It’s the eternal conundrum in the world of electronic music.

1) Kraftwerk is amazing.
2) Techno music is about 90% derivative of Kraftwerk.
3) Techno sucks.

So there I am in the airport, waiting for my family to come back from holiday with relatives. Music videos are on a TV set nearby. I hear a familiar tune, but with guitar instead of synthesiser. And I see that the new Coldplay song ‘Talk’ has slavishly lifted the melody from the very beautiful ‘Computer Love’ — everything from verses to chorus.

Should I be annoyed? I was at first, but was soon assuaged. I realised that the Coldplay tune is really good. They did a good job on it. You could even say it’s respectful of its source material. It’s not a rip-off; it’s a homage. Anyone who knows music would recognise that melody, and Coldplay used enough of it to let you know that they love it too.

It brought me back to one of the things I always loved about Kraftwerk: yes, they had effects before effects were cool, but they always had such a fine sense of melody. Which is why they are so great, and effect-driven techno isn’t.

The older son’s hair is getting kind of long.

He says “I’m thinking of getting my hair cut.”

“Really?” I ask. “Are you going to cut it short, or just shorter?”

“Just shorter,” he says.

Now isn’t that funny. Normally you have ‘short’, which is short, and ‘shorter’, which is more short. But in this case, it’s less short. I wonder why.

Probably an ellipsis thing. ‘Shorter’ here means ‘shorter… than it is’. You don’t say that part, but it’s there. And ‘shorter than it is’, by comparison, would be longer than the standard ‘short’.

The ‘just’ probably also contributes.

Any other theories?

I think I’ve figured out the Bush presidency.

1) Settle on some issue you want to tackle.
Iraq, Social Security, teen pregnancy, whatever.

2) Do exactly the wrong thing, and do it stupidly, so the problem gets worse.
For example, on teen pregnancy, push abstinence-only programs that don’t work and cause more teen pregnancies.
On Iraq, turn it into a hotbed of terrorism by waging a war incompetently, angering the populace, and inadvertently creating a market for new terrorists.
Social Security, Medicare, abortion, foreign policy, you name it.

3) Use the newly escalating crisis to demonstrate how much of a crisis we have on our hands.

4) Point out that the only way to handle the challenges we now face is your bold leadership.

5) Repeat.

Was it Ernest Benn or Groucho Marx who said:
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.

Update: On point 3, don’t forget the happy talk. Be sure and tell everyone how great things are going, but that there’s still a crisis. It sounds trickier than it is. The key is to talk about things you’re gonna do once you get your new superpowers.

I’ve been heavy into the research lately, which means I do nothing except run experiments on the laptop, eat (sometimes), listen to too much Radiohead (I’m afraid of Amnesiac), and take care of my wife’s dog.

Oh, and check the Net. I found a video of a flash mob I was in back in October 2005.

Here’s something I wrote about it at the time.

I was in a flash mob today. Outside the Art Museum in Perth, people were to bring pillows and start pummelling each other (gently) upon a pre-arranged signal. And then upon another pre-arranged signal, everyone was to put away the pillows and walk away as if nothing had happened. Very silly. Very Pythonesque.

So I caught the bus into the city after work to see what would go down.

I saw Postgrad Jeremy there with a friend. “You’re looking mighty suspicious,” I said.

“The cops are here,” said Jeremy. “Someone must have tipped them off.”

“Good,” I said. “I’ll take ’em. Us against the Man.”

There were seven of them.

“What would they charge you with?” wondered Jeremy’s friend.

“Aiding and abedding,” I suggested. “Assault with a comfy weapon.”

There were a couple of minutes left. I stood there with my green shopping bag bulging. A guy I didn’t know came up beside me and said, “Looks like a big turnout.”

I let a moment pass and said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Then it started. A whistle blew. I ran for the centre. It was like a huge mosh pit. I couldn’t see how many people there were, but it looked like a lot from the inside. I clobbered everyone I could see.

Then the whistle blew again, and it became just another walkway, except for random piles of fluff.

I told a friend about this, and he said, “The police were probably concerned that you were terrorists. Some kind of sleeper cell.”

They’ve done away with all the one- and two-cent coins in Australia. If you want to buy something worth $9.98, you have to round up to $10.00. On the other hand, if the item costs $10.02, you get to round down to the same ten bucks. It’s something a canny shopper has to keep track of when trying to save those extra couple of cents.

I was at the store yesterday, and the total came to $29.98. Which meant that I was going to have to pay $30. But I was not just going to capitulate like that. I had a trick up my sleeve.

“I’m going to use a credit card,” said I to the check-out girl. “Which means I pay only $29.98. In your FACE!”

She just looked at me for a moment, and said, “Now you don’t get your petrol voucher.”

A petrol voucher makes a liter of petrol four cents cheaper. You only get one if you spend… thirty dollars or more. She was right.

For a moment I wavered, but it was too late to go back.

“You may have won this one,” I said evenly, taking the groceries, “but there will be a next time.”

Oh, yes. There will.

Yes, I am in Australia, but as you’ve probably noticed, I tend to keep a close watch on U.S. politics. I am registered to vote in Washington, after all.

I’ve been watching the (inevitable?) confirmation of Alito to the Supreme Court with some anxiety. And so yesterday I did something I’ve never done before: called my senators to encourage them to perpetuate Senator Kerry’s filibuster.

So three cheers to Senator Patty Murray for voting ‘no’ on cloture.

Senator Cantwell voted ‘yes’ on the filibuster, but says she’s going to vote ‘no’ on Alito’s confirmation. I’d say don’t bother. The filibuster was the chance.

Congratulations to Murray for showing some spine and acting like a member of a real opposition party. That can’t have been easy.

Update: Senator Cantwell voted ‘yes’ on cloture, one of only three blue-state Dems to do so. But what do you know! she’s up for re-election this year. I will do everything I can to make sure she loses the primaries. Which, unfortunately for me, is limited to voting for the other candidate, and writing on a blog that hardly ever gets read.

We need Democrats who aren’t afraid to act like Democrats. The cloture vote really showed me what side people came down on, for better or worse.

I overheard this exchange between a nine-year-old boy and his mom’s wimpy new-age boyfriend, who I’ll call Claude.

The boy said, “I hate you, Claude.”

“Thank you,” said Claude.

“No, I hate you, Claude.”

“Thank you,” said Claude.

“Why are you saying thank you?” asked the boy.

“Because you expressed an emotion that was authentic at the time that you expressed it, which was hate,” said Claude. He said it very fluidly, as though he’d said this many times before.

So I said, “Now I really hate you, Claude.”

I’m so disappointed.

The award for Australian of the Year has gone to Ian Frazer, the creator of a vaccine that is 100% effective against human papilloma virus, which causes cervical cancer. One hundred percent.

So why am I disappointed? Two reasons.

First, a Nationals senator Barnaby Joyce has tried to dampen the enthusiasm by citing concerns that the fear of HPV might be the only thing holding teenagers back from indiscriminate fornication.

“There might be an overwhelming (public) backlash from people saying, ‘don’t you dare put something out there that gives my 12-year-old daughter a licence to be promiscuous’,” he said.

Senator Joyce – who has four daughters – said he would be “personally very circumspect” about giving such a vaccine to girls who were too young to cope with the potential consequences of sexual activity.

If you’ve been paying attention, you may be saying “Wait, didn’t this happen two months ago?”

Yep, but it’s happening again now. Senator Joyce has blundered into exactly the same rhetoric that the Christian Right used waaay back then. They have learned nothing. And that’s the second reason I’m disappointed.

Smarter idiots, please.

The hunt for esoteric meaning continues apace.

Remember how they used to tell you that records contain backwards satanic messages? And “The Bible Code” has turned a new generation on to twiddling letters to find the Real Meaning of the Text.

Well, twiddle this. A new anagram for ‘presbyterians’.

Beats the previous best anagram, “Best in prayers” by a long shot.

It’s Australia Day, and I’m heading for the beach. While lying on the warm sand, or dipping into the cool blue Indian Ocean, I’ll spare a thought for those of you who are shivering in the frozen North.

I ran across this piece of research on a site called LiveScience.

Democrats and Republicans Both Adept at Ignoring Facts, Study Finds

The study observed brain activity in subjects who were asked to reconcile contradictory political statements. What they found was that subjects ignored the contradictions in their own point of view, but (surprise) had no trouble finding problems for the other team. And neurochemistry rewarded them heartily for it.

The test subjects on both sides of the political aisle reached totally biased conclusions by ignoring information that could not rationally be discounted, [Drew] Westen and his colleagues say.

Then, with their minds made up, brain activity ceased in the areas that deal with negative emotions such as disgust. But activity spiked in the circuits involved in reward, a response similar to what addicts experience when they get a fix, Westen explained.

The study points to a total lack of reason in political decision-making.

“None of the circuits involved in conscious reasoning were particularly engaged,” Westen said. “Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want, and then they get massively reinforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of positive ones.”

So, a neurochemical payoff for the reduction of cognitive dissonance.

I didn’t like the title of the article at first (oh boy, another he-said-she-said), until I understood that they were talking about the phenomenon on the individual level. While individuals on either side do have trouble thinking critically about their own cherished viewpoints, there’s a case to be made that Republicans as a party benefit greatly from their current strategy of disinformation, noise, and obfuscation. Democrats, on the other hand, have real trouble getting the facts out there in public view, and would benefit if people didn’t ignore the facts quite so much.