The USA is rare among democracies in electing a President by a formula different from one-person-one-vote.

One well-known inequity is that small states get more electoral votes per inhabitant. I think of this as a linear effect, which, all else equal, gives a Wyoming resident a 3.5 times better chance of determining the President than a Californian.

The other best-known inequity is the winner-takes-all system in most states, which means that a few swing states end up determining the winner. This is a vastly greater injustice, for it is exponential. Thanks to the laws of statistics, the chance that a Californian might determine the President is in a precise sense exponentially small because of the exp(-x^2) shape of the normal distribution. Likewise for a Wyomingite. This biggest problem of American democracy is thus a corollary of the Central Limit Theorem.

[22 September 2024]

Harvard University Health Services has sent us all a memo about “best practices for protecting yourself and the community”. Six of the ten bullet-point recommendations concern ticks and mosquitoes, including this one:

• Avoid outdoor activities from dusk to dawn.

So I’ve looked around on the web. It seems that mosquitoes kill 1 or 2 people per year on average in Massachusetts through Eastern Equine Encephalitis or West Nile Virus, and ticks perhaps a similar number through Powassan virus or Lyme disease. Meanwhile my rough estimates are that Massachusetts can expect around the following numbers of deaths this year from various other causes:

150 homicides
400 car accidents
400 Covid
600 suicides
700 flu
1000 falls
1000 other non-auto injuries
2000 opioid overdoses

Do I conclude that Harvard is foolish to tell us to stay indoors after dusk? To tell the truth I’m not sure what I conclude; but the numbers are striking.

[12 September 2024]

The last two notes commented on the flourishing of bureaucracy at the NSF and in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, so it seems only fair now to mention the latest from Harvard University. All of us faculty just received an email about the university’s policies and procedures (related to doxing, as it happens). It was signed by the President, the Provost, a Vice President, and fifteen Deans.

P.S. 10 Sept. Here’s another email. Another deanship has been created.

[5 September 2024]

The cashier at the Broadway Marketplace just now asked me for two forms of ID before he could sell me a bottle of wine. He needed proof I was over 21. We joked about this, and he explained that policing has become very strict lately and the store can get into trouble if they cut corners.

Having rigorously established my age, he gave me the 10% senior citizens discount.

[5 September 2024]