Two Items Regarding Airplane Safety

Item one:

Chart: The Odds of Airborne TerrorOver the past decade, there have been, by my count, six attempted terrorist incidents on board a commercial airliner than landed in or departed from the United States: the four planes that were hijacked on 9/11, the shoe bomber incident in December 2001, and the NWA flight 253 incident on Christmas….

Over the past decade, according to BTS, there have been 99,320,309 commercial airline departures that either originated or landed within the United States. Dividing by six, we get one terrorist incident per 16,553,385 departures….

the odds of being on given departure which is the subject of a terrorist incident have been 1 in 10,408,947 over the past decade. By contrast, the odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are about 1 in 500,000. This means that you could board 20 flights per year and still be less likely to be the subject of an attempted terrorist attack than to be struck by lightning.

Item two:

Our current response to terrorism is a form of “magical thinking.” It relies on the idea that we can somehow make ourselves safer by protecting against what the terrorists happened to do last time.

Unfortunately for politicians, the security measures that work are largely invisible. Such measures include enhancing the intelligence-gathering abilities of the secret services, hiring cultural experts and Arabic translators, building bridges with Islamic communities both nationally and internationally, funding police capabilities — both investigative arms to prevent terrorist attacks, and emergency communications systems for after attacks occur — and arresting terrorist plotters without media fanfare.

They do not include expansive new police or spying laws. Our police don’t need any new laws to deal with terrorism; rather, they need apolitical funding. […]

It’s not security theater we need, it’s direct appeals to our feelings. The best way to help people feel secure is by acting secure around them. Instead of reacting to terrorism with fear, we — and our leaders — need to react with indomitability, the kind of strength shown by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill during World War II.

By not overreacting, by not responding to movie-plot threats, and by not becoming defensive, we demonstrate the resilience of our society, in our laws, our culture, our freedoms. There is a difference between indomitability and arrogant “bring ’em on” rhetoric. There’s a difference between accepting the inherent risk that comes with a free and open society, and hyping the threats.

We should treat terrorists like common criminals and give them all the benefits of true and open justice — not merely because it demonstrates our indomitability, but because it makes us all safer. […]

Despite fearful rhetoric to the contrary, terrorism is not a transcendent threat. A terrorist attack cannot possibly destroy a country’s way of life; it’s only our reaction to that attack that can do that kind of damage. The more we undermine our own laws, the more we convert our buildings into fortresses, the more we reduce the freedoms and liberties at the foundation of our societies, the more we’re doing the terrorists’ job for them.

Best Movies of the Decade

Three lists follow, all yoinked from Slashfilm: first and second, the best-reviewed movies of the decade (10 from Metacritic and 20 from Rotten Tomatoes), third, the IMDb top 25 movies of the decade. For each list, I’ve italicized the films I’ve seen, and bold italicized the films we have in our movie collection at home (in other words, both seen and enjoyed enough to keep). I’ve also tossed in links to searches on my blog to mentions or reviews of the films I’ve seen, when possible.

Metacritic’s Top 10 Best-Reviewed Movies of the Decade

  1. Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)

  2. Ratatouille (2007) (Cute, but has the usual Pixar problem.)

  3. Spirited Away (2002)

  4. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) (As with the entire LotR series, TRotK gets quite a few mentions.)

  5. Sideways (2004)

  6. WALL-E (2008) (Once again, the Pixar problem.)

  7. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)

  8. There Will Be Blood (2007)

  9. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) (Many mentions of TFotR have appeared over the years.)

  10. The Queen (2006)

Rotten Tomatoes: Top 20 Best Reviewed Films of the Decade (minimum 100 reviews)

  1. Man On Wire

  2. Up (Cute at times, but on the whole, we didn’t like it.)

  3. The Wrestler

  4. Finding Nemo (My original review stands, but…well, by now, you know what the “but” is.)

  5. The Hurt Locker

  6. Let the Right One In

  7. Spellbound

  8. Chicken Run

  9. Murderball

  10. The Fog of War

  11. Anvil! The Story of Anvil

  12. The Band’s Visit

  13. The Incredibles (I love the film, but…am I beating a dead horse yet?)

  14. Sideways

  15. The Queen

  16. Spirited Away

  17. Once

  18. Capturing the Friedmans

  19. Maria Full of Grace

  20. Winged Migration

IMDb’s Top 25 Movies of the Decade

  1. The Dark Knight (2008)

  2. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)

  3. City of God (2002)

  4. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)

  5. Avatar (2009)

  6. Memento (2000) (One brief, rambling review from when I fist saw it. Used to own this one, would like to again.)

  7. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002) (Once again, many mentions.)

  8. WALL·E (2008)

  9. Amélie (2001)

  10. The Departed (2006)

  11. The Pianist (2002)

  12. Spirited Away (2001)

  13. The Lives of Others (2006)

  14. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) (One very brief blurb.)

  15. Requiem for a Dream (2000) (A brief mention from when I bought the DVD. Don’t have the DVD anymore, but this is another I’d like to have in my collection again.)

  16. Inglourious Basterds (2009)

  17. Up (2009)

  18. Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)

  19. The Prestige (2006)

  20. Slumdog Millionaire (2008)

  21. Downfall (2004)

  22. Gran Torino (2008)

  23. Sin City (2005)

  24. District 9 (2009)

  25. Batman Begins (2005)

I haven’t been keeping up with my movie watching, have I?

Things That Bugged Me About ‘Up’

To start with, a list of things that I liked about Pixar‘s Up:

  • The animation, as always in a Pixar film, was gorgeous.
  • The opening ten minutes or so were some of the sweetest, saddest, and most touching work I’ve seen Pixar do since Jesse’s song (“When She Loved Me“) in Toy Story 2. Yes, I got sniffly.
  • There were a number of funny bits that got laughs out of me.

But, as I tweeted yesterday, I didn’t end up liking the film as a whole very much. What a tragic, depressing film.

  • Lesson number one: heroes will let you down. After spending his life idolizing the explorer, Carl finds him only to discover that he’s a greedy, obsessed murderous bastard with no redeeming qualities at all. Russell obviously idolized his father, and yet the failure of his father was a recurring theme, which ties right into…

  • Lesson number two: fathers also let you down. All we know about Russell’s father is that he’s been increasingly distant, to the point of being essentially nonexistent, until eventually Carl becomes a surrogate father for Russell.

  • What’s up with Russell’s family, anyway? We spend the entire film hearing about his absent father. There’s not a single moment of worry about Russell’s sudden disappearance when he inadvertently flies away with Carl. At no point do Carl or Russell show any concern about Russell missing his family, or his family missing him. The entire movie had me convinced that Russell was the child of a single-parent family, whose father had grown so distant that there was virtually no emotional bond between them whatsoever, given Russell’s lack of concern about his (admittedly inadvertent) kidnapping by Carl…but then, during the Wilderness Explorer award ceremony, suddenly Russell’s mother is sitting in the audience. He has a mother? What was she thinking during the time that her kid disappeared? Why was she so willing to allow Russell to continue his association with the old coot who kidnapped him, took him to South America, and nearly got him killed?

  • And, finally, there’s the familiar soapbox of Pixar’s roles for women. Let’s run down the women in Up.

    • Ellie. Initially, she’s one of the best female roles we’ve seen yet. As a child, she’s the stronger of the two main characters, taking the lead in her interactions with Carl, avoiding traditional gender stereotypes by fixating on the explorer and dreaming about adventuring around the world, and becoming one of the few Pixar characters available for little girls to look to and emulate.

      Then she marries Carl, grows old, and dies.

      Sure, it’s her memory that helps to prompt Carl to go on his adventure, but she’s not part of this adventure. Her only “adventure” in life was to get married. It’s sweet and all, and many of the moments where we see Carl missing her are very touching, but still…she spends the entire movie dead.

    • Kevin. A bird whose role is essentially comic relief and plot point, given a male name.

    • Russell’s mom. Never referred to, and only seen for a few seconds at the end of the film. As if that’s not bad enough, she wasn’t even allowed to be the proud parent awarding Russell his “Assisting the Elderly” badge when his father didn’t show up — rather, she sat passively out in the audience, apparently willing to allow Russell to be humiliated, until Carl shows up to act as a surrogate father and save the day.

      If Pixar wanted to have Carl step in, then why not have her on stage with Russell for the ceremony, then have Carl politely ask her for permission? Or why couldn’t Carl be in the audience, and have him give Russell Ellie’s pin afterwards, when it’s just Carl, Russell, and Russell’s mom? Why not find some way to arrange things that wouldn’t involve further marginalizing the mother?

  • How did the explorer get all those dogs? He must have added cloning to his list of achievements, as as far as we can tell, every one of those dogs was male. (Okay, you could make an argument that he only gave the translation collars male voices…but why bother to make multiple distinct voices for different dogs, but not bother to make girl voices for the girl dogs? I stand by my assumption that every dog on that ship was a male.)

  • The dogs flying little airplanes went too far. Until that point, all of those dogs were still dogs doing dog things, simply with the added comedy of the translation collars allowing us to hear what they were saying. Once they got in the airplanes, though, they broke the rules of the world that had already been established.

So, once again, we gave Pixar a chance, and once again, we were roundly unimpressed.

AMC Theaters OKs Bringing In Drinks and Snacks

Well, no, they don’t. However, they sure seem to be encouraging it, even if that’s not their intent.

This morning, Prairie and I went to see a matinee showing of The Princess and the Frog, Disney’s latest traditionally animated film. The film itself was a lot of fun, and we both loved being able to go out and see real animation on the big screen, something that happens all too rarely in these days of CGI and 3D gimmickry.

Unfortunately, as much as we enjoyed the film itself, we’re running out of reasons to bother with actual theaters, rather than waiting for video. The latest eye-rolling bit of obnoxiousness? It seems that AMC Theatres has discontinued all “small” sizes of drinks and candy.

When I went to the snack bar, planning on getting a small soda, the menu board had a blank spot under the “small” column for both drinks and candy. Scoping out the sales stations, I noticed that while they all had spaces for three sizes of cups by their soda fountains, only two were stocked. Asking the soda jockey behind the counter confirmed it: AMC is “reconfiguring” their snack bar options, and there are now only two sizes of drinks, medium and large.

While even the small drinks weren’t all that small before hand, it appears that now, the smallest size fountain soda you can get is a 32oz bucket, for $4.25. I have no real idea what they’ve done with their candy lineup, but I’m betting they just re-labeled all the “small” boxes to “mediums”, and knocked the larger “medium” boxes up to “large”.

Just one more reason (along with the barrage of ads euphemistically described as “pre-show entertainment,” the crappy customer service provided by the staff of most theaters, and the absolute lack of public decorum from the majority of other moviegoers) why my theater-going experience is going to be ever more rare. On those rare occasions when I do go — both Prairie and I are thinking that we want to see the 3D version of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, which will be our first modern theatrical 3D experience (no, I’m not planning on seeing Avatar in 3D…at this point, I’m not planning on seeing it until it’s out on DVD) — I’ll be taking advantage of Prairie’s largest purse and bringing in my own snacks and drinks.

12/21/09 Update: According to this Get Satisfaction customer support thread, small sizes of soda and popcorn do still exist, bundled together into a “Cameo Combo”. A combo doesn’t thrill me, as I’m not big on popcorn and would only want the drink, but the representative did say that it should be possible to buy the small drink on its own. I’m still not entirely thrilled by this (it seems ridiculous that this is the only way to get a reasonably sized drink), but at least it’s an option (assuming that the kids at the snack bar know about the option).

Links for December 10th through December 16th

Sometime between December 10th and December 16th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • 20 Best Science Fiction Books of the Decade: “After much mulling and culling, we’ve come up with our list of the twenty best books of the decade. The list is weighted towards science fiction, but does have healthy doses of fantasy and horror. And a few surprises. This list is alphabetical, and not in order of awesomeness. All are equally great and worthy of your attention. In deciding which would make the list and which wouldn’t, we weighed not only our opinions, but also those of the critical community at large – looking at how each book was received by reviewers for mainstream publications as well as science fiction magazines. There were many, many books we love that almost made the cut – if we’d let ourselves go it would have been more like the 100 best books of the decade.”
  • Why Fake-Looking CG Space Battles Are Beautiful: “Television used to be full of space skirmishes… that looked kind of bogus. And yet, they’re totally beautiful and make our inner children giggle with excitement. Here’s why we love the faux space battles. The 1990s were really the heydey for wonderful but not-quite-convincing space skirmishes. We used to see tons of ships flying around our screen, often too many to count. Unlike Battlestar Galactica’s quick cuts and weird handheld camera footage, these 1990s space wars were usually filmed with an unflinching eye or a slow pan, letting you see every computer-generated line and explosion. And it’s totally awesome.”
  • Octopus Snatches Coconut and Runs: “After turning the shells so the open side faces upwards, the octopuses blow jets of mud out of the bowl before extending their arms around the shell – or if they have two halves, stacking them first, one inside the other – before stiffening their legs and tip-toeing away. Dr Norman said: ‘I think it is amazing that those arms of pure muscle get turned into rigid rods so that they can run along a bit like a high-speed spider. It comes down to amazing dexterity and co-ordination of eight arms and several hundred suckers.'”
  • Facebook’s New Privacy Changes: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: “Being a free speech organization, EFF is supportive of internet users who consciously choose to share more on Facebook after weighing the privacy risks; more online speech is a good thing. But to ensure that users don’t accidentally share more than they intend to, we do not recommend Facebook’s ‘recommended’ settings. Facebook will justify the new push for more sharing with everyone by pointing to the new per-post privacy options — if you don’t want to share a particular piece of content with everyone, Facebook will argue, then just set the privacy level for that piece of content to something else. But we think the much safer option is to do the reverse: set your general privacy default to a more restrictive level, like ‘Only Friends,’ and then set the per-post privacy to ‘Everyone’ for those particular things that you’re sure you want to share with the world.”
  • Does CGI Ruin Movies?: “Watching movies where CGI has created entire worlds…may be technically impressive and the work of hundreds of artists up and down the moviemaking food chain, but none of it entirely convinces; there’s a distance that we, as viewers, instinctively pick up on because what we’re watching is so fake that it can’t even convincingly fake verisimilitude. It doesn’t matter how many how many hours or computer modeling programs have been spent to create ‘lifelike’ scenery or surroundings, it will always lack the element of chaos, the potential for mistakes, that makes it something we can believe (and lose ourselves) in.”

Links for December 2nd through December 9th

Sometime between December 2nd and December 9th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • What Is Google Voice?: "Ever since I got my Google Voice account, I have had to repeatedly explain to friends and colleagues what Google's free phone service is and (more importantly) what it isn't. If you, like them, have heard about Google Voice but still aren't completely clear about how it works and why you should care, here are some quick answers."
  • Start BitTorrent Downloads Remotely With Dropbox: "Now as long as you keep Dropbox and BitTorrent running, you can start torrents remotely. All you have to do is upload .torrent files to the Dropbox folder from wherever you are, using the web interface, and it should start downloading almost immediately on the other computer. I started doing this at the office, and it's worked for me without a hitch; by the time I get home, my downloads are usually ready. Give it a shot, and let me know what you think."
  • 500 Internal Server Error: 500 Internal Server Error
  • Happy 30th Anniversary to Star Trek: The Motion Picture!: "30 years ago today, on December 7th 1979 Star Trek leapt from the small to the big screen with Star Trek: The Motion Picture. All week long TrekMovie will be celebrating the anniversary, beginning today with a tribute by Free Enterprise producer Mark Altman, that looks at the film and its place in history."
  • How to Create the Perfect Facebook Fan Page: A couple good tips, but the biggest is the FBML application. I need to install this and play with it for the CWU Writing Center Facebook page when I get some time.

Links for November 30th through December 2nd

Sometime between November 30th and December 2nd, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • On Language – Against Camel Case: "Word spaces should not be taken for granted. Ancient Greek, the first alphabet to feature vowels, could be deciphered without word spaces if you sounded it out, and did without them. Spaces or centered points divide words on early Roman monuments, but Latin, too, ceased to separate words by the second century. The loss is puzzling, because the eye has to work much harder to read unseparated text. But as the paleographer Paul Saenger has explained, the ancient world did not desire 'to make reading easier and swifter.'"
  • Exploding Whale Video Reporter Looks Back Four Decades Later: "We're hearing this noise around us and we realize it is pieces of whale blubber hitting the ground around us (from) 1,000 yards away. …we ran away from the blast scene, down the dune and toward the parking lot. Then we heard a second explosion ahead of us, and we just kept going until we saw what it was: A car had been hit by this coffee-table-size piece of blubber and had its windows flattened all the way down to the seats."
  • Verizon Changes FiOS AUP, -1, Offtopic: "Verizon has changed their FiOS AUP effective yesterday, and added an interesting new clause to their specific examples that we're all familiar with: 'it is a violation of the Agreement and this AUP to … post off-topic information on message boards, chat rooms or social networking sites.' At this point, every FiOS-based Slashdot user is breaking the new AUP." As some of the (less amusing, on-topic) comments to this /. thread note, this is probably simply a poorly-worded clause intended to cover any Verizon-owned/managed forums, or to target spammers, or both. That doesn't make it any less amusing.
  • Is Obama Another Mr. Spock?: "He shows a fascination with science, an all-too deliberate decision-making demeanor, an adherence to logic and some pretty, ahem, prominent ears. They all add up to a quite logical conclusion, at least for 'Star Trek' fans: Barack Obama is Washington's Mr. Spock, the chief science officer for the ship of state."
  • 12 SF Movie Adaptations That Did the Books Justice: "Whether or not you loved The Road, most people seemed to feel it captured Cormac McCarthy's novel. Sadly, most adaptations do violence to the original books, but not all. Here are 12 adaptations that did right by the books."

Links for November 26th through November 30th

Sometime between November 26th and November 30th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • From the Archives, the Chaos of the WTO: "Ten years ago this week, Seattle was thrust into the international spotlight in a way that most people did not anticipate. Tens of thousands of protesters descended on our normally quiet corner of the United States. They brought with them their grievances and frustrations with the way our world was headed in 1999. Some of these [photos] have never been published before."
  • Cliff Mass Weather Blog: An Amazing Lightning Story: "Once in a while, I hear some amazing weather stories. Imagine being hit by lightning while driving. Instant destruction of the car's electronics, with the a window blowing out due the blast? Here is a true story shared by Judy Lew–she described it so well, I thought I would leave her own words, slightly abridged. And some pictures she shared. She sounds like the kind of person you would like to have around in an emergency! This lightning hit occurred on the 520 bridge in Seattle during commute time. This story illustrates how safe it is to be in a car during an electrical storm, since the current will pass around you."
  • Patrick Stewart: the legacy of domestic violence: As a child, the actor regularly saw his father hit his mother. Here he describes how the horrors of his childhood remained with him in his adult life
  • Panasonic discontinuing Technics 1200 turntables?: The rumours appear to originate from a New Zealand DJ shop called DMC World, which says on its product page: "Panasonic (the manufacturer of Technics) have announced that production of the world famous Technics SL-1200 and SL-1210 DJ turntables will stop at the end of February 2010". The turntables have been around for more than 35 years, and are featured in the London museum of Science and Technology as an important step in how music has been played and presented over the last century. Their popularity has ensued due to their tank-like construction, high torque and effective insulation from acoustic feedback.
  • On Twilight: What do you see in him?: Domestic violence is not romantic, and I don't care how much you say she started it, you don't hit your girlfriend. EVER. If the other women in your tribe had the sense that God gave mayonnaise, wolf boy would be lucky to only go to jail. Wait– there don't appear to be any other women in the tribe. sigh And this movie is the one that made $140 million bucks in one weekend. Bigger than Dark Knight. Maybe it's just that I'm older and (hopefully) wiser than the characters and thus out of this movie's target demographic, or maybe I'm a humorless feminist, but knowing that zillions of girls are seeing this getting the idea that a seriously unhealthy relationship is somehow the equivalent of true love — that is profoundly disturbing. Far scarier than a werewolf.

Facebook ‘Dislike’ Button Suspicion

I just got an invite to a Facebook group titled “DISLIKE BUTTON is here – ADD it now!”. After looking this group over, I have very strong suspicious about it, and my first impulse is to recommend that everyone ignore it.

First: Facebook still isn’t adding a ‘dislike’ button. This is a third-party software hack, and has nothing to do with Facebook. Admittedly, the group does admit this on their info tab — but placed so far down the page that most people will never see it. This is shady.

Second: The instructions on how to add the dislike button have very little to do with adding a dislike button, and everything to do with getting as many people as possible to look at the group. Out of five ‘installation’ steps, only one — the last one — has anything to do with installing the button. The other four are just about spamming the group out to everyone on your friends list. This is shady.

Third: The dislike button itself is a Firefox browser add-on, and will not work for anyone using Internet Explorer, Safari, or any other browser. This is not mentioned anywhere on the dislike button group page. This is shady. Also, because they stress that you have to invite all your friends to the group before adding the button, many people will not realize that the button will not work for them until after they’ve already spammed all their friends. This is doubly shady.

Now, I don’t know what the dislike button Firefox add-on actually does or does not do once it’s installed on someone’s computer. However, given that they’re being sneaky about the entire process, and seem more concerned with getting their software on as many computers as possible, this doesn’t look good to me.

If you get an invite to the dislike button group, I strongly suggest ignoring it. if you use Firefox and have already installed the Firefox addon, I strongly suggest removing it. I don’t know that it’s bad, but from what I can see, I strongly doubt that it’s good.