I really love this Q&A on reddit, which asks the community, "what are the things that you secretly do that would be frowned upon only by the reddit community and not by your technophobe friends?"

I like how the thread turns individual self-deprecation inside-out to reveal communal indignation. Here are some choice comments:

• I love Windows Vista.
  
• I shop at Best Buy and fucking love it.
  
• Twitter
  
• I refuse to recycle.
  
• My desktop has an icon in every available space.
  
• I have an aol account
  
• I really enjoy typing your instead or you're or you're instead of your. I also really enjoy typing its instead of it's.
  
• I have a website with 5 iframes on the main page. I also use tables.
  
• I've never had any complaints about Internet Explorer, and have never used Firefox.
  
• I watch Jon and Kate Plus Eight, for the adorableness, not the irony.
  
• I buy drinking water in 12 ounce plastic bottles. My cats drink it, too.

I've been listening to conservative talk radio and FOX News for months now, cringing as they smear Obama's healthcare plans. Since then, I've been blogging over at Loaded Terms, coming up with various ways that we can win the war of rhetoric. I've now summarized these ideas into a short memo that will help us change the terms of the debate.

Five years ago, I was inspired by George Lakoff's Don't Think of an Elephant, which offers suggestions to progressives on how better to frame political debates. Immediately it is clear that he uses his own advice as he refers to his audience as progressive instead of the smear-word liberal. The book was a cult hit when it came out, but unfortunately the advice was too late for John Kerry's election.

Right now, the conservatives are winning the war of words on healthcare, but we can turn the tide. Here are five message control suggestions for healthcare reformers:

1. When they mention socialist medicine, you mention unregulated, profit-driven, fragmented, capitalist medicine

When the opposition mentions socialist medicine, almost every time it kills the conversation. But it doesn't have to play out that way. Just as socialism evokes Stalin, Mao, and Che, why can't you evoke the robber-barons of the early 20th and late 19th centuries? Just as Americans are suspicious of socialist icons overseas, they're also suspicious of capitalist pigs at home, from Enron-types to Big Oil and Big Pharma.

The opposition is getting away with being the underdog party that will say "No" to socialist medicine. So it's our duty to reveal what they're implicitly for, which is essentially profit-driven, capitalist medicine. Ask the rhetorical question, "Why should providing health insurance be a profit-driven enterprise?" "Would you want to face an insurance company that has all the money and incentives in the world to deny your claims?"

2. Stop using the word public

When the opposition talks about privatized healthcare, they're subtly playing on Americans' fears about privacy invasion. When they talk about public healthcare, they're invoking Americans' fears of public services, like the DMV or welfare. Instead, try to appeal to patriotism using terms like National health insurance.

3. Stop referring to Europe and Canada

70% of Americans do not have passports. So in the average American's mind, the grass isn't greener on the other side, precisely because they've never seen it. The European label was political death for John Kerry in his failed 2004 bid for president. Likewise, Michael Moore didn't endear anybody by showing how Cuba's healthcare is so much better.

If you have to mention a comparative system, maybe mention Australia, a country that the cowboy types of America can identify with. And say something along the lines of this:

Health care doesn't have to be exclusively socialist or "capitalist". The Australian system is a good example. Everyone is provided with free public health care and about 40-50% also have private health insurance. You have the benefit of efficient, effective "capitalist" healthcare, and the safety net of the public system if something like what you described were to happen.

(source)

4. Instead of focusing on healthcare reform, start talk about insurance reform

The opposition has been playing on many Americans' fears that Obama is just causing too much change too much fast. The opposition talks about healthcare reform in terms that have nothing to do with Obama's proposal. It's almost a fact in conservative talk that Obama wants to put doctors on government payroll or that Obama wants to run the healthcare industry like he's "running" GM.

Also, the fact is most Americans are happy with their healthcare. That is probably the number one hurdle in changing the hearts and minds of Americans on this issue. It's the Lake Wobegon effect, where the average American believes their healthcare is above-average.

However, by referring to what Obama's reform plan is mostly about—insurance reform—you can localize the scope of the change. I think ordinary people have an intuitive sense that the insurance industry as a whole is corrupt and needs reform.

5. Instead of universal healthcare, talk about comprehensive healthcare

You have to tip-toe around people's fear of health welfare. Expanded coverage is something people agree with publicly, but in private, they would rather save their tax dollars.

By mentioning comprehensive healthcare, you invoke ideas of better health quality for individuals, which is actually very much a part of this. Small business owners, for example, who have been providing limited or no health insurance to their employees, have been clamoring for precisely this kind of reform.

Plus, you also remind people that perhaps their coverage may be limited. How many of you, when choosing your health insurance plan, had to make compromises and trade-offs? With national, comprehensive health insurance you won't have to do that. Rather you get more freedom and choices. What can be more American than that?

I've started another blog called Loaded Terms, which is about "changing the language of the (political) debate." I'm using it as another experiment in focused blogging.

I really enjoy rhetoric, and if anything motivates me about being a political-news junkie it's seeing how different groups tweak their messages to control the agenda.

My blog features some catchy suggestions for message control on healthcare reform:

• Stop talking about Europe. Start talking about Australia.
• Call the opposition profit-driven, unregulated, capitalist medicine.
• Pose it as a David-and-Goliath battle between Obama and the robber-barons of the healthcare industry.
• Talk about how expensive and inefficient capitalist medicine is.

There's many more ideas to come, and I hope that you will eventually become an evangelical for healthcare reform.

Even if you "do everything right," this should still concern you, because most of the debtors were well-educated, owned homes, and had middle-class occupations. Oh, and three-quarters had health insurance.

Three-quarters! Isn't health insurance supposed to protect you from this? Do you know how many bankruptcies were filed by members of your health insurance provider? Do you know how big their legal budget is in order to not have to pay you money?

Non-Americans in developed countries do not have this anxiety.

Link to the study.

These pictures are amazing.

Kottke mentions the Fallen Princesses project which re-imagines what Disney fairy tales would be like if things weren't so "happily ever after."

Little Red Riding Hood

This reminds me of another what-if re-imagining. This time, it's "what if celebrities lived in Oklahoma."

Jennifer Aniston

Inc's cover story is an interesting profile of 44-year-old Paul Graham, who is creating a new breed of venture capital firm, one that gives smaller chunks of funding to more start-ups (around forty-five funded each year). What I like most about Paul Graham is his rhetoric:

"Everything is becoming software," Graham argues. "Saying there are too many software companies in 2009 would be like saying that there were too many companies related to words after Gutenberg invented the printing press."

If you've never heard of Paul Graham, here is is a mini-CV: He holds a Ph.D. in computer science and has formal training as a visual artist. Before starting Y Combinator, his new VC fund, he founded Viaweb, an e-commerce software company, which he then sold to Yahoo for $49 million. After Yahoo, Graham created a new programming language and practically invented spam filtering.

Outside of the VC-world, Paul Graham is mostly known for his essays, which read like Malcolm Gladwell's writing—i.e. they put you in a temporary reality distortion field where seemingly disparate ideas achieve a sudden gestalt of connectedness and irrefutability. He is also known for his witty catchphrases. For example, he coined the expression "ramen profitability," to describe a start-up's ability to make enough money to cover the austere lifestyle of its founders.

Paul Graham at OSCON 2004

Photo credit: D. Story/J. Blanchard/O'Reilly Media

Like Buckminster Fuller of a previous generation, Paul Graham embodies the model, modern dilettante. Two of his essays that I enjoyed, which garnered huge play in the blogosphere, are Hackers and Painters and Cities and Ambition (both of which sound like the seeds of best-selling pop-nonfiction titles, like Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel.) In Cities and Ambition, Graham strikes a holistic pose and shows that the purpose of your city co-mingles with your own desires and either produce sterling start-ups (Silicon Valley) or brilliant literary types (Boston).

If I could sum up Graham's philosophy in two words it would be "consider everything." If you're a computer scientist, why not try painting? Why not try poetry at an open-mic? Why not work in Spain? The entrepreneur is intelligent in both breadth and depth, and his key skill is in synthesizing everything he knows to produce a product or bottom line.

But Graham is more than his accolades and words. He is a cult icon and star among young entrepreneurs. The average age of founders that Y Combinator funds is 25!

Paul Graham with some founders

The Paul Graham phenomena sheds light on the politics of programmers, and by extension portends a generational shift in political views. His essay Inequality and Risk is telling. In it Graham talks about the importance of low taxes, and how the prospect of becoming really wealthy is what motivates start-up founders to go through all the risks inherent in the field. The essay also has undertones of American exceptionalism, which is somewhat based in reality since we don't see other countries starting up Googles, Yahoos or Microsofts. Having lived in Silicon Valley myself for six years, I can tell you firsthand that there's a veritable self-important and pseudo-conservative streak to the region.

This attitude also bespeaks of a spirit of individualism that is prevalent among programmer types. For example, the prototypical nerd community slashdot has a libertarian bent (check out their poll). There's no way to know what causes this, but perhaps it has something to do with the do-it-yourself attitude of programmers (Paul Graham would prefer the term hackers). Programmers have a knack for manipulating tools to make their world more efficient. They also have a shared personal story of being outliers in academic settings.

(thanks to kottke for the profile tip)

Reddit's wikipedia subreddit is becoming one of my favorite destinations.

For example, the wikipedia entry for apophenia came up.

Apophenia is the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data. The term was coined in 1958 by Klaus Conrad, who defined it as the "unmotivated seeing of connections" accompanied by a "specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness".

In statistics, apophenia would be classed as a Type I error (false positive, false alarm, caused by an excess in sensitivity). Apophenia is often used as an explanation of paranormal and religious claims, and can also explain a belief in pseudoscience.

Conrad originally described this phenomenon in relation to the distortion of reality present in psychosis, but it has become more widely used to describe this tendency in healthy individuals without necessarily implying the presence of neurological differences or mental illness. In the case of autistic spectrum disorders, including Asperger's syndrome and individuals who are autistic savants, individuals may in fact be aware of patterns (such as those present in complex systems, large numbers, music, etc) that are infrequently noticed by neurotypical people. Rather than being aware of patterns that do not exist, autistic individuals may be aware of meaningful patterns within situations that appear meaningless to others.

Interesting article about one man's idea for Flint, Michigan:

Mr Kildee acknowledged that some fellow Americans considered his solution "defeatist" but he insisted it was "no more defeatist than pruning an overgrown tree so it can bear fruit again".

I really like this look.

New York artist Ross Racine creates aerial views of fictional suburbs, examining the relation between design and actual lived experience. No photographs or scanned images are used in the pieces above. Each was drawn freehand directly on the computer and then printed on an inkjet printer.

(via bad banana)

So I made Bing my default search engine for a week, and thank God it's Monday. The most compelling reason to switch back to Google is because Google Maps is so much better. I'd often type in a query like "Chipotle Austin, TX" in Bing and not see results that I knew were definitely here. Or if they were here, I'd have to use a few more clicks on Bing to zoom into the view I really wanted. Having said this, though, my verdict is not statistically sound enough for me.

Fortunately, I just found out about BlindSearch. It conducts your searches in Yahoo, Google, and Bing and presents the results in a randomized 3-column layout with all the engine's brand cruft scratched out. On the first search I did, for philosophistry, I voted for the Bing version! (via waxy)

I decided to renew my 1-week experiment with Bing by making BlindSearch my default search engine. To make this happen in Firefox, I'm using this add-on: Add to Search Bar.