Whose words?

Many are happy to interpret recent election results, but to me it's simple. People are out of work and taking it out on their elected officials.

According to my statistical analysis of past elections, the unemployment rate has been responsible for about a third of switched congressional seats. Further, when the unemployment rate is above about 7 percent, that contribution leaps to somewhere between half and two thirds.

When unemployment is high it is a huge factor in house seats being lost by the president's party. When unemployment is low, other factors come more into play.

Based on this theory, you could have predicted that Democrats would lose at least 40 seats in the House without looking at a single news story, poll result, party platform, or campaign ad.

But there's more to this story.

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Gut Check

It's not easy being logical in forming opinions. We humans are wired to make decisions with our guts, and to manufacture a rational world around those decisions.

We are easily manipulated. A news story with lots of blood convinces us that a minor issue is the problem of the day. For example, the Camera front page has a story about an accident at a flashing crosswalk, and suddenly flashing crosswalks are death traps. We conveniently ignore the fact that most traffic accidents do not happen at these crosswalks.

Then you throw in peer manipulation. One person says that pedestrians don't look before crossing the street. Pretty soon it is common knowledge that pedestrians in Boulder have a death wish and always walk out directly in front of cars without even a glance, an opinion that, if examined logically, couldn't possibly be true.

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Changing Attitudes -- Time is on our Side

Researcher Fran Simon of Denver is a lesbian woman, married in every sense of the word except legally.

Working for the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, Simon authored a Harris Interactive study last November that explored attitudes of Colorado residents toward LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) issues, including gay marriage.
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Crunching the Global Warming Numbers

Anybody who reads me regularly knows that I'm kind of a nerd, and also knows that I'm very interested in the issue of global warming. So, you won't be surprised to know that I've found all the raw data I can get my hands on, and loaded it into Excel to play with.

Yes, there's nothing like just looking at a set of data, drawing graphs, comparing one thing to another, just rolling around in it. Sometimes when you're off doing something else, like maybe a long run, an idea jumps out at you, some way of making sense of all the numbers.

One thing I found when comparing the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere to the average annual global surface temperature is that there is strong mathematical correlation between the two. Correlation doesn't necessarily mean causation. But what I found is that the strongest correlation (88.3% correlation) is between CO2 level in one year and temperature 14 years later. That not only gives us one more piece of evidence that one is a causal factor in the other, but it also gives us a time frame. When you burn a gallon of gasoline in your car, you are impacting the future climate of the planet. And that impact may be felt immediately and may last for decades, but the strongest impact is about a decade and a half in the future.

What does this mean? Well, for one thing, even if we stop burning fossil fuels today we will still be seeing the impact for a while. But it also means that our actions today will have an impact within the foreseeable future. The impact of burning a gallon of gasoline today on the climate twenty years hence falls to the same level as its influence on this year's climate. So, if we can get our fossil fuel burning under control, perhaps in twenty years we will start seeing a significant difference.

What else did I see in the data? Here's one: Right at the time of World War II CO2 levels in the atmosphere stabilized, and even fell a tiny bit. From 1939 to 1948, there was essentially no change in CO2 in the atmosphere.

Why? I'm not sure, but perhaps the level of industry was reduced, and gas shortages caused reductions in driving, and that may have been enough to get our CO2 emissions to a reasonable level.

What happened with global temperatures then? Well, as you might guess, they stabilized or fell immediately after WWII. Between 1946 and 1957, global temperatures fell by about 0.12 degrees C. Temperatures didn't really start rising again until the 1970s, about 20 years after the CO2 levels started really rising again.

What can we learn from this? Well the most positive thing I take from this is a confirmation that not only do temperatures go up when CO2 goes up, but temperatures go down when CO2 goes down. Plus, we have a concrete example of mankind actually influencing global warming in the correct (lower) direction. This tells me that if we reduce our CO2 output to a level at which its atmospheric concentration is stable, we might, just might, be able to get the temperature increases under control.

Of course, our annual CO2 increase today is about five times as high as the annual increases in the 50s, so it won't be easy to get it under control. Much more of the CO2 is being originated in places that aren't the U.S., so there needs to be a truly global attack on the problem.

But at least it seems technically feasible.

Now Is the Time for All Good Men to Come to the Aid of their Gender

The results of a recent study on bathroom-hand-washing practices were published recently, and they weren't pretty. It seems that when spies watched people in public restrooms, only 66 percent of men washed their hands, while 88 percent of women did so.

I wanted to get to the bottom of this story, and flush out the missing details, but curiously some of the vital parts were kept private. What I found is that this study is pretty much a bowl of crap. Here are a few dirty little secrets I was able to expose, all of which send the results of this study down the toilet.

Number one: No surprise, the results varied depending on where the spies lurked. The worst results were at Turner Field baseball stadium in Atlanta. 43% of the guys rushed back to the exciting game without so much as a rinse. Well, duh! Have you ever been in the men's room of a sports stadium? Would you want to touch more germ-laden fixtures than you absolutely had to? I'm guessing those faucets handles are pretty gross. That's assuming there are soap and paper towels. And when your feet are sticking to the floor, you'd probably rather get back to where there's a chance it might be mustard you're stepping in, rather than lingering for a few seconds longer in the muck.

Number two: Men are different than women. Again, duh. If I were the president of Harvard, making this statement might cost me my job, but it seems pretty obvious. Many men can use the urinal without ever touching themselves. If they do, it may be a casual touch to a part of the body that is generally more clean than the hands. And with automatic flush urinals, they can get in and out without touching anything but their zippers.

Number three: Numbers one and two -- they're different. I found a study online that showed men and women essentially even when it came to washing up after number two. The difference comes about when there is a difference -- vive la difference! Eliminate this discrepancy, and the gender gap is wiped out!

Number four: Did you see who sponsored the survey? Yes, it was the Soap and Detergent Association. Enough said.

By the way, bathroom spies are a clear violation of bathroom etiquette.


Q. Why don't men put the toilet seat down?

A. Because they know they'd have to wash their hands after!

Fun with Numbers

In my high school physics class, I discovered something called "dry labbing". When you dry lab, you figure out how the experiment is supposed to turn out, then you log results in your lab notebook that correspond to what you figured out (rather than having to go through the entire exercise). I reasoned that it wasn't a real science experiment anyway, because we were just demonstrating a well-known principle, rather than trying to find out something new. Also, you had to understand the material better to make up the results than you would to just write down what happened. Not to mention that for a clumsy adolescent science is never repeatable.

Needless to say, I only got to do this once, before I learned another valuable lesson that had nothing to do with physics. The lesson is, anybody can fudge the numbers, and in doing so can prove just about anything they want. Or, as Benjamin Disraeli said, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."

For example, take politics. In his recent State of the Union address, President Bush said, "Every year of my presidency, we've reduced the growth of non-security discretionary spending." Come on, now, how long did he and his speech writers have to think before coming up with something that sounded positive and couldn't later be shown to be wrong?

Here's the recipe:

• First, decide what point you want to prove.


• Second, come up with some numbers (it doesn't matter what or from where) that are related to your point.


• Third, state your point, along with the numbers, in close proximity, with conviction.


• Repeat the third step as required, until your numbers are accepted as a given and your point is accepted as the logical conclusion of your numbers.

Another example is the economic case for/against tax cuts. It's been proven that tax cuts improve the economy. It's also, coincidentally, been proven that tax cuts are bad for the economy.

What's the lesson? Well, I guess it is that when somebody is able to prove their point with statistics, they are probably hiding more than they are showing.