Month: January 2008

A reader writes:   

I intended to vote for Obama this morning and my husband for Hillary. But on the way to the polling place, my five year old daughter asked who we were voting for. I said, "Mommy is voting for a nice man named Barack Obama and Daddy is voting for a nice woman named Hillary Clinton." She replied, "But I thought only men were presidents."  It was a punch to the gut.  So I took her in with me and let her push the button on the electronic screen for Hillary. (My husband ended up switching and voting for Obama at the last minute so it all evened out.) You can call me a racist if you want, but I don’t want any one else’s daughter to say the same thing to her mother in four years.

Artist Thomas Briggs uses mathematics to create complex webs of color and form. Using tools more commonly applied to computational fluid dynamics, Briggs builds high resolution drawing-like images. The works seen here are reduced over 99 percent.

More after the fold.

An Oregon court finds that the views of a 12-year-old boy are a "fact necessary to the determination" of whether he should be circumcised. That’s a start.

Contact lenses could become the computer monitors of tomorrow:

One day it might not be unusual to wear a contact lens that projects the phone’s display directly onto the eye. Researchers at the University of Washington have taken an important first step toward building contact lenses that could do just that. By incorporating metal circuitry and light-emitting diodes (LEDs) into a polymer-based lens, they have created a functional circuit that is biologically compatible with the eye.

"If you look at the structure of a lens, it’s just a simple polymer," says Babak Parviz, professor of electrical engineering at the University of Washington. A number of researchers are putting electronics into polymers to build flexible circuits or displays, for instance. "What we realized was, we can make a lot of functional devices that are really tiny, and they can be incorporated into a contact lens to do a lot more than just improve vision," Parviz says.

More details here. Art from Ffffound, and here.

Oh well. Obama has at least six Latino supporters:

Note that the Survey USA poll you refer to finds Hispanics to be 1 percent of likely primary voters.  In other words, the conclusion that Hispanics support Obama is based on a very small number of people (maybe as few as 6).  Further, these are robo-call polls which may or may not present particular problems for people whose native language is not English.  In any case, the true test will be NY, NJ, CA and some of the others.

A reader transcribed the following conversation on Hardball tonight:

Chris Matthews: Faye, you first, you know Hillary Clinton, you know Bill Clinton. What’s Bill’s role in this thing, is it a good role or a bad role?

Faye Wattleton: Well, I think that Bill Clinton’s role is that of the spouses of all the candidates, he’s participating as a surrogate for his wife who is running. And I think that its entirely consistent with the ascension of other women to the top offices in their country; they come about it as the result of the president being their spouse or being members of prominent families. So I don’t think that we should be so upset and agitated about Mr. Clinton’s participation  – we should continue to focus on the issues that the people want to hear about…these other matters are really side issues.

Wow. A proud defense of nepotism over feminism. Or rather, as is the Clintons’ wont, a total conflation of feminism with nepotism. I remember similar Clintonian feminists in the 1990s trashing, smearing and sliming women who dared to complain about the sexual harassment and abuse of women that Bill Clinton – with his wife’s full knowledge – engaged in for years. This couple really do corrupt everything they touch.

A reader writes:

Holt obviously has no children. As a pediatrician, I attempted to heed the American Academy of Pediatrics’ advice on limiting TV for my kids.  I tried to teach them about all I wanted them to learn from an early age- I got nowhere.  Once my kids started to watch Sesame Street, I saw their eyes light up.  They all of a sudden developed a love of letters and numbers and shapes that I couldn’t instill in them personally.  The education that these talking puppets gave my children has been far more impressive than anything I did.  There’s some kind of magic that spreads into a child’s mind when a talking and singing puppet talks directly to them.  Thank God that these puppets were used for good and not evil.  I wouldn’t have stood a chance no matter how moral a compass I tried to imbue them with.

A reader’s eureka moment:

For the last six years, I’ve watched a fear-mongering fool manipulate us, ruin our standing in the world and abuse our principles.  It’s been hard to feel good about our country.  But when Obama won Iowa and surged in the New Hampshire polls I thought I’d underestimated us.  For the first time in my lifetime, my cynical generation was turning out heavily to vote. We were choosing, above all else, to be inspired.

Now, the Clinton campaign has gradually and expertly eviscerated him, and it turns out we’re not that country.  We’re still easily manipulated; we’re still scared; and we’re still a little racist.  It’s hard not to resent her for that.

Charles Franklin pores over the sensitive last-minute polling.