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The best conceived, designed, and expressed total idea, ever: Barack Obama's entire campaign, each and every part of it, including Barack Obama.

What we're experiencing now is blowback, the cumulative result of decades of quick fixes and dirty deeds. The carpet's squelching under our feet.
Through the endless hours of analysis and the endless op-ed essays, in India at least there has been very little mention of the elephants in the room: Kashmir, Gujarat and the demolition of the Babri Masjid.

Say you're EA sports, makers of the Tiger Woods videogame franchise. And you see a video on YouTube, where some kid is mocking you for a bug in the game that lets Tiger walk on water.
Here's exactly what you do.

I turned in my version of the Forrest Gump sequel, or Part II, whatever you call it… It’s a continuation really — I want to start the movie literally two minutes after the end of the last one, with him on the bus bench waiting for his son to get home from school. But I turned in the script the night before 9/11.

I assembled this team because I'm a strong believer in strong personalities and strong opinions. I think that's how the best decisions are made. One of the dangers in a White House, based on my reading of history, is that you get wrapped up in groupthink and everybody agrees with everything and there's no discussion and there are no dissenting views. So I'm going to be welcoming a vigorous debate inside the White House.
But understand, I will be setting policy as president. I will be responsible for the vision that this team carries out, and I expect them to implement that vision once decisions are made.

The story of how one of my Flickr pictures came to be used in a Hollywood movie.

Experiments with hand lettering...a series based on spam subject lines in my mailbox.

India is a more diverse country than the US. It is run on a parliamentary rather than a presidential system. The states have more autonomy in their functioning. It may thus be that the quest for an 'Indian Obama' is futile, since there cannot, and need not, be one. Rather than searching for a single, brilliant, charismatic leader who can reshape the country, we would be better served by a dozen, lesser (and less glamorous) figures who are, in some degree, Obama-like.

Today we're launching SearchWiki, a way for you to customize search by re-ranking, deleting, adding, and commenting on search results.

There are three common misconceptions that surface quite frequently:
1. Visual design is about making things look pretty.
2. Making things 'pop' more can improve visual design.
3. It's possible to evaluate visual design in pieces.

Throughout the Presidential Transition Project, this website will be your source for the latest news, events, and announcements so that you can follow the setting up of the Obama Administration.

A seven-part in-depth look behind the scenes of the campaign, consisting of exclusive behind-the-scenes reporting from the McCain and Obama camps assembled by a special team of reporters who were granted year-long access on the condition that none of their findings appear until after Election Day.

As part of his duties, the black man will have to spend four to eight years cleaning up the messes other people left behind. The job comes with such intense scrutiny and so certain a guarantee of failure that only one other person even bothered applying for it.

To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. "Can I interest you in the chicken?" she asks. "Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?"
To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.

I've been thinking lately about a dream candidate for my nerd habits, my nerdy business, and the way I live my nerdy life. Regardless of party affiliation, if you're running for an office from as small as city council all the way up to president, if you hit on any/all of these things, you just might get my vote.

I think that between science and religion there is, if not an incompatibility, at least what the philosopher Susan Haack has called a tension, that has been gradually weakening serious religious belief, especially in the West, where science has been most advanced. Here I would like to trace out some of the sources of this tension, and then offer a few remarks about the very difficult question raised by the consequent decline of belief, the question of how it will be possible to live without God.

Ask yourself: how has 'elitism' become a bad word in American politics? There is simply no other walk of life in which extraordinary talent and rigorous training are denigrated. We want elite pilots to fly our planes, elite troops to undertake our most critical missions, elite athletes to represent us in competition and elite scientists to devote the most productive years of their lives to curing our diseases. And yet, when it comes time to vest people with even greater responsibilities, we consider it a virtue to shun any and all standards of excellence. When it comes to choosing the people whose thoughts and actions will decide the fates of millions, then we suddenly want someone just like us, someone fit to have a beer with, someone down-to-earth—in fact, almost anyone, provided that he or she doesn't seem too intelligent or well educated.

I am glad many Indians whose pride trumps their sense of humour don't read advertisements for Danish newspapers. Otherwise they’d be out protesting an ad of the daily Morgenavisen Jyllands Posten.
The ad says: Life is easier, if you don't speak up. The ads show the Dalai Lama admiring the Himalayas while preparing to ski down a slope; Nelson Mandela relaxing on a beach, carrying a surf board; and Mohandas Gandhi, smiling with a beer bottle in one hand, with the other, he is barbecuing sausages, empty beer bottles at his feet.

But for someone to run 10.03 one year and 9.69 the next, if you don't question that in a sport that has the reputation it has right now, you're a fool. Period.

The Fitbit Tracker contains a motion sensor like the ones found in the Nintendo Wii. The Tracker senses your motion in three dimensions and converts this into useful information about your daily activities. The Tracker measures the intensity and duration of your physical activities, calories burned, steps taken, distance traveled, how long it took you to fall asleep, the number of times you woke up throughout the night and how long you were actually asleep vs just lying in bed. You can wear the Tracker loosely in your pocket or clipped to your clothing, even bras.

Fighting with your significant other? Who's right and who's wrong? Air it out anonymously while letting people of the world give you advice and make the decision on who should apologize.

A House By The Park is a first-hand chronology of the design, planning, and construction of a modern home in Seattle.

Privatize stray dogs. The municipalities of India's metropolises should put stray dogs on sale. Animal rights activists and dog lovers are free to buy and own the canines as pets. They shall be held legally liable for damages their pets inflict on others.

I am sick and tired of the president of the United States embarrassing me. The world we live in is too complex to entrust it to someone else whose idea of intellectual curiosity and grasp of foreign policy issues is to tell us he can look into Vladimir Putin's eyes and see into his soul.
George Bush's record as a student, military man, businessman and leader of the free world is one of constant failure. And the part that troubles me most is he seems content with himself.
He will leave office with the country $10 trillion in debt, fighting two wars, our international reputation in shambles, our government cloaked in secrecy and suspicion that his entire presidency has been a litany of broken laws and promises, our citizens' faith in our own country ripped to shreds. Yet Bush goes bumbling along, grinning and spewing moronic one-liners, as though nobody understands what a colossal failure he has been.
I fear to the depth of my being that John McCain is just like him.

We truly are a bunch of intolerant people. We want to be heard but do not have the strength to hear, we want to have an opinion but do not believe anyone else is entitled to one.

Your subject is Journal.
Feel free to interpret that how you like. For example, you could tell a story in diary entries or blog posts, or have a lost journal play a critical role in the narrative. You could tell a love story; a whodunnit; a gritty urban tale. Whatever. let your imagination fly, but make sure your story has a more than cursory connection with the theme.

In an attempt to excite audiences, Ram Gopal Varma and One More Thought Entertainment have announced a unique contest -- daring people from across the country to watch the movie alone in a theatre.
Phoonk is a movie based on black magic. The movie makers claim that the film is the scariest ever and have thus announced a reward of Rs 5 lakh to any person who completes the task.

Asako Narahashi's series "half awake and half asleep in the water," shows Japan's coastal areas as seen from the sea. Using a waterproof camera and watching the tide instead of the viewfinder, Narahashi captures a vision of Japan—and of the world—that is at once calming, eerie, enchanting, and unsettling. She is only occasionally swallowed by waves in the process.

The Better Place business model is one most of us already experience every day—with our mobile phones.
Think of it like this: we pay mobile providers for minute-by-minute access to cell towers connected together in cellular networks. Truth is, we pay comparatively little—or next to nothing—for the phones themselves. After all, what you’re really buying is air time, not a box with buttons.
The same model works for transportation. Just replace the phone with an electric car, replace the cell towers with battery recharge stations, and replace the cellular networks with an electric recharge grid. Now you're buying miles, not minutes.

Some days, the web feels like 5 people trying to make something; 5k people turning it into a list; and 500MM people saying, 'FAIL.'

I really need to figure out a way of being able to blog on my iPhone when I'm traveling in the state. It will never be as interesting as The Big B and his missing luggage but at least I'll be more regular.