Month: February 2013

Katherine Bouton reflects on the challenges posed her progressive hearing loss:

My work life was one long dance around the fact that I couldn’t hear a single thing. At a meeting I was leading, with eight or 10 people, I deftly (or so I thought) asked participants to send me a summary of their suggestions and I would incorporate them in my report. When someone called on the phone, I’d say, “I’m really swamped. Could you follow up with an e-mail?” Unless caller ID told me who the speaker was, I often couldn’t tell.

In a later article, Bouton describes the limitations of cochlear implants:

My success with the implant has been mixed. My hearing is still poor in the speech frequencies. I rely heavily on my right hearing-aided ear, and I continue to have a great deal of difficulty with the vowel sounds. Bit or bet; prim or prom; lift, left, loft, laughed. They’re all one to me. I can hear the rustle of a palm tree but not what my husband is saying in the beach chair next to me.

When he discovered he needed an expensive surgery, Michael Dempster entered into a domestic partnership with his girlfriend in order to access her employer’s healthcare plan. The registration fee was $35:

Ours is a domestic partnership of convenience, a commitment that changed in name only. Marriage is the serious step. The difference, in our case, is simple: We didn’t exchange vows before any loved ones or deities. We were half-hitched in May by a clerk named Rianuldo. But that’s underselling the process. There were traces of romance. She didn’t pause before signing the form, an indication, I thought, of trust or readiness or—I wasn’t sure. …

Implicitly, we’d said something like “I might marry (a less broken) you,” or even, “I will marry you,” but not yet “will you marry me.” Not that we gave it that much thought. We’re in love, happy, all that. If we break up, it’s as easy to dissolve a domestic partnership as it is to buy one. There’s a form online, a $27 fee. Efficient exes can bypass both fee and form by marrying someone else.

Harry Enten claims that the “stereotype of aged conservatives and liberal youth is wrong.” He compares the voting habits of various generations:

Most people part of the Eisenhower/Truman-generation, who vote more Republican than the nation at large, are likely to be around through the next three elections; estimates suggest life expectancies of about 9-16 years for people aged 80 to 70. Voters of the very Democratic Roosevelt-generation have life expectancies of less than eight years, being at least 85. Thus, the generations most likely to expire next are those who have historically been more Democratic.

Many might think that these Roosevelt-generation voters are going to be replaced by more liberal Obama-era voters, but polling casts that theory into doubt. Just because today’s college students are liberal doesn’t mean tomorrow’s will lean left, too.

He goes on to argue that “the generation of the next few years isn’t likely to be either conservative or overwhelmingly liberal; it’s probably going to be moderate” and that far “more than most young voters today, the next generation is likely to be up for grabs.”

(Chart from (pdf) Pew)

Friedersdorf traces them:

In 1912, Massachusetts enacted America’s first minimum wage law, but it only applied to women and children. Unlike men, they were deemed weak, and in need of protection from employers. As an empirical matter, their wages were much lower and their working conditions more dismal. There was also social unease with the increasing number of unmarried women working and living alone in the city — if their wages didn’t provide for their sustenance, who knew how they might make ends meet? A woman ought to be allowed to forgo marriage and pursue work outside the home, an article in The Literary Digest conceded, but she must become sufficiently skilled to earn a living wage, “because she has given to society the equivalent of that which she expects in return.” Otherwise, she ought to stay in her father’s house. Yet “if she has been driven into industry, not because she deems it her vocation to lie therein, but because her father can not support her at home, she is, indeed, the victim of our bad economic system, which has so nearly broken down…. She it is that is in greatest danger of falling into prostitution.”

Tim Murphy tracks down one man in charge of our defenses: Dr. Bong Wei, who approves of the Bruckheimer method:

Wie’s plan for destroying an Earth-bound asteroid is simple: Stick a massive nuclear device into it and blast it to smithereens. Notwithstanding the 168 factual inaccuracies NASA engineers have reportedly found in Armageddon, Bruce Willis and Billy Bob Thornton got it essentially right. “Astronauts will not be required, so clearly this would be an unmanned robotic mission—but we will need a nuclear device,” Wie says.

The key is, as Jerry Bruckheimer surmised, to drill beneath the surface of the asteroid. If the nuclear device explodes upon impact, it wouldn’t pack enough force to knock the asteroid off its collision course with us. And if the device hits the asteroid at too high a velocity—anything above 300 meters per second—it will simply disintegrate. Wie’s idea is to build a rocket that splits in two just before impact. The front end thereby acts as a blocker, plowing into the asteroid and forming a crater, which the nuclear device then drops into.

“Basically the whole thing was correctly described in the movie,” he says.

Carl Franzen explains the above map:

Now you can see the location of every recorded meteorite impact on Earth going back to 2,300 BCE all in one heat map created by Javier de la Torre, cofounder of geo software companies Vizzuality and CartoDB. De la Torre created the map using CartoDB’s mapping software, which relies on the free crowdsourced OpenStreetMap for its base layer. The meteorite impact site data — 34,513 individual points of impact in total — came from the [Meteoritical] Society, an international nonprofit scientific collaboration.

Maybe not:

[L]ots of Republicans who were running as challengers or in open seats in 2010—and then won—ran as incumbents for the first time in 2012. We know that incumbency is a powerful factor in House elections, bringing candidates greater visibility, adding to their campaign coffers, and deterring quality challengers from running. On average, an incumbent in 2012 ran five percentage points ahead of a non-incumbent candidate from the same party in a similar seat. Sixty-one seats were were decided by less than this margin.

More important, once we took incumbency into account, the apparent effect of gerrymandering vanished. That is, the ability of Republicans to retain the House majority may have been due to incumbency advantage, not new and more favorable districts.

A new poll in Illinois finds the public backing marriage rights for gay couples 50 – 29 percent, with 20 percent unsure. This issue is being debated in the legislature – so this is more a backgrounder on public opinion and pressure on lawmakers than a prediction about a referendum. To my mind, this is the most interesting nugget:

In a bit of a surprise, intensity of feeling is strongest among supporters of legalization.

Of the 50 percent who favor passage statewide, 37 percent do so “strongly” and 13 percent “somewhat” — an almost 3-1 margin. Among opponents, 19 percent “strongly oppose” passage, compared with 10 percent who “somewhat oppose” passage — about a 2-1 margin. The differing splits are within the survey’s accuracy range but may indicate that lawmakers face as much or more political risk voting “no” as they do “yes.”

That’s a big change from the 1990s. The State Senate has passed an equality measure by 34-21. The House is supposed to be less favorable. But the vote could come soon. Stay tuned. Illinois would be a critical huge state, like New York and California, in persuading Supreme Court Justices it isn’t such a big deal to rule on this in a reformist direction. The public and state legislatures are currently ahead of the court.

“Do you ask me whence comes the custom of blessing those who sneeze? We produce three sorts of wind; that which comes from below is too foul; that which comes through the mouth implies some reproach of gluttony; the third is sneezing, and, because it comes from the head and is blameless, we give it this honourable greeting. Do not laugh at this conceit; it is, they say, Aristotle’s,” – Montaigne.

John Allen Jr. can’t predict the next pope:

Benedict XVI has set the stage for an election in which the cardinals have some room to maneuver. By separating the end of his papacy from the end of his life, Benedict has ensured that the run-up to the ballot will not be dominated by the sort of elegiac commentary that always follows the death of a major world leader, and that loomed so large in April 2005 when the cardinals had to pick their way through throngs of emotional mourners in Rome.

In effect, Benedict XVI has created a situation in which the cardinals can move in a somewhat different direction, if they’re so inclined, without seeming to speak ill of the dead. All by itself, that makes this papal election, and the choices for Catholicism it crystallizes, both harder to handicap—and more fascinating to watch.