All posts by Chris

holding our breath

Politics

From a post on “Slashdot”:http://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=128064&cid=10700179 today:

_*Your friends are watching you*_

_All around the world, we’re watching you today. We love America, we want you to lead and inspire and show us what democracy and freedom and technology can do. But right now we’re feeling scared, confused, and angry about what your President has lead you to do over the past three years._

_Please, give us back the America we admire and believe in. Don’t turn yourselves into a religious state. Don’t turn your back on the UN and the other peoples of the world – in the end we are people first, American or French or Iraqi or Chinese second. Give us back the America that went to the moon and carried out the Berlin airlift and brought us the IT revolution. Give us back the America of Kennedy’s vision and MLK’s dream._

_And please, don’t let the world’s most successful democracy be reduced to a joke with a repeat of last election’s Floridan antics._

nail-biting supplies

Politics

If you’re going to be a nervous election-news junkie like me next Tuesday, “USA Election Atlas”:http://www.uselectionatlas.org/INFORMATION/ARTICLES/ElectionNight2004/pe2004elecnighttime.php might be a useful page to bookmark. They have a map of when polls close in each state, and it looks like they’ll be filling in vote counts as they come in over time.

Or, like Ben, you could sleep the blissful sleep of one who doesn’t know what all the fuss about Red and Blue is.

cul-de-sac

Science

From Yahoo News, via Deana: “In a breathtaking discovery, scientists working on a remote Indonesian island say they have “uncovered the bones of a human dwarf species”:http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&ncid=753&e=1&u=/ap/20041027/ap_on_sc/dwarf_cavewoman marooned for eons while modern man rapidly colonized the rest of the planet.”

I love it when we discover puzzling new evidence. Whatever the explanation turns out to be, the process of learning such extraordinary new things is worth it all by itself.

“This hobbit-sized creature appears to have lived as recently as 18,000 years ago on the island of Flores, a kind of tropical Lost World populated by giant lizards and miniature elephants.”

You just know that writers wait for opportunities like these…

on polls and poles

Politics

I’m wary of posting links to anything pollish. Not that I have anything against polls, but they do tend to… what’s the word?… lie.

However, I’ve become mesmerized by the “Race 2004″:http://www.race2004.net/ poll summary site, mostly because it has pretty colors. Er, I mean it has a state-by-state breakdown of polling, with predictions of the election winner based on the electoral college, not the popular vote.

Watching the swing states shift from day to day underscores how tight this race really is, but looking at the “if the election were held today” numbers shows how a dramatic victory can be accomplished by shifting a few votes here, a few votes there…

If it gets too much for you, take your mind off it with some comedy: “You Forgot Poland”:http://www.youforgotpoland.com/. Fnord.