When you walk through the valley
Saw 10,000BC on DVD as my dumb-bell movie. Roland Emmerich movie, following the white-saviour plot currently popular in Avatar. Reasonably entertaining, though the dialogue is staggeringly stilted. Not sure why in 10,000 BC everyone had to say "it is" rather than "it's". Are they supposed to be speaking a primitive English from before contractions had been invented?
I think in terms of movie plausibility there's a kind of Unlikely Valley. If a movie is generally plausible, you obviously don't find it implausible. But if a film is completely implausible, it also doesn't feel objectionable, because you're not expecting it to be accurate. It's only films in the Unlikely Valley, where they try to be realistic but fail, that give you a problem suspending your disbelief.
10,000 BC is well outside the Unlikely Valley.
What I'm Reading
Grabbed Digital
Photography Masterclass by Tom Ang from the library
Not sure it's quite a masterclass, but not for total beginners:
he expects you to know the basics about exposures and apertures
and so on. (Was quite surprised to find some people only slightly younger than
me not knowing what a camera aperture was).
Seems like a pretty good book. Full of helpful advice, both on a practical and an aesthetic level. It's full of glossy pictures, but they're not there to just look impressive on a coffee table, there are lots of layouts showing how various changes affect a scene, and step-by-step guides to image manipulation.
I found the structure a little awkward for me. There's not much long continuous text, rarely more than a few paragraphs, and there are lots of sidebars and digressions. Lots of people find that PowerPoint style much easier though.
Well worth a look through.
iPad
So, opinions seem mixed as you'd expect.
There seems to be a degree of agreement though, that the iPad doesn't fill any existing niche (smartphone, e-book reader, netbook, laptop, desktop) better than its current occupant.
So to the pessimists that makes it a failure. But the optimists think that it's going to create a brand new niche.
I don't think I'd have much use for it myself. I can see there might be groups that find it handy: students, people who can't type (we often forget about how many of them there are). I know that I tend to think of "portable" as "something I can stick in a pocket", whereas to a lot of people it means "something I can fit in my car".
So, I'm undecided, but leaning negative. Tabloids look cool, but they've been pushed pretty hard before without getting anywhere.
Web
Socioeconomics
Tesco bans pajamas as daywear.
We're all conservatives now.
The Americanization of
Mental Illness.
Common misconceptions
of sociology.
Life as a social worker.
China devaluation won't help West.
Zero-rupee
note fights corruption.
Don't write
off Japan.
Happiness
research suggests obesity worse than widowhood.
So if you're fat because of your wife's great cooking, the rational
course is to murder her?
Random. Unhappy hipsters. Weight Loss Cutlery. Simon Swears. Passive-agressive wifi names.
Politics. US. Dear Conservative Movement: Stop Ruining My Life. Fat Activists unhappy with Whole Foods low-BMI employee bonus.
Video. Future dating.
Science. Human brain encodes spatial information in the form of of a hexagonal grid. Garry Kasparov article on chess, computers and humanity.
Pics. Money origami.
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