Jason Griffey

In a post on election day, I suggested that we put Bruce Schneier in charge of the national election process here in the US. His recent post on why electronic voting is currently broken, and how to fix it, is among the most succinct I’ve ever read. Here’s a sample:

We need to start treating voting software like we treat any other high-reliability system. The auditing that is conducted on slot machine software in the U.S. is significantly more meticulous than what is done to voting software. The development process for mission-critical airplane software makes voting software look like a slapdash affair. If we care about the integrity of our elections, this has to change.

He breaks down the issues with voting in general, the specifics in regards to electronic voting, and makes suggestions on how we can improve said e-voting in the future (since it is apparent that we will be headed that direction whether or not it’s best). He says that everything comes down, more or less, to two propositions:

1. We need paper trails for audit purposes.
2. The software in question must be open source.

No surprises here…now can we make it happen?

I don’t have any idea what this is, but I want one. The video is amazing…

The Animaris Rhinoceros Transport is a type of animal with a steel skeleton and a polyester skin. It looks as if there is a thick layer of sand coating the animal. It weighes 2. tons, but can be set into motion by one person. It stands 4.70 meters tall. Because of its height it catches enough wind to start moving.

Cobb County, GA is at the center of a court case testing, again, how to deal with evolution in high school science textbooks. A sticker was placed in all science textbooks in the county stating:

“This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered.”

While I will actually agree that the sticker doesn’t present any actual falsehoods, evolution is certainly just about the closest thing to a fact we’ve got in science these days. No respected scientist believes anything else…so why the sticker? Cue the fundies:

The first witness, parent Marjorie Rogers, started the drive to put the stickers in the books. She said it was only fair to put a small disclaimer in a textbook where religious-based ideas about the origin of life are not mentioned.

“I don’t want the Bible taught in the classroom. But there is a wealth of science that would support intelligent design, and that is not taught,” she said. “There should be a marketplace of ideas.”

Guess what, Marjorie…scientific inquiry is the original marketplace of ideas. “Intelligent Design” lost. There’s absolutely nothing “intelligent” about it…nor scientific. Evolutionary theory is the way that life has speciated on Earth. Get used to it. But I fear that with the new political climate we might just see some of these typically rational judgements go the other way…welcome to Jesusland!

• Lesson One: An untimely reboot will cause write errors.
• Lesson Two: Said write errors, if they occur on the account info of Windows XP, are bad.
• Lesson Three: Being unable to read any account info, Windows XP will happily blue screen and reboot, only to repeat that process forever.
• Lesson Four: Even after editing the password file with a Linux boot disk in hopes of fixing the corruption…no dice.
• Lesson Five: Backup your data, boys and girls. Early and often. Luckily I only lost a handful of files, and spent only most of a weekend reinstalling everything.

Here’s a site that just gets creepy right. Make sure you read all the way through…esp. to the related characters blogs.

The Dionaea House.

I originally read this quote somewhere, and just found the article that it was from. After the results of this election, this scares me more than ever.

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

October 17, 2004, New York Times Magazine, Without a Doubt – By RON SUSKIND

FURTHER EDIT: For those of us who have joked about expat’ing, CNN says that you’ll have quite a wait to get into Canada.

Canadian officials made clear on Wednesday that any U.S. citizens so fed up with Bush that they want to make a fresh start up north would have to stand in line like any other would-be immigrants — a wait that can take up to a year.

EDIT: Kerry calls to concede.

And so it comes down, as many thought, to Ohio. 135,000 votes seperate the two in that state, with estimates of 125,000 to 170,000 provisional votes in question.

So, unless there is some amazing percentage of provisional voters that went for Kerry, it appears that Bush will come away with the 20 Electoral Votes from Ohio, and thus the presidency.

In addition, the Republican party came away with a majority in both the Senate and House of Representatives and picked off Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle.

I am, quite frankly, speechless. Especially in the South, the Republican party just destroyed the Democratic party in nearly every race. The Republican Party has done such a good job in appealing to the “single issue” voters (Abortion, Gun Control, the Religious Right, Gay Marriage) that seemingly people in the rural south don’t seem to understand that George Bush, his cabinet, and the entire National Republican Party hates their guts. They must, to have so royally screwed them economically for the last 4 years.

More as the day goes on.

I expect that there will be much, much excitement around the country today. We’ve already had a reporter beaten up by police, voters not given the choice of a paper ballot, and a documented hard-crash of an electronic voting machine, Among other issues.

I don’t really expect any voting issues at Sewanee Elementary School when I go to vote later today, but I know that in certain parts of the country there have been issues that should lead people to think that an overhaul may be necessary to our antiquated and overburdened system of voting. What’s the answer? I have no idea…the issues of ease of voting and security often are at odds. With voting in the US, you have the standard security issues of Authentication and Verification. How to reconcile those with ease of use is a difficult problem. I say we hire Bruce Schneier and set him to the problem.

In any case, we’ve invited over a few friends, and I expect we’ll be up late watching returns and hoping beyond hope that Kerry will pull out an upset in OH or PA. If not, and Bush wins, does anyone know a comfy country for an expat Spanish professor and her reference librarian husband?