Monthly Archives: January 2008

More Films of January 2008

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Posted by Lloyd Morgan on January 25, 2008 – 1:19 am
Filed under Media (Films & Music)

King of California, Superbad, and Everything's Gone Green

More films I’ve watched this month:

Superbad 4.5 / 5
The realists American Pie, one of the best comedies I’ve watched in a long time, and a film as funky as its soundtrack: Superbad is the coming-of-age movie that I wish was released when I was doing just that.
Being male may help in order to fully enjoy this film, but who cares: Superbad reinvigorates the tired movie stereotype of a bunch of inept teenagers attempting to score for the first time. My opinion may be biased due to the fact that Michael Cera is one of my favourite comedy actors, but I’ve already seen this film twice so you should see it at least once.

King of California 3.5 / 5
The slightly eccentric script keeps this film ticking along nicely but its the cast that makes it not just watchable, but enjoyable too. With Michael Douglas giving a heart-warming performance as a father recently released from a mental institute and Evan Rachel Wood as the daughter trying to keep both of their lives together, this most unlikely of stories is kept grounded through the reality of mental illness and familial bonds.

No Country for Old Men 4 / 5
Lacking both the dark comedy and memorable soundtrack that has typified the Coen brothers’ films since the mid 1990s, No Country for Old Men is a straight forward film noir parable. However, for a better take on the genre try Miller’s Crossing - a film where they didn’t have to rigidly stick to the original story.
This is a damn good film - I’m not denying that - I just don’t think it’s the classic it’s being made out to be.

Air Guitar Nation 3.5 / 5
The second ‘fringe’ documentary I’ve seen this month and by far the better of the two. When originally suggested to me I had no intention to watch this film - let alone enjoy it - but, after approaching with trepidation, my cynicism soon waned and I found myself totally engrossed in the stories unfolding before me. Strange? Definitely. Deep and meaningful? Maybe not. Peculiarly compelling? Definitely.

Everything’s Gone Green 3.5 / 5
I’ve had Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs (and JPod) highly recommended to me, so when I had the opportunity to watch Coupland’s debut screenplay I jumped at the chance - and I’m glad I did. An excellently quirky feature reminiscent of The Station Agent and Garden State, Green is a lush, feel-good movie, ideally suited to first dates or lazy nights in.

All-in-all, a good couple of weeks of film watching.

Whitespace and Typography - The Saviours of Usability

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Posted by Lloyd Morgan on January 23, 2008 – 7:30 pm
Filed under Everything Else, Photography, Sci/Tech
“…It is not surface, it is not the last thing that needs to be considered, it is the thing itself” - Stephen Fry

Unformatted code is analogous to an essay without paragraphs - or perhaps a paragraph without punctuation: all the data you need to understand the ‘essay’ is there, but without the correct formatting it just appears to be a jumble of words without any real thought or structure behind it. To fully understand the program (essay) we must be able to decipher the constituent parts and understand them as separate entities as well as inter-related parts. In programming, formatting and indentation aid understanding - without them, this task becomes exceedingly difficult. It’s the same as how without punctuation, we cannot fully understand the context of a sentence or paragraph.

It was here that I wanted to write about whitespace and its importance in programming, graphic design and photography. However, browsing the Internet to find some good articles to plagiarise verbatim reference and cite correctly, I came across a great piece on the powerful use of whitespace from A List Apart. Focusing on the design of both web and print media, the theories found there can be translated to many different types of content: advised reading if - like me - you’re a newcomer to design and usability theory.

Clicking through to the author’s website I discover that not only does Mark Boulton work a leisurely 5 minute stroll from my current place of work, but he also creates interesting and beautifully simple presentations - my favourite of which is Better Typography; produced for the Berlin Web 2.0 Expo on the importance of typography in design. With its practical and usable examples and vivid depictions of the impact typography can have, I advise giving it a read. Mark’s kindly allowed me to mirror the presentation locally, and I feel that Paola Antonelli’s TED Talk is a perfect compliment if you’re reading about design and typography for the first time.

Finally, if anyone has a good book recommendation on design, usability, etc. it’ll definitely make a welcome addition to my Intelligence by Osmosis series.

Intelligence by Osmosis - What Do I Want to Know?

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Posted by Lloyd Morgan on January 16, 2008 – 10:11 pm
Filed under Books

I’m a big fan of Clueless About Wine, (the now seemingly defunct) 365 Cheeses, and Get Rich Slowly - websites where the author has a go at being both student and teacher by writing on a subject that interests them in order to learn more about it. They’ve inspired me: what can I do that I can write about while also learning from the experience? What do I want to know?

When you really think about that question it’s actually not as easy to answer as it first seems. Like most things, as soon as you scrape the surface it becomes more complex and confusing than you thought. Of course there’s a lot I want to know, but what do I want to know that I can learn on my own, is interesting enough to become a viable long-term/permanent fixture of my life, and - more importantly - what can I make the most use of right now and in the future?

Then the signs came.

First was Scott H Young on Lifehack claiming that “it only takes reading 10-20 books on a subject until you know more on that topic than most of the population. Read 200-300 books on a subject and you’re an expert.” Next came a BBC article quoting a governmental study where “half of men aged 16-24 haven’t read a single book in the past 12 months with some claiming to have never read a book in their life.”

Let’s put these astonishing yet dubious statistics aside for now - after all, it’s not the stats that are important here: it’s the thinking behind them. And what is that? That reading gives you information and we should all be doing it. Sounds fair enough to me.

Through reading you are helping yourself communicate with every single person you come across, every single day: by reading new words in context you expand your vocabulary; by being ‘well read’ in many diverse topics you can engage more people in interesting conversation; having read ‘classic’ works you can understand what people mean when they reference them, quote them, or compare them to contemporary topics; you can, for once, answer that perennial modern question - Was the book really better than the film?; the list goes on. Let’s face it: absolutely nothing bad can come from reading a book - give or take a handful of paper-cuts in your entire life - so reading is a completely net-positive activity: for the logicians out there, this should surely be enough.

So by now I’m sure you’ve guessed it: I want to read more and write about it, right? Well, sort of. Above all I plan on changing my current reading habits: I have decided to try my hand at Intelligence by Osmosis.

Huh, what?

It’s not as ridiculous as it sounds. Honest. It’s just a sound-bite/buzz-word I concocted to make myself sound special when all I’ve done is make a decision to read more books written by intellectuals, whoever they may be. Generally I mean people who are well renowned in their field, rather than pretentious buggers who should know better.

I plan on reading a lot more non-fiction (or philosophical fiction) in order to learn more about specific topics, rather than spend the majority of my reading-time devouring novels - as is the norm for me. Why ‘osmosis‘? Well you see, I’m not going to read textbooks with the sole purpose of learning facts - I don’t want to actively seek knowledge; mainly because I don’t think that’ll be fun. Instead I plan to read more ‘pop-non-fiction‘: books authored by experts; on their topic of expertise; written in an engaging, interesting, and intelligent style, hopefully leading me to learn about these topics in a more enjoyable and passive manner. Hence Intelligence by Osmosis. Get it? Clever, huh? Oh OK, forget it!

The usual suspects of ‘popular science’ will be here: Noam Chomsky for linguistics, Steven Pinker and Edward Bernays for psychology, Sacks in neuroscience, Sachs in Economics (and Friedman, natch), Dawkins for Evolutionary Biology, and – of course – Hawking, Dyson, and even possibly Feynman, in theoretical physics. You get the idea.

Reading list to come soon. If you have any suggestions please, please, PLEASE let me know them - it’s not an easy list to come up with. Design, architecture, mediaevalism… anything… let me know.