Aarron Sorkin rips apart Occupy Wall Street (The Newsroom Season 2: Episode #4 Clip "Shelly On OWS" (HBO))

So, Aaron Sorkin has been sucking me into The Newsroom, against some of my better judgment. There are things he does very well and things that he does in a ridiculous manner (namely, having every character be utterly glib 100% of the time). One of the things he does well is have people talk about politics.

In the clip below, Jeff Daniels (one of the best actors in Hollywood and that's been true for decades) rips an Occupy Wall Street representative to shreds. Except that she's not really a "representative" in any formal since OWS doesn't have "leaders" because they wanted "everybody to have a voice."

Not the Smartest Guy in the Room

If we are to believe Ezra Klein, Larry Summers is the front-runner in President Obama's mind to take over the job of Chairman of the Federal Reserve as Ben Bernanke's replacement.  Bernanke hasn't been an ideal Fed Chair, but he's been far better than his predecessor, the absurdly overrated Alan Greenspan, whose monumental contribution to American economics was "lower interest rates and the economy will grow."
Now Benranke is retiring and Obama has to pick a new Chair.  In this space, we express our hope that Summers is not the choice.

Rooting for laundry

Just some brief thoughts while I watch Game 5 of the Stanley Cup Finals.  A couple things in the last few weeks have sparked some thoughts about sports fandom.

My formative years were in Boston.  In particular, the Boston of the 1970s, which featured very competitive teams in hockey and basketball, a couple noteworthy Patriots' seasons (albeit without any playoff victories), and of course some fear and loathing at Fenway.  If I had to rate my fan intensity at the time, it would have been 1) Red Sox, 2) Bruins, 3) Celtics, 4) Patriots.

That order changed in 1979 for two reasons: a) my family moved to Connecticut, and b) Larry Bird.
Hartford had its own new NHL team, the Whalers featuring Gordie Howe and, briefly, Bobby Hull.  The Whale was interesting for a few season, but their management in the late 80s and early 90s seemed to function more as a feeder system for the Penguins (Ron Francis!) than a respectable team.  In terms of my perspective, this meant a lot less local coverage of the Bruins.  On the other hand, Larry Bird made the Celtics an extremely exciting team, one which played a few games per season in Hartford.

So what I'm saying is that the Bruins dropped off the radar.  I did follow them in their Finals apperances in 1988 and 1990, but the Gretzky-era Oilers completely smoked them.

So over the years I followed basketball more and more and hockey less and less.  And then I moved to the DC area.  Now if anything could cure a person of NBA fandom, it might be the local presence of the Wizards.  So when I started watching the Capitals at Landru's, I saw an interesting team, esp. Mr. Alex Ovechkin, an exciting, charismatic player.  We saw this goal live:

But then I found that when the Caps played the Bruins, even though I'd completely lost touch with the team, I couldn't root against my favorite from childhood.  And I starting following Chara, Krecji, Lucic and the boys as they ran to a Stanley Cup title.  Yay!

Point is that I felt strongly about the logo, about the big B inside the spokes that makes the Bruins' logo.

My second point is different.  It relates to the murder investigation that has enmeshed one of the Patriots' star TE's, Aaron Hernandez.  I won't relate the details here.  Let's just that it looks very bad.  It looks like he was somehow involved in the murder of a guy who had been involved with his girlfriend's sister and that he actively tried to cover it up.  Some facts are indisputable, including that he brought in cleaners to clean the house, and that he destroyed his cell phone and his security system (presumably to get rid of incriminating evidence).

So this is a guy that all Patriots' fans loved just a few weeks ago.  He's a key part of their two TE offense, which has created all sorts of matchup problems for defenses.  But really, we don't know anything about the guy.  And it's depressing to feel that it's likely that he's just an overprivileged gangster, a jock who's never had to learn how to be a decent human being. And where the NFL (and most sports leagues) hold up their star players to be role models, the truth is that the ability to play football is no guarantee that a person is not a scumbag.  We've seen that with Ray Lewis, Mike Vick, Rae Carruth, etc., etc.

So here the point is that we need to be careful when we walk down the path of fandom, of rooting for laundry.  Because it may well be that the people being exalted don't really deserve it.

my Larry David experience

So, about a week ago, I had a weird experience.  I had driven down to Bethesda early in the morning to meet people to go for a long run.

Anyway, I pulled into a parking garage.  Since it was still early on a Sunday (before 8), it was pretty empty.  So I pull in and start getting my stuff together to go run.  Part of this process entails pouring Gatorade from a 32-oz bottle into my personal water bottle, to be easy to carry on my belt.  So I'm in the process of pouring and another car pulls into the garage.

And let's be clear here: there are at least 40 empty spots on my side of the garage, and also many others on the other side.

But the woman driving pulls forward, and then starts to back into the spot right next to me.  And she stops and, in an impatient tone of voice, asks me to close my car door so she can park.

I am incredulous.  In an empty parking garage, apparently what she really needed to do was inconvenience me.  So I say "in just a second, I'm doing something here."

And then she starts going on about manners, how I'm rude, etc.

I'm baffled.  Again, empty parking garage.  Dozens of places where she could have parked immediately.

So this turned into an unpleasant shouting match.

Petty stuff, certainly, but I post to ruminate exactly what people think about when they think about manners.  For this woman, her concept of manners was very limited.  I could say that it just meant "people let me do what I want" but, to be more generous, it means "people let me park where I want" regardless of what else is going on.

In my conception of manners, the concept includes not unnecessarily inconveniencing others.  If that had been the only parking spot, I would have been the one inconveniencing her, since she had no other option.  But really, she had plenty of options.  She just lacked awareness of her environment.   But then, when I confront her with her lack of planning, she has to double down on her righteousness.

I know this is mundane stuff, but it's the food of life, like American Splendor or Jim's Journal.  It's the kind of thing that Larry David eats for lunch.

Best of Bond III, It's Roger Moore!

Bond, Part III

OK, we've made it up to the early Roger Moore years.  We're talking Bond of the 70s, when gadgets ruled the day and the series didn't take it very seriously.  In particular, we're talking Live and Let Die, The Man with the Golden Gun, The Spy Who Loved Me, and Moonraker.

The common themes of these films, other than Roger Moore and his dry humor, include villains with absurdly large and complex secret layers, increasingly elaborate and unrealistic chase sequences, riffing off other major film trends, and Jaws.

Let's recall the criteria in this series of evaluations again:

• Bond – who the actor is, how good he is, and what he brings to the role
• the Villain- Mr. Big, Scaramanga, etc.  I judge the films on how compelling the villain is.
• the Bond Women – some films have few, some have many, but I’m pretty sure all have at least one. The quality ranges from Denise Richards’s absurd nuclear physicist to, of course, Mrs. Bond herself, not to mention Pussy Galore
• the Good Guys – M, Q, Moneypenny, Felix Leiter in his many incarnations and other sidekicks
• the Henchmen on the other side like Jaws, Oddjob, and Nick-Nack.
• the gadgets – not just judging how neat the gadgets are, but whether they were unwisely allowed to take over the film (as often happened with the later Roger Moore filims)
• whatever else I happen to think of

And now we move to

Live and Let Die

crazy mathematicians on film (update)

I know I owe the dear readers a continuation of the Bond series, but I'm taking a digression to write about math in film.

An update to my previous post on this issue.

Just saw the Paltrow/Hopkins film Proof, which deals with a father and daughter who are mathematicians who each has issues with mental illness.  In the case of the father, he is presented as a leading light of his generation who, tragically, succumbed to his illness as he grew older, becoming first incapable of doing serious work, and ultimately falling apart completely.  Oh, and he died before the film started.

As for the daughter, she's dealing with two issues.  First, there are her hallucinations of her interacting with her father.  To make the movie more exciting, the film also contains flashbacks!  The second issue is the discovery of a proof that is believed to be earth-shattering in its importance.  But there is a question of authorship.  The daughter claims that she was the author, but her sister thinks it's probably her father's work. Jake Gyllenhaal's character is initially skeptical but ultimately decides it's more likely that the daughter, even with her limited background, is the author as opposed to the father, who had drifted out of the field quite a time ago and wasn't familiar with the more modern methods used in the proof.

From  my perspective, this was a bizarre point to get stuck on.  If and when I am the author of ideas, I am the master of them.  A mathematician would not be able to fake authorship of a 40-page proof of seminal importance, which is what this proof is supposed to be in this film.  There is more to the presentation of ideas than the mere words that are on the page.

Anyway, this is certainly an interesting film, even though it's yet another "crazy mathematicians" film.  I have a bit of an issue with how the people talk when they're talking about math.  They simply aren't "talking math" like working mathematicians do.  This is something that would be harder for a non-mathematician to create.  Most of the discussions about math in this film are entirely at a superficial level, and never talk about content. A few words are sprinkled in here and there, but they feel more like oregano on a salad than anything else.  (Example: in a flashback Gwyneth is talking to a math prof about some homework she hasn't done well.  He says something like: surely you're not saying that differential equations are boring!  It's hard to imagine any mathematician saying something like that, for the simple reason that differential equations are among the most boring topics in all math.)

The meta-discussions are ok, and they do a good job in terms of how mathematicians talk about math to non-mathematicians.  But when mathematicians are talking to each other (and Paltrow and Gyllenhaal are supposed to be mathematicians in this film), they don't talk about math at that level.  Concepts should be flying back and forth but we see pretty much nothing.

Trying to think of other films that do a better job at this particular issue.  Fermat's Room does so, I think.  A Beautiful Mind?  No, not really.  Certainly not Good Will Hunting.  It's the kind of thing that Stanislaw Lem does so well in his writing.  Lem actually writes fictional math, which most authors don't dare to try to do.

Having said that, I think Proof does a better job in terms of explaining the social sphere of mathematicians than most films do.  Your typical mathematician is more like the guys in this film than they are like Ian Malcolm of Jurassic Park.

Newly re-named Blog!

Since it's been over five years since I visited Darwin Building, it seemed like we were long past a time where the blog name was appropriate.

Same high-quality content, but with a fresh, new title!

This title is gluten-free and contains no cholesterol.