So, let’s see, Microsoft pays AOL $750 million, AOL switches to Internet Explorer, and the two biggest behemoths in the online world start working together instead of competing.

The next time you hear anyone in the Bush administration talk about the importance of competition and the free market, remember whose Justice Department it was that brought us the Microsoft antitrust settlement.

The media have jumped all over this story about the study that shows playing shoot-em-up videogames increases visual attention skills. Could gaming really be good for you?

Well, I don’t doubt that playing games can be a good thing in some cases, and I’m not looking to join any kind of down-with-gaming posse. But there seems to be a huge hole in this study that I haven’t yet seen pointed out.

If, for instance, you read the Wall Street Journal account, this is what you learn about the various skills that seemed to improve among people who played a lot of computer games:

“In one test, a small object flashed on a computer screen for 1/160th of a second, and the volunteer had to indicate where.”

“In another test, between one and 10 small objects flashed on the screen simultaneously for a fraction of a second, too short to count them individually.”

“In another test, the researchers had volunteers indicate the location of a solid triangle in a circle on a screen filled with distracting shapes…”

Notice that one phrase keeps recurring: on screen. The researchers conducted all their visual tests on a computer.

As far as I can tell, this study managed to prove that if you spend many hours in front of a computer screen playing games, you will increase your ability to detect, identify, and remember objects on a computer screen.

That may have some real value in our society — which, after all, is increasingly operated via a computer screen. But it seems a far cry from proving the very different notion that playing computer games actually improves more general visual skills. I am not a student of the science of vision but I know there are such things as peripheral vision and depth-of-field, and that a computer screen — far from testing the full capacity of the amazing human sense of sight — operates in only a very narrow range of that sense.

Reading this fascinating story in today’s Times, about a rebellion of teens in a sort of quasi-military disciplinary camp in Costa Rica named Dundee Ranch, I read a name that sounded weirdly familiar: Narvin Lichfield. (OK, it’s the kind of name you remember.) Hadn’t I edited a story involving this person?

Yes — Andrew Leonard wrote this strong story for Salon back in 1998 about an effort by an organization founded by Lichfield to spam search engines via spurious multiple sites overloaded with meta-tag keywords.

Today, Lichfield is facing criminal charges from the Costa Rican authorities. And Google has pretty much put the practice of spamdexing to rest.

A Moving N.Y. Times op-ed by Ellen Ullman about how cross-generational knowledge transfer is suffering in the software industry with so many programmers out of work. Read it for her encomium to the “mysterious places, wild people, dreamers and tinkerers” that are the sources of innovation.

I’ll spare you the “nevermore” jokes, but it does seem like The Raven, one of my all-time favorite Salon blogs, has hung up his keyboard, at least for now. I’ll miss his caustic and restless reviews of the news.

William Gibson, speaking to the Director’s Guild of America. The whole speech is extraordinary.

Dan Gillmor’s on-the-scene report about OhmyNews, South Korea’s hugely successful experiment in grassroots-up online journalism. Most unexpected fact: The site’s progressive founder got some of his inspiration from his time as a student at Pat Robertson’s Regent University in Virginia, observing the way American conservatives get their message across in the U.S. media.

Also: “Dynamics of a blogosphere story”: An unusually comprehensive and detailed study of how blogs and the mainstream media interact to create “hot” stories, with interesting insights into how individual stories do or don’t “go viral.” [link thanks to Scripting News]

Since I’m lucky enough that this blog is read by a decent number of talented software developers and technology managers, it seems like a good place to point to this job posting. Salon is in the market for a VP/technology. If you’re interested or you know someone who might be, read the posting and see if it sounds like a good fit.

“This spring’s college graduates are entering the worst job market in 20 years.” A brief Robert Reich op-ed in today’s Times begins with this line. I read it over breakfast and it took me back…

…Because I graduated from college in 1981 and was looking for a job in 1982 — precisely the previous “worst job market” Reich is referring to, 20 years ago. It was the long Reagan recession — a painful, protracted period in U.S. economic history that is largely forgotten today thanks to the rosy hues the Gipper era has inexplicably assumed in the collective memory.

I have a file somewhere of rejection letters from publications I sought employment with — more than one of which along the lines of, “Gee, thanks, kid, you look pretty qualified, but I’m sorry to tell you we just published our last issue.” I ended up tightening my belt and freelancing for a year and a half before finally landing a regular freelance gig at the Boston Phoenix that gradually evolved into steady employment.

Now we’re stuck in another stubborn, graduation-blighting recession. The economics pros refuse to label it as such — supposedly, this recession ended over a year ago — but it sure feels like one to everyone I talk to.

And the important question right now is whether this recession will finally, as Reagan’s did, give way to economic growth and the semblance of prosperity — or whether this is a different kind of beast altogether.

The optimists have the following arguments in their favor: The economy is inherently cyclical, and sooner or later — well, by now, “later” is the only possibility — this downturn must end. And the Fed’s low interest rate policy and the Bush tax cuts (whatever their long-term cost in deficits and Social Security insecurity) provide plenty of anti-recession firepower. Just as the pain of the early ’80s preceded a rest-of-the-decade boom — and, for that matter, the pain of the early ’90s did the same — so we too can expect the sun to start shining any day now.

The pessimists survey the scene and point out that our situation today is inherently different from previous cyclical downturns. In the past, we’ve started with an inflationary trend; the Fed tightened interest rates, plunging the economy into recession but laying the groundwork for new growth as companies learned to do more with less. Today, inflation is dead, interest rates are rock-bottom and the economy is still stalled. The Fed worries about deflation, a threat unknown since the 1930s. And the very fact that nobody is sure what’s going on has a further dampening effect. Meanwhile, the Bush administration’s muddled “Cut taxes now, let our kids pick up the tab” approach is not instilling confidence in business or consumers.

A pessimist, then, views the present economy not as a repeat of the early-’80s or early-’90s style business cycle but as something more akin to the mid-’70s “stagflation” — an anomalous era when we suffered from both inflation and recession at the same time (something that economics orthodoxy insisted was highly unlikely but that those of us who lived through it remember quite vividly). This variety of cycle — the kind of fundamentally out-of-kilter global economy seen in the 1930s and 1970s — is not a two-to-three-year phenomenon; it’s more like a decade-long trauma.

My heart wants to be an optimist here, but my head is definitely feeling pessimistic.

I have never quite understood New York Times columnist Bill Keller’s take on George W. Bush. Every time Keller tries to zero in on the president — as in a long Times Magazine piece a while back, or in a column today about Bush’s God thing — he starts shuffling his feet, hedging and making apologies. He tells us that he understands important criticisms of the president, but then he finds some grounds upon which to explain that they don’t matter, or they’re not the point, or we shouldn’t worry about them.

In today’s column, Keller tries to argue that, yes, George Bush is driven by his religious belief, but that — since he does not have an overt agenda of converting the heathen or deriving specific political policies from his born-again faith — we should not worry too much. The president’s sense of divine mission? His apparent belief that every decision he makes is the right one because he is fulfilling God’s plan? No fear, says Keller — what’s wrong with self-confidence? Then he cites “John Green of the University of Akron, a scholar of religion in politics,” who “sees it as a perfectly ordinary way for a religious man to understand a task history has presented him.” “For Bush to conclude that this was God’s plan,” Green declares, “is not a whole lot different from a plumber in Akron deciding that God wants him to serve lunch to homeless people.”

Huh? I mean, I’d be delighted if Bush concluded that God wanted him to serve lunch to homeless people! The point that eludes Mr. Green is that the plumber in Akron is not making life-or-death decisions for millions of people, and devising policies that will shape the world economy for a generation. We worry when national leaders assume a mantle of divine destiny. The worry is based on history, not faith.

But the most bizarre passage in Keller’s column is his citation — with what I can only guess is approval — of a particularly ridiculous quote from the writer Gregg Easterbrook, trying to explain how Bush’s Christian faith shapes his policies: ” ‘I suspect Bush takes the view (which may prove right) that the ultimate argument will be between people who believe in something larger than themselves, and people who believe that it’s all an accident of chemistry,’ Mr. Easterbrook said.”

First, note the way Easterbrook — whom the article describes as “a liberal Christian” — stacks his language. If he’d said, “the ultimate argument will be between people who believe in supernatural mumbojumbo, and people who believe in their own powers of observation and reasoning,” we’d complain, rightly, that he’d injected a wildly unfair bias in his description of the disagreement between people of faith and nonbelievers. Instead, he’s turned that bias around and made it invisible — draping all the contradictions and difficulties of religion in the high-flying rhetoric of selfless dedication, and casually denigrating all the insights of the scientific worldview.

Easterbrook, on behalf of Bush, chooses to draw a wildly oversimplified spectrum of personal belief: There seem to be no other choices besides “belief in something larger than yourself” or belief that “it’s all an accident of chemistry.” Yet the two positions are hardly exclusive. I can forthrightly say that I have no belief in any traditional deity; put me firmly in the “accident of chemistry” camp. Yet such an accident is hardly trivial — it is itself full of beauty and wonder. It is very much “something larger than ourselves.” Indeed, there are many things “larger than ourselves” that I, despite my failure to be a “person of faith,” can and do embrace: Empathy, justice, generosity, creativity — none of these require the walls of a church, or trust in a “higher power.” Participants in institutional religions have no monopoly on the possibility of belief.

The real arrogance in Easterbrook’s stance — and one that I think also undergirds Bush’s worldview — is this implication that only people who have accepted Jesus, or Yahweh (or, Bush will add, opening the flaps of his “big tent,” Mohammed), can possibly find meaning in life. And only they can be trusted to find a moral path through life.

This is more complex, and probably more dangerous, than simple religious chauvinism of the “my god is better than your god” brand. Rather, it reflects a wistful desire, if not an active campaign, to turn back the clock to an era when being a non-believer actively disqualified one from participation in civic life. Of course Bush isn’t about to propose religious belief as a qualification for public office; but if we believe former speechwriter David Frum’s statement (repeated by Keller) that, in Bush’s White House, “attendance at Bible study was, if not compulsory, not quite uncompulsory,” then it’s also hard not to believe that Bush would be happy to impose such a requirement if he thought it had any chance of passing constitutional muster.

Keller, of course, is way too muddled to point out the final absurdity in the Easterbrook argument: its dichotomy plainly puts George Bush on the same team as the Sept. 11 killers. Warped and vicious they undoubtedly were; but who can question that they committed their suicidal act on behalf of “something larger than themselves”? No, Mohammed Atta and his crew did not see human life as an “accident of chemistry.” They believed in Allah. Their belief may have been a perversion of mainstream Islam. But belief it was, nonetheless.

So, pace Keller, I’ll continue to put my moral antennae on alert any time a leader starts using his or her own religious faith as a touchstone of civic virtue. It’s not always and inevitably a bad thing — the obvious and legitimate counterargument is the Rev. Martin Luther King. But it’s usually a sign to watch out.