November 2004

Keith Olbermann of MSNBC’s Countdown ran with the voting oddnesses last night, covering much of the stuff that has been blogged heavily in the last few days. For example, those mystery voters: “Interestingly, none of the complaining emailers took issue with the remarkable results out of Cuyahoga County, Ohio. In 29 precincts there, the County’s…

Well, the bollocks is officially over and Allawi has “given the go-ahead”. Now for the show. A “source” has suggested to me that most of the guerrillas have already exfiltrated and are intending to create mayhem in the rear once the US Marines are thoroughly committed. The hardly reported massacre of police in the Haditha/Haqlaniya…

I mentioned earlier that the dollar and for that matter, the US public finances, were being supported by a huge accumulation of foreign reserves, and that this was a basically unstable situation that however could remain in place for an unknown length of time until “it” happened. This is technically known as metastability. It looks…

..and electoral results looks like this. Via Crooked Timber

The Washington Post reports on the use of monster databases to record customers who return or exchange goods they find unsatisfactory, and to refuse returns automatically to people a computer decides do it too often. This is just another example of a worrying trend – using industrial-strength data mining and surveillance systems for trivial purposes,…

Brad DeLong reports on a Federal Reserve research paper by Matthew Higgins and Thomas Klitgaard on the way world central banks have been building up foreign exchange reserves. Up to this year, the total holdings of foreign currency assets in central banks have almost doubled since 1995. Now, there are a couple of obvious market…

The Daily Kos is on the case again, and this time it’s Florida that is having fun with maths. It appears, with the first sets of actual numbers in, that more people cast votes for Presidential candidates than voted at all. Not just that, but there is a mysterious surge in Republican votes in counties…

Random Reality reports that thieves have stolen a decontamination vehicle from the London Ambulance Service, full of atropine sulphate syringes. As yer man points out, if they shoot that stuff up they could well die.

Amid all the excitement, of course, serious illness seized someone else’s president. Yasser Arafat collapsed in his Ramallah bunker and was, after some parley, transported to France for treatment. Something of the division this is likely to unleash was well pointed up by the political squabble that broke out over the question of whether or…

Back in 2000, I was astonished to hear of the odd, Heath Robinsonesque voting machines of chad infamy. Being British, I was used to a voting system based on three P’s – paper, pencil, public counting. I’ve never been very keen on e-voting for the simple reason that I don’t see a benefit that outweighs…