Politics

No Blank Check

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Strictly speaking, $700 billion dollars (a couple of dollars for every star in the Milky Way) is not a completely blank check. But it’s pretty close. And that’s what the Treasury Department is asking for to buy mortage-related assets (“toxic waste”) from failing banks.

There is plenty of reason to believe that something dramatic has to be done, before our entire financial system up and dies. Talk all you like about punishing the heartless capitalists behind the mess, but if a long string of banks goes belly-up, nobody will benefit.

But, as Paul Krugman says, this is not the right deal. Mostly because of this paragraph in the proposed legislation:

Sec. 8. Review.

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

You’re kidding, right? Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson might be a smart guy, but he remains a cog in the Bush administration. The people who brought you the Iraq war, the Katrina response, Alberto Gonzales, Harriet Myers, and Guantanamo Bay. I don’t know about you, but when faced with a terrible crisis demanding immediate action, my first response is not “Let’s give those guys nearly unlimited power, with no oversight whatsoever.” An action that would be unique in American history, and possibly the largest transfer of power from Congress to the Executive branch ever.

More substantively, though, the plan is outrageous on the face of it. It is a feature of late capitalism that the government will occasionally have to bail out failing institutions. But typically the way that happens is for the government to simply take over the institution entirely, and sell off what it can. Here, the plan is to simply pay huge amounts of money for terribly bad assets — leaving the companies (and their managers) to get on with their lives and their valuable assets. As Josh Marshall put it: this is moral hazard on steroids. Taxpayers swallow the toxic waste, and Wall Street breathes a sigh of relief.

There’s no question that part of the idea here is “Something needs to be done in a hurry — let’s smash something through that gives us unchecked power, while everyone is panicking and not likely to ask too many questions.”

No economist, left or right, likes the plan. Obama is against the blank check, although doesn’t seem to be putting his foot down. McCain is thundering righteously against the robber barons on Wall street, as he has been doing — well, for at least the last week, before which he tended to thunder righteously against overzealous government regulators who were restraining Wall Street’s creativity. Change you can believe in.

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I Guess This Election Really Is About Change

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Occasionally we arrogant fundamentalist atheists are accused of picking on a simplistic, straw-man picture of God — some old man in the sky, Who meddles clumsily in our earthly affairs — rather than a more philosophically sophisticated view of the divine. Just to remind everyone, the unsophisticated version is alive and well, and has big plans for our upcoming elections. Here is an email being passed around among evangelicals. (Via.)

Dear friends:

Barack Hussein Obama has taken the nation by storm. From obscurity, with zero executive experience, or much of any kind, he has vaulted into the position of Presidential frontrunner. It is stunning. On the surface, it appears attributable only to his eloquent oratory and his race. But an invisible factor may be a strong spiritual force behind him, causing some people to actually swoon in his presence.

I have been very concerned that he has publicly said that he does not believe Jesus is the only way to heaven. This makes both the Bible and Jesus a liar, and it means that Christ has died in vain. A person cannot be a true Christian who believes that there are other ways of forgiveness, salvation, and eternal life with God. Only Jesus has paid the price for that.

Therefore, there is, indeed, another spirit involved. And this spirit has come into our national life like a flood. Last week at Obama’s acceptance speech, that spirit exalted itself in front of a Greek temple-like stage, and to a huge audience like in a Roman arena. Omama was portrayed as god-like. His voice thundered as a god’s voice.

At the end, Democratic sympathizer Pastor Joel Hunter gave the benediction and shockingly invited everyone to close the prayer to their own (false) gods. This was surely an abomination, but it was compatible with Obama’s expressed theology, and Hunter’s leftist leanings.

God was not pleased.

And God says, “When the enemy shall come in like a flood, the Spirit of the LORD shall lift up a standard against him” (Isaiah 59:19).

Enter Governor Sarah Palin. With incredible timing, the very next day, Sarah Palin also appeared out of nowhere. Her shocking selection as John McCain’s running mate stunned the world and suddenly took all the wind out of Obama’s sails.

We quickly learned that Sarah is a born-again, Spirit-filled Christian, attends church, and has been a ministry worker.

Sarah is that standard God has raised up to stop the flood. She has the anointing. You can tell by how the dogs are already viciously attacking her. But they will not be successful. She knows the One she serves and will not be intimidated.

Back in the 1980s, I sensed that Israel’s little-known Benjamin Netanyahu was chosen by God for an important end-time role. I still believe that. I now have that same sense about Sarah Palin.

Today I did some checking and discovered that both her first and last names are biblical words, one in Hebrew the other in Greek:

Sarah. Wife of Abraham and mother of Isaac. In Hebrew, Sarah means “noble woman” (Strong’s 8283).

Palin. In Greek, the word means “renewal.” (Strong’s 3825).

A friend said he believes that Sarah Palin is a Deborah. Of Deborah, Smith’s Bible Dictionary says, “A prophetess who judged Israel…. She was not so much a judge as one gifted with prophetic command…. and by virtue of her inspiration ‘a mother in Israel.'”

Only God knows the future and how she may be used by Him, but may this noble woman serve to bring renewal in the land, and inspiration.

Jim

The author, Jim Bramlett, was formerly an associate of Pat Robertson, and more recently has been kept busy recording angels singing.

(The BSD Daemon didn’t appear in the original email; that was my addition.)

I Guess This Election Really Is About Change Read More »

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Live-Blogging the LHC Startup!

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9:20 am Pacific Time: Let’s be clear. Tonight’s start-up is a symbolic event, not a physics event; as I understand it, the beam will only be circulating in one direction, so there won’t even be any collisions. Still, it’s a very important symbolic event! The first time the beam goes through the entire machine. So, just for fun, here will be a running commentary throughout the day, with links and musings and all that makes the blogosphere special. Co-bloggers are welcome to chime in, and any particle physicists out there who want to say something about the LHC are welcome to comment or email.

9:45 am (Pacific), Sean: Feel free, in the comments, to make predictions about what the LHC will discover (ultimately, not today). Here are mine. Crackpots not welcome. And seriously, folks — black-hole/world-ending jokes are only funny the first million times.

1:14pm (EST), Mark: Here at Cornell there’s going to be a public forum this evening with refreshments, chats with physicists, two talks (by Yuval Grossman and Peter Wittich) and with various instruments and components of the detector on display.

10:26am (PDT), JoAnne: Actually, it is the end of the world as we know it. I will never again have to write a paper detailing the signatures of some crazy new Terrascale theory, wondering if there is any chance of connection to reality. I will never again have to plot a cross section as a function of the Higgs mass. In fact, I will never again have to do a loop over the Higgs mass in a code. I will never again wonder how electroweak symmetry is broken, how the hierarchy between the electroweak and gravity fundamental scales is maintained, whether there is a WIMP dark matter particle, or whether supersymmetry or extra spatial dimensions actually exist. Fundamental questions and roadblocks that have plagued us for literally decades will finally be answered and we will at last be able to move forward instead of spinning our wheels. Yes, indeed, the world will be truly different.

10:47am (Pacific), Sean: Of course we are not the only blog covering this. The US/LHC Blogs have lots of information, and Tommaso Dorigo offers some inside scoop. There is also main CERN page for the event, and one for press releases.

12:02pm (Pacific), Sean: The real excitement of the LHC startup is, of course, that it’s an excuse to party. Mike in comments already mentioned the Fermilab pajama party. Here at Caltech, where it’s not quite so ridiculously late at night, we’re having pizza and beer. And (for the wimps who can’t stay up), a lunch BBQ tomorrow. Everyone should feel free to put together their own party! Suggested soundtrack. (Dammit, I’m violating my own rules.)

12:54pm (Pacific), Sean: I’ve asked some experts to chime in. Here is Gordy Kane, University of Michigan:

The Standard Model(s) of particle physics and cosmology are wonderful established descriptions of the world we see. They leave out a lot we would like to understand, from dark matter and the matter asymmetry of the universe, to WHY the forces and particles (quarks and leptons) are what they are. LHC won’t tell us much more about the world we see and how it is made, but the discoveries there will point the way to “WHY”. It’s a WHY machine.

The discovery that makes sense is supersymmetry, i.e. the superpartners of some of the Standard Model particles. There’s a lot of indirect phenomenological evidence that indeed some superpartners will be seen at LHC, such as the unification of the forces at very short distances, the absence of large new effects at the LEP and Tevatron colliders, and the very good indirect evidence for a light Higgs boson. A supersymmetric world is also one where we can understand how the electroweak symmetry is broken and how the matter asymmetry arises, and it has a dark matter candidate. I estimate ten or twenty gluinos and a lot of Higgs bosons will be produced in October this year (but not seen unless we are very lucky about the decay signatures). IF the LHC indeed establishes the world is supersymmetric, there is a great bonus – we can write string theories at the Planck scale where the laws of nature should be written and calculate predictions for LHC experiments and dark matter from them, and we can extrapolate data from LHC and dark matter experiments to the Planck scale to see what theories are suggested. Without that window we might never learn the underlying theory from which everything emerges.

It’s very lucky that our technologies and our society allowed us to afford and to build the LHC to study nature so deeply (another anthropic idea?). It’s very unlikely (because of technological and financial and cultural limits) that we can ever have a further facility to extend this study, so we’re very lucky that a framework like string theory has emerged, one that addresses all the basic questions, at the same time we may be able to get from LHC the data that can test and establish it.

1:24 pm (PDT), JoAnne: The History Channel (US cable TV) is airing
The Next Big Bang at 8 PM this evening. The show details our expectations for the LHC and features David E. Kaplan of Johns Hopkins as well as many other of your favorite physicists, so don’t forget to tune in!

1:58pm (Pacific), Sean: Ph.D. Comics weighs in.

6:53pm (EST), Mark: BBC World News America, starting in a few minutes on the East coast, and repeated later, will have a piece on the LHC.

4:05pm (Pacific), Sean: Prize for the best paper title goes to Mihoko Nojiri, arXiv:0809.1209.

The Night before the LHC
Authors: Mihoko M. Nojiri

Abstract: I review recent developments on the use of mT2 variables for SUSY parameter study, which might be useful for the data analysis in the early stage of the LHC experiments. I also review some of recent interesting studies. Talk in SUSY08.

4:25pm (Pacific), Sean: There will be a live webcast from CERN beginning at 11pm Pacific, with the actual beam scheduled for half an hour later. But right now you can click the link, and listen to a pre-packaged CERN video. You can also watch the startup on EVO, if you know what that means (or care to learn).

4:50 pm (PDT), JoAnne: Yours truly has just been recruited for a 5 minute live radio interview on KCSB (the station is on the UC Santa Barbara campus) at 7:30 tomorrow morning. I guess David Gross has the good sense to be asleep at that hour! In any case, I’ll be sure to drink some coffee first, lest I spew some gibberish on blackholes.

6:55pm (Pacific), Sean: Sorry, the “live” blogging took a hiatus while I was talking to Hal Eisner, a TV reporter (“extraordinaire,” he asks me to add) from the local Fox affiliate. He, quite rightly, was hectoring me mercilessly in an attempt to explain the purpose of the LHC at a level accessible to six-year-olds. (He also tried very hard to get me to say “God particle,” which I mostly resisted.)

What is the purpose? It’s to discover the laws of nature, of course, or at least extend our knowledge of them. But that doesn’t always quite cut it for people. I think it would suffice to the aformentioned six-year-old; kids are naturally curious, but adults have it beaten out of them by a relentlessly pragmatic world. Among other things, the LHC represents a tremendous triumph of the basic inquisitiveness of the human species.

7:20 pm (PDT), JoAnne: There’s a host of First Beam Day activities planned for tomorrow across the US. Check the listings for an event near you. Here in SF Bay area, swissnex, the annex of the Consulate General of Switzerland in San Francisco, is throwing a party tomorrow night in coordination with SLAC and LBNL. Much fun will be had by all!

7:53pm (Pacific), Sean: If you’re wondering whether the Large Hadron Collider has destroyed the world yet, see here.

If you’re wondering whether physics is more or less tawdry than politics, see here.

8:17pm (Pacific), Sean: The right response to end-of-the-world chatter is to change the subject — it’s just crackpottery, not a legitimate scientific debate. But damn, you have to be impressed with the vigor of the meme. Far and away the first thing that comes to mind when a person on the street hears “giant atom-smasher in Switzerland” is “might destroy the world.” How do we combat that? What is the one idea we would like to pop into people’s minds when they hear that phrase, and how do we get it there?

11:52pm (EST), Mark: Gotta sleep, but will try to tune into BBC Radio 4’s Big Bang Day when I wake up!

9:26pm (Pacific), Sean: Reporting now from the High Energy Physics conference room here at Caltech. In an hour and a half we’ll open a live feed to our colleagues at CERN, who will be updating us on what happens. Of course, the best answer is simply “all systems nominal.” The only way a detector will actually see anything (as I understand it) is if the beam is not focused perfectly from the start, which is perfectly possible. If the beam is well-behaved, it will just zip through.

But of course, there are many steps along the way, and “first protons circumnavigating the accelerator” is as good a “turn on” event as any. Folks in the know have assured me that CERN will not be hosting multiple “trust us, this is the real start” events — this is it.

9:48 pm (PDT), JoAnne:
From looking at our comments, it’s clear that some folks are still genuinely frightened by the LHC. This should not have happened. The LHC is one of the most exciting scientific journeys in our lifetimes! We should all watch it in wonder and be amazed at its discoveries.

Many a thoughtful, carefully analyzed and written scientific treatise has appeared which thoroughly disproves the claim that the LHC will destroy the Earth. But these aren’t published or mentioned or taken seriously by the press…. (HELP – I’m sounding like a Republican!)

So, let me present a different, non-scientific, but emotional argument. We physicists are human beings too. We have children, parents, siblings, friends, etc, that we care deeply about. We care about this planet and its future and the future of our families. There are literally thousands of physicists, worldwide, involved in the LHC. If there was a serious concern, the scientists themselves would have stepped forward.

As for me, one of my best arguments is that my bottle of 1990 LaTour remains in my cellar. I’m going to pull it out when we achieve collisions at the next accelerator after the LHC! Oh – and the fact that I’ve just spent the last 8 months undergoing intensive, arduous treatment for cancer so that I too can have a future and be a part of the LHC.

10:00 pm (PDT), John:

B minus two hours. Oh yeah! We’ve waited a long time for this.

11:03pm (Pacific), Sean: Action is heating up, although the pizza has yet to arrive. So I’m going to start paying attention to the “real world.” I’ll come back if any disasters occur.

11:30 pm (PDT), John:

Looks like CERN has stuck a PR video in place of the live webcast…not too surprising…maybe the site got hammered, or they have that up until it starts.

The SPS is cycling nicely. That’s what they’ll use to inject the beam in 30 minutes.

11:37 pm (PDT), JoAnne: This is the error message I’m getting:

Due to a huge interest for this live video feed of the LHC First Beam day, you may not be able to see the live video stream and we apologise for this.
Please try reloading the page, come back later, or check the other connection options available on this page.
Many thanks for your interest in CERN and the LHC!

The folks at CERN should have planned for heavy traffic – I’ve waited 25 years for this and I’m disappointed.

11:48 pm (Pacific), Sean: Getting updates from CERN. No disasters, but there was apparently a tiny glitch with one of the collimating magnets, which has now been fixed.

The current beams are low energy (450 GeV, lower than the Tevatron at Fermilab). They want to ramp up to 5,000 GeV (5 TeV) by the end of October — on October 21st, there is a get-together featuring heads of state, and they would love to have actual high-energy collisions by then.

They will be circulating the beam in both directions — just not at the same time, at least today.

The computing system involves about a hundred thousand processors — soon to be upgraded to a few hundred thousand. Data flies from CERN to Caltech at about 40 GB per second, which they also want to upgrade by a factor of ten.

11:58 am (Pacific), Sean: The webcast is limited to 2000 connections! Who’s the rocket scientist behind that?

Midnight (Pacific), Sean: First beam! Or so they say. (See below.)

12:03 am (PDT), John:

Woo hoo! Did it work?

I think it actually starts in a few minutes. The press kit says

9:00 Live satellite broadcast and webcast begin with an introduction from the commentators in the CERN Control Centre, an animation showing the passage of a beam through the LHC, and highlights of the LHC operators’ daily meeting where they lay out the procedure for getting the first beam circulating in the LHC.

9:06 Coverage begins of the first attempt to circulate a beam in the LHC. Lyn Evans, LHC project leader, will narrate the proceedings from the CERN Control Centre. Video of accelerator operators at work in the CCC will alternate with views of the LHC apparatus in its tunnel 100 meters underground.

12:08 (Pacific), Sean: Well, there was a video countdown. No human being has actually confirmed yet…

12:11 am (PDT), JoAnne: Only 2000 connections? No wonder nobody can get on! With all the hype they should have planned better than this….

12:22am (Pacific), Sean: Robert Aymar, CERN Director General … is speaking in French. Translation: in a few minutes we will let the beam zip through the LHC, sector by sector. (They stick absorbers in the way of the beam at certain points, just to check things in each sector before letting it go.) Sounds like the whole thing will take some time.

Liveblogging closer to the source from Adam Yurkewicz, and from David Harris.

I can’t update our blog because too many people are trying to read it!

12:33am (Pacific), Sean: First beam for real! We saw it! Not yet all the way around, as per previous update.

12:36am (Pacific), Sean: BBC reporter: “Ooh! This is exciting!”

12:38am (Pacific), Sean: Okay, I think the beam they had was … actually still in the injector, not the LHC. Because now there is really beam in the LHC! Still not all the way around.

12:40am (Pacific), Sean: Carlo Rubbia seen wandering around the LHC control room.

12:46am (Pacific), Sean: They removed another absorber, and now the beam has reached CMS! I think that’s 3 octants from the beginning.

1:02am (Pacific), Sean: They’ve made it about half way around, and are preparing a beam dump. Sadly, our reserved time on the videoconference has run out, as has my stamina, so I’m heading home. They’re predicting that a full circle will be achieved in the next half-hour or hour.

See you tomorrow!

1:12 am (PDT), JoAnne: The beam is at Point 8, which is 3/4 of the way around! Thanks to SkyNews for the feed!

1:18 am (PDT), JoAnne: Now the beam is at ATLAS, 7/8 of the way through. They are giving ATLAS some events (not collisions, but beam halo and beam gas). Lyn Evans, LHC project manager, was heard to say that he’s going to win his bet, whatever that is.

1:23 am (PDT), JoAnne: BEAM! We have BEAM! All the way round! Now they’re doing it again.

1:43 am (PDT), JoAnne: SkyNews has just interviewed folks in the control rooms for each of the 4 experiments. All of the detectors turned on without trouble and are excited to be getting beam halo and beam gas events. LHCb and ATLAS saw the muons from the beam dump!

Now that the beam has safely travelled through the full accelerator, it’s time for some shut-eye.

7:38 am (PDT), JoAnne: Turns out that the live radio interview was with KCBS here in the Bay Area (which makes much more sense than KCSB in Santa Barbara – our communications department got that wrong!) and just finished. They mainly asked questions about the operation of the accelerator, what comes next, etc. They did ask if the research was open and if all the results would be public or if some of it would be kept secret. And, yes, the subject of those pesky blackholes came up…

9:34 am (Pacific), Sean: As commenters have noted, Google has caught the fever:

But here is something better: the signal from ATLAS when beam first went through.

Click for the full glory!

Live-Blogging the LHC Startup! Read More »

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McCain/Palin

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So John McCain picks Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his Vice-Presidential nominee. I know nothing about her, so will suspend judgment. But she is a woman, which is fantastic. The U.S. will either have an African-American President or a female Vice-President, which is the kind of history that should have been made long ago; so kudos to McCain for his courage in making that choice.

Beyond that, there are just a few tidbits that seem to be trotted out in all the stories about Palin. She is very firmly pro-life. Unless you are a polar bear. She is in favor of domestic partnerships, although against gay marriage (which puts her in the official Democratic position). She’s been embroiled in some sort of scandal, although it’s always hard to tell at first glance how serious those things should be taken. Perhaps her signature issue, as far as national politics is concerned, is drilling for oil all over the place — she’s in favor.

One might wonder whether McCain undermines his message of the importance of experience by picking a 44-year old governor with no national experience at all. But one might wonder whether Obama undermined his message of bringing change to Washington by choosing a white male Washington lifer from the Northeast; so clearly the McCain camp thought this was worth the risk. We might learn terrible or wonderful things about her in the next few months, but for the moment this seems superficially like a more palatable pick than any of the bigger Republican names that had been floating around — clearly it was in McCain’s eyes. (Brad DeLong wonders whether a similar line of reasoning didn’t leave us with Dan Quayle twenty years ago.)

Update: I originally included a link to this YouTube video of Palin making Craig Ferguson an honorary citizen of Alaska, which I think speaks to her sense of humor. But it also involves Ferguson making jokes about her giving off a sexy librarian vibe, which is fine in the context of a late-night comedy show, but isn’t a fair first impression for a female candidate for a major national office. All sorts of jokes will doubtless be on their way, we might as well make some meager effort to start things off with more substantive considerations.

Update again: Because I don’t know anything about Palin, I’ve tried to be open-minded about the pick. But 24 hours later, the obvious first conclusion to which one is tempted to jump appears increasingly correct: this is a person who has no business being anywhere near a national ticket. Sufficient evidence for this conclusion comes from the words of her supporters, along the lines of: Sure, she’s woefully underqualified, but in all probability John McCain will live for at least another four years! And if he doesn’t, we’re sure she will have the good sense to resign.

I wonder how many times she has visited Iraq to get the facts on the ground?

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We Shall Always March Ahead

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You may have heard that history was made tonight. After an up-and-down convention, Obama hit his speech out of the park. And it was an awfully big park.

It was a tightly constructed, pitch-perfect speech. Obama came out feisty, challenging McCain directly and by name. Then he shifted briefly into wonk mode, laying out some of his policies for those who are too busy to check his web page. (My words, not his.) And he concluded by bringing out some of the soaring rhetoric that he does best. Here’s the text. And a tiny excerpt:

America, our work will not be easy. The challenges we face require tough choices, and Democrats as well as Republicans will need to cast off the worn-out ideas and politics of the past. For part of what has been lost these past eight years can’t just be measured by lost wages or bigger trade deficits. What has also been lost is our sense of common purpose – our sense of higher purpose. And that’s what we have to restore.

We may not agree on abortion, but surely we can agree on reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies in this country. The reality of gun ownership may be different for hunters in rural Ohio than for those plagued by gang-violence in Cleveland, but don’t tell me we can’t uphold the Second Amendment while keeping AK-47s out of the hands of criminals. I know there are differences on same-sex marriage, but surely we can agree that our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters deserve to visit the person they love in the hospital and to live lives free of discrimination. Passions fly on immigration, but I don’t know anyone who benefits when a mother is separated from her infant child or an employer undercuts American wages by hiring illegal workers. This too is part of America’s promise – the promise of a democracy where we can find the strength and grace to bridge divides and unite in common effort.

Tomorrow we can be all analytic and careful. Tonight, I’m just enjoying this.

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Gratitude

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I probably just shouldn’t go here, but the truth is that as soon as I read this:

Senator Obama would go a long way towards healing these wounds if he were to specifically praise the accomplishments of the Clinton presidency in a line or two during his speech on Thursday. That should be painless — he isn’t running against the Clinton legacy anymore, and it would probably be a good idea to remind voters that the last time Democrats were in charge of the White House, we had peace and prosperity. Similarly, he could thank President Clinton for all of the work he did throughout his life to bridge the divides in our country. This is a cause near and dear to the president’s heart.

what I was immediately reminded of was this:

In his memoir of his year in Baghdad as head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, L. Paul Bremer recalled that President Bush once told him that the leader of a new Iraqi government had to be “someone who’s willing to stand up and thank the American people for their sacrifice in liberating Iraq.”

Bremer noted that Bush made this point three times in the course of a single conversation and further insisted that the president of Iraq’s first interim government should be Ghazi al-Yawar, an obscure Sunni Arab businessman, because Bush “had been favorably impressed with his open thanks to the Coalition.”

Then again, my Mom always gives me a hard time for not being very good about sending thank-you notes. So it’s possible that serving as President simply equips one with a finely honed sense of the importance of expressions of gratitude, which my so-far non-Presidential life has deprived me of.

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Obama/Biden

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Cell phones around the country greeted their owners this morning with text messages proclaiming that Barack Obama had chosen Joe Biden as his Vice-Presidential nominee. An interesting pick; I would have been more excited by Kathleen Sebelius or Wesley Clark, but I can live with it.

The things you need to know about Joe Biden are: (1) He has been a Senator forever (half of his life). (2) He is a smart guy, not a stuffed suit. (3) He has formidable expertise in foreign policy. (4) He is somewhat prone to gaffes. (5) He is feisty, and effective in attack-dog mode. (6) He can be a bit of an asshole.

The best news about the pick is that it shows Obama wants to take the fight to the Republicans, especially on foreign policy. There is nobody McCain is likely to pick for VP whom Biden would not be able to make look silly in a debate. As Ezra Klein points out, all you need to know about why Obama picked Biden is contained in this very short clip:

He can think on his feet — literally, and apparently while chewing peanuts or something — and manages to effortlessly eviscerate Rudy Giuliani with a single sarcastic look. Most importantly, he gives the impression of being completely comfortable with the intricacies of foreign policy; this will contrast well with McCain, who loves to talk about foreign policy but is somewhat fuzzy on many of the actual details.

Biden is far from a perfect pick. He is a Washington insider, with a long track record of votes to be sifted through for ammunition for the other side. He voted for the Iraq war, even if he did try to craft a less-crazy resolution than the one that eventually passed. He has criticized Obama and praised McCain in the past. He voted to confirm Clarence Thomas. He said that Obama was the first “articulate and bright” African-American national politician. During a previous Presidential run, he had to drop out after a speechwriter plagiarized from British politician Neil Kinnock — including giving Biden some Welsh coal-mining ancestors he never had.

Nevertheless, I can live with the pick. Politics aside, I think Biden would be just about a perfect Vice-President, except for one thing. That is, he would be great at the actual duties of being a Vice-President — he will be a loyal and forceful advocate for the administration’s policies to the outside world, will provide invaluable inside expertise and ability to get things done, and will be an intelligent and loyally-critical voice during internal deliberations. He won’t be a yes-man, nor will he be a Cheneyan separate branch of government. The one downside is that I wouldn’t actually want him as President; he doesn’t seem the type to successfully steer a complex administration through the inevitable bumps in the road.

So here’s hoping that Obama wins the election, and goes on to a healthy and productive eight years in office.

Obama/Biden Read More »

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Prediction Contest Update

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The task was to predict how the popular vote in the 2008 Presidential Election would break down, expressed as Obama’s fraction of the total votes that will go to Obama+McCain, and also to give a standard deviation. The winner will be the prediction whose Gaussian distribution function has the largest value at the real fraction, whatever it turns out to be.

Entries are now complete, and here they are, in handy graphical format:

Pretty, isn’t it? But a tad cluttered. Zooming in a bit:

And, in case you are one of those jumbled in the middle there, zooming in a bit more:

The mean (unweighted — sorry) prediction was that Obama would win 53.6 percent of the McCain/Obama popular vote, while the median was 53.2. The average standard deviation was 1.2%. Clearly, for predictions anywhere near the popular values, a fairly small standard deviation was required for one’s curve to poke up past the crowd; indeed, some predictions with large errors are already mathematically eliminated. Like — me. That’s what you get for going first. Here is an even closer zoom, vertically as well as horizontally, centered on my 55.5 +- 1.5 prediction:

See that aqua-colored bell curve, reaching a peak of about .27 at 55.5? That’s me, swamped by narrower neighbors. Confidence pays! I think there are about 20 entries out of 61 that have a nontrivial chance of winning.

(If we were serious and respectable, we would have kept the predictions [and, crucially, the total number of entries] secret until they were all announced. We are neither serious nor respectable.)

See you in November.

Prediction Contest Update Read More »

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Presidential Prediction Contest

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Modesty forbids me, but honesty compels me: my 15-month-old predictions for the 2008 Presidential elections have thus far been so spot-on, it’s spooky. I know that many of you have clamored for us to drop the science stuff from our blog entirely, and just talk about politics and/or our personal lives, topics that are severely under-served in the blogosphere. My own preference would be to focus exclusively on physics, to the exclusion of any other topic of any possible interest, but who am I, anyway? This is a blog, after all, and I think we can all agree that the loudest commenters should have final say on what we post about.

Therefore, I feel compelled to offer up another round of predictions, now that we’ve narrowed the field to two major candidates. By why not make it more fun and have a prediction contest? Anyone can join in, just by leaving your prediction the comments. Entries that appear before the end of June will officially count.

But to make things somewhat science-y, let’s use equations to judge who will win. Each prediction consists of two numbers: the fraction f of the total popular vote cast for the two major candidates that goes to Barack Obama, but also the standard deviation σ of your prediction for that percentage. We are thus ignoring the electoral college entirely, and dealing with the annoyance of third-party candidates by concentrating exclusively on McCain vs. Obama. And we are assuming for purposes of misleadingly-precise quantification that each prediction follows a normal (Gaussian) distribution:

$latex displaystyle P(x) = frac{1}{sigma sqrt{2pi}} expleft(-frac{(x-f)^2}{2sigma^2}right) ,.$

And here is the rub: the winner is not the one whose fraction f is closest to the final answer, but the one whose value of P(x) is the highest, when x is equal to the fraction of votes Obama actually does win. The smaller your standard deviation is, the higher your P(x) will be for x very close to your predicted value f , but the faster it will die off as you get further away. So if you are extremely confident, you can ensure victory by choosing an appropriately tiny standard deviation on your prediction. Contrariwise, if you choose a large standard deviation, you might get lucky if none of the confident folks comes close to the actual result. Cool, eh?

So here we go: I predict that Obama will win 55.5% of the popular vote fraction, with 1.5% standard deviation. That’s right — a blowout. Might be crazily optimistic of me, but right now the portents are good. In Obama’s favor, the current electoral map is extremely favorable (not that it matters for our contest), he is an energetic and charismatic campaigner, his organization is impressively seasoned and effective, he will have twice as much money to spend, Democratic identification among voters is soaring, the incumbent President is world-historically unpopular, various economic crises are putting the squeeze on middle-class voters, the war in Iraq is hugely unpopular, and McCain is a bumbling and unconvincing candidate with a tattered organization, little support among the party faithful, a disturbing penchant for changing his mind and misunderstanding his own policies, and little interest in anything other than foreign policy. In McCain’s favor, Obama is black and his middle name is Hussein; also, McCain has a great rapport with the press, who respect his maverick image. Overall, I think the scales are pretty heavily tilted on this one, and I will not be surprised if McCain replaces Bob Dole as the Presidential candidate that Republicans would most like to pretend never happened.

Of course, I could be wrong. So let’s hear your predictions! The winner will receive a lifetime subscription to Cosmic Variance. Or maybe a T-shirt, if we get caught in a generous mood.

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