The most memorable reporting I've encountered on the conflict in Iraq was delivered in the form of confetti exploding out of a cardboard tube. I had just begun working at the MIT Media Lab in March 2006 when Alyssa Wright, a lab student, got me to participate in a project called "Cherry Blossoms." I strapped on a backpack with a pair of vertical tubes sticking out of the top; they were connected to a detonation device linked to a Global Positioning System receiver. A microprocessor in the backpack contained a program that mapped the coördinates of the city of Baghdad onto those for the city of Cambridge; it also held a database of the locations of all the civilian deaths of 2005. If I went into a part of Cambridge that corresponded to a place in Iraq where civilians had died in a bombing, the detonator was triggered.

This story was worth posting for that paragraph alone. The article... rant perhaps... is very, very good. The themes should be familiar to a lot of you, but perhaps the value of this comes from the stark reality that the people that control public opinion are really just as inane as you think they are. There is a lot of overt generationalism in it that seems to misplace the problem with the media as not being under the control of GenXers... thats not quite right, but this is a generational fault line. Ironically the author is a Boomer. He probably doesn't even realise that we came of age as the target of the system he is complaining about.