However desperate the situation and circumstances, do not despair.

 When there is everything to fear, be unafraid.

When surrounded by dangers, fear none of them.

When without resources, depend on resourcefulness.

When surprised, take the enemy itself by surprise.

Sun Tzu

The Nissan Cube (especially in white) looks to me like it ought to be filled with Clone troopers every time I see one. Now it needs to be filled with burning clone troopers.

Nissan has issued a recall to fix the Cube. In a severe rear-end collision, the fuel system could spring a leak. Not a huge leak that turns the car into a fireball if it gets a little love tap, like the Ford Pinto of decades past could do. It has to get slammed at 50 mpg with 70% coverage resulting in the Cube spinning  a quarter-turn. (Mind you, around here, people will do 50 in a school zone, so I’m not sure where it would be safe, but…) And even at that, the leak isn’t supposed to be major. Even so, leaking fuel is not good. Take your little Cube down to your local dealer and get it fixed for free.

Another designer locally did a great poster featuring some of Nashville’s neighborhoods and it became funny when people from all over town started complaining that their “hood” was missing from the list. She had done hers like a train stop list. I thought it would be nice to have one showing the Nashville suburbs, but that wasn’t really enough either because it cut off all of the central services district and a lot of places that were really important to me growing up. Anyway, I ended up with this. Some of these parts of town I didn’t know the names for and found on Google maps. The designer who created the one featured in The Nashvillest will customize hers for you, if you want one.

Some of the roses haven’t done well this year, some have. This one always looks beautiful when it blooms.

(via emilyryanmusic via excelsius via amberrhymeswithorange)

In the latest Newsweek there are some interesting numbers comparing how much things have changed over the last decade.

* This is a scary number for several reasons. First, there’s someone who counts them? (Yes, Blogpulse does.) And second, no wonder most of us get so few comments. Even though there are as many bloggers as their are blogs at a minimum, we’re still spread thin. There were over 52,000 new blogs added to the totals Blogpulse tracks yesterday.

** As far as emails are concerned, my company’s IT department estimates that 97% of the emails that hit our servers are spam.

*** Oh, shit!

Although I no longer do design and marketing work as I once did, I still pay attention to marketing – what works and what doesn’t. What’s good and what’s bad. Fast food, for better or worse, involves a lot of marketing differentiation advertising. (As an aside, this is why I completely refuse to eat at Sonic. I’m aftaid the food will make me as stupid as the people in their commercials.) Most are standard marketing fare. This is not. Although not designed for TV, since it’s over 2 minutes, just knowing that the company made this is still a significant impact. (From a tweet by Dave Delaney, who also has this on his blog.)

Every Life Has A Story – Chick-fil-A from Dan T. Cathy on Vimeo.

 The year 2010 happens to be 100 years after Mark Twain’s death and that’s when he said his autobiography could be published. Somewhat as a result of that, some material Twain wrote, but didn’t publish (or finish) is being released. Today, NPR published his Concerning the Interview, an unfinished piece. It’s well worth a full read. Some exerpts:

No one likes to be interviewed, and yet no one likes to say no; for interviewers are courteous and gentle-mannered, even when they come to destroy. I must not be understood to mean that they ever come consciously to destroy or are aware afterward that they have destroyed; no, I think their attitude is more that of the cyclone, which comes with the gracious purpose of cooling off a sweltering village, and is not aware, afterward, that it has done that village anything but a favor.

The Interview was not a happy invention. It is perhaps the poorest of all ways of getting at what is in a man. In the first place, the interviewer is the reverse of an inspiration, because you are afraid of him. You know by experience that there is no choice between these disasters. No matter which he puts in, you will see at a glance that it would have been better if he had put in the other: not that the other would have been better than this, but merely that it wouldn’t have been this; and any change must be, and would be, an improvement, though in reality you know very well it wouldn’t. I may not make myself clear: if that is so, then I have made myself clear–a thing which could not be done except by not making myself clear, since what I am trying to show is what you feel at such a time, not what you think–for you don’t think; it is not an intellectual operation; it is only a going around in a confused circle with your head off.

That’s the essence of the old TV cop show, Dragnet,“just the facts.” They, as police officers, were only interested in the facts of the case, not opinion or conjecture or rhetoric. And as Jefferson said, ““Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.”

So you’d think that fact-checking groups would be a helpful addition to the political process, zinging both sides of the spectrum after speeches or during them. Can you imagine the potential effect of real-time fact-checking scrolling across the screen as politicians speak? Wouldn’t that be awesome?

Well, it turns out the answer is no, it wouldn’t be. In a series of studies at the University of Michigan in 2005 & 2006, (I added the bolding. The source is the Boston Globe. It’s a good read. The Globe is still one of the best papers. in print or online.)

when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

Turns out that the fact is that facts backfire.

“Area Man Passionate Defender Of What He Imagines Constitution To Be,” read a recent Onion headline. Like the best satire, this nasty little gem elicits a laugh, which is then promptly muffled by the queasy feeling of recognition. The last five decades of political science have definitively established that most modern-day Americans lack even a basic understanding of how their country works. In 1996, Princeton University’s Larry M. Bartels argued, “the political ignorance of the American voter is one of the best documented data in political science.”

“The general idea is that it’s absolutely threatening to admit you’re wrong,” says political scientist Brendan Nyhan, the lead researcher on the Michigan study. The phenomenon — known as “backfire” — is “a natural defense mechanism to avoid that cognitive dissonance.”

Other things they noticed:

• The people who felt they were the most confident in their beliefs actually knew the least.
• The more people cared about the topic in question, the stronger the backfire
• It was spectrum-independent. Conservatives that believed there were WMDs in Iraq continued to believe that even after none were found. Liberals who believed the Bush administration ended stem cell research ignored that the ruling allowed research in some areas.
• People who do not feel good about themselves are less likely to be influenced by facts
• Politically sophisticated thinkers were even less open to new information than less sophisticated types. They may be right on 90% of what they know and totally off-base on the other 10%, but they ain’t budging from that 10%.