The first treatment center for Internet addiction recently opened near Seattle. I took a look at the center’s criteria for Internet addiction and it’s striking how similar the language is to that of alcohol or drug addiction. I’m still not convinced that anyone can truly be “addicted” to the Internet. It’s seems to have become a shorthand description for a more complex phenomenon that encompasses isolation, depression, social anxiety, and maybe a degree of obsessive compulsiveness. Heavy Internet use may be an indicator of these problems, but it doesn’t necessarily have a causal relationship.

These sorts of worries seem to accompany every new iteration of technology. I remember a lot of hype about television addiction when I was a kid. In fact, my parents seemed much happier when I turned off the television in favor of playing on my computer. Of course, this was long before blogs, Facebook, multiplayer games, and pr0n. The adolescent version of me, plopped into the 21st century, might easily have been one of those kids who had his laptop confiscated until I brought my grades up.

Schools and universities are starting up in a few weeks and the BBC is looking for incoming university students with disabilities to blog about their experiences as ivory tower initiates. Content will appear on the BBC’s disability-themed Ouch! website. The solicitation didn’t specify whether they are only interested in U.K. students, but it might be interesting to have an American perspective in the mix. And it could be a great way to earn yourself a little on-campus recognition, which in turn might reap rewards for your social life. The BBC is even offering a small stipend to the selected participants.

I blogged for Ouch! a couple years and had a great time doing it, although I never did get the autographed picture of Billie Piper that I had requested. The disappointment still lingers.

The trailer for Avatar, the next film from James Cameron, is now available. Avatar has garnered a lot of attention from the geek community because Cameron has demonstrated a talent for writing and directing intelligent, propulsive science fiction films (Aliens, Terminator 2) and because it prominently features computer-generated scenery and characters that occupy almost every frame of the film. The trailer looks spectacular, although it only hints at a plot centering on a paraplegic marine who volunteers to have his consciousness transferred into the body of a blue alien dude.

Hollywood really does have a soft spot for stories of gimps being given the chance to walk again. As long as the movie isn’t one big cliché, I won’t complain. But should I ever finish my current writing project, my next effort will be a futuristic tale of a gimp space pirate, his faithful robotic attendant, and his many, many love interests.

I like this quote from Robert Putnam, the noted political scientist, that I came across in The Daily Dish:

Most men are not political animals. The world of public affairs is not their world. It is alien to them — possibly benevolent, more probably threatening, but nearly always alien.

Whenever I start discussing health care reform with people who don’t closely follow this stuff, they are usually quick to ask why the Democrats don’t simply push health care reform through and be done with it. That question makes a lot of intuitive sense. After all, Democrats hold clear majorities in both the House and Senate while also controlling the White House. What’s the holdup?

In most parliamentary democracies, such large majorities would be more than sufficient to pass most major legislation. Not so in America. As much as our school textbooks like to portray it as the greatest political experiment ever, the U.S. has an extremely risk-averse political culture. The drafters of the Constitution were obsessed, perhaps to the point of paranoia, with placing checks to prevent one state or region from holding too much sway over the nation as a whole. It’s certainly an understandable impulse; nobody wanted to see the rise of an American tyrant after working so hard to throw off the shackles of a king. But that impulse led to the creation of procedures, like the filibuster, that can hardly be considered democratic.

Our system also concentrates a huge amount of power in individual senators, making it possible for a small cadre or even one senator to gum up the works and ensure that nothing gets done. In fact, I think we miss the point when we look at the Senate in terms of majority and minority parties. It’s more accurate to view the Senate as a collection of one hundred egos that are all looking for a bit of stroking.

These dynamics aren’t new, but they don’t get much attention usually because most people find the legislative process boring and removed from the realities of their own lives. The health care reform bill is one of the few times that a substantial number of Americans are watching the policymaking process in action and they are coming away feeling confused and a little repulsed. I don’t blame them. 

The story of wayward extraterrestrials who receive a less-than-welcoming reception from us Earthlings is a Hollywood trope whose roots can be traced back to movies like The Day the Earth Stood Still and persists in District 9. District 9 is the latest incarnation of the familiar tale and this time, the giant mothership comes to a halt over Johannesburg and carries a sizable crew of half-starved insectoid aliens that soon acquire the derogatory appellation of “prawns”. How the prawns came to Earth is never clearly explained, but the South Africans set about repeating their history by placing the aliens in a segregated shantytown known as District 9. The movie picks up twenty years later as the government is preparing to forcibly move the aliens to a larger detention facility hundreds of miles away from the unfriendly and suspicious population of Johannesburg.

District 9 could have been a tired retread of better science fiction movies, but it manages to give homage to those movies while making a lasting impression of its own. The movie veers from standard Hollywood fare by making most of the major human characters pretty unsympathetic. The protagonist is a loathsome mid-level bureaucrat who regards the prawns with thinly disguised contempt. And the aliens are decidedly alien; the movie makes no attempt to turn them into cuddly pieces of merchandise. The story also draws clear parallels with not only apartheid, but all the ill-fated attempts to segregate a minority population from the majority.

District 9 also succeeds at being a raucously fun summer popcorn movie. Besides the aliens (who are some of the most expertly rendered CGI characters I’ve seen so far), the movie has plenty of gunplay, badass alien weaponry, giant robots, and chase scenes. This is the best original science fiction film since Children of Men and obligatory viewing for any fan of the genre.