Who says it was impossible to put all animals on Noah’s ark?

Penn Station used to be beautiful

Last year I took the train to New York for the first time. I was surprised to arrive at Penn Station and find out that unlike Grand Central Station in New York or Union Station in Washington, DC, Penn Station was not pretty. Today it’s just an underground, dingy set of concourses. But it used to be beautiful:

This review makes me want to see the new Transformers movie

A reviewer on Io9 writes:

So, to sum up: Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen is one of the greatest achievements in the history of cinema, if not the greatest. You could easily argue that cinema, as an artform, has all been leading up to this. It will destabilize your limbic system, probably forever, and make you doubt the solidity of your surroundings. Generations of auteurs have struggled, in vain, to create a cinematic experience as overwhelming, and as liberating, as ROTF.

Women as well as men, everyone watching this film will feel the dissolution of all their certainties, all their illusory grasp on the world… but after you fall into a brazen despair that the walls of reality have become toxic ice cream of a million flavors, you will gasp with a greater realization: that once the world is reduced, forever, to a kaleidoscope of whirling shapes, you are totally free. Nothing matters, effect precedes cause, fish spawn in mid-air, and you can do whatever you want. Let yourself go in your adult diaper, Michael Bay invites you. Feel the music of total excess stir inside your deepest core. It is your Allspark, your cube. And you are a Transformer.

Star Wars, Star Trek, The Matrix, and Harry Potter are Actually the Same Movie

The Plot:

Once upon a time, Luke | Kirk | Neo | Harry was living a miserable life. Feeling disconnected from his friends and family, he dreams about how his life could be different. One day, he is greeted by Obi Wan | Captain Pike | Trinity | Hagrid and told that his life is not what it seems, and that due to some circumstances surrounding his birth | birth | birth | infancy he was meant for something greater.

And the story continues at Spiteful Critic…

Will Obama’s policies lead to an American “lost decade”

P.S. I won’t blame it all on Obama. Bush lead the way and Obama followed by making Bush’s profligate spending look like child’s play.

So how exactly did Bush steal the election in 2000?

The other day I read this:

If the American public who was outraged by the theft of the election from Al Gore in 2000 were as courageous and defiant then as the Green Revolution in Iran is now, we may not have had to endure 8 years of destruction to America and the world under Bush and Cheney.

I don’t understand how exactly the 2000 election was supposedly stolen from Al Gore. The votes in Florida statistically were a tie. But if the court would have given Gore what he asked for, a recount of certain counties, he still would have lost. 

But Gore wouldn’t have lost in all scenarios. It all depends on how they would have decided to count the votes. Using some criteria, Bush would have won and using other criteria Gore would have won. The long and short of it was that the election was really, really, really close. 

You can argue that different criteria should have been used or all of the ballots counted, but I don’t see a scenario were you can argue that Bush stole the election. Nor do I see why people should have taken to the streets in protest. 

Why solar power still doesn’t make sense

Loyd Case, the editor of the soon-to-be shuttered computer-enthusiast website Extreme Tech, recently wrote up his experience “going solar” one year into his experience. He spent around $38,000 to saves $3,000 a year in electricity costs. He mistakenly concludes that this the payback period is 12.5 years. That’s because he doesn’t include the the time value of his money.

If instead of paying for the solar panel up front, financed them with a loan, making payments of $250 a month, it would take 20 years at 5% interest to pay back his loan (if electricity costs and use remain constant). That is a long payback period, especially because solar panels will reduce in efficiency in the future.

Also, Case received a California rebate and Federal Tax Credit because he installed these solar panels. The California rebate probably amounted to $10,000. The real cost of his solar panels were nearly $50,000, making the investment in solar panel a bad deal.

Why do some people think it’s immoral to sell my organs?

Economics professor Daniel Hamermesh, and many others, believe it is repugnant and immoral to allow people to sell their organs. I don’t understand their argument. I find it repugnant and immoral for people like Daniel Hamermesh to tell me what I can and can’t do with my body. This is especially true when I would only help people my selling them my organs. 

Learning from Iran’s Twitter Revolution

I thought the title of the article was interesting, Learning from Iran’s Twitter Revolution, until I read the subtitle, “China, Iran, and France are all teaching lessons about broadband access that we in the U.S. need to hear.” Huh?  Twitter is the ultimate narrow-band internet application. You can only send messages of 140 characters. Iranians using Twitter doesn’t exactly make the case of the U.S. to get more broadband internet. 

So how does the author argue that ultimate narrowband internet application show us that we need more broadband?  Beats me, he never bothered to make the connection other than to write of Iran’s “Internet empowerment.” That doesn’t exactly provide the U.S. with an example. Instead he writes:

The Internet has heavily affected democracy in the U.S., too; Barack Obama’s campaign used YouTube, social networking, and e-mail to excellent effect. But the Iranian protests show a fissure in their society that we could do well to learn from. The vast majority of Tweeting and FriendFeeding going on in Iran comes from opposition supporters, who are more urban and wealthier than the Iranian population as a whole. What we’re seeing online may not be a properly balanced debate, because of different levels of access.

The lesson: a digital divide in a society directly impacts how democracy is conducted. The people who are online get more of a voice than the people who aren’t. If we’re serious about true democracy, we need to ask how we can get the Internet out to the 27% of Americans (according to the Pew Internet & American Life project) who don’t yet have it.

Obama used the internet well as a candidate, but he hasn’t as President. As a candidate he promised to post bills online for a five days before he signed them. But, as President he ignored this inconvenient promise, in part because he didn’t want people to see all of the crap in the stimulus bill.

By why does broadband matter? I don’t know. Mr. Segan continues:

  I’d love to say that dialup is just as effective as broadband. But just as the iPod popularized MP3 players by making digital music easy, broadband makes the Internet easy enough for many people to use. That means digital democracy has to be about broadband, not just about the Internet.

Broadband is nice and makes using the internet easier, but the thesis of this article is supposed to be how we are to learn from Iran’s Twitter revolution. Iran didn’t need broadband, according to the author, they needed Twitter—the ultimate narrowband application.

Broadband is great and the Iranian’s use of Twitter is great. But how much has Twitter use in Iran really mattered? How much does our perspective matter? He aren’t getting a lot of video from Iran, but we are getting a lot of Tweets. How does that affect our view of the importance of Twitter use inside Iran?    

Columbia Pictures Scraps the Movie Version of Moneyball

I really liked MIchael Lewis’ Moneyball. It tells the story of how Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane used advanced statistics to field good teams while spending a small fraction of the money spent by teams like the New York Yankees. The book is interesting, but it’s about statistics, not drama.

I was surprised to hear that a movie version of the book was in the works.  I couldn’t understand how it would work as a movie. And now it turns out that Columbia Pictures doesn’t understand either, even after greenlighting the film.  Columbia got cold feet on just before shooting was supposed