Senator Warner has announced that he will not run for re-election next year. A sad day for Virginia.

For any of you who have not been following the 54 million dollar pants story, this is your lucky day. Because it seems to have finally come to an end, and because here is a link giving you the low down. As it turns out, the pants weren’t worth 54 million dollars after all.

Basically the story is that a DC judge brings in a pair of pants to the dry cleaners. The pants are lost. After turning down offers of compensation by the owners, the judge sues them for 54 million dollars (down from $67,000,000). Apparently he arrived at this amount by calculating one offense for each day the “Satisfaction Guaranteed” sign was up, multiplying by three (because there are three people in the family), and then adding on a couple mil for mental anguish. Plus $500,000 because it was Tuesday.

What I didn’t know before reading this is that the guy had been banned from the store earlier due to a similar incident where he threw a hissy fit over another pair of pants. Then he begged them to take him back, since they were the only dry cleaners in the neighborhood. They did. This turned out to be a mistake.

The article has some coverage of the trial, where apparently the plaintiff broke down on the stand and rushed out of the courtroom in tears. He misses his pants.

The ABC News Law & Justice Unit has calculated that for the original $67 million Pearson sought, he could buy 84,115 new pairs of pants at the $800 value he placed on the missing trousers in court documents. If you stacked those pants up, they would be taller than eight Mount Everests. If you laid them side by side, they would stretch for 48 miles.

Today in Science Express, some MIT scientists announced experimental confirmation for a method of relatively efficient non-radiative wireless power transmission.

Basically, they lit up a 60W lightbulb even though the power source was 2 meters away without making anyone sterile in the process, and it only took 150W of power to pull it off. Imagine setting things on your desk (or on a Microsoft Surface) and having them charge automatically. Imagine never having to plug anything into a cigarette lighter, ever. I doubt you’d want to use it for lights or your air conditioner because of the inefficiency and waste involved, but for small, power unintensive appliences it could be pretty convenient.

I would really like to have access to read this paper for free to figure out how they did it, but maybe later I’ll see if the internet has the info. I’d like to know how the efficiency scales with range. I’m also totally into trying to replicate what they did as long as it doesn’t require a superconducting electromagnet or anything because, seriously, plugging things in is a serious drag. Actually, even if it does require a superconducting electromagnet, I could maybe see if my old physics lab has an old one and, like, some liquid helium sitting around.

An aide to our very own Jim Webb was arrested the other day for trying to carry a loaded pistol along with 2 loaded ammo clips into the US Senate office building.

Maybe someone should let the Capitol Police know that in Virginia, this is perfectly normal, accepted practice.

If you want people to be smarter, all you have to do is tell them that they can make themselves smarter.

Yeah, sounds ridiculous, right? But check it out. It’s a given that most people think that intelligence is fixed - some people are just smarter. Maybe it’s genetics, and maybe it’s upbringing, but once you get to a certain age your intelligence is set.

But most scientific studies do not support that. People actually can make themselves smarter if they work at it. So what would happen if you told people this? How would they act on that knowledge?

Some people did that study. They created two groups of college students, and taught one group that intelligence could be changed. The other group was taught no such thing. The results were fascinating:

Those students who learned about IQ’s malleability improved their grades more than did students who did not receive this message, and also saw academics as more important than did students in the control group. Even more exciting was the finding that Black students benefited more from learning about the malleable nature of intelligence than did White students, showing that this intervention may successfully counteract stereotype threat.

Can this sort of thing counteract the effect of stereotypes enough to make a real difference? In a later study, the evidence suggests that it can. This same type of study was done on seventh graders. The control group learned about memory strategies, and the test group learned about the possibility of intelligence development.

As compared to the control group, students who learned about intelligence’s malleability had higher academic motivation, better academic behavior, and better grades in mathematics. Indeed, students who were members of vulnerable groups (e.g., those who previously thought that intelligence cannot change, those who had low prior mathematics achievement, and female students) had higher mathematics grades following the intelligence-is-malleable intervention, while the grades of similar students in the control group declined. In fact, girls who received the intervention matched and even slightly exceeded the boys in math grades, whereas girls in the control group performed well below the boys.

Now, who knows if this is real. More studies are needed. But IF it is true, it absolutely must be part of the curriculums of schools, starting at the lowest levels. I mean, I would contribute money to a campaign to put PSA’s on TV telling people that they can become smarter if they want to be. I view this as a really big deal.

Someone or something named Morgan Quinto did a ranking of states by “smartness.” They used a variety of measures, such as percentage of high school graduates, college graduates, test scores, education funding, class sizes, education costs, and that sort of thing.

Anyways, Virginia ranked 6th, which is pretty damn good (there are a total of 50 “states”). All of the ones ranked above it are in New England (if you count Maine as New England), which we all know is filled with snobby intelligentsia anyways, so we can disqualify them based on the fact that they use all of their books to cheat and that the winters are really, really cold.

Here is the list.

PS: Arizona is the stupidest state.

Virginia is now officially a swing state. According to that article, the national Republican party is starting to concentrate their efforts (read: money) on 3-4 senate races: Missouri, Tennessee, New Jersey, and, yes, Virginia. This is significant in that it means they are to some degree abandoning Montana, Ohio (the focus of the article), Pennsylvania (home to Santorum, which is kind of a big deal), and Rhode Island. All of these have Republican incumbents and all of them have been leaning more and more to the challenger in the past weeks.

Basically the situation is that the Republicans need to hold on to 50 seats to keep a majority (with Dick Cheney). The only seat they have a real chance of picking up from a Democrat is in New Jersey. If the Democrats can hold onto that seat (which they have for like 30 years or something ridiculous), then they need to win 2 out of the 3 remaining competetive seats, Missouri (statistical tie), Tennessee (statistical tie), and Virginia (statistical tie as of last week or so) to take the Senate. This election is going to be down to the wire (nationally).

I am hugely in favor of having Virginia as a swing state (swing commonwealth?). I feel like it means you are relatively moderate, which is good for its own sake, and also because people pour money into you and do whatever you say if they think they can earn a favourable glance from you in their direction. When was the last time a foreign policy decision was made because of what people in Utah thought? Never. When was the last time a foreign policy decision was made because of what people in Florida thought? Every day since the end of the Cold War (see: Cuba).

So I think this could be a good thing for Virginia (if it is true). It is also a good thing for the voters in Virginia, because it means your vote really might make a difference in November. So make sure you do it.

PS: This site is a good read if you are like me and follow elections the way most people follow sports. It’s updated daily.