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According to recent reports, Yasser Arafat is in a state of superposition. Palestinian and French sources state he is dead and alive at present. If true, this represents the greatest breakthrough in applied quantum physics of the still youthful 21st century.
Professor Unzer N.T. Katz, a Quantum Mechanic, told reporters: “This is the most amazing event in the history of Quantum Mechanics! We experimentalists have managed to superpose an electron here and there, or perhaps a few measly atoms… but to superpose an entire human being! The implications are staggering! They are beyond imagining!”
French doctors were unavailable for comment.
I have been waiting for final results on the 2004 election at the county level before writing about them, but Brian beat me to it. The map at Freedom and Whisky is an early one with a number of ugly black holes for incomplete returns. Yesterday’s USAToday map is marked ‘final’ and has very little politicus incognito.
If you flip back and forth between the USAToday 2004 and 2000 Presidential election by county maps, you will see small but significant differences. The ‘Yankee’ vote is going more and more solidly Democrat. Counties north of New York City are becoming bedroom and retirement communities, a part of Greater Boston and Greater New York. New Hampshire in particular has been solidly colonized by New York City. Notice that almost all the State of New York went Republican and perhaps would have been carried by Bush but for the huge Democratic majority in New York City.
The rest of the country appears to show the Republican vote is growing in virtually all of the non-Urban counties. There is a significant decrease in blue-dominant areas in the non-New England States.
Also of interest is the Princeton map. While less dramatic, it is probably of more importance to an election campaign team as it shows much more clearly where the 2008 battle ground areas will be.
I would love to see this re-done as a pseudo-topographic map, and I’d love to see it for 2000 as well. That would give us a much improved view of long term trends. While blue usually does mean depth in such maps, that may annoy the more oversensitive amongst the bluish, so we will perhaps need both blue-deepest and red-deepest maps to avoid offending a victimized minority.
The long delayed assault on Fallujah is underway. Our troops have spent many months supplying the enemy with a target rich environment and it is about time we ended it.
There is some silver lining to the cloud. The months gave the new Iraqi government a chance to build its image within Iraq. It bought time for civilians in the town to get out or hunker down. It gave loads of time for every fruitcake from the Atlantic to the Pacific to make their way to Iraq and infiltrate Fallujah. They think they can win a great battle there, and I hope they keep believing it all the way until their very last breath.
You know these people are insane: noone but the terminally mentally deficient would want to be a part of an amateur effort to hold ground against the Marines.
I wonder if there might be a bit of Darwinian selection at work here.
PS: If we have any of the troops from that part of the world dropping by… good luck and good hunting.
Iraq The Model has translated comments of Iraqi’s about the US election that were posted to the BBCArabic site. You can read them all
here
I do not depend on the ‘main stream media’ world for my news. I expect that is true of most Samizdata readers as well. There is just the tiniest bit of self-selection effect at work here: you are applying your eyeball time to us rather than elsewhere. That given, I hope you are perusing the Iraqi blogs and papers for their take on the US election. There are many fine Iraqi blogs, but my current favorite is The Messopotamian. Here is his take on yesterday’s events:
Congratulations to all American people and to our Iraqi people for this great outcome of the American Elections. This was a great statement by the American people; a statement showing the quality and backbone of this people and affirming their worth and qualification as world leaders. Now that this matter has been settled in satisfactory manner, in my humble opinion; we should emphasize that this is no time for division and rancor. Senator Kerry has acted in very dignified manner when he did not allow the matter to drag, and has shown his patriotism and sense of responsibility and awareness that the interests of the country at these times require national unity and putting this election campaign behind our backs to concentrate on the momentous tasks ahead. Yes at times of war and conflict, the unity of the nation and putting higher interests above partisan considerations is the mark of a great people.
Read the whole thing. Then keep reading: it is well worth the time.
The following item was passed to us via our secret underground network of samizdatistas and has struck me as both so true and so humorous I simply must share it with you. It is purportedly written by George Carlin, a comedian whom I greatly admired in the seventies. It does indeed read like Carlin patter. If anyone has definitive information on the source, please let us know. George or not, I love it, so here it is.
YES, I’M A BAD AMERICAN
by George Carlin
I Am Your Worst Nightmare. I am a BAD American. I am George Carlin.
I believe the money I make belongs to me and my family, not some mid level governmental functionary, be it Democratic or Republican!
I think owning a gun doesn’t make you a killer; it makes you a smart American.
I think being a minority does not make you noble or victimized, and does not entitle you to anything.
I believe that if you are selling me a Big Mac, try to do it in English.
I think fireworks should be legal on the 4th of July.
I think that being a student doesn’t give you any more enlightenment than working at Blockbuster. In fact, if your parents are footing the bill to put your pansy self through 4 years plus of college, you haven’t begun to be enlightened.
I believe everyone has a right to pray to his or her God when and where they want to.
My heroes are John Wayne, Babe Ruth, Roy Rogers, and whoever cancelled Jerry Springer.
I don’t hate the rich. I don’t pity the poor.
I know wrestling is fake and I don’t waste my time arguing about it.
I’ve never owned a slave, or was a slave, I didn’t wander forty years In the desert after getting chased out of Egypt. I haven’t burned any witches or been persecuted by the Turks and neither have you! So, shut up already.
I want to know which church is it exactly where the Reverend Jesse Jackson practices, where he gets his money, and why he is always part of the problem and not the solution. Can I get an AMEN on that one?
I think the cops have every right to shoot your sorry tail if you’re running from them.
I also think they have the right to pull you over if you’re breaking the law, regardless of what color you are.
I think if you are too stupid to know how a ballot works, I don’t want you deciding who should be running the most powerful nation in the world for the next four years.
If this makes me a BAD American, then yes, I’m a BAD American.
If you are a BAD American too, please forward this to everyone you know.
We need our country back!
ED: The consensus so far is that this is not George Carlin’s work. I still like it though!
The night is young and the election is totally in the air. One of the more notable things I see thus far is how far behind BBC is running. At least fifteen minutes I would say. I have read things on the net like the Maine vote split long before the Beeb mentioned it.
There is also the question of the exit polling looking a bit shaky. The fact that so many Eastern states are still up in the air is quite unusual. One wonders if the Amish vote turn out might put Pennsylvania in the Bush column despite the solid Democratic machine controlled areas of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. That would truly be an interesting political event.
We will just have to wait awhile. If the exit polls are as badly off as some are saying, the election could suddenly shift to Bush and end early; if they are not, we could have a very long night ahead of us.
Particularly for those of us in the UK…
0350. Looks like the Beeb is now running real time on the Electoral counts, although they are a bit slow to pick up on some stories like the exit poll problems. As in, they have not brought it up at all. Hours to go no doubt, and here’s me with no more munchies…
Medienkritik has some food for for thought which I would recommend reading on this election day:
Democracy is something that members of free societies should never take for granted. It has been dearly paid for in the past and continues to be dearly paid for around the world today in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. We at Medienkritik therefore humbly encourage all our American readers to participate in the political process and the upcoming election. Whether you are a Republican, Democrat or Independent, exercise that simple and basic right that signifies our freedom: Vote.
It seems like everyone has announced their decisions now: even Megan McCardle. So it is my turn… well, actually that isn’t really true. You see, I had to vote about two or more weeks ago to make sure my absentee ballot made it to Pittsburgh by October 31st so my decision cycle was a bit tighter than most.
It is not so much a difficult decision as a painful one. I have had to do something I have never done in my life. I started off Clean for Gene putting up posters when I was still a high school student; friends were out for McGovern… and then the LP came along and made me feel comfortable voting, something I had not really felt in the earlier elections.
I have election after election been perfectly happy voting straight LP. Even if I did not see my candidate take an oath, I at least knew I agreed with what they stood for.
Unfortunately, this year I again became, in Marshall Fritz’s words, ‘Politically Homeless’. The LP stand on the current war has left me in the unfamiliar and awkward feeling position of selecting the least of three evils.
Do not get me wrong. There is really only one of the three candidates whom I really loath and it is not Badnarik.
I also a worry this election might be another squeeker, something I was not expecting. I believed it would be a runaway. That appears not be the case. Votes do matter more than usual this time.
It really came down to a no-brainer though. I have voted for a Republican for President for the first time in my life. I do not agree with George Bush on many issues, but I do indeed agree with him on the war and the war cabinet is one I quite like. There is a minor plus that all the right people are totally off the wall and over the top insane about the prospect of him winning.
There is an undertone of religious intolerance against his obviously sincere and deep faith. I do not find this distressing despite my own total non-belief. I am a pure physical scientist, but just because I do not see need to posit a supreme being does not mean I do not respect those who do. I feel George is a good man and honourable. I simply do not buy the rantings of the left or even of some of our own. Disagree with him if you must, but please do not descend into ludicrous accusations.
I do not like some of his domestic agenda, but for the exact opposite reasons the Kerry side is against it. On the other hand, he has managed a number of political shuffles that appear to be one thing but whose outcome was not really that bad. The cloning research ‘ban’ appears to have been little more than a ban of state funded research, something no Libertarian could argue with.
But that is all secondary. We are in the middle, not merely of a war in Iraq, but of a global war on whose outcome our very lives may depend. I am too close to technology not to realize how much evil can be done by a small number of dedicated followers of the dark side.
I endorse George W. Bush for President of the United States.
This morning I was left deep in thought after a seemingly innocuous article in Scientific American about Ebola vaccines. It sent me off into a bit of internal philosophizing. I have long intended to explicate a particular set of thoughts here but have never quite found the time. I do not have it right now either, but will nonetheless dedicate an hour to it. The day it deserves will never come.
There are three worlds. Not worlds in the sense of planets or matter but of realities. The first one is the world as it is. You may subdivide it any way you wish, but no matter what you do, there is still a here and now and all of the events unfolding as we speak. Whether we can understand or agree upon the details of the objective reality of this instant makes no particular difference to my thesis.
Second is the world of dreams. The one across the dream bridge. The one of our imaginations. The place where all Utopias exist and prosper. The place where perfection is possible and things just work themselves out according to great visions.
Third and last is the world of becoming. It is the first world of tomorrow or the day after that or the century after that. It is one which will one day be an objective reality on which philosophers will debate.
→ Continue reading: Three worlds
I just ran across this quote of Burt Rutan from this afternoon on Space Flight Now:
“Quite frankly, I think the big guys, the Boeings, the Lockheeds, the nay-say people at Houston, they probably … think we’re a bunch of home builders who put a rocket in a Long Easy,” he said, referring to one of his recreational aircraft designs. “But if they … got a look at how this flight was run and how we developed the capabilities of this ship and showed its safety, I think they’re looking at each other now and saying, ‘We’re screwed.'”
Yes, I do believe the pigs had their noses so deep in the trough they never saw the hatchet coming. If any of them did look up they just grunted at the idea anyone could possibly ever displace them, not realizing they were not being so much displaced as bypassed and made redundant to requirements.
I love the smell of bacon in the morning. It smells of… liberty.
I am sure the Scaled Composites team is busy with their last minute checkouts now. I will be following this event as closely as one can from a third of a planetary circumference away. Obviously I will not be as immediate as those on the edge of the runway, but perhaps I can supply knowledgeable commentary on the next few hours.
So, time to get the Anseri X-Prize out of the way and move on to the Bigelow et al Prize!
Time to up-ship! Hot jets, good luck and Godspeed Mike!
UPDATE: The pilot for this flight has been announced and will be Brian Binnie.
UPDATE 1257 UTC: Weather at Mojave is reported looking good. Which is not unusual for Mojave! White Knight/SpaceShipOne takeoff is scheduled for 1400 UTC, so I would imagine they are outside the hanger and doing the the Pre-Flight about now. Burt Rutan has reportedly stated they are shooting for the alitutude record today, 354,200 feet reached by Joe Walker in the X-15 on August 23, 1963.
UPDATE 1317 UTC: As Rand Simberg points out, today is the 47th Anniversary of the first satellite launch.
UPDATE 1339 UTC: WK/SS1 is reported to be on the taxiway. I imagine the crowds are waving flags and going wild about now. Not much longer before the takeoff… then we wait an hour for the drop and burn.
UPDATE 1356 UTC: WK/SSI is in the air. For the next hour everyone gets a sore neck watching them circle ever higher towards the 47.000 foot drop altitude. It gets a bit easier to follow them when they pass about 20,000 feet and contrails begin to show… of course that depends on the conditions at altitude and is not a given. Then they will fly to the East of the airport so they will be nearer Edward AFB for radar tracking. This means everyone gets absolutely blinded looking into the sun to watch the initial climbout after the drop an hour from now.
UPDATE 1425 UTC: If you were watching Black Sky on Discovery last night (obviously I did not, sitting here outside Belfast) and liked the simulations of the SS1 flight, you can buy the software at X-Plane. Tell Austin I sent you.
UPDATE 1431 UTC: I expect WK/SS1 is passing through 40,000 feet about now. I notice that an old friend of mine, Greg Maryniak, is the commentator for the X-Prize Foundation. Not that surprising since Greg and Peter Diamandes, who I’ve known since he and the late Tod Hawley were MIT college kids, run the place. Greg was the Exec at the Space Studies Institute in Princeton all through the 1980’s and into the early 1990’s.
UPDATE 1445 UTC: By the time you read this I expect SS1 will have dropped and fired the hybrid rocket motor. Yeehah!!!
UPDATE 1452 UTC: Drop and burn happened on time… burnout and SS1 is coasting upwards, hopefully to break the X15 record as well as cop the $10,000,000 Anseri X-Prize!
UPDATE 1455 UTC: Unofficial apogee at around 368,000 feet. They may have the record. X-15 max was 354,200 feet. Sounds like a safe margin to me!
UPDATE 1515 UTC: Verily as I was on the phone trading notes with Rand, it touched down. The X-Prize has been won! The X-15 altitude record has been bettered! Now, on to commercial Virgin Galactic flights, on to the Bigelow prize for an orbital flight by 2008… and not to mention we can expect the da Vinci project to carry out their balloon drop flight within a few months and Armadillo Aerospace should fly sometime next year too. Oh what a wonderful year this is!
UPDATE 1619 UTC: It seems the altitude is official and Burt is claiming the altitude record. In an article I wrote last year, I suggested Rutan has a shot at ‘the Triple Crown’ of aviation records. Voyager flew around the world non-stop for the distance record; SS1 has now copped the altitude record. The only gem missing from the Scaled Composites front office is speed. As many have pointed out, SS1 is probably not capable of surviving a low angle speed run. But that does not mean some near future Rutan vehicle will not do it. I think he will go for it at some point.
UPDATE 1654 UTC: I note that Leonard David has been the journalist blogging for space.com from Mojave. Len is another one of our little crowd of space illuminati. He started off with the Project Harvest Moon attempt to buy the last Saturn V’s back in 1976 or so; he founded a space organization of his own at university and later became the magazine editor for for Von Braun’s NSI, and later for Ad Astra of NSS, the merged L5 and NSI organization. He also plays a mean autoharp. Yep. We all know each other.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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