Blue

It's 9:30, and the nets have called Ohio for Obama. That'll do, pig. It's too early to shut down the laptop, so... landslide watch!

Trick, or treat

From David Kurtz at TPM:

There should be a support group for all those beleaguered progressives who over the years anxiously awaited elections in the futile hope that the polls showing their candidate behind would turn out to be wrong -- but who this year are fretting just as much that the polls showing their candidate ahead are wrong.

I plan to dress as a beleaguered progressive tonight for trick and/or treating. Julian has elected to go as a giraffe. Gordon will pretend to be a dog who's deathly afraid of children in costumes; tonight is right down there with independence day fireworks in his book.

Some photos are here. No photos of G, since cameras fall right behind fireworks, thunder and costumes on the scary list.

Cantaloupe

The first snowfall of the season, I pose. Noted through the windows of the CVBD Phoenix [1]: a place not quite home, not quite work, but that comes with a cup of yirgacheffe, a stack of Nature Cell Bio papers and an overrepresentation of Death Cab in the lift music rotation.

This weekend I was an invited speaker at a local meeting of medical physicists. This might be the first time I've given a talk to a group of which I'm not a member; I'm an instrumentation guy, and clinical radiation oncology folks comprised the audience. Although the subject matter was stuff I'm comfortable with in front of a white board for an hour, wearing a tie and standing at a podium somehow makes it nerve-wracking. Nonetheless, it all went well: their challenging questions were easy, the softball questions required clarification, and they had to smile and nod at my powerpoint drawings because they asked me to attend.

In addition to a nice discussion over lunch following the talks, I was treated to a drive through the easternmost part of Ohio and western bit of PA; the first half of the round-trip was completed before sunrise and in not-quite-icy rain, but the return revealed terrain molded by the Beaver and Ohio Rivers and glazed in peak late-October foliage.

[1] The link here is to a nice collection of blurbs about local history, a topic whose interest to me has only a weak space variance. Some updating attention would benefit the site, perhaps even a wiki-like implementation with review by the history department authorities that currently host it.

Run for the Cheetah 2008

A few Saturdays ago I attended the Run for the Cheetah, a 5k at the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo. The zoo is a fine place for a run; the entrance and savannah (and race start) are about 100' lower in elevation than the primate building and aquarium. The route, as we found out a few minutes before the starting whistle, would encompass two laps of the hill.

My memory of the race: beep, escape crowd, gradual uphill; monkeys! Left turn, winding path, giraffes! Past the flamingos, hang a right, big uphill. Tortoises, cheetahs, big downhill. Kangaroos lined up along a fence, snouts flopping side-to-side like tennis spectators. Lap; repeat. The attentive kangaroos made my day, and I enjoyed walking around the zoo afterward seeing the unusually attentive critters pre-opening-time.

Unless I'm mistaken, this is my first 5k running race. 23:07, a 7:27/mi pace averaged over this elevation profile.
Given the coincident start of the fall semester, this concludes the bulk of my 2008 training as well, for a total of about 700 miles of cycling, 600 miles on foot and 10 miles in the water. Time (no time?) for some mild strength training and occasional anti-stress running before rebuilding a winter base.

Early Voting

I just sealed up my absentee ballot. I'm always impressed at the plethora of choices for president, although the Green, Socialist and Libertarian parties were the only minor candidates I recognized.

A bit of a mess has brewed in our executive branch, and only one candidate is fit to sort it out. My scantron-style oval to Senators Obama and Biden; godspeed!

Economy of scale

Anyone [1] who hadn't already heard of Spore will after reading today's XKCD. "It looks brilliant," reports a self-identified addict of sandbox games. Coincidentally, the increasedly-having-been-misnamed [2] Sim City series of games already spanned many such orders of magnitude [3]; IIRC, one of the sequels expanded from cities to interconnected cities. There was an early knockoff called "Sim Earth", and a miniature version in "Sim Ant"? Furthermore, I've long suggested that an MMG consisting of many Sims, a few Sim Cities all within a giant game of Civilization would make for a good time. The thousands of players removed from the game when Vladivostok gets knocked off the map by a top-level schmuck arbitrarily razing cities for a few more civilization points at the end of the game will offer an instructive allegory to our often tacit support of our presumed representatives' warmongering ways.

If the moral remains translucent, we could try Nuclear War instead of Civ.

Anyway, I hope Spore sells like hotcakes, so someone I know tires of it and passes it along. After I graduate, of course.

[1] Always defined as the set S of people who are likely to read this post; Pr([Reads XKCD]S)~=1.
[2] Ouch. How do I quote Douglas Adams' description of The Trilogy, in the past tense?
[3] Ah, I see now that Will Wright is behind all of this. And, according to Wikipedia, it all sprung from his map generator for Raid on Bungling Bay. Will Wright for Hegemon!

Spam

In today's snail mail, an RNC/McSellOut fundraising letter.

I need individuals like you, [...] who have done so much to help our Party in the past...

Whoa. I've been paying pretty close attention since I came of voting age, and I'm pretty sure I've never lifted a finger to help that particular party. On the other hand, I can't imagine that the McCain campaign would outright lie, so maybe I'm mistaken.

We've all seen the Democrats' massive rallies, record-setting voter turnout and colossal fundraising efforts. It is obvious they are pulling out all the stops to win.

Fascinating. It must be bad when people get so excited about politics that they show up and vote. Instead, why don't we just stick a ballot box right at the entrance to church, then scare everyone else away with lies, lies and more lies about taxes, sex and, yes, the bridge. No comment yet on whether the 'other' Ohio is drinking the cool-aid, or just enjoying the post-drooling-mainstream-media-coverage-of-the convention bounce.