Film Review: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

I just saw the film; I enjoyed it; it met my expectations. It's probably a bit pompous for me to call it a "film," though.

The quick summary follows. If you consider anything on this list to be a spoiler, your expectations are set way too high.

• More fighting, especially hand-to-hand. Inexplicable-but-aesthetically-pleasing use of swords.
• Explosions; large mechanical objects falling from the sky, with and without wreathes of flame.
• Coming of age story. Suspicions of sexual infidelity.
• Death and/or resurrection of significant characters from the first film. Unexpected return of minor characters at opportune times; use of the phrase "You know this guy?"
• Introduction of new Bad Guys, usually of enormous size.
• Introduction of diminutive, bumbling, and/or cowardly sidekick characters, some of whom are of racial minorities. Humorous use of Spanish and pseudo-African-American English, especially stock phrases.
• Hardware mods, of robotic characters and of the leading lady.
• Set-up for a third film.

Inflation? Eh.

The American president is meeting with the German chancellor, and they disagree about what to do about the global economy. The Germans had some bad experiences a while back, and the Madam Chancellor is concerned about inflation.

But do we really need to worry about inflation? The way I look at it, a little inflation (a few percentage points; let's not go crazy) might not be a bad thing. I'm not anything like an economist, but:

One of our central bank's main economic levers is the interest rate that it charges other banks. Pay attention, because I'm about to mix metaphors: that lever has been pissed away. The federal funds rate stands at less than a quarter of a percent. When the economy slows, the Fed lowers its rates to make borrowing cheaper, thereby increasing the velocity of money in the market, thereby effectively increasing the amount of money available to each of us to spend, thereby encouraging us to spend it, thereby giving us yet more money to spend, and so on, until the economy recovers. But this tool is gone now.

Clearly, the Fed cannot lower rates when they are already at zero or nearly so (unless it intends to pay us to borrow money). That means that, sometime in between the end of the current downturn and the beginning of the next, interest rates will have to go up. A lot.

What would make the Fed want to raise interest rates consistently over several years? Quite so: a relatively high rate of inflation, caused by an overstimulated economy.

Why Hate Crimes Are Different

Attorney General Eric Holder argued today before Congress that laws against hate crimes should be expanded to protect women, gays, and the disabled. Republicans expressed skepticism, questioning whether it is necessary to offer special protection to certain groups. It is already illegal to assault or murder someone; why do we need additional laws on the books making it illegal to assault or murder someone because she's gay, or because she's female, or (as is already covered under the law) because she's Black?

It's not a bad question, as far as it goes -- so long as it does not degrade into the implication that certain classes of people should not be protected against violence at all. But here's why I think hate crimes are different from, and more harmful than, assaults and murders motivated by other factors.

Hate crimes incite further violence. A person who assaults someone else because of the class to which the victim belongs, rather than for some individual or particular reason, implicitly (or in some cases, explicitly) makes a very public claim that people of that class deserve violence. If a man kills his brother for seducing his girlfriend, he commits a no-doubt heinous, but nevertheless solitary, act. He is unlikely to contribute to a culture of violence against the brothers of other men. Such is not the case for hate crimes, as can be observed in the culture of impunity that surrounded racially motivated lynchings in previous generations.

Hate crimes are a form of terrorism. With the threat of further violence, hate crimes are intended by their perpetrators to instill fear in the population whose representatives are targeted. They thus make victims, not only of those injured or killed, but of whole classes of people. In a time when crimes of terror are receiving such great attention around the world, it would be ironic if we failed to recognize the same thing, on a smaller scale, right here at home. Indeed, since many acts of terrorism are themselves religiously or culturally motivated -- that is, hate crimes -- it would be doubly ironic.

Books Everyone Should Read

I was just thinking of some of the books I've read recently, and how nicely they dovetail with some things I've read in the past. Rather than keep my thematic reading list to myself, I decided to post it.

The following books aren't the greatest I've read, in absolute terms, but are those that I think have the most to say about our place in the world, as humans, and where we might go from here. Each has influenced my own thinking.

The order below is not the order of these books' greatness; it is the order in which I think you should consider reading them, if you have not read them already.

1. The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan. I started reading Michael Pollan's books recently after hearing several radio interviews with him. I've written about them before. He's one of those people who can talk to you about something mundane but make you see it in a new and fascinating way. In this book, he makes the case for a healthier, more humane, more sustainable, and ultimately more authentic way of producing and eating our food. But this isn't a book about food so much as about ecology and our place in the natural world.
2. Natural Capitalism by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins. Natural Capitalism bridges the gap between environmental protection and the free market, making the case -- through a series of real-world case studies -- that these two things aren't just compatible; they are inseparable.
3. "Paradises Lost" by Ursula Le Guin. I'm cheating a bit by including this short story on the list, because above I promised to give you a list of books, so I almost didn't include it. (This story is in the book The Birthday of the World: And Other Stories; the other stories are good, in true Le Guin style, but otherwise unremarkable.) The characters in this short drama are passengers on a generation ship, a spaceship that will require multiple human generations to reach its destination. We will return to the issue of space travel later in this list, but this story makes the cut for a different reason, because of the way it imagines the relationship between the passengers and their environment.
   
4. Manifold: Time by Stephen Baxter. This is the second of only two works of fiction in this list -- apologies to my fictophile friends. It makes a couple of interesting though experiments: (1) what does it mean to live in a closed economy (although I disagree that this will be the case in the future; see Natural Capitalism above), and (2) what would it take to overcome that limitation?
   
5. The Case for Mars by Robert Zubrin and Richard Wagner. Manifold: Time makes the case, in a fictional context, for the exploitation of natural resources, and the expansion of humanity, beyond our own planet. The authors of this book do the same but in the context of real-world experience in the aerospace industry.
   
6. The Starship and the Canoe by Kenneth Brower. This pseudo-biography tells the stories of physicist Freeman Dyson and of his son, George Dyson, contrasting their very different visions of human purpose and human happiness. George Dyson, who spent his early adult years living alone in a tree and building canoes, brings us back, full circle, to item (1).
   

What's on your list?

A Happy-but-Concerned Customer

For some time now, I've made it a policy not to eat bluefin tuna. My wife will tell you that whenever we try a new sushi restaurant, I embarrass her by asking the waiter whether the maguro on their menu is bluefin or yellowfin tuna. Fortunately, most places serve the latter.

Two things happened recently that have me stepping it up a notch. First, I heard yet another news piece on the sorry state of the bluefin fisheries. Second, I was offered some bluefin at restaurant where I was attending an event. I decided to write them a letter. The following will be going in the mail tomorrow:

---

To whom it may concern,
I recently attended an event at your restaurant, and I would like to thank you and your staff for a wonderful evening. The food served was delicious, and the staff was courteous, pleasant, and efficient.

I would also like to share my dismay upon seeing that you were offering bluefin tuna on the menu. This species is dangerously overfished, with some fisheries on the verge of collapse. I strongly urge you to consider purchasing albacore, yellowfin, bigeye, or other tuna species as alternatives to bluefin.

For more information on the condition of bluefin fisheries, see: http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSTRE53D00320090414.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch (http://www.montereybayaquarium.org/cr/SeafoodWatch/web/sfw_regional.aspx) and the Marine Stewardship Council (http://www.msc.org/cook-eat-enjoy/fish-to-eat) have more information about sustainable seafood choices.

Sincerely,
Rick Warren

Ice-Hearted American President Savages the Innocent

President Obama showed his true stripes the other day when, during a television interview, he brutally slew a fly who happened to be passing by at the time. PETA responded strongly, saying, "We support compassion even for the most curious, smallest and least sympathetic animals."

No doubt, had the President not responded so strongly, he would have been criticized by the other side for pandering to the country's enemies.

Update: Truly there is no rest for the wicked; it appears that I spoke too soon.

Computers Make Me Smarter

I just learned about a interesting new web site called Wolfram|Alpha from the creators of the software Mathematica, Wolfram Research. In the words of the company's founder, "If something can be computed, it should be easy to compute."

I entered "Los Angeles" and was given a short list of statistics about the city Los Angeles, California: location, population, etc. I next entered "Los Angeles, San Francisco" and was given a comparison of those two cities. I entered my name and -- you guessed it -- learned a little bit about that other guy. Oh well; I guess it doesn't know everything.

LA Pride

I went to LA Pride yesterday. I've written a lot about the politics that you might expect at such an event, so this time I'll stick to the other prominent feature of Pride: people watching!

I've been to San Francisco Pride once before. Overall, I'd say the LA celebration was louder, more crowded, and more over-sexed than that in San Francisco, which felt to me like almost any other street fair you might go to -- with the possible addition of free glow-in-the-dark condoms. At the same time, the standard deviation was considerably narrower LA. But San Francisco is San Francisco, LA is LA, and I had a good time yesterday.

It's commonly accepted that men are more shallow than women when it comes to romantic attraction. I find this to be true regardless of sexual orientation. The result is that, in a majority-straight crowd, the women -- who are trying to be attractive to men -- are more likely to obsess over their body image and to dress in ways that flatter their bodies. At the same time, the men -- who need only be attractive to women -- are more likely to come as they are.

This trend is reversed in a majority-gay crowd: the men are trying to be noticed by other men, so they tend to be very fit and to wear tight and/or revealing clothes. (Our society is more tolerant of partial nudity among men than women too, with the result that many Pride attendees wore very little indeed.) The women at yesterday's event were the ones who had it easy, and were much more likely, than at a straight event, to be frumpy and only semi-groomed.

The corollary is that, as a straight male, I am used to enjoying the benefits when my fellow citizens work hard to look their best. This trend, too, was reversed yesterday.

Thinking Differently About Messaging

Cross-posting from my RTI blog:

Message-centric design and data-centric design are similar, but they also differ in important ways. Let’s start with some terminology. There’s a reason why DDS says “sample” where JMS says “message”: those words are intended to suggest a different mental model to you.

When you hear the word “sample,” imagine some data value (perhaps the temperature in a certain place) being published periodically. Those values describe a single logical data object — an “instance” in DDS terms — whose state changes over time. Or think of subsequent frames of a movie: the movie is a single logical object, and you view slices of it one after another. In other words, in a data-centric design, as the system’s state changes, it uses the middleware to publish that state directly.

Read the whole post here.