This blog will present news items about the motion picture business, with emphasis on lower budget, independent film in most cases. Some reviews or commentaries on specific films, with emphasis on significance (artistic or political) or comparison, are presented. Note: No one pays me for these reviews; they are not "endorsements"! Starting in May 2016, many of the reviews for new feature films have been done on a hosted Wordpress site, and this blog now mostly does shorts and older films.
Since the 1990s I have been very involved with fighting the military "don't ask don't tell" policy for gays in the military, and with First Amendment issues. Best contact is 571-334-6107 (legitimate calls; messages can be left; if not picked up retry; I don't answer when driving) Three other url's: doaskdotell.com, billboushka.com johnwboushka.com Links to my URLs are provided for legitimate content and user navigation purposes only.
My legal name is "John William Boushka" or "John W. Boushka"; my parents gave me the nickname of "Bill" based on my middle name, and this is how I am generally greeted. This is also the name for my book authorship. On the Web, you can find me as both "Bill Boushka" and "John W. Boushka"; this has been the case since the late 1990s. Sometimes I can be located as "John Boushka" without the "W." That's the identity my parents dealt me in 1943!
On Monday, May 20, 2019, PBS Independent Lens aired Suzannah
Herbert’s film “Wrestle” (86 min), about a high school wrestling team in Alabama,
a tournament, a tough-love coach Chris Scribner, and the challenges that many
of the young men face at home and in the community, link.
The film has shown in several festivals, like Denver, Hot
Springs, and Oxford (MS).
There is a moment of triumph at the end for one of the team
members. The film emphasizes that the sport is both an individual and a team sport. You have to make weight, have discipline. And it can be intimate. It's an unusual sport.
The film takes place in Huntsville, in the northern part of
the state near the YN border, where the NASA space center is.I visited that in 2014, and earlier in 1989,
where there was an underwater training exhibition then.
“A Message from the Future with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez”,
an animated short film by The Interceptm 8 minutes, directed by Kim Boekbinder
and Jim Baat.
AOC narrates an optimistic Green New Deal in which humankind
and start to reverse climate change in 12 years – or else.
She points out that Exxon started doing studies on carbon
dioxide emissions in 1977, just four years after the Arab Oil Embargo of 1073 when
the mantra was to produce more oil and gas. By the late 1980s, people were
starting to notice the possibility that climate would be a big issue.
She also explains her “socialist” agenda.She points out that her native Puerto Rico
lost more people to Hurricane Maria than NYC did in 9/11.
There are some reports that California may ban internal
combustion engines in the future and allow only all electric.How can you have adequate range?
Ryan Davie offers a new gay short film, “Disc of Love”, from
Australia.
A young man is sad that his lover his leaving for bigger
things (I know the feeling) and he gives him a compact disc (remember those?)
to play in the car.
The CD infects the car’s system and teleports the young man
to the car, where he becomes a monster.
The problem is, all of this is inside a dream.Row your boat.
Represent Us with Jennifer Lawrence and Josh Silver give us
a short film “Unbreaking America: Solving the Corruption Crisis” directed by M.
J. Delaney (13 minutes).
The two hosts explain why normal political participation
gives average votes very little say in policies that get passed.There are several problems:Gerrymandering, a partisan duopoly, and elimination
systems that require politicians to raise astronomical amounts of money from
special interests to win, which feeds the paid lobbying (K Street in
Washington) industry.
There are three “lines” in the film.One is a flat line of zero slope showing that
the level of popular support for any policy (say Medicare for all) has almost
no effect on whether it passes.The
other is that national changes occur when enough states make their
changes.Lawrence cited both interracial
marriage and then same-sex marriage as examples of this process.The third line is user participation.
The ending of the film does suggest starting a movement,
knocking on doors, and the like. But the underlying ideas are important.The group “Better Angels” comes to mind. It
is hosting a closed viewing party premiere May 17.
Local Washington DC stations report that a 10 year old with
cancer (now in remission) Mason Bronner, made a short film “The Fallen” as a
superhero movie as part of a make-a-wish project. NBCWashington story here.
The film was premiered at the AMC Uptown theater tonight in
Washington DC. (with its giant curved screen).
“Artificial Gravity”, by Cool Worlds (same publisher as yesterday)
examines the practicality of life under rotational artificial gravity as a “fictional
force”.
General relativity maintains that gravitational force and
force from acceleration are indistinguishable. That creates the concept of permanent acceleration (until you run out of fuel) as in "High Life".
But the artificial gravity of a rotation structure (an O’Neill
Cylinder or the more modest and narrow Stanford Torus, both associated with “The
High Frontier” by Gerald O’Neill) is complicated by the vertical or radial
coriolos effect, which would certainly create curve balls in baseball.
He also discusses canal sickness.
Rotational instability is a problem for the O’Neill cylinder
but not the torus.
The concepts shown in this film will be very important for my screenplay, "Epiphany", based on my own "Do Ask, Do Tell" books.
“Mickey and the Bear”, directed by Annabelle Annatasio (83
min), was the other important film at the Maryland Film Festival that I missed
due to schedules.
The protagonist Mickey Peck (Camila Morrone), 18, struggles
with unelected family responsibility in her last year of high school, as she
has to take care of her widower Iraq War veteran father, addicted and with
PTSD, played by James Badge Dale.
She has her own goals of going to college on the West Coast,
which her filial responsibility deprives her of. And her boyfriend (Ben
Rosenfield) wants to get her pregnant.
The film was shot in Anaconda, MN, which I visited in 1981 (it snowed in May).
While at the Maryland Film Festival in Baltimore yesterday,
I noticed a writeup for a 75 minute black comedy called “Frances Ferguson”,
directed by Austin-based Bob Byington.
The film concerns a female substitute teacher Frances (Kaley
Wheless) who becomes infatuated with a physically mature student (Jake French),
tries to set up a motel meeting, gets arrested, convicted, sent to prison and
labeled a sex offender.
I missed the film (schedule conflict) and cannot a website
or indication of availability, so I can only offer a preview. But because I had
written a screenplay short around a similar concept that led to an incident in
my own substitute teaching career in 2005, I want to see it.For more details, please see the “Bill
Boushka” blog, story on July 27, 2007.
The film, however, seems to have many differences from my concept.Frances doesn’t even know what subject
(biology) she is supposed to cover when she shows up.Her behavior shows she is very apathetic to
normal ideas of morality. The prison visit by her mother, shown in the trailer,
seems to show that.
Ironically, however, she picks out her target after “teaching”
natural selection in biology, a politically divisive idea in today’s polarized
political climate. She is also bored in
her marriage (husband by Keith Poulson). She thinks normal marriage is a prison
by itself.
I hope this little film shows up on Amazon soon.
I’ll link to reviews by John DeFore (Hollywood Reporter) andFilm Threat(Chris Gore) at SXSW in Austin in March 2019.
There was no “preview” of a post-Avengers movie in the
end-credits (reviewed on my Wordpress blog), but “Everything Always” predicts a permanent “Galactus” for "Phase 4".
There will be a differentiation between “earth” threats and “cosmic”
threats.
EA talks about “branch reality” (even post infinity stones)
as the only way to save ordinary humanity.
Marvel and Walt Disney Studios have too much going for them
to let go of this.There are always more
plots.But can “everyone” be saved, or
only the most privileged?
But at least this movie didn't end with a king-and-pawn ending and a stalemate. Maybe the next movie will have a scene in one of Greenwich Village's little chess studios (or the Marshall Chess Club, which I visited in 2014).
Anton Pretrov examines “To the Edge of the Universe in Under
50 Years”?
The idea is a fuel supply that maintains constant
acceleration of at least 1 g. The acceleration provides artificial gravity,
which is better than a rotating cylinder. The longer it travels the more the
time dilation.
So you can get to Mars in 30 days, to the middle of our
galaxy in about 7 years your time , and the edge of the universe in 50 years
(not allowing for space expansion). What you see ahead of you is blue-shifted
and behind is red shifted.
This idea could allow selected astronauts to go very long
distances to find another Earth when ours is uninhabitable – but who gets to
go?
Ciara Lacy’s film “Out of State” was aired in abbreviated
from on PBS Independent Lens on Monday, May 6.
The documentary traces the lives of some convicts from
Hawaii shipped to privately owned and run prisons in Arizona.
Several of the men develop an interest in native dances and
culture and envision new careers when they get out of jail, only to find that
the programs they were counting on were cancelled when they return.
The men are heavily tattooed and aggressive, and from a
culture that I personally have practically no communication with.
“10 Ways Alien Life Could Be Radically Different from Earth's”, by John Michael Godier, a science fiction author.
The first example he gives is life with chemical makeup similar to DNA and RNA but different in chirality. Our own chirality on Earth (as visible) may be the result of chance. Open up your college organic chemistry text to explain the concept.
The talks about how photosynthesis would work on M-star planets, and says it might be based on retinol and be purple in color.
He also notes that on planets with very long seasons or ice ages, organisms could not simply hibernate but actually die and reanimate, maybe with new consciousness. There is a jellyfish on Earth that can revert back to “childhood” (like Benjamin Button) and regenerate without reproduction.
He also talks about azotosome pseudo-cell membranes in worlds without oxygen.
He talks about “Snapchat”-like life on a neutron star (like the 80s novel “Mission of Gravity”).
He even says that plasma inside a star might be able to form reproductive structures, as plasma membranes have been observed.
He says that phosphorus is scarce in the universe (maybe explaining the Fermi paradox) and that arsenic is more common. Mono Lake in California may have arsenic-based bacteria.
He does explore the idea of silicon life (that was a high school science fair project for me in 1960).
Life could exist with RNA only.
He does focus particularly on Titan, which could have paper-like floating colony organisms analogous to our slime molds.
I can remember being tantalized by an old black-and-white
movie series on Saturday nights in 1963, and one particular title was ‘The
Disembodied” (1957), from Allied Artists, by Walter Grauman.
One interesting tidbit is that the series apparently got its
name from the Pittsburgh Chiller Theater were supposedly it was shown.
A photographer (Paul Burke) gets involved in a jungle
accident where a man is mauled by a tiger, and the party winds up in a “resort”
where “voodoo queen” Tonda (Allison Hayes) is trying to entice men into losing
their sense of identity and murder her scroogy husband (John Wen graf).
The 66-minute film is considered “bad”, but I seem to
remember scenes were men would approach her and become aroused or tantalized by
the prospect of their own destruction and physical
desecration, as if they
could be replaced by something else and remember who they had been. There was a
line “she is voodoo queen” repeated with each man.
The cast of the people in the house was said to be “diverse”.
“The Library of Alexandria: The Crime that Set Human
Civilization Back 1000 Years”, a video by “Bright Insight”.
In the ancient era, when Alexandria, at the mouth of the
Nile (northof Cairo) was the leading
port city for ships to stop for trade, magistrates would go on board and
confiscate scrolls, and copy them by hand, and put them in the library, and
return copies to the ships.
About 700,000 scrolls were stored there at one time, until
Julius Caesar started a fire that accidentally burned it down, and destroyed
two thirds of the contents, around 47 BC.There would be several more fires in the following centuries. It was conquest and imperialism (a common crime in the eyes of the Left) that led to this catastrophe.
The videographer argues that we might have created technological civilization hundreds of years sooner and be living in space now. Or we could have destroyed ourselves with nuclear war or climate change sooner.
Content that did survive included the theory of Euclidean geometry.
The tragedies of the library would seem comparable to an
electromagnetic pulse attack on modern civilization by an enemy, or even a
Carrington-sized solar storm hitting the Earth today.We are not prepared for that.
The title of the YouTube channel corresponds to a property of the Rosenfels idea of "psychologically feminine".
There is a related post on the Book Reviews blog about libraries today.
Wikipedia attribution: By CarstenW - Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11993530
New York Times Op-Docs presents a short film by Joris
Debeij, “How Autism Feels: From the Inside”.
This seems to be filmed in Florida. The life of Jordan Kamnitzer,
who works in retail but has few social interactions, but plays jazz piano well,
is shown, as he befriends a woman with more severe autism.
Although Asperger syndrome is medically part of the autism
spectrum, in practice it works very differently, especially in the tech
workplace. James Damore considers himself somewhat autistic or Asperger-like (Quillette story),
but what is different is separating himself from more collective, tribali expectations
of behavior.People with Asperger’s
often communicate very clearly on matters outside of personal relationships,
and seem charismatic when on their own home turf.
“Lemmino” has a short film “Cicada 3301: An Internet Mystery”,
about a bizarre Internet treasure hunt – actually three of them, the first of
which started in January 2012.
The treasure hunt consisted of problem-solving problems on
4chan, sometimes leading to obscure websites, some of them on the Dark Web, and
making at least one physical trip to find an object with a QR code to be
scanned (rather like a paper wallet for cryptocurrency).
Some of the clues were in some specific books, like “Self-Reliance”
and “Liber Primus”.
It is unclear what the purpose of the exercise was, other
than to assemble a team of super-smart people.
I remember that the old Howdy Doody show had a "treasure hunt" in the real (cartoon) world.
Joe Scott asks “Is This Geometric Structure the Theory
of Everything?”
OK, quantum gravity links general relativity to
quantum mechanics, the large to the small.
Scott discusses a UCLA professor now in Hawaii who
developed a theory of E8 Lie Groups, Octonions that when projected make a beautiful
flower-like design. At all the nodes of this structure, every possible subatomic
particle can be predicted, as well as its behavior.
He also explains God, of consciousness, which is
necessary to perturb the smallest pixels in the structure to create a universe.
Living things come along, to oppose entropy, and look
after the universe, because they can make choices.
Does a biological lineage give continuity to
consciousness (vicarious immortality)?
Welcome to tribalism. The idea of
an infinite geometric structure gives the idea of immortality some meaning.
“Bitcoin: Beyond the Bubble” (Full Documentary), directed by
Tim Delmastro, 35 minutes, with interviews and animation, from 100th
Monkey Films, gives a lucid explanation of how Bitcoin and decentralized
digital assets evolved.
The film starts out with a photo of Bretton Woods, NH, as it
looked in 1944 when the world’s leading democracies set up the gold standard,
which Richard Nixon dissolved on August 15, 1971, creating the concept of fiat
money.That’s odd, as it led to Nixon’s
price controls, as I recall.
But the dollar note, backed up with the gold reserve at Fort
Knox, had always been the world’s “reserve currency”.Porter Stansberry and even Ron Paul have said
that removing that idea could lead to world financial collapse.
Digital currency is backed by the work it is done to create
it, solving complex mathematical problems (akin to mining gold). The proof of
value is stored on a decentralized but linked ledger called the blockchain.
Therefore no government can meddle with its value.
Other “value” could be stored on the blockchain, such as
Internet content, in danger of being taken down by censorship. In a sense that gives
the content potential value convertible to tokens (“dark currency” maybe).
The film compares the block chain to Bit Torrent, as P2P
software which was developed as Naptster was taken down. The Winklevii (associated with Mark Zuckerberg
at Harvard) had developed Bit Torrent.
Yet, the irony is that the financial world could still try
to capture the blockchain world and then lock people out, as is warned at the
end of the film.
One speaker, named Byrne I think, looked like Steve Bannon.
Any advanced alien civilization would have developed blockchain and digital currency. The speed of light would still limit commerce.
“Crypto” (Hollinsworth and Round Town Productions) is an important short film by Ansel Faraj,
written by Nathan Wilson, who plays the lead character Wesley, a recovering
addict (in 12-step program) who considers investing in bitcoin to set up money
for his son and bring his family back together.
The film actually lays out the steps of setting up the
digital wallet.
But he gets hacked after putting in $60000.
The film mixed black and white and sepia color in an
interesting way.
The film is a sequel to a 2013 short, “A Gambling Man”,
which I’ll look at later.
There is a feature film starring Richard Harmon called
“Woodland” (directed Jon Silverberg) about a journalist’s epiphany in the
woods, and it had been called “Crypto”.I wonder if that movie’s name change was because of this short film.
“Alien Ore”, a fan-made film directed by Kailey and Sam Spear,
from 20th Century Fox, on the 40th anniversary of the
first Alien movie.
On a gray rocky planet being mined for platinum, the crew, much
of it lesbian, finds an exploded body underground and soon the insect-like
monsters chase them back out of the tunnels.
I recall seeing the first Alien movie in Dallas at the
Medallion theater in May 1979.
I saw the 1997 film “Bent” (Film Movement and Samuel Goldwyn), directed by Sean Mathias, based
on the 1979 play by Martin Sherman, in Minneapolis shortly after I had moved
there.I may have seen it in the Bell
Auditorium at the University of Minnesota.
On the late 1930s in Germany, Max (Clive Owen), takes home a
Nazi stormtrooper posing as a gay trick, to the chagrin of his boyfriend.
He is taken to Dachau, does the work details and befriends another
prisoner but “chooses” to wear the yellow star for Jews rather than a pink
triangle.
The initial processing scene is quite striking.Not only is Max’s head shaved (no surprise)
but his wad of chest hair is loped off in camera like it as an afterthought.
The playwright wrote the script, and the film often looks like a filmed stage play.
“Caged”, directed by Dylan and Lazlo Tonk, presents a group
of high school students on athletic fields at a Netherlands school.One of the men (immigrant, Poc) has to get
used to the idea that at least two of his best friends are gay, despite dating girls.
He has to learn to defend them.
The sports are track and soccer, and the title of the film
refers to a wire structure where athletes practice soccer kicking skills. The campus is a huge complex of modern
low-rise buildings.
Wikipedia attribution link for Rotterdam picture, CCSA 3.0.
Screenprism analyses (12 min) the Coen Brother’s film “No Country for Old Men” (2007, best picture, Miramax and Paramount Vantage), especially the abstract and ambiguous ending.
The sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) is somewhat the alien spectator, as he relates what he sees to his wife (Tess Harper), the battle between the villain Chigurh (Javier Bardem) and Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), an ambiguous non-allegro hero.
The film suggests an internal time travel, where Bell changes places with his father, who idealized a simpler world.
The film was somewhat a modern western, set in the early 80s, just before modern tech.
The film is said to be faithful to the novel by Cormac McCarthy.
“The Color Purple”, directed by Steven Spielberg (1985) was
an unusual film for this director. It told a personal story of a black girl
growing up in the South in the early 1900s after abuse by her father (who made
her pregnant). It is based on a novel by
Alice Walker with a screenplay by Menno Meyjas.
I can recall seeing it at Northpark in Dallas. As I’ve gotten older, I seem to welcome this
level of intimacy even more.
It would make actress Whoopi Goldberg a regular, as on the
View.
This is a followup to the physics of the color purple.
“Cultural Marxism Explained”, by Dr. Jordan Cooper, from
July 2018. .
The video is in the style of a grade school filmstrip.
Cooper explains the history of Marxism, and then the development
of the Frankfort School and Critical Theory.
He sees cultural Marxism as the attempt to redistribute
wealth or opportunity strictly along to the idea of belonging to an oppressed
group.Christianity does reinforce helping
the oppressed, but on a case-by-case basis. Until Christianity, he says, here was
no coherent moral theory that it was important to help the poor or oppressed.
You can pay attention to opportunities for oppression on a
much more individualized level (“pay your dues”).You could, for example, restrict the use of
inherited wealth much more than we do now. “Class” and “oppressed group” are
not always the same. I faced this kind of a problem as an individual after a career-ending layoff at the end of 2001 taking my turn with more regimented, menial jobs. That is cultural Marxism at an individual level.
“Brain Divided”, a CGI animated short (5 minutes) by
Josiah Haworth, Joon Shik and Joon Soo, and the Ringling College of Art and Design,
has an odd concept, about a split personality.
An alien with a split brain codes a program to make
two abducted humans go on a "test" date inside their space colony – it’s heterosexual and has plenty of male
chivalry. But the split personality within the alien mind (split between red and blue moral values) causes the same among
the male human character.
An odd sci-fi concept indeed.Remember “Donovan’s Brian” controlling the stock
market (Lew Ayres) back in the early 1950s?
Suris has short films similar to yesterday’s, where he
offers commentary on another (conservative’s) presentation.
This time is “Hunter Avallon Fails to Use Facts and Logic”. There is an alternate title that is not too complementary. See the embed (well, "Who Knew?")
Avallon attracted attention when he his channel was banned
for part of the day April 8, one day before important House hearings on
Internet content moderation. This 20-minute video was made April 9.
Most of this particular video deals with a lot of the
canards (choice or lifestyle, etc). Ar
4.16 Suris does respond to the apparent argument that people have a moral
obligation to have children.
Suris does a nice job of destroying the usual stereotypes of
LGBT persons (although they were already going away with Stonewall).
“Why You Shouldn’t Debate Leftists: A Response to Prager U”
from Vaush. This indeed a good meta-interview.
Interesting meta-video, responding to Owen Benjamin of
Prager, who divides the world into “liberals and conservatives V THE LEFT.Owen
claims that the far Left has different aims, and wants to destroy current
society with expropriation to invent their own egalitarian utopia. The Far Left
wants America to be ashamed of its exploitations of PoC.
The response mentions that in the first half of the 19th
Century, all children were referred to as girls until about age 5, when boys began
to behave like boys. I had never heard that.
The format of this film reminds me of the book "The Life of a Fact".
“There’s No Purple Light” This should not be confused with Steven Spielberg’s
“The Color Purple” from 1985 with Whoopi Goldberg, which we can come back to another
time. There is a certain correspondence.
This little short explains the color wheel, and why there is
no purple light, even though we can see a color purple as next to red on color
wheel.
It has to do with combined signals of rods and cones.
It also has to do with primary colors for paint, compared to
mixing light.
“New York City, 1981: A Most Violent Year”, from A24 films
(6 minute short).
In 1980, John Lennon had been killed near the Dakota.
In 1981, the AIDS epidemic was just beginning to be noticed.
A black man describes witnessing a kidnapping and then being
kidnapped himself in the same convenience store one week later.He resisted. The bullet is still at the base
of his spine.
For the sake of journalism, I’ll present American Johnson’s “The
Capitalist Agenda” (or “Here’s Wht Capitalism S___ and Why It Needs to End”, as
an animated short (in a series).
It’s on his “NonCompete” channel.
He explains how capitalism replaced feudalism and how that did
give the underclasses a new chance.
But only a few people get a chance to make it if they’re not
already rich.
He also tries to debunk meritocracy.
You have to watch further videos to find out how to replace
it.
Umair Haque seems to want to go back to a system of guilds.So much for self-publishing.
No matter how good you are at your own goals, if you are
seen as an enemy merely because of capitalism, you can be destroyed, he seems
to be warning.I’ve seen this threatening
posture by the far Left before. Except
that this channel wants to “reject capitalism for fun and profit”.That sounds like an oxymoron.
Try this article from John Nichols in The Nation, when socialism "worked', if you like.
“Just Role With It” is an R-rated gay short film (so I won’t embed
it) where an actor is practicing his lines for a play where he loses his girl
friend.Here’s the link(Helix Studios,
and the video resolution quality is finally better than for some of their
earlier videos).
His best male friend comes over, and suddenly really “becomes”
that other character.
Some people have really been transformed by the characters
they acted, as this documentary short shows. (No, really, please don't model your behavior after cigarette smoking in older films; O want your body to stay biologically young forever.)
Eduardo Sanchez-Ubanell did a video where he tries drag at a dance party in West Hollywood (see
the LGBT blog March 31), where the challenge is not to be changed by the “acting”
experience. (Was it at The Abbey? That's the bar I remember well.)
What if a virus could transmit your identity and
consciousness temporarily to somebody else? The picture above poses the question (UFO's).
Here’s an April Fools short, “10 Types of Physics Majors”.
The film calls itself a “Joke”.
The same stereotypically manly handsome actor plays both
professor and student. He looks familiar.
I like the way they throw around the idea if string theory
as an answer to everything.
This video reminds me of asking a professor about the idea of
pursuing a PhD in computer science and not knowing what an index register is
(back in the 1960s).
Jade Tan-Holmes explains “Russell’s Paradox: A Ripple in the
Foundations of Mathematics” on the Up and Atom channel.
She starts out by describing the Barber’s Paradox.(See my GLBT blog today with an embed of a
short film by Eduardo Sanchez-Ubanell doing drag without really doing drag –
you’ll see that paradox.)
There is the idea that biology is based on chemistry, which
is in turn based on physics (I remember a middle school substitute teaching
assignment on this idea back in 2005), and physics is in turn based on
mathematics.She doesn’t mention it, but
elementary particles seem to follow the mathematics of quaternions.
The Foundations of Mathematics are traced through Plato and
Aristotle, up toe Frege, whose set theory was undermined by a letter from
Bertrand Russell stating the paradox, enumerated here in Wikipedia. Frege actually had a nervous breakdown
over the contradiction.
But does this contradiction somehow generate quantum
entanglement?
A co-worker friend back in 1971 when I worked for the Navy
Department gave me a used copy of a biography of Bertrand Russell.We used to tease each other with conjectures.
As taught in graduate school, mathematics used to be divided into Analysis and Algebra, with topology overlying analysis, and then there is such a thing as algebraic topology.
Since the recent performance of “Eugene Onegin”
(Tchaikovsky) at the Kennedy Center brought up the subject of a dilettante or
dandy (a pejorative in the view of George Gilder, for example), I thought I
would quickly revisit the 1968 thriller “A Dandy in Aspic”, directed by Thomas
Mann and Lawrence Harvey (uncredited), from Columbia Pictures.
Harvey plays British double agent Alexander Eberlin, who is
challenged to hunt down a Soviet spy Krasnevin, with the help of tag-team
sidekick Gatiss (Tom Courtenay) as well as girlfriend Caroline (Mia Farrow)
The only problem is that Karsnevin is the same person.So it’s a setup for artificial schizophrenia.
The promo trailer is a documentary about divided Berlin was
it was in the mid 1960s (post Kennedy).
.
Note the partying, the tattooing and painting, and the hippy
life on the West side, compared to the discipline of the East.
Films like this were the rage a few decades a year; they could make public life look eventful without dealing with the moral quandaries of the inequality underneath at a personal level.
Paul Rosenfels Community associate Rachel Bartlett had lived
in Berlin, especially East Berlin, in the late 2000s, and curiously missed how
it was before the unification in 1989.
Wikipedia attribution link for Berlin picture 2007, under
CCSA 3.0.
OK, you AP calculus students, here is your test this Friday.
Or it is a free-response question for
college credit.This was meaningful twelve
years ago when I worked as a substitute teacher (high school), which is a saga
in itself.You have to prove two
controversial theorems in complex variables, and one in statistics.
Ritvikmath, in this video, proves two of the least intuitive
theorems in mathematics (complex variables), the Morera Theorem and the LiouvilleTheorem (that a bounded everywhere-differentiable function remains a constant everywhere,
like Facebook). It probably does not
apply to quaternions. There is arelated theorem in statistics of significance in fluid mechanics. (The spelling of the mathematician's name is different from the Kentucky city's.)
The math professor’s technique is simple: write the steps of
the proof on simple sheets of paper and use colored felt ink.You don’t need fancy cameras to make the
videos.
The Liouville (an odd spelling of a French mathematician’s
name) was a question in my Master’s Orals at the University of Kansas, I
believe on January 18, 1968, on an unusually mild winter day in Lawrence. I
stumbled through this theorem (its in the Chapter 7 of my DADT-III book) and
probably barely passed the orals.(Yup, “You
passed”.But “He’s going into the
service”.)
On campus, we used to talk about “all this useless math” that
gave people deferments from going into Vietnam combat.No matter, quaternions probably explain the
elementary particles of physics, and the entire Universe follows the laws of
mathematics and statistics to a tee. We wouldn’t have Facebook’s algorithms or
today’s Internet without it.We all
exist because statistics says we must at some point.
I gave a much better technical talk, on my Master’s Thesis
(Minimax Rational Function Approximation) at one of my first job interviews in
Princeton NJ in December 1969 just before getting out of the Army.
What “professionalism” means has changed so much since then.
Presh Talwakar (of “Mind Your Decisions”) uses inductive
reasoning, in a nice animated video using a Texas Instruments Calculator (so
common in AP calculus classes) to show how a continuous factorial function would
behave.
It turns out to be the gamma function, where it turns out to
be the sqrt(pi)/2.
This counts as a film. Sargon of Akkad has made a 13-minute
documentary “Article 13 Cometh” about the EU MeP passage of the Copyright Directive. It's renumbered as Article 17 now.
Much of the film has a static background of a scene in ancient
Egypt alone the Nile with the Pharaoh responding to Joseph’s lucid dreams and
making them public.I guess that in
ancient Egypt telepathy functioned as a kind of Internet, like in the movie “Avatar”
for the residents of Pandora.
Sargon then shows some progressive interviews, or YouTube
executives (including the original claim that YouTube would be able to allow only
established companies to post), to examining the importance of preventing
downstream liability from being removed.Content creators really are better off it they are liable for what they post,
rather than the platform.That sounds
like an irony.
He also shows a tape of the 16 seconds it took the MEP’s to
vote and defuses the rumor that Sweden pressed the wrong button.
Logan Paul (who turns 24 on April 1) has released his first “official
movie”, that is: “Flat Earth: To the Edge and Back” It runs 50 minutes, almost long enough for a grindhouse feature.
So he makes a bombastic, mega-satire of what happens when someone
breaks into his palatial LA home and smashes all the globes.He gets with some of his friends and flies to
a Flat Earth convention in Denver and tries to pretend to be a “true believer”
to get a girl friend.
But some of the attendees are indeed into creationism.
And somehow they manage to take a million dollar rocket ride to the edge of the Earth. It's icy.
But Paul makes a great point: how do you know what you agree
upon as unchallenged truth?
We’re seeing all the social media unraveling today on issues
like whether biological gender is real.
