Sparrow by the creek
plucks out the brown blades of grass
and leaves the green ones.
Archive for April, 2009
While Walking through the Park on a Midmorning Break
17 April 2009First Post
11 April 2009First post on the WordPress.com blog. Everything seems to be working, and looking the way I want it. (So far.)
Thought
9 April 2009Who is a parasite and who is a host usually seems to depend more than anything on the size of the observer.
Morning Moment of Satori
9 April 2009First line of Chuck Barney’s column in this morning’s Contra Costa Times:
Funny how the level of disappointment one has for a new TV show generally rises or falls in direct proportion with the amount of expectation invested in said show.
Yeah, funny, that.
Changing Attitudes About Same-Sex Marriage
7 April 2009Interesting analysis by Nate Silver of gay marriage votes:
It turns out that you can build a very effective model by including just three variables:
1. The year in which the amendment was voted upon;
2. The percentage of adults in 2008 Gallup tracking surveys who said that religion was an important part of their daily lives;
3. The percentage of white evangelicals in the state.
Race, education, political party, and every other variable he looked at either didn’t have an effect or duplicated the effect of #2.
Marriage bans, however, are losing ground at a rate of slightly less than 2 points per year. So, for example, we’d project that a state in which a marriage ban passed with 60 percent of the vote last year would only have 58 percent of its voters approve the ban this year. …So what does this mean for Iowa? … [T]he model predicts that if Iowans voted on a marriage ban today, it would pass with 56.0 percent of the vote. By 2012, however, the model projects a toss-up: 50.4 percent of Iowans voting to approve the ban, and 49.6 percent opposed. In 2013 and all subsequent years, the model thinks the marriage ban would fail.
