Half Changed World

I’m enjoying the new "genius" playlist on iTunes.  Like the random shuffle, it gets me to listen to things that I forgot I had in my collection, but it doesn’t have the hugely jarring transitions between totally different types of music (or the random spanish language lesson or hypnosis mp3 mixed in).

I haven’t been reading much with ereader, but I think that’s because my test case (Nixonland) is just too dense to read in 100 word increments.  I read all of Little Brother on it, and had no problem with the format.

I stink at Trism, but it’s quite addicting.  I haven’t actually been playing any of the other games that I downloaded.

Somewhere along the way it ate the videos I had on it.  Not quite sure why, but don’t care enough to spend the time required to figure it out.

I spent about half of the weekend working — on a paper about work-life pressures on American workers.

Here’s what I’ve been working on this week:

This is pretty different from the usual way these numbers are presented, which is based on families rather than workers.  (Remember, if half of the families with children have an at-home spouse and the other half is dual income, only 1/3 of the workers will have an at-home spouse.)

For what it’s worth, the furthest back I was able to come up with
roughly comparable numbers for is 1975, when 41.5 percent of the
workforce were parents, and 35 percent of the working parents had an
at-home spouse.

I’d love some feedback on these graphs — what interests you?  Surprises you?  Is the second one too many slices to be easily interpreted?

Update:  I’m responding in the comments. But I also want to register my fury that Microsoft in Excel 2007 has made it impossible to apply patterns to different slices on a pie chart so that you can tell them apart when you print them in black and white.

Update 2: Ok, here’s one that shows part-time vs. full-time.

Via Becca at Not Quite Sure, Jon Stewart nailing people with their own words.

And Roger Simon on Why The Media Should Apologize.

I remember that around 9/11, people were saying that irony was going out of style.  But I don’t know how else we’re supposed to deal with this craziness.

Update:  Oh.  My.  God. I think I have to cry anyway.

For all that I think Sarah Palin would be a terrible president, I do think her nomination puts another dent in the glass ceiling.  Specifically, while there are a few hardliners still arguing that women shouldn’t be in positions of authority, there’s no doubt that the world has changed when Phyllis Schlafly is going around saying that Palin’s experience as a mother will make her a better vice president.  I really do think that the next woman who runs will find it a little bit easier as a result.

Martin Manley comments on the historical nature of this election:

"On the other hand, Clinton, together with Obama and McCain, may have just killed the white male ticket. As
a country, we are having our 56th presidential election, meaning that
about 200 people in American history have had the honor of running for
President or Vice President at the head of a major party ticket (some
have run more than once, some years there have been more than two major
parties). So far as I know, all but one of these candidates has been a white man (the exception is Geraldine Ferraro in 1984). With the nomination of Palin, neither party has fielded a white male ticket. Indeed, thanks to the contestants in this year’s election and the odd way the US selects Vice Presidents, a white male ticket may now be politically untenable.

"Fine."

Looking for some advice…

My team at work is trying to figure out a way to keep track of the huge numbers of statistics and examples that we all run across, and to make them accessible by all members of the team, so we all don’t have to read everything.  There’s a range of comfort levels with technology, and we’re all stretched pretty thin, so it has to be something that can be implemented with a minimum of effort.

I’ve been using Zotero for tracking reports and webpages, but so far, it can’t be shared across a group.  And you have to use Firefox to access it, which I think might be a barrier for some of  my colleagues.  I think a wiki is probably too challenging.  So, what’s the right choice?  Google notebook pages?  Sharepoint?  Any other suggestions?

It was a pretty uneventful first day of school around here.  Both boys are continuing at the same schools (preschool in N’s case) that they attended last year, so there was relatively little drama.  And the school bus even showed up on time.

It was an odd feeling for me to be standing around at the "parents’ coffee" at N’s preschool, looking at the teary-eyed parents of the younger children, and realizing that this is our last year of preschool. 

Some of my previous posts on the topic:

• 2004
• 2005
• 2006 and follow-up
• Much to my surprise, I seem not to have posted on the first day of school last year.  But I did write about the first PTA meeting of the year.

In response to my initial post about Palin, Beth posted a comment questioning her judgment as the mother of a child with Down syndrome choosing to take on the responsibilities of being VP.  I wasn’t particularly swayed by that argument — for one thing, I suspect that the day-to-day responsibilites of being VP are probably less than those of being Governor of Alaska.  Not to mention that with the employment opportunities for oil field workers being somewhat limited in the greater DC area, her husband would probably wind being available for parenting duties more or less full time.  (I’ve heard some people say he’s already doing the SAHD thing now, on leave from his other jobs, but haven’t read anything authoritative.)  I did wonder a little about the time/travel involved with campaigning, but was planning on ending with a somewhat smug comment about basically trusting people to make good decisions about their families.

I’m feeling less smug and more judgmental today.  Not because Palin’s teenage daughter is pregnant, but because, knowing that her daughter was pregnant, she accepted the VP nomination, and the media frenzy that goes with it.  And that seems like a pretty crappy thing to do to a teenager who is already in a stressful situation.

Does that change my vote?  Not in the least — I was never going to vote for McCain.  But it does make me think somewhat less of Palin as a person.  And it makes me eat a little crow about my claim not to judge other people’s parenting.

I keep checking the NOAA tracking page for Gustav.  I’m not sure what I’m expecting to change — it might weaken a bit, but it’s unlikely to veer off into the Atlantic.

They’re doing a lot of things right this time around that were screwed up for Katrina– ordering an evacuation early, providing buses for those who don’t have cars.  We’re pretty good at defending against the last threat — that’s why security is so good on airplanes, and so bad on subways or container ships.  Which makes me wonder what we’re still missing.

Perhaps more fundamentally, if Gustav hits near New Orleans and the levees don’t hold, it’s hard to imagine people coming back to rebuild again.

Some reactions to Sarah Palin for VP.

First, I have to say that my dad suggested that McCain would pick Palin over a month ago.  I thought he was nuts.

Second, this choice clearly succeeded in changing the political conversation from being about Obama’s speech.

Third, I don’t know if it will make any difference to the election.  In general, very few people vote based on the VP choice.  It will make the Christian right more eager to get up on a wet November morning, but might scare some folks on the fence who worry that McCain’s VP might actually wind up in the Oval Office in the next four years.  It might win some Hillary voters, but will piss off others who see it as meaning that McCain thinks they’re stupid (or that she’s a younger and less qualified woman getting what they fought for).

Fourth, I don’t think she’s qualified to be President.  But I’m not sure she’s that much less qualified than, say, Mitt Romney.  He was Governor of Massachusetts for 4 years; she’s been Governor of Alaska for 2 years.  He’s got more business experience; she’s got more local government experience.  And even the people who like Romney’s politics think he’s plastic, while by all accounts she’s quite real and is very popular in her state.