Films & Television

The world isn’t ready for the Watchmen film

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We went to watch the new Watchmen film over the weekend, a week after its premiere in Malaysia. We could have gone earlier, but we’d been meaning to go watch The Curious Case of Benjamin Button for a while now but one thing or another kept getting in the way, so we finally went for that last week. As I’ve posted before, I’d read the graphic novel the film is based on, so I knew what to expect going in and loved it. Judging, however, from the people who walked out before it was over in the cinema where I watched it and the overheard chatter about the film afterward, not to mention how poorly it’s been doing at the box office, it’s clear that most people either disliked it, or went in expecting a completely different kind of film.

After reading the discussion thread on the film on QT3 (much of which I should mention is very insightful and contributed a great deal to the opinions I’m expressing in this post), I found that perhaps the single best description of it is one posted by game reviewer Desslock: a $150 million art house film. Watchmen is not your traditional big budget summer blockbuster. It’s not even a superhero film in the traditional sense. It’s really an independent, art house quality film made for a very niche audience. It so happens that this one features superheroes as its characters, cost about the same as your typical Hollywood blockbuster, and was marketed to a mass audience who in all likelihood were led to expect something in the vein of Spiderman or Iron Man.

Continue reading The world isn’t ready for the Watchmen film →

News & Politics

Is Atlas Shrugging?

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I meant to post this earlier but my net connection, along with it seems that of a large number of other Malaysians, was down for the better part of Friday and Saturday. Here’s a link to an amusing article that I read on The Economist. Apparently one unexpected side effect of the current financial crisis has been a boom in the sales of books by Ayn Rand. The publication finds that there is a correlation between announcements of government intervention in the markets and spikes in the sales of Rand’s magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged.

The apparent cause is that current news seems to be echoing events in the novel, with Alan Greenspan’s admission of a flaw in the financial system being particularly seen by Randites as a cowardly capitulation reminiscent of a character’s rejection of reason in favour of faith in the book. More significantly, there seems to be a phenomenon called “Going Galt” going around in the U.S., named after John Galt, a major character in the novel.  The idea is that taxpayers should stop subsidizing the government’s wasteful bailout policies and opt out of the financial system by simply choosing to produce less wealth than they could or even choosing not to work at all or closing down their businesses.

For what it’s worth, even though I call myself a libertarian, I don’t identify with this movement at all. Tax increases are to be avoided whenever possible, but in this case are absolutely necessary for the long-term health of the U.S. economy. I’m never happy with bailing out failed businesses or borrowers who took on more liabilities than they could comfortably handle, but I cannot agree that the U.S. government should simply do nothing. I’d have preferred for example, that the U.S. government went ahead and nationalized any banks that are found to be insolvent, but it’s pretty obvious that this is going to entail an extremely large increase in short-term government expenditure that will eventually need to be paid for in the form of higher taxes. I certainly won’t pretend that doing it my way would be any cheaper.

One thing about this movement particularly irks me is that many of them don’t seem to understand the concept of marginal tax rates. There are stories, for example, about people going around finding ways to make sure their income doesn’t exceed US$250,000 because they seem to believe that the higher tax rate for that bracket would be applicable towards the entirety of their income, rather than just the specific amount that exceeds the ceiling. Not very smart for a bunch of folks claiming to espouse rationality and reason.

Games

Making mazes in Defense Grid

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I’ve been slowly making my way through Defense Grid, the tower defense game that I posted about a while back. I’m down to the last two maps, but I’m holding off finishing them until I go back through every single previous map and get at least a Silver Medal on all of them. My wife loves watching me play this game and both of us enjoy figuring out the best way to build a maze on each of the maps. Most of the time though we’d come up with a pretty good maze for a map, then go search on YouTube for a video on how the real experts do it, and then kick ourselves for missing something that seems so obvious in retrospect.

Then when I go look at the leaderboards, I get absolutely blown away by the top scorers. Someone tell how is it possible to get more than 200,000 points and to place nearly 300 towers on a map? Cheats?

News & Politics

What was once the happiest place on Earth

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I meant to post this last week but work got in the way and I never got around to doing it. This is a link to a piece on Iceland, arguably the single greatest casualty of the financial crisis. Since it’s written by Michael Lewis of Liars’ Poker fame, it’s unsurprisingly very insightful and well-written. Some choice quotations from the article:

“You have to understand,” he told me, “Iceland is no longer a country. It is a hedge fund.”

As absurdly big and important as Wall Street became in the U.S. economy, it never grew so large that the rest of the population could not, in a pinch, bail it out. Any one of the three Icelandic banks suffered losses too large for the nation to bear; taken together they were so ridiculously out of proportion that, within weeks of the collapse, a third of the population told pollsters that they were considering emigration.

They understood instantly, for instance, that finance had less to do with productive enterprise than trading bits of paper among themselves. And when they lent money they didn’t simply facilitate enterprise but bankrolled friends and family, so that they might buy and own things, like real investment bankers: Beverly Hills condos, British soccer teams and department stores, Danish airlines and media companies, Norwegian banks, Indian power plants.

One thing I found almost shocking is how unapologetically scathing Lewis is towards the Icelanders. It’s clear that he thinks that the Icelanders have no one but themselves to blame for their mess. Much of the media coverage I’ve read had a tendency to portray Iceland as an unfortunate victim of the excesses of U.S. capitalism.

Politics, Religion

PAS claims “half-naked” female students at Universiti Malaya party. Does not deliver.

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Like any hot-blooded male, I thought that news reports that female students at Universiti Malaya had attended an event on campus “half-naked” would lead to some racy photos. So I was disappointed when the photos that eventually turned up depicted nothing that you wouldn’t be able to see on any ordinary day in Kuala Lumpur. The accusations were made by an MP for PAS, a Islamic political party, who objected to the students wearing such clothes for a Ladies’ Night event at the university. As any sane person can see, the wonder is that something so insignificant would create such a controversy at all. You can read a detailed chronology of the accusations and public relations mess this has caused in the Malay language here. It’s pretty sad that the deputy minister had to even concede that such attire should not be allowed in the university lecture halls.

As a poster on LYN, where I picked up this news from, commented, this is rather insulting to the female students who attended the event. If anything, they’re the ones who deserve an apology from that PAS MP. As a Malaysian, I’m convinced that PAS is a far better alternative than the ruling National Front but cheap shots like this for the conservative crowd are making the party lose points among moderates. There certainly are PAS politicians who sound intelligent, reasonable and can act as an advocate for Islamic values without coming across as a barbarian. Take this opinion piece by Khalid Samad, PAS MP for Shah Alam for example. He writes:

I remember Datuk Seri Tuan Guru Abdul Hadi Awang’s lecture where he told us of a case in the time of the Prophet. A man came and admitted to the Prophet that he had committed adultery and requested that he be punished. The Holy Prophet remained silent and turned away from him. The man came in front of the Prophet and repeated his admission and request. The Holy Prophet responded in the same manner, turning away from him. The man came in front of the Prophet again and repeated the admission and request for the third time. The Prophet then asked the companions who were there witnessing this incident to take the man away and punish him as he requested.

Later the companions returned and reported to the Prophet that the man, prior to being punished, had a change of heart and ran away. They chased him and meted out the punishment. The Holy Prophet looked at his companions and asked: “Why did you chase him? You should have let him go”.

From the short story it is clear that there is no zealousness in the meting out of punishment. The Prophet only consented when the man showed great remorse for having sinned and wished himself to be cleansed. However, if that was no longer the case, the need was no longer there. Note also how the man was not questioned who his partner was. No thumbscrews. No witch hunt.

Actually it is this kind of zealousness which the non-Muslims fear from Pas and this is where we must emulate the spirit of the Islam more accurately. We should not become zealous moralists who wish to enforce their moral code on others. As I always say, preach, reason and argue with them in the best of ways. Never give them the impression that we wish to impose something on them irrespective of how noble the intentions. That was the way of the Prophet and that too must be our way.

If only all PAS politicians would heed those words.

Politics

Are you responsible for trash dumped on your property without your permission?

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Just because I love pondering questions about personal responsibility, here’s the latest one that’s come to my attention. The Daily Telegraph has a report on an Earl, that is one those filthy rich heriditary nobles who make the U.K. look so anachronistic, who is being sued by his local council for having one million old tyres and over a thousand tonnes of shredded rubber on his land. The problem is that the tyres were dumped on the Earl’s lands without his knowledge or his permission. However, because the unscrupulous businessman who was responsible for dumping them and who  has already been convicted and jailed for two months back in 2002 doesn’t have the money to properly dispose of the tyres, the local council is forcing the Earl to pay to clean the mess.

It seems that the tyres were dumped there quite a while back and the council issued an order back in 2004 to the Earl to dispose of them in an environmentally safe manner and the deadline was set for 2006. Since then, the Earl’s estate has managed to dispose of two thirds of the tyres at their cost but with over 350,000 old tyres on the property, the council has threatened to prosecute the Earl for not complying with its order. As you might expect, dealing with this much trash costs a considerable amount of money. While it is true that the Earl can afford it, should he bear that cost when he was not responsible for dumping the trash in the first place?

The article could do with some additional details but there seems to be plenty of blame to spread around and no easy answers. My gut instincts are that the council should pay the costs of cleaning up the tyres but should try to recover money from the parties actually responsible for creating the mess in the first place. Even if the actual businessman who dumped the tyres doesn’t have the money, it’s obvious that he was paid by someone to dispose of the tyres. It’s likely that he snagged the contract with an unrealistically low bid without having any intention to do the work in the proper way and the company or companies involved accepted his bid and paid the money just to make the problem go away. If this is the case, it might be possible to sue those companies for hiring an unlicensed contractor in the first place. If no money is forthcoming, then some jailtime, considerably more serious than a mere two months, might be in order for all those involved in the dumping.

Science

Recent Interesting Science Articles (February ’09)

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I’ve only noted one science article of any interest this month. Perhaps the financial crisis is taking its toll on scientific research as well? This one is from The Economist and covers how social animals make collective decisions. One study by Christian List of the London School of Economics and Larissa Conradt of the University of Sussex examined how bees choose a site to migrate to and start a new nest. As described, scouts are sent out to find suitable locations and when they get back they perform the bees’ infamous waggle dance to tell the rest of the hive what they’ve found out. The longer the dance goes on, the better the site. The entire hive needs to sort out which site is the best one and make a collective decision to move the queen and the worker bees to it.

The scientists found that the hive manages to make extremely reliable decisions even though there are only minor differences in quality between the sites. In order to find out how they did this, they created a computer model to simulate the results from different variables. They found that two aspects of their decision-making process were crucial towards correctly determining the best course of action: one, freely sharing information between the scouts and the rest of the hive and two, the independence of other bees to confirm the scouts’ findings by following their routes, checking out the site for themselves and then confirming the results to the rest of the hive by performing waggle dances of their own.

The implications for human behavior are obvious, though I think that the attempt by The Economist to link this to the theories of the 18th-century philosopher Nicolas de Condorcet, who believed that decisions taken collectively by a large group of people are more likely than those taken by a select few, is a bit of a stretch.

The unexamined life is a life not worth living