Comedy Central’s Key and Peele (whose program is in its final season, to the regret of many) show what life might be like if there were a little more justice in the world and the best teachers were valued as much as the best athletes. It also says a little more than one might expect. (Note the fake commercial at the end.)
by 
A possible to reason to reconsider moving to Florida:
This particular alligator does need to practice the dismount.
by Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike are writers who met, fell in love, and got married in New York and now live in Missouri, where he teaches creative writing and helps his twin sister run a bar. They’re just about to celebrate their fifth wedding anniversary when she goes missing, and a shattered glass coffee table suggests something bad happened.
Her wealthy parents, writers themselves, fly in to launch an effort to find her, and when the media discover that the missing woman was the basis for their hugely popular series of “Amazing Amy” children’s books, the disappearance becomes major national news.
Adapted by Gillian Flynn from her 2012 bestselling novel and told partly in flashbacks, this a quite good mystery-suspense film full of twists and surprises. There’s one scene of fairly graphic violence, and some elements of the plot are disturbing, but the story is also satirical, nicely skewering the modern news media’s tendency toward herd coverage of Big Stories, and some might view the whole thing as a very, very dark comedy.
The cast is excellent, including Tyler Perry as a celebrity lawyer, Neil Patrick Harris as Pike’s now-ultra-rich high school sweetheart, Carrie Coon as Affleck’s supportive twin sister, Kim Dickens as a local police detective, Missi Pyle as a parody of Nancy Grace, and Sela Ward (who incidentally looks about 30 but is nearly 60) as the host of a talk show.
Recommended, but probably not a good date movie.
by For decades a small number of astronomers have been searching for evidence of intelligent signals from space, so far with no confirmed discoveries. That doesn’t mean there’s nothing to discover, however, because they have barely begun to look at all the possibilities. Funding has been running only about a half-million dollars a year total, world-wide, entirely from private gifts. (NASA did provide a little support more than 20 years ago, but nitwits in Congress ridiculed the idea and insisted it stop.) To put the amount in perspective, half a million dollars is roughly 1/500 of the budget of the film Avengers: Age of Ultron.
However, that’s about to change. At a meeting of the Royal Society in London on July 20 — the 46th anniversary of the first Moon landing — Russian billionaire Yuri Milner announced that he is giving $100 million to expand SETI over the next 10 years. According to an article from the website of the journal Nature:
… The initiative, called Breakthrough Listen, will see radio telescopes at Green Bank in West Virginia, the Parkes Observatory in Australia, and the Lick Observatory’s optical telescope in San Jose, California, scanning around one million stars in the Milky Way and a hundred nearby galaxies. Milner is also releasing an open letter backing the idea of an intensified search; it has been co-signed by numerous scientists, including physicist Stephen Hawking. “In an infinite Universe, there must be other life,” Hawking told luminaries at today’s launch event. “There is no bigger question. It is time to commit to finding the answer,” he said. …
Milner, who is bankrolling the project, made his fortune through investments in Facebook and other Internet businesses, and in 2012 established lucrative ‘Breakthrough’ prizes to reward excellence in the life sciences, fundamental physics, and mathematics. A particle-physics graduate, he jokes that his interest in SETI began in 1961, the year of his birth; he was named after Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, instilling a life-long fascination with space and the possibility of alien life.
Paul Davies, a cosmologist and long-term supporter of SETI at Arizona State University in Tempe, who is not involved with Breakthrough Listen, says that he is “thrilled” by Milner’s initiative: “It’s fantastic that there still exist individuals who are not just rich but who have a cosmic vision that the whole of humanity can get behind,” he says.
The small SETI community will be inundated with a torrent of data — potentially as much in a day as earlier SETI projects collected in a year, Milner estimates. The data will be publicly available, to allow enthusiasts to join the search; Breakthrough Listen will also partner with the established SETI@home project that connects people’s home computers and uses them to crunch data. “The results belong to everyone equally,” says Milner, adding that transparency is particularly important in a project searching for aliens because “there are so many conspiracy theorists”. He also plans a Breakthrough Message competition — offering a $1-million pool of prize money — to construct a digital message to transmit to potential extraterrestrials (though there is no commitment to sending out the message).
Drake argues that Breakthrough Listen will have a positive impact on the wider astronomy community. The investment has saved the relatively old Green Bank and Parkes telescopes from the threat of closure, he says, as governments divert funds to larger-scale, higher-resolution projects such as the Square Kilometre Array (SKA). And the sky survey might discover more pulsars, and help to home in on the origin of mysterious “fast radio bursts” — pulses lasting only a few milliseconds. …
by This rather strange television series, a mixture of Western, comedy, and science fiction, was steampunk before steampunk was cool. It ran only 28 episodes over a single season. Bruce Campbell plays the title character, a graduate of Harvard Law School who’s happier as a bounty hunter. When his father, federal marshall Brisco County Sr, is murdered by the Bly gang, Brisco Junior accepts a commission from a group of tycoons to hunt down the killers, said gang having cost the tycoons a lot of money. The tycoons employ another lawyer, a citified fellow named Socrates Poole (Christian Clemenson), as their liaison with Brisco.
Julius Carry plays a towering former calvary soldier of black and Indian ancestry who calls himself Lord Bowler and owns a classy home in San Francisco where his English butler addresses him as “my lord.” He’s initially a rival bounty hunter but over the course of the series gradually becomes Brisco’s friend and colleague.
Early on, Brisco meets a hot blonde femme fatale named Dixie Cousins (Kelly Rutherford) who starts off as an ally of the bad guys but as she turns up from time to time in later episodes evolves into Brisco’s main love interest. John Astin is another recurring character, an inventor ahead of his time. There’s also an unhinged villain named Pete who keeps getting killed and showing up a few weeks later all better, and a few episodes feature the sheriff of a town called Hard Rock who acts like Elvis Presley.
Several episodes involve a set of mysterious orbs with strange powers. They have something to do with time travel and perhaps aliens. The writers admitted they never did figure out what the things really were.
Most of the plots don’t exactly hold up to logical analysis, much of the acting is questionable, and the jokes are often deliberately bad. On the other hand, everybody is obviously having a good time and the cast is pretty consistently likable, so provided you just agree to put up with the dumb stuff, it’s a fair amount of fun. The show aimed to be “just under over-the-top,” and that’s pretty much what it was.
Also, Kelly Rutherford: Woo, woo!
Here’s a collection of promos for various episodes:
by If you haven’t already seen this it’s reasonably amusing. Nick Offerman (best known for playing real man Ron Swanson on the sitcom Parks & Recreation) here portrays an opponent of efforts to get kids to eat better, contending that pizza, sloppy joes, and the like aren’t just as good as fresh produce, they are fresh produce.
The American Heart Association is behind this bit of satire.
by (Update: Unfortunately, the hitchhiking robot has been irreparably damaged by vandals in Philadelphia. More in this later post.)
In an interesting social experiment (described in an Associated Press report by Collin Binkley), a couple of Canadian researchers have launched a hitchhiking robot on a trip across the U.S. from Marblehead, Massachusetts, to San Francisco. (There’s also an article in The Week.)
The project was created by Frauke Zeller of Ryerson University in Toronto and David Harris Smith of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Both are professors of communication. The robot, which has a deliberately cheap “yard sale” look and is about the size of a child, is equipped with GPS and can carry on a limited conversation. It randomly takes pictures every 20 minutes or so, but they aren’t posted to social media unless the people currently hosting the robot give their permission.
The robot has already traveled across Europe and Canada, the latter trip taking 26 days. People transporting it have taken it to weddings and comic book convention, and many have posted selfies.
It began its latest journey being left by the side of the road in a hitchhiking pose in Marblehead, and it was soon picked up by German tourists in an SUV. You can follow its adventures on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook and on this website.
Ready for the USA from hitchBOT on Vimeo.
Link: https://vimeo.com/hitchbot/usa
by This is a fun space opera with a nice sense of humor and flashes of humanity, but it has so many characters and such a convoluted plot that it would have helped if the film had come with orientation briefings on who’s who and what’s going on.
The main protagonist is Peter Quill (Chris Pratt), who as a child back in 1988 was abducted from Earth by a gang of space pirates known as Ravagers. He grew up to became a member of one of their outlaw bands, and he’s ready to strike out on his own whether his redneck pirate captain (and former kidnapper) Yondu (Michael Rooker) likes it or not.
Quill has his own spaceship called the Milano (after his childhood crush, actress Alyssa Milano). He still listens to his Walkman and his one cassette, a mix tape of 70s hits his mother loved (“Hooked on a Feeling,” “Come and Get Your Love,” etc.). He calls himself Star Lord but has trouble getting anybody else to do that.
The background involves two stellar federations, the relatively benign Nova Empire, headed by a prime minister called Nova Prime (Glenn Close), and the militaristic Kree Empire, which had been at war with the Nova Empire for centuries but has just signed a peace treaty. The peace really pisses off a militant Kree named Ronan (Lee Pace) who hates anything Nova. Ronan has a tough henchman named Korath (Djimon Hounsou) and is also somehow allied with a vastly more powerful bad-guy über-alien named Thanos (glimpsed at the end of the first Avengers movie), who has only a minor part in this film but has lent Ronan two of his very dangerous adopted daughters. One of them, Gamora (Zoe Saldana), is an attractive green and the other, Nebula (Karen Gillan), is more a metallic two-tone. Both have enhanced speed and strength and are deadly in combat. In addition, Nebula has the ability to walk and pose like a runway model. She’s the bad one.
Early on, Quill (that’s the Earth guy turned rogue space thief, remember) finds himself in possession of the film’s MacGuffin, a mysterious and powerful orb. (Mysterious and powerful orbs served a similar plot function in the nineties sf-comedy-western series The Adventures of Brisco County Junior, but Bruce Campbell’s orbs were bigger.) A lot of people want this orb, including a broker called The Broker and a collector called The Collector, possibly because the writers themselves were having trouble keeping all the alien names and job descriptions straight. The Collector’s collection includes a Russian cosmonaut dog and another item not revealed until after the end credits, but which you’d find mildly amusing if you’re not Lea Thompson. Anyway, Yondu the space pirate captain wants the orb for its market value and Ronan the militant Kree wants it for more ambitious reasons, so he sends Gamora (that’s the green Zoe Saldana, remember?) to fetch it from Quill.
And yes, this will all be on the exam.
Amazingly, there are some major characters who aren’t after the orb, notably a raccoon and a tree. They’re after Quill, but only to collect a 40,000-monetary-unit bounty separately offered by his pissed-off former abductor-turned-employer Yondu for Quill’s capture and return in good condition so Yondu can get to be the one who puts him in bad condition.
No, I didn’t make up the tree and the raccoon to see if you’re paying attention. The raccoon-looking thing, called Rocket, is a genetically and otherwise modified creature with a high order of intelligence, technical skill, and a tendency to be a smart-ass. He’s voiced by Bradley Cooper (who also plays the title role in American Sniper), though he was portrayed on set by director James Gunn’s brother Sean in a green (or sometimes blue) body suit, so the other actors would have somebody to interact with. He also did Rocket’s lines during shooting and apparently ad-libbed a lot of things later recorded by Cooper. Sean Gunn happens to be a tall, thin guy, so he had to squat for almost all his scenes, including walking that way. It’s worth watching the “making-of” extra on the DVD or Blu-ray just to see how weird this looks.
The tree can walk and talk, but he only knows how to say “I am Groot.” Despite that limitation, he is able by means of expressive inflection to convey a lot more meaning than you might expect. Groot’s voice is supplied by Vin Diesel, and not just in English but also in Russian, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, and perhaps a few other languages as well for the international versions of the film. Diesel says that counting all the variant intonations, languages, and multiple takes, he said “I am Groot” over a thousand times.
The other major character is Drax (former pro wrestler Dave Bautista), a hulking pile of muscle who wants to kill Ronan for murdering his wife and child. As with the other characters, he turns out to be much more interesting than he first appears.
The film is of course crammed full of computer-generated special effects and fight scenes, but for once they don’t entirely replace characterization or ideas, which might help explain why the film was such an unexpected hit.
Director James Gunn, who co-wrote the screenplay with Nicole Perlman, started out making movies for low-budget comedy-horror producer Troma, and Troma-cofounder Lloyd Kaufman has a cameo as a prisoner in a violent space jail. (He’s the one who looks a little like Mel Brooks.) Stan Lee (who invented the Groot character back in the 1960s as well as various pieces of the backstory) shows up briefly as well, as in every Marvel film, this time playing a sort of aging Casanova.
(Updated 2018 January 29 to fix a few typos.)
by I don’t drink coffee and I’ve never liked the taste of it, but after watching this from Dr Aaron Carroll I’m thinking I should try to learn to like it. That’s especially true since I have problems with daytime sleepiness and a medication recommended to me for that (which it turns out I can’t take anyway) has some potentially serious side effects and (at least according to Consumer Reports) has never conclusively been shown to be work any better than coffee for that.
To summarize, it turns out that there has been quite a lot of research on coffee and health. Unfortunately, it has generally not taken the form of randomized controlled trials, which would be ideal but for obvious reasons not easy to carry out. Instead the studies have involved looking at how much coffee people consume and how healthy they are over time. Surveys of these studies, combining the results for very large numbers of people, suggest that moderate coffee consumption is associated with overall better health and lower rates of disease, including cancer, heart disease, and stroke. See the video above for details.
I feel I would be remiss if I didn’t also include the following short documentary illustrating a potential benefit of coffee from a non-medical standpoint, though I have some doubts about its scientific accuracy:
(This remains my favorite episode of Film Riot, a web series about filmmaking and special effects that also has an appealing sense of humor.)
by A few decades in the future the Earth is suffering serious environmental problems and an associated economic depression. Diseases wipe out entire food crops while dust storms sweep across the landscape.
Matthew McConaughey is a former astronaut now trying to do his part as a farmer. He’s also raising a teenage son and a 10-year-old daughter with the help of his late wife’s father (John Lithgow). The public has turned against such frivolous luxuries as space exploration, and the daughter gets in trouble at school for disputing the new textbooks that claim the Moon landings were Cold War propaganda and never really happened.
But it turns out NASA is secretly still a going concern where a team of scientist headed by one of McConaughey’s college professors (Michael Caine) is trying to come up with a way to save humanity, or at least as many people as possible, and to that end they want McConaughey and a small team of colleagues, including Caine’s daughter (Anne Hathaway) to take a spacecraft into a wormhole that’s been discovered in orbit around Saturn. The other end opens into a distant galaxy near some promising planets for colonization. But the cold equations of relativity may leave an uncrossable gulf between the astronauts and the people back home.
I don’t recall any other movie that so successfully combines high emotion with hard sf. One of the film’s executive producers is CalTech theoretical physicist Kip Thorne, famous among other things for a series of bets with Stephen Hawking about future discoveries in general relativity. The visuals for a scene set near a black holes event horizon were computer generated based on serious numerical analysis of some heavy-duty gravitational physics and the results turned out to give some new physical insights that led to at least one published scientific paper on black holes as well as another on computer graphics.
There are some implausibilities in the plot and some might find it over-dramatic, but on the whole this is one of the better examples of honest-to-goodness science fiction on film I’ve ever seen, and I recommend it.
As a bonus, here’s Neil deGrasse Tyson on the science of Interstellar. Be aware that there is one mild but non-trivial spoiler in the latter half. (For what it’s worth, had I seen this before viewing the film I don’t think that would have made a significant dent in my enjoyment.) At several points Tyson makes a some interesting general remarks about artistic license versus strict scientific accuracy and about science fiction as social commentary.
by