Why hope Obama gets the nomination? Some good reasons right here.

I don't particularly like his politics (of course), but in terms of charm and the other soft graces that can be oh-so-useful, he's the clear leader so far in both races.

And if a lot of white people in this country vote Obama, it's going to rock identity politics to its core, something I think is long overdue. I think claiming the country is intrinsically and deeply racist is already unsupported by the evidence, but what will the race-mongers do when we can point at a President as "diverse" as Barack Hussein Obama?

I conservatively estimate my endorsement to count for precisely 0 votes, but I'm going to endorse Fred Thompson.

This is not based on any of his particular views other than his repeated support of stronger Federalism, per my recent posts on the topic.

If I had to sell Federalism to the general public, rather than discussing pragmatics, I'd point out that on average, with stronger states, "everybody wins". Or at least at the state granularity, states hardly being politically homogenous, everyone wins. Californians can go be liberal, Texas can go be conservative, and we can all get on with it. Maybe even learn something about policy by seeing what happens when different people do different things.

In my non-humble opinion, my Differential Equations class bordered on the useless. DiffieQ has a few very valuable lessons to learn, but they are buried in a whole lot of cruft that has little value, both from a theory perspective and from a practical perspective.

One of its useful results is that certain types of systems with a certain critical amount of negative feedback inevitably result in oscillations, no matter how you try to avoid it. This pops up all the time in the real world, but extends beyond the obvious physics applications.

I would not be at all surprised to see [Christmas spending] begin to shrink in the years ahead, or at least fall below the rate of growth. My reasoning is simple. I want people to stop giving me stuff. I’ve got too much stuff already.

...we have more clothes than we can wear, more DVDs than we can watch, more food than we can eat, and more gizmos than we can figure out how to use. We don’t need any more, and increasingly, we don’t want any more.

So my cat, as he does so often, hops in a box. (He's loved the moving.)

My wife absentmindedly mumbles, "cat in a box.com".

I'm on the computer, and I think, hmmmm.

A-yup.

(Note: Not porn.)

Props to Destineer for their DS release of WordJong. The reviews are not wrong to give it an 8 of 10; it's no 9.8/10 multi-million-dollar blockbuster. But it is very solidly an 8 out of 10, a very competent execution of the basic concept. The dictionary is rich, the game modes complement each other nicely, exploring the basic concept without undue repetition.

If you think you might like it based off of the descriptions in the reviews, you probably will.

And if the tune of the title doesn't immediately come to you, give it a few reads aloud. It's a little ditty my wife has put together.

I'm officially a homeowner now, to the extent that you own something the bank owns 95% of. It's nice, but it's taking forever for various reasons to put everything together.

For instance, it was very nice of Mother Nature to cover my new driveway in eight inches of snow the day after the move. (Could be worse, could have been the day of.)

I've loosely defined the value function (link) to only compare two "things", without further specifying what "things" it can take, because some things we put in there (like CloseToFamily) are fundamentally non-numeric properties. But some people have their own specializations of this value function. One that almost nobody will admit to using, but a lot of people live by, is the Money value function. This function takes just one argument and returns a single concrete number with the unit "Dollars" (or relevant local currency).

Following up on Scientific Federalism:

Over the past 20 years, the World Bank and some rich nations Malawi depends on for aid have periodically pressed [Malawi] to adhere to free market policies and cut back or eliminate fertilizer subsidies, even as the United States and Europe extensively subsidized their own farmers. But after the 2005 harvest, the worst in a decade, Bingu wa Mutharika, Malawi’s newly elected president, decided to follow what the West practiced, not what it preached.

Stung by the humiliation of pleading for charity, he led the way to reinstating and deepening fertilizer subsidies despite a skeptical reception from the United States and Britain. Malawi’s soil, like that across sub-Saharan Africa, is gravely depleted, and many, if not most, of its farmers are too poor to afford fertilizer at market prices...

One of the milestones I've been watching for is the first entirely DVD-based TV-style series. It's going to happen sooner or later, and will mark a major shift in how TV is produced, once it becomes possible to make it without advertising or subsidy, the only two models that currently work. I've been looking forward to this because I think quirky niche content will benefit the most, and who doesn't think more quirky niche content is a good thing? Nobody who matters, that's who. (... said the nerd.)