An attractive woman comes up to you and asks if you'd be kind enough to take her photo in front of the Golden Gate Bridge. Naturally, you agree. As you're lining up a good shot, you can't help but notice the camera's sleek, lightweight design.

Sucker.

Is this the future of advertising?

While the losses [of 9/11, of the first WTC attack, of Khobar Towers, of African embassies, of the Cole] were tragic, they may be put in perspective if we realize that 85,000 people have been murdered in the USA since 9/11 -- not one in a terror attack.

...

60 percent of Americans are ready to pack it in in Iraq. Why were Western men willing to die in such numbers rather than accept defeat in the early 20th century, but this generation is not?

...

Preventive war as the antidote to terror seems ... to have failed us. Democracy as the surest guarantee of US security ... seems a less persuasive proposition.

The cost of empire is too high, and our willingness to pay the butcher's bill has diminished.

One man's crisis is another man's opportunity, and Patrick Buchanan the isolationist is on the campaign trail.

Losing the Will to Fight

Yet all these conflicts [of the 20th century], terrible as they often were, may be considered the growth spasms of a vigorous democracy. Even the fissures that Vietnam opened in our society, with all the bad feelings they emanated for years to come, can be seen as an enduring lesson in liberty: When the government ran an undeclared war the people did not support, they put an end to it. In that war at home there was honor on both sides; early on in our escalation in Indochina, there were even mass rallies held in favor of the war.

Wrongheaded as those might now seem to have been, I prefer them to our current state of civic disengagement. The most disappointing realization about the war in Iraq is how little we care, how precious few demonstrators there are on either side of the issue. Just as the war exists for most of us on television, so we have subcontracted out our civic feeling to the angry rhetoric of so many ranting heads. We do not serve, we do not pay, we do not watch, and we do not object. Imagine how this might have worked in World War II. No matter how this war comes out, we have already lost.

The Quietest War

1. Eat smart.
2. Work smart.
3. Memorise.
4. Mimic.
5. Challenge your brain.
6. Avoid smoking.
7. Think laterally.
8. Meditate.
9. Sleep well.
10. Exercise.

10 ways to a powerful mind

Even at Lynch's most fractured, in films like "Lost Highway," there's a sense that if you could somehow reach bottom, you'd find truth, some primal series of events that kaleidoscoped out of recognition in the telling. There's no bottom to "Inland Empire," at least not one that we discern after one viewing.

See also:

"Film is like a dinosaur in a tar pit."

'Inland Empire' | The IFC Blog

Martin Scorsese’s The Departed is a fascinating piece of Cuisinart filmmaking that brings together all the leading elements of gangster films in this young century.

The plot is so ingenious that one wonders why it took more than seven decades of crime movies for someone to come up with it.

Vera Farmiga is excellent in a secondary role in this film.

The Departed | At the Movies

“Geek Logik is a hoot!”
—Will Shortz, Crossword Editor, The New York Times

Here for the geek in all of us are fifty foolproof equations that take the guesswork out of life -- and the funniest twist on an idea since Richard Smith's The Dieter’s Guide to Weight Loss During Sex. Call it the algebra oracle: By plugging in the right variables, GEEK LOGIK answers life’s most persistent questions. It covers Dating and Romance, Career and Finance, and everyday decisions like Should I get a tattoo? Can I still wear tight jeans? Is it time to see a therapist? How many beers should I have at the company picnic?

How does it work? Take a simple issue that comes up once or twice a week: Should I call in sick? Fill in the variables honestly, such as D for doctor’s note (enter 1 for “no,” 10 for “yes,” and 5 for “yes, but it’s a forgery”), R for importance of job (1-10, with 10 being “personally responsible for Earth’s orbit around Sun”), Fj for how much fun you have at work (1-10, with 10 being “personal trainer for underwear models”), N for how much you need the money (1-10, with 10 being “I owe the mob”), then do the math, and voilà -- if the product, Hooky, is greater than 1, enjoy your very own Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

Includes a pocket calculator so that prospective geeks can immediately solve the equation on the back cover: Should I buy this book?

Geek Logik: 50 Foolproof Equations for Everyday Life

This book presents the concepts needed to deal with self-organizing complex systems from a unifying point of view that uses macroscopic data. The various meanings of the concept "information" are discussed and a general formulation of the maximum information (entropy) principle is used.

With the aid of results from synergetics, adequate objective constraints for a large class of self-organizing systems are formulated and examples are given from physics, life and computer science. The relationship to chaos theory is examined and it is further shown that, based on possibly scarce and noisy data, unbiased guesses about processes of complex systems can be made and the underlying deterministic and random forces determined. This allows for probabilistic predictions of processes, with applications to numerous fields in science, technology, medicine and economics.

Quantum information science and technology is presently one of the most active fields of research at the interface of physics, technology and information sciences and has already established itself as one of the major future technologies for processing and communicating information on any scale.

Information and Self-Organization: A Macroscopic Approach to Complex Systems

Tim Berners-Lee, Kurt Gödel, and Alan Turing are the pivotal pioneers who opened the door to the Information Revolution, beginning with the introduction of the computer in the 1950s and continuing today with the World Wide Web evolving into a resource with intelligent features and capabilities.

Taking the main questions posed by these thinkers—"What is decidable?" by Gödel, "What is machine intelligence?" by Turing, and "What is solvable on the Web?" by Berners-Lee—as jumping-off points, Thinking on the Web offers an incisive guide to just how much "intelligence" can be projected onto the Web.

Presenting Web intelligence from both philosophical and applied perspectives, Thinking on the Web explores the next generation of Web architecture, the Semantic Web, and takes a realistic look at the Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities resulting from this new layer of machine processing. It is divided into two sections, the first addressing Web intelligence and the second Web logic and language. The book builds from commonsense, real-world examples to some of the most cutting-edge issues surrounding the next generation of Web capabilities, including:

* Knowledge representation
* Computational complexity
* Semantic Web capabilities and limitations
* Web Ontology Languages (OWL)
* Semantic search

Throughout the book, a series of vignettes highlight important issues underpinning the Information Revolution, thereby mirroring the authors' attention to both the abstract and practical questions posed by a "thinking" Web. A unique guide to the next frontier of computing, Thinking on the Web offers both tech-savvy readers and serious computer science students a stimulating and practical view towards a smarter Web.

Thinking on the Web: Berners-Lee, Gödel and Turing

Graphics are great for exploring data, but how can they be used for looking at the large datasets that are commonplace today?

This book shows how to look at ways of visualizing large datasets, whether large in numbers of cases or large in numbers of variables or large in both. Data visualization is useful for data cleaning, exploring data, identifying trends and clusters, spotting local patterns, evaluating modeling output, and presenting results.

It is essential for exploratory data analysis and data mining. Data analysts, statisticians, computer scientists -- indeed, anyone who has to explore a large dataset of their own -- should benefit from reading this book.

New approaches to graphics are needed to visualize the information in large datasets and most of the innovations described in this book are developments of standard graphics. There are considerable advantages in extending displays which are well-known and well-tried, both in understanding how best to make use of them in your work and in presenting results to others. It should also make the book readily accessible for readers who already have a little experience of drawing statistical graphics. All ideas are illustrated with displays from analyses of real datasets and the authors emphasize the importance of interpreting displays effectively. Graphics should be drawn to convey information and the book includes many insightful examples.

Graphics of Large Datasets: Visualizing a Million