Overtaxed by Polls

Just finished watching Meet the Press, with David Gregory.  He and his guests talked about little else than polls.  Polls that say Obama is winning.  Depressing stuff, except that the good polls, Rasmussen and Gallup, say it's a tie. 
   Thing about polls, is that you gotta weight them.  If you do telephone polling (and all of 'em do) you quickly find out that people who answer their home phones in daytime are mostly retired elderly.  Every one else is at work.  And everyone knows that the retired elderly are conservative and vote Republican.  So they weight the results by what they think the population truly is.  If the pollster thinks the population is 41% Democratic to 34% Republican, he throws out  excess Republican polls until he gets  down to 41% Democrat and 34% Republican.  And so on for what ever other categories ( age, income, whatever) that the pollster wants to correct for. 
   The better pollsters, the ones with a reputation for accuracy that they want to protect,  are pretty good at weighting.  Rasmussen brags that his polls came out within 1% of the actual election results in 2010.  On the other hand, plenty of polls commissioned by politicians and newspapers come out the way the politician or newspaper wants them to.  Pollsters who merely want to get paid, will produce the results their customer wants.  The customer is always right.
    When I see a headline "Some and so is ahead in the polls by 1%" I know the newsie is flimflamming me.  The polls ain't that good.  When it's within 1%, it's a dead heat, no matter what David Gregory calls it.  It's gotta be more like 5 %, and it's gotta stay there for more than a day before I'm gonna believe it's in the bag for anyone.    
  So I look at the Rasmussen and Gallup websites from time to time, and ignore the newsie's poll chatter.
  
  

Peak Leaf Season

It's coming.  Drove over Crawford Notch the other day and a lot of trees have turned.  I still have some green left around the house, and I am pretty high up, so my trees turn a bit earlier than most.  It's pretty colorful already.  I figure by next weekend it will be slightly past peak.

Who makes the most airliners?

Answer, the US and Europe.  The Russians are just about out of the business.  Aeroflot buys western aircraft now.  From Aviation Week we have a few projections of production thru 2021.

Boeing 787     1300 units
Boeing 737     4799 units
Boeing 777     917 units

Airbus 320      5346  units
Airbus 350      817  units

Antonov An148   143 units
Ilyushin  IL-96      12 units
Irkut  MS-21       123 units

Boeing and Airbus plan to crank out thousands of aircraft, where as the Russians are looking at a few hundred aircraft, barely enough to keep their companies alive.

Official Microsoft Antivirus

Microsoft Security Essentials it calls itself.  Came free via Microsoft update.  So I ran it in "full scan mode" overnight.  It reported that it checked 1.8 million things on my hard drive and found seven "threats", all with the name of Java something-or-other.  Upon command it zapped all seven "threats".  It didn't call out tracking cookies as hostile which is nice and keeps blood pressure low among us users.
   My PC survived the experience, so here we have a nice free antivirus scanner.

What's in a name?

In Libya a US consulate was attacked, burned and looted.  The US ambassador and three other Americans were slain. In the real world, this is called an outrage.
   The Obama world has tried to call it a "protest" and "a bump in the road".   Recently they have called it "terrorism".   The TV news is now filled with talking heads discussing "terrorism".   It seems that the exact nomenclature used is full of deep inner meaning offering a clue as to the administration's true thoughts.
  Yeah, right.

Debi Warner for NH State Senate District 1

District 1,  my district is the north country.  All of Coos county right up to the Canadian border, and most of Grafton county.  The senate seat is open, John Gallus, the incumbent, is retiring this year.  Debi Warner of Littleton is running for the seat.  Debi is a personal friend of mine.  She is a fine person, caring, intelligent, and with a superior ability to listen to people.  She is very effective, and has already lobbied a bill thru the state legislature to make your medical records private, and prevent the Attorney General's office from requisitioning them when ever they felt like it.
   We should elect Debi.  She would be a most effective voice for us in the North Country.  To accomplish anything we have to get a majority in the Senate to vote in favor of it.  Debi is a wonderful advocate, able to bring others around to her point of view without baring teeth.  When we need something from Concord, Debi is the best person to get it for us. 

Food fights

First I hear about an epidemic of obesity  among children.  That has been hot for some time.  Then over the weekend  I hear that school children don't like the new healthy school lunches.  Well, no kid has ever had a good thing to say about school food.  Then  we have been hearing about humungous numbers of people going on food stamps.
  Now, this morning, Vermont Public Radio is bewailing the onset of wide spread hunger in Vermont.  A Green Mountain Famine as it were.
Can all this be true at the same time?