". . .Snyder’s beat sheet has taken over Hollywood screenwriting. Movies big and small stick closely to his beats and page counts. Intentionally or not, it’s become a formula—a formula that threatens the world of original screenwriting as we know it."

Save the Movie!

How about Lunch? Consequences of the Meal Context on Cognition and Emotion

So, Boston, NYC, and Miami are doomed. Bad news for sure! But "'tis an ill wind that blows nobody good," and according to NOAA's hokey visualization (zoom in to see the visualization icons), the Toledo Oregon Skateboard Park is destined (at 6 ft. above mean higher high water) to become a rather inviting-looking water recreation area.

The Egyptian Theater at Coos Bay is apparently a lost cause, however.

Sea Level Rise and Coastal Flooding Impacts

So, instead of giving one lady a Taj Mahal, putting up one guy's Great Pyramid, or interring one big shot's massive terra cotta army, we give more or less everybody a shot at an SUV, a smart phone, and a venti non-fat caffe caramel macchiato -- Did I say that right? -- (and we have pretty much determined that it's not a good idea to try to "consume" all of them at the same time).

Mass-produced consumer goods instead of unique Wonders of the World. Paradigm shift. Different measures of value.

What if Shah Jehan had said to his twenty-thousand artisans, "Hey guys, instead of building a monument for the eons, why don't you take all these materials we have assembled, the finest gems and stone gathered from all over the continent, and each of you just do something to amuse or impress your friends?" What if Khufu had commanded his 7000-strong labor force to render the giant limestone blocks into small representations of whatever was on their mind at the time? What if the master builders of Chartres had said, "Hey, you village peasant-types, here are some pieces of stained glass. See how many cute pictures of kittens you can make out of them."

Yeah, the historians of the future are going to have to adapt their discipline's techniques to include a robust capacity for intellectual waste management.

Hey, there may be some things of relative value in there, though. Who (except the historians of the future) can tell? Perhaps it's like that infinite monkeys and infinite typewriters theorem..Except that we are now dealing with around two billion . . . umm "monkey surrogates?" . .  and maybe about the same number of social media content input interface instances.

So yeah, it could take a quite a while before anything really valuable shows up.

Oh yeah, and what if the Ming Emperors, weary of many decades of costly maintenance, had opted for an ad-based funding model for the Great Wall of China? Just asking you to think about it.

Historians of the Future, Sorry About All My Photos Called DSC987234534.jpg or Whatever

First, it looks to me as though the overall percentages did not change much between 2006 and 2013. That is--the number of Americans opposed to government agencies snooping on them (regardless of their party) remained roughly the same. Similarly, the number of folks accepting the surveillance stayed about the same.

The article's characterization of the data as indicating a "virtually unyielding preference for partisanship over principle" seems purely a matter interpretation. Framed in another way, the data might be used to provoke interest in why the snooping-opposed faction tended to identify more as Democrat back in 2006 and more as Republican in 2013 (and vice versa). In that light, we should be grousing about our population's fixation on single-issue politics over party loyalty, or some such thing.

Second, a lot of variables underwent change between 2006 and 2013--not just the party of the US President. For one thing, the iPhone hit the market in 2007. Could it be that some folks just started becoming real introspective about government eavesdropping after realizing how much of their daily lives they were pumping through the aether with the mobile playthings they find so addictive?

I don't think the data this article cites means what they say it means.

NSA Confidential: We Love Big Brother If He's Got the Right Party Affiliation

Although he disputes it, North Carolina state enator Tommy Tucker is reported to have uttered this rejoinder to a challenge from a local newspaper publisher.

There was a time when we thought our society was engaged in preserving a "government of the people, by the people, for the people." Perhaps that is still true, but it is disappointing to be confronted with the possibility that some of these "of the people" people no longer consider themselves just people.

Tommy Tucker . . . Confronts Publisher . . . 

Our esteemed state legislators do not always give us our due through their efforts as statesmen, but they usually partially remedy that deficit by serving as bad examples deserving public ridicule.

State Rep Honors Himself with Resolution

Oz the Great and Powerful

Rachel Weisz provides a particularly well-nuanced performance as Evanora, a malevolent and deceitful Wicked Witch. Michelle Williams is guileless and charming as Glinda the Good Witch, a role for which she seems utterly perfect. Mila Kunis is at first winsome, and later ruthlessly implacable, as the grievously betrayed Theodora, Wicked Witch of the West.

James Franco, adept at insincerity, seems a bit off-key in those moments when the plot doesn't call for it. Bruce Campbell is wasted and mostly unrecognizable as an over-costumed Winkie Gate Keeper. 

In the end clever contrivance and showbiz spectacle trump real but strangely artless black magic--an unsurprising subtext affirming entertainment industry sensibilities and bemeaning the threat of true wickedness.  

Oz the Great and Powerful

"He said committee members also had a hard time defining what a stiletto is because the company that manufactured knives under that name has long since gone out of business and the word stiletto is also used to describe a type of heel on women’s shoes."

When it comes to debating firearms legislation issues, the variety of possible meanings of "gun" must certainly represent an insurmountable obstacle for the definition-challenged solons of the Sunflower State.

Shinola is an obsolete brand, too. Let's hope that future Kansas legislative agenda do not entail adducing the distinction between it and certain animal husbandry by-products. 

Bill legalizing switchblades passes Senate

"The

We've been manufacturing a lot of tech stuff that we have no idea what to do with when we don't want it any more. Abandoning it in large piles turns out to be unhealthy and unwise. Economic incentives to recycle have largely vanished.

"A little over a decade ago, there were at least 12 plants in the United States and 13 more worldwide that were taking these old televisions and monitors and using the cathode ray tube glass to produce new tubes. But now, there are only two plants in India doing this work." 

Should consumers/end-users bear any of the burden of this "glass tsunami?"

Unwanted Electronic Gear Rising in Toxic Piles

Here is a short video that purports to show the difference between what people generally believe and what is actually true regarding the economic disparity between the wealthy and the majority of Americans.

Wealth Inequality in America, Perception vs Reality

Unless there is something wrong with the coin or the flipper (and the process is not truly random), the chance remains fifty-fifty even after a series of highly improbable outcomes, such as 1,000 heads in a row. Outcomes do not become any less random or any more predictable just because the process is repeated.

This piece from NPR's Shankar Vedantam suggests that current popular myths about interviewing for a job might have basis in the gambler's fallacy. Is it better to have your interview scheduled late in the day? Perhaps so--if you happen to follow a series of poorly-perceived candidates. The interviewer is likely to commit this fallacy and assume that a series of tails (bad interviews) should not persist. By following a string of unqualified wannabees you will look good if only because the interviewer is mistakenly inclined to expect a heads (favorable interview) to be more likely.   

I suspect that some interviewers think this way. But I have also (personally) observed another kind of bias among interviewers. I think of it as a failure to "zero-out" all of the registers or re-initialize all of the variables from one interview to the next. What happens, it seems to me, is that an interviewer carries impressions of what  occurred in the first interview forward into the second, third, and so on. 

For example, if the first candidate was moderately bright, outgoing and friendly, then (at least for a while) subsequent candidates seem brighter, more outgoing and friendly. Once the interviewer loads these values into his mental variables they tend to remain there, influencing perceptions until something forces a reset.

This pattern persists when candidates are generally similar; extreme cases tend to force a reset. A seriously sullen candidate will likely erase the predilection to regard candidates as friendly, and may foster a new tendency to see them as moody. 

When you have an interviewer like this, that cheerful, confident candidate who breezed through the door just in front of you may have done you a favor instead of creating an expectation that you will land as a tails.

Deciphering Hidden Biases During Interviews

"Uh . . . Yes sir! Right away, sir!"

Beer and the Apocalypse

Originally posted 22 Sep 2012 on Google+

"Quality is never an accident. It is always the result of intelligent effort."

You Had One Job

Originally posted 23 Feb 2013 on Google+

"Periodic X-Ray examinations are important to the health of you and your family."

Intermission ads: an abandoned art form

Videbo visionem magnam lucens caerula nube plena mirabilia.

"I see a shining blue cloud, full of wonders."