The New York same-sex marriage bill, which passed the state assembly 88-51, was defeated in the state senate 38-24 , which isn't even close. (Anyone who knows anything about NY politics: why is the state senate so against it while the state assembly is so for it? It seems weird to me.) Between this and the Maine defeat, as @fivethirtyeight tweeted : "But boy, its been a rough couple of months ...
The Muppets cover Bohemian Rhapsody - excellent! After some depressing articles about football and head injuries , the co-chairmen of the NFL's committee on brain injuries resigned . They were mostly discrediting studies that showed brain injuries happened a lot, so the fact that they're no longer there means that maybe the NFL is taking the problem more seriously. Here's hoping!
I signed up for the Houston Turkey Trot 5K with my family. Unfortunately, it starts at 8 AM (which is very early for me these days) and I'm not in great shape and it's going to be cold, which doesn't do so great on my lungs. Hopefully I survive! Been working on WebOSJournal (the LiveJournalclient for the Palm Pre/Pixi) - it's coming along decently but I'm running into some frustration ...
I finally took the plunge and ordered a 23andMe kit. I got the kit in the mail last night and spit into the tube (they wanted a lot of spit so it took 5 minutes to do), sealed it up and sent it off this morning. Now the waiting begins... - The District of Columbia is proposing a same-sex marriage law. (yay!) The Catholic church, upon hearing this, warned that they would stop providing ...
After a few hours of assembling, here's what I ended up with: (more pictures behind the link) It's pretty unwieldly...hopefully it will survive on my desk for a little while. Links! - I've seen this around, but this support for same-sex marriage by age and state is pretty striking. Hopefully the 18-29 crowd will keep their opinion as they age :-) - A US interstate map drawn like the ...
I couldn't sleep last night so I whipped up this analysis of our home energy usage vs. temperature . It turns out that (spoiler!) we use more energy when it's hot outside. But I got to run my first linear regression! People who know about statistics: feel free to criticize/suggest improvements. (I'm not even sure I was looking at the right R-squared value...)
Washingtonvoters passed Referendum 71 which gives same-sex couples the right to domestic partnerships. So at least that's good news! A bird with a baguette damaged the Large Hadron Collider - apparently it's not going to delay it going operational later this month, but it does bring to mind the whole fate bringing down the LHC theory. Alternatively, as someone near me at work commented, ...
In the meantime, I updated the same-sex marriage map with the results from WA and ME, and added in percentages on votes the public had on same-sex marriage. (I think Mississippi's was the worst)
Not much in Austin is that interesting (but go vote if you haven't already, blah blah blah) - there are a handful of races throughout the country, but the big ones for me are in Maine and Washington. In Maine, same-sex marriage is being put to a vote (after the legislature passed it and governorsigned it, it was put on the ballot by a "people's veto"), and in Washington state the same thing ...
