notes.husk.org

In Our Past Light Cone

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:01:05 +0000

The singularity has already happened.

Oscar Thoughts

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 20:00:19 +0000

I put some thoughts about the Oscar nominations into a reply to Joshua Nguyen, but here are some more.

Hugo and The Artist lead the Oscar nominations by count. I suppose that proves that films about film go down well with people who make films.
… either that, or they like nostalgia about the time when cinema was the new, revolutionary artform.
Only one Best Picture nominee is set entirely in the present day (The Descendants).
My Week With Marilyn gets some reasonably well deserved Actor / Actress nods.
The Tree of Life should get the Cinematography award.
Cars 2 is the first Pixar film not to be nominated for Best Animated since the award started in 2001.
Music (Original Song) only has two nominees? Huh. At least there’s no Randy Newman.
Sound Editing for Drive would be nice.
Margin Call deserved a little more than Original Screenplay, but that it got that is far better than nothing.

An Oscar Reply

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 19:51:36 +0000

joshuanguyen:

matthew:

Seriously, though, last year was a parade of remarkable films; that’s not something you would conclude from these nominations.

War Horse???? It’s ET with a horse. Horse runs home.

Midnight in Paris? It’s a postcard extended to two hours.

Moneyball? A baseball movie where the audience’s attention span is the only meaningful antagonist.

Tree of Life: There’s a reason why the best movies tell stories. Visual poetry that’s more than two hours needs to be serialized.

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close: Schtick.

What a disappointing year for film-making.

What about the stuff that didn’t get nominated? More along the lines of Tree of Life as beautiful, heartbreaking films - but ones with more of a narrative - there are Melancholia and Norwegian Wood (although I don’t know if the latter counts for 2011, and it may fall into the Foreign Film ghetto anyway). Drive was a little flawed but definitely interesting and well made. Charlize Theron was unfairly overlooked for Best Leading Actress for Young Adult (although I accept it probably didn’t deserve a Best Film nomination), and although Gary Oldman represents Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the nominations for him and for Best Adapted Screenplay are far from enough recognition for that picture.

Perhaps it’s not so much a disappointing year for films as a(nother) case where you shouldn’t trust the MPAA to be your guide in what to see.

On PJ Harvey

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 08:20:56 +0000

Ben Ward:

I remember bemusement when I first heard a live recording of ‘Let England Shake’, complete with “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” refrain; it was not endearing. But when the album arrived, the abrupt, cheery opening melody quickly slides away to expose something more integuing and broody. ‘Let England Shake’ is the most coherent album of the year, and probably of a number of years before too. Musically and thematically, it’s wonderful throughout. It stands apart from PJ Harvey’s other work too. Frustratingly, I’ve missed her touring the album, but I find it difficult to imagine it mixed in with anything else from her extensive career. The record has a high peak, ‘On Battleship Hill’, the incredible ‘England’ through to the final soaring refrain of ‘In The Dark Places’ is a really wonderful set.

I was lucky enough to get a last-minute ticket to PJ Harvey’s show in the Warfield, San Francisco, in April.

It was a fantastic concert, partly because she pretty much only played music from the album. The material is so thematically linked that most of the other songs wouldn’t have fit, and the solution was simply not to play many.

April was a hard month for me. I was really hitting the first of a couple of bad patches last year, this one centred on a real feeling of homesickness. Despite hardly being a depiction of the best of the nation, Let England Shake really helped remind me of London and the countryside. Seeing the concert was some sort of cathartic, I think.

(NPR has a recording of part of the concert, if you’d like to listen.)

An Express year

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 03:59:06 +0000

bibliophylax:

“Winter is coming.”

BRITAIN FACES AN EARLY BIG FREEZE (Sep 20)

-20°C TO HIT US IN WEEKS (Oct 8)

BRITAIN FACES A MINI ‘ICE AGE’ (Oct 10)

ARCTIC BLAST TO BRING SNOW (Oct 15)

BIG FREEZE WILL KILL THOUSANDS (Oct 20)

ARMY PUT ON SNOW ALERT (Oct 30)

BIG SIBERIAN FREEZE TO HIT BRITAIN (Nov 2)

BRITAIN FACES KILLER ARCTIC BLAST (Dec 8)

IT’S A WHITE CHRISTMAS! (Dec 17)

An excerpt from a fantastic, terrifying glimpse into the world of the Daily Express (“like the Daily Mail but cheaper”) from Ned Morrell. As George Monbiot noted this week, the newspapers like making weather predictions, but they don’t often get called out when they’re wrong. (Christmas Day 2011 was mild in most of the UK.)

Euphemistic

Sun, 01 Jan 2012 20:23:53 +0000

A non-exhaustive list in a vague genteel to rude order of names for, well:

powder room
the littlest room
restroom
bathroom
wc
commode
lavatory
outhouse
throne
potty
toilet
latrine
bog
crapper
shitter

First inspired while noting the different terms used by Neal Stephenson in Reamde, and finally posted after reading an Economist article about euphemisms.

On Parliamentary Camera Antics

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 02:32:16 +0000

iamdanw:

“As Hoyer railed against them for failing to help working Americans, footage from C-SPAN went silent, then cut away. Moments later, C-SPAN took to the Internet to explain that it wasn’t their doing, but someone working for House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH).”

Boehner’s office cuts off C-SPAN cameras as GOP takes verbal beating | The Raw Story - I’m not sure I fully understand the american system of politics, but this is basically a member of the opposition party turning BBC Parliament off?

No. The Speaker of the House is the leader of the biggest party in the lower house of Congress, so perhaps the best equivalent would be the Tory Chief Whip leading the entire parliamentary party out and getting the cameras switched off. (It’s that or the Prime Minister, but the US doesn’t have anything like the conflation of powers that the British do, so I decided to avoid that. It’s also a reminder of how different the systems are.)

UK Parliamentary coverage would presumably come under the Speaker’s remit, and he’s non-political, so it’s pretty unlikely in the UK (although I dare say he can and could get cameras switched off).

In Defence Of: Lego Friends (and Creator)

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 19:26:00 +0000

Last week, the internet sat up and took notice of Bloomberg Businessweek’s cover story about the launch of Lego Friends, its new “for girls” line. There was much wailing of gnashing of teeth on Twitter, with a common and much-retweeted line being “Lego is launching a product line for girls. Someone should tell them that they already have one; its called Lego.”

Well, yes and no. As the article points out, much of Lego’s growth since its nadir in the early 2000s has been on the back of boy-oriented franchises: the biggest is Star Wars, but also Bionicle (fighting robots), Ninjago (fighting ninjas) and so on. Of course, culture isn’t as good at noticing when a line is aimed at males, since they’re the default market, so nobody’s really saying anything, but it is a change since the Lego of the 1980s.

Compare Lego Town circa 1981, with a “house with garden” and minifigs gendered merely by hairstyle (all the faces were the same smiling face) with City in 2011, dominated by fire, police and aeroplanes. (There is at least the City Corner set, with a female pizza chef, and it’s gratifyingly sold out at the moment.) Is it any wonder parents say things like “The last time I was in a Lego store, there was this little pink ghetto over in one corner”?

(Speaking of pink, Lego’s had that colour in its palette since at least the early 1990s, although it is somewhat rare. Lego Friends “introduces six new Lego colors—including Easter-egg-like shades of azure and lavender”, but pink was already there, including an entire pink brick box.)

Meanwhile, I’ve also seen people reacting against the idea that Lego Friends have backstories printed on the boxes, as if it’s assuming a lack of imagination on the part of girls. Well, perhaps, but if you’re playing with Star Wars, Harry Potter, or DC Superheroes sets, aren’t you also tapping into someone else’s narratives and creations?

Reading the article, it’s clear this isn’t something Lego rushed headlong into. They’ve talked to their potential customers, attempted to understand them, and dealt with their own core beliefs (including the previously-near-sacred minifig) to create something to sell - which, for better or worse, is what as a company they have to do. If we’re going to place blame somewhere, perhaps it should it be the external society?

Oh, and one last thing. If you really hate the idea of Lego Friends, why not ignore it and instead buy Lego Creator sets? Apple Tree House looks particularly good, and there’s not much gendered about it at all.

The 30 All-TIME Best Music Videos

Tue, 02 Aug 2011 02:14:27 +0100

To save you paging through the entire list, here (in reverse chronological order) are Time magazine’s choice of the best music videos.

Arcade Fire, ‘We Used To Wait/The Wilderness Downtown’ (2010)
Kanye West, ‘Runaway’ (2010)
Lady Gaga, ‘Bad Romance’ (2009)
Beyoncé, ‘Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)’ (2008)
Gnarls Barkley, ‘Going On’ (2008)
OK Go, ‘Here It Goes Again’ (2006)
The White Stripes, ‘Hardest Button to Button’ (2005)
Johnny Cash, ‘Hurt’ (2003)
Fatboy Slim, ‘Weapon Of Choice’ (2001)
D’Angelo, ‘Untitled (How Does It Feel)’ (2000)
Fatboy Slim, ‘Praise You’ (1999)
Chemical Brothers, ‘Let Forever Be’ (1999)
Björk, ‘All is Full of Love’ (1999)
Blur, ‘Coffee & TV’ (1999)
Pulp, ‘This Is Hardcore’ (1998)
Missy Elliot, ‘The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)’ (1997)
Jamiroquai, ‘Virtual Insanity’ (1997)
Weezer, ‘Buddy Holly’ (1994)
The Beastie Boys, ‘Sabotage’ (1994)
Nine Inch Nails, ‘Closer’ (1994)
Nirvana, ‘Heart-Shaped Box’ (1993)
Sinead O’Connor, ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ (1990)
Madonna, ‘Express Yourself’ (1989)
Peter Gabriel, ‘Sledgehammer’ (1986)
Run-DMC, ‘Walk This Way’ (1986)
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, ‘Don’t Come Around Here No More’ (1985)
a-Ha, ‘Take On Me’ (1985)
Godley and Creme, ‘Cry’ (1985)
Michael Jackson, ‘Thriller’ (1984)
Talking Heads, ‘Once in a Lifetime’ (1980)

"Not even numbers"

Sat, 02 Jul 2011 19:52:58 +0100

Dealtalk: Google bid “pi” for Nortel patents and lost (via):

“Google was bidding with numbers that were not even numbers,” one of the sources said.

“It became clear that they were bidding with the distance between the earth and the sun. One was the sum of a famous mathematical constant, and then when it got to $3 billion, they bid pi,” the source said, adding the bid was $3.14159 billion.

Well.

Firstly, of course they’re numbers. They might not be round numbers (by which, more specifically, I mean numbers with only one or two significant digits), but they are certainly numbers. Does “the source” also believe that humans should only communicate with the simplest of business jargon, because words are too confusing?

After all, comparing $3 with $3.14 is no harder than comparing $4 and $5, unless you’re in the early days of school.

Secondly, wasn’t their bid not pi, but π×10⁹? More accurately, π×10⁹ to either nine or eleven significant digits? (I suspect the former, since the other numbers listed are integer dollar amounts.)

Historical footnote: π wasn’t calculated to eleven significant digits until as late as 1400, by Mādhava of Sañgamāgrama, an Indian mathematician.