11.08.06
Posted in politics at 2:53 am by danvk
I shouldn’t have been so pessimistic. The Dems have gained at least thirty seats in the House and will have a comfortable majority. My old little league coach, Joe Donnelly, won his election by 8%. I’m happy. What has me ecstatic, though, is that the Dems are going to take the Senate, 51-49.
It looked like a lost cause earlier in the evening, when Harold Ford, Jr. was trailing big in Tennessee and George Webb was trailing by 30,000 votes in Virginia. Losing both of those races would have meant 50-50 at best. But then, with around 80% of the precincts reporting, Webb started closing the gap. Every time I hit Cmd-R, it would be slightly narrower. And then, suddenly, he was up by 3,000! That was the moment when I realized this could happen.
It’s all down to Montana and Virginia. Virginia official polls have Webb up by more than 8,000 votes, w/ 99.75% reporting. For some reason, CNN reported this as an 11,000 vote difference earlier in the night, when Webb was only up by 6,000. They just took 5,000 votes from Allen. Don’t know what was up with that. Depending on provisional ballots, there will probably be a recount, but I’d be shocked if it changed anything. Al Gore was only down 500 votes in Florida in 2000. Eight thousand is impossible.
In Montana, CNN is showing a 4,000 vote Tester lead with 84% of precincts reporting. I believe that almost all of the remaining 16% are from Yellowstone county, where Tester is leading by 1,273 votes. Whoever designed CNN’s county-by-county listings should be shot. Why can’t CNN show all the Montana counties on one page? And even worse, why can’t it show me just the counties which haven’t fully reported? In any event, the 84% number can’t go any higher until tomorrow morning, when Yellowstone county has a recount. Assuming no huge changes, Tester will win by 1% and the Democrats will take control of the Senate.
In non-political news, everyone should watch the Mercury Transit tomorrow morning. It lasts from 11:12 AM to 4:10 PM in Mountain View, so it should be visible on the east coast as well.
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11.07.06
Posted in politics at 12:00 am by danvk
I’d encourage everyone to watch HBO’s Hacking Documentary special free on Google Video. It’s 81 minutes long and follows Bev Harris, the woman who found the Diebold source code a few years ago and sent it to CS professors. It’s absolutely absurd that electronic voting software isn’t required to be open source. Possibly even more absurd is that Diebold tallies votes using Microsoft Access!
Some places to follow the election live tomorrow:
The general consensus seems to be that the Democrats will gain 20-30 seats and retake the House, but come up just a bit short in the Senate. I’m really nervous about all this. If that’s what happens tomorrow, I’ll be happy. The Dems need to pick up about 15 or 16 seats to take it, and my guess is that they’ll do it by less than people are expecting. Maybe 20, maybe less.
Senate.. I think the Dems take Montana and Virginia, and the Republicans take Tennessee. That leaves Rhode Island and Missouri. The people on CNN predicted that Rhode Island would go Republican and Missouri would go Dem. That’d mean a 50/50 Senate, which is a Republic majority. I’d believe that. I’m worried about Missouri and Montana, though.
Update: I looked over all the house races at electoral-vote and I counted 16 or so that were almost guaranteed democratic pickups. There’s another 15 really close races on top of that, so I can see the 20-30 pickup number.
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11.06.06
Posted in Uncategorized at 12:56 am by danvk
Is Computer Science really science? Interesting discussion here and here and here, kind of. I’m not sure what to think on this one. It obviously depends on you mean by “science,” but Theoretical CS has always struck me as far more similar to Math than Science.
If your Macbook Pro mysteriously stopped sleeping when you closed it, try downloading the combined 10.4.8 update from Apple.
I really like Anselm Kiefer. I would have linked directly to the San Francisco MOMA page on him, but they just had to make it all Flash. Jerks.
I also really like C++, particularly after reading about Boost.Lambda. Just like most other languages, it’s all about introducing useful abstractions. Unlike any other programming language I know of, it usually does this with zero performance degradation over C. More specifics when I start writing about Boggle…
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11.03.06
Posted in books, reviews at 10:00 pm by danvk
I found this review of Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff from the start of this summer. It’s interesting for me to read this, because my attitudes toward manned space travel have evidently changed dramatically in the past six months. More on that in the review of my next book.
I finished reading Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff this afternoon, and I was completely blown away. I may very well be a sucker for anything space-related (I did read every book on it at the local library), but this book was different. It made me feel as though every other book I’d read on the space program was an historical artifact, something that reflected the opinions and attitudes of its time towards the space program. But Tom Wolfe was cutting right to the quick. He was exposing the rest of the press for what they were.. the “Victorian gent,” as he likes to call them, throwing the astronauts softballs in order to portray them as national heroes.
The really shocking things that came out of this book is just how easily the whole space program could have been different, and just how much power the media had over it all. It wasn’t clear at all in 1959/1960 whether the Mercury program was the place to be. The test pilots weren’t sure if the space program was just a path to glory, or a complete dead end. The X-15 program looked much more promising at first. But what really shifted things was the first three successful Mercury flights.. Shepherd, Grissom, Glenn. When the press turned the astronauts into national heros, there was no backing down from this route to space exploration. And the X-20 program, which would have sent piloted craft into orbit, was scratched. Scratched to the point that I’d never even HEARD of it.
The bits of the book where he talked about the chimps were absolutely fantastic. A very Tom Wolfe tone.
I wished that the book had continued past the Mercury program. It would have been completely appropriate for it to go until the end of the Apollo program, when the infamous budget cuts came around. I would have loved to hear Tom Wolfe’s take on that part of the whole space story. A little followup on what happened to the characters, too. I checked them all out on Wikipedia… most satisfying: Deke Slayton finally got to fly in space in 1975, Pete Conrad walked on the moon (Apollo 12), and so did Alan Shepherd (Apollo 14).
I’ve had about as much Tom Wolfe as I can take for at least the next month, but I’d love to read something else by him in the future.
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10.25.06
Posted in programming at 11:10 pm by danvk
By the end of summer 2003, I was tired of Perl and ready to pick up a new scripting language. The only question was which one to choose, Python or Ruby? I staged my own shootout to decide. A hard drive crash prevented me from putting it online at the time, but I recently found the writeup, which you can read here. The short and sweet:
First of all, I’ll throw Perl right out. I love the language, but not for object-oriented programming. To write a purely procedural program I’d take it over both Ruby and Python any day of the week, but not for OO.
If I had my choice in the matter, I would use Ruby. It’s [sic] syntax seems cleaner, and it’s object orientation doesn’t seem hackish in the least. It’s performance, however, left a lot to be desired. Granted, deep recursion probably isn’t the most widely used technique, but there’s no reason it shouldn’t work. For a different sort of problem, I’d likely choose Ruby, though I’m worried I might have to switch over to Python if I ran into similar problems.
It’s interesting to read this in retrospect, knowing that i used Perl for the next three years before switching to Ruby this past summer. It was hard, but I developed a rule that’s helped. If I start writing a Perl program and it’s longer than two lines, I’ll switch over to Ruby. I’m typically glad I did. I’ve often wondered, in retrospect, why I didn’t switch back then.
First of all, why oh why did I have to use the Josephus problem? I’d been reading the Mozart/Oz book that summer and it seemed reasonable. I’d also just completed Rice’s Comp 212 class and thought that Objects were pretty neat. This test came from the Mozart book, used objects, and had a cool name.
Unfortunately, it also exposed a low stack limit in Ruby 1.6. If only I’d known about the ulimit command back then. If only Ruby 1.8 had been released on July 4, 2003 and not August 4. I can run the same Ruby program now and get up to N=547 with no difficulty. Recursion isn’t a particularly common technique in Ruby, so this test artificially punished it.
So why didn’t I follow my own advice and switch to Python back in 2003? Rather than throwing out Perl, I threw out OO. My post-Comp 212 interest in OO faded quickly, and it was back to Perl for those “purely procedural programs.”
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