Random stuff
When the urge to work comes over you, just sit down and relax, it should go away.
Many asked details about my scope. As stated before, its a Maksutov Cassegrain, more precisely its a Skywatcher MAK90EQ1 with 90mm aperture and 1250mm focal length. While we are talking about star gazing its interesting to note that I won't have to make seasonal watch plans anymore because Universe Today released a 407 pages PDF of daily watch plans for 2006. French readers will also enjoy this nice local sky guide optimized for 45 degree of latitude.
I came across a really nice photo set today. This kind of miracle is only possible with the new democratization of the web. Some beekeeper decided to casually share photos of is hives. Definitely not something I would look for, I stumble on those because of the magic of tags and "interestingness" computation. Had this been put on a personal home page with animated gifs, we would all have missed the birth of a bee, the nobleness of a wild hive architecture, the coziness of a nursery and the graphic comparison of young and old bee wings. Bee wings don't regenerate. Each bee has a fixed flight expectancy. When a forager reach the point where it can barely fly, it stays at the hive and uses its wings almost exclusively for cooling the hive.
In other news what a shock it was to find that some people who used to claim to be GNU/Linux specialists and who still put penguins all over their website recently switched to IIS. No need to say that I won't get my next computer from these bunch of hypocrites who want to sell you their skill to build your web server with Gentoo but who can't run it themselves.
Lets end with good news. Quebec is quietly consulting its population on a possible redesign of is election system. This is really great stuff except that no one knows about it. The first past the post (FPTP) system is really broken but I think that in Quebec it shows more. For the 2003 elections one party had 18% of the votes but ended up with only one seat out of 125. Note that I don't advise any one to vote for this particular fascist party. Duverger showed that the FPTP tend to produce two party systems and favor strategic voting, that is, voting for someone you don't like but who you think can win. FPTP has nothing to do with democracy, it produce alternation of the same two party without any regards to what the population think. But now that we have an opportunity to get a new voting system, which one should we pick? Wikipedia has a bunch of articles on voting systems and I think that any Québec citizen worthy of the name has to at least read all of those. There is also this really nice survey of voting methods.
What stands out is that all voting systems sucks. Forget about true democracy anytime soon. Proportional voting systems suck a bit less. If 51% of the population think that the other 49% should so shot, the 49% against the wall should have something to say about it. The easiest way to ensure proportionality is to have more than one person to elect per legislature. This can be achieved by merging existing districts or even by calling the whole country (some people still call this one a province) a single district with 125 representative to elect. Québec has only two big cities so merging all the districts into a single legislature might dilute important local questions. The proposed system in BC was to make several super district with single transferable vote. This ensure proportionality and local representation. The smaller the districts, the higher the local representation but you loose equally in proportionality.
Inside a proportional legislature, you have to choose a voting system. You can get a list that you rank by priority, you can get multiple votes, you can get a single vote but since you have a super district small parties have better chance to elect someone. With super districts, small parties can be more efficient. If they expect to have only a few candidate, they only need a few candidates, not 125 filler (proxy?) candidates that are just there to forward calls to the party leader.
Single transferable vote is interesting because it enable proportionality and minimize wasted votes. What is a wasted vote? Its a vote for someone who would get elected anyway. STV is really simple too. You rank the candidates you like by priority. When you first choice has enough vote to get elected, all the remaining votes are transfered to peoples second choice. How many vote is enough to get elected depends on some strange formula but other unlucky folks went thought the trouble of tuning it for us and it seems to work now.
Its definitely not easy to pick a voting system but its easy to see we need a new one, now. So make your readings and fill the voting commissions survey. And take a look at Saturn too, its breath taking!