Somewhere (2010)

There are so many bad movies out there in which nothing happens -- MST3K made fun of a few.  Just because the nothing happening is intentional doesn't mean it's a good movie.

Adverbially Adjectival

Reading The Book of Skulls; Robert Silverberg; 1972.  Another Nebula finalist.


Four stereotypes go on a road trip to find a secret society that could grant them immortality, with the catch that "four men enter, two men leave."  Each chapter is from the POV of one of the stereotypes.  I keep waiting for the Timothy chapter that simply reads, "My mother is a fish."  Sadly, it never came.  


Chapter 16: Eli

[...]  The air is crisp and cold.  The sky is improbably blue and clear.  This is apocalyptic country

Chapter 18: Eli

They were right to choose this cruel and shriveled terrain as the site of the skullhouse. [...] A desert is ideal.  Here the air is painfully blue, the soil is a thin burnt crust over rocky shield, the plants and trees are twisted, thorny, bizarre.

Dare he say that the country is apocalyptic again?  As if "{insert-adverb} blue" weren't cliché enough, he has to do it twice in successive chapters from Eli's POV.  Please, could we all just not describe the sky if it's simply adverbially blue, no matter how well it embodies that kind of blue?


There are some good thoughts in here, and if you managed to write a script that brought it out of the 70's (which, in addition to dealing with all the sexism, would require some serious rethinking of Oliver, at the very least), it could make a good movie.

I'm not fans of the Mannings**...

... but I enjoyed this article.  I had to watch the ESPN commercial, which isn't as good as Reilly's description of it, though the "making of" video was worthwhile.  The United Way spoof is still funny.



** for taking a collective dump on the Chargers; Peyton unintentionally by being taken #1 in the draft, leaving the Chargers to draft Ryan Leaf; Eli for refusing to play for the Chargers if picked (with Archie's blessing)

Good Will Hunting & Boogie Nights (1997)

I don't really have anything to say about the movies in particular.  I missed these in '97 and never got around to watching them until recently.  Boogie Nights either hasn't aged very well or wasn't as good as people thought it was.  Personally, I'd spent the last 14 years perfectly happy with "Dirk Diggler" as the nickname for Dirk Nowitzki.

Good Will Hunting has that scene in the bar where Robin Williams is arguing that Will needs to work out his issues before he can really work on math, or else he could end up like the unabomber (which was like stepping into the wayback machine), and a couple days after watching it I saw this article about the government auctioning off his property.  Weird.

Item Response Theory: It's factor analysis for categorical variables.

AnnMaria frets over the large number of useless academic articles and how this might relate to the general backlash against academia.  I think it depends on your field, or subfield.  Fifteen years ago, most of the Bayesian statistics articles I read were about trying to solve problems.  They generally began with a clear description of the model and the process used to estimate the model.  They had to, because it was all so new.  By contrast, the articles concerning extensions of traditional statistical methods seemed to assume you already knew everything about the method from prior articles.  It's one thing to follow a hyperlink to get to that information, but having to look up another article (which in turn might point to another article) just to figure out what the current article is talking about is a bit of a drag.  Maybe Bayesian statistics articles have this problem today.  At any rate, back in the day I did some work with Bayesian item response models, so here's my short description:

Item Response Theory: It's factor analysis for categorical variables.

There's even a journal article on it.  I think that's easier to understand than the description of the parallel analysis criterion.