My Only U.S. Election Post (or why I'm watching Game of Thrones instead of the debates)

The U.S. election is in full swing, and like the two previous elections I've been in the States for, and like so many car accidents, it's hard to look away. I will say this about U.S. politics: it's freaking entertaining. After the emergence of the "forty-seven percent" video, it's so easy to deconstruct the libertarian mindset being advanced by this country-club millionaire and all the country-club millionaires that he represents, that it hardly even seems worth trying.

The problem is that after all the hoopla of the conventions, after all the speculation and the debates and the polls, what's really going to happen? Not in November, but in 2013, and in the next four years. Mitt Romney has been next to silent on what he would do as president, even if he won both the House and Senate. Barack Obama is pretty unlikely to get a House majority or a significant margin in the Senate, and we've already seen the best he could do when he had both: a health care bill so watered down that it may as well have been  a Republican proposal (and was, but let's not even go there).

My first contribution to the Brandeis Science blog

My first post at a widely-read (ie, not this) blog is based on my friend Dennis Brietsprecher's recent paper in Sciecne.

The Information Diet: Some Thoughts

I recently read "The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption" by Clay Johnson, on my Kindle. Kindle allows you to immediately post to Facebook when you've finished a book, thus telling the world that you read and what you're reading. You don't necessarily need to say what you thought of the book, but I suppose it's implied that if you made it through the whole thing and chose to share it with the world, then it must be good enough. Indeed, I liked this book, or at least parts of it. It's ironic, however, to finish a book about information obesity and then immediately post about it on Facebook, so I waited a couple of weeks for my thoughts to digest, first.