Via JJD is Josh McHugh on "Apple's uncanny ability to provoke lust for electronic products."...#

``Speculating on suitors for Apple is a time-honored parlor game. With every downturn in its fortunes, pundits note that Apple has a hoard of cash - $4.5 billion today - which makes the company's $7 billion market cap mouthwateringly cheap. The prospect of owning Apple has tantalized several tech titans. Michael Dell drew Steve Jobs' lasting ire by suggesting that Apple be sold and its mound of cash distributed to shareholders. Scott McNealy and Larry Ellison both bandied Apple takeovers in the mid-'90s.

The biggest impediment to any potential corporate benefactor is also Apple's single biggest asset, cash pile notwithstanding: Steve Jobs. Certainly, lots of credit for Apple's visual and tactile product triumphs is due Jonathan Ive, the company's VP of industrial design, but Ive - and the rest of the overachieving crew - is addicted to innovation-at-all-costs because of Jobs. His hypnotic influence reaches beyond One Infinite Loop as well. For example, the Eagles had always balked at putting songs online, but Jobs talked the band into signing on for the launch of the iTunes store. *The music industry once despised Apple for its "Rip. Mix. Burn." advertising campaign. Now Apple counts all five major labels as partners.*''

Raymond Chen writes about just trying to get rid of the error messages that pop up on your computer screen.#

``When most people buy a car, they don't expect to have to learn how an engine works and how to change spark plugs. They buy a car so they can drive it to get from point A to point B. If the car makes a funny noise, they will ignore it as long as possible. Eventually, it may bother them to the point of taking it to a mechanic who will ask incredulously, "How long has it been doing this?" And the answer will be something like, "Oh, about a year."

[...]

Automobile manufacturers have learned to consolidate all their error messages into one message called "Check engine". People are conditioned to take the car in to a mechanic when the "Check engine" light goes on, and let the mechanic figure out what is wrong. Can we have a "Check engine" light for computers? Would it be feasible?''

Matt Moore links Neal Pollack writing about the VMAs, very funny. But not Ryan McGee.#

``Predictably, the five Queer Eyes for the Straight Guy show up. Carson Kressley hogs the camera, instructing the host how to button his jacket. Great. Six weeks ago, "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" was a delightful surprise. Now for the rest of our lives we'll be forced to endure Mr. Blackwell version 2.0.''

Julio Ojeda-Zapata writes about how his Doctor will Google things for him...#

``When visiting my doctor for a rash, he sat down at the examination-room PC to pull up relevant photos and pamphlets for me. I assumed he would dip into obscure databases for doctors' eyes only.

But no: He Googled it.''

Michael Heraghty links to The Most Disturbing Blog Entry Ever - Not for the faint.#

In this essay Andrew Moravcsik writes about the problems created by the United States' sole venture in Iraq and what it means to international institutions like the UN and NATO.#

``The Iraq crisis offers two basic lessons. The first, for Europeans, is that American hawks were right. Unilateral intervention to coerce regime change can be a cost-effective way to deal with rogue states. In military matters, there is only one superpower -- the United States -- and it can go it alone if it has to. It is time to accept this fact and move on.

The second lesson, for Americans, is that moderate skeptics on both sides of the Atlantic were also right. Winning a peace is much harder than winning a war. Intervention is cheap in the short run but expensive in the long run. And when it comes to the essential instruments for avoiding chaos or quagmire once the fighting stops -- trade, aid, peacekeeping, international monitoring, and multilateral legitimacy -- Europe remains indispensable. In this respect, the unipolar world turns out to be bipolar after all.''

Andrew makes an interesting assessment of why the two regions differ so much in opinion and methodology...#

``For Europe, the defining moment of the contemporary era remains the collapse of the Soviet empire, symbolized by the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989; 11/9 is thus more important to Europeans than 9/11. Without major direct threats to their security, Europeans have felt free to disarm, cultivate their unique postmodern polity, and criticize the United States.''

His opinion of European remilitarization seems to imply it is a solution without a problem.#

``Little has come of schemes for a powerful European military, however---and little will. [...] Even if Europeans could agree on the funding and the mission for such a unified force, moreover, new transport aircraft, satellites, and soldiers would not add up to a viable European alternative to U.S. unilateralism. For what would the Europeans do with their new poer? Deploy it against the United States? Launch pre-preventative interventions? Even if they sought simply to reduce European dependency on U.S. security guarantees, the result would only be to encourage the redeployment of even more American forces outside of Europe. In the end, the best way for Europe to play a world role is to play with, not against, the United States''

The answer, it seems to Andrew, is to identify what each group is best at and find a viable way to work cohesively.#

``A better approach to rebuilding the transatlantic relationship would aim at reconceiving it on the basis of comparative advantage, recognizing that what both parties do is essential and complementary. Europe may possess weaker military forces than does the United States, but on almost every other dimension of global influence it is stronger. Meshing the two sets of capabilities would be the surest path to long-term global peace and security.''

Joseph Nye writes about what the United States' moves around Iraq say about the country in general and what that says about future directions.#

``The world is off balance. If anyone doubted the overwhelming nature of U.S. military power, Iraq settled the issue. With the United States representing nearly half of the world's military expenditures, no countervailing coalition can create a traditional military balance of power. Not since Rome has one nation loomed so large above the others. Indeed, the word "empire" has come out of the closet. Respected analysts on both the left and the right are beginning to refer to "American empire" approvingly as the dominant narrative of the twenty-first century. And the military victory in Iraq seems only to have confirmed this new world order.''

He writes about the problem of "One-Dimensional Thinking" on the part of those in power.#

``Although the new unilateralists are right that maintaining U.S. military strength is crucial and that pure multilateralism is impossible, they make important mistakes that will ultimately undercut the implementation of the new security strategy. Their first mistake is to focus too heavily on military power alone. U.S. military power is essential to global security and is a critical part of the response to terrorism. [...] But all the precision bombing [in Afghanistan] destroyed only a small fraction of al Qaeda's network, which retains cells in some 60 countries. And bombing cannot resolve the problem of cells in Hamburg or Detroit. [...]

Power is the ability to obtain the outcomes one wants, and the changes sketched out above have made its distribution more complex than first meets the eye. The agenda of world politics has become like a three-dimensional chess game in which one can win only by playing vertically as well as horizontally.''

Another interesting thing in his essay is criticism of the assertion that the United States is an "empire"...#

``[...] As the British historian Niall Ferguson points out, modern America differs from nineteenth-century Britain in its chronically short attention span.

Some say the United States is already an empire and it is just a matter of recognizing reality, but they mistake the politics of primacy for those of Empire. The United States may be more powerful compared to other countries than the United Kingdom was at its imperial peak, but it has less control over what occurs inside other countries than the United Kingdom did when it ruled a quarter of the glove. For example, Kenya's schools, taxes, laws, and elections-not to mention external relations-were controlled by British officials, The United States has no such control over any country today. [...] Devotees of the new imperialism argue that such analysis is too literal, that "empire" is intended merely as metaphor. But this "metaphor" imples a control from Washington that is unrealistic and reinforces the prevailing temptations of unilateralism.''

He closes the book by talking about "The Paradox of Primacy"...#

``The problem for U.S. power in the twenty-first century is that more and more continues to fall outside the control of even the most powerful state. [...] The paradox of American power is that world politics is changing in a way that makes it impossible for the strongest world power since Rome to achieve some of its most crucial international goals alone. [...] the United States must mobilize international coalitions to address these shared threats and challenges.''

Max Boot writes about the new way wars are fought and what this means for the military and the portrait of future conflicts. He uses the war in Iraq as the prime example for this discussion.#

One thing is consistently underlines is that because of technological breakthroughs and better control, command, and communication structures, wars can be fought with far fewer "Boots on the Ground"...#

``The second Gulf War has proved to be more impressive than the Afghan war because it was a truly combined-arms operation. An examination of the conflict shows the potential of the new American way of war and offers some lessons for the future.

Coalition forces in the second Gulf War were less than half the size of those deployed in the first one. Yet they achieved a much more ambitious goal -- occupying all of Iraq, rather than just kicking the Iraqi army out of Kuwait -- in almost half the time, with one-third the casualties, and at one-fourth the cost of the first war. Many will argue, in retrospect, that Saddam Hussein's forces were not all that formidable to begin with, and there is no doubt a great deal of truth in this. But they were capable enough when they fought the Iranian army to a draw in the 1980s and put down Kurdish and Shi'ite insurgencies in the 1990s. And, on paper at least, the Baathist regime's military enjoyed a big numerical advantage over U.S. and British forces. Although the Iraqi army was much degraded from its pre-1991 heyday, it still deployed more than 450,000 troops, including paramilitary units, the Republican Guard, and the Special Republican Guard, whose loyalty had been repeatedly demonstrated. *Traditionally, war colleges have taught that to be sure of success, an attacking force must have a 3 to 1 advantage -- a ratio that goes up to 6 to 1 in difficult terrain such as urban areas. Far from having a 3 to 1 advantage in Iraq, coalition ground forces (which never numbered more than 100,000) faced a 3 to 1 or 4 to 1 disadvantage.*

That the United States and its allies won anyway -- and won so quickly -- must rank as one of the signal achievements in military history. Previously, the gold standard of operational excellence had been the German blitzkrieg through the Low Countries and France in 1940. The Germans managed to conquer France, the Netherlands, and Belgium in just 44 days, at a cost of "only" 27,000 dead soldiers. *The United States and Britain took just 26 days to conquer Iraq (a country 80 percent of the size of France), at a cost of 161 dead, making fabled generals such as Erwin Rommel and Heinz Guderian seem positively incompetent by comparison.*''

He also writes that all reports of difficulty in Iraq were vastly out of proportion with the truth, and offers this story as an example...#

``On March 27, Lieutenant General William Wallace, commander of the army's V Corps, which was in charge of all army units in Iraq, said in an interview that "the enemy we're fighting is a bit different than the one we war-gamed against." Unfortunately, when The Washington Post reported his comment the next morning, it dropped "a bit," giving the impression that U.S. forces had suffered a serious setback. (The New York Times rendered the quote accurately in one story but flubbed it in another.) A media frenzy ensued, with numerous stories suggesting that the offensive was bogged down and that the war could last months and result in thousands of casualties. Leading the charge was a platoon of retired generals who suggested that Rumsfeld had placed the invasion in jeopardy by not sending enough troops.

This criticism vastly exaggerated the difficulties encountered by U.S. forces. The Fedayeen turned out to be more of a nuisance than a serious military menace. Many of their attacks were reckless to the point of being suicidal. They would charge m1a1 Abrams tanks and m2 Bradley Fighting Vehicles in pickup trucks mounted with machine guns. *Sometimes the tanks would not even bother to open fire; they would simply roll over the attacking vehicles.* The "dead-enders" died by the thousands; few U.S. troops were killed.''

Max writes that there _was_ much worrying about what would happen when US Troops hit Baghdad, because they would be at a disadvantage in the urban terrain. This paragraph contains an interesting note...#

``The only remaining question was how much of a fight the coalition would face in Baghdad. Right up until the last moment, a chorus of gloomy commentators warned that the United States risked another Stalingrad. That was apparently Saddam's expectation too. *U.S. intelligence believes he distributed copies of the movie Black Hawk Down to give his commanders hints on what to do.*''

Another interesting that Max talks about is how flexible and decentralized the US Army's control structure is and offers a vastly different portrayal of it's opposition's structure.#

``Coalition forces, led by the United States, severely disrupted Iraqi command-and-control systems and moved much faster than Iraqi forces could handle. In military parlance, the United States got inside the Iraqis' "decision cycle." This task was facilitated by the fact that Saddam ran a highly centralized regime. Commanders were afraid to relay negative news to Baghdad for fear of incurring the wrath of Saddam or his homicidal sons. And once they were cut off from the center, commanders in the field were afraid to exercise their own initiative for the same reason. *Saddam had actually set up systems to ensure that his army commanders could not coordinate closely, for fear that they would plot against him.* Thus the Iraqi armed forces were organized on opposite principles from those of the United States, namely decentralization and joint operations. It was the difference in mindsets, as much as anything else, that allowed U.S. forces always to stay several steps ahead of their adversaries.''

The rest of the essay is about how the Armed Forces need to be more integrated with their equipment generation programs and that laws deciding what the Army cannot do, versus what the Air Force must do are very silly and counter productive.#

Jessica Stern writes about Al Qaeda and terrorist groups in general. Why they have been effective and how they will remain effective in years to come.#

Jessica writes in length about how terrorist groups are founded upon morals, and this is how they attract new member, but they soon devolve into power structures for weak and empty souls.#

``What accounts for al Qaeda's ongoing effectiveness in the face of an unprecedented onslaught? The answer lies in the organization's remarkably protean nature. Over its life span, al Qaeda has constantly evolved and shown a surprising willingness to adapt its mission. This capacity for change has consistently made the group more appealing to recruits, attracted surprising new allies, and -- most worrisome from a Western perspective -- made it harder to detect and destroy. Unless Washington and its allies show a similar adaptability, the war on terrorism won't be won anytime soon, and the death toll is likely to mount.

Why do religious terrorists kill? In interviews over the last five years, many terrorists and their supporters have suggested to me that people first join such groups to make the world a better place -- at least for the particular populations they aim to serve. Over time, however, militants have told me, terrorism can become a career as much as a passion. Leaders harness humiliation and anomie and turn them into weapons. Jihad becomes addictive, militants report, and with some individuals or groups -- the "professional" terrorists -- grievances can evolve into greed: for money, political power, status, or attention.

In such "professional" terrorist groups, simply perpetuating their cadres becomes a central goal, and what started out as a moral crusade becomes a sophisticated organization. Ensuring the survival of the group demands flexibility in many areas, but especially in terms of mission. Objectives thus evolve in a variety of ways. Some groups find a new cause once their first one is achieved -- much as the March of Dimes broadened its mission from finding a cure for polio to fighting birth defects after the Salk vaccine was developed. Other groups broaden their goals in order to attract a wider variety of recruits. Still other organizations transform themselves into profit-driven organized criminals, or form alliances with groups that have ideologies different from their own, forcing both to adapt. Some terrorist groups hold fast to their original missions. But only the spry survive.''

She writes that because the root desire of many terrorists is to enrich their lives and be free of the "humiliation of the Muslim, by the hands of the New World Order" and that terrorist tactics are not the same as traditional military tactics, Western governments will need to change their tune in order to be effective...#

``To fight such dangerous tactics, Western governments will also need to adapt. In addition to military, intelligence, and law enforcement responses, Washington should start thinking about how U.S. policies are perceived by potential recruits to terrorist organizations. The United States too often ignores the unintended consequences of its actions, disregarding, for example, the negative message sent by Washington's ongoing neglect of Afghanistan and of the chaos in postwar Iraq. If the United States allows Iraq to become another failed state, groups both inside and outside the country that support al Qaeda's goals will benefit.

Terrorists, after all, depend on the broader population for support, and the right U.S. policies could do much to diminish the appeal of rejectionist groups. It does not make sense in such an atmosphere to keep U.S. markets closed to Pakistani textiles or to insist on protecting intellectual property with regard to drugs that needy populations in developing countries cannot hope to afford.''

Kenneth M. Pollack has an essay in the July/August 2003 Foreign Affairs book about how the Gulf can be secured. (The whole thing is available at that link.)#

``Summary: The sweeping military victory in Iraq has cleared the way for the United States to establish yet another framework for Persian Gulf security. Ironically, with Saddam Hussein gone, the problems are actually going to get more challenging in some ways. The three main issues will be Iraqi power, Iran's nuclear weapons program, and domestic unrest in the states of the Gulf Cooperation Council. None will be easy to handle, let alone all three together.''#

Kenneth writes that the public is correct about America's main interest in Iraq, although maybe not in the same way as hypothesized.#

``America's primary interest in the Persian Gulf lies in ensuring the free and stable flow of oil from the region to the world at large. This fact has nothing to do with the conspiracy theories leveled against the Bush administration during the run-up to the recent war. U.S. interests do not center on whether gas is $2 or $3 at the pump, or whether Exxon gets contracts instead of Lukoil or Total. Nor do they depend on the amount of oil that the United States itself imports from the Persian Gulf or anywhere else. The reason the United States has a legitimate and critical interest in seeing that Persian Gulf oil continues to flow copiously and relatively cheaply is simply that the global economy built over the last 50 years rests on a foundation of inexpensive, plentiful oil, and if that foundation were removed, the global economy would collapse.''

Kenneth has a interesting summary of the problem of Iraq, and the balance of power in any region.#

``The paradox of Iraqi power can be put simply: any Iraq that is strong enough to balance and contain Iran will inevitably be capable of overrunning Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. This was the problem the region faced at the end of the Iran-Iraq War, when Iraq's destruction of the Iranian army and air force left it in a position to conquer Kuwait and threaten Saudi oil fields soon afterward.''

The explanation of terrorism and internal instability offered by Kenneth is revealing as well...#

``Terrorism and internal instability in the Persian Gulf are ultimately fueled by the political, economic, and social stagnation of the local Arab states. It is true that American policies anger many Arabs and that the Palestinian issue is a matter of great popular concern. But these are not really what creates fertile ground for domestic insurrection or the recruitment efforts of radical Islamist groups such as al Qaeda. What is more important is that too many Arabs are unemployed or underemployed because of the utter failure of their economic systems. Too many feel powerless and humiliated by despotic governments that do less and less for them while preventing them from having any say in their own governance. And too many feel both threatened and stifled within a society that cannot come to grips with modernity.''

The rest of the essay talks about how the key stabilizing and securing the Gulf is to create a way to have all it's member states negotiate and communicate in an organized fashion. This, rather than having a big dog like the United States, would serve as a way of appealing to the sovereignty and independence of the nations. It's very interesting because he says that using the Cold War actions of Eastern European states as a model. Everything is like something else, or can be.#

Charles Miller writes about how to sanity check a technological idea you've just had...#

``First, you're going to need some use-cases. Think of the precise situations in which your idea is going to be used. Each use-case should feature a user in a specific situation, using your new technology to reach a plausible goal. [...]

Except… use-cases aren't supposed to dictate the form of the solution. Delete your technology from the story, and ask yourself the big question. "If my new technology didn't exist, how would the user go about reaching their goal?"

What are the advantages to the user of doing it your way? [...]

If you can't confidently say your way is better, or you can't see a way of bootstrapping your technology to the point that its users see solid returns, then *you are a solution in search of a problem. It may be a clever and elegant solution, but without a problem to solve*, it's just going to sit on the shelf as an idle curiosity, gathering dust.''

Godless at Gene Expression links to Revolve - the "Girl Magazine" version of the Bible.#

Ole posts about IQ and Populations at Gene Expression...#

``The dark blue line is the average IQ of the world. I've also plotted the population growth of the five most populous countries, India, China, the U.S., Indonesia, and Nigeria; the average IQ of each of these countries is in parenthesis. (Nigeria is currently ninth, with Brazil (87), Pakistan (81), Russia (96), and Bangladesh (81) intervening, but by 2050 it will be fifth.) As you can see, in a 100 year period the world's average IQ will have dropped from 92 to 86, a change of 6%. That is pretty darn significant. And all because of differential population growth.

[...]

The human race has been in existence for approximately 150,000 years, during which time natural selection has incrementally increased human intelligence and cognitive ability. It is not possible to give IQ tests to humans from 100,000 years ago - at least not yet :) - so we can only surmise that there would have been a corresponding increase in measured IQ as well. Only recently - within the last 10,000 years or so - has this trend been halted, primarily by organized agriculture which enabled a small group of humans to provide food for a larger group. It now appears that very recently - within the last 100 years or so - this trend has been reversed. I call this Unnatural Selection, since it appears that societal rather than evolutionary effects are at work. The consequences of this overall decrease in world IQ have yet to be quantified, but they are bound to be significant.''

Carly has been writing lots of interesting posts recently, mostly about the books she's been reading and the jerks at Barnes and Noble.#

I just realized that no one else is probably going to be at my work today because of the holiday. All alone I guess. Sigh.#

On ll1-discuss there is some discussion about Object Oriented-ness. In part of this conversation someone was talking about modeling shapes and how Circles should but subclasses of Ellipse (So they can be compared via "equals"). Colin Putney wrote something very clever...#

``Not only do you not need to override equals, you don't need to subclass at all. Anytime you need a circle, just create an ellipse that just happens to be circular.

Of course, it still might make sense to have two classes, depending on the application. But if so, Circle should be the superclass. A subclass should extend its superclass, not constrain it. An ellipse is a circle with additional capabilities - it can have different radii along each of its dimensions.

It's ironic that shapes are so often used as examples in discussions of OO modelling. In fact, they make terrible examples, because geometry produces subtypes in exactly the opposite way that class-based object modelling does.''

Via KurzweilAI.net are David Hanson's Robot Heads -#

``The humanoids that have made news the past few years—Asimo, Grace, Kismet—are fine robots all, talented, versatile, smart, friendly. Asimo, the plastic-suited Honda humanoid, walks on two legs and welcomes visitors to the factory that builds it. *Carnegie Mellon's Grace, a six-foot-tall conglomeration of metal parts on wheels topped with an animated computer-monitor face, registered itself for a conference last year, found its way to the right room, and gave a presentation.* Kismet, the media darling of a few years back, looks people in the eye, smiles when they do, and learns just like a baby would, by watching and copying. Who wouldn't like these three? Other robots are being designed to work as nurses, tutors, servants and companions. But despite their talents, every one of these robots looks ... well, like a robot. They're sometimes appealing in a cartoonish sort of way, but they're metallic, awkward, clunky.

Not Hanson's heads. And for that reason, the next morning at 10:30 sharp the reporters are waiting—a roomful of them—and TV cameras are here to capture the debut of Hanson's latest, most advanced model. Hanson, 33, walks in and sets something on a table. It's a backless head, bolted to a wooden platform, but it's got a face, a real face, with soft flesh-toned polymer skin and finely sculpted features and high cheekbones and big blue eyes. Hanson hooks it up to his laptop, fiddles with the wires. He's not saying much; it might be an awkward moment except for the fact that everyone else is too busy checking out the head to notice. Then Hanson taps a few keys and . . . it moves. It looks left and right. It smiles. It frowns, sneers, knits its brows anxiously. Now the questions start, and Hanson is in his element: The head's got 24 servomotors, he says, covering the major muscles in the human face. It's got digital cameras in its eyes, to watch the people watching it, and new software will soon let the head mimic viewers. *Its name is K-Bot, and it's modeled after Kristen Nelson, his lab assistant.* ''

Daniel Drezner has quotes from the American Political Science Association's Annual Meeting...#

``From a panel discussant: "I was playing golf yesterday, and only psychologically left the golf course five minutes after this panel started. And let me just add how happy I am that APSA moved its starting time for the early morning panel from 8:45 AM to 8:00 AM''

`` "I need to finish quickly, since the governor signs all University of California diplomas, and I want to avoid a Schwarzenegger signature on my diploma." ''

Just A Gwai Lo links - ``If you were looking for a Shockwave presentation of Saddam Hussein rapping over an Eminem beat, this is your lucky day .''#

Via Ten Reasons Why is Can Grand Theft Auto Inspire Professors? -#

`` Until a few years ago, Mr. Gee was himself clueless about video games. He became interested in the subject as he watched his son, then 6 years old, play a game called Pajama Sam. Mr. Gee wondered what a game for adults would be like. So he bought a game called The New Adventures of the Time Machine, which was loosely based on the work of H.G. Wells.

"I was floored by how long and how difficult it was," he says, sitting in his office, one wall of which is now covered with posters of video-game characters. He realized that the gaming industry makes more money than Hollywood, which means that millions of people are plunking down substantial amounts for games that take on average 50 to 100 hours to complete -- roughly the amount of time spent in semester of college courses. "Some young person is going to spend $50 on this, yet they won't take 50 minutes to learn algebra," he says. "I wanted to know why." ''

Evan Kirchhoff responds to the idea that students should not be judged on their essays and factual memorization...#

``Secondly, we ought to be judging people by essays. It's called "reasoning" -- yes, not "problem solving" or "creative thinking" or "looking at the big picture". The latter are probably trainable to some extent through current games (as well as through a number of other activities, like team sports, which was the corresponding educational fad when I was in elementary school). Reasoning, on the other hand, is a process of connecting premises (English sentences) with conclusions (other English sentences). The only way of learning that is through the examination and construction of argumentatively connected English sentences: in other words, essays.

Thirdly, I went through school without any of that "historical trivia" of "names and dates". As a result, I'm now horribly ignorant. I couldn't tell you the dates of World War I to within 10 years, and the main thing narrowing that window is that I know it has to begin with a "19--". About 90% of what I know about world history in general, and the Middle East in particular, I've acquired over the past couple of years. This is embarrassing, and would be even more humiliating if our cultural standards for historical knowledge weren't so low. I agree that a good education should tie things into a general context (a pedagogical idea which was probably suggested about 2500 years ago), but the "big picture" emerges only from a series of small and specific data-points.''

Alexander Payne got some new kicks...#

Everyone gets brandwhorey about shoes. Women are, in my experience, magnetically fucking drawn to them; crazy black hole shit, unavoidable. And designer sneakers have become the male domain, with the black guys heading towards the jacked up court-ready foot-SUVs and the white guys laying it down for indie cred Chucks, big-tongued skater kicks, and other flat, arch-maiming epitomes of urban podia-foolishness. Shoes are stupid, but we love them dearly. We ignore the word from on high; we know we should all shuffle about in airy, simple, supportive Jesus-style sandals, and yet we fuck our feet up nice and good for hot kicks. We are flawed and weak for our shoes.

I am flawed and weak for Pumas. They're not so bad for my feet, actually, but they are much much too expensive. I had a black-steel-silver pair of Mostros, a "lifestyle shoe" (seen amongst its kind in the Puma online store) that I loved dearly. Mostros are the king-hell shoe, the mutant lovechild of a slipper, a running shoe, a climbing shoe, your favorite 3rd Grade velcro sneakers, and an octopus. They are unfathomably comfortable from the first steps and look fascinatingly good with everything short of a suit. My sad-cloud-palate Mostros were my goddamn shoes, and they had a good two or three months left of active duty in them when they were prematurely disposed of by an overzealous housekeeper. I was crushed, and the other Mostro color schemes out then couldn't begin to console me. ''