Tuesday     November 23, 2004   9:43 pm

I turned the light out to go to sleep, but the room was still bright after the light had gone out. At first I thought it was coming from the house next door, but I soon realized that it was my first experience in the new old house of having night turn into day because the ground outside was covered with the first snow of the season.

I went to the porch to see how the gold fish were faring as the snow fell around them. I wanted to check the water temperature but K had turned on the alarm, and opening the door would have made a big noise. The fish were moving kind of slow, but they seemed to be doing ok. The snow on the ground lit up the street as the usual darkness gave way to friendly winter light, and the branches of all the trees formed a canopy of bright arcs.

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Wednesday     November 17, 2004   12:08 am

Starbuck's WiFi deal sucks. They have an access deal through T-mobile. The "pay as you go" plan costs 10 cents a minute - with a minimum connection time of 60 minutes. Yes, that means that every time you touch the network you can't let go for 60 minutes. Even if you connect for just 30 seconds and then shut down your computer, you get charged $6.00. That sucks.

It especially sucks when so many independent cafes offer free WiFi. I'm not sure how long I expect free WiFi to last. I keep thinking that it will be shut down because people will abuse the anonymity of it. Nonetheless, for now when it comes to WiFi, independents rock and Starbucks sucks.

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Sunday     November 7, 2004   10:22 am

I've always wondered what happens to squirrels when they die. It's the same thing with birds. Do they simply fall out of trees? Do they ever die while flying? Besides being eaten by predators, what do they die of when they die of natural causes? Do they have heart attacks?

On the way out the door this morning, K approached me with a sad face and a task to do. She said there was a dead squirrel by the car. There among the yellowed leaves that we had been raking up yesterday, was a squirrel, face down, as if it were sleeping on it's stomach. I couldn't tell how it died. It could have been running around and had a heart attack. It could have been out in the street where it was hit by a car and managed to run to the side of the road before collapsing and dying of hidden internal injuries (I once experienced having this happen with a kitty cat).

I didn't know what to do with a dead squirrel. So I dug a small hole in the back yard and buried it there. I was surprised how matter of factg it all was. Despite the fact that I really like squirrels I wasn't sad or sentimental. I was simply putting something back into the damp, clay-like earth. As I did so there were three squirrels jumping around in the trees above me.

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Monday     November 15, 2004   12:05 am       tito       http://users.adelphia.net/~tazacups/      

My apartment is surrounded by really tall palm trees. The squirls love to jump around on those things. One day I was looking out the window and I see this brown thing falling from the top of the tree. It hit the ground with a light thud. I ran to the balcony to see what happened and there was this cranky looking, disheveled squirl. He climbed, slowly, back up the tree.

I did happen to find a dead one by the laundry room. It's funny because I also wonered if it had had a heart attack.

Wednesday     November 3, 2004   9:17 pm

"I don't understand the country I live in." That's what I told the woman who does the art work around the Institute when I sat down at lunch today. She looked devastated. Everyone I know is a little down today.

I was looking forward to bringing full sentences back to the white house. I was hopeful that the polls had overlooked the cell phone crowd, and had ignored young voters, and the despite Bush's very slight lead (often called a statistical dead heat), Kerry would emerge victorious - and we could put the country back on a more rational, less fear based track.

Last night when everything came down to Ohio, and Kerry was behind, I could see that there was virtually no hope. I had to ponder the question that haunts me everyday: What am I missing about George Bush? Why is this guy an attractive candidate when he can barely articulate a full sentence? When he has a reputation for silencing dissent? When he is known for avoiding information which contradicts his point of view? When he has a history of flakiness and failure? How is it possible that he leads the country into a voluntary pre-emptive war on another country for dubious and changing reasons, resulting in the deaths of more than 1000 Americans and the deaths and injuries of countless others, and more than half of the people I live with re-elect him?

When I look at the map of the country and it shows that the coasts voted for Kerry, while the middle of the country voted for Bush, I wonder what that means. I grew up in California. All my friends are on the coasts. I've spent the last 2 years living in the middle of the country, working in a professional intellectual research environment, and I've come to discover the anti-midwest bias in the research community. I've learned that many people believe that real research can't be done in the middle of the country. If you want to start a company, or do cutting edge research, you have to be on one of the coasts. I had no idea such a bias existed. Then again I had no real awareness of the middle of the country before I moved here. But now I wonder - what is the basis for that idea? And why does it coincide with the election results?

So today I felt quite a sense of hopelessness. I don't want 4 more years of war mongering and aggressive fear-based policies. I don't want 4 more years of bull-headed inarticulateness. I want a leader who can explain his ideas. I don't want a leader who doesn't talk to me and spends a month a year on vacation. But that's what we got. None of the people I know think very highly of our leader. In fact most people I know think he's an idiot.

As a scientist, it really bothers me when I can't look at a system and apply objective thinking to understand something about it. When it comes to George Bush, I can't understand why he is president, and why I and my peer group seem to be so out of touch with most of the people I live among.

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Thursday     October 21, 2004   3:36 pm

When I see all the polls being thrown around in the press about who will win the presidential election, I feel an uncomfortable sense of anxiety. Bush and Kerry are neck and neck, but Bush tends to have a slight edge over Kerry. So my science mode kicks in and I try to foresee a scenario whereby the current state of the polls would not reflect the outcome of the election. For instance, at what rate has Bush's lead declined, and Kerry's popularity increased, and will those rates remain constant or change direction and trend? What is likely to change between now and when the election is held in two weeks, that could shift the margin?

The optimist in me says not to give in to a Kerry defeat until the election is held. Like many things, we have to have faith and realize that the situation is not so deterministic that we can predict the outcome of a close election based on polls. There are more forces at work, more factors, than we can account for. Like the stock market, we don't understand enough to predict what will happen, despite the apparent ease with which we can generate polling data. I want to consider the Red Sox win against the Yankees last night. The underdogs coming back against amazing odds.

I'm bothered because, despite what I know of Kerry and Bush, I see that Kerry was rated as performing better than Bush in all three debates. I see that Edwards was rated as performing better than Cheney in the vice-presidential debate. Thus how could I reconcile a country electing for president the team that was rated as having lost all of the debates over a team that that was rated as performing better? Even though the last two debates were considered close - in that Bush didn't do quite as bad as he was considered to have done in the first debate, and when Bush does better than really bad people see him as doing really well (another way of saying this is that when Bush does better than people's already low expectations of him, he is considered to have done really well, as if he's always being judged on a relative, moving scale, instead of a static, semi-objective scale). I personally thought he was inarticulate and simple-minded in each of the last two debates.

So I'm hoping that current polls are missing a crucial element. In particular, I'm wondering about how polls are taken, and my guess is that most polls are taken over land line telephones. Yet in the past 4 years, the number of people with cell phones has increased dramatically. In addition, the people most likely to get cell phones are those who were not old enough to vote in the last election, or those who voted for the first time in the last election. Of this pool of 18 to 20-somethings with cell phones, and of those who have gotten cell phones and dropped their land lines, I'm hoping that this represents a currently poll-wise "invisible" group that is technologically savy and thus tends to favor Kerry over Bush.

Thus I'm hoping that despite what the current polls say, there are hidden forces underneath, that polling technology may have not caught up with, and thus has not corrected for, that can explain why the playing field isn't more level when we compare a failed, inarticulate business man who is a former alcoholic with a spotty service record who led our country into a voluntary war with an ever changing justification, to a decorated war hero with a proven life-long dedication to public service, and ask, who should be president?

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Monday     October 25, 2004   11:53 am       denise      

gee. for an answer, try watching Stolen Honor.

Here:

http://www.buttondepress.com/BostonManifesto/stolenhonor.wmv


Mr. Lifelong Public Servant went through four deferments before he failed to receive his fifth one (because he wanted to study in Paris--ironically). Later, flash forward to late 1971, Paris again where he is consorting with the enemy---as he was still an officer in the Navy Reserve at the time, whilst his less fortunate brethren are being tortured to avoid telling what he gave away for free.

Wednesday     October 27, 2004   11:46 am       chris      

Yes, but compared to Bush, Kerry still spent much much more of his life in public service than Bush did. And at least we know where Kerry was, in the early 70's. No one seems concerned that Bush skipped out on his service and medical exam, whereabouts and reasons unknown - among speculation that the military was begining to do drug tests.

Kerry acted pro-actively to stop or change the hell that was the vietnam war. It amazes me that people think, if he really did see terrible things (and knew from experience that what was confided in him at the Winter Gathering was true), that he should just keep his mouth shut. This whole shoot-the-messenger routine, which is also a common ploy of the Bush administration in general and appears to be adopted by many conservatives, is just embarassing and seems to contradict most people's notion of good samaritanism. Information is information. It's ridiculous to shoot or demonize the bearor of bad news.

We all know, and it is undisputed, that atrocities occured. Kerry was not casting blame on soldiers, he was citing events that were relayed to him by others in an effort geared at changing the war. Kerry haters and critics continually misrepresent that aspect.

And again, where was Bush? For him many would characterize the 70s by booze and cocaine, rather than trying to make an impact on the direction of his country.

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