Marriage equality lost in the New York Senate 24-38, a crushing defeat. Despite repeated assurances over the last six months by Governor Paterson and sponsors of the bill that they had the votes if they could just get a roll call, they obviously did not have the votes.

To add insult to injury a Marist poll released today reported that New Yorkers supported equal marriage rights 51% - 42%, a result outside the margin of error. (Other, previous polls have reported much closer results, one way or another).

Not a single Republican vote was cast in favor, although what likely happened is that a few Republicans would have voted for the bill if it had a chance at passage. As it turned out, some swing Democrats voted NO early in the roll call, pretty much assuring defeat of the measure.

NY Senate is now debating the equal marriage rights law.

My Daily Kos Diary on the subject (rec listed!)

live feed of the NY State Senate debate

The DC City Council voted 11-2 to legalize same-sex marriage today, a bright spot in an otherwise not-so-promising environment for equal marriage rights across the US in the near future.

A second vote needs to be taken in two weeks, the Mayor has to sign the bill (which he will do), and then Congress has to not act to invalidate the new law for 30 legislative days before the act will take effect.

...D.C. has the largest percentage of same-sex couples in the nation, where 1.5 percent of all households comprise same-sex couples. This is more than double the percentage of any other state... -- Pam's House Blend

While Switzerland's banning of the building of new minarets (by Constitutional referendum) has been made much of these last few days, I had no idea that:

• It was not until 1966 that any women were allowed to vote anywhere in Switzerland.


• It was not until 1971 that women were allowed to vote in national elections in Switzerland.


• It was not until 1990 that women gained the absolute right to vote in all elections in Switzerland

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/12/the-swiss-ban-minarets-ctd.html#more

... your television and computer monitor rely upon the element europium, which makes the color red appear on your screen. There is nothing else known to exist that can be used for the same purpose. Therefore, the ability to make TVs and computer monitors is entirely dependent on access to this material.

On Stimulating The Future, Or, "It's The Ytterbium, Stupid!"

which is an interesting article above and beyond this nugget, noting that currently 95%
of all Rare Earth element (in the sense of atoms) mining/production is done in China, and that many current and future technologically oriented products are dependent on these elements.

We discussed manhole covers' roundness in an earlier post. And, obviously causally, the SF Chronicle today has a front page articlediscussing someone who has written eight books on them and other similar 'oddball' objects.

Prices always seem to be going up, except when they aren't. The 32" flat screen TV I purchases a few years ago can now be had for a third of what I paid for it. But so what? Now everyone wants a bigger, flatter TV. Did the cost of living go down because flat screen TV's are 'better' than the clunking boxes they replaced, even if they cost the same or more, despite the fact that they sort of serve the same purpose?

And that's just the tip of the icebox. It's really hard to figure out whether a particular something has increased in cost or not over the years. A while back, I noted that I could find no way of figuring whether mattresses were cheaper now than a few years ago, or any information on their cost over time at all.

So here's a quiz for you:

Do you think, generically, we pay more for the residential electricity we use now than in 1990?

Poll #1491952 Do we pay more for electricity now than in 1990?
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 19

Do we pay more for electricity now than in 1990?

( The answer )

The December 2009 Scientific American describes a new way of dealing with garbage: zap it with bazillions of volts of electricity (actually, zap the gas in the container holding the garbage), creating a superheated plasma, hotter than the surface of the sun.

This causes the organic compounds in the garbage to turn into something called syngas, which can be used as fuel to produce electricity, while the remains becomes slag, which can be processed into building materials.

The cost of doing this has now come down enough so that "it's becoming cheaper to take trash to the plasma plant that it is to dump it in a landfill." Major pilot plants are under development.

"America is a Great Nation, due to our Diversity; but ONLY WHEN, This Diversity is VOLUNTARY."

George Hutchins, a 'Jesse Helms Republican', running for Congress in North Carolina.

"The movie doesn't handle nuance very well, and the dialogue spins pretty frequently into unmitigated corniness. But anyone who enjoys stylized hyper-violence should be enthralled by this long, sweeping, murderously vivid dramatization of ancient Chinese warfare..."

-- Amy Biancolli, SF Chronicle movie reviewer (p E6, 11/25/09), writing a five star review about the new movie Red Cliff.

Poll #1489139
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 12

My vocabulary

( Pardon my French )

In case you're desperately wanting to know the real dirt about researchers' emails that some claim throw all global warming science for the last two decades out the window, here's my current understanding of what was going on.

There are two sets of temperature data. One set is inferred data: ice core measurements, tree ring growth stats, stuff like that. Yearly temperatures from days of yore are inferred from that kind of data, and scientists continued to accumulate such data and derive temperatures through 1980 that way.

There is another set of data: actual temperature measurements, of sufficient amount and diversity to get a good handle on actual global temperature as opposed to inferred temperature. These measurements became sufficiently accurate some time before 1980 to be used (say 1960), but prior to that the best data scientists had was the inferred data.

It turns out that the inferred data and the actual measurements during the interval 1960 - 1980 don't agree. So which do you believe? Clearly, the actual measurements. But your graphs have to use inferred data from before 1960. Do you show the inferred data on your graphs through 1980, do you show both, or do you just show the measured data? And how do you compute global temperature between 1960 and 1980? Do you include the inferred data, or do you not include (hide) it.

That was the issue the most 'damning' email was discussing. Basically they subtracted out the inferred data to reach their conclusions (but still showed it on their graphs, so that scientists reading their papers would understand what they had done).

If this is in fact the story, it's pretty despicable, and all scientists so involved should have been shot. Imagine relying on real measurements with much smaller standard deviations rather than inferences with huge standard deviations when reaching your conclusions!

A November 2009 Scientific American article (p 60) notes that the US Energy Information Administration projects that the world will use almost 17 terawatts of power in 2030. But if the planet were powered exclusively by wind, water and solar energy, total demand would only be 11.5 terawatts, a savings of 6.5 terawatts or 38% of the entire world's energy consumption, and less than we use now. Currently, the world uses 12.5 trillion watts.

Why? Because electricity is used more efficiently than other forms of energy. Only 17%-20% of the energy in a gallon of gasoline is used for locomotion, the rest dissipates as heat. But 75% - 86% of the electricity used by an electric vehicle is used to move it.

No, not because of the filibuster. Or insurance companies. Or the budget. The culprit is starring us in the face on the front page of today's San Francisco Chronicle:

Anger, shock at mammogram guidelines

Large scientific studies have concluded that mammograms for women aged 40-50 are, on the whole,
more harmful than they are beneficial. Note that the conclusion wasn't that the mammograms were simply not cost-effective, but that they were on the whole harmful.

The article presents some of the data, then goes on to interview some women who had breast cancer detected in their 40's, got treatment, and are now healthy. They didn't interview the women who got false positives, or got cancer because of the radiation exposure and then died
(1 death for 2000 screenings, according to the article). Hard to interview dead people.

The article ends with a quote from a treatment survivor:

You're not a statistic. You're somebody's mother, somebody's sister, somebody's lover.
One life saved, that's the world.

But there's no obvious reason mammogram tests need to start at 40. Maybe they should start at 30. Or 41. Or 50. Maybe they should stop at 70, 75 or 80. Maybe individual circumstances (a history a cancer in the family?) should be the critical factor in deciding on thresholds.

You don't know. I don't know. The person being quoted doesn't know. Doctors don't know.
Politicians don't know. I'm guessing these rules were drawn up long ago, and were a best guess based on available data. They should obviously be subject to continued study and refinement as new data become available. In a world of six billion people, and a nation of 300 million, you are indeed (sorry) a statistic. Only by examining statistics can near-optimal rules hope to come into existence.

The blind defense of the status quo; the ignorant assumption that the way things are being done now is the way they must be done; the insane bleating every time it is suggested that more is not necessarily better. If the nation consumes itself attempting to pay for health care, this will be why, not whether there is a public option, or whether everyone must get insurance, or whether the Medicare adjustment on page 842 of the House health bill is off by 10%.

Save us from ourselves.