Arial v. Helvetica

Bruce Schneier writes:

Although Bin Laden has complained that Americans have completely misunderstood the reason behind the 9/11 attacks, correspondent inference theory postulates that he's not going to convince people. Terrorism, and 9/11 in particular, has such a high correspondence that people use the effects of the attacks to infer the terrorists' motives. In other words, since Bin Laden caused the death of a couple of thousand people in the 9/11 attacks, people assume that must have been his actual goal, and he's just giving lip service to what he *claims* are his goals. Even Bin Laden's actual objectives are ignored as people focus on the deaths, the destruction and the economic impact.

Perversely, Bush's misinterpretation of terrorists' motives actually helps prevent them from achieving their goals.

Read the rest. You'll be smarter for it.

Update: since the comments have turned to Rudy: Rudy's Five Big Lies

In the Next Few Months

Yes, it can be great fun to make snarky comments about what kind of mental illness must be afflicting the idiots among us. On the other hand I don't think it makes any sense to seriously try to do mass psychoanalysis from a distance. Sure, the results of this kind of thing help if you want to make caricatures of your subjects, but I'm not sure that's worth doing, either.

I get the feeling that Joel Spolsky doesn't like blog comments:

I don't know how many times I've read a brilliant article someone wrote on a blog. By the end of the article, I'm excited, I'm impressed, it was a great article. And then you get the dribble of morbid, meaningless, thoughtless comments. If the article, for example, mentions anything in anyway related to Microsoft, you get some kind of open source nuclear war. If the article mentions web browsing in any way, there's always some person without an outbound filter who feels compelled to tell you about how he uses Opera, so he doesn't have this problem, although, frankly, I could care less what Anonymous uses. He's not even human to me, he's anonymous. What web browser he uses doesn't amount to a hill of beans. It's not a single bean. It's not even the memory of last week's huevos rancheros. It's just noise. Useless noise. Thoughtless drivel written by some anonymous non-entity who really didn't read the article very carefully and didn't come close to understanding it and who has no ability whatsoever to control his typing diarrhea if the site's software doesn't physically prevent him from posting.

Harrumph. There are plenty of blogs with open comments that can get 100s of messages per topic, without having them turn into a mess of noise, where the participants know enough to avoid certain topics, where drive-bys are simply ignored. It's all about the regulars, the tone they set, and how they moderate discussions.

Science Tattoos

Study: Food in McDonald's wrapper tastes better to kids:

Anything made by McDonald's tastes better, preschoolers said in a study that powerfully demonstrates how advertising can trick the taste buds of young children.

In comparing identical McDonald's foods in name-brand and plain wrappers, the unmarked foods always lost.

Even carrots, milk and apple juice tasted better to the kids when they were wrapped in the familiar packaging of the Golden Arches.

The study had youngsters sample identical McDonald's foods in name-brand and unmarked wrappers. The unmarked foods always lost the taste test.

I have this thing about potato chips... if they're fresh out of the bag, I love 'em. But if they've been taken out of the bag, and put into a ZipLok baggie (like what my mom used to do for bagged lunches), they suck. I hate them. I don't know if there really is difference in taste, but I've convinced myself there is, and I refuse to eat chips out of baggies.

The study also noted that intrusive Big Brother government goes down easy when wrapped in the packaging of Small Government Conservatism ™; While the same product wrapped in paper with Korean or Russian writing causes severe vomiting and abdominal cramping.

The Onion:

"You won't need to eavesdrop to hear this: I voted for you assholes because you said you were against shit like this."

Ed Albaugh,
Elevator Repairman

(via)

Good live music month coming up: Adrian Belew on the 21st, Andrew Bird on Sept 12th (I have 2 tix to his 9/11 show in Asheville, NC, if you want to buy them!), Sea And Cake on Sept 26th.

And I'm considering Interpol, Pinback, Boris and Reverend Horton Heat, in Oct/Nov.

Good times for me.

And the baby cauliflowers are happy about it, too:

Nebulabrot