"Most user interfaces are terrible. When people make mistakes it's usually the fault of the interface. You've forgotten how many ways you've learned to adapt to bad interfaces."
- Grab the popcorn:
- Thirteen Days: Very good, accurate, and dramatic without being traumatic. The best of this bunch of movies.
- Finding Forrester: Much as one would expect, if you like this type of movie you will like this movie. It gets extra points for some nice scenes looking at the act of writing. On the frustrating side, more plot points are opened than closed. And I couldn't understand why a man who won't go outside wears so many coats. [Yes, I did that purposefully ;) ]
- Antitrust: Much better than I expected, given the bad reviews it's been getting. I found it fun and reasonable enough to satisfy most geeks. The smart kids were allowed to be smart, and didn't have to be cool or sexy or adventurous too. They didn't need "real" macho men to make their plans work. Besides, how can I not like a movie that creates climactic tension with websurfing? I can't imagine how Hackers got more positive reviews than Antitrust - I still can't believe I was dragged to that movie.
Monday Morning Simpsons Quote:
Not-Homer: "There's no air in space."
Homer: "There's an "Air 'n Space" museum."
Fuzzy Friends
Snow
Glow
Awww!: I saw the new baby elephant in the Seattle Zoo on the news the other night and it's absolutely adorable. The "falling in the bath tub" clip here is very cute. But if furry animals are more your style, you might want to visit the PandaCams of the new pandas at the National Zoo. [via Red Rock Eater]
Not an excuse for inaction: If you're going to protect and preserve the environment, what is your goal for the state of the environment?
...there is no "natural" state to return to. First, of course, all these systems have been evolving to respond to different conditions over geological time; there is no particular "base state". With human intervention, they have been further modified - and any attempt to "restore" them is, in effect, a further modification to suit human cultural and ideological norms. Difficult as it is to accept - there is no natural history any more; there is only human history. What these systems will be in the future is a human decision, a human choice. Having realized this, we cannot escape the ethical responsibility for that choice - what religion, what culture, what subgroups? The centrality of values and ethical choice to environmental decision making around the world is apparent.
[From Earth Systems Engineering and Management, Brad Allenby, IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, Vol. 19, No. 4]
Holly Bush
Photoshop is fun...
My friends aren't entirely lame: On the positive side, I was sent home with a copy of Evan Thomas's Robert Kennedy: His Life, which is turning out to be as well written as everyone has said it is.
Things keep getting weirder: I think it's very cool that astronomers can still look up to the stars and find unexpected things. Particularly when the unexpectedness relates to something as seemly simple as the orbital paths of planets.
"They are unique and frightening," the discovery team's leader, Dr. Geoffrey W. Marcy of the University of California at Berkeley, said of the newfound planetary systems. "We thought we understood the mass ranges of planets of other stars. We thought we understood the full diversity of planets."
[via Sigma Xi: In the News]
Roses
Monday's Simpsons Quote: "Oh, an effigy. Nothing burns like an effigy."
The Importance of Being Trivial: Lyn talks about whether "trivial" feminist issues, such as whether to shave one's legs, are really worth talking about or not in her latest All Too Cozy. Which resonated well with a passage I read in The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf the other day that looks at female focus on these types of details in a slightly different way:
Commiserating about the myth is as good as a baby to bring strange women into pleasant contact, and break down the line of Other Woman wariness. A wry smile about calories, a complaint about one's hair, can evaporate the sullen examination of a rival in the fluorescent light of a ladies' room. On one hand, women are trained to be competitors against all others for "beauty"; on the other, when one woman -- a bride, a shopper in a boutique -- needs to be adorned for a big occasion, other women swoop and bustle around her in generous concentration in a team formation as effortlessly choreographed as a football play. These sweet and satisfying rituals of being all on the same side, these all-too-infrequent celebrations of shared femaleness, are some of the few shared female rituals left; hence their loveliness and power.
Sometimes trivia is trivial: Forget the difficulties of picking and confirming a cabinet, and the effect on people's respect for the electoral system, clearly the crisis of the drawn-out election is that the Republican women didn't have enough time to get custom-made ball gowns. Some may even ... *gasp* ... wear off-the-rack dresses.
On the To-See List: A
couple of movies based on books that I liked are out, and are getting
decent reviews. The
House of Mirth was a great book and I've been surprised to hear that
people think Gillian Anderson managed to pull the role off. Chocolat
is getting more mixed reviews, and that one might go on the wait-for-video
list. It also wasn't as good a book.
Ways
To Leave Your Lover: Brunching Shuttlecock's ratings strike
again...
Slip Out The Back, Jack
I'm not entirely clear on the point of slipping out the back, as opposed to the front. Am I supposed to be afraid of the neighbors seeing me breaking up? Is the front door guarded by relationship-preserving rottweilers? Am I supposed to soften the blow by taking out the garbage? I suppose the furtiveness might appeal to those with an overactive sense of drama, but I say slip out whatever makes you comfortable. C
News Flash: Mathematicians perceived as geeky: Young people may be staying out of math because of their assumptions of what mathematicians are like.
"The average picture was of a scruffy person, probably with pens in his shirt pocket, holes in his clothes, and equations written on his arms."
...
Such people, according to one pupil cited in the study, are usually "bald, overweight, unmarried men who wear beards and glasses and lead little or no social life."
This is consistent
with other studies, such as those showing that the women who go into math
and science tend to have real life contact with people in those fields as
children, hence having models of mathematicians and scientists as real
people. Fortunately, I didn't form those images of mathematicians until after
I started my math degree... [via Sigma
Xi: In the News]
Goodnight Moon tree
Tracks in the snow
LEGO X-Wing
Cardboard clock kit
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