Echo Chamber

It is too easy to get caught up in partisan traps. I never bothered to figure out what John McCain was trying to say when he got caught with the “100 years in Iraq” statement, so I looked it up. Of course, it is not nearly so unreasonable as Democratic Party attack ads make it out to be.

Which is important, because I consider myself a moderate, even if today in America moderate-liberal tendencies have somehow been transformed into “radical left.” And I like to try and believe in the fundamental goodness of people, most of the time.

Hillary Clinton has fallen slowly but inexorably into moral bankruptcy, to the point where I cannot see her in the White House. If somehow she wrests away the primary victory from Obama through underhandedness and fear-mongering, I might be driven to vote for McCain. He is threading a very dangerous needle, but I still feel on the whole that he is probably a principled man, even if, after his 2000 trumping by Bush, he is a changed one, and not for the better.

Edit: Okay, maybe not with the voting for McCain business. Gotta keep some perspective…

[Richard Feynman] must have noticed my mood, because he suddenly stopped the story and asked, “Hey, what’s the matter?”

I hesitated. “I’m sad because you’re going to die.”

“Yeah,” he sighed, “that bugs me sometimes too. But not so much as you think.” And after a few more steps, “When you get as old as I am, you start to realize that you’ve told most of the good stuff you know to other people anyway.”

— Danny Hillis writes about Richard Feynman's time at Thinking Machines, working with him on some of the first massively parallel computer systems.

As people like Jessica Yellin, Katie Couric, Phil Donahue and Scott McClellan are making clear, these media outlets are controlled propaganda arms of the Government, of the political establishment generally. For many people, that isn’t a new revelation, but the fact that it’s becoming clearer by the day — from unimpeachable sources on the inside — is nonetheless quite significant.

— Glenn Greenwald on how Scott McClellan's new book is forcing the media to confront accusations of corruption that they have long ignored

Even if you haven’t seen the movie by now, you’ve probably seen the pointy-headed crystal skull, and in this movie we all learn exactly where that skull came from: outer space. (Or another dimension, but same thing, right?) Unfortunately, every Indiana Jones movie so far has been about the power of religious artifacts. Not only are the skull’s powers nebulous (it stops ants? It makes you go crazy if you look at it? It’s a magnet?), thereby making it a terrible MacGuffin, it calls into question the God-given power of every artifact Indy’s ever seen in action. Were the Shankara stones space rocks? Was the Ark radioactive? Was the Holy Grail a life-extending alien beverage container? Everything we know has been cast into doubt — now imagine how Indy feels, after spending a lifetime chasing this stuff.

— "You Are Now Leaving Indiana" from Television Without Pity

Post-Katrina FEMA trailers may have poisoned thousands of young children

Children who lived in the temporary shelters are at higher risk of severe breathing problems and cancer, thanks to unsafe levels of formaldehyde. FEMA knew about the problem in 2006 but did not begin to move people out of the contaminated trailers until three months ago. Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice. Be it incompetence or malice, people should go to jail.

What’s the Boy Scout motto?

For those who say I never write about work anymore…
The first time I met the CIO of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences was a hastily convened meeting on the day that we were moving Berkman from Baker House to 23 Everett. I was dirty, smelly, wearing a t-shirt and shorts, and I didn’t even know what we were meeting about.

Today, with no deadlines or meetings or people to bug, I spent the morning working from home. I knew I had to go in at 1pm for a training in the new version of our helpdesk software. Since it was just a two hour training and I wasn’t technically in the office, I threw on a t-shirt, khakis, and Tevas, and biked my unshaved, unshowered self over to the Science Center.

Who should plop down in the seat beside me but, of all people, our CIO, who had decided to drop in on the class. Unfortunate.

Says the Times, British television imports Eleventh Hour and Life on Mars will be facing off on Thursday nights in America starting next season. I’ve seen both — Mars is a fantastic police drama (my review), while Eleventh Hour is a dumbed-down (and boring) bioterrorism show. It’ll be interesting to see how the American versions turn out.

The McCain Doctrines

Matt Bai’s profile delves into McCain’s thinking on the Iraq war, tracing his evolution from post-Vietnam to present. It is a good read and helpful for getting a bead on where McCain really stands after a primary season that saw his tacking right and espousing opinions that don’t become him.