This article promises more than it delivers, but it’s worth reading anyway. It’s about efforts to induce and detect emotion in video game players. The argument is undeniable

We haven’t heard the last of the final analyses of Dean’s rise and fall, I’m sure, but we’ve probably gotten the last of the ones you should read, if you’re interested in what happened. This is an early-bird edition of an article that will be in May’s Atlantic Monthly, and it’s written by Dean’s own pollster, Paul Maslin.

Maslin writes clearly and evocatively. He takes you through the excitement and the drama of a campaign as well as any journalist I’ve seen. There’s strong foreshadowing, fleshy, warm characters with real flaws, vivid dialogue, structure, you name it.

And what does the article say? Everything that our newspapers probably don’t have enough time or access to present: that there was no single, simple reason for Dean’s rise and fall. Any campaign is a walk along a greased tightrope, a constant play of gambles and negotiations. Dean’s campaign especially was a movement with dense variables swinging every which way — his Internet base, his volatile campaign manager, the other candidates, Dean himself.

The next thing I’m looking for is Howard Dean’s own account of the experience, but I won’t hold my breath. Although he speaks his mind constantly, he seems to withhold his feelings. And if his article in Vanity Fair was any indication, he’s not much of an absorbing writer. But what a character.

I posted this on a blog I maintain for work, but I’m kind of amused by it, so I’m reposting here:

Today’s story idea is resolutions. The House of Representatives seems to make a lot of them. 

So far today, from what I can tell from the current floor summary, the House did this:

They met at 12:30 p.m., had 27 minutes of rollicking “Morning-Hour Debates” (whatever those are), then took a break. Then, they reconvened at 2 p.m., and spent the next 68 minutes debating resolutions. There’s one resolution thanking C-SPAN for 25 years of service. One resolution from the Senate permitting the use of the Capitol Building’s rotunda for next year’s Inauguration Ceremony. Another to rename a Kansas post office the Myron V. George Post Office. Yet another to honor the life and legacy of FDR, it being his 122nd birthday.

Then the House took another break, and they’re supposed to reconvene at 6:30, possibly to vote on yet more resolutions.

Tomorrow, according to CQ’s Midday Update, the House will consider a resolution to commend our soldiers in Iraq for the good job they’ve done and assert that the world is safer with Saddam Hussein’s regime deposed. (Note: CQ is owned by The Poynter Institute, which owns this website.)

Why all these resolutions? Is this a typical day? Given that there are 435 members of the House of Representatives, each of whom makes a not insubstantial yearly salary, how much does it cost taxpayers to have these folks spend an hour renaming post offices and singing “Happy Birthday” to FDR? How much effort do House staffers spend drawing up these resolutions?

A quick gander at Georgia’s list of recent House resolutions shows that state Congresses are probably the same story.

After I read this Wired article, I was grooving on DARPA for a good little while. If you haven’t heard about DARPA’s Grand Challenge, here’s the dish. They posted a prize of $1 million for any engineering team that could make an unmanned vehicle capable of driving from L.A. to Las Vegas. The Grand Challenge was a race for all the qualifying vehicles, to see which was the best.

Such a great idea, right? There’s no way to spark innovation like a contest. The favored teams would all spend two and three times $1 million to build their vehicles anyway, so this was all about the thrill and prestige of victory. And DARPA could pick and choose from all the technological wonderworks these teams would dream up to make something truly revolutionary.

And on top of it all, DARPA’s Grand Challenge website was fun and happy-looking; not at all what you’d expect from some stuffy government project. The FAQ included down-home humor, like: “it is expected that most teams will modify existing off-road vehicles for the Challenge, although who knows what could slither or crawl across the starting line.”

Well, the race was Saturday. None of the vehicles got even eight miles past the starting point. So, it was kind of a bust. But good times were had.

Still kind of grooving on DARPA … until I read this article. Eerie reminder of Total Information Awareness. Reports of DARPA’s plans to build a giant floating surveillance blimp to watch entire cities and track individual civilians. And, creepiest of all (to me at least), notes about DARPA’s research into technology that can grow and heal itself.

The rational, naive side of me says, “No, this is good. Self-repairing humanoid machines can clearly only be used for totally benign purposes, and will of course remain at all times under human control, despite DARPA’s efforts to produce military technology that can mimic humans’ heuristic capacities and awareness of their environment.” The even more rational, and now utterly paranoid, side of me says, “The Terminator is now governing California.”

Step three: panic!

UPDATE:Another article on DARPAranoia.

I ought to start tracking the your-mother jokes being tossed back and forth in the Presidential election. Here’s one from The Washington Post:

“SEN. JOHN KERRY’s Economic Policies Would Cost Jobs in Ohio,” a headline on the Bush campaign Web site asserts. “The most crooked, you know, lying group I’ve ever seen,” Mr. Kerry says of his Republican adversaries. “Sen. Kerry Flip-Flops on Israel,” says the Bush campaign. “Once again, George Bush is misleading America,” a Kerry advertisement charges. “So’s your mom,” says — no, wait. We haven’t seen that one yet.

If you’d written off the movie Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow after seeing the trailer, dust off your interest and read this preview, from the NYT Magazine. Not only does the movie sound excellent, the article’s a blast, too:

For [Kerry Conran, creator of Sky Captain], the question, as he put it, was ”Could you be ambitious and make a film of some scope without ever leaving your room?” And so 10 years ago, Kerry Conran went into a room in his apartment to make a movie. In some ways, he is just now beginning to come out of it.

At first, he was a mystery. Word of ”Sky Captain” began to spread around the Internet only after Conran finished primary shooting in London last spring — extraordinarily late for the Internet, which often seems invented specifically to track movies with giant robots in them. Even then, no one knew who Kerry Conran was. Google couldn’t touch him. He was so undocumented in the world of Hollywood that I briefly wondered, when I began pursuing him, if perhaps he was just a front for his producer and partner and mentor Jon Avnet, who is well known for producing ”Risky Business” and directing ”Fried Green Tomatoes” but who is not so well known for retro-science-fiction summertime blockbusters, and who unlike Conran seems to have been photographed at least once in his life. I don’t think Conran would mind that I doubted his existence. In fact, for a long time, that was the plan.

Conran created the entire universe of the movie using computers. I mean, I guess it’s not that rare in the age of Pixar, but the live actors involved (including Gwyneth, Jude, and Angelina) worked in front of blue screens the entire time. That seems big, somehow.

They can do anything here. When one of Paltrow’s arms was cut out from a shot, they copied the other one, flipped it and pasted it back in. Since all the lighting was being done on the computer, they could paint the frame with light and noirish shadows, erase it all and then start again.

We forget sometimes what a ridiculously amazing speaker Bill Clinton could be. If the man didn’t have so many serious character flaws, despite the fact that his Presidency’s successes, whatever they were, have been mostly frittered away and his failures amplified, I’d seriously consider handing the dictator-for-life baton over, just on the strength of his speeches. No other politician can do that to me. I hate it when politicians speak. Their words are so cheap. But his are so wonderful. Bleh. Just read the incredible speech. (Via MY.)

Salon is opening up a new bureau in Washington, D.C., under the direction of Sidney Blumenthal:

“The country wants and needs unintimidated news,” says Blumenthal. “The Bush administration has put enormous political pressure on the press not to probe its radical policies and their consequences. Salon intends to be fearless.” Under Blumenthal’s leadership, Salon’s new Washington bureau will produce a flow of revealing stories about the Bush administration and the election.

How are they planning to penetrate the famously secretive White House? I mean, come on, this is Salon. It’s being run by the former press secretary of Bill Clinton. And they’ve clearly stated their intention to air President Bush’s dirty laundry. Any “senior administration official” caught talking to them will be disembowled, lightly seasoned, and fed to Karl Rove for brunch.

Maybe they’re hoping to find more people like this former Pentagonian.* Maybe Sidney Blumenthal will discover what Dana Milbank could not. At any rate, they must think they’re going to get something. I’m interested.

Also — dude. A new Salon bureau? But isn’t Salon dead?

Maybe I’ll fire off an e-mail to my buddy Sid and get to the bottom of it.

Read more…

The old Lingua Franca is dead. Long live the new Lingua Franca. The two have nothing to do with each other, to be sure. The old Lingua Franca was a magazine about academia. The new LF is an Australian radio show about language, and it’s phenomenal. To wit, a defense of the art of euphemism:

As you mature and leave behind childish things, it’s important to learn how not to say what you mean. For a start, saying what you mean presupposes that you actually know what you mean (increasingly unlikely as you grow older, particularly when you reach your ‘golden years’ as we all say). Apart from that, it’s quite simply dangerous. As any ape knows, sending a clear signal about what you mean can get you killed in no time at all. Not having language, apes groom each other instead as a way of saying, ‘I’m on your side, I think you’re wonderful; here, let me just get that tick out of your hair, and you know, if there’s the odd baboon cutlet going around when you’ve finished eating, do toss it my way, if it’s not too much trouble.’ If you’re very, very nice to an alpha male chimpanzee, he might even let you fondle his scrotum.

Not all the episodes have full transcripts or recordings, but many do. Do go and have a look around the site.

I’m grooving on these frequent, article-length, well-reported Campaign Desk articles. This one’s particularly interesting.

Political blogs are mostly written by men, it turns out. While this is hardly news to me, it’s odd how rarely I’ve stopped to think about it. Tara McKelvey and Garance Frank-Ruta represent over at TAPPED, but otherwise, I don’t read any female political bloggers on a regular basis. So now I just feel vaguely unsettled. Besides Wonkette!, where are the female-written political blogs?

Note that despite women’s absence from the political blogosphere, even in the Campaign Desk article Kathleen Hall Jamieson continues her unchallenged hegemony over the realm of Random Sources, commenting on everything from women’s thoughts on the rodeo to the impact of talk radio.