Right Wing Nation

Just saw No Country for Old Men. Good movie.

Yesterday, we saw Miss Potter, about the life of Beatrix Potter (Peter Rabbit). I’m not sure what kind of drugs these imdb commenters are on, but I want some.

This is the story of Beatrix Potter, the author of many classic illustrated children’s stories such as “Peter Rabbit.” She was raised in the latter part of the 19th Century in an upper middle class, stuffy family. And worked in the early part of the 20th Century.

It is a story of rebellion, and one woman’s liberation from knowing one’s place, settling on an arranged marriage, and quietly raising a family in the shadow of a man. Beatrix (Renee Zellweger) would have none of that. She had a dreamy artist’s imagination and talent and temperament from an early age and simply rebelled and lived in her own created world. When the world recognized her talent, she slowly became a part of the commercial world via the book publishing industry and a mentor/love interest (Ewan McGregor) and the mentor’s sister (Emily Watson).

The cast is brilliant. You go back in time with them a 100 years and live with and understand their stilted social mores. The art direction and cinematography are stunning and are worthy of Academy Award nominations.

There is one neat trick of animation that appears throughout this film. The drawn animal characters occasionally become animated, but only to Beatrix. It sounds hokey, but it is a clever way to demonstrate how real these characters were to their author. And, it’s why they have rung true to children and to adults for many generations.

Beatrix is a model for determination and pluck and steadfastness. This is a beautiful story beautifully told. Undoubtedly, this film will be compared to “Finding Neverland.” “Miss Potter” is of the same high quality.

Well, the nicest thing I can say about it is that it is inoffensive. The problem with “It is a story of rebellion, etc., etc., etc.,” is that it isn’t really a story about much of anything, since there really isn’t much plot there. It could have been a fifteen minute short.

As for the “neat trick of animation,” there really wasn’t any point at all to that. It was, in fact, just a bit annoying. There was no reason for it, unless they were trying to make her look a bit crazy.

The real problem was Renee Zellweger. To call her awful would be complimenting her. The accent was even more dreadful than usual. In nearly every shot, her face was frozen into kind of a bizarre, painful grimace as if she had just had botox injections. I think she thought she looked like she was smiling, when in fact, she looked as if someone were sticking a hot poker up her derrière. And speaking of hot pokers, did I mention the accent that was agony to hear?

Like I said, it was inoffensive, but a waste.

Then there was some Sci-Fi channel stinker. It would have been awful, if we hadn’t seen Miss Potter. As it was, it was just really bad.

These are the questions they could use calculators on.

5. Write these percentages as decimals: 34% 52% 8%

6. Write these decimals as fractions: 0.5 0.03 0.95

7. Betty got 13 of the 20 questions correct in a biology test. What percentage did Betty get?

8. Gary ate 25% of a cake. What fraction of the cake did he eat?

Every time, they sink to new depths of lameitude. Jennifer Rubin says the wheels are off the bus. I’d say that happened on September 3rd. Forget the wheels. The axles are off, and the crank case is scraping the ground. And speaking of, why is this in the British press, but not here?

The [Democratic] aide said that her [Palin’s] repeated mockery of Mr Obama’s boasts about his time as a community organiser in Chicago are “the most effective criticisms of Barack Obama we have yet seen.” He said: “Americans in small and medium size towns dont know what the hell a community organiser is. Real Americans graduate from high school or college and get a job that pays a wage. Campus radicals go off and organise a community.”

Bingo!

Yet more fraudulent voter registrations from ACORN. They’re community organizers, you know.

Er no, contrast. ABC. Match the candidate to the action.

In response to an impending hurricane:

1. Postpones the beginning of the Convention and travels to the area where the hurricane will land.

     A. John McCain
     B. Barack Obama

2. Uses the hurricane as a springboard to attack his opponent 1,900 miles from the hurricane.

     A. John McCain
     B. Barack Obama

Do I really need to give you the answers?

Jennifer Rubin’s on a roll.

via Hot Air. You know, Your Changeyness, this probably isn’t the best idea.

A Friday hearing revealed that an Obama partisan has manipulated an independent investigator’s subpoena list for a controversial inquiry against GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

“What Would Daley Do?” probably isn’t the best moral compass to use in a Presidential election.

“Choosy shoppers choose John McCain.”

The nutjobs have decided the GOP is going to “steal” the election. You know, until 2000, I would have said that no 20th century President did more to damage the nation and politics than Richard Nixon. But Al Gore goes right down there with Nixon, after refusing to accept the vote, whipping up the idiots, taking it to the courts so he could have only certain votes recounted until he won, and then screaming about it when the SCOTUS did what they had to do and stepped in and stopped the madness.

Congratulations, Al.

Dan Riehl — from just down the road — shreds the latest Bloomberg gotcha!

Somebody’s desperate — and it ain’t Republicans.

Simulations 101

A simulation is a statistical model used to make informed predictions. Since simulations seem to have a mystical aura these days, due to all this climate stuff, it’s in everybody’s best interest to understand that no, they aren’t magic, and yes, they’re actually quite simple.

You need four things. You need data, from which you can create a model. You need simulated input data to feed the model, and that will produce simulated output data. Because the output are simulated, you need to run the simulation model repeatedly (these are called iterations), and the more iterations you run, the more reliable the output data are. Because you have multiple iterations and therefore, multiple output data, they are interpretated statistically to produce a single output.

Sound complicated? Well, simulations can be nightmarishly complex, but the general concept is actually pretty simple.

Let’s say you are a new freshman at Some State University, and your finances are tight. You did not purchase a parking sticker at registration because you are mathematically savvy and you wanted to determine whether it would be cheaper to buy the sticker or pay parking tickets. Let’s say you know that there is a 30% chance that if you park illegally in the lot outside your classroom building, you will get a ticket (we’ll ignore how you’d get that information). A parking sticker would cost $140 per semester, and each parking ticket would set you back $25. There are 15 weeks in the semester, and after looking at your schedule, you have determined that you would have to park in seven different lots every week (that’s 105 times a semester, and each time, you have a 30% chance of being ticketed).

The 30% chance of being ticketed is the probability you have extracted from the data (again, for the purposes of this, we’ll ignore how you got it). Let me show you how simple this is.

Imagine a roulette wheel with 100 pockets, numbered 1 through 100. Get a piece of paper and a pencil, and write Ticket Y and Ticket N on it. Spin the roulette wheel, toss the ball onto it, and wait for it to land in a pocket. If the number of the pocket is 1-30, make a hash mark under Ticket Y; otherwise, mark Ticket N. Now, because you are going to do this 105 times throughout the semester, repeat this process 105 times.

You have just completed one iteration of the simulation. The more iterations you do, the more reliable your results will be, so do 99 more iterations (by the way, do you see why these are known as Monte Carlo simulations?)

When you have finished all 100 iterations, average the Y and N hashes for all of the iterations (we do other things too, like look at the standard error and so forth, but that’s for another time). Now, multiply the average number under Y, multiply it by $25, and compare it to the cost of a parking sticker.

Using the roulette wheel is simulated input data. It isn’t real, because it’s not really parking in those lots. But it produces a random number, and since you know that the probability of getting a ticket is 0.3, you can determine, based on the simulated data, whether you get ticketed or not. So you can create a simulation model to determine whether it will be cheaper to buy a sticker or pay the parking tickets.

Okay, sure, you can look at the probability and the rest of the data and figure out that it’s going to be cheaper to buy the sticker. But that was merely a very simple model meant only to explain exactly what a simulation is. A simulation can be as complex as we need it to be. For example, weather affects the chance of being ticketed (meter maids don’t like being out in the rain and snow any more than you do). So if the weather is bad, the probability of being ticketed decreases. Again, as long as we know the probabilities, we can easily create a simulation. Also, lots are policed more at the beginnings of semesters (to catch the new students) and in the final two weeks (studying for and taking those final exams). If you have the probabilities, you can create the simulation. Staffing is tight, so lots are policed in shifts throughout the week, so the probability of being ticketed in a particular lot depends on the day of the week and the time. But again, as long as you have the data and can extract the probabilities, you can create the simulation.

This is what we call a manual simulation, where we use a raw probability to calculate the outcome, and for all but the simplest problems, isn’t very sophisticated. But we can use other software packages (the @Risk add-in for Excel, for example) which uses the distribution of past data instead of probabilites extracted from it to create highly sophisticated simulation models.

A simulation is only as good as the input data and the model. If you got, say, the probability of being ticketed wrong, your simulation output would give you an incorrect prediction. Likewise, if you set up your model wrong and got one of the calculations incorrect, you would get an incorrect prediction. Keep that in mind as you read about what this or that simulation predicts.

AJ effectively guts the NYT’s latest attempt to smear Palin.

Note to the Grey Lady: You may want to pay more attention to journalists who bother to do the legwork.

Focusing on the exotic trappings of Alaskan culture may make Palin seem a quaint and inexplicable choice. But understanding the real background of her steady rise in politics suggests that Barack Obama and Joe Biden are underestimating her badly. In this, they join two former Alaskan governors, a large number of cronies, and a trail of enemies extending back over a decade.

Hayward nails it to the wall in the first paragraph.

Lurking just below the surface of the second-guessing about Sarah Palin’s fitness to be president is the serious question of whether we still believe in the American people’s capacity for self-government, what we mean when we affirm that all American citizens are equal, and whether we tacitly believe there are distinct classes of citizens and that American government at the highest levels is an elite occupation.

“Of the people, by the people, and for the people” doesn’t mean anything as long as we have a professional political ruling class — which is, as far as I’m concerned, the only argument for term limits.

Gallup reports in their 9/1-7 poll that Obama is ahead only among 18-29 year olds. Reliapundit snarks:

Awesome.

Only quasi-adolescents can believe in Obama at this point.

Funny, but more to the point, as we near the election, Obama is relying more and more on the support of votes that have never materialized. And McCain’s strongest support is among voters 65 and older — the demographic that votes in the highest numbers.

Okay, it’s Zogby, so that makes it diabetic candy, but hey, enjoy! First, Florida:

Barack Obama could be on the verge of falling out of contention in Florida.

Despite spending an estimated $8-million on campaign ads in America’s biggest battleground state and putting in place the largest Democratic campaign organization ever in Florida, Obama has lost ground over the summer. Florida has moved from a toss-up state to one that clearly leans toward John McCain, fueling speculation about how much longer the Democratic nominee will continue investing so heavily in the state.

Obama can still win Florida despite the polling gains McCain has made since naming Sarah Palin his running mate, and there is no sign Obama is pulling back in Florida yet. Far from it. Obama allies say he has about 350 paid staffers in the state and about 50 field offices, including in places not known as fertile ground for Democrats, such as Sun City Center, Lake City and Sebring.

But for all the attention to Florida from the Obama campaign, there’s little tangible evidence it’s paying off.

He is farther behind in the state than John Kerry was at this point in 2004, even though McCain began buying Florida TV ads only last week.

Then Pennsylvania (click on the state):

McCain - 49.1%
Obama - 44.3%
Not Sure/Other - 6.6%

“This is a classic case of polling as a snapshot in time. We’re turning Pennsylvania purple today, as McCain takes a small edge. But as in Ohio, we are watching this closely and things could change in this classically blue state.”

Course, there’s no telling how many boxes of “ballots” they can “find” in closets in Philadelphia, like Gary or Seattle.

If you’re a math geek, FiveThirtyEight is addictive. The site is run by a crew of statisticians who run regressions and simulations on the poll data as they accumulate. In 04, I found FiveThirtyEight to be deadly accurate beginning about three months before the election, and have just started checking them out.

You’d never know it from the press, of course, but looking at the charted data, you can see that Obama maxed on Junethirteenth (hardly surprising), and then started to slide. So what else happened in June?

Hillary dropped out of the race.

Think about that. Ever since Clinton dropped out, Obama’s star has been fading (you can see his sharp decline coinciding with the GOP Convention and announcement of Palin as VP). So we’ve been getting stories about disaffected Hillary voters all this time, mostly discounting any real effect on the election, yet the data say different. Again, ever since Clinton dropped out, Obama has been going down.

Speaking of, Glenn Reynolds posted an article right after the 06 elections hypothesizing that the GOP Congressional approval started sliding with the Schaivo debacle. I’d like to test that. I have tried RealClearPolitics, but they don’t keep data that old, at least as far as I could find. So I’m going to try Rasmussen. And if I can’t find it, since I’m a premium member, I’ll contact Rasmussen and see if they can point me to all of those old polls.