18c pander

John McCain and Hillary Clinton are pandering to the stupid with the idea of temporarily repealing the federal 18c gas tax. Paul Krugman explains:

... the price to consumers will always rise until the quantity demanded falls to match the quantity supplied. Cut taxes, and all that happens is that the pretax price rises by the same amount. The McCain gas tax plan is a giveaway to oil companies, disguised as a gift to consumers ... The Clinton twist is that she proposes paying for the revenue loss with an excess profits tax on oil companies. In one pocket, out the other.

The sad thing is the media report this too as a "he said, she said" story. "She said repealing the gas tax will help people with long commutes. He said it's all just a gimmick that will increase prices in the long term".

Talking about a book I haven't read

The title of the book ("How to talk about books you haven't read") intrigued me enough that I picked up the book even though it's a translation from French.

The author, a professor of philosophy, doesn't actually tell you not to read books (at least in the first two chapters that I've read so far). Instead, he says that "reading" comes in shades of gray -- ranging from books you skimmed, or have heard about, to read but have forgotten to books you have read closely. To talk about books, he says, you need only to know the milieu, not the exact contents.

The title is catchy but the actual argument is quite ho-hum. Take for example, John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath. I think that I read it when I was in elementary school. Why do I think I have read the book? (1) Because I remember reading about a family driving across the country to California. They stop to fill gas and "let air out of the tires". At the time that I read that (my acquantance with cars was non-existent until I bought my first car in graduate school), I had no idea why anyone would let air out of tires. I still have a lingering memory of the confusion. (2) I have had several conversations about dust bowls and how Steinbeck gave Oklahoma a bum rap. And I do remember reading something about dust settling in on everything. But I could as well have been remembering the Harmattan wind of my West African childhood. (3) I also seem to remember something about locusts and people frying locusts and eating them. Now here's the clincher: Did I actually read all those in Steinbeck's book? Or have I conjured up a memory of the book from other things I've read or encountered? Who knows? These memories fit the impression I have of Steinbeck, and I can talk intelligibly about the atmosphere he evokes ... Why do I have to read Steinbeck's book at this point?

This is Bayard's point, or at least I believe it is -- I've read only 2 chapters of his book so far. Should I read the rest or move on?

First hint of a problem?

S1 and I were playing Scrabble today (we play a simplified form suitable for a six-year-old) and this is the board after a few plays:
Some of S1's words are circled. Should I reserve a spot at Betty Ford's place?

The problem with Obama

Paul Krugman is the probably smartest person writing columns for a newspaper. He saw through Bush at a time when most of us thought we'd like to have a beer with him. He's been totally anti-Obama this election cycle and in his latest column, he provides a lucid explanation of his reluctance to back Obama:

... maybe his transformational campaign isn’t winning over working-class voters because transformation isn’t what they’re looking for. From the beginning, I wondered what Mr. Obama’s soaring rhetoric, his talk of a new politics and declarations that “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for” (waiting for to do what, exactly?) would mean to families troubled by lagging wages, insecure jobs and fear of losing health coverage. The answer, from Ohio and Pennsylvania, seems pretty clear: not much. Mrs. Clinton has been able to stay in the race, against heavy odds, largely because her no-nonsense style, her obvious interest in the wonkish details of policy, resonate with many voters in a way that Mr. Obama’s eloquence does not.

But there is a problem with this diagnosis: It's not that Obama is not winning working-class voters. He's not winning older voters and he's not winning women. I think older voters are simply voting for the "brand-name" candidate -- Obama's simply less known to these voters. And women are voting for the woman in the race -- what's surprising is that Obama's doing so well when half the electorate can so easily identify with his opponent and when his opponent has instant name recognition. So, unlike Krugman, I'm not worried about electability.

Another point that Krugman makes, however, is deeply discomfitting because it is so true:

Tellingly, the Obama campaign has put far more energy into attacking Mrs. Clinton’s health care proposals than it has into promoting the idea of universal coverage.

Krugman saw that "compassionate conservatism" was a hoax because Bush's economics simply didn't make any sense. Has he similarly spotted the problem with the case of Obama? After all, the main rationale for an Obama presidency is the transformatial nature of his candidacy. Because he is an excellent communicator, he should be able to bring the American people along with him. But what use is being an excellent communicator and a transformational character if you don't bother to sell the big picture?

Seminar on Weather Data Mining at the National Weather Center

The meteorology department at OU has an unusual requirement of anyone who wants to become adjunct faculty in the department: they have to give a seminar, on a topic of their choice, at the weather center. I'm giving my seminar today. It's essentially a mash-up of a couple of conference papers along with some background to make it all flow together. If you're in the area and you're interested in the topic (the slides for the talk are online), come.

P.S. Because I pulled my talk out of already-written papers, and the papers are written with LaTeX, the slides are too. This explains their non-PowerPoint-like appearance. Using LaTeX (and Beamer) made it much easier to reuse figures, tables and equations.

Rowing in Oklahoma City

A couple of years ago, we met an amateur rowing team at a party.  I'd seen boats out on the Oklahoma river, which you cross to get to the city from Norman, but hadn't realized that it was a bonafide rowing place, one that people formed teams to row in.  This article in the New York Times explains why the river is good enough to host Olympic trials:

Knopp, a rowing enthusiast, looked at one 2,000-meter stretch that was perfectly straight and realized the Army Corps of Engineers had unwittingly created an ideal location for a boat race.

The memory of boathouses on the Charles (in Boston) makes me think would be so cool to have an OU boathouse on the river.  Although having a sailing club at Lake Thunderbird hasn't prompted me to take up sailing, so why would a boathouse prompt me to take up rowing?

It's a small world, take two

A visiting German meteorologist called in a hail report and estimated its size as being "twice the diameter of a 1-Euro coin" (read it with a German accent). I can only imagine the look on the face of the Weather Service person on the receiving end of the phone call.

NWUS54 KOUN 220905
LSROUN

PRELIMINARY LOCAL STORM REPORT
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE NORMAN OK
404 AM CDT TUE APR 22 2008

..TIME...   ...EVENT...      ...CITY LOCATION...     ...LAT.LON...

..DATE...   ....MAG....      ..COUNTY LOCATION..ST.. ...SOURCE....
        ..REMARKS..

0853 PM     HAIL             MAYSVILLE               34.82N 97.41W
04/21/2008  E1.95 INCH       GARVIN             OK   STORM CHASER   


        HAIL WAS ABOUT TWICE THE DIAMETER OF A 1 EURO COIN.
        REPORTED BY A METEOROLOGIST FROM MUNICH GERMANY.

Thanks to T. for pointing me to the preliminary storm report.