"High Functioning Autism" explained

“High Functioning Autism” , from a channel “Aspergers from the Inside”, apparently from the UK.

  

The speaker explains that Asperger’s is not simply autism with a normal or superior IQ.  He says it is struggle beneath what you can see.

He gives an example of an unemployed 55 year old man who seems to treat people badly.  He has lost his relationship and job and becoming homeless and can’t get back on the rails.  He did well earlier in life because people knew him.  But the economy and environment and political climate all change on him. 

"Are Aliens Hiding on Planet Earth?" -- as invertebrates?

“Are Aliens Hiding on Planet Earth?” narrated by Noah, on Unveiled.

  

  

Noah proposes a thought experiment, where you imagine a world with only two dimensions and beings in it, and wonder if they can see you.

  

He suggests dark matter might generate alien life.

  

He also suggests that the octopus (and other cephalopods) might have come from panspermia.

If your best friend can teleport himself/herself/theirself, then “they” may well be a Clark-Kent style alien.

  

Some people think that Mark Zuckerberg is an alien, and Alex Jones thinks that David Hogg is an alien. I think that’s paying someone a compliment, to compare him to a Marvel superhero.

  

So much for Roswell today.

"How Christopher Nolan Writes and Directs a Movie", from StudioBinder

"How Christopher Nolan Writes and Directs a Movie", from StudioBinder and “The Director’s Chair”.

  

He gives eight concepts, one of which is “scene geography”.  The audience should feel they are visiting a real place (in a sense) that they could move around it.  My own screenplay Epiphany is largely set inside an O’Neill Cylinder with various little communities you can travel between, and the communities are tied to past time periods on Earth, as are the characters (in a sense).

He talks about rising intensity (using “Dunkirk”).

  

He also talks about the Shepard Tone in music, a rising scale of which note is accented, giving a barber pole effect.

"Sunset" presents two gay male lovers contemplating the World War II draft, long before "don't ask, don't tell"

“Sunset”, directed by Kate Ennis and Gary Jaffee, written by Gary, is a 15-minute short film (from Band of Others) that presents us with two young gay men in a hotel room in NYC around 1942 both facing the draft, shortly after Pearl Harbor.  The first shot in the film is of a wooden radio with FDR's comforting voice. 

    

After making out, Arnie (if I have my characters right), played by Brian Trout, announces he has gotten out of being drafted by a “Jewish” psychiatrist with a metaphor about popsicles. This is the hairy chested one.

  

Peter (Niccolo Walsh), who (ironically) is the smooth one, is going to go and fight.  Maybe he’ll get a clerk-typist MOS.

The encounter has some dialogue about male fungibility and expandability, in wartime.  The women can always bear the children and raise them.  It also talks about who is a parasite.  This is pretty heavy stuff, but it needs to be heard.

   

The Army, of course, did its best to pretend it did not draft gay men when it knew it needed everyone and took them. Welcome to the world long before “don’t ask don’t tell”. 

Math video from "Calculus Forever": how to integrate "ln(x)" without the dreaded "parts" method

Take a break and do a math problem.

Mu Prime Math presents “Integral of ln(x) with Feynman’s Trick”.

The young instructor wears a Calculus Finisher t-shirt and is a southpaw for baseball purposes.

Wikipedia describes the ‘trick” here.

  

But the instructor insists that there be no integration by parts (or partial fractions, which is the good one.  You have to be really good a factoring, remember that?)

These math videos tend to present role-model clean-cut students, just like AOPS. But then there is Thebes, who is always showing us math exams!!  I won't bother with the canard "1=2" which is pretty easy to set up (if only you can divide by zero). 

Speculation builds on the "concept" of Christopher Nolan's 2020 trilogy finale film "Tenet"

3C Films does a speculation about Christopher Nolan’s new film “Tenet”, due in July, with a $235 million budget.  The title word is a palindrome (like the last movement of Hindemith's horn concerto). 

The speakers (2 of them here, 10 min) think is it part of a “franchise” of films of which Inception and Interstellar are the first two, and the plot will hook into both.  In both films, time is explored. 

The illustrative for the film shows a clock with a spiral.

The lessons of relativity are clear.  As your speed approaches that of light, time slows down for you.  The only way you could get around the paradoxes of time travel is to fork off multiverses. 

As you get older, time seems to move master because you have more experience, more information in your brain.  But you wonder if, during natural death, time slows down and maybe stops, so you experience immortality.

Of course, violent death would destroy that, but not a natural one. 

   

There are some YouTubers who make their own little short films (like LGBT, probably) but work for major studios in LA.  Many of them would have strong production and editing skills that they can apply to their own work.  Some of them probably know.  They can’t give away any ideas even in their own personal work. 

Picture: the sewing kit component from my little train display looks like a gyroscope or maybe an astrolabe. 

"When You're in Love with your Straight Friend": I called this situation "Temptation" in a subsection in my DADT-III book)

OK, Eduardo follows all the techniques for self-filming described in a video about two posts ago on this blog, but here is a delicious lt-5 minute short staying within the PG-13 world as it is now
  

How many of us have run into this?

“When You’re in Love with your Straight Friend” (actual film).

  

Eduardo is very coy at first about the straight friend who wants to crash, and then share the bed. Eduardo “has” something the friend wants (via upward affiliation).

  

Then he admits he is in love with the straight friend.  I’ve been there before.  (Page 54 of my DADT-3 book, the subchapter “A Temptation”, and then the last two stories of the “Fiction” section, suggested movie treatment here.

  

There is a YT new channel called “Men at Play”, that seems to come from Mexico or Spain, and features largely bearded men in business suits, tempting each other, but in most of the skits nothing happens. However, in “Malpractice” with Felipe Ferro and James Castle, a gay doctor sets up an illegal device to secretly film his examinations of his patients’ chests.

By the way, when I first tried to code this blog post, Blogger interpreted the "less than" symbol on my keyboard as a special command.  It meant "less than 5 minutes in length". 
 
Pictures: two different similar shots of mine, Palm Springs, CA, May 2012

Screenwriter Corey Mandell explains why "99% of Screenplays Are Rejected After the First Scene"

Corey Mandell on Film Courage explains why “99% of Screenplays Are Rejected After the First Scene”.

The first two scenes need to have conflict.  Does this mean that every script should take Hitchcock’s approach to starting “Vertigo”?

He recommends that aspiring writers work reading scripts for sixth months.  I know an actor who said he did that (for New Line).

He talks about a world of “too much content” which leads established companies to look for “brand loyalty” in existing public consumers.  But this may have led to a world where Hollywood does too many remakes and sequels.

Yet, at about 15:00 he says that a script needs to be original, that “only you could have written” (which is certainly true of my “Expedition”). 

My “Exposition” script starts with a lead character waking up in the dark, not knowing how he got there. Then one of the characters associated with “abducting” him is shown setting up access to his “mind” on a computer, and then you are shown that they are on a space station near another planet (it’s Titan, moon of Saturn).  You will then be shown part of the lead character’s first backstory (and I realize now it has to be absolutely clear how people would know this is that character’s background, and how the other people on the space station would know).  Soon you realize that the other characters in the space station are really the important ones (they are “angels”) and why, and you know you will take a “subway” to an O’Neill cylinder nearby.  But can you get all of this into two scenes? 

Oh, yes, he said, no one should have seen the script below.  I have treatments on another blog, and discussion of the ideas.  A lot of people know about this.

I hope Corey has talked about the way the Internet and Web would have changed Hollywood in the past twenty years. Yup, I know about the “Third Party Rule”.

  

(Oh, yes, I am intrigued by the premise of “Manifest”, and the idea that the characters know their owns sunset days.  But it took a whole season of a series to set this idea up.). 

"How to Film Yourself" videos a-plenty

Peter McKinnon, in Jan. 2018, proffered us “How to Film Yourself”.

Basically, get a tripod, get an attachment arm, and set it all up.  Everybody talks about expensive cameras like the A73, and they are getting smaller – except that you need GoPro for really tight spaces.  Some cameras will distort spaces and body proportions if not properly set up.

As for McKinnon’s tats, well, I’d lose them; but I tried to pick the video that answered the question.

You can look at Matt D’Avella’s channel and videos on minimalism, to a wife who does not practice it, and his move from NYC to LA;  but he has a high-end discussion on the technology of successful independent vlogging here.

His DIY manual is also from 2018, “How I Make My Videos”.  He pays a lot of attention to lenses, and various cameras.

  

John Fish described his operation in a Harvard dorm in Sept. 2018 and indicates a lot of effort with cameras and Final Cut Pro and manipulation of A and B-rolls, probably a few thousand dollars worth of cameras (students get a break on Final Cut).  He is now on gap year in Montreal.

  

YouTube offers some editing features only to partner programs and monetized channels, but we’ll have to return to that later.

A screenwriter demonstrates how he does a sci-fi assigned script in 48 hours, and this is engaging!

For today’s short, here is a demonstration by screenwriter Tyler Mowery, “I Wrote a Screenplay in 48 Hours”.  The scenery in the short looks like Los Angeles, maybe the Valley. 

The concept reminds me of the “48 Hour Film Project”.

He assigned himself a generic task, to write a sci-fi feature set on the Moon, with conflict between scientists and politicians from different countries.

He then laid out different characters.

He started writing about eight hours into the task.

The final draft was called “Blue Moon” and is given as a dropbox link on the YouTube file. That's also a name of an ale brand. 

He also uses Harmon’s circle model, which resembles Hauge’s somewhat.

Mowery likes to write on whiteboards, and has trigonometric circle diagrams on it, like he likes to reduce things to mathematics. 

    

My own script for “Epiphany” takes place largely on an O’Neill cylinder, where the main character has been abducted, as have some people he knows, to go back into backstories to solve a mystery that definitely matters to what happens to everybody on Earth.

Update: March 23 

I read Tyler's screenplay yesterday, "working at home".  The writing is crisp and straightforward, 90 pages.  The idea that a bacterium on the moon could cure disease on Earth (coronavirus??) seems oddly prescient, just before we knew about the pandemic.  

Robots and artificial consciousness

“These Self-Aware Robots Are Redefining Consciousness” (from Seeker Focal Point, 7 minutes).

The film takes the position that “simulating the future” for learning is a kind of artificial consciousness.

The film shows that even individual parts, like robotic arms, can be designed to develop this capability.

The concept was demonstrated on 2016 when a computer designed in the UK won a Go game against a world champion in a match played in South Korea.

Can conscious entities combine to form herd consciousness?  Is this what happens with bees?

In theory, robotic consciousness could provide a way to settle many planets in the galaxy, over millions to billions of years. 

  

Stephen Hawking warned about artificial consciousness (Vox)  

"Hann" is a male pronoun in at least one language (and a short film)

Runar Thor’s short film “Hann” (“Him” in Icelandic, 13 min) presents a nerdy teen (Asgeir Sigorusson) trying to remain vague with his parents about the gender of his first date.

The teen finds a teen beaten up at school before walking home, as the main plot develops.  He has gotten asked out, and the parents hope it is a sign they will have grandchildren.  The teen retreats to him room, filled with computers and gaming gear, to freshen up.  

The end of the film uses pronouns to convey the meaning.

  

The film has some wide screen shots of Reykjavik.  The Icelandic common words are more distant from English and from other Scandanavian languages than I would have expected.  The display of the letter b is odd.  

Wikipedia: 

By Blåmes - Own work, CC0, Link

"Microgravity Will Change How We Make Everything", by Bloomberg Business

“Microgravity Will Change How We Make Everything”, by Bloomberg Business (24 min), "Great Leap" series.

  

The environment in an orbiting space station is one of very little gravity or no gravity.

Large businesses are finding some items can be manufactured in these environments if they can be built to scale.

One example is 3-D printing of human tissue or even entire organs, in layers of cells.

Another is in building superconductor cables with new materials like zblan instead of silica.

It’s important to be able to be build stations that are large enough (the “Archinaut”), and the “tyranny of the fairing” (a rocket shield) will have to be overcome.

   

Victoria Blackburne Daniell narrates.

Picture: NASA, near Titusville FL, personal trip, 2015 

"Tribunals" (i.e., "Losing It")

Two men lose out on a dare, and find out “What Happens When Men Get Waxed” (5 min.), on the “Yes Theory” channel.

The second guy survives better than the first guy, but he had more to lose.

The Japanese woman seems to take sadistic pleasure in inflicting both pain and humiliation.  Would they do this on NBC's SNL some Saturday?   

The "Orange Man Bad" really has nothing to lose. 

The Tardigrade: a key to alien life?

“Something in Your Body Can Make You Invulnerable to Radiation” , by Riddle, gives a clue as to how life could evolve on a planet near a red dwarf with extremely variable solar radiation storms. Ot, "How can you swim in a spent nuclear fuel pool and stay alive?" 

The video discusses a tiny worm-like animal called the tardigrade, which can go into superhibernation when dehydrated and can shelter itself from radiation.  It can live in extreme environments all over the world. A recent Israeli spacecraft crashed on the Moon probably contaminated the Moon with them, and they might stay in suspended animation forever.

   

The tardigrade makes special proteins that can be deployed to shelter or coat DNA helices.  But vertebrates can also make these proteins.  Theoretically, on another planet with radiation variation, an animal’s DNA strands could be coated with this protein, rather like insulation (although myelin in mammalian nervous systems accomplishes some of this).

Some soft-core gay videos really do have "real stories" and "real characters" with issues; the NC-17 problem

Sometimes gay “soft-core” porn on YouTube (without showing “everything”) can tell a real story.

  

  

True, a lot of it is badly filmed and fuzzy (which could be a sign of an illegal copyright infringement and likely takedown), with poor camera angles.  A lot of the characters on some channels are heavily tattooed, which is not nearly as common in the gay male community as the videos would suggest.

  

I’ll mention two of them, without embeds because you have to sign in to your Google account to watch them (to prove you are over 18).  The lost likely rating each of these would get would be “R”. 

One is called “Office Threeway” with a banner “Investment in ‘Dickments’” and has versions running 3:51 and 4:05.  It starts with two attractive young men (white) playing cards in an office, wasting work time, as they have finished an IT project. A very tall, slightly Latino-looking young man, their boss or contractor liaison enters.  He admits he has no money and cannot pay them.  Well, there is another way he can pay them.  The intimacy is gradual and, for videos of this nature, rather captivating as to what he really can “offer” them.

  

The idea seems a bit cynical, but it makes a social statement nevertheless. Build up investments in capital on Earth?  Maybe it will be expropriated or taken from you by revolution anyway.  This seems like a social value statement.

Then “Gay Life” offers a 5.00 video by Rocco Fallon, “Arousing Memories”  [Next Door Studios}. A straight (but really bi) married man makes a living flipping houses (this would have worked better pre-2008 -- Dr. Phil would not have approved).  He wakes up from a dream (where there is a missed opportunity, like he could have out stuff on his fingers.)  He walks out to the patio and a handsome young gay contractor fixing the porch sits with a beer.  A conversation starts.  The house flipper decides he “wants” the young man and they have a convoluted negotiation that leads to some curious intimacy (the beer bottle gets in the way of one critical shot). 

You could extract some meaning from this little film as the house flipper wants to feel he has “become” the young man, if only briefly.

  

On the other hand, porn videos in leather bars are so explicit that they are just repetition and boring.

  

Some of the softcore YouTube videos come from sites like Next Door, which has a real (paid) porn channel again where everything is so explicit as to be meaningless, usually. “Helix” has some interesting stuff.

  

But you can imagine a film which is sexually explicit at the climax, extremely so, but where there are existential tensions between the characters that lead to it and justify it.  (“Bugcrush” [Jan 29, 2008] is such an example, although it is not quite as explicit as it might have been at the very end.)  There is no reason why NC-17 can’t be a rating for an artistically and morally integrated film experience. Roger Ebert used to say this.  

The video that I embedded (by Ali Robbins) explains the difference between “porn” and an adult film with character development (at about 5:00).

YouTube should be careful that explicit films use actors age <= 18.  One or two have been removed quickly (in recent months) for that reason.   Videos made in the US and western countries are supposed to comply (by law), but viewing an illegal one is actually a crime, possibly strict liability possession.

Update: Dec 19

Check GLBT blog today for writeup on how the business model for gay porn is changing, video by Michael Rizzi.

"When Was There Life on Venus?" There could be life in the high clouds, 30 miles up, with the same biochemistry base as ours

“When Was There Life on Venus and Where Did It Go?”

I’ve reviewed other videos on this idea 3/10/2018 and 926/2019.

Ridddle explains that Venus was rather earthlike for 3 billion years, had oceans, and that temperatures in winter at the poles could get as low as about 0 F.  Life have formed there and then migrated to Earth on meteorites (and even to Mars).  Volcanism turned the surface of Venus inside out around 750 million years ago, and we don’t know why (rather like everything turned to a super Yellowstone).

The volcanism released carbon dioxide and led to the greenhouse hot house.

The video warns that the Sun will get much hotter in about a billion years, and we really will have to move.

  

He says conditions in the high clouds of Venus are just about the same as Earth in temperate zones.

"First Ever Map of a Neutron Star" makes it look like a Christmas ornament?

“First Ever Map of a Neutron Star Reveals Something Weird”, with Anton Petrov.

  

The neutron star he describes is only about a thousand light years away and is about 14 miles in diameter with a mass slightly larger than the Sun.

The gravity of a neutron star is so strong that it deflects light, and enables you to see some of the backside.  This is called “gravitational lensing” (which would also apply to black holes).  It is possible for a neutron star to have its own planets.

But the pattern of this neutron star is that all the magnetic emissions are coming from the South Pole.

The computer simulations show the surface as having a pebbly-looking surface.

   

Inside the matter may be so compressed that it becomes “strange matter”.

"Autonomous Regions of Spain"

Geography Now explains the “Autonomous Regions of Spain” (17 minutes).

There are a lot more of them than I realized.  The best known are the Basque area (Bilbao and San Sebastian-Donesta), and Catalonia (Barcelona).

I visited Bilbao in late April 2001 (it’s not on the main railroad but has its own, as well as bus, from San Sebastian), and saw the Guggenheim.

Basque is a bizarre language not of Indo-European origin.  Catalan is an amalgam of Spanish and French.

There are various political designations for the various regions, which might be thought of as like states in the US.  There is even a little piece of North Africa that belongs to Spain, as well as the Canary Islands.

Spain is less hospitable to free speech, having long had a mandatory link tax (part of the EU Copyright Directive).  Portugal next door is said to have very fragmented Internet access, which sometimes consists of packages of social media and cable channels, with no net neutrality.  But when I was in the hotel in Bilbao (which was both palatial and cheap) my own regular Internet access was good (from a large business center). There was also a marathon run that Sunday, and an extensive subway.  Bars were filled with people watching soccer games.  San Sebastian has an international film festival.

Wikipedia attribution of Guggenheim picture:

By PA - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=69348007  

The museum appears in a Mission Impossible movie from the late 1990s/

"Why We Have a Snowflake Generation": this speaker feels manliness is being lost

“Why We Have a Snowflake Generation”, from London Real, “People Worth Watching”, today with Dan Pena.    (The other term is “coddled”.  My own grandmother used to say “pantywaste”.) The video's strike page calls itself "Generation of Cowards". 

This morning we had some snow after a cold front, and it didn’t stick very well.  Pretty good metaphor.

This generation hasn’t had war, and hardship, like earlier generations. 

Yup, some of the demonstrations at Evergreen State and Syracuse are really tragic.

This speaker talks about the handshake test.  Women have stronger grips than men.

  

Most of them have had no military service.

"How to Transfer Your Consciousness to Another Body": store it on Titan where it stays cold

“How to Transfer Your Consciousness to Another Body?”, by Ridddle.

The video (10 min) starts out by defining the Hayfick Limit, the number of times cells can divide in an organism, which means no organism is immortal without reproducing.  (There may be a jellyfish that is an exception by playing “Benjamin Button”.)

  

It’s possible for people to arrange to have their brains frozen, so they could be awakened millennia in the future when Man has moved to other planets to escape the billowing Sun (the ultimate climate change).  That wouldn’t work for Alzehimer’s. or if a vengeful assassin shot you in the head to make sure your demise was permanent.

But the storage and computational power to record the entire brain is beyond our computers (although quantum computers might do it).  The memory packs could be cold-stored in a data center on Titan, which belongs to Avenger’s Thanos (aka Carlos Maza with his Pride flags). 

Scientists have downloaded the brain of a planaria, with just 370 neurons, and transferred the memory to robots which actually behave like worms then.

Is a copy of your brain still you?  What if there are multiple copies?

Could a virus (maybe containing a micro black hole, which could evaporate into Hawking radition)  encode all of your memory and transfer it to someone else?

Your consciousness is a composite, as some semi-voluntary drives (like sex in most people) seem to have their own independent wills.

Enjoy this bonus from “Big Brain Boy” (competition for Pewdiepie), and I don’t think this 4-hour game is “made for kids”. 

Expected gutting of Paramount Consent Decree by DOJ could allow big movie studios to eliminate smaller distributors as competition

John Campea discusses the likelihood that the DOJ will do away with the Paramount consent decrees.

He refers to a Nov 19 article by Brent Kendall and Erich Schwartzel in the Wall Street Journal, which is discussed by Slashfilm, and had been discussed in Nov. 2018 by James Amos at Forbes. 

The speaker fears that large movie studios will require theaters to show their bad films as well as their blockbusters, and therefore reduce screen space for smaller indie films, possibly threatening smaller studios like A24. Changing the rule would stop the FTC from enforcing anti-competitive practices. 

It's possible that established guilds want this because "established" writers and actors can make more money in big studio production, and wouldn't face competition from those who work for less. When people work for others in union conditions, the content produced is often less original.

Picture: In Minneapolis, indie filmmakers often meet at Bryant Lake Bowl on Lake Street. 

"Gay Coded Characters" in movies and TV, as per Council of Geeks

“Council of Geeks” discusses “Gay Coded Characters” in “Gay Coding in Movies and TV”. It’s a lecture in seven parts.

I’m not sure if the speaker is fluid or trans, but “they” had a significant video on the COPPA problem recently (the FTC comment period ends Monday Dec. 9, reminder; here's a similar recent video).

Most of the examples here are for older films and are with villains, or comics movies or genres.

  (Well, Frodo’s relationship with Sam is gay-coded, more than just male-best-friend coded).  The “Joker” gets mentioned.   Yes (yeth), the lisp (lithp) can constitute gay-coding, but that was more pre-Stonewall (Tiny Tim, “OGAB”, as was “thmooth”).

This is not the same as casting diversity.  In a particular gay film, it might be important that the characters be sexually attracted to one another for more old-fashioned signals of the “external trappings of manhood.”

"In Arms": in high school, two friends deal with grief and loss

Lucas Cox directs the 9-minute short “In Arms”.

In a Catholic high school, two students deal with the loss of a sister, sitting on the floor of the bathroom. The setting is about as simple as you can imagine.

With Harry Thornton and Will Harrison.

  

This situation is as protist as it gets.

"5 Reasons to Like Blue Jays": are they smart?

I don’t know if blue jays, which are corvids, are as smart as crows, but I thought I would share “5 Reasons to Like Blue Jays”.  Corvids have evolved problem solving ability from evolution separately from mammals. 

The caterpillar scene is interesting.

Bluejays are common in northern Virginia and conspicuous.

But so are crows.  I had one befriend me in the house, and in the new condo a crow will sit on the balcony and watch me work at the computer.  On the day of Hurricane Sandy in 2012, the crow “Timo” kept chasing me back into the garage when I ventured out to test the weather. He knew a storm was coming and seemed to protect me.

"People Who Like to Be Alone"

Brainy Dose presents “People Who Like to Be Alone Have These 12 Special Personality Traits”.

In “Smallville”, the teen Clark Kent would say, “I’m different, I’m not special”.

But Clark was an introvert in the best sense.

I have to say that the first of these films has plenty of appealing looking young men in the mold of  the stereotype of "cis gay men", an ideal of the past. 

Beastie has a similar film, actually longer, “The 11 Unique Personality Traits”.

Beastie also adds three traits of extroverts.

If a journalist likes to jump out of planes sometimes, he could still be someone who works alone a lot. 

 If a waiter in a gay bar talks about doing base jumps and can actually do them, he’s likely to be more extroverted.

I matched up well with most of this, but I don’t have emotional sympathy for disadvantaged people, but I do understand their predicament.  But it is a somewhat distanced, measured understanding, about privilege or the lack thereof.  It isn’t quite the same as trading places or true “skin in the game”. Time is very important to me.  I value independence.  I related to cats more than dogs, and cats like me.  Moral compass can be very nuanced indeed.

Economic Invincibility, John Fish, and Tim Pool, as Youtube channel owners, all fit into this category.  Fish has discussed this openly. Jordan Peterson is the senior person of this personality type.  (You can name others, and yes, people think they are on the right, like Sargon of Akaad.  They absolutely do not support supremacy.) They all tend so be somewhat conservative, at least as far as resisting the ideas of tribalism or group rights or reparations. You could call them anti-tribalists.  The alt-right and far Left seem to be populated by conventional tribalists and “extroverts”.  The most infamous is orange man.

  

Todd Grande has videos on schizoid and avoidant personalities, and high functioning autism (Aspergers), all of which mix with introversion for various reasons.

The far Left is trying to force everyone to see themselves through "intersectional groups" and join causes and take on personal challenges dictated by others, as an ideological goal.  There is this idea that "victims" based on group-membership are "not good enough" to be worthy of one's potential attention for friendship.
 
Remember, though, "Carousel" ends with "You'll Never Walk Alone". 

Picture: Extinction Rebellion, Washington DC, Sept 23, 2019 

"Washington Nationals: Team of Destiny, 2018 Mini Movie": the short before the preview

There is a film showing of a 90-minute documentary at the Anthem theater on the Anacostia waterfront in Washington DC tonight, titled “The 2019 World Series Documentary”.  DVD’s are supposed to go on sale Tuesday, Dec. 3. 

I didn’t get around to getting to this, but I did find a 14-minute Tube by MCQ37 Highlights, “Washington Nationals: Team of Destiny, 2019 Mini Movie”.  The film shows the highlights of the disappointments in the playoffs in 2012 (I remember the top of the ninth when the Cardinals scored 4 runs after a borderline call of ball four with 2 outs), 2014, 2016, 2017.

Then it races through the 2019 season, after Bryce Harper went to the Phillies, and the Nats were 19-31 after the first fifty game.  The film shows the highlights of a 12-10 home win against the Marlins, and the Nats would go 74-38 for the rest of the season (finish 93-69), including winning the last 8 games and a 5-game sweep at home against the Phillies. Including the playoffs they would finish 86-43 from that point.

The film rushes through the World Series, where the visiting team won all seven games. The critical win might have been game 2, when the Nats scored 5 gift runs in the top of the seventh after an infield fumble and then a broken-bat hit. Good teams pounce on little mistakes, particularly when on the road.

They do show Kyle Kendrick’s slicing homer off the foul pole to put the Nats ahead in game 7.
   

It will be interesting to see if they can keep both Stephen Strasburg and Anthony Rendon.  High-average hitters like Rendon have the ability to make time slow down (from the brain’s perspective) so they can hit the ball – it seems genetic.  Animals, especially cats, can do this when hunting prey.

  

Here’s another video, about opening day of the 1955 season at Griffith Stadium, when the Senators beat the Orioles 12-5, but would lose the next day in Yankee Stadium 19-1, and would finish the season 53-101.  But they would go 13-9 against the Cleveland Indians that year (and against Boston the next year). In 1959 they would endure their 18 game losing streak. 

"10 Unsolved Mysteries of Titan": is it alive?

John Michael Godier presents “10 Unsolved Mysteries of Titan” (14 min).

This little film is just a week old.

Drones will fly around Titan in 2034.

Godier talks about the possibility of a subsurface ocean on Titan, resembling Europa’s.

He also mentions that hydrogen and acetylene disappear from the atmosphere as they float down, as if they were being eaten by alien microbes.

The dunes on Titan appear to consist of tholin, and some of the lakes appear to reside inside craters.

   

Titan would become much warmer in 4 billion years when the Sun expands to becoming a red giant.
   
Wikipedia: 

By NASA / JPL-Caltech / USGS - http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/?IDNumber=PIA10008, Public Domain, Link

"COPPA. YouTube, the FTC, and You!" from Hoeg Law, summarizes the problem for content creators

I’m going to treat this as a “short film” of the day: “COPPA, YouTube, the FTC, and You!”, by Hoeg Law, who operates the Virtual Legality YouTube channel from suburban Detroit.

The 6 minute video explains the “canard” by which the FTC and YouTube have passed some of the legal risk onto content creators, a theory that content creators might prevail challenging in court.  The behavior of Congress seems deceptive, intended to fool people don’t see logical traps.

The FTC has a comment period running through Dec. 9, 2019, and there is also a change.org petition, given in the notes for the video.

The situation is likely to result in many fewer channels on YouTube with content aimed at children or even gaming channels.

The underlying problem is that YouTube’s business model is dependent on behaviorally targeted ads, and even content providers who aren’t monetized benefit indirectly from the use of this model (the legal theory is called agency).

The problem could spread to other platforms but is largely mitigated when a site requires an account and logon to see content (an age-gate).

"Bonnie and Clyde" were less innocent than "Queen and Slim"

“Bonnie and Clyde” (1967, Warner Brothers, directed by Arthur Penn) comes to mind now because of a parallel to “Queen and Slim” (from Universal) in theaters now.

Bonnie (Faye Dunnaway) is bored with waitressing and falls in love with Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty, who was a heartthrob in those days), and they go on their famous crime spree of bank robberies and smash and grab jobs.

The difference, of course, from QS is that Bonnie and Clyde have no innocence. They have original sin.

  

This seems to be a film I saw in grad school days in Lawrence, KS.

"The Truth Behind Social Media": people aren't as good as they make themselves look on YouTube, Facebook or Instagram (or even ephemeral Snapchat)

“The Truth Behind Social Media”, aka “The Fake Reality: This Is How Social Media Is Destroying your Life”, by MotivationGrid.

The film says that an entire generation is addicted to the dopamine fix from social media, so they don’t know how to turn to people for help.

A lot of people look better on social media than they really are. The implication is that people who aren't good enough don't matter (welcome to Fascism -- and we got Donald Trump.) 

  

Well, some people I know really did come from “the real world only”, and with a few of them, I leave it that way.

  

The film shows Mark Zuckerberg (“who is an alien”) being questioned by Congress.  Zuckerberg conquered the planet.  Artificial Intelligence can take the galaxy.

Here's a similar short, "Tobacco Farmers in T-Shirts" (6 min) by "Be Inspired"/ 

"Tholins: Mysterious Brown Space Goo" -- did oxidizing it lead to life on Earth?

“Tholins: Mysterious Brown Space Goo Found Everywhere but Earth”

Anton Petrov notes the observation of this nitrogenous organic matter on Titan (really good landing through the fog), Europa cracks, Pluto, Triton, and even an asteroid.

Oxygen destroys tholins, which is why we don’t find them on Earth, and probably destroyed on Mars.

But some bacteria can thrive inside tholins in the laboratory.   

Carl Sagan had discussed the substance back in his book in the 1980s.
 
Wikipedia: 

By NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute - http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/crop_p_color2_enhanced_release.png (Converted to JPEG) (see also PIA19952}, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=41837276

"How Animals Perceive Time" (short)

SciShow explains, “For Some Animals, Time Moves in Slow Motion” (in video “How Animals Perceive Time”).

   

  

Generally, smaller animals with faster metabolisms may perceive more new information, which makes time seem to pass more slowly.  Cats perceive time as passing more slowly than us, where as dogs may be slightly faster (which doesn’t help if you don’t live as long).   (Once, a stray cat came by my apartment in Dallas every few days to check up on me, like I was his, but to him he had been away for a while.)

  

Athletes say time may slow down, giving them more time to see a baseball when batting.  That may be a genetic mutation which benefits people who turn out to be athletes. This may be particularly true for a high-average hitter in baseball (Anthony Rendon) compared to a tape-measure home run slugger (Bryce Harper).

It might be true, for example, for concert pianists. Or for computer programmers who can code very fast in terminal mode.

Flying insects may pass time very slowly, which makes it very hard to swat them.

Time seems to pass more slowly for children than adults, but that is partly because they have less prior experience to compare the present to, a variation of relativity.

   

It sounds plausible that as someone dies, time slows down, creating a sense of immortality (just as when you are a child, you feel you have existed always and have no sense of when you began).

Time passes more quickly in lucid dreams, especially nightmares.  An erotic dream of contact with someone one wants may seem to pass time in a normal aspect, and the dreamer may sense some control of the experience.

"Something About COPPA" and this video is rated 13+

“Something About COPPA (13+)” is a delicious 2-minute satire of what YouTube videos will look like after January 1, 2020, by Terminal Montage.

I’ve covered this problem on other blogs. An “age-gate”, automatically invoked when an IP address is signed on for the first time to a social media site, and secured and fed into a method to block behavioral advertising to that address, would solve the legal problem.  The idea has been known since the COPA trial (not COPPA) in 2007. It would cost maybe $20 million or so to develop and sell.

  

This little satire is not for kids – or is it?  Pewdiepie has weighed in on this, and so has Tim Pool.  

The best videos on COPPA come from Hoeg Law in Michigan.

"Tilt": bizarre comedy in India of two gay men considering a marriage proposal in a restaurant, and there are distractions

“Tilt” is a bizarre short film by Rohit Bhardwaj, Star 18 and Humaramovie (17 min).

In a restaurant in India, a young man intended to give a wedding ring to a dashing but inconsiderate more attractive man. The attractive man insists on smoking outside, and then insists that more diminutive suitor out himself to his parents, admitting he won’t give them grandchildren.

In the hallway there is a collection of paintings, and one of them shows two crashed small boats, and the painting is tilted to make on of them look level. The first young man keeps adjusting the picture and an older man sitting there gets angry and threatens the younger man’s life.

The suitor goes outside for another smoke.  Then a reconciliation must follow.

  

Some of the dialogue is in Hindi and some heavily accented English.  The men “look” European. 

The premise of the film is bizarre as India does not recognize same-sex marriage and has only recently loosened the sodomy laws. 

"Evolution Family Tree": show that high intelligence evolves independently repeatedly

\The “Evolution Family Tree from Single Cells to Modern Humans” (17 min) from Useful Charts.

The first living “cells” were probably bacteria and archaea (extremophiles – the most “alien”) and then the eukaryotes that split into “domains” -- plants, fungi, and animals.  (Bacteria and Fungi are no longer “plants”. Eukaryotes have cell nuclei.)

What gets interesting is to see how very high intelligence evolved separately several times.  Birds split off separately from reptiles (which have an amygdala) and became rather intelligent in problem solving with corvids (crows, jays, ravens). With mammals, high intelligence developed separately in elephants (which normally graze), carnivores (which have to hunt and can typically bond to humans), cetaceans (including orcas and dolphins, whose brains, which process sonar – an organic Internet – and have more cells than humans, and primates. Even some invertebrates (some mullosks) have self-cognition.

  

That’s a good reason to respect the rights of many animals. It also argues that intelligent life can evolve many ways.

There is a place in Ethiopia with no life at all (CNN). 

"Quantum Theory Reveals Parallel Universes", but please don't make the wagers

Arvin Ash presents “Quantum Theory Reveals Parallel Universes and Quantum Immortality in Alternate Universes”.

Toward the end of the video he presents the thought experiment by Max Tegmark that suggests your consciousness (“real you”) is the path of quantum choices that survived – there is a 100% chance that you exist in a parallel (not multiple) universe where a non-zero probability of a choice existed.

This sounds dangerous in a way, because common sense says you can’t undo an irreversible wrong choice. If you’re in prison, is “the real you” experiencing it, or a copy?  (I hate to say this, but such thinking could have led to mass catastrophes we have heard about caused by individual persons.)  You could still say that your POV identity is still limited by the consequences of the actual choices you make. 

   

Arvin talks about the “box wage” experiment (similar to Schroedinger cat) in an animated sequence.  (I hope videos like this aren’t called “made for kids” by meta-logic; I’ve blogged about the threat to videos recently from FTC  and COPPA). There are other videos that deny this idea.

But I do have to admit that some of the ironies in my life and the way improbable coincidence intervened in a few situations is quite hard to explain. “Coincidence” seems much more common than probability alone suggests.  There are a couple in play now that I can’t talk about publicly.

I am also reminded of some of the funny videos by young vloggers like Luke Korns where he tries a silly experiment and “this is what happened”. 

   

I even remember first grade (Fun with Dick and Jane) where the idea of spoiler was introduced;  on the last page of a little story in a reading lesson, we find out “what happened” (like Baby Sally said Oh-Oh-Oh [castles long in a chess game] or Puff the Cat ran back home; oops, grown-up science presented as “made for kids”.)

Arvin says that a major test of this whole idea will come with the development (like by Google) of a quantum computer.   (The NSA will have one first.)

Arvin says that