Dear Barack Obama,

Judging from a few of your more recent interviews, you seem to have a good sense of humor—even after such a long, brutal campaign. If you are elected president, a wonderful gift to the “hard-core Sean Hannity fans”[1] would be to, starting on election day, grow a luxurious beard for your inauguration on January 21st. A well-trimmed, Muslimy-as-all-get-out beard.

As for background music? How about anything off of The Best of the Black President by Fela Kuti?

Liberalism has, for at least the last few decades, been equated with evil in American political discourse. The media and politicians alike have bent over backwards to assure Americans that they are not liberal. Communist was an epithet from the 50's, during the reign of Joe McCarthy. Terrorist became all the rage after 9-11 as the muzzle of choice for those seeking to shut down an rational— or, god forbid, intellectual—discussion. Barack Obama, with his superstar status, clearly deserved... [More]

Designating 9-11 as a pinprick is an incendiary characterization. It was, however, an entirely appropriate,... [More]

After what seems like weeks of interviews that ranged from overly defensive to outright hostile, campaign ads that, at times, transgressed all bounds of logic and good taste and stump speeches that, one after the other, flamed out in flustered desperation, John McCain came back strong on Saturday night with a solid, funny, genial six-minute skit on Saturday Night Live. He was joined by Tina Fey—for those who have seen more of Tina than Sarah, it’s hard to tell the difference—and his wife,... [More]

The eyeballing game is an interesting game that challenges you to “eyeball” distances and angles for fabulous prizes, fortune and fame. You have as much time as you like to perform each of the following tasks three times:

• Make a parallelogram by dragging one corner to the correct position.
• Identify the midpoint of a line
• Bisect an angle
• Find the center of a triangle
• Find the center of a circle
• Make a right angle out of two line segments
• Find the point of convergence for three line segments

... [More]

Christopher Buckley made an appearance on the Daily Show last week. He’s actually quite an entertaining fellow and not at all arrogant and full of himself like his father (was). His father—William F. Buckley—was very intelligent and had an enviably large vocabulary, but behaved like an ass whenever he dared to speak to anyone just as intelligent who was simultaneously in possession of irrefutable facts that contradicted his deeply-held beliefs (check YouTube for interviews with Noam Chomsky... [More]

If you’re faced with a pile of data that needs to be sorted, you can use the Animated Sorting Algorithms by David R. Martin to decide, based on what kind of data you think you’re going to have. Click a little green refresh symbol in the rows to watch the algorithms race on the same dataset or click a column header to watch the same algorithm attack best- and worst-case scenarios simultaneously.

The presidential debates are over and none too soon. Obama’s adherents probably thought their candidate kicked McCain’s ass all over the stage and McCain’s probably thought their candidate looked forthright compared to Obama’s blasé information-rich stream of prose. McCain spent the three debates designating Americans as “his friends” whereas Obama addresses “folks” all the time. True believers are on-board, but does this work with the undecided? Why are people so eminently manipulable? Why... [More]

In discussions between two opposing viewpoints, people tend to choose a “winner” based on who’s willing to raise the volume and lower the level of discourse. If they can identify with one side’s points—or have no reason not to believe them—they tend to identify that way. Simplistic and specious reasoning, straw-man logic and outright, bold-faced lies often carry the day. Check out any Bill O’Reilly interview[1] and you’ll see a master of the form at work.

Now, the right-wing version involves ... [More]

So, suddenly everyone cares about macro-economics. Suddenly, we’ve upgraded our interest in the magic, money-making machine—this financial Perpetuum Mobile—from non-existent to frantic. For the longest time, very few of us cared exactly how it worked or why. No one bothered to ask why it was a given that investing in the market made sense—be it through funds, pensions or directly[1]—that’s why it’s called a given. (Duh.) We ignored clear signs that some were making out like bandits—and... [More]

GYWO was great when it was just a two-dimensional, two-color comic. Now, it’s absolutely hilarious as a video. The latest installment is The Debate (GYWO), where two office buddies banter about the town-hall debate last Friday.

“You watched the debate?

“Yes, and it was another victory for war-hero and country-first-putter, John McCain. […] Total mastery of the issues!”

I laughed. Out loud. But, that’s me. Your mileage may vary. The video is linked below.

The Debate (GYWO)

As of the weekend, we heard that the Dow industrials [was] down over 5,500 points, or 39%, from year-ago peak (MarketWatch). It’s strange, though, because doesn’t crash mean that everything stops working? Crash means bread lines and digging holes and filling them in again to pass the time. At least, that’s what happened during the last crash. What does crash mean today? The internet clearly still works. Jets are still flying on time... [More]

The Daily Show and the Colbert Report aren’t the only games in town anymore. The Onion, which started as an actual physical newspaper before migrating online, has a lot of audio and video content available, as well. The video content is incredibly well-produced and is designed to inspire the same “wait a second…is this real?” feeling as some of its better news articles do.

They have a few recurring themes, covering sports, political news and even a morning show. Here are a few of the better... [More]

And so it was during the vice-presidential debate last Thursday, where Biden stuck to his talking points and whole lot of policy (Bo–ring), while Palin stuck to her talking points, folksiness and, oddly enough, a whole lot of winking.[1] Reading the transcript afterwards confirms that there was very little substance to Palin’s responses and that to call them “responses” is being very generous. At least half of her answers were filled end-to-end with words and concepts completely unrelated to the... [More]

Lot of politicians—most recently and fervently, Vice-presidential nominee, Sarah Palin—want to represent “Joe Six-pack”. Good old Joe represents, for them, the quintessential American. America exists to protect Joe and, should Joe come to harm or should Joe fail, America has failed. Accepting that, perform the following thought experiment: envision Joe, picture good old Joe in your mind. Got it? Good. Now answer the following questions:

1. Is Joe black?
2. Is Joe gay?
3. Is Joe female?
4. Is Joe... [More]

They say that the financial system is on the brink of collapse, that it has stopped “working”. This sounds bad. However, before rushing to support whatever solution is put forward to fix it, it would be best to figure out what it was like when it was working smoothly. Only then can you know whether or not you want to fix it. Some of the votes of “no” to the bailout came from representatives that believed just that: that the goal is not to put everything back the way it was, with the same people... [More]

Sarah Silverman is back with a slightly-less-profane video offering than her last outing, this time stumping for Obama. On a site called The Great Schlep, she lays out her angle: with Florida playing such an important role in previous elections, jewish Obama supporters should “schlep” to Florida to convince their grandparents to vote for Obama.

The great schlep officially takes place over Columbus Day weekend. Talking points are available in PDF form from the web site.

SNL: Hillary Clinton & Sarah Palin Make an Announcement (NBC.com)

This segment was inevitable the first time someone noted that Sarah Palin wears “Tina Fey” glasses. Clinton & Palin come together to address sexism in the media; hilarity ensues.

SNL: Couric interviews Palin, Part 4 (NBC.com)

Katie Couric, not known for her hardball interviews or journalistic acumen or sophisticated questions, interviewed Sarah Palin this week; disaster ensued. No matter how hard Couric tried to toss Palin softballs, she bobbled... [More]

Google has entered the mobile market with the G1, a phone—as described in The G1: Almost perfect (CrunchGear)—for “the programmer and the geek and, in a way, the average consumer”. In a very, very small way. First of all, look at it:

G1 Phone

It’s a smart-phone and aimed squarely at the smart-phone market, but don’t even try to mention that the “average consumer” is even conceivably a target market for this monstrosity. It looks huge[1], way bigger than a BlackBerry or an iPhone. With it’s slide-out keyboard and... [More]

Examining the Republican TicketA recent analysis, George W. Bush’s Overall Job Approval Matches ARG Low (American Research Group), sounds pretty good, on the surface. People think Bush is doing a poor job; McCain wants to be Bush, so McCain’s plummeting, right?

Right?

Things are rarely that simple. Two excellent election resources are Five Thirty Eight.com and the vaunted Electoral-Vote.com (EV)[1]. Whereas both sites currently have Obama in the lead (with FTE giving Obama a 75%—oops, today, it’s 73%—chance of winning), the Republicans are not... [More]

Most of us don’t follow the markets very assiduously. We buy into pensions or mutual funds or get CDs or money-market funds at the bank or we just have a savings account with decent... [More]

Take the FM 100 Hue Test (XRite); make sure you have about five minutes or so. Decent light conditions and an LCD help. If you have a CRT, you should probably run some color calibration if it’s been 10 years since you last did one ;-).

When you’re ready to go, you get a grid like the one shown below.

The Color Test

If you’re wicked awesome and have eyes like Superman, you’ll be taken to the following screen after moving the little tiles and pressing “Score Test”.

You Have Perfect Color Vision!

Booyah!

The batch of conservatives preening their plumage weekly on This Week on ABC flipped a bitch so hard this weekend that they nearly lost their false teeth and toupés. After having effectively campaigned brilliantly for McCain throughout the 2008 season—when they thought electing him would be better for their investments, presumably—they now unreservedly trash him, dragging out his dirty laundry for all to see.

ABC Roundtable: McCain 'Unpresidential' & Age Issue (YouTube)

They played Obama’s newest campaign videos, then gleefully agreed with them,... [More]

At long last, the article A Nation of Masochists by Juan Cole (Informed Comment)[1] proposes a realistic alternate theory that explains America’s voting habits. This one is no less subtle that the current theory that Americans suffer from sheer, blinding ignorance mixed with heaping helpings of stupidity.

Juan Cole reports almost exclusively on the Middle East, but clearly something ruffled his feathers and he is pissed.[2] His recounting of the last eight years under the Republicans is mostly accurate, not completely fair, but... [More]