Rotwang's Lair

Avatar review (spoilers a go-go)

2009-12-19T23:53:55Z

It's been a good nine hours since I watched this so let's see how much I can remember of the thoughts I had on the way out of the cinema.

Right off the bat I want to say that I really enjoyed and was very impressed by Avatar. Interesting if I were to chose some adjectives to describe the film they might include subtle, complex and adult (as in making you exhibit adult ways of thinking). There was significantly less in-your-impact than I was expecting for something tagged as a blockbuster- not that I am complaining.

Okay - let's pick some specific areas.

I thought the SFX were exceptional and well deserving of the praise they are receiving. The 3D was understated and, apart from a couple of arrows-poking-out-the-screen I mostly forgot it was even in 3D.

The plot was one of the tightest I've seen and with the exception of a couple of minor things listed below I've yet to come up with any significant plot-holes. It has a number of interesting antecedents that have influenced it including, amongst others: Aliens (for the Marines), Speaker for the Dead (for consciousness capturing trees), Intergral Trees (for interconnected nature) and even a bit of On Deadly Ground.

In fact it makes a great deal of sense if Cameron is treating it as the long-time-coming sequel to Aliens. If you think about it for a moment then even Sigourney Weaver aside the Marine's had a number of roughly equivalent characters and this could have been the outcome to tracing the aliens back to their origin planet.

I very much liked that in everything we saw, while some things were very far fetched, everything was rationally plausable. There was no "magic" just the ocasional unlikely outcome such as the "Gaia saves us" ending. Technically it's possible that neural links could occur between animals and even plants in an ecosystem if rather unlikely. Some people have commented on the six legged horses being an evolutionary impossibility however I liked the six legged hyena-like creatures who use their front page of legs for attacking and, in theory at least, the horses could have evolved from them.

It took me some time to realise but there really wasn't an in-your-face moral to the whole film. While there is a lot of "treat nature better", "nature is in harmony", "family / clan are very important", "don't beat up the supposedly defenceless" memes none of them were forced down your throat which, naturally, makes them hang around in your head longer.

I thought that technical and especially biological design were probably the best I've ever seen in a film. The background of Pandora and how everything fits together was some of the best world building I've seen in any medium. I would happily watch a documentary or read a book just about that alone. It came close to overshadowing the whole plot of the film.

Kudos to Cameron for not having his aliens all speak perfect English.

I was surprised and, in the long run, impressed by the choice to make the avatar's remote controlled rather than full brain transfer. The mechanism in the film did make it harder for Jake to "go native" early on was used to intelligent advantage at several points.

I was extremely impressed by the characterisation. At no point did any of the characters appear to display and blood-lust except maybe of the Colonel at the end but he had just watched 100s of his troops killed. Earlier on both he and the corporate representative waited again and again for diplomatic efforts to try and solve the problem. The latter did treat the Na'vi as savages or even animals and had no problem with disposing of them when no alternatives were available but he certainly wasn't one dimensional. The Colonel expressed only a desire to complete his assigned role well and never showed any enjoyment of the death he was inflicting. In other words there were some people prepared to do terrible things but there was no stereotypical Bad Guy.

For a long film I didn't feel that there was any section that could be cut out. In particular after the slightly rushed start the hour of more of complete imersion in the Na'vi culture was just enough to really "see" them (to use the terminology of the film) before moving back to the human PoV.

For all of the excellent things in the film I do have a few issues.

The biggest one is that the whole plot would have been significantly different if the various air-vehicles had bullet-proof glass. Hard to believe in 2154 we can journey between stars but still have cockpit windows broken by arrows.

I've said above that, for the most part, everything in the movie was approached in a rational way. One of the few exceptions to this is the soul trees seeds landing on / taking off from people at important times in the film. I can't think how that would work.

There was a missed opportunity for Jake to have a friend in the marines whom he had to kill in the final battle as they ended up on opposite sides.

It would have been nice to know why it was so unimportant for humans to have unobtanium. Also, if unobtanium makes the islands fly then why have no creatures evolved to take advantage of this capability?

Best not to mention the closing music.

All this and I've still not mentioned my favorite part. Near the end when Coloney Quaritch, in his mech, and Jake are squaring off there are about four bars of music which are almost directly lifted out of the Ripley (also in a mech) / alien queen fight sequence at the end of Aliens. A lovely little homage which I suspect very few people picked up on.

In short - a good movie, highly recommended which I will probably pick up on DVD although mostly for the special features as, at 2 1/2 hours, I'm not sure how often I'd re-watch it.

Doublethink - is the following a good idea?

2009-12-17T16:33:56Z

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/dec/14/cowell-plans-political-x-factor On the one hand anything that encourages people to engage with the political process is good, yes? However, even ignoring things like non-existent vote monitoring, does this lead to the Tyranny of the Majority?

Is it TV or is it me?

2009-12-16T00:33:42Z

{Edit - *deep shame* - actually it was more Annie's idea than mine...}

Is TV formulaic and predictable so am I just psychic for being able to predict exactly what happened at the end of the last episode of this season of Dexter before the show even started?

Hint - it's the former.

Presedent Obama - first year in office

2009-12-07T01:53:12Z

A lot of people are saying that the upcoming first State of the Union speech from President Obama will highlight his lack of accomplishment since he came into office.

This is a very good overview article ripping into that myth. The linked-to Esquire article is particularly good at showing how he's been working on a lot of stuff without pushing it into the press and also how what he's done is a good mix of things that will be supported by left and right (or piss off either left or right depending on how you see it).

Also - for those that have not seen Polifact yet it's definitely work a look. Even if just to read the "pants on fire" Truth-O-Meter and see how Republican's and Republican apologists massively outweigh the Democrats (who have far too many as it is).

A "global ethic" vs nationalism

2009-12-07T00:45:10Z

Whatever you might think about the unelected leadership of Gordon Brown his TED Q&A on "global citizenship" (his words) gives a really interesting insight into the way he thinks. I have the feeling that enough global leaders might feel this way that we might just stand a chance as a species (the odd right-wing theocractic distraction aside).

Philosophy chats

2009-12-07T00:28:05Z

Ages ago I proposed the idea of getting together down the pub to chat about a topic arranged in advance. We tried, back on the day of the treasure hunt for those that remember that, but I'm not sure how well it went.

Anyway, I've been downloading and listening to some of ethical bites and it has renewed the idea in my head again. Specifically Annie and I listened to one on the subject of "pleasure" today and Annie got to tell me about Nozick's Experience Machine.

If people fancy getting together one evening in a pub somewhere (or, who knows, even at someone's place) to discuss this or any other good topic(s) people might have let me know.

Curse of Whedon strikes again

2009-12-07T00:21:39Z

I don't post much any more as you know. Twitter (@cholten99) picks up most things but there's actually a whole bunch of stuff I want to talk about tonight so let's start with...

Ah well. Curse of Whedon does indeed strike again. After a season and a half of average hooker/assassin episodes we finally start to get a little towards the really powerful uses of the technology in the show. Okay, we've had one or two others such as life after death but it was only when the Senator made the point about not knowing which parts of his life were actually real that it should start to hit home for the viewers. Of course, being Joss, the show barely got up to speed before it got cancelled. At least they had enough notice to make what will be, I hope, a cracking ending. If nothing else we should get an explanation as to the radically different "Caroline" seen by Bennet was the best friend of one of the world's best neuroscientists and not a hippy animal rights advocate. Perhaps she invented the technology in the first place...

First Firefly and now Dollhouse. I'm glad in a way that while I do like the show I lot I never became attached to any of the characters the way I did in Firefly.

Anyway - after all that the most effecting part of the show for me was when Topher erased the other "him". The very thought of committing suicide / murder in such a casual manner as that just make me feel genuinely sick.

Ethics - interesting stuff

2009-11-19T15:49:10Z

I must finish reading Moral Minds at some point since it's idea of "natural ethics" derived from out genes is fascinating (if hard to digest at first reading).

For example - why is it I have no problem with the idea of pigs being killed so I can eat them and yet feel very uneasy at the idea of them being killed just so they can be stabbed with ballpoint pens to prove how stupid the TSA are?

Aside - why is it that one of my friends on here only reads this and not Twitter and yet his girlfriend only reads Twitter and not this? You know who you are!

Battlestar Galactica : The Plan

2009-11-11T02:21:27Z

Oh well, here I was having seen the negative reviews of this all ready to sit down and lay into how much this show still has my unending ire after the last episode. Unfortunately (depending on your point of view) I actually thought The Plan was really rather good. It reminded me in many ways of the show at its height and was mercifully Roslin, Starbuck and Apollo light which helped a great deal. More than anything it showed how rubbish the cylons are. Everything from their original reason for attacking, their lack of post-attack preparedness, their inability to carry out simple missions right up to their being "turned" by associating with humans. Well portrayed I thought. It would have been interesting to see what Cavlin, very well played here in multiple versions, would have thought of the later Cylon occupation of New Caprica, the Cylon infection and the Temple of Five but I guess we will never know.

Quality episode of television. Doesn't stop me hating the last episode of the series with the fire of a thousand suns but a pleasantly diverting couple of hours :-).

Following on from the previous post

2009-11-06T12:55:07Z

The Democrat candidate won after the official Republican candidate dropped out and endorsed them.

Republican party continues to implode

2009-10-25T22:50:56Z

Blogging rather than tweeting as several friends not using Twitter yet (and this will get automatically forwarded to my twitterfeed anyway).

Sarah Palin (and others) endorse a non-Republican candidate in election.

So, the Palinator has official endorsed a candidate in an election who is standing against someone from her own party. In most political parties this would be immediate grounds for expulsion. Problem is the GOP thinks that the headline-grabbing loonies in its ranks have more credibility with their current base than the people in charge.

Of course since the candidate was nominated by local GOP members it also shows that the right-wing aristocracy aren't necessarily representing the party members at all.

Taking the p*ss out of Nokia

2009-10-23T16:48:12Z

Only funny 'cause it's true : http://vimeo.com/7142739

We've got some way to go but our heart's in the right place (it is supposed to be our left shoe, isn't it...?) :-)

In which the author makes a Bold Statement

2009-10-20T00:01:07Z

I'm not sure if trying to write this on the tube is a good idea. Still, better now than in 2012. If we're not vaporised around that time I should be able to tweet directly from here with all fumbled mistyping happily included (while I miss my station due to concentrating on writing). Still, Marshall Mcluhan aside...

I may be about to make a Bold Statement. This sort of thing is never advised but sometimes they are at least amusing.

Tonight I went to Methodist Central Hall for an Intelligence Squared debate. This event was on the motion "The house believes that the Catholic Church is a force for good". Speaking against the motion were Stephen Fry and Christopher Hitchens. For the motion was an African archbishop and Anne Widdecombe. The first three, Stephen Fry not surprisingly in particular, were excellent public speakers.

I'm giving nothing away to announce the results as they will be online soon enough and next week, we are told, the video of the event will be televised to 70 million people (mostly in Africa). It is the convention for IQ2 to canvas audience opinion before and after the debate and questions. In this instance before 634 were for the motion, 1,204 against and 432 undecided. After it was 237 for the motion, 2002 for the motion and 34 undecided.

Now alobear can tell you better than I about biased and self selecting groups. IQ2 events are organised by The Spectator and similar publications and so will naturally tend to draw a skeptical crowd. It was rather telling though that 20% of the way through the Q&A the chair asked for any questions not going to the Catholics and all hands went down. Only five people spoke for the Catholic side. One openly decried the state of the church and called for reform and 3 of the four others, all from Africa to judge by their accents, made statements about belief rather than asking questions. It was interesting to not that both Ms Widdicomb and the archbishop said at the end how much they enjoyed the event.

Anyway, what is this Bold Statement I was going to make? Well, I was thinking last night about the already monumental changes that have happened in my lifetime and wondering what else could happen if I'm lucky enough to live another 40 or 50 years or more.

Well, I'm going way out on a limb here but I starting to wonder if we're on the edge of a catastrophic collapsed of organised religion in most 1st world countries (US aside).

Perhaps I hang out too much in secular societies and have drank the Kool Aid but it seems to me that there are any number of signs.

Looking past events such as this evenings which tend to attract confirmed skeptics.

Much of the worlds most popular "new media", such as BoingBoing the world's most popular blog, are either completely run by atheists or give more space to secularists than religion.

Religion has all-but disappeared from radio and television. Not only shows about religion but characters even mentioning religion are now either the bad guys or seen to be out of date or somehow strange.

Church attendance numbers, Christian churches particularly, (again outside the US) are falling to record lows.

Perhaps most interestingly though is that I feel that now it is becoming taboo to discuss religion at all. The meme always was that it was bad to criticise religion but now that has bonded with not wanting to offend anyone and since it is so easy to become accidentally offensive when discussing religion, usually because the side defending it is doing it from faith rather than reason, it is simply easier to avoid it at all. I recently found out by accident, much to my surprise, that a friend of mine of many years is an atheist. The subject simply never came up.

I don't like Richard Dawkins much but many of the things in The God Delusion are true. I'm thinking in particular that as a society we are collectively holding our breath - waiting for someone to tell us it's okay not to believe. I don't think it will take much. A few high profile sports and pop stars saying the got to where they are today without God and the kids will be finally be able to say openly "I'm like them".

I do feel that a movement is growing. Yes, it is quite small now and mostly limited to the sort of folks who were there tonight but I do think we're reaching a tipping point and in perhaps the next 20 years it will become the norm to be an atheist, or at least an agnostic, in many countries of the world.

Are you ready to rock? :-)

2009-10-16T16:22:07Z

Cthulhu fhtagn!

2009-09-25T14:16:38Z

Interesting short video

2009-09-24T01:08:11Z

Props to mongo42 for posting this:

Lecture bingo

2009-09-22T11:40:26Z

I'm off to a lecture tonight on The World in 2050.

I'm going to have a go at listing what I would talk about and see how many of them come up...

"AI" still doesn't work (but we're getting closer via simulating large parts of the human cortex)
Home fabricating of products
Mass reduction in copyright and drug laws
Wars fought over resource issues (especially access to water) but fought using terrorist tactics - almost complete end of "state warfare"
Both India and China are more influential on the world stage then America or the European Union
Therapeutic cloning (limb and organ replacement)
Neural integration with prosthetics and other devices (such as "phones").
Most computing power processed remotely
Humanoid robots almost indistinguishable from people but only able to perform extremely simple tasks
Climate changes noticeable by everyone
Beginning of the end of the nation state as people identify more strongly with their online communities than their neighbours (see "Diamond Age")

That's just a 5 minute go - let's see what turns up... :-)

Interesting social comment (from /. of all places)

2009-09-06T18:25:01Z

In a thread about kids texting instead of talking but not actually about that...

Firstly:

"In the 1950s, recent history was what has happened in the last hundred years. Nowadays, thanks to what could be terms a cultural compression -- recent history is what has happened in the last decade. The older generation(s) like to point to this and say we've gotten dumber... The truth is we've just changed our scope. What happened in the 1950s doesn't have much (if any) relevance to our day to day lives now... What happened even ten years ago now has only limited importance.

Don't judge people based on their memory or caring for esoteric issues that might have affected life in the "distant" past (for people my age, that's anything more than about 30 years ago) -- they know just as many fungible facts as their older counterparts, it's just about a smaller period of time."

Followed by (my highlighting):

"'Compressing your timeframe' means that there is a lot more of history that you are doomed to repeat. It's happening right now. We have a war on drugs, 23% of national income going to the top 1% of earners, we've got tons of folks clamoring for a New Deal and public works, we've seen massive corporatization (media & Internet), we're even having our version of the Red Scare, the list goes on. So yes time is compressed. We're repeating much of 1920-1950 and with new technology we're doing it in a fraction of the time for 100x more people. But you sound like you probably have no idea what I'm talking about? There's a George Orwell quote that would go nicely here."

Interesting.

Other things I don't understand

2009-09-04T23:10:35Z

Starting with this : 1 in 3 teenage girls tell of sexual abuse by their boyfriends

I've commented on this kind of thing on LJ before. What makes it very hard for me to believe is that these numbers can be accurate (for a sensible definition of "abuse") and it isn't common knowledge. I was a teenager (some time ago) and I had a lot of female friends. Were 1 in 3 of them being abused? Seems extremely unlikely to me.

Then this :

A very difficult case but I don't see how people can have thought that it would go any other way. To my understanding it simply isn't a crime to talk someone into doing harm to themselves (I'm happy to be corrected).

Wireless electricity

2009-08-28T21:09:34Z

Been watching the TED video of Witricity. Extremely impressive technology but I worry that it will never take off because, unless you can tune the coils, it not possible to stop people leaching off their neighbours power...

Difficulties in being a "free speech" beliver

2009-08-25T16:08:44Z

One of my LJ friends mongo42 serendipitously just wrote a post on something I've had tagged to mention for a while.

The BBFC has denied a certificate to a Japanese film that is so horrific they don't believe that is should be seen by anyone. Now, while the film does sound truly nauseating the question is - at what point do liberal folks like myself and Matt consider that it should be stopped?

As well as the "public hazard" speech Matt refers to there is also a well understood sub-set of speech that is banned. That which is said to be "obscene". This is often defined by local community standards (guess what NYC and Ohio are quite different) and center around speech which is "harmful". Originally to "weak" people (women and children) but increasingly to everyone.

Obviously even someone like me is in favor of keeping this film away from highly impressionable people but who can define who they are these days? Most kids probably have a stronger stomach for this kind of thing than I do.

Well, I guess if this was easy people wouldn't still be fighting about it...

Young Rewired State

2009-08-23T22:55:01Z

#youngrewiredstate Had a great weekend at Young Rewired State.
A write-up here.
A Flickr stream here.
A twitterfall here.
Press Association copy here.
BBC article here.
Update on Yahoo Developer Network from Christian here. Including a cool (if rather small) picture of me.
Guardian article.
Meta page.
Video of the day.

My biggest finds of the weekend were YQL and the chaps that run the London Hackspaces.

Pic of my team - who won this "Wish I'd thought for that" award for our site "Will Work for Peanuts".

Clutter

2009-08-17T22:11:33Z

As people may know I, and Annie to a lesser extent, like to regularly get rid of "stuff" that we've accumulated over time. For example I've got a bunch of stuff up on Freecycle at the moment that's been sitting under the bed unused for years.

Regardless, this is still one of the most obsessive things I've ever seen.

That said I would find it difficult to even list the categories of the objects that I own - never mind any kind of actual list of items:

Flat
Car
Furniture
Electrical "white goods"
Other electrical goods
Orniments
Pictures
Books
DVDs
CDs
Games
Clothes
Kitchen utensils
Tools
Soft toys
Linens
Bathroom items
Plants
Fish
...

Terry Pratchett on the right to die

2009-08-07T15:41:31Z

See : http://www.boingboing.net/2009/08/07/terry-pratchett-on-t.html

Arcadia

2009-07-28T23:03:09Z

We went out tonight to see Arcadia. Probably one of the top five plays I've ever seen with something that will appeal to fans of comedy, tragedy, literature, history and maths. Tom Stoppard is a genius.

However, be warned, it's also very very sad. It's over two hours since curtain down and I'm still upset.