Why are people getting sick of The West Wing? Because The West Wing has gotten smug. And Sorkin puts stupid things in his scripts. Like his talk about artists as just people who captivate their audiences, as opposed to, say, caring. Here is the TWoP response:

A person who cares only about captivating his audience isn’t an artist at all — he’s an entertainer. The truth is the foundation of every artist’s work. An artist captivates his audience in the way he interprets the truth, even as he bends our perceptions of it to include impossible, supernatural elements, even as he sets it to music, even as he turns it inside out, paints it with the perspectives all out of kilter, and covers it in elephant poo — even as he denies that there is even such a thing as truth. All the dead artists in the world are collectively spinning in their graves at the suggestion that, like Sorkin, they were all just telling their “little stories.” Those little stories, and paintings, and plays, and symphonies, and poems, and yes, television shows have shaped every single culture on this planet, and in some cases, are all we have left of them. If Sorkin is afraid to be a part of that because he’s afraid of getting it wrong, or afraid that people won’t understand, or if he’s just afraid to — oh, I don’t know — grow a pair and take his critical lumps just like every other artist and learn from it, then fine. We lose a talented mind with an interesting view of the truth, and he loses the right to call himself an artist. But I will not just sit here and say nothing as he tries to drag the rest of the art world down with him. Hundreds of artists throughout the world and across time have been censored, imprisoned, exiled, and executed, and it wasn’t because they were simply trying to “captivate” people. It happens because, to put it in Sorkinese, sometimes an artist stands up, too. And they accept the consequences when their perceptions of the truth get them in trouble because they were wrong, or more frequently, because they were right. And finally, nothing an artist produces is as captivating as the way he shows us his truth. Nothing.

I love Television Without Pity. They just have a way of saying things that other people could never quite say right.

This evening I went to the Marketplace with the idea that I’d eat at Corner Bakery but nothing else planned. I knew there weren’t any movies there that I’d want to see, so I just ordered my standard order (combo – 1/2 chicken pomodori panina, a bowl of chili, and a raspberry bar for dessert). I went out on the patio and listened to some very nice music by the live band. I was given my order almost immediately, which was cool, and for some reason they gave me both my soup and a WHOLE chicken sandwich. So I packed up half to bring home…I was gonna tell someone they should be more careful but they were all very busy when I walked back in, and I heard someone else ordering a combo and being told that she gets half a sandwich, so I guess it was just a fluke.

Anyway, I was sitting on this patio on a nice warm night listening to a band sing Van Morrison and Stevie Ray Vaughan and I’m delicately cradling my grilled panini and popping garlicky crisps into my mouth and I feel completely and utterly contented, without feeling overly snotty. Okay, I know this makes no sense, but I was eating this food that made me feel very calm and good and content but not snobby but not common or lowly. I can’t describe it, it just felt so…so clean and correct.

Anyway, I left there after they finished the set and walked over to Barnes & Noble. I was reading David Brin’s wonderful The Transparent Society about liberties and freedom. He talks about something that a few years ago I was a big advocate of but in recent times I have forgot about — it is the reason I started this blog, the reason why I think blogs are the way of the future. It is the idea that some privacy invasion can often be tolerated when it is reciprocal.

The wearable computer, my erstwhile goal in life, now just a hobby as I’ve sadly moved on…allowing anyone to have cheap digital wear, including a camera that sees what they see and that transmits records to a secure location, using GSM phone frequencies or whatever, so that everyone is watching everyone else. It is encrypted, watermarked, timestamped, and safe, so it is true, verified, and absolutely beyond refrute, but only the recorder has access to it. The crimes of rape, of murder, theft, of muggings…anything where you comfront another person, they would all be drastically reduced. What, everyone’s going to wear a ski mask everywhere? Even when other forms of identification can be sensed, other biometric readings taken?

An open society is desiable over Ashcroft’s closed one, over the society of the Taliban and all the other terrible evils of the world, the evils that we hate but start to gradually become. And wearables would make society open.

Similarily, logging is essential to everything. If someone looks at my credit rating, I want an email telling me who, where, and when. Brin goes a step further with the wonderful assertion that, as we know, security through obscurity is no security at all, and that the ultimate solution for security is transparency of logging. If someone breaks in, as they will always do, the best thing to know is who they are, where they came from, how they broke in, and what they saw. We can’t stop break-ins all together, more firewalls will never compensate for lax passwords. Logging is our best hope.

Again, it has to be timestamped and digitally signed and verified and stored off-location. I think the most important step forward right now will be a completely independent and completely trustworthy digital identity verification system. I’m thinking someone buys an island and starts a country with the sole idea of it being a security capitol. They are accountable to no government or agency, but their operation, including all financials, all employees, everything they do, is completely open to review, voluntairily. The moment they start to throw up veils of secrecy is the day they are supplanted by another trustworthy carrier.

They need to make and distribute free powerful digital signature programs. And all the programs and protocols should be completely open, free, and verified by experts. They should establish a trust metric and a server trust system. They should give trust to local branches, and revoke trust if wrongdoing is uncovered or suspected. People should gain online reputations using real trust metrics.

We have PGP, but it hasn’t caught on. We have various document storage and delivery services, but none are standardized. We need someone to start with, say, the PGP standard, make an easy to use client for all platforms, and start providing verified timestamped authenticaed secured storage at a small cost per megabyte.

Think about it. What would it change? Well, everything that you sign, everything that you buy with credit or check or debit, every time you show your drivers license, every time you verify that something is real and authentic…any time you want to make sure there is no tampering. All of these things would be changed. And police brutality. And rape. And murder. Reduced, removed, taken out of style. Computer crime, wire fraud, breaking contracts, failure to pay, all gone. Yet we can still maintain limited and powerful privacy zones, zones similar to those, to again cite Brin, used in voting. Wherein intense verification takes place, but once you get past the checkpoints, your vote is your own and is anonymous. This would be an amazing leap, and I can see it within ten to fifteen years. Perhaps I’ll have to play a part in it.

When Farscape does a shout-out to both Buffy and Smallville (well, at least Superman). Total coolness.

First the study that says people who sleep longer will die sooner, then this report that sleeping longer and taking nice hour naps will improve memory and concentration. So a shorter smarter life, or a longer stupider one? *Sigh* maybe I’ll sleep on it.

I’m seeing it at Vivendi, and its really sad — a huge corporation dying due to it reaching too far. Well, here is a great article on AOL Time Warner, focused, as usual, around stock price.

Richard D. Parsons, AOL’s new chief executive, must combat the bitterness and resentment that Time Warner employees have toward their sister division at AOL.

New York Times (free registration required)

…kids really can change the world. Yay!

Link is to a Real Audio file from All Things Considered on NPR. It’ll only work if you have the evil Real Player installed.

It makes a nice story.

“From this day forward, the millions of our schoolchildren will daily proclaim in every city and town, every village and every rural schoolhouse, the dedication of our nation and our people to the Almighty.”

– President Dwight D. Eisenhower, upon signature of the 1954 law that added the words “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance.

And we’re just now thinking about the constitutionality of this?

With Mac OS X I’ve tried to move away from any reliance on Microsoft products. Not just because in general I don’t like the company, but because I hate being locked in to proprietry formats like those MS likes to spew forth.

For email I’m now having all of my correspondance forward to my @brandeis.edu account, and am using the free Unix utility procmail to filter it all into folders. No more bloated MS Entourage with its filters.

I want to use Address Book, but I’m gonna wait until Jaguar comes out in a few months, the new Mac OS X with a bette address book.

For word processing I use TextEdit and BBEdit, but for essays I still have to use Word…for now, until I take the time to learn the open TeX format.

For web I use OmniWeb and Mozilla, both of which rock in their own ways.

I use Adium for chat. No AOL ads!!!

What is great about all of these apps (with the exception maybe of Mozilla) is that they are very specialized for what they do, concentrating on doing one thing very well instead of doing a million things poorly. This is The Unix Way(tm) and I really like it.

All of these apps are also very customizable so that I am getting exactly the experience I want when I open them.

I guess most non-nerds, ie the majority of my readership doesn’t really care about all of this, but I just love being able to flip open my laptop and have all of my apps sitting there working exactly the way I want them. I don’t need to conform to a Microsoft way of doing things, my apps should conform to how I want to do things.

I completely agree with the 9th circuit decision, I have believed the pledge should be consisdered unconstitutional since I seriously though about it (about when I entered high school), and, correspondingly, I have refused to say it since that time. I challenge anyone to provide me with one legitimate reason why the phrase “under god” should be legal and should be in our national pledge. The only reason it was put in there was to differentiate America from the godless Commies, and it was a really stupid feel-good measure at the time that never should have lasted this long. I don’t live under YOUR GOD. And if your argument even mentions that our currency uses the phrase “In God We Trust” I will just have to ignore you — since when do two wrongs make a right?

I was trying to make this point, although a lot less eloquently, during a 10th grade discussion in Ms. Ryan’s English class. I was very suprised that this kind of view wasn’t commonly spoken. I think the reason is that the people who have it were not yet of age to write about it, and its just now getting attention:

Can a new generation of gender-blind Powerpuffs conquer inequality simply by optimistically refusing to recognize its existence? For many girls today, this approach seems to work. They don’t cry out against inequality; they simply take for granted that the world will treat them fairly — and in some cases the world seems to follow suit. “Of course I should be able to play football, or wrestle,” they tell us nonchalantly, as if suggesting otherwise is downright absurd — and it is, isn’t it?

http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2002/07/02/powerpuff/

One of my fun jobs at MP3.com is reviewing hardware. I’m pretty proud of this one.

I’ve now received two cool birthday presents — the wonderful gift from Sally and UPN’s decision to run the Buffy musical episode on my birthday! Best. Television. Ever. Yay!!!

The best thing about DVDs has got to be the director’s commentary tracks. I absoultely love getting into the head of the people who put a film together, and to find out why they did what they did. Sometimes you can hear a bit of animosity on the tracks, sometimes things don’t come out the way they should, sometimes people make decisions that are not necessarily artistically sound.

I was watching The Glass House (don’t ask how I ended up with it) and I saw a movie with a lot of potential and some absolutely beautiful and stunning cinematography and artistic aspects, but lacking a lot in terms of a real story.

Basically we have a psychological thriller about this very very interesting and powerful idea — if parents die and leave their children behind, what happens to the children? What if there are no close family members? What if they live on the other side of the country? The parents might find close friends of the family and designate them as caretakers, not necessarily knowing everything they should about the other people.

Listening to the director and the writer talk about the film, I could feel a lot of what it should have been, with intricate backstory and important subplots. But the demands of a major motion picture are for profit, and in this case the markets have shown that teen thrillers need to run one hour fourty or a bit below, not over two hours. And stories have to be easy to grasp. And thrills have to be gotten to with a minimum of extraneous backstory. And, with this movie, it had to be rated PG-13 for a wider audience, and that meant kicking out a lot of the very effective morphine addiction subplot (and some of the more grisly violent scenes, which really didn’t detract anything).

Being in a motorhome on the highway I have no idea how this movie was received ( I can’t even remember hearing of it, and I don’t have IMDb at my disposal at present), but I’m sure that it was somewhat disappoiting at the box office. And I can see that a third of the scenes in the trailer are not actually in the final cut of the movie.

Its sad when you see a movie like this, a movie that intellectual snobs like myself can brush off as stupid and formulaic and mainstream, and you see that real thought and work and sweat and tears went into the making of it, and the end result, while beautiful, was only a mediocre piece of film. Because it could have been a lot more.

Another thought to file away in my cultural analysis of Hollywood. And now back to writing my script, which has gotten no further in my week of vacation.

Picture a 31 foot motor home…err…”coach” with an attached 21 foot boat on a trailer a few feet longer. Luckily, I don’t have to drive the thing. But it means that any day-to-day activity, say, going to eat, becomes a bit of an ordeal. That and there are five people to satisfy.

Anyway, we end up at this restaurant that we had gone to on our previous sojurn to Lake Havasu City, and we get this nice waitress who has a day job of teaching fourth graders and spends nights waiting tables. And on the television, which I’ve decided I have to start calling the “telly,” there is this karate match. Two people, a kid and an adult man, swing little sickles around and do all kinds of cool flips. They finish and leave me in awe, then a girl and a boy come up to do another routine with staffs. Which leads to an exchange that slightly demonstrates my wit and that I shall therefore record in perpetuity here on my shrine of narcissism.

Danny: “What a nice story. Boy meets girl, boy attacks girl with stick, girl beats up boy, everyone is happy.”
Stu: “It looks like Iron Chef.”
Danny: “Yeah. Iron Chef Kung Fu versus Iron Chef Jujitsu…your mystery ingredient – a wooden stick. Begin!”
Jessica: “That’s not very funny.”
Danny: “Sure it is. I think I’ll put it on my blog.”
etc.

So I got my new motherboard today, so right about now my Power Mac should be back online, right? Um, so, I plug it all in and nothing happens…no power. Now the old mobo would light up and the fans would start, I just wouldn’t get into bootup. So this is odd…so I pull out the old board and stick it back in, and now it gives me nothing as well. Maybe it’s the switch? I try an iMac keyboard on both boards and get the same. So I take my old board down to our Dell PC and try it with that power supply. Nothing.

Giving up on that, I remove my 60GB hard drive full of music and such and plug it into the nice ClubMac enclosure I’m borrowing from Maintex. This thing takes an IDE hard drive and outputs to FireWire so I can plug it into my laptop and get all of the data off of it. Except that doesn’t work either. The lights light up, the drive spins, the read light blinks, but nothing comes up on the laptop. So I try my OTHER hard drive, the 40 GB one that I formatted just before the death of the motherboard. Still no go.

So what can it be? The new mobo from ebay could be bad, but the old one won’t light up either. It could be a power cord, but the power on the ClubMac unit lights up…it could be the power supply but it doesn’t work with the PC supply either…so what the heck is it? One thing I do know — I’m not dumping my old motherboard as a dud until this is all resolved. And tomorrow we go to the river, so I guess it has to wait a week. And I have to be puzzled and confused and upset for a week…because I’ve built computers, damnit, and if I’m such a Mac expert I should be able to figure this one out.

Next I’ll have to take it to MicroCenter and pay them $80 so they can diagnose the problem wrong… Grrrrr.

The photo thingy is basically fixed (yeah, I know there are still a few problems), so announcing the first New Gallery In A While. Enjoy! And by all means caption!

I pledged to myself that I would write my own review before I read any others, as I often find reviews changing how I perceive a film. Well, now that I’m done I’ve read the Salon review and have found, as is often the case, that Salon writers have expressed something much better then I can hope to.

WARNING: Major Spoilers
If you have any plans to see this movie please do so FIRST, before reading this entry.

Tom Cruise plays a guy named Anderton, which is weird because this morning that is what I decided to name the main character in the short film I am writing. In the movie the world is one in which everyone is profiled and marketed to by interactive ads at every turn, same as mine. Strange. Third, their world is one in which crime no longer exists, same as mine. No, just kidding, not same as mine. The entire movie bears no resemblance at all to mine. But those two coincidences are kinda fun, huh?

Okay, so, Tom had a son who got kidnapped. Now he runs this division of pre-crime that stops murders before they happen. Usually they can predict ’em a few days early, when it is a murder of passion they often have a lot less time, maybe 12 hours, for example. Meanwhile they have this awesome computer interface that is motion guided and allows you to fly through information. A lot of this is stuff similar to things made up by sci-fi writers and/or envisioned at the MIT Media Lab, my favorite place and one of the places that receives a shout-out in the credits.

So Tom shoots by all this info in these fuzzy future pictures, searching for clues to figure out who is doing what where, and then they go and stop it, and arrest the person before they commit the crime.

So Tom sees he’s the next killer, of some guy he’s never heard of. And now it gets interesting…can the system be wrong? We go on this notion for much of the movie, and it is a very very cool plot twist that they system turns out to be right, that was just a dead-end tunnel, that isn’t what went wrong. What went wrong is Tom was set up, and the dynamic of how he was is what I find most troubling about this movie.

The idea is that you have these three people who have been genetically mutated and can somehow sense the future. They exist in this little hive mind and figure out who will be murdering whom. So is the system foolproof? Sometimes the dominant seer (or, as they call them, precog) sees a different version of events, an alternate reality. This can lead you to all sorts of cool thoughts about the mailability of the future and pre-ordained actions and on and on, but that one that the movie focuses on is the question of whether once you know the future you can change it.

I think this makes sense. The precogs are seeing a future based on the events of the present — this is the chain of events that will happen. But, like with Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, by seeing the future it ceases to be. Once someone knows what will happen, their actions will be different, and thus it won’t happen exactly the same way. In Minority Report their movie science requires that a non-participatory third-party knowing about a future event will not change that event (eg, no strange butterfly effect-like phenomena) but someone who knows about the action and goes to stop it will change the future. So here we get Tom finding out that he is to kill a man, and by knowing that he will do so he can make a choice, take things into his (now more educated) hands, and, in the words of The X-Files, fight the future.

We don’t know what will happen, of course. For every book or show or movie or story about time travel there is a different explanation of how the paradoxes of time will work. This movie generally stays true to a logically valid premise, even if it may not be the “right” premise or one that the viewer necessarily believes. So, in this respect, it is “good” SF. It is logical science fiction, and I can’t fault them on that.

The notion of a minority report is, in fact, a good way of explaining the possibility for fluctuations in time and the idea that events are not necessarily fixed. If there were 5 precogs instead of 3 there would probably be even more minority reports. So again, this is all good.

Similarly, the future is very plausible. Retinal scanners ID-ing people everywhere does not seem unlikely. A pointless war on non-harmful drugs will likely continue. Marketing will become ever more pervasive. Computer interfaces and memory storage devices will improve greatly. Prostitution will change in form to computer programs that let people live in fantasy worlds of their own devising (“I want to kill my boss.” “I’m sure you brought pictures?” “Yeah.” “Okay, we can do that.”) So the movie is really really good in this respect — it creates a plausible and palatable backdrop.

So we finally get to the meat, which is Tom’s future murder. Ignore all of the fun chase scenes and the various measures he takes to avoid identification and get right to the heart of it — why would he kill this guy? Well, the guy is apparently the abductor and murderer of his son, so he has reason. Similarly, having seen himself kill the man at the hotel he knows how to go about it. But what I don’t ever see explained is how he killed the guy in the first place?

Here is the most spoilish section of my post, the major plot giveaway…don’t read this if the previous bits have intrigued you. Turn off your computer, come back later, this review will still be here…

Okay, so it emerges that Tom has been set up, framed, by the old guy. Old guy has hired a man to pose as the child killer, fabricated evidence, planted the clues, doing all this elaborate scheming to bring Tom down because he knows too much. So Tom sees himself killing the guy. But why? Why would he have killed the guy? Except that he saw himself doing so he wouldn’t have known of the man’s existence. This paradox doesn’t fit in with the well-crafted world. Let’s even ignore the whole setup and take this in its simplest possible form.

1. A sees himself killing B.
   
2. A wonders who B is, finds him.
   
3. A realizes B is evil, kills him.

Step three takes place only because of the implicit validity of step 1. But step 1 COULD NOT have occurred without step 3. We have a classic time paradox here…a guy goes back in time to tell himself some vital info he knows in the future, then he saves the day because of it only to go back in time and warn himself of this vital info that he picked up from warning himself. In short, there is no beginning! And if this time pattern doesn’t have a non-patterned beginning point, then there is no way to change it! Because once you change step 3, if step 3 is implicitly linked to step 1, you have changed step 1 and invalidated the whole process. This cannot work! The other murder, the murder of the precog’s mother, is brilliant. The way they figured it out is great. The misleading storys, the deception, the pacing is all really great. But this very important piece doesn’t make sense. Or perhaps I am missing something?

Let us move on.

Item: Tom Cruise has his own focus puller. He has his own guy to come on and make sure that he stays in focus. Wow. That was a weird credit.

Steven Spieldberg is moving to a darker tone with his latest movies. First there was A.I. with its scary future world, and now Minority Report. But Spieldberg is still afraid to go whole hog, to give up the happy ending completely. So with A. I. we have the strange section I have always called the “third half” in which David ends his life happy. Same here, as we have a closing narration in which the precog program is shut down, everyone finds peace, everyone is happy, blah blah blah futurecakes. And this happens again here, and that somewhat kills the journey by resolving in a matter that leaves me dissatisfied.

I really felt for the precogs, and their ending is weird. Their ability to see the future leaves them on the brink of sanity, a sanity carefully regulated by drugs and hormones and controlled environments. Once they are set free, their story of survival could be a movie in and of itself, not just a nice fade out on a home on the range where three kids live surrounded by books.

Tom getting back together with his wife? Nice, but again, doesn’t make sense. I thought she left him because he reminded her too much of her son. But then they get back together…and have another kid.

The poor Assistant AG. I really liked him.

The program — six years of stopping murders. Not a single death in all that time. This is amazing. And then we find one minor flaw, a flaw that could be worked around, and we shut the whole project down? What about the people we’ve saved?

Like it or not, right now the US is holding prisoners in countries where civil liberties are not to the level they are now. They are doing this because they want to fight the war on terror and in order to do so they are employing torture to get secrets out of powerful evil people. They are arguably saving thousands of lives. And the cost is only the horrible suffering of a few known evildoers. So keeping three mutants on ice for an indeterminate amount of time for the good of humanity is a much more difficult choice then simply shutting down the program because one of them, god forbid, feels pain.

The ending is cheap, and it really hurts the excellent potential of the movie. Really that is what this movie is — a great story, a wonderful backdrop, but the major storytelling is just not of a high enough moral caliber to fit the incredible fact pattern. The pieces are just not connected carefully enough.

So here is my review: a wonderful future world, a great idea, a good script (with a few bad moments), a story that, while not completely unique, is very compelling. A bad cop-out. A logic flaw. But a very good movie very well executed. A very intriguing scenario. A good detective mystery. A movie that truly kept me guessing for at least the first half. I liked it. I liked it a lot. 4/5 stars. Go see it!

At first you might laugh at the following:
Rosenberg has also openly speculated that the anthrax mailer is a contract worker for the CIA, and that the letters were some kind of CIA-approved experiment to test how the United States would react to a biological attack.

Laugh all you want, then read this:
“People need to take her seriously. Her arguments are reasoned. She has had an excellent reputation and has certainly made a name for herself in this area before any of the anthrax attacks. She is by no means a crackpot or a kook, nor is she a conspiracy theorist.”

Now read the whole article (warning: requires Salon Premium membership)