"Your New Social Credit Score": fictitious now (except in China), but could it happen in the UK, or even the US?

Tom Scott has published a YouTube dystopian animated short, “Your New Social Credit Score”.

The film refers to a fictitious social credit system for England and Wales, after Brexit and even Scotland’s and Northern Ireland’s separation.

It’s an obvious extension of China’s social credit score system now going into effect now.

I like (I’m kidding) the “certificate of disassociation” where you tell the government you have no connection with a person who is being blackballed.  The number of “disassociations” you get would lower your score.

I supposed voluntarism could be highly recommended to raise your score.

   

Maybe this is what we mean by personal “rightsizing”.  It sounds so very Marxist.

"The Choice": animated film show how a young adult male executive can stay thin, or get fat

“Project Better Self” offers this animated short microfilm, “The Choice”.

A young junior exec who works in “good clothes” makes his little choices about snacks, naps, walking, driving.  His workplace doesn’t have Varidesk yet.

I’m reminded of those Macy’s store ads of men with “slim” and “very slim” waists.  This guy remains slim with only one future.

I have to say, in gay bars, for men,  tall and thin is definitely in, whatever the openness to fluidity. A cat would jump onto the shoulders of the tallest guy on the dance floor to watch the action of everybody. That would make another idea for a short film.

  

Maybe the hapless guy in this short film has never read Stephen King’s “Thinner”.

"Tetration": when algebra gives more clues as to what generates consciousness

“Tetration” sounds like a horror film for DC Shorts.  Actually, it’s another entertaining math tutorial from “The Taylor Series”.

This little film explains why addition and multiplication work so well as operations in group theory when applied to real numbers (and complex).  It gets iffier when you get to quaternions, which generate the behavior of elementary sub-particles of baryonic matter and of the forces in nature.

It gets iffier, too, as operations get more complex (exponentiation and then tetration)   The commutative (and maybe associate) laws on your middle school algebra tests stop working. That’s troubling for consciousness. (Tetration is not the same thing as titration, like in chemistry quantitative analysis.)  

But his building new operations is important, because it could contribute even more to physics, like string theory.  You go from math to physics, to chemistry, to life (biology) to generating and recycling individual consciousness.   We don’t know once a new occurrence of a consciousness is instantiated and attached to a body (yours, or the bobcat who visits your house for food) whether it exists in some form once you’re gone.  If you know you’re dead, you’re immortal.  Math doesn’t tell us yet.   Nor does math explain group v. individual consciousness.  But it may tell us how easily life would arise on alien worlds. 

How to unwrap the Earth into a gigantic O'Neill Cylinder

“3Blue1Brown”explains “But Why Is a Sphere’s Surface Area 4 Times Its Projection?”

This 17 minute video offers two visual proofs of Area – 4 times pi times radius squared. The visual methods correspond to differentiation and integration in calculus. 

The unrapping of the sphere as a cylinder offers what – well, an O’Neill cylinder.

The projection of a shadow onto a flat plane also offers some possible sci-fi concepts if you want to make a movie about life in space.

This little video reminds me of my substitute teaching days.

"Why Social Justice Is Cancer": that is, the ideology of it, not the resultant

Lauren Chen explains “Why Social Justice Is Cancer: Identity Politics, Equality, and Marxism”

She doesn’t object to social justice as a natural result in a well-functioning society, but on it as an ideology.

She is right on in noting that the “social justice warrior” movement is about focusing on one’s identity as a part of a group and not as the self.  Along with this is the ideology of “intersectionality”.

Everything in this ideology comes from the karma of belonging to an oppressor or oppressed groups.

In intersectional theory, people pay for the sins of others in their groups.

She recommends people educate themselves about what’s in the Communist Manifesto.

People are calling “social justice combat” a new “religion”.

  

She also mentions the controversy over people (perhaps particularly on the “Right”) being taken off Patreon recently.

"A Tour Through Our Solar System": back to grade school, but some great art work

“A Tour Through Our Solar System” just gives us the basics.

Running 14 minutes, it comes from “Blogunknownmysteries” but has the narrative style of a 50s little Golden Book, maybe.

But there are pretty good illustrations of what places like Europa and Titan look like.

   

The Kuiper Belt probably extends about a light-year out, a quarter of the way to Alpha Centauri.

"Foodfellas": short film from USC Film School, where the mob takes over the fast food business

“Foodfellas”, a satire short film by Reuben Guberek , from Film School Shorts (USC), 13 min, is inspired by “Goodfellas”.

  

  

A young man makes a deal with a clown figure in the mob to dominate the fast food business. Pretty soon he has to endure the consumer lawsuits for Type 2 diabetes. And then he hunts down his boss. 

  

The shootout at the end is both terminal and funny. 

   

I wouldn't want to own a franchise bad enough that it would be a mob target.  And chicken nuggets don't look like bitcoins to me. 

    

The guy in “Pretty Privilege” (Oct 23) is credited here. 

Picture: My trip, Sept. 2018, near San Francisco Civic Center. 

"Infection Control Film" for UK hospitals: with pacman doctors there are no risks

BrandAnonymous has an “Infection Control Film” for Cambridge Hospital of the UK’s National Health Service.

It’s animated with pac-man like characters and a rhyming poem (imagine having been hired to write this script). But it manages to mention norovirus (“vomiting”).

The handwashing requires scrubbing and polishing nails (they would have been trimmed, as for piano). They involved scrubbing wrists.

I have a reason for looking at this in my own fiction writing, and I’ll come back to it.

Should we wonder about restaurants and fast food next?  

   

This is one of the shortest “short film” ever, at 1:13.

CNN Films: "Remembering George H. W. Bush"

Saturday night, December 1, CNN Films is airing “Remembering George H. W. Bush” (link ).
   

This may be the quickest feature film every assembled.  Bush died late Friday November 30 after many bouts with pneumonia.  His wife Barbara had passed away in April 2018.

Of course, what I remember best is how the world changed with the 1990-1991 Persian Gulf War. It would help set up the political climate in which Bill Clinton could propose lifting the ban on gays in the military.  I even remember Gen. Schwarzkopf’s radio briefings as I drove to work early in 1991.

And Bush was president when the Berlin Wall fell, and when the Soviet Union collapsed suddenly at the end of 1991.

Here is a story on GHWBush’s last words. 

His mother said, when you win, don't gloat.  Talk about the team, not yourself. 

The funeral will be at the Washington Cathedral on Wednesday December 5, 2018.

  

I remember when Barbara spoke about family values in the GOP convention in 1992.  She said “You don’t have to be married, but if you have children, they have to be the number one priority in your life.” 

His "Thousand Points of Light" is said to be the largest volunteer organization in the world.  I can't say I volunteer for people's everyday needs.  I hasn't been very personal recently.