Bounded in a Nutshell

So the voters of Canada have spoken. I'm not perfectly pleased with the results, but in my opinion there's more good than bad there. Some comments:

• Looking right now like a minority government, which I think is a good thing right about now. Neither of the parties that could potentially have taken a majority of the seats would have done much useful with it: the Liberals are in bad need of a little correction and reorganisation, and the Conservatives haven't even agreed on a platform yet. I know that CW is that minority governments are bad, but I've never seen the necessity of that. (Granted, the last one we had in Canada was when I was 4, when I wasn't exactly paying attention to such things.)
• Even better, it's a Liberal minority. This gives a much higher chance of maintaining some sort of loose equilibrium in the government; any partnership between the CPC and one of the smaller (left-ish) parties would be uncomfortable at best for all involved. Plus, I'm still not convinced that the CPC is as moderate as they've been trying to claim.
• As of this writing, the Greens have 4.3% of the national popular vote. The current laws state that parties that receive better than 2% across the country (or 5% in those ridings in which they're running candidates, whichever is smaller) can receive public funds: roughly $1.75 per voter per year. Given the turnout so far, the Green Party has achieved this no matter what else happens with the rest of the returns; this entitles them to nearly a million dollars of public money per year (until the next election) for party-building and such things. I see this as a good thing.
• (In case you're curious, the Greens are also the only minor party to achieve this threshold; the next best result was the Christian Heritage Party, which pulled in 0.3% of the popular vote.)
• It'll be interesting to see how the Liberals choose to play the new situation. The traditional option would be for them to form an alliance -- formal or otherwise -- with one of the other parties. The New Democrats seem like the natural choice; they have the seats when combined with the Libs to (barely) make a majority in Parliament. The Bloc could work as well, but since most of the Bloc's gain in support came from Liberal defections in Quebec, I'm not sure how well that would play in la belle province.
• There is another way, however: rather than binding themselves to another party, the Liberals can try to rule by general consensus, getting support from other parties on an issue-by-issue basis. As the most centrist of the parties in the Commons, they're in an excellent position to do this; off the top of my head I can't think of any actual issues that the NDPs, the Conservatives, and the Bloc would all agree on. Team Martin could keep this up until they lost a vote of confidence, which could be a very long time indeed unless the other three parties think that a new election would work in their favour.

Once the tallies are finalised, I'm going to analyse the returns from a PR (Proportional Representation) standpoint. Variations on the theme of PR have been suggested for Canada, and I'm sort of curious how different the outcome would have been had something like them been in place.

OK, this pleases me.

This is a depiction of all of the states that I have visited in my life. (The scare-quotes are because the website in question seems to be counting DC as a state.) Click on the image and you can go make your own.

Of course, if we narrow the field a bit -- say, only count the states (and district) where I have slept a night, then we get a slightly less impressive picture:

It's precisely useless crap like this that makes me love the Web so much.

Seven and a half months since the initial theatrical release, and I've finally watched The Matrix Revolutions.

Two hours that I'm never, ever getting back. Not even if I gave up smoking, since first I'd have to start smoking which would almost certainly defeat the point.

What a bad film.

Of course, I'm sure that all of my faithful readers have seen the flick already, and know exactly what I'm talking about. If you haven't, then don't worry! I've seen it so you don't have to.

First of all, yeah, sequels are supposed to have a strong component of MOS (More Of Same), because that's what your modern moviegoer expects. The classic action sequel is all about more, though; a sequel that seems like it's badly derivative of the original can generally be counted a failure.

The action scenes were... very dull. Particularly the whole Battle of Zion's Docks or whatever it was, which was about 90% CG and 10% characters that we don't know and don't therefore give a damn about. Maybe it's part of the whole Matrix Experience thing, where the ideal viewer has played the accompanying console games and bought three DVDs of peripheral materials of varying degrees of quality, but that ain't me, babe.

And then there's the story. The first movie was a cyberpunk kung-fu flick, but it at least made a strong case for being considered science fiction. There was a setting there that made no less sense than most other movie SF. Reloaded messed around with the backstory a little bit, cast a whole lot of stuff into doubt, and didn't make much sense on its own but I was willing to deal with that. After all, it was supposed to be the middle movie in a trilogy, and leaving a few balls in the air under those circumstances can be a very good thing.

But Revolutions? Screw the story, screw making sense, forget any possible claim to the title of Science Fiction. And what did they replace it with? Boring CG and symbolism with the depth and subtlety of a 7-11 holdup.

Gah. I need to go wash my mind out with something.

Dr. Orbifold is facing a fundamental crisis of identity: is he is or is he ain't a computer geek? (He didn't phrase it quite that way -- he was grammatical, for instance -- but we all know what he meant.)

I can sympathise with him here, for I, too, am not quite sure where I would fit in to such a classification. I think I can say without fear of contradiction that I was, in fact, a computer geek back in high school; I admittedly didn't last long in a Computer Science program at my undergraduate school, but the major that I switched into upon switching out of CS was principally concerned with abstract versions of CS problems, so I'm not sure how much of an improvement that was. (Except for, you know, that I liked it much better and didn't have to do nearly as much -- well, any -- programming. Except on co-op work terms, but that's another story.)

By most definitions, though, I'm really not a computer geek any more. Certainly I'm not a professional C.G. And yet! Like the good Doctor O., I maintain the delusion that the only thing between me and a successful career in computers is an effort of will. This is, of course, wrong.

Here's the thing: I'm good with computers. While I lost the patience for serious programming sometime before my 20th birthday, I still spend a good chunk of my waking hours in front of them and am not inclined to complain about it. I like fiddling around, I can generally pick up the hows and whys of applications with minimal fuss, and I'm willing to be impressed by kewl new innovations. And I can still speak the language, for the most part.

So I think Orbifold's question -- Computer geek? (Y/N/Q) -- is ill-formed. It's a false dichotomy; dividing the world into Computer Geeks who can immerse their minds in La Machine and make a good living doing so, and clooless noobs, is not a terribly accurate model of reality. Not everyone who really understands computers would make a good software developer. Not everyone who doesn't understand computers is incapable of working with them. It's more of a continuum; I'm probably something like 0.78 of a computer geek, and I'd imagine that Dr. Orbifold's about the same.

Of course, math geek is a fair cop, and I think the previous sentence made that distressingly clear.

Anyone know what the standard period of mourning for an ex-president is? It's been over two weeks now & still almost every flag in town's flying low.

Y'know, not that long ago the governor of this state died -- and that's actually the seated governor, not a former governor from a couple of decades ago -- and I'm pretty sure the flags were back at the top of their poles after about a week. What gives?

Gah. Sitting in my office waiting for a student who may or may not show up, and once again I neglected to do anything about breakfast this morning. Like, say, have any.

My problem with breakfast is this: I like half-sleep a whole lot. That period at the beginning of the day when you're still mostly asleep and yet conscious that you're asleep, and your blankets are nice and warm because your body temperature hasn't risen to normal levels yet... it's just swell, I think. And so I have the bad habit of indulging in the simple pleasure of prolonging semiconsciousness for as long as I can.

Of course I'm still mostly asleep at this point, and so the idea of long-range planning isn't really available to me very readily. And hence, I'll generally put off getting up until it reaches the critical point of my needing to be on campus in half an hour, and of course by then unless I want to grab McD breakfast biscuits (which I usually don't), I've shut off all possibility of a morning meal.

[Two minutes later:] OK, now that's done with. On beyond lunchtime!

I've noticed numerous commenters on the political blogs that I follow make very strong statements about the results of the presidential election this fall... usually along the lines of X has no chance or sometimes just plain old Y will win. All of these people sound supremely confident that they're right, which indicates that at least some of them are probably going to look pretty silly in five months' time.

People looking silly online isn't a concern of mine; I mean, really, that's what online is here for. No, I think that the thing to do is to make a little money off of it.

It works like this: suppose you get someone (call them X) who is absolutely positive that Bush is going to win. (There's a fair number of people who express this opinion around.) If X is serious in their opinion, and at all rational, then they should be more than willing to accept the proposition:

I'll bet you $100 against $100,000 that Kerry will win.

Now if they refuse to bet with you, then you can probably force them into an admission that they're not as confident as they actually want people to believe... which is at least a rhetorical win, which can pass for currency in the blogosphere. If they take the bet, then the thing to do is hedge yourself by finding an equally fervent supporter of Kerry and goad them into a similar proposition. Result: you'll lose some small amount of money on one side of the column, and win a much much larger one on the other. Not so shabby.

I suppose this is actually an advantage of having such a polarised electorate: it creates a truly lovely little arbitrage of this sort, since each side is going to be convinced that they're going to win because losing would be disastrous. Of course, I suppose this is only an advantage if one is willing to sacrifice all other political and ideological concerns for the sake of making a quick buck (or more to the point, thousands upon thousands of quick bucks). Somehow, I doubt that there's any shortage of such people.

It's looking like I get to vote in two federal elections this year, one for each of my citizenships. In an attempt to be a good little citizen of a democracy, today I investigated the websites of the four declared candidates in my home riding. (Note to my American correspondents: a riding is the Canadian equivalent of a congressional district, more or less.)

Overall, it's sort of an interesting field. The Liberal candidate's a former CFLer with a doctorate in biological/ecological sciences, but points against him for not bothering with a web page of his own. The NDP's man has been a journalist and a pastor, has a good track record in corrections reform, but isn't as funny as he thinks he is. The Greens have put up an engineer who's becoming a teacher, owns and operates a small organic farm, and is building a straw bale house: very cool, if that's the sort of thing you're into, although again no individual web page.

And then there's the Conservative candidate. Retired brigadier-general, undergrad degrees in math/physics and philosophy. On paper, a pretty good candidate. But there are aspects of his beliefs that seem a little incoherent to me.

To wit: he claims that self-reliance is something he believes in: the government should be one's last resort in resolving problems. However, you'll note on his positions page that he seems to call for significant government intervention in any number of areas. He feels that an MP should be permitted to vote freely on as many issues as possible, but should also support his (sic) party positions. (Self-reliance should be made of sterner stuff.) He believes in normative meritocracy, although how that's going to happen without government intervention (i.e. laws) isn't clear.

I know I'm being much tougher with this guy than with the others, but that's only because every indication is that he's going to win; the vast majority of the current riding was, before the lines were redrawn, part of the easternmost Alliance riding in Canada. He says a lot of the right things, but with enough weasel-room and backtracking that it's not entirely clear what his true positions are. If it were just him -- if the choice was honestly one of a representative for the riding -- then I might even consider voting for him.

Of course it's not just him. He's in Harper's party, and the implication of the bit about how an MP should vote their party line under most circumstances indicates to me that it doesn't really matter how good a candidate this guy is personally, because it's not him personally that one would be sending to the Hill.

You know what would be even better than having a recently-renovated stadium seating cinema right across the road from my apartment complex?

If they'd included proper sound insulation in the renovations.

As soon as they get around to indexing either this year's Congressus or the current JCMCC, I'll have more publications on MathSciNet than Ahmad Chalabi.

I've still got a couple to go before I can compete with Ted Kaczynski. OTOH, I've got a lower Erdos Number than either of them.