Are you havin' a laugh?

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The drama and theatrics surrounding the election are both horrifying (the "McCain croaks and Palin becomes President of the free world" scenario is so terrifying to contemplate in its not insignificant probability that it needs a name, like a Robert Ludlum novel: the Palinus Paradox, or the Terminal Regression, or the Persephone Vector, or something of the sort). But if you ask, are you not entertained? I must confess I am enthralled.


Watching Palin in interviews is like watching the British version of The Office for the first time: viscerally discomfiting yet spectacularly absurd. We're watching a potential President of the most powerful nation on earth being checkmated by Charles Gibson and Katie Couric. Oh, that David Foster Wallace were alive to dissect the Palin phenomenon.


If there's anyone celebrating, it's Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Conan O'Brien, Jay Leno, their writers, and every one out there trying to get a laugh.

















*Note: the last video is actually not a spoof by Tina Fey. That is actually Governor Palin speaking.


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HD video from DSLRs

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The Nikon D90 and the Canon EOS 5D Mark II (Canon's SLR names are way too convoluted) both shoot HD video in addition to serving as DSLRs.


But one problem of shooting HD video with a CMOS is that since there is no real shutter like on a motion picture camera, each "frame" is captured by simply capturing lots of images per second with that CMOS. If you read it 24 times a second, you get 24 frames.


But if the CMOS doesn't refresh fast enough and the camera moves while the CMOS is refreshing, the bottom of the CMOS might be reading part of the image from a different time than the top of the CMOS, and that rolling shutter produces a bad motion wobble or skew (what Jim Jannard calls "jelly movement") as in this sample video footage from the D90.



Here are some sample unmodified Quicktime movie files from the Canon EOS 5D Mark II. Suffice it to say no serious filmmaker will be throwing away a camcorder after purchasing either of these DSLRs (unless that child you're filming doesn't move much; what, little kids run around?).


I'm sure they're fine still cameras, though. So few people make large prints anymore, so digital SLR resolution has been sufficient for their primary purposes: web galleries, 4x6 prints.


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Taco truck, where art thou? Also, some Hulu updates

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We launched a bunch of new features to Hulu at around midnight, debugged for a while, and then just before 3am the late night crew here hopped into cars and rushed over to hit our late night go-to spot, the taco truck near Vons in West Los Angeles. Taco trucks do a poor job of branding. They have no names, only locations, and they are all referred to just by the generic name of their classification: taco truck.


That truck typically operates from 10pm to 3am, but on this night, it was not there. You know the economy is bad when even the taco trucks are impacted.


So we went to Izzy's Deli in Santa Monica and celebrated our labors until 4 in the morning.


Some of the new things you'll find on Hulu:



There are other subtle changes, some of which you may notice as you browse around the site.


Two other cool Hulu news bits: the latest issue of Wired magazine has an article on us, and Tina Fey mentioned Hulu when accepting the Emmy for 30 Rock as best comedy series on Sunday night. It's probably the closest I'll ever come to having Tina Fey say my name. Good enough.

We're also still working hard on adding and replenishing our content library. Here's the season three premiere of Heroes.





Okay, I will go collapse now.


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Human - Carpark North

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I saw this video for "Human" by Carpark North during a Scandinavian music video screening at the LA Film Festival earlier this summer. It was by far my favorite of the bunch which is saying something considering the series included a new Gondry-directed Bjork video.







The talented Martin De Thurah directed. If you're willing to navigate down through a Flash site, you can find a higher-res version of the video here.


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Democrats are from Mars, Republicans are from Venus

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UPDATE as of 9/18/08: FiveThirtyEight has Obama pulling back ahead in Electoral College Projections. Maybe the combined vetting of Palin by the Web and the MSM and McCain's inability to say anything coherent about the current financial crisis have stamped out the bounce from the RNC.


***


Democrats everywhere are in a depressed state as McCain has taken a slight lead in nationwide polls. As McCain and Palin continue to feed misinformation, the Democrats and Obama supporters continue to post refutations. How, they wonder in frustration, can Republicans continue to believe this misinformation?


A study offers a potential answer: using reason and logic to argue with Republicans doesn't work. In fact, it may just further entrench them in their beliefs.


A variety of psychological experiments have shown that political misinformation primarily works by feeding into people's preexisting views. But what's even more disheartening is that refuting misinformation may cause people to believe the misinformation even more strongly than they did before hearing the refutation.



Political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler provided two groups of volunteers with the Bush administration's prewar claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. One group was given a refutation -- the comprehensive 2004 Duelfer report that concluded that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction before the United States invaded in 2003. Thirty-four percent of conservatives told only about the Bush administration's claims thought Iraq had hidden or destroyed its weapons before the U.S. invasion, but 64 percent of conservatives who heard both claim and refutation thought that Iraq really did have the weapons. The refutation, in other words, made the misinformation worse.


A similar "backfire effect" also influenced conservatives told about Bush administration assertions that tax cuts increase federal revenue. One group was offered a refutation by prominent economists that included current and former Bush administration officials. About 35 percent of conservatives told about the Bush claim believed it; 67 percent of those provided with both assertion and refutation believed that tax cuts increase revenue.


In a paper approaching publication, Nyhan, a PhD student at Duke University, and Reifler, at Georgia State University, suggest that Republicans might be especially prone to the backfire effect because conservatives may have more rigid views than liberals: Upon hearing a refutation, conservatives might "argue back" against the refutation in their minds, thereby strengthening their belief in the misinformation. Nyhan and Reifler did not see the same "backfire effect" when liberals were given misinformation and a refutation about the Bush administration's stance on stem cell research.



If this means that some Republicans actually believe that John McCain invented the Blackberry, then I give up.


But what is a Democrat to do? How do you appeal to people who don't respond to logic or reason?


Jonathan Haidt, Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia, tries to answer the question of why people vote Republican in this article at EDGE, and in doing so, he tries to suggest some adjustments to the Democratic message. His hypothesis is that Republicans want moral clarity, but Democrats continue to bombard them with messages based in reason.



But now that we can map the brains, genes, and unconscious attitudes of conservatives, we have refined our diagnosis: conservatism is a partially heritable personality trait that predisposes some people to be cognitively inflexible, fond of hierarchy, and inordinately afraid of uncertainty, change, and death. People vote Republican because Republicans offer "moral clarity"—a simple vision of good and evil that activates deep seated fears in much of the electorate. Democrats, in contrast, appeal to reason with their long-winded explorations of policy options for a complex world.


Diagnosis is a pleasure. It is a thrill to solve a mystery from scattered clues, and it is empowering to know what makes others tick. In the psychological community, where almost all of us are politically liberal, our diagnosis of conservatism gives us the additional pleasure of shared righteous anger. We can explain how Republicans exploit frames, phrases, and fears to trick Americans into supporting policies (such as the "war on terror" and repeal of the "death tax") that damage the national interest for partisan advantage.


But with pleasure comes seduction, and with righteous pleasure comes seduction wearing a halo. Our diagnosis explains away Republican successes while convincing us and our fellow liberals that we hold the moral high ground. Our diagnosis tells us that we have nothing to learn from other ideologies, and it blinds us to what I think is one of the main reasons that so many Americans voted Republican over the last 30 years: they honestly prefer the Republican vision of a moral order to the one offered by Democrats.



Haidt notes that when emotions take hold, logic and reason are suppressed, and so policy-based messages by Democrats fail to resonate with Republican voters.



This research led me to two conclusions. First, when gut feelings are present, dispassionate reasoning is rare. In fact, many people struggled to fabricate harmful consequences that could justify their gut-based condemnation. I often had to correct people when they said things like "it's wrong because… um…eating dog meat would make you sick" or "it's wrong to use the flag because… um… the rags might clog the toilet." These obviously post-hoc rationalizations illustrate the philosopher David Hume's dictum that reason is "the slave of the passions, and can pretend to no other office than to serve and obey them." This is the first rule of moral psychology: feelings come first and tilt the mental playing field on which reasons and arguments compete. If people want to reach a conclusion, they can usually find a way to do so. The Democrats have historically failed to grasp this rule, choosing uninspiring and aloof candidates who thought that policy arguments were forms of persuasion.




...the second rule of moral psychology is that morality is not just about how we treat each other (as most liberals think); it is also about binding groups together, supporting essential institutions, and living in a sanctified and noble way. When Republicans say that Democrats "just don't get it," this is the "it" to which they refer. Conservative positions on gays, guns, god, and immigration must be understood as means to achieve one kind of morally ordered society. When Democrats try to explain away these positions using pop psychology they err, they alienate, and they earn the label "elitist." But how can Democrats learn to see—let alone respect—a moral order they regard as narrow-minded, racist, and dumb?



If it's not reason and logic that's failing to resonate with Republican voters, what is missing? Haidt identifies five moral foundations or dimensions that people value and thinks that Democrats only hit on two of them.



In several large internet surveys, my collaborators Jesse Graham, Brian Nosek and I have found that people who call themselves strongly liberal endorse statements related to the harm/care and fairness/reciprocity foundations, and they largely reject statements related to ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. People who call themselves strongly conservative, in contrast, endorse statements related to all five foundations more or less equally. (You can test yourself at www.YourMorals.org.) We think of the moral mind as being like an audio equalizer, with five slider switches for different parts of the moral spectrum. Democrats generally use a much smaller part of the spectrum than do Republicans. The resulting music may sound beautiful to other Democrats, but it sounds thin and incomplete to many of the swing voters that left the party in the 1980s, and whom the Democrats must recapture if they want to produce a lasting political realignment.



Some other excerpts:



In The Political Brain, Drew Westen points out that the Republicans have become the party of the sacred, appropriating not just the issues of God, faith, and religion, but also the sacred symbols of the nation such as the Flag and the military. The Democrats, in the process, have become the party of the profane—of secular life and material interests. Democrats often seem to think of voters as consumers; they rely on polls to choose a set of policy positions that will convince 51% of the electorate to buy. Most Democrats don't understand that politics is more like religion than it is like shopping.


The Democrats must find a way to close the sacredness gap that goes beyond occasional and strategic uses of the words "God" and "faith." But if Durkheim is right, then sacredness is really about society and its collective concerns. God is useful but not necessary. The Democrats could close much of the gap if they simply learned to see society not just as a collection of individuals—each with a panoply of rights--but as an entity in itself, an entity that needs some tending and caring. Our national motto is e pluribus unum ("from many, one"). Whenever Democrats support policies that weaken the integrity and identity of the collective (such as multiculturalism, bilingualism, and immigration), they show that they care more about pluribus than unum. They widen the sacredness gap.


If Democrats want to understand what makes people vote Republican, they must first understand the full spectrum of American moral concerns. They should then consider whether they can use more of that spectrum themselves. The Democrats would lose their souls if they ever abandoned their commitment to social justice, but social justice is about getting fair relationships among the parts of the nation. This often divisive struggle among the parts must be balanced by a clear and oft-repeated commitment to guarding the precious coherence of the whole. America lacks the long history, small size, ethnic homogeneity, and soccer mania that holds many other nations together, so our flag, our founding fathers, our military, and our common language take on a moral importance that many liberals find hard to fathom. Unity is not the great need of the hour, it is the eternal struggle of our immigrant nation. The three Durkheimian foundations of ingroup, authority, and purity are powerful tools in that struggle. Until Democrats understand this point, they will be vulnerable to the seductive but false belief that Americans vote for Republicans primarily because they have been duped into doing so.



If this is true, it could explain why trying to win an election with a strategy based purely on reason and truth is so difficult, and why Republican misinformation is so effective and durable. Obama wants to run a campaign based not in the same old political attacks, but it's clear to Schmidt and the McCain campaign that an election fought on those grounds is not one they can win.


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Lance's return

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In this Vanity Fair profile, Lance Armstrong elaborates on his plan to return to cycling with Team Astana to ride a few major races in 2009, including the Tour de France, where he'd be shooting for his eighth win.


Why did he decide to come back?



The impetus to come back, he says, sprang upon him quite unexpectedly over the summer, in Colorado. Armstrong had an epiphany on August 9 after placing second at the Leadville Trail 100 Mountain-Bike Race—a 100-mile “Race Across the Sky,

Kakutani on DFW

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Michiko Kakutani remembers David Foster Wallace.



David Foster Wallace used his prodigious gifts as a writer — his manic, exuberant prose, his ferocious powers of observation, his ability to fuse avant-garde techniques with old-fashioned moral seriousness — to create a series of strobe-lit portraits of a millennial America overdosing on the drugs of entertainment and self-gratification, and to capture, in the words of the musician Robert Plant, the myriad “deep and meaningless

George Saunders on Sarah Palin

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George Saunders drills, baby, drills in the humor column of this week's New Yorker. It will feel like a tragedy to half the country if McCain/Palin win the election, but on the bright (semi-dim?) side it will arm our humorists with four more years of material.



Now, let us discuss the Élites. There are two kinds of folks: Élites and Regulars. Why people love Sarah Palin is, she is a Regular. That is also why they love me. She did not go to some Élite Ivy League college, which I also did not. Her and me, actually, did not go to the very same Ivy League school. Although she is younger than me, so therefore she didn’t go there slightly earlier than I didn’t go there. But, had I been younger, we possibly could have not graduated in the exact same class. That would have been fun. Sarah Palin is hot. Hot for a politician. Or someone you just see in a store. But, happily, I did not go to college at all, having not finished high school, due to I killed a man. But had I gone to college, trust me, it would not have been some Ivy League Élite-breeding factory but, rather, a community college in danger of losing its accreditation, built right on a fault zone, riddled with asbestos, and also, the crack-addicted professors are all dyslexic.


Sarah Palin was also the mayor of a very small town. To tell the truth, this is where my qualifications begin to outstrip even hers. I have never been the mayor of anything. I can’t even spell right. I had help with the above, but now— Murray, note to Murray: do not correct what follows. Lets shoe the people how I rilly spel Mooray and punshuate so thay can c how reglar I am, and ther 4 fit to leed the nashun, do to: not sum mistir fansy pans.


OK Mooray. Get corecting agin!



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Karl Rove says McCain ads have gone "too far"

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Straight Talk Express has to stray far off the track for even Rove to call out McCain. Rove also says some of Obama ads have done the same, but I challenge any rational person to prove that case.


What's sad is that McCain once was one of the more appealing politicians for his willingness to offer "straight talk" and buck his party. But he's now made the deal with the devil that is the conservative core in his desperation for the Presidency.


It's doubly sad to witness this given David Foster Wallace's suicide. Wallace's writings on McCain during the 2000 elections were collected into a short book: McCain's Promise: Aboard the Straight Talk Express with John McCain and a Whole Bunch of Actual Reporters, Thinking About Hope.


Wallace saw some hope in McCain then. I have no doubt he would have been, or perhaps already was, deeply disappointed that McCain betrayed the Maverick.


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Big Z!

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The first no-hitter thrown by a Cub in my lifetime!


As a group, we Cubs fans are Catholic in our fatalism, and recent arm discomfort to Zambrano and Harden had us wondering if a strong regular season was just prelude to entering the playoffs short-handed. Some see the glass half-empty; Cubs fans see cracks in the glass itself.


For those of you who bleed Cubbie blue, MLB.com has video of every out (just the last pitches, so it only takes 4:32).


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