Dowbrigade

The University
of Maine College of Education and Human Development has announced
plans to require students working towards Maine teacher
certification to have Apple iBooks. The program dovetails with the state
of Maine’s own Learning
Technology Initiative, where all students and
teachers in seventh and eighth grades in Maine public schools also have
iBooks.

The requirement kicks in for first-year teaching students with the Fall
2005 semester. In addition to the Maine
Technology Learning Initiative,
the Teacher Education Faculty at the school cited Mac OS X’s reduced vulnerability
to viruses compared to Windows PCs as a contributing factor in their decision.

from Macworld

On Wednesday
we ventured into Harvard’s science ghetto for a lecture titled, ”The
Mathematics of Games and Sports," by the eminent
mathematician and sports fan Joseph B. Keller.

We arrived at lecture hall G115 in the Maxwell
Dworkin Lab five minutes late, and the room was already packed, As we
wormed our way into the back, a courteous undergraduate handed us a folding
chair, which we promptly unfolded on some poor fellow’s foot.

Glancing around the lecture hall at the crowd of about 200, we immediately
noticed several things. First, the audience was at least 90% male, not
surprising considering that both math and sports obsessions
are, in our culture, considered mostly (although not exclusively) male
domains.

The other thing we saw was that the ages of the mostly males we saw
ranged in an almost smooth spectrum from little kids of 8 or 9 to septuagenarians,
graybeards and wizened cane-walkers.

Personally, we were there hoping for some tips or techniques to improve
our historically disastrous bottom line in the boisterous world of sports
betting. One of the things we most enjoy about living in or near Cambridge
are the constant opportunities to listen to really smart people talk
about the things that light them up. This really smart mathematician
who obsessively applies numbers to sports MUST have discovered how to
turn
a profit on his efforts.

The lecture started promisingly enough. After warming up the crowd with
some really lame intellectual jokes about inverse problems, where you
start with the answer ("If the answer is "Dr. Livingston I presume?"
what is the question? Punchline: "What is your full name, Dr. Presume?")
he segued into a theoretical way to make money betting on baseball, or
any sports with many teams in a division.

The idea is that at the end of the season, "mathematical elimination"
is a tricky term.  Generally, the newspapers (and the bookies, Keller
implied) consider that a team isn’t eliminated until even if it won
all its remaining games, and the teams with which it is completing for
the
pennant
or a playoff spot lost all of theirs, it would still fall short. Keller
pointed out that it would be impossible for the competition to lose all
its games because a good number of those games were against each
other,
and somebody had to win.  Therefore, mathematical elimination actually
takes place a few games earlier, and somehow (we’re not really clear
on this part) a savvy bettor could parlay that into a profit.

From there, however, things rapidly went downhill. As Keller became
increasingly enthusiastic about his topic, he started talking in a foreign
language – math. Terms
like "connected matrix" "unique vectors" and "all non-negative
registers" were flying around the room as he launched into an explanation
of why the conventional league standings, as seen everyday in the newspaper,
were inadequate and misleading because they didn’t take into account
strength of schedule.

Next, he computed the most efficient expenditure of energy for a world
class athlete running in 100, 200, 400, and 1600 meter races, factoring
in acceleration,
oxygen burn, acid buildup in muscles and other constraints on velocity,
and showed how the performances of real world athletes mirror his findings.  Someone
asked if this also applied to race horses, and we grew momentarily hopeful
of gleaning a tip we could use. Unfortunately, Keller replied that although
his theory should apply to horses, the horses refused to listen.

At this point he unveiled his tour de force, a series of a dozen differential
equations to prove mathematically the obvious truism that a flipped coin
will land heads up exactly 50% of the time, representing with letters
and symbols the height of the toss, the rotational force, the movement
of the axis of rotation over time, the resistance of the air, etc.

Of course, we understood none of the math, and as we could see absolutely
no utility, let alone profitability, in the physics of tossing a coin,
we got up to leave. A marvelous invention, mathematics, but ultimately
little more than a toy with which to play with our senses. The seductive
illusion of numbers is that they really equal the physical reality they
are supposed to mirror, and within a fine-tuned human brain they can
reach a dizzying degree of internal cohesion and delicate complexity.
But in the final analysis, there are no zeros in nature, and an equals
sign is really just a pair of parallel lines.

In the
ebb and flow of American politics, or of any truly free political system,
organized groups of shared-interest activists, known as political parties,
are born and die, as do their leaders.

Since before the Civil War, the Democrats and Republicans have alternated
in power as they became more institutionalized, more entrenched in the
halls of power, and fostered political families on each side of the aisle
bred to power and privilege. We sometimes forget that there is nothing
in the Constitution mandating
these
two parties,
or even the primacy of TWO parties, or even any parties at all. 

Let us also not forget that the currently dominant parties WERE once
part of the same party. Andrew Jackson, a Democratic-Republican from
Tennessee, was elected president in 1828. His party had great support
in the South and West.  And who can forget successful American parties
like the Whigs, Federalists, Know-Nothings (our personal favorite) and
Bull Moose parties?

At least since before the last election, several deep political thinkers,
prominent among them Joe
Trippi, have been predicting the demise of one
of the political dinosaurs who have dominated the American political
landscape for the past 150 years. Given the current ascendancy and dominance
of the Grand Old Party at all levels, it seems obvious which
of our present parties is headed to the dust heap of history.

The Dowbrigade is among those who feel that 2008 will be the swan song
of the Democratic Party as a viable counterbalance to the triumphant
Republicans. As to who will replace the Dems, we have our theory about
that as well. Only one organization could realistically challenge the
primacy of the Republicans – the Republicans themselves.

Since late last year we have seen the 2008 election shaping up
as follows: The Bush junta, aka the Evangelical Republicans, will nominate
Jeb Bush, with Condi Rice as VP.  Attractive ticket. Sure to lure
in at least a smattering of women and blacks, just on general principal,
like Clarence Thomas.

The Democrats, we thought, were going with Hillary and some Southern
pretty boy or macho he-man, and hope for the best.  We saw this
as the kiss of death for the Democrats. We predicted that in a
hotly contested three way race, she comes in third.

Why do we say a three way race? Because we see the real threat to the
ruling junta as coming from within its own party.  There are still
plenty of old-school Republicans who still believe in evolution.  In
fact, there are millions of honest Americans who voted for George Bush
and
who are starting to have some serious doubts about the conduct of the
wars, both the military operations overseas and the cultural war here
in the homeland.

They would be ripe for a rational Republican alternative, like, say,
Colin Powell and John McCain.  How’s that for a ticket? They might
actually win.  They could call themselves the Real Republicans,
or the New Republicans, or the Rational Republicans, and they would defect
from the Administration with a sizable piece of the party organization,
fundraisers, career wonks and droids, and rank and file grassroots organizers.

This is key, as we are convinced that the realities of the modern American
form of democracy make it extremely difficult if not impossible for a
band-new, startup political party to seriously compete at any but the
most local level (all politics may be local, but economies of scale come
into play at state or national levels).  See, for example, the Constitution
Party, the America First Party, the Reform Party, the Green Party or
our own party, before we became a Republican, the Natural Law Party.

So
it is much more likely  that we see a realignment based on a
schism within one of the massive existing parties, and with its surfeit
of power and internal contradictions, the Dowbrigade nominates the Republicans. Stranger
things have happened.

For example, see the following
story from the front page of today’s
New York Times, about an unholy alliance taking form in Washington between
Hillary Clinton and Newt Gingritch.

Mr. Gingrich, the former House speaker, has been working alongside the
former first lady on a number of issues, and even appeared with her at
a press conference on Wednesday to promote – of all things – health-care
legislation.

But more puzzling than that, Mr. Gingrich has been talking up Mrs.
Clinton’s presidential prospects in 2008, to the chagrin of conservative
loyalists
who once regarded him as a heroic figure. Last month, he even suggested
she might capture the presidency, saying "any Republican who thinks
she’s going to be easy to beat has a total amnesia about the history
of the Clintons."

What is this coy eyelash fluttering? Does Newt know that he is now as
welcome in Republican circles as David Duke? Is Hillary trying to capture
some of that Old Republican Magic by reaching out to Newt? Could a
potential alliance between these uber-opportunists somehow pull Hillary
out of third place in the three-way contest we outlined above? 

We somehow doubt it, but it would sure make things interesting in what
is already shaping up to be the most entertaining election at least since
the guy
with the
ears. At the very least, combined with Bill’s heartwarming adoption by Poppy Bush (making Bill and George into some sort of twisted quasi-brothers}, this fraternization is returning both parties to their roots and true nature – the Democrat-Republicans of Andrew Jackson.

In politics, as in most of life. it’s all in the timing. When will
the
"moderate"
Republicans
make their break from the Evangelicals? They will probably wait for the
Bushites to invade another country or overstep themselves domestically
before acting.  They can always manufacture a crisis and get Cheney
and Ashcroft to freak out and declare martial law, or outlaw hip-hop
music, or arrest Howard Stern and shoot down his satellite, or something
equally over-the-top.

So get a good seat, folks, the show is about to begin.

article from the New York Times