For both debates, coverage from the Right has followed (and will continue to follow!) this pattern, which while logically consistent is also batshit crazy.  Worst of all, it smacks of the same flavors of clinging victimhood that the Right (correctly!) identifies as counterproductive among some sectors of the Left.

Phase 1:  “The game is rigged.”

The debates will be unfair, because the moderator is always some left-wing nutjob.  This follows from the premise that the moderators are drawn from the MSM, and everyone in the MSM is a left wing nutjob.  Jim Lehrer is biased.  Gwen Ifill desperately wants Obama to win so she can sell more books.  Giving a straight answer to a debate question, for a conservative candidate, would be implicitly surrendering to the bias of the event itself.  It is a conservative candidate’s patriotic duty to say what he or she came to say, regardless of what biased questions are posed by the moderator.  The pressure of being forced to go up against both the moderator and the opposing candidate is so great, that if our candidate is somehow able to recite his or her talking points while retaining some coherent English sentence structure, may our cup runneth over with bonus points.

Phase 2: “If you heard it was a blowout, we only won the game by a little bit.  If you heard it was close, ZOMG we rocked impossibly hard!”

Whatever you heard, our candidate slew the double dragon of the moderator and the opposing candidate.  We know this because our candidate didn’t recoil into a pre-linguistic state on camera, or degenerate to the point of shitting on the podium and throwing feces into the crowd.  He or she formed thoughts despite the hopes, dreams, schemes, and expectations of local/remote Communists, local/remote Terrorists, and anyone who writes for a newspaper or appears on a nightly news broadcast.  Any pre-debate doubts on our part had little if anything to do with his/her past performances, and most if not everything to do with how his/her performances were subsequently reported in the liberal MSM.  You see, we’re all partially brainwashed by the constant media barrage of liberal messages, so we’ve lost our ability to properly determine for ourselves what a broadcast of underprepared and/or totally incoherent nervous babbling looks or sounds like.

Feralchimp’s meta-scorecard:

• Biden and Palin each performed WAY better than their [detractors hoped / supporters feared] they might.  Minimal incoherent babbling from Palin, no F-bombs from Biden.  Ship it!
• Those hoped/feared performance levels were both lower than what people really expected in both cases, but much closer to expected in Palin’s case.  The worst case scenario was so bad for her, people on the Right were unironically talking about getting shitfaced as a coping mechanism.
• Biden debated better than Palin, but Palin debated [ more (better than expected) ] than Biden.
• Biden supporters saw Biden win the show.
• Palin supporters saw Palin win the show.

If you think that setting a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq equates to “raising the white flag of surrender,” and anyone could be President given a year or so of the right speech coaching, McCain/Palin is the ticket for you!

If you think that giving judges the power to force lenders to write down the principal on a failing mortgage is anything other than the government using threats of force to unconstitutionally void contracts between consenting parties, Obama/Biden is the ticket for you!

I looked at procon.org for the first time today, to try to fill in many gaps in my understanding of what McCain and Obama have actually said about their positions.

Issues where I prefer McCain’s position:
pro globalization, clear anti eminent domain invocation for non-public use, pro nuclear power, anti ethanol subsidies, pro migration away from social security

Issues where I prefer Obama’s position:
pro abortion choice, pro explicit and sustained sex education, pro “attacking Iraq in 2003 was a mistake”, anti “don’t ask don’t tell”, pro aggressive federally-funded stem cell research, anti immunity for telecoms complicit in warrantless wiretapping cases

Supposed differentiators that aren’t swaying me due to my own ignorance and/or the candidates’ lack of clarity, or (least likely) a personal sense that the universe lacks sufficient example data with which a totally informed, reasonably intelligent person of moral standing could possibly make a sufficiently-informed choice:
No Child Left Behind, timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, supposed difference of opinion on Mexican border fencing, medical marijuana (both candidates are anti federal raids in states with pro weed laws), Bush tax cut permanence, gun control, universal health care

Apple vs. Microsoft in the PC space turned out pretty well for consumers, but it sure did take a while.  Apple vs. Google in the phone space should bring improvements really, really quickly.

My regular flight instructor had to deal with some car trouble last thursday, so I flew with this other guy.  We talked a bit about aerodynamics before we went up, and he mentioned something counterintuitive / interesting / tragic about dive-bombers in WWII.

We lost a whole lot of them, which in itself isn’t shocking, but what’s odd is why we lost so many.

The problem wasn’t that:

• They exceeded the do-not-exceed speed of the airframe, ripped it apart, and crashed.
• They were usually headed directly into a hail of high-caliber and/or incendiary ammunition, which riddled / ignited the aircraft and subsequently caused structural failure / more crashing.
• They misjudged their altitude and biffed the target / ocean / ground.

Despite the fact that a dive is the single highest-speed maneuver one can perform in an airplane, the problem was often that they aerodynamically stalled the aircraft while trying to exit the dive.

One of the “flying 101″ definitions that gets drilled into your head is that a stall will occur at any speed, and any gross weight if the angle of attack (the acute angle formed by the wing chord line and the relative wind) exceeds some critical upper limit (ie - the critical angle of attack).

That law makes all kinds of intuitive sense when you consider a plane flying horizontally, then pitching up to exceed the critical angle of attack.  The relative wind in that case is parallel to the earth’s surface, which feels natural.  But it somehow becomes much less intuitive when you consider a plane flying straight down, then pitching relatively-up toward the horizontal plane.  The relative wind in that case is headed straight up, “out of the Earth”-ward.  Irrelevant rationalizations enter your mind, like “he’s still going so fast, and there’s gotta be more relative wind coming from the right, yeah?”  Negative.  The law doesn’t care what direction you’re traveling in, or where the Earth is.  You exceed the critical angle of attack, you stall.

So there you are, some poor bastard in a 1940s-era warbird, hurtling toward Earth and well-armed enemy at somewhere near the speed of God, and you survive long enough to drop your bomb.  “Whew,” you think, “time to GTFO” and jerk back the stick to stop pointing at the ship, the thousands of rounds being fired at you, and the Earth.  Suddenly the controls get all mushy, and just like that you’re no longer hurtling forward, hands first toward the ground at insane speed, but tumbling down, ass first at nearly the same speed.  You can’t see it, but you know it’s coming.

Shitty.

The positive take-away, though, is that a combination of independent study and supervised training under controlled circumstances can allow a man to win battle after battle against unintuitive and potentially dangerous branches of scientific truth.

One last Scheneir hat-tip post for the day.  Read this: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/09/secret_military.html

…then marvel at the high-quality snark in the comments.  A frothy blend of deadpan humor and real insight.

Apolitical statement #1: In any large, high-complexity search space where time and resources are limited, you’re just not going to cover the space without using heuristics to guide the search.

Apolitical statement #2: In a nutshell, the heuristic-based search for terrorists is (and was always going to be) problematic because:

• heuristics *always* miss
• heuristics that are good at hitting positives tend to be kind of shitty at missing negatives, and vice versa
• misses on positives (subject X was a terrorist that the search did not identify) and hits on negatives (subject X was misidentified as a terrorist) both really, really suck

There’s a rich an interesting philosophical/political debate to be had over whether we should, as a society, prefer to implement a search that fails in one direction or the other (failing to identify subjects who subsequently harm innocent people, or harming innocent people ourselves).  But that’s not really what I came here to talk about.

I came to say that when we actually get more *information* about what heuristics are likely to work, and what heuristics are unlikely to work, we should (at least temporarily) set aside our positions in the philosophical/political debate to absorb findings that *could* advance the state of the search science.

Link: MI5 released some interesting study results the other day (via CryptoGram).

I wouldn’t say I “studied” for the FAA written test this past weekend, per se, but I watched a lot of digital videos to prepare for some of the final stages of my private pilot training.  Short field / soft field techniques, medical information related to flying, radio navigation, night flying, preparing / filing / executing VFR flight plans, using the E6B “flight computer” (slide rule), weight and balance calculations, obtaining and making sense of various types of weather briefings, and a LOT about weather itself.  Good times.

First, a big heart-felt thank you to my mom’s friends, who pitched in to help Erica and I enter the exclusive club of washer and dryer ownership.  Now part 1 of a related saga.

Previous 3 weeks: looking forward to Saturday delivery of our new appliances.

Thursday night: call from delivery peeps confirming delivery for “tomorrow”; Erica calling back but getting an odd and non-committal response to change plans; FC calling and getting ahold of someone less surly and more informed.

Saturday morning at 8am: doorbell; FC and delivery guy looking skeptically at rear basement hatch; refusing delivery of dented dryer (with full support of delivery guys, who gave me a hotline to the right person at Lowe’s to get things straightened out with no additional hassle); looking on amazed as the guys got the washer through the hatch, installed, and tested in under 10 minutes.

Sunday morning: heard the truck pull up, two more nice delivery guys with undented dryer.  More skeptical looking at the rear basement hatch, but the dryer went in with millimeters to spare.  Moving straps FTW.  No additional 30-amp outlet OR dryer exhaust port in the basement, so no full install/test yet.

Today: getting in touch with building maintenance dude to see when the power and exhaust situation can get rectified, since our original punchlist had “washer/dryer hookups” plainly specified and agreed-to.

In other “less need for quarters” news, I picked up an EZPass on our way back from Utica last weekend, and am surprised at the qualitative quality-of-life improvement.  I didn’t realize how much energy I was throwing away worrying about keeping cash for pike tolls in the car, and this morning I actually used my cup holder to hold…a cup of iced coffee.

Had my first unsupervised solo on Monday night; second scheduled for tomorrow morning.  The checklists are the same, the plane is the same, the airfield is the same, but there are qualitatively weighty differences at the edges.

For example: In the supervised case, even when the student is running the checklists, the instructor is ultimately responsible for ensuring that the initial step from “aircraft parked” to “aircraft not parked” is made safely and in accordance with all laws and policy.  From an OSHA standpoint, a Cessna is sort of like a lawnmower on its side with no blade guard, blades extended by two feet in both directions, raised to chest level, on wheels, with the motor swapped for something 50-100x as powerful.  It’s with some gravity that one cranes his neck around and yells “clear prop!” out the window before turning the key on that monster.

And like, when the plane is back on the ground and you’re back at the ramp…where *exactly* is one supposed to park?

Now cleared for unsupervised solos in the pattern.  Time to turn up the gas on studying for / passing the written test.