October 7th, 2004

i am not a stuffed tiger.

follow-up

Josh Bearman follows-up on his weblog posting against polls with a longer story for LA Weekly, "Damn Polls"
... what 2000 reminded us about is that polls are not like taking samples of bacteria in a lake; they are an attempt to gauge human intentions, which are messy and resist quantification. [law]
It's a thorough and cogent discussion of the issues that make the whole business of news polling quesitonable. Nice to see this somewhere other than first-year stats courses, where things like sampling error and issues of interpretation were beaten into our heads by responsible biostatisticians.
i am not a stuffed tiger.

hmmm. explainer rains on our parade?

So, as the election approaches, I've been wondering why activist groups haven't tried to make voting more entertaining, as suggested by "Why We Hate Voting -- and how to make it fun again" [slate].

Today, Slate's explainer tells us that it's illegal to buy votes, even if it's with underwear (a la Michael Moore) [slate].

I hope that doen't invalidate the VOTEorNOT raffle. I could use the cash.

My guess is that it doesn't since you aren't actually required to register or vote to be entered in the drawing. As far as I can tell, the site's purpose seems to be aimed at viral marketing of registration information, since checking-up on voting would be really complicated, and probably illegal.
the only earth?

art walking

I met up wil Al, Malinda, Geoff, and some new imports to Seattle for some good old fashioned first thursday art walking in Pioneer Square. Of course, we couldn't resist the draw of the Live Girls cabaret (blaming it on the new kids). Amazingly, the show turned out to be consistently funny, benefitting from the addition of a puppeteer to the line-up.

Before and during the show, some pictures were taken. [flickr]