New Blog

J just emailed me the URL of a blogger he thought I'd enjoy, presumably because my last post said I enjoyed reading "finding the sacred in the secular" books. The blog's called Video Ut Intellectum. His translation of the title is listed as "Video ut intellectum: "I see (movies) so that I may understand."" I like that. That's exactly why I go to the movies too! At some point, I started quasi-worshipping at the movie theater, as well as the comic bookstore, and I can't seem to approach it any differently anymore. I look forward to reading some of this guy's blog.

Two "Comic Book" Books I want

I am really, personally, fascinated by and interested in the sub-genre within Christian popular Christian writings that posits there are marks of people's interest in the sacred spread everywhere in popular culture. Here are two new books that I want to get. The first is entitled Holy Superheroes: Exploring the Sacred in Graphic Novels, Comics and Film by Greg Garrett. The second is entitled The Gospel According to Superheroes: Religion and Popular Culture by B.J. Oropeza, with a forward by Stan Lee (interesting...). My favorite book of all this sub-genre is Robert Johnston's Reel Spirituality: Theology and Film in Dialogue. That's the high water mark, in my opinion, for this kind of Christian cultural writing. He does a really awesome job of taking movies, and popular movies especially, seriously, and the chapters that detail the Church's checkered history with Hollywood is really interesting. I especially appreciated his adaptation of Niebuhr's "Christ and Culture" taxonomy, because it helped me get a handle on the possible options Christians can have to movies, in general. There are so many of these books,t hough, that it's hard to read even a fraction of them, but this is the first I've seen on comic books, which I'm guessing is partly a sign of the concentration of superhero films in Hollywood right now.

Blinding You With Science

A few years ago, a physicist ran a hoax in an academic journal in which he published gobbley-gook postmodern speak, all of which was total nonsense, then got it published, only to then turn around and publish in a competing journal his letter saying it was total crap, and the joke was on the editors and the audience for buying it. It was basically an indictment of the crap that came out of english lit departments everywhere (and honestly, what ultimately caused me to major in economics, having spent 4 long years frustrated as an english major). Now the scientist has a new book out called Beyond the Hoax, which appears to be a book about both the hoax itself, the response to it, and more generally, the philosophy of science and science itself. Science, he argues, is not merely another way of knowing - while that is of course true. Science is theory-laden, but it's also required to be falsifiable which, to me, turns out to be really important for swatting the stupidity down. It's also why I think you see much less of the "schools of thought" stuff in the sciences than you do in the humanities. I mean, if the theory's not falsifiable and therefore non-empirical, you can't actually prove the other school's wrong. Heck, you can't even prove that your own views are wrong. They're held a priori as faith assumptions, presuppositions, and are basically invulnerable to criticism.

This isn't totally the same thing, but I was telling J last night that I get a little frustrated and impatient with theologians who criticize the market process, while simultaneously putting forth their own extremely naive "scientific" theories how market transactions alter the psychology of a person, somehow tricking them into being more selfish or something. I end up feeling like the spoil sport for pointing out that this is technically a hypothesis, and that it should be tested empirically and rigorously, because on the one hand, they're theologians and aren't trained to do empirical work (the one person I'm thinking of was really content to quote anecdotal conversations as "evidence" for instance) but on the other hand, they're arguing with such anger and intensity. It leaves very little common ground if you don't share their preferences for certain values, or certain social arrangements, if the theories cannot be required to meet empirical tests for validity. But of course, this is nothing compared to the kinds of things that wage in the literature departments - which totally starts to feel like some elaborate linguistic game.

Update: There's a great lukewarm review of the book at Amazon that you should read, that calls into question just how relevant the hoax really was, since there's no detection of the infiltration of deconstructionism within theoretical physics. I never took the hoax as being that, though. I always thought it was an attempt to externally attack certain postmodern literary theories, and not defensive. This is an interesting comment, though.

Alien

I'm personally amazed that this story is even getting any press, let alone the amount of press it's gotten. The guy claims he has a 2 minute video of an alien looking into his bedroom, and let some reporters view it. He is withholding the rest of the film, though, because he's making a documentary out of it. Still, come on. A grainy video of an alien looking into a room at night? Seriously, that should carry as much weight as a verbal report. Until an alien is caught and examined in a transparent way, these are just stories. Plus, I agree with Cowen that with the increase in amateur astronomy, there should be just countless of these reports by that specific group - that group more than anyone else, too - but there's nothing so far.

Wiffle Hurling

It's Kottke day at Scientific Pornography. Since my readers mostly read Kottke, this won't be new. Nevertheless, I was really intrigued by this new sport created two years ago called wiffle hurling. It uses the wiffle ball and bat as it's primary pieces, but is played like soccer. You appear to have to dribble the ball on your bat to move with the ball. You can also pass by hitting it. You can pick the ball up with your hand, but I think to have it leave your body, it has to be hurled with the wiffle bat. Anyway, it looks fun, and it seems like the kind of thing you could easily get your youth group to do. Church youth groups seem to be the early adopters of all things related to weird games.

Kamen's Robot Arm

Dean Kamen is so amazing. He's a modern Thomas Edison, I think. His inventions seem to have such practical human welfare value. Not that pure science isn't full of welfare - Kamen stands on the shoulders of pure scientists whose theoretical work, they may have thought, didn't obviously have any practical value. Kamen's latest is a robotic arm for amputees that has incredible dexterity and is light-weight, and in this clip, explains all that it can do, plus shows it in action. It's very encouraging and exciting. (ht to jk again).

Uncanny Valley in Star Wars

The above graph shows graphically the uncanny valley hypothesis, which has its roots in Freud, Jentsch and a Japanese roboticist named Masahiro Mori. The concept of the uncanny was a Freudian idea in which something was simultaneously familiar and repulsive, but in the early 20th century, I'm sure it was limited to fairly abstract things found in dreams or literature. By the late 20th century, with technological advances in robots and animation, as well as the growing popularity of science fiction, we began moving further up the "uncanny valley" curve, but still on the positive slope. With the real breakthroughs in animation in the late 1990s and 21st century, it seems like we plummeted. I remember first feeling something weird when seeing a trailer for a movie based on a popular video game. The animation artists had gotten a realistic animated human being, but it was very uncanny in the Freudian sense - I felt a little grossed out. I especially felt it when I saw The Polar Express, and it was with that movie's release that I started to see a ton about the "uncanny valley hypothesis." Without further ado, I present to you a 1 minute explanation of the hypothesis from 30 Rock (ht to jk). Very funny.

Seriously, though, I think our comic book artists and science fiction writers seriously underestimated the degree to which this is really a problem. What's really bizarre is that most likely, older science fiction movies which had primitive technology probably could represent transhumanoids in a way that was aesthetically superior, simply because they couldn't get so close to accuracy as to actually fall into the valley. Furthermore, you know how everyone always criticizes Barbie because her dimensions are so horrible? For instance, I think if she were proportional, then Barbie would be some kind of giant woman with huge boobs. But, what if it the reason children can play with Barbie is because of the uncanny valley hypothesis? That is, in order for the doll to even be playable, it must be to the left of the valley, which necessarily means distorting the image. Sort of flips the idea that we're giving false body image to our children when you think about that.



Update: At the end of the wikipedia article, they note several roboticists who say the hypothesis is pseudoscientific. I don't see how it could be "pseudoscientific", but it's entirely possible that we've falsified the hypothesis. But it's obviously scientific in the sense that it has testable predictions. We need only to agree upon (for example) a sequence of robots the move closer and closer to human likeness, show them to a random sample of people, and try to test their reactions against some control group. If they experience some significant increase in "repulsion," however we measure it, then we've been unable to reject the hypothesis of "no effect," so to speak. So in my mind, it does seem scientific. But what I suspect they mean is that the evidence for the phenomenon's existence is maybe weak. I've not seen any psychologists study it, so who knows, but apparently the film industry takes it seriously because of negative audience reaction to an old Pixar short that had an animated baby.

Hamlet 2

J pointed me to an article on red band trailers, that is itself worth your time (which if J and Matt are my only readers, this is directed to you, Matt). Then I found something in the article about a new movie coming out called Hamlet 2. It's from one of the writers of the Southpark movie, so I guess I can't be surprised by some what I'm seeing that is going on in the movie, but it looks really funny. Here's the green band trailer



Here's the red band version which is identical except for some f-bombs and ecstacy.

Red Band Trailers

J beat me to the punch. About two hours ago, I was on I Watch Stuff when I caught this post of the new Coen Brothers movie, Burn After Reading. I was just about to post the trailer on my blog, when I decide to run over to J's house and what do I see buy him posting the trailer. Fine. He can have it. For now. But since he asks the question as to why we're now seeing the red band R-rated trailers all the time, whereas in 2007 they showed up rarely, I kept thinking about it and wanted to venture a guess. I think it's the Internet [ed: you're a genius. Of course it's the Internet you idiot]. In the old days, the only showing for the trailers was in the theater, and so they had to make trailers that were green-band so as to not offend. With the Internet, though, they can effectively red band trailers, release them onto youtube or some other outlet, and let people self-select into watching them, thus avoiding the earlier problem of offending or enraging film viewers who didn't come into see Brad Pitt drop an f-bomb in a commercial.

But then that's kind of funny, isn't it, because what if they were coming to see a movie that had f-bombs? Presumably they wouldn't offend that crowd by showing red band trailers, would they? Hmmm. Good point. I don't know the answer to that one. I suspect part of it, too, was just the popularity of the earlier Knocked Up red band international trailer, (which was the first time I saw red band trailer), and the subsequent success of that film. In other words, their rising popularity is two things: (1) Judd Apatow's successful tender-yet-filthy-comedies formula, which used red bands to market and (2) a distribution network that would let you get these trailers out there (ie, internet) without having to impose the ads on people who don't want to see them (ie, self-selection).

Ebert Gives The Strangers 1.5 stars

You can see for yourself.

It was a terrifying trailer, we have to give it that, but in the back of my mind, I did wonder if they could pull it off. Sounds like they couldn't. But read Ebert's review, because it sounds like a little more complicated than his 1.5 stars suggests. The director, he says, can obviously direct, and it is a competent movie, with an excellent first act, but just explodes and dies in the third act into a "maddening, nihilistic, infuriating ending."

Ebert's best and most insightful writing is oftentimes in his bad reviews, but I can't figure out why this movie is so bad. The wikipedia entry is also very thin. Since I'll never see it, I wish I could find a good plot description, but it'll probably be a while til the wikipedia community gets someone to go see it and report.

Identity 2.0

I was trying to find a youtube of Lessig presenting so that I could see his style of Keynote presentation, and found this really great presentation on digital identity. Very insightful and interesting stuff. The aesthetic of the presentation itself, though, is phenomenal. He's speaking very fast, but almost his entire speech is in the presentation with only one or two words, or an image for the phrase, shown at a time. They move rapidly through making it almost like a cartoon with its moving images to create the appearance of movement, but it's not conveying movement so much as it's just enabling you to better understand a complex argument. I'll have to think about whether I could pull this off.

Lessig Style

I've seen several articles before (too lazy to dig them up) on Lessig's Keynote presentations. I think they're very minimalistic if I remember correctly with a black background. One physicist breaks them down for us and offers his own tweaking for considerations.

Lessig 2.0

Lawrence Lessig is changing from legal advocate for copyright reform to Congressional reform. As Cowen said, this is probably futile, but inspiring nonetheless. The Nation discusses what the move is about and offers some interpretations as to why it's happening. Some of it seems due to losing fight after fight on copyright, which according to people more studied on it, is a no-brainer. According to the article, Milton Friedman once said that applying copyrights retroactively was a no-brainer. Posner says, quoted in the article, that Lessig losing at the Supreme Court level on repealing the Sonny Bono Act was devastating for him because, in his mind, it was such a small dunk given the clarity of the Constitution's language about "limited" copyrights. Lessig's view is that the money in Congress has such a corrosive effect that it makes Congress get wrong even the easy cases - the ones that are so obviously right. Now he is intent on attacking the problem at its core, because the problem affects not only copyright and intellectual property issues, but even issues broader than that.

"It's the same dynamic with a host of issues, from the farm bill to the role of contractors in Iraq to an issue Lessig calls "the most profound" we face: global warming. There, the scientific consensus is absolute, the stakes dire and yet action has been routinely thwarted by a coterie of corporations that have a monumental monetary interest in the status quo. "Really, who cares about Mickey Mouse," Lessig told me over dinner the night before his talk. "But if we can't get global warming right? An easy question as fundamental as global warming? Then we're really fucked."

But then the article kind of gets more biographical, which I really enjoyed. I enjoy learning about Lessig - he's an inspiring person because of his passion, commitment and intelligence. Here is a nice little piece about him. I can just imagine Posner walking into this apartment - that itself is kind of funny.

At 46, Lessig has a boyish face, vaguely reminiscent of Harry Potter. He engages each question with a pursed, furrowed look of absolute concentration before unfurling an alarmingly coherent answer, often beginning sentences with the word "so," which makes it feel like you're encountering him mid-thought and need to catch up. "There's something kind of monkish about him, or austere," Posner told me. "When he taught at Chicago he had an apartment that was extraordinarily bare, like a monk's cell." Lessig is kind of an "ice-capped volcano," says Posner--his chilly exterior covers a passionate zeal. "He works harder than anybody I have ever met," says Lessig's good friend Alex Whiting. "It's unbelievable."

Google Android

No price point, but very pretty. If the price is low b/c of some kind of google ad subsidies, I'm going to freak.

The Social Benefits of Video Games

We hear a lot about plausibly serious harm done to youth who excessively play video games, particularly violent video games. We also think there's probably something wrong with the amount of time some games encourage. To do extraordinarily well in World of Warcraft, a gamer has to spend probably 50-70 hours a week for several weeks, even months. That's an expensive hobby to say the least in terms of opportunity costs. Which is why this article is kind of interesting (pdf warning). Speaking to one gamer who has attained the level of "e-famous" within the WoW, Tom Chatfield writes:

"[A] recent article in the Harvard Business Review, billed under the line "The best sign that someone's qualified to run an internet startup may not be an MBA degree, but level 70 guild leader status." Is there anything to this? "Absolutely," he says, "but if you tried to argue that within the traditional business market you would get laughed out of the interview." How, then, does he explain his willingness to invest so much in something that has little value for his career? He disputes this claim. "In Warcraft I've developed confidence; a lack of fear about entering difficult situations; I've enhanced my presentation skills and debating. Then there are more subtle things: judging people's intentions from conversations, learning to tell people what they want to hear. I am certainly more manipulative, more Machiavellian. I love being in charge of a group of people, leading them to succeed in a task."

Of course, I know some people who would interpret that second-to-the-last-sentence negatively [ed: do we really want people to be more Machiavellian?], but I think there's clearly something to be said that success in the real world does require at least some degree of rationality and competitiveness. I'm still reading it now, so may update this post later.

When Were We Freer?

This list of libertarian heresies by Tyler Cowen is really interesting. He gave this as keynote speaker at the IHS, and listed what he called "5 libertarian heresies." The first one is struck me as probably right:

First, he made a cogent case for the idea that we (in the developed world, at least) are freer now than we were in the past, and that it’s unwise for libertarians to look back on any particular era as some sort of libertarian elysium. If government was small way back when, in large part it was because everything was small. There is a tendency among some libertarians to argue for the future by going back to a past that did not exist; Cowen exposed this tendency very effectively.

So if libertarians are always looking to the past as an ideal, but we're freer now than ever, then why do they do that? I think there's a strong backwards and forward-looking tendency with a lot of social ideologies, both religious and secular. Not sure why, but I know someone who I bet has a few ideas.

HIs second idea is also interesting, and reminded me something that J said yesterday when he described what "development" meant:

I've got some quibbles with Easterly, but talking to individuals who are unfamiliar with development work about its aims I've found that one of the most basic and useful definitions of development is "moving people from a life of many hardships and few choices to one of satisfied needs and many choices." Moving from point A to point B is often a long and winding road, one down which I think you occasionally do need an "expert" to guide you along the particularly dark spots, but its hard to argue that the power to "figure out their own answers," the power of choice, isn't vastly more important than innumerable $4-million reports.

In Cowen's words, he argues for something he calls "positive liberty," which he described like this: "People should be able to do certain things, and the most successful society is one where the most people can do the most things. Then - and this is where there was an audible gasp around the room - he argued that roughly 70% of the liberties worth having fall into this ‘ability’ version of positive liberty.

Cowen also thinks the interest we have in inequality, as itself an intrinsic bad, is a "categorical mistake." If it's not a categorical mistake (it may not be), I suspect it's not nearly as problematic as we believe. Robert Frank thinks that inequality creates its own kind of winner-take-all inefficiencies, so I leave that possibility (which I'm sure Cowen has thought a lot about), but even with it, I think absolute poverty is much, much worse - by orders of magnitudes worse - than relative poverty.

Finally, the writer who summarizes Cowen's talk says Cowen ended with the following thought experiment, which I know is taken very seriously by Christian churches concerned about the effect of the market process on communities:

He then asked, somewhat rhetorically, if liberty was confined (and defined) by culture: ‘We should not presume that our values are as universal as we often think they are’. What happens, he asked rhetorically, if - in order to enjoy the benefits of liberty and prosperity - societies have to undergo a major cultural transformation, including the loss of many appealing values? Cowen focussed on Russian loyalty and friendship, but there are potentially many others. Think, for example, of the extended family so privileged throughout the Islamic world, or the communitarian values common in many indigenous societies.

JJ Abrams Discusses the Importance of "Mystery Boxes"

Dennett Explains Dangerous Memes

Robert Murdoch Predicts Obama

Murdoch predicts a Democratic landslide. I agree, and for all the reasons he notes: McCain's weaknesses seem far worse than Obama's to his own party, plus with it being a recession year and food and energy prices rising, I can't see how an incumbent can survive.

Ebert Reviews "Ironman"

Good to see that Ebert loved Ironman as much as me and J. did. Strangely, since he reviewed it in his journal, he didn't appear to give it a star rating, but his enthusiasm is similar to that which he showered on Spider-man 2 (4 stars), Superman (the original - 4 stars), Batman Begins (4 stars), and The Incredibles (3.5 stars). I'm guessing his review is functionally equivalent to a 4-star review, but maybe he'll update his page later and tell us outright. In my own opinion, I think Spiderman 2, Batman Begins and Ironman really hit the high bar for the comic book-inspired superhero cinematic version. I'll have to give some thought as to what makes each of them so good and so valuable later. Here's a good last closing part by Ebert on Ironman in the meantime:

That leaves us, however, with a fundamental question at the bottom of the story: Why must the ultimate weapon be humanoid in appearance? Why must it have two arms and two legs, and why does it matter if its face is scowling? In the real-world competitions between fighting machines, all the elements of design are based entirely on questions of how well they allow the machines to attack, defend, recover, stay upright, and overturn their enemies. It is irrelevant whether they have conventional eyes, or whether those eyes narrow. Nor does it matter whether they have noses, because their oxygen supply is obviously not obtained by breathing.

The solution to such dilemmas is that the armored suits look the way they do for entirely cinematic reasons. The bad iron man should look like a mean machine. The good iron man should utilize the racing colors of Tony Stark's favorite sports cars. It wouldn't be nearly as much fun to see a fight scene between two refrigerators crossed with the leftovers from a boiler room.

At the end of the day it 's Robert Downey Jr. who powers the lift-off separating this from most other superhero movies. You hire an actor for his strengths, and Downey would not be strong as a one-dimensional mighty-man. He is strong because he is smart, quick and funny, and because we sense his public persona masks deep private wounds. By building on that, Favreau found his movie, and it's a good one.

Ebert Reviews "Lars and the Real Girl"

Spoiler Alert

He gave it 3 1/2 stars out of 4. This paragraph kind of summarizes the basic plot, though it's much more this and in the end, not really even remotely as bizarre as this sounds too.

One day a co-worker at the office, surfing Internet porn, shows Lars a life-size vinyl love doll that can be order customized to specifications. A few weeks later, a packing crate is delivered to Lars, and soon his brother and sister-in-law are introduced to the doll. She is, they learn, named Bianca. She is a paraplegic missionary, of Brazilian and Danish blood, and Lars takes her everywhere in a wheelchair. He has an explanation for everything, including why she doesn't talk or eat.

The real plot is summarized in the next paragraph I'll quote - the story about Bianca is more a background to what is the real story. The real story is that Lars lives in a community who love him. They love him in such a radical way that they'll not only pretend Bianca is real, but they'll love Bianca as much as Lars does. There are scenes that made me cry and made me laugh til my side hurt. In one, Lars and Bianca get into their first argument (Bianca, of course, doesn't say anything we can hear, but Lars gets a mouthful it sounds like). Bianca had been out around town with the girls - getting her hair done, going to the library to read books to the kids (she is literally propped up, when Lars is not even there, in her wheelchair, holding a book open, and a recording reads the book while the kids hang on its every word). Lars thought that he and Bianca had a date to play scrabble that evening, but Lars's sister-in-law informs him that in fact Bianca had other plans, and that the schedule was posted on the fridge. This sends Lars into a conniption, after which he chews Bianca out, saying he doesn't feel like he needs to consult his girlfriend's schedule to play scrabble, and that he cannot believe that with 10 girls around him all day, not one of them could've made a phone call to Lars to tell him what was going on (!). It's all played completely straight, and actually feels like a real fight. Not a bizarre fight, either. The hilarious part is when the older women takes Bianca to her car, and then gives Lars a piece of her mind, telling Lars he shouldn't talk to Bianca that way, and that Bianca has her own life to lead, and that it's not right that she should be waiting for him while he works all day. To which, of course, Lars is completely speechless and realizing that he really can't say much about that, but yet still obviously mad. It's the sweetest thing to watch - sweet primarily, like I'm saying, because of how tender, how genuinely caring, this community is for Lars. They love Lars so much that they'll do things with Bianca. It's quite amazing, really. If ever you have wondered, "How do I love someone? How do I love this person who is so unloveable?" I recommend you watch this movie and then rewatch it, and then watch it again. This is how you love someone, anyone, everyone. Of these people, Ebert writes:

"The miracle in the plot is that the people of Lars' community arrive at an unspoken agreement to treat Bianca with the same courtesy that Lars does. This is partly because they have long and sadly watched Lars closing into himself and are moved by his attempt to break free. The film, directed by Craig Gillespie and written by Nancy Oliver ("Six Feet Under"), wisely never goes for even one moment that could be interpreted as smutty or mocking. There are, to be sure, some moments of humor; you can't take a love doll everywhere without inspiring double-takes. And Gus sometimes blurts out the real-world truths we are also thinking."

"Excel"

While doing a search through a pdf for the word "Excel," the first word that came up was "excellence," and it suddenly dawned on me - Excel (now a brand with its own meaning) was once short for excellence.

Lost!

Juliet Lapidos at Slate writes that it's strange how everyone has been saying what a complex narrative structure Lost has had, because in her opinion, it's not until this season (season 4) that it actually became that. I don't agree that the others weren't that, but it's a matter of degree because I agree that this fourth season is the best. My mind is just blown by what they've been able to do. Which reminds me of something. How often do I still occasionally hear someone complain that a movie or show was complicated and hard to follow? Every now and then to be sure, but usually when I see the show/movie in question, I can't see what they're talking about. Now it seems like every show or movie I watch has some non-linear complex narrative structure. I want to say this starts with Pulp Fiction, which was itself heavily a reference to Sergio Leone's classic, Once Upon a Time in America, both of which are highly nonlinear.

I don't really agree with a lot of her interpretation of the earlier episodes. For instance, the writers "dabbled in postcolonial theory, pitting the attractive, tank-top-clad plane crash survivors against island natives, an unkempt group in flannel and polyester called "the Others."" That seems like a weak interpretation to me. But I do agree the earlier seasons were more dabbling with theory in general. The first season seemed to drop into economic and political philosophies a lot, for instance, as well as overt religious themes involving sin, redemption, predestination and purgatory. That has almost disappeared in the fourth season, as has the previous discussions about politics, economics and social contract theory. The nature of society, for instance, seems to really be off the table as we dig deeper into what the island is and does. It feels less and less like a metaphor and more and more concrete and specific to the show. The show is also as suspenseful as it was in the first season. I'm not one of these that sees seasons 2 and 3 as flawed because they were less of that, because I think of those as chapters needing to establish facts about the island's history and its characters. But, nevertheless, I agree with Juliet (nice name) that this is the best season yet. I agree with her about how well they're handling the flash forwards, too. She writes:

Did the other crash survivors die? Are they stuck as they were before? Or have they managed to escape off-camera? Without these vital plot points, viewers don't know whether to think of the Oceanic Six as heroes or as Judases who have somehow betrayed their comrades."

This is what makes the flash forwards so interesting. Not to overuse a cliche, but they really are like jigsaw puzzle pieces. We cannot understand what these flash forwards mean because we don't know what happened, and so each flash forward we're shown has on so many different potential possibilities. Just to name one. Is Sayid, who is working with Ben to assassinate members of Charles Widmore's corporation, working with the other Oceanic Six, or are they all scattered and disorganized? It may seem like a small question, but actually knowing whether they're working together turns out is pretty crucial because we can't tell if the other Oceanic Six are moving on with their lives, or if they are conspiring. Is Jack independently trying to return to the island (as suggested in the season finale of season 3)? Is Sun's takeover of her father's corporation revenge or part of a plot concocted by the Oceanic Six to take on the Widmore Corporation? We're shown little set pieces that work coherently as "getting on with our lives/post-Island" stories, but which I suspect are unified by some larger plot on the part of the Island survivors.

Tonight, season finale. Tomorrow, watching it with J, H and P assuming my computer isn't broken.

Lars and the Real Girl (4 out of 4 stars)

... is a perfect movie. And Ryan Gosling, who's been steadily rising in my opinion, really shot to the top of the pack. The movie is the best I've ever seen on mental illness, and perhaps is such by being so humane and tender in its portrayal of a mentally ill man living in a community of friends who deeply love him. My wife also said it was the best movie she'd ever seen. Probably an overstatement on both our parts, but it was really great.

Mankiw makes the case for trade

Mankiw points to an Robert Driskill, an economist at Vanderbilt, which calls into question economists support for free trade. Mankiw then lays out a few reasons why economists still support trade on brief philosophical grounds.

I will say that his point about progressive taxes and redistribution is pretty much the reason I feel like supporting normatively trade. There are losers to free trade, as well as winners. We talk about general social welfare functions sometimes, but at the individual or household level, when trade causes domestic prices to fall, those industries who produce in the now less profitable industry go through changes. Capital markets seem to move much more quickly than do labor markets, and capital and labor markets seem to highlight a lot of the income disparities in the country today. The wealthiest Americans own most of the capital, and are also usually in occupations that are harmed less by trade. The poorest Americans have the least education, the least wealth, and are in industries now being outdated by globalization (for instance, the automotives). We can see very plainly that the gains to the winners are more than the losses to the losers, and theoretically could transfer income gained to that lost, and would still end up ahead. But, that never happens, which is why it seems to me more ethical to support some kind of progressive income tax scheme combined with a larger social security system that aids the least well off in the society. Call it Rawls' "veil of ignorance," but I figure that's what'd I would want if I were to suddenly wake up poor and uneducated, at mimimum.

Check out what happens when you put a cellphone in the microwave

Colbert Interviews Philip Zimbardo

Great interview by Colbert. There are two things discussed in the interview, maybe three: what is legitimate authority and under what conditions should we submit to authority, and secondly, why did Lucifer fall from grace? Amazingly, Colbert defends with incredible strength the orthodox position of Lucifer's fault in that ancient conflict, causing Zimbardo to say, "Wow. You really learned a lot from Sunday School," to which Colbert said, "I teach Sunday School, mother f***er!" which got of course a huge laugh and smiles. Colbert actually does teach Sunday School, too.

This guy Zimbardo is describing research that sounds an awful lot like an old 1960s experiment, but I'm too lazy to look it up. Maybe it's the same guy. The project found that when put in positions of authority, regular students playing the role of prison guards immediately because abusive towards the prisoners. I'd never heard that it turned into sexual abuse, though, because in that original study, the experiment was discontinued after about a day because of the physical abuse towards the prisoners (also college students). But, it sounds nearly identical, so maybe Zimbardo is the same psychologist, or maybe he's describing that old study in his book, The Lucifer Effect.

Update: MP tells me it was him. I was going to say, too, but didn't, that these very old, well-known experiments in psychology and sociology probably need careful scrutiny before we accept them wholesale. And it sounds like some replications have case some doubt. Doesn't mean it's settled, though.

Homo-eroticism in He-Man

Oh, this is a genius post by Sam Anderson (ht to jk) about rewatching He-man after a 25 year hiatus. He writes, "The show, it turns out, is not quite the singular artistic triumph I once thought it was." His analysis of the not-so-subtle homoerotic overtones of the show is brilliant.

"The best part about rewatching He-Man, after the initial nostalgia-burst, was tracking the show's hilarious accidental homo-eroticism—an aspect I missed completely as a first-grader. In the ever-growing lineup of "outed" classic superheroes, He-Man might be the easiest target of all. It's almost too easy: Prince Adam, He-Man's alter ego, is a ripped Nordic pageboy with blinding teeth and sharply waxed eyebrows who spends lazy afternoons pampering his timid pet cat; he wears lavender stretch pants, furry purple Ugg boots, and a sleeveless pink blouse that clings like saran wrap to his pecs. To become He-Man, Adam harnesses what he calls "fabulous secret powers": His clothes fall off, his voice drops a full octave, his skin turns from vanilla to nut brown, his giant sword starts gushing energy, and he adopts a name so absurdly masculine it's redundant. Next, he typically runs around seizing space-wands with glowing knobs and fabulously straddling giant rockets. He hangs out with people called Fisto and Ram Man, and they all exchange wink-wink nudge-nudge dialogue: "I'd like to hear more about this hooded seed-man of yours!" "I feel the bony finger of Skeletor!" "Your assistance is required on Snake Mountain!" Once you start thinking along these lines, it's impossible to stop. (Clearly, others have had the same idea.) It's a prime example of how easily an extreme fantasy of masculinity can circle back to become its opposite.

Kindle Price Falls

Both J and Kottke report the $40 drop on Amazon's Kindle. Kottke thinks sales aren't so good, which is possible:

That can't be a good sign, especially since, as Jason noted, the Kindle just recently came back into stock on Amazon.

Not that I want to be like the kid with a hammer to whom everything seems like a nail, but maybe this is just price discrimination. Early adopters have a higher willingness to pay, and so it's rational for monopolistic producers to try and segment the market and charge different prices based on those differences in demand. One easy way to do it is to release the good in stages with incrementally lower prices, and those with the highest discount rate in terms of needing the product sooner than later will pay the higher price, whereas those more patient and/or with a lower willingness to pay will wait. Win-win-win as Michael Scott would say.

Of course, it's also entirely possible that sales are slow, and really, sluggish sales are consistent with price discrimination, since it'd seem like the producer would realize he's extracting all the producer surplus he can from a price point when sales flatten. But, I think Jason's point is more that it's pretty soon to already be lowering the price, given how recently the Kindle rolled out and given that they just restocked the shelves.

Flying Fish in Flight: World Record (00:45)

According to Wikipedia, this Japanese film of a flying fish in flight is possibly the world record for recorded flight for a flying fish. It appears to fly for around 45 seconds, according to the article. I remember being a kid and thinking flying fish were incredible, and I still feel that way.

De-Emphasis on Race and Culture in Adoptions Changing

From the NYT, discussions about amending the Multiethnic Amendment Act be altered to allow caseworkers more latitude in considering race and culture in making placements with families. I was not familiar with studies, which are mentioned in the article, that found cross-race adoption placements were on average worse for the child, but this quote was illuminating of what it's like for the adoptee:

Many transracial adoptees say they struggle to fit in among their own family members. Shannon Gibney, 33, a writer in Minneapolis who describes herself as biracial, was adopted by a white couple who tried their best by providing things like books by black authors.

“But having books and other things about blacks is no substitute for actual experience,” Ms. Gibney said. “When I had questions about even little things like how to wear my hair, there was no one around to help me with my questions.”

I think Becker's work on the family and marriage discusses interracial marriage, and largely predicts interracial marriages will be less stable than same-race marriages. I only remember seeing that in passing and haven't studied it myself, though, but if true would not surprise me to learn it held for parent-child, too.

100 Oldest URLs

Just saw this on a poker website: 100 Oldest URLs. I had no idea people were snatching these URLs up back in 1985. A nice piece of history is in this list. A lot of tech companies in the list: xerox, sun, ibm, for instance. Microsoft isn't on here, highlighting their complete missing of the Internet during the 1990s I think. Some of these are a little speculative, though - marble.com and toad.com?

(Hey J - check out the one tied for 50, third from the last, which beat out Apple by a couple of months!).

Anne Lamott on Stephen Colbert

Be Still my Beating Geek Heart

Have I ever wanted to be a movie to be as good as I want this movie to be great? Of course, I also wanted to have mutant powers from 9-12 (any would do), and didn't get those despite numerous prayers and pleas. So I'm thinking that the chance that the greatest comic book ever written (even considered one of the greatest novels by some, into which company I'd place myself) can be successfully told on screen in roughly 3 hours is maybe not going to happen.



I tend to agree with what Moore says here:

"In an interview with Variety's Danny Graydon during Warner Bros.'s first possession of feature film rights for Watchmen, the graphic novel's writer Alan Moore adamantly opposed a film adaptation of his comic book, arguing, "You get people saying, 'Oh, yes, Watchmen is very cinematic,' when actually it's not. It's almost the exact opposite of cinematic." Moore said that Terry Gilliam, preparing to direct Watchmen for Warner Bros. at the time, had asked Moore how the writer would film it. Moore told Graydon about his response, "I had to tell him that, frankly, I didn't think it was filmable. I didn't design it to show off the similarities between cinema and comics, which are there, but in my opinion are fairly unremarkable. It was designed to show off the things that comics could do that cinema and literature couldn't."

More Great Wikipedia Articles

Sex in Space. It's not as referenced as I would like, as I wish it would just say flatout that human astronauts have or have not had sex in space, and this is what we know about it. It does make this interesting aside, though:

Regarding human sex, Dr. Anna Goncharova said that if crew members are just colleagues and friends, one should never impose on them any intimate relations for the sake of their psycho-emotional stability. [5] It was rumored that the unhappy marriage of Soviet cosmonauts Valentina Tereshkova and Andrian Nikolayev was in part instigated by the pressure of the IBP.

Sunshine (2 out of 4 stars)

As a permanent winter settles upon the Earth, a spaceship is sent on a desperate mission to drop a nuclear device into the sick sun and "re-ignite" it. To name the ship "Icarus I" seems like asking for trouble in two ways, considering the fate of the original Icarus and the use of a numeral that ominously leaves room for a sequel.

So opens Roger Ebert's review of Danny Boyle's 2007 science fiction movie, Sunshine. Leave it to Ebert to notice such a small detail like the fact that the original ship was named Icarus I and not just Icarus (sans roman numeral).

The movie was a bit of a letdown. The first half was really riveting. But when trouble happens in space, it gets pretty ridiculous and even I found it hard to suspend my disbelief. Let alone my wife! It would've worked much better as a straight, sophisticated scifi story, but throwing in the madman really just made it way too outlandish. First of all, I found myself questioning the cost-benefit conclusion. For that reason alone, I hated the movie because that's like making me lose my religion! Seriously, I need to work it out. At what probability is it rational to leave the mission to intercept another ship and get their bomb, even though doing so has risks itself and you have no certainty the ship is functional. After all, it's been orbiting the sun for 8 years, with a crew of 8 people and resources to only take care of them for 3 (but theoretically could take care of one person much longer). I guess I had a hard time believing that with so much at stake, that any answer would've made sense. Shouldn't you be astronomically risk averse when all of mankind is going to die if the sun's not ignited? The second thing, obviously, was the lack of the boogieman who shows up roughly 2/3 of the way through. Won't give anything away, but that whole thing bothered me.

What was really great about the movie was the imaginative technology and the space station. It was somehow portrayed as not so distant into the future as you might think. Everything seemed to have a kind of utilitarian purpose - like the magnetic lamps that attached to the outside surface to illuminate the workers as they worked. They rested on the surface, and then floated up like balloons. There were many things like that in the movie that were aesthetically interesting. Or when they attempted some pretty daring things - like wrapping themselves in cellophane and blowing the airlock to be rocketed from one ship to another in -200 degree temperatures outside the space station! That was unbelievable, and reminded me somewhat of The Abyss in parts. Actually, the movie reminded me too much of The Abyss. I though this movie was more handsome than The Abyss, but it more coherent. The boogiemen just seemed to me to serve no purpose except to force some events to go really bad. Was it an action movie or this weird, opera? I couldn't tell, b/c it tried to be both and was never either one perfectly.

So I gave it 2 out of 4, which is below the 3 out of 4 stars Ebert gave it. He also summarized in his own words what I liked and disliked about the movie. He notes that technically, the Sun isn't dying so much as it is infected with a particle called a "Q-ball" which is some kind of left-over thing from the Big Bang which is working like a virus on the sun (that's my own interpretation, as it gets pretty hairy pretty quickly). Here's what Ebert says, though:

What about the Q-ball? It's a "non-topological soliton," Wikipedia explains, before grumbling in a related article, "it is not easy to define precisely what a soliton is." Don't you love this stuff? Isn't it better than a lot of analysis of the psychological interactions among the crew?

Exactly. What's great in the movie is the scifi. What sucks is the philosophical stuff and the really artificial plot twist. I especially hated the Captain who likes to sit and stare at the sun in this one room with the filter set really low, nearly blinding him, after which he talks about how we're all one with the darkness and stupid crap like that. I don't care how long you're in outer space - you do not start reverting to 10th grade English lit. discussions about the meaning of life.

One thing I did like about the movie, though, was the shots of the Sun. Whether it was the Sun viewed from the Observation deck, or the Sun viewed from some perspective of another craft, it was genuinely terrifying to watch. You could feel how vulnerable the astronauts were, for one. If they were to ever get within direct range of the Sun, for instance, perhaps because they weren't shielded by the ship's shields, they'd be incinerated instantly. This, again, was part of the very cool aesthetic of the film that I enjoyed. But, what I think I am negatively responding to was the sense that they made a movie about an aesthetic, and used a thriller plot-device to make it into a three-part film.

Limit to No Limit

Just learned the local poker parlor has quit spreading its weekly $2/4 limit game, which bites. Now it's only pot and no limit. There is a weekly $50 freezeout no limit tournament on Friday nights, and a $20 buy-in limit tournament on some other night. Neither of which appeal to me. But, I did make some friends at a retreat recently who are interested in starting a poker game of friends, and so maybe I can talk them into a game with some substance. Really I wish I could find a 2/4 limit game, though. Tends to be juicy, in my experience, but affordable. (The two are probably correlated. The more affordable the game, the juicier the game). I may attend this one freezeout and then just ask around. They also have $1/2 no limit cash games, with minimum buy-in of $100 and maximum buy-in of $500. Which, to me, is hardly a constraint for a person with a large bankroll, which I don't have and apparently won't have the opportunity to build up. I think this is just the consequence of the popularity of No Limit poker. More traditional games like limit don't have nearly the appeal when watched on ESPN or Travel, and so with scarce seating plus many inexperienced players gravitating towards no limit, both poker houses and poker players gravitate towards no limit as well. Kind of stinks for me, though. I love no limit, but cash games are so volatile. I buy in for $100, have a great hand, and then get called to go all-in? Without the right bankroll, you can't make the right decisions, since the "right decisions" are only right in a probabilistic sense. You may lose that one race, but you know you win more times on average than you lose and thus end up having a higher "expected" winnings in the longrun. But if you have only enough money to play the one race, then of course the longrun is the shortrun.

Oldie but a Goodie

I saw this dozens of times growing up. I'm not sure why exactly, except that it was probably a movie my parents loved and a movie which played everyday on at least one of the cable channels we had. I just added it to my queue, and am looking forward to watching it again after this extremely long hiatus. Maybe J. and his wife could come over and see it too?

You Can Tell I'm Reading Wikipedia by What I'm Posting

"You know something’s poetry if a shiver goes up your spine." - Charlie Kaufman paraphrasing Emily Dickinson.

Spike Jonze Gap Commercial

I know this is old, but I don't have a television (or more specifically, don't have broadcast or cable channels on my television). So this is new to me.

RIP Sydney Pollack

Sadly, Sydney Pollack died of cancer at age 73. Pollack was a celebrated filmmaker, actor and producer who won the Academy Award for Best Director with Out of Africa. He had been nominated for both They Shoot Horses, Don't They and Tootsie. For popular films, he was director of The Firm. He recently starred with George Clooney in Michael Clayton, and when I saw him in it, I was quietly pleased because he had great presence and was an excellent character actor. He also had a somewhat timeless quality to him, at least for the last 10-15 years. He looked the same in Michael Clayton as he did in Husbands and Wives, or maybe I just though the aged well and so didn't tend to notice. Anyhow, best wishes to his friends and family. He was married to the same woman for 40 years, with whom he had three children.

Ebert on Morris' SOP

Interesting blog entry about pictures and context in Morris's new documentary, Standard Operating Procedure:

But listen to the words in the screen. The people in the photographs are as puzzled as we are. They did things they might not have done under other circumstances, and yet were blindsided by this particular set of circumstances. The wisest statement in the film (however obvious) is by the prison guard Javel Davis, who says, "Pictures only show you a fraction of a second. You don't see forward and you don't see backward. You don't see outside the frame." You don't see why these Americans enlisted in the military or the National Guard, you don't see their training, you don't see their experiences, you don't see how Iraq changed them. They seem to wonder about these things themselves. We look at old photos of ourselves and wonder why we ever wore that shirt, or combed our hair that way. When did I stop using Brylcreem? Why was I that person?> Still more does Lynndie England wonder how, at 20, she found herself in photographs from Abu Ghraib, pointing to a man forced (not by herself) to masturbate.

Lovefest in Ebert Comments

It's a lot of fun reading the comments over at Ebert's blog. I think the love on there is truly genuine. A lot of people (myself included), when they read Ebert, feel understood plus feel like someone is out there speaking for them. That is, they feel a connection with Ebert, and they feel like someone is an Advocate for them in the real world. It's hard not to sense the soteriological elements in that, but isn't that really ultimately what salvation is? A relationship with a person who both gets us and defends us. Of course, the Christian theory of salvation adds into that the idea of sin and forgiveness of sin, but even that seems captured by our desire to have an advocate. I have personally been heavily influenced by the Christian teachings on sin and forgiveness, but initially, it was the idea of a God who understood me and who advocated for me that really drew me in.

What I Just Learned in the Ebert Comments

In 1998, Ebert named Dark City the best movie of the year.

How do you say "Tomatometer"?

I was reading this Ebert blog post, and the following caught my eye.

At noon Sunday, I attended a press screening of "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull." I returned to my laptop, wrote my review and sent it off, convinced I would be in a minority. I loved it, but then I'm also the guy who loved "Beowulf," and look at the grief that got me. Now Indy's early reviews are in, and I'm amazed to find myself in an enthusiastic majority. The Tomatometer stands at 78, and the more populist IMDb user rating is 9.2 out of 10. All this before the movie's official opening on Thursday.

First, the obvious. Yes, I am giddy with excitement to learn what strong an audience response the movie is getting. Like the rest of the world, I figured it'd suck, since it had George Lucas involved, and since I've actually grown to despite Harrison Ford (despite loving his movies). But the other question I had is the "Tomatometer." How do you say this? I said "Toe-may-toe-meter" but then I thought it sounded better saying "toe-may-tommeter". I really like the second pronunciation myself, and yes I know there's a really funny joke in this about how you say to-may-toe-meter, and I say toe-may-tommeter. I am not as dumb as I look.

Nevertheless, I really liked this part of the discussion of the movie. Ebert discusses how and why the movie got a standing ovation at the Cannes, and in doing so, does that thing that makes me love him so much - his honesty, charitableness, and deep understanding of movies as an artform (and especially his understanding of "popular").

Nevertheless, I believe the S.O. was genuine the other night. It takes a cold heart and a weary imagination to dislike an "Indiana" film with all of its rambunctious gusto. With every ounce of its massive budget, it strains to make us laugh, surprise us, go over the top with preposterous action. "Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" does those things under the leadership of Spielberg, who knows as much as any man ever has about what reaches the popular imagination. The early reviewer on the web site, on the other hand, knew as little.

Photos of TV

Mike Sacks took pictures of people on his TV, and the result is pretty funny and crude. I have a theory that everything can be sexualized with a photograph. But, clearly, the news gave this guy a lot of help. (hattip to kottke)

More Kindle Coveting

Justin Blanton tells me the kindle, in so many words, is bad ass (ht to jk). I'm now jonesing for the Kindle. I was originally jonesing for the iPhone, but the pricetag deterred me (that and my wife's refusal to buy me one, but as that was the pricetag, we can say her refusal was the instrumental reason, but the pricetag the intrinsic. See, I did learn something at the new faculty retreat taught by philosophers last week). Then I started looking at the iPod Touch, but it too wasn't totally doing it for me. Then the guys at MR kept going on and on about Kindle, so I checked it out. Now I'm on the Kindle kick. But, the Kindle is really not helping me out on the price front. Whereas I think it's a better overall fit, in terms of practical usage (since I read constantly, and prefer electronic PDFs, and then books after that), the pricetag ($399) is still not doing it for me. Maybe when I clean up at the poker table this summer, I'll buy myself one, but first I need some answers.

1. Realistically, will I ever be able to get academic textbooks and academic books on it? Obviously, if this is just going to cover popular books or literature, then I can't rationalize it as well. So is the longrun equilibrium that everything is published with an easy electronic version too? If so, I totally want one.

2. Does it have anything like a calendar? Seriously, I need dayplanner on this mutha. Give me a reader with a small app like iCal and I'm set.

Freakonomics Backlash

I had dinner with a Chicago economist one night several years ago in which the topic of Levitt's popularity came up. He said that at UC, it gets very polemical, particularly when certain Nobel Laureates complain about Levitt's work. He then said something to this effect - he wishes everyone would quit complaining (he thought some of it was jealousy) because Levitt's was expanding the pie, so to speak, and making it easier for others to do more interesting work. So we finished our meal, and that was that.

In light of Emily Oster's latest Hepatitis B paper, which finds no evidence for it explaining the female deficit in Asia, I'm wondering if that UC economist didn't overstate things. To quote Spiderman, "with great power comes great responsibility." Now I see a serious backlash which is basically, "economists need to quit sticking their noses in everything." Probably what it is, really, though, is simply that there's some low hanging fruit outside our discipline where economists could come in and easily snag it. Then as we pushed harder, we ended up in the same places as the more seasoned researchers in those areas. Maybe that's why there's an incentive to find counter-intuitive results. Plus, I think there's a built-in bias being at Chicago (though Emily was at Harvard when she wrote the paper, Chicago's De Gustibus Non Est Disputadum paradigm of Becker-Stigler, I think, basically made this the de fact bias of every department since we're all Chicago economists now) against appealing to cultural explanations when trying to explain some phenomenon. It just seems like cheating to economists that when you see something - say, a lot of missing women in a country - that the reason is because, well, people prefer sons. Turns out, that's probably the right answer, but ex ante, it nonetheless feels lazy.

In Becker and Stiglers's paper De Gustibus, they basically recommended pushing price theory as far as it'll go, really until it breaks. I like that. Thing is, I guess it's going to at some point break. And we all would like to believe it won't be us that is doing the breaking when it does, but that's part of it. Despite all the negative publicity Emily's been getting (as part of this overall anti-freakonomics backlash), I think science went forward through it. Of course, I also think we have to be careful. At a retreat, I was telling a non-economist what I studied and they said, "So can you basically do the 'economics of ...' anything? Like could I write the "economics of Buffy the VAmpire Slayer"? And I said, "well, yes and no. Yes, right now, there's a lot of papers that are just plain clever, in the worst way. But, at the same time, economists have a lot at their disposal - methods, data, computer power, and market incentives (eg, Freakonomics' success) - so it's probably not a surprise. But, two, it's shaking out, and I think we're at a new place where people just aren't all that impressed by novelty like they once were."

Still, the search for truth is not uncorrelated with the desire for novel things. It's a lower order motivation, to be sure, though.

New Weezer Video is Right on So Many Levels

LOST!

Finally watched last week's episode of Lost (or the week before, whenever it was) last night with the wife. Argh! I was so anxious the entire episode I almost puked. I'm feeling so many weird emotions about the close of this season. I know the Oceanic six survive, so it creates so much confusion when I see them scattered across the island. Sun on the boat filled with C4. Hurley at the Orchid. Jack (sans Kate and Aaron) en route to the Orchid, and Kate and Sayid have been captured by the time-less tribe? How is this going to go from here to the six of them getting off the island? The other thing that is blowing my mind is to see the Six, off island, trying to start new lives. I mean, Sun buys out her father's corporation with her Oceanic settlement. Why would she do this? Is Jin dead? That she would go to such lengths to get revenge on her father by taking over his corporation seems like the kind of thing a person does when they are starting over, which implies she's "left" the island emotionally and spiritually, and not just physically.

OR, not. The flash forwards are cleverly telling a story of despair that when rewatched with new context tell a different story. For instance, Jack's relationship with Kate initially seemed one way, now seems another. So, I'm wondering if what we're witnessing is not a plan. Remember her words to her father? Something like, "When I get back, I'm gong to talk to you about the new directions for our company." On one level, maybe this is just her screwing with him. But, on another level, she has a plan to use the corporation's wealth to go back to the island - sort of like a new corporation to battle Widmore's corporation. You saw it here first. I will say, too, that I'm 1-1 on correct hypothesis this season. I correctly predicted that Jack's weirdness towards Aaron was due to learning Claire was his half-sister, and the most recent episode confirmed that, so I think you should definitely update your opinions of my now new theory.

But back to my pukey feeling. The other thing is - have we really seen the worst that is going to happen on the island? We saw the military team kill maybe a dozen people, and that's bad, but Sawyer, Locke and Hurley were the ones who saw that. And Ben. But not Sayid, and when Ben tells Sayid not to become emotionally involved and to remember what they did to "your friends," I got the sense Sayid had witnessed something. Plus, Sun mentioned in the carrier to Jack that "we are in shock, Jack." Which again is making me so nervous. Two hour finale this week. Can't wait.

Eagle Eye

Just ran across this trailer while perusing movie websites at an ungodly hour. It's apparently the first original script from Steven Spielberg since The Goonies. Shia Lebouf (I refuse to learn the proper spelling of this guy's last name) is apparently Spielberg's new muse. First, he's in Transformers, which is by that director who was Spielberg's protoge (either Bay or Bruckheimer, I'm too lazy to check). Then Indiana. Now this one. How'd this guy get tapped to be a movie star? I mean, literally - it's like Spielberg said, "Hm, I'm bored. I'll make this kid a huge action star" out of nowhere. Anyway, the trailer looks good. Very Matrix-y, though.

Summer Plans

1. Two new Batman movies this summer means I'm watching two Batman movies (hopefully) multiple times. The sequel to Batman Begins fills my heart with a kind of hippity-hoppity jumpy happy feeling, and this Gotham Knights trailer - while not at that level - also looks great.

2. Poker. Lots of poker this summer. That is at least the hope, the prayer. We'll see. This largely depends on whether the wifey is reading this post right now and uses her line-item veto powers to stop it from happening (hey wifey! Looking really sharp in that new shirt!).

3. Research. Several new projects with new co-authors starting up June 1st. Can't wait. Gonna be studying things like Viagra, AIDS cocktails, pornography, and violent video games. Yes, they pay me to do this. Yes, I do find it kind of funny.

Surfing in Class

Ian Ayres reports on U of Chicago's dean of the law school recently announcing that laptops cannot be used to surf the web during a lecture. I may need to make a similar speech in my undergraduate classes (my grad classes are so small and require constant note-taking that cannot be done with laptops [read: mathy]). I remember my old colleague from grad school, who did a joint PhD/JD, telling me about being in one class with every student having a laptop out while the prof lectured. One student - who was not amazingly at the back of the class - was watching the then-new Paris Hilton porno on his laptop! Definitely a negative externality if there is one.

Funny Ebert Observations

From Ebert's latest 3.5 star review of the new Indy movie:

Not many of the audience members will be as logical as I am, and wonder who went to the trouble of building parallel roads in a rain forest.

I just love lines like this, too. It's sooo Ebert. It's like he is, again, referring to some movie genre law.

Relationships between certain other characters are of interest, since (a) the odds against them finding themselves together are astronomical, and (b) the odds against them not finding themselves together in this film are incalculable.

Stupid Sunburn

Stupid sunburn has been waking me up every 60 minutes or so. Definitely one for the record books. My ankles are almost purple if you can believe that - PURPLE! My one-year-old daughter just brushed against my left ankle while crawling on the ground, and for 15 minutes afterward I felt like my leg was being devoured by fireants. And of course, now it's almost 4am and I'm AWAKE rather than asleep where I should be. So wrong on so many levels.

Random Links Before Bedtime

Most of these I picked up from Chris Blattman's blog, but I'll just post it here anyway.

1. Chris reports on a "clever + useful" new paper that finds credible evidence for voting fraud in Nigeria based on psychological biases in reporting random numbers. People tend to make non-random mistakes when attempting to write down "random" numbers, and so they use some basic rules of thumb to look for statistical deviations in voting outcomes, using Swedish races as a control group, and sure enough, find evidence for it. I agree with Chris that this is a great useful+clever paper. We all wish our papers were useful, or maybe we wish they were clever, but to be really clever and useful? That's the bi-fecta. My personal favorite for "clever+useful" is Joe Doyle's papers on foster care and adult outcomes (papers 1 and 4 on this list). I swoon over his identification, and then when I stand up, get engaged by the value of what we learned about the potential pitfalls of placing kids in foster care who maybe didn't need it.

2. Over the last ten days, I was traveling a little bit. One night at my parents' house, I just couldn't fall asleep (likely b/c of the 5:00pm cup of coffee I'd had earlier), so I drifted downstairs to the old couch and watched CABLE TELEVISION (ahhhh... so nice). What was on but Scorsese's Taxi Driver, which I hadn't seen in years. I have a nice photo in my office of one scene from the movie, as it's one of my favorites, but it's a "favorite" that I can only see with significant time lapses, usually measured in years. Anyway, I started watching it about 20-30 minutes before this scene. One of the things that has always caught my eye in this scene is at the minute marker of around 2:40-2:43. It's where Travis Biddle looks at the crazy, now one-handed man, climbing the stairs after him. Biddle stares at the main in a kind of curious look as he holds his hands to the bullethole in his neck, which is gushing a lot of blood. Biddle then does a weird little dance - a kind of sidestep, side turn, backwards step - sort of like he was dodging the man, but only just barely. Because the scene has had the speed slowed down, it looks like a little dance to me, anyway, and evertime time I see it, I kind of laugh inside a little. It's an incredibly gruesome scene, so tell the kiddos to go to bed first. The ending is still very perplexing to me. All I can think is that Biddle's failure to assassinate the Presidential nominee leads him to go on a random killing spree, in which his small affections for Iris is enough to center his rage on her pimp employers. For those affections, he is able to achieve some catharsis with respect to the fury inside him. How differently it would've turned out for everyone in the story had that Secret Service agent now spotted Travis acting weird in the crowd. Probably the mohawk was a bad choice, since it only made Travis stand out more. I really love the ending with Cybil Shephard, because I cannot figure out if she is interested in striking up a relationship with him, or just wanting to reach out to help him, since she had run so fast from him once he took her to that porno.

Update. Since I'm awake at 4am, I thought I'd rewatch that scene again. Sheesh, how sad. Stupid sunburn. Anyway, I had a memory that George Lucas's wife, Marcia Lucas, was the editor on this movie, so maybe she is responsible for that little scene. IMDB reports she was the supervising editor, which may or may not mean that.



3. The story with Christina and David Romer's almost-leave for Harvard is getting a lot of online coverage. We are lucky that such prolific blogger as Brad DeLong is at UCB to give his occasional thoughts. I wonder what in the world happened with the Harvard President to withdraw the offer? I wish I knew someone at Harvard on faculty that could share the gossip. I live for this stuff!

Porn Tax

In what seems like an event made especially for this blog, or what Oscar Wilde would call life imitating art, California is considering a tax on pornography to deal with its fiscal problems. (Insert "sin tax" jokes here). Seriously, this is a quote that deserves careful analysis:

However, many economists believe that pornography is an industry with inelastic demand -- meaning market conditions typically don't affect consumers' desire for the product. In other words, it is believed that most porn consumers would continue to buy regardless of how much it cost.

I agree that "pornographic materials" have inelastic demand, but I don't agree that the for-pay products produced by the pornographic industry are inelastic. With so many free porn online, such a tax would likely (a) cause the price of products produced by legal corporations to rise and (b) cause a decrease in the purchasing of pornographic materials with (c) a substitution towards more free materials online. In effect, whether this would effectively reduce aggregate consumption of pornography is likely untrue, but whether it would effectively reduce purchases is likely true. In such a case, the total tax revenue California could expect to receive from the tax is therefore much lower than one would expect if we modeled demand as inelastic. There is of course also the possibility that the industry would leave California and migrate to another state where there isn't a tax.

The fixed costs of production are so low in pornography that I can easily see that kind of thing happening. As much as I hate to admit, I'm reluctant to say that this is a good idea. Of course, I would personally prefer to see aggregate pornographic consumption to fall, but at this point, with the Internet what it is, I doubt supply-side interdictions will have any real effect.

Sunburnt, but alive

Just got back from a lengthy bit of travel. I am quite changed for it - mostly for the better, although hopefully the one way I'm worse for it won't be too bad in the longrun. I went kayaking on a river in central Texas for two very hot days, and received a blistering sunburn all over my body. It is especially bad on my ankles, and I can barely walk because of it! That's a first for me. I usually bronze from the sun, because of my complexion, but that's only if I have a base tan to begin with, but since I've been locked up in an office for a year, needless to say, I was as white as the driven snow.

On the good side, I did receive my class evaluations for my two classes this semester, and I'm pleased to say that one of the classes tracked almost perfectly with the scores recorded by the "comparison group," and the other blew the comparison group out of the water. I think that the department will feel good about it as a result.

I'm going to be preparing a new class in the fall - principles of microeconomics. I've taught it before, but only in summer school. As I'm an applied microeconomist, I want to be on top of this class. I'll be using Frank and Bernanke's book, because (a) I used the FB book for macro and (b) I really like Robert Frank and his "economic naturalism" approach to teaching. For principles of micro, because this is a Christian university, we have to teach a section on ethics. I think I'm going to dive into the deepside of the pool and take on the "morality of capitalism" head on. If readers here are familiar of some short essays that perhaps represent good critiques of capitalism from a Christian point of view, perhaps things like Small is Beautiful or Wendell Berry, could they point me to it? Thanks!

More Econ Advice

Leeson wrote me back quickly. Here was his response to my question, "how do you do it? What's your secret?" He wrote, "Remember why you got into economics in the first place. Let this guide your work in the journals and in the classroom. Do this and everything else falls into place."

What I Learned From Peter Leeson Today

I just learned of a new economist named Peter Leeson. Because I am not an Austrian economist, I do not know about the particular economists in that rank, but Peter is an Austrian economist. I found Peter's name by chance while on Chris Blatman's blog. Chris linked to a new article by Peter cleverly titled An-arrgh-chy: The Law and Economics of Pirate Organization. It was published in 2008 in the prestigious Journal of Political Economy. The article is an analysis of the criminal organization of maritime pirates during the middle of the second millenium, and specifically, how institutions of law and order were designed in the absence of governments. I suspect this paper, and others by Peter, will take on the same kind of case study to anarcho-capitalists and libertarians as David Friedman's work on Iceland once did. That is, that private markets can find efficient solutions to market failures without governance. Anyway, back to Peter. I was just curious, and so looked at his CV. Wow. The guy got his PhD in 2005 from George Mason, spent what looks like little more than 2 years at West Virginia, then went back to GMU as full professor. This year, 2008, has been an exceptional year for him. He's got the JPE, a Journal of Legal Studies, Journal of Law and Economics, Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Law and Economics Review, Public Choice, Economics Letters. Everything after that is more or less in very lowly ranked journals, but that doesn't mean the papers are bad per se. Peter's an Austrian and so publishes in Austrian outlets, which given his stellar 2008 year, makes me less likely to write those pubs off than I normally would having not read them myself. Anyway, unbelievable. So I dug around some more and found this flattering story about him from the Mackinac Center. By age 17, he'd read Human Action three times? Hmmm. That's three more times than I've read it, though I'm staring at it on my shelf right now.

Anyway, I'm deeply impressed. So of course I wrote Peter and asked him what his secret was. How in the freaking world does he practically manage to crank all that out? I mean, I'm sure the truth is that there is considerable variability in quality on that CV, but so what. The guy is doing what he loves obviously. I remember once being in a poetry workshop in college, and having someone from another university come into town to talk to us. She was an established and successful poet, and we novice poets were on pins and needles wanting advice and input. One guy asked an interesting question. He said he was writing a lot of poems that read like a thesaurus. That is, like the words were just fancy words, and he couldn't make it stop. What did she suggest? Her advice was gold (how do people come up with advice like this? Am I saying advice like this and not knowing it? Anytime I try to give advice, it's always stupid compared to this!). She said it sounded to her like he needed to get those words out, and she just encouraged him to write them out. I mean, yes, of course. Write the stuff out. You have a paper inside you, then you write it out. That's sure as hell going to be more productive than trying not to write it out. Besides, I bet you 1000 dollars Peter Leeson had to write through some really bad papers to get to his 2008 papers. That, too, I learned from a poet - William Stafford this time. Guy wrote a poem a day his entire life, and what became clear to me is that poems, if they are inside you, have a tendency to queue up. So you can say you want to get to the really good ones, but if they're queued up, then you're not going to get there til you get there. And that means, like the first lady said, writing it out. I think economics is the same thing. The difference is that unlike poems, you can't really crank through them. You can't write an economics article a day, for instance. You can, though, study what interests you. Even if it's not fashionable, and even if it doesn't seem important, you figure out what you care about, and then you work on that. I think Leeson does this, from the looks of his CV. All that austrianism and law and economics and anarchy. That's because he loves that stuff.

Anyway, I'm going to do it too. I'm going to make this summer work. NOt sure what a realistic goal is, but come June 1st, I'm the proud new owner of a freaking expensive new dataset, and I'm going to start work on it. And when I'm done, I'm going to send these suckers off and move to the next thing. So I learned a lot today. From Emily Oster to Peter Leeson, I learned a lot about the craft, or at least had it reminded to me again.

Over (almost)

Yay! It's done. I just gave my last exam. I still have to grade and I have two people taking the exam on Wednesday, but it's basically done. And, from the look of the class today, it was definitely an unusually difficult exam. The last class bombed it, and I'm sure this one will have, too. Which sucks. I take no delight in it, and almost always such outcomes mean I did something wrong. Not so much in preparing them for the test, but probably more in the test design itself. So this will likely be heavily curved. I hope they learned something this semester, tests aside. I think they did; they said they did, and they seemed different to me, but who knows.

On a different note, I laugh everytime I read this quote from The Office:

"Let me describe the perfect date: I take her out to a nice dinner. She looks amazing. Some guy tries to hit on her... now he wants to fight- so I grab him- I throw him into the jukebox! Then the other ninja’s got a knife, he comes at me, we grapple, I turn his knife on him. Blood on the dance floor. She’s scared now. I take her home. I’m holding her in my arms. I reach in for a kiss... I hear something in the leaves, I flip her around, she gets a poison arrow right in her back. She was in on it the whole time... but I knew."

Dwight Schrute said that, probably around season 2 if I had to take a guess. It's so funny and I can't quite figure out what it is that makes it so funny. First, it's got to be this funny that Dwight said it. If I were to see this written on the bathroom wall, I might smile, but I wouldn't laugh like I am right now. It's entirely contextual and rooted in the fact that I can hear Dwight saying it, and knowing that this is not a joke - it's actually his idea of the perfect date. And knowing Dwight, there's something bizarrely innocent about the dream, and that true love is in there somewhere. But secondly, the transitions are hysterical. Where'd the ninja come from? No, not the ninja - the other ninja, meaning the first guy was also a ninja! But that little factoid was either conveniently overlooked, or Dwight just took it for granted that his audience would know that the perfect had to have some ninjas in it. I think without that little feature - the "other ninja" part - the joke isn't even half as funny. And finally, "blood on the dance floor. She's scared now. I take her home." I'm speechless at that point. The closer isn't even the funny part - it's all the rest.

Burke quote

One of my favorite quotes by Edmund Burke, from his excellent book A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, is below. I think it captures the spirit of Emily Oster's papers on hepatitis B.

"I am satisfied I have done but little by these observations considered in themselves; and I never should have taken the pains to digest them, much less should I have ever ventured to publish them, if I was not convinced that nothing tends more to the corruption of science than to suffer it to stagnate. These waters must be troubled before they can exert their virtues. A man who works beyond the surface of things, though he may be wrong himself, yet he clears the way for others, and may chance to make even his errors subservient to the cause of truth. . . . I only desire one favour; that no part of this discourse may be judged of by itself and independently of the rest; for I am sensible I have not disposed my materials to abide the test of a captious controversy, but of a sober and even forgiving examination; that they are not armed at all points for battle; but dressed to visit those who are willing to give a peaceful entrance to truth."

Oster (2008)

Incredibly impressive. A new NBER working paper by Emily Oster and Gang Chen entitled "Hepatitis B Does Not Explain Male-Biased Sex Ratios in China" is just out. Emily, as you recall, had a 2005 paper that claimed to find the exact opposite, and it turned into a single-authored publication at the prestigious Journal of Political Economy. Now she finds the opposite. It's not so much impressive that she found the opposite, because so many people since then have been casting doubt on that hypothesis, but rather that she worked on it til and then produced scholarship finding it wasn't correct. I now have more even more respect for Emily Oster than ever before. I'm honestly not sure I could have done that, but now that she has done it, I will have her as a model in my mind. Tyler's right - this is truth seeking. I've spoken with Emily, and I remember her telling me very clearly in a conversation that what she believed economists should be doing and being about is the pursuit of truth. That was it. Not economic imperialism or fame, but simply testing hypotheses and finding answers. I now believe her.

Now I'm just waiting on Levitt to write, "Legalized abortion did not cause the fall in crime in the 1990s to have all of my faith restored.

Indiana Jones and The Summer of Doom!

Or, Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Crystal Crap. Or Raiders of the Lost Billions we almost made. However they end up saying it, it sounds like they'll say it.

Kindle? Maybe...

Lots of bloggers are blogging about Amazon's new Kindle. Check out the link for a commercial at Amazon on it. I've always been skeptical of electronic reading devices, but then Tyler Cowen starting having multiple posts about it, and then it caught my eye that it has basic web access. Really? I didn't know that, and interestingly I am in the market for a portable Internet device (though my wife and I disagree on that fact, currently). I'd wanted the iPhone, because it seemed like such a great device, but then I don't use cell phones ever, and isn't that the main reason you get it? I then turned to the iPod Touch, but honestly, I don't listen to music so much, so constantly, that that makes sense either. I mean, all I want is a portable electronic Internet device - not a phone, not an MP3 player.

But then I realized as I was reading this. THe other thing I do do all the time is read books and articles. Constantly. I'm an academic, after all. And apparently you can store like 120,000 electronic books in this mutha. Plus, check your web? Megan Mcardle gave several reasons she loves hers, and then I realized Amazon prices for books on Kindle is something 70% off the retail price.

I know that what Amazon is doing is trying to have the next iPod, and the similarities are overwhelming. Amazon becomes the clearinghouse for the books the same way iTunes did. And with so many people blogging and buying books, maybe this isn't a crazy dream. Still, it's got that damn monopoly price tag attached to it - $400 bucks! For that price, I really could get an iPhone, and to be perfectly honest, what person in their right mind would rather have a Kindle than an iPhone? I'm on a fixed budget here people. But this is early adoption prices, so I know it's just price discrimination at its finest, and I support price discrimination 100%. So I guess it's going to be my pretenure gift for myself, or maybe I'll get NSF to buy it for me with a grant somehow.