What we don’t know is killing us.

Do guns kill people? Do people with guns kill people? Do people without guns kill people? Do people with guns prevent other people from killing people?

You think you know. I think I know. But really, we don’t. 

Nobody does, because we aren’t doing the science that would give us the answers. Why not? Good question. The last attempt at this kind of research, done in 2004, came up with the conclusion that we don’t know enough. And since then, nothing.

Why not? Ask the NRA, who have been lobbying vigorously to shut down this kind of work. Think tobacco lobby, climate change denial, the usual money trail.

That the opponents of research are funded by the nation’s firearms industry is a pretty good indication of what the answers might be, if we could ever fund the research again. But until we do, we’ll never know.

And it’s killing us.

You can read more about this here.

The Social Network -- See it with a friend: preferably a live one.

Has this film already come and gone? Kim and I got to see it at the Destinta last night ... a discount theater without the discount prices. There was one other couple. Granted, it was as Monday night and everyone else was home conversing with virtual friends. A nearly deserted live space provided the perfect atmosphere for this morality tale about loneliness at the top and bottom of the online relationship juggernaut that is Facebook. This could have been 'Risky Business II' but for a brilliant script, deft directing, and serious elements of Faust, Citizen Kane and Das Rheingold/Lord of the Rings. Troll-like genius Mark Zuckerberg, spurned in love (not for being a nerd, but for being ... an asshole! as his girlfriend tells him in the opening scene), hammers his fury and loneliness into brilliant, shining, all-powerful software that enslaves the world, destroying him and his friendships in the process. Sorkin's script is full of drive-by geek-speak delivered in wonderful Mamet-like staccato. It irritates and illuminates at once. Great performances from Jesse Eisenberg (Zuckerberg), Justin Timberlake (a creepy and evil Napsterish Sean Parker) and (my favorite) Armie Hammer as the impossibly noble, Wagnerian Winklevoss twins. Here's a proper and brilliant review, if you need one. Otherwise, just go. You know you can't resist.

Remember your first library? Remember snapping turtles?

My first snapping turtle book.

I once read that writing is theft. Surely much of it is just that; but even more of it is borrowing. We borrow our ideas from what we overhear and observe, what we read, the scent on the breeze, a notion that we get from walking through a new and different place. Then we return them.

The notions of theft and borrowing occurred to me this morning as I stood in my local library, in the magazine section, literally surrounded by a riot of points of view. What do the Muslims think about Christian terrorism, the Crusades and the Inquisition? They're still pissed, and it's right there in Muslim Sunrise. What do Hindus think about? Statues and a bath in the Holy River -- you can see the photos in Hinduism Today, on a shelf a safe distance away from the Muslims.  Did you know the National Review this month is caricaturing the Shepard Fairey Obama "Hope" poster by replacing Obama's face with Jimmy Carter's? Fiendishly and frightfully clever.

It's all at arm's reach.

What's a middle-aged man like me doing in the magazine section of the Mt. Lebanon Public Library on a crisp, sunny October Saturday morning, instead of wolfing down pancakes at Pamela's or biking the singletrack of South Park? I was actually trying to stock up on literature for a two-week vacation. My quarry was Daniel Okrent's book about Prohibition, Last Call. Long gone in my life are the days when it was easier to buy books than it was to read them. Two kids in college and a freelancer's salary have gently led me to rediscover the wonder of borrowing ideas ... and then returning them so that someone else can borrow them as well, free of charge.

The Mt. Lebanon Library displays its books enticingly, on carousels and vertical shelves, almost like a museum. How long will it be before it actually becomes a museum? With all three copies checked out, should I break down and buy a copy of Okrent's book? It wouldn't be a bad addition to my home library, which has a lot of history. Or should I download it to my phone and save some luggage space on the trip? More and more the e-book becomes the easy choice. When will the library start lending e-books? And when will the library just morph into iTunes?

I hope not soon, at least not until they figure out how to replicate the aroma of a library -- paper, glue, binding, and humanity -- in an online experience. For me, this scent is a Proustian trigger that urges me to explore the new and different. It takes me back to my first library, a neighborhood place on the edge of a blueberry farm in suburban Bellevue, Washington. At kindergarten age, we were allowed to cross the fields to check out books about insects, dinosaurs, snapping turtles and spaceships under the apple tree. I discovered the story of Minn of the Mississippi, a giant snapping turtle whose life spanned the continent from the headwaters of the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico ... places I'd barely heard of. We sat on the linoleum floor and browsed the lower shelves, checked out a stack (you could have up to six!) with our crumpled, hand-typed cards. As often as not, the hike to the library was a meander through a living world of dragonflies, frogs, salamanders, stink bugs and katydids giving life to the grassfields and drainage ditches of the pre-Microsoft Seattle area. Intrigued by the reality and life around us, we borrowed the ideas behind it ... and brought them back two weeks later.

What do the Muslims think about the Crusades, and what do the Hindus think about when they're decking themselves out with flowers and bathing in the river? And what do the Conservatives think about Obama's Hope? Do snapping turtles still traverse the Mississippi from headwaters to Delta?

The answer is probably just a short walk from where you live. Enjoy it while it lasts.

Bing This

"But It's Not Google." That's the snarky derivation that Net wags are giving to Microsoft's new Bing search engine. Micro hopes to take yet another run at Google, the monster, killer Web app that has become a global verb. And, according to the New York Times, Steve Ballmer hopes the name will 'verb up,' just like Google did.

Will it work this time? Go to Bing.com (I got there the usual way, by Googling it) and you'll get -- not a search engine, but a video ad for the coming attraction. And here's the promise: Bing doesn't just deliver results, it delivers what you need to make decisions: comparisons, drilldown links, groupings, options.

But wait. Isn't that Yahoo? Before Google, Yahoo was the go-to search page because it provided you with an edited catalog of relevant results. I'd argue that Google beat this not just because its results were more frequently updated, but because they weren't pre-edited. And they were fast. The Google results page can be scanned quickly and easily, then fine-tuned through another lightning-quick search. Users find what they want incrementally through dialog, kind of the way a learning brain likes to work, rather than by being presented with a single, complicated click-splat layout of pre-filtered results. We know where the market went, and where it has stayed.

But then I'm an old geezer. Maybe the kids can handle more stuff on the screen than I can. Maybe they're not incremental, dialog-based searchers. Maybe they like click-splat. Maybe Bing will deliver the bling that MicroSoft is looking for. Maybe.

Good luck.

Companies need to remember: Twitter is a two-way Tweet

Now that Facebook is worth billions again, and Twitter is so hot that it's attracting scammers, it might be time to take them seriously as channels for corporate marketing messages.

When I was at the Big Corporation we took the easy route with Twitter: used it to rebroadcast our RSS feeds -- news releases, Web site updates, etc. It was easy to set up and worked like a charm.

But.

But I always felt that it was a little TOO easy. And I wondered if our followers were actually reading the tweets. But, hey, it didn't cost anything, so what's the harm?

Here's the perfect commentary on how to use Twitter in a corporate, or in this case, a municipal setting, without coming off as a mindless Twit. Blogger Stan Schroeder's short and funny case study on how the Boston Police Department uses Twitter as an online police scanner makes a great point: it's not only about getting the news out there, it's about humanizing your organization by listening to your audience.

Despite Twitter's primary function as a broadcast medium, don't forget that it's a two-way channel. The gold comes when you put something out there that compels a follower to Tweet back. And the real payoff is about how you handle that. If the straight-faced cops in Boston can loosen up online, maybe you can, too. You should.

Unpack those Beanie Babies and PEZ toys

Expect a surge in eBay traffic next year. Former president/CEO Meg Whitman is writing a memoir in preparation for her planned California gubernatorial bid in 2010. It's expected to publish in February. According to the New York Times, the book will be less about the online auction icon and more about Whitman's personal values. Oh boy.

Hey, good luck, Meg. But I'm hoping to cash in on the cases of old cameras, fishing equipment and (still) unsold Beanie Babies I drag out every once in a while when things get slow.

Here are a couple gems from the eBay Wikipedia entry:

• The story that eBay was founded to sell PEZ collectibles is a PR myth
• The first item sold on eBay was a broken laser pointer
• eBay entrepreneurs have tried to sell the parts for a cruise missile, a complete F/A 18 Hornet, and an entire aircraft carrier, with varying success
• Last year during the Icelandic financial meltdown, someone put the entire island up for sale on eBay. Bjork was not included.
• It's unclear at this point whether Whitman's book will be available on eBay

Mad Men: the lost script

Congrats to the Pittsburgh Ad Federation for their successful Mad Men event, held at the Left Field space of Smith Brothers Agency on the North Side last night. Way too much alcohol, not enough Lucky Strikes. In other words, the evening was as perfect as Basket of Kisses.

While we were busy gobbling up things wrapped in bacon, a well-worn typescript fell to the floor from the briefcase of someone standing nearby. I didn't recognize the guy -- he was wearing a fedora, a skinny black tie, and the shiniest shoes I've ever seen on a man. I picked up the papers to hand them back to him, but he had vanished.

Anyhow, it turned out to be a script for the upcoming season of the hit AMC show. I share a piece of it with you, because I know that you, too, are a hopeless fan:

OPEN on ROGER STERLING staring into camera. Small beads of sweat stand out on his well-tanned forehead and drip from the edges of his perfectly cut silver hair. Roger lights up a Lucky Strike and blows a forceful and tense puff into the camera. Pull back to reveal DON DRAPER standing behind him.

ROGER STERLING (as DON DRAPER lights up a Lucky Strike): Don, I got a call from IBM today. They want to change their media spend. They're pulling it off of television and putting it into something ... something they're calling "The Internet"

DON DRAPER: Internet?

ROGER STERLING (turns to face DON DRAPER. Mixes himself a Rusty Nail): Yeah. Never heard of it. They're telling me it's like television, only you can watch all the porn you want with it.

DON DRAPER (picking up a bottle of Old Granddad on the credenza): Porn? What about Bonanza? What about the Loretta Young Show? What about Dick Van Dyke? They're pulling huge share for these guys. And the "Think" slogan. We billed 20 million for that. We focus grouped the hell out of it, and that messaging is solid. Christ, Roger, I've got John Cameron Swayze lined up for the next flight of sixties. It's gonna cost us to pull out now.

ROGER STERLING: Who cares about Hoss and Little Joe when you can get a look at Marilyn Monroe's ta-tas for free? They say that what we're doing is not moving the iron, Donny. They're saying we dropped the ball. They're saying YOU dropped the ball.

DON DRAPER (pours himself a third Sidecar): Come on Roger, someone's blowing smoke up their asses. They're not talking about moving the business, are they? I can control this.

ROGER STERLING (stubbing out his cigarette, lights up a pipe): I don't know what they're telling you, but I saw Tom Brown having drinks at Delmonico's the other night with two suits from Google, Jobs and Gore. Way too buddy-buddy for us to feel comfortable about it. You had damn well better control it.

PEGGY OLSON appears in office doorway in a starched cotton blouse, carrying a stack of folders

PEGGY OLSON: I'm sorry to interrupt, Mr. Sterling, but you said you wanted these survey results right away.

DON DRAPER (lights another Lucky, glares at Peggy): Peggy, this is not a good time.

ROGER STERLING: No, it's all right. We're just about done. Wait a minute, Peggy, didn't we just send this out this morning? How'd you get results so fast?

PEGGY OLSON: Survey Monkey. On the Internet.

DON DRAPER (sloshing his drink): Monkey?

ROGER STERLING: Don, why don't you shut up and pour yourself another Grasshopper.

PEGGY OLSON (lights up a Lucky): Roger, there's something else I think you should have a look at. It's called "YouTube."

DON DRAPER: Tube?