Many democracies run, with varying degrees of formality, on a coalition system. Many parties via for seats in a legislative chamber, representing many distinct interests. Generally, there is something that can only be done with a strict majority, often things like passing bills or electing a Prime Minister. Since the interest groups are so fragmented, for a given bill, many of the groups may have weak or even no opinions about it; for instance, a labor party may have no strong opinions either way about a gun control bill. (I'm not saying that everybody who calls themselves "labor" parties, and I think there are a lot of them, won't have an opinion, just that they may not.)

This post is an introduction and will serve as an index to a series of posts I am doing on myths about the United States Govermental system. It was one post but it grew too long.

It is an important series because the myths I will be addressing are very widespread, and many of them are quite damaging.

Myths:

1. The US Is A Two Party System, Not A Coalition System
2. The US is Formally A Two-Party System
3. The Purpose Of Voting Is To Determine A Winner
4. My Vote Doesn't Count

   Interlude: Making Sense Of The 2004 Election

I was reading somebody talk about the distribution of people who "agree global warming is an issue" and how it has changed over time, and it made me wonder where I would fit in.

• I agree that the evidence is that the global average temperature is rising.
• I agree that there are certain economic issues this causes, and recall that when I use the word "economic" I automatically mean "potentially costing lives" (as opportunity costs come home to roost).
• I do not agree that it is proven that human influence has had an impact. I agree that this is a plausible hypothesis, but I think that it is far from proven. Evidence that the Sun has heated up a little strikes me as far more likely to account for it; at the very least this demands a factors analysis and I pretty much a priori discard any claimed analysis that says humans are 100% responsible, on the grounds that climate change has happened in the past, indeed, climate stasis never has. (No reasonable environmentalist claims 100%, of course, but unreasonable ones are talking, too.)
• I do not agree that warming is automatically a disaster. I think it is plausible that it may even be a net gain (more useful land), but there's only one real way to find out and that is to see it happen. Analysis that we loose X feet of coastland invariably fail to take into account other lands we gain; Siberia could become more hospitable, for instance, and that's a huge chunk of land.
• I don't agree that we should drastically cut back on pollution for global warming's sake. In fact, this argument really boggles my mind when there are invariably better arguments for reducing pollution. We could reduce the emissions of our coal plants to reduce global warming... which many people still do not accept and no one is qualified to say whether the coal emissions are affecting it, or in which direction... or we can reduce coal plant emissions because people die (sooner) when they breathe them. Pollution should be rationally minimized for many reasons, and global warming, even if we grant the most catastrophic versions, is still rather far down on the list of reasons, swamped by many other more immediate and pressing ones like killing people, animals, or plants for no good reason.

Over the past few decades, psychology has taken great strides towards becoming a real, hard science instead of an "observational science" like history. Cognitive psychology has helped lead the way, since it has been lucky enough to be able to measure things like response times to stimuli for a long time now, but it has proven more difficult to test theories of how minds work on the lowest level.

Enter computer science and the field of machine learning, able to implement certain theories of mind and see how they perform under controlled conditions. As you've probably noticed, they have not created a completely artificial human intelligence. But they have been able to learn a lot of things, and equally important, unlearn a lot of things, and disprove a number of theories.

It was about this time last year that I was finally getting tired of the election.

Observation: Maybe it's just my connection to the weblog world, but the intensity of the election coverage doesn't seem to have gone up much. Which is to say, we've been going full-bore on this issue for over a year now.

If Bush wins this year, are Democrats and the media going to start holding the primaries for 2008, oh, say, February of next year?

So far, barring major changes in policy by Kerry, I still plan to vote Bush on the grounds that the problems I have with Bush are just totally unaddressed by Kerry.

Here's an example: Russia has slid back to a dictatorship and Bush doesn't much care. We aren't looking at a repeat of the Cold War (the USSR lost economically and the gap has only widened), but this is a big deal, because they have nukes.

RSS Bandwidth is coming up again, as I said it would almost exactly a year ago. As I laid out in that post, and to review today, there are(/were) two basic problems:

1. The entire RSS file is transferred on every request.
2. There is only on source for an RSS file, and no matter how svelte you make a request for an RSS file on the network, eventually you will take down the server and eat through tons of bandwidth in a world where millions of people may ask for a file every hour.

People are cautiously dancing around declaring the new Bush documents forgeries. I feel no such compulsion. This is absolute, positive proof. No question. It is utterly inconceivable that anything in 1973 would match the default Microsoft Word document of 2004, letter for letter, automatic superscript for automatic superscript, kern for kern (particularly impossible). The probabilities boggle the mind. The minor discrepencies are clearly artefacts of the aging process or deliberate smudging.

Reading this article somewhat indirectly prompts me to wonder how far the protesters are going to go in New York.

It makes me think some of the "radical" protesting ideas, like splitting everybody into groups of ten and taking as many street corners as possible may be the only sane thing for the protesters to do, because I think "mob mentality" is going to be the greatest danger to the protesters there is.

I've got a lot of big writing projects going on right now, and that is sapping my desire to post here.

But I did want to share one interesting link I found while working on one of them: Reflections on Relativity. It is a free, online book covering relativity (not just Einsteinian but also pre-Einstein conceptions), in a highly mathematical fashion that manages not to be so drenched in equations as to be incomprehensible without serious study, an extremely delicate balance.