The Reality Project

Obama's 30 minute infomercial

I thought it was terrible - a bizarre, schmaltzy hybrid of local tv news style human interest stories and reality tv-type intrusion into people's lives. It was not certainly, though, not targeted at me. And though I do not watch local news or reality tv shows, apparently a lot of people do, so the medium will be familiar and attractive to them. Perhaps it worked, then.

On the other hand, there were fewer direct connections between the particulars of the struggling real people and the details of his plans, which seemed to me a rather significant failing and left me continually wondering: why are these stories being told at all? Just to feature families in swing states, I imagined, until they brought someone on from Kentucky.

I did not appreciate the recycled clips from the debates, the convention and his prior bio-pic. Couldn't they whip up some fresh stuff? Did they realize too late that they didn't have 30 minutes of something to say?

The combination of the content-free real people stories, the lack of new details about any actual governing plans and the rampant reuse of old material left me feeling I had wasted my time watching it. Whether they wasted their time showing it depends on the mystical and impenetrable process by which swing voters 'decide' for whom to vote.

"He'll make Cheney look like Gandhi"

Good video on McCain's militarism:

McCain's downward spiral

Was there a time when McCain was a decent, respectable fellow? All memories of that bygone era are getting washed away by his current behavior. Perhaps the most egregious example to date:

Stick to cheap wine

My plan to never try a bottle of wine over $20 so that I don't develop a taste for the expensive stuff has now received support from experimental psychology. A study called, "Do more expensive wines taste better?" concluded:

Individuals who are unaware of the price do not derive more
enjoyment from more expensive wine. In a sample of more than 6,000 blind
tastings, we find that the correlation between price and overall rating is small
and negative, suggesting that individuals on average enjoy more expensive
wines slightly less. For individuals with wine training, however, we find
indications of a positive relationship between price and enjoyment. Our results
are robust to the inclusion of individual fixed effects, and are not driven by
outliers: when omitting the top and bottom deciles of the price distribution, our
qualitative results are strengthened, and the statistical significance is improved
further. Our results indicate that both the prices of wines and wine
recommendations by experts may be poor guides for non-expert wine
consumers.    

This reminded me of the famous and almost too-good-to-be-true study that called into question whether wine experts could even tell the difference between white and red wine:

 A few years ago, Frederic Brochet, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Bordeaux, conducted a rather mischievous experiment. He invited 54 experienced wine tasters to give their impressions of a red wine and a white wine. Not surprisingly, the experts described the wines with the standard set of adjectives: the red wine was "jammy" and full of "crushed red fruit." The white wine, meanwhile, tasted of lemon, peaches, and honey. The next day, Brochet invited the wine experts back for another tasting. This time, however, he dyed the white wine with red food coloring, so that it looked as if they were tasting two red wines. The trick worked. The experts described the dyed white wine with the language typically used to describe red wines. The peaches and honey tasted like black currants.

McCain to terrorists: Please kill my opponent

Either McCain is too old and senile to censor himself so as not to endanger the lives of his fellow citizens or he was deliberately tipping off terrorists in Iraq about Obama's schedule:

DETROIT (Reuters) - Republican presidential candidate John McCain said Friday that his Democratic opponent, Barack Obama, is likely to be in Iraq over the weekend.

The Obama campaign has tried to cloak the Illinois senator's trip in some measure of secrecy for security reasons. The White House, State Department and Pentagon do not announce senior officials' visits to Iraq in advance.

"I believe that either today or tomorrow -- and I'm not privy to his schedule -- Sen. Obama will be landing in Iraq with some other senators" who make up a congressional delegation, McCain told a campaign fund-raising luncheon.

Hummus vs. Hamas

Borat star Sacha Baron Cohen, in his new character Bruno, fooled a former Mossad agent into giving him an interview about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

A former Mossad official said he was the target of the latest undercover operation by British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen.

Israeli analyst Yossi Alpher was invited to be interviewed for what was supposed to be a documentary on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

He said he realised something was amiss when he saw the interviewer - a man claiming to be a German rock star dressed in leather and studs - who compared the Middle East conflict to the spat between actor Brad Pitt's former and current wives.

In answering one question, the interviewees had to explain the difference between Hamas - an Islamic group ruling Gaza - and hummus - a chickpea paste eaten throughout the region.

Terror Hurricanes?

The National Intelligence Council puts climate change in terms even Republicans can understand:

Global warming could destabilize "struggling and poor" countries around the world, prompting mass migrations and creating breeding grounds for terrorists, the chairman of the National Intelligence Council told Congress on Wednesday.

   

Climate change "will aggravate existing problems such as poverty,
social tensions, environmental degradation, ineffectual leadership and
weak political institutions," Thomas Fingar said. "All of this
threatens the domestic stability of a number of African, Asian, Central
American and Central Asian countries."

People are likely to flee destabilized countries, and some may turn to terrorism, he said.

Novel Writing

Clearly a profession consistent with my ideas on deadlines:

When it comes to the novel, however, Americans are still willing to take it slow, or at least reward the writers who do. Indeed, in recent years a highly visible group of "Great American Novels" have emerged from 10, 12, and even over 20-year gestation periods.

Edward P Jones, Junot Diaz and Jeffrey Eugenides all took 11 years to write their Pulitzer prize-winning novels -a blink, really, when compared to Shirley Hazzard and Marilynne Robinson's 23-year gaps preceding The Great Fire and Gilead respectively.

In a country that invented the internet, let alone the interstate, where computers are replaced every two years and iPhones tossed out after mere months, this is beyond pokey. It's positively counter-cultural.

Sniffing coffee

Good news for those of us who like the smell of coffee but not its taste:

DRINKING a cup of coffee can wake you up, but perhaps just a whiff of Java is enough to reverse the effects of sleep deprivation on the brain.

A team led by Yoshinori Masuo at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Tsukuba, Japan, deprived rats of sleep for a day. When they examined their brains they found reduced levels of mRNA - messenger molecules that indicate when a gene is being expressed - for 11 genes important to brain function. When the rats were exposed to the aroma of coffee, the mRNA for nine of the genes was restored to near normal levels, and pushed to above normal levels for two - GIR, involved in neuro-endocrine control, and NFGR, thought to control oxidative stress (Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, DOI: 10.1021/jf8001137).

Better late than never

From the Times of London:

Get Osama Bin Laden before I leave office, orders George W Bush