Kubrick, Scorsese, Coppola’s top 10 movies of all time. A lot of Fellini.
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Lore is available on Amazon instant video
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Kottke writes: “If Smashing Telly were still going, this would be perfect for it: every feature-length Andrei Tarkovsky film is available for viewing online for free.”
Indeed. See them all here.
For the record, Mirror is my favorite.
The BBC iPlayer link is here.
[Note this is not the creationist nonsense of the same name]
What Darwin didn’t know was exactly how right about natural selection he was.
This is a great documentary, not so much in terms of production, but solid content. It looks at the evolution of the concept of natural selection, from Darwin to evolutionary developmental biology, where the correspondence between the fossil and DNA records are exactly what prove the theory beyond all doubt.
The history of natural selection is the opposite of its popular perception, it is a story of slow acceptance in the scientific community culminating in total validation and proof rather than an antique concept which has raised recent doubts. Vapid but noisy objections emanating from the current rise of religious extremism are an irrelevance in terms of the time-line of evolution by natural selection as an idea and reasonable debate about it.
Who knew that without knowledge of genetics, Darwin’s humility in absence of absolute proof of his ideas, would allow him to insert in his last edition of the Origin of Species a nod to the possibility of Lamarckian evolution; that de Vries’ (false) idea of the origin of species as coming out of nowhere through single mutations almost replaced Darwin’s gradual selection after he died; or that for the 50th anniversary of his death, the Natural History Museum in London put on a show of Darwinian evolution that ignored the very idea of natural selection that makes it Darwinian in the first place?
Exotically named and unplaceable accented Dutch-Kiwi-Canadian-South-African biologist, Armand Marie Leroi, leads us through this history with the eventual triumph of natural selection. This culminates in the Neo Darwinian synthesis of evolution and genetics and the ‘evo-devo’ combination of evolutionary and developmental biology, which create an accurate view of the tree of life and realize the full grandeur of the mechanism that describes its growth – natural selection.
I have low tolerance for self indulgent artsyness and Tarkovsky films look superficially like they might be in this category, which is a shame because, as Tony the Tiger might say, they’re great. Nothing comes as close to a moving painting as a Tarkovsky film.
Here is a documentary where the director recounts his life and work.
The Crystal’s “He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)“, caused a storm of protest when it was released in 1962, and its ambiguous sentiment underlies ‘It Felt Like a Kiss’, Adam Curtis’ new film. It is a portrait of America between 1958 and 1965, a period when radical individualism emerged with superficial freedom and underlying entrapment. The film has been conceived of as much as a multi-media art piece, as a TV documentary, the BBC having given Curtis an unusual degree of freedom, possibly because they are not quite sure what to do with him.
Curtis is like the Malcolm Gladwell of film making, there is a nagging doubt that what is being argued isn’t science but the delivery is so masterful and thorough that its utterly compelling. It Felt Like a Kiss looks stunning from the trailer (look out for the full version), but perhaps its rhetoric will elicit similar mixed feelings as inspired the subject. Regardless, Curtis, who creates movies that are like the conspiracy theory films that clog Youtube (except that they produced with intelligence), will no doubt become a web celebrity when his next film, which deals with the Internet itself is released combining the meme like qualities of his format with a self-referential subject.
The BBC, in their infinite wisdom, have regionally restricted everything including trailers of It Felt Like A Kiss, so I am linking to the Guardian. A full version of the film is on Curtis’ web site, but is also UK only (I cannot watch it, because I’m in France).
Two new people will be helping me stoke Smashing Telly as editors. Their qualification? Both are great, independent minded, pickers and collectors and have something interesting to say. These seem to be paramount skills in this here Internet age. Both are living in New York, but that is co-incidence.
Jim Nachlin was brought up in a mini commune in a Soho Loft in the 70’s and learned to ride a bike in it because the streets weren’t safe. I like him because he is genuinely eccentric and insightful in a way that people who try to be never are – and because he only likes second hand things.
Hunter Gatherer is from Detroit and now also lives in New York. At first I though he was a brit because when he blogged about the UK it had insight that could only come from someone who had been brought up there. Now I realize that his perceptions came from watching TV. Anyone who has powers of observation like that would be a great contributor here.
[ NASA have restored the moon landing video. Slightly odd in a way, because part of the appeal of the live transmissions was their distinctive poor quality compared to the film flown back later. They were really far away and the crackle and hiss created an electrifying sense of excitement. ]
Update: One of the bizarre things about the Internet is that despite its promise of real time media, refreshing a text based web site is a lot less interesting than watching TV when it comes to breaking news. I was looking for something online which captured the excitement of the moon landings in real time, and not a Twitter feed. SMS is less dramatic than what we had 40 years ago. It turns out that Jason Kottke has created a fantastic site which is showing the moon landings as they happened 40 years later to the second. a simple a powerful idea: watch it here.
Why does it matter that we went to the moon?
Did we really ‘come in peace’ by sending people on a purposeless voyage riding incredibly expensive, Nazi designed, bomb rockets, in an inter-empire pissing contest, while millions starved?
Yes.
Human beings are hard wired to murder each other. We are tribal, hairless apes whose aggressive tendencies, when transferred from the sticks and stones of the ancient African savannah to modern industrialized nations, threaten the atomic slaughter of millions with a single phone call. And despite our species-wide back slapping about human capacity for caring, we are selective about who we care for. Just as we feed dogs dozens of other mammals during their lifetime, but would go to jail if we fed a dog to one of them, our capacity for empathy is selective and over-rated. Many of the people that suffer daily in poor regions have been treated worse a pet dog; they are like the food we give to our pets, something we don’t think about because they are physically distant.
Sending people to the moon helps quell the most egregious effects of our instincts. It is the most notable thing hairless apes have done since shedding hair because it places our notion of drive and purpose outside of the planet, and therefore allows anyone on the planet to share equally. It symbolizes our ability to channel aggression to conquer space rather than each other and a creates a tangible purpose that is independent of terrestrial geography.
If space missions allow people to behave as one looking out, from some perspectives, they are all that we have done looking in from outside. An alien staring at our planet for the last 4 billion years from the remote vacuum of space might see nothing more than the silent blip blip as a handful of people left earth and went to the nearest ball of rock and back, more than a generation ago. And 40 years later – nothing.
That blip blip, created all of the challenge of war, all of the excitement of weapons and all of the triumph of victory – without the killing, something that resonates on a personal, sentimental level.
When I was 3, my grandfather met Neil Armstrong and gave me his autograph. It started a lifelong obsession with space technology which gave me the same instinctive visceral kick as toy gun. I now have an 18 month old son and I’ll be able to give him something other than toy soldiers to play with and something more to aim for than those blips.
What could possibly be more important?
If you can overcome the fact that Niall Ferguson seems to have slowed his metabolism to alter his rate of speaking to avoid any exertion whatsoever in the summer heat that this talk was delivered, then it’s interesting – interesting because it is dull and obvious but wrong.
Darwinian Natural selection takes a minute to grasp and a lifetime to misunderstand, as Ferguson demonstrates – his premise is that markets might be Darwinian. Perhaps the reason he is appears so cautious, is that accepting that greed driven markets are Darwinian is one step away from politically unacceptable Social Darwinism.
Maybe it was for this reason that Paul Kedrosky originally put up the clip with the disclaimer: “I’m skittish about the over-application of neo-Darwinian thinking to everything in sight , but this talk by Niall Ferguson is worth a look”
Since neo-Darwinism refers to a strict interpretation of Darwin’s exact description of Evolution, Niall Ferguson’s market evolution is nothing of the sort – it could equally be saying that markets are Lamarckian and not Darwinian, since successful market strategies are passed on during the lifetime of those who develop them.
This is the problem with applying Darwin to everything. Clearly all order is ultimately self-emergent, it is a meta law that must therefore apply to every collection of interacting systems but unless you describe the mechanism you aren’t saying much.
For example, Darwinism requires a finite environment (creating the constraints for competition), mutation (to create new things to select) and inheritance (to create a cycle for rules of selection to apply). The rules of selection themselves are defined by the interaction of a specific system and specific environment. Capitalist markets are based upon growth markets where supply and demand are elastic and where advantage comes from invention – or ideas. The genes are memes and there is no proof yet that memetic Darwinism is more than analogy.
Ferguson is surprised that when he showed a slide of Dawkins and Gould to an audience of bankers at a conference organized by Goldman Sachs, not a single person could identify them. However, Ferguson may be able to recognize evolutionists and evolution in the colloquial sense but not Darwin and his theory. Understanding the exact mechanism of evolution is the contribution that Darwin made and is often misunderstood because the idea of natural selection is so easy to grasp in a general form.
That markets are Darwinian in the colloquial sense of survival of the fittest, is obvious but unfashionable. That markets are truly Darwinian means that they are not Lamarckian and that a business advantage cannot be transferred during the lifetime of the system that Darwinian rules are operating on – that would be remarkable. Just as there is some debate about whether memes are really Darwinian, its not clear that markets are, but not for the reasons that Ferguson argues.
[ I suspect that memes are in fact really Darwinian and that the way that the Lamarckian problem is removed is to figure out what the equivalent of an organism is for memes.
Organisms themselves are persistent features which remain after all their constituent molecules are replaced through eating and pooping. In this way, organisms are actually like ideas or rather a specific message containing ideas.
In the generalized world of any type of idea or information, memes are ideas contained in messages and memetic organisms are a specific example of a message, for example in the binary encoding of a computer, the pen marks in a letter or a business transaction.
The life cycle that makes this non Lamarckian is the successful or unsuccessful application or transmission of an idea or collection of inseparable ideas from one message encoding to another. This could be from a computer to a print out or even a collection of neurons in someone’s head, in every case the message idea is contained within a new message medium.
Reproduction of animals through transfer of an idea of how to build that animal (contained in its DNA) from one animal to its offspring is a specific case of memetic transfer. ]
via Paul Kedrosky
My hobby is Physics, specifically information theory. Not a popular pastime to have, perhaps, but my Dad is a physicist and the interest rubs off.
One thing I’ve learned is that to get simple explanations for things, counter to popular belief it’s better to get the view of the best physicists than the best communicators. Richard Feynman was both.
There are many Feynman clips around, but Bill Gates has spent significant time and some of his fortune tracking down rights for a famous series of 7 lectures by Feynman at Cornell University in 1964, called the Messenger lectures. They have been put up for free at the Microsoft Research Web site, as part of project Tuva, with full transcripts and interactive features.
The extras are thorough and useful for this type of subject matter, but the format is very like an old school interactive CD-ROM, where the interface re-invents the wheel and omits standard functionality such as the ability to embed.
[ BTW – these Microsoft Silverlight powered videos were almost impossible to watch for me, due to stopping and starting. Like the bad old days before Youtube used flash embeds and web based video suddenly seemed good enough. Silverlight is, in theory solid, so what’s up here? Is it just me? ]