In 2004, I asked my readers to consider an alternate universe where a 9/11 scale disaster is averted by Presidential action.

Nobody would ever know that 9/11 was averted, either, and even if they did notice the story would be played up as the Adminstration trying to take credit for preventing something that couldn't possibly have happened anyhow.

Like I said, you can't win.

Today, we get to see that played out in the real world. A 9/11 attack has been averted, and do the Powers That Be get any credit? Nope, silence at best, conspiracy theories at worst. If the attacks get through, it's Bush's fault. If the attacks are stopped, well, obviously, they don't exist, so the fact that anybody believes they did and may have become unduly concerned is Bush's fault.

den Beste at Chizumatic (likely permalink) is annoyed by this article about linguistics and pronunciation.

The researchers took the sounds of more than 3,000 words in English and subdivided each by its phonetic features — in other words, what a person does with his mouth, lungs and vocal cords to produce the sounds of each word.... About 65 percent of all nouns have another noun as its nearest neighbor, and about the same percentage of all verbs have another verb next door, Christiansen said.

Yesterday, an incumbent Democrat Representative was almost certainly ousted (McKinney), an incumbent Republican Representative in my home state of Michigan was beaten in his primary and his opponent is almost certain to win, and Democrat Senator Lieberman faces what promises to be an intense battle after losing his primary.

There's an interesting way to interpret this which I haven't seen anyone mention yet. The theory of gerrymandering districts is that if you draw the district to be 60%+ solidly Republican, that the incumbent will basically be assured of re-election. Upon this quite a lot of the informal goverment system is based, including a lot of cynicism on the part of the electorate about the difficulty of actually affecting the government. However, the danger of gaming a system is that it tends to play you right back; you usually win a reprieve, but then whatever forces you were trying to deny come back redoubled.

In physics, there are Conservation Laws, which are among the most important discoveries mankind has ever made. The great-granddaddy is Conservation of Energy, that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. An unexpected energy imbalance has driven a lot of physics; for instance, neutrinos were discovered mathematically long before they were actually detected because of an energy imbalance in beta decay.

In the human social world, the conservation laws are not so obvious. But I'm increasingly of the opinion that there are many quantities that are quasi-conserved across years and decades, with a balance that accurately reflects the deposits and withdrawals made against it. I say quasi because they are quite as pure as Physics conservation laws, and they usually involve fundamentally innumerate quantities anyhow. But they still come close to a conserved quantity for it to be useful for understanding things in the real world.

I recently installed Google Analytics on my site, after seeing it in action at work. One of the reasons I installed it is I was interested in seeing what hits were "real" on my site, as a search engine or referrer spammer won't trigger the analytics Javascript code. (Or, at least the spammers don't seem to be doing it yet.)

I figured that Google would show fewer hits than my web logging software, but I was unprepared for the magnitude of the difference. For Friday, August 4, my web logging software reports 431 unique visiters accessing 1447 pages. (Yup, small site, no?) Google reports 50 visits for 50 page views. That is quite a difference.

I had a funny dream last night.

I dreamt that somebody came up with a symbol that would cause you to die if you looked at it. I’m not sure exactly what the symbol was, but it was an 8 by 8 grid of single-digit numbers and a few lines. (Matrix mathematicians beware!)

The funny thing is this: Nobody believed it when told. They’d demand to see it, snatch it out of the person’s hands, and as they are collapsing to the ground loudly declare, “See, I told you so.”... their final words.

For work, I had to install Internet Explorer 7.0 beta 3 to track down some issues we've been having with it.

I won't try to review it, because as soon as I squash the problems I'm rolling back my VMWare image to before the install; until IE 7 is the dominant browser I need to keep that around. All I want to do is point at and gently mock the new IE 7 logo.

For at least the last six months, I have been fighting two warts on my foot. (Don't worry, no pictures will be in this post.) I have spent at least $100 on various treatments over that time period, probably more, and basically, they have had no effect. I could knock the warts back, but leaving them alone for three or four days returned them to full strength.

My wife finally reminded me of how much we had spent and announced that I should seek a doctor. We'd be paying full price for the doctor, so I decided to look around one last time for other, cheaper wart cures.

For a long time now, I've believed that either the Democrats make major changes, and oust their most radical elements, or they are dead. For the last few months, I've been betting on the latter.

The scenario I've thought most likely has been a calving of the Republican party into two parties along indeterminate (and at the level I'm thinking about, basically irrelevant) lines, but how's this for an alternate scenario, brought on by the article Democrats would be weaker without Lieberman by Marc Danzinger, which I will quote:

And when Lieberman is sitting in his Senate office next year, do you think the Democratic Party will be stronger or weaker for his departure?

Chizumatic says (likely permalink):

The future belongs to Robert Rodriguez, who is the only director I've ever heard of who argued for a lower budget for one of his films than the Hollywood studio wanted to give him. Rodriguez believes that tight money brings out the best in a production crew, and his track record backs that up.

See also Serenity, the Firefly movie. I'm the kind of person who enjoys listening to director commentaries, and as I recall the commentary is full of "Well, we didn't have the money to do this, so we had to do that, and I think it came out better" and "Well, the actor accidentally did this, and we didn't have the money to reshoot, so we had to roll with it" and "We told the special effects guys to just come up with something cool within the budget, and they came up with this and it was awesome."