Global Warming Gilligans

All this global warming hysteria makes me think of the Gilligan's Island episode where everyone thinks the island is sinking because Gilligan keeps moving the Professor's measuring stick into deeper water.

Presidential Primary Calendar

Political parties pick their candidates through a screwy delegate system that includes proportional representation based on the number of party voters in a district, primary elections, and caucuses. But here's my proposal for an updated primary calendar simplified as if parties picked candidates the same way the Electoral College picks presidents. This model of "1/8-1, 1/4-1, 1/2-1, all" cumulative progression could be extended to the delegate system.

The goals I used were to break up the calendar so candidates could get to as many states to campaign in person as possible, to give small states a head start, but to not settle the races before all states got a chance to vote.

The last goal means that with 538 total electoral votes, 270 are needed to win a majority.

First start with small states in the Northeast and West to get to 51 electoral votes (about 1/8 of total votes).

Region	State	Electoral Votes
Northeast	Vermont	3
Northeast	Rhode Island	4
Northeast	New Hampshire	4
Northeast	Maine	4
Northeast	Delaware	3
Northeast	DC	3
Northeast	Connecticut	7
West	Wyoming	3
West	South Dakota	3
West	North Dakota	3
West	Montana	3
West	Idaho	4
West	Hawaii	4
West	Alaska	3
Total	14	51

Then go to more small states in the Midwest, South, and West to add 80 more votes to get to 131 total electoral votes (about 1/4 of total votes).

Region	State	Electoral Votes
Midwest	West Virginia	5
Midwest	Oklahoma	7
Midwest	Kentucky	8
Midwest	Kansas	6
Midwest	Iowa	7
South	South Carolina	8
South	Mississippi	6
South	Arkansas	6
West	Utah	5
West	Oregon	7
West	New Mexico	5
West	Nevada	5
West	Nebraska	5
Total	13	80

Then continue with mid-size states to add 136 more votes to get to 267 total electoral votes (just under 1/2 of total votes):

Region	State	Electoral Votes
Midwest	Wisconsin	10
Midwest	Tennessee	11
Midwest	Missouri	11
Midwest	Minnesota	10
Midwest	Indiana	11
Northeast	Massachusetts	12
Northeast	Maryland	10
South	Virginia	13
South	Louisiana	9
South	Alabama	9
West	Washington	11
West	Colorado	9
West	Arizona	10
Total	13	136

Then finish in one big bang to allocate the last 271 needed electoral votes and pick the winner:

Region	State	Electoral Votes
Midwest	Ohio	20
Midwest	Michigan	17
Midwest	Illinois	21
Northeast	Pennsylvania	21
Northeast	New York	31
Northeast	New Jersey	15
South	Texas	34
South	North Carolina	15
South	Georgia	15
South	Florida	27
West	California	55
Total	11	271

Kill the Dollar Coin

In addition to getting rid of the penny, I think Congress and the Mint should stop fooling around with the idea of a dollar coin. After two attempts at coins featuring people nobody knows, at least the Mint is now putting presidents back on their next dollar coin attempts. They're also introducing inscriptions on the edges of the coins, which may help give the coins a feel in your pocket different than quarters. However, it's unfortunate that the first dollar coin will have a portrait of the same president (Washington) who's also on the quarter — the coin most confused for the dollar coin.

The pocket factor is the primary source of my opposition. Let's try an experiment: open your wallet right now and count how many $1 bills you're carrying. I have 6 in mine.

Now imagine having to carry the same amount in big, heavy coins in your pocket, or digging through the contents of your change purse just to find a dollar. Ask anyone in the UK how they feel about having to carry their large, heavy pound coins and most will say they'd rather carry paper.

Get Rid of the Penny!

It's time to get rid of the penny. With news that pennies now cost more than a cent to manufacture, it's time to reconsider the penny coin's usefulness.

With today's prices, where even a gumball goes for 25 cents or more, there is no need for pennies in cash transactions! Pennies simply accumulate in old coffee cans and jelly jars.

I propose that every cash transaction be rounded up to the nearest nickel, with shop owners (not the government!) keeping the difference. All non-cash transactions would still be calculated to the penny.

In the average transaction, a customer would only pay 2 cents more when rounding up to the nearest nickel. In the best case, there's no difference at all. In the worst case, the difference is only 4 cents. That averages less than 1% of the typical cash transaction above $2.

Let's take a look at all 100 possible combinations of change in a cash transaction: from 0 cents change, to 99 cents change. In all 100 of these transactions you use the following numbers of each coin:

• Pennies: 200 coins, 2.0 average per transaction


• Nickels: 40 coins, 0.4 average per transaction


• Dimes: 80 coins, 0.8 average per transaction


• Quarters: 150 coins, 1.5 average per transaction


• Total: 470 coins, 4.7 average per transaction

Now lets look at all 100 combinations of change in a penniless world (where each transaction is rounded up to the nearest nickel):

• Pennies: 0 coins, 0.0 average per transaction


• Nickels: 40 coins, 0.4 average per transaction


• Dimes: 80 coins, 0.8 average per transaction


• Quarters: 150 coins, 1.5 average per transaction


• Total: 270 coins, 2.7 average per transaction

You can see that in a penniless world, we would use zero pennies and exactly the same number of every other coin! The average number of coins in change drops from 4.7 to 2.7 per transaction - more than 42% fewer coins!

Opponents of eliminating the penny include charities who raise money by collecting pennies. My God! I see a huge opportunity there - collect nickels and dimes instead!

Some claim that the poor transact mostly in cash, placing an undue burden on them. In that case, the rounding could be made neutral by changing the rule to round down to the nearest nickel any transaction that would result in 1 or 2 pennies in the change, and rounding up to the nearest nickel any transaction that would result in 3 or 4 pennies in the change. On average, this results in zero difference from actual amount paid using exact change to the penny.

Other opponents, like the Congressional delegation from Illinois where Linclon spent most of his adult life, want to see Lincoln continued to be honored with a coin. Well, he's already on the $5 bill - a much greater honor than the lowly penny!

Cash only adds value to the economy when it is used - but most pennies are simply stored, meaning the cost to manufacture them must be borne for little economic value. Eliminating the penny will reduce the overall cost of minting coinage, and reduce the frustration of storing a surfeit of pennies.

Remember when all we had to worry about was the Soviets?

I'm going to call this the "Song of the Day" post, even though I'm going to talk about 4 old songs from the 80's...

Sometimes my mind plays associative tricks on me. The recent Hezbollah aggression against Israel made me think of the old Sisters of Mercy Song "Doctor Jeep" which includes these lyrics:

Everybody shouts on I love Lucy

Pee Wee reads the evening news

A pre-owned song or a second-hand Uzi

Everybody got a job to lose

Here come the golden oldies

Here come the Hezbollah

Businessmen from South Miami

Humming the AOR

Meanwhile...

I like Cal and his dog Napalm

I like Ike and his itty-bitty A-bomb

Everybody got one, I want mine

You can order it up on channel nine

Meanwhile, in the Sheraton,

Doctor Jeep plays on and on and on

The 11 missing Egyptian students made me nostalgic for the days when we worried where missing Soviet submarines were, rather than where foreigners of the same demographic responsible for the murder of almost 3,000 Americans on September 11th, 2001 are wandering around at the moment. Hence a flashback to Thomas Dolby classic "One of Our Submarines":

One of our submarines is missing tonight

Seems she ran aground on maneuvers

And of course, the 1989 fall of the Soviet empire proved Jackson Browne prescient with "Layers in Love" which included this:

Last night I watched the news from Washington, the capitol

The Russians escaped while we weren't watching them, like Russians will

Now we've got all this room, we've even got the moon

And I hear the U.S.S.R. will be open soon

As vacation land for lawyers in love

And apropos of nothing other than the recent anniversary of the old German Unity Day, June 17th, commemorating a valiant 1953 anti-Communist protest in East Germany, is Alphaville song "Summer in Berlin":

This day's an invitation

And it's just for you

You've got a reservation

For the 17th of June

Open your eyes

And let the sun break in for a while

There may be something

That you've never seen inside

(The new reunification day was moved to October 3rd when the country was actually reunified after the fall of European communism.)

Aah, the old days when reading between the lines was the most intriguing part of foreign policy...

The Dangers of Relying on the State

Watching the victims of hurricane Katrina in New Orleans stranded by their government yet demanding help from another layer of government, and now seeing Islamic kids in Paris rioting against the unfulfilled promises of liberal socialism, I am again reminded why citizens must rely on themselves first, their families second, their friends and community (churches, Rotary, etc.) third, and their government least of all.

The danger of the welfare state is most nakedly exposed when its promises inevitably cannot be kept, when expectations are not met. Then the only one to blame is not yourself, but the government, someone else, "them." Your only recourse is panic, riot. It is dangerous for citizens to rely on promises of politicians. It is dangerous for the state to create false expectations with promises that cannot be kept.

Where were the citizens of New Orleans when decisions about their levies and city planning were made? They were on Bourbon Street, figuratively or literally. Where were their families with places to stay or the know-how to get things done? Casual sex is more fun than commitment and marriage. Where were their friends with the means to get them out of town? They hadn't bothered to meet a broad array of friends. Where were their church busses to evacuate the infirm and those without transportation? They didn't care to join a church. What were the citizens of New Orleans to do when community and government leaders abdicated at every level? They were to panic. Where was the basic comprehension of "citizenship" that should have deputized new leaders to control looting and equitably distribute perishables, or to police the toilets at the shelters? That was not something they were taught, nor cared to learn. That was something "other" people do.

Government simply cannot hope to plan a modern economy, nor provide jobs for all who desire one. Government can only hope to tame the tiger, not control it. Government must ensure equality of opportunity, then get out of the way. It's not up to the French government to give its citizens jobs. That is up to French business. But when you can't fire an employee, you simply won't hire her in the first place. When you would be forced to overpay for work locally, you source that work elsewhere. Eurosocialism's pop-economics oversimplifies promises and burdens its subjects with rules that make market flexibility impossible. That brand of liberalism fails to appreciate feedback loops, the laws of unintended consequences, human nature.

There is a place for government in all this, but that place is last. No man is an island, but the government is not the closest shore.

Un-intelligent Non-design

Proponents of Intelligent Design (or ID, the assertion that God designed all the details of life) miss the single most important goal of science: to identify patterns that can be projected into the future to usefully predict the outcome of actions taken today.

While I don't deny the existence of a Designer, I do not find the Intelligent Design proposal compelling.

Scientific theories like general and special relativity, F=ma, Newton's laws of gravity, molecular dynamics, recombinant DNA, quantum mechanics, etc. are mere estimations or representations of an infinitely more complex reality. Scientific laws or theories are useful because they tell us how to accomplish space travel, power generation, television, white paint, medicine, etc. Scientific theories are testable and independently reproducible, otherwise any proposed theory is not accepted.

ID can not be tested, nor can it be used to predict any useful information. It is therefore useless. The theory (or laws if you prefer) of evolution, on the other hand, are useful. Studying how ecosystems have reacted to environmental changes in the past inform us on how ecosystems might react in the future to changes today.

An example often cited as proof that life was designed is the miracle of the eyeball. How could something so complex and useful just pop into existence without a designer? Intelligent Design proponents fail to appreciate the huge relative competitive advantage the ability to merely sense light and dark (such as the euglena) has on any creature. Relatives that can't sense the shadow of a predator quickly die out. Further changes that, say, allow an organism to detect which direction light is coming from (such as in planaria) have an additional advantage. These incremental advantages easily build up over billions of years (truly quite a long time) to create the eyeball. Voila!

In fact, proof that eyeballs offer a huge competitive advantage can be seen in the number of organisms that have similar eyeballs: from humans all the way back to fishes and invertebrates. The fact that different types of eyes evolved independently in insects and vertebrates is more proof of their evolutionary usefulness. Eyes must have been one of the first organs to develop, they are so darn common and useful!

Another Intelligent Design concept that is irreducible complexity: the notion that the sum of the parts is so much greater than the parts themselves, that those parts must have been assembled by a Designer. An example given in an article in today's Wall Street Journal uses a mousetrap as an example of irreducible complexity: remove any single piece of a mousetrap, and the whole thing ceases to function. Similarly, remove any bit of a cell's mechanism, and the cell will cease to function. Mousetraps have designers, therefore a cell must also have a Designer. This is a flawed metaphor. Do trees create wood solely so some designer can build a mousetrap? Does wood have no other use? Can wood exist outside of a mousetrap? Were springs developed solely to build mousetraps? Does humanity itself exist only to build mousetraps?

Certainly most cells as they exist today could not suffer the removal of any constituent part. But ID proponents fails to mention that there are many kinds of cells in existence today, not all with the same components. Flagellae, cilia, hard-walled cells (such as in plants), soft-walled cells (such as in amoebae or animals), solitary single celled organisms, organized colonies of single celled organisms (notably sea sponges), and complex multi-celled organisms all exist today. Not all components necessary for one type of cell to survive are present in the cells of other organisms. Some non-living natural compounds can even demonstrate self-organization into things that look like components of cells, such as cell walls. The building blocks of life may be more commonly available than guessed.

ID ignores the Darwinian corollary called co-evolution: evolution of one group of organisms may be influenced by evolution in another set of organisms. For example, if a predator kills all its easily caught prey, and only hard to catch prey is left, the predator population eventually drops. Now hard to catch prey can proliferate. Only the few predators capable of killing hard to catch prey survive, but eventually prosper as their food supply rebounds. If you were only seeing the aftermath of this process, you might incorrectly guess that the predator has always been able to catch its prey the same way. The same thing has apparently happened to cells. Mitochondria, the parts of cells that convert RNA into proteins, has its own DNA, causing some researchers to theorize the mitochondria once existed as an independent organism itself. Certainly if you remove all the mitochondria from a cell today, that cell wouldn't live much longer. But there certainly was some proto-cell that didn't have mitochondria that still survived. But that proto-cell certainly wasn't robust enough to create today's complex organisms.

Intelligent Design proponents also fall into the common trap that most non-rigorous students of Darwin's theory leap to: anthropomorphism. Evolution does not have a "goal." Even science teachers and certainly journalists fall into this trap. How many times have we heard something like, "The dolphin developed sonar so it could see underwater." Bullcrap. The dolphin didn't develop sonar. Sonar happened: Rudimentary echolocation gave some ancient dolphins a slight advantage over their cousins. Slight improvements over the eons, and perhaps some catastrophic die-offs, have allowed today's sophisticated dolphin sonar to persist.

Evolution simply happens, and the resulting organisms either survive, or don't. External factors determine the ultimate utility of any random mutation. Sometimes mutations are so detrimental the individual organism dies quickly. Sometimes mutations simply appear and fade in a general population of organisms. Sometimes large scale environmental changes, such as mass extinctions seen throughout geological history, weed out all but the few organisms most capable of surviving the change. Even tiny competitive advantages can, thorugh the generations, become dominant.

What God probably designs is more along the lines of an infinite number of universes with an infinite number of scientific laws. Or He designs the mechanism that allows universes to exist. Or he designs the mechanisms that allow those mechanisms... ad infinitum. At any rate, only a tiny fraction of those universes where the rules and timing are just exactly right produce organisms capable of recognizing God's wonders. Other universes just don't - no love lost, no tears shed. Everything in nature is a result of the design of those laws. The Designer is an indirect designer. He simply sets up the conditions and lets everything else flow from there. Our living God is probably more interested in how we morally relate to other results of His creation, including to each other; not in determining if this fish or that toad develops a tumor or a third eyeball. The higest praises we can give are continuing to delve deeper into how God's universe works, and respecting how we relate to God's universe.

An interesting article: Fact and fiction on evolution by Cathy Young at The Boston Globe.

Update, 11/21/2005 - Charles Krauthammer - Phony Theory, False Conflict