Steve Sailer dissects voting patterns and suggests that Republicans—who tend to do well among married couples and families with children, and in places where housing is plentiful—ought to make their stand on "affordable family formation". Presumably Democrats could make a stand on this as well; I'm not exactly sure where all the causal arrows are pointing here. Anyway, interesting analysis; Sailer also notes that "the spread of immigrants into the middle of the country puts once-solid Republican states [Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, Georgia, North Carolina] into play."

Elizabeth Anderson channels Hayek to… well, defend the liberal welfare state it seems: "In Law, Legislation, and Liberty, vol. 2, Hayek argued that, for a society to secure the liberty of all, its distributive rules cannot aim at achieving some pre-established pattern of distribution based on individual need, desert, or merit. Instead, they should be purely procedural in form. Set up a system of fair, impersonal rules governing our interactions and applicable to all, let people choose freely from among the opportunities generated by acting within the constraints of the rules, and whatever distributions of goods result from following the rules will be just." So that rules out communism but not much else, no?

Ah... chess tactics. For the record, my chess game consists entirely of sneaky knight forks, primarily because they're so delightfully infuriating, and my winning strategy really involves making my opponents lose their cool and start doing stupid stuff. Which is why I never challenge anyone over the age of 12.

Jon Henke's much-linked post on torture deserves yet more links.

Fish! (Long story, but true.)

I've spent the last hour clicking around Pharyngula's fun little carnival. Fascinating stuff, especially this linked-to post on the Epoch Times revolutionaries in China.

And... a fun article about just how totally awesome math is, by way of profiling Dartmouth's Dan Rockmore. Except, at least while I was there, Rockmore didn't actually teach any math classes at Dartmouth—he taught Computer Science. And he's wrong about the slicing the cake bit. No matter; the rest is quite good.