Lionsgate shrugging

Friday, April 28th, 2006

Variety reports on Lionsgate shrugging:

Lionsgate has picked up worldwide distribution rights to “Atlas Shrugged” from Howard and Karen Baldwin (“Ray”), who will produce with John Aglialoro.

As for stars, book provides an ideal role for an actress in lead character Dagny Taggart, so it’s not a stretch to assume Rand enthusiast Angelina Jolie‘s name has been brought up. Brad Pitt, also a fan, is rumored to be among the names suggested for lead male character John Galt.

Angelina Jolie is a Randroid? Who knew?

Video blogs, ready for prime time

Friday, April 28th, 2006

David Kushner claims that Video blogs are ready for prime time:

Amanda Congdon, 24, is running through the wintry streets of Manhattan in a purple cape and leotard. This may not seem like a milestone in Internet history, but it is: The perky actress is starring in the first commercial to be aired in a brand-new medium – the video blog, or vlog. Her silly superheroics are worth $40,000.

Congdon is the host of Rocketboom, a satirical news show and the most popular vlog on the Net. Despite having no budget, Rocketboom has 250,000 visitors a day, and that number is rising fast. Now Congdon and producer Andrew Baron are taking a cue from the ad-driven revenue of top bloggers: “We want to make a business out of vlogging,” Congdon says.

With the proliferation of devices like the video iPod, the vlog boom is on. As of March there were more than 6,500 vlogs, says directory Mefeedia.com, compared with fewer than 300 a year earlier. Apple’s iTunes store has offered vlogs for download as video podcasts since October, giving sites like Rocketboom a potential audience of 40 million iPod users.

And there’s good news for vloggers who want to monetize their fame: Advertisers are getting more comfortable with online video spots. In the United States, Internet video ads brought in $225 million in 2005 and are expected to break the $1 billion mark in 2008, according to eMarketer, a New York research firm. “Vlogs are very targetable,” says eMarketer analyst David Hallerman. “They’re small, but they have a niche audience.”

They also operate with amazingly low overhead. Baron, a former professor at Parsons school of design in New York, found Congdon through an ad on Craigslist. Now they write, shoot, and edit five new shows a week, each shorter than five minutes, in Baron’s apartment. Increasingly, they rely on a team of freelance correspondents — Rocketboom fans — from around the world. “The show is just whatever we find interesting,” Congdon says.

Why the NFL Is Drafting Benchwarmers

Friday, April 28th, 2006

Sam Walker explains Why the NFL Is Drafting Benchwarmers:

One problem facing NFL teams is that college players aren’t as polished as they used to be. Recent NCAA reforms limiting football scholarships and tightening academic standards have reduced the size of the talent pool. College teams are now restricted to 20 hours of practice a week during the season and 15 days in the spring. Add in the growing number of players leaving early for the NFL, and college coaches say they don’t have time to teach proper football technique, let alone install the kinds of complex schemes the pros use. “We have to acknowledge what we’re dealing with,” says Virginia head coach Al Groh.

Once these players get to the NFL, the learning curve is even steeper than before. Many NFL teams have switched to a 3-4 defensive alignment (three down linemen and four linebackers) that requires players with specific combinations of quickness, bulk and intelligence that most college systems don’t cultivate. On offense, more college teams are using a scheme where a super-mobile quarterback takes snaps from the shotgun formation with as many as five receivers and creates chaos by improvising. Meanwhile, the NFL is more interested in tall stationary passers who can take snaps from center, drop back efficiently, read mismatches and deliver crisp passes with an efficient arm motion.

Subtle as they may seem, these discrepancies can make it tough for some campus stars to impress NFL scouts. One of this year’s best examples is Louisville defensive end Elvis Dumervil. During the 2005 season he set an NCAA record with 10 forced fumbles and led the nation with 20 sacks — four more than his closest competitor. In addition to serving as team captain, he was an All-American who won the Bronko Nagurski Trophy for the nation’s top defensive player and the Ted Hendricks Award as best defensive end.

To NFL scouts, however, Mr. Dumervil’s most important characteristic is this: He’s not quite six feet tall, which means he is three inches shorter than a typical NFL player at the position. As a result, more than a dozen college ends of lesser reputations could be taken ahead of him this weekend. “It’s ridiculous,” he says. “I’ve seen guys with three or four sacks rated higher than me because they’re 6-foot-4.” Throughout his career, he says, “I’ve always believed in performance over potential. The stats don’t lie.”

Life without numbers in a unique Amazon tribe

Friday, April 28th, 2006

Life without numbers in a unique Amazon tribe describes how the “Piraha apparently can’t learn to count and have no distinct words for colors”:

1 + 1 = 2. Mathematics doesn’t get any more basic than this, but even 1 + 1 would stump the brightest minds among the Piraha tribe of the Amazon.

A study appearing today in the journal Science reports that the hunter-gatherers seem to be the only group of humans known to have no concept of numbering and counting.

Not only that, but adult Piraha apparently can’t learn to count or understand the concept of numbers or numerals, even when they asked anthropologists to teach them and have been given basic math lessons for months at a time.

Their lack of enumeration skills is just one of the mental and cultural traits that has led scientists who have visited the 300 members of the tribe to describe the Piraha as “something from Mars.”

Daniel Everett, an American linguistic anthropologist, has been studying and living with Piraha for 27 years.

Besides living a numberless life, he reports in a separate study prepared for publication, the Piraha are the only people known to have no distinct words for colours.

They have no written language, and no collective memory going back more than two generations. They don’t sleep for more than two hours at a time during the night or day.

Even when food is available, they frequently starve themselves and their children, Prof. Everett reports.

They communicate almost as much by singing, whistling and humming as by normal speech.

They frequently change their names, because they believe spirits regularly take them over and intrinsically change who they are.

They do not believe that outsiders understand their language even after they have just carried on conversations with them.

They have no creation myths, tell no fictional stories and have no art. All of their pronouns appear to be borrowed from a neighbouring language.

Their lack of numbering terms and skills is highlighted in a report by Columbia University cognitive psychologist Peter Gordon that appears today in Science.

Explanations range from inbreeding, to a culture of isolation, to a simple lack of words for numbers.

From the Wikipedia:

  • As far as the Pirahã have related to researchers, their culture is concerned solely with matters that fall within direct personal experience, and thus there is no history beyond living memory.
  • The language is claimed to have no relative clauses or grammatical recursion, but this is not clear. Its seven consonants and three vowels are the fewest known of any language.
  • The culture has the simplest known kinship system, not tracking relations any more distant than biological siblings.
  • The people do not count and the language does not have words for precise numbers. Despite efforts to teach them, researchers claim they seem incapable of learning numeracy.
  • It is suspected that the language’s entire pronoun set, which is the simplest of any known language, was recently borrowed from one of the Tupí-Guaraní languages, and that prior to that the language had no pronouns whatsoever. Many linguists, however, find this claim questionable, noting that there is no historical-comparative evidence indicating the non-existence of pronouns in a previous period of the history of Pirahã; also, the overall lack of Tupi-Guarani loanwords in areas of the lexicon more susceptible to borrowing (such as nouns referring to cultural items, for instance) makes this hypothesis even less plausible.
  • There is a disputed theory that the language has no colour terminology. There are no unanalyzable root words for color; the color words recorded are all compounds like bi3i1sai3, “blood-like”.
  • They have very little artwork. The artwork that is present, mostly necklaces and drawn stick-figures, is crude and used primarily to ward off evil spirits.
  • The Pirahã take short naps of 15 minutes to two hours through the day and night, and rarely sleep through the night. They often go hungry, not for want of food, but from a desire to be tigisái (“hard”).
  • The Pirahã have not related to researchers any fiction or mythology.

Reefer madness

Friday, April 28th, 2006

In Reefer madness, the Economist explains that “marijuana is medically useful, whether politicians like it or not”:

If cannabis were unknown, and bioprospectors were suddenly to find it in some remote mountain crevice, its discovery would no doubt be hailed as a medical breakthrough. Scientists would praise its potential for treating everything from pain to cancer, and marvel at its rich pharmacopoeia—many of whose chemicals mimic vital molecules in the human body. In reality, cannabis has been with humanity for thousands of years and is considered by many governments (notably America’s) to be a dangerous drug without utility. Any suggestion that the plant might be medically useful is politically controversial, whatever the science says. It is in this context that, on April 20th, America’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a statement saying that smoked marijuana has no accepted medical use in treatment in the United States.

The Names of Alchemy

Thursday, April 27th, 2006

The Names of Alchemy — from before modern chemistry and Lavoisier’s modern chemical nomenclature — obviously couldn’t reference the various compounds’ elemental components. You can’t name something carbon dioxide until you know what carbon and oxygen are, and that carbon dioxide is composed of one atom of carbon combined with two atoms of oxygen.

Some examples:

the green lion (iron sulphate) — a typical term from alchemy, which was never concerned to make its recipes and references too clear.

spirit of salt (hydrochloric acid) — because it was made from salt.

butter of antimony (antimony trichloride) — because of its waxy quality.

flower of zinc (zinc oxide) — found as a deposit in zinc chimneys. “Flower” means “flour” here; the words are etymologically the same.

spirit of hartshorn (acqueous ammonia) — a perfectly straightforward name; it was distilled from harts’ horns! The same substance derived from another and less attractive process was called volatile salt of urine. There was also salt of hartshorn (smelling salts) narcotic salt of vitriol (boric acid) — made from (green) vitriol, another name for iron sulphate, not to be confused with blue vitriol, or copper sulphate.

fixed air (carbon dioxide); it got that name because it’s denser than regular air, so it settles to the bottom of your container and doesn’t mix with other gases.

regulus of antimony — A regulus (‘little king’) was the heavy substance that sank to the bottom of your crucible. ‘Antimony’ then referred to kohl (antimony trisulphide), regulus of antimony thus referred to the pure metal isolated from kohl — what we now call antimony.

sal ammoniac (ammonium chloride) — because it was made from camel dung from the Temple of Jupiter Ammon in Egypt.

bismuth glance (bismuth sulphide) — a glance was apparently a shiny substance.

acqua regia ‘kingly water’, a mixture of hydrochloric and nitric acids, which could dissolve gold lunar caustic, sticks of silver nitrate used in surgery; ‘luna’ was an old alchemical term for silver.

Happy days are here again — or are they?

Thursday, April 27th, 2006

Happy days are here again — or are they? claims that “Americans are fed up with George Bush’s Republicans, but the Democrats look far from invincible.”

The article cites Crashing the Gate, where Armstrong and Moulitsas complain that:

single-issue groups not only hurt the Democratic Party in its search for a common identity, but they help provide the Republicans with a treasure trove of attack opportunities. While the Democratic Party should be the party of people, it has become, with a lot of help from Republican framing, a party of “immoral” abortionists, “extremist” tree-huggers, “corrupt” labour officials, “greedy” trial lawyers, “predatory” homosexuals and “anti-white” minority activists. After all, these are the loudest and most influential voices in our party…so it’s not a stretch for demagogic Republicans to paint Democrats as a loose collection of selfish people who are fanatical about their specific cause and have no larger concerns — for the economy, the military, or the country.

On the Democrat’s strategy for “Real Security”:

This document would be more convincing as a call to arms if it did not read like a string of phrases chosen for their popularity with focus-groups and then crammed into one sentence after another. For example: “To Ensure Unparalleled Military Strength and Honour our Troops, we will rebuild a state-of-the-art military by making the needed investments in equipment and manpower so that we can project power to protect America wherever and whenever necessary.”

Churchillian it may not be, but most of “Real Security” is sensible. The trouble is that its main hard proposals — kill Osama bin Laden, train more special forces, reduce dependence on Middle Eastern oil and make 2006 “a year of significant transition to full Iraqi sovereignty” — sound awfully similar to Mr Bush’s plans.

Where the details differ, the Democrats’ suggestions are sometimes footling (create “a national tyre fuel-efficiency programme”) or daft (criminal penalties for energy companies that “price-gouge”). One throwaway commitment casually promises to reshape the world: the Democrats would “[e]liminate terrorist breeding-grounds by combating the economic, social and political conditions that allow extremism to thrive.”

Historian Paul Kramer revisits the Philippine-American War

Thursday, April 27th, 2006

Historian Paul Kramer revisits the Philippine-American War and finds some “eerie similarities” with the current war in Iraq:

  • A conventional invasion and speedy victory followed by an unexpected, protracted nonconventional insurgency.
  • Violations of human rights norms by the occupying Americans.
  • Repeated claims that the war was justified by and fought on behalf of higher principles of “civilization” or “freedom.”
  • Declarations that the war was over in hopes of ending domestic controversy about it.
  • The sense that it was America’s right, duty and obligation to engage in nationbuilding and installing “democracy,” of which the United States was considered an unblemished example.

Film of the book: top 50 adaptations revealed

Thursday, April 27th, 2006

The “experts” at The Guardian have revealed their list of the Top 50 Adaptations of books to film:

  1. 1984
  2. Alice in Wonderland
  3. American Psycho
  4. Breakfast at Tiffany’s
  5. Brighton Rock
  6. Catch 22
  7. Charlie & the Chocolate Factory
  8. A Clockwork Orange
  9. Close Range (inc Brokeback Mountain)
  10. The Day of the Triffids
  11. Devil in a Blue Dress
  12. Different Seasons (inc The Shawshank Redemption)
  13. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (aka Bladerunner)
  14. Doctor Zhivago
  15. Empire of the Sun
  16. The English Patient
  17. Fight Club
  18. The French Lieutenant’s Woman
  19. Get Shorty
  20. The Godfather
  21. Goldfinger
  22. Goodfellas
  23. Heart of Darkness (aka Apocalypse Now)
  24. The Hound of the Baskervilles
  25. Jaws
  26. The Jungle Book
  27. A Kestrel for a Knave (aka Kes)
  28. LA Confidential
  29. Les Liaisons Dangereuses
  30. Lolita
  31. Lord of the Flies
  32. The Maltese Falcon
  33. Oliver Twist
  34. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
  35. Orlando
  36. The Outsiders
  37. Pride and Prejudice
  38. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
  39. The Railway Children
  40. Rebecca
  41. The Remains of the Day
  42. Schindler’s Ark (aka Schindler’s List)
  43. Sin City
  44. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
  45. The Talented Mr Ripley
  46. Tess of the D’Urbervilles
  47. To Kill a Mockingbird
  48. Trainspotting
  49. The Vanishing
  50. Watership Down

New way to treat obesity heralded

Thursday, April 27th, 2006

New way to treat obesity heralded:

Boosting oxyntomodulin limits appetite and raises activity levels at the same time — leading to speedy but healthy weight loss rates, a UK study suggests.

Caprica

Wednesday, April 26th, 2006

The Sci-Fi Channel has announced a new spin-off series, Caprica:

From executive producers Ronald D. Moore and David Eick (‘Battlestar Galactica’), writer Remi Aubuchon (’24′) and NBC Universal Television Studio, this new series is set over a half a century before the events that play out in ‘Battlestar Galactica.’ The people of the Twelve Colonies are at peace and living in a society not unlike our own, but where high-technology has changed the lives of virtually everyone for the better. But a startling breakthrough in robotics is about to occur, one that will bring to life the age-old dream of marrying artificial intelligence with a mechanical body to create the first living robot — a Cylon. Following the lives of two families, the Graystones and the Adamas (the family of William Adama, who will one day become the commander of the ‘Battlestar Galactica’) ‘Caprica’ weaves corporate intrigue, techno-action and sexual politics into television’s first science fiction family saga.

If I may geek out for a moment: Frakkin’ awesome!

Smith is Legend

Wednesday, April 26th, 2006

I was a fan of the original Asimov I, Robot short-story collection, and I enjoyed the original Wild, Wild West TV show.

I also enjoyed Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend.

Now Smith is Legend — and that’s probably not a good thing:

Will Smith will star in I Am Legend, the long-gestating Warner Brothers adaptation of Richard Matheson’s classic SF novel, to be directed by Constantine helmer Francis Lawrence, Variety reported. Smith has a pay-or-play deal to make Legend his next project, after he completes Tonight, He Comes at Sony.

Akiva Goldsman rewrote an original script by Mark Protosevich. An early 2007 start date is planned for the movie, which will be shot in New York.

The film moves the story from Los Angeles to a post-apocalyptic New York and will center on the last healthy man following the release of a virus that decimates the population. To survive, he must battle mutants that wreak havoc during the night.

Legend came closest to getting made back in 1997 with Ridley Scott directing Arnold Schwarzenegger. Warner applied the brakes because the budget hovered around $108 million, a figure considered high at the time. Michael Bay and Smith then aligned to have a go at the film in 2002, but the pairing didn’t advance.

Matheson’s book was the basis of previous movie adaptations, including the Vincent Price movie The Last Man on Earth and the Charlton Heston vehicle The Omega Man.

Sizing Up ‘Slim’ Shirts

Wednesday, April 26th, 2006

The Wall Street Journal sizes up ‘slim’ shirts:

But slim fits — called everything from tailored to modern fits by manufacturers — aren’t just for slim guys. Some are cut roomier on top to accommodate men who are muscular — or just bigger — in the chest. We compared 10 slim-fit shirts with 16-inch necks and found that chest measurements varied by as much as five inches. Some tapered from wide shoulders to narrow waists, while others had straighter, boxier cuts, including some with relatively wide waists. Some could be worn only by truly thin guys.

Their Best for Big Chest and Narrow Waist:

Arrow’s fitted shirt, with a 49-inch chest, is the widest on top and among the narrowest at the waist, where it measures 42 inches.

For a 16-inch neck, a 49-inch chest is pretty big — but so is a 42-inch waist.

By ancient Greek ideals, a 16-inch neck would go with a 43-inch chest and a 30-inch waist.

My failed fling with a book packager

Wednesday, April 26th, 2006

John Barlow, a relatively unknown author, describes his failed fling with a book packager:

Book packaging is not a new phenomenon. It involves getting a book concept together, thus saving the publisher the trouble of finding writers, illustrators, editors, etc. Then a finished concept is sold to a publisher as a fait accompli. 17th Street is currently the most successful packager in the world when it comes to teen literature and the targeting of “Generation Y.” My (then) agent was understandably keen, explaining that this particular book packager was behind the hugely successful teen fiction series Sweet Valley High. Even through the telephone line I could sense that his eyes were slowly turning dollar-bill green at the prospect of working with 17th Street who, it seemed, were trying to move into midgrader lit in order to suck up some of the Harry Potter juice that was (and still is) sloshing around the publishing world.

It all goes terribly wrong, as you might imagine.

Is Marvel Ready for its Close-Up?

Wednesday, April 26th, 2006

Is Marvel Ready for its Close-Up? Yes, it would appear:

In 1998, after years of mismanagement by financier Ronald Perelman had left the company bankrupt, toy executive Isaac Perlmutter bought Marvel and put Arad in charge of getting Hollywood to base blockbuster films on its characters. The results speak for themselves: Under Arad, the first seven Marvel-based films — from the low-budget vampire-hunting epic Blade to the first Spider-Man and X-Men movies — each hit No. 1 at the box office. All told, the 12 Marvel-character films made during Arad’s tenure have grossed $3.6 billion worldwide. Profit has quadrupled in the past three years to $103 million in 2005, revenue has surged, and Marvel’s stock, as low as $3 per share at the time of the 1998 acquisition, trades today at about $20.

Now Marvel wants to move from licensing its properties — for a low-risk 2 to 10 percent of profits — to producing its own movies:

Marvel has borrowed more than $500 million to finance its filmmaking and will have to absorb heavy losses basically on its own if any of its self-made films bomb. Under certain conditions, it could even lose control of the rights to its characters. But to Arad, 58, the risk is worth running, and the reason can be summed up by this fact: The two Spider-Man films have grossed nearly $1.6 billion at the box office; Marvel is estimated to have received just $75 million of that. “Nobody knows better than us how to make our characters come alive for audiences,” Arad says. “We just want to get paid for it.”