M&Ms prove Darwin was right

Ok, so the (anonymous) M&M entry submitted to Roger Ebert's blog was copied/stolen from a 1996 listserv post signed by Emil Huston of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. Ebert has added an attribution, and it's still an important piece of research (and in an easier-to-read format on Ebert's site).

We are a banana republic...

... with nukes.
After the House failed to pass the bailout package, on Monday afternoon Paul Krugman posted a blog entry titled OK, we are a banana republic in which he quotes himself from an earlier post:

So what we now have is non-functional government in the face of a major crisis, because Congress includes a quorum of crazies and nobody trusts the White House an inch.

As a friend said last night, we’ve become a banana republic with nukes.

And just because it's interesting, roll back the clock three years to his column of 8 August 2005, That Hissing Sound

Of course, some people still deny that there's a housing bubble. Let me explain how we know that they're wrong.

One piece of evidence is the sense of frenzy about real estate, which irresistibly brings to mind the stock frenzy of 1999. Even some of the players are the same. The authors of the 1999 best seller "Dow 36,000" are now among the most vocal proponents of the view that there is no housing bubble.

And speaking of "Dow 36,000" (and returning back to the future):

And last year, when the McCain campaign announced that the candidate had assembled “an impressive collection of economists, professors, and prominent conservative policy leaders” to advise him on economic policy, who was prominently featured? Kevin Hassett, the co-author of “Dow 36,000.” Enough said.

Ebert update (3 of 3): Creationism Q&A

Another Ebert commentary, this time, the seriously funny Creationism: Your questions answered. (I guess it's just seriously, uh, serious if you really believe men walked the earth with dinosaurs.)

Ebert update (2 of 3): Movie rating systems

Roger Ebert's Journal entry, You give out too many stars, wherein Ebert discusses stars, thumbs, and the "Little Man" of the San Francisco Chronicle.

Ebert update (1 of 3): Lost parts of "Metropolis" found

In a commentary posted 4 August, Roger Ebert writes:

It is the most sensational find in recent film history. A nearly-complete print of Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" (1927) has been discovered in Buenos Aires, 80 years after it was thought a quarter of the film was lost forever. Called by many the most important of German films, one of the landmarks of silent Expressionism, its plot had several loose ends that will now be repaired.

Qualifications

What's all the ruckus over John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate? As this article in the Anchorage Daily News quotes Alaskan State House Speaker John Harris, a Republican from Valdez: "She's old enough," Harris said. "She's a U.S. citizen."
And before running for governor, Palin was mayor of Wasilla, AK (pop. 8,471 per 2005 census estimate). We did, after all, once elect a ticket with Dan Quayle as vice president.

Addendum [09.03.2008]: Yes, the "bikini picture" is Photoshopped.

Pentagon: Iraq War a 'major debacle'

A McClatchy article from 17 April 2008 reports:

WASHINGTON — The war in Iraq has become "a major debacle" and the outcome "is in doubt" despite improvements in security from the buildup in U.S. forces, according to a highly critical study published Thursday by the Pentagon's premier military educational institute.

The report released by the National Defense University raises fresh doubts about President Bush's projections of a U.S. victory in Iraq just a week after Bush announced that he was suspending U.S. troop reductions.

The report carries considerable weight because it was written by Joseph Collins, a former senior Pentagon official, and was based in part on interviews with other former senior defense and intelligence officials who played roles in prewar preparations.

It was published by the university's National Institute for Strategic Studies, a Defense Department research center.

"Measured in blood and treasure, the war in Iraq has achieved the status of a major war and a major debacle," says the report's opening line.
...
The report said that the United States has suffered serious political costs, with its standing in the world seriously diminished. Moreover, operations in Iraq have diverted "manpower, materiel and the attention of decision-makers" from "all other efforts in the war on terror" and severely strained the U.S. armed forces.

"Compounding all of these problems, our efforts there (in Iraq) were designed to enhance U.S. national security, but they have become, at least temporarily, an incubator for terrorism and have emboldened Iran to expand its influence throughout the Middle East," the report continued.

We're number one!

A USA Today article reports that Lexington-Fayette County ranks number 1 in per capita carbon emissions according a report out of the Brookings Institution. Other cities in the top 10 include: Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Louisville, Nashville, St. Louis, and Knoxville. On the other hand, among the cities with the lowest (per capita) carbon emissions include: LA, New York, San Jose, and San Francisco.

The counter-intuitive rankings are because (as the article summarizes), "Sprawling, car-dependent metropolitan areas with low-cost electricity emit more carbon dioxide per capita than densely populated cities with extensive mass transit systems where electricity is more expensive."

Here's a quick link to the Brookings report tables and supporting material (PDF).

She only grows stronger and more powerful

Here's a story of stunning political correctness. In May, Rachael Ray appeared in an ad for Dunkin' Donuts wearing a "black-and-white silk scarf with a paisley design." Conservative bloggers, led by Michelle Malkin, saw something far more sinister: they likened the scarf to a keffiyeh, the type typically worn by Muslim extremists, calling it “jihadi chic” and saying the ads “casually promote the symbol of Palestinian terrorism and the intifada, the keffiyeh, via Rachael Ray.”

The backlash was swift and the story soon went viral. A New York Times blog wondering if doughnuts have replaced social security as the undisputed "third rail" of American politics. For more laughs, there's the YouTube video, “Rachael Ray Is a Terrorist” (This story comes up about halfway through, but the rest of the video is pretty funny, too.)

Rachael's critics and enemies would do well to heed Anthony Bourdain, the celebrity chef and food writer, who has warned against her “strange and terrible powers,” and has earlier said: “Complain all you want. It’s like railing against the pounding surf. She only grows stronger and more powerful.”

Full disclosure: I have a thing for Rachael Ray.

KySpace

NASA's Phoenix Mars lander has landed on the north polar region of Mars and transmitted photos.
Kentucky has its own space program, albeit on a scale smaller than NASA, but nevertheless a leader in developing "CubeSat" technology. The annual KySat (to be renamed KySpace) conference was held 07 May in Lexington. The keynote speaker was Jeffrey Manber; here is KySpace blogger Wayne Hall's post on the Manber talk; here's his full coverage of the Kentucky Space Conference '08.

Distractibility not necessarily a disability

Being easily distracted, or, as I now prefer to think of it, having a "broad attention span" may be tied to creativity and wisdom. A New York Times article reports on studies analyzed in a new edition of a neurology book, “Progress in Brain Research.”

In a 2003 study at Harvard, Dr. Carson [Shelley H. Carson, a psychology researcher at Harvard whose work was cited in the book] and other researchers tested students’ ability to tune out irrelevant information when exposed to a barrage of stimuli. The more creative the students were thought to be, determined by a questionnaire on past achievements, the more trouble they had ignoring the unwanted data. A reduced ability to filter and set priorities, the scientists concluded, could contribute to original thinking.

I cannot comment on my degree of original thinking, but others have certainly noted in me (both personally and professionally) "a reduced ability to filter and set priorities"!

Ebertfest 2008: "The real deal in brown paper wrapping"

As film exhibition in North America crowds itself ever more narrowly into predictable commercial fodder for an undemanding audience, we applaud those brave, free spirits who still hold faith with the unlimited potential of the cinema. - Roger Ebert


Here's the (somewhat belated) wrapup on the 10th Annual Roger Ebert's Film Festival.

Roger Ebert himself was "in exile," having broken his hip at the rehab center in Florida while trying to get himself in shape to attend. Having not yet regained the capacity for speech, Ebert has begun a blog/journal; here are his two Ebertfest entries: Ebertfest in Exile and Ebertfest in Exile II (or, why Ebert wants Joe vs. the Volcano, "a film that was a failure in every possible way except that I loved it" at his Festival). The best reader comment I saw posted was this one: "Will you PLEASE stay put? Or by 2013, the festival will be hosted by your brain in a vat."

And links to the Ebertfest 10 Photo Blog and Lisa Rosman's Festival Blog, The Broad View.

The festival traditionally opens Wednesday night with a 70-mm film, and this year was Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet.



For me, the most interesting discussions came from directors Ang Lee (following the screening of Hulk) and Paul Schrader (following the screening of Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters).
Lee indicated that Hulk was largely driven by issues between him and his father. See Lisa Rosman's post, Angsty Lee (and his Hulk). And while the military had no issues with Sam Elliott's portrayal of General Ross, there was a big issue with the fact that they didn't win! (As Lee said, what would be the point of the film if, in the end, Hulk was defeated?)

When a representative of Fuji, one of the primary financial backers of Paul Schrader's Mishima, told the (Japanese) man who had in turn promised their backing to Schrader, the man told the Fuji representative he would have no option but to "protect my family." Apparently this was a coded way of saying that, unable to deliver on his promise, he would be forced to kill himself. (Unspoken was the implication that this, in turn, would guarantee that no Japanese would do business with Fuji.) Fuji came through with the money, though they still officially deny any involvement. And the film has had virtually no distribution in Japan, all of which led Schrader to describe Mishima as "a film financed by no one, seen by no one." His view is that life doesn't have problems (which would imply solutions); rather, it has conundrums (to be explored). He also said that "Christianity, whatever you want to say about it, is a blood cult."

In her final post, Ms Rosman says her happiest surprise of this year's festival was Bill Forsyth's Housekeeping, and goes on to say about her flight from Champaign to NYC:

And on the final leg to NYC, Forsyth and I talked and talked and talked. Apparently hangovers aid my powers of comprehension. I’m glad. He is the essence of Ebertfest: The real deal in brown paper wrapping.

Expelled (once and for all)

In this third (and, let's hope, last) post in this series, I'm including links to four articles in eSkeptic debunking claims made in Ben Stein's new film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.

• Expelled Exposed, Part 1: Ben Stein’s Blunder (by Michael Shermer)
  
• Expelled Exposed, Part 2: The Richard Sternberg Affair (by Ed Brayton)
• RichardDawkins.net: Open Letter from Richard Dawkins
• video parody: Sexpelled: No Intercourse Allowed
  

Anticipating success with their feature film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, Producers Mark Mathis, Logan Craft and Walt Ruloff have already leaked a teaser trailer for the film’s sequel. Their “teach the controversy” slogan seemed to work well in getting the general public to believe that Intelligent Design is a viable alternative scientific theory to Evolution, so the team has moved on to promoting other theories that they feel are being suppressed by the scientific community. Sexpelled: No Intercourse Allowed tells of how Sex Theory has thrived unchallenged in the ivory towers of academia, as the explanation for how new babies are created. Proponents of Stork Theory claim that “Big Sex” has been suppressing their claim that babies are delivered by storks. Furthermore, Stork Theory proponents warn of the serious moral dangers posed by teaching children that sex has a function. They point out that evil dictators such as Hitler, Stalin and Mao all believed in Sex Theory, and they may have even had sex themselves.

There is also a late-breaking new development in the controversy, a new theory called Avian Transportation Theory.

Unlike the original Stork Theory, the modern, sophisticated “Avian Transportation Theory” (ATT) merely points out that there are gaps in the orthodox Sex Theory, and that current sonogram imaging is unreliable. Moreover ATT does not specify that babies are necessarily brought by storks but by “large birds unspecified” (although many individual ATT theorists PRIVATELY believe it is a stork).

WATCH the spoof

Here's a quick link to the YouTube version:

Note: Btw, I really do enjoy Ben Stein's Everybody's Business column in the the Sunday New York Times Business section.

Expelled for Real

Christine Comer was the Director of Science for the Texas Education Agency for nine years, until she was forced to resign for failing to remain neutral on creationism.
Watch the video.

A random (the first three, at the time I happen to be looking) sampling of responses on youTube is fascinating:

• if there is no such thing as intelligent design then explain a redwood tree or how a whale starts out as a simple protein molecule. evolution sucks and so do evolutionists. [So all of biology (along with chemistry, physics, geology, astonomy) can be replaced with "The Flying Spaghetti Monster did it."]
  
• Thanks state coerced schooling. Thanks to your one size fits all we got yet another power struggle on our hands! [Not sure if this comment is supportive or critical; but my understanding is that in the U.S. curricula are determined by thousands of individual school boards; very decentralized, compared with other countries?]
  
• intelligent design is not the same thing as creationism - you don't have to be religious to consider ID. [Of course it's not! Creationism requires your god; ID is satisfied by the Flying Spaghetti Monster.] Richard Dawkins belives in intelligent design [I strongly expect this will come as quite a surprise to Mr. Dawkins!]
  

PZ Meyers expelled from Expelled!

PZ Meyers, author the popular Pharyngula blog on ScienceBlogs, relates how he was expelled from a screening of the creationist propaganda movie Expelled back in March. It's an amusing story!

A recent post on Pharyngula discusses how David Bolinsky, creator of the Inner Life of the Cell video, accuses Expelled of theft.

In another of the ScienceBlogs, Afarensis, the post Expelled Bungles it Again discusses how, in "masterpiece of framing strategy" the film, in its effort to link Darwinism to Nazis and the Holocaust, includes an interview with an anti-Semite. "Unfortunately, the guy [Maciej Giertych] is a creationist and signer of the [Discovery Institute's] 'Dissent from Darwin' list." For more on this, check out another of the ScienceBlogs, Stranger Fruit, by John M. Lynch, and his post Expelled: Now with added anti-Semitism.

For a comprehensive listing of links to reviews and news coverage, see the Resources link on

Men Who Explain Things

Just this Tomgram post from Rebecca Solnit, titled The Archipelago of Arrogance.

The Butterfly Effect (Edward N. Lorenz)

Edward Lorenz, best known for the notion of the "butterfly effect," died last Wednesday. From the New York Times obituary:

In discovering “deterministic chaos,” Dr. Lorenz established a principle that “profoundly influenced a wide range of basic sciences and brought about one of the most dramatic changes in mankind’s view of nature since Sir Isaac Newton,” said a committee that awarded him the 1991 Kyoto Prize for basic sciences.
...
As recounted in the book “Chaos” by James Gleick, Dr. Lorenz’s accidental discovery of chaos came in the winter of 1961. Dr. Lorenz was running simulations of weather using a simple computer model. One day, he wanted to repeat one of the simulations for a longer time, but instead of repeating the whole simulation, he started the second run in the middle, typing in numbers from the first run for the initial conditions.

The computer program was the same, so the weather patterns of the second run should have exactly followed those of the first. Instead, the two weather trajectories quickly diverged on completely separate paths.

At first, he thought the computer was malfunctioning. Then he realized that he had not entered the initial conditions exactly. The computer stored numbers to an accuracy of six decimal places, like 0.506127, while, to save space, the printout of results shortened the numbers to three decimal places, 0.506. When typing in the new conditions, Dr. Lorenz had entered the rounded-off numbers, and even this small discrepancy, of less than 0.1 percent, completely changed the end result.

Even though his model was vastly simplified, Dr. Lorenz realized that this meant perfect weather prediction was a fantasy.

A perfect forecast would require not only a perfect model, but also perfect knowledge of wind, temperature, humidity and other conditions everywhere around the world at one moment of time. Even a small discrepancy could lead to completely different weather.

Dr. Lorenz published his findings in 1963. “The paper he wrote in 1963 is a masterpiece of clarity of exposition about why weather is unpredictable,” said J. Doyne Farmer, a professor at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico.

The following year, Dr. Lorenz published another paper that described how a small twiddling of parameters in a model could produce vastly different behavior, transforming regular, periodic events into a seemingly random chaotic pattern.

At a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1972, he gave a talk with a title that captured the essence of his ideas: “Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?”

The last Titan (John A. Wheeler)

John Archibald Wheeler, the physicist who gave black holes their name, died last Sunday.
From Dennis Overbye's New York Times obituary:

Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said of Dr. Wheeler, “For me, he was the last Titan, the only physics superhero still standing.”
...
Among Dr. Wheeler’s students was Richard Feynman of the California Institute of Technology, who parlayed a crazy-sounding suggestion by Dr. Wheeler into work that led to a Nobel Prize. Another was Hugh Everett, whose Ph.D. thesis under Dr. Wheeler on quantum mechanics envisioned parallel alternate universes endlessly branching and splitting apart — a notion that Bryce DeWitt, of the University of Texas in Austin, called “Many Worlds” and which has become a favorite of many cosmologists as well as science fiction writers.
...
At a conference in New York in 1967, Dr. Wheeler, seizing on a suggestion shouted from the audience, hit on the name “black hole” to dramatize this dire possibility for a star and for physics.

The black hole “teaches us that space can be crumpled like a piece of paper into an infinitesimal dot, that time can be extinguished like a blown-out flame, and that the laws of physics that we regard as ‘sacred,’ as immutable, are anything but,” he wrote in his 1999 autobiography, “Geons, Black Holes & Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics.” (Its co-author is Kenneth Ford, a former student and a retired director of the American Institute of Physics.)

One for the ages (Arthur C. Clarke)

In his short story “The Nine Billion Names of God,” published in 1953, Clarke wrote of a pair of computer programmers sent to a remote monastery in Tibet to help the monks there use a computer to compile a list of all the names of God. Once the list was complete, the monks believed, human and cosmic destiny would be fulfilled and the world would end.

The programmers are fleeing the mountain, hoping to escape the monks’ wrath when the program finishes and the world is still there, when one of them looks up.

“Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.”

[From Dennis Overbye's essay, A Boys Life, Guided by the Voice of Cosmic Wonder]

Arthur C. Clarke died last month. Based on Clarke's short story The Sentinel, he and Stanley Kubrick wrote the screenplay for 2001: A Space Odyssey, one of Roger Ebert's Great Movies

To describe that first screening as a disaster would be wrong, for many of those who remained until the end knew they had seen one of the greatest films ever made. But not everyone remained. Rock Hudson stalked down the aisle, complaining, “Will someone tell me what the hell this is about?'' There were many other walkouts, and some restlessness at the film's slow pace (Kubrick immediately cut about 17 minutes, including a pod sequence that essentially repeated another one).

The film did not provide the clear narrative and easy entertainment cues the audience expected. The closing sequences, with the astronaut inexplicably finding himself in a bedroom somewhere beyond Jupiter, were baffling. The overnight Hollywood judgment was that Kubrick had become derailed, that in his obsession with effects and set pieces, he had failed to make a movie.

What he had actually done was make a philosophical statement about man's place in the universe, using images as those before him had used words, music or prayer. And he had made it in a way that invited us to contemplate it -- not to experience it vicariously as entertainment, as we might in a good conventional science-fiction film, but to stand outside it as a philosopher might, and think about it.
...
Only a few films are transcendent, and work upon our minds and imaginations like music or prayer or a vast belittling landscape. Most movies are about characters with a goal in mind, who obtain it after difficulties either comic or dramatic. “2001: A Space Odyssey'' is not about a goal but about a quest, a need. It does not hook its effects on specific plot points, nor does it ask us to identify with Dave Bowman or any other character. It says to us: We became men when we learned to think. Our minds have given us the tools to understand where we live and who we are. Now it is time to move on to the next step, to know that we live not on a planet but among the stars, and that we are not flesh but intelligence.

[Update 2008.05.15 I discovered that Roger Ebert has posted a journal entry, Arthur C. Clarke: Star hero.]

In a post (Arthur C. Clarke: A Techno-Optimist With Climate Concerns) on his Dot Earth blog, Andrew Revkin takes the occasion of Clarke's death for "pausing for a moment to take note of the power of imagination, and fiction, in helping humans step back from the daily rush and examine our predicament and possibilities from a distance."

SPACE.com carried this tribute, and The Planetary Society has an article, including a 1983 essay by Carl Sagan, In Praise of Arthur C. Clarke which he closes by writing

I may have been of some little help to Arthur over the years, for example, with the end of the movie “2001”; and the ideas in such stories as “A Meeting with Medusa.” But what Arthur has done for me is vastly greater. Through his non-fiction books and his science fiction stories and novels, his invention of the communications satellite, his defense of reason against the clamors of superstition, his work in more finely honing the British Interplanetary Society, and through his classic motion picture, Arthur has done an enormous global service in preparing the climate for a serious presence beyond the Earth. I hope that the governments of our epoch will have the sense to continue making Arthur’s dream—shared by so many of us—a reality.

Dave Itzkoff's essay, The Fuzzier Crystal Ball, discusses the future of science-fiction after Arthur C. Clarke.

And Dennis Overbye's essay carries this postscript:

*By the normal conventions of this paper, by the way, I should be calling him Mr. Clarke or Sir Arthur, on second reference. But there has always been an exception for people who “belong to the ages,” and Arthur C. Clarke has always belonged to the ages.

"Nobody who writes faster can write better, and nobody better is faster"

A. O. Scott writes something of an homage to Roger Ebert in today's New York Times. In an April 1 letter to readers of the Chicago Sun-Times Ebert announced his return to (written) criticism, following the 10th Annual Roger Ebert Film Festival. (Although cancer free, Ebert's latest surgery -- his third -- failed to restore his ability to speak.)

Not that any of us could hope to match his productivity. Nor could we entertain the comforting fantasy that the daunting quantity of the man’s work — four decades of something like six reviews a week, as well as festival reports, learned essays on classic films and the occasional profile — must entail a compromise in quality. As A. J. Liebling said of himself, nobody who writes faster can write better, and nobody better is faster. The evidence is easy enough to find: in the Web archive, in his indispensable annual movie guides and in a dozen other books.

It is this print corpus that will sustain Mr. Ebert’s reputation as one of the few authentic giants in a field in which self-importance frequently overshadows accomplishment. His writing may lack the polemical dazzle and theoretical muscle of Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris, whose names must dutifully be invoked in any consideration of American film criticism. In their heyday those two were warriors, system-builders and intellectual adventurers on a grand scale. But the plain-spoken Midwestern clarity of Mr. Ebert’s prose and his genial, conversational presence on the page may, in the end, make him a more useful and reliable companion for the dedicated moviegoer.

His criticism shows a nearly unequaled grasp of film history and technique, and formidable intellectual range, but he rarely seems to be showing off. He’s just trying to tell you what he thinks, and to provoke some thought on your part about how movies work and what they can do.