The hat problem:

Three players enter a room and a red or blue hat is placed on each person's head. The color of each hat is determined by a coin toss, with the outcome of one coin toss having no effect on the others. Each person can see the other players' hats but not his own.

No communication of any sort is allowed, except for an initial strategy session before the game begins. Once they have had a chance to look at the other hats, the players must simultaneously guess the color of their own hats or pass. The group shares a hypothetical $3 million prize if at least one player guesses correctly and no players guess incorrectly.

Can you figure out how to win more than 50 percent of the time? A Berkeley math professor did.

Weirdly, this does not appear to be a joke:

MURFREESBORO, Tenn. - Staff members of an elementary school staged a fictitious gun attack on students during a class trip, telling them it was not a drill as the children cried and hid under tables.

James Fallows on a tragic new twist to the U.S. Attorneys scandal: "If this is so, it is ... as low an act as any we have heard of in modern politics."

Fresh Air interview with Friday Night Lights exec-producer Peter Berg, which confirms two things I'd suspected about the show: (a) the actors are usually ad-libbing (something that's especially apparent in the scenes between Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton, who make me think Yeah, this is how married people talk), and (b) the people making the show really, really care about what they're doing.

This is kind of crazy: Time needs a short essay on evolutionary biologist and atheism cheerleader Richard Dawkins for its annual 100 Most Influential People list. So who do they commission to write it? Michael Behe, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, which advocates for "intelligent design." Behe, predictably, writes a piece that's critical of Dawkins and his ideas. When Time runs it, though, they add all kinds of language that makes Behe sound more respectful of Dawkins than he really is. The following seems to have been made up from whole cloth by an editor at Time:

It is a measure of the artful way Dawkins ... tells a tale and the rigor he brings to his thinking that even those of us who profoundly disagree with what he has to say can tip our hats to the way he has invigorated the larger debate.

Behe's original contains nothing about "the artful way Dawkins ... tells a tale," or "the rigor he brings to his thinking" (in fact, he accuses Dawkins of sloppy argument). It doesn't credit him with invigorating anything. Behe's only words of admiration are for Dawkins's "energy and determination."

This is unfair to Behe, obviously, but I don't give a fuck about Michael Behe, and if he ever gets sick, I hope he insists on limiting his treatment options to creationist medicine. The real problem is that the editorial process on display here -- Hey, here's thinking outside the box: what if we get one of those intelligent design guys to write about Dawkins? / I love it! / Say, did you see that Dawkins piece? Needs to be toned down a little ... -- trivializes and misrepresents the issue and goes out of its way to cast a creationist-in-disguise as a reasonable, respectful adversary with a plausible case.

Last year the city of São Paolo, Brazil, passed a law banning all outdoor advertisements. A set of beautiful photos of cityscapes that aren't trying to convince you to buy something is here. Wanted: a major American city with the stones to do this. I'm looking at you, San Francisco....

Is Karl Rove the new Hegel? From the are-you-sure-that's-what-you-mean? department:

A White House official who has been intimately involved in shaping Bush's war dialectic said the president will continue to talk about the "global war on the terror," even if it "doesn't fit a political science definition."

Geek fact-checking department: We were surprised to see this correction in the LA Times:

FOR THE RECORD:
Alan Moore book: An article in Sunday's Calendar section about comic-book artist Frank Miller referred to the graphic novel The Watchman by Alan Moore. The title is The Watchmen.

Well, no, actually -- the title is Watchmen. Still uncorrected are the assertions that Daredevil has no powers (he has preternatural senses, including radar, that compensate for his blindness) and that Miller is "the most important comic book artist of the last 25 years."

Shocking decline in literacy among moralizing newspaper columnists

Bad writing is everywhere, of course, but when it shows up in a piece bemoaning the death of reading, it's particularly enjoyable. The piece in question, by one Kathleen Parker, is from the Orlando Sentinel's website. The opening sentences have already been mocked by Bookslut, but they're worth mocking again here:

People who read books are different from other people. They're smarter for one thing. They're more sensual for another. They like to hold, touch and smell what they read.

That's funny for two reasons. (a) It's not true, or at least it's completely speculative. You can maybe infer that book-readers are smarter than average (although then you get into semantics about the word smarter), but you'd have to bring some data to substantiate the "more sensual" claim. (b) It's entirely off-point. If reading books is a good thing, that has nothing to do with what books feel like or smell like.

Then there's this funny thing Parker keeps doing where she uses hyperbole -- a legitimate linguistic device with a long pedigree -- and then turns around and apologizes for using it.

Soon, who knows? Maybe we'll be burning books in the town square chanting: We don't need no dadgum books. We got Innernet porn 'n' satellite TeeVee! OK, so maybe the end of civilization isn't nigh, but the systematic gutting of culture from newspapers is symptomatic of a broadening illiteracy that bodes ill for the republic. [Italics mine]

If you think a book-burning riff will help make your point, go for it. If you think it's a bit far-fetched and might undercut the seriousness of your argument, leave it out. (I'm with option B -- people don't burn things that they don't give a shit about -- but it's your call.) But why on earth would you include it and then dismiss it as unrealistic? Parker does something similar in the last graf:

The loss of yet another book editor and the homogenization (or possible loss) of another review section may not cause the Earth to shift on its axis, but it is symbolic of the devaluing of American letters.

Why raise the possibility of the Earth shifting on its axis only to dismiss it?

Parker's main point is that newspapers that are eliminating book-review sections are "apparent signatories to a suicide pact."

From a practical standpoint, [such cuts make] no sense. Clue: People who read newspapers are also likely book readers. So why do newspaper editors and publishers think that killing one of the few features that readers might -- big word here -- READ is a smart move in an era of newspaper decline?

Because the people who run newspapers have never thought about any of this even once in their lives, and they need Kathleen Parker to tell them which side their bread is buttered on.

Listen, Kathleen: I'm as anxious about the decline in book-reading as you are. (I am, after all, writing a book, and I'm hoping there will be people to buy it when I'm done.) I like book reviews too, maybe more than you do: when you say that Florence King, of the National Review's Misanthrope's Corner, "elevated book reviewing to a literary art form," it makes me wonder if a voracious reader like yourself has gotten around to Virginia Woolf or Edmund Wilson. But if there's one thing book-reading in America doesn't need, it's an illiterate newspaper columnist for a champion.

Terror

Of all the scary shit that has happened in the past seven and a half years -- the stolen election, the people crashing planes into buildings, the "suspension" of civil liberties, the trumped-up intelligence, the misbegotten war, the failure to plan for entirely foreseeable events, the insistence on "staying the course" when any hope of success is gone and on sacrificing human lives to avoid embarrassment, the contempt for international institutions, the illegal domestic spying, the politicization of every arm of the executive branch -- the one that I can never quite forget about while I'm watching The Office, the one that has turned into a persistent hum of terror at the back of my head, is the indefinite detention of hundreds of foreign nationals on little or no evidence without trial or appeal, also known as "Guantanamo Bay." I often find myself trying to avoid reading about it, it scares me so much.

Here's a Peabody Award-winning episode of This American Life, originally broadcast last year, about what happens at Guantanamo and how we got to this sorry pass. (I guess they're taking another break from documenting liberal upper-middle-class existence.) It includes interviews with two former detainees. (Ira Glass begins the program by pointing out how rarely we see interviews with ex-Guantanamo inmates on TV or in the paper.) You can download it to your iPod or read the transcript. It will make you think about Kafka's The Trial, and about Orwell's 1984, and about the stories we used to hear about the USSR, and about what the hell has happened to this country.

Have you, like me, been wondering: why the fuck is Alberto Gonzales still running the Department of Justice? It can't just be Bush's famous "loyalty," can it?

Well, it isn't. In an LA Times op-ed, Elizabeth Holtzman explains the real reason.

Everyone agrees that the New York subway map is impossible to read. Eddie Jabour is trying to do something about it. Check out his maps here.

Long piece by the Voice's J. Hoberman on the brief, weird stardom of Elliott Gould, who happens to be my ego-ideal.

Curious about how Zack and I used to spend our time c. 1984? Click here.

The first Thursday of May is designated National Day of Prayer by Congress. (Apparently it was originally an interfaith thing, but it's been hijacked by the Christian right.) So here's a good idea: atheists are organizing to give blood en masse, in "a nationwide action which we hope will point out that there are alternatives to silently beseeching a deity to perform miracles."

It's particularly funny watching David Brooks flail around trying to make sense of Darwinism while Robert Wright, who wrote the book on it, is a guest columnist. Today he nails the kind of piece Brooks was trying to write on Thursday. (Wright is kind of my hero, and his The Moral Animal and, especially, Nonzero are crucial pieces of my mental furniture.)

Liberals - just how stupid are they?

OK, so John McCain is a psychopath -- this we already knew. (What the "Bomb Iran" thing most reminds me of is Ronald Reagan's joke about "We begin bombing in five minutes.") But why is MoveOn.org buying airtime to point this out? McCain is struggling to convince Republican primary voters that he's not too liberal. An attack by MoveOn can only help him.

I can see three possibilities:
(a) MoveOn thinks McCain is the weakest of the Republican candidates, and they're trying to help him in the primaries so he'll be defeated by the Democratic candidate;
(b) MoveOn thinks McCain is likely to win the primaries (despite all signs to the contrary), and they're starting the general election campaign early;
(c) MoveOn is trying to raise money from a bunch of fucking idiots who don't understand how elections work.

Please vote in the comments, or let me know if I've missed something.

Parody newspaper completes descent into self-parody

I've noticed a miniature This American Life backlash lately, prompted by the launch of the TV show (which I haven't seen, because like the rest of the American people I do not get Showtime). As someone who still likes the radio version of TAL (or, more accurately, as someone who recently started listening to it again because they've begun podcasting it), I think most of the criticism (I'm looking at you here, Virginia Heffernan) is kind of petty, ignoring the things that are excellent about the show to pick on its (real or perceived) flaws. Mickey Kaus, on the other hand, accurately points out that a recent episode's foray into political advocacy was kind of trite. (Incredibly, Kaus still doesn't have permalinks; go here and search for "Glass snobbery," which I assume is meant to be some kind of pun.) [Like your headlines are so great -- ed.]

But this, from the Onion, is so off-base it's kind of absurd: "This American Life Completes Documentation of Liberal, Upper-Middle-Class Existence." What the fuck are they talking about? From memory: an incredible episode about prison life, another about the evangelicals of Colorado Springs, a third about a U.S. military aircraft carrier during the war in Afghanistan. This American Life has given me a remarkable kind of fine-grained access to aspects of the American experience that are usually off-limits to liberal, upper-middle-class Americans like myself. (Listen to those episodes and see.) So, yay for TAL, and a rousing fuck you to the Onion.

People 1, robots nil

Dear Abby,

A software program thinks that a random chunk of my novel was written by a girl. Does this mean I'm gay?

Bilious in Brooklyn

Attention Zack fans: Here's his story on upstart Dem congressman Tim Ryan from the Washington Monthly, which is apparently more important than, you know, blogging.