Every time I feel like I’m making progress in turning “the damn strategic voting chapter” into a final paper worthy of submission, I stumble across a new bug in Zelig. I’d theorize that Gary King doesn’t want me to publish anything, but I’m afraid I’m far too insignificant a microbe in the whole political science universe to be squashed so deliberately.

If I were better organized, I’d spend the time I’m waiting for the bugs to be fixed writing up the changes I’ve made already—most notably, tossing the interviewer measure of sophistication in favor of an item-response theory model. That would probably cover the real reason I don’t seem to be able to publish anything—well, besides my lack of a research budget, RAs, and course releases for research, and a computer on my desk at work that probably was the cheapest thing Dell marketed to its education customers three years ago.

Megan asks:

How did I end up on the Libertarian circuit anyway? I am quite the bleeding heart; I give change to homeless people and play team sports and volunteer in a community garden and shit. It’s like I’ve fallen in with a bad crowd, just ‘cause they’re all funny and cool. Marginal Revolution is totally a gateway drug.

I’m not sure any of those things would qualify or disqualify anyone from being a libertarian (or even a Libertarian), since none of them have to do with the use of the government’s monopoly on the legitimate use of force to coerce certain individual behavior. No libertarian I’m aware of would forbid† Megan from giving change to homeless people, playing team sports, or volunteering in community gardens; nor would any* make her do any of those things.

† Hardcore Objectivists would probably make fun of her for doing some of these things, but one need not subscribe to Objectivist beliefs to be a libertarian. Thank God.
* Well, except a few liberals who like to call themselves “libertarian” because they’re for some unfathomable reason embarrassed to be known as liberals, like Bill Maher. But that’s a whole other kettle of fish.

Today’s Post-Dispatch has almost all the information you need to know about the grand opening of Metrolink’s Cross-County Extension next Saturday.

SLU has moved up a few spots in the latest U.S. News rankings of the best national universities to 77th, in a four-way tie with Virginia Tech, UC-Boulder, and Stevens Institute of Technology.

In a completely unrelated development, the Spreadsheet of Death™ 2007 edition is up to around 30 entries already.

Via Stephen Karlson, I found a site that will let you display all the urban rapid transit systems you have used in the world:

Got at b3co.com!

With a little source hacking, I added the Munich U logo (which is the same as the Berlin U logo anyway).

Ok, this is just weird, although I have to give the “artist” props for originality, even if it strikes me as some sort of bizarre attempt at borderline necrophilia-slash-bestiality.

Then again, maybe I don’t.

Matthew Shugart and David Bernstein read the exact same passage in Ha’aretz and come to pretty much diametrically opposite conclusions—Shugart, that the war was foolhardy; Bernstein, that the Israeli defense minister didn’t take Hezbollah’s missile arsenal seriously enough.

Granted, I tend to think Shugart is right (far) more often than Bernstein, but here I’m just bemused by the juxtaposition—and would be more likely to be concerned that the IDF didn’t take Hezbollah’s missile capability all that seriously.

I took advantage of my free time today by going to see the Cardinals beat the Cincinnati Reds 2–1 this afternoon at New Busch. The price was reasonable—$19 for the ticket, plus $3.50 in Metrolink fare to and from the park-and-ride at Delmar Loop—and it was a fun diversion for a few hours, even if I had to overcome some mild agrophobia due to being seated literally in the highest row at the stadium. If nothing else, I can tell my kids I saw the Reds’ Ken Griffey Jr. hit a home run.

Here’s a bunch of photos I took today at the new stadium—it’s very nice.

There was a minor snafu on the trip back; since I had read the Metrolink travel advisory I wasn’t annoyed (unlike many other occupants) when the train I was on decided to kick everyone off at Forest Park, but I was getting irritated when the promised empty train to Lambert didn’t show up until after another full Lambert train had passed. Even so, I was back home within an hour of the end of the game, despite rush hour traffic virtually everywhere on my driving route back from the station (Skinker, Forest Park Pkwy, and Brentwood).

My new neighbor notes a poster from the St. Louis Public Schools that makes me seriously wonder where my 1% city payroll tax dollars are going.

Which reminds me, I think I can finally go on a “taxation without representation” rant for the first time in my adult life…

After what charitably may be two years of stagnation, reportbug is gaining a couple of new interfaces soon. Probably the more high-profile effort—and the one that’s closer to primetime—is Philipp Kern’s “Summer of Code” project to add a Gnome2 interface to reportbug, which should be hitting the experimental distribution soon.

Meanwhile, I’ve started fiddling with the urwid library and have made startlingly rapid progress constructing a UI with it, even though I am still getting the hang of the widget system… some widgets just refuse to go inside other widgets in ways that are not completely obvious to me, leading to strange runtime exceptions that are hard to debug. In any event, before it hits the mirrors, there’s more stuff to be done—most notably, the bug tracking system query interface (I haven’t even started tackling that yet) and figuring out how to suspend the urwid session to launch an editor that may want to use the console. On the latter point, I may go back to running each dialog as a separate session, which would also give me the console log back.

JMPP explains why she won’t be dating you—yes, you. Me, I know I’m quality… heck, my mom says so, and whose mom would lie to their kid?

Sorta-kinda credit to Amber Taylor, although I saw it in Google Reader before she mentioned it.

Update via Amber’s comments: If you know your SAT or GRE score, find out if you are worthy of JMPP here (broken in Safari, use Firefox instead). Fun for the whole family!

Craig Depken at Division of Labour looks back at the 1905–06 overhaul of football rules and looks ahead at the more modest changes to be implemented in the NFL this coming season.

A couple of noteworthy blemishes on my otherwise pleasant day thus far:

• What logical reason could exist for using a different lock (which my key doesn’t open) on the door to a building facing the street when I can walk (but really wouldn’t want to while carrying a 50-pound box of books) through a breezeway and unlock the door facing a giant open space in 30 seconds?
• People who get in line at Sam’s Club with memberships they know are expired to try to put something over on the cashier are, in a word, irritating.

I can’t say my day has been that productive, but I did unpack a few boxes of books in my office, flip through the (limited) amount of information I received about my advisees, and start to get the computer in my office pointed in the direction of being functional.

How to calculate the effective size of a 16:9 television when viewing 4:3 material:

effsize = √((diag × 0.654)² + (diag × 0.49)²)

where diag is the diagonal size of your 16:9 television.

For example, the viewing area of a 27-inch 16:9 HDTV is about the same as that of a 22-inch 4:3 television when viewing old-school, non-widescreen material.

Reader exercise: solve for diag to figure out how to replace an existing 4:3 television with a 16:9 one that provides the same viewing area as that TV.

Daniel Drezner is soliciting reader advice on a new job for Atlanta U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney, who lost her primary race this week. Of course, that assumes McKinney doesn’t get her recount.

Reminder to self: specify that I want a Mac Pro on my desk when negotiating my tenure-track contract this fall (with whomever that might be).

I can’t say I’m particularly surprised that Disney has decided to ditch the ‘ABC Sports’ brand in favor of promoting all of its sports programming under the ESPN banner, especially considering that the network’s “Wide World of Sports” theme is more often seen being mocked on Cheap Seats than on ABC proper.

It’s just as well, seeing as the man most people today would identify with ABC Sports, Al Michaels, is now on NBC with John Madden and the network primetime NFL package anyway.

I went to see Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby at the movie theater a stone’s throw from my apartment at the Galleria this afternoon; except for the $6 matinee ticket, and perhaps the relative invisibility of Andy Richter’s role (I think he may have managed one line in the whole film), it was quite enjoyable, and probably more consistently funny than the film it will be inevitably compared with, Farrell’s Anchorman, which I found more “weird” than “humorous.”

For what it’s worth, it seems that the crowd here was rather less turned off than that in “Clerksville” by the more outlandish characteristics of Sacha Baron Cohen’s character.

In this day and age, with increased personal mobility, relying on people to know the local rules and mores is getting a bit outmoded. The most recent case in point is encapsulated in Steven Taylor’s last run-in with the good people protecting the skies from toenail clippers at the Transportation Security Agency:

[I]f they want everyone to remove their shoes, there should be a sign.

Indeed.

I’ve generally lost interest in the whole Duke lacrosse imbroglio, but KC Johnson notes some very interesting developments in the case that reinforce my prior belief that Durham DA Mike Nifong is, as the kids say, “completely full of shit.”

I think I’ve now tracked down most of the books in my study, but I imagine some more will turn up over the coming days, as there are still boxes marked “study” that need to be triaged.

If you’re going to tell me to drag the little icon of your application into my Applications folder… do me a favor and include an alias to Applications in the disk image, so all I have to do is drag the little icon over an inch or so, rather than fooling around in the Go menu and raising and lowering windows to make the drag work right.

My fancy Belkin MediaPilot wireless keyboard doesn’t play nicely with my new USB KVM switch (the Mac handles it OK, but Windows XP doesn’t like it for some reason, alas), so I’m back to using my trusty IBM Active Response Pro keyboard with one of those PS/2-USB adapters.

Frankly, I’m surprised that’s the only real problem I’ve had so far in setting up my computer stuff. I was expecting (knock on wood) to blow out a fuse or three instead.

I now have an appointment to see Brent Schaeffer demolish the Missouri Tigers on September 9th. That is, if Brent can manage to be eligible to play by then…

Update: As Alfie notes in the comments, the Brent Schaeffer era has now commenced in Oxford.

After spending the best part of 3 hours on hold today, I finally found someone who could activate my cable modem in St. Louis.

I know I’m going to just love Charter Communications.