Cuz We Said So

Facebook and FriendFeed

I’m a technophile, and 9 times out of 10, I’m likely to be the first on my block to try out a new gadget or software application.  Every now and then, though, I’m late to the party.  I still remember a friend telling me in 1996 that I should really check out this World Wide Web thing, which was bound to catch on. 

Social networking has turned out to be a similar blind spot for me.  I’ve been signed up for LinkedIn for at least a year, for professional purposes, but I only decided to check out other sites last week, starting with Facebook.  Huh.  It turns out millionis of people aren’t completely crazy after all.  (At least, not because they use Facebook.)  Yeah, it’s sorta fun.

And, intruiguingly, I find the market reaching what appears to be a new level of interoperability just as I’m starting to pay attention.  As I was playing around with Facebook over the weekend, I ran across a question from Rip, asking what social bookmarking services his friends were using.  My initial reply was that I wasn't using any, since it seems to me like you need to reach a certain critical mass of friends who use the same service so that there's somebody to look at your stuff.  The more I thought about it, though, the more that seemed like a lame answer.  And after a little exploration, I discovered that with the increasingly cross-site nature of the social networking scene makes my initial assumption incorrect. 

First, I decided to check out del.icio.us, of which I've been peripherally aware for a while, and discovered that it's a pretty nice service.  Then I discovered that you can install an app so your del.icio.us clippings show up in your Facebook minifeed.  Ditto with the digg.com app.  I don’t know any of my friends using Digg or del.icio.us, but I have friends using Facebook, so just like that, the critical mass issue has gone away.

Then I discovered FriendFeed, which operates like the Facebook mini-feed, but doesn't require the viewer be a member of the site.  Consequently I now have a public feed here, which I'm bouncing to my home page, in case someone decides to look me up at my domain.  It’s pulling in postings from Cuz We Said So, flickr, Digg.com, del.icio.us, my Google Reader shared feeds—all with no membership required.  Very, very cool.

What can I say?  I may have arrived late, but at least I’m making up for in enthusiasm what I lacked in punctuality.

David's Del.icio.us Links for 2008-06-30

• Change your Windows Open/Save dialogs with PlacesBar Editor
  (tags: productivity windows utility)
• An article giving strong evidence of global warming « Fabius Maximus
  (tags: climate AGW politics globalwarming)
• Cancer 'Cure' In Mice To Be Tested In Humans
  (tags: cancer medicine sci-tech)

Dan Kish Using and Explaining Echolocation (Video)

Obama-Nation I: Negotiating with Terrorists

Well, since it's now clear who the '08 Presidential Candidates will be, I decided it's time to start a series of articles on the candidates.  Beginning with Barack Obama, the lovable, cuddly candidate from Illinois that everyone loves to love.

Let's start with negotiating with terrorists.  Does Obama support negotiation with terrorists?  Curiously, I cannot find any place on record where he definitively states that he does not support negotiating with terrorists.  Let's assume that he wouldn't (which may or may not be a safe assumption, but I'll give him the benefit of doubt).

On his own web site is a series of backpedaling remarks regarding negotiations with Iran:

Obama was asked "Would you be willing to meet separately, without precondition, during the first year of your administration, in Washington or anywhere else, with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea, in order to bridge the gap that divides our countries?" Obama responded, "I would."

and...

Asked if he were still willing to meet without pre-condition during your [sic] first year with Fidel Castro, Kim Jung Il, Hugo Chavez, Obama said, "I do."

As others have pointed out, in these statements, Obama is not saying that he will meet with terrorists per se, but rather with known state sponsors of terrorism.  This is, of course, a reversal of the Bush doctrine that holds state sponsors of terrorists responsible for the actions of the terrorists they support.

In other statements on his website, Obama "clarifies" that "preconditions" are not the same as "preparations":

Obviously, there is a difference between pre-conditions and preparation. Pre-conditions, which was what the question was in that debate, means that we won't meet with people unless they've already agreed to the very things that we expect to be meeting with them about.

Right.  In particular, we say "are you willing under any conditions to agree to stop sponsoring Islamic terrorism" and if they say "no" then we don't have anything left to talk about, since we don't negotiate with terrorists.

Apparently, Obama understands this:

We must not negotiate with a terrorist group intent on Israel’s destruction. We should only sit down with Hamas if they renounce terrorism, recognize Israel’s right to exist and abide by past agreements.

Wait.  That sounded like a precondition to me.  I'm confused.

What makes it patently clear that Obama just doesn't get it is this asinine statement in regard to dealing with states like Iran and North Korea:

Obama said, "The approach I am suggesting, the tough but engaged diplomacy that I am suggesting is the kind that was carried out by John Kennedy, it was carried out by Richard Nixon, and it was carried out by Ronald Reagan."

Absolutely and completely incorrect.  In particular, Reagan's approach to state sponsors of terrorism was essentially the Bush doctrine.  Just ask Gaddafi.

Regardless of his misunderstanding of political history, Obama is clearly indicating his position supporting negotiation with state sponsors of terrorism.

Am I the only one who understands that while you can negotiate with adversaries, you can't negotiate with nutcases?  Doesn't everyone understand this?  Or do we now need to argue whether Hugo Chavez, Kim Jung Il, and Ahmadinejad are nutcases?

So, will Obama negotiate with state sponsors of terrorism?  His answer: an unqualified YES.  Will he negotiate with the terrorists themselves?  His answer: a qualified NO.

Graphing the Political Blogosphere

PresidentialWatch08 has put together an appealing visualization of the political blogosphere that Russell in particular may also appreciate, given his interest in topology back in college.  Their map shows “297 most visible and influential websites and blogs - out of a complete dataset of over 2000 sites… .”. Each site’s influence is measured by link count among its fellow sites and is shown by size, with each sites political affiliation selected manually and shown by color.  The more links between sites, the more tightly they are drawn together, so communities should tend to cluster together on the map.  Doing a spot check, I generally agreed with how they chose to categorize major blogs and media outlets, though I might argue a few.  (For example, I’ve always found NPR, which they show in yellow, to slew to the left, and my sense is that the Wall Street Journal, which they show as pink, leans conservative in its editorial policy, but slews left in its news coverage.)

Their blog has details on how they built their map.

2008 Blockbuster 5 "The Happening"

For those uninterested in spoilers, here's my short review. This film kind of blows. Shyamalan's latest, a strange sort of morality tale that involves a silent killer stalking Mark Walhberg and Zooey Deschanel is dull, uninvolving, and kind of stilted. Despite the fact that I've liked all of Shyamalan's work, from the classic "The Sixth Sense" to the well-meaning-if-flawed "The Lady in the Water". This is the first to dip into "I just don't like that movie" territory. (FWIW, this is also the first Wahlberg film I haven't liked. Too bad. Marky Mark was on quite a streak there.)

Now, to truly review the film, I will spoil much of it here for you, now:

What's wrong with this movie? Well, pretty much everything.

The writing is, as I said above, stilted and kind of preachy. (More on that later.) There are a few nice lines, and a few real laughs, but nothing that really grabs you and puts you in the movie. As for the story, Shyamalan just loves Philadelphia. Fine. We get it. But does he have to set everything there? Even Stephen King stories wander out of Maine every once in a while. I think he hamstrings his own tale by locking it down in the northeast part of the country.

The direction is really disappointing. He's got a good cast (which also includes John Leguizamo and Betty Buckley) and only gets a couple of noteworthy performances from them. They seem to be in a zone of dazed acting, as if he wants the viewer to be more involved in the mechanics of the plague and less in the emotional connections between the characters. And the camerawork was totally pedestrian. I didn't get any of the wonderful stillness that inhabits his other films. It's like he wanted to amp up the tension with movement. Hey, Night. Watch your own previous films some time. That's tension. This is sound and fury.

As for the plague itself, it's just all kinds of stupid. Plants, after thousands of years of mistreatment by us mean humans, plan a coordinated attack, releasing toxins into the air. These toxins cause us to lose our minds and kill ourselves. Now, this is explained as a process by which our "self preservation" reflex is deactivated. But there's a long way from "I'm not going to save my own life" and "I'm going to actively end my life", which those who are affected do. In a variety of visually interesting (if not strictly logical) ways. So, strike one.

This is explained as an evolutionary event. Well, evolution is a process whereby minor changes to a species are selected for or against by natural selection. What does evolution have to do with this? Were there a thousand situations in the past where plants slowly learned which toxins had which effects on humans, and it wasn't until this day (at 8:33 AM) that they all (not just one species, mind you, ALL of them) learned how to do this? They simultaneously learned how to sense the presence of a large number of humans? They propigated this knowledge from Boston to Baltimore... but no further? They decided this was fun, and they just stopped a day later? So, strike two.

(On the scale in particular, it's just dumb. If this were a real, ecological event, it would either be much smaller, on the scale of a single field, say... or much larger, swamping the planet. This is where Shyamalan's fascination with Philly shoots him in the foot.)

Then, at the end of the film, this is all tied up in a nice little environmentalist bow. This wasn't a random event (which is precisely how evolution works, BTW). This happened because we have threatened the Earth, and the Earth is striking back. Okay, of all the junk science out there, this is the worst. Shyamalan thinks he's serving the environmentalist movement? He's setting it back ten years with ridiculous warnings of something that could simply never happen. There's at least an archeological record that shows the kind of stuff that happened in "The Day After Tomorrow". This is purest fantasy, and Shyamalan should have kept the story in that realm. Three strikes... you're out!

And, of course, there's the most predictable "shocker" ending ever. Totally hated it. A straw man conservative talk show host is pooh-poohing the dire warnings of the scientist that humanity is being attacked by nature, and he says he'd believe it, but only if it happened somewhere else. Cue the extras in Paris. Can I call a fourth strike?

Wow, the more I analyze this film, the more I see how much it suuuucks.

2008 Blockbuster 4 "The Incredible Hulk"

I, like everyone else who actually appreciates cinema, hated Ang Lee's "Hulk" from a few years ago. It was... what is the word... oh, yes... boring. Yes, Lee managed to make a film about a guy who spontaneously morphs into a huge, green, indestructible behemoth boring. Kudos.

Now with Marvel financing their own films (see "Iron Man"), they realized they need to reboot the Hulk, and reboot him fast. He's too big a name in the Marvel Universe to just ignore. Enter director Louis Leterrier (Transporter 2) and Edward Norton (he's an actor) and you get a new Hulk. It's so new, it's not even pretending to be a sequel.

In the opening minutes of the film, as the credit roll, we see glimpses of the origin story. Bruce Banner, with the help of his girlfriend Betty (Liv Tyler), experiments on himself with a gamma radiation therapy, and is transformed into The Hulk, to the horror of Betty's father, General Ross (William Hurt). If this doesn't sound familiar, it's because it's not. This was not the story of the original movie. This plays out as if it were clips from a previous film that was never made. I found that very enjoyable. (Sorry, Ang.)

What I enjoyed even more was the ways this movie pays homage to the TV series from the 70's. For example, Bruce's driving goal is to cure himself. This is partly because he hates being the Hulk, but also because he wants to get back together with Betty.

The actual antagonist of the film isn't really General Ross, but one of his soldiers, Emil Blonsky, played quite well by Tim Roth. Blonsky wants the power and invincibility of the Hulk for himself, and if you've seen any of the ads for this film, you know he gets his wish. The final match between Hulk and Abomination is surprisingly involving, considering it's a couple of CG characters.

I've got to hand it to Marvel for hitting the ground running with a second great comic book adaptation in as many month. Here's hoping they keep up the good work.

5 Non-Blockbusters

I had the opportunity to see several of the films at the Seattle International Film Festival (or SIFF for short) last week.

"Saving Grace" is a period piece starring Julianne Moore about the Baekeland family and their twisted lives. It was all very nicely shot and luxuriously appointed. It was just way to skeevy for my tastes.

"TBD (Nothing to Lose)" is a thriller from The Netherlands about a convicted murderer who escapes from his mental institution and goes on a quest to clear his name, not of all his convictions, just those he claims not to have committed. (He's got no quibble about the claim that he killed his father. His description of the crime in the opening moments of the film is hilarious.) As his escape begins to fall apart, he captures a hostage, a thirteen-year-old girl, and the rest of the film is a weird sort of road trip for these two characters. Sadly, even though I'm sure this was the whole point of the film, it took a huge left turn in the final minutes and left a very bad taste in my mouth. Hard for me to recommend this one.

"Garden Party" is a more traditional sort of American independent film. Imagine "Pulp Fiction", but the characters are smoking weed instead of doing heroin and coke, and there's WAY less blood. The set up is kind of similar: a collection of characters wanders around Hollywood, each following their own story arc (teenage girl flirts with the porn industry, middle-aged guy meets his dream girl, etc). They are all connected to each other, even if those connections take the audience a bit to learn. It was all pretty much okay, except for one small performance. I could have watched an entire movie about Ross Patterson's Joey Zane, a hyperactive record producer. He was killer. The rest was meh.

"About Water: People and Yellow Cans" is an Austrian documentary about (you guessed it) water. It's divided into three chapters. The first looks at the floods in Bangladesh and the crazy things the farmers there have to do to keep their lives "afloat". The second chapter shows what happens to the fishing town of Aralsk in Kazakhstan when the Aral Sea retreats and all that's left is desert. The third chapter dives into the poorest of the poor in Nairobi and the ways they buy, sell and use water. It's a little overlong, but quite fascinating nonetheless.

"Man on Wire" was easily my favorite of these films. Philippe Petit, in 1974, strung a cable between the two towers of the World Trade Center in New York. Then he spent 45 minutes performing a wirewalking act with no net. You might think that's not the stuff of an entire movie, but the interviews and the footage and the photographs and the insane energy of Petit himself make it all so very worthwhile. The film is both breathtaking and hilarious.