Forget Rasmussen or Gallup. If you really wish to know how the public feels about the candidates for president, just let Google’s autofill feature drop some knowledge. Below are real screen grabs. All I did was type ‘[this person] is a’ and let Google and its database of popular search queries do the rest. My takeaway? People have issues. Also, the president is a brony.
Frank Bruni of the New York Times weighed in this weekend on another arena of American life where form has overtaken substance. From the article:
Is all of this hot air [disingenuous political ads, quote mining, etc.] part of a broader climate of unprincipled hucksterism? As a country we’ve shifted emphasis from goods to services, manufacturing to marketing, and everyone natters on about the importance of brand rather than the quality of product — about the sell rather than the substance.
via AllThingsD
Missile Test weighs in on all the defense spending going on in the United States and also how we as US citizens are enjoying our ‘freedoms’:
Americans have less personal freedoms since the attacks on 9/11. We are watched, spied upon, patted down, forced to peel down layers of clothing, etc. Thousands are humiliated everyday, forced to prove their innocence in a country whose due process laws are among the standard-bearers for the rights of the accused throughout the world. But now, all of us, some on a daily basis, but at least all during the course of a year, are forced to show they harbor no ill will towards the building/plane/sporting event they are about to enter, by showing that there are no malicious materials on their person or in their possession. We are a nation of the accused, pouring more than half a trillion of our dollars every year into a system that uses that cash to blow things up overseas and overreact to the threat of terrorism at home.
Nation Post: Leaked U.S. cable lays out North American ‘integration’ strategy
The integration of North America’s economies would best be achieved through an “incremental” approach, according to a leaked U.S. diplomatic cable.
The cable, released through the WikiLeaks website and apparently written Jan. 28, 2005, discusses some of the obstacles surrounding the merger of the economies of Canada, the United States and Mexico in a fashion similar to the European Union.
“An incremental and pragmatic package of tasks for a new North American Initiative (NAI) will likely gain the most support among Canadian policymakers,” the document said. “The economic payoff of the prospective North American initiative … is available, but its size and timing are unpredictable, so it should not be oversold.”
Let me tell you something you already know. The world ain’t all sunshine and rainbows. It’s a very mean and nasty place and I don’t care how tough you are it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain’t about how hard ya hit. It’s about how hard you can get it and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward. That’s how winning is done!
–Rocky, Rocky Balboa
A great, 7-minute Ted Talk by Dave Meslin on the antidote to apathy:
Local politics — schools, zoning, council elections — hit us where we live. So why don’t more of us actually get involved? Is it apathy? Dave Meslin says no. He identifies 7 barriers that keep us from taking part in our communities, even when we truly care.
The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.
VentureBeat: Google acquires BumpTop: Will Android get a 3D facelift?:
What’s Google going to do with BumpTop? The search giant hasn’t said anything about the deal yet, either on the main Google blog or in response to VentureBeat’s email requesting comment. The most likely area seems to be its Android operating system for smartphones and (eventually) other devices, such as tablet computers. Some of these ideas and technologies might give the Android interface a leg up over Apple’s iPad and iPhone. Google is also developing the Chrome operating system for netbooks, but BumpTop seems less relevant there, since the Chrome OS is all about the web browser.
I reacted to BumpTop in ‘07 and ‘09 and now that Google has bought them, I’ll respond again.
First off, I still feel the same way now as I did in my last two posts on BumpTop. In short, I still feel they’ve taken the desktop metaphor too much in the direction of a real-life desktop as to render it useless. It suffers from not enough abstraction.
To err is human, and it’s the computer’s responsibility to reduce human err[or]s.
John Gruber made a great analogy:
Used to be that to drive a car, you, the driver, needed to operate a clutch pedal and gear shifter and manually change gears for the transmission as you accelerated and decelerated. Then came the automatic transmission. With an automatic, the transmission is entirely abstracted away. The clutch is gone. To go faster, you just press harder on the gas pedal.
and:
That’s where Apple is taking computing. A car with an automatic transmission still shifts gears; the driver just doesn’t need to know about it. A computer running iPhone OS still has a hierarchical file system; the user just never sees it.
In addition to a lack of abstraction, the desktop metaphor doesn’t have any relevancy in the mobile space. The desktop metaphor bridged the gap between the pre- and post-computers worlds when Xerox debuted their Star workstation in 1981. Apple would subsequently co-opt that idea and build on it with their operating system for the Lisa.
We still have folders, files and and trash icons in the mobile space but we’re entering a world where what you call the space where all these icons live matters less and less. The iPhone has “home screens” and the upcoming Windows Phone 7 and Palm webOS both use “tiles”.
Unless Google makes significant changes and simplications to BumpTop I see it’s implementation in Chrome OS and/or Android and a FAIL from the start.
