‘Lt. Uhura’ On How Rev. King Told Her To Stay On ‘Star Trek’
Via the Episcopal Café.
MLK and SF
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Tag Archives: movies
Minnesota Death Star
From Boing Boing
Bad Movie Physics: A Report Card
Illustration by Stephanie Fox. Research by Nivair Gabriel.
At io9, with an explanation of why Star Trek was not included.
Via Universe Today.
At Convergence this past July they showed Mission to Mars with a live running commentary by a Physics professor and a JPL Systems Engineer. It was hilarious.
Book Find
After being snowbound for 40 hours we were finally able to get out late Sunday morning. The first event: A family trip to a bookstore. There I found and bought a copy of The Big Con: The Story of the Confidence Man. I had read it decades ago, back in college or even high school. The author, David W. Maurer was a long time friend and colleague of my parents. When I saw The Sting a few years later I immediately noticed how closely it followed Maurer’s book and mentioned that to my father. Dad agreed, but that was done with without Maurer’s permission or any acknowledgement of his work. As noted here, a lawsuit followed.
After all these years, The Big Con still finds new fans, such as Cory Doctorow.
The Glorification of Noise
Somehow it has entered popular culture that people (normal adults, not undergoing torture or otherwise in pain) should want to
scream as loud they can, and indeed should pay for the opportunity to do in a crowd. See these images from the downtown Minneapolis Skyway:
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I find the idea of being in such environments to be absolutely terrifying. Every time I see one of these posters I get this urge to run off to a library, or maybe a monastery.
This seems to be part of a trend. Recall this story, which I linked to last summer (h/t jeff_duntemann).
I was going to add some dark musings about what this means for communication, society, and humanity, but I will leave these as exercises for the reader.
Hollywood and Facebook
Mark Zuckerberg’s Take on “The Social Network”
“We build products that 500 million people see… If 5 million people see a movie, it doesn’t really matter that much.”
Via Ann Althouse.
Not just me
Something bugging you about Twilight?
Fantasy before Reality
I stumbled on 5 Ancient Acts of War That Changed the Face of the Earth. The history is accurate, though the style and vocabulary are …. not what I used when writing papers for History 10 at Carleton 40 years ago. Also interesting are the parallels used to describe historical events. Mildly NSFW language behind cut
From Hilbert Space to Dilbert Space, and beyond 