This New Republic article quotes an unnamed senior ISI (Pakistani intelligence angency) official who claims that a White House aide told ISI’s director that “it would be best if the arrest or killing of [any] HVT were announced on twenty-six, twenty-seven, or twenty-eight July” That is, during the DNC. Slim evidence, granted, but the timing of the actual announcement of the capture of an HVT really is highly suspicious, and this article was written before the actual capture.

Of course, a Democrat would never, say, bomb Bosnia to distract the public from a certain intern…

You know the celebrity Kabbalah craze has escaped the asylum walls of Hollywood when Target can charge $27 for a piece of red string.

A recent study done by two psychological researchers (including Sheldon Solomon, of my own Skidmore College) backs up the psychology behind the Bush team’s tactic of constantly referring to 9/11 whenever they’re in trouble in the polls. Playing on people’s fears is, well, an evil thing to do–it’s what terrorists do, and it’s what the Bush team is doing.

Well, sort of: “I’ve got my laptop and I’m staying just over the state line, close enough to smell the democratic process!” Obviously, it’s a spoof over the hype about convention blogging. Best line: “Do we live in an age so framed by artifice that fake newscasters reporting real news are more real than the real newscasters reporting fake news, thereby becoming the story and eclipsing the real news?”

With the DNC in town this week, the place is crawling with celebrities, politicians, and news people. Boston.com is offering a forum for people to post their sightings, and out of curiosity, I’ve been having a look. Today, someone posted that they saw Walter Cronkite. Did you know that in Sweden they call news anchors Kronkiters? I’m not making this up…

So, being immersed in DNC hype here in Boston, it’s tough not to get a little into it. So here’s a round-up of some things worth reading from today.

I generally let my news aggregator do a lot of my idle web surfing for me. I’m not knocking it: I end up finding way better stuff, and finding out more points of view on individual news stories than I ever could without it. But a downside is that a big chunk of my media consumption ends up being filtered through news sites and blogs, which by their nature is an interlinking cloud of buzz moving linearly forward through time. I’ve been more in the mood for something less ephemeral. From Walden: “What news! how much more important to know what that is which was never old!” So, a good place to find things which were never old, and plenty of things that are old, too, is the Wikipedia.

Today, the thing I found that I knew nothing about was Ray Johnson and mail art. Yesterday, I used it to see if George Washington Carver invented peanut butter. (He didn’t: Dr. Kellogg did).

No, it’s not a prototype of an updated Goliath for the new Knight Rider movie, it’s the BladeRunner, a dual-mode transport that runs on rails and roads. [via Slashdot]

I can’t quite explain why this video fascinates me, but I consider myself a horrible shirt folder, and I try so hard to be a good shirt folder, that there’s something unreal about just watching this woman speak in japanese, draw some imaginary lines across the shirt, and then all of a sudden, she grabs it, flips it, and it is Gap-ready. I keep watching it over and over again.

The New Yorker has an extremely frustrating online presence, but this mostly-OK interview with the author of this week’s article about CTY is the best approximation I can link to. The article itself is decent. I haven’t thought about CTY in ages. CTY was a big influence on me at an impressionable time, though working there for a few summers did manage to cure me of any ongoing idealization or nostalgia. The article brought back lots of good memories. It even gets some of it right, which is pretty good by my low expectations of journalism, but it’s clear from the title (”Nerd Camp”) that the author was fishing for a certain story. Where he doesn’t get it right, it tends to be the Nerd Camp story asserting itself.

Thinking about the origins of Unix makes me want to point out the terrific Art of Unix Programming, by Eric Raymond, who has grown a cottage industry of explaining hacker culture and the open source movement to both the cultures themselves and to the outside world. Particularly noteworthy in The Art of Unix Programming are the Basics of Unix Philosophy, such as the Rule of Parsimony (”Write a big program only when it is clear by demonstration that nothing else will do”) and the Rule of Silence (”When a program has nothing surprising to say, it should say nothing”). My perennial favorites in the Jargon File, which have applications in the civilian world, are Hanlon’s Razor (”Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”) and “wave a dead chicken“.

From The Economist: “It is that interplay between the technical and the social that gives both C and Unix their legendary status. Programmers love them because they are powerful, and they are powerful because programmers love them.” (Which reminds me of Socrates in Euthyphro: “The point which I should first wish to understand is whether the pious or holy is beloved by the gods because it is holy, or holy because it is beloved of the gods.”)

Just like the waffling, liberal weenie John Kerry, John Flansburgh of They Might Be Giants can’t seem to make up his mind. Here, he says

“Tippecanoe and Tyler Too” is the “Rock Around the Clock” of campaign songs. It was the first one that really was a hit. And it was a huge nationwide hit. It’s just a great song—it’s really bitchy and mean-spirited in a way that’s kind of exciting.

But here, he says

It was the campaign song that invented the campaign song… I was interested in it because it’s a great song, but historically, [through] the little bit of research I’ve done, I got the impression that it was the ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ of campaign songs.

Make up your mind, Johan. And next time, leave R.E.M. off your album, and I might buy it.

Dartmouth proejct to statistically detect photoshopping. If it works, it’s a step toward being able to trust what you see again. [via Roland Piquepaille’s Technology Trends]

Exactly what it sounds like…