Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

...to phillip2637!!! Have a great one!!

Election day

All across my friends list there are people reporting huge lines at the polls, urging their friends to vote, expressing cautious hope. I particularly draw your attention to An Open Letter to the United States of America by telynor. Go vote.

I'm guardedly optimistic, as the phrase goes. The right of all couples to marry in California hangs by a thread. All across the country people are voting with machines that are easy targets for fraud. The election could easily have already been stolen, and the Supreme Court could well let them get away with it again. Even if Obama wins, the outgoing administration is, even now, shredding decades worth of regulations, and has hired a generation of right-wing civil servants who will take decades more to age out.

This mess is not going to be cleaned up in the next four years, and possibly not in my lifetime. Go vote anyway. It's important.

I voted

Just got back from voting; there were only four people ahead of me in the line, but one was a provisional so it took a while. No matter.

If you're in the US and haven't voted yet, DO IT.

The dangers of e-voting (again)

Update: Problems with e-voting reported early in battleground states | InfoWorld | News | 2008-11-04 | By Elizabeth Montalbano, IDG News Service

Problems with e-voting machines were reported early on election day in several U.S. states, including Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia, which are identified as battleground states where the outcome of the vote could tip the presidential race in favor of either Democratic Sen. Barack Obama or Republican Sen. John McCain.

According to voter reports on the ground and from watchdog organizations, there were problems with getting e-voting machines up and running in these key states and others, and in some cases the machines would crash during the voting process and had to be rebooted.

Pennsylvania and Virginia were among states Verified Voting, an advocacy group focused on improving voting systems, and other watchdog organizations said they would keep a close eye on for voting problems. Neither state had early voting before Nov. 4, nor do they require paper-trail backups with the touchscreen electronic-voting machines in place at polls.

Critics of e-voting say that without a paper trail, there's no way to audit the results of a touchscreen machine, often called DREs, or direct recording electronic machines.

I'm not saying that there is deliberate fraud going on, only that it wouldn't surprise me at all, and that there's no way to detect it.

I guess I'm still a pessimist

Obama won. Good. Pretty amazing, actually. Things will improve, though probably not as much or as quickly as I'd like. Or at least not go to Hell quite as quickly.

Prop 8 and Prop 4 appear to be winning in California; I probably won't know the final results before I go to bed, but I'm not particularly hopeful. Damn. It'll be a long, long battle to fix those.

I'm sleepy, and cold, and not as happy as by rights I should be.

I'm not sure why disappointment over 8 is hitting me as hard as it is. Perhaps because it's yet another triumph of hate over love, bigotry over tolerance, religion over rationality. As usual.

River: The Lark in the Morning

This post by madfilkentist led me a merry chase, past this web page and this article, to the idea of chronotypes.

Normal people have a circadian clock set pretty close to a 24 hour cycle, and don't have much trouble shifting it around. Owls have a cycle of longer than 24 hours, and tend to become night people, going to bed late and sleeping long hours. Larks have a shorter cycle, and become morning people, fading early in the evening and getting up early.

I used to be an owl. Back in grad school one of my classmates spent a year or two living on a 26-hour cycle; he would get back in sync with the world every other week. I myself was more likely to see dawn before going to bed than on waking up.

I seem to be a lark now. It's fairly recent; I think I was "normal" for a long time in between. It may have something to do with the facehugger. I enjoy the extra time in the morning, though it's too irregular to count on. Maybe that will improve over time. Sleep is pleasant, but I don't have time for it.