I’m a sucker for Carrell and Colbert. But even if one isn’t, this is truly awesome: Steve and Stephen impromptu singing the national anthem.

[DAP: Office Tally]

Sen. McCain raised the idea of joint town hall meetings with Sen. Obama, you say?

I [McCain] propose these town hall meetings be as free from the regimented trappings, rules and spectacle of formal debates as possible, and that we pledge to the American people we will not allow the idea to die on the negotiation table as our campaigns work out the details. I suggest we agree to participate in at least ten town halls once a week with the first on June 11 or 12 in New York City at Federal Hall until the week before the Democratic Convention begins at locations to be determined by our campaigns.

And Sen. Obama said he’d be interested (though not quite so soon)?

“I look forward to, you know, having more than just the three traditional debates that we’ve seen in recent presidential contests,” [Obama] said.

No moderators? Both candidates explaining their policy views and proposals to the public? I hope I’m not the only one who thinks that this could be really, really great. Not only does it allow the voting public to see these candidates in a more informal (and arguably more substantive) environment but – shock of all shocks – the candidates would actually be able to regularly talk with each other instead of at (which mostly means past) each other.

Now, one might argue that this format favors McCain. He is clearly stronger in this type of setting than he is when giving set speeches; his fine-but-flat speech on Tuesday was a good example. Obama is clearly inspiring and effective in delivering set speeches, but he hasn’t always been the greatest in a debate setting. But a town hall meeting is (hopefully) different from a moderated debate. I get the sense that, once one gives Obama the chance to elaborate on his views, he does so with nuance and articulation (in the same way that McCain generally does).  Both of these men are smart and articulate, and both are capable of defending their policy views in a nuanced way in a public setting. I don’t think this format inherently favors either one of them.

As someone for whom this race is currently a toss-up, I really want to see what each of these men brings to the table. If both men are interested in truly moving past some of the partisan rancor that has enveloped American politics over the last quarter century, I think this would be an excellent place to start.

It’s Guillermo del Toro, according to the New Zealand Herald.

Del Toro directed Pan’s Labyrinth, which was a beautiful film in all aspects. I think he’ll bring even more visual richness to Middle Earth than Peter Jackson did. A fine choice, indeed.

[Hat tip: PTWSTSTS]

One of the reasons I continue to subscribe to the New York Times (by Kindle now) is the glut of excellent long form journalism. This is why I subscribe to The New Yorker, too.* Finding the time to read long articles is a trick sometimes, but they’re almost always worth it.**

I had occasion, over the weekend, to read such an article: “Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty?” The basic premise of the article is that cellphones are making life all over the world more efficient, and will continue to do so. But while we in the developed world have largely taken the benefits of cellphones for granted, people in the developing world are using these little devices as in some incredibly innovative ways, including mobile banking, commerce, news, and rallies. One of the most intriguing notions the article raises is that cellphones represent a “fixed identity point” in an increasingly fluid world.

Some of the best quotes of the article are after the jump, but you really should read the whole thing yourself. Here’s perhaps my favorite quote:

Nokia’s temporary design studio sat in a rented two-room concrete hut at the intersection of two busy dirt lanes, across from a woman selling chunks of watermelon and peeled lemons and next to a large water tank labeled “Church of God.” There was a sheet of fabric strung up in front, with neat painted lettering that read: “Your Dream Phone. Share it with the world.” … One Liberian refugee wanted to outfit a phone with a land-mine detector so that he could more safely return to his home village. In the Dharavi slum of Mumbai, people sketched phones that could forecast the weather since they had no access to TV or radio. Muslims wanted G.P.S. devices to orient their prayers toward Mecca. Someone else drew a phone shaped like a water bottle, explaining that it could store precious drinking water and also float on the monsoon waters. In Jacarèzinho, a bustling favela in Rio, one designer drew a phone with an air-quality monitor. Several women sketched phones that would monitor cheating boyfriends and husbands. Another designed a “peace button” that would halt gunfire in the neighborhood with a single touch.

You should also check out the website of Jan Chipchase, a Nokia researcher and the human subject of the article. It looks pretty interesting.

If you’ve been wondering what the heck’s going on in “the markets,” apparently you’re not alone:

I’m here to urge you not to feel sheepish. This may not be entirely comforting, but your confusion is shared by many people who are in the middle of the crisis.

This entirely un-comforting though comes from today’s “Economic Scene” by David Leonhardt, the New York Times economic columnist who writes clear, readable columns about economics every single Wednesday.

Leonhardt lays out what’s happening in pretty clear English - at least the clearest that I’ve come across thus far. I’m not going to try to summarize here because Leonhart is much smarter and more articulate than I. But I encourage you to read the whole article.

What does one do at Best Buy when one is functionally unemployed? Play around on the gadgets, of course. Sure, it’s cool to play the video games, but who can walk by a Mac and resist its shiny-ness. It’s alluring. I’m currently writing this post on a 20″ widescreen iMac. It sure is purdy. And I’m being told (actually, told repeatedly) by the television loop that a Mac is awesome and really easy. I can create a blog with it and everything. Wow! Unfortunately, it is one gajillion dollars. D’oh!

All kidding aside, this is a pretty sweet machine. Someday…

(Though the timing is out of whack, it could be kind of cool to read this post before reading this one)

On Sunday, Kenya’s president was named the winner of a perilously close (and highly disputed) national election, throwing the country into turmoil.

Thousands of young men burst out of Kibera, a shantytown of one million people, waving sticks, smashing shacks, burning tires and hurling stones. Soldiers poured into the streets to fight them. In several cities across Kenya, witnesses said, gangs went house to house, dragging out people of certain tribes and clubbing them to death.

“It’s war,” said Hudson Chate, a mechanic here. “Tribal war.”

The ruling party certified the vote on Sunday, which gave the president a 2 percentage point victory (46 percent to 44 percent) over the opposition candidate who, until Saturday, looked poised to win quite handily. The final ‘official’ tally put forth by the government was 4,584,721 votes for the President compared with 4,352,993 for the opposition candidate.

The trouble is that, according to election observers, the ballot tallying was rigged.

“The presidential elections were flawed,” said Alexander Graf Lambsdorff, the chief European observer.

Koki Muli, co-chairwoman of the Kenya Election Domestic Observation Forum, said she was in the room on Sunday when the election commission was presented with dozens of suspicious tally sheets — some missing signatures, others missing stamps — and most of them were from the president’s stronghold of central Kenya. In some areas, more people voted for the president than there were registered voters. “I saw this with my own eyes,” she said.

Ms. Muli said that 75 of the 210 constituencies — meaning more than one-third of the vote — had serious question marks and that the election chairman initially agreed to investigate. But later on Sunday he changed his mind.

One sad fact among many in this conflict is that the violence is primarily driven by ethnic and tribal rivalries. The President is part of the Kikuyu tribe, which has been the dominant ethnic group since Kenya’s independence in 1963. Minority ethnic groups, led by the Luo, feel cheated out of a legitimate victory. As a result, violence has erupted across the country between the Luo and the Kikuyus, which has left over 100 dead thus far.

After three days of rioting, some streets in Nairobi are beginning to look like war zones. Trucks filled with soldiers rumbled through a wasteland of burned cars and abandoned homes, their tires crunching over broken glass. Gangs of young men have built roadblocks between neighborhoods of the Kikuyus, Mr. Kibaki’s tribe, and the Luos, the tribe of Raila Odinga, the top opposition leader, who narrowly lost the election. …

Witnesses said that in some areas mobs had stopped cars and pulled out passengers. They demanded identification cards to determine whether they were Kikuyu — one can often tell by the name — and if so, they were lynched. Six Kikuyus were hacked to death in Mombasa, on Kenya’s eastern coast, Agence France-Presse reported. …

The most intense fighting, though, is in western Kenya, Mr. Odinga’s stronghold, where a mix of hooliganism, political protest and ethnic violence has taken dozens of lives. The police have responded by shooting looters on sight and ordering a curfew in Kisumu, barring people from leaving home at night or walking around during the day in groups of more than two.

This kind of ethnic division and violence is reminiscent of so many countries that it is difficult to recall them all. Most immediately, it brings to mind the sectarian violence between Sunnis and Shi’ites in Iraq. One interesting thing to note, however, is that there are some who are refusing to fall into tribal warfare in Kenya, as in Iraq.

[A] lot of people have not given up on democracy. On Monday, several hundred men in a mixed Kikuyu-Luo slum held a peace march. They met in the road that divides their enclaves, distinctions nobody really cared about until a few days ago, and spoke about putting down their weapons and working out their problems.

“For all these years, we’ve been living together,” said Stanley Maina, a Kikuyu shopkeeper. “Why are we fighting now?”

This is a similar refrain that many ordinary Iraqis have voiced over the past three years. Before Saddam’s demise, the distinction between Sunni and Shi’ite was almost non-existent. Now, it’s almost all that matters in most cases.

This story could (and the cynical side of me says it will) get buried by the news cycle of the new year, the Bhutto assassination, and Thursday’s Iowa Caucus. That’s unfortunate, I think.

I encourage you to go here and here to see some of the astonishing pictures taken of this crisis.

[Disputed Vote Plunges Kenya Into Bloodshed - NYT]

[Fighting Intensifies After Election in Kenya - NYT]

The gems on this list are among the most compelling pieces of evidence that the writers’ strike is such a bummer. Even though the stars deliver them, it’s the writers who come up with this stuff. Here’s hoping the dispute gets settled soon. The best of the bunch (in my estimation) are:

Scientists say because of global warming they expect the world’s oceans to rise four and a half feet. The scientists say this can mean only one thing — Gary Coleman is going to drown. - Conan O’Brien

Senator Obama is not the first African American to run for president, but he’s the first African American to have a prayer. Which is ironic, since two of the others were reverends. - Stephen Colbert

Disney’s making a movie starring a black princess. And we only had to get through a Native American princess, an Arab princess, a Chinese princess, even a half-fish princess. Not to mention the countless cats, dogs, mice, elephants, talking cars, and whatever the hell Stitch was. - Larry Widmore, The Daily Show

‘Earlier tonight, after serving eight years in jail, assisted-suicide doctor Jack Kevorkian was on Larry King Live. When Kevorkian saw Larry King, he said, ‘I swear, he was like that when I got here. - Conan O’Brien

Barry Bonds is only three home runs away from becoming the all-time home-run king, and when it happens, I just hope he doesn’t get a big head. - David Letterman

My idea of getting lucky in the men’s room is when the motion sensor works on the faucet. - David Letterman

You can not take the hilarious black guy from the office. Stanley is part of what makes this branch so extraordinary — the bluesy wisdom, the sassy remarks, the crossword puzzles, the smile, those big watery red eyes. I don’t know how George Bush did it when Colin Powell left. - Michael Scott, The Office

[DAP: The Office_US)

Now that I’m done with grad school, I have my life back. I get to spend time with my wife and do the things that I want to do, one of which is reading for pleasure. And I love it. I’ve been able to read articles that I’ve been wanting to read for a while, but haven’t had the time. I also read Imperial Life in the Emerald City, a book about the first year under the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Iraq after Saddam was overthrown (which I plan to give fuller attention in the near future). For right now, however, I’ll just link to articles that I found particularly well-written and/or interesting over the last couple weeks. Be forewarned, this is a pretty long list, and it’s heavy on the New York Times and The New Yorker.

Even though companies would like you to believe that each new technological advance is revolutionary, few are. The iPod was revolutionary. The iPhone was, too. But perhaps, just maybe, the most revolutionary device to come out in 2007 was the Amazon Kindle, Amazon’s foray into the world of electronic readers. It may just change the way we read. I plan to write more about this in a forthcoming post. Presently, though, my purpose is to think out loud about the device itself. Sure, it has downsides. It’s ridiculously expensive, it’s still the first version, it’s a gadget (which means it’s breakable), and it’s aesthetically unpleasant (based, of course, on pictures, rather than a hands-on experience). The gargantuan Next Page and Previous Page buttons on either side of the device seem like a bad idea (both aesthetically and funcitonally). Here’s what it looks like:

See what I mean? Kinda boxy and unpleasant looking. There are, indeed, a couple of fairly* negative reviews out there worth considering that hit on some very salient points.

But oh man are there upsides.

For starters, the Kindle can hold up to 200 books, magazines, and/or newspapers at a time (and that’s before adding a SD memory card, which can bring that number into the thousands). Thus, it cuts down on the amount of physical clutter around the house. Physical books are nice; there’s a lot of sentimentality there. But they’re kind of a pain to move from place to place. And I haven’t read all the books I display anyway; I just have them there (in a sligthly unkempt, messy-genius sort of way, of course) to impress people. Also, the physical newspaper creates a huge mound of paper to recycle.

I’ve also read a good amount of reviews that are actually okay with the design and have lauded the reading experience on the Kindle. It uses the E Ink technology that mimics the experience of reading on a page. One review puts it this way:

That evening I just read. The Kindle disappears, and I realize how important the design of the book is … It is, in short, the most invisible piece of technology I can recall owning. This makes it supremely unsexy, and exactly right.

This sounds like precisely what a reading device should be. I should forget that I’m using a device and be immersed in the reading material. It’s also supposedly got outstanding battery life, meaning little worrying about charging or running out of juice.

The Kindle is also connected to Sprint’s EVDO network all the time for no extra fee (yet). Sure, the Sprint network lacks coverage in some areas. But the DC metro area isn’t one of them. This is cool not only because one can download a new book and be reading it within a few minutes, but, more importantly, because one can get a newspaper delivered automatically every morning. No more missed deliveries, no more suspending delivery when one goes on vacation, no more torn newspapers.

This leads to the most compelling reason (for me) to consider the Amazon Kindle: the price. I know what you’re thinking. “$400 for a device that you don’t need is too expensive to be justified.” Plus, the standard $9.99 price for bestsellers is a bit steep. But I’m a New York Times subscriber, and I’d really like to stay that way. It costs $13.99/month for a 7-day/week subscription on the Kindle, which comes out to a tidy $167.88 per year. By contrast, it costs $816.40/year for a 7-day/week paper subscription. The Kindle would be worth it within the first eight months. Yes, there are fewer pictures in the paper. Yes, I can get the Times for free on the internet (though I can’t take it with me). And yes, there’s no crossword in the Kindle edition. But the fact that I can get the same content plus the Kindle device is compelling. (Here’s a really good review of reading the Times on the Kindle) And, you can transfer PDFs and other documents to the Kindle either for free or a $.10 fee (paying Amazon to make the conversion). Now if only The New Yorker and The Economist would move to Kindle format, I’d be even more tempted.

So what do you think, dear reader? Do you think the Kindle is a worthwhile device? What would you change? Would you pull the trigger? Am I paying too much attention to the positive reviews? I probably won’t truly, realistically think about buying it** until an updated version is released or it comes down a bit in price. (And there’s that little detail about being sold out) I also wish there were a physical place to try the device out. Oh well. It’s fun to think and read about.

Now that I’m done with school, I plan to re-form the blogging habit (if the past activity on this blog can be called a habit). I’ve got posts brewing on Pan’s Labrynth, intelligence and reading, eating healthier, ‘God is Green’, ‘The Gods Aren’t Angry’, the 2008 presidential race, and many other things.

As I sat down to write substantive posts, I looked at the blog and decided to give it a face-lift. Who knows if it’ll stick, but I like it for now…

Two university professors (one a sociologist and one a statistician) wrote an interesting op-ed about performance enhancing drugs in baseball for today’s New York Times. They look at the players indicted by the Mitchell Report and analyze the data before and after each player allegedly started using performance enhancing drugs (ERA for 48 pitchers; batting averages, RBI, and slugging percentage for 23 hitters).

Surprisingly, they find that, according to these measures, performance enhancing drugs have generally had a neutral-to-negative effect on baseball players’ performance. While this is intriguing information, perhaps the most striking part comes near the end of the article, when they talk about Barry Bonds.

What should not be overlooked is that Bonds’s profile is strikingly like Babe Ruth’s high performance level until near the end of his career, with one standout home run year — a year in which other players on other teams also exceeded their previous levels.

During the last six years of Ruth’s 22-year career he hit 198 — or 28 percent — of his 714 home runs; Bonds, in the last six years of his 22-year career, hit 195 — 26 percent — of his 762. There is no convincing way to demonstrate that Bonds’s performance owed more to drugs than Ruth’s did to his prodigious use of alcohol and tobacco.

While this article is intriguing, and while they do address the issue, I think they place too little emphasis on the effects of aging and athletes trying to mitigate those effects. For example, with the Ruth-Bonds comparison, Ruth was 35 to 40 years old in the last six years of his career while Bonds was 37 to 42 years old in the last six years of his career. This may not represent that big a difference, given the improved quality of life between 1935 and 2007, but it is worth mentioning, I think. (It would prove interesting to look at other top home run hitters to see what percentage of their home runs were hit in the last six years of their career)  Also, they find that Roger Clemens’ ERA through 1997 was 0.32 points higher than his ERA from 1998 on (during which he was 35 to 44 years old). One could argue that, if he had not taken performance enhancing drugs, his performance would have declined more rapidly. Regardless, this is interesting stuff which deserves a closer look.

So, a funny thing just happened. I submitted my last final of graduate school. I’m done. And it’s a good feeling.

I have grand designs on doing more of the things that I want to do, reading more of the things that I want to read, blogging more frequently, and simply resting from the insane push of the previous month. Some of this will probably happen, but work is bound to keep me late, and things that I may not want to do are bound to pop up.

But I do know one thing,* I’ve finished grad school.**

I can’t thank my wife enough for her constant support and good humor. And now, I’m off to enjoy the feeling of reading a book for pleasure. w00t!