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Got to see it last night in Lincoln. Fun flick. It's set in the lush and colorful jungles of Pandora. The jungle night is filled with deadly beasts, gorgeous glowing super fireflies, and the Nahvi, a race of noble savages, all tall, lean, and beautiful despite blue complexions and thick noses. The Nahvi ride on "horses" and fly on dragons, hunt with bow and arrow, and except for being blue, look a lot like American Indians. They dwell in/under/around a humungeous and sacred tree that reaches up many stories into the sky. The scenes of jungle travel on foot, hunting, riding, flying and living in the jungle are fantastically well done and keep your attention.
The charm of this movie is in the excellence of the sets, scenery, and Nahvi. The acting is difficult to assess, when you suspect all the Nahvi facial expressions come from the depths of a computer. In fact this is not an actor's movie. The main characters are all Nahvi and are computer generated/augemented/whatever. The Nahvi are done with bits and bytes and pixels, not makeup and costuming. It's well done, the Nahvi are very believable. Give the CGI folks a few more years and we won't be able to tell live actors from CGI ones.
The plot is pure space opera, the good guys (Nahvi) and the bad guys (earthmen) clash in spectacular fashion. Characters are cardboard, who cares about the bad guys motives, we just enjoy watching the fight.
Lots of electrons have been spilled on the web about the deep inner meaning of this flick. Me, I don't think there is one, the movie puts on a great show, I enjoyed watching it. It's like Westerns or Bond movies, fun but not serious. Enjoy it. I did.

First Purchase a Piggy Bank

Front page story in the Saturday Wall St Journal explaining how economists are cheapskates. Children of economists recall how tight fisted their parents were. Things like keeping the thermostat set so low the wife threatened to move into a motel, private label groceries, off-brand tennis shoes, and a 1995 Subaru with a piece of electrical tape covering the "check engine" light.
Wow. I must be an economist. I do all those things and more, like buying at thrift stores.

The last tube bites the dust

Big heavy Samsung 27" TV started to die. Picture flickered and the sound cut in and out. Damn thing was only six years old. So off to Walmart and home with a new 32 inch LCD Sony. Infinitely lighter. Could be wall mounted with just molly bolts thru the sheet rock. It has threaded holes in the back to accept eyebolts. Only trouble is the eyebolts are a non standard Japanese metric thread, not available at Franconia Hardware.
Plugged her in and went thru that "find the active channels" thing that digital TV's do. I'm on cable and the TV found all the analog cable channels AND discovered 16 digital channels that I never know were there. The digital channels all have strange numbers with a decimal point in them, like 89.104 or 123.2. The remote has a decimal point button. Some of them are second copies of analog channels, like the TV Guide channel and Vermont PBS. Others might be worthwhile, one was playing a movie that didn't seem to be on any other channel. I cannot find the digital channels on TV Guide, either from the cable or from the Internet, which means you gotta channel surf to see if they are playing anything watchable. The channel numbers are up to 7 digits long, which strains my memory. I'll probably make up a cheat sheet.
The 32" LCD is an inch smaller than the 27 inch CRT it replaced when playing ordinary video. Plain Old Television Service (POTS) has the familiar 3:4 aspect ratio. The LCD Sony is 16:9. Playing POTS video you get a letterbox effect, a pair of vertical black bars on the sides. Active picture area, excluding the black bars, measures 26 inch on the diagonal.
If you don't like black bars, you can stretch the picture sideways to fill the screen and make all the actors look short and very stocky. Not to say fat. Or select "stretch both horizontal and vertical" cropping off the top and bottom of the image. This makes the "crawl" go off screen.
Video quality is quite good. Lots of resolution good color balance. Viewed from TV watching distances, it's beautiful. Viewed from computer monitor watching distance you can see some fuzziness on the POTS video. The few high def digital video channels are sharper and nicer.
The Sony has all sorts of gozintas, S-video, composite video, component video, digital video, USB video, laptop computer video, plenty of connectors to hookup the DVD, the VCR, and the stereo. Some of the lesser LCD TV's lacked the composite video input, which you need for the VCR. If you have a VCR and a collection of oldie but goody tapes, make sure a new TV has a composite video input along with all the fancier ones.

Honest plotting

There are a lot of ways to fiddle with a line graph to alter the message. One common trick is to mess with the vertical axis. By rights, the vertical axis ought to go down to zero so you can see the magnitude of the line. Plenty of plotters, and a lot of plot software, set the vertical axis to start at the minimum data point and stop at the max data point. It is claimed that this shows more detail in the data. Yeah, I suppose. It also has the effect of making a very slight change look a helova lot bigger. I consider that misleading.
I notice the global warmers always blow their plots up vertically as much as possible.

Profiling is a thought crime

So what is a TSA screener supposed to do when he sees a young, male, bearded, robed, passenger going thru? Treat him the same as the little old lady next in line? Check him out a little more? The young Islamic men who get their bags hand searched will complain they were "profiled", by which they mean they were subjected to extra screening for the wrong reasons. They will claim they are being picked on because of their race (skin tone actually), sex, religion, national origin or something or other. It's not what was done, it's the motivation behind it, which makes the accusation of profiling an accusation of a thought crime. The TSA screener was thinking wrong thoughts.
I don't like thought crimes. What a person thinks is his own business. And short of mind reading, there is no way of knowing what some one thinks. We can outlaw actions, we shouldn't outlaw thinking.
In actual fact, they were screened 'cause they looked suspicious. Most of them could avoid the extra hassle if they purchased tickets in advance, dressed appropriately, groomed themselves properly, and avoided speaking in foreign languages. The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.

Competition or FCC to "regulate" online search?

The FCC, founded in the 1930's to assign frequencies to radio broadcasters and do price fixing for the telephone company, wants to expand. They want to regulate Google and make it "fairer". They are supported by loads of webbies who feel their websites arn't getting good positioning on Google.
Google has competitors. If Google's service and site rankings don't please the web surfing public, they can and will go elsewhere. That's all the regulation needed. I see no reason to give FCC bureaucrats a say-so in how a search engine ranks websites. In fact, that could get scary, the current FCC would tell Google to rank Democratic sites above Republican sites.
Article here.

It's the crotch bomber.

ABC has a picture of the infamous bomb. It was 80 grams of PETN fixed in the bomber's jockey shorts, right between his legs. If it had detonated, the bomber would be unable to enjoy the 72 virgins promised to jehadi warriors in paradise.
Pat down searches for this kinda bomb will be embarrassing for all concerned.

The ABC story claimed that 80 grams (about 1/6 pound) could "blow a hole" in an airliner. Fortunately, well built jetliners can continue flying with a hole blown in them. 80 grams isn't much. Air to air missiles carry much bigger warheads (5 pounds) and do not always bring down their target.
I remember an F105 jet fighter that took a missile hit in the tail. Heat seeking North VietNamese missile flew right up the tail pipe and exploded. Blew the crap out of the tail section, but the aircraft returned safely to base. The engine kept running, and the rudder and elevons kept working.
I don't believe a crotch bomb has enough power to crash a Boeing jetliner.