Movie Comments/Recommendations

1. Confessions of a Superhero: This is a documentary following four people who take pictures for tips outside Grauman's Chinese Theatre in LA dressed up as Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and the Incredible Hulk. It is very entertaining in a semi-morbid kind of way.
2. A League of Ordinary Gentlemen: This is a documentary about the Pro Bowling Association right after it was bought by some retired Microsoft techies. The PBA almost failed and the new owners made changes to it work.
3. Helvetica: I swore I would not watch this movie. I did. It's only worth about 30 minutes of viewing. After that, it gets kind of repetitive. Some people take fonts way too seriously.
4. Word Wars: This is a documentary that follows four professional Scrabble players. It builds through the Scrabble "season" to the championship. It's very entertaining.
5. The King of Kong: Billy Mitchell is the greatest Donkey Kong player ever. Can he withstand the challenge of a new commer? This movie takes a fascinating look at a very odd subculture. Of particular interest are Billy Mitchell's toadies. Why do they choose to orbit such a small star?
6. Burden of Dreams: Director Werner Herzog struggles to make a film deep in the Amazon rain forest. This film is so meta. The main character of the film is attempting an act of art in the jungle too. It's like Herzog is making a film about himself without knowing it.
7. Primer: A very confusing movie made on a budget of something like $15k. It's very good for such a small budget.
8. I Like Killing Flies: A guy runs a restaurant in New York for twenty plus years in one spot. He dishes out good food. He also dishes out his own view of life. I really liked his poem about parties of 5. (His place is very small and he won't serve parties of more than 4).
9. Silent Light: This is a very, very, very slow movie. It might be the slowest movie ever. I kept watching to see the payoff. There was one. It wasn't worth it. This is a great movie to make fun of as you fastforward through the slow scenes (most of the movie).
10. The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill: This is a documentary about a guy that takes care of wild parrots. He gets really close to them. Somehow, despite all odds, this movie ends on a positive note.
    

A Couple More Interesting Wired.com Articles

This one is about a guy that works very hard to memorize all sorts of things:

http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_wozniak?currentPage=all

This one is about a long running hypertext-like vaporware project:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/xanadu.html

The project's webpage proudly says the project was started in 1960 and somehow it has jumped to 3D. I wonder what a 3D hypertext browser looks like. = )

http://www.xanadu.com/

Wired.com has a lot of good stuff.

Netflix Queue

I now have 54 movies in my Netflix queue. I just added some movies MarkM recommended. 54 movies is about nine months of movie viewing for me. So, I'm set for a while.

I wish there was an easy way to share your queue so that people could say things like "Don't watch that movie. It sucks!".

Also, I think it's not good that searching movies on Netflix with the phrase "disc golf" matches zero movies that have anything to do with disc golf.

The Cyphernomicon

This is such a great document:

http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/crypto/cypherpunks/cyphernomicon/CP-FAQ

I really like its outline format. More documents should be written in that way.

The Long Tail

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html

That's an interesting and well done essay. The only question is "What could I do on the Internet to get my part of the tail?". I'd only have to make $200k a year. I could live on that.

Disc Golf Duel

This is almost as weird as the links I posted this weekend.

The Internet is So Weird

Pictures of Tom Selleck, waterfalls, and sandwiches:

http://selleckwaterfallsandwich.tumblr.com/

This page is epic (I'm worried about the creator of that page):

http://community.livejournal.com/ohnotheydidnt/27350111.html?page=1

One of my all time favorites (it's inexplicable):

http://www.rathergood.com/gaybar

Check out this "photo" of a huge wolf (Is it real? Hogzilla was real.):

http://www.mikehanback.com/blog/index.cfm/2009/9/25/Photo-Biggest-Wolf-Ever

Unheard Explanation For Global Warming

I've heard a lot reasons for global warming. However, I've never heard this one:

According to the European Environment Agency “Global sea surface temperature is approximately 1 degree C higher now than 140 years ago”.

NASA puts the change in Global atmospheric temperature during the same period at 0.76 degree C. You don’t have to be a genius to note that the water has heated up faster than the air, which ought to be a pretty good indication that it has nothing to do with CO2. Air is an insulator compared to water, and the “greenhouse effect” is a sham.

If NASA has not completely misled us, the ocean temperatures are rising. But neither NASA nor the IPCC has considered the huge gravitational effects of other planets on the Earth’s fluids, mainly the ocean and the molten centre of the Earth, through friction. Gravitational forces of other bodies affecting the Earth are hundreds of thousands of times stronger than solar radiation.

Other studies state "Although observations and models confirm that recent warming is greatest in the upper ocean, there are widespread observations of warming deeper than 700 meters."

What’s happening is that gravitational pulls are warming the Earth, which is warming the oceans, and the oceans, when warmer, dissolve less CO2, which they release into the atmosphere, accounting for that increase.

From: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7017922.ece (In the comments.)

Somebody needs to put together a web page that shows every purported cause of global warming. I think it'd be an interesting read.

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