I’m liking the look of Chris‘ new project, No Love Lost: Narcissism & the New Age, a book he’ll be writing on line. Nice cover art, too.

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Electronic Gaming Monthly runs transcripts of encounters between classic video games (think Pong) and modern 10-12 year olds. Very funny and just a little disturbing. (Thanks to Rick Klau for the link.)

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My nephew registered a domain name for his Sensei about a year ago. My nephew’s name does not appear anywhere on his Sensei’s very minimal, single-digit-trafficked site. My nephew got junk mail (of the paper sort) from Google addressed to him at his Sensei’s address. My nephew is quite confident that there’s only one place on the planet where his name appears linked to his Sensei’s address: in the domain registration.

So, is Google snail-spamming everyone in the US address who owns a domain name? I know I got mine.

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Paul Krugman lays out the e-voting machine issues in his column. Here’s his opening paragraph:

Inviting Bush supporters to a fund-raiser, the host wrote, “I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.” No surprise there. But Walden O’Dell – who says that he wasn’t talking about his business operations – happens to be the chief executive of Diebold Inc., whose touch-screen voting machines are in increasingly widespread use across the United States.

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The Boston Globe today has an article (the link will break tomorrow) about the Dean campaign’s plan to ask its supporters MoveOn-ishly to raise money to support Democratic Congresspeople running in tightly contested elections. There are three obvious motivations for this: To take back Congress, to do favors for some Congresspeople who can return the favor, and to rebuild the Democratic base.

That last one is the kicker. This campaign from the beginning has felt more like a movement than like a campaign (to paraphrase Natasha C). Given the zealotry of the supporters, it’s even more surprising that the campaign has succeeded by not focusing obsessively on the guy at the top of the pyramid. Now, by turning the energies of supporters towards Congressional candidates, the Dean campaign is building a base for actions beyond the elections.

I don’t know of a campaign that has so successfully integrated vision, innovation and hardball pragmatics.

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The Sims 2 is on its way. The creators have added features that they think will make the game more fun such as enabling the Sims to remember events and to share those memories with one another: if a daughter sees a father kissing someone who isn’t her mother, the daughter may choose to share that memory with Mom. Why was memory added to The Sims? For moral reasons? To make the simulation more accurate? Nah, just because memory-sharing makes the Sims more fun.

So, here we have an artificial community designed purely as entertainment. How close does that get us to God’s view? And what would be the fewest rules required to create an artificial world that begins with just one man and one woman that evolves into something like the world we have today? (This is Wolfram’s quest transposed into the social world of history.)

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In a comment, Kevin Jordan writes:

348North News is a normal aggregator in much of the way you think of it. However, it allows me to identify keywords or themes that it puts together into phrases — and then matches up the phrases with like articles. Like a cross between Google News and Daypop (but that makes it sound much more complex than it is).

If you want to see an “interests” based summary for me, check out the Phrase Index. I use fairly general keywords so as not to miss out on the future items.

I haven’t tried it, but the approach sounds promising.

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Michelle Johnson, in the Boston Globe today (link breaks tomorrow), lists the gadgets to get for your most beloved geeks. The gadgets are, in order of appearance:

iPod (and other players, including Rio Nitrus and Dell’s Digital Jukebox)

ZVUE! movie player that only plays movies in its proprietary format (D’oh!)

Mission 3D’s Photo3D kit that takes 3D photos with any digital camera. You have to wear special glasses to see the effect.

Netflix, the subscription service that sends DVDs to your house.

USB flash drives, including IBM’s, Verbatim’s and Iomega’s

Philips’ Audio Key Ring MP3 player

SanDisk 8-in-1 USB 2.0 card reader

Services that let you push-and-talk via your cellphone, from Sprint and Nextel

The Sidewinder hand crank that recharges your cell phone battery

Wireless IM’ing with Motorola’s IMFree

I have none of these devices except the boring old USB flash drive. But I can’t say that I actually want any of them, except maybe an iPod. What I actually want is the Garmin StreetPilot 2610 GPS for my car. Now we’re talking gifts for geeks!

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