In this guide to more than forty film noirs and the locations where they were shot, readers visit the Mission Dolores cemetery, where James Stewart spies Kim Novak visiting Carlotta’s grave in Vertigo; the Steinhart Aquarium, where Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth rendezvous in The Lady from Shanghai; and Kezar Stadium, where Clint Eastwood, in Dirty Harry, captures the serial killer, Scorpio, in a blaze of ghastly white light.

Martin Scorsese calls it "a fascinating work of criticism disguised as a guided tour around a great city."

"Nathaniel Rich's smart, incisive, and inclusive book will appeal to lovers of film noir—and of San Francisco—all around the country. A wonderful guidebook to that city's cinematic netherworld, it makes you want to get lost in the films even as you find your way through the city."

SF Noir: The City in Film Noir from 1940 to the Present

But, in fact, this world of binary outcomes is an illusion.

The Illusion of 'Either-Or' Politics

In the long run, this line of research could lead to even higher resolution imaging for distant objects, the researchers said. This includes more detailed views of other planets as well as of human movement through surveillance satellites.

New superlens opens door to nanoscale optical imaging, high-density optoelectronics

When the probability of measuring a particular value of some quantity varies inversely as a power of that value, the quantity is said to follow a power law, also known variously as Zipf's law or the Pareto distribution. Power laws appear widely in physics, biology, earth and planetary sciences, economics and finance, computer science, demography and the social sciences. For instance, the distributions of the sizes of cities, earthquakes, solar flares, moon craters, wars and people's personal fortunes all appear to follow power laws. The origin of power-law behaviour has been a topic of debate in the scientific community for more than a century. Here we review some of the empirical evidence for the existence of power-law forms and the theories proposed to explain them.

Power laws, Pareto distributions and Zipf's law

Decius wrote:
] noteworthy wrote:
] ] Timothy Naftali, author of Blind Spot: The Secret History of
] ] American Counterterrorism will be interviewed on the Fox &
] ] Friends morning program, Wednesday, June 1st, 7AM.
]
] Have you read this book?

Yes, I have read the book. I originally posted a review of the book on May 5. I also recently mentioned it in a thread about the detained Cuban bomber.

] "Naftali concludes that open, liberal democracies like the U.S.
] are incapable of effectively stopping terrorism." What does he suggest?

The book is first and finally a history book, so it is primarily an analysis of the past rather than a prescription for the future.

He concludes that Americans are basically unwilling to do what it takes to decisively defeat terrorism in "peacetime", both at the level of the public and also at the senior levels of the military and government. He cites the inherent structure of American government as partly responsible for extreme political sensitivity to public pressure when it comes to imposing restrictions on the public and authorizing invasive security measures.

In the last chapter, he criticizes Clinton for the way he allowed the public to drive his external policies. He calls Clinton's efforts "serious, but in retrospect ... half-hearted." Those who've read the two stories last year in the Washington Post (and memed here, to characteristic American indifference), which detailed the various abortive attempts throughout the 1990s to capture bin Laden in Afghanistan, will understand Naftali's criticisms in this regard.

Anyone who followed the news during the Clinton years will recall the way in which his administration extensively employed opinion polls in order to devise and refine public policy positions. In this book, and in the 9/11 report more broadly, the public-private contrast of Clinton becomes quite clear. Although he declared (privately and secretly) to the government, the military, and the entire intelligence community that stopping bin Laden and al Qaeda was The Supreme Job One, Above All Else, No Expenses To Be Spared, he never explained this intense focus to the public. In the midst of all the personal scandals of his second term, Clinton devoted enormous amounts of time to counterterrorism, but in the end he failed to act, at least in part because he was concerned about a lack of public support. This was largely a problem of his own making, because he kept the risks hidden from the public. It wasn't until Decemb... [ Read More (0.6k in body) ]

RE: Timothy Naftali to appear on Fox News

Army Lt. Gen. Steven Boutelle, the service's chief information officer, said he supports JACN and believes DOD officials need to dramatically change the way they acquire and deploy network systems.

DOD mulls network coordination

The style is impressionistic, covering a huge canvas with a light brush. The chapter on cities, for instance, describes deftly the flair, and the stink, of great cities but relegates their social history to endnotes and references. If the book has a weak point, it is the exceptional facility of Seabright's writing—sometimes his verve threatens to carry him away. But then, this may well be intentional: The book is obviously not meant as an exercise in planned economy, but as an excursion, without blinkers and without apprehension, through a tumultuous crowd of ideas.

The Man of the Crowd

The Weinsteins also recently announced a slate of films to be released by the Weinstein Company, including a sequel to Sin City due for release next summer.

Sin City duo plan horror return

There's nothing quite like a jolly good British negative review ...

Richard Dawkins: This film is even more pretentious than it is boring. Over-use of the word "paradigm" is a pretty good litmus for inclusion in the scientific equivalent of Pseud's Corner, and the film's "expert" talking heads score highly. What drives me to despair is not the dishonesty of the charlatans who peddle such tosh, but the dopey gullibility of the thousands of nice, well meaning people who flock to the cinema and believe it.

Simon Singh: I have spent my entire working life either doing science or conveying its meaning and beauty to the public. Consequently, I despise What the Bleep Do We Know!?

What The Bleep Do We Know?

On Yahoo, you can search for members who have similar tastes. Members can control who gets to see their collections. People you follow are called "influencers"; their highly rated songs will play on your personalized "LAUNCHcast" radio station. Those who seek your recommendations are deemed "followers."

Music-subscription services can be a good deal