Worst movie of all time?

For many years, I was under the impression that the 1959 film, "Plan 9 from Outer Space," was the worst movie of all time.  It is very good at being bad: But I was just introduced to "Turkish Star Wars," a move with Spanish subtitles. I don't know anything about whether this movie ever hit the big screen anywhere, but it is quite entertaining for its many failures. It's difficult to think of any aspect of film-making that this movie doesn't fail at.  From Wikipedia:

Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam (The Man Who Saved the World) is a 1982 Turkish science fantasy adventure film also known as Turkish Star Warsbecause of its notorious use of unauthorized footage from Star Wars and other movies worked into the film.

Upon its initial release, the film was panned by critics for its incoherent storyline, poor performances, and use of stock footage and music from other films.

Despite this (or possibly due to this), the film has gained a significant cult following over the years. Louis Proyect of Rec Arts Movie Reviews called the film "classic midnight movie fun."[2] Phil Hall of Film Threat gave the film a perfect 5 stars, calling it "jaw-droppingly insane ... a film that makes criticism moot."

Here is "Turkish Star Wars" in its entirety:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=4441&v=arpH88Mx3z4

Continue ReadingWorst movie of all time?

Getting upset about the right things.

Here's a post by Darrell Lackey, a pastor challenging Christians to get save their energy and frustration for the right kinds of things. He begins the post with this statement that Tony Campolo has been known to use when addressing Christian audiences:

I have three things I’d like to say today. First, while you were sleeping last night, 30,000 kids died of starvation or diseases related to malnutrition. Second, most of you don’t give a shit. What’s worse is that you’re more upset with the fact I just said “shit” than you are that 30,000 kids died last night.
There is some good food for thought for all of us in this post, whether or not we are religious (I am not).  For example, many of us often get much more upset about the minor irritations of our own local lives than the enormous suffering and stark injustices over the next hill or the next continent. For instance, our own country has been bombing many countries in the Middle East for many years.  We've been bombing Afghanistan since 2001, and according to reliable sources, we have been killing many innocent civilians in a "war" regarding which we are utterly unable to articulate any meaningful objective or metric of success. Therefore, that "war" goes on, largely unchallenged and unnoticed, our news media almost never mentioning that we are even at war.  Out of sight, out of mind for most of us. If we want to be morally cohesive, we need to use unceasing effort to make certain we are focused on the things that matter.  That is often not easy to do.  Trying to stay focused on important things in a sustained way wears us down.  It's not easy to be moral.  It's much easier to complain about that the microwave burned the popcorn. To live moral lives, we need to stay focused on important things, and focus is another word for attention, a psychological resource that humans have in short supply.  Attention is like a spotlight.  When we look at a thing, we often exclude attending to most other things.  that's how we are wired; we are almost the opposite of omniscient, even though we want to believe that we are generally aware of most things that are important. Because attention is so limited, our attentional decisions and habits (maybe we should call this our "attentional hygiene") gives us great power to define our "world."  Whether it's conscious or unconscious, we are capable of manipulating what we pay attention to, and whatever we choose to ignore simply doesn't exist for us; if we are not paying  attention to something, it holds no moral sway over us because our attentional choices turn it into nothing at all. Most of us aren't at all bothered by world starvation most of the time because  we are not thinking about that horrific problem.  Further, human animals are capable of not paying attention to things that are right in front of us.  This is especially true when we are emotionally motivated to not see.   See no evil and hear no evil functionally means that there is no evil. I have long been fascinated by this confluence of attention and morality and, in fact wrote a detailed paper on it, drawing from many domains of cognitive science:  "Decision Making, the Failure of Principles, and the Seduction of Attention."  Feel free to take a look, if you find this general topic compelling.

Continue ReadingGetting upset about the right things.

What the Bible actually says about abortion.

Here's a fascinating post from a quirky and thoughtful website called "Bible Funmentionables." In this particular post, Michael Morris puts on his news reporter hat and simply asks what "God" had to say about abortion.

But many of the same people who give God a pass for allowing so many embryos to die, would like us to believe that God is punishing us for not making all abortions stop. Setting aside the fact that making abortions illegal does not cause them to stop, let’s examine what the Bible says DIRECTLY about abortion.

Spoiler alert: "It’s clear that if pro-lifers want to bring the Bible into the debate, the Bible is NOT on their side." The evidence presented at Bible Funmentionables includes passages like this:

If his soul is not filled with good, and he does not receive proper burial, I say that an aborted birth is better than he. —Ecclesiastes 6:3

I'd encourage a visit to this post to prepare you for the next time a Bible thumper tells you that the Bible prohibits abortion.  You will be prepared to intelligently discuss the issue by citing chapter and verse.

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Moore’s Law: Alive and Well.

Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. It's still going strong 52 years later, ever since 1965, when Gordon Moore made his prediction. That this law has has held for more than 50 years is amazing, almost miraculous-seeming. It reminds me of the wheat and chessboard problem (sometimes expressed in terms of rice grains), a mathematical problem expressed this way:

If a chessboard were to have wheat placed upon each square such that one grain were placed on the first square, two on the second, four on the third, and so on (doubling the number of grains on each subsequent square), how many grains of wheat would be on the chessboard at the finish?

In the chessboard example the final number is a whopping 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 (the 64th Mersenne number). Wikipedia reports this commentary:

In April 2016, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich stated that "In my 34 years in the semiconductor industry, I have witnessed the advertised death of Moore’s Law no less than four times. As we progress from 14 nanometer technology to 10 nanometer and plan for 7 nanometer and 5 nanometer and even beyond, our plans are proof that Moore’s Law is alive and well".[25] In January 2017, he declared that "I've heard the death of Moore's law more times than anything else in my career ... And I'm here today to really show you and tell you that Moore's Law is alive and well and flourishing.

 

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Time to take down the Confederate Statues.

At National Review, Arthur Herman gives his best reasons why the public Confederate statues should remain in publicly owned spaces.   I do believe that Herman put the best foot forward of the "Keep the Statues" crowd. I disagree with him. These statues belong, if anywhere, in the Jim Crow wing of a history museum.  Herman received strong pushback in the comments to his article, many of these comments echoing my beliefs. Here are some samples of the comments critical of Herman's defense of the statues: "The timeless virtues of slavery. Symbols of Southern history of slavery." "Most of those statues were NOT erected in the days after the Civil War. Nor were they erected in the days since the 1970s, when Jim Crow was over." "They were put up as part of the wave of "Lost Cause" historical revisionism that swept the South in the first half of the 20th century. The purpose was to try to redeem *the cause for which the South had fought*." File-Lee_Park,_Charlottesville,_VA.jpg "I don't have a problem honoring the ordinary enlisted men--the privates and sergeants--who fought bravely on both sides of the Civil War. But the Confederate leadership--and this includes Lee--should not be honored because the cause they fought for was *to break up the United States*." Most of those statues were NOT erected in the days after the Civil War. Nor were they erected in the days since the 1970s, when Jim Crow was over. They were put up as part of the wave of "Lost Cause" historical revisionism that swept the South in the first half of the 20th century. The purpose was to try to redeem *the cause for which the South had fought*." "Thomas Jefferson is NOT honored because he had slaves. He is honored because he wrote the Declaration of Independence, which asserted the equality of all humanity before God. Tear down his memorial and you would be tearing down the Declaration of Independence too."

Continue ReadingTime to take down the Confederate Statues.