Category: General

I honest to god am not sure why Below hasn’t gotten more attention. OK, sure, it’s a submarine movie, and we’ve seen one of those this summer. It’s a B movie, clearly. But surely Miramax remembers that David Twohy has directed two B movies so far, and while The Arrival kind of tanked there’s a rumor that Pitch Black did fairly well and launched some bald guy’s career.

Or perhaps they don’t. In any case, a week or so before it opens, they released a trailer. No spoilers in the trailer, although it gives the setup for the movie and makes it clear that it’s a horror flick. I am so much going to see this.

You know how you can be muddling along in your life, never realizing there’s something missing, and then all of a sudden boom there it is? That one object that will fill the elusive hole in your existence? The object that calls to you, not like siren luring you to disaster, but like an old friend you’re meeting for the first time?

That’s how I feel about this. Now with Mac OS X support.

Gaiman wins! Neil Gaiman’s essentially been suing Todd McFarlane to clarify who owns the rights to Miracleman (who is not from the Spawn universe), along with Angela, Cagliostro, and Medieval Spawn (who are). The jury found for Gaiman and the trial now enters the damage phase, in which the jury decides who gets what as a result of McFarlane’s misconduct.

This is excellent news in that it probably means we’ll see Miracleman reprints. Plus, hey, you gotta cheer for Neil.

I really wish I’d found this CLI for the Linksys WAP11 a few days ago; I could have skipped digging out cables for my Windows box. Alas alack. Still, worth flagging for later experimentation, especially since it allows one to up the base station’s power output.

For the curious, I’m using the WAP11 and the Linksys WET11 Wireless Ethernet Bridge to bridge between my apartment and my brother’s place. I could have used two WAP11s, or I suppose two WET11s, but either of those approaches wouldn’t have gotten me a wireless network — just a bridge. As is I can use my iBook while sitting on my front steps.

A little while ago, I kvetched about the algorithms that produce Google News. I feel somewhat vindicated, since I don’t think this image really reflects the top Sci/Tech news of September 30th, 2002.

The new Two Towers trailer is now available in Quicktime. (Link obtained from Ain’t It Cool News.) Enjoy.

On October 11, 2002, the following movies that I want to see will open:

• Below, a submarine haunted house flick directed by David Twohy (Pitch Black) and written by Darren Aronofsky.
• The Grey Zone, directed by Tim Blake Nelson and starring Steve Buscemi, Harvey Keitel, Mira Sorvino.
• Knockaround Guys, a much-neglected gangster flick with Vin Disel, Seth Green, Dennis Hopper, and John Malkovich; the writer/directors also wrote Rounders.
• Punch-Drunk Love, the new Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights, Magnolia) movie that happens to star, um, Adam Sandler.
• The Rules of Attraction, based on a Bret Easton Ellis novel, which has good word of mouth.
• Swept Away, which is directed by Guy Ritchie (Snatch) even if it does star his wife Madonna.
• The Transporter, directed by the great Corey Yuen (Fong Sai Yuk and a million others) and written by Luc Besson.

That’s seven movies solidly worth seeing, ignoring the other seven opening that weekend. Do they wanna kill me?

The 2002 MacArthur Fellows were announced today.

Matthew White’s done some really excellent research on death tolls in the 20th century. It’s very grim; it’s also a good reminder of atrocities we might otherwise forget. The rest of his Atlas of the 20th Century is also pretty interesting.

The new Google News service kind of bugs me. The FAQ says this:

The headlines on the Google News homepage are selected entirely by a computer algorithm, based on many factors including how often and on what sites a story appears elsewhere on the web. This is very much in the tradition of Google’s web search, which relies heavily on the collective judgment of web publishers to determine which sites offer the most valuable and relevant information. Google News relies in a similar fashion on the editorial judgment of online news organizations to determine which stories are most deserving of inclusion and prominence on the Google News page.

Huh. So the most reported stories show up on Google News, which causes people to report the stories more, and so on. In engineering, they call this positive feedback. It is not always a good thing.

Mind you, Google’s always used algorithms like this for their search. Daypop, the popular (and currently dead) weblog search service, creates a similar effect with their Top Forty listing of popular links from the world’s weblogs. So this is nothing new, per se.

Still. I have a penchant for the unexplored, the new, and the underreported. It seems to me that Google is encouraging the homogenization of the Web, here. The algorithm is problematic when applied to news, and it has the same problems when applied to web search.

Discussing this is, alas, met with scorn from the weblogging community. Daniel Brandt is a bit of a loon, admittedly, and his personal stake in these arguments is well documented. But there’s some truth at the core of his complaints. Besides, you’d kind of expect Doc Searls to stand up for Google. He’s one of the guys who benefits from PageRank.

When Doc Searls says “Why is this bad? Because PageRank doesn’t give a fair shake to stuff nobody points to? What user would want that?” I am forced to reply, “Users who want to find stuff outside the beaten path.” PageRank is great for building up an initial concept of the Web; if you’re starting from scratch, you get an accurate picture of which sites are important. But from that point on, you make it harder for completely new sites to break into the rankings. New clusters of link relationships won’t be ranked as highly as the old clusters.

So that’s why Google News kind of bugs me.

Disclaimer: I used to work for AltaVista.