energy-related solutions. Everyone should read this book, and if you teach earth system sciences you should consider using this book as a guide in your teaching, or in some cases, assigning it in class. The book is written to be read by general audiences, so it would work well in a high school or college setting.
is a brand new title by Don Prothero. 
was written by Nathan Emery, who is a Senior Lecturer (that’s like a Professor of some sort, in America) at Queen Mary University, London. He researches the evolution of intelligence in animals, including primates and various birds, and yes, including the crows!
by Jon Young. This is an exploration of nature based on this premise: the robin knows everything about its environment, and this information is regularly conveyed via the bird’s call, or its behavior. By observing that behavior or understanding the robin’s vocalizations, you can poach that information and also know a lot about the immediate environment, which may be your own back yard, the area near your camping site, the wooded gully the enemy may approach you by, or a nearby park. (My full review is 
, by Sébastien Reeber could be rewritten to say “Temperate and Subtropical Waterfowl of the Northern Hemisphere,” though that would be a bit misleading because a large percentage of these birds migrate long distances, so really, it is more like “Waterfowl of the world except the ones that stay in the tropics or otherwise don’t migrate north of the tropics,” but that would be a silly title.
