Category: Films and movies

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

The Young Turks

When Jon Stewart interviewed former president Jimmy Carter recently, the topic of Stewart’s upcoming ‘Rally to Restore Sanity‘ arose. Carter commented that Stewart was now becoming involved in politics. At the same time, fellow comedian Stephen Colbert testified before a congressional committee.

At the same time as Stewart and Colbert are moving in new directions, a new satirical news source has emerged. The Young Turks is a website and media show sponsored by Sirius Satellite Radio. It has a kind of unpolished authenticity, lacking the production values of Stewart and Colbert’s offerings. It skews younger and edgier, and the website will start playing a Sirius Satellite stream if you leave it alone too long.

Many young people who I know don’t own televisions, and watch only Stewart and Colbert as video news sources. I am not sure how to feel about that, all in all. Neither seems too partisan, in the end. They mock Obama and Democrats about as much as Republicans. At the same time, perhaps it is worrisome that people (myself included) only absorb American news by means of a couple of spoof shows. There is a risk of fostering confirmation bias, and of developing a distorted sense of what political figures stand for and how influential they are.

On the other hand, most people I know also get a lot of print news from online sources (and sometimes even old school printed newspapers). Stewart and Colbert make intelligent arguments in clever ways, and don’t usually seem to misrepresent people too egregiously. Also, watching those shows helps people stay in touch with the general state of discussion about American politics, which probably resides more on television than online, at least for those who aren’t part of the tech-savvy subset of news consumers.

Northern lights webcam

The Canadian Space Agency has set up a website that allows the live viewing of the northern lights from Yellowknife, in the Northwest Territories. You can watch live during the appropriate hours, as well as watch the previous night’s video in time lapse and selected videos from especially active nights.

The videos are pretty small and not super high resolution. The ‘AuroraMAX’ site would probably benefit from the addition of some large still photos. The sun’s 11-year cycle of activity is expected to peak in 2013, and the site has a mandate to carry on until then. The site doesn’t say what kind of equipment is being used, but it seems to be a fisheye lens on either a video camera or dSLR.

Blu-Ray encryption broken

The content of DVDs is theoretically protected by the Content Scramble System (CSS), a cryptographic Digital Rights Management (DRM) system meant to prevent the copying of discs and restrict which devices discs can be played on. For instance, when DVDs were first released, they could not be watched on Linux machines. That changed with the advent of DeCSS: a program that circumvents the copy protection on DVDs.

Blu-Ray discs use a DRM system called High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) to try and accomplish the same things as CSS. Now, the master key for the system is publicly available, which will allow full resolution copying of discs and circumvent the ‘revocation’ system built into HDCP.

The message? You can’t hide secrets from the future with math.

Inception

This past weekend, I saw the film Inception. To a large extent, it felt like an updated version of The Matrix with dreams in the place of computers and less automatic weapon fire. It was also a pretty well constructed jewel heist type movie. It included some neat things conceptually and visually, and didn’t contain much that was frustrating or perplexing.

The image of a beach as where you end up when trapped at the lowest level of dreaming may have been inspired by what artificial intelligences can do to unwary hackers in William Gibson’s Neuromancer universe. It was also interesting to see who head related devices seem to be out, when it comes to mind-machine interfaces. Now, people connect tubing to their inner arms, probably to evoke the addictiveness and danger of intravenous drug use.

All told, I thought the film was well worth seeing.

Burn After Reading

The Coen Brothers film Burn After Reading is an entertaining character comedy – a bit like The Royal Tenenbaums, insofar as the oddity of the characters is the main source of humour. That said, it is significantly darker and has a bit more of a political message: namely, that we might be wrong to assume that the CIA and comparable organizations are actually competent.

In any case, I found it entertaining and amusing.

David Mitchell on climate change

A couple of years ago, the issue of the consequences of climate change being very depressing came up here, given how dealing with the problem means giving up some excellent things, like being able to visit China or Hawaii on a whim and being able to concentrate our scientific efforts on neat things like space travel.

More recently, David Mitchell (of Mitchell and Webb) produced a funny video with a similar message:

David discusses why tackling climate change is always presented to us by people who either tell us off or patronisingly try to convince us that tackling it is “cool” or “fun”, when actually it’s just something we have to do, because of facts.

I don’t entirely agree with him – since I do see moving to renewable forms of energy as an opportunity. That said, I do like the delivery of his message.

Agora

I saw Agora yesterday, and found very little in it that was redeeming. The film depicts the mathematical work of Hypatia, set against a background of religious violence between pagans, Christians, and Jews. The great majority of the film consisted of angry young male religious fanatics, killing another for reasons that were never very well established. All the dialog was excessively melodramatic and unconvincing, and the motivations of all the characters remained obscure.

Given the span of time and the number of characters included in the film, it feels a bit as though they took a trilogy worth of material and crammed it into one film by removing everything that wasn’t a critical plot point. Imagine The Lord of The Rings compressed into two hours by removing everything except key plot points; this film has that kind of pacing. As a result, the film feels like a series of climaxes with no lead-up to give them context or follow-through to show their consequences.

The mathematical sub-plot contrasted aesthetically with all the background violence, but also felt unconvincing and unnatural. Rather than being given any appreciation for why people care so much about the mathematical questions, or what solving them might mean, we are treated to an epistemology reminiscent of Dead Poets Society or an episode of House: all sound bites and sudden insights, with little sense of what makes the knowledge significant.

Not recommended.

Khan Academy

Khan Academy is a collection of over 1,400 miniature lectures, delivered by one man via YouTube. They cover topics that range widely, in disciplines including mathematics, chemistry, biology, statistics, history, finance, and physics.

From the twenty or so I have tried, they seem to be quite accessible, at least for those with a basic grounding in mathematics. I had never covered matrices in high school or university math, but the videos in the linear algebra collection have left me with what feels like an adequate theoretical awareness of what they are, why they are useful, and how they fit into mathematics more broadly.

The whole collection is worth a look.