Clean Coal

Has anyone else noticed a shortage of information on the Web about so-called clean coal?

I am going to begin a survey of the information that is available and report it here.

Stay tuned.

A brief socialist history of the automobile

Check out this brief socialist history of the automobile at
Links – International Journal of Socialist Renewal

Matrimonial Math

The news broke today that Connecticut is about to become the third state to allow gay marriages.

I was feeling just snarky enough that I jumped immediately to the conclusion that people in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and California must just be smarter than everyone else. Er, except New Yorkers.

However, I decided to be fair and test the hypothesis. My hunt for statistics netted me a data set produced by Morgan Quitno Press, which is lately become a subsidiary of the Congressional Review. It aggregates twenty-one different measures of the effectiveness of education in each state, and ranks the states according to which is "smartest."

Massachusetts and Connecticut, as I predicted, rank second and third respectively. California has not done so well. Of course California is a big compost heap of a state and I suspect its smartness is extremely regionalized. Curiously, Vermont and New Jersey, both of which have Civil Union laws, rank first and fourth.

So smart people are more liberal?

There is a correlation between how smart a state is and whether it is colored red or blue on the New York Times electoral map. I have grouped together states according to the Times's categories and predicted outcomes--Solid Obama, Leaning Obama, Tossup, Leaning McCain, and Solid McCain--and calculated average smartness scores for each group, expressed as a GPA.

Outcome	GPA
Solid Obama	2.36
Leaning Obama	2.14
Tossup	1.87
Leaning McCain	2.27
Solid McCain	1.60

The correlation is not perfect but I'm satisfied. I do wish we were doing better than a C+, though.

Arizona, John McCain's state, comes in last at number 50, though to be fair, Barack Obama's Illinois, at number 35 is not doing a whole lot better. Maybe that's why Obama had to sit through meetings with Bill Ayres.

Likes and Dislikes

This are lists, in progress, of things I like and dislike about Miami. I wanted to have two running columns, but I can't make that look good, so one list will follow the other.

Likes
rain
geckos
self-service check-out at the public library
tiny little frogs

Dislikes
snails
Republicans
poor connectivity of bicycle and pedestrian routes