November 2005 Archives
John
He that speaketh of himself seeketh his own glory:
but he that seeketh his glory that sent him, the same is true,
and no unrighteousness is in him.
-- John 7:24
You have to be Spielberg to get away with that
There's an interesting comment about Spielberg's decision not to campaign for an Oscar with his new movie Munich. They aren't even having a premiere. The excerpt is below.
Spielberg Just Says No
Nikki Finke on Spielberg's decision NOT to campaign:
There will be no press junket, no premiere and, most importantly, no Oscar marketing campaign beyond trailers and posters for Steven Spielberg’s movie Munich, I have learned. This dicey decision to have no traditional publicity for the film before and after it opens December 23 is the director’s alone. He will not even be giving press or broadcast interviews. “The official strategy is for the movie to speak for itself,” an insider told me this week. “All they’re going to do is just show the movie to people. You have to be Steven Spielberg to get away with that.”
But competitors think that may also be because Spielberg may have snagged the cover of Time magazine, which no one will confirm.
For months now, Munich has been touted as the Oscar front-runner, even when no one had seen the film. The first invitation-only screenings of Munich will start after December 1. Executives for Universal, one of the producers/distributors of the film along with DreamWorks, are scheduled to see the completed movie November 30.
www.oscarwatch.com/moveabletype/archives/2005/11/spielberg_just.html
Games and Academia
The New York Times ran an interesting article last Tuesday (22 November) about a new academic interest in studying video games. In the United States, while there were only about 5 university programs that studied video games five years ago, there are more than 100 now. Excerpt below.
Video Games Are Their Major, So Don't Call Them Slackers - New York Times
"The skills and methods of video games are becoming a part of our life and culture in so many ways that it is impossible to ignore," said Bob Kerrey, the former Nebraska senator who is now president of the New School, which includes Parsons.
Parsons has offered game courses to graduate students for five years and this fall began an undergraduate program in game design.
"But if you just look at the surface of people playing games, you are missing the point, which is that games are all about managing and manipulating information," Mr. Kerrey said. "A lot of students that come out of this program may not go to work for Electronic Arts. They may go to Wall Street. Because to me, there is no significant difference - except for clothing preference - between people who are making games and people who are manipulating huge database systems to try to figure out where the markets are headed. It's largely the same skill set, the critical thinking. Games are becoming a major part of our lives, and there is actually good news in that."
Cheek to Cheek
"Heaven, I'm in Heaven. And my heart beats so that I can hardly speak. And I seem to find the happiness I seek. When we're out together dancing, Cheek to Cheek..."
-- Fred Astaire, in Top Hat (1935)
Cedric at the AMA
"I got the new Apple Tic-Tac. It freshens your breath and plays one song."
-- Cedric The Entertainer, at the 2005 American Music Awards
From Beyond a Starry Grave
They can be a great people, Kal-el; they wish to be.
They only lack the light to show the way.
For this reason above all, their capacity for good,
I have sent them you, my only son.
-- The voice of Jor-el
See the new Superman Returns trailer here
On abrupt climate change
When most of us think about climate change, we imagine gradual increases in temperature and only marginal changes in other climatic conditions. We understand that such adjustments could either continue indefinitely or even level off at some point in the future. Conventional wisdom states that modern civilization will either adapt to whatever weather conditions we may face—that society’s adaptive capacity will outpace the potentially overwhelming impact of climate change—or that our incremental efforts, such as the Kyoto Protocol, will be sufficient to mitigate the impact. The IPCC documents the threat of gradual climate change and counsels that, thankfully, the impact on food supplies and other important resources will not be severe enough to raise security implications. Agriculture will continue to thrive and growing seasons will lengthen. Northern Europe, Russia, and North America are set to prosper agriculturally while southern Europe, Africa, and Central and South America will suffer from increased dryness, heat, water shortages, and reduced production. Many typical climate scenarios demonstrate cautiously but fairly that overall global food production is bound to increase.
Dangerous acts of self-deception often begin exactly like this.
-- Sorry, but this is from somewhere whose reference has escaped me. It sounds like an excerpt from a Global Business Network report.
On limits
"You have to accept that somewhere in you, you have a personal limit, but chances are, it's nowhere [near] where you think it is. Chances are it's going to be much farther, deeper, longer than you thought."
-- Tanya Streeter, who holds the world record for free diving, able to dive on a single breath to a level of 500 feet, equivalent to the height of a 50 story building.
Tattoos for Toddlers
Shake With Your Right Hand, Make Money With Your Left: The Trend Desk - Yahoo! Finance
Tattoos R Us
At last, body art a parent can love. Iconoculture reports on Tattoos With a Purpose, which sells temporary tatts for tykes. The tattoos, which last for seven days, say, "If I am lost please help me be found" and have space for the parents' phone number." Designed for field trips, family vacations, and shopping malls, the tattoos cost $2 apiece or $10 for a six-tattoo kit.
- Dan Pink
Brilliant foresight
"They couldn't hit an elephant at this dist..."
- Last words of Gen. John Sedgwick, spoken as he looked out over the parapet at enemy lines during the Battle of Spotsylvania in 1864
"And for the tourist who really wants to get away from it all, safaris in Vietnam."
- NEWSWEEK, predicting popular holidays for the late 1960s
"The ANC [African National Congress] is a typical terrorist organization. Anyone who thinks it is going to run the government in South Africa is living in cloudcuckoo land."
- Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, 1987
From Saint Augustine
Remota itaque iustitia quid sunt regna nisi magna latrocinia?
In the absence of justice, what is sovereignty but organised brigandage?
-- Augustine, De Civitate Dei lib.IV cap.IV
What's real in the world, and what isn't?
Shirky: Ontology is Overrated -- Categories, Links, and Tags
Consider the following statements:
A: "This is a book about Dresden."
B: "This is a book about Dresden,
and it goes in the category 'East Germany'."
That second sentence seems so obvious, but East Germany actually turned out to be an unstable category. Cities are real. They are real, physical facts. Countries are social fictions. It is much easier for a country to disappear than for a city to disappear, so when you're saying that the small thing is contained by the large thing, you're actually mixing radically different kinds of entities. We pretend that 'country' refers to a physical area the same way 'city' does, but it's not true, as we know from places like the former Yugoslavia.
- Clay Shirky
Ghost Stories (Art Kleiner)
Writing is crystallized voice. When I was first trying to teach myself to write, I took the need to capture voice seriously. Every night, before going to sleep, I wrote my recollection of a conversation I had had that day, trying to draw out the feelings that it had left me with, and gradually — as I picked up sophistication — trying to evoke those feelings in some reader somewhere else.
- Art Kleiner
Excerpt from Kevin Kelly's Wired article, We Are The Web
There is only one time in the history of each planet when its inhabitants first wire up its innumerable parts to make one large Machine. Later that Machine may run faster, but there is only one time when it is born.
You and I are alive at this moment.
We should marvel, but people alive at such times usually don't. Every few centuries, the steady march of change meets a discontinuity, and history hinges on that moment. We look back on those pivotal eras and wonder what it would have been like to be alive then. Confucius, Zoroaster, Buddha, and the latter Jewish patriarchs lived in the same historical era, an inflection point known as the axial age of religion. Few world religions were born after this time. Similarly, the great personalities converging upon the American Revolution and the geniuses who commingled during the invention of modern science in the 17th century mark additional axial phases in the short history of our civilization.
Three thousand years from now, when keen minds review the past, I believe that our ancient time, here at the cusp of the third millennium, will be seen as another such era. In the years roughly coincidental with the Netscape IPO, humans began animating inert objects with tiny slivers of intelligence, connecting them into a global field, and linking their own minds into a single thing. This will be recognized as the largest, most complex, and most surprising event on the planet. Weaving nerves out of glass and radio waves, our species began wiring up all regions, all processes, all facts and notions into a grand network. From this embryonic neural net was born a collaborative interface for our civilization, a sensing, cognitive device with power that exceeded any previous invention. The Machine provided a new way of thinking (perfect search, total recall) and a new mind for an old species. It was the Beginning.
Kevin Kelly in WIRED magazine
