Can a gun have a soul?

Brad Bird???s award-winning but critically ignored feature animation debut pondered how a paranoid, post-war America might react to an overwhelmingly powerful interstellar invader. A decade on, the cult classic stands as arguably the most intellectually and emotionally moving science-fiction tale in recent history.

via A Decade Later, The Iron Giant???s Weaponized Soul Still Stirs

Ten years on, Wired notes that not much has changed in the wake of the Iron Giant. If anything, the mainstream of movie making has gone from bad to worse:

For proof, look no further than G-Force, the recently released children???s CGI spy-fi fantasy starring sentient and armed guinea pigs working for the FBI.Or consider Iron Man. The 2008 movie, based on Marvel Comics??? armored war machine and released during the so-called war on terror, managed to make an arms-dealing billionaire look cool. If you think there???s going to be much more than explosions or jokes in its highly anticipated sequel, due in 2010, I???ve got a subprime mortgage to sell you.And then there???s Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, the ultimate weaponized fantasy about gas-guzzlers that suddenly become useful for something ??? and not just carting around Megan Fox???s massive rack, either. The list goes on.

Even Harry Potter, a once innocent lad in a world of endless possibilities has become focussed on a revengeful teen who with his masters will stop at nothing to get back at the Undeniable Evil. I was so dissappointed: in the scene where Draco Malfoy is brought to tears over this terrible task put to him, I thought how wonderful would it have been had Harry found him, consoled him, pledged to work with him to free him of the illusion of his 'immutable' fate, and the two once mortal enemies could finish the series as the very best of friends. Naturally, I hear you say because you've been led to expect it, this would be absurd and would somehow 'destroy' the Potter Franchise. To that I can only counter that it is the standard plot twist of nearly every Pokemon movie! And with that I lament on how many parents I've met can forbid their children from pokemon cards yet fully fund their child through the Harry Potter's Revenge cycle held out as a far more 'decent' path in their literary tradition.

For my part, as a parent, I'll point my kids at Hogarth Hughes, ???the luckiest kid in America.???

Why can't you tickle yourself?

MindHacks vs the BBC who sadly had not done their due diligence on the question of why we're unable to tickle ourselves no matter how hard we try. The answer? Turns out to be another evidence that the world you inhabit is not the same world I inhabit, it is a 'Matrix' simulation, but one of our own making, grounded periodically in sensory input:

a scientific paper [pdf] entitled 'Why can't you tickle yourself?' addresses exactly this question.

The science of this is quite well known (in fact, it was featured in the original Mind Hacks book as Hack #65) but in summary it seems that the brain simulates of the outcomes of actions based on your intentions to move because the actual sensory information from the body takes so long to arrive that we'd be dangerously slow if we relied only on this.

This slower information is used for periodic updates to keep everything grounded in reality, but it looks like most of our action is run off the simulation.

via Bang goes the bus top and still no tickle

So it is true: Life is but a Dream!

CwF + RtB = Paydirt

Some complained that such a model only worked for "big" name acts like Reznor, so I later expanded the original presentation to include many other acts of varying levels of fame and success to show how it could work at many different levels. Most recently, I used those examples to show where I believed the overall music industry was heading.

But, it actually goes beyond just the music industry. In fact, I'd argue that these models apply to many different industries, including the media business.

via techdirt.com

Merce Cunningham 1919-2009

High American Modernism is drawing to a close; it's hard to imagine anyone keeping that flame alive into the 22nd century.  I love all of its masters, regardless of genre:  Elliot Carter, Jackson Pollock, Ornette Coleman, Thomas Pynchon, etc.

But I think dance, with its corresponding advantages of kineticism and athleticism,  might have been the most comfortable place for that temperature, even more so than with music, painting, or fiction. I only saw the Merce Cunningham company a half dozen times.  Now that he's gone I wonder why I didn't see even more.  Every time I left the theater electrified and inspired.

via Merce Cunningham 1919-2009