An inconvenient Ecuador

I heard a story on the radio the other night. actually a 'Geo Quiz'(quiz answer) about Ecuador (here is a print article if you dont feel like listening). Basically the Ecudor's government has found oil reserves under an ecologically important area of the rainforest and want to sell the drilling rights but is willing to forgo selling them if the international community will pay $350 million a year for ten years.

At first blush this sound like they are holding the rainforest ransom. But then I thought about it some more and I figured this is a global resource for biodiversity and carbon sequestration. Why should a developing country like Ecuador have to bear the entire burden for keeping this land pristine? Curious

lego car saga directors cut

Here is a stop motion animation video Oliver and I made, enjoy

Turbo Boost Michael

The first snow dump today. The whether forecasters have been very excited the last few days, and with good reason this time, well mostly just because it is the first of the season. The snow started this morning and has been more or less steady now through the early afternoon. More expected this evening.

I was excited about this. I bought a new sled for Oliver yesterday. When I picked him up form school we went shopping and bought him some new snowpants and other a couple of other things to help him have fun in the snow.

One odd thing, I could not find any nice warm socks for either him or myself. You would think that in Minneapolis in the end of November you would be able to buy them out of dispensing machines at the gas station, but no luck at Target. Well that is the only place I looked and I find that they are always missing odd things that I assume they will have. I once asked for Ritt dye (with which Ann and I were going to dye Oliver's Winnie the Pooh blue, that was all he wanted for Christmas, he kept asking, a blue Winnie the pooh)anyway I had looked all over for Ritt dye. and finally asked someone, she got a little defensive and said that they didn't carry that sort of thing. I thought she might be confused so I explained quickly what it was. 'I know what it is and I know that we dont have it.' I did better yesterday, no wool socks, but when Oliver asked where they kept there lunchboxes the lady knew exactly where in sporting goods to find them.

I used to never pass a bar...

I PASSED THE BAR EXAM! I received the letter in the mail today. I had to sit down to open it and then... "I'm pleased to inform you...." I'm not a lawyer yet, I have to wait to be sworn in at the end of the month before i can practice. But not to early to order business cards right?

That's the secret of entertaining. You make your guests feel welcome and at home. If you do that honestly, the rest takes care of itself.

This hawk choose our backyard to have its lunch. There was not much left of it by the time I snapped this picture but he was treating himself to some little bird. The hawk was quite a sight and I was glad it stayed long enough for me to snap a couple of photos. Unfortunately I only got a handful because my camera crashed. Really. First the auto-focus stopped working then it just shut down. I thought it was the batteries, but new batteries were no help. It would turn on for a moment and then shut down again. A few hours later I tried it again and it worked fine. I'd left the batteries out for a bit and it seemed to have reset itself somehow. I needed to re-enter the date and time. The camera is one of the digital ones that sort of looks like a regular 35mm, a decent zoom built in but not SLR and you cant put lenses on it or anything. Before I got it I had done some research to see what I wanted, but then this one was on sale and it was the floor model so I got it relatively cheap. Lately I've been all about the bargains. When a big box 'associate' tried to give me $10 off a dvd player because it was also a boxless floor model, I told her that I could go as high as $25 but I didn't think I would pay $36 for a dvd player.

Today I used a gift card to buy a webcam. I really have little use for a webcam but thought it would be fun for my son and I to play with. He loves projects and I saw a cool demonstration of stop animation I'm hoping to make work. So the gift card would only cover the most basic webcam and I didn't want to spend much or any real money on it. So I looked online for some reviews of the webcam hoping to find that it was very basic but good quality and worked well with few snags. That is not what I found, instead there were only a few reviews but they were all sort of bad saying that it was sort of a hassle. There was only one good one. Here is my theory; anyone who buys a $25 webcam is very unlikely to write a review if it works fine. Its obviously not going to knock anyone's socks off at this price point. But if there was widespread problems a decent number of people would write negative reviews because no matter the price, if something you pay for is really a pain you need to vent and a negative review is a great way to do it. So, the fact that there was only a small handful of negative reviews online despite the fact that this webcam is widely available implies that usually it works ok. This may not be the soundest way to interpret negative reviews, but i like my theory.

[UPDATE, that webcam had exactly the same problems that I had read the reviews abotu nad I had to return it and cough up a few extra buck for a nicer, well reviewed, one. Here is a movie we made with it.]

Barring that natural expression of villainy which we all have, the man looked honest enough.

The Supreme Court is about to look at a case (William Crawford v. Marion County Election Board) challenging an Indiana election law requiring that voters (except those voting absentee, such as those in nursing homes) provide state issued identification before they are allowed to cast a ballot. The competing interests in the case are, on one side, the allegation that voter fraud is a significant problem and that requiring voters to provide identification is a reasonable means of deterring voter fraud. On the other side is the belief that the ID requirement will result in eligible voters not voting either because they are turned away for a lack of identification or because as the process is more burdensome they simply stay away from the polls

The real argument is mainly political. Minority and poor voter are more likely not to have the proper ID despite being otherwise eligible. Poor and minority voters vote overwhelmingly for Democratic candidates. Any suppression of this voting block will help Republican candidates while any increase in their participation will help Democratic candidates.

The Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit upheld the law, determining that the danger of voter fraud outweighed the danger of disenfranchisement. The majority opinion, by Richard Posner, asserted that "The benefits of voting to the individual voter are elusive..." and that this was a reasonable means to deter voting fraud. This despite the fact that it is already criminal to commit voting fraud and "as far as anyone knows, no one in Indiana, and not many people elsewhere, are known to have been prosecuted for impersonating a registered voter."

The central legal question in the case will turn on determining the correct standard of review. If the law were reviewed under strict scrutiny Indiana would have to show that a compelling state interest was at stake and that this law was narrowly tailored to secure that state interest, or that there was no less burdensome means of achieving that interest. Few laws ever survive this level of scrutiny.

But to look at it as a simple balancing test, closer to what Posner did, we simply need identify the larger danger, voter fraud or disenfranchisement. There are several ways to look at this. Which is the larger problem, voter fraud or low voter participation. More specifically, voters being turned away for a lack of ID or voters pretending to be someone else to vote illegally. Beyond that how many voters will not even try because of the extra burden versus the voter fraud that will be avoided preemptively by the law.

It is interesting to note that increasing voter participation automatically dilutes the effect of any fraudulent votes, (i.e. if only ten people were to vote, two fraudulent votes represent 20% of the total but every additional legitimate vote will decrease that percentage). But reducing voter fraud does absolutely nothing to enfranchise those who have been wrongly prohibited from voting.

From a results based perspective, is it more likely that the result of an election will be effected by having legitimate voters turned away or not even try to vote because of the law, or that the result of an election will be effected by the laws effect of reducing fraudulent voting. In practice there is little evidence of widespread voter fraud but it is equally unclear how many people that are eligible will not vote because of the ID requirement. If we knew the precise answers to these questions it might just be simple math. For example if we knew the law would prevent five fraudulent votes but would disenfranchise 25 voters the law is 'bad', but if it prevents 25 instances of voter fraud while only disenfranchising five voters it would be a good law. However we do not have these answers.

Without these answers we must either err on the side, of ensuring that all eligible voters are allowed to vote but increase the risk that some may vote illegally or, of taking greater measures to reduce voting fraud but acknowledge that some eligible voters will be prohibited or deterred from voting. In the absence of any indication of widespread voter fraud, to knowingly disenfranchise voters seems unsupportable.

additional resources
Brennan Center for Justice
ACLU
LA Times editorial
Non Profit Vote

You’d have to get a lot of spiders together and feed them a whole lot of food to make a web that big,

My son gave me my birthday present last night. It is a book by Arianna Huffington, Fanatics and Fools. Without an aside to explain my political leanings or Arianna Huffington's writing, this is a book I'll likely read and enjoy. In fact it is one of the more personally appropriate and seemingly thoughtful gifts I've received in a while. My parents or sisters likely would not know me well enough to buy this book, although my wife and a few of my closer friends might. What makes this gift from my son particularly interesting to me is that he is five years old and he picked it out all by himself, in fact he picked it out once and my wife put it back but he found it again and insisted that he wanted to give it to me for my birthday. I have no idea how he chose it but I do have some idea how he convinced my wife to buy it for me on his behalf.

Five year olds are incredibly persuasive; they are shameless and persistent. They have fully functioning brains but relatively tiny skulls. As a result I believe that their synapses must be more tightly packed, making that synaptic gap a little smaller. While in the case of any single synapse this makes little difference but with many synapses the difference becomes significant. This allows them to think very quickly. Their brains also contains very little actual knowledge, there is nothing to bog down its processes (remember how fast your computer was when it was new?). They can make up new reasons and ideas to support their point of view faster than you can begin to get your head around an explanation as to why it is not a good idea to shoot the fish with the paintball gun, and wonder who told them about paintball guns anyway and where did he get that fish. He has already made two chipmunk traps out of laundry baskets by the time paintball fish thought has run through your mind. To him it must seem like my thoughts are standing still while his move like that lady in the Matrix movie. No wonder he gets bored and impatient. He does about a month's worth of thinking everyday. He's so cool.

Envy is the ulcer of the soul.

canoes by my house

But thus do I counsel you, my friends: distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful!

China is criticized for undervaluing its currency. This leads to Chinese exports being artificially cheaper imports to China being more expensive, a de-facto Tariff. At the same time the dollar is dropping relative to the Euro. All you hear in the news in relation to that is how expensive it is for American tourists to travel to Europe right now. You never hear about how this makes our exports to Europe cheaper or how it might make American tourist spending in China a better bargain. All I’m trying to illustrate so far is that the conventional wisdom in relation to international trade policy is shaped by superficial analysis. So what are we to think of the ‘lead scare’ from the Chinese exports? Parents in America have been awash in news of lead contaminated children’s toys coming from China. Very identifiable, mainstream toys; the Sarge jeep from Toys and Polly Pocket (she had dangerous magnets rather than lead) baby bibs have also been recalled because of lead contamination. Talk about a shot to the psychological gut. This is the sort of news that every parent I know will spend some time reading and thinking about, talking about on park benches while the kids hang off the jungle gym. It seeps very quickly into consciousness. And before that it was tainted dog food from China killing our pets, not to mention toothpaste. Really no quicker way to tap into American sentiments than through our kids and our dogs. There was a story on NPR a few weeks ago about a family that decided not to buy any products, food shoes etc, from China. As you can imagine this was quite difficult, and apparently, even more difficult than you imagine. This news cycle is likely better than any tariff that the US would be able to get past the WTO. Of course there is little mainstream coverage of Brazil’s complaints about prohibited cotton subsidies in the US.

I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying that I approved of it.

Exceptionalism; a pity that no one else understands its dangers.

Whether it is the city upon a hill or the realization that only little people pay taxes, each one of us knows, deep down in our heart, that we are a little bit better. Sure we may not be as rich or strong, but that is all circumstantial. Everything else being equal, there is a certain something that makes our county or our kid exceptional.

The concept of American exceptionalism has been well hashed out. What has been less thoroughly explored is the portrayal of exceptionalism in animated feature films. I am speaking, of course, of The Incredibles.

It is this sort of hero worship instilled throughout our lives that encourages our society to define itself through its greatest achievers, Charles Lindberg, George Patton and Barry Bonds. Of course it would be worse than futile to judge these heroes by the same rules that we apply to the lowly commoners. Because of the importance of their calling it is their duty, really, to carry out their designs; if a few toes get stepped on, it is small price to pay. But of course each of us believes that we are that exceptional individual, or at least could be, who is left to carry the water?

Why not judge the quality of our society by the norms rather than the exceptions. It would by definition be more relevant to most people.

I have had more trouble with myself than with any other man I've met.

This evening, just now really, I crossed a line. In retrospect, I should have seen it coming.

I had thrown its predecessor under the stairs in the basement of our old building; I say under the stairs but it was more like a hole in the wall behind the water heater. At the time, water was rushing in from the storm drain that emptied into that space knocked out of the wall.

Eventually this one, the replacement, started having trouble with one of its feet. It was able to amble along for a while until I finally called someone. They said there was nothing they could do but there were products on the market that would serve to make it almost as good as new. I never looked for that product, rather, I looked through my toolbox and ended up taking a piece out of my plumbing repair kit. I cut it to size with an Exacto knife and carefully crazy glued it in place, it was almost like new. Well it did not look like new but it stood level and did not wobble. When the other foot gave me trouble I already knew just what to do.

Recently I thought it was dead, unexpectedly unresponsive and no signs of life for days despite all my efforts at revival. But after a couple of days everything seemed to be ok again; later, unresponsive again. 3 days without any signs of life this time, but, like Lazarus as good as new after that. Ann knew someone who was willing to take a look but the diagnosis was completely inconclusive, he could find nothing wrong. Back home, after much consternation and some trial and error, I finally crossed the line;

I duct taped the battery back into my laptop.