Clinton/Sanders expose American innumeracy

So Clinton and Sanders were in pretty much a dead heat in the Iowa caucuses yesterday, with Clinton edging out Sanders by a few votes. Now I’m watching people freak out over a couple of stupid facts.

  1. A few of the caucuses were settled by flipping a coin. Yes? So? The votes were tied. The rules require representatives to be selected. A coin flip is a fair way to settle which candidate will be represented, when there is a tie. I have no problem with using a chance distribution to decide, but some people are just horrified at this ‘primitive’ way of making a decision. How else do you propose to do it? Trial by combat?

  2. Most annoying are the people who are shocked that there were 6 precincts where there was a tie, and in all 6 the coin flip favored Clinton. Again, that’s to be expected, that occasionally you’ll get a run of consecutive identical results. It would be curious if you never got a run of 6. But now we’ve got all these reporters earnestly explaining trivial outcomes.

    The Iowa Democratic caucus vote count was so close last night that at least 6 precincts were decided by flipping a coin — an obscure procedure in the Iowa caucus bylaws. And in all 6 instances, the last remaining county delegate went to Hillary Clinton. Winning 6 coin tosses in a row is extraordinarily rare, and only has a 1.6 percent probability of occurring. As journalist Ben Norton explained, that’s broken down by calculating (1/2)^6, which is 1/64 — or 1.6 percent.

    This needed explaining? No wonder casinos and lotteries do so well — and no, that’s not an extraordinarily rare frequency.

    Maybe this is why so many people have difficulty grasping evolution. Small probabilities with many trials adds up to a significant likelihood.

  3. It is absurd to try and spin this into a ‘win’ for either side.

    If Bernie Sanders had won half of the coin flips and split the six county delegates three and three with Clinton, he would have finished at 698.49 delegates to Clinton’s 696.57, effectively giving him an Iowa victory. According to a live map of all Iowa precincts, Clinton has a razor-thin 0.3 percent lead over the Vermont U.S. Senator with 99.9 percent of precincts reporting.

    The race was close enough that it could wobble one way or the other on the basis of a couple of coin flips. As far as I’m concerned, it was a statistical tie, and I don’t care how many ifs you concatenate to shift it into an imaginary win for your favorite candidate.

Also, it was Iowa, and a primary. Who cares? We’ve got two Democratic candidates who are equally appealing to motivated voters in one state. This does not settle the election, and a good case could be made that it is completely irrelevant to the final outcome, which is going to hinge on far more variables.

I swear, watching pundits overanalyze this one result is almost as infuriating as the Republican slate. Stop it.

Jebus. Look at this headline at The Blaze: Hillary Clinton Has The Most Statistically Improbable Coin-Toss Luck Ever. NO IT’S NOT.

Why is Kasich still running?

I think it’s because he’s profoundly delusional. Here’s Kasich praising Pink Floyd and Roger Waters specifically.

But…but…but we know what Waters thinks of the Republican party.

I watch the workings of politics [in the US] and particularly the Republican Party. They work with the axiom that you can tell as many lies as you want – and often the bigger the better – and eventually they will believed.

Or this:

Because your electorate, and it’s only the Republican electorate that we’re taking about now, are kept entirely in the dark by a malignant mainstream media lead by Fox News, but closely followed by all the other talking heads that just want to kind of smile at you and toe the party line and never question anything seriously, especially about the United States or what it is and what its aspirations are or what it wants to be, except that it wants to be a major imperial power all over the world. You have bases in 135 countries, which is extraordinary, though nobody ever seems to question it.

You pour huge amounts of your national resources into the Pentagon and use it, basically, to push around the rest of the world and make yourself unpopular with everybody else. And nobody seems to address any of this. This is a silence hovering over this great nation, and I think it’s a silence that is about to be broken.

This is not to say he approves of the Democrats — he’s such a strong pacifist I imagine he looks on all American politicians with disgust. Have you seen Kasich’s positions on the military? I would like to see Waters’ response to an invitation from a Republican to get Pink Floyd back together again.

#UnMinnesotan

This ad was run in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. I’m pretty sure it’s a damning example of what UnMinnesotans call the regressive Left.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably a Minnesotan Pop, “Up North” and snow days all mean something to you. So do the values we’re raised with: everyday, sleeve-worn courage, goodness and kindness. Though we may be a soft-spoken bunch, we know better than to be silent or still in the face of bigotry shown to Muslims. Our fellow Minnesotans. Every intolerant social post, every prejudiced comment aimed at Muslims needs a response. Your response. We must lead people to a place of tolerance and understanding. We must come together as a diverse and vibrant community. Our values don’t take days off and neither should we. If you’re Minnesotan, you know this to be true. We know better. We can’t be tricked into betraying our values. It’d be so very, very un-Minnesotan of us.

If you’re reading this, you’re probably a Minnesotan
Pop, “Up North” and snow days
all mean something to you.
So do the values we’re raised with:
everyday, sleeve-worn courage, goodness and kindness.
Though we may be a soft-spoken bunch,
we know better than to be silent or still in the face of
bigotry shown to Muslims. Our fellow Minnesotans.
Every intolerant social post,
every prejudiced comment aimed at Muslims
needs a response. Your response.
We must lead people to a place of
tolerance and understanding.
We must come together as
a diverse and vibrant community.
Our values don’t take days off and neither should we.
If you’re Minnesotan, you know this to be true.
We know better. We can’t be tricked into betraying our values.
It’d be so very, very un-Minnesotan of us.

Online Sudoku Workshop: A little trail of logic

As ever, even though it’s the very first in the series, Online Sudoku Workshop is brought to you by your friendly, neighborhood Crip Dyke.

This is a strange turn, I’m sure. Gender and sudoku? Well, yes. But not yet. Mostly I’m doing this because it’s fun to talk logic and sudoku and just how exciting it is to learn new things, but I will use this as a metaphor in discussing gender later. Come for the sudoku, stay for the sudoku. Come back again later for the gender. If you’re only in it for the gender metaphor, this will certainly be too long for you. In fact, it’s too long for a single post. I’ll start my puzzle-solving with some of the puzzle already done, and still I have to break this up into 3 posts. [Don’t worry, though. If the merchandizing revenues are good enough, I’ll go back and do the prequels so you can see how we arrived at the point we’ll begin our exciting puzzle-solving together.]

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A calm, rational reaction to the Zika virus

Peter Doherty explains the likely outcomes of the Zika virus pandemic.

What we are seeing in the Americas is a classic “virgin soil” epidemic. Enormous numbers of people and mosquitoes are being infected, the virus is transmitting at a very high level, and there may be as many as 4×106 cases. Apart from affected neonates, all will likely recover, with increasing “background” immunity progressively limiting the number of new infections in subsequent years. The current molecular technology is such that making a protective vaccine should be technically straightforward, but the process of safety testing and evaluation could take several years.

…

The long-term prospect with Zika virus is that we will live reasonably comfortably with it, especially if there is a vaccine to protect women of reproductive age. The principal decision for responsible authorities, like National Governments in endemic areas and the WHO, is whether there is a case for fast-tracking, then funding, a vaccine to protect all young women. For the present, pregnant women are advised not to travel to these countries and, for those where this in not an issue, insect repellant also offers some protection against much nastier viruses like dengue and Chikungunya.

It’s spreading rapidly, and one contributor to that is the ridiculous attitudes of conservative Christianity, but this one, tragic as its consequences can be, isn’t the big pandemic that will kill us all. And the answer to it lies in natural properties of adaptive immunity and vaccines.

Charles Pierce reminds us of progressive history

It’s good to see someone mention that the Democratic party has deep progressive roots. He mentions a lot of names that stirred up sad memories. Jesse Jackson, presidential candidate in 1984 and 1988; I supported him, although his campaign fizzled out in the primaries before I got to have a say out in Oregon (I really detest our system that gives Iowa and New Hampshire an undeserved excess of privilege in electoral politics). Howard Dean in 2004; he was my preferred candidate then, too. I have a long history of support for failed candidacies, I’m afraid.

I keep making these choices, and will keep on doing it, though. He quotes Jackson’s speech before the Democratic Convention, and yeah, it reminds me why.

We find common ground at the plant gate that closes on workers without notice. We find common ground at the farm auction, where a good farmer loses his or her land to bad loans or diminishing markets. Common ground at the school yard where teachers cannot get adequate pay, and students cannot get a scholarship, and can’t make a loan. Common ground at the hospital admitting room, where somebody tonight is dying because they cannot afford to go upstairs to a bed that’s empty waiting for someone with insurance to get sick. We are a better nation than that. We must do better. Common ground. What is leadership if not present help in a time of crisis? So I met you at the point of challenge. In Jay, Maine, where paper workers were striking for fair wages; in Greenville, Iowa, where family farmers struggle for a fair price; in Cleveland, Ohio, where working women seek comparable worth; in McFarland, California, where the children of Hispanic farm workers may be dying from poisoned land, dying in clusters with cancer; in an AIDS hospice in Houston, Texas, where the sick support one another, too often rejected by their own parents and friends.

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Maher and Chachoua get taken apart

Last Friday, Maher hosted cancer quack and HIV fraud Samir Chachoua on his show for an embarrassingly credulous segment, in which he claimed to have cured Charlie Sheen’s HIV with goat’s milk. This weekend, Virginia Hughes quickly put up a good takedown, and now this morning, as I expected, Science-Based Medicine eviscerates Chachoua and Maher at length.

If there’s one person who is living proof that being an atheist has nothing to do with being a skeptic, it’s Bill Maher. Touting himself as being supremely rational in comparison to those “God botherers” and Republicans, Maher has himself embraced antivaccine pseudoscience, other cancer quackery, and general pseudoskepticism about “Western medicine.” Nor is this the first time he’s embraced HIV quackery, either. Indeed, I’ve been pointing out for more than a decade now just how much pseudoscience Maher embraces. Unfortunately, in some circles, that doesn’t seem to matter. For example, in 2009 Atheist Alliance International awarded Maher the Richard Dawkins Award, which was likened to Jenny McCarthy receiving a public health award.

So I suppose it’s not that surprising that Maher went full quack. I just never expected him to embrace so quacky a quack so credulously. My bad.

This is not the first time, it won’t be the last, and sadly, it will not harm his career as a self-proclaimed skeptic one little bit.

As much as I’d like to believe it…

This claim that beards are good for you is unadulterated anecdotal nonsense.

In an investigation led by the BBC, beards were found to contain microbes that kill bacteria — in other words, a potential new kind of antibiotic.

First clue: the BBC is not a scientific institution. They’re a media company.

Second clue: they set up an imaginary conflict with a hypothesis by another media company: the New York Post.

By that point, the third paragraph, you can just dismiss the whole crapfest.

I kept going, but their whole methodology is pointless. They sent off swabs taken from men with beards to be dabbed on petri dishes, and some were found to have bacteriocidal properties. Whoop-de-doo. You can do that with dirt, too. Why are people surprised that there are complex and diverse interactions between organisms at the microbiological level?