I greatly enjoyed the documentary about Richard Feynman shown on BBC2 TV last night, having already greatly enjoyed the docu-drama about the Feynman Challenger investigation.

Last night’s documentary contained the following particularly choice piece of dialogue:

“Why is your van covered in Feynman Diagrams?”

“Because we’re the Feynmans.”

Good answer.

There is a picture of the Feynmans, next to their van, which I found here, where the picture is slightly bigger.

Does this van still exist, with all the Feynman Diagrams on it?  I hope so.

Here.

Via here.

That’s the headline, but really, all that the cats are doing is killing off a few endangered bird species.

I guess people get so used to saying that something is both destroying the planet and meanwhile killing a few endangered species, that if all that it’s really doing is killing a few endangered species, it must also be destroying the planet.

Madsen Pirie has a posting up about the Parisian origins of the Statue of Liberty, featuring one of my all time favourite photographs.  Which gives me an excuse to exhibit some snaps I took in Paris last February, of the Statue of Liberty.

There are two miniature Statues of Liberty in Paris.  Before visiting Paris I didn’t realise there were any, and since being in Paris until now, when I looked it up on the www, I hadn’t realised that Paris contained two.  There is a very small one in the Jardin du Luxembourg, and a less small one next to Grenelle Bridge, which is the one I went to see:

I still have tons more Paris photos to show off, but that’s a start.

This afternoon Antoine Clarke and I, all being well, will be having a recorded chat about the US presidential election.

[LATER: Here is the recording.  Not everything went well.  If my computer’s response is anything to go by, you will hear this through only one speaker, and in somewhat imperfect sound.  But nobody listens to BrianMicklethwaitDotCom sound files to be knocked out by their superb sound quality.  What we both say is audible, and the good news is that the file is far smaller than usual.  I hope that, if you listen, you enjoy it.  It lasts just under 45 minutes.]

Meanwhile, here is another attempt to embed a video here.  This time it’s John McCain, talking about just how badly Obama screwed up this Benghazi business.

That got shown on CBS.  How many people have watched it, or will watch it before the election, I have no idea.  The importance of this and all the other Obama scandals is not that they are scandalous, but whether or not large numbers of Americans are hearing about them.

I have been speculating that the “mainstream” media would maybe desert Obama.  Well, a few people in it are expressing doubts, but on the whole media bias has never been more blatant and brazen.  This is because Obama is, far more than any previous Democrat, their perfect candidate.  Hard left, and determined to inflict (in a thoroughly bad way) fundamental change on America.  I really want these media people to get the kicking of their lives.

Obama’s enemies are still trying to sort out whether they think Obama is merely crass by nature, or evil on purpose.  We may never know.  Successful people (and Obama has been very successful by most measurements) do what they are best at.

I cannot for the the life of me see how re-electing Obama could possibly be anything but a giant act of folly and self-destruction on the part of America.

The BBC, by the way, are still saying that this election is a dead heat.  Or this is what they said on the 9am news bulletin on Radio 3, just before CD Review last Saturday.  Others say Obama is going to get landslided.  I think landslide, but ... we shall see.

If the video isn’t working properly, please let me know.  Not that I will then know what to do, but it will influence my enthusiasm for further such attempts.

Well, well. I just added, to the posting below, this:

Actually, I think I got the first two sentences of the paragraph above wrong.  It should read: “What polls tell you is not what voters are thinking.  They tell you what the pollsters think the voters are thinking”.  What I actually put is indeed “not entirely true”.  This explains, I think, and as my original version does not, why pollsters don’t get the result right, but do get right the direction in which opinion is heading at any particular moment, which, as I introspect, I have been letting them tell me about.  Because they do get that right. The misleading samples of people that the pollsters each talk to include a few who change their minds, and the pollsters do pick up on this.  So, now, the pollsters are getting right that opinion is flowing steadily away from Obama and towards Romney.  But at no stage in this process did, or do, or will they register how bad things were, and are, and will be, for Obama.

And mere hours later, I read this:

One way of avoiding this error is to look at the same poll over a long period of time.  The numbers themselves might be off, but as long as the same flawed methodology doesn’t change, you should still be able to pick up trends.

Indeed.

But he’s not even sure that Obama will lose, although he definitely inclines that way.  I incline that way more and more definitely with every day that passes.

And now, it seems I’m only one of a stampede.

Already, I am turning my mind to a piece about Romney, entitled something like: Okay, he’s going to win, but then what?

I now think Romney is going to win big.  Part of why I think that is captured in point 2 in that graphic, which I found here.  No one has to know.

In particular, the pollsters do not have to know.  I think the polls have, all along, been wrong about this election, wronger than ever before.  The polls are not being told what people have been, are, and will be thinking.  The polls were wrong when they said Obama was walking it.  They are wrong now that they are saying it’s close.  They will be wrong when they say Romney will just about win, as they soon will.  But on the day, in the real poll, Obama is going to be slaughtered.  Romney will win all the “battleground” states and several which are not now even thought to be in contention.

What polls tell you is not what the result will be.  They tell you what the pollsters think the result will be.  How do they know what they know?  Same way I do.  They guess.  (In this respect, poll results remind me of economic models.) Okay that isn’t entirely true.  I myself factor in what the polls say when I make my guesses.  But the polls are sufficiently wrong to be very wrong indeed, for an event that can be bent into a completely different shape by single figure percentage point errors.

[LATER: Actually, I think I got the first two sentences of the paragraph above wrong.  It should read: “What polls tell you is not what voters are thinking.  They tell you what the pollsters think the voters are thinking”.  What I actually put is indeed “not entirely true”.  This explains, I think, and as my original version does not, why pollsters don’t get the result right, but do get right the direction in which opinion is heading at any particular moment, which, as I introspect, I have been letting them tell me about.  Because they do get that right. The misleading samples of people that the pollsters each talk to include a few who change their minds, and the pollsters do pick up on this.  So, now, the pollsters are getting right that opinion is flowing steadily away from Obama and towards Romney.  But at no stage in this process did, or do, or will they register how bad things were, and are, and will be, for Obama.  End of LATER.]

We shall see, etc.

Debate Two between Obama and Romney has now become about whether Obama can win by a knockout.  Maybe he can.  But, he won’t.

Romney’s final burst of adverts will have further impact.  Obama’s adverts have accomplished little.  They said Romney isn’t likable, is a right wing nutjob, etc.  Debate One negated this message.  They said something about “Big Bird”.  Ridiculous.  But that doesn’t prove that adverts accomplish nothing, by their nature.  Just as in the debates, and unlike Obama, Romney (and Ryan) have plenty of persuasive things that they want to say.

In a comment on this, I noted that the TV Umpire lady in the Vice President debate did Biden no favours by allowing him to behave so very badly.  Had she told him early on to stop his giggling and interrupting, Biden might well have won that debate.  But give TV Umpire lady her due, she did at least interrupt Ryan, whenever his speeches were starting to sound too eloquent.

But Romney’s adverts can correct that, by saying everything Team Romney now wants to say, and which the mainstream media have until now stopped them saying by less expensive means.  And, they can use the exact words which will work best.

Plus, Team Romney will have, I believe, another two debates worth of Obama waffle to use, like they have already used Biden’s laughing.

Like Jim Bennett said:

John, let me suggest that the criteria for victory are changing. The debate no longer ends when the debaters walk off stage. And now it no longer ends when the TV spinners have, like cuckoos, laid their eggs and flown away. There is now the long, long reverberation in social media, where the basic debate footage serves as raw material for mash-ups and parodies and treatments for the rest of the election cycle and beyond. And Biden’s performance, which won him some tactical advantage in the debate, has set him up as the target for rich satire and a way that Ryan’s conventional performance didn’t and cannot do. His performance is comic gold, and although within hard-core Dem/left circles he will be celebrated as the warrior, everywhere else, and especially for basically apolitical young YouTube viewers, he will be the jackass supreme. I suspect that by Election Day, the various parodic videos will have had a larger viewership than the debate itself. By this criterion, the tactic was a massive miscalculation.

If the same thing happens to Obama, between now and the election (I believe it will), he really will be slaughtered.

But … we shall see.

LATER: Mitt Romney in a landslide.

I stayed up, not so much to watch the Vice Presidential Debate, as to see what would be made of it by others, most especially the BBC.

The BBC’s lady with big blond hair said (a) that it was too close to call, but then (b) called if for Ryan.  Two reasons for making Ryan the winner.  One, Biden had to win, to get some momentum back for Obama.  A draw was enough for Ryan.  So Biden actually lost.  Two, Biden actually did lose, because of all his smirking and interrupting and condescending.  Biden did all that wrong.  Ryan did nothing wrong.  So, Ryan won.

The BBC agreed, in other words, with PJTV drunk blogger Steven Green, who also had Ryan winning.  It’s not a knockout, but it is a win.

My personal take?

At first I was rather impressed by Biden, but then I started to find his air of forced merriment unsuitable for the grim things he was arguing about.  I was glad to see that others thought that too and that it wasn’t just me.

Biden was the more obvious “performer”.  Which is not good.  He was the one trying to create an atmosphere, like an old school stage actor.  Ryan seemed more himself.  Which could just mean that Ryan is a better performer.

Because Ryan was defending while Biden attacked, it looked like Ryan was the actual Vice President, defending four defendable years of him being Vice President and Romney being President, rather than Romney and him being the challengers.  But that may have been because I had the sound switched off for quite a lot of it, while I read other stuff.

If you had seen those two faces in a thirties or fifties political movie, you’d have said Ryan was the young brainy lefty Democrat, while Biden was the old country club Republican President.  But old Republican President is not the persona you want for an attack.

As it was, Young Ryan was under pressure from both Old Biden and the big blond American TV lady.  Ryan kept his cool.  He proved himself a better guy than lots of those watching may have realised.  The general American opinion of Ryan will surely go up, even if only a bit.  He was under big pressure.  He did not buckle.  He was the one who proved he had the Right Stuff.