Over at Forbes.com -- not exactly a bastion of left-wing thought -- Bruce Bartlett looks at what Tea Party protesters actually know about the taxes they're protesting. The answer, which will probably not surprise you, is "not much".

In short, no matter how one slices the data, the Tea Party crowd appears to believe that federal taxes are very considerably higher than they actually are, whether referring to total taxes as a share of GDP or in terms of the taxes paid by a typical family.

Tea Partyers also seem to have a very distorted view of the direction of federal taxes. They were asked whether they are higher, lower or the same as when Barack Obama was inaugurated last year. More than two-thirds thought that taxes are higher today, and only 4% thought they were lower; the rest said they are the same.

As noted earlier, federal taxes are very considerably lower by every measure since Obama became president....

It's hard to explain this divergence between perception and reality. Perhaps these people haven't calculated their tax returns for 2009 yet and simply don't know what they owe. Or perhaps they just assume that because a Democrat is president that taxes must have gone up, because that's what Republicans say that Democrats always do. In fact, there hasn't been a federal tax increase of any significance in this country since 1993.

This is a topic that's come up several times over the years on the Karate CyberDojo: in the classic karate punch, the hand moves from the chambered position, with the fist palm-up at the hip or beside to chest, out to the target, turning over so that at the end of the motion the palm is down. It is important to maintain proper body alignment throughout the movement, but I think many karateka do not understand the alignment of the elbow and shoulder here. This is from a post I made to the CyberDojo today:

Put your arm straight out in front of you, palm up, point of the elbow down. There are two motions you can make to turn your palm down:

1) Keeping the upper arm in place, rotate just the forearm -- "pronation of the forearm at the radioulnar joint", to get anatomically geeky about it. The shoulder doesn't move, nor does the elbow. If you bend your elbow after this rotation, your hand moves upward. This is, I think, the "correct" movement.

2) Allowing the upper arm to move, rotate the entire arm from the shoulder -- "medial rotation of the shoulder at the glenohumeral joint". As you do this, the elbow moves up and out (superiorly and laterally) away from your center line. If you bend your elbow after this rotation, your hand moves medially, toward your center line. This is the "incorrect" movement, because it puts the shoulder in a weaker position and moves the elbow out of line.

Of course we're not robots that move only one joint, and I think we all have a little bit of movement 2; trying not to move the shoulder at all probably is counter-productive. But most of the motion to turn the fist over should be movement 1, at the forearm.

This lab report from a frustrated physics major reminds me all too much of my own lab work, before I gave up on my foolish notions of attempting a double physics/CS degree and decided to just major in hacking. (I especially remember optics lab. My data disproved every principle of the field...)

Abstract: The exponential dependence of resistivity on temperature in germanium is found to be a great big lie. My careful theoretical modeling and painstaking experimentation reveal 1) that my equipment is crap, as are all the available texts on the subject and 2) that this whole exercise was a complete waste of my time.

...

Results

Check this shit out (Fig. 1). That's bonafide, 100%-real data, my friends. I took it myself over the course of two weeks. And this was not a leisurely two weeks, either; I busted my ass day and night in order to provide you with nothing but the best data possible. Now, let's look a bit more closely at this data, remembering that it is absolutely first-rate. Do you see the exponential dependence? I sure don't. I see a bunch of crap.

However, his conclusion that "I should've declared CS. I still wouldn't have any women, but at least I'd be rolling in cash." might have been true in the dot-com boom, but sadly not so much any more, with more and more software jobs being sent overseas.

Zelda's Inferno exercise: write about spring, in a triolet form: (ABaAabAB pattern)

the grass was brown but now is turning green
each passing day the sunlight shines longer
on trees the buds of blossoms can be seen
the grass was brown but now is turning green
open the window, let air through the screen
now the pulse of life is growing stronger
the grass was brown but now is turning green
each passing day the sunlight shines longer

Joe Gans was the first black American to win a world boxing title. He was the lightweight boxing champion from 1902 to 1904 and 1906 to 1908 -- and many boxing historians claim he actually held the title straight through 1902 to 1908. (The records are not clear.) The 1906 fight in which he defended or regained the title went for 42 rounds!

H.L. Mencken called him "probably the greatest boxer who ever lived"; Jack Johnson (the boxer, not the musician) said Gans moved around the ring "like he's on wheels up there." Madison Square Garden has a statue of him, and there's a painting of him in The National Gallery of Art.

(110-year-old film footage of Gans most controversial fight, in which it's alleged he took a dive, is on YouTube.)

But Gans has largely been forgotten, even in his native Baltimore. Baltimore's City Paper covers Kevin Grace's attempt to rectify the historical injustice a bit:

As the 100th anniversary of Gans' death on Aug. 10, 1910, approaches, some fans and boxing historians are trying to resurrect his story. A Gans biography came out in 2008 and another is set for release in the next year or two. At least one screenplay is looking for a home, and rumors are afoot about a documentary film. But Joe Gans' most vocal booster isn't a writer or a filmmaker or even much of a boxing fan. He works in ground operations for Southwest Airlines at BWI.

...

And so began his campaign to resurrect the boxer's legacy. For months, Grace made phone calls, filed papers, knocked on doors, and leveraged friendships in the hopes of waking Baltimore--and the world--up to Joe Gans. He sought support from local boxers, City Council members, and community organizations; learned the bureaucratic channels that lead to street namings and city sculptures; and put together a short documentary about Gans to accompany his pitch. He had business cards made for the Friends of Joe Gans, an organization with a membership of one. He dreamed of grand gestures like a commemorative stamp, a statue, historical markers, and an honorary street naming. Grace is matter-of-fact about his unusual dedication. "I don't have a vested interest," he says. "I'm just a concerned citizen, and if I don't do it, nobody will."

So I just bought a tailcoat on eBay. Why? Because I'm going to the prom! The Nationwide Equality Prom, "Dress You Up In My Love," that is.

Constance McMillen just wanted to go to the prom with her girlfriend. Rather than let this happen, the big-minded folks at her Fulton, Mississippi school district canceled the prom.

So on April 2nd (the scheduled prom date), people all over the country are going to put on the ritz to show solidarity with Constance and other LGBT teens.

Wanna play along? You don't even need a date. Here's the Facebook page for this event, and you can watch for updates here on Tumblr.

And here's an eBay search for cheap tuxedo jackets, for those who prefer the yang clothing option. (I wouldn't even try to give advice or links to those looking for a prom gown!)

(Yes, tails are a little extra for a prom, perhaps, but I'll get more use of them as ridiculous regalia than I would an ordinary tux jacket.)

The BBC reports that The Hobbit -- "prequel" to The Lord of the Rings -- start filming in July. Guillermo del Toro will direct, Peter Jackson will produce, and Sir Ian McKellen reprises his Lord of the Rings role as Gandalf the Grey.

There's also a planned sequel, not based on a Tolkien novel, that will cover the period between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

Expect these films when you see them.

Interesting article on the (mis)use of statistics in science over at Science News:

“There is increasing concern,” declared epidemiologist John Ioannidis in a highly cited 2005 paper in PLoS Medicine, “that in modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims.”

...

Nobody contends that all of science is wrong, or that it hasn’t compiled an impressive array of truths about the natural world. Still, any single scientific study alone is quite likely to be incorrect, thanks largely to the fact that the standard statistical system for drawing conclusions is, in essence, illogical. “A lot of scientists don’t understand statistics,” says Goodman. “And they don’t understand statistics because the statistics don’t make sense.”

...

How could so many studies be wrong? Because their conclusions relied on “statistical significance,” a concept at the heart of the mathematical analysis of modern scientific experiments.

...

Statisticians perpetually caution against mistaking statistical significance for practical importance, but scientific papers commit that error often. Ziliak studied journals from various fields — psychology, medicine and economics among others — and reported frequent disregard for the distinction.

“I found that eight or nine of every 10 articles published in the leading journals make the fatal substitution” of equating statistical significance to importance, he said in an interview. Ziliak’s data are documented in the 2008 book The Cult of Statistical Significance, coauthored with Deirdre McCloskey of the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Two tough guys to add to your list of vegan athletes:

• Mac Danzig, lightweight MMA fighter, with a UFC record of 20 wins, 7 losses, and 1 draw. He's former lightweight champion for the King of the Cage and Gladiator Challenge MMA organizations, Extreme Challenge Trials 2001 U.S. MMA National Champion, and winner of the The Ultimate Fighter 6. Danzig's website describes him as a "vegan, naturalist, animal lover and serious photographer."
• Keith Holmes, former WBC middleweight champion, says being vegan "helped me to eat healthy" and "helps me get my wind quicker between rounds." Holmes held the title from March 1996 to May 1998, and again from April 1999 to April 2001. Holmes's lifetime record to date: 41 wins -- 25 by knockout -- 5 losses, no draws. Holmes media kit describes him as a "devout vegan". While his most recent bout was last year -- at the age of 40 -- these days he's devoting a lot of his energy to community work in his native DC and to music, with an album coming out this year.

So for those who want to argue that vegans are a bunch of wimps and that you need to eat animal flesh to be strong, I invite you to contact these gentlemen.

The Constitution provides that every ten years, the Federal government shall conduct an "Enumeration" of the people, for the purpose of apportioning Congressional representation.

It does not provide for interrogating the people about race, ethnicity, family relationships, home ownership status, or any other information. (I got the "long form" back in 2000, which had over 50 questions; they seem to have done away with that one this time, though.)

Before you provide such information, feeling assured that it's private and protected by law, you might want to consider that the Census Bureau provided the U.S. Secret Service with names and addresses of Japanese-Americans during World War II so that they could be herded up and put in concentration camps.

It's not that I'm expecting any such round-up to be repeated any time soon, mind you; it's a matter of principle. The only thing the Federal government needs to know for the census is how many people live here, and that's all it's going to get from me. If it wants more information, it can get it with anonymized surveys.