Entries for November 2004
The Incredibles is just a flat-out fun movie. Tons of laughs, some nice family moments, and lots of explosions and cool stunts (although the latter were somewhat subdued because of the crappy sound in our theatre). Elastigirl is my new favorite superhero…great superpowers, a wonderful mom, and she vacuums too. Edna Mole, voiced by Brad Bird, who also wrote and directed the film, was the funniest character, but the uber-quick Dash provided the best laugh of the movie for me. The film was also packed with references to other movies. I only caught the Star Wars ones, but I’m sure that some industrious movie nerds are even now compiling an extensive list of references which will be available on the web soon.
Cory Doctorow’s riff on branding and trademarks. Trademarks went from protecting consumers to protecting brands.
Trailer for Pixar’s new movie, Cars. No, not that new movie…the way new movie due out in 2005.
Upscale hotels now offering in-room iPods, sometimes encased in Lucite and chained down. It didn’t work for Jabba in keeping Han from walking away. (Oh wait, that was carbonite…)
James Surowiecki on the decline of branding. “We’ve always overestimated the power of branding while underestimating consumers’ ability to recognize quality.”
Stocks of defense companies rose to 52-week highs on news of Bush victory. How much of this is due to actual benefit as opposed to perceived benefit?
The other side of the coin: the exit polls weren’t wrong…the election results were. I had this thought too, but unfortunately it’s a hopelessly partisan issue and difficult to prove. Bottom line: whoever won, we need a better electoral process in the US.
America is not red and blue, but more of a purple. Someone needs to do this with a map of the counties that the USA Today published.
The Economist on the music industry. Relying on one-hit acts is crippling the industry.
I don’t think America is that divided. I think most of us are ill-informed in two major ways, “conveniently” split along the lines of the two major political parties available to us. We’re told we have two different choices — you’re rooting for this team or that team and the other team is the enemy — and we believe that and organize our beliefs accordingly. There’s a lot of fear and emotion involved on both sides. I can’t count how many times in the last two days I’ve heard self-righteous “liberals” call the entire middle of the country “stupid”. Kerry voters, we need to get over ourselves…we’re not special. We’re not informed by some superior intelligence that gives us a unique insight into how the world should work. We buy into the Democratic Party/liberal/anti-conservative/fear the church crap in the same way that our “red state” brethren buy into the Rebublican Party/conservative/anti-liberal/fear the gays bullshit.
Half the country is not stupid. We’re all stupid. We’re convinced several times a day to do things that aren’t in our best interests. We work too hard. We’re drinking, eating, medicating, and smoking ourselves into early graves. We overextend ourselves on credit. We knowingly stay in emotionally or physically abusive relationships. We let television raise our children. We’re deliberately mean and nasty to people we don’t like or agree with. We learn science from the Bible. We stay silent when speaking out would help someone. We fear the future. We fear death. And we’re lazy about our beliefs and convictions and we let the Democratic and Republican Parties dictate the political agenda in America by pushing our emotional buttons. Red, blue, black, white, brown, yellow, purple, and retina-burning yellow-green…we all share the blame.
Speaking of, I’ll tell you who’s smart. Karl Rove is smart. Karl Rove knows all of the above and used it perfectly to his advantage. It’s not necessarily that America as a whole validated the actions of George Bush over the past four years…it’s that the Republican Party got more of their people to the polls than the Democrats did. Looking out across America, what’s one of the largest groups of people with a single strongly-held set of beliefs? The evangelical Christians. They comprise a large portion of the US population and believe in God more strongly than most other groups believe in anything. The Bush camp used a coordinated campaign to speak directly to those people and put their strong belief in God in direct opposition to what the other side stood for: liberals want to kill innocent babies, allow gays to marry, and let non-Christians run the country/world. To an evangelical Christian, the fear that those things will happen is almost overwhelmingly unbearable. Based on that emotional appeal, they turned out in droves, voting for Bush in greater numbers than in 2000 and overwhelming the increased turnout on the other side of the aisle.
The Democrats, with ill-defined fears of a mishandled Iraq war, America’s place in the world, personal freedoms, anti-science agenda, the economy, and Bush’s general stupidity, couldn’t muster the same kind of turnout. They and their supporters ran a more decentralized campaign, with blogs, 527 groups, and assorted other groups all having their own agendas. Liberals had a million slogans, initiatives, and platforms, each tailored for a different group of people. In theory, this was lauded as a fantastic idea…you could reach more people with less organization and target small groups of people with exactly the message that would appeal to each group. But it didn’t work out that way. The top-down campaign with the one focused message targeted at a large group of people won out.
California voters approve $3 billion for stem cell research. New lines of stem cells will be created, which researchers say will make up for the inadequacies of the existing lines.
10 things the Chinese do better than we do. Cell phones, adult playgrounds, daily banking, etc.
What to watch for on election night. A guide to watching the election returns.
The Internet is on fire today with all the election stuff going on and it ain’t pretty. Mypollingplace.com is down as are many of the state election polling place locators (the NY state one is throwing a “Web server too busy, try again later”). Rock the Vote has been up and down. Many weblogs covering the election are having problems too. Instapundit, Daily Kos, Talking Points Memo, and Boing Boing have all been down or really slow at some point today. The large news sites like CNN and MSNBC are fine…they’re architected to handle huge surges like this. kottke.org is doing OK as well, but I’m not seeing anywhere near the traffic that Instapundit must be getting today. As great as the Internet is, it still sucks to have these single points of failure. When Boing Boing’s single server goes down or their router is handling too many requests, the site is completely offline. We need to get to the point where single sites and applications are as robust as the Internet at large.
Images of America voting. People are taking photos of their ballots, their “I voted” stickers, etc.
As important as this particular presidential election is, I’m more interested in the longer term factors affecting the voting process in the US. The electoral college system, how the media’s election day coverage influences voter turnout, the construction and dissemination of information to voters by state and federal authorities, the voting process…basically the user experience of voting.
So if you’ve voted today (or earlier by absentee ballot), I’d like to ask you: how did your voting experience go? Any problems? How did you find out where to go and when? Did you vote using a computer? Any better/worse than a paper ballot? Were election officials helpful? Was there anything in particular you wished had been done differently? If you planned on voting and were unable to, what was the reason? Those are just suggested questions…basically I’d just like you to share the story of your voting experience, from registering to the actual voting process. In sharing our stories, maybe we can have some effect on changing what doesn’t work for the next election. Thanks.
Update: Lots of great responses so far (over 200 of them). Thank you and keep ‘em coming! See also some election day images from Flickr (here’s a shot from inside my voting booth).
Instead of endorsing a candidate for President (ok, short answer: voting strategically against Bush, not that my vote will make any difference in NY), I’d rather see who you guys are planning to vote for and make that the de facto kottke.org endorsement. I already know what the answer will be, but I’m curious to see the extent of the skew. So…
Who are you planning to vote for in the 2004 US Presidential election?
Oh, and if you’ve already voted by absentee ballot, please indicate your choice. I’ll keep this thread updated as the votes roll in and the poll will close when I feel like it.
After 201 votes: Kerry 72%, Bush 10%, Ineligible 8%, Not voting 4%, Other 3%.
After 510 votes: Kerry 70%, Bush 13%, Ineligible 9%, Other 3%, Not voting 2%.
After 1070 votes: Kerry 71%, Bush 13%, Ineligible voter 9%, Other 2%, Not voting 2%.
After 1631 votes: Kerry 70%, Bush 14%, Ineligible voter 9%, Other 2%, Not voting 2%.
Up-to-the-minute results here.
Ok, I think there are enough precincts reporting in and the percentages have stayed steady enough that we can comfortably call this sucker. FWIW, kottke.org officially endorses John Kerry in the 2004 Presidential election. What huge effect this will have on the election will be revealed tomorrow.
Gladwell on the difference between modern society’s perception of trauma recovery and the reality. “The vast majority of people get over traumatic events, and get over them remarkably well. Only a small subset—five to fifteen per cent—struggle in a way that says they need help.”
The NY Times has an excellent list of What to Do on Election Day. In particular:
Your board of elections can tell you where to vote. If you can’t reach the board, a nonpartisan hotline, 1-866-OURVOTE, has a polling place locator. So does the Web site www.mypollingplace.com.
No voter can be turned away in any state this year without being allowed to vote. If there is a question about your eligibility, you must be allowed to vote on a provisional ballot, the validity of which will be determined later. But if you are entitled to vote on a regular ballot, you should insist on doing so, since a provisional ballot may be disqualified later on a technicality.
If you experience problems voting, or if you see anything improper at the polls, you may want to get help. It is a good idea to bring a cellphone, and phone numbers of nonpartisan hotlines like the Election Protection program’s 1-866-OURVOTE and Common Cause’s 1-866-MYVOTE1.
As long as you are in line before the polls close, you are legally entitled to vote. Do not let poll workers close the polls until you have voted.
So put those numbers in your cell phone and don’t leave until you’ve voted.
Anil’s got a new design with Google ads pushing content way down the page. But try the search in the upper right…the results appear right away on the page, iTunes-style. Very cool.
Reading the great National Geographic article on evolution (Was Darwin wrong? NO. The evidence for evolution is overwhelming.) I couldn’t help but think about the discovery of Homo floresiensis, a species of tiny humans that lived on a small island in Indonesia as recently as 13,000 years ago. A bit from the evolution article:
[Evolutionary theory is] such a dangerously wonderful and far-reaching view of life that some people find it unacceptable, despite the vast body of supporting evidence. As applied to our own species, Homo sapiens, it can seem more threatening still. Many fundamentalist Christians and ultra-orthodox Jews take alarm at the thought that human descent from earlier primates contradicts a strict reading of the Book of Genesis. Their discomfort is paralleled by Islamic creationists such as Harun Yahya, author of a recent volume titled The Evolution Deceit, who points to the six-day creation story in the Koran as literal truth and calls the theory of evolution “nothing but a deception imposed on us by the dominators of the world system.”
Flores Man lived at the same time as so-called modern humans and there could have been some interaction between the two groups. That’s troubling enough from a creationist’s perspective, but some Indonesian myths tell of tiny human-like/monkey-like creatures that are rumored to exist to this day and several eyewitness reports from various sources in Indonesia have hinted at the existence of a bipedal ape called orang pendek. If orang pendek does exist and turns out to be Homo floresiensis, what an amazing discovery that would be. But two different species of contemporary humans…that’s a troubling reality to deal with for those that believe strictly in the Genesis account of human origin and supremacy.
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