Row v. Wade

Friday, October 31, 2008

Courtesy of shirt.woot.com -- they sell one new t-shirt every day. This one is unfortunately, but not surprisingly, sold out.

Coverage of Obama Assassination Attempt: McCain Strategy?

Monday, October 27, 2008

First of all, I am NOT suggesting McCain or his campaign had anything to do with the "Obama assassination / mass murder attempt" hot off the presses right now -- my tin-foil hat is still collecting dust in my 2000 election closet.

What I am suggesting -- or rather, predicting -- is that the McCain campaign is going to exploit what is an opportunity for them to show Obama as a likely target of violence. If Obama's health is in danger, people may not want a mid-term upset -- the obvious irony being that McCain has a much greater risk to his health, and has a far worse potential successor.

So how will the McCain campaign exploit this tactfully? They can't just up and say "See? He's at risk cuz he's black!" No. They will say this:

"The McCain campaign is disgusted by the actions of these domestic, racist terrorists. We are all very fortunate that Senator Obama was not harmed and we offer our sincere condolences to him and his family."

They will bring up terrorism because people will favor a war-time Republican. They will say Obama was "fortunate" to imply that he was lucky "this time". And they will repeat it often.

Perhaps I'm being too cynical. I sure hope so. We'll see.

My heart does sincerely go out to Senator Obama and his family. This must be enormously frightening. Stay strong!

If Obama Wins Virginia (or Colorado), He Can't Lose

Friday, October 24, 2008

I was hoping to make this a much more polished post, but I'm racing to get out of work so it'll have to do ;)

As many of you know, I've been following the statistical analysis of this election obsessively. And according to my calculations, in the worst case, as long as Obama wins Virginia (a state that he's consistently been leading by 6 points) then he can't lose the election.

Here's why:



(Dark Blue = Obama will win them
Light Blue = Obama will likely win them
Blue border= Swing states. 50% win chance)

Let's imagine the worst-case scenario where Obama loses all the swing states, and all the light blue states. In total, that's 115 Electoral Votes. Leaving Obama 260 EV's. However, if Obama wins Virginia or Colorado, then he wins.

This puts the news that McCain is pulling out of Colorado in a very interesting perspective. Why is he pulling out of Colorado? To focus on Pennsylvania -- a state where Obama leads by about 12%. This is an absolute last-ditch effort for McCain, and one he will very likely lose.

Even if he manages to get Pennsylvania, all Obama needs to do is get Colorado, Virginia, and any one swing state to win. Since Obama will likely get both CO and VA, then all he has to do is get one swing state.

McCain has to either pull a rabbit out of his hat, or cheat the election process. My next blog entry is going to be on how difficult it is to cheat in this election. Stay Tuned!

Neuro-Science Thought Experiment on Facial Recognition

Friday, October 10, 2008

This isn't really a post as much as me just writing down a future reminder-note of what I think would be an interesting research project involving facial recognition in the brain. This note will remind me to Google it later and see if it exists already.

My thought is that if we were shown a picture of a total stranger who is standing in an area very familiar to us, then we would more easily recognize him or her later in public than if we were shown a picture of him or her in an unfamiliar area.

The idea behind this is similar to size reference in photographs: e.g. if we're shown a picture of a rock, we have no idea how big it actually is until we see something familiar next to it, like a hand (or even better: our own hand).

Now imagine you see a picture of a stranger, or even a celebrity. When you see this person in real life, you almost immediately notice how their face is different than you expected. This is because the mapping from 2 dimensions into 3 is not perfect, and a lack of reference in the photos you saw, I'm guessing, makes it less perfect.

If you instead see a picture of this person in your front lawn or in your room, then your extreme familiarity with the reference points should correct some of the subtle flaws in bone structure, even lighting. In other words, you subconsciously know how things "should look" in your familiar environments and inversely how things would look outside of the environment.

So it would be interesting to get 3 groups of people; the first group is shown pictures of a stranger in unfamiliar areas, the 2nd familiar areas, and the 3rd a mix. Testing recognition would be the hard part. I would choose one of these:

1. Have a line-up of strangers that all look very similar to each other and see who correctly guesses the right one.

2. Have the stranger walk into the testing facility just as the subjects leave and see who noticed him or her.

3. Show altered photographs of the stranger and see who most accurately "senses" the differences.

The applications for computerized facial recognition and 3-d mapping from a 2-d image are also interesting. Theoretically, you could thoroughly familiarize a computer with a space (say an airport) and use that knowledge to more accurately recognize faces of criminals walking about. Or beyond that, allow a computer to more quickly generate an understanding of new objects in a space by using pre-processed information to reduce the processing of real-time recognition.