The Frustrated Bunny

To start, I want to say that on the big question, I was right. Obama won. Granted, that wasn’t much of a prediction on my part (all hail Nate Silver and his glorious statistical models), but it was right nonetheless. On the question of Obama winning both New Hampshire and Virginia with Romney taking North Carolina, I was also right there, but not exactly in the way I stated. I expected Virginia to be called MUCH earlier. I had no idea it was going to be that close. On that same note, I expected Ohio to be called much later or still be up in the air this morning. Both of those predictions were based much more on gut feelings than actual science, which goes to show that when there’s good math involved, it’s probably better to go with the math than your gut.

The prediction for an early Virginia call may have also been wishful thinking on my part, because as much as I absolutely live for Election Day, I wanted to be able to tune out early for once. I suppose it was still relatively early–even Fox News called the race at about 11:15 pm ET, which I could say is only a little later than I’d predicted (I said it would be over by the time The Daily Show came on, and the call came about halfway through it), but the path was not what I thought it would be.

Oh, and I mentioned the Mustache Drinking Game. Yes, we played it! As it turns out, it makes you pay a LOT more attention to what’s going on. In the end, we didn’t quite play it as a game, but used it more as an auxiliary form of entertainment while we had a few social beers.  The picture in this post is one taken during Obama’s victory speech, after someone moved the mustache to intentionally line up with his face, which seemed like a hilarious thing to do at the time, and I’m still pretty amused by it. Mustaches may become a regular part of my Election Day repertoire.

Okay, so between looking at a map of when polls close, looking at Nate Silver’s model, and playing with electoral votes, I am ready to make predictions. I’ve provided links so that you may play along at home.

If you take an electoral map and fill in all the states that are strongly leaning toward either candidate (>90% likelihood of winning, with the exception of Ohio…more on that in a second), you wind up at Obama with 253 EV and Romney with 191.

So to start out, my map has 7 states “in play”: New Hampshire, Virginia, North Carolina, Ohio, Florida, Iowa, and Colorado. Of these, NC, VA and NH will likely be “called” first since their polls close the earliest and they all show significant “lean” in one direction or the other (but not enough to be considered a sure bet).

OH also closes pretty early, and most models show it as a very likely Obama win, but no statistical model, no matter how robust, can account for electoral fraud and other shenanigans. So I’m treating Ohio exactly how I’m treating Florida in this prediction–essentially a 50/50 tossup that won’t be called anytime tonight, so I’m going to ignore it in my prediction of when I get to go to bed.

Nate Silver’s model shows a lean toward Obama in both NH and VA. If he wins these states, combined with the total “sure bet” electoral votes that I’m starting with, that puts Obama at EXACTLY 270. I would expect that NH, VA, and NC will all be called by 9 pm ET, about an hour after the rest of the polls close in NH. Without any other tossup states considered, if two of those three states go for Obama, I’d say you can pretty much call the election for him outright before the Daily Show comes on.

So that’s my prediction: If two of those three states (NH, NC, VA) go for Obama, we can pretty much call it a night. Everything else is just playing the Mustache Drinking Game or catching a friend up on the episodes of Doctor Who that aren’t on Netflix while keeping the rest of the returns on mute (because I do still want to know the results of local elections, and the gains and losses in Congress).

I originally posted this as a comment on Facebook to a post by someone who tried out Windows 8 and didn’t like it. Unsurprisingly, I have opinions on this. I have also added some additional context in italics throughout the post.

The problem with Windows recently has been twofold: 1) computers have become ubiquitous, and therefore, the lowest common denominator of users has gotten lower and lower. 2) When the “average” user today is a lot dumber than the “average” user 10 or 15 years ago, and MS creates focus groups for features and UI, you wind up with a lot of people who have no prior context for MS/Windows UI and perhaps find things like the Office Ribbon and Metro (Windows 8′s new UI) to be more intuitive.

However, for the rest of us who have been using Windows as a matter of course since 3.x (or earlier), we’re forced into a completely new environment that has been so overly focus-grouped and idiot-proofed that it’s no longer a production tool; it’s a toy. It’s a Fisher-Price “My first operating system.” (To be fair, I also had these feelings about the UI shift from 3.x to Windows 95, and I got over it, so take that as you will.)

I’ve been ok with some of this up until this point because even in Windows 7, I can customize my functionality into a desktop that doesn’t work terribly differently (from a usability standpoint) than any other Windows environment since Win95. However, with what I’ve seen of Windows 8 (and I will admit I have only seen demos and reviews and haven’t had hands-on time with it), the traditional desktop functionality has been shunted into what feels like a development ghetto in favor of something “simple” and colorful. And it looks like it works great in a tablet/mobile environment– it’s possibly one of the most powerful ones out there–and takes into account a lot of problems that exist when a touch screen is your primary input and mitigates or eliminates many of them. But that doesn’t translate to desktops or laptops meant as business tools, and despite predictions to the contrary since the release of the first luggable, the desktop is not going away. (In fact, I am typing this on a desktop I built fairly recently.)

I predict that Microsoft’s mobile and desktop OSes will fork again after this iteration. Windows 8 is not something I can see being widely adopted in stuffy, enterprise environments (and like it or not, that’s still their primary customer base). This will become evident, and they will correct course.

View of Downtown Fort Worth (photo by Andrew)

Andrew and I have begun taking walks around our neighborhood and the surrounding neighborhoods in downtown Fort Worth. Mostly, this has been for exercise, since we’ve noticed we’re not nearly as active as we were when we were in school. We’ve been doing this for several weeks now, and it’s proven to be a very interesting and educational experience. We’re discovering new places and learning how roads and neighborhoods connect in ways that would never be possible in a car, or even on a bicycle. Our approach to walking around downtown is actually pretty organic–we start at home, pick a general direction, and then wander along streets and trails until we decide to turn around and head home, usually taking a different path than we came. Sometimes we have a destination in mind–”let’s walk to TCC;” or “let’s walk to Montgomery Plaza;” or “let’s walk to Trinity Park.”  Most times, however, we just pick a general direction and take the same approach I recall taking as a kid when my friends and I would explore our neighborhoods: “let’s see what’s over here!” This results in taking a lot of non-optimal paths between where we start and where we end up, but this sort of non-linear exploration has also resulted in some eye-opening revelations about Fort Worth’s city planning philosophy. I hope to make a series of posts about the things I learn and notice about Fort Worth itself, as well as some more general observations and thoughts about urban (re)development and city neighborhoods. There will be pictures, though probably mostly taken with my phone, since lugging around my camera on 8-10 mile urban hikes in 90+ degree heat is not my idea of a good time. Read the rest of this entry »

This question has turned up on my social networks a number of times in the last few weeks as gas prices have risen quite a bit over the past month or so. The short answer: it’s not. Ok, ok…that’s not what you wanted to hear. $3.89 a gallon is a lot when you’re used to gas in the low-to-mid $2 range. It’s about that much per liter in places that don’t give insane subsidies to oil companies, but let’s just tackle the question of why gas is so relatively expensive right now. Keep in mind the explanation below should be taken as a 10,000-meter overview and barely scratches the surface of all of the factors that affect the price of gas. But it’s a pretty good look at what’s affecting things right now.

Because the price of gas is tied very closely to the global price of oil, when things happen that either change the global supply of oil or make investment speculators think the supply of oil is going to change, they adjust their purchase and offer price for oil futures accordingly. (Investment speculation is based entirely on buying stakes in a commodity based on what you think it will be worth at some point in the future.)

So recently, Iran (a significant producer of oil) stopped exporting oil to several countries in Europe, and Israel has been rattling its sabers in the direction of Iran, among a handful of other things that indicate possible future instability in oil-producing regions abroad, meaning that speculators are hedging that the global supply will decrease, making the price go up.

You’ll note that I keep talking about the “global price.” Oil is what they call a “fungible” commodity–meaning that it doesn’t so much matter who is producing oil or how much, if production is impacted in any oil-exporting nation, the price is affected worldwide. (It also means that no matter where the oil that made the gas of your tank came from, all oil producers ultimately get a cut of what you paid.) So the old chestnut about how gas prices would be lower if the U.S. could somehow drill for/refine more oil is largely false. What’s really odd is that the only way that could possibly work is if the American oil industry operated completely isolated from the global market–meaning we neither imported nor exported any oil–which, for those of you who are starting to think that sounds like a good idea, would likely cause a global economic collapse of epic proportions.

Additionally, gasoline refineries in the U.S. use two different “blends”–a summer blend and a winter blend. We’re about at the time of year where suppliers are switching to their summer blend, which is more expensive to make than the winter blend. Summer blend emissions are typically lower and the gasoline is optimized to work better at higher temperatures.

So at the moment, we’re experiencing a double-whammy of summer blend switchover costs and price increases from speculation due to threatened increased instability in the Middle East.