Per Daily Kos:

Research 2000 for Daily Kos. 1/12-14. Likely voters. MoE 4% (No trend lines)

Leahy (D) 58

Douglas (R) 36

Republican Gov. Jim Douglas is decently popular at 52-41, which he’d have to be to continue winning gubernatorial races in the most Democratic state in the union. Yet even he is no match for Sen. Patrick Leahy, who has an extremely high 63-33 favorability rating.

Not that this comes as any surprise, but Leahy is golden for 2010. Douglas will stick to the governor’s mansion.

Full crosstabs at Markos’ diary (linked above)

Three guesses as to what that quote’s about.

“Think of it as a radio contest.”

Hmm… something that gets you a prize of some sort?  A chance to win inaugural tickets?  Perhaps a game?

Not so much so.

This is what Commissioner Patricia Moulton Powden had to say about the following.  Per The Rutland Herald…

As the economy continues to slink downward, the Vermont Department of Labor has been swamped with new unemployment claims – and the state is now scrambling to get more workers in front of phones to help out residents who have lost their jobs.

Commissioner Patricia Moulton Powden told lawmakers Wednesday that her department has seen a more than 100 percent increase in calls in the last two months. There were 7,300 weekly unemployment claims in November, she added, compared with 16,000 by the end of December.

This has meant that the state Labor Department often does not have enough staff to handle all the calls and Vermonters are getting busy signals or the “circuits are busy” message when they try to call.

And while the state has been adding staff to the call centers, Powden said Vermonters who need the services should keep on calling.

“Think of it as a radio contest,” she said. “Just hit the redial button.”

This is a little more serious than this sort of flip response.  But I bet if we wanted to save a little money, we could just outsource this to India.

There was a bit of a kerfuffle here (and throughout the liberal blogosphere) over whether we should give Obama a nice little honeymoon or push him over policies that we don’t support.

Now we have the answer:

The message was heard and is being acted on.  Barack Obama and his administration-to-be has been listening to Democrats and now is revising the stimulus plan.

The message is clear: criticizing Obama’s plans yields results.  

Yesterday’s Rutland Herald Headline: Leak fixed, Yankee at full power

Today’s Reformer headline: VY powers up, down for new problem:

Power was reduced due to a problem in the switchyard located just east of the reactor building, according to Rob Williams, spokesman for Yankee.

The plant was powered down after operators discovered reduced pressure in one of the switchyard breaker’s insulating gas. The breakers open the circuit on the high-voltage transmission lines that originate at the plant.

[…]

On Monday afternoon, technicians were replenishing the sulfur hexafluoride gas and trying to determine how the breaker lost pressure, said Williams.

I’m not sure which concerns me more: the fact that VY keeps having these problems or the fact that VY never seems to know why it’s having these problems.

December 5, 2008: a post by John Odum: Don’t mess with Lamoille County:

Let’s see, Lamoille County has about 25,000 people or roughly 4% of Vermont’s population (as compared to Chittenden County which has a population of about 150,000, or 24% of Vermont’s population.

But that tiny Lamoille sliver of the population will soon include: The Speaker of the House (Shap Smith), the House Majority Leader (Floyd Nease) and the Senate Appropriations Chair (Susan Bartlett).

I guess that makes li’l Lamoille County the political big dog in the state, eh?

More than five weeks later, in today’s Burlington Free Press, Lamoille lawmakers rise to the top:

“It’s just happenstance,” said new House Speaker Shap Smith, a Democrat from Morristown. Still, in addition to having a Lamoille native running the 150-member House of Representatives, a Johnson resident – Rep. Floyd Nease – won the job of House majority leader. He’s in charge of the 95-member Democratic caucus.

Two other Lamoille residents have holds on the state’s purse strings. Sen. Susan Bartlett, a Democrat from Hyde Park returns as chairwoman of the House Appropriations Committee, which helps write the state budget. Rep. Richard Westman, a Republican from Cambridge, continues as chairman of the House Transportation Committee, which is charged with writing the plan for spending on roads, bridges, rail and airports.

Per today’s Rutland Herald:

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has given Entergy Nuclear permission to reduce the number of times it conducts tests on control rods, a key safety system at Vermont Yankee plant.

In a decision released earlier this week, the NRC granted a license amendment to Entergy that will allow it to test the control rods on a monthly basis. The control rods are now tested weekly. Entergy filed the request in February 2008.

The control rods are inserted in the reactor core in the event of an emergency or a power reduction to reduce the amount of nuclear reaction in the plant.

UPDATE: Sites are coming back, and things have stabilized. Looks like BlogPAC and the netroots community are going to engage activiely to make sure that Soapblox – which has really become the backbone of the netroots – stays viable. Whew.  -odum

Okay, so here’s the deal: Soapblox, the site that hosts Green Mountain Daily and a whole host of other leftwing blogs, is in serious trouble.  At least one of their servers was hacked, bigtime, and several sites that use Soapblox are completely down.

This isn’t even the worst part.  The worst part is that the owners of Soapblox are considering shutting the system down completely.  

The details behind this are over at Daily Kos, but I’ll give the quick summary: Soablox is incredibly cheap and the people who run it do so for very little (if any) profit at all. (seriously: I’d be charging 2-3 times what they charge for the same service, and my rates are not high).

It looks like the only way we’ll be able to keep Soapblox up and running (with its complete history) is to give Soapblox a reasonable fee for its services, which means we need to start soliciting donations to keep it active.  

I don’t have the button to accept donations ready yet, but we’re hoping to do this.  We can host GMD elsewhere, but we’ll lose all the content of the site so far if we do so and have to start over from scratch.  I’ve got all the e-mail addresses, so that if we do go down, we can send a notice out to everyone, but that’s the best I can do right now.

This is big, folks.  Really big.

The night sky: a 41 minute, 57 second exposure:

Clicking on the image gets you to a larger version with some details (camera settings, etc).  To get a larger version, click here

Recently, over on Daily Kos, I reposted a piece I wrote in December of 2007 about Asch’s work on conformity, and that post provides the framework for today’s personal stories about conformity.  

To recap (with more details in the previous post), in the figure shown here, when asked which line most matches the one on the card, many people were influenced to choose the incorrect answer, even when they were sure that C was correct, through the influence of others choosing the same incorrect answer.

I understood this research long before I read about it, even though I had neither the words nor expertise to explain it.  When I was a kid, I used to try social experiments in movie theaters.  I would, for example, see if I could get other people to applaud when I applauded.  It turns out I could.  Much of the time, it only took one or two other people to go along and then the whole theater was doing it.  

My favorite though, was getting people to laugh.  

This particular trick worked best in comedies that had lots of dramatic moments in them, or dramas which had many funny bits.  This is what you do: make a point of laughing loudly (but not in a fake over the top “I’m acting like someone having fun!” way) at a point in the film where there is nothing funny going on, but after someone has just said something.  

It is common for someone else in the audience to think they’ve missed a good joke and start laughing as well.  In a matter of seconds, you can have an entire theater laughing at something that is not even remotely funny.  

There is an anecdote about Vladamir Horowitz in this regard.  It may be just a story, and it may be true, but it illustrates the point.  Carnegie Hall, the story goes, has people hired to applaud at key points.  These are people who know when the pieces begin and end and when it’s appropriate to applaud.  Classical musicians can be a stuffy lot, and they do not appreciate it when people applaud between movements but before the piece has finished.  The clappers, therefore, provide an informational service, allowing the audience to know when the piece is over and giving them permission to clap.

Horowitz didn’t think this was necessary.  He insisted that there were enough people in the audience that knew classical music that they’d clap when appropriate and the rest of the audience would follow.

Horowitz was, of course, wrong.  He completely bombed at Carnegie Hall.

Which brings us to the story of Joshua Bell’s rush hour violin performance.   Read the article in full– it’s well worth reading, and I don’t want to try to rehash it because doing so would not do it real justice.  It does, however, serve as background for what I’m going to say below.

The short version is that there’s a certain sense of consensus to Bell’s popularity.  Does his music shine through and ring true throughout, regardless of circumstance?  Do people stop and listen to him because he’s a brilliant musician, or do we stop to listen because, socially, enough people have determined that he’s a brilliant musician that we conform to the idea that he’s brilliant once enough people tell us so?  

Mind you: I’m not speaking to the accuracy of the claim of brilliance on Bell’s part.  I’m talking about the perception of it and how that perception comes to exist.

Think about the “popularity” of such people as Paris Hilton.  She’s not famous for anything she’s said or done.  She’s actually a recursive celebrity: she’s famous for being famous, and then people know who she is because other people know who she is.

I’m talking about all this because I think that knowing how conformity works is something we can use to our advantage.  How often do we find the media making claims about what “people” think?  This can create self-fulfilling prophesies, convincing some of us that we’re not conforming.  It doesn’t take a lot of people to swing an election; if you can convince just 10% of the population to conform to a specific idea against their better judgment, you can swing an election.

If you can, as was done in the 1980’s, convince the public that people think of “liberal” as a dirty word and that “card carrying member of the ACLU” is a good attack on a political opponent, you can swing an election.

And if liberals and card-carrying members of the ACLU try to hide from those labels, they behave in a fashion which convinces the public that there’s something to be ashamed of there.

Twenty years ago, I met William Sloane Coffin.  I will never forget one specific thing he said– when Dukakis was being accused using that exact term: “a card carrying member of the ACLU,” Coffin said that it was bad for him to try to shy away from that, that the proper response was “damned right I am.  And here’s my card.”  Coffin understood conformity and knew that when politicians act as though they are not part of the mainstream, they lose voters.  He was right.  

We don’t have to be the majority, but even when we are the majority, we too often act as though we’re not.  We pretend deference to Republicans whom we soundly rejected in the last election. We behave as though we owe them something because so many voters supported them.  

We need to stop this.  We need to do what needs to be done, do the right things as they come up and just act as though everyone supports us, even when they do.  Until Democrats can learn that lesson, we’re going to be allowing Republicans to take too much control of the agenda.  Politics doesn’t need to be about party, but it does need to be about doing what’s right, and it’s pretty clear in the coming months what we need to do.  Step one is to stop pretending that Republicans have or deserve power.  The more we act as though they have power, the more people believe them to have power, and the more power they get.  The more we act as though they are irrelevant, the more people begin to believe it.  

We need to make their irrelevancy manifest, and we need to do it now.

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I’m a big believer in art.  Art, from my point of view, is not exactly about product or, really necessarily anything at all.  It’s more about simply interacting with the world in a different fashion than people expect.  

For me, there are two primary forms of art that engage me the most: music is one, and I’ll talk about that some other time.

The other is light.

Lots of people take photos of light.  Photos are, at their core, the rendering of light.  It’s common to do shots of night, with the movement of natural lights.  Here I’m going to quote from a book I put together while I was recovering from surgery, The Book of Light:

…what happens when you are not merely photographing the events as they occur at night, but instead focus on light that you yourself manipulate? There are lots of sources of light that make fairly bright images in the darkness, and some of them will create very cool effects by actively changing colors or pulsating while you use them…

I take photos of light, moving and shifting in different fashions.  These aren’t Photoshop effects or digital manipulations after the fact.  These are photos, taken in a single exposure, of various events that involve light.  

The above photo, for example, was an exposure that lasted 7 minutes and 22 seconds.  During that time, I turned a light on and off in different locations and positions in order to create a tunnel effect.  When I looked at the photo later, I thought the color was okay, but the black and white really grabbed me.  That’s the only role that Photoshop played here: the choice to render it in black and white after the shot was taken.

Note: all the photos here are smaller versions; clicking on them gets you to larger versions with details.

Another few photos:

This one…

…was a 6 minute, 39 second, exposure.  In the upper left, you can see a small streak in the sky.  That’s a planet.  On a different night, you would be seeing stars streaking through as well.

I created that photo by using a rope light, putting it in different positions, turning it on for a moment, turning it off again, moving, and repeating the process.

This one…

…was an even longer exposure: 8 minutes, 16 seconds.  It was taken on a snowy night, also using rope lights to create the strange object shown.  The streaking lights on the right and in the background are lights from the plow going back and forth.  The light structure itself didn’t take long at all, but I left the shutter open longer just to get that plow going by.

I particularly love this shot:

It uses two different rope lights.  In this case, I didn’t actually turn them off while shooting.  Instead, I would hold them in place for 4-8 seconds at one point, move them, and then hold them in place again.  This is why you get that motion blur with the lights from one position to the other.  It was a relatively short exposure for this sort of work: just over 6 minutes, but effective.

This next shot is 8 minutes, 41 seconds:

And this one is a whopping 12 minutes, 3 seconds:

And this one is a very short exposure, just over a minute:

It’s not a light drawing, but I like the shot a lot and just took it on the 30th so I figured I’d include it.  It’s the moon and (I think) the planet Venus, framed by trees and traffic patterns.

I’ll close with one more photo: an extremely long exposure:

This was a 17 minute, 52 second, exposure.  The idea was that I would use one camera to take this photo while using the other to do a fairly complex light drawing.  I’ll have to try that again another time, as the light drawing in question suffered from what we in the trade call the “protezione di obiettivo” problem.  This loosely translates to: “I left the lens cap on.”  Yes: twelve minute exposure, all sorts of really cool lights doing all sorts of stuff and then when I checked the exposure, I realized that there was nothing there.  

Oh well.  I will try again.

By the way, if you are at all familiar with astronomy in the Northern U.S., you’ll actually be able to recognize a specific and well known constellation in this shot.  Anyone able to tell me what it is?  

I do this work for a variety of reasons, but I think part of it is because it helps me to feel engaged with something beyond myself.  There is a truth to it, a brightness to the night that illuminates the world around it.

I also do this because there’s something captivating about engaging the night, especially in winter, when most of us are actually a bit afraid of it.   It ties back into the natural world, in ways that are difficult to explain well.

But, really, it’s just something I love to do.  I like the sense of serenity I get from doing this; there’s a quiet calm to it.  I like the sense of creating something that’s uniquely mine.  Plenty of people do night photography and manipulated light photography but no one actually does it the way I do.  I was originally inspired to do this by Eric Staller, who is amazing, but my work is nothing like his.  It was the idea of the manipulated light that got me going in this direction, and little else.

So, that’s my story about art and what it can mean to me.  What does it mean to you, and what are the rest of you thinking/doing as far as the new year goes?