Review: The X-Files: I Want To Believe *spoilers*

After all these many years since the end of the series and the last movie, why would you care or even want to go see this latest X-Files movie? Lord knows it's not because of David Duchovny's screen presence. Nor is it that you'll finaly understand all the ins and outs of the conspiracy back story. This is very much a "monster of the week" story. Nor does the movie take advantage of it's presence on the Big Screen in any significant way. But I still highly recommend seeing this latest X-Files movie because the script is good. Very Good.

*Spoilers ahead*

This X-Files movie starts out with the abduction of woman FBI agent, and later we find out she's just the latest in a string of abductions. The twist in the case is that an excommunicated priest has been having "visions" about the abductions. Fox Mulder and Dana Scully are of course long gone, disgracefully kicked out of the FBI. But the agent in charge, a Ms. Dakota Whitney, begs them to come back and evaluate the case and in particular determine if the ex-priest, a Father Joe, is a fraud or not.

Mulder and Scully aren't exactly welcomed back to the FBI and there are many agents who think that they are on a wild goose chase with Father Joe.

But amazingly enough, he manages to lead them to various body parts buried in a field of ice that have connections to the missing women. But how? How does he know? He is frustratingly non-specific about his abilities and his claims.

Father Joe, having committed heinous crimes in the past, doesn't win anyone's trust. And Dana Sculley, a troubled Catholic herself is especially skeptical and challenging of Father Joe.

But twice during the course of the investigation, Father Joe looks straight into her eyes and tells her something. When challenged about it, he claims to not know why he said the things he said. The first thing he told her was "Don't give up." which she interprets as advice to not give up on a terminally ill child she is trying to save at the hospital where she works. And as it turns out, her continued research into treatment options causes her to run across some obscure medical research that turns out to create a big breakthrough in the case. The second time Father Joe speaks to her, he quotes a particular chapter and verse from the Bible and for reason's unknown to Sculley, those numbers cause her to make a random guess about the whereabouts of Mulder and rescue him just in time to prevent his arm from getting chopped off. These things challenge Sculley to question her faith. As a Catholic, she can't help but wonder whether these messages are from God, coming through the disgraced priest who might just have been forgiven his sins and rewarded for his faith. Oh and by the way, Father Joe cries blood at one point, completely unexplained but quite possibly a stigmata.

Meanwhile, Mulder is convinced that there is some sort of psychic connection between the Bad Guy and Father Joe. The nature of the visions is consistent with his past experience with psychics and Father Joe's ability to lead the FBI to hidden bodies and body parts can hardly be explained except if you believe that Father Joe can see what the Bad Guy has done.

But most of the FBI agent's aren't buying it. They are convinced that there is a more mundane relationship between Father Joe and the Bad Guy and in the end they find one. And this relationship is related to Father Joe's past crimes and sins from decades ago. And although the FBI cannot connect Father Joe directly to the abductions, the charge him as an accomplice.

Which is why the subtitle for this brilliant script is "I Want To Believe." All the key characters of the story want to believe something else and there are enough facts/coincidences/apparent miracles that they can all find something to support what they want to believe.

So go see the movie, if you haven't already, for the cool story line and tightly woven script that takes the usual "monster of the week" formula and cranks it up another notch.

Review: The Dark Knight

Some pretty much spoiler free thoughts on The Dark Knight movie

Here's the thing about the Batman move that impressed me so much. The superheroes and villains seemed more human in this movie than any of the other comic book movie I've ever seen.

One of the constant themes through the movie was how the public of Gotham City treated Batman, and without getting too spoilerish, I'm just gonna say that it ain't pretty and yet rang very true to human nature, IMHO. People forget that Batman is an Outlaw in the eyes of most people. And more importantly, we forget that Batman is a human being and his life _sucks_ because he has to be Batman and he is actually desperately grabbing at straws to have some semblance of a normal life.

Likewise, the joker, is not so much a supernatural evil force as he is an insane human being. For the most part, the things you see The Joker doing are not too far beyond the pale for someone that is insane, amoral, and unconcerned about whether he lives or dies. He even makes a point about 3/4 of the way through the movie that he favors simple tools like knives and barrels of explosives, and fire, etc. Throughout the movie, you get these insights into the origin of his insanity, but they aren't quite consistent with each other. In any case, the origins of his insanity seem almost mundane, as if any average Joe could become the Joker. And as insane as he is, The Joker understands that he and Batman have much more in common with each other than they have in common with the people of Gotham. And the Joker uses this to his advantage on multiple occasions. Likewise, the Joker understands the fickleness of the public and knows how to manipulate people both using mass media and in one on one situations.

The make up job on the Joker is really the least creepy thing about him. It's his insanity that creeps you out the most because it seems so human. And while much has been made of the creepy makeup job, the real genius in this portrayal of the Joker is in how Heath Ledger plays him physically. It's a combination of multiple nervous ticks with a lanky, slack, devil-may-care posture that really sells him as an amoral, insane man.

Harvey Dent's descent into insanity and transformation into Two Face was equally compelling though less developed just because he doesn't get the screen time that Batman and the Joker get. But there's a very subtle message in the Two Face sub plot because it adds some subtext to Batman's personality. It makes you realize just how easily Batman could crack up and turn just as insane as Two Face. It makes you realize just how tenuous Batman's grasp of being good guy is.

To reinforce the authenticity of the human motivations of the super heroes and villains, the Gotham City in this movie is super realistic. They do little to hide the fact that Gotham City is Chicago. And in fact I think the movie makers deliberately filmed at some of the famous Chicago landmarks so that you would realize that this Batman is set in the here and now and people are acting exactly like people in the here and now would react to Batman and the Joker, etc.

There were a couple plot tropes that got on my nerves a bit. The one that stuck out the most was a riff on the issue of mass surveillance which I thought was handled poorly. But I can overlook it in the spirit of just not having enough screen time to deal with it properly. Likewise, there's an exploration on how people act differently in crowds vs individually which was kinda crammed into the movie.

My only substantive gripe about the plot was that they were trying to ground the superheroes and villains deep into every day human nature. And this is why the movie works so well. But they contradict it a bit by giving The Joker and almost superhuman ability to set up all his traps and bombs and mass media manipulations in very short periods of time. But I guess it's easy to underestimate how much chaos an insane man can cause when he's literally got nothing else to do.

Lastly, I have to call the film makers out on one major point which is that this is an adult movie and honestly I would not recommend that kids see it. It is too brutally violent. With very selective editing, they managed to imply but not show all the gore in the movie. And there's no doubt in my mind that the film makers worked very very hard to qualify for a PG-13 rating, following all the objective criteria. But even so, the brutal violence is just too much for most 13 year old kids, IMHO. The film makers should have just gone for the R rating. Maybe they wouldn't have broken all the box office records like it did, but they would have convinced the world that there really can be a damn good comic book movie for adults.

Bovine Geocaching

The Economist web site has an interesting story about high tech cow herding. Maintaining fences to keep cows constrained to your property is an extremely expensive, time consuming and labor intensive activity. According to the economist, fences can cost $20,000 per kilometer just for the materials. Given that ranching is a very low margin business, this is a huge expense.

So researchers have been looking at alternate ways to keep the cows where they need to be. One of the thngs they've been working on is using the same basic technology that has been used to keep dogs in fenceless yards.

The way it works is that the cows are fitted with some high tech head gear called an Ear-a-round. The Economist article describes it like this:

The Ear-a-round consists of a small, light box that sits on top of a cow’s head, and a pair of earpieces made of fabric and plastic. The box contains a computer chip, a GPS tracking device and a transceiver that enables it to be programmed remotely. The earpieces serve both to keep the box upright and to supply command signals—either sonic or electric—to the animal wearing the device. For maximum working lifetime, the whole thing is powered by lithium-ion batteries that are topped up by solar cells.

The cows are then monitored by satellite GPS tracking. I imagine you could then create a Google Maps application to show where your cows are at any given time! You then use the tracking system to identify the area where the cows need to be. When they start to go astray, they either feel a shock or hear a bad sound in one of their ears. The cow then turns in the right direction to get away from the negative feedback.

The device is smart enough to learn which feedback works with each cow and how much is needed. As the animal gets used to the device, the signals become less and less harsh. And now they are even starting to experiment with positive signals. And, I kid you not, they are experimenting with piping in cowboy songs that are hundreds of years old into the ears of the cattle to see how effective they are at guiding the cows to the right area.

This amuses me to no end.

They are also experimenting with fitting just a limited number of cows with this gear instead of every sigle one. The idea being that if you get a critical mass of cows followng the signals, the rest of the cows will follow the herd on their own.

There are some other benefits to fenceless cow herding, It has less impact on the environment. Environmentalists have long complained that fences impede the natural migration of roaming wildlife. So this system would address that concern as well.

Headscarves and Hairdressers

The Evening Standard of London recently published a news story about a London Salon owner becoming the center of a controversy over a Muslim job applicant. This has quickly become one of those battle-fronts-in-the-culture-war stories because it has raised all sorts of issues about discrimination, freedom of association, and practicing religious customs in public spaces.

As I understand it, a Ms. Sarah Desrosiers owns a salon in London called Wedge. In the news story she’s quoted as saying

"I sell image - it's very important - and I would expect a hair stylist to display her hair because I need people to be drawn in off the street," said Ms Desrosiers. "It's the nature and style of my salon that brings people in and someone having their hair covered conflicts with that. If someone came in wearing a baseball hat or a cowboy hat I'd tell them to take it off while they're working. To me, it's absolutely basic that people should be able to see the stylist's hair."

I think the gallery photos on the Wedge web site back her up:

Clearly she’s going for an urban alternative vibe and she does indeed show off her stylists and her stylists’ hair.

Ms. Bushra Noah, pictured below, is suing Ms. Desrosiers for discrimination. In a legal letter sent to the tribunal overseeing the discrimination suit, Ms. Noah claimed that she was discriminated against because of her Muslim custom of wearing a head scarf at all times.

photo credit: The London Standard

Apparently, Ms. Desrosiers conducted her initial interview by phone and offered Ms. Noah a “trial day” at the salon. Ms. Noah apparently made no mention of her headscarf practices in the interview so it wasn't until the trial day that Ms Desrosiers found out about it. Ms. Desrosiers apparently made it clear that the stylists were expected to help sell the image of the shop because they how they appeared helped draw in walk by traffic.

According to her news story, Ms. Noah had applied for approximately 25 hairdresser jobs without success and she is quoted as saying,

“I decided to sue this hairdresser because she upset me the most. I felt so down and got so depressed, I thought if I am not going to defend myself, who is? ... Ever since I was in high school hairdressing is what I wanted to do. It is sad for them to not give me the opportunity. This has ruined my ambitions. Wearing a headscarf is essential to my beliefs.”

There are lots of thorny issues in this case. First of all, is it OK for the salon owner to require the stylists display their hair as part of the image they are trying to create for the shop? Why or why not? And how does that balance against religious customs involving a hair. What if a job applicant was bald? What if a job applicant simply had unwashed/unkempt hair? What if the job applicant was a Hassidic Jew wearing his traditional payot? What if the job applicant was a Rastafarian wearing dreadlocks? What if the applicant was a good ol’ boy who insisted on wearing a John Deer baseball cap every waking hour? Which of these applicants should Ms. Desrosiers be able to reject on the basis of the appearance or lack of appearance of their hair? Does it matter if the customs relating to the applicant’s hair are religiously motivated or not? Does religious practice trump job requirements? Is the appearance of the stylist and the stylists’ hair a legitimate issue for Ms. Desrosiers to make hiring decisions?

Forget hair for a second. Ms Desrosiers claims she is selling an image. Is that legitimate? Is she allowed to create an image for her salon according to her preferences and vision? Can this image she’s striving for include exclusion of people who don’t fit that image? Would it be OK is she had simply said, “The woman just doesn't fit the image I’m striving to achieve?” What if the job applicant had been a Hindu woman who wore bindis on her forehead and other sorts of tilak every day? Would this be a legitimate reason to reject her as a job applicant?

I think that starts to get to the nub of the issue and the reason it makes so many of us uncomfortable. When you start discussing the issue in that way, you begin wandering down a very slippery slope that ends in gender-exclusive clubs, Aryan nationalists, class hierarchies and all sorts of other nasty things.

I think there are two key issues we have to keep in mind regarding this lawsuit.

First of all, the issues of free association, workplace behavior, job requirements, and religious practices all have to be balanced against each other. None of these issues is absolute and takes precedence over the others at all times.

In particular, we've learned over the years that there are times when our participation in public life requires that we curb our religious practices in public. Catholic churches have learned not to ring their bells at all times of the day and instead restrict themselves to a schedule and volume that’s acceptable to their local community. Most employers discourage or even forbid the display of religious symbols when “on company time.” Likewise there are issues which employers have seen that it’s good to accommodate employee’s religious practices when possible.

In order for people of many faiths to coexist and live together peacefully, these sorts of restrictions and accommodations have to be made. We work these out one case at a time and build up a body of case law and customs and acceptable practices over time. There’s nothing wrong with that. And letting freedom of association, or business requirement trump religious custom in one case is not automatically going to turn us into evil bigots. True, we have to be constantly vigilant against that danger and we have to have a good healthy debate and dialog over the evolution of our customs to make sure we don’t go too far. But it’s OK to let other issues trump religious practices sometimes.

Likewise, believe it or not, the concept of free association isn't entirely dead. No one owes Ms. Noah a job. Ms. Desrosiers certainly doesn’t owe Ms. Noah a job. Over the years we've been very careful to not allow discrimination and exclusivity based on a variety of issues. Everyone can recite these by memory. And one of these is religion.

So the question becomes, if you claim that a religious custom is interfering with the image you are striving for in the workplace, does that constitute discrimination? As I understand this particular case, the claim is not that Ms. Desrosiers rejected Ms. Noah because she is a Muslim, but because her religious custom interferes with the plans she has for her business. She seemed to be willing to give Ms. Noah a trial period if she was willing to remove her headscarf. So is it discrimination or not

This leads me to the second important lesson from this case. Given that there are going to be cases in which workplace custom, free association, and other factors are going to trump religious custom, it’s important that all religions be treated equally. If we decide that Ms. Desrosiers we indeed guilty of discrimination, then must she also accept Hassidic Jews, Rastafarians, and Hindus as well? I would say the answer is yes. You can’t favor one religion’s customs over another. You codify into law special treatment for Muslim customs, Christian customs, or any other religion. So when we look at this particular case, we have to set aside the fact that the particular religion involved in this case is Islam and look at it in a broad sense regarding all religious customs as they conflict with the salon’s image.

In this particular case, I tend to side with Ms. Desrosiers. I think she has voiced counter-balancing interests and business issues that are sufficient to justify her exclusion of Ms. Noah because she wouldn't display her hair. I'm sorry that Ms. Noah's ambitions suffered as a result of being rejected for 25 jobs. But her ambitions do not trump Ms. Desrosiers' ambitions which would almost certainly be equally destroyed if she were forced to hire people against her will. If the job in question were a more a mundane field, such as accounting, I'd be a lot more sceptical. It’s interesting to turn the issue around. Suppose business wanted to cater to devout Muslims and therefore wanted all its female employees to adopt the modest dress requirements. Would we want to force that business to hire a woman that didn't want to adopt the headscarf requirements? I wouldn't, for exactly the same reasons I side with Ms. Desrosiers in this one.

Two Stories From The Fast Food Front

The juxtapostion of two news stories involving burger joints is just to delicious to pass up.

First, there's a news story in the Star-Tribune of Minneapolis, MN, about a man in Quinton Virgina who lost 80 pounds by eating every meal at Mc Donald's. Yes. You read that right. He _lost_ 80 pounds by eating every meal at McDonalds. According to the news story, he didn't eat the burgers, but instead he ate "Mostly salads, wraps and apple dippers without the caramel sauce."

Chris Colson started off at 278 pounds and now weighs 199. He says he wants to get down to 185, the weight he was at when he married his wife.

Second, earlier this week, Fox News reported that Burger King announced that it had just brought to market the world's most expensive hamburger. According to the news story:

The fine ingredients of what is called simply 'The Burger' include Wagyu beef, white truffles, Pata Negra ham slices, Cristal onion straws, Modena balsamic vinegar, lambs lettuce, pink Himalayan rock salt, organic white wine and shallot infused mayonnaise in an Iranian saffron and white truffle dusted bun.

All proceeds from the $200 burger go to a London charity for abused children.

I think when Mr. Colson reaches his goal, somone ought to buy him "The Burger" to celebrate.

Not Your Average Floor Mat

This past week I had to have my car's brakes worked on. Local friends will be relieved to know that it is now safe again to ride in the car with me.

For complex repairs, I try to take my car into the dealer. So I took the TSX into the Acura place to have the work done. And they always have this auto-dealer-theater where they make a big production about how carefully they are treating your car etc.

One of the things they always do is put a piece of paper in the floor board, presumably so that their service technicians wont sully your car with dirt from their boots etc. And as usual, the Acura people did this too.

Only in this era in which everyone is wants to keep up their green reputation, they no longer put simple paper floor mats in the car, noooooo. That would be a missed opportunity. So it's no longer a floor mat, it's a......

Eco-Barrier!

Baby For Sale On Craig's List

"Baby put up for sale on Craigslist"

"VANCOUVER, British Columbia (Reuters) - A couple has been arrested in what Canadian police said on Tuesday was an apparent offer to sell a seven-day-old baby girl on Craigslist for C$10,000 (5,000 pounds).

. . . . .

Vancouver police said the couple told investigators the offer was a hoax, but were arrested for public mischief with other criminal charges possible as the investigation continues.

'There are so many questions here,' Constable Tim Fanning told reporters."

Yes. Many questions indeed.

The story notes that a woman saw the ad and repored it to the police. So yay for self-policing. I wonder how many people read that ad and didn't do anything about it?

The newspaper article says that the ad mentioned that the baby was an accident and that the couple could not afford to care for it properly and wanted to give the baby a good home. When confronted by police, the couple said it was a hoax.

Granted it's wrong. But how and why is it wrong? Women who go through the "normal" channels for putting a baby up for adoption often set up legal agreements with the adopters in which the adopters compensate the mother for medical expenses as well as compensation for time and inconvenience. So that sounds an awful like "work for hire" to me. So I don't think you can say selling babies on Craigslist is wrong simply because they were asking for money. What if someone had answered the ad and they'd come to an agreement in principal about "the deal" and _then_ gone to all the proper authorities for making the adoption happen legally. Would that have been so bad?

My reaction to this scenario is that it would still be very unseemly, but at least that the baby's interests would have been properly represented. And I think that reveals the real nub of the evil in the craigslist baby ad. Sure the couple's ad said that they wanted to "give the baby a good home." But I think the couple's intentions were given away by the fact that the ad said the baby was "for sale" instead of "up for adoption." That kind of says it all. Would they have given up the baby to the first person who showed up at the door step with the cash? The very nature of craigslist would lead you to think so. I know that when I've sold stuff on Craigslist my policy is strictly, "first person on my doorstep with the cash gets it." I think that's why the idea of selling one's baby on Craigs list is so deeply viscerally wrong. it's not the money so much as it is the complete disregard for the baby's well being and safety.

No iPod For Old Men

There's a reason that all those iPod commercials feature oung kids in musical bliss rather than older people. Turns out that older folks, especially men I think, have a problem with ipods. When the earbuds are inserted into the ears of older men, it tickles the hair growing out of their ears such that it's annoying to listen to the iPod for any length of time.

Not that I would have any personal experience with this phenomena. Oh no. Of course not. No way.

Mobile Bill Boards

I am not one of those folks who objects to bill boards on the interstate and highways. I don't believe the world owes me a pristine, view of the unspoilt country side. I'd _like_ there to be no bill boards. But I wouldn't go on a campaign to have them eliminated either.

But when it comes to mobile billboards, like the one you see below, I go ballistic and my blood boils.



Bill boards on the side of the highway, might be ugly. They might even be distracting. But they don't contribute to traffic mess the way mobile bilboards do! That's where I draw the line.

I took some solace in this particular instance because the company that had hired the mobile bill board to clog the streets of Chapel Hill was in fact, going out of business.

Not Laughing At Napoleon

The amazing thing about watching Napoleon Dynamite, a movie which purports to be a comedy, is that it didn't get a single good laugh out of me the whole time. A chuckle here and there, yes. Maybe an amused smile, once in a while. But honestly I didn't really laugh once during the entire 82 minutes. And this, I think, is the entire brilliance that is Napoleon Dynamite. Despite his uber-geekiness, despite the complete lack of social graces, despite being crippled with an equally geeky family of apparent losers, despite being the butt of every high school indignity, I never once felt like it was OK to laugh at what was happening to Napoleon Dynamite. I never once felt like it was OK to laugh at _him_. As Napoleon admits during the movie's big turning point, he always trusts and follows his heart. And that's ultimately why he's such a sympathetic character and that's what insulates him from ridicule.

Let's See How Many Ways Calvin Can Be Snarky In A Single Post.....

Tim Berners-Lee, "inventor" of the world wide web, is on a new mission to rid the computer field of "stupid male geek culture." From the news article:

The inventor of the world wide web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, has called for an end to the "stupid" male geek culture that disregards the work of capable female engineers, and puts others off entering the profession.

Berners-Lee said that a culture that avoided alienating women would attract more female programmers, which could lead to greater harmony of systems design. "If there were more women involved we could move towards interoperability. We have to change at every level," he said.

According to Berners-Lee, a culture exists where women can be put off a career in technology both by "stupid" behaviour by some male "geeks", and by the reactions of other women.

"It's a complex problem — we find bias against women by women. There are bits of male geek culture and engineer culture that are stupid. They should realise that they could be alienating people who are smarter and better engineers," said Berners-Lee.

Engineering research facilities that interview candidates based only on how many papers they have had published also risk adding to the problem, according to Berners-Lee, because of an apparent in-built bias against women.

One academic went through a sex change, submitted the same papers under both identities, and found that papers were accepted from a man but were rejected when they came from a woman, said the web inventor. This bias is unaccountable, but adds to institutional bias, he said.

There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that Tim Berners-Lee is sincerely trying to make his world a better place. I honestly do not doubt his intentions one iota. In general, I admire him. But I really think he's put his foot in his mouth on this one and I have to make a few snarky comments:

1) Does the second paragraph seem just, i dunno, a tad chauvinistic?

2) Doesn't "move towards interoperability" sound like a euphemism? :-)

3) The one and only "example" he cites, in the last paragraph is in fact easily explainable without resorting to sex-bias. Papers are accepted for publication not only on their merits, but on their merits relative to the other papers that are also under submission. And besides, one data point does not make a trend.

4) Selecting candidates solely on how many papers they've published does sound like a problem to me, but that's a completely independent problem from sex bias. (And, for the record, having never staffed and Engineering Research Facility, I can't say for certainty that judging number of papers published is NOT a good way to select candidates.)

5) I thought the whole point of geek culture was to judge people on their mastery of the domain of geekiness and their contribution to the the geek community of that domain. By definition, it's a merit based culture. And while it's true that geeks get involved in their petty drama games by refusing to acknowledge each other's geek creds, etc. Such activities in themselves are not so much examples of sexual bias as they are of being petty and insecure.

and finally.....

6) I guess that whole semantic web thing didn't quite work out.

Calvin Learns About Fact Checking

One of the many, many podcasts I listen to is Slice of Sci Fi. It's a great podcast full of discussion about upcoming science fiction movies and TV shows, etc. In the most recent episode, there was some discussion about the up coming release of yet another cut of Blade Runner to celebrate the visionary film's 25th anniversary.

Cool! The new cut includes some minor edits to lengths of some scenes and includes two reshot scenes.

But the real news on the Slice of Sci Fi show was that Ridley Scott, the director, referred to Deckard as a replicant at the 2007 ComiCon, apparently settling the long debate about this issue. Well, that's big news if true due to the long drawn out debates among film buffs. The folks on Slice of Sci Fi went on and on about this and I was excited about. "Aha," I thought to myself, "fodder for Stuck In Traffic!"

So this afternoon, I started writing a post about how I felt about this revelation. A post which I eventually had to trash for reasons I'll discuss in a minute. But for the record. I have long believed that in a good movie, every scene is critical to the movie and is required to move the story forward. Anton Chekhov, once said that if there is a gun on the wall in the first part of the play, it is certain to fire off before the last curtain, or something close to that. So the scene in Blade Runner where Deckard is drinking heavily and contemplating a series of photographs on his piano, he has a flash of a dream about a unicorn. There's no other reference to this throughout the movie until the very end when he finds a tiny origami unicorn outside his apartment put there by his police handler.

On one level this means that the police knew where the last replicant was and they chose not to kill her and let her have a life with Deckart, short though it may be. But the significance of it being a unicorn must be explained. A movie this well crafted wouldn't accidently have to referencesto unicorns and make them be coincidental. I had to conclude that the only explanation was that Deckard is a replicant. But I think the whole point of the movie is that the line between replicants and humans had been thoroughly blurred. I'd prefer that there be some ambiguity in whether or not Deckard is a human or a replicant.

I was furiously composing my analysis about this and I decided that I really needed to cite the Ridley quote for the article, so I could prove that the issue had been settled once and for all. Off to Google-land I went. I threw in a few choice key words and immediately came up with a a sci-fi channel interview. And I was reading through the interview and sure enough, there's the quote from Ridley Scott. Cool! But as I read through the rest of the article, there were all these references to movies being "in production" which had been out for a long time and then it hit me like a on of bricks. Sure enough. The article was from way back in 2002! I did a little more digging and stumbled across a Wikipedia entry about Blade Runner. There I found out that yes, this information had been in general circulation since at least 2002 and possibly earlier.
Furthermore, I discovered that other people close to the film, notably the screen writer have continued to insist that Deckard is a human.

I could go on about the debate, but I won't. I read the entier Wikipedia entry and many of the cited references. When I was done, I couldn't think of a single thing to add to the debate that hadn't already been said much better than I could.

But the real conclusion I got from this is THANK GOD I DID SOME FACT CHECKING. I'm so glad I decided it was important to include a hard citation to the original claim. If I had not done that, I would have posted a headline to the effect of "It's Official: Deckard is a Replicant!" and touted it as real news in the scifi world. And no doubt I would have been corrected on this point within 10 minutes of posting it and I'd be really really embarrassed to have rushed the news to print without doing some fact checking.

I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this. There's been a spate of news stories recently, especially about the Iraq war that have turned out to be total fabrications. The most recent being The New Republic's publishing of accounts from an Iraqi soldier about brutal, salacious stories from the front lines that have been debunked. My favorite analysis of this story is over at The Big Lizard's Blog. Explaining all the threads in a story is important. It's important in a fiction story. It's imporant in a news story as well. Citing your sources so they can be verified is important. It's important in scientific research and it's important in journalism. Fact checking is important.

WiFi Camping

In the past we have had tendency to associate wireless internet access with the leading edge of technology. Something that the technology geeks use and the high powered business executives use. We associate WiFi with expensive iPhones, and laptop computers. We associate Wifi with trendy coffe shops. It used to be a status symbol for people who can afford to pay for the expensive technology and $5 coffee drinks.

But a July 9th story published by the Associate Press shows just how far wifi technology is seeping into our culture.

The story reports that a growing number of campgrounds are installing wireless internet in the campground in response to customer demands. Yeah sure, people might go to a campground for the fun of pitching a tent, coking over a fire, and communing with nature, But before crawling into their sleeping bag at night, more and more campers want to check their e-mail and post their pictures to flickr.

RV parks are especially feeling the demand from customers for free wifi access at RV campgrounds. The article quotes Jef Sutherland, vice president of information services for Kampgrounds of America, as saying "We've become a society where e-mail is as important as our phone for business and personal communications. Our guests just expect Wi-Fi at KOAs."

Forget the iPhone as a cultural indicator. I think it's far more significant that our society has embraced internet culture to the point where we demand wireless net access at places like campgrounds. We've clearly mved passed to the tipping point for pervasive internet access and shows that a critical mass of people don't want to ever be out of touch with their online persona.

Al Gore Finds Himself

So Al Gore has finally found himself. He's the new Jerry Lewis, rounding up hoards of B-List entertainers for an annual telethon to raise money, or at least raise consciousness about a Very Important Issue which we should all pay more attention to. Like Lewis' Labor Day Telethon for he Muscular Dystrophy Association, the glitz of the Live Earth didn't quite hide the fact that it's well, a little bit dull.

I think it's inevitable that an event that was hyped so much would be followed with a media storm of critical press and I along with them can't help but be a little snarky about the whole thing. The event was Big, way Big. Bigness commands attention. So what was communicated, what was said. Was consciousness raised at all?

The nominal purpose of Live Earth was to get all those booty shakin' hipsters to participate in the Call To Action. It's filled with very tame things:

• I will change four light bulbs to CFLs at my home.
• I will ride public transit or carpool one or more times per week.
• I will shop for the most energy efficient electronics and appliances.
• I will forward a Live Earth email message to 5 friends.'
• I will shut off my equipment and lights whenever I'm not using them.
• Add my name to the Live Earth pledge.

The first five items strike me as not doing partcularly much to save the planet or reduce carbon emissions. But I'll grant that they are consciousness raising items. They are items that any Joe Schmoe can do and feel good about. So, ok. I'll buy into the theory that if you get people to adopt these simple things it will start getting them to think in a greener more environmentally conscious way which will cause them to act in mor eprofound ways when the opportunity comes up. So, fair enough. Although I am amused that these lightweight items are made even lighter weight by the fact that you can choose which ones, if any, you want to do. So you can just sign up for the "I will shut off my equipment and lights whenever I'm not using them." That's the one that I'd sign up for because it has the added bonus that it will make my parents happy because that's what they always told me as i was growing up.

What about that last bullet in the call to action? It's the "Add my name to the Live Earth pledge." which is listed below:

I pledge:

1. To demand that my country join an international treaty within the next 2 years that cuts global warming pollution by 90% in developed countries and by more than half worldwide in time for the next generation to inherit a healthy earth;
2. To take personal action to help solve the climate crisis by reducing my own CO2 pollution as much as I can and offsetting the rest to become "carbon neutral;"
3. To fight for a moratorium on the construction of any new generating facility that burns coal without the capacity to safely trap and store the CO2;
4. To work for a dramatic increase in the energy efficiency of my home, workplace, school, place of worship, and means of transportation;
5. To fight for laws and policies that expand the use of renewable energy sources and reduce dependence on oil and coal;
6. To plant new trees and to join with others in preserving and protecting forests; and,
7. To buy from businesses and support leaders who share my commitment to solving the climate crisis and building a sustainable, just, and prosperous world for the 21st century.

So on point number 1, I would note that joining treaties does nothing to cut global warming pollution. People have to figure out how to make the reductions first. And why isn't every country equallly responsible?

On item 2, I can applaud the personal action orientation. While deeply suspect of the whole carbon offsets idea, I like that this is a pldege to take personal action rather than issuing a demand for joingin a treaty that demands something that may or may not even be possible.

Dunno about item 3. Sounds nice. But is it technically feasible? Can it be done at a cost that still enables us to generate cost effective energy? Or is this a thinly veiled way to call for an end to burning coal?

Number 4 I can cmpletely buy into. Do what you can personally do and make happen.

Number 5 I have the ssme criticism as number 1, laws and policies are wishful thinking about alternate energy sources are merely wishful thinking if they aren't practical and feasible from a cost perspective.

Number 6 I can buy into. Planting trees is good, and by extensions, helping to clean up the environment and various ways. picking up garbage out of streams and parks. helping with reforestation projects. Joinign land conservancies. All seem like good, practical things that people can do.

Number 7 is merely a motherhood and apple pie statement. Show me a leader who isn't for all those things. Also "sustainable, just, and prosperous" are all very mushy words that are definied differently for nearly ndividual.

I read through a lot of the media coverage and there were many snarky articles about the fact that the music acts weren't "big enough" or at least not as big as the Live Aid concerts. (Hey, The Police are plenty "big enough" for me, but they are rather 80's arent they?) There were snarky stories about inadequacy of the facilities at the events. "Waiting an hour for a beer? Oh My God, What was Al Gore THINKING??"

But the real issue is whether Al Gore accomplished his mission of forcing global warming onto the international political stage. That's not something you can measure immediately after the event. Only time will tell whether Live Earth will create millions of green activists across the planet or if Live Earth will become one of those yearly things which we praise if asked but channel surf across as soon as no one is looking. I dunno but I wouldn't counting my carbon offsets just yet.

Octosquid

As reported by the Star-Bulletin in Hawii, Researchers discovered a brand new sea creature, heretofore unclassified from the depths of the ceam. You can see a picture of it here. Because parts of it resembled an octopus and parts of it resembled a squid, the researchers have dubbed it an octosquid.

Bah! Humbug. Can't they do better than that. Don't they have any spark of imagination whatsoever???? If I were going to name this creature I'd give it a spiffier name like kraken.

Finger-pointing over executive pardons

Lots of outrage this week over Bush's decision to commute Libby's sentence. Lots of wailing and gnashing of teeth from the Demcratic side of the spectrum. Former campaign manager for Bill Clinton, Dick Morris offers up some counter balance to the issue on vote.com. One of the more damning bits:

Then, of course, there was also Marc Rich, the fugitive oil broker who renounced his American citizenship. Rich was illegally buying oil from Iran during the American trade embargo and hid the $200 million in trading (and over $100 million in profits) with Iraq using dummy transactions in off-shore corporations.

Ironically, Scooter Libby was one of Rich’s lawyers, while Rudy Giuliani was the U.S. Attorney who brought the indictment. Amazingly, the U.S. Attorney’s Office was never contacted by the White House for input into the pardon decision. Here’s what the prosecuting attorney had to say about the pardon:

“I cannot imagine two people that were less suited for a presidential pardon than Marc Rich and Pincus Green[the co-defendant]. It is inconceivable that President Clinton chose to pardon the two biggest tax cheats in the history of the United States who had renounced their citizenship, been fugitives for seventeen years, and who had traded with the Iranians during the hostage crisis. While I do not know what motivated President Clinton to pardon Rich and Green, I can state that it is implausible that those pardons were based on his evaluation of the merits of the case...” [http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/pardonsex8.htm]

Interestingly, Rich’s wife bought furniture for the Clinton’s Chappaqua home and contributed at least $450,000 to the Clinton Library.

In the same article there's also comparison of Bil Clinton's lying under oath which led to his last minute plea bargain and charges of selling pardons. The full story is here.


Political finger pointing aside, it does make one wonder why the president has these powers in the first place. I can almost buy into it in the sense that the President is head of the Executive Branch charged with enforcing and executing the laws of the country and therefore should have the power to correct errors and flaws in the execution of justice thsat he presides over. And yet it does seem like it's ripe for abuse.

Quraneyeens

At lunch I was doing my usual foraging of blogs looking for something interesting to read and ran across a pointer to this blog post at The Big Pharaoh. It was about a sub sect of Islam known as the Quraneyeens. Seems that 15 practitioners of this brand of Islam had been recently imprisoned in Egypt What? Muslims persecuting Muslims? You bet. Why? Because they’re Muslims who believe in the Quran, and only the Quran.

According to the blog post, there are two key religious texts that are the foundation of Islam, the Quran and the Hadith. As I understand it, (and correct me if I am wrong), the Quran was, according to tradition, written directly by The Prophet himself. Whereas the Hadith is a set of observations about his opinions and actions and lessons that were preserved orally for over 150 years before they were written down, raising issues about whether or not the preservers of the oral tradition either deliberately or unintentionally injected their own biases, opinions, and political agendas into the Hadith.

update: Commenter rayhaan tells me that "Hadeeths are sayings, actions and endorsements of the Prophet." But agrees that they were preserved orally because very few could read or write at the time.

One can see analogous issues in other religions. According to a comment on the blog post, Judaism has the Karaites, who reject the Talmud and rely on the Torah. And in the United States, there is a Christian denomination known as the Church of Christ who believe in modeling their life only on the words and actions of Jesus. In the more extreme Church of Christ congregations, they do not even celebrate Christmas because Jesus didn't celebrate Christmas. (well, maybe with ice cream and cake and pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, but only when he was a kid, but I digress...)

The reason this has any relevance at all to anyone outside the religious scholarship community is that, again according to the blog post, many of the more odious aspects of Islam that we deplore, such as the status of women, and the justified killing of non-Muslims, originate from the Hadith, and not the Quran.

So by focusing on the Quran, the Quraneyeens have a path for continuing to be faithful Muslims while rejecting violence, the oppression of women, etc. In the United States, there is an organization called The Free Muslims Coalition which is led by some of the leaders of the Quraneyeens which has actively demonstrated against terrorism, anti-Semitism.

Very cool. I hope more and more people learn about these folks and I hope they are not persecuted into oblivion.

If You Can't Afford To Buy....

If You Can't Afford To Buy....
Originally uploaded by cspowers.

Saw this on Gorman Street in Raleigh, North Carolina, February, 2007.

Blinders, Very Narrow Blinders

From this article in the Oscoda Press, which I believe is in Michigan.

Ousted Alcona treasurer arrested
by Holly Nelson

HARRISVILLE - Thomas Katona, 56, the former treasurer of Alcona County and a resident of Harrisville, was arrested Tuesday, Jan. 16, for allegedly embezzling more than $1.2 million of county funds to invest in the Nigerian fraud scam, according to Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox.

Katona was arraigned in 81st District Court on Jan. 17 on eight counts of embezzlement by a public official and one count of forgery. If convicted, he will face a maximum of 14 years in prison.

According to the attorney general and court records, while Katona was vacationing in London, England, in November, employees of the treasurer’s office were notified by National City Bank that Katona allegedly made eight unauthorized wire transfers of county funds, totalling $186,500, during August and September.

Later on in the same news story:

A forensic audit of Alcona County records was conducted by the Michigan Department of Treasury in December, revealing a shortage of $1,236,700, according to Cox, who noted that Alcona County’s yearly budget is approximately $4 million.

So basically this guy not only fell for the Nigerian fraud scam, he embezzeled over 25% of the county's public funds to do so. (The story indicates that he also "invested" around $72,000 of his own money.)

I can think of a dozen snarky things to say about the intelligence of this guy and even more about greed. But these sorts of stories hit a point of absurdity after which I start to feel sorry for the guy and I start to wonder, how awful was this guy's life that he started to believe a) that this Nigerian thing wasn't a fraud and b) that he'd get away with embezzling a quarter of the county budget?

How I Want My TV

There is an interesting article in the latest issue of The Economist about the convergence of computers and TV and what the business model of that convergence will look like. Briefly, the article discusses three models:

Pay Per Show: In this model, you pay for each show you download. Once you've paid and downloaded it, you can do pretty much whatever you want with it. Burn it to DVD, lave it on your hard drive, move it to your iPod, etc. The Economist notes that this is the model Apple has established with the iTunes.

All-you-can-eat: This is the model being established by Netflix and some others. Basically you pay a fee for access to a service and you can watch all the content from that service that you want. In this model, they generally stream your selected show to your TV and there isn't a way to permanently store the show for later watching in the future.

Free: This is the model being implemented by Joost a new peer to peer protocol being developed by the same guys who brought you KaZaA and Skype. In this model, the content will be free just like TV is today but it will contain commercials. Not so many as current TV. They are claiming 3 minutes per hour. Joost will have things called "channels" but they won't be programmed to a schedule. They will in effect be play lists of TV shows which you can pick from.

Of the three, Pay Per Show is the one that comes closest to describing what I want. I guess my attitude on this is at we're all paying for our TV in various ways now. In theory, TV is free, but in practice, we all get that cable bill or satellite bill every month. So my opinion on the matter is that I want to minimize the amount of my payment that goes to infrastructure for delivering the content and maximize the amount of my payment that goes to the writers, actors, and other creative people that actually produce the content. (And for the record, I include producers as being part of the creative team too since they effectively have to buy in to the vision of the show and assume the financial risks).

What I want is TV that works just like a combination of a Tivo and the RSS subscription model used by podcasts and video podcasts, Let's call it the RSS model. So today I can brows the internet and find all kinds of interesting podcasts and video podcasts. Sometimes I find them by word of mouth from friends, sometimes I find them by browsing directories of podcasts. Sometimes I just run across them on various sites. Regardless, once I've found a podcast I like, I can basically subscribe to it with a single click. No more difficult than clicking a hyper-link. OK, well, in practice it's actually a little more complicated than that. But still, it's pretty darn easy.

The thing that is appealing to me about that model is that _anyone_ can do it. Everyone is on equal footing. Just like anyone can have a blog, anyone can be a TV producer. The same mechanism can be used by CBS and NBC to produce and distribute their hot new shows. The same mechanism can be used by the local amateur theater group to distribute videos of their production. The same mechanism could be used by the corner church to distribute video of their Sunday services. A key fundamental feature of the RSS model is that no one has a monopoly on the distribution infrastructure.

Currently as far as I am aware, virtually no one requires payment for RSS subscriptions. But it is technically possible work out billing and usage and payment options into the RSS technology. This gives me the most flexibility. In the RSS model, I could choose to subscribe only to free content, or I could choose to pay money in exchange for a subscription to my favorite TV show. And in the RSS model, my payment would go directly to the people who are producing what I enjoy. No more paying money to the cable industry as a whole and letting money trickle back to the various cable TV channels, some of whom I like and some of whom I despise.

Once I've done a one click subscribe and possible made a payment to receive the show. I want the episodes to get downloaded to my "Tivo" and stay there for as long as I want. I might want to watch an episode once or twice or 5 times. I might want to burn it to some other media for long term storage so I can watch it over and over again. I can accept license agreements that prohibit me from giving away licensed content to my friends. But when I pay for a show, I expect that I have it available to watch whenever I want to.

In the great TV/Computer convergence movement, an RSS model would favor the computer side of the convergence. And frankly, that has always made the most sense to me. I can imagine computers getting smarter about content distribution and understanding how TV is encoded. That's largely what we have today. We mostly just need to scale up the capacity of personal computers to accommodate the amount of video we're talking about. On the other hand, I can't really see TV's getting smarter to the point of being able to do all this. And even if they did, what would they appear to be if not a networked computer on the web?

So in the long run, an RSS model for TV content would mean that your TV is eventually replaced by a "media center" PC and that thing that displays the video will no longer have a cable TV connection, or a satellite dish connection. It will simply be a very expensive, high quality monitor for your home server.