Month: August 2022

Earlier this year the Department of Education conducted a "special administration" of the long-term NAEP test for 9-year-olds. Why the long-term test instead of the main NAEP test? Because by chance they had conducted a long-term assessment in 2020, which meant that a 2022 retest would tell us a lot about how the COVID-19 pandemic affected elementary school students.¹

So how did our fourth-graders do? In a word, badly. Here are the topline results:

The usual rule of thumb is that ten points on the NAEP equals one grade level. This means that in reading, kids in fourth grade this year were about half a grade level behind the fourth graders of 2020. In math they were about three-quarters of a grade level behind.

But it gets worse. The best students lost only 2-3 points in both reading and math while the worst students lost 10-12 points. Low-income students (-6 in reading, -8 in math) lost more than non-poor students (-3 in reading, -5 in math). Students in the West (-1 in reading, -5 in math) fared considerably better than students in every other region (-7 in reading, -8 in math). Black, white, and Hispanic kids all lost about six points in reading. In math, everyone lost a lot but Black kids lost a catastrophic 13 points. Oddly city kids didn't lose anything in reading. Aside from that, kids in suburbs did a little worse than kids in cities, towns, and rural areas.

That's the basics. I'm sure there will be plenty of analysis over the next few weeks, but for now the basic results are all we have. I also suspect there's going to be a very great deal of shrieking and moaning about how our children are all doomed to a future of failure, but please don't join in. These things tend to wash out in later school years, and I very much doubt that by the time our fourth graders graduate from high school they'll be noticeably different from any other graduating class.

¹The long-term assessment is a special version of the NAEP that's been designed to stay the same from year to year, thus making it highly useful for comparisons over time. However, over the course of two years it's no different than the main NAEP test. It's just chance that it happened to be the only test given in 2020.

The main NAEP test was given to 9-year-olds in 2019. It seems to me that 2019-22 would have been a perfectly useful comparison period, but I guess 2020-22 gives a slightly better focus on precisely the pandemic years.

Jim Geraghty is afraid that maybe we didn't win the Cold War after all. Sure, he says, it seems like we won:

And yet… Putin-era Russia doesn’t look all that different from the bad old days of the Soviet Union, particularly this year.

The Russian army invaded neighboring territories....horrifying brutality and the deliberate targeting of civilians....mercenary forces deployed to Syria, Libya, and the Central African Republic....“spheres of influence.”

....Just about all dissent in modern Russia is gone; pro-state propaganda dominates all forms of media....Russia is no longer interested in engaging with the West if that engagement requires them to abandon their dreams of an expansionist empire.

....Putin’s Russia has a different style than the Cold War-era Soviet Union, but it remains the same in most of the ways that matter most: totalitarian, brutal, aggressive, expansionist, habitually deceitful, paranoid, devious, and controlled by men whose blood is almost as cold as the country’s winters....In light of all that… did we really win the Cold War? Or did we just win the first round?

Oh, we won. But as George Kennan tried to tell us 70 years ago, Russian conduct is rooted in centuries of autocracy, inferiority complexes, and difficult relations with Western Europe. Communism wasn't responsible for that, it was just the latest veneer on top of it.

Winning the Cold War was never likely to change Russia's temperament significantly, though we had high hopes at the time. And if things had gone just a little differently, we certainly could have done better than Vladimir Putin. Still, winning the Cold War didn't mean turning Russia into Switzerland. It meant freedom for Eastern Europe and the end of communism as a serious alternative to free-market capitalism.

Thirty years later, both of those victories are almost entirely intact. Hell, most of Eastern Europe is part of NATO and the EU. And communism is dead no matter what China calls its government. There are still plenty of autocracies around, with many of them trying to manage their economies, but that's neither new nor significant.

The great ideological war of the 20th century is over. Capitalism won a rousing and complete victory. Just don't mistake that for an end to brutality, war, and tyranny. It'll take a lot longer than 50 years for those to be tossed onto the ash heap of history.

Sarah Palin has lost the special election for Alaska's House seat. So sad. Better luck in November, Sarah.

The good people of Michigan recently gathered a huge number of signatures to put an abortion-rights measure on the November ballot. The Bureau of Elections examined the petitions and found that the vast majority of signatures were valid. So, the citizens having spoken, they duly recommended it be put on the ballot.

But wait. The Board of State Canvassers has final say and its Republican members voted against allowing it on the ballot. Did they have a reason?

The board’s GOP members voted against approving the measure for the ballot after the anti-abortion group campaigning against the amendment, Citizens to Support MI Women and Children, argued that spacing and formatting errors in the text circulated to voters for their signatures rendered the effort invalid.

Say what? Spacing and formatting issues? Is this a deliberate joke? An explicit "fuck you we just don't want it on the ballot"? Here's the entire text:

It's easy to see what happened here. The text is right-justified, and the word-processing program did a lousy job of it. Because of this, there are a few passages where the spacing between words is so small that it's hardly visible.

Nonetheless, it's easy to read and the text is clear. But this is what things have come to. The Republican board members are, indeed, explicitly saying "fuck you we just don't want it on the ballot." So now it's on to the Michigan Supreme Court.

This is—finally!—the first real picture I've taken with my new telescope. It's an image of the Iris Nebula (NGC 7023), a reflection nebula in the constellation Cepheus. It's blue thanks to the romantically named SAO 19158, the young star in the center that illuminates it.

This is not a bad image, but it's not as sharp as it should be because, for some reason, I was unable to get autoguiding to work. Once I debug that problem, I'll try again and post the results.

I chose the Iris Nebula for my first serious image because (a) it's very pretty, (b) it's currently high in the sky, and (c) I wanted a nebula that was nice looking and fairly easy to photograph, but wasn't something you've already seen a thousand times. But I'll try some of the more famous ones later.

TECHNICAL INFO: This image is the product of 51 separate exposures of 60 seconds each. It was stacked and processed in Astro Pixel Processor and then finished up in Photoshop. It's remarkable how much better APP was compared to ASTAP, the other stacking/processing program I tried. Like night and day.

I used the defaults in APP because I don't yet understand its options. I just pressed the "Integrate" button and let it run.

Unemployment has plummeted everywhere:

Unemployment rates were lower in July than a year earlier in 383 of the 389 metropolitan areas, higher in 5 areas, and unchanged in 1 area, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today.

Well, almost everywhere. So who are the five unlucky areas that managed to beat the odds and show an increase in unemployment?

• Yuma, AZ
• Bloomington, IN
• Elkhart-Goshen, IN
• Columbus, IN
• Lafayette-West Lafayette, IN

Yuma is the true outlier here, rising 1.7 percentage points from 16.6% to 18.4%. What the hell is going on out there?

The other four cities are all in Indiana. Their joblessness increases were small, but still, aside from our friends in Arizona no other state had even one area with increased unemployment. What the hell is going on out there?¹

As for the other 48 states, good job. Unemployment is down in every single area. My own metropolitan division, Anaheim-Santa Ana-Irvine, dropped a stunning 3.6 points from 6.4% to 2.8%. Hooray for us.

¹Indiana as a whole managed to eke out a 0.2% decrease in unemployment. This was the worst performance in the nation. The best performance was turned in by California, which had a 3.9% drop in unemployment. You can check out your neck of the woods here.

Republicans in swing districts are running scared:

At least nine Republican congressional candidates have scrubbed or amended references to Trump or abortion from their online profiles in recent months, distancing themselves from divisive subjects that some GOP strategists say are two of the biggest liabilities for the party ahead of the post-Labor Day sprint to Election Day.

“The Dobbs decision has clearly energized Democratic voters to the point where they have closed the enthusiasm gap with Republicans,” said Whit Ayres, a longtime GOP pollster, referencing the Supreme Court ruling that ended the constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy. Asked whether it hurts the GOP to have Trump back in the news, Ayres replied, “The best case for Republican candidates in the midterms is making the upcoming election a referendum on the Biden administration.”

Republicans in purplish districts or states are caught in a vise: they can either piss off Trump or piss off voters. I suspect there will be something of a panicked stampede toward voters over the next couple of months.

This might well be my last M-protein test:

It's been flat for the past three months, which is fine. It would be a little worrisome under normal circumstances, but since I'm now off the chemo regimen and just waiting for the CAR-T treatment, all that matters is that I'm not getting worse. And I'm not!

In other news, my blood is clotting just fine; my glucose is only slightly higher than it should be; my electrolytes are in great shape; I have the proper amount of magnesium, phosphate, and uric acid; my immune system is good; and I don't have HIV, Epstein-Barr, or any form of hepatitis. Bottom line: aside from the whole cancer thing, I'm in great shape.

This was taken in the Saint-Martin neighborhood near the Place de la Bataille de Stalingrad. This is apparently a guy whose wife/partner/whatev really, really doesn't want him smoking indoors.

It's Tuesday, so it must be gasoline day:

Down another nickel! Thanks to Joe Biden's hard work, gasoline now costs less than it did 40 years ago.¹

¹Adjusted for inflation, of course.²

²Also, 40 years ago was 1982, the aftermath of the Iranian oil embargo. Still, gasoline is less expensive now than it was then. Facts are facts. Suck on that, Glenn Kessler.