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Students’ and Renters’ Votes Shouldn’t Be Counted?

Republican Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen is suing the Government Accountability Board to check all voter registrations back to Jan. 2006. A discrepancy that would make a voter appear ineligible to vote is mentioned in this Isthmus article: a difference in addresses between the voter registration and the DOT database.

The address on my driver’s license (renewed every, what, 7 years?) isn’t current. It has changed at least 3 or 4 times since I registered with the DOT. So I suppose I could expect to have my vote thrown out with no warning if I don’t go down to the DMV and update it. Is my vote “fraudulent” because of this mismatch?

What about students and other renters that move every year? Is it likely that their DOT address record matches their voter registration?

How do you wipe out large numbers of votes from young people and those that aren’t wealthy enough to own a home? Van Hollen knows.

Van Hollen is also the co-chair of McCain’s campaign in Wisconsin. Do you see a conflict of interest?

EDIT: Go to Voter Public Access to check your voter registration status.

National Priorities

Using the figures from Death and Taxes I calculated that over the last month I personally contributed over $100 to the Global War on Terror. Over the same period about $36 went to the Department of Education.

The federal budget for 2009 is $1182 billion. $189 billion (16%) of that goes to the GWOT. $59 billion (5%) goes to Education. How much did you pay for each this month?

The Difference Between Obama and McCain’s Tax Proposals

This graph shows how each candidate plans to distribute his bribes if elected.

[Washington Post via gruber]

Review of tick, tick… BOOM!

Lindsay Christians’ review of tick, tick… BOOM! appeared today in 77 Square. Most of the fault is found with the show itself, which I think would have benefited from further workshopping before being published. I was mentioned by name (a first for me):

Jordan Peterson, playing primarily Jon’s best friend Michael, [...lends] his pleasant baritone to songs like “Real Life” and “Johnny Can’t Decide.” Peterson is animated in the entertaining “No More,” a song about his new apartment and the bohemian life he left behind, and believable as a successful executive who travels to escape his loneliness.

Props are given to the excellent band: Chris (keyboard & director), Mark (bass), Rocky (guitar), and Sean (drums), as well as Paul’s excellent lighting design and Meghan’s staging and costume design. It was a good opening weekend, and it’ll be over in a flash…only two more performances: Friday and Saturday. Our first rehearsal was just over 3 weeks ago; I’d say it’s going pretty well.

How To Crack a Master Lock Using Python

My landlord recently built storage lockers in our basement, and I dug through my junk drawer to find an old combination Master Lock to secure mine. I had forgotten the combination. Not to worry, as it’s not too hard to crack one if you have about 10 minutes to try up to 100 different combinations using this technique:

1. Set the dial to 0.
2. Pull up and maintain pressure as if you’re trying to open the lock.
3. Let up just enough pressure to let the dial turn until it stops.
4. Wiggle the dial back and forth. It will have one number’s-width of play in it, and it will either move from one whole number to the next or from one number’s half-position to the next number’s half-position. For example, it will move from 3.5 to 4.5. In that case the number we want is 4. Ignore positions where it “straddles” a half number, like if it moves between 3 and 4.
5. There are 5 of these numbers. Write them down. All of them except one will end with the same digit, e.g.: 2, 12, 22, 27, 32. The one that doesn’t fit this pattern, 27 in this case, is the last number in the combination.

The first 60 seconds of this video demonstrates the technique to find the numbers:

This Python script makes it pretty quick to list the 100 possible combinations once you’ve isolated the last number using the above technique:

masterlock.py:

import sys
last = int(sys.argv[1])
remainder = last % 4
first = [remainder]
while first[-1] < 36:
first.append(first[-1] + 4)
if remainder == 0:
second = [2]
elif remainder == 1:
second = [3]
elif remainder == 2:
second = [0]
elif remainder == 3:
second = [1]
while second[-1] < 36:
second.append(second[-1] + 4)
for f in first:
for s in second:
print f, s, last


Just pass the script the last number in the combination, and it will spit out a list of all 100 possible combinations, like so:

python masterlock.py 7

Of course, this shows that combination Master Locks are really only secure if someone can’t spend 10 minutes messing around with your padlock without getting caught. And it means that if you have ten minutes, and something to write with and on, you can open someone else’s padlock. Don’t be a jerk.

I haven’t confirmed this, but I’ve heard that Master Lock redesigned their locks within the last couple years so that this trick doesn’t work anymore. My padlock was purchased before that.

I know that my padlock really isn’t protecting my stuff very well, but considering that the storage locker “walls” are made of chicken wire, the padlock isn’t the weak part of the system. The lock’s just there as a deterrent to keep my (hopefully) honest neighbors out of my stuff.

My First Kiva Loan Has Been Repaid

One year ago Nazirjon Holdorov requested a $1000 loan from Kiva, a non-profit organization that connects microfinance organizations to online lenders that each contribute small amounts.

I was one of 29 people that lent him money, and today he repaid his loan in full. This is the first Kiva loan of mine that’s been paid back, (no defaults yet, either) and it’s cool to see the system working.

Unscientific Anti-Vaccine Hysteria Could Cause A Measles Epidemic

Herd immunity arises when enough of the population has been vaccinated against a disease that individual cases cannot spread to enough people to cause an epidemic. We almost got there with measles near the end of the 20th century. Then Andrew Wakefield published a now-discredited study and the myth began that the Measles, Mumps, and Rubella (MMR) vaccine causes autism.

from The Guardian:

The rate of MMR vaccination fell from 91% in 1997 – approaching the “herd immunity” levels that would virtually wipe out the disease – to 80% in 2003. They have recovered only slightly since then. The reason, almost certainly, is that parents were frightened by a possible MMR “link” to autism. This fear carried little credibility among medical professionals. But it received high, sometimes hysterical, media coverage.

[...]

The research that led to suggestions of an MMR “link” with autism came from Dr Andrew Wakefield and 11 colleagues at the Royal Free Hospital, London. It was later discredited. He and two others are now charged with serious professional misconduct before the General Medical Council.

This myth has received enough sensational press coverage that the suspicion that vaccines cause autism has entered common knowledge. Celebrities like Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey are furthering anti-vaccination propaganda. This could have serious repercussions on public health in America. Just when science was finally ridding us of a deadly disease, unscientific superstition came along to put us back in danger.

See Wikipedia for a summary of the “controversy” regarding autism and the MMR vaccine, and Science-Based Medicine for a discussion of vaccine side effects from an MD who specializes in Infectious Disease.

It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Hippie Christmas

It’s the middle of August, which means it’s time for the UW-Madison students to arrive and for thousands of downtown apartment dwellers to toss most of their possessions to the curb and be homeless for a night until they can move into their new place the next day.

Right outside the front door of my building was a box marked “FREE” of discarded electronics including what are now my new alarm clock and subwoofer-equipped computer speakers. It doesn’t get any easier or cheaper than this.

The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything: Dopamine

Read Montague, the director of the Human Neuroimaging Lab at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, TX, is trying to crack the code of how the brain makes decisions — the neurochemical foundation of free will.

The neurotransmitter dopamine‘s effect on creating the sensation of reward in the brain was discovered in the 50′s. Montague’s research is showing that the activity of dopamine neurons influences decision making in a more complex manner than previously thought. Dopamine isn’t just produced when something favorable happens. It’s also produced as soon as there’s an expectation that something favorable will happen.

What’s interesting about this system is that it’s all about expectation. Dopamine neurons constantly generate patterns based upon experience: If this, then that. The cacophony of reality is distilled into models of correlation. And if these predictions ever prove incorrect, then the neurons immediately readjust their expectations. The discrepancy is internalized; the anomaly is remembered. “The accuracy comes from the mismatch,” Montague says. “You learn how the world works by focusing on the prediction errors, on the events that you didn’t expect.” Our knowledge, in other words, emerges from our cellular mistakes. The brain learns how to be right by focusing on what it got wrong.

So the brain learns by avoiding prior mistakes and trying to supply itself with “fixes” of dopamine — kind of a brute force trial-and-error. Is that the meaning of life? Too much dopamine causes an organism to ignore its basic survival instincts even to its own death:

They inserted the needle right next to the nucleus accumbens (NAcc), a part of the brain dense with dopamine neurons and involved with the processing of pleasurable rewards, like food and sex.

Olds and Milner quickly discovered that too much pleasure can be fatal. After they ran a small current into the wire, so that the NAcc was continually excited, the scientists noticed that the rodents lost interest in everything else. They stopped eating and drinking. All courtship behavior ceased. The rats would just cower in the corner of their cage, transfixed by their bliss. Within days all of the animals had perished. They had died of thirst.

Maybe the ultimate goal is to do whatever it takes to keep as much dopamine flowing as possible while still keeping yourself fed, sheltered, and breeding for as long as possible. It’s elegantly simple. Working out the details of pursuing that goal is the interesting part.

[Seed Magazine]

Do we need all these nukes?

This video gives you an idea of just how large and expensive our nuclear arsenal is. How could we possibly need all of these nuclear warheads? Is it just to keep money flowing to the companies that build and maintain them?