Back of the Envelope

Some of you might be wondering what I've been doing on my trip to Boston. Well, part of what I've been doing, aside from hanging out with old friends, is trying to convince my old fellowship at MIT to start a group blog (thus the demonstration post below). I think it would be a neat idea, and give GCF a strong presence on the web and a stronger online community. Of course, I've also recommended that this blog focus on religion and not politics. If GCF takes my advice, I'll probably be a member of their blog at least long enough to get them up and running. This may involve some cross-posting and more articles on faith and theology. I'll let you know what happens.

This is a test to demonstrate how easy it is to put stuff online. See, I'm just like Glenn Reynolds.

Update: The link above was previously just a generic link to Instapundit, but I've changed it to point to the specific post I was thinking of when I put it up.

A friend's letting me use his computer to check e-mail and such, so I thought I'd write a quick post. The big news this weekend is the bombings in Spain. Others have already posted more and better than I'll be able to do, so check out Hugh Hewitt, Captain's Quarters, Instapundit, and Tim Blair. I'll just repeat Captain Ed's suggestion that we pray for Spain. Pray for comforting for the mourning, healing for the injured, for justice and for grace.

I'm travelling to Boston this weekend. I don't expect to have much Internet access there, so expect blogging to be light. Once again, if anyone wants to buy me that laptop, the situation might be different.

Paul Krugman has this to say on Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Lateline:

If you like, the vast right-wing conspiracy isn't a theory, it's quite clearly visible to anyone who takes a little care to do his home work.

[Thanks to Tim Blair for the link]

What I want to know is where I can sign on to the VRWC. Karl Rove won't return my calls.

Mark Steyn has a beautiful column today in The Spectator (registration required).

Maybe the collapse of the church and the looming demographic disaster facing Quebec and most of Catholic Europe is just another coincidence. But, for whatever reason, Europeans have less and less interest in God's first injunction, to "go forth and multiply". And, as a consequence, they'll enjoy their post-Christian EUtopia, but only for the two or three generations it lasts...

In his new book, Civilization and its Enemies, Lee Harris begins with the following observation: "Forgetfulness occurs when those who have been long inured to civilized order can no longer remember a time in which they had to wonder whether their crops would grow to maturity without being stolen or their children sold into slavery by a victorious foe. That, before 9/11, was what had happened to us. The very concept of the enemy had been banished from our moral and political vocabulary."

Very true. But other countries at other times have been made "forgetful" by civilised order. It's the particular form of civilisation that makes this bout of forgetfulness potentially fatal. In post-Christian Europe - where fertile women who not so long ago would have had three children by the age of 24 now have one designer child at 39, where social welfare programmes depend on a growing population, where the main source of immigration is from a culture that despises secularism as weak,short-sighted narcissism - societal "forgetfulness" isn't just a passing phase you can snap out of. In this situation, the Christian fundamentalists, Holy Rollers, born-again Bible Belters and Jesus freaks of America are the rationalists. It's the hyper-rationalists of secular Europe who are living on blind faith.

As I said, it's a beautiful column, read the whole thing. It ties in quite strongly to the Roe effect (more here and here). But whereas in the US, it looks like the domestic conservative and religious populations will grow while the secularist liberal population shrinks (in relative terms, at least), in Europe it is the immigrating Islamic population which are growing. A US governed by conservative Christians will maintain essentially the same rights and freedoms (despite what the Left would have you believe). The same cannot be said if the unassimilated Islamic groups come to power in Europe.

Update: Minor editing. I clarified that I meant unassimulated Islamic groups.

Old Post: I originally talked about the Roe effect below.

It took me all day to do this, which explains why this is the only post today. I've been wondering about whether it's possible to quantify the Roe effect. According to Pia de Solenni's column in National Review:

Approximately 40 percent of American women under 45 have had at least one abortion. Twenty-five percent of all pregnancies end in abortion. Since the legalization of abortion in 1973, over 40 million abortions have taken place.

What I basically did was calculate what the 2000 population of each state would be if those 40 million had been born, then derive the electoral college representation for the revised population. Since I didn't have access to the complete statistics for abortions performed in each state, I used this source for the abortion rate per 1000 women aged 15-19. I took this rate to be representative, so that this rate times the total population of the state is proportional to the total number of abortions in the state over the last 30 years. (For state populations, I used the 1990 US census. Since the abortion rates were for the years 1988, 1992, 1996, and 2000, I used the rates from the year 1988 for simplicity.) This gives me a set of numbers proportional to the number of abortions per state, which I normalize to 40 million. I then reapportioned the House seats for each state given the new population. Any statistician can point out the multitude of problems in this analysis: taking one year to be representative for an entire three decades (which ignores changes in demographics and abortion laws), assuming the rate for teenage girls is representative of the rate for all women, not accounting for population migration, etc. A lot of these would be solved if someone could point me to a simple listing of the number of abortions received by the residents of each state since Roe v. Wade. In any case, with my limited information, I've calculated what the electoral vote would have been in the 2000 election using the Electoral college as apportioned by the 2000 census (NOTE: The 2000 election used the apportionment of the 1990 census, so this result differs from the electoral votes the candidates actually won.), and what it would have been if the 40 million citizens had been born. This is assuming that each candidate won the same states (unlikely, considering the millions of extra voters) and received all the electoral votes from those states (not all states are winner-take-all). You'll note that if the election had taken place under the 2000 Census, Bush would have won 278 to 260. Whereas with the revised population, it would only be 270 to 268. In the table below, those states that voted for Bush are in red, and those that voted for Gore are in blue.

State	Population (thousands)	Electoral Votes	Revised Population (thousands)	Revised Electoral Votes
Alabama	4447	9	4916	9
Alaska	627	3	703	3
Arizona	5131	10	5662	10
Arkansas	2673	6	2903	6
California	33872	55	42067	59
Colorado	4301	9	4767	8
Connecticut	3406	7	4096	8
DC	572	3	814	3
Delaware	784	3	902	3
Florida	15982	27	18420	27
Georgia	8186	15	9055	14
Hawaii	1212	4	1485	4
Idaho	1294	4	1356	4
Illinois	12419	21	14200	21
Indiana	6080	11	6583	11
Iowa	2926	7	3198	6
Kansas	2688	6	2931	6
Kentucky	4042	8	4336	8
Louisiana	4469	9	4821	9
Maine	1275	4	1408	4
Maryland	5296	10	6353	11
Massachusetts	6349	12	7504	12
Michigan	9938	17	11589	18
Minnesota	4919	10	5379	9
Mississippi	2845	6	2994	6
Missouri	5595	11	6151	10
Montana	902	3	972	3
Nebraska	1711	5	1866	4
Nevada	1998	5	2255	5
New Hampshire	1236	4	1409	4
New Jersey	8414	15	10095	16
New Mexico	1819	5	2011	5
New York	18976	31	22953	33
North Carolina	8049	15	9130	14
North Dakota	642	3	684	3
Ohio	11353	20	12572	19
Oklahoma	3451	7	3758	7
Oregon	3421	7	3864	7
Pennsylvania	12281	21	13745	21
Rhode Island	1048	4	1179	4
South Carolina	4012	8	4429	8
South Dakota	755	3	793	3
Tennessee	5689	11	6237	10
Texas	20852	34	22760	33
Utah	2233	5	2327	5
Vermont	609	3	684	3
Virginia	7079	13	8110	13
Washington	5894	11	6723	11
West Virginia	1808	5	1919	5
Wisconsin	5364	10	5825	10
Wyoming	494	3	532	3

Candidate	Current Elect. College Total	Revised Elect. College Total
Bush	278	270
Gore	260	268

Update: Talk about irony. I posted this on what La Shawn Barber notes is the National Day of Appreciation for Abortion Providers.

Update: It figures. I get a link from Best of the Web and it's on a post where I messed up the Old Post, New Post scheme. It's fixed now.

Update: One of my commenters says that unless I can show that women who've had abortions have less children overall (in other words, that they don't make up for the aborted children with children later in life), then my statistics don't hold. He has a point, but it would be hard to separate that from other correlations. I think the analysis is valid as long as the abortion is treated as a form of contraceptive. The Alan Guttmacher Institute argues that most women have more children than they want, and abortion is a necessary means for keeping that from happening. Doc Rampage argues that abortion is a symptom, not a cause, of lower family size with some groups. I'd be interested in seeing more data on this, if anyone wants to point me in the right direction.

It looks like even sentient slime molds have beat me to blogging.

James Taranto at Best of the Web on Opinion Journal has been talking about the Roe effect for a while now:

Our theory is that abortion is making America more conservative than it otherwise would be.

We base this on two assumptions. First, that liberal and Democratic women are more likely to have abortions. Second, that children's political views tend to reflect those of their parents--not exactly, of course, and not in every case, but on average. Thus abortion depletes the next generation of liberals and eventually makes the population more conservative. We call this the Roe effect, after Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court's 1973 decision that established a constitutional right to abortion.

It's not the sort of thing that should make conservatives happy. If conservatives are gaining in relative numbers, we should find it appalling that it's happening because of state-sanctioned murder, no matter that we've done our best to fight it every step of the way. While Mr. Taranto initially presented this as a theory sans facts, he's begun to gather facts and figures which back him up, as his most recent column shows. Personally, I found this hard to believe initially, especially since the impression I have is that most women who have abortions are teenage girls. This skews things significantly, since many of them are scared and seeking a quick solution rather than sticking with their values. Many are pressured into it by boyfriends and parents. Those who do carry the pregnancy to term often give the baby up for adoption, and the political beliefs of the adoptive parents aren't correlated to those of the birth mother. Again, these are impressions rather than hard numbers. However, Mr. Taranto's column does show a correlation between liberal beliefs and abortion rates for girls aged 15-19 on the state level. This is something I can more easily believe, since we're now talking a correlation between the society's attitude toward abortion and the rate at which pregnant teenagers attain abortions. A frightened teenager is more likely to act against her personal beliefs and get an abortion if the community in which she lives is accepting of the practice. I think Mr. Taranto's conclusion that the red states are growing in population more rapidly than the blue states may very well be the case. As a reader points out in a newer James Taranto column,

The main impact in liberal states is the invisible impact on representation, because they are growing more slowly than conservative ones. Between the 1990 and 2000 censuses alone, six of 20 Gore states lost representatives, and only one (California) gained. The result is that Gore would lose 278-260 under new apportionment; the margin in 2000 (before a faithless District of Columbia elector abstained) was 271-267.

Working backward, if he carried the same states, Gore would have won under the apportionment systems of 1980 (271-267) and 1970 (278-260). That's also a 36-member swing in House representation for the red states after Roe, which is greater than the Republican margin of control.

I'll need to work through the numbers more carefully (my initial, admittedly naive, calculations aren't in line with the dramatic shift in reapportionment). While this is certainly nothing to gloat over, I wouldn't be surprised to discover that abortion, like many of the great evils of the twentieth century, is ultimately self-defeating.

New Post: I calculate the change in electoral votes due to the Roe effect above.

My own web-published fiction inspired Dave at Doc Rampage to post some of his own. Unfortunately, it's only a small segment, but it's good stuff nonetheless. He appears to have a taste for Greco-Roman culture similar to my own.

Ramesh Ponnuru of National Review is wondering who first came up with the Hatch Amendment proposal, himself or James Taranto of Best of the Web. If he'd been reading my blog, he'd know that pretty much everyone and his brother proposed something along these lines at some point.

Old Post: My last post on this issue is here.

Eugene Volokh of the Volokh Conspiracy has come out in support of Orrin Hatch's Federal Marriage Amendment. Weakly, with plenty of caveats, to be sure, but still it's nice to see.

New Post: More on this here.

Old Post: I first pointed out that this election year provides an opportunity for Bush to make inroads with African-Americans here.

Yet another reason that the Black vote may be in play: Kerry's ineptness.

"John Kerry is not a black man — he is a privileged white man who has no idea what it is in this country to be a poor white in this country, let alone a black man," said Paula Diane Harris, founder of the Andrew Young National Center for Social Change.

(Thanks to Captain Ed for the link.)

This week's Carnival of the Bush Bloggers is up on Blogs for Bush. See what the Bush bloggers have to say about recent issues. My post on letting the state legislatures decide the gay marriage question made it. I also liked La Shawn Barber's comments on the judiciary memos... in fact, I liked her blog so much I added her to my blogroll. This wasn't based just on this post, though. I only add blogs to my blogroll when I find myself going back to their site time and again over at least a week--I had already seen the post in question before the Carnival went up. Check out her site, La Shawn Barber's Corner.

Ralph Nader is coming to the University of Rochester, where I work, to speak about Consumer Advocacy on March 24th. Normally, I'd rather pull my own teeth without the benefit of anesthetic than go to a talk by Ralph Nader, but I'm a blogger now, which means I have responsibilities. I'm still trying to live down the fact that I didn't even hear about John Edwards's visit to Rochester until after it had made the news due to his total lack of disability etiquette. So I should go and report back to you guys. Post in comments if you want me to go, or if you have any specific questions you want me to ask him. I might even be able to live blog the event if someone wants to buy me the laptop on my Amazon Wish List.

New Post: It looks like I will indeed be blogging Ralph Nader, and it might even be live.

Doc Rampage has given me my very first online review of Fire. He liked it. Fire is free, and will likely remain so forever (or at least until I have to start paying for online storage space). I can't say the same about the sequel, assuming I ever finish writing it. Hey, we engineer/blogger/writer types have to eat too.

I was going to comment on President Bush's Bioethics Council, but then I thought I should start closer to home.

I have a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, which generally means that I am either a professor or a researcher. In my case, I am a researcher who runs experiments and analyzes the data. My area of research is quantum computation, as you may have figured out from other things I've said around here. Quantum computation has its own ethical dilemma. To date, we've discovered that it's very good at two useful applications, performing unordered searches and factoring large numbers. The first may be useful, while the second is definitely useful. It's much easier to find a prime number and multiply it by another large prime number than to factor a large product of primes. When I say much easier, I'm talking about it taking the same computer a few seconds to do the finding and multiplying, versus a few million years to do the factoring. This sort of one-way problem forms the basis for public key encryption (although it is of course more complicated than that), such as that used in RSA, the encryption protocol used to transmit information on the Internet. For more information on RSA, check this FAQ from the sci.crypt newsgroup. A quantum computer with a sufficient number of qubits could factor a large product of primes faster than a classical computer create it in the first place. If someone were to produce such a computer today, all Internet transactions would suddenly be vulnerable.

You can tell what use people are planning for a quantum computer by looking at where the funding is coming from. Right now, the people giving out the funds are the Army Research Office, the Defense Department, and, oh yes, the NSA. It's clear that the main objective is decryption (or, perhaps, to prove that a quantum computer is so far from realizable that public key encryption is secure).

In my experience, very few scientists working on quantum computation projects think about the ethical implications at all. For the most part, they console themselves with the fact that a quantum computer capable of factoring a decent sized key is so far in the future that by the time it gets here (~25 years or so), we'll have better encryption (hopefully, quantum encryption). That may or may not be the case. I've heard that the federal government may be pushing for a five-year program to develop a quantum computer that can factor 128-bit encryption. (I've been looking for confirmation but I haven't found it yet.) This is wildly ambitious--I don't think it will happen--but how many scientists, who previously considered quantum computation safe because it was decades away, would jump at the chance to partake of this funding?

For the record, I have thought a bit more in-depth about quantum computation, partially because I took part in a discussion group with MIT's Graduate Christian Fellowship based on the book Responsible Technology. To a large degree, the questions about developing a quantum computer revolve around who would get it. Quantum computers aren't going to be available on the open market anytime soon, and they'll probably be as regulated as nuclear power. So, assuming I helped create a quantum computer, would I trust the NSA to use it wisely? I certainly don't mind them cracking a terrorist's e-mail, but I wouldn't want them reading mine. So, I don't think that the technology itself is wrong, but I am concerned over how it would be used.

Dave Barry's newest column takes on the budget deficit in a convenient question and answer format:

Q. But surely we -- the baby boomers and senior citizens -- are not going to selfishly steal the future from our kids, and generations yet unborn!

A. Of course not! We're going to let the government steal it for us.

Q. Well, OK, then! It sure is a good thing that young people and generations yet unborn do not, as a rule, read the newspaper.

A. I'll say! If they ever found out about this, they'd be putting anthrax in the nation's Metamucil supply!

One thing Dave Barry forgets is that while we do not read the newspaper, we young people do read the Internet, so as long as his columns are posted online, we will find out about these things.

Old Post: This train of thought started below.

Doc Rampage joked a bit about how much traffic I get in a comment. I'm hardly high traffic, but I've done pretty well for being less than a month old. My average daily traffic these days is 25-35 visitors according to Sitemeter. It's partly luck and partly salesmanship.

Most of my traffic probably comes from Blogs for Bush. It's the only blogging consortium I'm on so far, although I'd like to join up with blogs4God, but they prefer blogs that are at least a month old. Joining these sorts of consortiums are probably the best way to gain traffic and make a name for yourself. Consortiums, aside from linking to all the blogs on their main page, usually ask their members to include some form of their blogroll as well. Blogs for Bush is especially good for this because it uses a rolling blogroll that puts the blog with the most recent update at the top, which means I'm pretty much guaranteed a few hits every time I post. Of course, just joining isn't enough... participating in Carnivals, posting in comments (with links to specific posts), and using trackback with those blogs that have it are all good ways to get attention.

Carnivals are pretty much consortium specific, but comments and trackbacks are good ways to get attention whenever they're available on a higher traffic blog. Then, of course, there's occasionally selling a post to one of those high traffic blogs by e-mailing a link. I haven't been doing that too much recently... the odds are pretty low considering the amount of e-mail they get. Sometimes you get lucky, though.

Also note that some blogs also have a reciprocating policy--you put them in your blogroll and they put you in theirs. Some of them use automated blogrolls to do this, powered by a service such as Blogrolling.

And of course, I post at a pretty good clip. I have something new every day, even if it's just a note that I don't have much today. Aside from giving visitors a reason to check back often, just in case I updated, it puts me at the top of those rolling blogrolls more often.

Don't overdo it, though. It's frustrating when you have good material that nobody's reading, but there's no point in getting attention when you don't have good material. You can get them to come, but they won't come back. Right now, I'm really not making much effort to sell my blog. A comment when I have something on my blog that's relevant to someone else's blog post, a trackback ping whenever I refer to someone else's blog in one of my posts, and participating irregularly in the Carnival of the Bush Bloggers. I like the traffic I currently get, and I want to make sure those who are coming by have something worth reading, which means I better stop with these self-indulgent posts about blogging and get back to politics. I never really did rake Glenn Reynolds over the coals properly...

Here's a quick review of the topics I touched on the previous week.

Quantum Computation -- I finally introduce the topic of quantum computation, with a quick introduction and pointers to some of my papers.

Skeptics Anonymous -- I complain about the misuse of this resource made available by MIT's Graduate Christian Fellowship.

The Complementarity of the Sexes -- I point out that men and women are, you know, different, and that in and of itself may make heterosexual marriage advantageous as a social unit.

The Bioethics Council -- After a week of promises, I finally get around to commenting on the controversy surrounding the President's Bioethics council.

What is a qubit? -- I talk a bit more about quantum computation, explaining what a qubit is.

The Blogosphere -- I comment on some of the utilities out there that link blogs together, especially those which have gotten me visits.