Category: Films and movies

Whether big-studio or independent, celluloid or digital, anything about movies

HOPE 6 videos

2600 Magazine has just posted an archive with 67 hours of talks originally given at HOPE 6 in 2006. They are available for purchase at DVD quality, of free viewing via YouTube at lower quality.

There is some seriously interesting stuff in here: Basics of Forensic Recovery, Binary Revolution Radio, Exploring Your World with Open Source GIS, GPS, and Google Maps, Keynote Address – Richard Stallman, Urban Exploring: Hacking the Physical World, and a lot more.

Note: many of these videos include bizarre and implausible conspiracy theory ideas.

“Chasing Ice”

I saw “Chasing Ice” with some Toronto350.org people tonight. The film has a lot of visual appeal and contains some useful information. It’s definitely worth seeing.

One interesting thing about it for me is what is suggests about human reasoning. From a scientific standpoint, all this photographic and videographic documentation of melting glaciers is probably less useful than RADAR images shot by satellites. Yet the process of collecting the videos and photos, and the human drama involved in the endeavour, seems to significantly increase the salience of the message for people. After the film ended, most of the people in the theatre were happy to sign the Toronto350.org divestment petition.

Emotional salience may be what we really need at this point. We’re at a moment in history where most people accept that the climate is changing in dangerous ways because of human activity, and that something should probably be done about it. The trick will be getting people, firms, and governments to do enough quickly enough to prevent the worst things that could happen.

The film will be playing at Toronto’s TIFF Lightbox until December 13th.