I wonder what the voting participation rate is among the Occupy Wall Street crowd. Do you think it’s higher or lower than comparable cohorts?

After all, one answer to OWS is – why don’t you go out an elect candidates who will support your interests? If you want to increase corporate taxes (for example), why don’t you elect someone who will? Why don’t you run for office yourself? Wouldn’t all this be more effective than sleeping in the park?

Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn’t. Many of them would claim that the democratic process is so broken that it’s not worth it. Look at the marginalization of Dennis Kuchinik, Ron Paul, Howard Dean, etc. Any views not solidly in the mainstream are ignored. You cannot run for or hold office without corporate support and the quid pro quo that entails. You can’t fight the system.

And yet, I think for many that is an excuse. My guess is that the OWS people by and large choose to avoid the democratic system. I wonder if I’m right?

I agree with this blogger, who thinks that compulsory voting would be the best thing for OWS. Along the same line of thought, National Voting Day and the National Popular Vote movement. Or indeed any kind of systemic reform that makes it easier for citizens, (particular poor ones) to vote, or makes their votes worth more than they are today. It is no accident that the GOP so stridently objects to the census using statistical measures, and fights so hard to make voting difficult.

It had to happen sometime. It’s just not funny anymore. I cancelled the season pass on TiVo.

We just adopted a puppy!

Sweet sassafrass, this little guy is cute!

Update: We named him Oliver.

Seriously. It would really hit the spot.

I suppose I’m demanding too much of our local paper. But this bugs me.

11/11/11 is very special to two boys and two moms

Friday will have a date that occurs only once in a century: 11/11/11. Besides being the title of a movie thriller debuting this week, these numbers have significance for many people throughout the world.

It is unarguably true that 11/11/11 happens only once a century. On the other hand, so does 11/10/11. And 11/11/12. Every day of the century, represented this way, happens exactly once per century. That’s the whole point of the mm/dd/yy system, if the same mm/dd/yy meant more than one day it would defeat the whole point. Does it have significance for many people throughout the world? Probably. But it shouldn’t.

Notice that Scott Adams has done something clever here. This joke was not about the typical Y2K scare. The joke couldn’t be based on that, because that was a logical fear, given uncertainty about the technology that used timestamps. So he had to change the topic to have Dogbert claim the world would end, which didn’t match the real fears at the time.

Underlying this post is the idea of separating out numerical features of the measurement system, as opposed to numerical features of the underlying reality. A day is a day, no matter what system we use to indicate it. Daylight savings time does not actually change when the sun rises. A Mayan calender system than runs out in 2012 does not mean the actual world ends. And so on. The world is the world, no matter how we measure it. Features of the measurement system do not change the reality underneath.

Quick Update: I just found an old post on much the same topic.

Don’t make me sing!

Zach get out-Zach’d. You know about Between Two Ferns, right?

Is the NBA just millionaires vs billionaires? Did you know that 60% of NBA players declare bankruptcy within five years of retirement?

A whole section for this!?

Tom Hanks vs The Fonz.

A batch of great old photos. And some more.

Joker & Lex

The Declining Hotness of Flight Attendants

Boy balances ball on fountain

Baby doesn’t understand why their magazine doesn’t work (like an IPad)

I love leaves so much!!

The truth behind Garfield.

Not today…

I have to agree with this sentiment.

Great Halloween pumpkin

On religion’s place in US History

How to present to Jeff Bezos at Amazon

Fan dressed as referee stops game, fights break out

How to announce a vacation trip

How to make money off your viral video

Such is life

A few Occupy Wall Street related links (which Muttroxia supports):
Bill Maher explains why Occupy Wall Street will win

Ken Jennings on the 99%

Where are you in the seven billion people on earth?

Here’s what the “99%” are mad about.

This is the way you do a “Thank you for your donation”

Makes a man feel good to help out.

I haven’t posted much about poker because there isn’t much to say. Full Tilt got shut down, we don’t have as many local games, and not much new to say. I’ve also been playing badly and who wants to blog how bad they are? Not me!

The last few outings I’ve lost money for the same reason each time. I make the read that someone has me beat, but talk myself into calling. Getting away from the other guy’s monster hand is vital and I’m not doing it.

Last night I was playing very tight. Four times around the table, I hadn’t raised once, I had played past the flop only once. Finally I got a playable hand: A-J suited. I put in a standard raise. The next player re-raised and I called. The flop was J-x-x. I bet with top pair. He re-raised. Hrm. Time to think this through…

• I normally can’t read him very well.
• He bluffs, but when he does his bluffs are big ones. His re-raise is big, but not big enough. The bet isn’t scaling up enough compared to the pot size – not enough to scare someone off. It doesn’t feel like his usual bluffs.
• The pre-flop bet was roughly a quarter of his stack. The post-flop bet is the same. If he continues at this bet pattern, he’ll have put in all his money.

Conclusion: He’s betting enough to milk the pot. He has Queens, Kings, or Aces. Maybe trips. I’m beat.
Stupid brain tricks: But maybe he doesn’t! I should call him.

I call him. And call his identical bet on the turn. And am not surprised when he turns over pocket aces for the win.

Variants of this have happened in the last few outings. I’ve lost patience and self-discipline at the table.

This is priceless.

How does this not completely destroy him?

In the early years of his political career, Rick Perry began hosting fellow lawmakers, friends and supporters at his family’s secluded West Texas hunting camp, a place known by the name painted in block letters across a large, flat rock standing upright at its gated entrance.

“Niggerhead,” it read.

Or this?

Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, who often waxes nostalgic about his small-town roots, grew up in an almost all-white rural area where many referred to slingshots as “niggershooters.” One elderly black resident recalls being introduced by her boss at a party decades back as “my maid, Nigger Mae Lou,”

But somehow he has.

Even his fiercest critics in Texas say that racism is not on their short, or even long, list of Mr. Perry’s sins.

Ah, Texas!

Job interivew

Why an old folk-music collector has the copyright for a Jay-Z song.

Traffic stop joke

Another great drumming video

Great pole dancing move (seriously)

Smooth recovery

Michelle Bachman tapes a soundbite.

Atheist bake sale. I like the last one.

CNN soundtrack fail

Nailed it.

Deaf person hearing herself for the first time. These always get me.

“Greatest music video ever made” And of course, a parody. I still prefer the high school one from a few years back, even better than Grand Rapids. That one still blows my mind.

Just play it how it’s written!

How stress is killing you

Archie out of context

Celery - Nature’s toothbrush

Arthur is just wrong

Great protest sign.

Honestly, I have no idea what this is telling me to do.

How can you screw up a toilet paper holder? The ‘bumps’ where the holder goes into the wall are big enough that the roll rubs on them. The friction means that the roll doesn’t roll. If it was a quarter inch wider or further from the wall… doesn’t anyone test these things before they are sold? How come the Sheraton is still buying them?

I’ve never been in a hotel room that had overhead lighting. Instead the lighting is from a half-dozen individual lamps. Each of these lamps takes up a lot of space and only illuminates its own area of the room. Even within the same room, they are controlled by different switching interfaces – wall switches, base switches, bulb switches. Why not just have regular overhead lighting, like pretty much every room in America?

Upon further reflection, there is often overhead lighting in the bathrooms. That only makes this phenomenon all the more puzzling, since that shows it’s not the hotel infrastructure that physically prevents overhead lighting from being installed everywhere.

As long as I’m at it, would it kill them to install a dimmer in the bathroom? Either it’s pitch dark or shockingly bright. It would be very helpful to have an in-between setting.

As long as I’m complaining, the Glee version of Bohemian Rhapsody (which I’m told is selling more than the original) is similarly bad. Cheesy and overblown, and that’s before you have to suffer through the video. Clearly lip-synched (more so than usual), featuring a birth sequence that (as usual for bad television) features no pain drugs, no hygiene, no timing of pushes, no cutting the cord, no afterbirth, and finally produces a baby who is clearly a few weeks old already.

(Making fun of Glee is like shooting fish in a barrel, so I must point out that I love their version of Don’t Stop Believing. Although you are again well served by turning off the video and just listening to the music.)

This is a sign for the business center at a conference:

Man, I just want to make a couple xeroxes! Calm down, Hewlett Packard!

OK Go is vastly overrated. Their clever videos hide the fact that their songs aren’t any good.

This goodbye piece, from a long time congressional worker, should be mandatory reading.

James Fallows provides an interesting follow up.

In a related piece, Joe Nocera has a fawning profile of Jim Cooper as “The Last Moderate”. It reinforces one of my perennial themes, the perfidy of Newt Gingrich. “To Cooper, the true villain is not the Tea Party; it’s Newt Gingrich.” Absolutely true. It was Gingrich who put politics before policy, party before country, and set in motion all the forces that have destroyed the institution of Congress.

The world hits seven billion (that’s 7,000,000,000!) people!

A Texas senator I suddenly like. A lot.

Oprah and the yelling goat made me laugh out loud.

Beavis & Butthead are back. Here they are, watching Jersey Shore.

Where the music industry makes profits – 30 years in one graph

Magnetic soap bubbles. Eerie.

On first plane trip, man spots his own house being robbed, saves the day

Trippy Optical Illusion

That seems unpleasant

Firefighter test

Vlad

Even spiders love it

Amazing art morph

If they ever invent Cookies n’ Cream pizza, I’ll never eat anything else for the rest of my life.