Archive: August 02, 2002
Just saw Signs tonight. Good. Very different than what usually comes out of Hollywood. I have to chew on it more.
M. Night Shyamalan's "Signs" is the work of a born filmmaker, able to summon apprehension out of thin air. When it is over, we think not how little has been decided, but how much has been experienced. Here is a movie in which the plot is the rhythm section, not the melody. A movie that stays free of labored explanations and a forced climax, and is about fear in the wind, in the trees, in a dog's bark, in a little girl's reluctance to drink the water. In signs.
The genius of the film, you see, is that it isn't really about crop circles, or the possibility that aliens created them as navigational aids. I will not even say whether aliens appear in the movie, because whether they do or not is beside the point. The purpose of the film is to evoke pure emotion through the use of skilled acting and direction, and particularly through the soundtrack. It is not just what we hear that is frightening. It is the way Shyamalan has us listening intensely when there is nothing to be heard. I cannot think of a movie where silence is scarier, and inaction is more disturbing.
Here's an article about the movie at Salon, though I didn't get to read it yet. Annette also has some intelligent comments, which are right on even though she hadn't even seen the movie yet. I didn't know anything about it before I saw it, which is the way I like it 
Who knew that Joss Whedon wrote an 8 issue comic book mini-series called Fray? Also check out this interview with Joss Whedon about Fray.
Scripting News:
Glenn Reynolds asks a poignant question. "What would things be like for Palestinians now, if Israelis or Americans thought like Arabs? They wouldn't be like anything at all, of course. There wouldn't be any Palestinians." Bada-boom.
Cool.
Also, a quick note:
UPDATE: Reader Faisal N. Jawdat thinks this is a foolish generalization, bordering on racism. Well, it's a generalizaton: sort of like talking about "Germans" during World War Two. One might have pointed out that there were a few anti-Nazi Germans in Germany, and plenty of loyal, decent Americans of German extraction. But this wasn't necessary, since it was understood that the reference was to the vast majority of Germans, who were participants in a psychotic death cult that led them to march in the streets en masse and cheer the death of innocents. So we're really only at odds with the ones who think that way -- of which there were estimated to be 10,000 in the streets celebrating last night, and quite a few doing the same thing on September 11.
This is an important observation. I have to point out the Biblical analogy: Jews get the "Christ killer" rap because the Bible refers to Jews in reference to those who killed Christ. Same principle applies there.
By all but the most crazy liberal weirdos
LGF:
The United Nations painfully, grudgingly admits there was no massacre in Jenin.
"Israel did not contribute to the report, which was compiled using information from UN officials, the Palestinians, private relief organisations and foreign governments."
Who no doubt tried with every fiber of their beings to find Israel guilty of something. But couldn't.
Nice.
"Some Arab officials hoped the report would serve as a basis for charging Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon with war crimes, but it did not provide any such evidence."
I love it. This is how the BBC concludes their report—after citing numerous examples of Palestinian war crimes. Poor Arabs, humiliated by the Jews again.
Via WHEDONesque, check out the Buffy Dialogue Database. Lots of stuff there. WHEDONesque links to their epiosde list by writer which is awesome.
I've never, ever, taken notice of writers for TV series before I got into Buffy. (Maybe because I've never been obsessed with a TV show before.)
True.
Re: Diego Gutierrez... Normal Again was an amazing episode. While season 6 sucked as a whole, there were some very good parts.
CNN: Dogs are smarter than people think.
"Animal behaviorists used to think their bark was simply a way of getting attention. Now a new study suggests that individual dogs have specific barks with a range of meanings," New Scientist magazine said on Wednesday.
Well duh.
Adam Langley: Memes.
I don't think memes/genes are conscious, but I do think that, as replicators, they can exert a powerful influence to aid their replications. You can often pick out features in memeplexes (a set of interacting memes which can be functionally treated as a whole) designed as an `immune system' etc. For example the Christian ideas of "I am the one true god, worship no other" and of faith seem (to me) to fit into that category.
Since I'm making value judgements about moral systems I must have some built in morality (memes) which almost certainly come from my upbringing. My upbringing is mostly Christian, but not strongly so. My parents don't go to church etc so I have a pretty common Western set (don't kill people, be nice etc).
However, I feel the need to justify those memes and I flat out reject the theistic aspects of Christianity. I also reject some of those upbringing moral memes. So either I have `scientific model' memes too or something is built in.
He's right, it is kind of rambling  . He also seems to be using a lot of jargon which I don't think is helpful, but then, I'm not familiar with "memetic theory". Regardless there's a ton to discuss here. Not right now though, not at 2 in the morning.
Via Dorothea, ITworld.com: Separating Content from Presentation: Easier Said Than Done.
Yes, it makes sense, for all sorts of reasons, to separate content from presentation. Yes, XML is a great technology for helping you achieve that.
However, sometimes, the medium is an inextricable part of the message. The next time someone tries to sell you a line like "just separate the content from the presentation with XML" be warned -- it is not necessarily that simple.
One of the things I've always been concerned about regarding the separation of content and presentation has to do with this aspect of templating systems: From my understanding, most templating systems cache all the data that the page needs before any output is sent, and then they display the data. At least that's how Interworld worked. What happens when this would take a prohibitive amount of memory? Do all templating systems cache data this way?
A revised version of XHTML 1.0 has been released. I've never understood why Script and Style elements are #PCDATA instead of #CDATA. I'd love to hear the reasoning behind that.
Also see this HTML compatibiltiy note on Embedded Style Sheets and Scripts.
Use external style sheets if your style sheet uses < or & or ]]> or --. Use external scripts if your script uses < or & or ]]> or --. Note that XML parsers are permitted to silently remove the contents of comments. Therefore, the historical practice of "hiding" scripts and style sheets within "comments" to make the documents backward compatible is likely to not work as expected in XML-based user agents.
How annoying is that? You're supposed to use external scripts if your script contains a less than character or an ampersand, which we all know rarely if ever turn up in programming. Asses.
You're really supposed to escape the contents of any embedded script with <![CDATA[ .. ]], but as I discovered, that doesn't seem to work in browsers (which is probably why they just tell you to use an external script or stylesheet). Here's my workaround to make my pages with scripts validate: I use the <![CDATA[ crap, but I put it inside JavaScript comments like so:
<script type="text/javascript">
//<![CDATA[
... script goes here ...
//]]>
</script>
This way it validates, and it's totally valid, but doesn't screw up user-agents which don't support the <
Friday, August 2, 2002
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The Elegant Universe
Well I have finally found the crazyguy that preaches useless nonsencein A...
Joseph Baxter: Jan 7, 11:07pm