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"Researchers now spend a lot of time trying to understand universal moral intuitions. Genes are not merely selfish, it appears. Instead, people seem to have deep instincts for fairness, empathy and attachment." Man, I'd certainly like to think so. In any case, "neural Buddhism" has a nice ring to it. … 0 This impressively detailed and articulated toy WALL•E almost makes me wish I were five years old again and still really into robots in an uncomplicated way. … 1 The Iron Giant begins. (I suppose this could also augur the T-1000, but I prefer to take the optimistic speculative-fictive view.) [via] … 0 "Remember when we thought pinstripes were cool? Remember when we thought Members Only was cool? Man, what we were smoking?" … 0 I find this commercial strangely charming. … 0  It's an interesting suggestion. I don't know that much about actual autism, aside from mild kidding over the years concerning various friends or myself being "autistic" about certain things, or the occasional Aspergerian aroma wafting off the behavior of an acquaintance, but I could certainly foresee a corporate/industrial environment where such spectrum conditions, wherein some skills are lacking but others are markedly enhanced, find specialized applications. It could be argued that those opportunities and applications already exist, albeit not explicitly so labeled—for now. … 0 "When a social norm collides with a market norm, the social norm goes away for a long time. In other words, social relationships are not easy to reestablish. Once the bloom is off the rose—once a social norm is trumped by a market norm—it will rarely return." … 0 Long overdue: this site now has a unified RSS feed. The various subsections always had their own separate feeds, but now you can just subscribe to a single aggregation. Thanks, Yahoo! Pipes. … 0 Just plain sick. … 0 What pains me about this Google April Fool's wank is that I actually wish it were true. … 0 (I'm not really compelled/inclined to update STREAM much these days, but SCENE and SOURCE remain current. Just FYI. XYZ PDQ. ETC.) … 0 The trailer for Bratz makes me want to have an abortion, and that's not even physically possible. … 1 I like those new Trojan when-pigs-fly commercials, even though they sort of give off a creepy Looking for Mr. Goodbar-by-way-of-Jean-Pierre Jeunet vibe. … 0 Yes I love my iPhone and want to merge with it and make cyborg babies. … 3 "This is something I think Ridley Scott does better than almost any other director. Whether he's shooting a fantastical movie like Alien (1979), or a realistic one like Black Hawk Down (2001), you always know where you are in the movie's physical space. Blade Runner is unmatched by any other sci-fi film in terms of feeling like you're in an environment you understand." … 0 "From all appearances, there are only three reasons God produces a Great Flood here: 1. Because it's cute when animals gather two by two (though totally unnecessary, since the flood barely covers the Washington D.C. area). 2. Because he wants to a stop a piece of legislation that threatens to shave off federally protected parks for development purposes. 3. Because yet another upper-middle-class suburban dad needs to spend more time with his family." Well, that pretty much answers my one question about Evan Almighty: namely, how the filmmakers worked around that whole pesky "Old Testament god wiping out most of humanity for having gay sex and stuff" issue. Not exactly the stuff of feel-good comedy. … 0 John Lasseter (reportedly) finally puts the kibosh on Disney's direct-to-video sequel sausage factory. … 0 "To help pass the waiting time, I drew some pictures of me and my future iPhone!!!" … 1 "One day, your computer will be a big-ass table." … 0 "A quarter-century ago, U.S. Snooze, as it was once known, devised a brilliant marketing strategy to escape its own somnolent reputation as the reading matter of choice in mid-western dental waiting rooms: it would become the premier ranker of the reputations of the nation's colleges and universities." Oh snap! … 0 Heh. … 1 This wonderful terrible squirrel catapult reminds me of the similarly kinetic flying death squirrel from this Vault commercial. … 0 "I think the part I remember most was that when she walked into the room, this burst of 'clean' just filled the room. It wasn't perfume or shampoo or a scented lotion. It was just 'clean.' Well-groomed, I guess." That's what I like to hear. Especially after reading this. … 0 The art of the tease. … 0 "Most people are surprisingly bad at spotting fake smiles. One possible explanation for this is that it may be easier for people to get along if they don't always know what others are really feeling." I identified 16 of the 20 smiles correctly. Hmm. … 0 In my college days I once made fun of this girl named K____ for being the type of person who always thought earnestly about her response when asked how she was doing, and answered honestly—as opposed to a flippant, insincere Tony-the-Tiger-rific "everything's great!" Turns out, in the intervening years, I've become one of those earnest, honest answerers as well. I don't think people always know what to do with that. … 0  … 0Putting tuneful toon tots behind the wheel to shill gasoline sends all sorts of wrong messages but it's also frickin' adorable. … 0 "Concerned that the estate’s lawyers would impinge on his authorial freedom, Mr. Conroy joked publicly that he would open his sequel with this line: 'After they made love, Rhett turned to Ashley Wilkes and said, "Ashley, have I ever told you that my grandmother was black?"'" … 0 "Apparently when team Jolie-Pitt's pride is in the house other parents aren't allowed to take pics of their kids' birthday parties. 'Parents are instructed not to look at Angelina,' one source says." … 0 "He was cremated and I couldn't resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow. My dad wouldn't have cared.... It went down pretty well, and I'm still alive." … 0 Heh. … 0 "You can't rush creativity. Well, you can, but then you get broadcast television." … 0 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is the number one movie at the box office this weekend? Between this and 300 and Wild Hogs and Norbit, I haven't the faintest finger on moviegoing America's pulse this year. … 0 Sometimes I'm startled by the things people remember that I've said. I don't pay attention to nearly half the things people tell me. (The other half I obsess over.) … 0 Heh. … 0 I felt vaguely guilty for including a Sacagawea dollar in the delivery guy's tip, but what the fuck was I supposed to do with it? … 1 I've always held that Ann Coulter is just a glorified lowest-common-denominator performance artist, not unlike an insult comic, who merely says outrageous things to get the attention she invariably and unfortunately receives. That said, she's still a hate-mongering manure spokes-skeleton. Winking and nudging only go so far. … 0 "However, the only permanent cure is to go back to Japan—never to return to Paris." … 0 Seven years. … 1 Emmanuel Lubezki wuz robbed. … 0 "When it comes to best picture, the publicist says, 'These are five movies that will be largely forgotten. Other than maybe The Departed, as a cable staple.'" … 0 "Almost every story line was a dud, and no amount of Sorkin whimsy, tear-pulling or soap-box speeches could save them. In fact, those often made the stories worse." … 0 "David knows what he wants, and he's very clear about what he wants, and he's very, very, very smart. But sometimes we'd do a lot of takes, and he'd turn, and he would say, because he had a computer there, 'Delete the last 10 takes.' And as an actor that's very hard to hear." … 0 "The luxury and danger of being a screenwriter is an abundance of unstructured time." … 0 It occurs to me that I own an awful lot of DVDs for someone who seldom watches DVDs. I guess I like knowing my favorite cinematic moments are stored as ones and zeros on all those silver platters—within reach, just in case I need them. … 0 Seriously, bring it. … 0 "There really is nothing out there for those who want satire that tilts right." Um, and this dumb, derivative shit is your answer? … 0 The comments about Paula Deen are hilarious. And I, too, have often wondered whether Duff Goldman's cakes actually taste any good. … 1 Wow. … 0 "Of course, one of the cheapest journalistic tricks going is to get a piece of a mindless, tawdry media frenzy by denouncing it. The writer gets to wallow profitably in whatever gutter has everybody's attention while still being wry and high-minded. The readers get to join the fun without losing their self-respect. It's a win-win sort of arrangement for a certain knowing-wink-and-sly-nod wing of the media culture." Just to wallow for a moment, I've also perversely been reminded of a passage from The Secret History: "It was this unreality of character, this cartoonishness, if you will, which was the secret of his appeal and what finally made his death so sad. Like any great comedian, he colored his environment wherever he went; in order to marvel at his constancy you wanted to see him in all sorts of alien situations: Bunny riding a camel, Bunny babysitting, Bunny in space. Now, in death, this constancy crystallized and became something else entirely: he was an old familiar jokester cast—with surprising effect—in the tragic role." (p.357) I should probably go think about global warming now. … 0 (Okay, several more.) … 1 In light of recent events. … 0 Oh man, Norbit's no good? I'm bummed. … 1 I wonder what you'd be left with if you edited every episode of Lost down to just its present-tense scenes. A lot of sighs and sidelong glances would lose their meaning, but would it become half an hour (give or take, factoring out commercials) of less increasingly frustrating viewing? … 0 Julie Taymor directed it? I'll see it. … 0 "Welcome to 'sexpresso'—the latest coffee fad to hit America, in which the country's seemingly boundless fascination for Italian-style Java is combined with its equally boundless fascination for half-naked women." Sounds like something out of Idiocracy. … 2 "Imagine a world with no land at all, merely the impenetrable depths of a seething ocean. Models of planet formation predict the existence of such worlds, even though our own solar system has none." … 0 Conan O'Brien versus Serena Williams at Wii Sports tennis. … 0 No surprises there. … 0 COPYRIGHT © 1996-2008 RAZA SYED. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. |
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