I was genuinely and deeply moved by this silly little video. What a wonderful idea!
A life is a little soap bubble. It might sometimes bump up against the other little soap bubbles and even stick for a while. But the advantage that soap bubbles have over lives is that no matter how close your life comes to another persons, the bubbles never merge.
Showing posts with label WTF. Show all posts
Showing posts with label WTF. Show all posts
Thursday, December 10, 2009
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Random Quickies
Fast roundup of some cool stuff from over the last few days.
David Saltzburg is a name you might not know, but he’s the science advisor for the most nerdtastic sit-com since everybody on Gilligan’s island was waiting for The Professor to build a working shortwave out of coconuts and Tina Louise’s spaghetti straps. The Big Blog Theory is a great basic science blog and I think you’ll be surprised how far we’ve come since those seven stranded castaways were on the TV show Lost. FWIW, the comic book and sci-fi geek stuff is just as accurate.
The perfect gift for that multi-tasker on the go who you don’t like very much- The Laptop Steering Wheel Desk! Notice the later pictures of the product and the user comments.
Tennessee passed laws earlier this year to allow guns in restaurants, parks, and bars. I’ve given a lot of thought to what kind of mindset it takes to think you need a gun on your hip no matter where you go. No conclusions yet, but it’s been interesting to wonder what the world looks like to these people.
Am I the only person that, when told that a medium movie popcorn has the same caloric and nutritional value as three Big Macs, immediately thinks- well, what the hell, might as well have three Big Macs?
I also wonder if I’m the only person who watches the Apple computer ad campaign and thinks that John Hodgeman is smart, funny, and cool and that Justin Long is a dimwitted hipster douchebag? Learning that Apple computers are such soap bubbles that they can be broken by a little cigarette smoke only reinforces this idea. And learning that Apple voids your warranty if anyone has smoked in the house with your precious little computer-like status symbol just reaffirms that the douchebaggery goes all the way from the user to Steve Jobs in an unbroken line of vinegar and water.
And the iPhone sucks (bandwidth).
When I think of the Shroud of Turin I immediately free associate pareidolia and a line from the first Ghostbusters movie, “No human being would stack books like this.” Oh faith, why are you so faint?
What is the chance that two old women in Kentucky would try to decide for everybody else what books should be in the library? About the same as the Alaska governor thinking she was elected to tell people what to read. That is- about 100%. Here’s a hint, if you don’t read books and you don’t want anyone else to read them you are not contributing to the advancement of humanity.
Don’t believe in evolution? I’ve got news for you, nobody cares what you believe. The great thing about science is that no belief is required for it to work. Guess you also don’t believe in Doberman Pinschers.
David Saltzburg is a name you might not know, but he’s the science advisor for the most nerdtastic sit-com since everybody on Gilligan’s island was waiting for The Professor to build a working shortwave out of coconuts and Tina Louise’s spaghetti straps. The Big Blog Theory is a great basic science blog and I think you’ll be surprised how far we’ve come since those seven stranded castaways were on the TV show Lost. FWIW, the comic book and sci-fi geek stuff is just as accurate.
The perfect gift for that multi-tasker on the go who you don’t like very much- The Laptop Steering Wheel Desk! Notice the later pictures of the product and the user comments.
Tennessee passed laws earlier this year to allow guns in restaurants, parks, and bars. I’ve given a lot of thought to what kind of mindset it takes to think you need a gun on your hip no matter where you go. No conclusions yet, but it’s been interesting to wonder what the world looks like to these people.
Am I the only person that, when told that a medium movie popcorn has the same caloric and nutritional value as three Big Macs, immediately thinks- well, what the hell, might as well have three Big Macs?
I also wonder if I’m the only person who watches the Apple computer ad campaign and thinks that John Hodgeman is smart, funny, and cool and that Justin Long is a dimwitted hipster douchebag? Learning that Apple computers are such soap bubbles that they can be broken by a little cigarette smoke only reinforces this idea. And learning that Apple voids your warranty if anyone has smoked in the house with your precious little computer-like status symbol just reaffirms that the douchebaggery goes all the way from the user to Steve Jobs in an unbroken line of vinegar and water.
And the iPhone sucks (bandwidth).
When I think of the Shroud of Turin I immediately free associate pareidolia and a line from the first Ghostbusters movie, “No human being would stack books like this.” Oh faith, why are you so faint?
What is the chance that two old women in Kentucky would try to decide for everybody else what books should be in the library? About the same as the Alaska governor thinking she was elected to tell people what to read. That is- about 100%. Here’s a hint, if you don’t read books and you don’t want anyone else to read them you are not contributing to the advancement of humanity.
Don’t believe in evolution? I’ve got news for you, nobody cares what you believe. The great thing about science is that no belief is required for it to work. Guess you also don’t believe in Doberman Pinschers.
Sunday, November 8, 2009
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
WTF- Anti-corporatism, District 9, the Economic Meltdown, Basic Math, and Matt Taibbi. Kitchen Sink Optional.
Another brief moment on District 9, but not really. Actually this is something I rarely do, that popular blog format- the point by point snipe. But it isn’t actually that either. It’s just that something reviewer Daniel Engber wrote in his review of District 9 for Slate.com well and truly pissed me off:
“And so the film abandons any pretense of exploring the dynamics of social upheaval. Instead we're treated to yet another take on the evils of corporatism. Could there be a more egregious sci-fi cliché? In Moon we had Lunar Industries Ltd.; in Wall-E it was Buy N Large; Blade Runner featured the Tyrell Corp. And let's not forget the executives from the bio-weapons division of Weyland-Yutani, who cause all the carnage in Aliens.
…
It's a little odd, if you think about it, that District 9—and the whole sci-fi genre—should be so hung up on this one issue. Especially since creatures that arrive from another planet so clearly stand in for humans who arrive from another country: space aliens, illegal aliens. On the io9 blog, Charlie Jane Anders has argued that the archetypes of science-fiction are refugees; indeed, a long list of sci-fi novels explore the theme of immigration in great detail.”
Duh! Most Golden Age SF was written by Jews and the genre emerged just before and after the second world war. How oblivious can Mr. Engber be?
“Film directors, too, have in the past used stories of marooned aliens to examine race relations (e.g. Brother From Another Planet, Alien Nation) and assimilation (e.g. The Man Who Fell to Earth, Superman). Yet recent sci-fi cinema continues to dwell on the corporate menace.”
Obviously the answer to my previous questions is: completely. Personally, I don’t find anything odd at all that SF is interested in corporatism. Corporations as they exist in the modern world are a virtually unparalleled organization in human history. Huge completely amoral social structures, without geographic boundaries, immensely influential and wealthy, often more powerful than governments, with no motive other than avarice, and a organizational structure which is basically a meritocracy where merit consists of being Machiavellian in the pursuit of personal ambition and power.
In fact, it seems that if corporations didn’t exist, SF would have had to invent them.
Corporate intrigue really hit mainstream SF with the advent of Cyberpunk. There had been cautionary tales of large business interests in SF before that- Cyril Kornbluth and Frederik Pohl’s classic The Space Merchants pretty much laid the groundwork for the idea that business interests would surpass both government and religion as the dominant organizational structure in human society. But with Cyberpunk, corporations became a SF staple right along with space travel, aliens, and technological advancement. It makes perfect sense. Corporatism has that wonderful Frankenstein monster duality that drama depends on. As technology becomes more complex it requires more resources to improve that technology. Yet as society progresses we expect government (naively) to become more responsive to the citizenry. Thus we become caught in a catch-22 of high-tech capitalism requiring decisive innovative organization while high-tech democracy requires more slow moving bureaucracy. In a Darwinian sense it’s easy to see why the natural selection of the marketplace, which reassesses feedback four times a year, would result in more powerful social organizations than government which are naturally and contrivedly resistant to change even in a democracy.
The result seems to be the system we currently find ourselves in. I haven’t commented for awhile on what Matt Taibbi has been writing in Rolling Stone over the last two months but it is the most cogent and clear explanation of the economic situation over the last 12 months that I’ve found. If I were to consider myself a diminutive Diogenes, Taibbi is perhaps the last honest man I’ve found in the media. He is non-partisan, hellishly smart, unrelenting in his pursuit of a story, and perhaps the funniest writer anywhere in the mainstream media. He often gets compared to Hunter S. Thompson and rails against the comparison. And for good reason. He may be as funny and irreverent as Thompson, but what he is practicing isn’t gonzo journalism- it’s real journalism. It’s just that in our Pepsi drinking, McDonalds eating, GAP wearing, plastic culture, where real debate is ignored and faux debate is ubiquitous, where “news” reporting has the same relationship to real news that the WWF has to real sport, he’s an oddity. Someone who looks deep into the world and reports on what he sees and is flabbergasted that his society is so completely stupid and gullible.
A couple of months ago he wrote an article for Rolling Stone that pretty much laid out one (just ONE) aspect of how the government came to give so much of the American population’s money to a few obscenely rich private organizations for no reason other than that they were a big part of the status quo that is turning this country into a slave state. Since then he’s been shouted down by any number of corporate shills (slate rears it's ugly head again- who says there aren't callbacks in my writing?) defending Goldman Sachs for both infiltrating our government and taking TRILLIONS of dollars out of taxpayer’s pockets. Now it looks like Taibbi may resemble that character in DISTRICT 9 awaiting trial for revealing his company's illegal business.
A democracy cannot stand without an informed electorate. And the lack of basic math skills in America is apalling. Here is a short primer of what you are being told without realizing it:
There are about 330 million people in the US.
An average family consists of 4 people.
So there are 82.5 million American families.
A trillion dollars is a thousand billion dollars. And a billion is a thousand million dollars. So a trillion is a million million. (Yeah, I know this is stupid, but what are you going to do?)
So every time you hear the word trillion, if you are a member of the average America family needs to think, “They just used TWELVE THOUSAND ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY ONE of my dollars.
That’s right but even that may be a little abstract. So instead, every time you hear trillion on the news remember that your family just bought somebody a 2008 Honda Accord!
(Look it up on kbb.com, the Kelly Blue Book site. I put in parameters for several cars and was non-plussed that last year’s Accord, at the base level, with 60,000 miles (as my top number- basically unlimited mileage on a one year old car), in good shape, resulted in about 13 thousand dollars. It seems a wildly low number. But OTOH I have a confession to make. I’m a middle-aged single man who makes what I consider a decent living and I can’t understand how an average American family lives on 50K a year with kids in school and cell phones for everybody. So I sure can’t realize how our government indebts every family for a year old Honda Accord for every trillion dollars they spend when the average family can’t afford to DRIVE year old Honda Accords.)
Anyway, a trillion dollars is every American family buying a car for somebody who already has more money than they could ever dream of. Last I heard, 50% of the wealth in this country is now controlled by the top 1% of the population. It is nothing short of obscene feudalism. And of all the corporate media, I’ve found only Matt Taibbi and a couple of others with the wavos to call our “representatives” out on it. Read his articles. Read his blog on True/Slant. He’s trying to clue you in.
Anyway, we’ve traveled far and wide in this post. And that’s why this blog has degenerated to movie reviews and random insaneness. The world is a complex place. And to really examine the problems in it takes complexity. A blog may not be the format for that and there may not be any place for it in an America that not only thinks there are simple answers to complex questions but can’t understand complex answers in the first place. Who knows. Matt is trying and SF continues to present cautionary tales of our own excess.
Next: facts about health care and the best superhero movie ever made.
Stay tuned…
“And so the film abandons any pretense of exploring the dynamics of social upheaval. Instead we're treated to yet another take on the evils of corporatism. Could there be a more egregious sci-fi cliché? In Moon we had Lunar Industries Ltd.; in Wall-E it was Buy N Large; Blade Runner featured the Tyrell Corp. And let's not forget the executives from the bio-weapons division of Weyland-Yutani, who cause all the carnage in Aliens.
…
It's a little odd, if you think about it, that District 9—and the whole sci-fi genre—should be so hung up on this one issue. Especially since creatures that arrive from another planet so clearly stand in for humans who arrive from another country: space aliens, illegal aliens. On the io9 blog, Charlie Jane Anders has argued that the archetypes of science-fiction are refugees; indeed, a long list of sci-fi novels explore the theme of immigration in great detail.”
Duh! Most Golden Age SF was written by Jews and the genre emerged just before and after the second world war. How oblivious can Mr. Engber be?
“Film directors, too, have in the past used stories of marooned aliens to examine race relations (e.g. Brother From Another Planet, Alien Nation) and assimilation (e.g. The Man Who Fell to Earth, Superman). Yet recent sci-fi cinema continues to dwell on the corporate menace.”
Obviously the answer to my previous questions is: completely. Personally, I don’t find anything odd at all that SF is interested in corporatism. Corporations as they exist in the modern world are a virtually unparalleled organization in human history. Huge completely amoral social structures, without geographic boundaries, immensely influential and wealthy, often more powerful than governments, with no motive other than avarice, and a organizational structure which is basically a meritocracy where merit consists of being Machiavellian in the pursuit of personal ambition and power.
In fact, it seems that if corporations didn’t exist, SF would have had to invent them.
Corporate intrigue really hit mainstream SF with the advent of Cyberpunk. There had been cautionary tales of large business interests in SF before that- Cyril Kornbluth and Frederik Pohl’s classic The Space Merchants pretty much laid the groundwork for the idea that business interests would surpass both government and religion as the dominant organizational structure in human society. But with Cyberpunk, corporations became a SF staple right along with space travel, aliens, and technological advancement. It makes perfect sense. Corporatism has that wonderful Frankenstein monster duality that drama depends on. As technology becomes more complex it requires more resources to improve that technology. Yet as society progresses we expect government (naively) to become more responsive to the citizenry. Thus we become caught in a catch-22 of high-tech capitalism requiring decisive innovative organization while high-tech democracy requires more slow moving bureaucracy. In a Darwinian sense it’s easy to see why the natural selection of the marketplace, which reassesses feedback four times a year, would result in more powerful social organizations than government which are naturally and contrivedly resistant to change even in a democracy.
The result seems to be the system we currently find ourselves in. I haven’t commented for awhile on what Matt Taibbi has been writing in Rolling Stone over the last two months but it is the most cogent and clear explanation of the economic situation over the last 12 months that I’ve found. If I were to consider myself a diminutive Diogenes, Taibbi is perhaps the last honest man I’ve found in the media. He is non-partisan, hellishly smart, unrelenting in his pursuit of a story, and perhaps the funniest writer anywhere in the mainstream media. He often gets compared to Hunter S. Thompson and rails against the comparison. And for good reason. He may be as funny and irreverent as Thompson, but what he is practicing isn’t gonzo journalism- it’s real journalism. It’s just that in our Pepsi drinking, McDonalds eating, GAP wearing, plastic culture, where real debate is ignored and faux debate is ubiquitous, where “news” reporting has the same relationship to real news that the WWF has to real sport, he’s an oddity. Someone who looks deep into the world and reports on what he sees and is flabbergasted that his society is so completely stupid and gullible.
A couple of months ago he wrote an article for Rolling Stone that pretty much laid out one (just ONE) aspect of how the government came to give so much of the American population’s money to a few obscenely rich private organizations for no reason other than that they were a big part of the status quo that is turning this country into a slave state. Since then he’s been shouted down by any number of corporate shills (slate rears it's ugly head again- who says there aren't callbacks in my writing?) defending Goldman Sachs for both infiltrating our government and taking TRILLIONS of dollars out of taxpayer’s pockets. Now it looks like Taibbi may resemble that character in DISTRICT 9 awaiting trial for revealing his company's illegal business.
A democracy cannot stand without an informed electorate. And the lack of basic math skills in America is apalling. Here is a short primer of what you are being told without realizing it:
There are about 330 million people in the US.
An average family consists of 4 people.
So there are 82.5 million American families.
A trillion dollars is a thousand billion dollars. And a billion is a thousand million dollars. So a trillion is a million million. (Yeah, I know this is stupid, but what are you going to do?)
So every time you hear the word trillion, if you are a member of the average America family needs to think, “They just used TWELVE THOUSAND ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY ONE of my dollars.
That’s right but even that may be a little abstract. So instead, every time you hear trillion on the news remember that your family just bought somebody a 2008 Honda Accord!
(Look it up on kbb.com, the Kelly Blue Book site. I put in parameters for several cars and was non-plussed that last year’s Accord, at the base level, with 60,000 miles (as my top number- basically unlimited mileage on a one year old car), in good shape, resulted in about 13 thousand dollars. It seems a wildly low number. But OTOH I have a confession to make. I’m a middle-aged single man who makes what I consider a decent living and I can’t understand how an average American family lives on 50K a year with kids in school and cell phones for everybody. So I sure can’t realize how our government indebts every family for a year old Honda Accord for every trillion dollars they spend when the average family can’t afford to DRIVE year old Honda Accords.)
Anyway, a trillion dollars is every American family buying a car for somebody who already has more money than they could ever dream of. Last I heard, 50% of the wealth in this country is now controlled by the top 1% of the population. It is nothing short of obscene feudalism. And of all the corporate media, I’ve found only Matt Taibbi and a couple of others with the wavos to call our “representatives” out on it. Read his articles. Read his blog on True/Slant. He’s trying to clue you in.
Anyway, we’ve traveled far and wide in this post. And that’s why this blog has degenerated to movie reviews and random insaneness. The world is a complex place. And to really examine the problems in it takes complexity. A blog may not be the format for that and there may not be any place for it in an America that not only thinks there are simple answers to complex questions but can’t understand complex answers in the first place. Who knows. Matt is trying and SF continues to present cautionary tales of our own excess.
Next: facts about health care and the best superhero movie ever made.
Stay tuned…
Friday, May 1, 2009
WhyThatFrown- Four Horsemen to Run in KY Derby
Well, again I’ve been away from the blog for awhile. Accelerating workloads and new challenges in the “real” world have limited my online musings to the occasional trollfight on HairyFishNuts or an email to Chez over at Deus Ex Malcontent, or comment my own brand of snarky self-indulgent blather on the excellent Science Avenger’s blog, and reading Badtux and Matt Taibbi (but not commenting much).
FWIW, if you don’t read everything Taibbi writes you are missing the most cogent, funniest, most insightful writing since Hunter Thompson was whoring for Matt’s current main employer, the Rolling Stone. Writing the truth in a time when satire is reality is the perfect job for someone of Taibbi’s talent and missing him is nothing short of criminal.
But while logging on to update myself about the fall of civilization, circa the start of the third millennium of the Common Era, I had to make a few brief comments about the world outside the window.
I’ve been saying to friends and astonished acquaintances for the last several years that the fundamentalists might be right about one thing- we seem to be heading to a confluence of catastrophes that cause one to wonder whether the four horsemen are racing in this years Kentucky Derby. Eight years of Republican rule have solidified the opinion that I arrived at during the Regan years (and to be honest about the whole trajectory, my first wife was a Regan delegate from TN at the 1980 convention- we both had it bad- and I’ve never really given up my Libertarian leanings) that while the small-government, free-market, personal liberty platform of the GOP is attractive, all the thugs are actually good for when they get power is starting wars and wrecking the economy in an orgy of unbridled avarice. I’d bet that had you polled thoughtful people whether or not we would ever elect a president less honest than Nixon, less charming than Regan, and less competent than Bush I they would have said that even the American electorate couldn’t manage that. Then we went and elected Dubya TWICE. And what did he do? Started not one, but two wars, with ambition to house them under the big tent of a never ending state of warfare that would have made Orwell vomit in his own mouth, and wrecked not only the domestic economy but did it in such a way that he brought the world economy to the brink. While at the same time denying the biggest environmental crisis in the history of human civilization because it would have hurt the bottom line of his domestic and foreign oil buddies. Thus presiding over the rapid loss of the ice caps with an idiotic Alfred E. Newman “What, me worry?” grin. And in the process wiped his ass on the constitution, tapped American’s phones, read our emails, studied our library and credit card records, castrated Habeas Corpus, and…
Well, I digress.
So the end times Derby watch goes on. War has taken and early lead into the first turn, with Famine being ridden by the spectre of climate change hot on his heels. But wait, there’s a dark horse coming up from the rear.
Pestilence is coming on strong. Being ridden by a jockey named Swine Flu. This new contender may not be able to hold this pace until the backstretch, but the betting windows are still open and the odds are changing. The World Health Organization just placed a sizable bet on him coming from behind.
While it’s a sad thing to watch the end of the world, I have to say that there’s a part of me that understands some of that apocalyptic fervor that grabs the fundamentalist. If you’re going to the Derby this weekend, or just an interested spectator of the human race, remember that the most exciting place to sit is the front row near the finish line.
FWIW, if you don’t read everything Taibbi writes you are missing the most cogent, funniest, most insightful writing since Hunter Thompson was whoring for Matt’s current main employer, the Rolling Stone. Writing the truth in a time when satire is reality is the perfect job for someone of Taibbi’s talent and missing him is nothing short of criminal.
But while logging on to update myself about the fall of civilization, circa the start of the third millennium of the Common Era, I had to make a few brief comments about the world outside the window.
I’ve been saying to friends and astonished acquaintances for the last several years that the fundamentalists might be right about one thing- we seem to be heading to a confluence of catastrophes that cause one to wonder whether the four horsemen are racing in this years Kentucky Derby. Eight years of Republican rule have solidified the opinion that I arrived at during the Regan years (and to be honest about the whole trajectory, my first wife was a Regan delegate from TN at the 1980 convention- we both had it bad- and I’ve never really given up my Libertarian leanings) that while the small-government, free-market, personal liberty platform of the GOP is attractive, all the thugs are actually good for when they get power is starting wars and wrecking the economy in an orgy of unbridled avarice. I’d bet that had you polled thoughtful people whether or not we would ever elect a president less honest than Nixon, less charming than Regan, and less competent than Bush I they would have said that even the American electorate couldn’t manage that. Then we went and elected Dubya TWICE. And what did he do? Started not one, but two wars, with ambition to house them under the big tent of a never ending state of warfare that would have made Orwell vomit in his own mouth, and wrecked not only the domestic economy but did it in such a way that he brought the world economy to the brink. While at the same time denying the biggest environmental crisis in the history of human civilization because it would have hurt the bottom line of his domestic and foreign oil buddies. Thus presiding over the rapid loss of the ice caps with an idiotic Alfred E. Newman “What, me worry?” grin. And in the process wiped his ass on the constitution, tapped American’s phones, read our emails, studied our library and credit card records, castrated Habeas Corpus, and…
Well, I digress.
So the end times Derby watch goes on. War has taken and early lead into the first turn, with Famine being ridden by the spectre of climate change hot on his heels. But wait, there’s a dark horse coming up from the rear.
Pestilence is coming on strong. Being ridden by a jockey named Swine Flu. This new contender may not be able to hold this pace until the backstretch, but the betting windows are still open and the odds are changing. The World Health Organization just placed a sizable bet on him coming from behind.
While it’s a sad thing to watch the end of the world, I have to say that there’s a part of me that understands some of that apocalyptic fervor that grabs the fundamentalist. If you’re going to the Derby this weekend, or just an interested spectator of the human race, remember that the most exciting place to sit is the front row near the finish line.
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