Picoverse (Robert A. Metzger) 2002

So help me, if I read another "hard" SF book ("hard" in quotes because it quickly abandons any pretense at science for fantasy) in which the two female characters are "the Power Bitch" and "the Hysterical Mother"... sheesh.  And would it kill the editor to know the difference between "breech" and "breach"?  When the hull of a spaceship is ruptured, or a topic of conversation introduced, it has been breached.  "Breech" is used incorrectly at least 3 times in a 20-page stretch that leaves me in no doubt that it's not simply a typo.  This drives me nuts.

Tangled (2010)

Tangled made its way through our netflix queue and we previewed it last Monday, then with the kids Tuesday, and Connor has wanted to watch it twice more.  I couldn't remember what happened in the original Rapunzel story past the prince finding her tower, so this was a good reason to brush up on it.

The good:

• They've kept Gothel's name for Rapunzel's adoptive mother.  That's always a nice touch.
• The twist on the Rapunzel story to give her hair magical powers granted by the flower actually gives Mother Gothel a real motivation to keep Rapunzel hidden away.  This is actually an improvement over the "Gothel's a witch; that's what witches do," reasoning of the original fairy tale.**  It's also interesting that Mother Gothel herself is not magical, but simply very competent (if incredibly selfish).
• This is a triumph of computer animation.  The animated faces are so expressive on Rapunzel's real parents that they didn't even bother hiring voice actors for those characters.  The flying lanterns are gorgeous and there's movement in the backgrounds (like the water sloshing up on the shore as Flynn Rider talks to the Stabbington Brothers near the end) that you normally simply don't see in hand-drawn animation***.  Wow.  It looks every bit the second most expensive film ever made, and one of the few in the top 40 I actually liked.

The meh:

• They've changed Rapunzel's parents from poor folks to royalty, and switched the prince of the original fairy tale into a thief; this is no Aladdin-style street rat with a heart of of gold who only steals to eat, this is a cold-hearted professional who breaks into the palace and betrays his co-conspirators without a second thought.  I want to liken him to a Han Solo-style rogue, but while Flynn Rider does have his charming moments, I feel uneasy rooting for him because a truly likable rogue has to be fighting against unjust authority or trying to make the best of a really bad situation.  The kingdom in Tangled appears prosperous and well-ruled, so it doesn't feel right that Flynn is a criminal.  At any rate, it would be nice if Rapunzel were a commoner, too.  No princesses are necessary here, and it feels like a missed opportunity.
• There were no musical numbers that I was humming to myself the next day.  On rewatching, they're all solid, but Gothel's "Mother Knows Best", might be the most memorable****, and it's not quite "Poor Unfortunate Souls"
• The viking thugs feel like an unnecessary addition of forced comedy.  However, their role is small, and the vast majority of the movie revolves around the three principles (Rapunzel, Mother Gothel, Flynn Rider) with not-too-distracting contributions from the sidekicks (Pascal, the Stabbington Brothers, Maximus)

Overall, this isn't vying for a spot atop my list of favorite animated movies, but it's a worthy addition to Disney canon.

** this does present a possible moral that "Only by destroying her unique gift can she lead a normal life and have a family and get married."  Then again, should the hair define who Rapunzel is?  I don't think so.

*** maybe they did all this in Up and Toy Story 3; I haven't seen those.  

**** kudos to Donna Murphy's dominant performance as Mother Gothel; in many ways, she's more interesting than our heroes.

Using gmail the right/wrong way

For about 5-6(?) years, I've been using Gmail exclusively for e-mail, and for most of that time, I haven't bothered deleting anything; however, over the past week I've been trimming.  Why? I wasn't even close to the limit (19% of space used).  


The problem is how I was using Gmail.  I'm a member of several listservs, some of which receive many e-mails in a day that I don't want to see until I had a free moment to look at them, so I was auto-labeling and archiving them, then clicking on the label when I wanted to read them.  The problem is that after a few years, one of the labels had 12k conversations, and it would take upwards of 20 seconds for Gmail to (presumably search and sort by date and finally) display the messages.  So I started cutting old messages, and now it's much zippier.


Now, the way I'm probably supposed to be using Gmail is to send those e-mails to a secondary inbox and actively archive them; that way, I'd only load the whole label when I'm searching for an old e-mail.  Of course, that's based on a search, so I'd have to give them an extra label to put those items in a secondary inbox.  I don't think priority inboxes would be useful here; I *know* which items I want to go in this secondary inbox.

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.