corollary

Entry #129

Listening to:

Bartok, string quartet no. 6.

The supreme court in Florida has decided that the recounts still going on in four counties there must continue, and that they have to be incorporated into the final tally. Maybe my prediction will be wrong, and Gore will now win. However, let's pretend consistency is a virtue and continue to predict victory for Bush. If Gore doesn't get enough votes after the recounts are included, then he will surely give up, even though the ballot in Palm Beach County was so badly put together.

I think the whole problem would be solved by reforming the way in which states selected their electors, and this is something I believe the states could do off their own bat. Instead of the current all-or-nothing approach, a state's electors should be appointed in proportion to the vote received in that state. This would have two advantages. One, results would be less likely to hinge on tiny numbers of votes (clearly Florida would give close to half of its electors to each of Bush and Gore and that would be the end of it). Two, a greater proportion of the votes cast would have an effect on the overall result. Consider the situation in California, which has some inordinate number of electoral college votes because it has such a big population. Gore won California, which means that all of the votes cast by Republicans in California are going to have absolutely no effect on the result of the election. California is perhaps not a "safe" state for either party, but in states where one or other party has safe majorities, voters for the minority party are effectively permanently disenfranchised.

It would be interesting to know what the situation would look like if this system had been used in the current election. There might even be third party electors in the electoral college.

(Note that the system in Maine and Nebraska is probably better than all-or-nothing, but it still voids non-victorious votes in the Congressional districts.)

To turn away from politics: a couple of articles on the business of software engineering. As I wrote to my brother recently, the best book on all this is still probably Fred Brooks's "The mythical man-month", but these are also interesting.

The first is by Philip Greenspun, and has attracted a lot of flak for appearing to suggest that successful programmers should work 70 hour weeks. In fact, most of the article is about how companies should make work-places as pleasant as possible for their (presumably highly-strung, primadonna-ish) programmers. The second is an older piece about how programmers contracted to NASA work in a completely different way and turn out very high quality code.

Finally, I will be updating the log very irregularly, if at all, over the next 6 weeks.