SLM Daily

A few items in the media that have caught our notice this week:

• First off, just another note to say we really enjoyed our time on KMOX-AM's Mark Reardon Show Monday afternoon discussing SLM's $10 million September cover story, "What's the Big Idea?" Read more details about the show and listen to the audio here, or go straight to the audio file.

• Speaking of Big Ideas, specifically author Curtis Sittenfeld's call for Missouri drivers to "put the phone down and drive," a tidbit in Wired last weekend caught our eye. Gizmodo writer Joel Johnson, in a piece exploring why there are no safer ways to text while driving, admitted to texting his way across southern Missouri:

But I’ve done it. I suspect many of you have done it. Just last weekend, careening south through rural Missouri in a rented Pontiac, I sent and received a dozen text messages with my sister as we coordinated the logistics of a family emergency. I was upset, tired, and finding being a safe driver difficult enough without trying to peck out letters on a glowing touchscreen with my thumb.

But I did it because that’s what I had to do. I could have pulled over each time. But who does that really?

Yikes!

• Finally, some offbeat tech news emerged earlier this week: Apparently computer-science researchers at the University of Michigan and Princeton University have reprogrammed a Sequoia AVC Edge—the electronic voting machine used by many counties throughout Missouri—to run Pac-Man. The good news (or bad news, if you're an old-school gamer)? Neither St. Louis city or county uses that particular brand of voting machine. See VerifiedVoting.org's list of counties that do here.