Thomas Sowell's Fuzzy Math
On Memorial Day I read the local daily from cover to cover, one of my favorite lazy holiday traditions. I was pleased to find Thomas Sowell writing the same kind of piece he always writes -- an unhappy, factually thin screed on how one of these days, mark my words, as God is my witness, blacks will wise up and become more like Thomas Sowell.
If the share of the black vote that goes to the Democrats ever falls to 70 percent, it may be virtually impossible for the Democrats to win the White House or Congress, because they have long ago lost the white male vote and their support among other groups is eroding. Against that background, it is possible to understand their desperate efforts to keep blacks paranoid, not only about Republicans but about American society in general.
For an economist, Sowell's not very good with numbers.
Black voters comprised 11 percent of the electorate in the 2004 presidential election and went 88 percent Kerry, 11 percent Bush. The shift Sowell yearns for would amount to a 1.98 percent boost for the Republicans, hardly enough to cause Democrats to become electorally extinct.
Sowell's also spreading fuzz when he claims Democratic support is eroding among "other groups." Looking at presidential elections since 1976, it's difficult to find any demographic category in which support for the Democratic candidate is in significant decline.
Exit polls have tracked 28 distinct demographic categories in the last eight presidential elections, according to data compiled by the New York Times.
In 2004, the Democrat's percentage of the vote fell to the party's 28-year low in only three of those categories: Hispanics, Republicans, and conservatives.
By comparison, the Democrat hit a 28-year high in seven categories: people 45 to 59, unmarried people, suburban residents, independents, Democrats, liberals, and Democratic congressional voters.
The party also reached an all-time peak among circumsized white male suburban lapsed Catholic computer book authors aged 30 to 44 with luxuriant hair who are worse off today than they were four years ago.
Deep Throat Old News to Student
Now that Mark Felt has owned up to being Nixon nemesis Deep Throat, I hope the media tracks down Chase Culeman-Beckman.As recounted in Slate, Culeman-Beckman made news six years ago by claiming that he learned Deep Throat's identity 10 years earlier at summer camp.
The 19-year-old college student broke one of the biggest news stories of the 20th century in a paper for his school, which Slate quotes:
I was in the "Herons" group along with about fifteen other 8, 9, and 10 year olds ... One Friday in July we went on a trip to Long Beach, Sag Harbor, and Jacob, Max and I ended up sitting in the sand precociously talking about politics. It was an election year and I was in favor of George Bush because he had gone to the Greenwich Country Day School where I was attending, while Jacob and Max were for Michael Dukakis, although I do not remember why. At some point, the conversation turned to Nixon and Watergate ... which I knew little, if nothing, about. During the conversation Jacob told me: "Deep Throat was Mark Felt, he's someone in the FBI. I'm 100% sure."
I hope he got an A.
Update: A paper found Culeman-Beckman, who never believed Carl Bernstein's denial that his 8-year-old son could have found him out.
He'd Rather Fight Than Switch
This morning's Guardian has an amazing transcript of a joint interview with the writers Christopher and Peter Hitchens, brothers who hadn't spoken in four years.I love this exchange between an audience member and Christopher Hitchens:
Female audience member: Excuse me. I'm not usually awkward at all but I'm sitting here and we're asked not to smoke. And I don't like being in a room where smoking is going on.
Christopher Hitchens (smoking heavily): Well, you don't have to stay, do you darling. I'm working here and I'm your guest. OK. This is what I like.
Ian Katz (Guardian interviewer): Would you just stub that one out?
Hitchens: No. I cleared it with the festival a long time ago. They let me do it. If anyone doesn't like it they can kiss my ass.
(Woman walks out)
Choosing a Programmer's Editor
A reader laments the difficulty of writing programs in a plain-vanilla text editor:I have a question that I can't seem to frame correctly. It relates to my inability to format nested punctuation (in any language, on any day). I would dearly love to see a quasi-visual editor which replaces the {{ ... }} with nested shading, and bold type used to identify classes, italics for variables, etc. etc.
It clearly calls for a different approach to the text-bound, linear approach to coding. What would such a beast be called?
Most programmers choose their editor with more care than they put into the purchase of a car. I've been lusting after this vi reference coffee mug and I don't even use the program. I feel like H.I. McDunnough in Raising Arizona, driving past convenience stores that aren't even on the way home.
For years, sheer laziness caused me to write my Java classes, Perl scripts, and other software in Windows Notepad. When I did some professional development last year for Best Blinds, a local ecommerce company, I decided it was time to find a decent programmer's text editor for Windows.
I settled on UltraEdit-32, a $40 programming, web page, and hex editor that gets great reviews in places like PC Magazine.
There are some quirks with the software, such as a hidden-character issue that was causing the header() function to fail in PHP scripts, but otherwise I've liked the editor for both programming and web design.
UltraEdit offers some great features for programming (screen shot), including keyword and class highlighting and the identification of matching brackets.
Though I recommend UltraEdit, I'd dump it for an outliner that supported code highlighting. After writing UserTalk scripts in Radio UserLand's outliner, I'm convinced an outliner is the best way to write programs. The ability to expand and collapse blocks of code as you're editing, to see exactly what you need to see, is a huge benefit.
Sixth Singer Joins Podcasting Choir
Mark Pursey has become the sixth member of the Creative Commons Choir, the asynchronous podcasting singing group that's now one-sixtieth as large as the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.I'm disappointed that the music press has yet to take note of our new genre, which takes MIDI orchestral accompaniment of Dixie to a place no one could have imagined.
When our choir stops growing, I will go the Jandek route and self-release this song commercially, putting all choir members one step closer to membership in the Recording Academy.
Anyone with a credit on six commercially released tracks can pay the $100 yearly dues and receive voting rights in the Grammy Awards and other perks. I just have to find one store on the planet that will sell us.
An e-mail from a reader of Sams Teach Yourself Java 2 in 24 Hours:i really enjoyed reading what you wrote and especially the way you wrote it!! all i want to know now is how i can make a virus because some of my pals are bugging me and i'm really pissed! and like you i feel that i'd rather be georgia vs. mafiaboy !! thanks again and please send me a repley as soon as possible and please please make sure to include a virus making "formula in it". bye
Non-Olympic Sports Test Medal
News to me: The World Games are an every-four-year event that features several dozen sports that haven't made it to the Summer Olympics yet, including fin swimming, korfball, sumo wrestling, and tug of war. This year's event begins July 14 in Duisburg, Germany. Nine of its competitions have become Olympic sports since the event was founded in 1980.Out of all of the obscure sports, the most unusual may be korfball, a co-ed sport in which players throw a soccer-like ball into an 11.5-foot high basket and aren't allowed to dribble, run with the ball, or guard a player of the opposite sex.
A competition video shows how the sport works (warning: contains hazardous levels of throbbing Eurodisco music), and it appears to value the set shot that once ruled the game of basketball. Only two colleges field teams in the U.S.
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