What's your name?

Celebrities' Real Names: for all of you who really wanted to know that John Wayne's real name was Marion Morrison.

H/T: Ayyyy!

Top 100 Films Meme, Part II

I'll bite on Darwin's Top 100 Films Meme.

1) Your favorite five movies that are on the list.

Vertigo
Amadeus
To Kill a Mockingbird
Patton
Bringing Up Baby

Honorable Mention: Ben-Hur (a sentimental favorite 'cause I watched it over and over again as a youngster)

2) Five movies on the list you didn't like at all.

E.T.
Annie Hall
Doctor Zhivago
2001
The Graduate

3) Five movies on the list you haven't seen but want to.

All About Eve
Birth of a Nation
Duck Soup
The Jazz Singer
Schindler's List -- maybe.

(I would remind Darwin that we have seen, and liked, Double Indemnity.)

4) Five movies on the list you haven't seen and have no interest in seeing.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Raging Bull
Clockwork Orange
Goodfellas
Platoon


5) Your favorite five movies that aren't on the list.

The Thin Man
Fellowship of the Ring
The Incredibles
Gladiator
This Is Spinal Tap

Top 100 Films Meme

I have a co-worker who is semi-obsessed with the American Film Institute list of the top 100 films. He's been working through the whole list on NetFlix and, when a movie is mentioned, invariably asks, "But is that one of the top 100 films?"

This same co-worker recently watched Princess Bride for the first time and announced it to be "the dumbest, shallowest movie I've ever seen." As support for this, he pointed out that it was not on the top 100 films list.

Your authors here enjoy a good movie as much as the next fellow, though our chances to watch movies are drastically curtailed these days. (Most good movies are either unsuitable or uninteresting to the girls at this age, and starting a movie at 9pm or later when the kids are sound asleep is usually such a tiring prospect that we just pick up our books and head for bed.) Still, I don't have the respect for critical authority that my co-worker does, and so I'm going to stoop to creating a meme for all and sundry.

Go to the AFI Top 100 list and pick:

1) Your favorite five movies that are on the list.
The Third Man
Amadeus
Vertigo
Schindler's List
Patton

2) Five movies on the list you didn't like at all.
The Graduate (like the closing song, found the movie pointless)
E.T. (which I've always found curiously annoying)
Annie Hall (a few bits of good writing, but Woodie Allen was so annoying)
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Forest Gump

3) Five movies on the list you haven't seen but want to.
Double Indemnity
Casablanca (how I've missed this all these years I'm not sure...)
To Kill a Mockingbird
Bridge on the River Kwai
One Flew Over the Cockoo's Nest

4) Five movies on the list you haven't seen and have no interest in seeing.
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
Midnight Cowboy
Platoon
Tootsie
Some Like It Hot

5) Your favoritve five movies that aren't on the list.
Lion in Winter
O Brother Where Art Thou
Brazil
Gosford Park
Man for all Seasons


Tagging: JulieD, Matthew Lickona, John Farrell

Hope Springs Eternal

Rick Lugari sends me news of a not-so-upstanding young man who tried to make a million dollars -- and is being charged with forgery. It seems that this con man, like the more musical Harold Hill, does not know the territory.

Sterilizing for a Greener Planet

Jay Anderson links to an article from the UK Daily Mail about women (and their boyfriends/husbands) who get sterilized because their environmental convictions lead them to the belief that adding more people to the world's population would be selfish and destructive.

Finally, eight years ago, Toni got her way.

At the age of 27 this young woman at the height of her reproductive years was sterilised to "protect the planet".

Incredibly, instead of mourning the loss of a family that never was, her boyfriend (now husband) presented her with a congratulations card.

While some might think it strange to celebrate the reversal of nature and denial of motherhood, Toni relishes her decision with an almost religious zeal.

"Having children is selfish. It's all about maintaining your genetic line at the expense of the planet," says Toni, 35.

"Every person who is born uses more food, more water, more land, more fossil fuels, more trees and produces more rubbish, more pollution, more greenhouse gases, and adds to the problem of over-population."

While most parents view their children as the ultimate miracle of nature, Toni seems to see them as a sinister threat to the future.

I've run into milder forms this myself, from "replacement only" people who consider having more than two children to be a crime against future humanity. I suppose this is only taking things one step farther.

The ironic thing in all this is that in elevating the world's ecosystem to something so sacred that it must feel no impact from humans, such extreme environmentalists turn humans into an exception from the rules that govern other species. Most species, if provided with vast unused resources, will reproduce in order to exploit them as rapidly as possible. If later the species population runs out of resources, famine reduces the population back down to sustainable levels.
Humans, having the intellectual capacity for forsight and not liking the idea of maxing out resources and experiencing a major dying-off, wisely wish to avoid consuming resources in this sort of unthinking fashion. We seek both to avoid a situation in which resources suddenly run out, and to avoid turning the regions we inhabit into unpleasant places.

And yet, this idea that we should actively seek to erase our impact on the world by erasing (or vastly reducing) ourselves as a species seems to deny the physical part of our nature. As well as being thinking creatures, we are also a species, and for what do species exist other than to be fruitful and multiply?

Voting and the Heap Paradox

One feels foolish basing a post around a comment made on another blog since it is just this sort of ingrown quality which often gives online discourse a bad name. And yet, it's hard to resist at times, so I'm about to indulge myself. Last week I ran across a comment made by this fellow, on this post, which ran as follows:

What I say is that a person’s individual vote doesn’t matter, in the sense where “matter” refers to having any effect whatsoever on the outcome of the election. It does of course matter in terms of what it does to the person voting.

The interesting thing about this is not, I think, the author's wider claim that voting is merely a training ground for moral relativism (which I find both uncompelling and uninteresting), but rather that it seems like an interesting variation on what is called the "heap paradox".

The heap paradox is as follows. Say you have one grain of sand. You add another grain of sand to it. Do you now have a heap? No. You add yet another grain of sand. Do you have a heap of sand now? No. And yet, if you continue adding grains of sand you will eventually find that you have a heap of sand. Similarly, if you have a heap of sand and you remove one grain, you still have a whole heap; you don't have heap-1.

A heap is, thus, an entity with a definition which is not strictly quantitative, and yet relies on having at least some minimum (though unspecified) number of constituents. There is no specific number of grains of sand which clearly marks the borderline of "heap" and yet it is nonetheless clear that some numbers do constitute a heap (126,452) and others do not (6).

Some similar things seem to be at play in regards to voting. Clearly, in most elections the margin of victory is sufficiently large that if any one person, or any dozen or hundred or thousand had not voted, the outcome would have been the same. But imagine we have an election in which the results are one million votes for candidate A and one million and one votes for candidate B. Whose vote decided the election?

Well, no one vote did. If I voted for candidate B, one could say that without my vote he would not have won, but it is not my vote in specific that decided the issue, because if any one of the million other voters who cast a vote for B had not voted, he not have won. Thus, A was defeated by one vote, and yet no one voter cast that vote, A was defeated by the sum of the actions of all two million and one voters who voted.

Thus, it is in a certain sense true that no person's individual vote has "any effect whatsoever on the outcome of the election", in that no specific vote is "the deciding vote" in an election. Except in the sense of being chronologically the last vote cast, not single vote ever is a deciding vote.

And yet, clearly, if some given number (varying depending on the closeness of the election results) of voters had not voted, or had voted differently, the outcome of the election would have been different. It seems non-sensical to say that the casting of any one vote has no effect, when the sum of several of these "no effect" events could be "effect". It we take "no effect" to be 0 and "effect" to be 1, then if we say that individual votes have no effect we are suggesting that 0+0+0+0+0+0=1

Thus, while it is in a certain sense true that an individual person's vote does not matter, it is true in a sense which arguably doesn't matter. Because while it's true that the vote itself is not by itself decisive, the cumulative (and at times even the individual) effect of not making votes is in fact quite decisive. To suggest that it doesn't matter if you vote because your vote will not "matter" in the above sense makes no more sense than to claim that one can have a heap of sand without actually having any sand grains.

When Daddy Gets Bored During Read-alouds

It's been raining for the last two days here in central Texas, much to the dismay of yours truly, who wanted to spend the long weekend finishing up the playhouse out back. (Half the rafters are up, but that's sure not enough to keep the rain out.)

We went to the library yesterday, so this afternoon saw me sitting down with a stack of picture books and the girls -- who until offered read-alouds had been been fighting tooth and claw. By book four in the stack Daddy was getting a bit bored, as displayed by inside parent jokes like this, directed at MrsDarwin across the room:

(from The Fire Cat by Esther Averill)
Darwin: "He picked her up and took her gently..."
MrsDarwin: "Hey, now."
Darwin: "...down to Mrs. Goodkind. Mrs. Goodkind thanked Pickles."

Yes, when the fire cat rescuing a kitten from a tree becomes innuendo, it's time for Daddy to head back to the office.