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Derek Jarman’s Wittgenstein

October 5th, 2007 · 1 comment or link to (permalink)

This is an odd but fascinating movie. Derek Jarman was often self indulgent as a film maker, but he innovated, and some of what he did was great. He directed the seminal punk movie, Jubilee, many of the Smiths’ pop promos and a beautifully filmed portrait of the painter Caravaggio. The self indulgent stuff included the simultaneously hyper camp and mind numbingly dull Sebastiane, which was entirely in Latin.

Wittgenstein is an interesting subject, being one of the few philosophers that wasn’t entirely self indulgent.

BBC 1 hr 11 min 53 sec Sep 21, 2007
philosophy.dude.googlepages.com

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Claude Shannon

September 25th, 2007 · comment or link to (permalink)

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Even if information theory doesn’t become the cornerstone of Physics, an outcome that now seems plausible, Shannon’s contribution to science is immeasurable. The encoding in this video itself is a result of Shannon’s ideas.

People are just starting to put up statues of Shannon, in future he will surely be remembered as the most important home grown scientist of the 20th Century.

Trivia: Shannon was a distant relative of Edison.

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