Pick me up, Momma

June 10, 2012 9:53 am

Heather is reaching the needy, clingy stage highlighted by separation anxiety.  She also seems to be starting to teethe.  So she wants to be held a lot.  We pretty much always pick her up the same way, by sliding our hands under her armpits.  She appears to have figured this out and when we go to pick her up she won’t reach for us, but she will lift up her arms.

And now she seems to have come up with the idea that if she can get our hands under her armpits then we have to pick her up.  This coupled with her daily-increasing mobility makes for some adorable behavior.  However, her first issue is that she doesn’t know how to get her legs out of her way, but once that’s sorted out she jumps right into action.

My favorite part is right at the end.  Once she gets herself all situated she just stops and looks up at Jess as if to say, “Alright Momma, I did my part, now you have to pick me up.”

One year older…

9:34 am

Saturday birthdays are the best.  We got up in the morning and I played with Heather while Jess decorated the apartment.  We thought Heather would enjoy playing with a bit of streamer.  Little did we know that streamer dye runs very easily.  So Heather ended up with blue all over her tongue, hands, and mouth.  It was rather entertaining and it mostly washed off.

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Once the apartment was decorated and after we had breakfast we decided it was time to open presents.  Other Dickerson children might consider this blasphemy, but Jess convinced me it was a good idea.  Since it was Saturday we could hang out in pajamas and open presents and then you have the whole day to play with things; it’s like Christmas, but then there’s cake.  It’s really hard to argue against this logic.

Heather helped with presents for a little while, but then became much more interested in what Jess was doing.

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Hey look!  I got my very own Galileo thermometer!

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After opening and playing with presents for a while, it was time for Heather’s nap.  So she slept while we prepared for the day.  And after her nap we went to California Pizza Kitchen for birthday-lunch.  Birthday-dinner is more traditional, but it’s kind of hard to go anywhere for dinner when Heather goes to bed by 6 each night.

When we got home from lunch it was just about time for some friends to come over so we could have cake and hang out.

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Jess was kind enough to do our usual Saturday grocery shopping on Friday so we were able to just relax and enjoy the day.  It was a good day.

Approval Voting

June 4, 2012 3:40 pm

Some of the most interesting classes I took during college were the artificial intelligence courses.  These courses usually took concepts from psychology, sociology, political science, and evolutionary biology, and discussed them in the context of logic, mathematics, and algorithms.  It’s absolutely fascinating stuff.

One of the most interesting topics from all of my education was about voting—discussed in the context of Arrow’s impossibility theorem, the Gibbard–Satterthwaite theorem, and Condorcet’s paradox.

The Wikipedia introductions in each of those articles are pretty easy to understand.  But in quick, simplified, summary:

Condorcet’s paradox explains how it’s possible for an election to have no meaningful winner because any choice can be argued against due to a cyclical ordering of choices (think rock-paper-scissors).

The Gibbard–Satterthwaite theorem shows that (for 3 or more choices/candidates) if voters order the candidates by preference and you try to choose a single winner from those preferences, then either (1) someone is a dictator and controls the outcome, (2) some candidate can never win, or (3) voters have an incentive to lie about their preferences in order to influence the outcome (people can game the system).

Arrow’s impossibility theorem is similar, but deals with systems that attempt to find a preference order over all candidates rather than a single winner.  For a reasonable set of axioms that define a “fair” voting system, there can be no voting system which satisfies all of the fairness axioms simultaneously.

I think these ideas are simply enthralling.  We then went over a slew of different voting protocols (ways of casting and counting votes) and showed how they were bound by these concepts.

Our class discussion naturally led to which voting protocol was “most fair.”  But, necessary in that discussion is also which voting protocol is most fair without being too complex to actually use.

Most of the time when we think about voting in the United States, we’re thinking about plurality voting (first-past-the-post or winner-take-all).  This is when, trying to get a single winner out of a group of candidates, each voter casts one vote and the candidate with the plurality of votes wins.  It happens to be a very simple protocol, but, in the opinion of the class (which I agree with), one of the least fair protocols.  Without discussing the technical violations of Arrow’s fairness axioms, the reasoning we used was that when there are many candidates with similar levels of support, a large part of the population ends up being unrepresented and, due to this, plurality voting tends to collapse to a two-party system (often where neither candidate is really liked, but only preferred over the other candidate).

In our discussion, we tended to favor approval voting for its simplicity and ability to stave off a collapse to the two-party divisiveness.  In approval voting, each voter simply votes for any/all candidates of which they approve.  So if there are 4 candidates and you like 3 of them, you vote for all 3.  Or if you only like 1, just vote for that one.  There now is no reason to collapse into a two-party system because I can vote for all candidates I feel are qualified instead of fearing that the “other person” will win and I therefore must vote for the “most electable” of my actual preferred candidates.

Approval voting, of course, has some of its own problems, but we felt it was certainly more fair than plurality voting and would help solve some of the problems we’re experiencing in U.S. politics right now in terms of partisanship, divisive rhetoric, and inviability of third-party candidates.

Erin – age 15 – stuck in hamper

May 24, 2012 10:01 am

She may now have a law degree, but at 15 Erin still struggled against the mighty forces of the plastic hamper.  My favorite comment from Mom: “She’s supposed to be smart.”

Enjoy!

I also enjoy that Erin had apparently been toddling around like this for some time.  Enough time for Mom to find the video camera and get it working and then say “Okay Erin, now let’s see you go around the room in it again.”