Same ol' bullshit

It seems like Palin is as mavericky as candidate McCain is:

A significant part of Palin's base of support lies among social and Christian conservatives. Her positions on social issues emerged slowly during the campaign: on abortion (should be banned for anything other than saving the life of the mother), stem cell research (opposed), physician-assisted suicide (opposed), creationism (should be discussed in schools), state health benefits for same-sex partners (opposed, and supports a constitutional amendment to bar them).

from Anchorage Daily News profile

Repo man on Colbert Report

Kerry's speech

Aside from TPM, there has been little praise for Kerry's speech (text video) at the convention, but if you watch it, and disregard the occasional flub and awkwardness, it really is quite good. I think Kerry did the best job of articulating what's wrong with McCain as President.

Candidate McCain now supports the wartime tax cuts that Senator McCain once denounced as immoral. Candidate McCain criticizes Senator McCain's own climate change bill. Candidate McCain says he would now vote against the immigration bill that Senator McCain wrote. Are you kidding? Talk about being for it before you're against it. Let me tell you, before he ever debates Barack Obama, John McCain should finish the debate with himself.

He did it with flair and fairness; it's exactly the kind of heavy-hitting the Dems may have to embrace to counter the anti-Obama smear campaign.

EDIT: OK maybe the "little praise" ain't accurate after all-- home-W, Kos (yeah that's Stencil next to Kos, shouldn't he be?)... EDIT EDIT: OK, OK now the NYT is piling it on.

Poll stat coverage

An edifying post on "statistical tie" versus "margin of error" from the Washington Monthly blog. Bluefishcanoe, this sounds right, right?

808 state

A metafilter post with a bunch of 808 State (not from Hawaii) youtube videos and 808 info.

A new kind of computer science

I don't pretend to understand this, but when someone announces they have found, "the fourth fundamental circuit element, along with the resistor, capacitor and inductor," I take notice (ref (see, it's so easy!)). It seems odd to me that this bit of electrical engineering, known as the memristor, was "found" and not created-- the researchers write, "Here we show, using a simple analytical example, that memristance arises naturally in nanoscale systems in which solid-state electronic and ionic transport are coupled under an external bias voltage." Uh, OK.

Anyway the NYT says, "Potentially even more tantalizing is the ability of the memristors to store and retrieve a vast array of intermediate values, not just the binary 1s and 0s conventional chips use. This allows them to function like biological synapses and makes them ideal for many artificial intelligence applications ranging from machine vision to understanding speech."

Katrina spills

In a recent op-ed for the Washington Post Charles Krauthammer argues for increased oil-drilling because, in part, "The United States has the highest technology to ensure the safest drilling." This may be true, but it does not follow that our technology is safe enough. Krauthammer continues, "Compare the Niger Delta to the Gulf of Mexico, where deep-sea U.S. oil rigs withstood Hurricanes Katrina and Rita without a single undersea well suffering a significant spill." This is a pretty strong statement to make without any references, and it turns out it is simply false. Katrina resulted in the largest oil-spill since the Exxon Valdez (ref). This is the age of the internet, why can't the Post make its opinion makers include references in their pieces? Just one hyperlink dudes? At best this practice would prevent blowhards like Krauthammer from just making shit up to support their cases, and at worst we could locate the sources of these insidious falsehoods.

Manny commerical

A commercial for ESPN that never aired: Link... After all this stuff, I love the Red Sox a little a less.