MightyGodKing reminds me that it's been far too long since I last watched Kayhryn Bigelow's Strange Days:

[...] Strange Days is great for reasons other than its often impressive precognitive abilities. It's got Angela Bassett in what I would argue is her definitive movie role and one of the baddest-ass female action hero roles ever, which by itself makes the entire catalogue of Angelina Jolie look wussy. It teaches us the secret of making Juliette Lewis tolerable, which is to have her sing rather than speak (seriously: the movie's major flaw is that Lewis' appeal to Ralph Fiennes is only evident when she's singing). It has a killer supporting cast: Sizemore, Michael Wincott, Vincent D'onofrio, William Fichtner, Glenn Plummer. It has an absolutely fantastic soundtrack that sounded in 1993 like what the future of music would sound like, and to an extent still does. It has one of the most beautiful and heartfelt endings I've ever seen in a movie, and begins with what I still hold up to be one of the greatest cold opens in film history (which, lest we forget, was filmed long before lightweight digital cameras were available, and thus had to be filmed entirely on full-sized Steadicams)

I'd have said that Tina Turner was Angela Bassett's definitive role, but would add that¹ I reckon that her definitive role should have been Storm. I've nothing against Halle Berry, but failing to cast Angela Bassett was a horrible missed opportunity for all concerned IMHO.

1. In common with 90% of geekdom. ↩

Assange versus Zuckerberg.

[Via Ghost in the Machine]

Muppet Doctor Who. And why not?

[Via The Medium is Not Enough]

Scott Eric Kaufman confirms that Frank Miller's Holy Terror is every bit as dreadful as the whole BatmanCostumed vigilante-versus-Osama bin Laden concept sounded back when he announced the project in 2006:

If you thought his sexism was shameless, you should see his xenophobia [...]

Chris Sims gathers the views of The (Fictional) 1% on #OccupyWallStreet:

Instead of paying taxes to support a corrupt system, I put my money where it does the most good: A utility belt full of sharp pieces of metal that I throw at the mentally ill. I am the 1%.

Bruce Wayne
(Alias) Batman

[Via Crooked Timber]

Tom Morris, on behalf of Wikimedia Commons: Ladies and gentleman, we got him.

Walt Disney's Sin City: the best trailer mashup I've seen in ages.

[Via Alyssa Rosenberg]

A Philosophy of the SUPER Wealthy (or the 1%).

[Via The Edge of the American West]

The Human Slingshot.

Three thoughts:

1. You couldn't pay me enough money to ride that thing!
2. Is it wrong to be mildly disappointed that the passenger remains attached to the slingshot throughout?¹
3. Throwing footballs at the slingshot's passenger is just not on.

[Via MetaFilter]

1. As opposed to continuing forwards and landing in a suitably padded receptacle a few fields over… ↩

John Jeremiah Sullivan and his wife had just moved into a rather nice house in Wilmington, North Carolina that they couldn't really afford when they received an invitation to share their new house with the cast of One Tree Hill:

Often I think of Greg. What an amazing guy. Truly amazing, as in he brought us into a maze. We only ever saw him once. I've never seen him since. And this is a small town – you see people. It was like they flew him in for this meeting. He was a big guy in a loose Hawaiian shirt. Goatee, sunglasses. Did he tell me he played rugby, or did he look exactly like someone I knew who played rugby? He sat across from us at our kitchen table, a thirteen-foot dark wood table that purportedly came in pieces from a Norwegian farmhouse, relic of nesting panic (long table, order). Greg sat across from us. He explained that they'd mostly be using only the front two rooms of the house. This was the place they mainly shot. The rest of our character's house had been re-created on a set, and the transitions would be made seamless in editing.

He laid out the deal they'd struck with the previous owners. We move you into a Hilton. Meals and per diem. We put everything back the way it was. We take Polaroids of your bookshelves to make sure we've put the books in order. That's how thorough we are. We even pay people to come in afterward and clean up. The house looks better than you left it.

We'll pay you $—— for an exterior shoot, $—— for interiors. The combined amount equaled our mortgage.

Yes, I think we can work something out.

"The front two rooms" – that phrase, in particular, we heard repeated: It has a poetic density to it, like "cellar door," so I remember. The front two rooms.

Michael Winslow performs Led Zeppelin's Whole Lotta Love on a Norwegian talk show.

Be sure to listen out for the guitar solo starting at the 1 minute 27 second mark…

[Via kottke.org]

When lightning strikes …

Be sure to take a look at picture #19: that's not something you see every day.

[Via Gary Farber]

Perhaps the most succinct, incisive critical evaluation of Torchwood yet, courtesy of Penny Arcade:

I'm not down on Torchwood in absolute terms. But it must be consumed with careful precision, like blowfish.

How to make sure your stolen iPhone gets returned. Heh…

Jotly cares about you:

Your life is exciting and worth sharing: everything with everyone! Everyone cares about everything you do. Now you can rate your entire life and share the experience.

Fortunately, this is just a spoof. Let's just hope it doesn't give anyone any bright ideas…¹

[Via Subtraction.com]

1. Who am I kidding? As you read this, there are half a dozen wannabe Zuckerbergs watching the Jotly video and hoping that their service is going to make it to market before someone else sews up the rate-everything market. ↩

The distribution of Nobel prizes by country¹ and year.

Whilst I understand the author's reasons for charting the host country of the winners, it'd be instructive to be able to overlay that data with further data sets showing the country of origin of the winners and the country they were in when they did the initial work that won them the award.² Not so much to try to get some credit for academics who went to the USA in search of funding and facilities, but rather to see to what extent there's a pattern of people making discoveries/coming up with new theories early in their career then moving to the US to exploit/elaborate upon their initial insight. The question this chart doesn't answer is whether the winners had to go to the US in order to make their breakthroughs, or whether it was making their initial breakthrough that brought them to the attention of the big US institutions.³

[Via Flowing Data]

1. Which means the country hosting the researchers at the time of their award, rather than the nationality of the recipients. ↩
2. At least for the science awards: the Literature and Peace awards are much more widely distributed, and I'd imagine that the career path of the recipients of those awards isn't much like that of the scientists and economists who gave the US the huge lead it holds in the chart. ↩
3. It'd all be something of a generalisation of course, with lots of room for individual decisions to have been skewed by factors beyond the issue of where research could best be carried out, but still potentially instructive. ↩

Evgeny Morozov finds Jeff Jarvis' latest paean to the wonders of the internet deeply flawed, and rather unserious:

Why are we so obsessed with privacy? Jarvis blames rapacious privacy advocates – "there is money to be made in privacy" – who are paid to mislead the "netizens," that amorphous elite of cosmopolitan Internet users whom Jarvis regularly volunteers to represent in Davos. On Jarvis's scale of evil, privacy advocates fall between Qaddafi's African mercenaries and greedy investment bankers. All they do is "howl, cry foul, sharpen arrows, get angry, get rankled, are incredulous, are concerned, watch, and fret." Reading Jarvis, you would think that Privacy International (full-time staff: three) is a terrifying behemoth next to Google (lobbying expenses in 2010: $5.2 million).

"Privacy should not be our only concern," Jarvis declares. "Privacy has its advocates. So must publicness." He compiles a long and somewhat tedious list of the many benefits of "publicness": "builds relationships," "disarms strangers," "enables collaboration," "unleashes the wisdom (and generosity) of the crowd," "defuses the myth of perfection," "neutralizes stigmas," "grants immortality … or at least credit," "organizes us," and even "protects us." Much of this is self-evident. Do we really need to peek inside the world of Internet commerce to grasp that anyone entering into the simplest of human relationships surrenders a modicum of privacy? But Jarvis has mastered the art of transforming the most trivial observations into empty business maxims.

Contrary to Jarvis' protestations, Morozov's review doesn't read to me as a personal attack – more a clinical, brutal dismantling of a collection of shallow cliches in support of the argument that we shouldn't worry about the way pretty much every commercial entity we deal with online seeks to hoover up as much personal information about our use of the internet as it can because the (somewhat nebulous) benefits outweigh the potential problems. So long as you respect your cultural norms, you'll be fine.

[Via The Awl]

I didn't think there was much you could to to improve upon John Carpenter's The Thing, but somehow it's been done.

Ladies and Gentlemen, pray silence for … John Carpenter's "The Thing": The Musical. So, so good.

[Via MetaFilter]

Bookmarked to geek out over later: Tangle – a JavaScript library for reactive documents.

"Reactive documents" is such a dull term: just go and play with the examples and you'll see how much fun could be had if your documents could act like spreadsheets.¹

[Via The Tao of Mac]

1. I realise that's not exactly an enticing prospect to some, but it's a a truly neat idea, nicely implemented. Honest! ↩

Adam Butcher's Internet Story:

A series of shocking events unfolds when a young man creates a public treasure hunt for his own amusement and a video blogger decides to pursue the riddles across country.

It's only nine minutes long, but well worth a look.

[Via Waxy.org Links/]