Perriello–Rah!

It’s not a secret that I have disagreed with Mr. Virgil Goode’s representation of my US Congressional district (see references later), so I am very glad to see that others share my support for Tom Perriello, a sensible, enthusiastic, and considerate candidate for the 5th district in Virginia.

Mr. Goode has a history of intolerance, ineffectiveness, and misleading campaign activities that make his candidacy questionable. Mr. Perriello has addressed issues directly and offered a positive view of where our neighborhood and country can go. So, I was enheartened to see that the Danville News endorsed Mr. Perriello.

Earlier posts about Mr. Goode’s problems are here, here, and here. Learn about Mr. Perriello…and vote for him.

Wassup redux

Even without having much access to TV, I know about the famous series of commercials featuring guys having a beer and watching the game. Well, folks at 60 Frames have revived it with an important twist. So, turn off iTunes and take a couple of minutes to watch this.

Flash of the electrons to So Cal Muchacha for alerting me to this. (Of course, BoingBoing had this a few days ago; I just don’t keep up the way I once did.) Rah-hoo-ray for 60 Frames. Only about 2.5 million YouTube views at the time of my posting.

Sam Wang’s Congressional projection

Sam Wang, who writes the Princeton Election Consortium’s blog entries, has an entry entitled “Congressional predictions I: Senate 59-41, House 258-177″ that is well worth reading. He routinely does a fine job of aggregating data from polls and examining them scientifically.

The voting makeup of next year’s Congress is a simple sum of votes, and therefore poses an easier estimation problem than the Presidential race. Many other sites give just the average estimate. Here I will give a probabilistcally-based analysis that (a) estimates the likelihood of Democrats reaching a supermajority in the Senate, and (b) puts confidence intervals on the estimates. This projection will be updated as the election nears.

Link to Professor Wang’s entry. For other aggregations of polling data, see my earlier entry.

36 more hours in Charlottesville

In his New York Times guide for a weekend in Charlottesville, Joshua Kurlantzick did an admirable job of capturing many reasons to visit the neighborhood, but he couldn’t capture them all and some of us might disagree with the list sites and eateries he chose to include. That locals might disagree with the list he provided in his 26 October 2008 story is easily understood; there are many possible reasons: There’s too much to cover in 10 or so bullets; hidden gems are hard to find quickly; people might interpret his lenses as colored by common tourism; etc.

So, I thought we might suggest a few alternatives for those 36 hours, or for a return visit. I’ll start the list with a few quick recommendations (in no special order) and readers can add more in comments:

And sometimes spammers are very savvy

On the heals of the message I noted in a recent post about an ungrammatical, transparent  phishing attempt, I got another that is quite sophisticated. In the context of the problems with US financial institutions, this one refers to a very current news event: Citigroup’s purchase of Wachovia. In addition, it doesn’t baldly request that one submit his userid and password (along with name, birthdate, birthplace, and SSN), but alludes to a change in signature requirements.

Sometimes scammers seem stupid

Over the time that I’ve been watching the Internet (which is since the early ’80s), the sophistication of the medium has grown substantially. This is also true for the sophistication of the scams perpetrated on the Internet. But, not all scammers seem to have kept their boats afloat on this rising tide. The accompanying image of an e-mail message I got today illustrates something that must be near the low end of the scale for refined phishing. Of course, if spammers are counting on a hit rate of less than 1% when they send a message such as this one to millions of addresses, mayhaps they don’t have to be finesseful. Account details from 5000 folks who are less sharp than this scammer might still suffice.

Lifehacker list

The folks over at Lifehacker have a nifty list of Web resources about the current US elections. It’s one of their top-10 lists, and it includes lots of informative sites. Although most folks will already be familiar with some of the sites (e.g., Nate Silver’s Five Thirty Eight), there are others that I suspect even avid browsers won’t know.

Jump to the post. Flash of the electrons to Sam Wang at Princeton Election Consortium for alerting me to the post.

Happy NCOD

Image from qrd.org

National Coming Out Day is today. It’s a good day. I hope folks will look others in their eyes and be happy to know ‘em.

National Coming Out Day is an internationally-observed civil awareness day for coming out and discussion about lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) issues. It is observed on October 11 by members of the LGBT communities and their supporters (often referred to as “allies”).

Check info from Queer Resources Directory (source of the image here). Get some info from the Human Rights Campaign. Read more from Wikipedia. Check the well-crafted entry from Lesbian Dad