Elsewhere, December 9, 2010

Elsewhere: A collection of interesting links and articles that I’ve come across in the last week or so. Follow me on Twitter for more of the same.

Olivia Collette has written a fantastic article on Pan’s Labyrinth (contains spoilers):

In many interviews, Guillermo del Toro has talked about his fascination with the “deeply disturbing” nature of fairy tales. It’s why they lend themselves so seamlessly to “Pan’s Labyrinth,” a story about a young girl, Ofelia, who’d rather deal with the horrors she creates herself than the monstrosities chosen for her by Francoism.

Netflix is booming thanks to their streaming service but movie studios and cable TV providers see that as a growing threat:

…under the terms of Netflix’s deal with Starz, the pay-TV channel, which allows Netflix to stream movies from Sony and Disney, Netflix pays about 15 cents a month for each subscriber, much less than the $4 to $5 a month that cable and satellite owners pay for access to Starz, according to research by Mr. Greenfield.

For that reason, Netflix is increasingly viewed as a threat by cable companies and movie studios, who are considering a variety of ways to put the brakes on the company’s growth.

Interesting factoid: Netflix accounts for over 20% of all North American Internet download traffic in peak evening hours.

Any efforts by studios and cable TV providers to hinder Netflix will backfire on them unless they can exceed the user experience provided by Netflix… which is going to be very difficult.

Christine Whelan asks “Is it moral to fake kindness?”

Is it honest to look for the positives in an otherwise distasteful situation? Is it honest to search for some element of shared interest, and focus on that, to get someone to warm up to you? Is it honest to yourself and others to admit mistakes, knowing that it might give you the upper hand in the rest of the negotiations?

Should you honestly tell your roommate she looks fat in her summer white pants, or that he should dump his clingy girlfriend? When you put on a big smile for your sixth interview of the day in a seemingly hopeless job search, are you being honest? And where is the line between direct communication and hurtful, unnecessary insults?

These are questions our great-grandparents would have dismissed out of hand. In their world, there was virtue in being polite, and if you didn’t have something nice to say, you shouldn’t say anything at all. During the inner-directed 1960s, however — the era of the Human Potential Movement and self-actualization — sincerity and expressions of visceral emotions became our new definition of honesty. And these ideas stuck.

Mark Vernon wonders if mathematics is a divine language:

Imagine, one day, that life shows up on another planet. Moreover, it’s intelligent life. Imagine, too, that we’ve a reasonably swift means of communication. We’d need a common language with which to talk. What might that language be? One candidate would be mathematics.

Mathematics seems to be a universal language. Science presumes as much: it works as a descriptive and predictive tool, both on the small scale and at the very large. Moreover, it works for systems that are very close and quite distant — so distant that they reach back to the earliest moments after the Big Bang. And when you stop to think about it, that’s quite remarkable.

Facebook’s Julie Zhuo on online anonymity and contempt and internet trolls:

Psychological research has proven again and again that anonymity increases unethical behavior. Road rage bubbles up in the relative anonymity of one’s car. And in the online world, which can offer total anonymity, the effect is even more pronounced. People — even ordinary, good people — often change their behavior in radical ways. There’s even a term for it: the online disinhibition effect.

Many forums and online communities are looking for ways to strike back. Back in February, Engadget, a popular technology review blog, shut down its commenting system for a few days after it received a barrage of trollish comments on its iPad coverage.

A child abuse expert claims that the TSA’s pat-downs may cause children to be more susceptible to sexual predators:

An expert in the fight against child sexual abuse is raising the alarm about a technique the TSA is reportedly using to get children to co-operate with airport pat-downs: calling it a “game”.

Ken Wooden, founder of Child Lures Prevention, says the TSA’s recommendation that children be told the pat-down is a “game” is potentially putting children in danger.

Telling a child that they are engaging in a game is “one of the most common ways” that sexual predators use to convince children to engage in inappropriate contact, Wooden told Raw Story.

Timothy Dalrymple asks, “What’s Better: Grilled Cheesus or the Absent God?”

What I’m wondering is: What is the effect of this absence on the people, and especially on the children, who watch movies and television? Because this way of avoiding God-talk is, in itself, making a statement of spiritual significance to the audience.

[…]

What is the worldview communicated by now-contemporary movies and television? When children watch thousands of hours of movies and television, in which untold thousands of characters face untold thousands of decisions, including extremely important decisions, without once asking what God would have them do, or how this will affect their souls and their eternal destinies, or whether there is such a thing as eternal truth and salvation, how does this effect them? Are we illicitly training our children to face life’s decisions without reference to God, by showing them an endless succession of fictional characters who do precisely that (and get along just fine, thank you very much)?

Umberto Eco on the whole WikiLeaks snafu:

But let’s turn to the more profound significance of what has occurred. Formerly, back in the days of Orwell, every power could be conceived of as a Big Brother watching over its subjects’ every move. The Orwellian prophecy came completely true once the powers that be could monitor every phone call made by the citizen, every hotel he stayed in, every toll road he took and so on and so forth. The citizen became the total victim of the watchful eye of the state. But when it transpires, as it has now, that even the crypts of state secrets are not beyond the hacker’s grasp, the surveillance ceases to work only one-way and becomes circular. The state has its eye on every citizen, but every citizen, or at least every hacker — the citizens’ self-appointed avenger — can pry into the state’s every secret.

How can a power hold up if it can’t even keep its own secrets anymore? It is true, as Georg Simmel once remarked, that a real secret is an empty secret (which can never be unearthed); it is also true that anything known about Berlusconi or Merkel’s character is essentially an empty secret, a secret without a secret, because it’s public domain. But to actually reveal, as WikiLeaks has done, that Hillary Clinton’s secrets were empty secrets amounts to taking away all her power. WikiLeaks didn’t do any harm to Sarkozy or Merkel, but did irreparable damage to Clinton and Obama.

IGN lists five things that they want to be in Mass Effect 3, and five things they don’t:

It’s no secret that BioWare is working on Mass Effect 3. After all, since its announcement the Mass Effect series was touted as an epic space trilogy. Though everyone at IGN loves Mass Effect 2, there’s always room for improvement. It’s clear that BioWare cares enough to listen to their fans and the second game of the franchise is the best evidence of that. The sequel went under the knife and addressed a lot of issues players expressed about Mass Effect.

So here we are, listing off five things we don’t want in Mass Effect 3 and five things we think should be added to the concluding chapter of Commander Shepard’s story. Let’s start on a positive note, shall we?

I agree with all of the suggestions. Piloting the Normandy in some space combat would be awesome, but multiplayer would be counter-productive.

Does God exist inside or outside of time?

Time is a function of creation, as much as [physicality]. For God to create a physical world is not to bind God to being in everything, or to give God physical substance.

Should the same be said of time? That though time exists and we cannot conceive of a world without past, present, and future, that God is not contained within this system?

Questions like these are precisely why I think Christians need to read more science fiction.