Big Data, Big Planet

I wrote Big Data, Big Planet for UCARConnect explaining what I do to K-12 teachers and high school students.

Climate reconstruction with atmospheric rivers, including the one that flooded one third of Los Angeles in 1938.

The November 2016 issue of UCARConnect is all about Data: The Currency of Science.

Animation from The atmospheric river that caused the Los Angeles flood of 1938.

The unique pain of living in a swing district

If Leo Tolstoy lived in the South Bay, I wonder what he would make of this election?

We've received most of these flyers.

Due to gerrymandering, very few races are really in play. The California 66th Assembly seat in south coastal Los Angeles county is an exception.  This may be the most important Assembly race in California.

Al Muratsuchi (D) won in 2012, helping CA Democrats win the 2/3 super-majority in Sacramento necessary to pass laws in the aftermath of Proposition 13. David Hadley (R) narrowly won in 2014, which ended the super-majority and brought back gridlock. Now they are battling it out in a rematch.

The burden of living in a swing state pretty much sums up our experience living in a swing district within blue California.

We are being stalked at home by phone calls.  We get postcards from Independent Expenditure (IE) groups accusing Hadley for being a Trump surrogate (which he denies) and Al Muratsuchi of protecting pedophile teachers and of voting to repeal Proposition 13 for residential properties (both lies.)

At first, I wondered why we were receiving so many postcards from the Hadley camp (both from the official campaign and also by IEs funded by out of state right-wing billionaires.)  This election season has been a crash course in election tactics.

The postcards with bold fabrications against a Democratic candidate, sent to a home with registered Democrats, is all about suppressing Democratic votes.  If they can sow enough confusion, they hope to dishearten us enough to not bother to vote.

It worked in 2014, when Hadley won by 700 votes by using the exact same lies and tactics.

In 2014, only 40 percent of the 66th Assembly District’s registered voters showed up to the polls, versus 70 percent in 2012. That led to a loss of about 78,000 total votes.

I think that the total disregard for truth--lying about your opponent early and often--is Trump-like. So I do understand the logic of comparing Hadley to Trump.  The two candidates are not equally bad.

#nastywomen and #badhombres, get out and vote!

Your Colorado Voter Guides

Hey, that's me, a volunteer!

This week, I've been walking around my precinct distributing the BoCoDems 2016 Voter Guide.

This Voter Guide was dropped off at your door, or mailed to you by a neighborhood volunteer!"

It's a long ballot, with many Ballot Issues.   By press time, the BoCoDems had made recommendations on all but 4 of the initiatives.

Once again, my Colorado friend has written a well-considered guide to the issues.  To learn more, go to Colorado and Boulder Ballot Issues.

The two guides differ on Boulder County Issues 1B & 1C and BVSD Issue 3A.  So please read them and make up your own mind.

As long as I have your attention, vote the down-ticket races.  If you don't vote, then someone else decides for you.  Moreover, you won't get national candidates that you are happy with unless you give them experience at the local level.  Get civically-engaged.  Convince your friends and family to become civically-engaged.

We have a presidential candidate for a major party that says very dangerous things about minorities, women, the disabled and climate scientists.  This election hits very close to home.  If nothing else, please vote to protect me.