So I stayed up for the Great Debate

Well, it went off.  Nobody imploded on stage.  Romney looked and sounded good.  Jim Lehrer moderated and just asked the questions and then let the candidates speak to them, which is good.  No new ideas were presented.  But they did speak to the issue, the economy, and kept the discussion on an adult level, and didn't wander off into trivialities. 
Good show.
We will see if it influences the polls.

Air Strikes won't work says Aviation Week

Long illustrated article discusses the Iranian situation in depth.  The writers conclude that the Iranian nuclear facilities are too deeply buried to be damaged by bombing.  Even by USAF, let alone the Israeli Air Force. Unless nukes were used.  USAF won't use nukes and we are pretty sure the Israelis won't either.  The article did say that the Stuxnet computer virus slowed the Iranians down by five years, but that won't work again the article says.  The Iranians are constructing a secure network and taking their computers off the public Internet. 
  Of course, Stuxnet wasn't spread via the Internet.  Stuxnet was put on flash drives, and they scattered a few infected flash drives around the parking lots outside Iranian nuclear facilities.  Sharp eyed workers would spot the flashdrives lying on the asphalt, pick them up and take them in to their cubicles.  When they plugged them into their computers, Stuxnet would load itself into RAM and go to work.  No Internet access required for infection.

Frank and Robot, Depressing movie

Youngest son dragged me over to the Colonial to see this flick last night.  Frank, retired old codger, has grown children who worry about his health.  Frank has been letting things go, like the dishes, hair cuts, picking up, housework in general.  It's unattractive. 
  So the children buy Frank a household robot.  It cleans and cooks and sweeps and urges Frank to eat healthy and go on low sodium diets and yadda yadda.  Somehow Frank, wily old codger who used to be a cat burglar, talks the gullible robot into becoming his assistant on a few burglary jobs around the town.  "Just to keep his hand in". 
  It's cute, and there are some good lines, but speaking as a guy approaching old codgerhood, I found it depressing.  Frank is at end of life, alone, with nothing to do.  His children are unattractive, deeply into trendy unproductivenesses, and no grandchildren.  It's so bad that Frank develops a father-son relationship with the robot. 
   Depressing movie. 

What is it with Democrats and Tax Hikes?

Democrats want tax hikes.  It's their holy grail.  Obama keeps talking about the need for more taxes.  ("a balanced approach") So do Anne Kuster, Maggie Hassan, NHPR, and Carol Shea Porter.  David Gregory offered a 10 for one deal, "For each dollar of tax hike you Republicans give us, we will give you 9 dollars of spending cuts."  Real bipartisan that is.
   As far as Democrats are concerned, original sin is refusal to hike taxes.  They beat on Republicans about this all the time.
   And the electorate must have some kinda death wish, they keep on electing democrats. 

Refrigerator patents

According to the Wall St Journal, Whirlpool and LG settled their patent suits over household refrigerators yesterday.  Wow.  The household refrigerator was invented a hundred years ago.  You would think the patents had expired by now.  Ingenious lawyers, aided and abetted by the ever helpful US Patent Office, have managed to bill yet more hours over trivia. 
  The last go round was over "the concept of a refrigerator dispenser with an extendable tray and water spigot".  And that idea really really deserved a patent because it was not obvious to any housewife, let alone someone "skilled in the art".
   We could get the economy moving again except every time someone puts a product on the market they get sued by patent trolls.  There is nothing new about refrigerators.

Leaf Season

Leaves beginning to turn in Crawford Notch (just north of North Conway).  Took this pix on Thursday. 

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.