A Thanksgiving story

A Thanksgiving related story, actually. It's about a time when close friends and family gathered at my in-laws' place, and that evening we teamed up for a game of Pictionary. There was an easel set up, and it was the turn of the opposing team (including father-in-law Paul and friend DJ). Paul was drawing.

Paul drew three little sailboats. The number was apparently important, because DJ proceeded to dub them, "Niña, Pinta, Santa Maria," and Paul nodded assent. So far so good, apparently. So then Paul drew a wavy line before the boats and a flat oval blob on the side of the wavy line opposite the boats. He pointed at the blob, emphatically. It was a large object on the... shoreline, then? It was...

"Plymouth Rock!" DJ shouted.

"Yes!"

And Paul and DJ proceeded to celebrate. I turned toward teammate 3XHAR, and he was looking at me with this expression of "what the hell just happened?" And I asked aloud, "That being where Columbus" (pause two seconds), "dropped off the Pilgrims?" I was momentarily stunned at how Paul and DJ could have possibly been on the exact same ahistorical wavelength. Of course, we gradually succumbed to laughing fits over the absurdity of it, and the tale is now a family gem.

So Happy Thanksgiving everyone, and be sure to reflect fondly this holiday on how Providence guided the Puritans to hitch a ride with Columbus, sign the Santa Maria Compact and settle the Bahamas!

Regards,

Kwik2Jujj

Phish out of water

Spam and phishing emails are still getting past my ISP's filtering. An html-formatted phish email pretending to be PayPal arrived today. Of course, the phishes are always html-formatted because it's the only way to conceal their blatantly fraudulent hyperlinks. Anyway:

You are receiving this notification because PayPal is required by law to notify you at least quarterly that your account statement is available.

Oh, good Lord. But the funny part is in a sidebar of the formatted email titled "Security Center", where it says (in part):

PayPal will always address you in emails by your first and last name, or by your business name if you have a Business account.

So how did this email address me?

Dear PayPal member:

Bzzzzzzzzt! Bad phisher! Bad! No biscuit!

Along these lines, the feel-good story of the day: State of Virginia jury recommends nine-year sentence for spammer. That'd be nice if it sticks. Unfortunately, since the guy was a prolific spammer for several years he's built up millions with which to pay lawyers.

If someone spammed you with an offer to send out goons on your behalf to beat up a convicted spammer, would you respond to that spam?

Pardon the pause

With the Presidential Election over and done with, a survey of blogdom might lead one to think that there's nothing left to talk about. You'd certainly think that about my blog anyway. A thousand pardons! The only politically compelling thing going on 'bout now on my radar screen is the crusade to bar Arlen Specter from the Judiciary Committee chairmanship. Well, that and the fact that 55 million Americans are not leaving for Canada and France after all. Par for the course when you're talking about campaign promises, I guess.

As for current events, we have Yassir Arafat's death from... nothing, apparently. Wasn't cancer. Heart disease? Nope. Ulcers? Nope. Rickets? Gout? Dropsy? More stunning lack of curiosity from the mainstream media.

As I was saying

Scroll or click down to my "Math-impaired" post. I state:

Those networks [CNN, ABC, CBS] are very partisan, very bad at math, or both.

I had reached that conclusion based on evidence on hand at the time. Now, the New York Times has an article that confirms the baser suspicion:

The critical moment came at 12:41 a.m. Wednesday, when, shortly after Florida had been painted red for Mr. Bush, Fox News declared that Ohio -- and, very likely, the presidency -- was in Republican hands. Howard Wolfson, a strategist, burst into the "boiler room" in Washington where the brain trust was huddled and said, "we have 30 seconds" to stop the other networks from following suit. The campaign's pollster, Mark Mellman, and the renowned organizer Michael Whouley quickly dialed ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC -- and all but the last refrained from calling the race through the night. Then Mr. Wolfson banged out a simple, two-line statement expressing confidence that Mr. Kerry would win Ohio once the remaining ballots were counted.

Got that? ABC, CBS, and CNN refrained from calling Ohio for Bush at the behest of the Democratic party. This is not a Brent Bozell hypothesis or a "vast right wing conspiracy" allegation; this is the Times. As I observed a week and a half ago in this post:

[O]ne thing this election will be remembered for is that the major established media news organizations finally and decisively chose to be partisan organs.

Quod erat demonstrandum.

By the way...

I hope you took my advice and placed a few friendly wagers on a Bush victory in the wake of the Redskins loss. You're probably not going to catch too many "investment" tips from this blog, so get 'em when they're hot.

As for me, I happen to work primarily with engineers who, with the exception of hustling products out the door sans adequate testing, are otherwise averse to gambling. So my pre-election "wagering" consisted of standing pat on certain equity positions in the Nasdaq. Yes it was profitable, but you just don't get that same smug sense of self-satisfaction as you get from winning a face-to-face bet.

Math-impaired

Apparently, Kerry has conceded the election. The evidence in the numbers is overwhelming. I'm looking at a 136 kvote margin in a state that has at most 155k provisional ballots and maybe 10k overseas absentee. When you compute how those uncounted ballots would have to break for Kerry, it's just inconceivable that Ohio would flip. And that's assuming that all 155k provisionals are valid, when in fact a substantial number will inevitably be tossed.

And yet CNN, ABC, and CBS still have not called Ohio for Bush. Kerry himself is calling Ohio for Bush! Those networks are very partisan, very bad at math, or both.

Quick point

The crowds of Democrats who have been whining for four years about the supposedly obsolete, useless, nonessential Electoral College are oddly silent this morning. How quickly they have lost their enthusiasm for election reform!

Larger point: All the rhetoric about a "stolen" election in 2000 is exposed as just so much hot air. Because if there is any legitimate way to close the gap in Ohio, Kerry will be perfectly willing to govern having won only twenty states and with a more than three million vote deficit in the popular tally. Without any hint of irony!

Waiting for Michael Moore to spout a conspiracy regarding Fox calling Ohio for Bush early...

Yelling at my TV again

Some campaign commercial was yammering about how Congressman Bedfellow (not his real name) had increased funding for "first responders." This apparently is the hip buzzphrase for emergency personnel in the Homeland Security apparatus. Of course this catapulted my wife and I into a discussion about the drastically underfunded and neglected "second responders," which is to say, the gapers and the rubberneckers. What about them? Are they not also an integral part of any tragic scene?

The primary need among the second responders is, of course, a better view. Whether it's a matter of allowing the second responders closer or bringing the action closer to them is negotiable. But thus far I am aware of no major candidate who has chosen to help, much less champion the second responders, even though I have to believe this is an automatic vote-getter.

What's a guy gotta' do to...?

Get sick, win a trip to Paris! Don't get too excited though, because this deal's usually only open to dictators and terrorists, folk the French find it advantageous to curry favor with. In this specific case we're talking about Yasser Arafat.

It's 'round about this point I usually hear an objection to labeling Arafat a terrorist. These objections never cease to amaze me. Did not Arafat personally orchestrate the second intifadeh, the main hallmark of which was the bombing of Israeli civilians? Was he not the leader of the PLO and Black September? Did he not personally order the murder of U.S. Ambassador Cleo Noel Jr.? It shouldn't take the deaths of that many innocents in order to take this relatively small truth-in-labeling measure.

I even get static from my wife on this. I joked to her that maybe Arafat was feigning illness after tiring of staring at the walls of his crumbling Ramallah compound for thirty months. You know, holding the thermometer next to the kerosene lamp until he hears the nurse coming back -- that sort of thing. My wife admonished me to "be nice." "The man might be dying!" And that's bad how, exactly? I asked her whether this schadenfreude prohibition is also in effect for Osama bin Laden. Or how about Saddam? She hasn't ruled on that yet.

On the flip side, it also amazes me how little respect other figures are accorded, despite their achievements on behalf of vast swaths of humanity. My computer's background image at work is a small, plain black-and-white photo of Ronald Reagan with Margaret Thatcher. This once earned a derisive snort from a coworker, which begs the question, "Just how many millions of people does one have to free from tyrranical government to earn Windows wallpaper status?" Sure, Reagan may be a hero to millions in Poland and the Czech Republic, but apparently my coworker has higher standards than that. He's probably waiting for the right rock band to catch his fancy...

Exploiting a Packer victory

Are you quietly hoping that Bush is reelected? Are you distressed that the Washington Redskins lost their pre-election home game, auguring a presidential loss for the incumbent party? Worse yet, were you a conflicted conservative cheesehead on Sunday?

If you are... jeez! Snap out of it and use your brain! There's a big difference between patterns that have plausible cause-and-effect relationships, such as a major league baseball team's payroll affecting whether the team has a winning record, and data-mining artifacts where relationships are discoverd in retrospect and persist only as long as pure chance allows.

Once you get that straight, you can ascend to to the next plane. Namely, exploiting (for fun or profit) the poor thinking habits of others. For example, this is one of those nice opportunities that lends itself to a substantial trading advantage. Election futures and polling in recent weeks peg Bush's election chances consistently better-than-even, around 55 to 65 percent. Therefore, if you run into a pro-Kerry coworker emboldened by Washingon's Sunday loss, it's a great opportunity to draw that coworker into an even-money bet. That spread between the wager (fair for a 50-50 contest) and the "true" probability (skewed in your favor) always makes you money in the long run, and hopefully the near-term too.

Still got lingering doubts? Hesitant to buck the oracular power of two squads of athletic millionaires chasing after a ball for three hours? Well consider this: Maybe we're just intepreting the data wrong. Maybe when the Redskins lose, it actually cuts against the last popular vote winner's party. Would that not also be consistent with the available data? Of course it is! So what do you think of the predictive power of the Packers-Redskins game now?