"In the military they have $5.2 million they spent on goldfish — studying goldfish to see how democratic they were..."

"... and if we could learn about democracy from goldfish. I would give the president the authority to go ahead and cut all $5 million in goldfish studies."

Said Rand Paul, and Princeton professor Iain Couzin protests.

It's not goldfish, it's golden shiner fish. And: "Our work aims to understand the principles of collective control in animal groups and what this can inform us about collective robotics. It has nothing at all to do with human politics."

"If you think about it, schools of fish have been on the planet for much longer than we have and they’ve evolved to find solutions to problems. They can sense the environments in ways that we simply didn’t know how to do that.... From ant colonies to schooling fish, it’s not that complicated but the feats they can achieve are extraordinary. The collective of a whole can solve problems in ways individuals cannot."

I'm glad he mentioned the ants, because if there is one tag that I love to get the opportunity to use on a blog post, it's "insect politics." The tag is based on the 1986 movie "The Fly," in which a scientific experiment — which I doubt Rand Paul would vote to fund — merged a scientist with a fly. Toward the bitter end, the fly/scientist — played by Jeff Goldblum — started raving about insect politics:

Have you ever heard of insect politics? Neither have I. Insects... don't have politics. They're very... brutal. No compassion, no compromise. We can't trust the insect. I'd like to become the first... insect politician. Y'see, I'd like to, but... I'm afraid, uh...

But now, apparently, the human politicians are funding not just insect politics but fish politics (and robots!). I'd love to see a movie called "The Fish," in which Jeff Goldblum does a science experiment that turns him into a crazy, raving Goldblum/Goldfish* and rants about fish politics.

Or... oh, wait!... was that already a movie with Don Knotts? "The Incredible Mr. Limpet"! Knotts is a little man who tries to enlist in the Navy in 1941. Rejected, he wanders down a pier, falls into the water, and turns into a fish. As a fish, he's able to join the Navy, and he helps locate and torpedo Nazi submarines. How do you like that, you doubter of science, Senator Paul?

Ah, but Mr. Limpet was a heroic individual superfish, and Professor Couzin is interested in fish because of the way they act in the collective. Typical left-wing elite university ideology. The value of studying fish is that they've evolved past individualism. They give us a way to look at how the collective of a whole can solve problems in ways individuals cannot. But this has nothing at all to do with human politics. This is about collective robotics. Nothing to worry about here. The collective. Robots. Nothing to do with humans.
___________________________

*Yes, I know. It's not goldfish, it's golden shiner fish. That makes me think of a movie too.

"We have a machine with a robot fist that will be programmed to deliver a punch in the chest that inflicts exactly that amount of pain."

A hypo for the clueless.

After beginning its new design era with an Adorable Obama cover...

... which looked like this, The New Republic comes out with its next issue, addressing the subject of "The Republicans" ("The Party of White People"), and it looks like this:



That came in the mail today. Yes, I've subscribed. The toy robot is there to cover up my address label. And yes, I understand the reference to "The Beatles" (i.e., The White Album).

At the Robots-for-Walker Café...

... it's time for another dance.

(On the screen-within-the-screen, Glen Shulfer's immortal anthem.)

Robot news.

1. "The Rise of the Robots Has an Upside." Adapt!

2. "British troops are using... state-of-the-art handheld tiny surveillance helicopters, which relay reliable full motion video and still images back to the devices' handlers...." Close your windows!

IN THE COMMENTS: Chef Mojo said:

3. Kia "Respect The Tech" Super Bowl commercial.

Althouse unfair to F. Scott Fitzgerald?

Midway through my journey of isolating and writing about sentences from "The Great Gatsby," I find myself confronted by one creeley23 — a commenter within the confines of this Althouse blog — who says: "Hmm... rereading the first ten pages of Gatsby I see that Ann is picking klunky, atypical sentences out of the text."

I have chosen things like: "Sometimes a shadow moved against a dressing-room blind above, gave way to another shadow, an indefinite procession of shadows, that rouged and powdered in an invisible glass." And: "A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea."

But, in my defense, I have also chosen: "A breeze stirred the gray haze of Daisy’s fur collar." And: "Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry."

Remember, the original idea was:

What I like [about "The Great Gatsby"] is that each sentence is good, on its own. Seriously. Test it out. "As my train emerged from the tunnel into sunlight, only the hot whistles of the National Biscuit Company broke the simmering hush at noon." Every sentence is a writer's inspiration....

I feel like starting a blog devoted to individual sentences in "The Great Gatsby," chosen randomly, and continuing until all the sentences have been used up.

I didn't start a new blog, obviously, only a daily discipline on this blog. I confess to not proceeding by random selection. But I haven't gone searching for "klunky" sentences. I've flipped around in near-random style, though. I don't use the first thing I see. Opening up Chapter 1 right now, I see  "I told him" and "We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch." These are examples of non-"klunky" sentences that I would reject, but not because I'm gunning for F. Scott. My initial motivation was love. I thought of all the high school students — I remember being one — who were assigned this book and made to read the whole thing. That being the task, the really interesting sentences are speed bumps. They're completely annoying. You can't take the time to figure them out. What should be loved is hated. Later in life, I reread the book and enjoyed it, because of the worthiness of individual sentences.

Here's a way the book could be taught in a high school class. (But maybe they'd fire you!) Class, this is a book with some very weird sentences. Who can find one? Students read individual sentences out loud and the teacher cuts and pastes the sentences, so they are projected on the board. Encourage the students to pull out things that are the most outlandish and impossible to understand. Encourage laughter. Email the list of sentences to the class and have them reply to the email cutting out all but one sentence, the sentence they'd most like to talk about. Quickly read the email and pick a sentence that got a lot of attention. Puzzle through what it might mean with the students so that they appreciate the fun of getting wrapped up inside one sentence. Give them 20 minutes to write about one of the other sentences.

Must they read the book? Tell them they can read the book if they want. But tell them they can go to Wikipedia and read the plot summary and the list of characters there. The idea is to spend time with particular sentences and to figure out why someone would write like that. Must they love F. Scott Fitzgerald? No! They can be like Palladian — the original commenter genius of the Althouse blog — who said:

Has anyone calculated how long this Gatsby project is going to go on? How many sentences are in the book? How many sentences have been covered so far?

I ask partially out of curiosity and partly because I hate "The Great Gatsby". Why couldn't we have done Chaucer or "Paradise Lost" or something?

I said:

I don't think the project asks you to like "The Great Gatsby." It should work for the haters. Bring that hate!

Palladian said:

That's true! I think the general tone of the comments on these threads led me to think of them as reverential, but your writing about them is actually neutral and occasionally negative.

The watchword watchphrase of this blog has long been "cruel neutrality." And, indeed, I see that even before I responded to Original Commenter Genius Palladian, he was responded to by Upstart Commenter Genius betamax3000, who said:

"the Inquisition that goes on forever. Interminably."

(That's a quote from the post, which is about a "Gatsby" sentence that includes "interminable inquisitions.")

Ann has gone full Althouse Snow Globe Theory now:

"She sets the Snow Globe with cruel neutrality for us to shake and see patterns from the flitter. There is not the expectation of sentimentality. She is asking us to look, together; however, often there is no resolution, each reader seeing only his own flitter of understanding."

And there betamax3000 is quoting himself, from this earlier thread, about one of the least "klunky" sentences that has ever found its way into the "Gatsby" project:

"They knew that presently dinner would be over and a little later the evening, too, would be over and casually put away."

When can we put this "Gatsby" project away, like a dinner and an evening consumed blandly and casually in the Midwest, where all the Gatsby characters belong?

"I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all — Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life."

That's a sentence I've been saving, in my holding pen of sentences — "klunky" and not-"klunky" — that might get the nod some day on this project, and I guess I've given that one the nod today.

But is today the last day? Is it time to move on to "Paradise Lost" or "The Divine Comedy"?

If the assignment were — in this non-existent high school class — to read straight through "The Great Gatsby," you would know when you were done. The hard task your real teacher tasked you with has a knowable end. It's not interminable, even though the word "ceaselessly" is the 4th-to-the-last word. You get to "ceaselessly" and there's "into the past" and you are done. Your reading of "Gatsby" has receded into the past, like last night's huge, hard-to-digest dinner. You wake up with a stomachache. You can't take too much. You only want to nibble at the edges of some stale ideas, like maybe a blog post, a blog post about one sentence. You can nibble, and — in the comments — you can dribble. Like betamax3000 on last night's "Something was making him nibble" post :

Re: "Oh! For a minute there, I saw 'nimble,' and I was flummoxed."

I like nibble better. Not just because it makes me think of squirrels nibbling on a nosh. I often find myself nibbling at the edge of stale ideas. Of course, it is easier to nibble at the edges when the stale idea is square-shaped, like a behind-the-sofa-cushion Cheez-It: there are corners. Corners are the perfect nibble starters. Plus, Cheez-Its -- and the non-square Cheeto, for that matter -- leave your fingers orangey, like all the best ideas, stale or not.

So one morning when the sun was warm
I rambled out of New York town
Pulled my cap down over my eyes
And headed out for the western skies
So long New York
Howdy, East Orange*.

(*"Even when the East excited me most with sprawling, swollen orange fingers: you're gonna have to take notes faster, friends)

Which brings us back to a point: Naked Dylan Robot would love to hear Fitzgerald try to sing some of Fitzgerald's sentences. Naked Dylan Robot would laugh and laugh.

"Everybody's sturdy physical egotism must get stoned."

"When the winds of changes shift
May your malnourished peremptory heart always be joyful
And may your song always be sung
May you stay forever slightly worn, young man, with shell-rimmed glasses and scanty blond hair."

For a writer whose rep is based in large part on making words sing his words just don't... sing. Maybe Naked Albanian Phonetical Dylan Robot could give a try, but I don't think it would get there. Nor Naked Phoenician Dylan Robot, for that matter*.

(*this is -- of course -- self-contradictory: per Wikipedia "in Phoenician writing, unlike that of most later abjads such as those of Aramaic, Biblical Hebrew and Arabic, even long vowels remained generally unexpressed, and that regardless of their origin". No Naked Dylan Robot of any proud heritage could forsake the long vowels: exps: oooohhhhhmaaa-ma is this reaaaaaaally the eeeeend, etc etc).

Perhaps Naked Dylan Fitzgerald Cow could make a go of the following:

Now you see this one-eyed midget
Shouting the word "MOO
And you say, "For what reason ?"
And he says, "Hoo?"
And you say, "What does this mean ?"
And he screams back, "You're a cow
Give me some milk
Or else go home".

-- but Naked Dylan Fitzgerald Cow is a Talent. And not afraid to nibble, stale or no. Someone should make a Snow Globe for Naked Dylan Fitzgerald Cow: Ann could put it next to her Robot on her desk and take a picture. I would call in sick to work the next day.

Is your tummy feeling better now? Maybe saltines and ginger ale would help. That's what my midwest-born-and-raised mother would offer me when I was feeling queasy. But you've got to eat something. You must go on — ceaselessly, interminably — when the project is one sentence a day. One day at a time. One sentence at a time. One nibble at a time. One blog post at a time.

Let me see your workspace.

Lots of links to photos, collected in a Metafilter post, but the links all go to LinkedIn, and there's some serious hostility to LinkedIn for spamming us all these years. And it's not just that....

I'd be happy if they'd just get rid of the "influencers". It seems as if they had deliberately set out to make a list of the most annoying, unselfconscious people on Earth. I mean, which other list manages to contain the globular egos of David Cameron, Deepak Chopra, Richard Branson, Arianna Huffington and Martin Varsavsky, a.o.?

If you want to see the workspaces of some admirable people, I love this book, "Writer's Desk," with excellent photographs by Jill Krementz (who was married to Kurt Vonnegut) and an introductory essay by John Updike.

And here's what my desk looks like right now:


(Partial view, with snow.)

ADDED: What's with "a.o." in the blockquote above? Is this another call for me to check Urban Dictionary?

A.O.    7 up, 3 down
Stands for Accidental Ownage. When someone shows off and fails, or something like that.

Dude, this guy was trying to do a handstand on a rail and he flipped over.
Whoa, that's total A.O.

"Google Now does a much better job, moment to moment, in anticipating the information that a user needs than Siri."

"So what can Siri do better? Have an emotional relationship with a user...."

Google Now does not attempt personality, merely efficiency, and given that company’s strengths, I think this is a good design decision. But if Apple cannot compete on sheer efficiency, can it make up for it with charm?

This is in fact one of the main uses for “personality” in humans—to make up for deficits....

Here's an illustration of how that works:



Once you know the programming is designed to smooth over the shortcomings of the product, will it still work? Maybe so. Another question is whether Apple will give us some alternative personalities. Siri comes across as a relatively perky and warm young female. That's not what everyone wants! I'd like to see some more amusing approaches. Why not a witty, bitchy older woman or a comical guy? Unfortunately, Apple won't associate itself with anything sexual, but I'm sure many users would like their computers' voice to take daring liberties with them.

ADDED: "The human brain is built so that when given the slightest hint that something is even vaguely social, or vaguely human... given the slightest hint of humanness, people will respond with an enormous array of social responses including... reciprocating and retaliating."

I was so tired when I wrote last night's "Gatsby" post.

It was a real struggle with that sentence:

There was dancing now on the canvas in the garden; old men pushing young girls backward in eternal graceless circles, superior couples holding each other tortuously, fashionably, and keeping in the corners — and a great number of single girls dancing individualistically or relieving the orchestra for a moment of the burden of the banjo or the traps.

You might say I wrestled with that sentence. The commenters — whom I read this morning, after I conked out and slept for 10 hours — helped me make the connection to wrestling. Terry said: "The key phrase, I think, is 'on the canvas.'" That affects how you think of the men pushing the young girls, the gracelessness, and the tortuously. Dancing is like wrestling here. In the "Gatsby" project, we look into one sentence, in isolation, but I just looked back into the text to get a better picture of that canvas, which I took to be a way to transform lawn into dance floor. I get to this sentence:

At least once a fortnight a corps of caterers came down with several hundred feet of canvas and enough colored lights to make a Christmas tree of Gatsby’s enormous garden.

So let that be today's sentence. Lots of Cs: corps, caterers came, canvas, colored, Christmas. Christmas replacing the garden evokes the New Testament supplanting the Old. From the Garden of Eden to the salvation of Christ. By the way, that is the sentence just before the "crowded hams" sentence that made me angry 3 days ago.

I'll leave you to untangle the strands of colored lights that festoon the Christmas tree sentence, because I need to get back to what people said about yesterday's sentence. I must say I laughed out loud when McTriumph said:

Professor Ann, your first thought was musicians using the girls as instruments? You should write a novel, "Fifty Shades of Banjo."

And then betamax3000 introduced Naked Andy Kaufman Robot. Betamax has done this "naked robot" routine before, but the Andy Kaufman iteration blew my mind, because I was still admiring Terry's wrestling insight, with men wrestling/dancing with woman, and then to bring up Andy Kaufman — when Kaufman not only had a comic act that was about wrestling with women, but he had a routine that consisted of taking the stage and reading, in its entirety, "The Great Gatsby." But it's not as if betamax3000 just said, "Hey, this is so Andy Kaufman — the wrestling and 'The Great Gatsby.'" No, betamax did a series of comments that twisted the "Gatsby" text into things that would be said by the Naked Andy Kaufman Robot:

I have pushed many women gracelessly backwards on canvas. It has been both tortuous and fashionable, leaping high from the corners of the ring onto the contestant below: in that moment there is Truth, Sweat and Cheers. Many people assume the urge to wrestle women is sexual. As a wrestler of women I can definitively say that this is untrue. Mostly. In the main it is about the defining moment of being Superior, of recognition of the Pinner and the Pinnee.

A few moments on Etiquette.

A sportsman never uses the Banjo or the Traps on a female wrestler. While he is allowed to use the Piledriver it is not to be done from a height greater than a women's modest skirt: below the knees only, gentlemen.

Danny DeVito did not understand. He would ask "Andy, why don't you stop wrestling women?" and I would reply "Danny, why don't you stop being so short and disheveled?"

Shirt tucked or not, in the ring Danny would've been able to stand as tall as his Courage would allow him to be, but -- sadly --he did not understand.

Tony Danza would argue "I'm a boxer. What would be so different if I boxed women?"

I could only shake my head. He did not comprehend the difference between wrestling and fighting. A punch is anger, but only through grappling do we experience the common ground between the sexes: the canvas ring is where the true colors are painted, like a woman's red nails or a man's 1969 orange Camaro.

I once wrestled a woman who smelled of avocado. In the midst of our grappling a moment was frozen as that scent overpowered my senses, psychically and spiritually. Was the avocado Fear or Power? How could I pin this woman down, this woman who smelled of avocado? How could I keep her soul and buttocks confined beneath me when the Avocado was everywhere? In the end I won the match, but the avocado defeated me on a far grander level.

Every woman has the Avocado inside her -- this, a true wrestler knows -- knows and respects...

And:

The first time I wrestled a woman was practically a religious experience. At the end I laid on the canvas pinned, defeated and euphoric: through my bell-rung eyes I saw God through the rafters wink at me. I do not remember her name but I remember the look of Victory in her eyes and how I peed a little.

And:

Women have soft elbows. When you are elbowed in the solar plexus by a woman it is different than a man's elbow: there is Understanding. There is Forgiveness.

And:

When pinned between a woman's headstrong knees a man has no choice but to understand: it is the Silent Conversation, and the chafing will heal.

And:

To repeat: wrestling a woman is not sexual. Excitement is for the Soul and the Arms and the Thighs, not the Loins. To have an erection in the ring is to give the Devil a Handle.

There's more, but enough of the quoting of the Naked Andy Kaufman Robot. Let's turn to the wonderful commenter Chip Ahoy, crisply quipping:

Later, following the death of Gatz, the same canvas was turned over to modern dance.



But that didn't last. The dancers, bored of dancing set off in pairs to the beach, to break up and pair off again and break up and pair off.

I remember that modern dance GIF. It was back in 2009, when I wrote about "Lawrence Halprin... 'the tribal elder of American landscape architecture'" whose wife was a dancer who, he said, "could not be contained by a rectangle," so he built her a dance deck that was the "odd, improvised shape" you see in the photo. Back then Chip Ahoy said:

I too knew that my wife could not be contained on a rectangular deck for she is uncontainable, so I improvised with an deck area that could be danced on several levels. The outer levels tilt so that anything placed on them slide off toward the center, and built with portals that promise escape but all lead circuitously back to the main dance area, rather like a hamster habitat. I rounded the edges and varied the angles for nature has few straight lines and fewer right angles and my wife is nature personified, and that made the whole deck railing more difficult, you see, which I then electrified because I knew she would make several attempts at an over-the-rail vault. The deck areas are also surrounded by a moat that I populated with piranhas that I feed regularly by dropping in a steak so they're veritably trained to converge en mass, along with back up electric eels and those really gross blood-sucking slugs, all to discourage wandering beyond the safety of boundaries I set forth with my architecture. The deck itself is fitted with sprinklers at its farthermost points that spray a mist with power hose force to warn the little sylph-like dancing scamp whenever her dance gives the appearance of breaking loose or she nears the end of her retractible chain.

And then Chip proceeded to animate a dancer for the odd, improvised dance deck.

And now, it's your turn to dance. Dance all night in the comments, backward in eternal graceless circles, tortuously, fashionably, individualistically.

"A tray of cocktails floated at us through the twilight, and we sat down at a table with the two girls in yellow and three men, each one introduced to us as Mr. Mumble."

For some reason, that's been my official favorite "Great Gatsby" sentence for a long, long time. I thought I'd bring it out today after getting unreasonably angry at yesterday's "Great Gatsby" sentence (here in our Gatsby project of looking at one "Great Gatsby" sentence each day in absurd isolation). You remember, the crowded hams and the salads of harlequin designs. People said to me, Althouse, you are wrong, this is a perfectly wonderful sentence, it describes sumputuousness and sensuousness. Sumptuousness! I was contemptuous of all this you-us-ness. I said:

1. Any hack writer can use a lot of words and create a picture of a "sumptuous" feast.

2. I'm a reader, a consumer of the words, not of the food itself, so it's not like I'm getting a lot to eat here.

3. "Sumptuousness" seems like a corny idea, like something from a Harlequin (!) romance, especially in the effort to make it seem to refer to sexuality.

4. I'm not getting enough of an elite vibe from the food choices. They seem rather awful. It really does make me feel like it's Thanksgiving at Mom's, not a glorious affair at Gatsby's. Crowded hams! Could ya scootch over, Mom?

Then betamax3000 came in with sharp analysis attributed to Naked Advertisement Copywriter Robot:

Naked Advertisement Copywriter Robot has analyzed sentence and determined an 8.6 correlation with:

Appleby's

Suggested improvement: addition of the word "drizzled."

And so forth.  And that put me in a cheerful mood and prompted me to whip out the official Althouse favorite sentence. Three men, each one introduced to us as Mr. Mumble. I love that. After reading that, you feel like taking an oath never to say anything as banal as: I was introduced to three men, but I didn't catch a single name. Or: Someone introduced us to three men, but the sound quality in the room was such that they might as well all have been named Mr. Mumble. No, you realize, from now on, I must remember to simply assert that the men were introduced as Mr. Mumble. Let the reader lag for a quarter of a second and imagine that could be their names and then get it. Readers are quick. They get this comic, surreal accuracy.

Similarly surreal, the tray of cocktails floated at us through the twilight. Don't bother us with the human being carrying the tray. No one thinks there's some magic floating tray. We get it, and we feel woozy with cocktails, so that it's no wonder every man is Mr. Mumble and every woman is a swatch of color — yellow, in the twilight.

"Until about 30 years ago, the typical 'Dutch Wife' (love doll) sold at sex shops in Japan was of the inflatable type..."

"... and of shoddy quality that was easily subject to deflation at the slightest, er, prick."

That's just offensive. Not just the terrible pun, but the abuse of the Dutch.

“When customers brought the dolls in for repairs, vendors would stick on hot patches, like on tire inner tubes,” [said Hideo Tsuchiya, president of Orient Kogyo K.K., a manufacturer of state-of-the-art love dolls].

Some of these buyers, however, had their own reasons for preferring rubber joy mates to real women. Some weren’t satisfied with going to brothels. Others, jilted by their mates, had become eternally suspicious of females....

Orient Kogyo also provides after-service. When and if the time comes for the dolls to part with their owner, the company will conduct a kuyo (Buddhist memorial service) for the doll, complete with floral offerings....

"Sometimes a shadow moved against a dressing-room blind above, gave way to another shadow, an indefinite procession of shadows, that rouged and powdered in an invisible glass."

Earlier today, I made a "café" post out of a photograph of a tablescape that included my small toy robot, and betamax3000 used it as an occasion — a "café" post is an open thread — to speak for the robot, saying Althouse-blog-related things like: "Robot has no need for F. Scott Fitzgerald. Robot has no need for extraneous data." And "Robot would eradicate Gatsby of unnecessary organic units. Story now smaller."

The Althouse blog has an ongoing Gatsby project consisting of quoting and talking about one sentence from "The Great Gatsby" every day. No one remembers why. It's simply a tradition on the Althouse blog. There's talk of switching to "Lady Chatterly's Lover" or "The Little Prince," but these are rumors, borne in on the breeze that sweeps through the windows and makes the curtains swirl upward into the ceiling that seems like a wedding cake.)

So I've chosen a sentence for Robot/betamax3000 with all the organic units pre-eradicated. A shadow moves. That's the action. It moves and gives way to... guess what?!... another shadow. And more and more shadows. A procession of shadows. A shadow parade. Another inanimate thing is the dressing-room blind. And since we've got a dressing room, we can imagine an organic unit putting on makeup — rouge and powder — but our organic units are eradicated, so it's nothing but a shadow, the absence of a living person, and lest you think you see a person in that mirror in the dressing room, F. Scott Fitzgerald will have you know that even the looking-glass is invisible.

"There are some good things" about being "robotic."

"Discipline comes to mind. But it sounds like there is just no emotion. People that know me, I don’t think they would say that. I certainly am not a fist-pounder. That isn’t my style. But that and emotion are two different things. One is just a way of expressing it, basically. So, anyway."

Says Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple (picked by Steve Jobs).

At the Robot Eclipse Café...

... shake 2 red fists and get on with whatever conversation you wanted to have.

AND: Stock up on the official chewing gum of the Althouse blog.

"Curiosity Rover Could Spark Mars Space Race."

Really?

Everyone from President Obama to Bill Nye to scientists involved with the project lauded Monday's achievement, the most expensive, heaviest, and technically complex rover ever successfully landed on Mars. It may also give NASA, an agency that has recently come under fire for ending the space shuttle program and which has been pointed to as prime for budget cuts, a much-needed boost....

"The successful landing of Curiosity... marks an unprecedented feat of technology that will stand as a point of national pride far into the future," Obama said in a statement....

Is there that much interest in Curiosity? It seems to me people won't be seriously interested in a mission to Mars until we send human beings. But the space program shouldn't be about providing excitement and emotional gratification to people. It should be science, not theater.

A new Obama ad and a new Romney ad.

I'm getting these via Paul Constant at Slog, who says this about the Obama ad:

Holy fucking shit. This is the most brutal attack ad I've seen in a long, long time. It minces the hell out of Romney's offshore fortunes and his record as a jobs exporter (in the private and public sectors). And it makes fun of Romney's singing voice, turning his version of "America, the Beautiful" into a symbol of his warped view of patriotism... This is just an incredible, devastating attack ad. I don't know if it's going to turn any hearts and minds to Obama, but it's going to sure as hell send the Romney campaign reeling. And the Obama campaign likes it when the Romney campaign is reeling.

And he says this about the Romney ad:

It's weak sauce. First of all, you can't argue against negative campaigning in a negative ad. Second, both Romney and Obama have both used negative ads before, so this is nothing new. What this ad is complaining about is that Obama's negative ads are working.

Here's the "brutal" Obama ad:



And here's the "weak sauce" Romney ad:



A few thoughts:

1. The Obama ad is nicely done artistically. It's different.

2. People generally experience Obama as more human than Romney. The new Obama ad undercuts efforts to portray Romney as plastic and robotic. Remember when Hillary Clinton got caught singing the National Anthem badly?



The impulse to use this clip to mock Hillary backfired. People tend to find sincere but bad singing endearing — and this can be especially good for a candidate who has been coming across as too controled. It's "a completely humanizing moment."

3. The Romney ad is much less striking. Unlike the Obama ad, it doesn't grab attention as a beautifully crafted short film. It looks do-it-yourself and webby. There's humility to it. Just wondering what happened to the hope, you know. It oddly resonates with the Obama ad that tries to humiliate Romney for singing badly. America is oriented — generally — toward liking Obama, the man. That's a mysterious process. Hard to see exactly why it happened and how it could be reversed. Obama is relying on it... and relying on the seeming impossibility that anyone could love Romney. The Romney ad very gently tries to undermine the love. He gave us hope. Where is the hope?

The Madness of Madison.

State Street, today:



ME (reading aloud, to my companion): Walker is not above the law and will go to prison.

CHALKING MAN (to me): It's true! John Doe!

ME (to the chalking man): Live the fantasy. (To my companion:) The madness of Madison.

One hour earlier — about a block from there — we walked past a man who was lying supine on a low concrete wall. Eyes closed, he intoned repeatedly:

I am a good slave
Free to a good owner
I will obey my master

"[M]ost voters' knowledge of economics is so shallow that not only is Mitt Romney attacked for being successful in business..."

"... but Romney doesn't even seem able to defend himself."

Can Mitt educate us?

This seems related to my earlier post today, about whether people learn better taught by robots.

Let me snip a clip of the clip at the link:



More importantly, here's Glenn Loury — whose academic field is economics — critiquing our economic illiteracy (and he's "not a Romney guy"):

"[S]tudents assigned randomly to statistics courses that relied heavily on 'machine-guided learning' software -- with reduced face time with instructors -- did just as well, in less time..."

"... as their counterparts in traditional, instructor-centric versions of the courses. This largely held true regardless of the race, gender, age, enrollment status and family background of the students."

Why are you better than a robot?

The robotic software did have disadvantages, the researchers found. For one, students found it duller than listening to a live instructor. 

Duller than a live instructor! Good lord, we teachers provide some mild amusement. But the students are fooling with the internet or at least daydreaming, so it may only be the illusion of relatively less dullness.

Some felt as though they had learned less, even if they scored just as well on tests. 

We make you feel you've learned, even when we haven't. It's the empathy, I bet. Robots don't care. But I'm sure they could pretty easily tweak the robotics to give comparable cues to the student and stimulate the same feeling of having learned.

Engaging students, such as professors might by sprinkling their lectures with personal anecdotes and entertaining asides, remains one area where humans have the upper hand.

Oh, come on, you could program the robots with much better jokes-n-anecdotes than the professors. I mean, the one thing we professors have is that we might say anything — the spontaneity. If that's a human being up there, then she might be saying what she's saying now not because she's programmed, but because she just thought that. She responded to something that a student said. But I think you could program a computer to have lots of material and to put things together spontaneously. What's different is that the student knows it's just built into the program, but the human-being teacher actually had a human experience with the student.

How precious is that?

Why are you better than a robot?

"Don't get too excited, Meade. It will be this kind of kiss."

I wrote in September 2008 (before I'd met Meade in person) in the comments to a post based on the NYT headline "Obama to Dispatch Female Surrogates," which I'd said "put a picture in my head of Obama releasing an army of programmed fembots." That was some crazy "war on women" the last time around.

I love running across old byplay between me and Meade. And I also love running across these old political things that bear some relationship to what's happening today. But the women stuff was much more fascinating back then, when Obama had crushed women's dreams of the first woman President and McCain had released The Palin.

The new headline, "Obama Camp Turns to Clinton to Counter Palin," flips the image. It's not Obama, but the Obama camp -- a large, faceless group -- and now it's not a large, faceless group of women, but one particular woman, Hillary. Don't pin anything directly on Obama, and don't disrespect women by portraying them as nonindividuals.

Can you guess what got me to that old post? I'd searched my blog for the word "faceless" — trying to get to this blog post I'd written a week or so ago about the 3 times Obama called people "faceless" in "Dreams From My Father." That post followed on an inquiry into the story (from Obama's book) about how, as a boy, he'd shouted at and shoved a little girl.

There were faces then — big faces. Hillary. Sarah.

I Am Big, It's the Pictures That Got Small
Sunset Blvd. at MOVIECLIPS.com

They used to be big. It's the politics that got small.