It's going to be an interesting Presidential campaign, no matter what. All plausible candidates have glaring flaws in them.

The idea of the Lincoln-Douglas debates are deeply ingrained in the American psyche, but I think it's time to face up to the fact that that era of the debate has passed.

Instead, I wish the candidates would do a written debate. I don't just mean "Send them each a bunch of questions and publish both responses", I mean an interactive series of answers and rebuttals. Randomly choose half the questions to send to the one candidate first, half to the other. Set some word limit. (And if were up to me, I'd tell the candidates that it's a hard word limit; send me 600 words instead of 500 if you like, but I'll just cut you off mid-sentence...) Stop at two or three iterations. In the internet era, I'd give them as many hyperlinks as they wanted and not count them against their word count, and invite the candidates to continue after the official debate on their own websites, if they like, giving both of them the last word.

And here's a fascinating article on children and lying; why they lie, where it comes from, and all based on real science, not pop science. Most interestingly, it compares the reactions of parents to the lies and how that can affect the child.

Although we think of truthfulness as a young child’s paramount virtue, it turns out that lying is the more advanced skill. A child who is going to lie must recognize the truth, intellectually conceive of an alternate reality, and be able to convincingly sell that new reality to someone else. Therefore, lying demands both advanced cognitive development and social skills that honesty simply doesn’t require. “It’s a developmental milestone,” Talwar has concluded.

This puts parents in the position of being either damned or blessed, depending on how they choose to look at it. If your 4-year-old is a good liar, it’s a strong sign she’s got brains. And it’s the smart, savvy kid who’s most at risk of becoming a habitual liar.

A truly awesome article about computer science meeting social science via cellular automata-based simulations in The Atlantic.

...

OK, this defies pull-quoting. Just read it.

(Also: If you're a programmer, it's really easy to set these simulations up and play away; the claim that this requires "sophisticated modern programming languages" is basically false, it's just modern languages make this really, really easy. I'm sure there are tools for these things, but I'm not sure they're really necessary...)

Shamus posted a challenge, which went (in part):

I enjoyed the discussion the other day on the various uses and uselessness of super abilities. It is surprisingly difficult to benefit the world, even when you wield fantastic powers. Imagine if you were granted the following:

• Incredible strength....
• You can fly....
• You are functionally indestructible....

...I’m annoyed at how useless I would be, in the big scheme of things. I couldn’t solve any of the world’s major problems. I couldn’t even solve the small ones.... [more interesting discussion]

Merit has nothing to do with America; it’s all about white male privilege. Do not be fooled by the rise of Hillary and Obama; put them together, and what do you have? White. Male. - Bleat

Oh, and what's up with this "true conservative"/"true liberal"/"true libertarian" crap?

Is there anybody who uses this phrase and doesn't simply mean "truly agreeing entirely with me?"

I have a sort of mental translation table I use to decode what people really mean; my classic example is "free" -> "paid for", which works pretty well. I've recently added "X is not a true Y" -> "I am an arrogant twit which can't conceive of the idea that I might not be entirely correct in my views", and it seems to be working out pretty well too.

Ignorance is bliss.

Therefore, political ignorance is bliss.

The Internet has brought us a high level of political coverage and punditry available at a click. With that, many more people now have detailed dossiers on every political candidate in the nomination process. And what has this knowledge brought us?

If worrying about the climate is your thing, I find this sort of thing about ten times more worrying than global warming.

Why hope Obama gets the nomination? Some good reasons right here.

I don't particularly like his politics (of course), but in terms of charm and the other soft graces that can be oh-so-useful, he's the clear leader so far in both races.

And if a lot of white people in this country vote Obama, it's going to rock identity politics to its core, something I think is long overdue. I think claiming the country is intrinsically and deeply racist is already unsupported by the evidence, but what will the race-mongers do when we can point at a President as "diverse" as Barack Hussein Obama?