as we may blog

I was caught off guard yesterday during a very brief business trip to San Francisco. I haven’t been on a flight in probably twenty years where the pilot bothered to point out the sights below, but the captain of yesterday’s flight did. About halfway through the flight he announced that we had climbed just a little bit and reached our final cruising altitude of 40,000 feet; those of us on the left side of the plane would be able to see Omaha in fifteen minutes; right now we were traveling over northern Iowa.

At that moment I strained to look out the window as best I could from my aisle seat. Fields and crops, a few roads intersecting neatly at 90 degrees. Try as I might, I wasn’t able to identify any river, road, or city looking south, so I wasn’t exactly sure where I was. I thought for a moment about how odd it was to be screaming past family and friends at 600 mph, a tiny speck in the sky if any of them had happened to look up at exactly the right place at exactly the right time. It was a strange, homesick couple of minutes.

For whatever reason I think that I do my clearest thinking on long flights. The suspension of time, that placeless feeling I get when I’m in an airport, being forced to sit for six hours with two hundred strangers, well… it gives me a chance to step back and look at where I am, so to speak. There was no great revelation yesterday, just a few poignant minutes considering the pilot’s words while I watched my old home pass below.

…while Tony enjoys a New York slice

According to two economists studying bandwagon effects in sequential voting systems like the United States’ presidential primary system, “early voters have up to 20 times the influence of late voters in the selection of candidates.” From the abstract:

Candidates experience momentum effects when their performance in early states exceeds expectations. The empirical application focuses on the responses of daily polling data to the release of voting returns in the 2004 presidential primary. We find that Kerry benefited from surprising wins in early states and took votes away from Dean, who held a strong lead prior to the beginning of the primary season. The voting weights implied by the estimated model demonstrate that early voters have up to 20 times the influence of late voters in the selection of candidates, demonstrating a significant departure from the ideal of “one person, one vote.”

A Financial Times blogger defends the use of Iowans for the task of candidate filtering:

Isn’t it irrational for late voters to delegate the decision making to Iowa and New Hampshire? On an individual level, no. My vote is very unlikely to make a difference, so while I may vote because I want to have some skin in the game, or because I feel it’s my duty, I am hardly likely to spend too much time consulting the manifestos. Let Iowans do the hard work.

(link mine)

I’d love to read the full paper. Too bad it costs $5. I’m particularly interested to see how their model explains two recent instances of momentum shift in wide open candidate fields: Bill Clinton’s very poor start in 1992 and Bush’s despicable victory in South Carolina in 2000.

Apologies to the nerds for the Tufte reference.

We’re flying back to the motherland for a whirlwind graduation weekend. I’ll do my best, but posting will be difficult until Tuesday. The good news is that the last two weekends numbed you to the disappointment of a not updated As We May Blog May Blog. You are tough and will survive this.

I’m looking forward to a couple days of fresh air, open spaces, and eatin’ good in the neighborhood.

Have a great weekend y’all.

Now playing: Local H, “Bound for the Floor”

I’m taken back to 2000 or so when Iowa City was abuzz with the news that a MYSTERY BAND would appear at the Union Bar on Thrusday night. The idea was that you paid a $10-ish cover charge, got your beers, and waited around for the unknown to happen. It was, like, the exact opposite of every concert anyone had ever been to!

Presumably (and with the aid of several beers) the false spontaneity of the event would sear memories in your head and you would talk with your buddies about the event in a viral manner.

I didn’t go. But I heard that Local H played and, regrettably, failed to keep it copacetic.