It’s a little silly to be writing a third post about Avatar, particularly after seeing Up in the Air over the holiday and regaining some perspective on what movies can actually do.  But this is about technology!

After Avatar we sat around Rocket Bar, snapping the 3D glasses in half and trying to recreate the day we spent screwing around with polarizing filters in middle school physics class (though more drunkenly this time). As with all 3D-via-2D-surface technology, different images need to be delivered to each eye, and since the glasses weren’t the stupid red/blue combo from days of yore, we figured that they were doing so by delivering left-eye and right-eye frames in different polarities of light, with correspondingly different polarizing filters to keep the signals distinct.  Combining the two filters ought to have let us filter out all light.  Or so the classic experiment goes.

But it didn’t work!  Well, maybe it did, a little.  When you put the lenses in front of each other and rotated one 90 degrees, there was a noticeable dimming, but not the total blackout that I expected.

Today a gentleman named Daniel posted some information to the HacDC list explaining what’s going on: the light isn’t linearly polarized, it’s circularly polarized.  I can’t claim to really understand this, but the relevant wikipedia page contains a diagram that almost fools me into thinking I do.  More from Daniel:

… circular polarization is a lot like linear polarization and unless you’re viewing circularly polarized light it IS a linear polarizing filter. However if you’re viewing circularly polarized light then the benefit over linear-only is that you can turn your head from side to side without losing the effect (not real clear on how this works). RealD’s breakthrough was in coming up with a cheap way to combine the linear filter with a quarter wave plate in one package without costly lamination, so they’ve brought the more advanced circular technology into the mainstream by making it affordable. However, there is additional cost in that the screen has to be coated in aluminum paint or something that will reflect the light while maintaining polarization.

Interesting!  The RealD wikipedia page fills in some more blanks.  There are really only four parts to the system: a high-end digital projector that can manage crazily high frame rates and which your theater has hopefully already bought; the aforementioned polarity-preserving coating on the screen;  a polarizing filter that sits in front of the projector, rapidly flipping between directions of circular polarization as right eye/left eye frames pop out of the projector; and the glasses, which are just specially-treated plastic.  So there you have it.

What may be even more interesting than RealD’s tech is how this will all play out in the home theater space.  Matt told me that he’d spoken with his dad, who’s a screenwriter (among other things), and that the industry is extremely excited about the prospects of Avatar because people can only get the 3D experience in the theater — and anything that can prop up the perpetually-ailing (but completely essential-to-the-industry! for reasons of  history, vanity and stupidity) theater business will be very welcome indeed.  So it’ll be nice to have that precious 3D magic bottled up in the theaters, ensuring a steady stream of fat-walleted rubes.

Except, of course, that the Avatar videogame, which you will play at home, is going to be 3D.  Actually, this is technology that’s been out for a while.  Rather than fancy alternating-frame polarization, which a normal TV can’t manage, the viewer wears glasses with LCD shutters that snap on and off to control which frames each of her eyes sees.

This kind of setup doesn’t appear to be particularly cheap at the moment — you need some wireless syncing stuff in there too, not just amped-up solar calculator technology — but it’s certainly not unattainably expensive, and you can bet that the price will drop tremendously when someone begins pushing this as an essential home theater amenity and not just a niche gamer accessory.  For all I know the Avatar game will drop the price considerably — I imagine it’ll be shipping SKUs that include the glasses.

And at that point, it’s hard to imagine that the industry won’t shoot itself in the foot, reenabling piracy when it foolishly decides to buy whatever DRM snake oil it’s being pushed by tech company salespeople to excuse the lucrative sale of Blu-Ray 3D discs.   I mean, sure, in-theater cam work would be more difficult with a 3D film, but this stuff is getting distributed digitally anyway.  I suspect we’ll see 3D torrents within 8 months of the first home theater-compatible 3D movie release.  Then we’ll see some codec adjustments to make the formats more space-efficient, and then we’ll be back at the status quo.  And then, as the joke must inevitably go: on to Smell-O-Vision/the iTablet/whatever, the new savior of the film industry.  I just hope this silly 3D cycle completes its run before I’m forced to buy any stupidly 3D-capable audiovisual equipment.

Well, the holiday break wasn’t quite the triumphant return to blogging/exercise/filial-website-development that I’d hoped.  It was plenty enjoyable, though, with an awfully nice stretch of time spent in Cazenovia and what has to be considered a successful New Year’s — certainly it was an improvement over last year’s edition, if only because the bodily fluids spilled at this party were merely couch-threatening rather than life-threatening.  Honestly, though, even the Mystery Puker acquitted himself well: that semi-comatose young man and his Brother With The Enigmatic Accent left sheepishly and cooperatively, but not before handing Charles $60 for “cleaning costs”/hungover New Year’s Day dinner.  Well done! If you asked Emily Post about the best way to go about regurgitating in a stranger’s house, that is exactly what she’d tell you to do.

This year the special Party MVP award goes to Dave and the Governess, who were there at the front lines and quick to deal with all the unpleasantness.  Someday, when life becomes more like the Lord of the Rings movies I watched over the weekend, there will be alabaster statues of you, next to the ones of Courtney, Radley, Becks, Ficke, and all the other New Year’s Party heroes from the Fourth Age of Men.

As for the Christmas holiday — well, I was hopelessly, embarrassingly spoiled.  The two most egregious single pieces of loot: a new Weller soldering iron from my sister and her boyfriend and, from Emily, a Bosch jigsaw that I’m hesitant to look up on Amazon lest I find myself horrified at how much she spent.  I’m pretty excited to start making (hopefully progressively-less-) ugly wooden boxes once the temperature in the garage becomes tolerable.  In addition to those I also received really lovely, thoughtful gifts from Emily’s mom and sister, my own mother, my dad, and really everyone who puts up with my nonsense.  I am feeling quite grateful and more than a little sheepish about it all.

Via Yglesias and Spencer, io9 makes the race-based case against the movie: When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like “Avatar”? It’s a good piece, and worth reading.

It’s a lousy headline, though. First, the answer is obvious. Second, while I think this is a valid reading of Avatar and movies like it, I think it makes some unfortunate implications about the motivations of the people making these films. The self-congratulatory white guilt narrative discussed emerges from narrative necessity as least as much as it arises from an incoherent, subconscious and pervasive sense of racial culpability. Put another way: it’s not just liberal guilt! It’s professional laziness, too!

Consider an alternate explanation for the movie’s setup. We’re writing a script! We’ve gotten an impressive rendering farm online and built these neat cameras and the crew jackets are all printed up, but there are still a few nagging details to work out before we start rolling. For instance, we need a protagonist around which the action will revolve. He or she needs to have an arc. And the opposing sides of the central conflict need to be drawn in stark Manichaean terms — the innocents need to seem super-innocent — because we’re not trying to make That Kind of Movie. When things blow up at the end, we want to audience to be happy!

All of this can lead us directly to a colonial narrative, and it can do so without anyone trying to atone for white privilege at all. It also explains Romeo Must Die perfectly well, for example. And The Transporter. And Total Recall (though admittedly that movie added some pleasantly confusing recursion). And The Professional. And really just about every other action movie, where a protagonist recognizes his complicity in an evil enterprise and then assumes an unrealistically prominent (and violent!) role in resolving the central injustice.

When you draw boundaries between factions along planetary lines, it makes sense to insert race as a dimension in your story. And once that happens, I agree that an insulting and naive sort of primitivism is sure to follow — something that Reihan gets at here (though there’s a hell of a lot of projection going on in that piece — the movie says nothing about half the claims that Reihan makes about the Na’vi).

But I think that the strictures of dumb action movies are what really determines the shape of Avatar. Sure, Cameron’s only too happy to toss in some junk about Iraq, and the environment, and race. Again, the white guilt narrative isn’t an incorrect reading. But I think it is a mistake to assign it outsize importance — if you do so you wind up in weird places, like the blog post quoted by that io9 piece that essentially complains about Cameron not casting an ethnic Na’vi actor for his lead role.  I mean, you do realize you were wearing 3D glasses, right?

So, look: the conservatives have a point: this movie does not present an even-handed consideration of the case for rapacious, imperial, homicidal, psychotic resource extraction. Probably there are some really cool consumer electronics that were made possible by burning down the ancestral homeland of that indigenous population!  Not once does James Cameron’s script discuss the boost in Na’vi GDP made possible by the incineration of their psychic soul tree thing.  For shame.

Seriously, though: any conservatives who object to this movie are automatically giving up the game.  Are you really taking offense at a polemic against murdering natives and destroying the environment for naked greed? Really: you think your ideological program stands in opposition to the idea of not killing innocent people and stealing their land?  I mean, if that’s the war you want to fight, be my guest.  We can deal with that.  But I sort of thought we had called a truce and agreed that we were all trying to figure out a positive-sum way to reconcile our unbearable hippie nonsense with your corporate overlords’ ruthlessness.  We were all going to drink Coca-cola in idyllic natural settings, no?  I guess I just think it might be better for you to sit this one out.

But whatever. All that aside, it really was an awesome movie, in the original sense of the word.  A lot of comparisons are being made to a lot of different movies, but I think the most relevant one is The Fifth Element. Like Jim Cameron, Luc Besson made a bunch of great movies, then revisited a story he had been mulling since before he could conceive of decent stories.  The Fifth Element was a visually arresting, relentlessly kinetic and occasionally emotionally-compelling spectacle, and because of all that it didn’t really matter that its core was totally risible Captain Planet bullshit.

I think the same can be said of Avatar.  This movie would be better without narration. It would probably be better without dialogue!  But by saying that I don’t mean to imply that it’s trading solely in effects-driven flash rather than story.  It’s just that the story is so vast, so archetypal, that the specifics don’t matter, and are consequently allowed to devolve into camp (really: unobtainium?).  THIS IS A BIG FUCKING MOVIE.  That’s all I can really say about it with any sense of confidence.  That, and: go see it.  Wear the stupid glasses.  You’ll like it.

Yglesias responds to Michael Wolff’s ruminations on Chuck Schumer calling a flight attendant a bitch:

…by eliding the term “bitch” he manages to completely avoid the subject of sexism, which I think is at the core of the complaint here. But the term is a pure contentless gender-slur. It’s like you’re saying “I disagree with what you’re doing and also you’re a woman which is a bad thing to be!!!!!!!!”

Even if a woman is doing something legitimately bad, it’s no more appropriate to insult her with that term than it is to break out a racial slur just because a guy you have a legitimate beef with happens to be black. That’s the issue here.

Disclaimer: “bitch” is not a term I like nor one that I use. When I hear other people use it, I think less of them.

But I’m not sure that what Yglesias says above is correct. I wrote something about this years ago, but it came out hopelessly muddled, so let’s try again.

The difficulty here is in figuring out what we find objectionable about the word. It’s easy to become confused by the fact that pejorative language is reserved for unpleasant situations, and give in to the temptation to think that wishing away the word will also make those situations disappear. Yglesias understands that this is stupid way of thinking: people will continue to get upset with one another. And although it’s obvious that we should all strive to be pleasant human beings, there’s nothing necessarily unjust about expressing your strong dislike for someone. Rather, it’s the act of denigration-via-classification embodied by these terms that makes them so odious. This is also correct, I think.

But the comparison to racist language is problematic. It seems to me that as a society we’ve pretty much decided that acknowledging racial differences is inappropriate except in very specific circumstances. It sounds a little weird when you put it that way, but I think it’s essentially what we’ve done and that it’s basically a good idea — a custom that pushes human behavior in positive directions.

It’s not clear to me that a similar societal decision has been made with respect to gender differences. I say this primarily because most people continue to think it’s fine to use gendered pronouns. And if that’s all right, I don’t necessarily see an inherent problem with gendered pejoratives (though certainly there can be circumstances surrounding their use that are profoundly problematic — the practical case against the word “bitch” is quite strong, I think). Heroine/hero, she/he, bitch/dick. There’s a low-resolution take on the continuum. The fact that only the last pair would strike most people as objectionable makes me think that we’re facing the situation I talked about above: wishing that people wouldn’t get angry with one another and use harsh language. That’s a fine thing to wish for, but I don’t think it’s got much to do with social justice.

The other possibility, of course, is that we should be objecting to gendered pronouns with positive or neutral affect (e.g. heroine, she) as well, just the same as we don’t use different words for valorous people of different races. I think this is probably correct, but I also think it’s probably not a position that most of the people engaging in this debate would find appealing enough on an intuitive level to embrace. Come to think of it, resistance to the social project of eliminating gendered pronouns could easily be the thing that eventually earns the “cultural conservative” trophy for my generation (take heart, though, future young people: we’ll be dead before you know it).

A few weeks ago Sara mentioned to me that she was enjoying a band called Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros. I would’ve been sold on the strength of the name alone; a friend’s recommendation was more than enough to make me resolve to give them a listen.

It took me a couple of weeks, though (and an additional tweet from Matt) before I got around to it. To be honest, I’m not sure I’m a fan of the album. I find large parts of it to be a bit boring; other parts remind me — for reasons I can’t quite identify — of the sort of bloated, Fleetwood-Mac-ian WASH-FM rock that echoes off receptionist desks all over this town.

But “Home” — goddamn, what a song.

Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros – Home

There are a lot of things to like about it. I could’ve been counted as a fan on the basis of the Morricone-isms alone. And I’m a complete sucker for the female vocal, which has the sort of breathy, stretching-after-a-nap timbre that only happens when a really cute girl picks up a serious cigarette habit.

But more than that, it’s an amazing recorded performance between the two singers, one that evokes a genre tradition but invigorates it with a sense of utter, honest vulnerability. I haven’t heard anything like it in a while.

If someone stuck you in a studio, said “We’re rolling, try to sound in love“, could you do it this well? I’m left completely charmed, slightly wary, and unsure whether to believe in the singers’ talents or (god) their love. I may vaguely hate them for making me write that sentence, but I can’t deny that the sound they make together is miraculous.

There’s nothing quite like sorting through resumes to make you feel like an untalented cliche.

I can’t even play drums!

Earlier this week my old boss, JP, sent me a note saying that the full-text RSS script I’d written was being shut down.  EchoDitto was nice enough to continue hosting it on their servers, but it had been consuming an increasing share of resources, and finally it needed to be killed.  Sad.

Then, horrifying.  JP had mentioned it idly, but until I saw the Google Alert for this I didn’t quite realize what had been going on.  The self-described black-hat search engine optimization crowd — the folks who assemble sites peppered with ads that are designed to attract search engine traffic, aka “link farms” — had been using my script to steal other people’s content and republish it on their own sites.  Using this sort of genuine content helped them snag traffic more effectively than they could with the gibberish that you sometimes see in spam, so they were sorry to see the script go.

Well, I appreciate the attention, but it’s not exactly what I had in mind for my work when I released it.  So I explained the situation, and bid them adieu:

I was at least somewhat aware of this danger, and consequently didn’t open-source the code (thank goodness).  It was still a bit of a shock to see the reality of what I’d wrought, though.

I still believe what I wrote in that initial post: it’s pointless for online publishers to try to control how their readers consume content.  If you wish to publish digitally, you need to accept the realities that come with doing so.  Pretending otherwise is just going to inconvenience your readers and slow your business’s necessary evolution.  Prolonging that process seems likely to increase the painfulness of the process, not eliminate it.

For those curious, the algorithm was exactly what many in comments had guessed.  I used some regular expressions to build a hierarchical structure representing all the <div> and <td> elements in each page associated with an RSS item.  These tags are the ones most often used to provide a page’s layout, and the full text of an entry can usually be found in a single instance of such a container.  I then traversed this structure, looking for the text excerpt from the original RSS item.  Once found, the rest of that container’s contents could be pulled out.  It’s a simple idea, though the realities of HTML — and the difficulty of preserving byte offsets between a sanitized working copy and the original — made the actual implementation require quite a bit more cleverness (and caching) than it may sound like.

The result worked pretty well. Still, there were a few problems with the approach.  For one thing, comments were frequently included in the same container as the main entry.  For another, the script would fail if the RSS entry text was a summary of the item rather than an excerpt. I think that both of these are surmountable problems: a better approach would examine the “textiness” of each container using a variety of scoring metrics.  Something similar could be used for detecting the start of comments (which tend to be peppered with timestamps, quotations of the original text, and occur after a big <h[1-6]> containing the word “comment”).  I took a stab at a new, Pythonic implementation using Adrian Holovaty’s templatemaker and a few other tools, but a lack of immediate success (and much higher computational demands than the original script) made the project fall by the wayside.  Now that I know how it might be used, I’m even less likely to pick it back up.

But I’d still love to see my algorithm adapted by the people who make RSS readers, and would be happy to talk to any interested and qualified parties about making that happen.  Those SEO morons don’t appear to be particularly technically proficient — I’m not too worried about them managing to steal content via a client-side app (though certainly some thought should be given to the matter before giving the store away, say via Applescript).

If you ask me, this New York Times article is fairly asinine.  Is our collective decision to exempt the nonprofit sector from taxation a good idea? Well, I don’t know.  I think you can make a pretty good case that it isn’t — that the sorts of problems that charities try to solve would be more constructively handled with coordinated state action, and that there’s not much of a reason at all for exempting various types of membership organizations from taxation.

But the article really doesn’t get into any of that.  Instead it just talks about the large number of nonprofits, rather than discussing where the big tax expenditures actually lie.  Then they throw in some anecdotes about charities for donkey rescue and sending clown noses to soldiers, which, ha ha, sound pretty stupid to readers that don’t care about donkeys or clown supplies (but probably do care about various tax-exempt universities with big endowments and profitable sports programs (also tax-free) that’ve still been raising tuition much faster than inflation).

At any rate, we’re working on the nonprofit sector over at Subsidyscope, and will have more to say about it soon. But for now, suffice it to say that health care and education is where the money is in the nonprofit sector.  Podunk institutes and foundations that seem to be put together to secure prestige for their organizers more than to do good works might offend our sensibilities, but they’re not really costing our government all that much money.

There’s an interesting conversation taking place on the HacDC email list right now about the use of auction sniping tools — software that places your bid at the absolute last minute.  It’s most game theory, but there are some psychological aspects to this as well (your evaluation of this ratio will likely vary with your own prejudices*).

Anyway, it’s exactly the sort of thing that someone should write a smart blog post about.

Not me, though! I have to catch a bus.

* FWIW, my anecdotal experience is that sniping tools have sometimes — but rarely — helped me get great deals.