UNDERDOG of PERFECTION

Generalizing on a Cosmos magazine article on how archaeologists are using satellite images (including those publicly available through Google Earth), it fascinates me to observe the ways that, as we (as a species) gather more and more data, and build ever-more-effective tools to study the data, completely unexpected information emerges. It’s almost like a feedback loop for human knowledge.

Yes, we’re still less than 100 hours into 2008, but the first caucuses are today and the general election is but ten short months away. Have you picked your candidates?

Like the Political Compass site I wrote about last year, there is now a nifty Electoral Compass website (which, tellingly, is Dutch, not American) with Flash-y goodness, that asks your opinion on a variety of political issues, then plots your position on a similar coordinate grid (though I’m pleased they’ve reversed the Y axis), along with the relative positions of the major presidential candidates. What’s really cool is that it has checkboxes that you can tick off to filter the results based on a variety of broad issues, allowing you to decide which factors are most important to you in finding a candidate who best represents your views. The final results page also lets you see how your answers to the specific questions compare to each of the candidates’ views on the same topics, based on their statements from past debates and positions outlined on their campaign websites. You can even see a breakdown of your relative proximity to each of the candidates, sorted from most- to least-similar.

Me, I’m not terribly surprised to see that I have more in common with Barack Obama than Mike Huckabee. But it’s still reassuring to get objective verification. It’s also not surprising that among the Republicans, I’m most closely aligned with Ron Paul, although I still (thankfully) only agree with him 50%. One thing that does surprise me is that on the economic scale (the X axis), I’m actually to the right (slightly) of someone (Hillary Clinton). But I’m more progressive (ranging from 11% for Obama to 91% for Thompson) than all of the candidates. Here’s to progress.

Kudos to former NBC reporter John Hockenberry for sharing his observations about the woeful state of network news reporting in a Technology Review article entitled “You Don’t Understand Our Audience.” Modern “reporting” is worse than a bad joke: it’s an affront to critical thinking and a disgraceful shirking of an important responsibility to the public.

As much as I’m willing to rant against the “mainstream media” (and even worse, the bogus claims of “liberal bias” in said media by the partisan hackery of the likes of Fox News), my perspective carries far less impact than that of someone who’s been on the inside and managed to escape with his integrity and commitment to truth intact.

He even gets a bit theoretical at one point, and comes pretty close to my oft-rehearsed tirade against commercially-driven news programming:

Networks are built on the assumption that audience size is what matters most. Content is secondary; it exists to attract passive viewers who will sit still for advertisements. For a while, that assumption served the industry well. But the TV news business has been blind to the revolution that made the viewer blink: the digital organization of communities that are anything but passive. Traditional market-driven media always attempt to treat devices, audiences, and content as bulk commodities, while users instead view all three as ways of creating and maintaining smaller-scale communities. As users acquire the means of producing and distributing content, the authority and profit potential of large traditional networks are directly challenged.

But the real value of Hockenberry’s perspective comes from his insider experience — a look at the real Jack Donaghys of the world that I only wish was unbelievable:

I knew it was pretty much over for television news when I discovered in 2003 that the heads of NBC’s news division and entertainment division, the president of the network, and the chairman all owned TiVos, which enabled them to zap past the commercials that paid their salaries. “It’s such a great gadget. It changed my life,” one of them said at a corporate affair in the Saturday Night Live studio. It was neither the first nor the last time that a television executive mistook a fundamental technological change for a new gadget.

Yes, this person is an idiot. And he’s one of the people who are deciding what “news” the public receives.

Of course, the network heads cannot accept all of the blame for the current state of affairs, nor is the Internet the panacea of truth and intellectual freedom that it may, at first, seem to be. Consider this: the community-built Wikipedia article on Jack Donaghy is longer and more detailed than that of his real-life counterpart.

On a tangent (not that I wasn’t already on a tangent), I did a Google image search for “dunce executive” in vain hope of finding a copyright-free photo to use with this post, and I was led to a British blogger’s post about Minneapolis’s own James Lileks’s (yes, two in one sentence!) reassignment to beat reporting at the StarTribune. I was momentarily outraged, until I realized that this reassignment took place seven months ago; if I’m just now learning of it, it must not really be that big of a deal to me. Besides, this news pales in comparison to the same blog’s more recent announcement that China has banned reincarnation. So um, yeah… Internet… news… wow, I really feel informed now.

Meanwhile, the story has gotten even more grim at the Strib, where the “reader rep” (known in more perspicacious, if gender-biased, times as an ombudsman) whom Lileks somewhat desperately implored his fans to contact regarding his reassignment, was herself let go (without replacement) five months later. So much for journalistic accountability. And now I’ve somehow managed to come full circle.

If you ever visit a large and/or busy post office, you may have seen one of the US Postal Service’s latest advances in self-service technology, the Automated Postal Center.

The post office near my downtown office building has one of these, and I love it. I use it every chance I get. Not to slight the job performance of postal workers (never cross a postal worker), but I find these machines to be faster and more efficient than going to the window, plus there’s almost never any line. Granted, maybe someday when everyone learns to love technology as much as I do (fax machines and photocopiers excluded), things will change, but for now I can usually just walk right up, take care of my business, and move on.

But there’s something about these machines I don’t like: the illogically friendly, human tone of the on-screen text, especially at the conclusion of the transaction:

Thanks. It’s been a pleasure serving you.

Really? Has it? Can a machine derive pleasure from anything? And if so, from serving me? Well, I suppose we do want our sentient utilitarian devices to be as servile as possible. But we’re not there yet. Some human wrote the computer program that operates this equipment, and they put that string of text into it. Who are they fooling? And why are those people being allowed out in public?

Wouldn’t “Thank you for your business” have sufficed? I’d feel a lot more comfortable with that.

It all began a couple of weeks ago. Lying in bed at night, SLP and I both heard a strange rustling sound in the ceiling. Unable to do anything about it, and uncertain if it even was anything to be concerned about, we listened for a few minutes and then, when it stopped, went back to sleep.

Then we went away for a week. We’ve been back for three or four days. Last night around 10 PM we were lying in bed, each watching our respective iPods. (Me, Curb Your Enthusiasm; she, 30 Rock; the fact that we were both isolated in the worlds of our pocket-sized cocoons rather than interacting with each other or even watching the same show, a sign of the times. We’ve also been known to sit side-by-side, each competing against an AI opponent in computer Scrabble, rather than just busting out the board and playing the game together.)

And then it happened. We both jolted up at the sound of a thud and some frantic rustling in the cheap economical IKEA wardrobe at the foot of the bed.

What transpired next was a scene worthy of the sitcoms we were watching.

“Did you hear that?”

“Yeah… was it… in the closet???”

“I think so.”

“What should we do?”

“Hmm…”

“Maybe it was just some clothes falling down.”

“Yeah…” And then I went for it. Foolish, perhaps, but I opened the door. The next 1/8 of a second happened in slow motion. Something dark writhed slowly in the air and landed, stunned, on the floor.

“IT’S A BAT!” I shrieked, channeling my inner 7-year-old girl.

We both leapt from the bed and danced around on tiptoes, arms flailing, for a few seconds.

“Cover it!”

“With what???”

“Find something!!!!”

I grabbed an empty toy bin and nervously inched towards the still-still bat. I frantically threw the bin over it, hoping it was covered.

“Now what?”

“Is it dead?”

“I don’t know. I think I hear it rustling around in there.”

After consulting the Interwebs, we determined a course of action: SLP went down to the basement to get a large piece of cardboard to slide under the bin, trapping the bat in a makeshift cage, while I continued the tiptoe dance upstairs. (Miraculously our 4 1/2-year-old son slept peacefully, feet away, through it all.)

Eventually she returned with the cardboard, which I gingerly slid under the bin. I peeked around to the back, where I discovered (with more shrieks and cringing) that part of one of the bat’s wings was protruding… but it appeared secure.

My wife sprinted down to the kitchen as I carefully made my way, holding the cardboard in place and somehow controlling my natural clumsiness adequately to keep from bumping against a door frame and prematurely freeing the beast, until I made it to the back door.

While she held the door open, I stepped out into the snow in my bare feet, shouted, “Here we go!” and with much haste hurled the lot as far out onto the driveway as possible.

It took several hours to come down from the trauma, but eventually I fell asleep. I saw this morning that our driveway-sharing neighbor had moved it off to the side, and it did not appear that anyone had needed to be taken to the hospital for rabies shots, so I am assuming the bat escaped.

The question remains, how exactly did it get into the roof (assuming it was what we heard a few weeks ago), and furthermore how it got from the rafters down into the bedroom and then, unnoticed, into the wardrobe. I blame shoddy work by the roofers who probably did not adequately vent our bathroom fan two years ago. For now, though, I am simply glad that there are (as far as we know) no longer any non-human mammals dwelling in our home.