Again, I have to say this was the worst Oscarcast I've seen, and I go back a while. Some great winners, a nice distribution of awards, but the show? Dead. In. The. Water.But Ebert has a compliment for Randy Newman:
Randy Newman won for the best song Oscar for "We Belong Together," a title that might describe the many of the works that received his 19 previous nominations.
For that, Cooper was ridiculed by James Rainey of The Los Angeles Times. CNN media critic Howard Kurtz questioned whether Cooper should be “taking sides.” And one Liz Trotta said that “any correspondent worth his salt knows that you shouldn’t be making editorial comments.” She, amusingly enough, is employed by Fox News.
All three critics concede Cooper was accurate: The regime did lie. Yet they question whether it was journalistically ethical to say it.
Take a close look. You will seldom see a clearer portrait of the timidity and obsequiousness that have infected and, increasingly, defined, American journalism.
Here is my pet theory: After years of criticism for their liberal bias -- some of it merited – news media, eager as a puppy to be liked, have corrected by over correcting. Which is to say that in the search for that mythical beast, objectivity, they have sought to banish from the news-gathering process an indispensable element: judgment. Excluding, of course, Fox, for which a reluctance to judge has never been a problem.
The rest of the journalistic world seems to have embraced its own version of those robotic, idiotic zero-tolerance policies where some kid gets suspended for bringing Midol to class. Meaning, in other words, a paradigm from which human reasoning and common sense are exiled.
So, on any given story, a reporter is encouraged to get the facts, make sure the liberal and conservative talking points are represented and, once those boxes are checked, to feel as if she has done her job, has been objective. No thinking required.
Me, I have no idea what objectivity means, at least insofar as news reportage goes. What I do understand is fairness, the requirement to give voice to both sides, all sides, of a given issue: abortion, immigration, gun control, the budget, whatever.
It’s not just that 46 percent of Republicans believe the lie that Obama is a Muslim, or that 27 percent in the party doubt that the president of the United States is a citizen. But fully half of them believe falsely that the big bailout of banks and insurance companies under TARP was enacted by Obama, and not by President Bush.The source of this "knowledge" is "the media" - in fact, a "lamestream media" all its own.
Take a look at Tuesday night’s box score in the baseball game between New York and Toronto. The Yankees won, 11-5. Now look at the weather summary, showing a high of 71 for New York. The score and temperature are not subject to debate.
Yet a president’s birthday or whether he was even in the White House on the day TARP was passed are apparently open questions. A growing segment of the party poised to take control of Congress has bought into denial of the basic truths of Barack Obama’s life. What’s more, this astonishing level of willful ignorance has come about largely by design, and has been aided by a press afraid to call out the primary architects of the lies.
In the much-discussed Pew poll reporting the spike in ignorance, those who believe Obama to be Muslim say they got their information from the media. But no reputable news agency — that is, fact-based, one that corrects its errors quickly — has spread such inaccuracies.
So where is this “media?” Two sources, and they are — no surprise here — the usual suspects. The first, of course, is Rush Limbaugh, who claims the largest radio audience in the land among the microphone demagogues, and his word is Biblical among Republicans. A few quick examples of the Limbaugh method:
“Tomorrow is Obama’s birthday — not that we’ve seen any proof of that,” he said on Aug. 3. “They tell us Aug. 4 is the birthday; we haven’t seen any proof of that.”
Of course, there is proof as clear as that baseball box score. Look here, www.factcheck.org, for starters, one of many places posting Obama’s Hawaiian birth certificate. [More specifically, http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/born_in_the_usa.html -jwj]
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Finally, there is Fox News, whose parent company has given $1 million to Republican causes this year but still masquerades as a legitimate source of news. Their chat and opinion programs spread innuendo daily. The founder of Politifact, another nonpartisan referee to the daily rumble, said two of the site’s five most popular items on its Truth-o-meter are corrections of Glenn Beck.
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It would be nice to dismiss the stupid things that Americans believe as harmless, the price of having such a large, messy democracy. Plenty of hate-filled partisans swore that Abraham Lincoln was a Catholic and Franklin Roosevelt was a Jew. So what if one-in-five believe the sun revolves around the earth, or aren’t sure from which country the United States gained its independence?
But false belief in weapons of mass-destruction led the United States to a trillion-dollar war. And trust in rising home value as a truism as reliable as a sunrise was a major contributor to the catastrophic collapse of the economy. At its worst extreme, a culture of misinformation can produce something like Iran, which is run by a Holocaust denier.
It’s one thing to forget the past, with predictable consequences, as the favorite aphorism goes. But what about those who refuse to comprehend the present?
Founded in 2000, the IdeaFestival (IF) is a world-class event that attracts leading global innovators and thinkers to discuss and celebrate imagination, new perspectives and transformational ideas.
The IdeaFestival provides a unique stage to explore the cross-cutting nature of innovation involving a range of diverse disciplines, while supplying the creative tools needed to “see”, synthesize and apply this knowledge in new, dynamic ways.
The maximum efficiency of the silicon solar cell in use today is about 31 percent. That’s because much of the energy from sunlight hitting a solar cell is too high to be turned into usable electricity. That energy, in the form of so-called “hot electrons,” is lost as heat.
If the higher energy sunlight, or more specifically the hot electrons, could be captured, solar-to-electric power conversion efficiency could be increased theoretically to as high as 66 percent.
“If we take the hot electrons out, we can do work with them,” says Zhu. “The demonstration of this hot electron transfer establishes that a highly efficient hot carrier solar cell is not just a theoretical concept, but an experimental possibility.”
Planck will chart the temperature variations in CMB with 10 times WMAP's sensitivity and three times its angular resolution. The microwaves are also polarized so that the electric fields in waves coming from any particular spot in the sky wiggle in a definite direction—just as ordinary light waves reflected from a pond are polarized so they oscillate horizontally as they zip into your eye. WMAP sketched the polarization of the CMB; Planck will render it in great detail.
Planck will be far more sophisticated than its predecessors. WMAP sampled microwaves at five frequencies; Planck will monitor nine of them over a range 12 times wider. WMAP cooled its detectors by exposing them to the frigidity of space; some of Planck's detectors must be cooled to within a fraction of a degree of absolute zero with a liquid-helium refrigerator. As WMAP did, Planck will circle the sun in synchrony with Earth, hovering at the so-called second Lagrange point, or L2 .
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But the prize quarry for Planck researchers is the B modes. These features are swirls in the CMB polarization mapped across the sky, and spotting them would essentially clinch the case for the mind-bending theory of inflation.
The notion that the universe briefly expanded at faster than light speed might seem absurd, but it solves some thorny problems in cosmology, including a big one posed by the CMB itself. The temperature of background radiation is almost exactly the same—2.725 kelvin—all over the sky. That's perplexing because the distant reaches of the universe in opposite directions are so far apart that not even light has had time to travel between them. So they could not have interacted and should have no reason to have reached so nearly the same temperature. Inflation solves this problem by positing that opposite ends of the universe were cheek-by-jowl until the sudden expansion pulled them very far apart.
Although inflation fits the facts so far, researchers do not yet have direct proof that it occurred. The B modes would provide that. Current theory predicts that inflation should have generated gravitational waves and that those waves should have left lingering swirls in the polarization of the CMB.
Wooden was a dignified, scholarly man who spoke with the precise language of the English teacher he once was. He always carried a piece of paper with a message from his father that read:
“Be true to yourself. Make each day a masterpiece. Help others. Drink deeply from good books. Make friendship a fine art. Build a shelter against a rainy day.”
In An Appreciation, Harvey Araton writes
Wooden won a record 10 national titles, including seven straight from 1967 through 1973. His teams reached 12 Final Fours, and they won 88 straight games between 1971 and 1974. He had supreme talent, including the most dominant centers of the era, Lew Alcindor and Bill Walton.
He also had critics, who reason that there was little competition out west and remind us that Sam Gilbert, a U.C.L.A. booster, served as friend and fixer for many a Bruin star, landing the university on probation six years after Wooden retired in 1975.
Who knows what Wooden knew or didn’t want to know? Temptation was not invented with John Calipari or Jim Calhoun, but there was one compromise Wooden absolutely refused to make.His players never took control of the gym. Great as they were, Pauley Pavilion never became their stage to pose for the pros, and doing it the coach’s way was about more than getting a haircut.
“His skills as a coach are overlooked because everyone focuses on the talent,” Geno Auriemma, the Connecticut women’s coach, whose team currently has a 78-game winning streak, wrote in an e-mail message. “He taught the game as well as anyone ever has or will.”
It must have been during the run of championships that I had occasion (I don't remember the circumstances) to attend the NCAA regional being held in Freedom Hall in Louisville. At some point in the game the public address announcer, John Tong, came on and announced (in that wonderfully distinctive voice of his): "This score just in from the West Regional. Santa Clara, 52..." At this my mind jumped ahead and assumed Santa Clara had played a slowdown, and won in an upset, probably 52 - 50. But after a pause of just the right length, Tong continued, "... UCLA, 90."
"Martin Gardner is one of the great intellects produced in this country in the 20th century,” said Douglas Hofstadter, the cognitive scientist.Michael Shermer, the publishing Editor of Skeptic magazine, wrote an essay about Gardner in 2002 titled, Hermits & Cranks.
W. H. Auden, Arthur C. Clarke, Jacob Bronowski, Stephen Jay Gould and Carl Sagan were admirers of Mr. Gardner. Vladimir Nabokov mentioned him in his novel “Ada” as “an invented philosopher.” An asteroid is named for him.
Mr. Gardner responded that his life was not all that interesting, really. “It’s lived mainly inside my brain,” he told The Charlotte Observer in 1993.
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Mr. Gardner, who lived in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., for most of the years he wrote for Scientific American, resigned from the magazine in 1981. Two years later he began a column in Skeptical Inquirer, “Notes of a Fringe Watcher,” which he continued to write until 2002. He had already begun beating this drum, debunking psuedoscience, in his book “Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science.” He helped found the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal.
In The New York Review of Books in 1982, Stephen Jay Gould, the evolutionary biologist, called Mr. Gardner “the single brightest beacon defending rationality and good science against the mysticism and anti-intellectualism that surround us.”
In 1952 he expanded it into a book called In the Name of Science, with the descriptive subtitle “An entertaining survey of the high priests and cultists of science, past and present.” Published by Putnam, the book sold so poorly that it was quickly remaindered and lay dormant until 1957, when it was republished by Dover. It has come down to us as Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, which is still in print and is arguably the skeptic classic of the past half a century.
Thankfully, there has been some progress since Gardner offered his first criticisms of pseudoscience. Now largely antiquated are his chapters on believers in a flat earth, a hollow earth, Atlantis and Lemuria, Alfred William Lawson, Roger Babson, Trofim Lysenko, Wilhelm Reich and Alfred Korzybski. But disturbingly, a good two thirds of the book’s contents are relevant today, including Gardner’s discussions of homeopathy, naturopathy, osteopathy, iridiagnosis (reading the iris of the eye to determine bodily malfunctions), food faddists, cancer cures and other forms of medical quackery, Edgar Cayce, the Great Pyramid’s alleged mystical powers, handwriting analysis, ESP and PK (psychokinesis), reincarnation, dowsing rods, eccentric sexual theories, and theories of group racial differences.
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What I find especially valuable about Gardner’s views are his insights into the differences between science and pseudoscience. On the one extreme we have ideas that are most certainly false, “such as the dianetic view that a one-day-old embryo can make sound recordings of its mother’s conversation.” In the borderlands between the two “are theories advanced as working hypotheses, but highly debatable because of the lack of sufficient data.” Of these Gardner selects a most propitious example: “the theory that the universe is expanding.” That theory would now fall at the other extreme end of the spectrum, where lie “theories almost certainly true, such as the belief that the earth is round or that men and beasts are distant cousins.”
A geomagnetic storm began at 05:55 AM EST Monday, April 5, 2010. Space weather storm levels reached Strong (G3) levels on the Geomagnetic Storms Space Weather Scale. The source of the storming is an Earth-directed Coronal Mass Ejection associated with a weak solar flare that occurred in Active Region 1059 on April 3 at 05:54 AM EST. This is expected to be an isolated storm that should subside quickly. Other than the flare and CME erupting on April 3, this active region has not produced any significant activity. Systems that can be affected include electric power systems, spacecraft operations, high-frequency communications, GPS, and other navigation systems.
Charlie Kaufman, the writer and director of "Synecdoche, New York" (2008), my choice for the best film of the decade, will appear after the screening of his masterpiece at Ebertfest 2010. The 12th annual festival will be held April 21-25 at the landmark 1,600-seat Virginia Theater in Champaign-Urbana, and for the first time ever, all festival Q&A sessions and panel discussions will be streamed live on the Internet.
Presented by the College of Media of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the festival features a dozen screenings, along with lectures, guest appearances and special events. I program, produce and host the event, along with my wife Chaz. Thanks to my computer-generated voice, I plan to play a larger role onstage this year.
In September, the Army announced that it would spend $300,000 to study the impact of pairing psychiatric service dogs like Jet with soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with post-traumatic stress disorder. Both the House and Senate have recently passed bills that would finance the training and placement of these dogs with veterans.
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But Clive D. L. Wynne, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Florida who specializes in canine cognition and has himself said he met a border collie who knew 1,500 words, takes issue with efforts to compare human and canine brains.
He argues that it is dogs’ deep sensitivity to the humans around them, their obedience under rigorous training, and their desire to please that can explain most of these capabilities. They may be deft at reading human cues — and teachable — but that doesn’t mean they are thinking like people, he says. A dog’s entire world revolves around its primary owner, and it will respond to that person to get what it wants, usually food, treats or affection.
“I take the view that dogs have their own unique way of thinking,” Dr. Wynne said. “It’s a happy accident that doggie thinking and human thinking overlap enough that we can have these relationships with dogs, but we shouldn’t kid ourselves that dogs are viewing the world the way we do.”
Ben Stein, you hosted a TV show on which you gave away money. Imagine that I have created a special edition of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" just for you. Ben, you've answered all the earlier questions correctly, and now you're up for the $1 million prize. It involves an explanation for the evolution of life on this planet. You have already exercised your option to throw away two of the wrong answers. Now you are faced with two choices: (A) Darwin's Theory of Evolution, or (B) Intelligent Design.
Because this is a special edition of the program, you can use a Hotline to telephone every scientist on Earth who has an opinion on this question. You discover that 99.975 of them agree on the answer (A). A million bucks hangs in the balance. The clock is ticking. You could use the money. Which do you choose? You, a firm believer in the Constitution, are not intimidated and exercise your freedom of speech. You choose (B).
Squaaawk!!! The klaxon horn sounds. You have lost. Outraged, you file suit against the program, charging it is biased and has denied a hearing for your belief. Your suit argues that the "correct" answer was chosen because of a prejudice against the theory of Intelligent Design, despite the fact that .025 of one percent of all scientists support it. You call for (B) to be discussed in schools as an alternative theory to (A).
Your rights have been violated. You're at wit's end. You think perhaps the field of Indie Documentaries offers you hope.
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You release your film "eXpelled."As you fully expect from all your experience, it is rejected almost unanimously by the MSM. It receives an 8% rating on the TomatoMeter, earning it a place on the list of the worst-reviewed films of all time. In a review not catalogued by Tomatoes, ChristianAnwers.net writes that your film "has made Ben Stein the new hero of believers in God everywhere, and has landed a smart right cross to the protruding jaw of evolution's elite."Again, the useful excluded middle. Those for whom Ben Stein is not a hero are not believers in God. It also follows that the phrase "believers in God everywhere" does not extend to believers in God who agree with Darwin. So ChristanAnswers has excluded two middles at one fell stroke.
It's a long post, but well worth reading in its entirety!
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.And just because it's interesting, roll back the clock three years to his column of 8 August 2005, That Hissing SoundAs a friend said last night, we’ve become a banana republic with nukes.
And speaking of "Dow 36,000" (and returning back to the future):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 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.
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.
