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Diary
By TheophileEscargot (Mon Feb 04, 2008 at 09:09:43 PM EST) Watching, Listening, Reading, MLP (all tags)
Listening: "Philosophy and Religion in the West". Watching. Web.

What I'm Listening To
Finished TTC course Philosophy and Religion in the West

One of the better courses from there that I've done. More intellectually challenging than some of them: often needed to go back to the course guide to work things out.

As I mentioned before, the first section is the most fascinating, concentrating on the interaction between the Judeo-Christian scriptures and Neoplatonic philosophy.

The later sections suffered a bit. The middle section was pretty familiar to me since it concentrated on the major enlightenment and modern philosophers.

The final section deals with more modern and some contemporary philosophy of religion There's material on neo-Orthodoxy, the "Biblical Other", process philosophy and logical empiricism.

While it's new and complicated stuff to me, found it less interesting because it seems to be a bit lacking in actual consequences. Even if God is changing in time, if reality is a process not an event, if God is the subject and we are the object, if our experience is merely a bundle of successive sense-impressions; none of it actually seems to mean you should do anything differently.

Overall though, a worthwhile course if you're interested in the subject.

Watching
Saw Cloverfield at the cinema. I really liked it, but both people I was with hated it.

Yes, it is pretty much what you expect and was obvious from the trailers: Godzilla meets Blair Witch Project, monster movie allegedly filmed on a shockproof super-duper-camcorder with Dolby surround sound, night-vision, lamp, and very long-lasting batteries. But that's pretty much what I wanted, and I thought it put a refreshingly different angle on things. It's a story from the point of view of the average guy, not a hero defeating a baddie in a predictable sequence of climaxes. Captures the menace more effectively than most movies, with glancing shots and noises from all around. It wasn't saddled with dull and implausible exposition 'explaining' the monster, nor an absurd happy ending like 'I am Legend'. And I was glad that it didn't follow the current fashion for ponderous length, was a crisp hour and a bit..

The thing about Hollywood seems to be that everyone whines when they follow formulas, but they whine even more when the formulas are broken. They hate crappy star vehicles, but whine that there's no-one to feel sympathetic with when there's no star.

Oh well, I liked it.

Web
Pics. Minijets, about. Christian Dispensational Charts. Old African-American portraits. WTF? Today is the day

Tech. Web users slightly less dumb.

Shift platform game.

Articles. 1939: toilet attendant foils IRA bomb plot. Media falsehood: fueled by dubious polling companies like this? [MeFi]

Blogs. Coppersblog: just another day. The Hollywood scriptwriter caste system.

Socioeconomics. Hedonic adaptation. Includes graphs of how happiness changes before and after various events.

Male life satisfaction

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She'll never leave Fred, and we know it | 23 comments (23 topical, 0 hidden)
If you liked Cloverfield, you'd probably like by ObviousTroll (4.00 / 2) #1 Tue Feb 05, 2008 at 03:59:57 AM EST
The Host - despite the Netflix blurb, it absolutely does NOT have a Hollywood ending.

--
Has anybody seen my clue? I know I had it when I came in here.
The Host by nebbish (4.00 / 1) #15 Wed Feb 06, 2008 at 01:07:52 AM EST
Is a real gem. I don't usually like Korean cinema (style over substance) but it's a really deep film - all that family stuff; and it has a weird atmosphere to it, something to do with being set almost exclusively amongst the concrete struts of a bridge. It's a fave.

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It's political correctness gone mad!

[ Parent ]
That "minijet" sure looks like by ObviousTroll (4.00 / 1) #2 Tue Feb 05, 2008 at 04:13:10 AM EST
a BD-5j.

The Sipa mini-jet is the one with the twin tails.

It's amazing how the details of childhood daydreams still pop out my head. I had a Cox line-flying version of the BD-5 (no j). Sweetest toy a 70's geek could hope for.

--
Has anybody seen my clue? I know I had it when I came in here.

charts by ucblockhead (4.00 / 1) #3 Tue Feb 05, 2008 at 07:14:14 AM EST
Interesting, but I'm confused as to what the difference between "layoff" and "unemployment" is.

The divorce one is particularly amusing.

Re: polling companies. I just saw this this morning. In my state, Clinton is either ahead by ten or behind by thirteen, depending on which poll you believe. Some of it is poor polling, I'm sure, but I've lately wondered if some polling is as much an attempt to drive numbers as to report them.

I mostly liked Cloverfield, but didn't love it.
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[ucblockhead is] useless and subhuman

Layoffs/unemployment by TheophileEscargot (2.00 / 0) #4 Tue Feb 05, 2008 at 07:25:22 AM EST
From the paper:
For the last catch-all category of unemployed five years or more, we require that the individual report unemployment at each of the last five interviews (and be in the same unemployment spell)
...
Finally, layoffs are identified from the replies given to questions on whether (and if so at which date) the individual had left a job since the beginning of the previous calendar year. If they had done so, they were asked to state why they had left. Individuals have been laid off in the past year, according to our definition, if they left their job after the date of their previous GSOEP interview, and the reason for leaving was "plant closing" or "dismissal".

--
It is unlikely that the good of a snail should reside in its shell: so is it likely that the good of a man should?
[ Parent ]
ah, thanks by ucblockhead (4.00 / 1) #5 Tue Feb 05, 2008 at 07:33:01 AM EST
It's interesting that layoffs generally make people happier in the end. (Though I wish they'd followed all the charts out beyond five years.)
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[ucblockhead is] useless and subhuman
[ Parent ]
Lets put it this way.... by Tonatiuh (2.00 / 0) #23 Fri Feb 22, 2008 at 05:15:23 AM EST
I would love to be layed off. That would allow me to stop working for 2 years.

Who would not be happy with such a prospect?

[ Parent ]
I was surprised at the media falsehoods story by Dr H0ffm4n (2.00 / 0) #14 Tue Feb 05, 2008 at 11:36:10 PM EST
a) Is it a surprise to anyone that the majority of news is provided by PR departments via news agencies? Do people really believe that a daily paper with over 50 pages is actually written from scratch by investigative journalists every day?
b) The 'story' criticising the fact that news is full of PR is actually a plug for the author's own book!

[ Parent ]
Don't understand the charts by Dr Thrustgood (4.00 / 2) #6 Tue Feb 05, 2008 at 08:00:48 AM EST
For female life satisfaction ones, marriage satisfaction at year 4 is below that of widowhood... which doesn't add up, right?

Same is true of the blokes.

What is my stupidity allowing to get in the way of understanding the above?



Well by TheophileEscargot (4.00 / 3) #7 Tue Feb 05, 2008 at 08:47:05 AM EST
Marriage at Year 4 is way happier than Widowhood Year 0. It's slighly lower than Widowhood Year 4 though.

I suppose after four years they've pretty much recovered from the pain of widowhood and are back to normal. Whereas at marriage year 4 you've adapted past the initial hump of happiness and are suffering from the pain of marriage. You may even be posting whiny articles to HuSi about it...
--
It is unlikely that the good of a snail should reside in its shell: so is it likely that the good of a man should?

[ Parent ]
widowhood by ucblockhead (4.00 / 1) #17 Wed Feb 06, 2008 at 06:36:14 AM EST
A proportion are in the first happy years of marriage number two.
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[ucblockhead is] useless and subhuman
[ Parent ]
Widowhood by R Mutt (2.00 / 0) #21 Wed Feb 06, 2008 at 06:54:19 AM EST
For the last catch-all category of unemployed five years or more, we require that the individual report unemployment at each of the last five interviews (and be in the same unemployment spell). The same procedure is used for marriage, divorce and widowhood, with the sample for the latter consisting of those aged between 16 and 80
I'd interpret that to mean that they don't remarry within the five years.

Also the trough pain of widowhood seems to be much greater than the peak happiness of marriage. Looks like -1.0 vs 0.3 in males, -1.0 vs 0.4 in females. So a marriage wouldn't really compensate for it.

What we really need to do is to integrate the total unhappinesses of widowhood and divorce, multiply them by the probabilities of each; then compare that to the integrated happiness of marriage.

Then we would finally know scientifically whether marriage is a good idea...

[ Parent ]
an interesting question by ucblockhead (4.00 / 1) #22 Wed Feb 06, 2008 at 06:57:11 AM EST
I can't help but notice that to make yourself happiest, you need to get into a really crappy marriage and then get divorced.

But the curse of human existence is that we are driven to do things we *know* will make us unhappy.
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[ucblockhead is] useless and subhuman

[ Parent ]
oh also by ucblockhead (4.00 / 1) #18 Wed Feb 06, 2008 at 06:37:28 AM EST
Note how big the error bars are on the widowhood graph. That means they had very few instances to draw from.
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[ucblockhead is] useless and subhuman
[ Parent ]
Isn't it obvious? by DullTrev (4.00 / 2) #8 Tue Feb 05, 2008 at 09:02:57 AM EST

The graphs show the best thing about marriage appears to be getting out of it.


--
DFJ?
[ Parent ]
subjective well being and other odds and ends by lm (4.00 / 1) #9 Tue Feb 05, 2008 at 11:14:38 AM EST
From the paper, life satisfaction is defined entirely on as the quantified answer to a single question, ``How satisfied are you with your life, all things considered?'' I'm not convinced that this is a good metric.

And if I'm reading the data correctly, the change in life satisfaction is being displayed in tenths of a point while it is being measured on an eleven point scale (0 through 10). On many of the charts, such as that for marriage, this means were talking about relatively low shifts in subjective well being.

Some of the prior years exhibit odd trends. In the case of widowship, I suppose in a number of cases the death of the spouse is foreshadowed by illness or injury. So it makes sense that subjective well being would decline prior to the event itself. But what about being layed off or being unemployed? Those sorts of events are usually anticipated years in advance.

Lastly, while the trends seem to indicate that various events generally make people subjectively better or worse off (depending on the event), the authors had a much more limited conclusion: that, with the exception of unemployment, people tend to return the same subjective score before and/after these specific events.

Kindness is an act of rebellion.
Richard Layard by TheophileEscargot (2.00 / 0) #10 Tue Feb 05, 2008 at 12:05:26 PM EST
Puts quite a bit of effort into justifying that measurement in "Happiness: Lessons from a New Science", saying it matches up well across cultures and ties in with brain activity.

I would guess layoffs and unemployment are preceded by uncertainty and noticeable problems beforehand. It's usually pretty obvious when you work in a contracting field.
--
It is unlikely that the good of a snail should reside in its shell: so is it likely that the good of a man should?

[ Parent ]
agree by alprazolam (4.00 / 1) #11 Tue Feb 05, 2008 at 02:03:39 PM EST
its been obvious to me for 3 or 4 years now that i'm about to get laid off, and it's been bothering me for that long as well.

[ Parent ]
Right, but a year? Two years? by lm (2.00 / 0) #12 Tue Feb 05, 2008 at 04:32:29 PM EST
In my experience, lay off rumors generally have a lead time measured in months rather than years. Although, it could be that most companies tend to lay off people who under perform. Perhaps  those who are discontent tend to be underperformers and disproportionately the target of layoffs.

I also forgot to mention that the data is all tied to Germany. I don't have any reason to think that this would be problematic. But neither do I have any reason to think its representative of life in the states.

Kindness is an act of rebellion.
[ Parent ]
Well by TheophileEscargot (2.00 / 0) #13 Tue Feb 05, 2008 at 07:37:48 PM EST
If you're working on a car assembly line in the Eighties, you're aware you're at risk more than a few months in advance.

I don't see anything particularly surprising in the data. There's quite a lot of this happiness research around, and this seems pretty in line with the rest of it.
--
It is unlikely that the good of a snail should reside in its shell: so is it likely that the good of a man should?

[ Parent ]
good and bad companies by ucblockhead (4.00 / 1) #19 Wed Feb 06, 2008 at 06:40:56 AM EST
Layoffs are much more likely to happen in poorly run companies with moral issues then in well run companies with happy employees. Layoffs may only have lead times of six months to a year but the problems that cause the need for layoffs can be decades in the making.
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[ucblockhead is] useless and subhuman
[ Parent ]
Cloverfield by nebbish (4.00 / 1) #16 Wed Feb 06, 2008 at 01:18:42 AM EST
Disclaimer: I haven't seen it yet - but that's never stopped me criticising something before :)

I don't think using hand-held cameras and that documentary-style is particularly new or interesting. Cannibal Holocaust did it back in the 70s and it's been done many, many times since. For a recent example see the appalling low-budget Brit horror The Zombie Diaries. Actually, on second thoughts, don't :)

Secondly, it's a stylistic tick, and not what breaking formulas is about. Breaking formulas is in plotting, storyline, characters, stuff that actually MATTERS.

I'm with you on the famous names thing, but they do have to be good actors playing good characters. If you're not engaging it's not because they're not famous, it's because either the character or the actor misfires.

What I've heard about Cloverfield is that the characters are bland, twentysomething middle-class New Yorkers and the film is just the same old monster movie. It doesn't appeal to me enough to go and see it at the cinema. Having just seen The Host (see other comment) and the original Japanese Godzilla a couple of years ago, I can't see the point of it at all.

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It's political correctness gone mad!

More than a stylistic tick by ucblockhead (4.00 / 2) #20 Wed Feb 06, 2008 at 06:47:44 AM EST
In defense of the movie, it isn't just the shaky camera thing. It's also about telling the classic monster movie story from an entirely different perspective, from the point of view of the people on the ground who haven't a fucking clue what is going on. It is definitely breaking formulas in terms of plot and storyline.

That said, the plot and style constraints themselves force the story into places that aren't as enjoyable. And yes, the characters are all pretty bland. But it is certainly *not* just the same old monster movie. In fact, one of the reasons the characters are so bland is that they react pretty much like people really would. There's no punchy dialog or witty statements. There's a lot of screams and inane blather.

I'd classify Cloverfield as an interesting experiment that only partially succeeds. But that's better than a schlocky retread.
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[ucblockhead is] useless and subhuman

[ Parent ]
She'll never leave Fred, and we know it | 23 comments (23 topical, 0 hidden)

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