This is a fantastic video. Watch it.

Like most voters, I find negative attack advertisements that air on television obnoxious and somewhat insulting; as if I have so little cognitive power the McCain camp will manage to convince me the eight-year-old Obama spent his time making time bombs with some crazy radical rather than building castles with LEGO. In my daily read of political blogs, I discovered the Obama campaign's latest advert taking a shot at Senator John McCain:

While I wouldn't call it my favorite advert, it's a much less obnoxious negative advert than it could have been. As political campaigns ostensibly have no choice but to run these sorts of advertisements, it would make me happier if they all looked like that one. It doesn't have some spooky voice in the background. It doesn't have overly dramatic scary music playing to give it that "you should be scared of this other guy" quality. Instead, it lays out a reasonably clear logical path that leads a voter to chose Obama-Biden, not McCain-Palin. Not too bad.

As one of my economics professors put it, the American auto industry "shouldn't exist." Therefore, it was with great dismay that I read the increasingly nonsensical US Congress may move to bail out the US auto industry. Again. Of all the programs and projects that merit or simply need better funding in this country, saving the US auto industry would not make the top five quadrillion. We could invest in education, in infrastructure or in healthcare. Anything but the auto industry!

With the move toward greener modes of transport — provided the nose dive in oil prices doesn't push people back to their Hummers — the American auto industry cannot compete. The Chevy Volt is lovely. But, as is so often the case, it's too little too late. The Japanese and the Europeans have an enormous lead in the short run. Ford actually pays Toyota a license fee to use its Hybrid Synergy Drive software for its hybrid gasoline-electric vehicles. Audi, BMW and Mercedes now sell cars that use cleaner diesel engines to burn as much fuel as a much smaller vehicles. The American automakers can't compete in the short run. It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever to spend valuable government dollars just to make sure that a few thousand people don't lose their jobs tomorrow.

Which is not to say I don't care about those autoworkers who will lose their jobs should the US auto industry collapse. Such an event would qualify as unfortunate. I do care quite a bit, however, that those autoworkers keep their jobs at the expense of a much more important program. With $50 billion, the United States could, for instance, make a good effort at modernizing its ancient, decaying power grid. Not only would that create a fair number of good jobs in and of itself, it would also put the United States in a better position to harness clean, renewable energy that also creates jobs, reduces our dependence on foreign oil and keeps more polar bears alive.

In the long run, America could lead the way in clean transport. A number of US firms have promising battery technology that could become vital to the production of tomorrows vehicles. Companies like Tesla Motors have the potential to become the Google of clean transport, creating good high-skill jobs, propelling our economy forward and making the planet cleaner. Ford, Chrysler and GM offer nothing but a huge bill to save a few unfortunate people at the expense of the whole country. Let's put that money to use somewhere useful.

Every once in awhile, someone asks me about the United States' transition to digital television scheduled to take place two years later than originally planned in February 2009. Given the enormous sum of money the government has spent on public service announcements, coupons and other publicity, it always surprises me just how little the average person knows about the upcoming changeover.

That is, until I paid a visit to the FCC's digital television information website at dtv.gov. The government — or at least the FCC — must think Americans are incredibly stupid. I could not find a video, article or advertisement that actually explains the difference between analog and digital broadcasts. The page titled, "What's DTV?" completely misses the boat. It begins:

This makes me think, as most uneducated consumers do, that moving to digital from analog television is really a transition to high definition television. It's not. (And it's not their fault they don't understand it either.)

Rather, the DTV transition will move over-the-air broadcasts in the United States to a digital method of transition from an analog transmission system. I can describe the delight of eating a box of Moonstruck chocolates in English or in French. But regardless of the language I choose to speak, the intrinsic meaning of my prose remains the same. "Moonstruck chocolates are delicious," conveys the same message as, "Les chocolats de Moonstruck sont délicieux." In the same way, broadcasters will now transmit a 480 line, interlaced picture via digital broadcast rather than via an analog broadcast. The picture remains intrinsically the same.

Of course, my choosing to speak in English rather than French has some benefits. For one, I have a much stronger command of English than French. I could describe eating a Moonstruck truffle as, "A blissful experience that sends one into a transcendent state of nirvana." But, without a French-English dictionary handy, I cannot describe the experience of eating a Moonstruck truffle with as much metaphorical detail. So too can broadcasters, by virtue of the digital transmission method now beam fuzz-free standard definition and beautiful high definition pictures with 5.1 channel surround sound into people's homes.

Consumers, however, may need one of those mythical converter boxes if their television doesn't have a digital tuner. It would be as if I asked one of my non-French speaking friends, "Connais-tu une bonne boisson pour accompanger des chocolats de Moonstruck?" An older television glosses over the digital signal because it has no idea what to do with it or what it means. The converter box acts as a sort of translator that could step in and convert my previous statement into English: "Do you know a good drink to go with some Moonstruck chocolates?"

See? It's not that complicated! Would it kill the FCC to actually explain the technical difference between analog and digital television? Their oversimplified explanations only serve to make me and everyone else befuddled and confused.

On the heels of Governor Palin's assertion that some parts of the country are more "pro-American" than others, came Minnesota Representative Michele Bachmann's recommendation that the Congress establish a committee to investigate anti-Americanism in our nation's government. To their credit, both Representative Bachmann and Governor Palin have apologized for their questionable remarks.

But it seems Rep. Bachmann has a few more skeletons secreted away in her xenophobic armoire. The Huffington Post writes about another episode of intolerance from late 2005. In the wake of the youth riots in the Paris suburbs, Rep. Bachmann claimed the unrest in the French capitol came about as a result of laziness and propaganda disseminated by al Jazeera. She commented, "It's suburbanites, the kids, that are watching cable TV, Did you know that? In a lot of these high rises where a lot of the suburban youth are doing writing or doing they have cable TV in their apartments." Yes, the rioters probably had cable television. Yes, they lived in what one might call the Paris suburbs.

But Rep. Bachmann makes two fallacious assumptions. First, she assumes that having cable television implies a person lives in some kind of palatial penthouse apartment. In the United States, only a tiny minority of people receive their television over-the-air. I would venture a guess that more than half of US citizens below the poverty line have cable television. Second, she assumes suburbs in the United States are comparable to suburbs in France. When someone says "American suburban teen," I think of a college-bound child who drives a Volkswagen Jetta, shops at J. Crew and goes to movies with friends on the weekend. When someone says "French suburban teen," I think of a struggling child of immigrant workers who could succeed with just a touch more equality and a touch more opportunity. Big difference.

Worse still, she goes on to assert, "Not all cultures are equal. Not all values are equal." It is as if she wants to commit US troops to some kind of Victorian era imperialist quest to impose our moral beliefs upon other cultures. It frightens me to think these are the people running our government.

The BBC just ran a story about the TrueCall, a device developed by a group of British eggheads sick and tired of receiving unwelcome phone calls. The idea behind the device is quite brilliant, though not particularly original: numbers on a user-created white list go through normally, numbers on a black list receive a snippy recorded messages and unidentified callers must wait on hold while the end user decides what to do. Ad blocking browser plugins and some spam email filters work in much the same way.

With that idea in mind, it struck me that some kind of iPhone application might be able to do something similar. The iPhone, with its works (almost) anywhere Internet connection, could download a list of known telemarketers' phone numbers and display the incoming call to the end user depending upon its status. Then I remembered that Apple has yet to grant developers that kind of system-level access — namely the ability to tinker with the Phone application — to make such a system possible. Unfortunate.

In the interim, someone — perhaps me if I have enough time — should put together a plugin for Mac OS X Address Book that syncs one huge vCard file with the name "Telemarketer" and known telemarketers' phone numbers between Macs and a user-created telemarketing blacklist in the cloud. I would never need to answer another junk phone call again. Unfortunately, there's no way to have the iPhone answer the call and play a pre-recorded message.

I'm sick. And I have been for the last three days. As someone who firmly believes recovery and stress do not mix well, I've spent most of my recovery time sleeping or reading obscure 19th century French literature. But as much as I enjoy dreaming and struggling with dead verb tenses, I have also caved to popular culture and watched a few episodes of Gossip Girl on the Internet.

Admittedly, Gossip Girl would not have been my first choice. Digging through the iTunes Store, however, it quickly became clear that I have already seen all of the "good" television produced in the last decade. I also feel uncomfortably pretentious, judgmental and elitist whenever I comment on the television adaptation of the Gossip Girl novels with, "I've heard the books read like one giant product placement." Thus I spent a few hours in the company of Blair, Dan, Serena and the rest of the melodramatic, judgmental ensemble of fictional Manhattanites.

While I doubt I will become an avid follower of the series, it has some merits. The costume design is nothing short of incredible. Everyone looks very sharp, though not at the expense of conveying their personalities. I only wish there existed a real college campus where everyone looked so sharp. People should at least change out of their pajamas to attend class.

I have also become a great fan of Blake Lively's voice. It reminds me of a chocolate-covered sea salt caramel. It's sensuous, smooth and sultry, but with a pleasant bite and a wonderful, unquantifiable playfulness. If Ms. Lively ever narrates a documentary, I intend to be the first in line for tickets.

Above all else, though, Gossip Girl makes me question the influence of mass media and popular culture on today's — shall we say — young adults.

Teen-oriented television brims with female characters who have their cake and eat it too. Gossip Girl's Blair, for instance, sits at the top of her fictional preparatory school's social hierarchy and manages to maintain an implied high level of academic achievement. Likewise, Serena, the program's protagonist, seems assured a fictional place at Yale College and garners the attention the the series' namesake Gossip Girl. (A brief aside. Gossip Girl has a particularly sophisticated method of disseminating her blog posts. No blog I know of sends multimedia messages with pictures, video and sound to all of its subscribers whenever something new goes online.)

The male characters, however, seem forced to choose between social smarts or book smarts. Serena's love interest, Dan, never displays any real mastery of social skills, though he undoubtedly comes across as intelligent. On the other side of the coin, Chuck, the chauvinist playboy and occasional antagonist in the series, has a clear mastery of social skills, but never really displays any intellectual ability beyond a knack for scheming.

Similarly, NBC's The Office — arguably a more male-oriented program — portrays the male characters as irresponsible, oblivious, negligent, or simply all three. Based on the one episode of The Office I've seen, I would not hesitate to call Steve Carrell's character an idiot.

How hard would it be to pen a popular television series featuring Blair Waldorf's male twin as its protagonist?

While women still experience some level of discrimination in the workplace, my personal observations suggest that the young women of America's schools, colleges and universities, work — on average — much harder than their male counterparts. Obviously, a number of factors play into this lack of motivation, but I feel like popular culture reinforces unfortunate stereotypes and something need be done.

I've given up on finding the time to dig up a weird, but wonderful word every week. So I'm rechristening the Word of the Week, the Word of the Moment. If I run across something I like, I'll post it.

When I lumbered out of bed this morning and hobbled to the bathroom to shower, I did not expect to spend ten minutes waiting to bathe. But I did. I spent at least ten minutes waiting idly for the poorly engineered, "environmentally friendly" combination of plumbing and water heating apparatuses to deliver water warm enough not to give me frostbite. This, like the cell phone problem I wrote about on a previous occasion, epitomizes the lack of thought people give to supposedly environmentally friendly ideas. It also underscores just how stupid our supposedly intelligent buildings are.

Even with a specially-designed low-flow shower head, I wasted at least ten or twenty gallons of water waiting for hot water. While I doubt the state of Maine has a shortage of fresh water, wasting that quantity of water seems contradictory to the aim of making a shower more environmentally friendly. It also raises the possibility that the hot water heating system operates inefficiently, and thus wastes energy, if it takes just under ten minutes to feed hot water into the shower.

The solution, as I see it, lies with intelligence. If the water heating system in my dormitory had a bigger, better, faster brain, it could undoubtedly save tremendous amounts of energy without sacrificing my time or my comfort.

I have often wondered, for example, why showers, sinks and baths have such imprecise temperature controls. One must fiddle with several knobs for a minute or so — wasting water and energy in the process — to find that "just right" temperature. On the other hand, a computer controlled water heating system could take a person's preferred water temperature, measured to degree Fahrenheit precision, and summon that person's desired water temperature and flow at the push of a button in much the same way some high-end cars store seat position and climate control preferences in drivers' key fobs.

What's more, if the software controlling the building's water heating system employed a Bayesian classifier, it could eventually predict hot water usage patterns to a reasonably high degree of accuracy and precision. Such a system would also reduce the amount of energy expended heating water, improve people's comfort by always having heated water ready and reduce the amount of water wasted before a person actually takes a shower.

Many environmental advocates object to the amount of lamb imported from New Zealand because the idea of transporting food all those thousands of miles offends their carbon conscious morals. These people, however, ignore the host of factors that make up a products carbon footprint, which, in the case of lamb, actually make imported New Zealand lamb more environmentally friendly than domestically produced lamb. Likewise, people living on the East Coast of the United States would actually act in a more environmentally conscious manner if they bought wine imported from Europe, rather than shipped across the country from California.

People need to think before they think green. These reactionary solutions to environmental impact issues, in many cases, create just as many problems — for the environment and for people's overall welfare — as they create. Not to mention they make me wait an intolerably long time to take a shower.

Apparently unschooling is the new schooling. Apparently intellectualism has become so repugnant to some parents that to simply not teach their children at all has become popular in some circles. In fact, the movement has spawned its own hideous green-and-white website where interested parents can read all about the merits of not actually educating their children. (There's something mildly ironic about that last sentence.)

The idea, as I understand it, is that by simply aiding their children in exploring the wonders of everyday life — albeit in more depth than one might traditionally do so — children will learn by some kind of mysterious osmosis. As the unschooling.org home page says about math and unschooling:

Sure. Because the average parent would look at a quilt and immediately leap into a discussion of non-Euclidian geometry, or because the average parent will look at a can of paint and start babbling on and on about algebraic rings. Math, and really the bulk of traditional education, will, as the unschooling.org folks correctly note, have little use in a person's everyday life. Learning about algebraic rings, however, does serve a purpose; it exposes people to complicated ideas, which — if understood — lead to real learning.

This whole plan depends upon the motivation of teenagers, the intelligence of parents generally and sheer happenstance for presenting the right context for a learning experience. Three very capricious variables indeed. The mere presence of the question, "Is this legal?" on their FAQ page should be enough to kill the movement.

Though I don't think anyone put it better than Harvard College Director of Admissions Marlyn McGrath in a recent interview: "Having no academic experience is a profound disadvantage for students applying to college."

Over the summer I helped to setup a fantastic web portal for students at Bates College. While it's not quite what I had envisioned, mostly due to security-related restrictions that prevented me from deploying a custom coded content management system, it's nice nonetheless.

Thus, if you happen to be a Bates student, I would encourage you to pay a visit to batescentral.org and have a look around.

The Bates economics department is testing my patience. For some inane inexplicable reason, the department refuses to teach economics with true numerical analysis. It frightens me to think the College will grant someone a bachelor's degree in economics without requiring that same person to have taken anything beyond calculus of a single variable.

Trying to do numerical problems in my economics courses without the aid of such useful tools as demand and supply functions, differentiation, and integration drives me crazy. I feel like I have a learning disability because I struggle to understand the bizarre overly vulgarized "economic formulas" provided by my economics professors. People of all ages deserve to know that the price-point elasticity of supply or demand is simply the product of the ratio of the price and the quantity demanded or supplied at that price, and the derivative of the demand or supply function at that point. It's easier, more accurate and it makes so much more sense!

Not that I blame my professors for my misery. Every member of our economics faculty — or at least every member of our economics faculty I've met — is incredibly intelligent, and, for that matter, probably reasonably good at very high-level mathematics.

Rather, I blame our society's general fear or stigmatization of mathematics for my current predicament. For whatever other inane and inexplicable reasons, people generally seem to possess a strong aversion to math. I had to exercise extreme self-restraint the other day when a fellow student expressed her intention to major in economics and never take another math course again. I would call that course of action moronic, to put it mildly.

I only wish our economics department would ditch its soft math requirements and pile on the prerequisites for economics courses. If some students have to become philosophy majors, so be it. Economics and mathematics go together like garlic and butter.