This is what Florida politics looks like.

My goodness, all this drawn-out brouhaha about how Florida Democrats did or didn’t really stick their feet in it this time by going along with the Republican-dominated legislature’s scheme to move up the state’s primary. But it’s just the latest episode in the ongoing saga of this state’s hapless Dems since they lost both executive and legislative branches back in the 1990s. The only reason there are any at all in office statewide now is because the Repubs pulled a howler of their own in ‘04 by saddling themselves with Katharine Harris running against Senator Bill Nelson; the Florida Secretary of State who helped pull off the Great Election Robbery of 2000 turned out to be such a ditzy disaster that by comparison Lil’ Bush comes across like Winston Churchill. But I digress. My point is that after observing local Democrats at close hand for years now, I must say the “circular firing squad” (as their Broward County chairman has put it) they formed over this past February’s notorious primary is — yawn — just par for the course when you know the context.

Orlando Sentinel: Anti-evolution bill clears another hurdle. Ugh.

The Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday gave a partisan passing grade to the bill critics say is designed to challenge the teaching of evolution in Florida classrooms.

Sen. Ronda Storms, a Tampa-area Republican and former teacher, is carrying the bill at the behest of religious groups who lost a close vote to amend Florida’s science-teaching standards earlier this year. the Academic Freedom bill, as it’s known, says teachers can’t be discriminated against for teaching ideas contrary to the theory of evolution.

Storms said it was needed because teachers are “muzzled” from bringing up problems with the theory by administrators who “give you bathroom duty, they give you bus duty, you don’t get a planning period … so that their unhappiness is expressed.”

The panel passed the bill 6-3, with Democrats expressing some reservations that it could prompt lawsuits for violating church-state separation, and was a stealth attempt to inject religion in classrooms.

Education is changing.

It’s not that we won’t continue to have and use PCs in schools, but the market and intellectual momentum clearly lie elsewhere.

So forget about personal computers: the future of education probably lies with digital games.

I really like the photo accompanying this article about McCain.

There are almost one million names on the US Government’s terrorist watch list. What use could a list of that size be? The number of false positives must be huge!

In September 2007, the Inspector General of the Justice Department reported that the Terrorist Screening Center (the FBI-administered organization that consolidates terrorist watch list information in the United States) had over 700,000 names in its database as of April 2007 - and that the list was growing by an average of over 20,000 records per month.1

At that rate, our list will have a million names on it by July. If there were really that many terrorists running around, we’d all be dead.

Spore keeps looking better and better.

It’s no secret that YouTube has embraced user generated video since its inception. Armed with a video camera and an Internet connection, anyone is able to contribute. We’re seeing more and more videogames starting to incorporate user generated content into the gaming experience — so we often ask ourselves, why not similarly empower gamers to share their experiences with each other?

Enter Spore, the much anticipated game from Electronic Arts and Maxis, which lets players create their own alien creatures, import their creations into the game world, and upload video of their creatures’ moves directly to YouTube from within the game.

Nerdfotainment

What do we know about nerds? Well, we know a lot. They need a project, are systematic thinkers, and they love puzzles and games. This brings me to a whole pile of entertainment that has shown up over the past ten years. All of which, I believe, is specifically designed for the nerd demographic, since all of the content shares a common characteristic: it’s terribly complex and nerds enjoy making it more so.

The Clintons, a horror film that never ends - Andrew Sullivan.

It’s alive! We thought it might be over but some of us never dared fully believe it. Last week was like one of those moments in a horror movie when the worst terror recedes, the screen goes blank and then reopens on green fields or a lover’s tender embrace. Drained but still naive audiences breathe a collective sigh of relief. The plot twists have all been resolved; the threat is gone; the quiet spreads. And then . . .

Put your own movie analogy in here. Glenn Close in the bathtub in Fatal Attraction – whoosh! she’s back at your throat! – has often occurred to me when covering the Clintons these many years. The Oscars host Jon Stewart compares them to a Terminator: the kind that is splattered into a million tiny droplets of vaporised metal . . . only to pool together spontaneously and charge back at you unfazed.

The Clintons have always had a touch of the zombies about them: unkillable, they move relentlessly forward, propelled by a bloodlust for Republicans or uppity Democrats who dare to question their supremacy. You can’t escape; you can’t hide; and you can’t win. And these days, in the kinetic pace of the YouTube campaign, they are like the new 28 Days Later zombies. They come at you really quickly, like bats out of hell. Or Ohio, anyway.

A story about Atari.. Back in the day.

My very first day at work I arrived at my office after orientation and found an Atari 800 computer in a boxes. I spent a little while setting the machine up, got it working, and went to get coffee.

When I returned, a staffer appeared in my door. “Oh,” she exclaimed, “You knew how to set up your computer! I was going to do that.”

“Well, thanks, but…” Didn’t everybody know how? Setting up an Atari computer wasn’t amazingly simple and obvious, but it wasn’t all that hard, either.

It was a portent of things to come. My first officemate didn’t know how to set up his computer. He didn’t know anything, it appeared. He’d been hired to work on Dig Dug, and he was completely at sea. I had to teach him a lot, including how to program in assembly, how the Atari hardware worked, how to download stuff, how to debug. It was pretty bad.

That would be a general theme throughout my tenure at Atari. Newly hired people didn’t necessarily know how to do their jobs, and I spent a lot of time helping them figure stuff out that they should have known in order to land a job in the first place. Atari’s hiring practices were not very careful.

God Hates Obama.