lion_lamb
Can a movie based on a novel ever be as good as the book? That's the big question for Twilight fans this week, and a sure topic of discussion on this community devoted to all things Bella and Edward.

geocaching
Have a hankering for a high-tech treasure hunt? After you take your GPS for a walk in the woods in search of the latest geocache (i.e. hidden container), you can share your find, get tech tips, and discuss the sport at this geocaching community.

topmodel
Have we really reached the end of another ANTM cycle? The finalist of Cycle 11 is announced on Wednesday, so expect some fierce discussion and model partisanship at this top Top Model community.

Welcome to a Very Special Edition of LJ News.

Moving Day and What It Means for You

Moving What Where?

The long-awaited server move takes place this Tuesday, November 18, at 8:00 a.m. PST. We're moving the site from servers based in San Francisco to the servers in our new data center in Montana. A massive data move like this takes a lot of heavy lifting, and to haul all that data from San Francisco to Montana, we have to take the site down, starting at 8:00 a.m. PST on Tuesday morning. We don't think the move will take more than four hours, but there's always the possibility that it could take longer (the best laid plans and all).

What Does This Mean for You?

During the downtime, nothing on LJ will be available—no posting, no Friends page, no LJ mail, nada. When we bring the site back up, we're going to ease into it rather than open up a floodgate of traffic. Posting might not be immediately available or the site could be slow to load for a while.

New servers mean new IP addresses, so it's possible that LJ mail might not reach your email inbox because your email provider or client doesn't recognize the new IP addresses. We're working with email providers to whitelist the new IPs. There are a few things you can do on your end:

• Add these two IP addresses to your "allowed senders" list (or whitelist) and address book in your email client: 208.93.0.18 and 208.93.0.50. These are the new IPs for sending comments notifications and LJ mail to your email inbox.


• Add lj_notify@livejournal.com and webmaster@livejournal.com to your email address book.

If you can't edit the spam or junk filters in your email client, you may need to disable them entirely. Make these changes just before 8:00 a.m. PST on Tuesday morning or shortly after the site comes back up to ensure that your LJ mail makes it to your inbox.

Those of you who use domain aliasing to forward your domain to your LiveJournal will need to create a CNAME record that maps to livejournal.com. Please note that we're no longer supporting the A record. For more information, check the domain forwarding FAQ.

Before the move, you can check lj_maintenance for complete details about the planned downtime. During the move, you can check status.livejournal.org for updates about the site's status.

Permanent Account Sale Delayed

We regret to inform you that due to the server move, the Permanent Account sale has been pushed back to December 4, rather than November 20 as announced in the last news post. After the virtual dust has settled from the move, we'll be able to turn our attention to the Permanent Account sale. Except for the start date, the details remain the same: You have a limited opportunity to purchase LJ for life for only $175. It's a bummer to delay the sale, but on the bright side, you have more time to save up.

But What About A La Carte Userpics?

We know we promised more information about a la carte userpics, and we're sorry that details have not been forthcoming (blame it on the move). We're still planning on having a la carte userpics, but we don’t have any details yet. When the move is over, we'll have more information. We're sorry for the delay.

I'm much later than usual in announcing this, but in care you're interested, I'm going to be in a concert today:

The Oregon Sinfonietta performs Bruckner's 3rd Symphony
Sunnyside Adventist Church
10501 SE Market St
Portland, OR
3pm Sunday November 16

For those friends and family who are not quite sure whether we're near the Sylmar fire that's raging in LA, you can rest easy. We're about 20 miles south east of where the fire is, and it's heading west so away from us if I understand correctly. But we are getting a lot of smoke in the whole area.

We're pulling the plug! And putting it back in a different location! Ok, that was bad.

Seriously though, our data center move -- from San Francisco to Montana -- is scheduled for THIS TUESDAY, November 18, 2008 at 16:00 UTC (this equates to 8AM Pacific timezone) and will last for 4 hours. Unfortunately it'll be total downtime for all our sites and services -- no posting, no reading, no email.

Another news announcement will be posted on Monday November 17, including links to updated FAQs that you'll want to check out before the move.

As always, status.livejournal.org will have any updates during the move so bookmark it and check it out for the latest news.

All of us at LiveJournal have been eagerly looking forward to this move and I want to thank you for your patience and understanding as we put the finishing touches on something that will allow us to bring you an even better product in the future.
Though for us in the Ops and Engineering teams, we'll be REALLY happy if, on Tuesday, everything just works the same way it did on Monday.  Heh.

bt

Books that have been influential (see Paul's list for explanation). Building the list first, and tricking it out with links and explanations later:

• The Feynman Lectures on Physics, esp. vol 1 and 2: Not just for their content, but also for their dramatically radical teaching style. Excessive for their original purpose (an undergrad course at Caltech!), but perfect for the student of physics who doesn't have to "get a grade" but wants to know how it really works.
• The Language Instinct: Why everything you were ever taught about languages by your high school teachers is wrong, and what this means about the brain. Should be required reading for all English teachers at the high school level.
• Zen Mind Beginner's Mind: Shunryu Suzuki roshi (teacher) introduces you to the practice of Buddhism in the Soto zen tradition. This is a book you will give away again and again.
• Practical Applied Mathematics: Most books on mathematics focus on solving problems and proving theorems about solutions. This book actually focuses on how to build a model. Most of the mathematics would typically be understandable by a junior or senior undergrad, but courses rarely talk about building models. This also emphasizes the importance of nondimensional models.
• Bayesian Data Analysis: Andrew Gelman shows you how statistics really ought to be done. If you work with data, you need this book.
• Modern Applied Statistics with S-Plus: Venables and Ripley give you a major toolkit for data analysis in R (the GNU version of the S language). If you work with data, you need this book (updated version includes R specific stuff).
• Why Buildings Stand Up: Mario Salvadori explains the basic concepts of structural and architectural design, with a lot of nice examples and sketches.
• Why Buildings Fall Down: Salvadori again, on forensic analysis of failures. Fantastic book, and includes a section on the twin towers, written by a second author (Salvadori is dead now).
• On Lisp: Paul Graham shows you how to think about programming and metaprogramming in the most metaprogrammable language that has ever been invented.
• Scheme and the Art of Programming: This was the beginning programming book used at ISU to introduce CS majors. It's a good introduction to very high level programming concepts. Much better than your typical "C++ how to program" or whatever. It probably isn't as good as SICP but I haven't actually read SICP.
• Bicycling Science: A review of the science and mechanical engineering involved in the bicycle. A very nice overview of some concepts in mechanical engineering, as well as a great inspiration for bicycle riders.
• fill in more...

A wonderful meme from linettasky. "List the 20-odd books you have personally read that have been most influential in your life. By personally read, I mean that we aren't talking about indirect effects of famous books you haven't read. By influential, I mean intellectually, spiritually, politically, aesthetically, or any other way you might be influenced (e.g., books that have shaped habits or hobbies of yours). I'm not referring to your favorite stories qua stories -- plenty of mine are omitted from the list below. The question here is lasting effect."

( Read more... )

The whole "Sarah Palin thought Africa was a country" thing was evidently a hoax perpetrated by Fox's source, who turned out to be a pair of merry pranksters having some fun at Fox's expense while also making a point about the shoddy journalistic standards of Fox, though in fairness, MSNBC and various other media outlets got hoodwinked as well.

Since my earlier commentary didn't depend on the veracity of the claim, which I considered dubious, but rather focused primarily on Fox's motive in running with the story, I feel that my earlier comments remain valid.

Discuss.

Just finished a strong application for an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship in Civil Engineering. One way to get back the taxes taken from previous paychecks :-)

With any luck, things will go through, and I will be able to afford to finish my PhD and produce a kick-ass risk model for soil liquefaction, while at the same time advancing multi-scale mechanics of materials.

now I just need some of those books from Amazon to arrive...

For friends planning to be in the bay area around thanksgiving, I'm going to be there wednesday-saturday the week of thanksgiving. Give me a call!

UPDATE: NSF says transcripts were received correctly so i can stop stressing out!

nanowrimo
Week two of National Novel Writing Month is upon us. What better way to rally your word count than with some wise plot advice or an invigorating round of NaNo sprints over at this very wordy community?

lucylou
Comics artist Lucy Knisley is so devoted to the medium that even her journal is in comic form, from an account of her latest book event to her experience waiting for Obama to speak in Grant Park on election night.

louisebrooks
Silent film star Louise Brooks deserves to be known for much more than her hairstyle (even if it is one of the most famous bobs in history). The Louise Brooks Society dedicates itself to the life and times of a gifted actress and insightful writer.

...and anyone else who cares about my blog.

Here's the scoop... Back in early September, DnC had another one of their barbecues in the park. It was at the same park as we did last year. This time around, we had a bunch of people from work, which was interesting. One of our co-workers claimed that his wife was xenophobic, and it was a good chance for her to overcome her fear. Another co-worker's wife could ride the Uni pretty well. Impressive.
Unfortunately, even though there was leftover sushi rolls, it was spoiled by the end of the day, so I couldn't eat any of the leftovers. Dangit.

We had a quick dinner for freshcoast's birthday back in mid-September. It was a Okinawa-style restaurant. Which gave me a pre-view of what we would be able to eat in Okinawa. Unfortunately, Midori couldn't make it. (She had a long commute from school back then). It was a relatively small gathering, with DnC, Dave, freshcoast and Rie.

The BIG event in September was our trip to Okinawa (沖縄 to go here. Given that it would take a day to travel and a day to take care of business, we decided to make a trip of it. It was a first time there for me, but Midori has been there a long time ago. We took off from FUK because the package deal from there was cheaper than flying from KMJ. We took the limited express train to Fukuoka, which makes it relatively painless.

We arrived in the early afternoon and got our rental car. Unlike in the US, the rental cars in Japan are kept until it is driven into the ground. Our rental has definitely seen better days, but it was fully functional. It was a bit of a trick to get to the hotel, since the intersection that would get us there was less than intuitive. We stayed at the GRG Hotel, which was pretty good for the price.

After the day's travel, I didn't feel like driving, so we took the monorail to our first destination, Shuri Castle (首里城). It, being part of the Ryuku Kingdom independent of mainland Japan for most of its history, has a different flavor from other castles in Japan. After touring the castle, we found a nearby diner and dove into てびち (pig feet), チャンプルー and 沖縄そば (Okinawa noodles). I didn't like pigs feet very much before, but that wasn't too bad.

We made our way back to the monorail after dinner and stopped at Omoro-machi area in Naha, which is noteworthy for having a Duty-Free Shop. I didn't quite understand at first, but after watching Midori make a purchase for her dad, I began to grok. Basically, one has to be from outside the prefecture to make purchases there. The stuff there is treated as if it is not imported into Japan yet. Then, the traveller who comes to Okinawa technically imports it into Japan when they go home, duty free. Or, put another way, the items there are treated like any other duty-free shop elsewhere in the world, except that it's physically in Japan. I don't know how they got this through the legal and regulatory barriers, but there it was. After midori picked up a belt for her dad, we hopped back on the monorail and moved to Makishi station. There, we walked down Kokusai-dori (国際通り), which is basically a string of gift shops (with other shops and restaurants mixed in).

After all that walking, Midori was getting tired, so we went back to the hotel to prepare for a new day.

Second day was a big road trip. We basically drove up the west side of the island hitting various tourist spots. Our first stop was simply a brown sugar factory, where we got a short tour and got to shop in the attached gift shop. The next stop was more of a tourist spot. The Ryukyu Village (琉球村) was a collection of homes from the Ryukyu era, transplanted and preserved there. There were craft items in the Ryukyu style, as well as some activities if we had time for them. Moving right along, we stopped at Manzamou (万座毛), which is a rock shaped like an elephant's trunk. That's all it was, but it was a nice view of the ocean. Next, we stopped at a confection factory, where we taste-tested pretty much every cake, cookie, bun, etc. they had on display, as well as having a little snack of ice cream and a cream puff. The place also was next to a beach, so I was able to go out and step in the water a little bit. We didn't have time to take a dip, however.

Our next main stop was the Nago pineapple garden, ナゴパイナップルパーク. Again, we were able to taste every kind of pineapple cake, tart, juice, wine, cookie, pie, etc. There was also an all-you-can-eat pineapple bar. However, by the time we got there, we were pretty much stuffed silly on all of the other stuff. :(

That was most of the agenda that day, so we started heading back to the expressway entrance, near our final stop. We thought we were in no hurry, so we stopped at every interesting little sight or thing we saw along the way. Which lead to my main disappointment for the trip. The tour package included a free entry to the Nago Paradise (botanical garden). However, by the time we got there, it was closed. DANG. If we didn't make all those stops (including an extra trip back to the confectionery shop when we realized that we had a coupon for free cookies there as well), we would have made it. Bummer.

So, we got on the expressway and got back pretty quick. Our dinner was obtained at a convenience store, but in Okinawa, they have てびち in the convenience stores. Pretty cool. We also picked up Taco Rice, which is also considered an Okinawa dish. It is steamed rice with taco meat, lettuce, tomatoes, cheese, and salsa on top. Yum.

The last day was the big day, the reason we were on the island to begin with. It started out with a little thrill. I left the light on in the car the night before. The hotel staff told me before it sat in the parking structure for 1/2 an hour, but that was enough for the car to not start the next morning. The hotel staff was kind enough to give us a jump, and we were off. We got to the consulate a half-hour early, and was able to get started right away. Overall, the process was relatively painless... except for the $355 fee. Ouch.

We finished before noon, which gave us time to go to the Ashibina outlet mall, where we had our final meal in Okinawa--more 沖縄そば and Taco Rice. From there, we drove back to the car rental place, but I missed a turn because the navi was off by a few meters. And, because it didn't give directions when one is in a minor road ("Please make your way to a major road, as shown...."), I had to kind of feel my way back to the shop.

The rest of the trip was uneventful, as we moved smoothly to the airport, through Fukuoka, and back to home.

==
Dan has finished his term at the Japan office, so DnC held a send-off for him. We had the usual suspects there. It was a good dinner. It seems he's got a job lined up at the headquarters... which reminds me of how uncertain my prospects are.

It was a long entry--the Kagoshima stuff will have to wait. Until next time.

I decided to watch a movie tonight, and keystricken said she would join me, provided I could come up with a movie she was interested in. So I gave her five choices:

- Amélie
- Blues Brothers
- Down with Love
- Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
- Playing By Heart

I asked her whether she could see any connection among the five movies. She said, "well, with the exception of Blues Brothers, I'd say you're feeling lonely."

Huh.

We watched "Down with Love", which was, as usual, excellent.

Find Your Friends, Now with Dialog Box

We wanted to give you an update about the Find Your Friends feature we talked about recently in news and feedback. Based on your feedback, the opt-in implementation has an overwhelming mandate from the people. So that's the method we're going to use. Before we launch this feature, we need you to set your preference for the setting. The next time you visit the LiveJournal homepage, you'll see a dialog box that prompts you to set your preference for whether you want your email address to be searchable by the new Find Your Friends feature. If you have more than one account, the dialog box will appear the first time you visit each account's homepage.



The Find Your Friends feature will be launching in the weeks to come.

Permanent Account Sale Coming Soon

It's almost here—the Permanent Account sale! For a limited time only, you can purchase a Permanent Account for only $175. Your chance to get LiveJournal for life starts on November 20. Check out the benefits:

• All the cool features offered to Paid Accounts


• The highest amount of storage available on LJ (currently 10GB, but we think there might be room to grow in there)


• No ads in your journal and, as long as you're logged in, you won't see ads anywhere on LiveJournal


• The most userpics available on LJ (currently 144 and increasing all the time with our Loyalty Userpics program)


• $25 of your purchase price donated to charity (look for details about the chosen organizations in the next news post)


• The peace of mind that comes with never having to make another payment

We've been talking about this sale for a while now, so hopefully you've had some time to save up for it. Remember, the Permanent Account sale is very temporary. We don't want anyone to miss out, so tell all your friends that the sale starts November 20 and ends November 26. After that you'll have to wait at least another year for your chance to buy a Permanent Account.

When you purchase a Permanent Account, you can gift a friend with any balance of paid time or extra userpics you might have. Look for more details in the next news post, and keep an eye on the Gift Shop to buy your Permanent Account as soon as they go on sale!

Profile Page Goes Live

The redesigned Profile page is graduating from beta and going out into the wider world of LiveJournal. The design team put hundreds of hours into this redesign, with a marathon three rounds of beta testing. We considered every comment and critique that came through feedback and worked hard to incorporate as much user input as possible. We think the profile page is much improved and ready to go live.



Thank you to all the beta testers for your hard work and feedback. We couldn't have done it without you (no, really).

Montana-Bound

By the time you read the next release, a shinier, faster, better LJ will be up and running on the servers at our brand-new data center in Montana. The ops team is hard at work packing up bits and bytes here and unpacking them in Montana. The new servers and data center are an investment in LJ's future; they also offer more immediate benefits, such as room for more userpics, improved energy efficiency, and, of course, cool new servers. Check lj_maintenance for news and announcements concerning the move. If there's any downtime during the move, exact dates and times will be posted there. And you can always check status.livejournal.org, our offsite status page.



Unpacking is the hardest part of moving.

Watch This Space

Back in our lj_2008 update, we mentioned that we were going to start increasing our local partnerships in India and elsewhere. Like india_sport, for example. Building on those experiences, we've been hard at work expanding our global footprint with a new partnership with one of the leading newspapers in the United Kingdom. So watch this space in the next release for an exciting announcement!

Search Update

So, Find Your Friends is almost ready to go (you can choose your setting now, before the feature goes live, as noted above). But, as talked about in the lj_2008 update, our goals for improving search included two other projects. Where do they stand?

• Search for public posts and comments: We're making great progress on developing a search engine for public posts and comments, which will include tags and interests.


• Journal search: We've been so hard at work on the other two search projects that Journal search for Paid users to search within their own journals isn't going to make it to the finish line in 2008. We're still working on it, although it has turned out to be a bit more complicated than we originally thought.

Word Counts and Daily Posts

As of last Saturday, furiously clattering keyboards can be heard echoing around the globe. NaNoWriMo is off to a roaring start—word count updates are flooding the NaNo servers, main characters are refusing to cooperate, and world coffee prices are skyrocketing due to demand. We had an overwhelming response to lj_nanowrimo (and the overflowing email inbox to prove it), and we're all (except for our accountant) really rooting for you to finish those novels. And for those of you who are busy crafting daily blog posts for NaBloPoMo, keep it up! We know you can do it.

OpenID 2.0 Now Supported

In the last release, we upgraded our OpenID client support to include OpenID 2.0. So if you're a user with an OpenID 2.0 account (like Yahoo, for example), you can use that ID to log in to LiveJournal.


And More

You can find all the details of this week's release at lj_releases.

On Lunch and I am totally Bored

OK, two of my friends have already posted this video this morning:



Rather than comment on both their blogs, I'm just going to comment here. If that makes the video more viral, so be it. ;-)

What's most remarkable is that this video is coming from Fox. If MSNBC were reporting that Sarah Palin didn't know that Africa was a continent composed of multiple countries, it wouldn't be so interesting. Liberal media bias, blah, blah. But coming from "Fair and Balanced" Fox, along with the frank admission that they'd been sitting on this story until after the election, we start to see some of the machinery of politics exposed.

It's abundantly clear that there are elements of the Republican party that are trying to pin the blame for the loss on Sarah Palin, and Fox is allied with those elements.

There have long been strange bedfellows in the Republican party. Party leadership has been dominated by plutocrats since the progressives bolted in 1912. They were most visible in the Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover administrations. In 1929, they ran the country into the ground, and in 1932, they ran the party into the ground; from 1932 to 1964, they lost seven of nine presidential elections. Eventually, as the Democrats alienated certain constituencies, the GOP was able to establish a winning, if somewhat peculiar, coalition formula: the plutocratic core; conservative Christians, alienated from the Democrats by Roe vs. Wade, feminism, gay rights, vocal atheists, etc.; bigots, alienated from the Democrats since 1948 when Humphrey started pulling the party toward civil rights; and hawks and neocons who see the Democrats as being dominated by McGovernites since 1972. The plutocrats run the show for the most part, and they're largely concerned with low taxes (especially on capital gains and dividends, their bread and butter), and every other issue serves chiefly as a carrot on a stick to help maintain the coalition. Roe vs. Wade is the best example; the plutocrats actually have a strong political interest in preserving it. When the party leadership saw that Cindy McCain's husband was likely to have trouble motivating the religious right to get out there and vote, they decided to pad the ticket with Sarah Palin.

They created a monster, and there's a real risk of her taking over the GOP. That prospect scares them.

Sarah Palin may well have the grass-roots support to win the nomination in four years, but she has high enough negatives that she'll never win a national election. She has Reagan's magnetism when delivering prepared speeches, which makes her a highly effective stump speaker, but she fails catastrophically whenever she's required to think on her feet. Moreover, the plutocrats have zero faith at this point in her ability to lead even if she were elected, especially in time of economic crisis. That's why so many of them were endorsing Obama; it's not like they were going to be seeing any capital gains any time soon. Now the plutocrat leadership is storming the castle with torches and pitchforks, and they have one goal in mind: eliminate the threat that Palin poses to future Republican prospects, and restore plutocrat domination of the GOP.

Fundamentally, as a Rupert Murdoch property, Fox is a plutocrat network, and that explains much of its newfound opposition to Palin. There's still a great deal of support for Palin, but it comes from a different corner. We may end up seeing a conservative Christian cable news network established, a cross between Fox and CBN, with a clear goal of providing support for Sarah Palin in 2012.

It's going to be an interesting four years. I should stock up on popcorn.

Many people have been thinking about yesterday's winners in the presidential campaign.  I'm going to stop to consider who and what lost:

Divisiveness lost

It's insightful to contrast the following quotes:


Another way of phrasing this is to point out that Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton lost.  This election was a repudiation of race-baced identity politics.  It can work to elect urban mayors and the like, but it doesn't win higher office.  The civil rights era generation of leaders may not have had an alternative to identity politics, but there's a younger generation (Duval Patrick is another) that can transcend it.  The only way Obama could win was to convince the electorate that he sincerely sought to represent the entire electorate rather than just those who shared his identity, and he managed it.  Palin thought she could get away identity politics.  She thought wrong.

Extremism lost

For some time now, I've been describing myself as a centrist.  The conventional approach is to play to the extremes to get the nomination, and then play to the center to win the election.  McCain did the opposite; he won the nomination as a moderate, tapped Sarah Palin, and shifted to the right.  That's not how elections are won in this country.  Obama went by the book and played to the center, certainly since the convention.

Ignorance lost

Let's consider educational background.  The son and grandson of admirals, John McCain was the third generation of his family to attend the Naval Academy.  He finished near the bottom of his class.  Sarah Palin bounced from campus to campus (four transfers in all) before finally graduating from the University of Idaho, where she studied broadcast journalism, i.e. how to look good on camera.  They're both academic lightweights, even by modern Republican standards.  Let's compare them with some of their recent predecessors.  George W. Bush, nobody's idea of an intellectual, has a Yale MBA, and Dick Cheney has a MA in Political Science.  Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush both had undergrad degrees in economics.  Among less successful candidates, Bob Dole and Dan Quayle both have law degrees... much like Barack Obama (who graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law, i.e. in the top 20% of his class) and Joe Biden.

The McCain campaign tried to spin the difference in education as indicitive of elitism.  That argument went over well in some parts of the country (Sarah Palin's "real America," perhaps), but it didn't win them the election.  The political strategy of dumbing down national leadership to appeal to the ignorant electorate has failed.

Privilege lost

I try not to assign too much weight to narrative, but I'm disinclined to support a candidate who represents several generations of privilege.  It reminds me unpleasantly of monarchism.   As previously noted, John McCain is the son and grandson of admirals and a third generation Navel Academy graduate.  In these respects, he resembles George W. Bush, who is the son of a president, the grandson of a senator, and a third generation Yale graduate, or Al Gore, a son of a senator.   He's also a Vietnam War hero who subsequently married to a wealthy heiress, and in both regards he resembles John Kerry. 

I distrust political dynasties.  I was never a great fan of the Kennedy family, and I've not especially inclined to support Hillary Clinton based on her choice of husband.  I probably would have given FDR a pass, largely because his relation to Theodore Roosevelt was sufficiently remote.

I find it refreshing when a promising candidate lacks a silver spoon or a distinguished heritage, since neither is a reliable indicator of merit.  There are, of course, exceptions: Jonathan Coulton is a third-generation Yale graduate, and I don't hold it against him.  One of the things I liked about Bill Clinton, though, was that he'd risen from obscurity on his own merits.  Obama has that, too.  Of course, so does Sarah Palin, but I see her as having risen more based on her looks and her knee-jerk ideology than on any real merit.

Hope won

One of the biggest changes that has already taken place is that Barack Obama has become a meaningful role model for African-American youth well outside the traditional occupational boundaries, and by smashing the highest glass ceiling, he's showing people that a great many opportunties are available.  All the bling-flashing dealers and pimps look small next to him.  Today, the most admired black man in America is not an athlete or an entertainer but a law professor who is slated to be the next president.  If he can make studying look cool, if he can counteract the Steve Urkel stereotype, he can do a great deal to help academic performance.  I'm also optimistic that The Audacity of Hope and Dreams from My Father might eventually supplant The Autobiography of Malcolm X as inspirational reading.  Revolutionary rhetoric loses much of its appeal when democratic change is a realistic option.  "Whatever means necessary" is a lot less frightening when voting is demonstrably sufficient.  How long to wait in line at the polls? Three hours? Five hours? Whatever is necessary.

The Hangover

Not everything went as well as one might have hoped.  Stevens appears to have won, and I'm afraid he'll be pardoned by Bush.  Coleman appears to have won by a whisker.  Michele Bachmann will continue to be Minnesota's answer to Wisconsin's Joe McCarthy.  And, of course, California passed Prop 8.  For those wondering how Prop 8 passed in California, I have found this rather compelling, if somewhat politically incorrect, piece of analysis.

(I might go through and add more links to this post at some point.)