The ending of Synecdoche, New York
so, i saw this thing...
most people are other people
Skeptical Clergy
Daniel Dennett and Linda LaScola interviewed five Protestant non-believers, as the title of their paper suggests: “Preachers who are not believers”.
“Here are some questions that have haunted me for years. How many preachers actually believe what they say from the pulpit? We know that every year some clergy abandon their calling, no longer able to execute their duties with conviction. This can never be a decision taken lightly, and many of them labored on for years before taking the leap. Are they the tip of an iceberg? Is there a problem of deep hypocrisy separating many pastors from their flocks? What is it like to be a non-believing preacher? How do they reconcile their private skepticism with the obligations of their position? And how did they get into their predicament?”
The Washington Post has a set of responses to the article, including one from Richard Dawkins:
“At a lunch party I was placed next to a well-known female rabbi, now ennobled. She asked me, somewhat belligerently, whether I said grace when it was my turn to do so at High Table dinner in my Oxford college. “Yes,” I replied, “Out of simple good manners and respect for the medieval traditions of my college.” She attacked me for hypocrisy, and was not amused when I quoted the great philosopher A J (Freddy) Ayer, who also was quite happy to recite the grace at the same college when he chanced to be Senior Fellow: “I will not utter falsehoods”, said Freddy genially, “But I have no objection to making meaningless statements.””
“ I really like the idea of a meritocracy, where, sure, you want to have things you’re proud of that you’ve done, but in the same sense, a writer is only a writer when he or she is writing.
Great and far-reaching interview with Merlin Mann about choosing who you are, what you do, for who… and about making old people cry. A couple of other quotes…
“I’m talking about the fact that I personally feel most alive when I’m making something”
“If I speak to somebody in my own voice, they can make their own decision about whether they want to listen and follow along. But the voice will be unmistakable. To me, that’s where the value is. The internet is empowering this in a way that was inconceivable 20 years ago, so I don’t know why you would just think of it as free marketing instead of an opportunity to figure out who you are in public.”
Forced perspective… This trick is often used in movies to make miniature models look like full-sized props. However, I don’t think we will be able to use this trick when filming in stereo for 3D movies.
Interesting painting technique - money shot at 0:48.
Daniel Kahneman (photo links to TED talk) discusses two aspects of our selves that result in different concepts of happiness: our reflective self, and our experiencing self.
The experiencing self lives each moment; is unhappy every moment during a dentist drill, for instance. The reflective self is our memory, how we remember that dentist appointment. Interestingly, these two selves optimise for different sorts of happiness.
Take two different dentist appointments. One is short with high levels of pain. The other has the same amount of pain for that short time, but is then ended with a minute of lesser pain. Although experientially the second appointment was worse (‘more’ pain experienced), we actually remember that second appointment more fondly than the first, because it ended with less pain. This results in a concept of ‘reflective happiness’ which is not about how happy a person lives their life, but about how satisfied they are when they think about their lives. Thus, we optimise differently for money, goals, friends, etc.
He gives another example, someone living in Ohio, fed up with the weather. They want to move to California. The reflective self ends up moving to California in the hope of getting happier, because they think the climate will be better. Once they move, the experiencing self will not be happier, because climate is not one of the day-to-day factors in happiness. However, they will think they are happier, because the reflective self compares the climate to the terrible weather back in Ohio.
These differences in what we consider happiness as we live, and what we consider happiness when we think about life, mean we end up doing very different things.
“ After the release of the 1997 film, Titanic, Kate Winslet was dubbed by one newspaper as “the sinking man’s crumpet”, but this moniker was repeated only by one other British newspaper.
Thinking man’s crumpet - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (via EMax)
It’s a painting, right? WRONG! Look again — it’s actually a photograph of a real-life model snapped by University of Hawaii professor Peter Kun Frary outside of a MAC cosmetics store at Ala Moana outdoor shopping center in Hawaii. (via Makeup Girl — Real-Life Model Imitates Painting - Urlesque)
