Caturday felid: The world’s bravest kitten

August 4, 2012 • 4:25 am

(Warning; there’s a dog in this video, but it’s included only as a foil for the CAT.)

It always amazes me that an animal with the power and weapons of this Doberman (look at those teeth!) knows to pull its punches when dealing with a friend.  How does it know just how hard to bite without inflicting damage?  But what’s even more amazing is that the kitten shows no fear.  That means, I suppose, that mothers have to teach their young the fear of big mammals with teeth—or that familiarity breeds amiability.

Oh, and I’m going to add a cat-related anecdote just sent to me by alert reader Hempenstein:

I heard this last night at a nice [outdoor, woodfired-oven] pizza party.

A couple agreed to house-sit, and tend the cat as part of the deal.  There was a note:

The Cat Eats at 4am.  You Have to Watch Him Eat.

They figure it’s a joke, put the food out that night and went to bed.   At about 4am the cat comes in and jumps on the bed.  They throw him out and shut the door. He starts throwing himself at the door and yowling, but eventually it stops. Later, the guy gets up to take a leak and sees a pair of eyes glowering at him.

But before long the cat learns to eat by himself.

A couple years later they’re at a party with the folks they house-sat with, and they mention that they didn’t get up at 4 to watch the cat eat.

“WE KNEW YOU TRAUMATIZED HIM!”

George Harrison: “Something”

August 3, 2012 • 3:12 pm

Because it’s Friday afternoon. This is one of  Harrison’s greatest compositions, recorded by the Beatles on the Abbey Road album and performed here live in 1992.  The video ain’t so hot but the sound is good.

He died 9 years later at age 58. I miss him, and doubt we’ll ever again see such an amazing concatenation of talent as Harrison and his bandmates.

There must be peanuts

August 3, 2012 • 12:30 pm

The Mars rover Curiosity will touch down on the red planet Monday at about 1:30 a.m. EST (US) Monday, and I’ll post a day in advance so you can stay up to watch, especially since it will be televised live. To see how the landing will take place, go here and watch the movie “Curiosity: Seven minutes of terror.” It will make you marvel at the creativity of our species.

But amidst all the fantastic science that underlies this project, there’s still a bit of woo. As alert reader Chris informs me, the CNN blog Light Years describes a superstition around the landing:

An hour before the Mars rover Curiosity is scheduled to make its dramatic touchdown on the surface of our neighboring planet, there must be peanuts.

David Oh, lead flight director for the mission, explains that it has been a tradition for decades to open up cans of peanuts and pass them around to the team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory responsible for overseeing the landing of the rover. Curiosity is scheduled to land at 1:31 a.m. ET Monday.

“It’s always been a lucky charm for us, and missions have always seemed to work out better when we had the peanuts there,” Oh said. “For landing this, I’ll take all the great engineering we have, and all the luck you can give us, too.”

Of course there’s been no controlled experiment, but I bet these guys aren’t gonna mess with cashews or macadmia nuts come Monday morning!

It’s curious that these scientists, and other skeptics like me, often have our own superstitions.  I have a lucky number (I’m not saying what it is), and I used to walk home from school judiciously avoiding stepping on cracks in the sidewalk. Sometimes I still do it just for fun. But my lucky number is nonnegotiable, even though I know in my heart that choosing things (or having a good feeling) based on a single integer is ludicrous.

Does that make me an accommodationist? And do you have any superstitions?

Are “best-of” polls bad?

August 3, 2012 • 8:33 am

An article by Bim Adewunmi in Wednesday’s Guardian,“‘Best of’ lists – what are they good for? Absolutely nothing,” takes issue with the British Film Insitute’s list of greatest films (see my post on this poll from yesterday).  The article seems a tad tongue in cheek, so it may be a parody, but I don’t think so. If it’s serious, then Brown sees such polls as counterproductive for several reasons (I quote from the piece):

  • They remove originality of thought. Have you ever tried to compile a list of the best books of all time? Have you automatically written down any or all of these usual suspects – Dickens, Nabokov, Austen, or Woolf – without even realising? We’ve all done it. These authors and their many works are undoubtedly excellent, but is that the only reason they came to mind? No, they’ve been “normed” into your life.
  • They kill joy. We’ve all used the clapping Orson Welles gif to punctuate Tumblr posts, sure, but have you ever watched all of Citizen Kane? All my life, I’ve been told it is the best thing my eyes will ever see. I have Citizen Kane fatigue. This is what lists do – when the hype gets too much, all joy is extracted from the endeavour.
  • They confirm your most depressing fear: you are desperately uncool. By definition, lists are exclusionary, separating the wheat from the perceived chaff. And while we all have views that might be considered a bit left field, we imagine those mark us out as cool mavericks, not social pariahs. But imagine the explicit confirmation that you’re wrong about everything – your favourite film, your most treasured book, your most beloved album. All wrong.

A few readers have echoed similar sentiments, but I am a strong advocate and follower of “best-of” lists.  Yes, sometimes I’ll label my own posts as “best-of,” but it’s clear that these things are pretty subjective.  What I mean is “Jerry thinks these are the best.” I think it’s unproductive to use such lists as a barometer of how “sophisticated” one is, or to feel inferior to those who make the lists. It’s better to think of them as learning tools, or guidelines for growth.

To me, the lists let me know about books or movies that might be worth watching or reading, and have been hugely valuable in that way. While taste is subjective, the taste of people who are regularly exposed to film and books, and think about them, tends to run along concurrent lines, and so it’s worth paying attention to their suggestions.  Some of the lists I like include film ranking like the BFIs, the New York Times‘s annual list of the year’s best books, and the Modern Library‘s list of the 100 best novels, which is really good.  Such lists can acquaint you with great literature that you’ve never even heard of.  (Have you read, for instance, A House for Mr. Biswas, by V. S. Naipal? If not, you’re missing a fantastic book).

I also like to look at the lists of contenders for Pulitzer Prizes and, especially, for the Booker Prize. It was the latter that turned me on to Pat Barker’s Ghost Road Trilogy, a fantastic series of books about the First World War, The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga, Life of Pi by Yann Martel (yes, I know it has religious overtones, but I still loved it), and The Bone People by Keri Hulme.  I enjoyed the hell out of those books, and wouldn’t have known about them save for the Booker nominations.

The notion that lists are useless is belied by an article by Mark Brown appearing on the same site on the same day. It recounts the reaction of Nick James, editor of Sight and Sound magazine, which publishes the BFI polls, to watching one of the top films:

Third in the critics’ list is Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story, the 1953 Japanese drama. “I watched this film just three days ago and I couldn’t stop crying,” said James. “It tells you more about family life than any recent Hollywood film, I would suggest, even how we live today. It is very poignant and sad and heartbreaking and fabulous – it is a masterpiece.”

He’s right on the mark here; that film is fabulous. And how would a reader even know about it if there weren’t such lists?

I get email from people with anger management issues

August 3, 2012 • 4:14 am

Ah, I love the smell of vitriol in the morning. I woke up to find this lovely screed from “Dan” (with the title line, “Do you get paid?”) waiting impatiently in my inbox.  Groggy and sans latte, I couldn’t at first make out the reasons for his venom. But then I spotted two sentences (I’ve put the relevant bits in bold) that gave the game away:

Seriously,

Do people actually pay you to teach their children? You’re seriously one of the least intelligent, least rational people I’ve ever encountered in all of blogs on the internet. I’m pretty confident that my middle school nephew’s blog about kickball and spongebob, and sometimes even spongebob playing kickball, is more coherent than yours. You’re bad at what you do and the points you make, especially in regards to religion, are not scientific or empirical at all. Stop lying.

I read on your blog that you think that science and religion are completely incompatible, and that couldn’t be farther from the truth and you truly have no evidence to support that. You seem to talk about “compartmentalizing” a lot, as if that somehow proves your point. On the contrary, I would think that it takes a lot of compartmentalizing to be a blithering, lying douche bag who has not nearly the scientific knowledge of Polkinghorne, et al. but pretends he does, and as an atheist, can’t admit, that life is therefore ultimately meaningless or that absolute morals do not exist. But instead you have to rely on completely irrational attacks. You lie, plain and simple. Just come out as the fraud that you are and admit that you’re a lonely guy that just hangs out with cats. Don’t piss on the parade of young, impressionable kids that actually follow your blog. And I say this, mainly cause I find and work with young kids that actually think you know what you’re talking about. It’s embarrassing. You’re a dork, and that’s not an ad hominen, I say that mainly because you’re a dishonest piece of work who has to be blatantly dishonest, unscientific and irrational to convince young people of your ridiculous viewpoint. That really makes you a dork. Good science completely disagrees with you, and in years time, I guarantee any viewpoint you support, which I can’t even call scientific, aside from the basic principle of evolution, will be disregarded. You’re truly an irrational, unscientific idiot. I can’t believe some layman actually think that you would know anything about science, aside from some biology.

– Dan, Maryland

My conclusions:

  • The most bizarre aspect of this mind-dump is that he constantly accuses me of lying but gives no specifics.
  • It’s another religious dude who doesn’t act like a Christian (of course, he could be a Jew or a Mormon, but I suspect not).
  • I’m not a lonely guy who hangs out with cats because I don’t have a cat.
  • Funniest line: “You’re a dork, and that’s not an ad hominen.” He also misspelled the last word.
  • We must be making headway with the young people if I’ve driven him to such heights of fury!
  • He hates me because I don’t love baby Jesus. And I should just shut up. Because of reasons.

As per my policy, I won’t disclose the guy’s email address since there’s no direct threat here, but I will send to him the URL of this post and the readers’ comments.  So if you have anything to say to Dan beyond what I’ve said above, comment away.  There’s no need to reassure me that I’m okay, though, as over the past 3.5 years of doing this website (has it really been that long?) I’ve developed a tough hide about morons like this. (Excuse the ad hominen.)

The mother lode of evolution videos

August 3, 2012 • 3:58 am

If you’re a teacher, an autodidact, or simply someone who wants to learn about evolution, I highly recommend this “Evolution Documentary” site , which has collected well over a hundred evolution-related videos from a variety of sources. Here’s a screenshot of some of the sources.

There are, for example, 74 videos from the BBC alone, including ones by Attenborough and Dawkins, and series about human evolution, Darwin, geology, and so on.

It’s a fantastic teaching resource, even if you want to teach only yourself.

h/t: DocAtheist

Sight and Sound’s 10-yearly poll of best movies

August 2, 2012 • 8:53 am

Every ten years the British Film Institute (BFI) announces two lists of “The greatest films of all time.”  This has been going on for sixty years, since 1952, and the latest results were just announced in Sight and Sound, the BFI’s magazine (the link goes to Slate‘s summary of the poll).

As my nephew Steven, the film buff, notes, “The poll was first conducted in 1952, and has taken on an academic legitimacy shared by no other such rankings.”  There are actually two polls. As Slate says, the famous one is this:

The Sight & Sound poll was compiled from the top-ten lists of 846 critics, programmers, academics and other movie-lovers, who together nominated more than 2,000 different films. Sight & Sound determines no criteria for “greatest,” suggesting only that “You might choose the ten films you feel are most important to film history, or the ten that represent the aesthetic pinnacles of achievement, or indeed the ten films that have had the biggest impact on your own view of cinema.” The poll is generally considered to be the most respected and the best barometer of changes to the canon over time. Roger Ebert wrote in 2002, “it is by far the most respected of the countless polls of great movies—the only one most serious movie people take seriously.”

So what are this decade’s results? Here are the top ten films:

Critics’ Top 10 Films of All Time

  1. Vertigo
  2. Citizen Kane
  3. Tokyo Story
  4. La Règle du Jeu (The Rules of the Game)
  5. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans
  6. 2001: A Space Odyssey
  7. The Searchers
  8. Man With a Movie Camera
  9. The Passion of Joan of Arc
  10. 8½

Of these I’ve seen #1-3, 7, 9, and 10.  I haven’t even heard of #5 (a study of an American farming town, made in 1927, and characterized by Rotten Tomatoes as “considered by many to be the finest silent film ever made by a Hollywood studio”),or #8 (a Russian experimental film on the day in the life of a city, made in 1929), but you can read about them at the links. And I’ll be sure to see both of them soon.

I like “Vertigo”, but not sure I’d put it on my own list (fourteen months ago I posted my own list of best films). “Citizen Kane” would be at the top of anyone’s list, but I didn’t put it on mine simply because it stands apart from the others in a way that prevents me from rating it.  But “Tokyo Story”, as I noted in my earlier post, clearly belongs on top. It, and several other films by Ozu, are unrecognized masterpieces. By all means see them.

I am ashamed to admit that I’ve never seen “2001,” and while “The Searchers,” the only Western on the list, is good, I wouldn’t consider it a masterpiece. “The Passion of Joan of Arc,” on the other hand, clearly is, with Maria Falconetti giving the best silent performance I’ve ever seen. I can’t recommend that one too strongly.

And clearly missing on this list are my two favorite American films, “Chinatown” and, especially, “The Last Picture Show” (one of the two or three best American movies ever made), as well as the second best (after “Tokyo Story”) foreign film of all time, “Ikiru“, by Kurosawa. All three of these movies get a rare 100% rating from the critics at Rotten Tomatoes.

Finally, Sight and Sound also published a list of the top ten films selected by directors themselves.  Here’s the list:

1. Tokyo Story
t2. 2001: A Space Odyssey
t2. Citizen Kane
4. 8 ½
5. Taxi Driver
6. Apocalypse Now
t7. The Godfather
t7. Vertigo
9. Mirror
10. Bicycle Thieves

“Tokyo Story” now occupies its proper spot, but where is “Ikiru”?

Also this year, the BFI put up a list of the 50 greatest films of all time. It’s well worth perusing if you’re renting stuff on Netflix.  The top ten (same as in first list above) give summaries of the movies, and the rest have links to BFI summaries. It’s a respectable list, but really, “Mulholland Drive” and “Some Like it Hot”? Those are good films, but in my opinion hardly influential classics.

You know what to do now: weigh in below with agreements, disagreements, or your own list.  Remember, we’re looking here for great films, not ones that are just entertainment.