Category: Films and movies

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

iTunes 10.1.1 (4) bug

One really annoying bug exists in iTunes 10.1.1 (4). When you buy a track from the iTunes Store, it doesn’t go into Apple’s default ‘Recently Added’ smart playlist. This makes it so you have basically two different ‘inboxes’ for new songs, podcasts, etc. You need to remember whether you bought a song on iTunes, ripped it from a CD, or downloaded it as a free podcast, etc.

It would be better if songs you purchased appeared in ‘Recently Added’ along with everything else. It would be especially useful when traveling and listening to previously-downloaded podcasts.

House of Cards

House of Cards is a British television series available on Netflix.ca. It is like an evil version of Yes, Minister – documenting the functioning of British politics, but with a much darker and more brutal tone. For example, the Prime Minister uses the SAS to carry out assassinations which are blamed on the IRA; security personnel murder unarmed civilians with impunity; and extensive cover-ups are successfully undertaken.

It’s the sort of show political junkies might appreciate, though I think it is probably less true to life overall than its more light-hearted equivalent.

Mythbusters and animal products

I enjoy the show Mythbusters quite a bit. I like the contrasting personalities of the hosts, and I like the way they stress how the ultimate test of any theory is experiment. The constraints of a television show can somewhat restrain them, when it comes to being rigorous and showing their work, but it is obvious that there is more thinking (and math) that goes on in the background.

One aspect of the show I don’t fully approve of is their frequent use of animal products. They often use dead pigs as stand-ins for human beings, usually when testing myths about whether something would be deadly or not. They also use lard as a lubricant, and other animal products.

I don’t think it is always wrong for human beings to kill animals for their own purposes, but I do think there are many reasons to oppose factory farming and many reasons to use non-animal alternatives when possible. In that spirit, it seems to me that the Mythbusters could find analogues for human beings that didn’t have to be raised in the kind of conditions these pigs probably were. Also, it seems plausible that testing urban legends isn’t a sufficiently important purpose to justify the use of animal products, when there are reasonable alternatives available.

In the grand scheme of things, Mythbusters is a minute consumer of animal products. Fantastically larger quantities get consumed by human beings and other animals every day. That being said, the Mythbusters are role models within a certain community, and it might have a positive effect if they established a policy on the use of animal products that takes into account some of the ethical considerations involved.

Ballet announcers

It occurred to me that one reason why having an announcer is useful when watching a competitive sport being played is because it reduces how much you need to know and think in order to understand what is going on. Announcers describe things like the histories of particular players, the roles of people in each position, and strategies. This lets you enjoy the spectacle without remembering everything about it, and without having to exert excessive effort to understanding what is going on. That is particularly useful in complicated sports with lots of rules, like baseball and football. Sports obsessives may find it surprising, but I think ordinary people tire of remembering a million complicated rules (just as ordinary people probably tire of the numerous and often arbitrary rules of grammar adored by pedants).

It also occurred to me that there are sports that forego announcers, often at least partly because they clash with the sport’s aesthetic. Dancers, figure skaters, and ballet dancers are expected to be silent and make it look easy. Having announcers overlaid on top of them seems crass, and like it would detract from the art.

It could be an interesting performance piece, however, to overlay constant narration onto an athletic performance that usually lacks it. A ballet with hockey-style announcers might be more accessible to people who don’t know much about ballet and who don’t want to spend the whole show puzzling about what is going on (the same reason there are short summaries at the start of Shakespeare’s plays – perhaps modern novels should have those too).

Fun, and also educational

Here’s a question that I think a lot of Ottawa-area Anglophones would appreciate an answer to:

Are there any good French television shows or films available via Netflix streaming?

For one reason or another, a few of us could benefit from some revision and practice.

I think most people watch at least some television as a guilty pleasure (HBO doesn’t count as television, does it?). Maybe we could just do that in French and kill two birds with one stone – get in one’s vegging time, and maintain French language skills.

Jordan Peterson on psychology

As a lecturer, the University of Toronto’s Jordan Peterson is quite something. Yesterday, Tristan showed me videos of a couple of his lectures. One of them – The Necessity of Virtue – is available online.

One thing I found striking about the talks (which are mostly about psychology and ethics) is just how much we know about the brain, and how much we can reduce seemingly complex human behaviours and experiences to be predictable operation of certain brain structures. I had not previously realized the full importance of the hypothalamus. In one particularly grim example, Peterson explains that a cat stripped of almost all of its brain, but left with a spinal cord and a hypothalamus, will still behave much like an ordinary cat, except that it will be unusually likely to explore and unable to mate (if male).

What humanity is learning about the brain (which seems to produce the mind) seems likely to have considerable importance both for understanding the world in important ways and for deciding how to act in it. I will be adding Peterson’s Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief to my reading list, and may even be able to finagle a way to audit one of his courses if I do move to Toronto.

Heading home

Tonight, I saw the Coen brothers film True Grit and found it quite interesting and enjoyable. Hailee Steinfeld is very entertaining to listen to, and her character reminds me of Lyra from Philip Pullman’s ‘His Dark Materials’ trilogy. That said, the film did leave me wondering why a young woman of such premature sophistication would maintain such a simplistic attitude about the desirability of revenge. Seeing Jeff Bridges play a hardened ranger was amusing, though also a bit hard to swallow after having been frequently exposed to him as a pot smoking bowler / detective.

Tomorrow, I will be taking a Greyhound up to the border, across to Montreal, and home to Ottawa.

[Update: 29 December 2010] I was amused by this text message, which I received from Fido upon crossing the border into the United States:

Fido welcomes you abroad! Our Travel Packs help you save http://fido.ca/m/usa (data fees apply) Regular roaming rates: $1.45/min, $0.75/txt, data up to $0.03/kB

First, I found it funny that they use the term ‘abroad’ to refer the the almost trivially routine transit across the 49th parallel. Second, I found it curious that their chosen form of ‘welcome’ to a new place is exorbitant roaming rates.

Blackadder Goes Forth

The fourth season of the British comedy series Blackadder focuses on the first world war and the efforts of Rowan Atkinson’s character to avoid going over the top into the machine gun and artillery blast of no man’s land. His cynical view of the war is contrasted with the naive patriotism of the upper class twit portrayed by Hugh Laurie who – right until the last episode – has a kind of exaggerated cheerfulness that mocks superficial public support for war efforts.

All told, the series is a pretty convincing demonstration of the pointlessness of WWI and the dangers of unthinking nationalism and militarism. The entire season is available on Netflix.

Mythbusters

For the unfamiliar, Mythbusters is a television show in which a group of geeks test the validity of ‘myths’ about how the world works. Examples include whether poppy seeds can make a person fail a drug test, whether cell phones interfere with aircraft instruments, whether falling bullets can be lethal, etc.

While many of these questions can probably be answered with a reference text and as calculator, what distinguishes the show is how they set out to physically test the myths in question. Rather than just calculating how much helium it would take to lift one of them, they build a gigantic rig of 50 huge helium-filled tubes in a gigantic hanger.

In the past, I have been a bit bothered when they have done something physically that could have been very easily disproven with a bit of math. A little moment in an episode I saw yesterday changed my thinking a bit though. It was the demeanour of Adam Savage – one of the show’s two main hosts – when they were trying to make him buoyant in air by filling a small inflatable boat with helium. In the little clip, it is obvious that both he and Jamie Hyneman know perfectly well that the boat won’t have sufficient buoyancy. They do the physical test not because it is necessary, but because it illustrates their methodology.

As an XKCD comic points out, the lack of scientific rigour in some Mythbusters experiments is only a very minor basis for criticizing the show. It’s obvious that they put more thought into their trials than they have time to discuss on the show. For instance, testing the myth that Benjamin Franklin flew a kite in a thunderstorm with a key on the string, they mention in passing the use of an ‘authentic’ key. Furthermore, it seems clear that their major message is about the importance of empirical testing and verification, which is ultimately the best mechanism we have for making sure what we believe about the world is remotely accurate.

The show is a lot of fun, and I think it transmits some really important ideas about science. Their fondness for explosives certainly makes for enjoyable television. Furthermore, Kari Byron’s participation certainly doesn’t hurt the show’s entertainment value; she has to be one of the most attractive women in the entertainment industry, particularly when welding.