"Winning" the "War" in Iraq

According to Joe Klein, John McCain said the following yesterday in New Hampshire:

This is a clear choice that the American people have. I had the courage and the judgment to say I would rather lose a political campaign than lose a war. It seems to me that Obama would rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign.

Klein dismisses the comment as "unpresidential" and "sad."

I won't quibble with that, but I have some more basic questions. Would someone please define the words "win" and "war" for me in the context of the current situation in Iraq? Because it's just not clear to me what McCain means when he says those words.

If the American occupation of Iraq is still a war, then who are exactly are we fighting it against? And how will we know when we have won?

I could understand it if McCain would argue that we have to stay in Iraq until its government is capable of maintaining at least the level of security currently in place. But all this talk of winning and losing obscures that goal. Stabilizing Iraq isn't a war and it isn't a game--and it's too complex of a process to lend itself to such simplistic rhetoric about winning or losing.

Given Bush's scandalously low approval ratings, one would think McCain and his campaign staff would be more careful to avoid sounding as simplistic and binary as the current president is known for sounding. However, it seems to be increasingly an open question as to how in touch with the situation in Iraq McCain is anyway. Trying to dumb down your talking points to score cheap political points with unsophisticated voters is bad enough, but actually believing such statements is outright frightening.

Superhero Summer

Yeah I've seen the new Batman movie. Twice. Jealous?
After today's viewing, I have to stick by my claim that Batman is without a doubt the best superhero ever and certainly the best superhero to have a movie this summer. Superman is stupid because he can do everything ever, and only one thing kills him. There are no real conflicts that Superman has to face. This sets him apart from Spiderman, who does face a few quandaries-- fighting crime while also puberty, and denying his love for MaryJane (which, let's face it, we all have to do at some point or another). However, both Superman and Spiderman are geeks. Superman is squeaky clean; Spiderman is squeaky lame (anyone remember when he went all emo in the third movie? Embarrassing.).
But the Batman is complex. Which of his identities is his true character? Playboy billionaire? Normal nice guy who wants to get with Rachel Dawes? Or caped crusader, who must stop at nothing to vanquish his formidable rogues? Unlike Superman and Spiderman, the Batman has rules that he must obey, and not just the laws of physics (which simply don't apply to many heroes). The Batman is on another level. He never allows himself to kill his enemies, and the villains of Batman are the craziest and most deadly of all.
There is obviously the Joker, a psychotic madman who seeks nothing but chaos. There is the Riddler, a narcissistic criminal who can't help but leave clues about his real identity for the authorities (Ted Bundy anyone?). There's Two-Face, a schizo who leaves the fate of his victims up to the chance of a coin flip. And Penguin, the made man embodying bureaucratic corruption. Also Mr. Freeze, who f'ing freezes people (!). And no one forgets Catwoman, who is just plain dead-sexy (Michelle Pfieffer more so than Halle Berry, in my opinion). Everyone knows the villains define the hero, so the Batman must be the man.
At last we have a superhero movie that people outside the 7-12 age group won't be ashamed to love. It's dark, twisted, and flat-out cool. At the end of the movie (don't worry this isn't a spoiler) Lt. Gordon says Harvey Dent (the district attorney who isn't afraid to prosecute corrupt mob guys) is the hero Gotham needs but not the one they deserve, and he says Batman is the hero Gotham deserves, but not the one they need (at that given moment, you'll get it when you see it). But I beg the differ, Lt. Gordon. The Batman is the hero we deserve and need. There is now a new breed of superhero that makes Superman and Spiderman look like downright clown shoes by comparison. There is Batman-- my white (dark) knight.

Recommended Multimedia

I've linked to Dan Savage's weekly sex-advice podcast previously, but this week's installment is particularly good.

Seriously, if you have any interest in sex, this show is for you--check it out.

Also, I'm looking for some feedback. Is anyone reading these recommendation posts and finding them interesting? Drop my a quick line in the comments section or via e-mail if you are.

Recommended Reading

Our own print edition's commentary on Steve King's recent behavior wasn't the only such piece published today. Iowa Independent also drew attention to some recent remarks they considered to be inappropriate.

But regardless of how anyone feels about King, I'm certainly glad I live in Iowa rather than in Turkey. It's not as though my homosexuality is immediately apparent to everyone I meet, but I certainly don't make any effort to hide it--and I've never felt threatened in Iowa City. However, given this chilling account out of Istanbul, I can't say I'd act the same way if I lived there.

Continuing on with the depressing news, more questions are being raised about the reliability of DNA-matching databases. This really ought to remind us that we always need to be careful about integrating new technologies into our criminal justice system before we're completely sure of their reliability.

In somewhat confusing news, the Iraqi government seems to be pretty confident foreign combat troops will be able to be out of the country by some time in 2010--but this is after Iraq's prime minister first made a similar comment before seemingly back-tracking on the issue. It will be interesting to see how all this plays out in both the American and Iraqi elections.

Retreating to the realm of techno-optimism, which is one of my favorite safe havens, I'm happy to pass along data suggesting that 25 percent of the people on Earth will be online by 2012. Hopefully, computer translation will be good enough by that point to tear down the language barrier that has divided humanity for so long.

Finally, if you're not looking forward to all the typing and clicking you'll have to do to in the future if your job requires you to work primarily online, I have some good news. Technology that literally allows computers to read people's minds is already here and improving rapidly. Keyboards and mice may well go the way of the floppy drive sooner than most people imagine.

The Election that Never Ends!

This is the election that never ends,
Yes it goes on and on my friend.
Some reporters started covering it, not knowing what it was,
And they'll continue covering it forever just because,
This is the election that never ends...

Seriously, most reporting of the 2008 presidential race has degenerated into something only demented children's show producers previously had the gall to subject the public to.

It's hard to believe how excited about this madness I used to be. I spent last summer and fall chasing the plethora of presidential-nomination hopefuls around Iowa and faithfully transcribing as many stump speeches as I could. And I could barely contain myself on caucus night when I got the chance to witness Huckabee and his supporters celebrate their stunning defeat of Mitt Romney, which ultimately opened the door for McCain's historic comeback.

Oh for the days when Barack Obama was still a long-shot. Or when Ron Paul, Dennis Kucinich, and Mike Gravel were still running around gleefully throwing pies in the faces of the more mainstream candidates. But no, those days are long gone. And after a year and a half of intense media attention, we still have about three and a half months left to go until election day. The problem is that everything meaningful to be said has already been said. Now we're just stuck in a hellish repeat loop, a tortuous echo chamber of empty rhetoric and asinine "analysis."

So I've done the unthinkable. I've unsubscribed (in Google Reader) from every exclusively election-related site and blog save two: Politico.com and Marc Ambinder's reported blog on politics. I've also maintained my subscriptions to Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish and several state-level partisan blogs, but those all have value to me outside of their presidential election coverage--and from now on I'll be reading far fewer of their election-related posts.

I'm pondering going even further and just taking a second to check up on the Iowa Electronic Market every couple of days to see where the race stands. It's more reliable than any pundit's piffle anyway.

It's a really good thing I'm not on the politics beat anymore. I couldn't take it.

A City Comprised of Ants

A friend of mine found numerous copies of an odd manifesto taped up in downtown Iowa City. It begins as follows:

This is a city comprised of ants. They are its tenants and its keepers. They crowd the narrow byways between the paving stones with their vehicles in miniature. They rush between the moss that lines their narrow streets in a hurry to arrive somewhere so that they can wish to be somewhere else. They move with frenzied jerks and carry things too big for them to understand. They run to and fro, looking without seeing, hearing without listening, taking without thinking, intent on their appointed tasks. Sacred are the things that do--queen and worker, warrior, nurse--and shamed are those who think.

I've setup a blog in an attempt to track down the person or people behind this fascinating little rant. Check it out to read the rest of this unique little piece of found philosophy.

Any help in my strange quest to talk to the author(s) would be greatly appreciated. And, yes, I've already put enough time into Googling phrases from this piece to be convinced its not anywhere else online--or at least not in Google's search index.

Recommended Multimedia

MIT researcher and desktop fabrication pioneer Neil Gershenfeld gives a talk that makes one wonder what the world economy might look like in twenty years if his technology actually develops as much as he says it will:

Living (and Working) the Revolution

My column this week:

The world is my office, library, and entertainment center. As long as an Internet connection is available, I can use any computer to access most of my work-related and personal files as well as a significant percentage of humanity's collective knowledge base.

According to Arthur C. Clarke, a famous author and inventor who died earlier this year, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

I appreciate the profundity of that maxim daily as the feats I am able to accomplish armed only with my slim laptop and versatile mobile phone would have belonged only in the pages of a science-fiction novel as recently as a few decades ago. And I'd likely get burned at the stake for witchcraft if my electronics and I were somehow transported back a few hundred years into the past. But these technologies remain in their infancy. In coming years, complex tasks requiring more computational power than is currently available to most users, such as rapidly generating high-definition video and audio files, will become trivially simple and cheap.

Read the rest here.

As long as I'm linking to my own articles, I might as well include today's story about how agricultural development is actually responsible for our severe flooding:

Iowa hasn't always been quite so flood-prone.

The state's native prairies originally absorbed most of the rainfall, but their development has led to increased runoff and flooding.

Wayne Peterson, an urban conservationist working for the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship, said the state's landscape processed rainwater quite differently before most of the natural habitats were developed into agricultural fields and urban areas. Peterson worked in the field of agricultural land conservation for more than 20 years before becoming involved with urban issues.

"Two hundred years ago, Iowa was full of prairies, savannas, and wetlands," he said. "The vast majority of the time when it rained, the rain infiltrated into the soil, moved through the soil matrix, and became part of the groundwater discharge into the river."

Read the rest here.

cheese is my chocolate

I have a confession to make. I do not like sugar. I was born without a sweet tooth. In many ways this is a fantastic handicap. I never laid around in the grass on humid summer days lamenting the tardiness of the ice cream man. I do not waste my miniscule income on sweets and consequently I do not have to worry about burning off those unnecessary calories (alcohol, is of course, another story). Chocolate and soda do not wreak havoc upon my complexion and my dentist pretty much loves me. 

So why, you may wonder, am I telling you this? All you sugar junkies out there, gritting your filling-ridden teeth together, secretly plotting my demise because I do not share your weakness? Well, having an aversion to sugar is not as sweet as you may think. Valentine's Day is pretty much the worst day of the year. Not because I haven't had my share of sweethearts, but they all tend to express their affections with the standard box of chocolates. I always have to plaster on a smile, pull back the ribbon, and suffer through two to three pieces as to placate them before pawning the gift off onto a friend or roommate. Halloween? Forget about it. I forever won my younger brother's loyalty by sharing my horde with him every October. 

I will never know the hilarity of sitting around with girlfriends digging into pints of ice cream or gorging myself on cookie dough. My birthday parties were about the lamest things ever, because I never wanted cake. My mother was kind enough to make muffins or banana bread. One year, for the sake of my guests, she talked me into a lemon pie, which is about the only pie I can stomach. Try explaining that to your boyfriend's family at Thanksgiving. "No thanks, I don't care for pumpkin pie." It's un-American. They looked at me as though I had said I enjoyed drowning puppies in my free-time!

My lack of sweet tooth is also a bit disconcerting because I love to bake. I single-handedly do all my family's Christmas cookie baking. Whenever I have a dinner party, there is always at least one pie available. I also bake and decorate elaborate cakes for my friends' and roommates' birthdays. If, heaven forbid, you ever find yourself in the hospital, you can be sure I will appear with a basket full of muffins, cookies, and sweet breads. I'm essentially Suzie Housewife. I can't help it! I intend to supplement my fledgling writing career with a bakery. I work in one now. My boss is constantly approaching me with cookies, cakes, and frostings asking me to sample them while she moans in sugary satisfaction. I like to believe I fake it pretty well. I must have been brainwashed at an early age, because death by chocolate cake just tastes like death to me. I do have a secret weakness, however, and a fantastic dealer. The addiction? Cheese. El queso. Kase. Fromage. Delicious!! 

It all started last summer. My roommate Sara, also a cheese-aholic, and I caught wind of the cheese factory in Kalona. One afternoon we climbed into her car, ignoring the threat of an impending storm and headed west/southwest on Highway 6. We drove straight into a black wall of doom; however, the lighting strikes and forceful winds were no deterrent to our acquisition of cheese. By the time we arrived at the factory the sky had opened up and it was torrentially down pouring. Once inside we stood in the red tiled entryway gawking. The front room has windows that remind me of the nursery wing in a hospital. Soaking wet, we gaped like excited parents at the production of fresh, squeaky, cheese curds. Passing into the store section of the establishment we instinctively bypassed the teas, mustard and other goods for sale, stopping with mouths ajar before the cheese case. 

What you need to understand about the cheese case in Kalona is that it looks like any other grocery store deli case. But don't be fooled. There is one tiny, yet exceedingly important difference: little plastic dishes of sample cheese. I stood immobilized with wonder. I was able to choke out, "Cheese is my chocolate..." Sara later laughed at this observation and recounted it to many of our friends and acquaintances, but at the time she dumbly nodded in agreement as we descended upon the cheeses. 

They had every kind of cheese imaginable: sharp, white, and mild cheddar, aged and baby Swiss, muenster; Gouda, Brie, Havarti, Feta, and pepper-jack. There were cheeses infused with habeneros, lemon peel, mustard seed, sage, horseradish, and yes, even chocolate. There were spreadable cheeses and string cheeses, and there behind the counter, were the squeaky cheese curds, sold in half-pound increments. I purchased some aged Gouda, a small piece of the lemon peel cheese, some spreadable port wine, and half a pound of the cheese curds. Sara bought feta, dill-havarti, salami sliced so thin you could read War and Peace through it, and of course, a pound of squeaky cheese curds.

Squeaky cheese curds are about the most amazing thing ever. I wouldn't even say they necessarily have the most delectable flavor, though Sara ardently disagrees. I believe their power is derived from their freshness. The squeakiness is also hilarious. They only squeak while they are fresh and served at room temperature. They give the consumer the aural sensation of gnawing on a very vocal mouse. Sounds gross I know, but I assure you it is one of the simplest joys of life. It also serves to provide a vigorous abdominal workout from the peels of laughter. We have made many subsequent pilgrimages to the Kalona cheese factory since that first venture. We relish in the enjoyment of witnessing newcomers chew on their first squeaky cheese curd. Kalona cheese factory aside, my fridge is constantly stocked with at least three different varieties of cheese. It's a problem. So there you have it. I have no sweet tooth. My name is Katie Gadient and I am a cheese junkie.

Synthesizing Diverse Data Streams

At first glance, my "Recommended Reading" posts and the long lists of articles I share in Google Reader may seem like odd amalgamations of unrelated tidbits of information. To some extent they are. However, there is also a method to my madness, a subtle synthesis I am attempting to weave out of all those disparate threads I pull in from all over the Internet.

The environment around us is changing rapidly--and I'm not talking about global warming. Science and technology are empowering people to radically reshape our mediascape as well as our social and political discourses, the very framework of our society. If you doubt that, just look at the difference between the world today and the world as it was fifty, a hundred, or five-hundred years ago.

Before technology allowed a substantial increase in economic development, the communications, social, and political paradigms in which we currently operate weren't even possible. The lives of our ancestors took place in a context that would seem alien to us if we were to experience it firsthand. What we take for granted as simply "the way things are" isn't as permanent as we often tend to assume from our temporally provincial perspectives.

The lives of college students in Iowa City today are so fantastical in their oddity that our acceptance of them as normal serves to drive home my point about us being generally unable to think outside of our immediate context, beyond the narrow horizons visible from our historical vantage point. Students use the Internet for almost everything--from communicating with their parents back home almost instantaneously and at virtually no cost to reading scholarly papers that would have required days or weeks of effort to obtain only a decade or two ago after only entering a few well-chosen key words in Google Scholar and clicking a mouse button.

Rather than having to struggle for our daily sustenance, we face an epidemic of obesity, brought on by an historically unbelievable bounty of cheap calories. As opposed to learning the skills we need to survive directly from our relatives and passing them on largely unchanged to our descendants, we study new scientific disciplines that our professors have forged for themselves over the course of their careers.

The world we inhabit today would have been scoffed at as implausible science fiction if it had been accurately and in detail described to the average person in 1958, a mere fifty years ago. And it's hard for me to imagine it could have appeared to be anything other than a demented fever dream if it had been foreseen in a vision by an average inhabitant of 1508. Of course these same points are equally valid when applied to the differences between any historical eras.

We have every reason to believe the same will continue to be true in the future. The evidence that the pace of technological/scientific/legal/political/social change has accelerated over time is quite strong--as is the evidence that this acceleration remains ongoing today. Therefore, it likely won't take until 2058 for the world to develop into a place that would seem to us today to belong in a science fiction novel. Likewise, it's unlikely for it to take until 2508 for the world to evolve into a state that we wouldn't be able to accept it as reality even if we could see it.

Consider the following quotation:

"In times of change, learners inherit the Earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists." — Eric Hoffer

In order to be good writers and journalists, we must cup our hands over our eyes and strain to stare as far into the distance as is possible. Rather than getting bogged down in the banal headlines in the papers today, we need to think long and hard about what will be relevant tomorrow and in the coming years of our lives.

The opinions pieces and columns that will be of interest beyond the week in which they are printed are the ones that will have the biggest impact. And isn't that why we're doing this? If not out of a desire to shape public discourse and policy, then for what purpose do we write?

In order to succeed we need to cultivate our abilities to learn new ideas and skills constantly. If we fail to do so, we will be left behind along with our outdated tools--like spoken-word storytellers whose lessons have been transcribed and thus transcended the need for their originators or bewildered scribes frantically scribbling away as the new printing presses bury them in copy. But those who are able to keep up will not only have the ability to continue to compete in their chosen media market, they will also always have plenty of material to write about, to bring to the attention of everyone else.

A writer's ability to pull coherent, nontrivial insights out of the deluge of data with which the Information Age has flooded our consciousnesses is her most important skill. Mere transcription isn't particularly valuable now that distributing information is so cheap and easy. Analysis is the value we add to our articles--and it's about the only thing we can reasonably expect to get paid for doing as journalists.

Obviously, it's impossible for any one person to keep track of all the important developments going on throughout the world today--they're just coming too hard and too fast. But we do need to pay close enough attention to a sufficiently broad spectrum of information sources to be able to see how developments in the areas in which we are experts interconnect with the world at large. It's the only way to be sure what we write is truly worth reading--the only way to move beyond telling people what happened today and into the realm of making plausible arguments about what those events will mean to people in coming years.

To sum up, it keeps getting easier to find out what's happening now and harder to ascertain what will happen next. Therefore, providing current data will continue to become less valuable as a service whereas analyzing the implications of that data will continue to become more valuable.

Steve King Watch

The never-boring Iowa representative from my home district made the news again today for his actions during a Congressional hearing.

Do any of my fellow bloggers who don't also write for the metro section care to comment?

Recommended Reading

If anyone wonders how I keep track of all these diverse websites I link to, I use Google Reader. It's very easy to use and basically lets you pull in information from multiple sources and compile it into your own personalized newspaper. Give it a try if you're sick of letting other people decide which articles you should see.

I'll begin with an article discussing the future of the Washington Post. It quotes Microsoft's Steve Ballmer as saying that no one will read paper newspapers anymore in ten years. Though it may take a bit longer than that, it will happen eventually. Start thinking about how that affects you if have any plans to make your living as a journalist. In an economic system like we have in America, it's your job to figure out how to make money doing what you like. So stop fretting and get to it.

In the international sphere, Glenn Greenwald calls American elites on how they seem to hold other countries to quite different standards than ourselves:

If there were a powerful nation (besides the U.S.) that had a leading foreign policy analyst unapologetically justifying the brutal destruction of another country by explaining that its citizens needed to "Suck On This," and had a leading presidential candidate who sung songs about dropping bombs on the U.S. and who told jokes about killing Americans (while his leading ally demands that that country attack even more countries), we would be subjected to an endless array of Op-Eds from Fred Hiatt and Charles Krauthammer condemning them and demanding that "meaningful action" be taken against such a "rogue nation." And Tom Friedman would be righteously and darkly insisting that such a country be "compelled to change its behavior."

Moving on to American politics, Marc Ambinder provides some interesting analysis of how Obama has managed his campaign, which is a refreshing change from all the nonsense that passes for political reporting in most publications.

Also in good political journalism, Radley Balko asks some excellent questions of John McCain.

Thinking of longer-term issues, John Robb ponders how communities can use disruptive new technologies to protect themselves.

As always, for more links, go here.

Sex on the Beach

After reading about the British couple caught “doing the nasty” on Dubai’s Jumeirah Beach, I couldn’t quite decide what my initial reaction to the article was. I certainly felt compelled to laugh above all things. This is the type of behavior that deserves a good slap in the face and a hearty, “What were you thinking?”

First of all, any activity performed on a public beach is obviously very public. A sea of raging hormones isn’t even enough to hinder this very evident fact. Eat a booger on the beach or pick a sand wedgie-everyone is at liberty to see these things, no matter how dark it is outside or how sneaky you think you’re being doing whatever it is that you’re doing.

Second of all, in a place that frowns upon public displays of affection and any sexual activity outside the confines of marriage, it seems that it would be somewhat easy to pick up on these social cues. It seems that it would all come down to a, “You know honey, while we’ve been here, I haven’t seen a single couple holding hands. Come to think of it, I haven’t seen a single couple period.”

As a traveler to a foreign area, especially one with such conservative values, it would seem that these would be things you’d pick up on right away as a tourist: what do these people do all day, how do they behave, how should I act as a guest in their country? I, for one, wouldn’t want to be the one caught walking down the beach eating a bag of potato chips during daylight hours- a very forbidden act since Muslims fast until sunset. Travelers to foreign places are like amoeba under a microscope. Why do anything that would draw attention to you and your partner, not only in the place you’re visiting, but in your home country as well? I can’t say that I’ve ever gone to Miami and seen couples fornicating randomly all over the beach and thought to myself, “Well, that’s normal.”

Maybe it was something in the water. The lesson here: if you want to frolic wildly on a beach, go to Cancun.

New Yorker, Politics of Fear

The cartoon showing Barack (in turban) and Michelle (packing serious heat) burning an American flag in the Oval Office is dangerous. The effort to satirize politics of fear is valiant, but I'm afraid it's come up short. Satire is something that people have difficulty trying to understand. It's easy to regurgitate the definition that satire exposes vice by ridiculing it, and it's even easier to write off offensive material as "satire," but it's not easy to digest what it all means. In this case, satire missed the point, has become ineffective, and now poses serious problems.
I recently read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for a class. The work is sometimes classified as satire, but other times classified as racist. In order for Twain to attack racism, he had to use racist themes, words, images, whatever. For this reason, debates still swirl about Twain's intents. Is it racist or anti-racist? Those who think it's anti-racist end up attributing more intelligence to their audiences than is due. But not everyone "gets it." In reality, the text can be blatantly racist, offending some and developing stereotypes in others. With satire, authors can't count on preferred/intended readings. Because of satire's capability for being misunderstood, the New Yorker cartoon will produce wide-ranging, unfavorable effects.
I know I'm not the only one who has received those ridiculous mass chain e-mails smearing Obama as some sort of undercover, Manchurian-Candidate-esque agent of eeevil who is a small part of a much larger decades-long scheme to convert the US of A into a Nation of Islam. Or something like that. This is laughable, but it should seem threatening. There are probably people out there who actually believe that. When they see a political cartoon of Obama in Muslim-garb burning American flags, no light bulb goes off for them. There is no printed title ("Politics of Fear") on the cover to act as a disclaimer. We can't pretend that everyone who sees that cartoon will be able to identify it as satire. For the insane conspiracy theorists who go to fantastic lengths to smear Barack, the images on the New Yorker will seem like evidence.
When satire misses the point, it often reinforces the vices it hopes to destroy.
Sure the chain e-mails are stupid. Yeah the cartoon is stupid too. But so are a lot of (*ahem* ultra-right, hick-ass, knights-of-the-klan) Americans. And that's what I'm worried about.

Recommended Reading

Though I recently expressed excitement at the prospect of electronic parking meters in San Francisco because they would allow people to pay with their smart phones, I recognize how careful we have to be when using computer systems to control vital infrastructure. The difficulties of protecting such technology from outside attack is difficult, but keeping an eye on those who are supposed to be managing it is equally important. Another story from San Francisco illustrates this point quite well:

Terry Childs, 43, is accused of locking out the city from its FiberWAN network containing city e-mails, payroll, police records and information on jail inmates. He was arrested Sunday after refusing to hand over passwords to the Wide Area Network system he is accused of taking control of.

Thus, as we rightly go about using technology to make our lives more efficient, we also need to make sure we maintain security and accountability in the use of these new technologies.

But not all problems necessarily require new technologies to solve them. How can people get around now that gas is so expensive? Perhaps by going the decidedly low-tech route of using one's own two feet. As I've long supposed, higher gas prices may actually be helping us fight our national obesity epidemic:

Keeping gas in the family truckster is slimming more than wallets these days and could have Americans tightening their belts -- literally. According to Charles Courtemanche, an assistant economics professor at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro, rising fuel prices are the ultimate crash diet for a nation that grew fat on cheap gas.

Courtemanche says a $1 increase in the price of gasoline could cut the obesity rate by 10 percent, saving 16,000 lives and $17 billion in health care costs each year. He makes the case in "A Silver Lining? The Connection Between Gasoline Prices and Obesity," his doctoral dissertation in health economics. The paper, currently being peer-reviewed, can be summed up in the simple idea that people walk more, bike more and dine out less when gas prices rise.

In other news relating to increasing transportation costs, some engineers are advocating growing food within major cities:

What if "eating local" in Shanghai or New York meant getting your fresh produce from five blocks away? And what if skyscrapers grew off the grid, as verdant, self-sustaining towers where city slickers cultivated their own food?

Dr. Dickson Despommier, a professor of public health at Columbia University, hopes to make these zucchini-in-the-sky visions a reality. Despommier's pet project is the "vertical farm," a concept he created in 1999 with graduate students in his class on medical ecology, the study of how the environment and human health interact.

(Via Boing Boing.)

Finally, Reason's Matt Welch encourages everyone to take a deep breath and realize that people have been selling papers by proclaiming the coming apocalypse for quite some time--and of course they've been wrong thus far and will likely continue to be:

For the record, as someone who both predicted the dollar collapse and believed fervently in the Y2K bug, I think that things will continue to get worse, especially as the housing mess continues to unwind (not soon enough for renters like me and Paul Thornton!) and entitlements continue to swell larger than Al Gore's neck. But I can't help wonder if that's more about a juvenile fondness for train wrecks than a sober assessment of an economy that, despite its many flaws, has consistently outpaced the doomsayers for what, a quarter century now?

For more interesting links, click here.