The GOP Presidential Line-up
[Reprinted with the permission of Matt Bors]
Ancestors along the highway
[This idea was born as a comment here, but I decided to create a separate post out of it]. What if your mother stood right behind you, and your mother's mother stood right behind her? Then your great grandma and then your great great grandma. Imagine them all lined up, one foot apart, stretching out into the distance. If a generation is deemed to be 25 years, a line of your ancestors as long as a football field (300 feet) would stretch backwards 7,500 years. The woman at the end of that 300 foot line would have lived during the time when agriculture just began in ancient Egypt. You'd still recognize each of your ancestors in that 300 foot line to be fully modern humans, biologically speaking. Isn't it amazing to think that you could run along side that entire 300 foot line of your ancestors in only 15 seconds (I'm assuming you’re not an Olympic caliber sprinter) to end up standing next to one of your own ancestors who was alive 7,500 years ago? Now think even further back. In An Ancestor’s Tale, Richard Dawkins calculated that 20,000,000 great-grandparents ago, our relatives were small shrew-like animals living at the end of the Cretaceous period. What if you spaced out your relatives one foot apart to extend all the way back to these shrew-like creatures? That line would be 3,787 miles long. That's about the length of highway running from my hometown of St. Louis, Missouri to Anchorage Alaska. Imagine speeding alongside that line of your relatives at 60 mph, seeing the generations of your relatives whizzing by, more than 5,000 of them every minute. It wouldn’t take long to reach the last of your relatives who looks like you. In fact, your trip would have barely begun. Biologically modern humans (those whose bodies are the functional equivalent of our own bodies) came onto the scene between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago. Driving at highway speed parallel to that line of your own relatives, you'd run out of your biologically modern human relatives less than one-minute after beginning your trip. That's only 4,000 generations. [More . . . ]
The Apple iPhone: yet another conflation of needs and wants
It's deemed "news" rather than advertising: It's right up there with Paris Hilton. Hundreds of people who lined up to be among the first to get their hands on Apple Inc.’s coveted iPhone are now the braggarts and guinea pigs for the latest must-have, cutting-edge piece of techno-wizardry. Gotta have…
A drinking game about the President’s al Qaeda obsessions
Chris Kelly writes about that "thing" on the President's mind during today's 45 minute trip to Rhode Island. Bush dropped in, to see what condition his condition was in, and to address the Naval War College. For the audience members playing the drinking game, the 9/11 references were: 1) "This…
Ten tips for lousy interviewers: no more excuses for bad interviews
Is it just me, or are the interviews you see on television getting worse and worse? There are exceptionally good interviewers, of course (such as Bill Moyers). Bad interviews are the norm, however. This is a shame, because most bad interviews could be cured if only the interviewers would follow a few basic rules
Before I go further, I should make it clear that my frustration is with interviews that are serious attempts to discuss a topic with a guest in order to inform or entertain the audience. I am excluding from this critique interviews on comedy shows (such as Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert), where the interviewer is expected to interject his or her personality with more gusto or even to toy with the guest.
Without further ado, here are 10 basic rules for conducting effective interviews:
1. The interviewer needs to shut up and let the guest talk. How often is it that an interviewer just can’t hold back and ends up dominating the interview, failing to allow the guest a fair chance to talk? I’ve often watched interviews by Charlie Rose that remind me of this point. Although Charlie books some terrific guests and does some excellent work, he is one of those interviewers who is often incapable of staying out of the way. Many interviews end up being “about Charlie.” In the legal field, the trick to effective direct examination of a witness is to ask brief questions that allow the witness to “bloom” in front …
