No Pundit Intended

2006-05-31T17:10:00.000-04:00

Disney/Pixar Cars Premiere: NASCAR, Music, Celebrities, Fireworks, fly-overs, and the world's largest digital movie screens.

Last Friday, May 26, 2006, I took my family to the world premiere of the new Disney/Pixar animated feature, Cars. The story revolves around stock car racing in a world populated just by cars and other motor vehicles. Richard Petty has a small but important voice role and there are also bit parts by Dale Earnhardt, Jr. and Darrell Waltrip, so the premiere was fittingly held at the Lowes Motor Speedway, just outside Charlotte, N. C. Brief review of the movie: highly entertaining, but not as fresh as Pixar's earlier films. The story will seem too familiar to grown-ups. Cars opens June 9th in the United States.

The Speedway is an immense complex which can seat 167,000 people. The track is 1.5 miles long, the length of 26 football fields. For the premiere, about 30,000 seats were available, all around “Turn 2.” The tickets were available to the public, but sold out fairly quickly. Most of the tickets went, I'm sure, to NASCAR fans. This is the biggest week for Lowes Motor Speedway, culminating in the Coca-Cola 600. I'm not a NASCAR fan, but I found out about the event from a mailing from Disney. Our sons, courtesy of their Aunt Henrietta, have a subscription to Disney's online game, ToonTown, and Disney has our address from that. The tickets were priced very reasonably, $10 each, with proceeds going to charity.

We started from Chapel Hill, except for my wife and 9-year old son, who were at the N.C. Zoo in Asheboro on a class field trip--busy day! We picked them up there, then headed down N.C. Route 49, which I hadn't traveled on for years, through the Uwharrie National Forest. This turned out to be quite fitting, since a theme of the movie is enjoying the scenery on Route 66, instead of speeding along Interstate 40.

One funny thing happened on the way down. My 16 year-old daughter got a phone call from one of her best friends. The conversation went something like this: “Hello ... I'm in the car on the way to Charlotte. ... Because! ... I'll talk to you later. ... Because! ... I'll be back tomorrow.” She didn't want to tell her where she was going. As it turns out, she didn't want to have anything to do with Larry the Cable Guy, who has a major role in the picture and was the emcee for the live portion of the premiere. He was completely inoffensive at the premiere, my daughter admitted, not (in her words) his “usual celebration of ignorance and bigotry”!! I have no idea if this is an accurate description of his act, which I've never seen.

Disney was taking a risk holding the premiere outdoors and weather nearly ruined it. I checked the forecast the night before and there was a 60% chance of rain. Sure enough, as we headed down NC49, the sky darkened and there was lightning in the distance. Highway 49 leads right to Morehead Road, where the speedway is. As we approached the speedway, we traveled through vast campgrounds filled with RVs. It confirmed my daughter's worst suspicions about the redneck nature of the event. More than a few Confederate flags were evident. There are African-American NASCAR fans, by the way, including the husband and young son of one of my coworkers. She tried to get tickets to the event, but it was already sold out. I'd guess that only about 1% of the crowd that night was black.

It only started to rain as we were looking for a parking place. After we parked, we waited for a break in the weather. When the rain seemed to be slowing, we got out of our car--and then the hail started! Or maybe it was just sleet, I don't know if there's a distinction. It was just rice grain-sized, but there were reports of dime-sized hail in nearby counties.

We waited in the minivan, with the windows steaming up. We tried to call the speedway to find out if the event was going to go on, but just got in a seemingly endless hold loop.

Eventually the weather calmed down a bit and we trekked to the stadium. At the gates we were handed free plastic rain ponchos. I don't know if that's a standard NASCAR thing or just something special for this event, but, either way, they were very welcome. By the time we got to our seats the rain had stopped, but it did drizzle a few times during the evening, so we did use them.

There were 4 or 5 giant TV screens showing the celebrities arriving on the red carpet outside the stadium; a couple of NASCAR announcers narrated. Three trucks with jet engines mounted sideways on the back were blowing water off the track.

After a long time, the festivities began. In some order the following happened:

There was an exhibition race, 8 cars for 12 laps, with Disney Studios' chairman Dick Cook starting the race in the pace car. Darrell Waltrip won the race in what was apparently a pre-planned outcome.
A military band played some patriotic music; at the end, perfectly timed, four F-16s flew over the stadium.
Country music group Diamond Rio sang the National Anthem, with an honor guard from the 82nd Airborne presenting the colors. Just at “the rockets' red glare,” red fireworks shot up and, well, the bombs burst in the air. Nice touch.
Larry the Cable the Guy told a few jokes and introduced Disney chair Dick Cook, John Lasseter, Paul Newman, and Speedway chairman Burton Smith. The former pair presented the latter pair with oversized checks for their charities, with half a million going to Newman's Hole in the Wall Gang camp and the same amount to the Speedway Children's Charities.
A band that just plays parties and other events warmed up the crowd with a lively set. Unfortunately, there were sound problems; we couldn't hear one of the singers. Perhaps the problem was just in our section of the stadium.
Larry the Cable Guy told a few more jokes and introduced the cast of the movie that were present: himself, Paul Newman, Cheech Marin, Richard Petty, John Ratzenberger, Michael Wallis (author of Route 66: The Mother Road), Tony Shalhoub, Katherine Helmond, Bonnie Hunt, Darrell Waltrip, and Owen Wilson.
Country star Brad Paisley sang three songs, including “Mud on the Tires.” Evidently he's quite popular. I'd never heard of him, but he was quite good. A couple of his songs are on the Cars soundtrack. I notice on Wikipedia that he appeared on a TV special, "Route 66: Main Street America" on The Learning Channel" back in 2000.
Larry the Cable Guy recognized several groups in the audience--military families and children from the Speedway charities.
Larry the Cable Guy introduces surprise musical guest Chuck Berry! Holy cow, he's 79 years old! One of his hits was "Route 66" (Get Your Kicks on Route 66). Coincidentally, I saw him 19 years ago, almost to the day (5/24/1987) at the American Booksellers Association Convention. He gave a great private show there to promote his autobiography. I thought he was old then! Unfortunately, at the Cars premiere, there were major screw-ups in the sound system. First we couldn't hear him sing, then we couldn't hear his guitar. Then he introduces the piano player and we couldn't hear the piano! It was infuriating. I hope that the problem was not in all sections of the stadium--that would be insulting to the performers as well as the audience. I don't even remember what he sang because I was so steamed.

At last, around 10PM, the movie started. The entertainment was fine, but considering the weather and the number of young children present, it could have been shorter.

The movie was great fun. It tells of a cocky, rookie race-car, Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson), who is in three-way tie for the Piston Cup. (Until very recently, NASCAR's season championship was the Winston Cup.) On the way across country to the special tie-breaker race, in the middle of the night Lightning falls out of his trailer and, with no headlights, gets lost on a back road. Trying to get back to Interstate 40, Lightning causes quite a bit of damage to the desert village of Radiator Springs and is put in the hoosegow by the local sheriff.

Lightning is sentenced to fix the damage, which takes several days. Grown-ups won't find much suspense in what follows: will Lightning find humility, small town values, true love? Will the embittered veteran be coaxed out of retirement, will Lightning win the big race? Cars is not at the level of Pixar's top films, Toy Story(s), Finding Nemo, or The Incredibles, but it is a solid piece of entertainment, like A Bug's Life or Monsters, Inc.

After the credits rolled (and, yes, there was something clever during the credits), there was a short fireworks display. Then we left; it was midnight.

The film was shown on four giant movie screens--115ft by 50ft (35m x 13m)--projected digitally using DLP Cinema 2K projectors from NEC, Christie, and Barco. Each screen was lit by three projectors perfectly overlapping to achieve maximum brightness. The resolution of each projector is 2048 x 1080. The picture was superb--perfect, really. A side purpose of the premiere was to show off the capabilities of the DLP projectors. I think that digital projectors have definitely arrived.

I see that Carmike is installing DLP projectors in a big way, including in a theater not too far from me. I'll have to check out what DLP looks like for a live-action picture.

The sound, unfortunately, was not good. It was unpleasantly loud and, though I could understand all the dialogue, I don't think I would have recognized any actor's voice (except John Ratzenberger) if I didn't already know who they were. There was something very wrong about the audio spectrum.

Despite the weather and the sound problems, we all had a great time, even my teenage daughter (although she may not admit it).

2004-08-20T00:00:00.000-04:00

La Palma Mega-Tsunami?

Last week, Bill McGuire of the Benfield Hazard Research Centre in London was again pushing his theory that a collapse of the volcanic island La Palma in the Canary Islands is likely to cause a "mega-tsunami" that could cause a giant wave crashing into much of the United States. This was also the subject of a BBC documentary which has been shown several times on the Discovery Channel.

Well, don't worry too much. Tsunami experts have looked into the theory and don't consider it much of a threat. First, they expect La Palma to collapse in many small landslides, not one giant one. And, second, even if the worst case collapse did occur, the wave would be much smaller than McGuire says. A three foot-high wave looks to be the biggest that could hit the U.S., not a 200 foot-high wave. Note that in the documentary, the example they give of a mega-tsunami is a landslide in a bay. In the open ocean a wave would behave considerably different. To quote a committe of the Tsunami Society:

We would like to halt the scaremongering from these unfounded reports. We wish to provide the media with factual information so that the public can be properly informed about actual hazards of tsunamis and their mitigation.
Here are a set of facts, agreed on by committee members, about the claims in these reports:

While the active volcano of Cumbre Vieja on Las Palma is expected to erupt again, it will not send a large part of the island into the ocean, though small landslides may occur. The Discovery program does not bring out in the interviews that such volcanic collapses are extremely rare events, separated in geologic time by thousands or even millions of years.
No such event - a mega tsunami - has occurred in either the Atlantic or Pacific oceans in recorded history. NONE.

The colossal collapses of Krakatau or Santorin (the two most similar known happenings) generated catastrophic waves in the immediate area but hazardous waves did not propagate to distant shores. Carefully performed numerical and experimental model experiments on such events and of the postulated Las Palma event verify that the relatively short waves from these small, though intense, occurrences do not travel as do tsunami waves from a major earthquake.

The U.S. volcano observatory, situated on Kilauea, near the current eruption, states that there is no likelihood of that part of the island breaking off into the ocean

These considerations have been published in journals and discussed at conferences sponsored by the Tsunami Society.

2004-08-19T22:35:00.000-04:00

Bush's Exit Strategy

The news this week that President Bush is planning for the long overdue reduction of troops in Europe and Asia reminded me of a conversation I had recently with my parents. They had both been reading The Sorrows of Empire : Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic by Chalmers Johnson. One fact from the book that they found dismaying was that the U.S. has over 700 military bases in foreign countries.

I did some web research and found the Base Structure Report. Sure enough, there are 702 foreign bases. Well, 702 foreign installations, anyway. The Aviano air base in Italy actually comprises some eight installations: the main base and seven annexes for housing, administration, and storage. Of the 702 installations, 312 are in Germany. If you add up Germany, Italy, the United Kingom, South Korea, and Japan, you get (if I count correctly) 598. So, 85% of the bases are in just five countries.

2004-08-12T12:39:00.000-04:00

At Photo.Stamps.Com, you can create genuine U.S. postage stamps with your own photos on them. I've got to try this out! It's almost enough to get me to actually send someone I know a physical letter instead of an email .... Naaaah!

2004-08-10T22:59:00.000-04:00

Cool video of a landslide in Japan

2004-08-07T20:54:00.000-04:00

But the greatest of these is...

There is an excellent version of Boggle on the web at WEBoggle.shackworks.com where you compete against other players online. (You can also buy the traditional Parkers Brothers version of Boggle at Amazon.com.) When WEBoggle first appeared, I played it obsessively for a couple of days...okay, for a couple of weeks. Now I just play every once in a while.

Fairly often, the letters FAW come up on the board. There is no word "faw", but I once worked with a lovely young lady named Faith Faw, when I was working at the Intimate Bookshop in Chapel Hill. She was the eldest of three girls (this is a true story). The three sisters were named Faith, Hope, and Sandra.

I'm still amused by this almost twenty years since I first heard it.

2004-08-04T00:51:00.000-04:00

I see in a post at kottke.org that Malcom Gladwell is writing a book one the topic based on his 2002 New Yorker article "The Naked Face." There was an earlier discussion there about the article and whether a cop was justified in shooting a suspect, as described in the article.

There was an article on the same topic in the January 2004 Smithsonian Magazine (abstract online) and there the cop gives a slightly different version of what happened.

He [Paul Ekman] believes the best answer to the complexities of the human face lies not in computers but in the human mind-particularly in a handful of minds with a special gift for reading faces. Over the years, Ekman has identified about 30 such savants, people who consistently score 80 percent or better on his one-hour test of their ability to detect lies. He calls this group the Diogenes Project, after the Greek philosopher who peered into the faces of fellow citizens by lantern light in search of one honest man. Most, such as Sgt. Robert Harms of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, are in law enforcement.
But even the Diogenes types are not "walking lie detectors," says Harms. They're simply people who have developed the habit of listening harder and watching more closely, because their work depends on it. "It isn't magic, it isn't voodoo," says Harms. "It's just one other tool that we have in our bag of tricks."
If Harms sounds cautious, it's because he's leery of inducing false confidence among people desperate for a simple solution to terrorism. The "Pinocchio syndrome," he says, encourages people to hope there might be one telling facial expression as obvious as Pinocchio's nose. An August 2002 article in the New Yorker, for instance, suggested that it was reasonable for a cop with the Diogenes gift to have shot and killed an approaching assailant based on "a hunch, a sense of the situation and the man's behavior and what he glimpsed inside the man's coat and on the man's face."
But being right 80 percent of the time on the Diogenes test is hardly shoot-to-kill accuracy. The cop in the New Yorker article, in fact, was Harms, who got out of the car afterward and held the assailant in his arms as he died. Harms says what he actually glimpsed, long enough to read the brand name, was a can of hair spray in one of the assailant's hands, and, in the other, a cigarette lighter. It was a weapon, a makeshift flamethrower capable of torching Harms and his partner. "It wasn't something I was reading in his face, or any kind of cues," Harms says. "It was the totality of the situation."

2004-07-18T01:57:00.000-04:00

Collaborative Filtering

Craig Newmark notices something about the list of most-referenced movies and those that are missing from the New York Times list.

One thing I wanted to mention was another way of rating movies: to predict how much you will like a given movie based on your ratings of other movies and comparing that to the rating given by others who liked the same movies you did. The mail-order DVD rental website Netflix includes just such a system. There were a few earlier experiments with this on the Internet, notably EachMovie.com and MovieCritic.com, now both defunct. The only free website I know of that currently rates movies this way is MovieLens.

DEC (Digitial Equipment Corporation, later bought by Compaq which later merged with Hewlett-Packard) sponsored Eachmovie.com and made the data from the project available for research purposes. As part of class project at UC Berkeley, a principal components analysis was done on the data. The results are interesting. The meaning of the first three components they found seem pretty natural, but I'm not sure about how they named the next two:

COMPONENT 1: HIGHBROW to LOWBROW (magnitude = 128)
58 Il Postino (The Postman) 52 Mighty Aphrodite 41 Richard III 232 Eat Drink Man Woman 306 Three Colors: Red 608 Fargo 265 Like Water For Chocolate (Como Agua Para Chocolate) 307 Three Colors: Blue 25 Leaving Las Vegas 111 Taxi Driver (1976) 800 Lone Star	374 Richie Rich 65 Bio-Dome 267 Major Payne 420 Beverly Hills Cop III 174 Jury Duty 135 Down Periscope 810 Kazaam 419 The Beverly Hillbillies 66 Lawnmower Man 2: Jobe's War 502 The Next Karate Kid 688 Operation Dumbo Drop
COMPONENT 2: CLASSICS to CONTEMPORARY (magnitude = 48)
1250 The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) 1019 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) 1262 The Great Escape (1963) 1195 The Magnificent Seven (1954) 1287 Ben-Hur (1959) 1283 High Noon (1952) 914 My Fair Lady (1964) 899 Singing in the Rain (1952) 1231 The Right Stuff (1983) 1028 Mary Poppins (1964) 1012 Old Yeller (1957)	85 Angels & Insects 81 Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead 180 Mallrats 766 I Shot Andy Warhol 444 Even Cowgirls Get the Blues 663 Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy 347 Bitter Moon 778 Trainspotting 352 Crooklyn 259 Kiss of Death 156 Blue in the Face
COMPONENT 3: GIRLS' MOVIES to BOY'S MOVIES (magnitude = 30)
421 Black Beauty 262 A Little Princess 46 How to Make an American Quilt 261 Little Women 531 The Secret Garden (1993) 238 Far From Home: The Adventures of Yellow Dog 271 Losing Isaiah 270 Love Affair 8 Tom and Huck (Tom Sawyer) 258 A Kid in King Arthur's Court 351 Corrina, Corrina	1476 Private Parts 842 Tales From the Crypt Presents: Bordello of Blood 879 The Relic 1431 Beverly Hills Ninja 1405 Beavis and Butt-head Do America 1407 Scream 798 Daylight 799 The Frighteners 1429 Jackie Chan's First Strike 1004 The Glimmer Man 1120 The People vs. Larry Flynt
COMPONENT 4: CHICK FLICKS to HORROR (magnitude = 26)
1353 The Mirror Has Two Faces 1363 The Preacher's Wife 1043 To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday 605 One Fine Day 830 The First Wives Club 613 Jane Eyre 838 Emma 1367 101 Dalmatians (1996) 1113 The Associate 848 The Spitfire Grill 17 Sense and Sensibility	328 Tales From the Crypt Presents: Demon Knight 426 Body Snatchers 366 Wes Craven's New Nightmare 610 Heavy Metal (1981) 1261 Evil Dead II (1987) 1347 A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) 332 Village of the Damned 606 Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh 177 Lord of Illusions 188 The Prophecy (God's Army) 413 Airheads
COMPONENT 5: ACTION to HEARTWARMING (magnitude = 15)
517 Rising Sun 805 A Time to Kill 832 Ransom 161 Crimson Tide 257 Just Cause 490 Malice 544 Striking Distance 423 Blown Away 1092 Basic Instinct 379 Timecop 280 Murder in the First	99 Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam 818 A Very Brady Sequel 312 Stuart Saves His Family 631 All Dogs Go to Heaven 2 343 The Baby-Sitters Club 609 Homeward Bound II: Lost in San Francisco 181 Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie 711 Flipper 126 The NeverEnding Story III 810 Kazaam 63 Don't Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood

2004-07-18T01:53:00.000-04:00

From The Furrygoat Experience:

Check out a totally cool spiderman movie “The Peril Of Doc Ock”, completely done in Lego stop motion. Check it out. Very neat.

2004-07-13T00:38:00.000-04:00

Most "referenced" movies on IMDb

Another interesting way of looking at movies is the number of times a movie is referenced by other movies. It gives some indication of how influential a movie has been and how it has infiltrated our culture. I downloaded the movie links data from the IMDb (see this page) and summed up, for each movie, the number of other movies that it was "referenced in", "spoofed in", or "featured in" other movies.

Number one, with 502 references, is The Wizard of Oz. Think of how many times you've heard "I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore," "I'll get you my pretty... and your little dog too!," "Lions, and tigers, and bears! Oh, my!" or "I'm melting! I'm melting!" You have to see these movies just to know what people are talking about, whether or not the movies are good--but mostly they are good.

One of the movies that is missing from the New York Times list (see previous post) is The Matrix. Although the movie makes no sense upon close examination, it's still an unbelievably cool movie, whose style has been very influential. It is the only movie from the 1990s that is in the top ten most-referenced. It's astounding that the Times' list does not contain it, but does have lesser action flicks, such as Mad Max. Not that I consider Mad Max a bad movie--and Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior is terrific! But, really, The Matrix not in the top one thousand??!? As an exercise to the reader, find the visual reference to Mad Max in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl.

Without further ado, here's the list of the most referenced films:

Rank	References	Title
1	502	Wizard of Oz, The (1939)
2	496	Star Wars (1977)
3	336	Psycho (1960)
4	261	Godfather, The (1972)
5	259	"Star Trek" (1966)
6	249	Casablanca (1942)
7	244	2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
8	223	Jaws (1975)
9	198	Gone with the Wind (1939)
10	188	Matrix, The (1999)
11	186	E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
12	183	Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
13	181	Pulp Fiction (1994)
14	179	Taxi Driver (1976)
15	178	Alien (1979)
16	174	Apocalypse Now (1979)
17	171	Terminator, The (1984)
18	165	King Kong (1933)
19	164	Exorcist, The (1973)
20	162	Frankenstein (1931)
21	161	Citizen Kane (1941)
22	157	Shining, The (1980)
23	157	Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
24	155	Rosemary's Baby (1968)
25	151	Clockwork Orange, A (1971)
26	144	Vertigo (1958)
27	143	Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
28	139	Night of the Living Dead (1968)
29	136	Titanic (1997)
30	134	Silence of the Lambs, The (1991)
31	134	Jurassic Park (1993)
32	131	Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The (1974)
33	128	Aliens (1986)
34	122	It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
35	121	Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
36	113	Blade Runner (1982)
37	110	Rocky (1976)
38	107	Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi (1983)
39	104	Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
40	104	Dirty Harry (1971)
41	103	Nightmare On Elm Street, A (1984)
42	102	Scarface (1983)
43	102	Graduate, The (1967)
44	102	Dracula (1931/I)
45	100	Superman (1978)
46	99	Halloween (1978)
47	96	"Simpsons, The" (1989)
48	94	Singin' in the Rain (1952)
49	92	Friday the 13th (1980)
50	92	Carrie (1976)
51	91	Buono, il brutto, il cattivo, Il (1966)
52	91	"I Love Lucy" (1951)
53	90	Goldfinger (1964)
54	89	Reservoir Dogs (1992)
55	89	North by Northwest (1959)
56	88	Sound of Music, The (1965)
57	86	Planet of the Apes (1968)
58	85	"Twilight Zone, The" (1959)
59	81	Batman (1989)
60	79	Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
61	78	Blair Witch Project, The (1999)
62	77	Forrest Gump (1994)
63	76	Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922)
64	76	Metropolis (1927)
65	74	Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999)
66	74	Dr. No (1962)
67	74	"X Files, The" (1993)
68	73	Saturday Night Fever (1977)
69	73	Gojira (1954)
70	73	Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)
71	73	Back to the Future (1985)
72	72	Sunset Blvd. (1950)
73	72	Evil Dead, The (1981)
74	71	Rear Window (1954)
75	71	Deliverance (1972)
76	71	Birds, The (1963)
77	69	"Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, The" (1962)
78	68	Independence Day (1996)
79	68	Die Hard (1988)
80	68	"Gilligan's Island" (1964)
81	67	Triumph des Willens (1934)
82	67	RoboCop (1987)
83	67	Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
84	67	Full Metal Jacket (1987)
85	67	Easy Rider (1969)
86	66	Ghost Busters (1984)
87	66	"Brady Bunch, The" (1969)
88	65	On the Waterfront (1954)
89	65	Maltese Falcon, The (1941)
90	65	Goodfellas (1990)
91	65	Blues Brothers, The (1980)
92	65	"Saturday Night Live" (1975)
93	65	"Oprah Winfrey Show, The" (1986)
94	64	Shaft (1971)
95	64	Mary Poppins (1964)
96	63	Spartacus (1960)
97	63	"Batman" (1966/II)
98	62	Third Man, The (1949)
99	62	Streetcar Named Desire, A (1951)
100	62	Some Like It Hot (1959)
101	62	Lion King, The (1994)
102	62	High Noon (1952)
103	62	Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
104	62	"Jeopardy!" (1984)

kenhirsch at ftml dot net

2004-07-12T19:04:00.000-04:00

Best movies that are not in New York Times List

By Ken

Via Newmark's Door, I see the New York Times list of The Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made, also available in convenient dead tree format. Craig Newmark notes one favorite movie of his that's not on the list. I was surprised to easily find a few great movies not on the list.

Rather than just note favorite movies of mine that are not on the list, I decided to be a bit systematic about it and find which movies from the Internet Movie Database's "Top 250 movies as voted by our users" are missing. You'd expect that most of them would be on the list, since the Times has 1,000 places and IMDb only lists 250.

Here's the list of those spurned by the Times (with the IMDb ranking as of July 9, 2004):

Rank	Rating	Title	Votes
2.	8.9	Shawshank Redemption, The (1994)	121,085
3.	8.9	Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, The (2003)	67,490
9.	8.7	Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, The (2002)	88,830
9.	8.7	Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, The (2001)	130,998
13.	8.6	Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980)	88,332
19.	8.6	Memento (2000)	73,335
28.	8.5	Cidade de Deus (2002)	14,025
30.	8.4	American Beauty (1999)	92,955
32.	8.4	C'era una volta il West (1968)	12,433
34.	8.4	Matrix, The (1999)	121,388
41.	8.3	Fight Club (1999)	89,771
43.	8.3	Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)	14,076
46.	8.3	Boot, Das (1981)	24,305
52.	8.3	Requiem for a Dream (2000)	36,168
54.	8.3	Se7en (1995)	72,706
56.	8.3	Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)	50,749
60.	8.2	Alien (1979)	52,767
62.	8.2	American History X (1998)	47,298
63.	8.2	Léon (1994)	41,307
64.	8.2	Sting, The (1973)	19,981
68.	8.2	Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003)	42,742
69.	8.2	Vita è bella, La (1997)	31,991
71.	8.2	Finding Nemo (2003)	28,342
74.	8.2	Modern Times (1936)	8,284
76.	8.2	Great Escape, The (1963)	16,506
83.	8.2	Wo hu cang long (2000)	44,507
84.	8.1	Braveheart (1995)	78,571
86.	8.1	Metropolis (1927)	9,728
91.	8.1	City Lights (1931)	6,307
92.	8.1	Blade Runner (1982)	64,777
93.	8.1	Donnie Darko (2001)	34,075
94.	8.1	General, The (1927)	5,441
95.	8.1	Sixth Sense, The (1999)	81,876
99.	8.1	Nuovo cinema Paradiso (1989)	11,549
100.	8.1	Princess Bride, The (1987)	46,469
101.	8.1	Mononoke-hime (1997)	15,005
109.	8.0	Lola rennt (1998)	26,949
110.	8.0	Toy Story 2 (1999)	34,137
113.	8.0	Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)	65,636
116.	8.0	Forrest Gump (1994)	74,268
118.	8.0	Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004)	20,992
119.	8.0	Dogville (2003)	7,419
120.	8.0	Glory (1989)	18,684
122.	8.0	Mystic River (2003)	15,846
125.	8.0	Once Upon a Time in America (1984)	14,822
130.	8.0	Green Mile, The (1999)	48,764
133.	8.0	Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi (1983)	69,534
138.	8.0	Arsenic and Old Lace (1944)	9,523
142.	7.9	Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)	51,890
145.	7.9	Christmas Story, A (1983)	16,473
148.	7.9	Amores perros (2000)	11,006
150.	7.9	Lost in Translation (2003)	26,643
153.	7.9	Gold Rush, The (1925)	5,180
155.	7.9	Spider-Man 2 (2004)	11,081
158.	7.9	Bronenosets Potyomkin (1925)	4,645
159.	7.9	Life of Brian (1979)	27,671
164.	7.9	Witness for the Prosecution (1957)	4,141
165.	7.9	Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The (1962)	5,923
166.	7.9	Charade (1963)	7,329
167.	7.9	Ying xiong (2002)	7,666
168.	7.9	Gladiator (2000)	76,809
170.	7.9	Sling Blade (1996)	17,519
173.	7.9	Hotaru no haka (1988)	4,808
174.	7.9	Magnolia (1999)	37,653
176.	7.9	Almost Famous (2000)	31,870
179.	7.9	Night at the Opera, A (1935)	4,941
181.	7.9	Ed Wood (1994)	17,754
186.	7.9	Killing, The (1956)	5,477
187.	7.9	Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)	43,714
188.	7.8	21 Grams (2003)	12,003
193.	7.8	Dog Day Afternoon (1975)	11,949
194.	7.8	Harvey (1950)	6,553
196.	7.8	Stand by Me (1986)	25,685
197.	7.8	Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922)	6,648
199.	7.8	Twelve Monkeys (1995)	52,813
200.	7.8	Big Fish (2003)	18,187
201.	7.8	Terminator, The (1984)	50,270
205.	7.8	Lion in Winter, The (1968)	4,828
207.	7.8	In America (2002)	4,699
208.	7.8	Miller's Crossing (1990)	11,665
209.	7.8	Passion de Jeanne d'Arc, La (1928)	2,584
210.	7.8	Whale Rider (2002)	7,089
222.	7.8	Snatch. (2000)	34,665
224.	7.8	Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998)	27,217
225.	7.8	X2 (2003)	28,551
226.	7.8	Big Lebowski, The (1998)	39,650
228.	7.8	Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927)	1,992
230.	7.8	Rio Bravo (1959)	5,906
231.	7.8	Untouchables, The (1987)	25,844
232.	7.8	Others, The (2001)	29,385
233.	7.8	Planet of the Apes (1968)	17,058
234.	7.7	Bride of Frankenstein (1935)	3,610
235.	7.7	Die xue shuang xiong (1989)	7,529
240.	7.7	Persona (1966)	2,720
242.	7.7	Sleuth (1972)	4,016
243.	7.7	Minority Report (2002)	41,232
247.	7.7	Good Will Hunting (1997)	52,672
250.	7.7	Heat (1995)	35,787

Minor notes: There are actually 1,005 movies in the New York Times list! The NYT list only includes movies through 2002.

kenhirsch at ftml dot net

2003-10-13T17:35:00.000-04:00

Gold from the Captain's Chest

Last night I was reading to my six-year old boy, Franklin, from Treasure Island. He had seen Treasure Planet, then the 1950 Disney live-action Treasure Island and then he wanted me to read the book to him. We were up to Chapter Four, The Sea-Chest, right after Captain Billy Bones dies and Jim and his mother try to get help from the nearby village to fend off Blind Pew and his mates, who are going to return at ten o'clock for the Captain.

Franklin has a tremendous vocabulary for a six year-old, but the Nineteenth Century language is a bit tough. Even I have to guess at some words: gully? lugger? So I stop every page or so to make sure that he's understood what's gone before. We were just about this paragraph, where Jim's mother declares her determination to get the money from the Captain's chest that he owed her for unpaid room and board:

They say cowardice is infectious; but then argument is, on the other hand, a great emboldener; and so when each had said his say, my mother made them a speech. She would not, she declared, lose money that belonged to her fatherless boy; "If none of the rest of you dare," she said, "Jim and I dare. Back we will go, the way we came, and small thanks to you big, hulking, chicken- hearted men. We'll have that chest open, if we die for it. And I'll thank you for that bag, Mrs. Crossley, to bring back our lawful money in."

So I'm explaining about infectious and emboldener when Franklin asks "Did the Captain swallow the gold pieces?"

"Huh??? What do you mean swallow..." I say, perplexed.

Franklin: "Well how did the gold get into his chest?"

At this point I almost fell to the floor laughing!

Ken Hirsch

2003-10-13T12:04:00.000-04:00

Transition to Authenticated E-mail

Tim Bray proposes having people pay 1 cent per email. It's not much, but it would make some many non-profit email lists unworkable. Most other proposals like this charge only for the first email from an unknown sender, and usually a lot more than one cent. This does require the recipient (perhaps at the ISP level) to keep track of who is already authorized to send free mail.

There are actually quite a few workable schemes for preventing spam. Tim Bray is right that any system where sending is both free and anonymous will always be open to spam, but it's not necessary to charge on a per-message basis. One system that is beta-testing right now is Bonded Sender. With this system, the owner of an outgoing mail-sending server puts up money to guarantee that his system won't be sending spam (on the order of $1000 per server, with $500/year renewal). There's a contract that specifies what is spam and a third-party arbitrator for handling disputes. Existing mail-filtering software can easily check the BondedSender status via the DNS system, as they generally already check the DNS status of senders.

There are a couple of drawbacks to this. First, the IP verification won't work with dynamically-assigned addresses. Second, some smaller email senders may not want to spend as much as $1000 on this. Third, it doesn't help you if your ISP is not participating. All of these can be overcome by using a paid relayer, as Tim Bray suggests. It would be up to the relayer to determine how to prevent abuse of its own system.

Other systems work by verifying a digital signature and certificate of the sender, either on a per-message basis (S/MIME or PGP) or on a per connection-basis (using SMTP over TLS). This doesn't require a static IP address to verify identity.

Although it may seem complex and even chaotic, more than one mechanism will exist to prevent spam, even in the long-term. For a variety of legal, political, and financial reasons, no one solution will please everyone. We need to have some sort of meta-email system for allowing these to co-exist effectively.

What I propose is that an independent group be established which will provide a framework for interoperability. What needs to be done?

A description of anti-spam policies. For example, Tim Bray's proposed SMTP4ALL charges $.01 per message. Or FirstClassEmail may charge $1 per message. BondedSender contractually forbids spam and requires a cash bond up front, as well as identity verification.
There are a lot of possible policies. It should be up to the recipient to specify what policy is acceptable, but there needs to be a concise list so that the decision can be coded in a program.
There also needs to be a way for the recipient to find the policy. For certificate-based systems, the policy can be encoded directly into the certificate, but the exact syntax needs to be defined. For other systems, something else needs to be devised.
A way to describe the properties of an individual sender or message. It may be part of the sender's anti-spam policy that unsolicited mailings are allowed, but that each mail will be labeled with what type of mail it is, e.g. commercial, personal, political, charitable soliciting, etc. Similarly, a system such as Hotmail may want to label each user as to whether they are a verified, paying customer, or an anonymous, free customer.
Some sort of meta-enforcement scheme. There needs to be a way of knowing if SMTP4ALL is really charging $.01 per message or if it's letting spammers send through at 1/1000 of that price. Is a CA shirking its duties?
We don't want the chaos of the current RBL system. This is not something that should be checked on each message. This meta-enforcement system won't vouch for hundreds of thousands or millions of individual mail servers, but only for (hopefully) a few dozen parties that are responsible for enforcement.

Some of this can be developed under the auspices of the IETF (or IRTF), but the IETF won't take on any kind of enforcement role.

In addition, we need a way to transition to authenticated email. I have proposed that each recipient use a challenge-response system (such as TMDA, but a prepaid system like SMTP4ALL could also serve in that role.

kenhirsch at myself dot com

2002-12-17T14:55:00.000-05:00

Last Thursday I watched an episode of E.R. where each segment was followed by one that preceded it chronologically, like the movie Memento or that Indian wedding episode of Seinfeld. This reminded me that I've been meaning to write about how I really dislike the fact that all blogs are in reverse chronological order.

Either I read from top to bottom and get a Memento-like experience, seeing references to things I am supposed to have already experienced;

Or, on the other hand, I can try reading from the bottom, two paragraphs down, three up, one down, four up--no wait, that's part of the "next" message--and so on.

I suppose people who check their blogs every 15 minutes don't have this problem, but I have a job.

No doubt I'm in the minority, but I can't be the only one who finds this annoying. So, for those who are working on news aggregators, blog outliners and the like, please include a chronological sort option.

2002-09-29T13:01:00.000-04:00

E-mail Ken Hirsch

Don't expect any regular blog here. I rarely have anything to say and almost never have time to say it! But I did email Eugene Volokh a response to his speculation about Saddam Hussein threatening the U.S. with nuclear weapons. Professor Volokh asked if he could post it on his blog. I said sure, but then realized that this would be the only thing people ever read about my views on Iraq. Out of context, people might group me with Fisk or Chomsky! So I decided to expand on it here.

Before getting down to business, let me say that The Volokh Conspiracy is an excellent blog and I agree with Eugene & Co. most of the time. I even respect Eugene Volokh as a programmer--I regularly use a computer program that he wrote when he was just a child prodigy programmer and not yet a rising star of Constitutional scholarship.

But now I must disagree. First, I will stipulate that Saddam is an evil, loathsome, ruthless, dangerous, unrepentant, lying dictator. He has thwarted the weapons inspectors at every step. He still has some missiles and chemical weapons and will scheme to acquire more. He will try to build nuclear weapons and may succeed. The world would be a much better place without him and a case can be made that it is worth going to war to rid our planet of him.

However, when Eugene Volokh suggests that Saddam would threaten the United States with nuclear weapons, I must protest. Saddam is not suicidal. Our response to Saddam is predictable and would be along the lines of this, which is what I emailed to Eugene:

Dear Saddam,
As you may have gathered by now, your largest military base and "presidential palace" are missing. We are sure that everybody within is dead, because we were sure to use our 10 megaton warheads. We will not be intimidated.
For every nuclear explosion in the United States, at least two targets in Iraq will be completely destroyed. The first two targets on the list are Baghdad and your hometown of Takrit. Our bombers are flying in a holding pattern nearby, awaiting my orders. No more than twenty minutes will elapse between my orders and the bombs falling.
Simultaneously with our demonstration in Iraq, we broadcast the follow offer in the United States, that all Iraqi operatives who turn themselves in within twenty-four hours will have their lives spared and that the first person to reveal the location of each nuclear bomb in the United States will be able to name a ten mile-radius zone in Iraq that will be spared nuclear annihilation.
Your "trusted agents" now have to weigh the fear that you might survive to seek reprisal against their families with the certainty that every last relative of theirs will be vaporized if they obey you. We think the choice is easy.
You have twenty-four hours to reveal the locations of all warheads. Our only offer is that if you comply, the death penalty will not be sought when you are brought to trial. We think this is a very generous offer.

Saddam cannot expect any lesser reply and would never use nuclear weapons overtly against the United States.

In reality, the threat from bombs hidden in our cities is not that much different from what we always faced from the Soviet Union. If Time Magazine's Hugh Sidey is to be believed, President Kennedy suspected a nuclear bomb hidden in the Soviet's Washington, D.C. Embassy even while he faced down the Russians during the Cuban missile crisis.

What Volokh is arguing, I think, is that America is so soft and Saddam so tough that we would back down from any confrontation with Saddam if he could detonate even one weapon on our soil, even if our response is total annihilation. Yet for decades we have been staring down the barrel of nuclear holocaust and did not blink.

Steven Den Beste echoes Volokh's argument, although he also considers Volokh's particular scenario as not credible. Den Beste claims rather dubiously that deterrence worked against the Soviet Union because "the leaders there had approximately the same kind of attitude about damage to their nation as we did about ours" and he credits the development of the "mutually assured destruction" doctrine to John Von Neumann.

The actual history is somewhat different. The MAD doctrine was developed while Stalin was in power, a leader to whom Saddam bears more than a passing resemblance. Stalin actively murdered, starved, and militarily sacrificed tens of millions of his own citizens, and could credibly claim that he would do it again. His reign of terror and internal purges seem to the very model of Saddam's own practice. Von Neumann did indeed propose and analyze MAD among many other policy options, but he famously summarized his own preference this way: "If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at 5 o'clock, I say why not one o'clock?" The preventive war doctrine was actively considered in the 1940s and 1950s and was a cause for concern among our allies. Sound familiar?

Thus concludes my disagreement with Eugene Volokh. While there are some threats from Iraq worth worrying about, their actually using nuclear weapons against the United States is not one of them.

What about other scenarios?

Some have suggested that Saddam might smuggle weapons into the United States and explode them without taking credit. Or that he might give one to Islamic zealots who would carry out the attack. Well, that is a remote possibility, but one that I cannot entirely rule out. The chance of discovery, before or after the attack, is very real and it's unclear what benefit Saddam would gain from an anonymous attack.

Mostly, Saddam is rational. The war against Iran and the takeover of Kuwait were both ill-fated, but there was real gain to be had in both and the expectation of success was not unreasonable. Saddam never did use his chemical weapons against the U.S. or Israel, because he feared retaliation.

On the other hand, I have to admit, Saddam did try to assassinate ex-President Bush. There was nothing to gain from that but revenge, and a big risk of retaliation.

"Aha!" various blogsters exclaim, "given the dire consequences, no matter how unlikely, we are compelled to act! If you can't guarantee this won't happen, we just can't take the chance." And they're serious about this.

Well, if going to war had no costs and no risks, they'd be right. But there are many real costs to war and many risks that are much more likely than Saddam trying to sneak nuclear weapons across borders.

If we are going to take far-fetched scenarios as guides to policies, how about Saddam spreading smallpox in our cities if we do invade? "If you can't guarantee this won't happen, we just can't take the chance." You see, that reasoning works both ways.

This has always been the biggest problem with Pascal's Wager. Blaise Pascal argued that the consequences of eternal damnation were so great that no matter how small the likelihood of God's existence, it was foolish not to devote own's life to God. Unfortunately, it's not clear to which God one should devote one's life.

Though the threat of nuclear terrorism from Iraq is scary indeed, there are so many other speculative threats that could justify a preemptive attack. Surely anyone who has thought about the problem realizes that the greatest threat of nuclear terrorism comes not from Iraq, but from Pakistan. Pakistan already has nuclear weapons and its military and intelligence operations have many known links to the Islamo-fascist nutcases who have already attacked us. Yes, the régime-du-jour has been most cooperative, but how long will they last and can they really guarantee that the weapons won't fall into the hands of those whose suicidal fanaticism has already been so memorably demonstrated?

Or, if it's too late to deal with Pakistan, how about Iran? They haven't yet had the pleasure of hosting even one visit from arms inspectors and it is widely believed that they are even closer to developing nuclear weapons. Their active support for Islamic terrorists is widely known. How can we risk leaving them in power? "If you can't guarantee this won't happen, we just can't take the chance." This argument is just too broad to be taken seriously.

What Saddam actually wants nuclear weapons for is to threaten to use them. If he had had them back in 1990, it's doubtful that Saudi Arabia would have agreed to allow American troops on their soil. Saddam would have had effective control of the entire Arabian Peninsula and incredible leverage in OPEC. He would be a major regional power.

If he got them now, he would no longer have to fear invasion, since that's one case where we can be sure he would use nuclear weapons. The already leaky sanctions would evaporate as his neighbors would fear Iraq more than us. He would be able to sell oil and rebuild his military. Those are likely consequences and should be at the center of the debate.