• News​de​signer.com | Top 50 U.S. front pages
• New­seum | Today’s Front Pages

Over­all, the qual­ity of front page designs is excel­lent. There is one news­pa­per cover that stands out to me though, is the Chicago Sun-​Times.

I really think this is the per­fect cover. A great pho­to­graph. A simple two words. A grand state­ment, wrapped in restraint. Beautiful.

The runner-​ups are the St. Peters­burg Times, States­men jour­nal, and Virginian-​Pilot.

Hon­or­able men­tions go to the fol­low­ing covers:

Lastly, I have to make men­tion of the Boston Herald and its never-​ending pur­suit of the per­fect tabloid-​style front page.

My favorite of the group is this quote from Obama while he was prepar­ing for one of the pri­mary debates (empha­sis added):

I don’t con­sider this to be a good format for me, which makes me more cau­tious. I often find myself trapped by the ques­tions and think­ing to myself, ‘You know, this is a stupid ques­tion, but let me … answer it.’ So when Brian Williams is asking me about what’s a per­sonal thing that you’ve done [that's green], and I say, you know, ‘Well, I planted a bunch of trees.’ And he says, ‘I’m talk­ing about personal.’ What I’m think­ing in my head is, ‘Well, the truth is, Brian, we can’t solve global warm­ing because I f—ing changed light bulbs in my house. It’s because of some­thing col­lec­tive‘.

I’m glad this type of stuff is leak­ing out.

For the last eight years I have been ashamed to be an Amer­i­can. I have been ashamed of the actions of my coun­try at home and abroad. There are too many things that I have been ashamed of to even begin to list. Today, I am proud. For the first time in eight years, I am proud of my country.

I have hope that the tide is turn­ing. I have hope that Obama, the first African Amer­i­can U.S. pres­i­dent, will make a last­ing mark. I hope that he will make a last­ing mark not because he is the first African Amer­i­can pres­i­dent, but because he could be the next JFK or FDR. BHO, anyone? I also have hope that per­haps this elec­tion will embolden the Demo­c­ra­tic party to finally grow a back­bone. It has been far too long since I’ve dared to hope for the future of my country.

Things to be even more hopeful (and happy) about today

In my home state of Mass­a­chu­setts, all three of the ballot mea­sures went my way. There will not be an income tax ban. Yay! for Mas­sArt (and other public ser­vices). It will no longer be a crim­i­nal penalty to pos­sess less than an ounce of mar­i­juana. Yay! for not wast­ing state money on pros­e­cut­ing the War On Drugs. Lastly, start­ing in 2010, there will be no more gam­bling on dog races. Yay! for the greyhounds.

In Maine, where I grew up, they voted down a mea­sure to allow a casino to be built. In South Dakota, where my lovely grand­mother lives, they voted down an ini­tia­tive that would have banned most types of abor­tion. In New Hamp­shire, they went blue across the board: pres­i­dent, sen­a­tor, gov­er­nor, and house of rep­re­sen­ta­tives. In Mon­tana, a red state where I have many family mem­bers (who may or may not be red), Barack Obama very nearly won.

Only Cal­i­for­nia can put a small blem­ish on this day. As it stands now (accord­ing to The New York Times), the propo­si­tion to ban same-​sex mar­riages holds a very small lead.

If that is the only thing that I am dis­ap­pointed about today, that is worth a cel­e­bra­tion. Today is a good day.

Basi­cally, these items are pack­aged at in ready-​to-​ship boxes, minus the retail pack­ag­ing. Amazon can send the boxes with­out using extra pack­ag­ing. It sounds like it saves every­body some money and helps reduce waste. Great call Amazon.

Design-​wise, I’m really dig­ging the way that Fisher-​Price card­board box looks in the pic­ture. Nice and simple.

Pros

• Avoids any extra HTTP requests for files with IE-only hacks
• Slicker than includ­ing that mon­stros­ity inside the head tag
• Allows for easier read­ing and main­te­nance of stylesheets. The IE hacks can be placed where they’re rel­e­vant in the stylesheet.

Cons

• Doesn’t this defeat the entire idea of sep­a­rat­ing out hacks from stan­dard CSS?

Does anyone else have opin­ions on the matter?

Via Yahoo News.

Safari is get­ting pretty slow with all of those tabs so I kind of needed to do a com­plete dump of the tabs. With­out fur­ther ado, here are the links (for my ben­e­fit as much as yours).

Wireframes

• Build­ing a Web­site Wire­frame in Illus­tra­tor
• Why You Should Create a Wire­frame First
• Wire­fram­ing With InDe­sign and Illus­tra­tor
• Wire­fram­ing Part II: Illus­tra­tor Basics

CSS Galleries

• CSSelite.com
• CSS Drive (This site appears to be down as of writ­ing this)

WordPress Themes (Inspiration)

• The­me­For­est
• WP Glam­our
• Cellar Heat: A Free Word­Press Theme

Photoshop and Illustrator Tutorials

• Create a Vibrant Modern Blog Design in Pho­to­shop
• Grunge Border
• Quickly Add Grunge To Text
• Illus­tra­tor Tuto­ri­als

Other Stuff

• Adobe Kuler
• 960 Grid System
• How to: CSS Large Back­ground
• Word­Press Developer’s Tool­box
• Remov­ing Cat­e­gory Base from Word­Press URLs

The mood in Boston is sour. My mood is sour. I so should have taken my roommate’s advice when draft­ing my fan­tasy league play­ers. She rec­om­mended not draft­ing my favorite team’s play­ers because if in the unlikely event they got injured (or played poorly), I would be doubly upset. I politely dis­agreed and drafted Tommy.

There are only two pos­i­tive things I can come up with regard­ing this dis­as­trous injury:

1. Matt Cassel played sur­pris­ingly well. He didn’t screw up once. ¹
2. I drafted Eli Man­ning as my second quar­ter­back. I get the best of both worlds here. If he man­ages to play well then my fan­tasy team will do well and I’ll be happy. If he man­ages to play very poorly, I’ll cackle and be happy.

Look­ing on the bright side, there are a lot of great play­ers on the Patri­ots team, even if they are a little long in the tooth. If every­body does their part, and maybe a little more, the team still might manage a descent season if Cassel can just keep the ball safe. There have been plenty of NFL teams that have done alright with lack­lus­ter quar­ter­backs. *Cough* Giants. Bears.

I sup­pose we’ll have to wait and see what hap­pens. For now, I’m very sad about season that I was so excited for. I didn’t expect the Patri­ots to be fan­tas­tic this year, but I was excited nev­er­the­less. Hope­fully the team can rally around the new play caller and still make a run at the play­offs. I think this will be Cassel’s last shot to make some­thing out of his NFL career. Hope­fully he does well.

1. Although even this is some­what depress­ing; the best I can say about him is that he didn’t screw up. I also thought that he was helped by the offen­sive line play­ing good and a great run­ning game that was absent the entire pre­sea­son.↩

During a screen­ing inter­view, I was asked how I would design a bike fit for some­one visu­ally impaired. I responded some­thing to the effect of, “What, like, for blind people?”, and she answered yes.

I thought for a moment and then I responded, “Well.. a blind person riding a bike doesn’t sound like a very safe idea, so I would make the bike sta­tion­ary, maybe with a fan blow­ing in the person’s face. He prob­a­bly wouldn’t even know the difference.”

She was speechless.

So bad. Although, if I was asked a sim­i­lar ridicu­lous ques­tion in an inter­view I would prob­a­bly react by think­ing of the most sar­cas­tic response I could. Good thing I already have a job.

Par­al­lax turns a selected ele­ment into a ‘window’, or view­port, and all its chil­dren into absolutely posi­tioned layers that can be seen through the view­port. These layers move in response to the mouse, and, depend­ing on their dimen­sions (and options for layer ini­tial­i­sa­tion), they move by dif­fer­ent amounts, in a par­al­laxy kind of way.

This is pretty neat stuff. I’m rack­ing my brain trying to think of gra­tu­itous ways to use this in my next design project. So far I’m only think­ing of run­ning dogs…

3 Who, although a gifted aca­d­e­mic, is still a douche.

Full marks for honesty.

Via Kottke.

Exist­ing users is a dif­fer­ent story though. They already have their home direc­to­ries. Depend­ing on how many users you have, adding/deleting files from you old users can be a daunt­ing task. Ten users is easy enough, but 50 is silly and over 100 is ridiculous.

Long ago I wrote a series of scripts (well actu­ally just one) that I use and modify for what­ever files I need to change. I basi­cally just loops through each home folder in a spec­i­fied direc­tory. It’s really a pretty basic script. Here’s an exam­ple of one that I was using:

# Copy new dock and fix permissions

echo "\ncpdock.sh"

dir=`ls $1`

cd ${1:?"No directory specified!"}

echo "PWD = `pwd`"

echo "\n$dir\n"

for folder in $dir; do
    echo "...copying dock plist to $folder"
    cp /com.apple.dock.plist $folder/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.plist
    chmod -R 700 $folder/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.plist
    chown -R $folder:staff $folder/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.plist
done

That’s easy enough. It’s kind of a pain though to modify the scripts all the time. Also, it’s very dif­fi­cult (and scary) to try and explain how to use these scripts to my less Bash-​inclined co-​workers.

The other day I found this great little piece of soft­ware writ­ten by Nicole Jacque called Home Direc­tory Helper. It does exactly what all of my scripts did, except with an easier to use GUI inter­face. Very nice, and highly recommended.

Let me get this part out of the way first: Dear EA Sports. For the love of god, please hire some frack­ing user inter­face design­ers. The user inter­face for Madden sucks, and seems to get worse every year. Quit spend­ing all of your time making every­thing glossy and shiny. Just make it better. If you’re unsure of how to do this, WWDC might be a good place to start.

Moving on. My first impres­sions of the game went some­thing like this:

• Load­ing, Wait­ing, Load­ing, Waiting
• Madden Test. Neat idea. What’s with the weird glassy field and see-​through players?
• Appar­ently I am close to all-​madden on offense, but am still at rookie level on defense. Inter­est­ing. The com­bined IQ puts me at below 500.
• Load­ing, Wait­ing, Load­ing, Waiting
• Start up fran­chise mode. No need to save, I just started.
• Start first game. Oh wait, I can prac­tice for points. Umm, really con­fus­ing, I have no idea what I’m doing. OK, I com­pletely bug­gered up what­ever that was. Let’s start the god­damned game already.
• Load­ing, Wait­ing, Load­ing, Waiting
• Because of my offense in the madden test, play­ing offense now is com­pletely impos­si­ble for me. I quickly throw one inter­cep­tion and punt twice. Despite my rookie-​level defen­sive set­tings, the Jaguars quickly pass and rush their way down the field and score on me. This is not going very well.
• What’s with all of the ridicu­lous camera angles?
• Is it just me or is the game-​pace faster?
• Some­time in the late first quar­ter or early second, I call a play from the play call screen. The sound con­tin­ues, but the screen freezes at the play call. I hear my play­ers run the play I called, the con­troller vibrates, announc­ers con­tinue talk­ing. I can actu­ally con­tinue pick­ing plays an even call time­outs, but the screen is com­pletely frozen. I have to restart the game.
• At this point, I real­ize that I had not saved any­thing yet and decide that maybe I would rather do some­thing else.

That was Wednes­day night. Thurs­day night went like this:

• Repeat all steps from Wednes­day night

So basi­cally, I’ve attempted to play exactly two fran­chise games. I have not even made it to half­time with­out the game freez­ing on me. WTF EA Sports. This is the sor­ri­est excuse of a release game. It is unplayable. Even worse, a quick Google search shows that I’m not the only one:

Keep in mind here that this game is brand new and I played it exactly twice; both times it froze. My PS3 is only a couple of months old as well. The offi­cial EA Forum has a thread about the freez­ing issues. It’s cur­rently 37 pages long.

I was really hoping that this game would look great on the PS3. I didn’t expect for it not to work at all. I really hope that that class action law­suit suc­ceeds and they sue the shit out of EA.

lsof | grep DISKNAME

Read the full tip from Mac OS X Hints.

This updated quick­start guide is very sim­i­lar to the Tiger Server Quick­start Guide posted in 2005. It’s pri­mary pur­pose is to get you up and run­ning quickly, over­com­ing common hur­dles such as DNS and bind­ing con­fu­sions. With the move to launchd over cron, those steps are now included as well.

You can grab the pdf at AFP548.com.

The arti­cle includes some par­tic­u­larly good instruc­tions on using and set­ting up rsync, launchd, and Net­work Home Redirector.

Via Infinity’s End.

At my work we use an OS X server to host the home direc­to­ries of all of our users who log in to our lab com­put­ers. We cur­rently only sup­port OS X clients, so we’re only doing this over AFP. Last semes­ter we used a Tiger server and clients, but this summer we are upgrad­ing every­thing to Leopard.

After set­ting up a test client com­puter in Direc­tory Util­ity (used to be Direc­tory Access in Tiger) to con­nect to our server I fig­ured we were good to log in with one of migrated user accounts. We don’t do bind­ing or Active Direc­tory or really any­thing com­pli­cated so usu­ally the process is pretty straightforward.

After set­ting up the client and restart­ing, I attempted to log on using one of our net­work users, and was met with this big fat error message:

Not only did not log­ging in not work, but the entire descrip­tion of the error read “Logging in to the account failed because an error occurred”. Gee, thanks Apple. Very useful.

This error wasn’t entirely for­eign to me. I remem­bered seeing it occa­sion­ally in Tiger, but couldn’t remem­ber if we had ever estab­lished a cause, let alone a solu­tion. Just for kicks I tried log­ging on with the same account on one of our older Tiger clients (that was known to work with the old Tiger server). The mes­sage is slightly more ver­bose, but gen­er­ally still the same:

I knew that AFP was work­ing because we had some share points up and run­ning. So, AFP and at least some level of authen­ti­ca­tion were work­ing. After inspect­ing the server fire­wall and open direc­tory logs, as well as the client logs, it seemed clear that the user was authen­ti­cat­ing prop­erly. It was some­thing that was hap­pen­ing after the actual suc­cess­ful authen­ti­ca­tion that was caus­ing the error message.

After some research and thought, it occurred to me that it was very likely that there was some sort of con­fig­u­ra­tion gone awry with the actual home direc­to­ries. Then I real­ized that I had com­pletely neglected to actu­ally con­fig­ure the old home direc­to­ries on our server to be shared at all!

So basi­cally the user was log­ging in and authen­ti­cat­ing suc­cess­fully. Then when the client asked for the home direc­tory the server was like, what home direc­tory? And the client was like aww shit. I’m gonna log you out right now ’cause I need your home to work. And the server was like, all right, fine. Some­thing like that.

After some simple home direc­tory shar­ing con­fig­u­ra­tions, every­thing was run­ning with­out another episode. Sigh.

After an ini­tial false start attempt­ing to simply upgrade the server, I ended up simply installing the Leop­ard server from a blank disk. This seemed to take care of most of the really strange things that were hap­pen­ing after the upgrade.

This par­tic­u­lar server is of the head­less XServe vari­ety, so we pri­mar­ily use Apple Remote Desk­top to access it in addi­tion to the Server Admin Tools and SSH. Since installing Leop­ard on the server how­ever, I’ve been notic­ing that at times it is acting errat­i­cally. Usu­ally I’ll first notice that the server will either stop show­ing up in ARD or it show up as black, indi­cat­ing that there is no ARD agent on the com­puter. I’ve tried restart­ing the com­puter, which will fix it, but that’s not a very good solu­tion for obvi­ous reasons.

I had also noticed while using Server Admin that some­times the server CPU is run­ning at com­pletely full capac­ity, like in this screenshot:

The other day the server stopped respond­ing in ARD again. As usual though, I was still able to access it through both Server Admin and SSH. After a little research, I found this useful page of com­mands, which includes this one-​liner:

sudo /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Resources/kickstart -restart -agent -menu

Run­ning this com­mand restarts the ARD Agent, which is what we want if it is frozen. Once I did this things got a little better, and the server came up in ARD as active. I tried con­trol­ling the server through ARD, but no dice, still no connection.

At this point I noticed that there was a user logged on to the server and I remem­bered that I had also been having prob­lems with VNCDragHelper freez­ing. I found this on an Apple dis­cus­sion page:

When remotely man­ag­ing an XServe with OS 10.5.1 from a 10.4.11 client with ARD 3.2, sev­eral times (3 up till now) the server UI becomes unre­spon­sive, at least finder. This even gets worse when trying to start the Appli­ca­tion Mon­i­tor, then also the Dock freezes, and the Appli­ca­tion Mon­i­tor UI never opens. When doing an ssh> sudo top, it shows that both “Application Monitor” and “VNCDragHelper” do con­sume almost 100% CPU. Luck­ily only on a Single core, but that keeps two cores (one proces­sor 100% busy). kil­lall “Activity Monitor” brings the activ­ity mon­i­tor down, when send­ing it with Remote Desk­top Unix command.

Per­fect, that must be it. In SSH, I ran the fol­low­ing command:

sudo killall -9 VNCDragHelper

I also killed the loginwindow because that appeared to be frozen as well (judg­ing from the top com­mand that I ran):

sudo killall -9 loginwindow

Sud­denly after run­ning both those com­mands, the server leapt back to respon­sive­ness. I was able to access it in ARD with­out prob­lem. Also, after about an hour I checked the CPU dia­gram in Server Admin and was able to see a notice­able improvement.

Now that’s a sight for sore eyes. For ref­er­ence, I was run­ning 10.5.3 and ARD 3.1 when this prob­lem hap­pened. I’m not sure that any­thing has been fixed in 10.5.4 though.

One of my favorites:

Via Kottke.

I fired up Mail and clicked on the note icon and…nothing hap­pened. Hmmm, check the Menu bar. Go to File → New Note…nothing again. Well okay, I thought to myself, some­things wrong here. Maybe I should do a Google search. Hmmm, what to search. Mail Notes Error. Umm, okay too generic, I’ll try being more spe­cific. Apple Mail error open­ing new note. Grrr. Try sev­eral other search strings. #@$%*! ¹

Okay, so it’s become clear to me at this point that Googling the prob­lem is just not going to work. I decide to fire up Con­sole to see if there are any enlight­en­ing error codes. Con­sole does at least offer me some­thing, in the form of “Mail[471] font-​family cannot be nil”.

Hmm, that looks like gib­ber­ish to me. I do some more unsuc­cess­ful Google searches. Finally, I decide to attempt to decode that error again. That error means that some­where a font family is not selected or unavail­able. We know it’s hap­pen­ing when a new note is being cre­ated. I opened up Mail again and started pur­su­ing the pref­er­ences. Low and behold, under the tab for Fonts & Colors, I found this:

The field for the Note font is com­pletely blank. I selected a font and attempted to open a new note. Success!

As it turned out, this hap­pened to be a very simple solu­tion for a very silly prob­lem. That solu­tion took me over an hour to figure out. Unfor­tu­nately, I’ve never been able to figure out why that field was blank in the first place. I wonder how many other people have had this exact same prob­lem and just given up on trying to figure it out.

1. Side Rant: What exactly was Apple think­ing when they named their email client “Mail.” Could they have thought of a worse name? It is impos­si­ble to search for infor­ma­tion about a prob­lem with the pro­gram because “mail” could refer to so many things. It’s kind of like buying a com­puter, that has the model name of “computer.” Then say said com­puter one day won’t start up. You find another com­puter and start doing a search for the prob­lem. Your query string is going to look some­thing like this: [brand name] com­puter won’t start. Com­pletely use­less.↩

Here is my cute little guy, which I named Morsel.

The best part is when you get to go take the crea­ture for a spin and tell it to do all sorts of pre­pro­grammed actions. You can also take video of your crea­ture in this screen.

Make sure to check this one out. I can’t wait until the game comes out in September.

This build­ing has always amazed me ever since the first time I stum­bled upon it. It is quite an impres­sive sight. Oddly enough, I live within walk­ing dis­tance of this build­ing. I didn’t real­ize until I read the Wikipedia entry on the build­ing that sev­eral notable people have their offices in the Stata Center, includ­ing Noam Chom­sky, Tim Berners-​Lee and Richard Stallman.

The fun­ni­est thing for me about the archi­tec­ture of the build­ing is that it has always given me a very vis­ceral reminder of Ayn Rand’s novel The Foun­tain­head. Every time I see the build­ing I think that it looks like some­thing Howard Roark would have built.

I have no idea why I always have this reac­tion, because when I actu­ally stop to think about it, I believe that Roark would hate the Stata Center. He would hate it because it doesn’t make any sense. Excerpts from the Wiki entry only high­light this fact:

There is also one lec­ture room where, because of the slight lean of the wall panels, some people have been known to expe­ri­ence ver­tigo. Sound insu­la­tion is almost absent. The build­ing has also been crit­i­cized as insen­si­tive to the needs of its inhab­i­tants, poorly designed for day-​to-​day use[...]

Also later in the entry:

On Octo­ber 31, 2007,[9] MIT sued[10] archi­tect Frank Gehry and the con­struc­tion com­pany, Skan­ska USA Build­ing Inc., for “providing defi­cient design ser­vices and drawings” which caused leaks to spring, masonry to crack, mold to grow, drainage to back up, and falling ice and debris to block emer­gency exits.[8] A Skan­ska spokesper­son said that prior to con­struc­tion Gehry ignored warn­ings from Skan­ska and a con­sult­ing com­pany regard­ing flaws in his design of the amphithe­ater, and rejected a formal request from Skan­ska to modify the design.

This is most cer­tainly not some­thing that Roark would have done. If not this though, what would one of Roark’s build­ings actu­ally have looked like? It is appar­ently a common spec­u­la­tion that Rand based Roark’s archi­tec­ture on that of Frank Lloyd Wright. Although she has specif­i­cally denied this, it seems to me to be a very close match based upon her descrip­tions of Roark’s architecture.

When I updated to Fire­fox 3, I imme­di­ately noticed that Book­marks were not vis­i­ble under book­marks menu. The Search engine field had a generic icon and when I selected ‘Manage Search Engines’, the dialog box was frozen and I couldn’t get out of it with­out quit­ting Fire­fox. When I tried to enter a URL into the URL field and press ‘enter’, noth­ing hap­pens. How­ever, when double-​click on a URL in an e-mail mes­sage, that appears to work. […] When I switched to a local admin account (i.e., Fire­fox pro­file on the local hard drive), it seems to work fine. How­ever, when I switch back to my net­work home account (on our XServe), it still dis­plays the prob­lems described above. I tried other user accounts on our XServe with the same problems.

This is kind of unbe­liev­able to me that Fire­fox 3 was released with such a show-​stopping bug on the Mac side. I’m pretty sure that most com­pa­nies that use Macs use them with net­worked home direc­to­ries (at least in the Aca­d­e­mic world). It’s good to know though before I start adding Fire­fox to the images for fall semester.

Appar­ently this is a doc­u­mented bug and as a com­menter sug­gested, will be fixed in the future. You can read the bug track in Bugzilla to see how the fix is progressing.

Via Kottke.

The class-​action law­suit, launched by two gamers in Wash­ing­ton, DC, and Cal­i­for­nia last week, alleges that EA is engag­ing in “blatantly anti­com­pet­i­tive conduct” by rais­ing the price of its foot­ball game offer­ings after secur­ing key licens­ing deals.

Hurray for gamers.

For those of you who are unfa­mil­iar with the issue, Elec­tronic Arts is the maker of the very pop­u­lar Madden Foot­ball game series. One of the big rea­sons for the recent suc­cess of the series is that since 2005, it is the only game that is licensed to use the real NFL teams and play­ers in the games. Many gamers have been frus­trated with this arrange­ment because they feel that this licens­ing deal pro­vides EA with very little incen­tive to actu­ally improve the game, because there are no real com­peti­tors. From the Wikipedia entry:

In 2005, the pro­duc­ers of the Madden games, EA Sports, signed an exclu­sive licens­ing deal through 2009 with the NFL and the NFLPA to give them the exclu­sive right to use the NFL’s teams, sta­di­ums and play­ers in a video game, some­thing which has been widely crit­i­cized (this deal has since been extended through 2012). This exclu­sive license has put an end to com­pe­ti­tion in NFL video games and, some have sug­gested, this gives EA less incen­tive to main­tain qual­ity and a greater oppor­tu­nity to increase prices.

I think that this law­suit is a win-​win for gamers. The Madden series is not bad, by any stretch. In fact, I just got Madden 2008 last Christ­mas and was blown away by how much fun it was. The point is that if you are a real NFL fan and want to play a game with the real teams and play­ers, this is the only game to choose from. That’s a huge advan­tage for EA, and puts a lot of poten­tial game makers out of the market. Lack of com­pe­ti­tion is always a loss for the consumer.

I don’t think there’s a gamer out there who loves foot­ball (and even loves the Madden series) who will argue that EA has stopped releas­ing any­thing more sub­stan­tial than yearly roster updates in regards to the Madden series. That’s a shame.

The game will present stu­dents with “real issues and real problems,” O’Connor said, giving them the oppor­tu­nity to “step into the shoes of a judge, a leg­is­la­tor, an exec­u­tive - teach them how to think through and ana­lyze prob­lems, take action and voice opin­ions to their elected representatives.” As an exam­ple, she cited an early exer­cise cen­ter­ing on First Amend­ment rights, using cases like Tinker v. Des Moines and “Bong Hits 4 Jesus.”

In addi­tion to The Escapist arti­cle, The New York Times also pub­lished the arti­cle “Sandra Day O’Connor’s Plan for Joy­stick Jus­tice” in yesterday’s paper.

One quote that caught my eye in the arti­cle from The Escapist:

“Only one-​third of Amer­i­cans can name the three branches of government,” O’Connor said in a keynote address to the Games For Change con­fer­ence, “but two-​thirds can name a judge on Amer­i­can Idol.”

While I under­stand O’Connor’s point, that doesn’t really seem to be a fair com­par­i­son. Wouldn’t it make more sense to say that that x many people can name all three judges on Amer­i­can Idol? I’m sure that a lot more than one-​third of Amer­i­cans can name at least one branch of our gov­ern­ment, while (pos­si­blly) less than two-​thirds of people can name all three judges on Amer­i­can Idol.

I, for the record, can name all three of both. OMG I’m so smaht¹.

1. Pro­nounce pho­net­i­cally² for Boston accent effect.↩
2. There is a sad, sad irony in the fact that I just had a really hard time fig­ur­ing out how to spell pho­netic (and wasn’t even close). Thank good­ness for Goolge again.↩

The dif­fer­ence between a repub­lic and a democ­racy is rather sim­i­lar to the dif­fer­ence between a jury and a lynch mob.

This quote was brought to us in a com­ment by AJCal­houn on the Salon.com book review of Rick Shenkman’s Just How Stupid Are We?.