Although the initial press email was slim on details, the "Guitar Wizard" game to be shown off next week at CES aims to be a Guitar Hero that actually teaches you how to play guitar. (Sort of like a Rock Band for drums!) The software will ship with a Washburn electric guitar with a MIDI pickup and will sell for around $180 on the back half of next year. It could be a hell of a tool if they execute properly.

Guitar Wizard: Like Guitar Hero with a Real Instrument - Boing Boing Gadgets

The impression of America as a land of freedom, rights, and law is something that I think Muslims all over the world believed. They especially considered America the only country in the world where they could have unfettered rights to worship as they see fit. That impression has been immensely damaged.

This, fundamentally, is the most important failure of the Bush administration. He obviously needed to let the war mongering fascists at it in the wake of 9/11, the gloves did need to come off, but he went too far. He should never have hired authoritarian lawyers. He could have pursued the GWOT within the framework that existed, with maybe only minor tweaks. By shrugging the checks and balances at the heart of our system and creating legal no-mans-lands his approach became unamerican and he has therefore changed what people think we are. That has done us serious harm. Hopefully, the next president can repair some of the damage.

What America Must Do

1. Obama beat Hillary among women voters 35 to 30 percent.
2. Amid record Democratic turnout, as many people under 30 showed up to caucus as those over 65.
3. Sixty percent of the GOP electorate in Iowa were born-again Christians.
4. Rudy Giuliani finished with a mere 4,013 votes, in sixth place, with less than half of the support of Ron Paul.

Maybe he's not so Ready after all.

Everyone is talking about Huckabee. His honest expressions of faith I think have wider appeal than his actual evangelical policy stances. But is this a fluke or does this guy really have a chance of becoming the nominee? I'm been assuming the former, anyone disagree?

Iowa By the Numbers

We selected fifteen entries to be in the exhibition, with seven alternates (in case print versions of the original selections could not be obtained). Many images were highly rated by the selection panel; we present the top forty-nine here. We invite you to view all the entries that were entered into the contest.

I can't embed pictures from this page. It replaces the image with one accusing me of theft! Not all uses of img src are negative for the host. I'm driving traffic to their contest!

Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest 2007

possibly noteworthy wrote:
The last several slides are new to this briefing.

David M. Walker, comptroller general of the United States, at the 2008 Economic Forecast Forum:

The federal government is on a “burning platform,” and the status quo way of doing business is unacceptable.

• Faster Economic Growth Can Help, but It Cannot Solve the Problem

Are the candidates confronting this issue? Mostly they seem to ramble on about "coverage."

This graph of per capita health care spend versus life expectancy offers some hope. The reason our health care system is fucked up is that health care isn't like cars or houses. You don't have the option of cheap healthcare, in the way that you can buy a cheap car. The difference in terms of the quality of your life is far more substantial, and so the market can't set sane prices. You can't negotiate a good price if you can't walk away from the table.

Per Capita Spending and Life Expectancy

There are other people who should read this book. Your girlfriend will better understand why you turn into a jerk in your home office. Your mom will understand why you don’t call. Giving this book to your boss is a tricky proposition. Even if he needs it, you can’t tell him that, so surreptitiously leave it in his office… like a pen.

Managing Humans is 209 pages with 34 chapters. The 6 pages per chapter average is ideal for your attention deficient lifestyle. People dig it.

This book isn't just about management, it's about creating places where people can comfortably build stuff. It's about what to do during the first ninety days of your new gig, and explains why you should pick a fight, because bright people often yell at each other.

Managing Humans

Since late summer, the US Federal Reserve has been attempting to manage the slow-moving financial crisis triggered by the collapse of the US housing bubble.

At the start, the Fed assumed that it was facing a first-mode crisis -- a mere liquidity crisis -- and that the principal cure would be to ensure the liquidity of fundamentally solvent institutions.

But the Fed has shifted over the past two months toward policies aimed at a second-mode crisis -- more significant monetary loosening, despite the risks of higher inflation, extra moral hazard and unjust redistribution.

As Fed Vice Chair Don Kohn recently put it: "We should not hold the economy hostage to teach a small segment of the population a lesson."

No policymakers are yet considering the possibility that the financial crisis might turn out to be in the third mode.

This is a scariest thing I've read in the past few months.

Three cures for three crises | Brad DeLong, in the Taipei Times

We've talked about these on MemeStreams before. This one is particularly good. I liked the question mix, and I think it put me in an accurate location on the map (although their map is upside down from most maps, which was disorienting at first). The most interesting thing is how far the candidates are drawn from eachother. Both candidate clusters were also far from me, which is accurate. Some of the Democrats just barely pass into my sphere of approval, and none of the Republicans do, although Ron Paul comes close. I'm not sure thats totally right but its close.

I will say, however, that while I think the candidates are likely positioned correctly on the economic liberty scale, I don't think they are positioned well on the social liberty scale, but this might be because my definition is socially liberal is different from the one being used here. They rank things like pro-gun control positions as "socially liberal," which is incorrect, although it fits into the traditional left/right narrative. This would mean that on their graph social progressivism isn't the same thing that is mean by "socially liberal" on traditional graphs. The position that truely reflects social liberty on this graph may be close to the center, although ironically, authoritarians who support gun control and censorship would end up in the same place.

This website's tools for analyzing the degree to which you agree and disagree with the candidates are extremely powerful, and they provide lots of break down for the individual questions. This is really helpful in seeing which candidates closely match your views. Although Obama is not the closest candidate to me, we agree about a suprising number of things. Unfortunately, we disagree about some issues that are very important right now.

Electoral Compass

If a TSA agent stops you in an airport and starts asking questions, are you free to leave? What happens if you refuse to answer? Doesn't the 4th amendment require reasonable suspicion before a government agent can seize a citizen. I'll offer at least even odds that this SPOT program won't survive judicial scrutiny as is. This post links an interesting discussion of this question.

So, I wonder if a period of questioning by a SPOT guy (especially the MA State Cops in BOS) could be construed as a Terry Stop? Is someone's perceived behavior good enough to provide "reasonable suspicion that criminal activities is a foot [sic]."? I've read other stuff defining that there has to be a context for the "reasonable suspicion" and that a police officer has to be able to reasonable articulate why he or she concluded that a crime was about to be committed...

From this case, here is a pretty interesting argument against the SPOT program and the accusations of it being a "dragnet" for all sorts of thing unrelated to aviation security:

Is a TSA SPOT interview a "Terry Stop"

The TSA has finally managed to successfully turn the airports into a dragnet that pulls in large numbers of people guilty of all kinds of minor offenses that have nothing at all to do with terrorism.

"In the SPOT program, we have a conversation with (passengers) and we ask them about their trip," said Maccario from his office in Boston. "When someone lies or tries to be deceptive, ... there are behavior cues that show it. ... A brief flash of fear."

Such people are referred for secondary screening, which can include a pat-down search and an X-ray exam. The microfacial expressions, he said, are the same across many cultures.

Since January 2006, behavior-detection officers have referred about 70,000 people for secondary screening, Maccario said. Of those, about 600 to 700 were arrested on a variety of charges, including possession of drugs, weapons violations and outstanding warrants.

So they have a systematic process of harrassing travellers. For every 100 travellers that they detain and harrass they find one person guilty of a "crime." Most of those crimes involve warrants out for things like unpaid parking tickets, possession of illegal drugs (a victimless crime), and "weapons violations" (unregistered firearms or knives that are outside local municipal rules likely possessed by people who aren't even planning to get on a plane and may not even know they are illegal, etc)...

As long as there is a risk of terrorism this system will be perpetuated, but its real purpose is in enforcing a myriad of laws regulating behavior that is at best only illegal because of its secondary social effects and not because it is directly harmful to anyone, and at worst is a direct effort at social control by narrow minded and powerful people.

The next time some TSA person smiles at you and asks how your day is going think of this passage from 1984:

He did not know how long she had been looking at him, but perhaps for as much as five minutes, and it was possible that his features had not been perfectly under control. It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself — anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offence. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called.

I know I will, and I know I'll be in for secondary screening while they try to determine whether my rage at their assault on the freedom this country once knew is a sign that I'm hiding something they can charge me for. Some day, perhaps, that rage itself will be illegal.

Airport profilers: They're watching your expressions