I just wanted to add that I did indeed vote for Obama, just as I said I would a couple months ago. That didn't change.

What did change is that I've warmed up to him considerably in the intervening weeks, and I can now say that I voted for him enthusiastically. Basically, he became much more of a populist in these last few months.

Whatever the outcome of the election, for so many reasons this has been a historic campaign, one that I never thought I'd see in my lifetime.

It makes me just a bit more hopeful about the future of this country.

And now I'd better stop, or my curmudgeonly side will start to offer opinions about McCain and Palin, and I try to keep this a family-friendly site.

In a nutshell, they have wider margins of error, they overstate the Democratic vote, "leaked" exit polls may be completely bogus, and you'll know the actual results soon enough anyway!

Her elderly mother is in a nursing home so she obtained an absentee ballot for her.

"She's voted in every election that she could, so I thought I'd just let her pick for herself. I read off the list of nominees and she picked Bob Barr.

"I think she mixed him up with Bob Barker."

That's not a bad reason compared to some that I've heard over the years.

Anyway, Bob Barker and Bob Barr are, of course, very different.

One's an American game show icon who has become a laughing stock in his old age, and the other is Bob Barker.

And I saw something that I've never seen before.

There was a line. Where there never was a line!

Not a very long line by some standards, but a line nevertheless. I'd guess about 40 to 50 people were ahead of me.

I'd have done better by going a bit later, as when I left about 20 minutes later, there were only about 20 people behind me.

There was a potential problem with the voting procedure, however.

When you arrive, you are supposed to sign in and let the voting officials verify your registration. Then you get in line.

Normally there's no problem with this because typically there are only about four or five people (at most) waiting to vote. But today the line snaked around into another room, so there was no way for the voting officials to keep track of everyone.

It would have been possible for someone to sneak into the line without signing in.

Now the folks in line were doing their own vetting ("Did you sign in?") so I suspect it would be difficult for a significant number of people to vote without signing in.

But not impossible.

Anyway, she called me from her polling place a little before 7am. She said she's never seen anything like it. Over 300 people already in line, and more people are streaming in. It sounds like a madhouse.

Craig,

Scientists tell us that there are 60 billion neutrinos striking every square centimeter of the Earth each second.

Do you believe that? And does it worry you?

--JT

I wonder if he'll answer...

At 5 a.m. on Oct. 9, the Strongsville mother of five sat at her computer and wrote a letter to the editor that she knew might enrage fellow residents. She began by recounting a recent conversation she'd had with her 7-year-old son:

"Mom," he said, "who are you voting for?"

"Sen. Obama," she said.

"Oh, no!" he said. "You can't have an evil president."

"I didn't know whether to laugh or cry," she wrote.

Hours earlier, Mahon had been driving home from the local mall with her 14-year-old daughter when they spotted some people carrying homemade political signs after leaving a Strongsville rally for John McCain and Sarah Palin. The worst of the signs called Obama a terrorist.

Mahon was stunned. She used the opportunity to talk to her daughter about the politics of fear, and race.

An hour later, her son was blurting out his alarm about Obama.

"That came from his friends," she told me, "and you know they had to be hearing it at home. I sat him down and explained that nobody who runs for president is evil, and that you can't believe everything you hear."

The whole article is worth reading: Connie Schultz: In breaking silence about hatred, Strongsville mom finds support

I guess this is big brain week.

The latest episode of the Brain Science Podcast has an interview with Gary Lynch discussing his book Big Brain: The Origins and Future of Human Intelligence.

A very accessible discussion of, among other things, how the human brain evolved to be so big. His position is that there was no natural selection pressure in favor of greater intelligence (even today, many, many people do just fine with very limited intelligence. Just look at Sarah Palin!).

Rather, when our distant ancestors became bipedal, the size of the birth canal increased, and this led to larger-brained babies.

Intelligence was just an accidental side effect.

Since the human birth canal puts a limit on the size of babies' heads, could the availability of Cesarean sections cause humans to evolve to have larger brains?

Turns out the answer might be yes:

Babies have very big heads that squeeze with only great difficulty through a relatively narrow pelvis, so the relationship in size between head diameter and the diameter of the pelvic opening has been a limitation on human evolution. We know this had to be a factor in our evolution: the average newborn mammal has a cranial capacity that is roughly 50% of the adult size, chimpanzee babies have heads about 40% of the adult size, but human babies have crania that are only 23% of what they will be in adults. While our brains have gotten larger over evolutionary time, they have not gotten proportionally larger in utero, because large-headed babies increase the difficulty of labor and cause increased mortality in childbirth. If childbirth could bypass the pelvic bottleneck, that would allow for fetal heads to grow larger without increasing the risk of killing mother and/or child.

Read the rest of PZ Myers's post on Will the availability of C-sections give humans bigger brains?

Paul Krugman won the Nobel economic prize for his analysis of how economies of scale can affect trade patterns and the location of economic activity.

A well-deserved award. Congratulations, Professor Krugman!

It's filled with photos, tidbits, and interviews with many of the folks who have been involved with the show over the years.

Worth a look.

I just took a peek.

And...

...

...it's not as horrible as I feared it might be.

Which isn't saying a whole lot...

To be effective, of course, the neutering would also have to be performed on any of their existing progeny.

He's by turns funny, serious, impassioned. Worth a look.