Yet another data dump - 3 September 2008

Ugh. I think I was piling on myself today with insecurities, fears, and irrational paranoias. If I can get the kinks of that worked out back to some point where I feel better about myself, I think things will pass. Of course, there’s also the possibility that I’m getting sick, and that’s not really helping my physical or mental state. Need to break bad patterns again, which makes me wonder if it’s a cyclical thing for me, since about this time last year, I think I was having similar mental states, even if it was different problems. Same stuff, different year? Although, if this is a cycle thing, maybe I can throw a notice into the future to myself to say, “Chill. Relax. It’s not as bad as it looks, really. Find that confidence you have when you’re in places you consider familiar or skilled at and take it with you out into the unknown. You’ve survived it before, and you’ll do fine. Really.”

International news - Russia does as the conventions do, err... journalists attacked in Russia for doing their jobs, The UN apparently can't make a definition of terrorism because it isn't willing to ram through something that declares people fighting what they see as battles against occupiers as terrorism,

Domestically, look forward to September 28, a day that will apparently launch the Pulpit Initiative, whereby pastors stand up, endorse political candidates, and dare the IRS to yank their tax-exempt status for it.

another account of the way governments are handling peaceful protests at political conventions - fear, terror, and unnecessary violence. Inside the area, new planks decry the use of inflation-adjustment when deciding metrics, which can make for some interesting results when applied to various conflicts over time, making some seem more expensive than they really are, and others much cheaper than they really were.

More on the VP pick of Sarah Palin - Liberal Eagle tells us this decision makes John McCain a bit of a loose cannon when he doesn't get his way, Alternet has a quick hit about her campaign to continue letting people hunt wolves from airplanes as sport, dogemperor is pretty well convinced Palin is a Dominionist and trying to hide it, even as her potential boss gets a big bump from having firmly pandered himself to fundamentalist religious conservatives and her daughter's choice to continue her pregnancy gets praise from prominent anti-choicers and solidifies their support for Palin, which, I guess, indicates that she taught her daughter well enough to always have the child if one gets pregnant, even if she didn’t teach her well enough on abstinence until marriage. I’m beginning to wonder if this is a fundamental situation that many sons and daughters of strongly antichoice parents find themselves in. Oh, and for spice, Governor Palin cut funding to several organizations trying to assist teenage mothers. AmericaBlog notes that a claimed visit to Ireland for Palin wasn't more than a stopover, which leads The General to declare his knowledge of foreign policy experience in Georgia. Riffing on this, Matt Mayer points out what should be the realization that neither campaign can really score hits on the "experience" issue, but instead weights Palin’s experience over Obama’s because she was an executive and he’s only been a legislator, a position that Thomas Sowell echoes by declaring the attacks on Palin's experience to be useless and Senator Obama's pronouncements on foreign policy "immature". Apparently, a candidate for President of the United States should only talk about what he has personal experience with. If that’s the case, then what exactly do our candidates really have to talk about? Brent Bozell III sees a liberal-bias media smear campaign against Palin, picking her apart when Biden got a free pass, and the celebrities endorsing Senator Obama as a liability instead of a benefit, Hank Adler finds male chauvanism and arrogance in Senator Obama's description of Governor Palin, Thomas Sowell decries the focus on Governor Palin's daughter as another smear campaign at work, despite most of the things being reported on Palin are true and can be supported by evidence and testimony, her and several conservatives’ own use and pumping up of the ”Supermom“ meme, and the attempt to score several political points mentioned earlier as the anti-choice religious conservatives congratulate Governor Palin and her daughter on following their agenda, putting up Bristol Palin as a poster child that she may or may not actually want to be. Kathleen Parker wants it both ways, with praise heaped upon the Palins for practicing what they preach, and scorn sent at those on the opposite side who want to use the issue as political football.

Bill Murchison believes all we've found out about Palin so far helps to make her more real than Senator Obama, despite only having been in the eye for a few days, and Paul Greenberg starts the questioning as to whether Hillary Clinton would have been a better choice, based on her convention speech.

Liberal Seagull, however, points out once again that numbers say different things in different contexts, and that not everything that appears in a graph is telling the whole truth - when it comes to taxes, there’s more than just income taxes to work with.

More generally in opinions, Walter E Williams fels affirmative action in law school is taking students who would otherwise do well at second or third-tier schools and turning them into first-tier failures, because these students can’t perform at the highest levels, having only gotten in because of their ethnicity, and lack the hard work, desire, and smarts that it takes to be a lawyer at that school. Something’s not ringing quite kosher here - in the first year, they’re falling to the bottom... do they stay there? Apparently only 57 percent pass the bar, no matter how many times they try. No corresponding figures for the other side? What percentage of white folk pass their bars over time? Are some bar exams more stringent than others?

And then, if taken down to a classroom where everyone is about equal, suddenly everyone does much better. How much of that is finally having found a pace that works, perhaps a smaller class size, and all sorts of things that are related to the school and the instructors, not the innate talent of the person in question? If you took all the people who were in the bottom 10 percent at the big prestigious law schools and gave them an environment where they didn’t have to move miles a minute and feel left behind, I’m sure they’d all do better. Even better, if you had the top schools mimic the class sizes and pace of the lower-tier schools, how well would their bottom 10 percent start doing?

Jerry Bowyer confidently declares that "recession" talk is overinflated and overblown, despite the country not really knowing whether we’ve hit the bottom of the pond yet.

Gruesome news as two brothers confessed to selling body parts from the corpses in their funeral home/crematorium.

In science and technology, a proposal to utilize the Sahara desert as an electricity generator through solar, and eventually have forests and other crop-growing materials there, reclaiming the desert part and helping with irrigation, which sounds ambitious and awesome, the Arctic ice cap becoming an island, which isn’t necessarily as happy a thought, a possible upper bound to black hole size, the possible antithesis to the invisibility cloak, which would let people inside its purvey see outside, and smart movie posters that will download material to cell phones and let televisions download when those phones are brought back in contact with the TVs.

Last for today, a quick hit from the Happiness Project detailing six tips to generate happy that take less than five minutes to do, hopscotch mods demonstrating creativity, and comic strip writing 101.

Things I have learned, version 11

Version 11 covers the last couple months on the tail end of my first year. It’s not to say that I haven’t learned lots of stuff already, it’s just that things have been relatively quiet on the Interesting Stuff list

1) Not everyone feels that their fellow beings are deserving of common courtesy, nor is everyone considerate of the possible effects their actions have on others.

1b) Some even take this to the point of telling someone not to talk to the librarian so they can sit and read the paper quietly outside of the quiet area.

2) Summer reading is a time of great fun, but an avalanche of stuff, so much so that things get forgotten. Writing stuff down/keeping an electronic to-do list is definitely your friend.

3) Every time I do something new, it’s an opportunity for documentation, because there’s some part of the process (or the whole thing) that doesn’t make sense to me.

3b)That said, there’s still a remarkable amount of stuff I don’t know. Only recently did I find out that there are multiple methods for the disposal of certain types of materials.

4) There is no telling what someone will be offended by in a book. I say this because every time I hear a complaint about a book, I get another confirmation of the wisdom of “access for all, without restrictions, without censorship, and without really giving a damn what people think about it.”

5) There’s also no telling what someone will be offended by in an interaction. Learning through feedback after the event is a clumsy way of learning, but it’s better than nothing at all.

6) Wearing the badge means that occasionally, someone will shout at you to “do something” about someone else. The fun happens when the other person is behaving within the policy rules.

7) I really need to work on my communication skills - I’m not getting things across the way I should.

8) Corollary to that: I keep finding out that rules bend where I expect them to be reasonably stiff.

Tune in next time to see what else about the world of my work and life I didn’t know before it happened to me.