Careful With Those Odds

There's a story circulating today about a child born today, Leap Day, to a mother also born on Leap Day. This is presented as being a two-million-to-one event, and it's not hard to see where they get those numbers. Suppose you take a mother-child pair at random. What are the odds they'll both have been born on February 29th? Well, Leap Day occurs (roughly) once every four years, which adds up to once every 1461 days. So if one in 1461 is the odds of the mother's being born on Leap Day, and also the odds of the child's being born on Leap Day, then assuming the two are independent events the odds of the coincidence are 2,134,521-to-one.

But this isn't necessarily the right way to think about it. How surprised should I be that today, February 29th, 2012, featured a coincidence like this? Well, there are seven billion people in the world, and the global annual birth rate is roughly twenty births per thousand people. That's 140 million births in a year; in a leap year, that's 382,514 births per day on average, but let's be conservative. Let's be really conservative, actually, and say there will only be 200,000 births today. That's really conservative. Now, all of those children are born on February 29th. Now we can ask whether their mothers were also born on Leap Day, and we should expect that one in 1461 of them will have been, on average. So we should expect this two-million-to-one coincidence to occur around 130 times today. And remember, I made some quite conservative assumptions along the way. If on any given Leap Day it didn't happen that a child was born whose mother was also born on Leap Day, it would just be weird. In fact, once every eleven Leap Days or so we should expect a child born to parents both of whom were born on Leap Day.

There's another way to spot the unimpressiveness of this coincidence. For any given individual it's a two-million-to-one long shot that both they and their mother will have been born on Leap Day. But there are seven billion people in the world. So we would expect to find over 3000 such individuals alive at this moment. The world's a very big place, and something that's a two-million-to-one long shot can easily have enough opportunities to happen to be quite common overall.

State of the Senate Races

With Olympia Snowe's godsend of a retirement, and Bob Kerrey's apparent decision to jump back into the race, I think it's worth taking a fresh look at the upcoming batch of Senate elections. There are ten Republican-held seats. Of these, Maine is favored for a Democratic takeover, Massachusetts is no worse than a toss-up for the Democrats, Nevada is no worse than Leans Republican and is probably just a pure toss-up, and Arizona, though a stretch, is possible. It's unlikely that Indiana Republicans are sufficiently idiotic to ditch Richard Lugar, but if they do, that's also a potentially competitive race. In other words, on a good night it would be easy for the Democrats to win three (of ten!) Republican-held seats. If things go extremely well between now and November, we could conceivably win five.

As for Democratic-held seats, of which there are twenty-three, I think one can safely say that California, Delaware, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, and West Virginia are pretty much safe holds. It looks very much like Bob Casey and Sherrod Brown will hold on in Pennsylvania and Ohio; likewise Debbie Stabenow in Michigan. I'd say Bill Nelson's a modest favorite to hold on to Florida. Meanwhile, I'd say we're noticeably favored to win open seats in Connecticut (which will be a net gain from the Connecticut for Lieberman Party), Hawaii, and New Mexico. Now, Virginia, Wisconsin, Missouri, and Montana are distinct toss-ups, and in North Dakota and Nebraska you'd have to say we're favored to lose. But if Kerrey is really running, then we've got strong candidates in both those states, Kerrey in Nebraska and Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota. There aren't, in other words, any Safe Republican pick-ups. A short while ago it seemed very much like there were. I'm not sure either NE or ND is more than Leans Republican.

One thing this means is that it's not inconceivable that the Democrats could actually hold on to all twenty-three of their seats. If they do, incidentally, those twenty-three Democratic Senate seats will get a lot more liberal, with Chris Murphy (probably) replacing Lieberman and Kerrey replacing Nelson. Now it would certainly be impressive if we manage to do this, and it would take quite a good night indeed, but recent elections have tended to be very good for one side or the other, and I honestly don't think 2012 is going to be a Very Good Night for the Republicans.

At the very least, it looks like the Republican effort to take back the Senate is a lot harder than it used to be. I'd estimate two seats where Democrats are favored to pick up a Republican seat, and also two where Republicans are favored to pick up a Democratic seat. That leaves five toss-ups, of which four are Democratic-held. A very rough estimate of expected results, then, might be Republicans +1.5 seats on the night, which would not be enough to make Mitch McConnell majority leader.

It's a pretty good week so far, in other words. And Santorum hasn't even won Michigan thereby throwing the Republican primary into even further chaos yet!

On Olympia Snowe's Retirement

First of all, this is the best news I've heard in a very long time.

Second of all, I entirely sympathize with her lack of interest in continuing to be a Senator. I particularly empathize with her lack of interest in continuing to be a Republican Senator; she is probably the person for whom living under Mitch McConnell's party discipline regime is the most onerous, and most requires her to support positions she doesn't actually believe in. That's got to be fairly little fun.

But as this little post on TalkingPointsMemo notes, her statement reads almost exactly like Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN)'s retirement statement. Washington's so damn partisan, and the Senate particularly so, so they're getting out to make a difference. But, uh, guys? You know how you make a difference? You stay and fight. Being a U.S. Senator means you have a whole lot of Power. Formally, you have one-hundredth of one-half of one-third of the power of the U.S. government, which is one-six-hundredth of the largest power in the world. Informally, people like Snowe and Bayh, by positioning themselves as marginal Senators on numerous issues, had much more real-life power than that. If centrist-y types like the two of them, Joe Lieberman, Ben Nelson, etc. would stick around instead of retiring and being replaced by generic partisans, there would be a substantial bloc of moderates in the Senate who could rule the chamber if they wanted to.

But if they just retire, and become lobbyists or whatever else they do (and, by the way, Senator Snowe: please, please, please run on the Americans Elect ticket this fall. Please!), then all they've done is give up the better part of their ability to change the world in ways they want.

Love: You're Doing it Wrong

The following are quotes from an antebellum Southerner, in 1854, in a book describing the ideal Southern society:

"A man loves his children because they are weak, helpless, and dependent; he loves his wife for similar reasons. ... He ceases to love his wife when she becomes masculine or rebellious."

"So long as she is nervous, fickle, capricious, delicate, diffident, and dependent, man will worship and adore her ... If she be obedient, she is in little danger of mal-treatment; if she stands upon her rights, is coarse and masculine, man loathes and despises her, and ends by abusing her. Law, however well-intended, can do little in her behalf."

There's a lot to say about that, or perhaps not so much a lot to say as a very little bit to say very emphatically, but my particular observation is that this guy clearly has a strange concept of love. Weakness, helplessness, and dependency are things which naturally inspire pity, and maybe perhaps a feeling of protectiveness. Love is not pity and protectiveness; it may include these things, if a loved one is, you know, weak, helpless, and dependent, although in its best forms it should also probably include a desire to help change those circumstances. I think what this guy really means is that, so long as his wife is properly submissive in the way described, a man will "love" the feeling he gets from his dominion over her. But, uh, "I love having dominion over you" is very different from "I love you." You're doing it wrong, antebellum Southerners.

The Tea Party Are Not Civil Libertarians, Okay?

Toward the end of a blog post about an apparently-dead-or-at-least-comatose NSA proposal to, I dunno, surveil the Internet more than the government already does, Kevin Drum tosses this line into an attempt to analyze the partisan breakdown of the issue:

Obviously the GOP base is inclined to think that anything Obama opposes must be good, and they certainly supported the increased surveillance powers that George Bush gave to NSA. On the other hand, tea partiers tend to be suspicious of this kind of Big Brotherish monitoring.

But the problem is, there's just no truth to this! At no point has the Tea Party in any noticeable way made any sign that it opposes the security state! They love the security state, as well they should, as they're just the very most conservative of conservative Republicans. Because if you're against surveillance, you must be for the people we want to surveil, which means you support the Islamofascists in their efforts to take over America and impose Sharia law here. Of all the many, many things to mind about the mainstream media over the past few years, perhaps the one I mind the most is the way absolutely no one challenges the assertion that the Tea Party is about libertarianism. It just is not. True, the movement is in some ways inspired by Ron Paul's quasi-libertarian campaign from 2008, but they've taken all of the least libertarian parts of his platform and ditched the parts that make one kind of almost admit that he's an actual civil libertarian. It's just one great big lie that the Tea Party opposes "Big Brother" government surveillance programs. It's just a lie.

On Posthumous Mormon Conversion

I should preface this by saying that the Mormon custom of posthumously baptizing various "heathen" types, like Jewish holocaust victims, is weird in the extreme and kind of sick. Moreover, it's patently offensive, in the strict sense; it sends a clear message of "y'all are inferior and need our help," and there's every reason to find that message kind of offensive. And the All Dead Mormons Are Now Gay thing is bloody brilliant; these sickos deserve every little bit of messing-with we can give them, both for the weird posthumous conversion thing and for their general homophobia.

But I personally, as a strong atheist, find that the whole thing is just not a big deal. The people in question are dead. It doesn't, and can't, matter to them, because they're dead! It's just a bunch of lunatics dancing around in funny patterns and chanting absurd phrases in dark rooms in Utah. It's a nothing. Absolutely nothing about the universe, or the well-being of the dead persons in question, changes because of these absurd/obscene little rituals. You can't posthumously convert someone to Mormonism, because religious adherence requires a living mind to do the adhering. The Mormon Church can write down Anne Frank's name in a list of Mormons somewhere, but so what? That doesn't actually matter one tiny little bit.

Like I said, that doesn't change the fact that they're what I can only justly refer to as sick fucks for doing this, or the fact that it is offensive and should be considered offensive. But aside from the offensiveness thing, this isn't some big terror they're inflicting upon the world. It's just their own little insanity in their own little world.

Bring Back 30-Day Sentences!

I'm sitting in my Law & Society class learning that, when people are considering the possibility of sanctions in considering whether to commit a crime, the certainty of a punishment matters a whole lot more than the severity. So, in other words, if Sanction A is a 50% chance of a 1-year jail sentence and Sanction B is a 25% chance of a 2-year jail sentence, both of which give an Expected Value punishment of six months, most people will be more scared of Sanction A than Sanction B. This is interesting for the death penalty debate, since trying to impose the death penalty makes it much harder to get the punishment imposed. But I think it's also interesting because over the past many decades we've moved away from giving people a 30-day sentence for run-of-the-mill offenses. This is probably a mistake, since it's probably easier to give people 30-day sentences than five-year ones. It's also vastly less destructive of social well-being. At the very least we wouldn't suffer much of a reduction in deterrence, and we'd move away from our 'throw everyone in jail forever' society.