Just long-winded rambles on politics and pop culture, philosophy and cognitive science.
I will note here that my Netflix habits are unconventional. During my early days as a Netflix subscriber, I spent anywhere from 1 to 3 hours a night watching DVDs on fast forward with the subtitles on. Because I read fairly quickly, I was able to follow twists and turns at high speed, thus increasing my cultural literacy in record time.Wha...?? I truly can't find any words...
A month later he was back visiting Moscow and called a sparsely attended news conference to denounce an intensifying campaign against him. He denied having falsified his diploma and went on to explain, among other things, his interest in “gypsy hypnosis.” Marina Donskaya interrupted him, having lost patience with the pressure. “He’s not gay!” she shouted, referring to slurs that had been appearing in the Arkhangelsk press. “He impregnated me.”
Reaction from male players was mixed. Federer said it was “a great move,” but Tommy Haas said, “I don’t think it’s really fair.”UPDATE: Sheetal below suggests that the women should now start playing best-of-five sets. I disagree. I think the best-of-five format goes on for far too long. Instead the ATP tour might just want to make it best-of-three sets even for the guys (it is so in most ATP tournaments, I think, just not in the Grand Slams).
...“I think the depth of men’s tennis is much tougher than the women’s, plus we play best-of-five sets,” Haas, a German, said yesterday in Memphis after a 7-6, 7-6 victory against Amer Delic.
“Not to say that the women don’t deserve it,” he said. “The top players train very hard and are very good tennis players, but in general I don’t agree with it.”
The highbrow meets the lowdown and dirty in Jean-Claude Brisseau’s “Exterminating Angels,” which kicks off the series of 18 films tonight. (It opens commercially in three weeks.) Raunch of the most decorous kind, this blush-inducing Valentine’s Day offering concerns a director, François (the game Frédéric van den Driessche), who’s holding auditions for his next project, a thriller. This being an art-house thriller, or at least a French filmmaker’s conceit, the actresses will, ooh-la-la, have to masturbate on camera. There won’t be any men, François assures the startled women, except for those who will presumably line up around the block to see the final results.
Most of the actresses decline François’s offer, but a few agree to abandon propriety and clothes, which leads to several explicit boudoir — and one under-the-restaurant-table — encounters. The film raises fascinating questions about power and sex both in regard to the director-actress relationship and, more generally, men and women. In Mr. Brisseau’s case those questions turn out to be intensely personal since he was convicted in 2005 of sexually harassing two actresses who claimed, yes, that he had forced them to masturbate during screen tests for another film. It remains unclear how Mr. Brisseau, who was apparently unarmed, forced the women to engage in acts of self-pleasure, but this transgression brought him a suspended jail sentence, a fine and, of course, the inspiration for his next film.
Nothing like life-meets-art. I think I'm going to go see this one...
“We are tickled pink to be here,” said Dennis D. Cavin, the vice president for international air and missile defense strategic initiatives at Lockheed Martin.Yes, tickled pink to be in Bangalore hawking fighter aircraft for sale to the Indian Government. Huh. Where do they come up with these expressions?
No one who sees the first fifteen minutes of Seraphim Falls can doubt that Brosnan is the movies’ supreme grunter: He is to acting what poor Monica Seles was to tennis. He added grunts to his feats in his Bond movies, presumably to make 007 seem more human, but they were too jarring in that high-style context. Here, they make for a powerful soundtrack. The movie opens with him taking a bullet in the shoulder (aggghhh!), rolling down an embankment (uggghh arrrr), tumbling into a raging river (raahruuuf!) that dumps him over a falls (yaaaaaaaaah), digging the bullet out of his shoulder (arf%^Sssss$#yyy!) with a big knife and then cauterizing the wound (ayyyeeeeeeeeee!!!). I’m not being facetious: This is very impressive stuff. If his acting career ever stalls, he could make a fortune dubbing kung fu pictures.
Labels: funny
Lifehacker links to an invention that I’ve thought for years would be a good idea (I’m sure that plenty of other people have had the same thought). Many people have their clocks running a few minutes fast, to encourage them to leave earlier for appointments to get there on time etc etc. The problem with this is that if you’re half-way rational, you’ll correct for the error, making it useless. So the solution is to have a probabilistic clock, where the clock is fast, but you aren’t sure how fast it is within a given and relatively short time range. Thus, you’re more likely to depart early for your appointments and get there on time (or a few minutes ahead, most probably, in many situations). This is exactly what some bloke has programmed, although it doesn’t appear that it has an alarm feature yet.This is embarassing to say but I never thought of a probabilistically faster clock, despite my engineering degree and all. And I’ve done the same thing this past month—speeded up my wrist-watch, but ended up being late anyway because I know it’s faster! (My fellow van-poolers haven't been so pleased with my chronic lateness. But I'm trying, guys, I'm trying!)
Still, this brings up another point. My wrist-watch is of the old variety, with hands, and time-marks arranged in a circle, which means that the lowest time-interval you can accurately measure is 5 minutes. When I set it to run fast, I didn’t want to run too fast, thereby resulting in me getting there early (smart, huh?), so I set it to run faster by something less than 5 minutes. What this something is, I can’t recall—and really, no one thinks of measuring minutes except in multiples of 5. Therefore my watch does seem to be running probablistically faster, since I don’t know exactly how fast it is. No?
Last weekend’s FT had a Dear Economist (i.e. Dear Tim Harford letter) from someone who always sets his watch fast and still manages to fool himself into being on time. ‘Mark’ wondered how this was possible, what with him being a rational actor who writes to economists asking for life hacks.
The answer was “you have a split personality, a warped view of time and are too lazy to do simple sums. Now put down this magazine: I suspect you are running late for something.”
There are no good reasons for watching Celebrity Big Brother and very good reasons for not. Not watching will spare you the nerve-fraying annoyingness that is Shilpa Shetty. Everything about her is infuriating: her haughty way of stalking about, her indomitable self-confidence, her chandelier earrings, her leaping eyebrows, her mirthless smile, her putty nose and her eternal bray, "Why does everyone hate me?" Not to mention the crying jags. What no one seems to have quite understood is that Shilpa is a very good actress. Everyone hates her because she wants them to. She also knows that if she infuriates people enough, their innate racism will spew forth.As a Tamil, Shetty has certainly had to deal with discrimination at home in suburban Mumbai. Her only motive for parading in front of the other women in the house with whitener on her face was to show what utter hicks they are, how little they understand of her complex reality or of a billion people in the subcontinent who all want to have wheat-coloured skin. I bet thousands of brown-skinned girls in Southall fell off the sofa laughing when she did that.
Bollywood is no picnic; anyone who makes 51 Bollywood movies in 13 years has to be tough. Shilpa has a black belt in karate. She is just the girl to raise the pit bull in a dizzy little drip like Danielle and keep her frothing at the mouth long enough for her nascent career as a sweet little Wag to disappear down the drain. When Shilpa is finished with Danielle even Teddy Sheringham will know what a small, dark heart beats within her fetching chest. This explains the slightly cannibal air of self-satisfaction that never abandons Shilpa. She knows what she is doing. She will shred the nerves of all the other women in that house until even Cleo pulls back her frozen lips and shows the fangs behind her witless Mona Lisa smile.
I can switch Shilpa off. The people in the house with her haven't got that option. The problem is that most of the housemates are too dim to convey what a pain in the ass Shilpa is without appearing to persecute her. So Danielle, beside herself with rage because Shilpa cooks with onions, calls her a dog. Jack Tweed calls her a cunt. The word was bleeped out, leading many viewers to speculate that she had been racially abused. That is not surprising. This is a racist country; to the vast majority of couch potatoes out there, Shilpa is a "Paki bird".
Labels: books, funny, media, movies, newspapers
I think that the British prejudice about Germany’s supposed humour famine stems from the fact that there is no German tradition of daily banter. In London you can hear a dozen wisecracks in a day — at work or on the bus or in the coffee shop. They may be lame, but at least they’re quick. In Germany, humour is stockaded, kept apart from everyday life. In the evenings Harald Schmidt, a genuinely funny talk-show host, will crack their sides. But only after dinner has been eaten, the plates rinsed and the yoghurt pots washed, ready for recycling. In the office next day people will repeat Schmidt’s gags and they will laugh again. However, they will fail to spot the inherent absurdities of their own office life.
Alex Burnet was in the middle of the most difficult trial of her career, a rape case involving the sexual assault of a two-year-old boy in Malibu. The defendant, thirty-year-old Mick Crowley, was a Washington-based political columnist who was visiting his sister-in-law when he experienced an overwhelming urge to have anal sex with her young son, still in diapers. Crowley was a wealthy, spoiled Yale graduate and heir to a pharmaceutical fortune. ...LOL. So not only does Mick Crowley sodomize two-year old boys, he also has a small penis. Isn't that funny? Like a double-sledgehammer? You could imagine Crichton going, ok, what's the worst I can do to Crowley? A child-molester, aah, yes. Of a two-year old. Yessss. But surely, nothing could be more damaging to a man than the size of his penis?
It turned out Crowley's taste in love objects was well known in Washington, but [his lawyer]--as was his custom--tried the case vigorously in the press months before the trial, repeatedly characterizing Alex and the child's mother as "fantasizing feminist fundamentalists" who had made up the whole thing from "their sick, twisted imaginations." This, despite a well-documented hospital examination of the child. (Crowley's penis was small, but he had still caused significant tears to the toddler's rectum.)
You can read these books in search of an ideology, but you won't find a distinct one. Clearly, Crichton is no liberal (although he argues that one of his earliest books, A Case of Need, did have a pro-abortion rights message). But a free-market conservative wouldn't write an essentially protectionist book like Rising Sun, either. What Crichton's worldview really amounts to is a kind of hectoring contrarianism that is increasingly targeted at America's know-it-alls, against the liberal elites, against the very type of expertise that had given him his professional cachet. And that worldview has reached its bitter, frothing apex with State of Fear.
Anti-expert, is what Crichton is. That does make a twisted kind of sense. But more on that, some other time.
Why is the idea of a thinking machine so compelling?
Minsky: I think there is a worldwide survival problem. As the population grows and people live longer, there won't be anybody to do the work. So there is an urgent need to make inexpensive mechanical people that are able to do all the things that moderately unskilled people do now.
Dennett: I don't find that very convincing, Marvin. I think we're interested in it for purely curious, scientific reasons. We want to know how we work.
Labels: cognition, criticism people, funny
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