ninme

Posted by ninme at 7:43 pm No Comments

click to enlarge

And I usually love infographics.

:(

Posted by ninme at 7:38 pm No Comments

John Derbyshire (an Englishman) mentions two criminals executed in Japan despite the leftyish Justice Minister’s abolitionist stance, and says at the end:

Executions in Japan are by hanging: The Japanese at least understand that capital punishment is an act of state violence, not a medical procedure, as in the dishonest and despicable system of “lethal injection.”

The condemned prisoner also does not know the day of his execution. This is the same as the old French system, if I recall my Camus correctly. Amnesty International says this is cruel, but I’m not sure I agree.

Hmm.

Posted by ninme at 10:06 am No Comments

This is amazing. All the artsy Brits in my Twitter stream have been moaning about the UK Film Council getting the axe, but then the author Ian Rankin mentioned this article as a “sharp and persuasive critique”.

The Times – Good riddance to the UK Film Council, by Chris Atkins

The real scandals, however, came out of the UKFC distribution fund. This doled out more than £4 million a year in grants to help to release finished films (to pay for posters, advertising and so forth) and Pete Buckingham, the head of the fund, has given public money to some unlikely choices. In 2007, the impoverished rock band the Rolling Stones and the unknown director Martin Scorsese collaborated to make the forgettable Shine a Light — essentially a piece of marketing to plug the Stones’ album. The Film Council handed over £154,000 to promote Mick and Keith despite the Stones being worth more than £100 million. …

But the distribution fund’s greatest balls-up was the Digital Screen Network. In 2004 the Film Council announced that it was going to invest £14 million to install digital projectors in more than 200 cinemas. At first glance this was manna from heaven for low-budget film-makers. The costs of physically distributing our movies on celluloid film were crippling. Digital distribution could bypass all these costs, as hard drives could be made and shipped for a tiny fraction of the costs of film prints. But rather than make the technology “open source” (meaning that anyone can render a Quicktime on a hard drive and screen it) the Film Council decided to listen to the anti-pirating lobby, and set up an expensive encoding network. This meant that to get our film to cinema we had to go to just one company that had the monopoly on managing the Digital Screen Network. Getting a film out this way takes ten days and costs £5,000, even though you can encode a film at cinema quality on your Macbook free. The derisory £5,000 that the UKFC gives to every indie film suddenly doesn’t seem so generous.

The real disaster, however, came with the council’s placement of the digital projector in cinemas. In the majority of cases the theatre owners put them in their largest screen, which made perfect sense to them because they could maximise revenues. But when independent films were being released, they would get placed in the smaller screens, with no digital projector, so we still had to spend money on prints. Meanwhile in Screen One, the publicly funded digital technology was screening Toy Story 2, which no doubt delighted the Hollywood studios that have had their costs subsidised.

Amazing.

Posted by ninme at 7:26 pm No Comments

Wheat & Weeds – Mad Men, Season 11

Posted by ninme at 7:15 pm No Comments

Those of you (most of you) who don’t play this game won’t get this, but this is OUTRAGEOUS: PLANTS VS ZOMBIES IPHONE PULLS MICHAEL JACKSON ZOMBIE, OTHERS TO FOLLOW

It’s a vaguely Michael Jackson-looking zombie doing the thriller dance. What a bunch of GREEDY GUSSES.

Posted by ninme at 6:10 am No Comments

Curtsy to Brett McS for this one: Magic of mobile phones and Wi-Fi foreseen 100 years ago

A runaway success in 1910, the book has been reprinted 100 years later – again to huge acclaim.

By commissioning experts in their respective fields, editor Arthur Brehmer ensured his book’s incorrect predictions were just as interesting as the many correct ones.

In his essay “The Wireless Century”, author Robert Stoss predicted: “Everything we now can send and receive through wires we can also send by wireless means.

“Everyone will have his own pocket telephone with which he can connect with whomever he wishes, wherever he is: on the sea, in the mountains, in his room, on a racing train, ship or a plane gliding through the air.” This pocket telephone would have a myriad of settings including ring tone and vibration options.

He forecasted a kind of public Wi-Fi in “every train, public house and apartment” and even the humble fax – useful, he suggested, to transmit last-minute stays of execution signed by the Kaiser.

Austrian novelist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Bertha von Suttner foresaw a united, peaceful Europe based on reciprocity – and the fear of overkill.

Love would be deconstructed by 2010 to its constituent parts: “radioactive sympathy rays of the soul and the heart”. Religion would be alive and well, “but as one house, no one will demand: ‘Feel, think, believe as I do’.”

It’s a far sight from the Fritz Lang.

Posted by ninme at 9:09 pm No Comments

Hmm, what to link to today…

Corner – Wikileaks vs. Democracy

It will take time to assess the real harm caused by this dump of some 92,000 classified documents into the public domain by Wikileaks. But as I argue this morning, the Obama administration’s warning that there would be damage seems highly credible. It’s hard to fault the New York Times in this instance. After all, this material was going to be published anyway by Wikileaks, which is where responsibility lies.

The larger point one might draw from this episode is that democracies like ours have a vital need for secrecy in the conduct of foreign affairs and war. And Wikileaks, which appears to be beyond the reach of our laws, is engaging in an assault on democratic governance. Our best hope of avoiding future such episodes is to do a better job of protecting secrets. Part of this involves tighter security and harsher penalties for those who leak vital secrets. Another no less important part is tackling our government’s penchant for overclassification and mis-classification, which breeds disrespect for legitimate secrecy and creates a climate in which even leaks of highly sensitive information are taken as a norm. None of this is a satisfactory solution to our problems in this realm. But a satisfactory solution has not yet appeared on the horizon.

Wheat & Weeds – Wicked Leaks

Legal Insurrection asks:

How many of the Journolists who object to the release of their e-mails regarding the 2008 presidential campaign will spend the next several days gloating over the publication by WikiLeaks of over 90,000 classified military documents regarding the war in Afghanistan?

And meanwhile many of our soldiers and allies in covert positions have had their covers blown and will likely die as a result. A hanging is called for.

Maybe the ghost of the vaunted FDR will have this guy taken out and summarily shot?

Posted by ninme at 8:33 pm 3 Comments

Well, Cameron Diaz is annoying. Tom Cruise is weird. But mostly he’s weird because he should be so very good. But then he’s weird and that makes him weirder. But when he’s on, he’s very good. Anyway it’s nice to hear this:

The Sunday Times – Jeremy Clarkson talks cars, fighter jets and biscuits with Hollywood A-listers Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz … and drives a Saab 9-5

Two hours, however, turned out to be nowhere near early enough for what Tom had in mind. He set a lap time in a shower, but then the sun came out so he wanted to go again and see how he’d do on a dry track. The billion Fox people realised this would throw their schedule into disarray and immediately all of them whipped out their BlackBerrys to talk to Battersea heliport.

Then he decided he wanted a go in the Bugatti Veyron Super Sport. Out came the BlackBerrys again. “Can we land a private jet on the Mall?” One of them explained that he had a premiere to attend that night but Tom didn’t seem that bothered. “I’ll get changed in the car,” he said.

You might imagine Cameron was different. She wasn’t. She wanted to do doughnuts. She wanted to try the new hot BMW Z4. She wanted to chat. Tom wanted to chat. Not just to me, but to the people who brought them things. To everyone. The researchers. Even James May. The BlackBerrys were melting.

Eventually we started the show and we had to talk about vomit and that went on for a lot longer than I’d thought. And then a member of the audience fainted and Tom was out of his seat, making sure the poor man was all right. And the billion people from Fox were probably thinking: “Can we just shoot him and get on with it?”

But Tom was having none of that and, once the man was all right, he sat back down and we talked about his Mustang P-51 (that’s a second world war fighter plane) and Cameron talked about how she’s broken her nose four times and how a lot of stuff goes into her face. And then we talked more about sick. And then they were ushered by the Fox people into the waiting cars to get up to London for the premiere of Knight and Day, the film they’re promoting. But Tom wasn’t quite finished. “Would it be possible to have an ‘I am the Stig’ T-shirt?” he wondered. And so we gave him one and he was gone. And we did the rest of the show and then I drove home.

It was a very good Top Gear. That bit at the end about Ayrton Senna was a fine piece of journalism. I’d never seen them do anything like it on this show. I loved that they mentioned his good deeds and religion but, and you might want to pay attention to this in the back, NBC, they didn’t turn it into a soft-focus-swelling-violins piece about him hugging grannies and children. They stuck to the racing.

He died in 1994, when I was about to graduate from the 8th grade. And I never heard of him before in my life. But then I suppose Italian formula one races were very far away at the time.

Posted by ninme at 8:36 pm 1 Comment

Or this week. Or Month. Or, hell, it’s been a bad year: year.

WSJ – Lost in Translation
New cognitive research suggests that language profoundly influences the way people see the world; a different sense of blame in Japanese and Spanish, by Lera Boroditsky (professor of psychology at Stanford and editor in chief of Frontiers in Cultural Philosophy)

To find out, my colleague Alice Gaby and I traveled to Australia and gave Pormpuraawans sets of pictures that showed temporal progressions (for example, pictures of a man at different ages, or a crocodile growing, or a banana being eaten). Their job was to arrange the shuffled photos on the ground to show the correct temporal order. We tested each person in two separate sittings, each time facing in a different cardinal direction. When asked to do this, English speakers arrange time from left to right. Hebrew speakers do it from right to left (because Hebrew is written from right to left).

Pormpuraawans, we found, arranged time from east to west. That is, seated facing south, time went left to right. When facing north, right to left. When facing east, toward the body, and so on. Of course, we never told any of our participants which direction they faced. The Pormpuraawans not only knew that already, but they also spontaneously used this spatial orientation to construct their representations of time. And many other ways to organize time exist in the world’s languages. In Mandarin, the future can be below and the past above. In Aymara, spoken in South America, the future is behind and the past in front.

*mind blown*

Posted by ninme at 8:31 pm 7 Comments

We’ve been talking to these dudes, right, for redoing the house we just bought (kitchen, bathrooms, all unfortunately but lovingly done in the 90s). And the topic has come up of lead paint. One guy, a nice guy, quick to laugh, just became very quietly angry, tried to shrug it off, then said it was “stupid.” The other guy, very funny, very smooth, everything’s can-do, always has something to say about anything, just became very very quiet and bit out that “that lead paint, man, it’ll be my nemesis.”

The story appears to be this: Guy #1 said, cryptically, that there are new government regulations covering the handling of paint taken out of homes that date to before the lead paint ban. Paint has to be swept up, the swiffers or cleanup cloths photographed, then used, placed in clear plastic ziplocks, photographed again, then everything put in special orange plastic garbage bags, then thrown in the dump with the asbestos for the tractors to drive over anyway.

I wonder if it’s a bit like the dude builder’s version of that stupid lead testing in independent charity toy stores that went around last year.

Posted by ninme at 8:23 pm 2 Comments

Telegraph – Wayward Alzheimer’s patients foiled by fake bus stop
A German nursing home has come up with a novel idea to stop Alzheimer’s patients from wandering off: a phantom bus stop.

“It sounds funny,” said Old Lions Chairman Franz-Josef Goebel, “but it helps. Our members are 84 years-old on average. Their short-term memory hardly works at all, but the long-term memory is still active. They know the green and yellow bus sign and remember that waiting there means they will go home.” The result is that errant patients now wait for their trip home at the bus stop, before quickly forgetting why they were there in the first place.

“We will approach them and say that the bus is coming later today and invite them in to the home for a coffee,” said Mr Neureither. “Five minutes later they have completely forgotten they wanted to leave.” The idea has proved so successful that it has now been adopted by several other homes across Germany.

*cries*

Posted by ninme at 11:45 am No Comments

This is well done:

Posted by ninme at 9:10 am No Comments

Work part time as a council member in a (working-class, mostly Hispanic) town of 39,000 and make $100,000; get a job as the police chief and make $457,000; get elected mayor and make nearly $800,000.

Truly California is the land of opportunity.

Posted by ninme at 9:00 pm 3 Comments

Looking at the photos accompanying the Times article about the Prime Minister’s trip to Washington. Wouldn’t it be funny (funny ironic? funny haha?) if Dave is to Obama what Bush was to Tone. What is it about the co-politicals rubbing each other the wrong way?

In other news: There isn’t any. It’s 10 pm and I haven’t even opened my Google Reader today (how I get most of my non-paywalled news).

Posted by ninme at 8:36 pm 1 Comment

I love Kevin Spacey. I really do.

I think impersonations must be the best kind of comedy. One doesn’t even have to say anything funny, just a good impersonation is enough to make everyone shriek with laughter. Why is that, I wonder.