Why you shouldn't trust polls

The Daily Kos has been running a series of State of the Nation polls for the last year and a half. Today they announced that those polls appear to have been complete bunk, the results at least manipulated if not completely made up. This was only discovered by statistical analysis of the data about the polls and polling process the Daily Kos published along with the poll results.

Now, the polls weren't from some fly-by-night operation. Research 2000 was one of the most respected polling houses in the business. But the one thing that strikes me is that, despite that, they simply had a lousy track record at actually correctly predicting outcomes. To me it seems obvious that if the polls are being done right and are accurate then they should closely match the actual outcome, and if they don't match the outcome then the rest doesn't matter because the polls are useless for prediction. If anyone's reporting those polls knowing about their track record, they're using those polls for something other than simply tracking actual sentiment on an issue.

My advice: never trust a poll unless the data underlying it is published for independent review. And never trust a poll or the use of that poll when the polling house doesn't have a good track record of getting the outcomes right.

SOE FanFaire in Vegas

OK, FanFaire's handled. Drive up Wednesday evening, stay until either Sunday afternoon or Monday morning depending on what's going on. Dean and Lia will be going with me, so whether I can handle the gas and brakes on the car isn't an issue.

The failure of Ponzi

Everybody knows Facebook has games. One of them I've been playing is Ponzi. It's a fairly fun, fairly addictive game. The gameplay itself is simple: you set the employees of your company to doing jobs to earn money. You use the money to buy bigger offices and furnish rooms in them, and to hire more employees. You compete against your friends to see who can earn more money faster. It's fire-and-forget: once you set the jobs running you can go away and not come back until the jobs are done and you need to collect your money. Early on jobs take minutes to run, but fairly quickly you graduate to jobs that take an hour or two and then into the 5/10/15-hour jobs later in the game. So, while it's fun it's not going to eat up a lot of your time. And the competition is addictive. You start playing it, and pretty soon you're hooked and having fun. And after playing it for a few days, you'd find yourself thinking (as I did) that this is worth $10-15 easy.

And that's why it's closing down: because I'd only spend $15 on it. It's not big enough to justify my spending even $5 every month on it. And the addictive part comes from the competition with others. This game works only because it's networked. If I couldn't see how I was doing relative to my friends and interact with them in various ways (eg. send them a parade to brighten their day, or leave Mr. Dino snoozing on their lawn), it'd be dull as dirt. That networked aspect means central servers with their ongoing costs, but players aren't going to be willing to set up Yet Another Subscription and pay enough every month to be worth it.

So, R.I.P. Ponzi.

Mage cloth armor

Note to game designers out there: THIS is mage armor.

Obama extends Federal benefits to same-sex couples

Obama widens the range of Federal benefits extended to same-sex partners. I'm sure the Religious Right is going to go ballistic over this. Me, I think they need to get over this nervousness about their inherent attraction to members of the same gender, loosen up and get on with more important things than trying to ban their temptations so they won't be tempted anymore.

SOE FanFaire

I'm hoping I make FanFaire in Vegas this year. We're trying to get a bunch of our EQ2 guild together there. I've got my membership bought and my hotel room reserved, the problem will be my feet and driving. If Dean gets sent up it'll be no problem, I can have Lia drive up with me. If Dean doesn't get sent, I have to decide whether it's worth 2 round trips worth of gas. I don't want to fly up because my feet just aren't going to handle the airport/airline bullshit involved.

If I go I want to see if I can wrangle Toraneko into coming to dinner one night. Especially if Tiff and Brea make it, Tora might have fun talking renfaire shop with someone who fights with live steel (and appropriate armor).

BP knew about DH well problems 11 months ago

Ouch. Apparently BP knew about indications there were problems with the Deepwater Horizon well up to 11 months before the incident occurred. IMO the government should simply find BP negligent in ignoring all those indications and hold them 100% liable for all costs of repair and clean-up. And then slap the industry as a whole with regulations requiring all those things that BP ignored or didn't want to do that could've prevented the blow-out, plus increased inspections and oversight. And give the inspectors the power to order the work done directly, with the company being billed for it, if the company doesn't want to do it on their own.

Cleaning and dust

One thing I've noticed about the new apartment is the dust. Here there's very little, even with the doors and windows open, and it's all a light-grey dry powdery stuff. The old apartment always had lots and lots of a nasty black stuff that accumulated fast. In a week it'd be as if I hadn't cleaned at all. And this stuff wasn't dry, it was kind of oily and adhered to things so you needed soap or a cleaner to get it off (plain water just pushed it around and made a mess). I thought it was carbon from cars in the city, but down here I'm right beside a fairly major road and I'm not seeing any of it. Makes me wonder more about the building I was in.

Political wackos

You may have thought the birthers were crazy. But no, that's nowhere near as crazy as the fringes get. This is how crazy they get. Seriously, clones? I don't know what these guys are on, and I'm pretty sure I don't want to. Nor do I want anything to do with this Restore America Plan of theirs, not if it involves America being in any state they'd be comfortable in.

Voter registration change

Well, it's official. I used to consider myself a Republican, way back when. Then, as the Republican party changed, I wound up registering as non-partisan/independent. The recent antics of the Republicans and their supporters have finally convinced me: I've opposed them for years, but it's time to make that opposition official.

I'm changing my voter registration to Democrat.

If the Republicans want to know why they've lost me: go look at your own supporters, your own policies. Go look at your own screeches of outrage over how dare anyone disagree with what you want.

Deleting a Facebook account

Normally Facebook just has you deactivate your account. It still exists, all the data's there, it's just not accessible. Sounds like a bad idea to me. If I leave Facebook, I'd prefer my account really be gone, or as close to it as Facebook will allow. Unfortunately that may take jumping through some hoops:

1. Delete all your Wall posts.
2. Go through your photos and delete all of them, and any albums you've made.
3. Go through your profile and clear everything out of it.
4. Remove access to all applications you've allowed to access to. Remove them from the list entirely.
5. Go into your account settings, Edit Friends, look on the left for Lists and select the Friends list. Remove all your friends from this list. Clear out any other lists you've got too.
6. Wait for a week.
7. Finally, go to https://ssl.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_account which displays the real "Delete account" form. If you're truly sure you want to be gone, hit Submit.
8. After having deleted your account, clear all facebook.com cookies from your browser. Don't go back to Facebook or try to log on to it for 14 days (2 weeks).

Hopefully at this point your account is solidly deleted.

It's quiet. Too quiet.

That pretty much sums it up. The place isn't quite mine yet, if that makes sense. The apartment's bigger than the old place, I'm kind of rattling around. And I haven't quite settled in yet. Everything's not quite where I'd've put it, it'll take a bit to get to where everything's natural to me. Feels weird. But I'll manage. A week or two and the place'll be mine.

Now I just need to get slippers that aren't too long that I can actually get over my heel at the same time.

Aircraft DSW

Adapted from a true story by an SR-71 pilot:

Our SR-71 was on a routine training flight over California, listening to ATC chatter. Most of it was general aviation checking in, things along the lines of "Tower, Cessna Tango 195, what's my altitude and ground speed?" "Tango 195, tower. I have you at 105 knots at flight level 100.". For the uninitiated, that's 105 nautical miles per hour (about 121 mph) at 10,000 feet altitude.

Then over the radio came "Tower, this is Dusty Five Two, requesting an altitude and ground speed check. Over.". Dusty 52 was the lead element in an F/A-18 flight. We knew they were just trying to impress the civilians, F-18s have a ground speed indicator and don't need the tower to tell them that. "Dusty 52, tower. We show you at 575 knots at flight level 450." came the reply.

Just as I was about to make a remark, I heard the click of a mike being keyed and the laconic drawl of my back-seater. "Tower, this is Aspen Two Zero, requesting altitude and ground speed check please. Over.". There was a pause, and then came back "Aspen 20, tower. We have you at 1982 knots at flight level 800.". "Thank you, tower. Aspen 20 out.".

There was no more traffic from the F/A-18s.

So you need a typeface

Courtesy of Caprine on LJ: the flowchart for choosing a typeface. I have to agree about the path to Comic Sans, although the path to FF Din is amusing too.

Sudden rainstorm

All of a sudden we've got another rainstorm outside. This is weird, it's been a long time since we've gotten this many rainstorms this time of year. Not that I'm complaining, mind you.

Testing a cross-post

Let's see how Windows Live Writer works. I've got it configured to cross-post to LJ and IJ as well as posting to Jeran's Den. WLW may be from Microsoft, but it's one of the first editors I've seen that looks like it allows straightforward cross-posting of entire entries.

I've also got Live Messenger set up, now I need to collect, confirm and configure my ICQ and AIM identities. I seem to have forgotten passwords.

New coffee maker

The Keurig B40. I got the extra cup+filter that lets me use regular ground coffee in it, so I'm not limited to the pre-packaged K-cups. I've also concluded that I don't like French roast coffee. I've got the rest of the sampler pack to go through, and a couple of bags of ground coffee to hold me over until I can get whole-bean from Henry's.

Avatar and earthquake

Went to see Avatar yesterday with Dean and Lia. The previews were punctuated by an earthquake. Magnitude 7.2, centered south of El Centro. It happened right during a part of the Clash of the Titans preview that had lots of bass, so we weren't sure immediately if it was an earthquake or just the sound system.

As far as the movie, it was good. The most impressive thing is that you can't really distinguish the CGI from the live action. The CGI doesn't have the traditional CGI look, it looks like live action. Of course you can't find actors 9 feet tall, and I dare you do to an ikran live, but it doesn't look computer-generated. Oh, you can spot it when the CGI and live-action characters interact, small things like skin doesn't depress like it really should when a CGI character touches a live actor, but you have to look really really close to spot it. And as Dean said, if you're looking that closely for flaws you're missing the point of watching this movie.

I did notice a lot of parallels with Aliens beyond just having Sigourney Weaver in it. Selfridge is an awful lot like Carter Burke. Trudy Chacon reminds me, both physically and personality-wise, of Pfc. Vasquez. Jake Sully reminds me a lot of Cpl. Hicks. I shouldn't be surprised considering who directed both. It works, though.

One thing you'll notice is that the avatars really do resemble their actors. Much of that's from the way the CGI was done. It's all motion capture, but taken to the next level. The capture uses a lot more reference points, and unlike traditional mo-cap it also includes capture of the face. And all this is used to completely drive the CGI models. The end result is CGI aliens that look and move realistically, even down to the fine movements of facial expressions. That realism is one of the things that makes the CGI work as well as it does.

All in all, I recommend seeing this movie.

April Fool's Day

And so it begins. Hint, guys: if you're a news site, flooding your front page entirely with April Fool's stories is not funny. It's just annoying. Yes, Slashdot, I'm looking at you. A few stories sprinkled in, that's funny. Nothing but joke stories, that's just going to make me shake my head and go elsewhere for the day.

Computer assembly, done

And I'm back up. A small glitch with the monitor not wanting to work at full resolution, but that's fixed. EQ2 now runs at 35fps even in Sundered Frontier where I was getting 6-8fps on the old machine with lower-quality settings. A bit of work on Ventrilo left and transferring the last of the software, but I think I'm there.