Teabaggers, Socialists and Health Care

Scott Brown's Senate victory in my home state (or Commonwealth, to be more precise) has left me feeling more disconnected from the United States than ever before. For nearly 5(!) years I've been hearing people make derogatory comments about Americans being loud, fat, obnoxious, etc. My standard reply has always been to point out that the United States is a huge place with 300 million people, and making generalizations is silly.

Specifically, I come from the urbane, sophisticated, cosmopolitan part of the country, and I'm more at home in the UK than I would be in, say, rural Mississippi. But now the same teabag unrest that has been burbling in those "other" parts of the USA has helped propel a no-name Republican into the seat held by Ted Kennedy for 46 years. After a few days of despondence I've come to see Brown's victory as the result of a perfect storm of three main factors: (1) the tendency for voters to blame the continuing bad economy on the incumbent party, (2) the Republican choice of an engaging everyman vs. the Democrats' effete product of the Boston political machine who couldn't connect with a phone jack, and (3) the strange nature of special elections.

Finally, where does this leave the Democrats' struggling attempt to reform the American health care system? I won't bore you with me thoughts, but point you to an excellent op-ed by Paul Krugman which summarizes them perfectly.

More on airline security

Bruce Schneier is generally awesome, but this piece neatly summarizes my feelings on an appropriate response to the crotch bomber.

Security Theater

I'm sitting in the AA lounge at Logan, waiting for my flight back to London and pondering the ridiculous reaction of the government and the public to the Crotch Bomber. Maureen Dowd's op-ed captures the "be afraid, be very afraid" mantra of modern air travel, even when it is repeatedly demonstrated to be extremely safe.

Two failures happened in this incident:

1. Intelligence on the suspect wasn't distributed widely enough to flag him to airport or immigration authorities.
2. His crotch bomb made it on the to the plane undetected.

The first is a problem, and should be addressed. It is the only lesson we can learn from this incident. Trying to adjust airport screening approaches to the last attack is a pointless waste of time and resources. Focus on the bad guys and let the rest of us bring our toothpaste on planes without being hassled.

"Why" are these words in "quotes"

Signing off message from reception:

Thank you all for your co-operation and may we wish you all a very "Happy Christmas" and a "Prosperous" New Year.

Are they sarcastically wishing people a Merry Christmas?

A bit of TMQ

Tuesday Morning Quarterback (who is apparently a jackass in his personal life) used to always bemoan chicken coaches who punted in situations where a bold gamble on 4th down was statistically more likely to succeed. While Coach B has been excoriated for his decision in last weekend's loss to the Colts, Freakonomics guru Steve Levitt disagrees.

Gut disorder 'blamed on leaks'

So says the BBC's coverage of my latest paper, which just came out in Nature Genetics. Someone needs to have a word with their science headline writer.

Hawai'i II

This post will hopefully be more interesting than the last one (which mainly consisted of a recitation of flight times and places). I'm now transitioning out of vacation mode and into conference mode in Honolulu. Four days on the Big Island were amazing, and included snorkeling, a 4WD trip to the summit of Mauna Kea to see the observatories and go stargazing, hiking across a volcano crater and seeing the lava flow into the ocean. Today, on my last free morning, I went on a two-tank dive: first to the wreck of the Sea Tiger, and second to a nearby reef.

Although I'm about to go mingle with some work colleagues at the opening mixer, I'm still enjoying the Aloha spirit.