On the Alaska Special election

OK, I promised to revisit this, so here I am revisiting this.

Alaska’s current system is as follows:

The “primary” is an at-large race with all candidates on one ballot, irrespective of party. Voters get a single vote. All but the top four candidates are eliminated. Then, in the “general”, voters rank choice the top four candidates, and the ranked choice ballots are tabluated by reassigning the votes of the last place candidate down their rank order.

Primary results:
Palin 27.1
Beigich 19.1
Gross 12.8
Peltola 10.1
Sweeney 5.9

First round ranked choice:
Peltola 40.2
Palin 31.3
Beigich 28.5

Second round ranked choice:
Peltola 51.5
Palin 48.5

Doing the math on the totals showed the Beigich vote broke
50.3 Palin, 28.7 Peltola,, 21.0 No one

But, looking at these results, you might immediately ask “what about Al Gross?”

He did qualify for the second round, but being a Democratically aligned independent, opted instead to drop out. What would happen if he had stayed in? Let’s just scale up the top four from the first round so that the sum total is 100%

Primary with only top four:

Palin 39.2
Beigich 27.6
Gross 18.5
Peltola 14.6


These totals still look badly out of line with the first round results, with Palin doing better, and Gross + Peltola doing much worse than Peltola did in the first round. It is pretty well documented that, since the primary, the Dobbs decision and all of the Democratic congressional legislative successes happened, and Democrats, across the board, are doing better than they were two months ago. To account for this, I’m going to go and make the Gross + Peltola total match the Peltola total and the Palin + Beigich total match it’s actual result. I’m also going to flip Peltola’s and Gross’s position in the general, both for a better apples to apples comparison with the real result, and assuming that “Dobbs momentum” would have broken toward a pro-choice woman

First Round General, with gross, rescaled to match real general

Palin 35.1
Beigich 24.7
Peltola 22.5
Gross 17.7

Now, this is the key point. How the ranked choice breaks down depends a lot on how those Al Gross votes break. If they 100% all go to Peltola, then Peltola goes to first place in the second round, and we play out the same result. But what happens if they do something like break something like 70% for Peltola, 20% for Beigich, and the rest spoiled?

Second round general, after gross votes break
Palin 35.1
Peltola 34.9
Beigich 28.24

apply the same fraction vote break to Beigich from the real first round, and rescaling to 100 to account for the spoiled ballots:

Third round general, hypothetical
Palin 52.9
Peltola 47.1

There are a lot of hypotheticals in this arrangement, and this is not meant to be a demonstration of “this is definitely how the race would have turned out”, but the key point here is that the outcome ranked ordered balloting depends a lot on the order in which candidates are eliminated from the ballot, and it opens up races to strategic decisionmaking. Here, the decision by Al Gross to drop out of the election is critically important. We got to this conclusion by making not-wild assumptions.

Also, none of this is to discount the accomplishement Peltola made. Here, we handwaved the real campaigning and work that was done as “Dobbs momentum”, but that’s almost certainly only half of the story. I’m not trying to talk about her real campaign and real victory, but just trying to demonstrate how ranked-order balloting can play out, and how important strategic concerns and party coordination remain in these systems.

Thank you for reading.

On Alcubierre Warp Drives

OK, I’ve read this article that I’ve been asked about a few times now.


Background (general relativity):
There is a hard limit to speeds that objects can take in special relativity that generalizes to general relativity. This is the famous “you can’t go faster than the speed of light” claim, which, I’d argue, in the case of travel over distances small compared to the curvature of space, is really kind of closer to “moving faster than light doesn’t MEAN anything, it’s a non-concept”


General relativity, however, offers a loophole. Since spacetime is curved, and the curvature can be time-dependent, you can create various schemes where you are basically “surfing” in spacetime, and appear to have travelled faster than light to distant observers. Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre worked out one particular exact solution to Einstein’s equation, the fundamental equaiton of general relativity, that allows motion like this.


There are several naïve problems with directly applying this “Alcubierre warp bubble” solution though:

  1. The model requires a matter distribution that has a negative energy density, and this is not known to exist
  2. The amount of negative energy required in order to safely transport a human with the Alcubierre geometry is something like “negative one times the mass of Jupiter”
  3. While the particular Alcubierre geometry does not allow the warp bubble to stop, slow down, or turn, if you allowed these features, it would inevitably enable time travel, grandfather paradoxes and the like. Which, basically ruins the predictability of physics

For these reasons, most physicists have believed Alcubierre-style drives to be unbuildable, in principle. Enter the above cited article.

Background (quantum field theory):

OK, so, the other half of prerequisite to understanding this article is understanding what the Casimir effect is. The real ground basis here is that in quantum mechanics, systems tend to have what is called a “ground state energy.” Most famously, this is represented by the 1s orbital of the electron in a hydrogen atom from chemistry class — the electron can go to this energy level, but it can go no lower in a hydrogen atom. Most quantum mechanical systems with finite energy have some sort of “lowest possible” energy. When you do quantum field theory for the first time, though, you find that you have to treat every point in space like it is a “bound system” in a particular mathematical way that is beyond the scope of this article. This results in an infinite energy for spacetime called the “vacuum energy”. Current QFT frameworks basically sweep this away and say “the only meaningful energies are differences with this vacuum energy,” and then go on with their lives.

Henrik Casimir, however, came up with a clever way of poking the vacuum, so to speak. He realized that if you took two metal conducting plates, you would change the number of possible states available to the system in between the two plates in a way that depended on the distance between them. In particular, you’d end up removing states available to the system, which would mean, basically, that there would be vacuum energies not accessible between the plates — it would look like the energy density between the two plates was, in fact, less than the vacuum energy. He then showed that the plates would exert a force on each other due to this effect. This force was later measured.

The White, et. al. article

So, the above article got published a few days ago. The takeaway of the article in the popular press is “we built a tiny warp bubble.” I believe this claim to be wildly misleading at worst, and missing several Jupiter-sized caveats at best. Here is the basic argument in the paper:

  1. We have come up with a novel way of computing the Casimir negative energy density in a system of many, arbitrarily shaped plates
  2. We have developed a particular geometry of plates such that they create a “negative energy density” that matches the negative energy density required to create an Alcubierre metric
  3. Therefore, we have made a very small warp bubble

But, notice what was left out of the above argument:

  1. Any real evidence that “negative energy relative to the QFT vacuum” really means the same thing as “negative energy in General relativity”. In particular, there is no measurement of gravitational effects of Casimir cavities and a demonstration that they are, in fact, negative matter distributions. Note how different the above two approaches are. It is not obvious that they are equivalent.
  2. Any measurement of superluminal effects, or even an assertion that they are there.
  3. Any analysis of the motion of particles under the influence Alcubierre metric beyond just a naïve matching of the energy density functions

I’d argue that these points are most of the connection that one would have to make between “There is a Casimir force” and “I have a warp bubble,” and I will go back to my claim that the linked article is wildly premature in it’s claims at best.

Errata (edit):

I should note that there are reasonable arguments to believe that the Casimir cavity is not a negative energy density per GR. For one thing, the relationship between vacuum energy and the cosmological constant, which would follow from just treating vacuum energy as “gr mass-energy” has famously produced “physics’s worst prediction” (namely, that the cosmological constant is less than 1/10^100 the size that it “should” be). There is almost certainly more complexity there than just saing “A = B” and calling it a day.

Similarly, someone reading the above might think about “negative mass”, and think “antimatter”, but that is not correct. Antimatter has positive mass for the purposes of general relativity (easy way to see this, a photon can decay to an electron and a positron, but the photon gravitated with a positive mass-energy, so the products have to too, they don’t just cancel). General relativity couples to the four-momentum of matter, and the four-momentum of matter is conserved in decays in quantum field theory.

My court packing scheme

If the Barrett nomination goes through and the Democrats subsequently get the trifecta, this would be my response:

  1. Pass a bill that expands the supreme court to 11 justices, name two appointees
  2. Propose a constitutional amendment that:
    1. Sets the court at nine justices permanently
    2. Sets the tenure of a justice to 18 years, nonrenewable, with one expiring every two years, in feburary of odd years
    3. Retires existing SC justices in inverse order of tenure (so, Thomas, Breyer, Roberts, Alito, Kagan, Sotomoyor, Gorsuch
    4. States that if an appointee to any federal office is not voted on in six months, the senate will have been considered to have waived its right to advise and consent, and the appointee takes their office

If the republican state legislatures want to live with the court packing scheme, they would get to. But if they want to repeal it, this amendment gives them a path to repeal the court packing scheme and replace it with a sustainable and fair way of dealing with the problem — every president gets two appointees, the senate majority leader doesn’t get a pocket veto, and there is no more waiting for 85 year olds to die as a structural part of our system of government.

It’s not enough to retaliate against abuses. Make structural changes that make future abuses of the same type impossible.

On “the magical founders”

In response to Barrett, a pretty great op-ed in the NYT.

This is the main point I’ve ever harped on with the “Originalism” thing. The equal protection clause of the 14th amendment fundamentally changes the entire constitution. it touches every word that comes before it. To talk about the “original public meaning” of, say, the bill of rights without discussing how this was changed by the 14th amendment is to be utterly and completely full of shit, IMO.

There are many toxic stews that exist in American’s heads, good and bad, and one of them is this thought of the Founders as Lycurgus, giving us this perfect, unimprovable system validated by their deep and infinite wisdom, rather than politicians working within the political constraints of their era, that created a deeply unstable young country that outright fell apart within 80 years of its founding. In the context of the 1790s, you can certainly point to some accomplishments (and egregious failings), but in order to do that, you have to be willing to see that what was passed down from that era, with the aid of retrospect, was not perfect for their time, much less from ours.

And when you interpret the constitution, you have to not only factor in the original document, but the leanred wisdom that came from generations that came after 1790, and saw that the system was deeply flawed, and had to be changed. And that those people didn’t get it right, either.

Proportional Representation, a mini-essay

You want to abolish “the two party system”?
What you shouldn’t care that much about is IRV for President, instead, what you should want is proportional representation for the house.

  • What is proportional representation, you say?
    It’s a system where you work to make sure that the representation of parties in the legislature is proportional to their representation in the population.
  • How do you do this?
    The two most common ways are the Single Transferrable Vote and Party Lists.
  • So, tell me about Party Lists, then?
    In a party list system, you break up the population into large districts that do not redistrict. Many representatives (or MPs, as they are referred to in Parliamentary systems) are elected per district. The census just changes the number of representatives in each district. At election time, each party publishes an ordered list of candidates. If a district has 10 seats, then a party that gets 40% of the vote gets four seats, and the first four people on their list are elected. Some versions of this system will have rules that create some minimum amount of the vote required to hold one seat.
  • OK, what is this Single Transferrable vote thing?
    Same idea with the multimember districts, but now, voters publish a ranked ordered list for the candidates, like in the IRV proposals. But now, the idea is that you are electing more than one candidate for that district, with the goal of guaranteeing that everyone’s vote goes toward electing *someone* (as in, to balance the “My vote never counts because I’m a democrat in a 90% republican district” error with the “My vote never counts because I’m a republican in a 90% republican district” error) so:
    1. First, any candidate getting more than (100%/number of reps in districts +1) of the vote is elected.
    2. Now, eliminate the last place candidate, and reassign their second place votes to non-winning candidates. Also, take the second place choices of winning candidates beyond the winning threshhold (if it took candidate X 25 votes to win, but they got 39 votes, take 14 votes for the first place candidates and assign them to second choices)
    3. repeat until all seats are filled
  • What is the advantage of these?
    The big one is that they give geographically dispersed minority groups a chance to get representation without weird gerrymanders. If you made California into a single district and elected its house members with a list system, there would probably be Greens and Libertarians seated in Congress right now. The other thing is that they get much closer to “every vote matters”. If there are no longer any 85% districts, and it actually matters whether one party gets 5% more of the vote, then all parties have to stop neglecting any winnable votes. If you need only 1/10 of the vote to elect one out of ten represenatives (in either STV or List), that can be a lot more attainable than having 50% of the vote in a given district. Also, of course, you deal with the “Nader effect” stuff, which is actually more pronounced in countries like Canada and the UK, which have 4-5 major parties, but still use single member districting (ex: anti-Brexit parties actually won a larger vote share than pro-Brexit parties in the 2019 UK general election, despite the overwhelming Conservative win in terms of number of seats). But to me, the main thing is that you really fix both problems with gerrymandering and with having to draw minority-majority districts in robust ways that are difficult to re-break. And with that latter issue, you simultaneously solve the “if you draw a minority-majority district, you further dilute the minority vote elsewhere” issue.
  • Ok, disadvantages, then?
    It can often lead to the spread of a large number of fringey parties. If you need a small dedicated population ONLY to get elected, then you can open the floodgates to some small groups. Examples of this are the Netherlands (there is literally a “people over 65 party”) and Israel (a bunch of parties representing extreme-Orthodox groups have wedged into parliament and had a lot to do with the harsh tenor of post-Barak Israeli politics). I would say that these examples are actually blunted in their downsides in a US context, relative to Parliamentary systems, because the President is independently elected from Congress, unlike the Prime Minister, who is elected by Parliament, so “fractured parties having to work together with shifting coalitions” may be a feature rather than a bug.
  • Disadvantages to the specific forms listed above?
    Well, the Single Transferrable Vote gets pretty unwieldy once you get more than 5 candidates per district — 5 seats x 5 parties = 25 major candidates, so you’re asking voters to rank-choice to 25th place or more, that said, it does give a lot more control to voters about who they want in office, with the fine detail that is given at the ballot. Also, tabulation of results is obviously super complicated mathematically, so there can be a bit of a disconnect between “my vote” and “what my vote means”. A lot of Americans would probably find the central role that List systems give to parties disconcerting, no matter how much Americans view politics in VERY party-centered ways, anyway.

Anyway, that’s my argument. You get many more benefits out of proportional representation for congress than the simple “I want to vote for Nader, but I want to elect gore” arguments for IRV at the presidential level. Thank you for reading through my rant.

Still here, still heartbroken

There’s not a lot to say in this endless isolation. I have an immunocompromised partner, so we’re on strict lockdown through this whole thing. While we wait it out, the situation outside seems to deteriorate more and more. I work my job, I excersise, I pay attention to my loved ones, I donate money to causes, I make calls, rinse repeat. It’s hard to keep up with people because even small talk is kind of impossible in the bottomless sea of sameness and despair at the world.

And it’s hard to feel bad about myself, because my situation is SO EASY compared to what everyone else is going through. I have a job, I’m not sequestered alone. I’m basically fine. All I can do is keep an eye out to help those that need help and try to do my part to fight back this tidal wave of racism, anger, callousness, and rage, and try to see to it that when we come out the other side of this, it will be into a realigned world.

If you’re still trailing along and reading this, thank you, and miss you. ❤

Everyone is wronged, and everyone is the asshole

So, sequestration hasn’t been especially great on my mental health — all of my self-soothing techniques to deal with depression have pretty much been short circuited, but at least I’m not living alone and in a stable and loving situation. I think we’ve all adjusted into this thing, and I’m doing well enough…

But I’m so worried about everyone else. I’m still on a small, select number of facebook groups, and one of them had a good old classic explosion the other day, and it’s still going on. Some of it is legitimate grievances and disagreements that have been brewing, but at the same time, any willingness to give patience and the benefit of the doubt is just straight out the window. And it’s completely understandable. We are all stressed, we all have a viewpoint, and none of us have the benefit of those mirror neurons anymore.

And the thing is, before all of this happened, social media, globally, had become a cesspool where meaningful conversation was straight impossible. The days of “lj drama” look positively idyllic compared to today. It was enough to force my migration here before coronavirus was a household name. I feel that, when we’re all done with this sequestration, the damage done by an unfiltered social media world will be hard to even start to assess.

On rules

So, this is a thing I’ve been thinking about a lot. We all talk a lot of big games about corruption, “bought” public figures, sell-outs, lobbyists, money in politics, and the like. But what I see precious little of is any suggestion of what the new rules should be to root out those things. There seems to be a persistent belief, really amongst both conservatives and leftists, that if you simply put non-corrupt people in power, it all will magically dissipate. Hence why conservative activists can listen to yells to “drain the swamp” without seeing the shallowness of a complete lack of any attempt whatsoever to address problems of corruption, any reforms to the public service, anything. Because, to them, it’s not about rooting out corruption, it is about having someone *on their side* shaming people they *personally don’t like*.

But I’m not really hear to rag on conservatives, though the Trump era makes that simple. I’m here to talk about what changes to laws, procedure and practices should be made to deal with corrupt practices. Without new processes to hold leaders accountable, any yelling about “corruption” is a dead leader, no matter how saintly your leader is. So, below is a non-exhaustive list of the things that your sweetiepoo thinks contribute to our broken, corrupt culture of politics:

  1. The worst is our general, total state of dysfunction with unearned veto points. It isn’t even close to enough that something has the support of two congressional committees, the full house, the full senate, and the President, it needs the approval of the leaders of both houses to even reach a vote in those houses, and it has to pass through a filibuster in the senate. The most basic of reforms would say that you should at least streamline that some, because at any of those points, typically the least public one, interests can step in and block issues from taking the floor, and you can run into crap like McConnell’s categorical blocking of judicial appointments during the Obama adminstration (btw, you could kill both the “it takes too long for anything to go through the courts” and the “Trump and McConnell have illegitimately stolen the federal judiciary” birds with one stone — create new federal judgeships equal in number to the pending nominations Obama had on Jan 20, 2017.)
  2. Similarly, the revolving door crap has to end. A simple ban on any sort of paid work doing political advocacy or lobbying for anyone who has been at a high level of government is just common sense. If that “reduces the quality of people running for office”, I scoff at you. There are legions of exceptional goddamned people working in obscurity without the hope or desire for a high-paying management consulting or lobbyist job. One could also argue that this is hard to define, but a working definition could come
  3. People who make decisions about the economy should not be allowed to hold stocks or run businesses. All personal assets should be mandatorily put into a blind trust, by any high official, be they high level executive agents, the President, Congressmen, or Supreme Court Justices
  4. Any direct dispute between congress and the executive should be in the original jurisdiction of the supreme court and entitled to a speedy decision. The court system is not a way to filibuster arbitrary executive actions until any court decision on them becomes moot.

There are many more other ideas that one could propose. But it’s lazy and dumb to yell about corruption and abuse of power, or to expect it to just go away when someone you like is around. There have to be actual, real rules to constrain behavior, and real consequences when the rules are broken, or it’s all just talk. I don’t have the answers, but I do know that we collectively need to be thinking about the answers.

I liked “The Rise of Skywalker”

There, I said it. It was a lot of blatant attempts at emotional manipulation, and a lot of direct callouts to various complaints over the years, and a lot of the plotting straight up didn’t make sense.

But it’s more “this really could have used a lot more editing” than it was “this was horrible.” But the thing had a much better sendoff for Luke than “The Last Jedi”, and Rey’s arc was great. I will say that I’m a sucker for two plot elements, though:

  1. Unexpected help showing up until it is absolutely most needed
  2. Being terrified that the thing that makes you special is your downfall

So hey, here I am, the cat that knows that its strings are being pulled with the laser pointer, but still wants to chase the fucking dot.

Back in St. Louis

Back home visiting my parents. There was snow on the ground as I drove through all of the old places that the me who existed in high school drove through.It’s been a bit of a spell since I’ve been back here, and I still have a lot of anger built up around not being out (at least my version of out), about all of the things I’ve kind of choked back over the past two decades I’ve been on my own, and really, an especially nasty fight I had with my parents about the election in 2016. They claimed blackout over it, and I believe them, but it doesn’t really do much to block out dealing with those words and where to go from there.

I don’t hear much pressure about grandchildren anymore, but hey, having the “I’m very possibly sterile” conversation with them would be… a doozy too.

But here we are, all of the themes of connection and intimacy showing up again, but here it is about something damaged from when I was younger. I can’t tell if I’ve just gotten old or cold, or if paths have just diverged so much. Or maybe I just need to try harder. I don’t know. I’m glad I’m up here, I do feel like I’m accomplishing something, but, it’s hard too.