On watching polls

Bush's Approval Rating Stabilizes, according to the Washington Post. Great news for Bush, except that it's not true, or true only in a vapid sense. What the Post noticed was that their poll number is essentially unchanged from the last time they took it. But you can see from the big chart (from the bombastic but meticulously researched, and, as far as I can tell, scrupulously honest Pollkatz site) that there's a tremendous amount of noise and transient jumpiness in these things, often more than the sample-size-based "margin of error" implies, and drawing a line between two individual data points is not going to signify an important trend. (At least the Post is comparing two instances of the same poll, which ought to control for systematics, and is more than one can say for some such stories.) What the big picture looks like to me is that the drop in approval rating might be slowing from the rapid rate of descent following the Iraq war to the more stately, linear decline that was happening prior to it. Or maybe not. For all anyone knows it might have found a bottom, but it's certainly too early to say that.

It's all too easy to accept these stories uncritically, and either gloat or scream or write long analyses of the national Zeitgeist as the case may be. People who are very politically plugged-in and anxious for the numbers to trend, say, downward will often read some news story about Bush's latest outrage, see a news story about a blip in some poll number, and emit paragraphs of anguished moaning about the idiot electorate. The fact is that it takes something really enormous to cause an immediate spike or drop (the historical Gallup charts are a fascinating chronicle of the past half-century—I wish he'd add the numbers for Gerald Ford), everything else takes time, and week-to-week fluctuations in a single number mean essentially nothing.

Update: The Washington Post link now goes to a version of the story with the even more counterfactual title "President Rallying Support in Polls". Fortunately, others are also calling bullshit on variants of this story, which seems to be driven by administration spin. As a liberal Democrat, I'm not so disheartened by conservatives talking up a nonexistent Bush bounce; they're probably just seeing what they want to see, which is a natural human trait. I'm disheartened by the liberals I see talking it up as Further Evidence that The Sheeple Will Swallow Anything. Sometimes I think some of us want to believe that nobody agrees with us. The 2004 election will be an uphill battle for any challenger, no matter what. But there's no sense in borrowing trouble.

Shenzhou 5

Yang Liwei heads for orbit.

Update: Spaceflight Now is doing its usual running report and has a feature story. Of course, the Chinese state media being what they are, it's unlikely we'll get a gigantic flood of information.

Update: Here's astronautix.com's background page, with links to large amounts of deeper background. According to this site, they're doing the manned-spy-satellite thing. That's a bit surprising to me, given that both the Soviets and Americans already tried that approach and ultimately abandoned it as not cost effective. (The Soviet one was, as far as I know, the only manned spacecraft ever to have a big honking gun mounted on it; one American attempt was with the space shuttle Challenger in 1984, and the Soviets actually hassled the astronauts with a ground-based laser. Cold War fun all around.)

James Bond kinda stuff

Though the Chinese Shenzhou spacecraft looks a lot like a Russian Soyuz and uses similar principles, it's not an exact copy. It's larger and more advanced in several ways. One interesting detail is that the orbital module that provides living and working space for the crew is designed to remain operating in orbit after the astronauts have come home in the separate reentry module. Apparently, some of the unmanned test flights of the Shenzhou over the past few years also carried an electronic military intelligence module designed to operate for several months after the main mission was over.

I can't tell from the released photo whether Shenzhou 5 has the same ELINT package mounted on the fore end. It does have those big spy cameras. It's possible that they will continue operating after Mr. Yang comes home, though it does raise the question of whether they're digital or film-based (the latter would require some means of getting the photos back; film-based unmanned satellites would drop little reentry capsules-- I don't know whether anyone does that any more, and, probably, neither do you).