Fri - July 28, 2006

The larger war: Faith VS. Reason

I caught Bill Moyer's PBS mini-series for the first time tonight, Faith & Reason. It's SO refreshing to see and hear smart people on TV again.

It's a timely, brilliant interview show that doesn't aim to dumb-down the topic in any way. Moyers is great at probing and attempting to keep his guests grounded without injecting himself into the discussion. It's a flammable topic and I'm certain that a majority of Americans could only bear 1-2 minutes of it without being stirred to hatred or being bored to the point of touching the "channel up" button.

For the rest of us, it is a reaffirmation that there are truly intelligent people on this earth that think the way we do. Please take a moment to see the show, or click here for archived interview excerpts.



The most ironic thing may be how much like an evangelical his resemblance is.

Posted at 11:23 PM      

Thu - July 6, 2006

Blogging. Not Blogging.

I'm beginning to have a love/hate relationship with blogging. The first reason to doubt the process is that I am usually inspired/free to post well past my bedtime. The second is that the blogging process is so very insular. It feeds on itself.




Popular blogs are those that get linked to by other blogs. Often very little original thought is added. The tools on the web make this easy to do--case in point: I'm working on a plain vanilla Bloglines professional blog targeted to my co-workers and clients here: http://www.bloglines.com/blog/IanMalbon

Hmm. I'd love to have the time to filter 150+ posts per day and provide critical commentary, but I'm getting paid to do something else.

The upside is that, when a blog posts something truly interesting, it gets the viral spin from other top blogs, and it bubbles up, usually first to The Daily Show, then NPR, then newspapers that have no real writers, then CNN.

I can only hope to be noticed by these beacons of journalism someday.

Posted at 01:11 AM      

Mon - May 29, 2006

Tilting at windmills

This is weird. I recently found out that the Who's classic "We Won't Get Fooled Again" was voted by the UK Independent as the "Number 1 conservative song". This is arguably a response by some "folk" against terror attacks. I'm sure the line "And I get on my knees and pray..." helps these conservatives feel even better about the song.

Back in 2003 I put this song on a mixtape called "Bush Vs. Saddam". It was a cynical collection of tracks meant as a commentary on the futility of a misguided policy. More importantly, I chose that particular Who song as a rallying cry against a second term for Bush. "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss..."

Weird that this song could be embraced by polar opposites. That's where the songwriter comes in. Pete Townshend's response is a nice study in greys (that's "grays" for US liberals, and "nonsense" for US conservatives).

Posted at 02:10 AM      

Mon - April 17, 2006

Hypersensitivity?

It's unlike me to post about something like this, given that I'm an advertising professional, and an unabashed Apple fan.

Something is bothering me more and more about the iPod Nano commercial that's on TV currently. It's a nice piece of digital art, where thousands of CD covers self assemble into strings, and cubes, eventually constructing an entire cityscape of CD covers. They finally collapse into a fast moving stream that fills an iPod Nano with cool music aplenty.

Youtube.com hosts the ad here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NdgaVOn3sc

An HDTV version of the Ad is posted on apple.com, too. I'm sure you've seen it.




The problem is, at the very moment in the commercial that the CD "buildings" start crumbling, the lead singer (the track is "Cubicle" by Rinocerose) lets loose with a credible rock scream. I know we're 4+ years on from 9/11 and the World Trade Center, but isn't this just a little creepy to anyone else? I've been Googling, and I can't believe I'm alone on this.

In fact, I know the review process for commercials, I am certain that this came up at some point. It feels like a calculated risk on Apple's part.

Am I being hypersensitive?

Posted at 10:41 PM      

Wed - February 15, 2006

Vice President Quail

The V.P. shoots a friend in a hunting accident.



At first I thought the story was odd. I soon after decided that it was pretty much a non-event, an accident, an unfortunate private mistake that changed lives, but took none. I also thought that all the attention that the Left would inevitably pay to this would be seen as a desperate attempt at conspiracy theorizing.

Then I read this post. Like it or not, this will be a distraction for a while longer.

At least until Abu Ghraib 2.0 gets widely distributed, or American Idol gets down to its final six.

Posted at 11:46 PM     Read More    

Sun - February 12, 2006

"Gaming the System"

It's taken me 40 years of life on this earth to realize the following flaw:

I may not be good at games.

Sure, I can fill out most crossword puzzles in the time it takes to have lunch. I used to own the 50-yard dash in Junior High (I developed early). I play Scrabble well against mental peers who don't play more than I do.

But the realization I've come to is that I generally do not immediately seek ways to bend the rules to increase my chances of winning. I play for playing's sake, and value others who respect the rules and want to engage in the same type of fair play.

Here's a concrete example. My mobile phone is a Sony Ericksson T616. The first week i got it, I downloaded Cybiko's Backgammon game. I can play against the program without using any minutes on my plan. For months, I played Backgammon against my phone whenever I had down time, or was waiting in line--you know, all those moments in modern life when playing a game "against" your phone seems like a nice way to spend otherwise wasted time.

I quickly realized that I should be playing in "Expert" mode, instead of Beginner or Advanced, because it offered a greater challenge. Then I noticed a scoring discrepancy. The programmers, in order to "even the odds" made this rule: when the program wins, you lose more points then you can gain by winning. As your score progresses, the risk of losing becomes much greater than your gain by winning. Eventually, a player can gain 1 point by winning, but lose 31 points by losing. This felt unfair, and became a disincentive to play.

So, in a moment of frustration and creativity, I decided to save a game that I was just about to win, bigtime. I then learned that I could load that game and play it in a fraction of the time of a regular game, and keep winning, again and again, and again. I could inflate my score with less effort, and reduce the 31 to 1 discrepancy that the programmers had introduced.

The point? It took me over two years to discover this. See why I may not be good at games?

Most importantly (and why I am okay admitting to this), I think that this speaks to an issue of character.

There are those of us who value rules, and enjoy exploring the landscape of life that exists within them. On the other side there are those who believe that ends always justify means, and work immediately to "game the system" to gain advantage.

Some of these people are business executives promoting potential pyramid schemes for personal gain.

Some of them are teenagers playing online role-playing games in one window, while hacking the game servers in another.

Some of them are politicians at the highest levels of power.

Some of them are "theologians" who think less about their faith than their personal gain.


Wow. I've just drawn a line from backgammon on my cell-phone to Islamist Reformation and U.S. policy change in 500 words or less. Can you beat that?

Posted at 01:16 AM     Read More    

Thu - February 2, 2006

State of the Union - Deconstructed

The folks at Think Progress worked hard in real time during the State of the Union address.

Most of the typical disinformation went right over the heads of we the people (at least those of us who weren't watching "American Idol").

PDF link here .



(P.S. note to self, read up on "Switch-grass" and "Human-animal hybrids")

Posted at 01:07 AM      

Wed - February 1, 2006