Remember the derby cars sawed in my shop last week?

Remember the derby cars sawed in my shop last week?  Alan L. sent over this photo of Nick L. with his finished “wookie board” car.  Nice!

Nick's dad is quite a talented photographer, no?

This is being reported...

This is being reported ... as the sinking of a battleship, to make an artificial reef.

Uh, no.

That's not a battleship, not even in the Mexican Navy.  It's just barely a ship, for crying out loud.

But the video is cool!

We're so glad we left California...

We're so glad we left California...  After reading this, I wonder if Victor Davis Hanson might be following us someday soon.  Depressing, that piece is, if you ever loved California...

You don't often hear something like this...

You don't often hear something like this ... from a dedicated progressive.  Just listen!

I want you to know...

I want you to know ... that Mia Love is a Utahan, and a Republican representative to Congress.  Look what she's proposing.  Ain't it wonderful?  I estimate its chance of passage at about 0.0000048%, give or take a few millionths.  But we can dream, can't we?

Wait a minute...

Wait a minute...  In last night's Iowa caucuses, on the Democratic side there were six precincts where the ballots were tied – evenly split between The Hillary and The Bern.  So what did they do?  They tossed a coin to decide it.  That's fair enough; in a tie they break it by randomly choosing a winner.

But...

In all six of these tied precincts, The Hillary's people won the toss.  What's the chances of that?  For a geek like me, that's a trivial question.  Assuming the coin tosses really are random, there's exactly one chance in sixty-four that Hillary (or Bernie) would win all six of them.  If it had gone the other way (that is, Bernie winning all six), would that have changed the election results?  I'm not sure, as the Democrats have a less-than-transparent mechanism, population-based, for deciding how much weight to place on each precinct's votes.  If the precincts decided by a coin toss are small (in population), as is most likely, then their cumulative effect might not be enough to change the outcome.  But we don't know that – at least not now – and given the shenanigans the Clinton dynasty is justly famous for, I find that ... at least unsettling, and possibly suspicious.

I'd sure like to know whether if Bernie had won tosses, he'd be the winner...

Meanwhile, Scott Adams is broadly hinting that it's possible the Republican caucuses were rigged.  The most persuasive piece of “evidence” he offered (assuming it's accurate) is that Microsoft supplied the software that totaled the Republican results, Rubio's biggest donor was Microsoft, and Rubio is a big-but-plausible winner.  Hmmm...

Comet 67P...

Comet 67P...  Every time I look at one of these images, I marvel that I live in an age where I can sit in my living room and look at photos taken just hours ago by a camera located very nearby a comet! 

When I was a boy on our farm in New Jersey, comets were largely mysterious objects about which there was far more speculation than actual knowledge.  Not so many years later, we have sent robotic explorers to two comets, we have several more such explorers that will be visiting, and we've gained an enormous amount of concrete knowledge about comets – including magnificent photos like these, streaming back from the Rosetta spacecraft.  While there are still many mysteries about comets (especially about their origins), there's a solid base of knowledge and understanding now – there's more knowledge than speculation...

So the Iowa caucuses are over...

So the Iowa caucuses are over...  What did we learn?

Not much, I think.  The big loser would appear to be The Hillary – a tie with an octogenarian socialist is pretty far removed from the expected coronation.  It's only one tiny step from losing to the octogenarian socialist.

On the Republican side, there were three viable candidates going into the caucuses (Cruz, Trump, Rubio) ... and there are three viable candidates coming out.  The three of them finished less than 5 points away from each other, which I'll call a tie for statistical purposes.  So ... a great, big nothing-burger.

Another loser (but this is almost an evergreen assertion these days): the polls.  Not a single one of them correctly predicted this outcome.  Everybody was surprised by (a) Trump's loss, slight as it was, and (b) Rubio's near-tie.  My takeaway from this is the same as my takeaway from the pollsters in the 2012 election: political pollsters and weather forecasters are the only two occupations I know of where getting the wrong answer most of the time isn't career-threatening (I'm looking at you, weather forecasters of northern Utah last week!).  We shouldn't give either group any credibility in our thinking.

I'm feeling ... very reinforced in my lack of excitement and engagement with this year's Presidential contest.  We still have five viable candidates (Clinton, Cruz, Trump, Sanders, Rubio), not one of which I'd look forward to having as my President.

My favorite observation about the evening, made by several people in several forms: the alleged party of old white men (the Republicans) gave over 60% of their votes to (relatively) young minorities, while the allegedly minority-friendly party of the people (the Democrats) gave 99.4% of their vote to old white folks...