Should we be cowering in our vintage bomb shelters after the underwear bomber was foiled last week? Nate Silver, the fantastic statistics geek, pulled together the numbers in a great post at FiveThirtyEight.com called “The Odds of Airborne Terror”. To summarize: not all that great.

Jesus Diaz at Gizmodo, created this nice graphic of of Silver’s work:

I wish I could remember where I read this, but someone pointed out that if the odds of being on a plane with one bomb are so infinitesimal, the odds of being on any particular plane with two bombs must be unimaginable. It would stand to reason then, the most effective thing you could do to protect yourself from being on a flight with a bomb-carrying terrorist is to always carry a bomb yourself. (Just kidding, folks.)

FiveThirtyEight.com: The Odds of Airborne Terror

Gizmodo: The True Odds of Airborne Terror Chart

It’s now been days since the Bay Bridge broke and was closed on October 27. If you’re not from the area you might not know this: a repair that was done over Labor Day failed and sent 5000 pounds of metal onto the roadway. Miraculously, no one was killed.

The stuff that fell lies in front of the Ryder truck in the picture above.

I ran across an excellent article on what might be going on (via Gizmodo). Check it out, since our media outlets have been incomplete covering this part of the story.

http://www.sci-experiments.com/BrokenBridge/BrokenBridge.html

(By the way, there’s an odd near-coincidence here: The Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989, which closed the bridge and prompted all this work to replace the eastern span of the Bay Bridge occurred just before Game 2 of the World Series.  October 27 was the day before Game 1 of this year’s Series.)

This is a new one to me and a welcome development…presidential recognition of the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots and our current celebration of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Pride Month.

Here’s the text of today’s presidential proclamation:

Over the weekend, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued a proclamation of her own:

MoveOn.org has a funny thing where you can throw tomatoes at AIG and learn interesting facts:

THE AIG TOMATO TOSS

(If you don’t want to sign up, just make something up. Make sure the email address you put in this format: something-at-something-dot-something)

Enjoy!

Mortgage-backed securities, credit default swaps, stock injections. These and more are components of the global financial crisis. If you’re like me, they’re not things we learned along with supply-and-demand in basic economics classes. And yet, we’re being told we have to shoulder the burden to somehow solve this mess. Wouldn’t it be a good idea to have some understanding of the issues?

Along comes my favorite radio program, This American Life with its ongoing patient and entertaining coverage which explains some of this. As is always the case, you can listen to the episodes for free online, download the most recent episode or go to iTunes to buy the shows.

First up is Episode #355, originally broadcast on May 9, 2008, entitled “The Giant Pool of Money”. This one deals with the mortgage crisis and those very odd financial instruments called mortgage-backed securities.

Then comes the show from last week, Episode #365, “Another Frightening Show About the Economy”.  Here they deal with credit default swaps and how the government failed us miserably in deciding to not regulate that market. They discuss an alternative to the bailout which involves the government investing money in the banks, something called stock injection. Prescience indeed… this is precisely the approach the European Union countries have taken today. It looks as if our government will reverse course in favor of stock injection as well.

By the way, remember how McCain said he would “fire” the chairman of the SEC? (Strictly speaking the President can’t do that.) You can hear about the man himself, Christopher Cox in Episode #363, “The Enforcers”. There they talk about how he declined to regulate another financial practice that contributed to the current debacle, naked short selling.

One of the ongoing reporters on the financial crisis, Alex Bloomberg, returns to the show this week, in Episode #366, “A Better Mousetrap – 2008” with updates. (If you haven’t heard this on your local NPR station, the episode should be up on the website tomorrow.)

Since we’re far from the end here, This American Life has updates on their homepage.

We have finally begun the final 100 days of the Bush era. A new poll from Newsweek today shows that 85% of us are dissatisfied with how things are going…a paltry 10% Panglossian optimists think otherwise. Similarly the failure-in-chief has a 25% job approval rating, the lowest in 50 years.

100 days…not a moment too soon.

On page A17 of today’s SF Chronicle, in the world section, I saw this entertaining ad:

I wouldn’t go to the “blossomgoodchild” website (who knows what malicious code might lurk there), but the blogspot address is probably safe enough.

What’s even better is when you see the ad that’s printed next to it:

www.10-14-08.blogspot.com

In all the years I’ve lived in California (and it’s been many), I have never seen this kind of smoke. Even the Oakland Hills fire of 1991 didn’t have this kind of atmospheric impact. The picture above is pretty much what the sun looked like today, all day, every day this week. Normally, we don’t see that kind of color except right at sunset. As far as I can tell, the closest fire is about 50-60 miles away.  It’s very strange to wake up in the morning and smell smoke like this. Today none of the local geography was visible from our house, not even the highest point in the Bay Area, nearby Mt. Diablo.

There are currently just over 1,000 wildfires burning, mostly in Northern California, of which 36 are considered major fires. About 159,000 acres have burned or are burning. The situation exploded last weekend, with 512 lightning strikes happening during mostly dry storms.

Here are some information resources if you’re interested:

Google’s wildfire map

California Dept of Forestry: wildfire information page

Governor’s Office of Emergency Services

As a guy whose parentage is half-Filipino, I could hardly believe my eyes and ears when I caught this latest insulting gaffe from the Idiot-in-Chief.

The president of the Philippines, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, was in Washington on my birthday (Tuesday) for a visit that unfortunately included a trip to the White House. Never mind that typhoon damage and the ferry disaster loom large on Filipino minds: GW had to make cute about a Filipino-American who works on the kitchen staff at the White House.

PRESIDENT BUSH: Madam President, it is a pleasure to welcome you back to the Oval Office. We have just had a very constructive dialogue. First, I want to tell you how proud I am to be the President of a nation that — in which there’s a lot of Philippine-Americans. They love America and they love their heritage. And I reminded the President that I am reminded of the great talent of the — of our Philippine-Americans when I eat dinner at the White House. (Laughter.)

 

PRESIDENT ARROYO: Yes.

 

PRESIDENT BUSH: And the chef is a great person and a really good cook, by the way, Madam President.

 

PRESIDENT ARROYO: Thank you.

SHEESH!!! What a jerk…

YouTube video

Huffington Post