Word: soundingly
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...November, Obama is redoubling his efforts to talk to struggling working-class voters with feel-your-pain intensity and increased specificity about how he would help them as President. His man-of-the-people persona has improved lately but is still a work in progress. McCain continues to sound more like the incoherent Bob Dole than the inspirational Ronald Reagan when talking about tax cuts and the rest of his economic platform. No matter what Hillary Clinton says about healing the Democratic Party, it seems clear the mistrust between Obama and her (and their respective supporters) runs deep. Finding common...
...faster that software evolves, and the harder it gets to distinguish between people and computers, the faster CAPTCHAS have to change. They might soon involve identifying animals or listening to a sound file--anything computers aren't good at. (What's next? Tasting wine? Composing a sonnet?) Von Ahn is confident that the good guys are still ahead for now, but the point at which software can reliably read CAPTCHAS is probably as few as three to five years away...
...past the obscenities, and the criticism amounts to this: lead singer Chris Martin is a cornball solipsist, the melodies all have the same mass-produced "character" as a Pottery Barn table, and Coldplay's albums sound like crib-safe versions of Radiohead--a band that, while commercially less successful, is infinitely more hip and worthy of adulation. Film critics have waged their own version of this argument with moviegoers about the relative merits of Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese, resulting, as you've no doubt heard, in the complete commercial failure of all Spielberg movies. But if scathing reviews haven...
...could be a passing satellite. Everything seems to exist in its own silo until a rising whoosh comes along and the instruments merge into a huge harmonious collision. The track is called Life in Technicolor, and what differentiates it from previous Coldplay attempts to lasso the cosmos (Speed of Sound, Clocks) is the details--or rather, the fact that there are details. Whereas before, the band would pound listeners into submission with giant chords and a lyric about space, here they let the songs' various parts resolve themselves, and there are no lyrics at all, just a single evocative group...
...neat trick, turning discipline into ecstasy, and Coldplay executes it with enough variations to keep things surprising. Strings pop up everywhere--not to grease your tear ducts but to enrich the sound and drive the countermelodies. After years of playing to the back row, guitarist Jonny Buckland has discovered that guitars come with more than one pedal, and his work on Lovers in Japan and Violet Hill is admirably precise. Will Champion, whose previous claim to fame was having the greatest drummer name of all time, bangs away on his kettles and timpani like a man celebrating his release from...