The movie What the bleep do we know is a pseudo-scientific exploration of using quantum mechanics to justify a human potential-like pseudo-religious concept. I have an undergraduate degree in physics from MIT, and so I recognized a lot of the arguments as absurd immediately, but I reached the limits of my depth, particularly on the history of QM in this argument. Most, but not all of the concepts could be easily refuted from an undergraduate understanding such as mine, some seem to require more depth. But the practicing physicists I reviewed my answers with seemed to think they had nothing useful to add to the discussion, in part I suspect out of the still-somewhat-in-vogue idea that the best way to confront anti-scientific ideas is to ignore them, viz the debate over intelligent design (which I think, personally, the flying spaghetti monster settled.)
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Woo rented a minivan!
Now I just need to rent a family to ride around in it and complain. It does have back seat video but I can’t reach the gas pedal from there.
I got a Toyota Landcruiser as a rental car for the first time. It was kind of absurd as a rental. Oversized and a bit mushy, but otherwise it was a perfectly competent car. I still don’t get the “luxury 4WD” concept. I understand luxury cars - they are about comfort. But I don’t get a vehicle that’s premise is to be durable and tough yet coddles it’s occupants as if they’re eggs. You should be able to climb into a 4WD vehicle covered in mud and not think twice about the interior.
This is an odd car - basically a 4WD minivan with a nose. The body of the car is surprisingly low for the type of vehicle. One steps out and is surprised the ground is so close. That makes getting in and out easy, but there’s no real value in the 4WD then…
Inside it has the appearance of being faux luxurious. The seats are pseudo leather, the dashboard black and squishy… the stereo is pretty standard chevy lame. No auxilary input and the XM radio thing seemed to be stuck on 4 channels. One was amusingly listed as POTUS08 and was non-stop election news.
The car has a squishy suspension but a moderately powerful engine. There was an unexpected amount of wind noise in the cabin, perhaps one of the window seals wasn’t quite all there.
A Pervert’s Guide to Cinema is not as promising as the title would suggest. It is a wonderful collection of clips of various movies that are far more effectively tied to together cinematically than they are philosophically. Slavoj Zizek narrates a discussion of his apparent discomfort with sex, shame at being male, and hatred of his parents as if they were universal neurosis somehow illuminated by cinema. I found his critiques and comments on the films and directors generally interesting and compelling. His generalizations about the motivations for sex, arousal, libido, etc were pretty silly. Comparing the marx brothers to the Id, the Ego, and the Superego… hmm… I found Bataille’s Erotism: Death And Sensuality better thought out, if equally inapplicable to people not plagued with some serious issues.
(Friday, Aug 29 2008 Telluride Film Festival)
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