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If freepatriot were a webcomic, what would it look like?

“Conservatives” Are Single-Largest Ideological Group

Percentage of “liberals” higher this decade than in early ’90s

by Lydia Saad

PRINCETON, NJ -- Thus far in 2009, 40% of Americans interviewed in national Gallup Poll surveys describe their political views as conservative, 35% as moderate, and 21% as liberal. This represents a slight increase for conservatism in the U.S. since 2008, returning it to a level last seen in 2004. The 21% calling themselves liberal is in line with findings throughout this decade, but is up from the 1990s.

These annual figures are based on multiple national Gallup surveys conducted each year, in some cases encompassing more than 40,000 interviews. The 2009 data are based on 10 separate surveys conducted from January through May. Thus, the margins of error around each year's figures are quite small, and changes of only two percentage points are statistically significant.

To measure political ideology, Gallup asks Americans to say whether their political views are very conservative, conservative, moderate, liberal, or very liberal. As has been the case each year since 1992, very few Americans define themselves at the extremes of the political spectrum. Just 9% call themselves "very conservative" and 5% "very liberal." The vast majority of self-described liberals and conservatives identify with the unmodified form of their chosen label.

Party-Based Ideology

There is an important distinction in the respective ideological compositions of the Republican and Democratic Parties. While a solid majority of Republicans are on the same page -- 73% call themselves conservative -- Democrats are more of a mixture. The major division among Democrats is between self-defined moderates (40%) and liberals (38%). However, an additional 22% of Democrats consider themselves conservative, much higher than the 3% of Republicans identifying as liberal.

True to their nonpartisan tendencies, close to half of political independents -- 45% -- describe their political views as "moderate." Among the rest, the balance of views is tilted more heavily to the right than to the left: 34% are conservative, while 20% are liberal.

Gallup trends show a slight increase since 2008 in the percentages of all three party groups calling themselves "conservative," which accounts for the three percentage-point increase among the public at large.

Thus far in 2009, Gallup has found an average of 36% of Americans considering themselves Democratic, 28% Republican, and 37% independent. When independents are pressed to say which party they lean toward, 51% of Americans identify as Democrats, 39% as Republicans, and only 9% as pure independents.

Ideological tendencies by leaned party affiliation are very similar to those of straight partisan groups. However, it is worth noting the views of pure independents -- a group usually too small to analyze in individual surveys but potentially important in deciding elections. Exactly half of pure independents describe their views as moderate, 30% say they are conservative, and 17% liberal.

As reported last week on Gallup.com, women are more likely than men to be Democratic in their political orientation. Along the same lines, women are more likely than men to be ideologically "moderate" and "liberal," and less likely to be "conservative."

Still, conservatism outweighs liberalism among both genders.

The pattern is strikingly different on the basis of age, and this could have important political implications in the years ahead. Whereas middle-aged and older Americans lean conservative (vs. liberal) in their politics by at least 2 to 1, adults aged 18 to 29 are just as likely to say their political views are liberal (31%) as to say they are conservative (30%).

Future Gallup analysis will look at the changes in the political ideology of different age cohorts over time, to see whether young adults in the past have started out more liberal than they wound up in their later years.

Bottom Line

Although the terms may mean different things to different people, Americans readily peg themselves, politically, into one of five categories along the conservative-to-liberal spectrum. At present, large minorities describe their views as either moderate or conservative -- with conservatives the larger group -- whereas only about one in five consider themselves liberal.

While these figures have shown little change over the past decade, the nation appears to be slightly more polarized than it was in the early 1990s. Compared with the 1992-1994 period, the percentage of moderates has declined from 42% to 35%, while the percentages of conservatives and liberals are up slightly -- from 38% to 40% for conservatives and a larger 17% to 21% movement for liberals.

Survey Methods

Results are based on aggregated Gallup Poll surveys of approximately 1,000 national adults, aged 18 and older, interviewed by telephone. Sample sizes for the annual compilations range from approximately 10,000 to approximately 40,000. For these results, one can say with 95% confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error is ±1 percentage point.

In addition to sampling error, question wording and practical difficulties in conducting surveys can introduce error or bias into the findings of public opinion polls.

We Made "The Sight!"

Thanks to the Mullah El_Ron for pointing it out to me:

The famous handgun website "The Sight1911M1" has included us as a featured link in their "Assembly/Disassembly" references.



Thanks, guys!

Sermons and Messages

Please take some time to read through some of these articles I've written on the Christian faith:

A New Neighbor

Punishment, Discipline, and Submission to Authority

Dreams for the worship team

Jezebel!

American Idol and the Church

The Stairway to Heaven

Prophetic Worship

Why Worship?

For Whom the Bells Toll

The scottauld.com Domain Name Odyssey

Or, how I lost my domain name to incompetence and treachery

5/18/2005

This is a long story. Feel free to ignore it. My pal Mike asked me, "Whatever happened to your scottauld.com name?" I replied with the following tale, and it was the first time I had actually written out the entire story. So, in the hopes that it will someday help someone else, here goes:

In 1997, a company called websolo.com was offering to register domain names for you and host the files for the site for $10/month. At the time, this was a very good deal because it was normally $200 to register a domain name. Do you remember $200/year? I do.

You see, websolo.com was a registrar, which meant they could register domain names on a DNS server and propogate the name to the world. In order to get lots of hosting clients, they offered to register your domain name for you on their own DNS servers if you would sign up for a year of hosting at $10 /year. I jumped at it.

scottauld.com as it appeared in 1999

They registered my domain name, scottauld.com, on their DNS servers, and that propogated around the world in 48 hours, like it was supposed to do. The whole world's DNS servers quickly learned that scottauld.com should point to websolo.com's hosting servers. And my files lived happily on those servers for six years, with me paying $10 / month for the priviledge...

I used the scottauld.com name to host the "Macintosh Compendium," a home for Apple Computer-centric wallpapers and other material. We got quite a few visitors over the years.

Fast forward to 2003.

I had begun registering my domain names at GoDaddy.com for $8 / year. Great price, i

(this is an aside:)

possible because the registrar monopolies had been broken up sometime around 1999. That's when Verisign lost their mopopoly (which they had attained by buying the big registrar in the world. Many new companies became registrars and started allowing you to register names much, much cheaper.

Okay, I digress. Anyway, I had bought several names from GoDaddy.com for $8 / year. I wanted to consolidate my scottauld.com name over to GoDaddy. I was willing to keep hosting the files on websolo.com (now known as Aplus.net) with the same ten bucks they were already making off of me. I merely wanted to move where the name was held.

But aplus.net told me I couldn't move the NAME (which they always had stated that I owned) to another server. In other words, even though they said I owned the name, they wouldn't relinquish the name to another DNS server on another company.

If you know how domain names are administered, then you know that each domain name has three "contacts": Registrant contact, Administrative contact, and Technical contact. What websolo had done was to place my name as Registrant and Administrative, but their own name as Technical. That prevented me from moving the name, because you have to get permission from the contacts to move a name.

After multiple emails and calls, head games and shenanigans, and an improper say/do ratio, I finally gave up on them. I cancelled the service with websolo.com/aplus.net, told them to stop billing me and to let the domain name die. I never told them my new email address, never told them where the site was being rebuilt (freepatriot.com) and basically told them I was disconnecting from the internet forever and to consider me dead.

Now, they never removed the entry for scottauld.com from their hosting servers. You already know that a webserver has entries for names that it hosts, and if that server gets a request for scottauld.com it knows which directory to load. That's what they still have configured on their name servers. But they have deleted me from DNS, and that change (deletion) propogated around the world, which is why that name no longer works in a web browser.

freepatriot.com today

Maybe someday I'll buy the name (it's free now) and just point the people to my real site. Or maybe someday I'll have to move this site to another name, since Spam eventually catches up with you and is the bane of all domain name owners. Only time will tell.

If you are interested in what the site (or any other website) looked like over time, visit archive.org for a look back in time.

UPDATE 7/28/08: an Australian racecar driver named Scott Auld owns the name now. Bummer.

Vertical Drop of a Projectile

In response to some questions about ballistics that I posed to my pal Tony, a math whiz if ever there was one, I received the following letter:

Scott,

I created a table and graph for you regarding the vertical drop (in feet) of a projectile based on it's velocity and distance traveled. Do note that the values in the table are feet, not inches. For example, a bullet traveling at 900 ft/sec will drop over 7 feet after traveling horizontally 600 feet (200 yds).

Two assumptions were made: the projectile was fire horizontally (obviously) and air resistance was neglected. Accounting for air resistance would affect the results - all vertical drops would increase. By how much? I can only guess at this point - could be a little, could be a lot. Naturally, the farther the target, the greater the difference between the numbers I calculated and the "real-life" numbers. We could figure it out if we know how much longer it takes for the bullet to reach the target. But none-the-less, these values do give you a rough idea of how much the projectile will drop.

I used two very simple formulas:
d = vt
s = 1/2at^2

I'm going to rewrite them just a bit:
Dx = vt
Dy = 1/2at^2

Now, I'm going to "massage" the formulas a bit:
t = Dx/v
Dy = 16t^2

Now, for a little substitution:
Dy = 16(Dx/v)^2

The formula above is what you asked for. It addresses your question, 'how to calculate the answer to a question like "calculate the amount of drop at 50 yards, 100 yards, and two hundred yards for a bullet fired horizontally at 1000 fps."'

In English, the formula states, "To find the vertical drop, in feet, of a projectile, divide the horizontal distance to the target by the velocity of the projectile, square this value, then multiple by 16." Not overly complicated, but then again, not exactly the easiest numbers to crunch out in the field. Just identify your distance to the target and your muzzle velocity and you can get a good idea of the vertical drop in feet (neglecting air resistance).

Enjoy,
Tony

I am sending this from the future

Physicists Are Looking At How We Might Take A Trip Through Time
Wall Street Journal ^ | 21 November 2003 | SHARON BEGLEY


Ronald Mallett hadn't even heard of physics when he read H.G. Wells' 1895 classic, "The Time Machine," just a few months after his father died at age 33.

The 10-year old assumed that to build such a device, and see his father again, he should go into electronics, his dad's field. It was only during his stint at the Strategic Air Command that he learned that it was physicists who were discovering seeming impossibilities: that space can bend, time can slow, particles can be waves and waves, particles. It was physics, he realized, that offered the hope of making Wells' fiction -- and his boyhood hope -- a reality.

"But I was astute enough not to tell people I was interested in the physics of time travel ," says Dr. Mallett, a professor at physics at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. "I chose black holes as my cover story, and didn't come out of the time-travel closet until 1998."

The closet is emptying fast. Ever since Einstein formulated his general theory of relativity in 1915, describing gravity as dips and curves in the single entity called space-time, researchers have been finding hidden gems in its equations. Those equations permit numerous "solutions," or particular shapes of space-time -- from deep wells to gentle waves. One solution, for instance, implies the existence of black holes; at first only theorized, black holes have since become, through astronomical observations, members in good standing of the cosmic menageries. Now physicists are taking seriously the newest solutions, those that imply geometries of space-time that actually allow travel to the past.

Prof. Mallett theorized in 2000 that if a powerful laser light were bent into a ring, it would create a region at its center where space-time curves back on itself so severely that someone proceeding into the future would wind up back when he started, in his own past. In 1991, Princeton University astrophysicist J. Richard Gott theorized that cosmic strings, thinner than an atomic nucleus but infinitely long and more massive than a galaxy, could warp space-time enough to create these paths to the past, called closed timelike curves.

But it is a 1989 discovery, by Caltech's Kip Thorne and colleagues, that has done the most to get the physics of time travel into reputable scientific journals. They theorized that general relativity permits wormholes -- tunnels that cut across a curved region of space-time, connecting here to there and now to then. Earlier calculations suggested that wormholes don't stay open long enough to serve as practical time machines, but Prof. Thorne showed that, with enough negative energy, they can be propped open.

That's how the heroes of "Timeline," in theaters next week, travel back to the 14th century (and immediately plunge into nonstop sword-wielding, horse-galloping mayhem). In the film, scientists accidentally discover a wormhole, one end of which is anchored in 1357 France. That gets a thumbs up from physicists: If wormholes and closed timelike curves exist, they are going to be found, not created. You'd have to settle for whatever endpoints they have.

Just because wormholes emerge from general relativity doesn't mean they emerge in reality, of course. But physicists take them seriously because of their experience with black holes, which were first only theoretical, too. Maybe wormholes, too, will move from theory to reality.

"In physics," says physicist Michio Kaku of the City College of New York, "that which is not forbidden is mandatory. If you want to forbid some bizarre phenomenon, you have to kill it by showing that a law of physics prevents it."

No one has yet done that with wormholes or time travel . The energy needed to prop open a wormhole is about what you would get by converting the mass of a large star into energy through E = mc2. But that is a practical, not a fundamental, objection. British cosmologist Stephen Hawking once proposed a "chronology protection conjecture" that would forbid time travel as a result of the laws of physics, but has since retreated.

That has brought a sea change in physics. "A dozen years ago, if you talked about time travel your name would be mud," says Prof. Kaku. "But now we feel that by exploring the possibility of time travel , we are testing the extremes of the laws of physics, which may lead to new physics."

If new physics is lurking anywhere, a good place to check is the sub-subatomic world of "quantum foam." In this roiling microworld, space itself is holey, and wormholes and black holes 100 billion times smaller than a proton constantly pop into existence (as the blip that became our universe probably did) only to quickly disappear (as our universe didn't). But it might be possible to pump enough energy into an otherwise transitory wormhole it to keep it around.

Physicists even have the engineering specs for how to then turn a wormhole into a time tunnel. Anchor one mouth in the present -- say, Nov. 21, 2010. Drag the other mouth through space at nearly the speed of light, until Nov. 21, 2011. Moving objects age more slowly than stationary ones, according to relativity. If you hop inside the wormhole, therefore, you could travel to any point in time in-between, back to 2010.

And there's the rub. Time travelers could never reach a time earlier than when a wormhole was engineered. No wonder none have visited us.