Thursday, October 30, 2008

Election Special

A hodgepodge of election stuff, in my last post before November 4.

The markets and polls both suggest that the election is not that close. There's no question who will win in my (and Obama's) home state. The senate race here is even less interesting with the Republicans not even bothering to mount a serious campaign against the incumbent and Majority Whip, Dick Durbin. At least the house race in my district is tight with the incumbent, Mark Kirk, a moderate republican running against Dan Seals, an up and coming African-American. Sounds familiar.

Before voting, check out the answers Obama and McCain both gave to Science Debate 2008. Keep in mind that science will likely get a back seat given the tight budget constaints that we will have in the next several years. McCain's promise to freeze most federal spending will be particularly bad for science.

In the category of "Good Searching means Less Privacy" comes the Contributions Search Engine on the New York Times site. Type in a relatively unique name like "Fortnow" and you'll discover my $255 donation to the Obama campaign. In full disclosure, I also donated $100 to Obama in the primaries.

So why $255? Did I really mean to donate the maximum I could in one unsigned byte? Actually $255 = $1000/4 + $5, with the $5 coming from one of my daughters who wanted to add her own contribution. I still live in a base-ten world.

5 comments:

  1. hey guys, you may be interested in review this article http://arxiv.org/abs/0810.5056

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  2. Excellent! In order to award you the $1 million (US), we'll need a current bank account and routing number. We also need an advanced fee of $1000 (US) to process the the deposit of the award money. Congratulations.

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  3. ...with the $5 coming from one of my daughters who wanted to add her own contribution.

    You do realize that by not listing your daughter's name, you have laundered money for a political contribution, right? =)

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  4. I don't understand why people would vote for such an EXTREME liberal. Don't they know that extremes on either end are disastrous? Extreme conservatives are like an overly strict parent, and extreme liberals are like an overly permissive parent with zero discipline. Either way of parenting is disastrous for the child.

    You may not like many of Bush's policies, but at least we haven't had a major terrorist attack on US soil in the past seven years. With Obama as president, I'm afraid that's going to change.

    At least McCain is not as conservative as Bush. Obama, on the other hand, would be our most liberal president if elected.

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  5. 3/10. More subtlety next time, anon 4.

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