Betting Market Doesn't Look Good

8:29 pm Eastern time:

Who's Winning the Election ?!?

I'm thinking that the best way to gauge the presidential election in real time might by following the betting markets. After all, these traders are buying and selling in real time based on whatever scraps of information (or rumors or gossip or misinformation) they can find. These markets were skewed for the last few weeks because some big buyers ("whales") were buying a lot of Trump shares, raising the price dramatically (and, some think, giving Trump another excuse to dispute the election). But now that it's push-come-to-shove that should be over and they're looking to make money based on reality and the whatever "information" is available to them.

With that, here's how the PredictIt Presidential Market has been going today. Trump is up, but the difference is now trending down.

Of course, the site has their own graph which is updated in real time:

More Map Porn

This circle holds half the world's population (of humans):

Young Voters Discover Trump is a Piece of Sh!t.

Here is longer audio of the Trump "grab her by the pussy." I've never heard this before, from the beginning.

 
Yes, people do lots of things for love & sex. Not all are the proudest moment of our lives. But most of us don't assault people. And who the F brags about it like this if they do?? And to the media, of all places.

 
Anyway I feel I have to post this because I've never heard it before. It's upsetting young Gen Z people who are voting for the first time but never knew this happened....as it should. 

What woman or Christian could vote for this piece of shit? Or any man who cares about women? I just don't get it. I don't understand what's happening in that half of America.

@toxicthotsyndrome @miss redacted✨🪩🩷🇵🇸 ♬ original sound - RepublicanVotersAgainstTrump

The Scale of Lake Powell (3 mm = 1 BL)

 The other day I noticed that the level (elevation) of Lake Powell in the US changed by 0.01 ft:

I thought it would be fun to see how much water is in the 0.01 ft (= 3 mm). Subtracting the contents gives

785 acre-feet 

= 970,000 m³ 

= 0.97 Mm3 

= 260 M gallons 

= 968 ML. 

≈ 1 billion liters

where L=liter. (using little L -- "l" -- for liter can get confusing).

So a water rise of 3 millimeters is about a billion liters of water. 

(I assumed vertical edges on the lake, so I can approximate the rise as a being in a box with nice vertical edges. But probably not a good assumption for more than that.)

PS: It's Excel's fault if I made any calculation errors. It always is. 

Stupidity in America

The US has done much better after getting out of the Trump depression than most other countries:

Yes, Trump and his stupidity are responsible for the 1Q20 to 3Q20. Biden wasn't even elected until 4Q20 and didn't take office until 1Q21. 

It's all on Trump. His MAGA supporters really are too stupid to understand this. Simple data and they can't understand it. Or how well the Biden economy has done post 1Q21 when he was sworn in. 

Shear stupidity, nothing but, is going to drive a stake into the heart of America. Just watch. It's already happening. Stupid people who just can't think.

Maybe we deserve it. Probably, This country is a complete mess.

"I Can Fix Stupid"

Things are really starting to get crazy in parts of America:

A regional public health department in Idaho has outright banned COVID-19 jabs, the Associated Press reported Friday. The Southwest District Health Department board, which governs six counties along the Idaho-Oregon border, voted 4-3 against the recommendations of the district’s medical director, Dr. Perry Jansen. “Our request of the board is that we would be able to carry and offer those [vaccines], recognizing that we always have these discussions of risks and benefits,” Jansen said at the meeting last month. “This is not a blind, everybody-gets-a-shot approach. This is a thoughtful approach.” The ban appears to be the first such instance of a U.S. governmental body blocking inoculations, the AP noted.

If I'm reading this correctly, a local state clinic in the state of Idaho will no longer vaccinate people against COVID. 

Because they can't understand the difference between science and conspiracies. This is medieval.

I saw a little cartoon a few years ago. A woman in it says, "You can't fix stupid." A COVID virus replies to her, "I can fix stupid." 

So Perfectly Canadian

Mean Center of Population of Canada:

 

Source: a Canadian

Canada is Kinda Weird

This is a little old, but here's a map of Canada divided into four areas of equal populations, about 8.6 million each. (Canada's total population in 2024 is 41.0 million.) About the same as Virginia in the US.... It's almost like Canadians want to be as far south (warm) as possible, given their national border. Except for the yellow Canadians. Probably like Alaskans... Anyway, I think Canada has about the right-size population for a decent country--not too many, not too few. Maybe a bit too many though. 

Nota bene: But Canadians aren't weird! I've never met a Canadian who wasn't a nice person. (Traveled there a lot for work in 1993-94.)

Mental Health and Society

“Mental health cannot be defined in terms of the 'adjustment' of the individual to his society, but, on the other hand, that it must be defined in terms of the society to the needs of man, of its role in furthering or hindering the development of mental health. Whether or not the individual is healthy, is primarily not an individual matter, but depends on the structure of his society.”

-- Erich Fromm

Climate News I've Seen (esp the third)

There's too much climate news to keep track of anymore, but here are a few recent items I've come across:

• Students are now required to take a course in climate change in order to graduate from the University of California at San Diego. Forty different versions that meet the requirement will be offered. The article says, "...at least 30% of a course's content must be related to climate, and the class must address two of these areas: scientific foundations, human impacts, mitigation strategies, and project-based learning." I'd choose scientific foundations and mitigation strategies, but that's just for me. Irrelevant fact: I took Introduction to Statistics from the psychology department to fulfill my college's social science requirement. I knew most of it from high school. It wasn't a good choice, in retrospect, as I took very few "soft" courses in college; it was almost all math & physics


• The Independent: "...hurricanes as intense as Helene, which were once expected to occur every 130 years, are now likely to happen every 53 years – about 2.5 times more frequently." 
• "A separate analysis of Helene last week by Department of Energy Lawrence Berkeley National Lab scientists determined that the climate crisis caused 50 per cent more rainfall in some parts of Georgia and the Carolinas, and that observed rainfall was “made up to 20 times more likely in these areas because of global warming."


• UniverseToday.com: Advanced Civilizations Will Overheat Their Planets Within 1,000 Years
• "Earth’s average global temperatures have been steadily increasing since the Industrial Revolution. Depending on the extent of temperature increases, the impact on Earth’s habitability could be catastrophic. In a recent study, a team of scientists examined how temperature increases are a long-term issue facing advanced civilizations and not just a matter of fossil fuel consumption. As they argue, rising planetary temperatures could be an inevitable result of the exponential growth of energy consumption. Their findings could have serious implications for astrobiology and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI)."
• Here's a preprint of the study: "Waste Heat and Habitability: Constraints from Technological Energy Consumption," Amedeo Balbi et al, arXiv 9-Sept-2024. The analysis is very simple physics. Here's a key figure:

• Mind, this has nothing to do with fossil fuels. It's only about how much power the planet uses--could be solar, could be nuclear (fission or fusion), geothermal, FFs -- because the problem is waste heat from the machines run by our power sources, not the type of power sources.

"They're Made of Meat"

"They're Made of Meat" is a sci-fi short story by Terry Bisson, written in 1991. It only takes about 4 minutes to read. I thought it was very good, but that's all I'm going to say. You might like it too.

There's also a short audio play that takes about the same amount of time to listen to. Also good, IMO.

Oganesson (Z=118)

"For me, it is an honour. The discovery of element 118 was by scientists at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Russia and at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the US, and it was my colleagues who proposed the name oganesson. My children and grandchildren have been living in the US for decades, but my daughter wrote to me to say that she did not sleep the night she heard because she was crying."

— Yuri Oganessian, for whom element 118 is named