Blayne Sucks

If you’re reading this blog, then there’s an excellent chance you’re interested in this video from Peter Jackson. He walks through several of the sets, costumes, and lots of other pre-production items. It’s definitely worth watching.

My main concern with the movie version of The Hobbit is that I don’t know how they are going to translate the more literary elements of the book to the silver screen. Chapter 5, in particular, worries me. The chapter is titled “Riddles in the Dark,” and it is filled with a lot of both riddles and darkness. It’s probably my favorite single chapter of any novel I’ve ever read. Sometimes, I’ll go back and just re-read that one chapter randomly. How do you portray a play on words in a movie without losing the effect that it has on the reader?

Maybe I’m too invested in it as a written work to imagine it working in a movie, but I don’t think I’m the only one with concerns. Then again, maybe I’m worried over nothing. I had similar concerns with the original Lord of the Rings movies, and those turned out well. It’s nice to see that they are actually making the movies now.

I saw Waiting for Superman last night, and I definitely recommend it to anyone who’s been on the fence. The movie is a documentary of the U.S. education system by Davis Guggenheim, who also made An Inconvenient Truth. The story follows a small handful of children from various backgrounds who have applied to be in the lottery for crowded public charter schools because the ‘normal’ public schools have failed them. To setup the ending, the movie starts with an introduction to these students and their different situations. As the movie progresses, it explains more of the recent history of public education in the United States, and both Allison and I sort of lost track of the fact that these were real students from real families. The ending actually shows the various lottery processes. I had been told that the ending was quite moving, so perhaps it didn’t affect me as much as it could have. Consider Kristen Paglia’s review at the Huffington Post:

From an education advocacy standpoint, this film is a gamechanger. As Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa stated at the screening, “If your blood is not boiling by the end of this film, then there is no blood pumping through your heart.” My blood was certainly boiling. Further, having fallen in love with these five children, it was hard to distinguish between the tears of rage, sorrow, and triumph by the end. This film will inspire change.

You don’t have to be super politically engaged to know that there’s a ton of problems with education in America. Sadly, it’s been a huge problem for years. Waiting for Superman does an excellent job highlighting some of the biggest problems. I’ll try not to spoil the movie for you by revealing too much, but one thing that stuck with me was an Illinois statistic about the rate of people losing their credentials for various professions. Here’s the NY Times review, which also focuses on this statistic:

In Illinois, where one in 57 doctors loses his medical license and one in 97 lawyers loses his law license, only one in 2,500 teachers loses his credentials, because of union rules.

Scary, right? The movie has a lot of other revealing things to say about the NEA and the AFT, which may come as more of a shocker to people who didn’t go into the movie thinking they were bad for education.

Guggenheim positions several people as heroic figures of a teaching revolution; it’s a stark contrast from his depiction of unions. Geoffrey Canada, Michelle Rhee, and the founders of KIPP come off looking like saints fighting the good fight. They should be lauded for their efforts, but it’s not really about finding heros. Finding heros is difficult, inconsistent, and probably not scalable. Again, from the HuffPo review:

We absolutely cannot underestimate the power of charismatic and visionary leaders, and I am grateful for the people who had the courage to make a film that celebrates education heroes, but there are not enough of those heroes to go around.

Even if we can find heros, the politics of teaching are such that they have the deck stacked against them. After the movie came out, Michelle Rhee was pushed into resigning as the D.C. Schools Chancellor. From Adam Schaeffer:

No man or woman, mayor, chancellor or superintendent can significantly and permanently reform the government education monopoly. It is unreformable. Rhee’s tenure and modest success underscores this fact. Entrenched interests regroup, respond, bide their time, and reformers move on or are shoved along.

What can we do? Well, we can realistically identify the teachers that aren’t getting the job done. Finding obviously bad teachers isn’t hard and would make a big difference. One of the reformers interviewed for the film said that if we could get rid of the bottom 6% to 10% of the profession our schools could be right back up near the best in the world. School superintendents should have the ability to fire the worst teachers rather than perform some idiotic dance of the lemons. What’s a dance of the lemons you ask? Here’s an explanation from the Hoover Institute article linked above:

Often, as a way to save time and money, an administrator will cut a deal with the union in which he agrees to give a bad teacher a satisfactory rating in return for union help in transferring the teacher to another district. The problem teacher gets quietly passed along to someone else. Administrators call it “the dance of the lemons” or “passing the trash.” Howard Fuller, the superintendent of Milwaukee public schools from 1991 to 1995, explains: “Administrators found they needed to trade bad teachers because it’s easier than getting rid of them. We had one teacher who put a student’s head down the toilet. He simply got moved to another school.”

It’s much easier to identify the worst 10% of the profession, but we can’t easily get rid of them. Remember: Illinois was only able to fire one teacher of every 2,500. That’s 249 bad teachers keeping their job for every one that gets fired.

If there’s a problem with Waiting for Superman, it is simply that the documentary needed to follow a compelling story. The most emotional aspect of the movie is watching these students as they go through the lotteries for their various charters. Unfortunately, this positions charter schools as “the answer,” when in reality those schools are still publicly funded schools. They are still subject to pressure for politicians and unions, albeit somewhat less than a normal public school. The story makes for a great documentary, but in reality we need a truly competitive environment for education. Here’s Neal McCluskey of the Cato Institute:

The only way to make educators truly put children first is to require that they satisfy parents — the customers — to get their money. And that can mean only one thing: transforming our education system into one in which parents control education funding and educators have to earn their business.

Think about this for a moment. If parents had complete control over who got paid to teach their children, would we have a problem getting rid of the worst 10% of the profession? Would we have trouble accurately compensating great teachers? Would we have children stuck in lotteries like those in the movie? One of those children was entered because her mother couldn’t continue to pay for her parochial school on top of paying taxes to support her local public school. What would be so bad about treating school as a business? Again, here’s Neal McCluskey:

If a firm isn’t happy with a supplier, does it call its congressman, hold fora, pen op-eds, badger reporters, all in the hope of eventually persuading the supplier to change? Of course not: If the supplier doesn’t improve, the firm just finds a new one and moves on!

Since it is election season, I’ve seen several commercials for political candidates that attempt to trash their opponents by saying they want to eliminate the Department of Education. Every time I see one I think, “Education is too important to be a department in the government!” Do we really want to put all our eggs in one basket?

If you haven’t really given education policy much thought before, consider seeing Waiting for Superman in theaters. It’s a good introduction to both the politics and the emotion surrounding education policy. Also, when we saw the movie last night, they gave us each a $15 gift card to use at DonorsChoose.org. Regardless, it was a great way to spend an evening.

It’s probably not a stretch to imagine that few people are interested in watching a movie about cryptography. Cryptography isn’t exactly a sexy topic in pop culture, but then again almost every element of World War 2 except cryptography has its own movie. This is somewhat ironic given the huge number of movies set in World War 2 and the incredible importance of cryptography during the war. Enigma is an attempt at a cryptography movie set in World War 2, and I had the opportunity of watching it this past weekend.

Engima is a mixed bag of incredible accuracy and complete fantasy. Perhaps the best example of this is the setting. Although Enigma is set in Bletchley Park, which is where Enigma was actually broken during the war, they don’t even use the actual Bletchley Park Mansion in the film. Almost the entire plot is fictional, but the details about the Enigma machines themselves are extremely accurate. There are a couple of scenes that quickly explain the purpose, construction, and use of the Enigma machines in a concise and easily understandable manner. If you’ve ever tried to do this, you probably know that isn’t easy. The depictions of the huts, bombe, and other elements of Bletchley Park were similarly well done. For example, the windows were shuttered at night to ensure that Bletchley Park wasn’t visible to the Germans from the air. The movie uses this during an excellent depiction of an all-nighter at Bletchley Park.

The main character, Tom Jericho, is based on a real person, Alan Turing. In the movie Tom’s life is turned upside down by a romantic relationship with a Claire, who disappears without a trace. Tom spends most of the movie trying to figure out what happened to Claire, and he ends up falling in love with his primary collaborator in the search. I hesitate to give away much more than that because the movie is primarily a mystery involving spies, codes, and secret love. It’s a fun little movie if you like guessing at what really happened.

Tom’s real-life counterpart, Alan Turing, proposed to Joan Clarke while at Bletchley Park despite being a homosexual. Turing was also famously eccentric. For example, he was an avid runner, but he would sprint anywhere he needed to be regardless of the distance or circumstances. He even ran the 40 miles to London from time to time. As you might imagine, this doesn’t always create a socially pleasant appearance. Alan spent the rest of his (short) life struggling with society’s treatment of his homosexuality. He committed suicide at age 41 in a strange and ambiguous fashion that might best be described in film.

Although I really enjoyed Enigma, it mostly left me thinking that someone desperately needs to make a movie about what really happened at Bletchley Park. So much has basically been forgotten or overlooked simply because it is so hard to describe to folks who aren’t mathematically inclined. There’s a common cliché in science fiction films where a geeky guy does some indescribably hard fictional math and saves the day. This usually occupies a tiny slice of the films in between insane computer generated fight scenes. This cliché applies to World War 2 films with two important exceptions. First, the cryptographers at Bletchley Park actually solved some incredibly hard problems. Like, it really, truly happened, and it actually saved the day. Second, World War 2 movies usually don’t even give Bletchley Park a tiny slice of the film in between computer generated fight scenes! As a result, pop culture is ignorant of one of the greatest stories of World War 2.

In short, if you’re interested in a fun, fictional mystery or if you enjoy cryptography at all, then Enigma is for you. However, if you’re looking for a movie that will accurately represent the reality of Bletchley Park’s role in World War 2, then you’re going to have to make it yourself. I recommend starting with some sort of combination of A Beautiful Mind and Saving Private Ryan.

Last week Bruce Schneier commented on a story about a prison that let an inmate convicted of credit card fraud reprogram a prison computer. Schneier believes this sort of thing should be an “obvious” no-no, and I agree. However, it isn’t obvious to a lot of intelligent and well-intentioned people. In fact there’s consistently been debate on whether or not criminals should be hired for computer security positions. There are people who fervently believe the myth that being an excellent criminal carries over into being an excellent law enforcement officer or security adviser.

Unfortunately, pop culture continues to prop this myth up with TV shows like the USA Network’s upcoming White Collar. The show is about an FBI agent who teams up with his nemesis-turned-good-guy to solve crimes that no one else could solve. Another TV series, called Dexter, which appears on Showtime, portrays a forensics expert who secretly murders the criminals he finds through his work. Both of these shows operate on the premise that experience committing crimes is useful in preventing them.

In reality, committing crimes and preventing crime are fundamentally different activities not because of the skill sets but because of the motivation and interests involved. In fact, the skill sets may be strikingly similar in a lot of ways. Some pirates are excellent sailors, some outlaws can shoot extremely well, and some hackers know a lot about computers. Don’t focus on asking whether the skill sets overlap. Instead, focus on questions like these: Are they dependable? Can they work well with other people in your particular work environment? How do you know they are actually interested in helping your organization? How do you know they are truly reformed?

After focusing on these questions, the truth comes to light: it is very rare that an excellent criminal history translates to an excellent crime-prevention future. There is a reason that police departments do a criminal background check before hiring someone. There is a reason that day care providers don’t hire convicted child molesters. There is a reason that banks don’t hire convicted felons to do security. Why wouldn’t the same rationale carry over to information or computer-based crimes?

Now, there are instances of convicts making amends and turning their lives around. Frank Abagnale is perhaps the most famous of these reformed con men. Hollywood capitalized on his story with the highly successful movie Catch Me If You Can. I know several people who have heard him speak at security conferences, and they have told me that he continues to apologize for his life of crime at the beginning of his talks, decades after they occurred. In fact, he may be a good model of how to lead a life of contrite contribution to law enforcement after being an extremely skilled criminal. He worked long and hard to earn the trust of banks and the FBI. He was initially paid only for positive results, and used the money he earned as a security consultant to pay back his debts.

Still, as a general rule, it should be obvious that hiring anyone convicted of computer fraud to do computer security work is a bad idea. Why take the risk? There are a lot of extraordinarily talented computer security experts who do not have the baggage of a criminal record. If you find, after searching for a non-felon, that you need the particular skills or expertise of a convicted computer fraudster, then don’t put them in a position of power. Don’t trust them without oversight. Don’t get caught up in the Hollywood story. The Frank Abagnales of the world are exceedingly rare; hiring a felon to do computer security almost never ends well.

I have seen the new Star Trek movie twice, once on opening weekend and once, in IMAX, the following weekend. In short, I thought it was fantastic, and I would encourage everyone to see it. In this post, I will provide a rambling postmortem / braindump on what I thought worked, what I thought didn’t work, and a bit of the big picture. If you are interested in a more traditional review, you can find some aggregated reviews here, and I think this one most accurately reflects my feelings. Before I go any further though, I want to start with this short disclaimer:

This post contains spoilers. Do not read further if you have not seen the new Star Trek movie and you are planning on doing so (though at this point I have to ask: why are you waiting?).

Read the rest of this entry »

Last weekend I was able to see a documentary called Helvetica. Although most people I’ve recommended it to this past week have been less than enthusiastic in their feelings towards watching a documentary of a typeface, I strongly urge anyone reading this to give it a fair shot. It is a short documentary on something that virtually everyone takes for granted. I guarantee it will give you a new outlook on text.

To back up a couple of steps, I wanted to talk about Times New Roman, which I have have always disliked. I think I pretty much hate all serif based typefaces. (Serif typefaces have ‘feet,’ called serifs, on letters like capital A’s while sans-serif typefaces have none.) Times New Roman was the default font on many word processing programs when I was in high school. As a result, it was the “required” font for many projects and papers that I had to write. In fact, Times or Times New Roman are still frustratingly required for most academic publications. My favorite font to use in high school was Arial. I even reconfigured the default typeface on any word processing program I could get my hands on to Arial. I was never entirely sure why I liked it, but it seemed to get out of my way. I just felt less formal and made me more relaxed when I was writing something.

How does this related to the documentary? Apparently, many type designers feel that Arial is a rip-off of Helvetica! That’s right folks. There was even speculation that Arial would make an appearance in the film as a villain, but I won’t spoil the surprise for you. Microsoft didn’t want to pay the royalties for Helvetica so they made their own “humanist” typeface. (A humanist font is essentially one that is closer to how a human would write the letter than one that appears machined.) Does that not sound like classic Microsoft to anyone else?

More broadly, anyone who loves design or is otherwise detail-oriented would love this documentary. There was a great quote from Paula Scher in the documentary that holds a subtle truth which applies very broadly.

When you come into design at the point that you start out in history, without knowing that you’re starting out in history, very often you don’t have a sense of what came before you, how it got there, and you certainly don’t know what’s going to come after.

What modern technology company has the best reputation with design? Apple. Why? Most people say this is entirely due to Steve Jobs. How did Steve Jobs become enamored with design? Calligraphy. Calligraphy is as old as writing itself. He began to really appreciate at an early age the historic impact of design and communication. Every aspect of your product speaks to the user. This has been critical to their success.

Anyhow, I hope you’ll consider watching Helvetica. They have a blog on their website which is also rather interesting. You might also like Typographica’s Favorites of 2007.

I don’t really have the opportunity to watch as many movies as I once did, but I recently saw The Fountain by Darren Aronofsky whom you might remember from Pi or Requiem for a Dream. At 96 minutes long The Fountain is an incredibly descriptive movie that says quite a bit more than movies nearing twice that length of time. It was billed as a movie about living forever, and if you aren’t in the mood for a thinking movie, then you should probably pass because this one will seem entirely pointless. However, if you are in the mood to watch a movie that might force you to reflect on what it means to live, then you definitely will enjoy this.

Most of our lives consist of a frenetic discord of which we may not even be fully aware, but if you are able to find stillness in the noise you can see the underlying harmony to be found simply in living. Sometimes, I think the Biblical message about the rich man trying to enter heaven is overly specific, but metaphorically correct. It is not simply wealth that prevents people from understanding our purpose in life. Those who have great wealth, responsibilities, or addictions can’t hear the harmony of life as easily as those without.

In some ways, this is a sort of existential crisis. If you spend your entire life working for the wrong things, then you’ve essentially done nothing with your life. However, if you spend your entire life searching for the right thing to do and not acting, then you have also done nothing with your life. How then should one go about living? Perhaps the best plan is to achieve a system of checks and balances to act and then review consistently. The Fountain certainly makes the case that it is essential to take a few moments from time to time to listen for harmony.

This movie is about a man’s recognition of the harmony of life through his wife’s illness and despite his “richness.” He is a doctor researching a cure to cancer or some similar ailment. He is obviously talented and has obviously worked very hard throughout his life, but it appears that his work takes on new meaning when his wife becomes ill. This story is interlaced with an older story of a Spanish Conquistador who has similarly worked very hard, but finds his purpose in life takes on new meaning when the Queen of Spain is threatened. This shows that the problems we have with finding this solace within our own lives are not new.

I won’t give away more of the movie even though I’m not sure there’s really a secret to give away. There is a lot of symbolism in the movie and with its short duration it would certainly make for a great discussion afterwards. Some of that symbolism is Christian, and if you are a member of a Bible study, I hope that your group would be open minded enough to talk about such things rather than institutionally ignore them. I recommend that you rent it or add it it to your Netflix list. It’s definitely worth the price of admission.

I have commented before about the how cool Ben & Jerry’s is (pardon the pun), but it’s worth bringing up again because they are introducing a Simpsons brand of Ice Cream. The flavor will be called Duff & D’oh-nuts and it will only be available in Springfield, VT on their all-day movie premire celebration. They are also renaming their Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough to Chocolate Chip Cookie D’oh for the day.

This is just another wonderful movie promotion for the Simpsons Movie, which already has the best movie promo ever under its belt. Seriously, if you haven’t done so yet, check out the pictures on the Simpsons Kwik-E-Mart blog. The makeovers are extensive.

All good things come to an end. Even though I no longer live in Austin, I admit that I feel no small twang of sadness that the Alamo Drafthouse Downtown closed its doors. Perhaps that is a little melodramatic because they are simply changing locations, but this is the original. As the original Alamo blog implies, it’s hard to beat the original. Certainly the spirit of the operation will carry on, even if the location is different.

Well, it’s anybody’s series now. Honestly, I can’t believe that we’re sitting here in this position. I never thought that we’d get past game six in this series. San Antonio was lucky to win game five and needs to get their act together for game seven. I didn’t watch game six, but I suppose I’ll suffer through game seven.

If you’ve been watching the news lately you’ll have seen several individuals garner national attention for various things. Natalee Holloway missing in Aruba. The 11 year old boy scout found after he was missing for four days. Jennifer Wilbanks incited a national press frenzy when she ran away from her husband and extravagent wedding.

These stories are nothing new to the American public, but there have been a number of them recently and they have left me thinking. What is so important about these individuals that separates them from all the other Americans that get kidnapped, get lost, or run away from their weddings? Why do they receive so much attention?

Fame is something pretty powerful in America today. Jennifer Wilbanks has reportedly got a book deal in the works that will make more money than I would likely make in the next ten years. Does a woman who runs away from her family and lie to the police really deserve a book deal like that? It’s probably going to be ghost written for her too.

I haven’t decided what to think about these so-called human interest stories. I’m not sure what else I would put in the press though, so perhaps I should shut up if I don’t have a better idea.