This is the funniest movie I've seen in a long time.

"Little Miss Sunshine" doesn’t look particularly ambitious, in terms of either its narrative or its function-over-form visual style. But tucked in between all the hurt and the jokes, the character development and the across-the-board terrific performances is a surprisingly sharp look at contemporary America, one that sets the metaphor of the stage (and, by extension, competition) against the cherished myth of the open road.

You should definitely check this out.

Little Miss Sunshine

This movie seems worth seeing.

“Factotum” presents the age-old struggle of man against mediocrity. Henry Chinaski (Mr. Dillon), Bukowski’s familiar alter ego, is the heroic survivor of countless benders, brawls, rejection slips, crazy women and soul-killing, mind-deadening jobs. Or, as he puts it so nicely in the novel: “How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed” — there is, naturally, a scatological dimension to this list — “brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?”

Factotum

In a recent essay posted on the Web site Edge.org, Lanier disparages the recent spate of efforts that rely on conscious collaboration (like the anyone-can-participate online reference work Wikipedia) or passive polling (the so-called meta sites like Digg, which draw on user response to rank news articles and blog postings). To Lanier, these represent an alarming decision—rejecting individual expression and creativity to become part of a faceless mob. To emphasize the enormity of this movement, Lanier titled his essay with a fearsome moniker: "Digital Maoism."

Lanier has done us a service by warning that the pedestrian preferences of the hive mind all too often overwhelm the truly essential. But let's face it—Chairman Mao would have hated the Internet.

Poking a Stick Into The 'Hive Mind' | Steven Levy on Jaron Lanier

From Publishers Weekly: Starred Review. Emsley (Vanity, Vitality, and Virility: The Science Behind the Products You Love to Buy) hits a bull's eye in this fascinating, wonderfully readable forensic history of five deadly chemicals (mercury, arsenic, antimony, lead and thallium) and their starring role in that most intoxicating drama of pure evil: murder. A deeply knowledgeable chemist (he's science writer in residence at Cambridge University) with a gift for making accessible the dry and bewilderingly arcane, Emsley's at his best in case studies of infamous poisoners and their victims. During the reign of James I of England, for instance, the poet Thomas Overbury, having fallen out of royal favor, was administered three fatal doses of mercury, only to survive. For his stubbornness he was administered a fourth dose—by enema—and finally succumbed. Mary Bateman, the "Yorkshire Witch," was equally unlucky. Convicted in 1809 of poisoning a client, Mary was hanged and her corpse skinned so pieces could be sold as charms. Not all the incidents are in the past: Emsley also discusses contemporary environmental poisoning from mercury and Saddam Hussein's use of thallium sulfate on his enemies. Fanatical devotees of the macabre might thumb past sections devoted to less sensational history. But the general reader will not be disappointed: each of these deadly toxins was at one time or another promoted for its unique health or beauty benefits.

The Elements of Murder: A History of Poison

This book explores the development of the video game as a new form of interactive media and a template for future modes of entertainment. While television programs and movies are predominantly passive enterprises, video games engage the audience and provide not only audio-visual stimulation but also an enriching interaction that creates a heightened sense of immersion. Through a detailed discussion of gameplay and game design principles, Natkin explores the nature of this interaction and its impact on the entertainment industry. He explains the developmental process behind game design and the new concepts of narration and entertainment it has introduced. He then considers the future of gameplay with its potential for developing new means of artistic expression and its liability to be abused as an outlet for propaganda and coercion.

Video Games and Interactive Media: A Glimpse at New Digital Entertainment

Tolkien's first job, on returning home from World War I, was as an assistant on the staff of the OED. He later said that he had "learned more in those two years than in any other equal part of his life." The Ring of Words reveals how his professional work on the Oxford English Dictionary influenced Tolkien's creative use of language in his fictional world.

Here three senior editors of the OED offer an intriguing exploration of Tolkien's career as a lexicographer and illuminate his creativity as a word user and word creator. The centerpiece of the book is a wonderful collection of "word studies" which will delight the heart of Ring fans and word lovers everywhere. The editors look at the origin of such Tolkienesque words as "hobbit," "mithril, "Smeagol," "Ent," "halfling," and "worm" (meaning "dragon"). Readers discover that a word such as "mathom" (anything a hobbit had no immediate use for, but was unwilling to throw away) was actually common in Old English, but that "Mithril," on the other hand, is a complete invention (and the first "Elven" word to have an entry in the OED). And fans of Harry Potter will be surprised to find that "Dumbledore" (the name of Hogwart's headmaster) was a word used by Tolkien and many others (it is a dialect word meaning "bumblebee").

Few novelists have found so much of their creative inspiration in the shapes and histories of words. Presenting archival material not found anywhere else, The Ring of Words offers a fresh and unexplored angle on the literary achievements of one of the world's most famous and best-loved writers.

The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary

In An Engine, Not a Camera, Donald MacKenzie argues that the emergence of modern economic theories of finance affected financial markets in fundamental ways. These new, Nobel Prize-winning theories, based on elegant mathematical models of markets, were not simply external analyses but intrinsic parts of economic processes.

Paraphrasing Milton Friedman, MacKenzie says that economic models are an engine of inquiry rather than a camera to reproduce empirical facts. More than that, the emergence of an authoritative theory of financial markets altered those markets fundamentally. For example, in 1970, there was almost no trading in financial derivatives such as "futures." By June of 2004, derivatives contracts totaling $273 trillion were outstanding worldwide. MacKenzie suggests that this growth could never have happened without the development of theories that gave derivatives legitimacy and explained their complexities.

MacKenzie examines the role played by finance theory in the two most serious crises to hit the world’s financial markets in recent years: the stock market crash of 1987 and the market turmoil that engulfed the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management in 1998. He also looks at finance theory that is somewhat beyond the mainstream--chaos theorist Benoit Mandelbrot’s model of “wild” randomness. MacKenzie’s pioneering work in the social studies of finance will interest anyone who wants to understand how America’s financial markets have grown into their current form.

An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets

Three years ago, the artist Clifford Ross unveiled the R1, a still camera of his own design and construction—a Rube Goldberg assemblage of cadged and commissioned parts. Although it used film, it captured far more detail than any other camera, digital or not; the resolution was five hundred times as high as that of your run-of-the-mill digital point-and-click. In Ross's giant landscapes, you can make out the woodgrains on barn shingles thousands of feet away, and see mountain trails seven miles off. The pictures seem to be made not of pixels but of vision itself.

The subsequent curiosity and admiration of scientists turned Ross, who had previously made abstract paintings and photographs of ocean waves, into a congregator of technical minds—a high-res den leader—and before long he began conceiving a successor to the R1, which would draw on the expertise of his new genius friends, and, of course, enable him to make art.

Behold the R2.

Bad-Ass Camera

The report of the 9/11 Commmission is now available as a comic book. Check it out.

"Never before have I seen a non-fiction book as beautifully and compellingly written and illustrated as The 9/11 Report, A Graphic Adaptation. I cannot recommend it too highly. It will surely set the standard for all future works of contemporary history, graphic or otherwise, and should be required reading in every home, school and library."
     --Stan Lee

I ran across this at the bookstore yesterday. It seems well done.

Washington Post ran a story on it back in July:

The book condenses the nearly 600-page federal report released by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States to fewer than 150 pages, and the creators say they hope their book will help attract young readers and others who might be overwhelmed by the original document. With sans-serif captions, artist renderings, charts and sound-describing words such as "Whooom!" and "R-rrumble," the adaptation recounts the attacks with parallel timelines of the four hijacked planes.

The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation

With synergy, all the computers on your desktop form a single virtual screen. You use the mouse and keyboard of only one of the computers while you use all of the monitors on all of the computers. You tell synergy how many screens you have and their positions relative to one another. Synergy then detects when the mouse moves off the edge of a screen and jumps it instantly to the neighboring screen. The keyboard works normally on each screen; input goes to whichever screen has the cursor.

In this example, the user is moving the mouse from left to right. When the cursor reaches the right edge of the left screen it jumps instantly to the left edge of the right screen.

You can arrange screens side-by-side, above and below one another, or any combination. You can even have a screen jump to the opposite edge of itself. Synergy also understands multiple screens attached to the same computer.

Running a game and don't want synergy to jump screens? No problem. Just toggle Scroll Lock. Synergy keeps the cursor on the same screen when Scroll Lock is on. (This can be configured to another hot key.)

Do you wish you could cut and paste between computers? Now you can! Just copy text, HTML, or an image as you normally would on one screen then switch to another screen and paste it. It's as if all your computers shared a single clipboard (and separate primary selection for you X11 users). It even converts newlines to each computer's native form so cut and paste between different operating systems works seamlessly. And it does it all in Unicode so any text can be copied.

Do you use a screen saver? With synergy all your screen savers act in concert. When one starts they all start. When one stops they all stop. And, if you require a password to unlock the screen, you'll only have to enter a password on one screen.

If you regularly use multiple computers on one desk, give synergy a try. You'll wonder how you ever lived without it.

Synergy