The wrong way to attract young viewers?

It is a truism in the marketing industry that the 25-49 age group is the one you should be chasing. Not being a marketing guru, I am not quite sure why this is because it seems like older people in general are the ones with more disposable income, while younger people are dealing with the expenses of starting out in life, raising family, etc. Maybe it is because older people are more set in their ways and can’t be easily persuaded to chase after the next new thing or adopt the latest fashion.
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Punch-drunk NSA

As the Snowden hits keep coming, the NSA seems to be flailing around like a punch-drunk boxer, aiming at random. For example, Dan Froomkin at The Intercept reports on the bizarre reaction by Robert Litt, general counsel to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, when asked by top news editors to show exactly what damage had been caused by the Edward Snowden revelations.
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Lawrence Walsh dead at 102

The Special Prosecutor appointed to investigate the Iran-Contra affair died yesterday at the age of 102. His work on the case highlights for me two things. One is the danger of prejudging people based on the labels that are affixed to them; and the other is how we have a system whereby criminal acts in the service of power are excused and condoned at the highest levels.
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Update on our smelling prowess

Some time ago, I wrote about a study that said that we humans could smell 390 different smells. This seemed big enough to me but as commenter ChasCPeterson pointed out, this was not the full story because that number referred to the distinct number of olfactory sensors we have that can identify specific molecules but that we can actually smell combinations of these basic smells and the number of combinations can thus be much larger.
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It must have seemed like a good idea at the time

Bill Donohue, head of an outfit called the Catholic League and who is more Catholic than the pope, seems to make a good living and gains publicity by protesting loudly at anything that can be interpreted as a slight on Catholicism. He was predictably outraged (his outrage meter is always at 11) at the attempts by LGBT groups to march in the St. Patrick’s day parades in New York and Boston. When they were rebuffed, Donohue was again outraged that beer companies Sam Adams, Heineken, and Guinness withdrew their sponsorship and vowed not to drink their beer.
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Tech companies scramble to avoid NSA damage

The big US internet technology companies protested loudly that the mass spying by the NSA on the people using their systems was done without their knowledge or consent. One could be excused for being skeptical of their claims of innocence and now a top lawyer for the NSA confirms our doubts, saying on Wednesday that Silicon Valley companies knew all along that the NSA was spying on their systems.
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Harry and Hermione (Harry Potter spoiler alert!)

When I was reading the Harry Potter books, although J. K. Rowling told a good yarn and plotted her stories well, the romance between Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley never seemed to me to be plausible. It seemed like the author was trying to avoid the obvious narrative device of the leading man and leading woman getting together at the end and was going for the slightly counter-intuitive relationship. It just did not work for me. Harry’s romance and marriage to what’s-her-name was also implausible as can be seen from the fact that I can’t even recall her name (or her face from the films) and remember anything about her except that she was Ron’s sister.
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