Look for teeth whitening products and your bound to come across this lovely page: Best Teeth Whitening Products - Compare, Buy, Review the Best Teeth Whiteners. How nice! Someone has gone out and tried all these products and reviewed them and put them in the best order. I wonder who would do that—maybe I want to thank them for doing the gumshoeing for me. Hmm. No byline. No email. No instant messaging name. Land’s sake! No company name or phone number. Well, that piqued my curiosity. And what do you suppose happens when you whois http://www.best-teeth-whitening.com/ neighbors? That’s right. Nothing! The domain is actually registered by proxy through (guess) Domains By Proxy, Inc. Now ask yourself, why go to all the trouble to write a review of products and then take no credit, and obfuscate who you, in fact, are. The smartest in the class will get this quick. And frankly, I think this kind of crap should be just as illegal on the web as it is on TV or anywhere else. It is false advertising, pure and simple.

That’s right, I said it: brain-computer interface.  It’s coming soon to a computer near you and Hrafn Thorisson (fellow twiner) has the scoop over at his blog thinkartificial.org.  The device is essentially an electroencephalogram (EEG) which detects brain activity via nodes placed on (or in this case, near) the scalp.  But unlike predecessors that, at best, could detect brain pattern waves, this device seems to have achieved better resolution and can interpret more complex commands.  I’ll be very interested to see how something like this might work in concert with predictive typing.

If there is such a thing as free will, then we are left with choices and we have the capacity to reason about them, and that leads us to evidence.  Evidence, information that has suffered the test of falsehood, can help us to ascertain our choices—not to know if our choice is correct—but to know why we made it and to illustrate to ourselves why we would make that choice again. In that, even when the choice is the wrong choice, we can find solace in accountability. We surveyed the information, ascertained its correctness, and then made a decision. This is reason. Read more…

I’m logging this one under “Mind Control” because I think this is one of the best essays in recent memory about what is really going on in the mind’s of politicians. We, as a country, and the media, have become so obsessed with taking sides on debates that we’ve really blinded ourselves to what makes a good leader. It is not their policies.[^1] It is not their stances on certain issues. What is the ultimate test of a good leader is how they run their organizations. Chip Collis makes the excellent point that the one respect in which W and HRC are alike is in the fact that they favor cronyism over being open-minded and diplomatic. And cronyism is what really did damage to this country over the last eight years, from “Rumsfield to Brownie.” Do we want more of that?

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One of the effects of design in media is its ability to underscore or derail a message. And that’s an important fact for a presidential candidate (or their campaign materials designer) to take into consideration. I mean, despite its at-first-glance solidity and structure, you wouldn’t want to end up using a font (Trajan) that for the most part these days, is totally associated with horror movies. Conscious or not, there’s an underlying aesthetic appeal built in the color and font and graphic choices of the candidates. In fact, I personally believe that the savviness of the campaign materials probably says a lot about a candidate’s lack of a tendency to micromanage. Bad design decisions are far more likely the fault of overly-fussy and uninformed clients then they are designers. So, who’s looking savvy for 2008 anyway?

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