Who need sunglasses? Throw on Solar Face Shield and you’ll be good to go. The description says “Padded head band for comfortable fit”, but I’m not sure that strapping a dark windshield to the front of your face would be comfortable, regardless of the headband.
Legalized weed is putting California’s drug dealers out of business, as well as its hippies.
Chevrolet Tavera protagoniza escândalo internacional na GM é um post do blog Notícias Automotivas - Carros
O Chevrolet Tavera, um SUV de origem Isuzu e vendido exclusivamente na Índia – protagonizou um escândalo internacional envolvente a cúpula de engenharia da General Motors. Sam Winegarden, então vice-presidente mundial de engenharia de motores do grupo americano foi demitido sumariamente após 29 anos de casa, levando consigo outros 10 executivos nos EUA e Índia.
O motivo é que a GM teria autorizado adulterações nos dados técnicos do Chevrolet Tavera a fim de conseguir homologação em novos padrões de emissões e de categoria na Índia. Funcionários da empresa teriam falsificado testes de emissão de poluentes para que o SUV fosse aprovado pela legislação do país asiático.
Winegarden teria autorizado a troca do motor do Chevrolet Tavera de homologação para o teste indiano. O novo motor é mais limpo e atende às exigências locais, mas foi colocado apenas para a avaliação, sendo que os carros de produção continuaram a ser feitos com o velho, que teria sido reprovado. Além do motor, os envolvidos falsificaram o peso do veículo para adequá-lo à legislação.
Ao todo, 114.000 unidades do Tavera foram produzidas de modo irregular, visto que estavam equipados com o motor antigo e peso fora dos padrões. A GM então decidiu demitir todos os envolvidos por “violações de política da empresa”. Além disso, a montadora determinou um recall de todas as unidades com motores diesel 2.0 e 2.5 feitas entre 2005 e 2013, além de ter interrompido a produção dos mesmos. O modelo conta ainda com versão a gasolina 2.2 com 114 cv e 18,3 kgfm, que continua sendo feito.
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I've spent about two days with the Leap Motion Controller, a Kinect-like PC accessory that uses infrared sensors to translate the motions of your hands into input for applications. The device I received is one I pre-ordered more than a year ago; I've been anxiously awaiting its arrival ever since I saw the first video of the device in action.
The Leap costs $79.99, and for your money you get a tiny little aluminum rectangle. It fits easily in the palm of my hand, and once situated on the desk it's essentially invisible. There are precisely two external features: the green power LED and its USB port.
When it's powered on, a trio of faintly glowing red lights are visible through the smoked glass top—presumably the infrared sources. The device's field of view extends in a dome, up to 25 cm tall and quite wide—there's a pretty big area in which your hands and fingers and pencils and whatnots will be picked up.
The lamp is this cat’s best friend
Albener PessoaAlguem ja assistiu In The Flesh ? Orphan Black eh bem legal.
The BBC is killing it with new scripted series — Orphan Black and In The Flesh were two totally unexpected (but fantastic) TV surprises. And now we have a new series called Atlantis to look forward to. Fingers crossed this new drama doesn't sink the BBC's new record of quality drama.
Rape has become endemic in South Africa, so a medical technician named Sonette Ehlers developed a product that immediately gathered national attention there. Ehlers had never forgotten a rape victim telling her forlornly, “If only I had teeth down there.”
Some time afterward, a man came into the hospital where Ehlers works in excruciating pain because his penis was stuck in his pants zipper.
Ehlers merged those images and came up with a product she called Rapex. It resembles a tube, with barbs inside. The woman inserts it like a tampon, with an applicator, and any man who tries to rape the woman impales himself on the barbs and must go to an emergency room to have the Rapex removed.
When critics complained that it was a medieval punishment, Ehlers replied tersely, “A medieval device for a medieval deed.”
- Half the Sky, Nicholas Kristof
REBLOGGING THIS. x1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
A medieval device for a medieval deed - yes.
This is perfect
Meet the Awesomes, a misfit gang of superheroes voiced by SNL luminaries like Seth Meyers, Kenan Thompson, Bill Hader and Taran Killam. Created by Seth Meyers and Mike Shoemaker, the show follows the gang's efforts to put themselves back on top. The idealistic but untalented time-bending Prock (Meyers), has to put together a new team to face the city's evil-doers. Look out for ten episodes which will begin streaming each Thursday starting August 1.
More at hulu.com/awesomes.
0 CommentsThe post Meet The Awesomes appeared first on The Awl.
Albener PessoaUau, que viagem. Tambem podemos pensar como Freud: as vezes um charuto eh apenas um charuto
Most have greeted the new sci-fi action movie “Pacific Rim” as mindless entertainment, and it certainly is that. But the movie is about much more than just computer generated action sequences and campy dialogue. In fact, it’s an allegory about the effects of globalization on manufacturing employment.
First, some important spoilers. “Pacific Rim” is a film about giant robots fighting giant sea monsters. For reasons that are not clear to begin with, these lizard-like creatures begin to emerge from an inter-dimensional breach deep in the Pacific Ocean, whereupon they attack various port cities. Emerging from the heart of the region most closely associated with globalization anxiety, these monsters represent the forces of creative destruction unleashed: they are unthinking, mysterious, and utterly disruptive.
Today there is growing anxiety about globalization and what it means for many individuals. The ratio of global imports to world GDP has risen from 14 percent in 1970 to just under 30 percent in 2008. At the same time, American manufacturing employment as a percentage of total employment has steadily fallen from 26.5 percent to 9.25 percent over roughly the same time period. Even in absolute terms, manufacturing employment has fallen by more than two million since 2000.
While some of this decline is no doubt due to increases in the productivity of American manufacturing, the recent events in Detroit illustrate the fraught consequences of increased global competition. It’s only natural that these anxieties—like the anxieties of previous times and places—should find expression in seemingly unrelated works of popular culture.
When traditional military forces prove less than adequate against the rising tide of monsters, nations naturally respond by building 250-foot tall robots, controlled by a pair of pilots using a kind of next generation Wii system. As the film explicitly notes, these robots were initially developed using DARPA funding, and represent a kind of industrial policy, each nation deploying its own robot champions. There is a Russian robot team, a Chinese team, an Australian team, and of course an American one, each protecting its home country.
But while the robots are initially successful, the monsters keep growing and invading at an ever-faster pace, overwhelming the efforts of the local industries. In response, the world’s leaders decide to abandon their industrial robot program in favor of literally building giant walls around all of their ports. It is explicitly mentioned that this has cut off trade and forced rationing and other hardships on the population—though it does seem to create a fair number of short-term blue collar jobs actually building the wall. The one city that doesn’t succumb to protectionism is Hong Kong (which happens to be an oft-cited example of free trade success in real life), where the remaining robots all relocate.
Along with the robot teams are two scientists who hope to solve the monster problem. The first, representing the neoclassical school of economics, believes that the behavior of the monsters can be explained and predicted based on mathematical models that he developed (when the models initially appear inaccurate, he gives the standard explanation that his theory was right but the timing was wrong). The second scientist is more of a behavioralist, who thinks that to understand the monsters you have to examine them, how they are, rather than working from deductive theories about them.
Combining their wisdoms, the scientists are able to discover that what appear to be unthinking “market forces” are actually being controlled and manipulated by a race of lizard-like aliens who hope to take over the planet. These lizard-aliens represent an amalgamation of multinational corporations, international finance, and so forth. The rise of trans-national corporations and magnates seemingly detached from any loyalties save global commercial conquest has long been decried, and giant lizards have long been used as a symbol for international bankers (conspiracist David Ickies imagines an international plot of actual shapeshifting lizard aliens). The most recent controversies over multinational misdeeds include accusations of Apple hiding international profits, Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin renouncing his American citizenship to move to Singapore (and avoid paying millions of dollars in taxes), and massive global price-fixing conspiracies.
While I won’t give away the ending, unfortunately the heroes eventually defeat the aliens in a way that doesn’t offer much guidance for today’s macroeconomic situation.
Searching for deeper meaning in a Hollywood movie about giant lizards may seem a stretch, but it certainly isn’t unprecedented. The original “Godzilla” movie was a clear allegory for the atomic bombing of Japan, while “Cloverfield” dealt with post-9/11 psychic traumas. Today there is growing anxiety about globalization as a huge, destructive force beyond the control of individuals, and so it’s only natural that this should find expression is popular culture.
Plus, watching giant robots fight is pretty cool.
Josiah Neeley is a Policy Analyst at the Texas Public Policy Foundation in Austin, Texas. His views on giant lizards are not necessarily those of his employer.
Albener PessoaO timming eh muito suspeito ...
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Albener PessoaHahahaha.
Reajustando o segmento de entrada no Brasil é um post do blog Notícias Automotivas - Carros
Por que tão caro? Todos nós sabemos que o preço do automóvel no Brasil está cada vez mais alto. Esse valor alto se dá por diversos fatores que sempre são citados quando se inicia a clássica discussão do porquê do preço alto. É o tal do Custo-Brasil, Lucro-Brasil e uma enxurrada de impostos que incidem uns sobre os outros.
Porém, há uma coisa que quase ninguém comenta: há vários modelos da mesma categoria. Como assim? Para se ter ideia, na VW, Fiat e GM existem 4 hatches compactos diferentes. Gol G4, Novo Gol, Fox e Polo; Uno Mille, Novo Uno, Palio Fire e Novo Palio; Celta, Onix, Agile e Sonic.
Vale lembrar que, no Brasil, o Agile é vendido como sendo superior ao Onix ao passo que na Argentina, onde ele também é vendido, ele é colocado como sendo inferior àquele! Novos carros chegam e modelos ultrapassados que eram para sair de linha, permanecem firmes e fortes no mercado.
Desta forma, começa um efeito dominó: o modelo de entrada vai empurrando os preços de cada categoria até que o último da fila, chamado pela mídia de “compacto Premium” custe o preço de um hatch médio. Em outras palavras: ao invés de substituir, cria-se uma nova categoria e cada vez mais os preços vão aumentando.
Neste post, resolvi dar uma organizada nessas categorias, eliminando alguns modelos mais veteranos como fiesta rocam e gol g4. Esses carros sairiam de linha, dando lugar aos modelos mais modernos e seguros, ficando, assim, menos categorias “iguais” e preços mais acessíveis. A categoria dos ditos compactos premiums seria, assim, extinta.
Fiz uma tabela para ilustrar a situação:
Chevrolet
O Celta sairia de linha, dando lugar ao Onix, mais moderno e aceito que o Agile (que também deixaria o mercado) e, em seguida, teríamos o Sonic, que teria preços a partir de 30 mil reais ou menos, dependendo da motorização.
Volkswagen
O longevo Gol G4, juntamente com o Novo Gol, daria lugar ao Fox e, em seguida, teríamos o Polo, que poderia ser atualizado pela VW.
Fiat
Uno Mille (que já tem data marcada para ir embora) e Novo Uno seria extintos, ficando o Novo Pálio no segmento de entrada. Logo após, teríamos o Punto com preços em torno dos 30 mil reais, dependendo da motorização, versão, etc.
Ford
Fiesta Rocam seria extinto e o New Fiesta ocuparia sua posição. No segmento de entrada, ficaríamos com o novo kA, que tem previsão para o início do ano que vem.
Peugeot
Nosso 207 (conhecido como 206+ na Europa) daria lugar ao 208, concorrente direito do novo fiesta, punto e cia, ficando no segmento de entrada da marca.
Citroen
O C3 poderia ser atualizado e ter o visual interior do C3 europeu, tendo uma queda nos preços, também em torno dos 30 mil reais.
Renault
O idoso Clio II daria lugar ao Sandero, que ficaria no segmento de entrada. A Renault poderia oferecer o Clio IV para concorrer com C3 e cia.
Hyundai
HB20 continuaria como modelo de entrada da marca, porém com preços condizentes à categoria.
Honda
Apesar das dimensões avantajadas, o “hatchvan” da japonesa concorreria com Fiesta, 208 e cia, também com preços menores.
Toyota
Etios continuaria como modelo de entrada da marca, porém com preços condizentes à categoria.
Como ficaria:
Por Eduardo Pruvinelli
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There are a lot of people complaining about lousy software patents these days. I say, stop complaining, and start killing them. It took me about fifteen minutes to stop a crappy Microsoft patent from being approved. Got fifteen minutes? You can do it too.
In a minute, I’ll tell you that story. But first, a little background.
Software developers don’t actually invent very much. The number of actually novel, non-obvious inventions in the software industry that maybe, in some universe, deserve a government-granted monopoly is, perhaps, two.
The other 40,000-odd software patents issued every year are mostly garbage that any working programmer could “invent” three times before breakfast. Most issued software patents aren’t “inventions” as most people understand that word. They’re just things that any first-year student learning Java should be able to do as a homework assignment in two hours.
Nevertheless, a lot of companies large and small have figured out that patents are worth money, so they try to file as many as they possibly can. They figure they can generate a big pile of patents as an inexpensive byproduct of the R&D work they’re doing anyway, just by sending some lawyers around the halls to ask programmers what they’re working on, and then attempting to patent everything. Almost everything they find is either obvious or has been done before, so it shouldn’t be patentable, but they use some sneaky tricks to get these things through the patent office.
The first technique is to try to make the language of the patent as confusing and obfuscated as possible. That actually makes it harder for a patent examiner to identify prior art or evaluate if the invention is obvious.
A bonus side effect of writing an incomprehensible patent is that it works better as an infringement trap. Many patent owners, especially the troll types, don’t really want you to avoid their patent. Often they actually want you to infringe their patent, and then build a big business that relies on that infringement, and only then do they want you to find out about the patent, so you are in the worst possible legal position and can be extorted successfully. The harder the patent is to read, the more likely it will be inadvertently infringed.
The second technique to getting bad software patents issued is to use a thesaurus. Often, software patent applicants make up new terms to describe things with perfectly good, existing names. A lot of examiners will search for prior art using, well, search tools. They have to; no single patent examiner can possibly be aware of more than (rounding to nearest whole number) 0% of the prior art which might have invalidated the application.
Since patent examiners rely so much on keyword searches, when you submit your application, if you can change some of the keywords in your patent to be different than the words used everywhere else, you might get your patent through even when there’s blatant prior art, because by using weird, made-up words for things, you’ve made that prior art harder to find.
Now on to the third technique. Have you ever seen a patent application that appears ridiculously broad? (“Good lord, they’re trying to patent CARS!”). Here’s why. The applicant is deliberately overreaching, that is, striving to get the broadest possible patent knowing that the worst thing that can happen is that the patent examiner whittles their claims down to what they were entitled to patent anyway.
Let me illustrate that as simply as I can. At the heart of a patent is a list of claims: the things you allege to have invented that you will get a monopoly on if your patent is accepted.
An example might help. Imagine a simple application with these three claims:
1. A method of transportation
2. The method of transportation in claim 1, wherein there is an engine connected to wheels
3. The method of transportation in claim 2, wherein the engine runs on water
Notice that claim 2 mentions claim 1, and narrows it... in other words, it claims a strict subset of things from claim 1.
Now, suppose you invented the water-powered car. When you submit your patent, you might submit it this way even knowing that there’s prior art for “methods of transportation” and you can’t really claim all of them as your invention. The theory is that (a) hey, you might get lucky! and (b) even if you don’t get lucky and the first claim is rejected, the narrower claims will still stand.
What you’re seeing is just a long shot lottery ticket, and you have to look deep into the narrower claims to see what they really expect to get. And you never know, the patent office might be asleep at the wheel and BOOM you get to extort everyone who makes, sells, buys, or rides transportation.
So anyway, a lot of crappy software patents get issued and the more that get issued, the worse it is for software developers.
The patent office got a little bit of heat about this. The America Invents Act changed the law to allow the public to submit examples of prior art while a patent application is being examined. And that’s why the USPTO asked us to set up Ask Patents, a Stack Exchange site where software developers like you can submit examples of prior art to stop crappy software patents even before they’re issued.
Sounds hard, right?
At first I honestly thought it was going to be hard. Would we even be able to find vulnerable applications? The funny thing is that when I looked at a bunch of software patent applications at random I came to realize that they were all bad, which makes our job much easier.
Take patent application US 20130063492 A1, submitted by Microsoft. An Ask Patent user submitted this call for prior art on March 26th.
I tried to find prior art for this just to see how hard it was. First I read the application. Well, to be honest, I kind of glanced at the application. In fact I skipped the abstract and the description and went straight to the claims. Dan Shapiro has great blog post called How to Read a Patent in 60 Seconds which taught me how to do this.
This patent was, typically, obfuscated, and it used terms like “pixel density” for something that every other programmer in the world would call “resolution,” either accidentally (because Microsoft’s lawyers were not programmers), or, more likely, because the obfuscation makes it that much harder to search.
Without reading too deeply, I realized that this patent is basically trying to say “Sometimes you have a picture that you want to scale to different resolutions. When this happens, you might want to have multiple versions of the image available at different resolutions, so you can pick the one that’s closest and scale that.”
This didn’t seem novel to me. I was pretty sure that the Win32 API already had a feature to do something like that. I remembered that it was common to provide multiple icons at different resolutions and in fact I was pretty sure that the operating system could pick one based on the resolution of the display. So I spent about a minute with Google and eventually (bing!) found this interesting document entitled Writing DPI-Aware Win32 Applications [PDF] written by Ryan Haveson and Ken Sykes at, what a coincidence, Microsoft.
And it was written in 2008, while Microsoft’s new patent application was trying to claim that this “invention” was “invented” in 2011. Boom. Prior art found, and deployed.
Total time elapsed, maybe 10 minutes. One of the participants on Ask Patents pointed out that the patent application referred to something called “scaling sets.” I wasn’t sure what that was supposed to mean but I found a specific part of the older Microsoft document that demonstrated this “invention” without using the same word, so I edited my answer a bit to point it out. Here’s my complete answer on AskPatents.
Mysteriously, whoever it was that posted the request for prior art checked the Accepted button on Stack Exchange. We thought this might be the patent examiner, but it was posted with a generic username.
At that point I promptly forgot about it, until May 21 (two months later), when I got this email from Micah Siegel (Micah is our full-time patent expert):
The USPTO rejected Microsoft's Resizing Imaging Patent!
The examiner referred specifically to Prior Art cited in Joel's answer ("Haveson et al").
Here is the actual document rejecting the patent. It is a clean sweep starting on page 4 and throughout, basically citing rejecting the application as obvious in view of Haveson.
Micah showed me a document from the USPTO confirming that they had rejected the patent application, and the rejection relied very heavily on the document I found. This was, in fact, the first “confirmed kill” of Ask Patents, and it was really surprisingly easy. I didn’t have to do the hard work of studying everything in the patent application and carefully proving that it was all prior art: the examiner did that for me. (It’s a pleasure to read him demolish the patent in question, all twenty claims, if that kind of schadenfreude amuses you).
(If you want to see the rejection, go to Public Pair and search for publication number US 20130063492 A1. Click on Image File Wrapper, and look at the non-final rejection of 4-11-2013. Microsoft is, needless to say, appealing the decision, so this crappy patent may re-surface.) Update October 2013: the patent received a FINAL REJECTION from the USPTO!
There is, though, an interesting lesson here. Software patent applications are of uniformly poor quality. They are remarkably easy to find prior art for. Ask Patents can be used to block them with very little work. And this kind of individual destruction of one software patent application at a time might start to make a dent in the mountain of bad patents getting granted.
My dream is that when big companies hear about how friggin’ easy it is to block a patent application, they’ll use Ask Patents to start messing with their competitors. How cool would it be if Apple, Samsung, Oracle and Google got into a Mexican Standoff on Ask Patents? If each of those companies had three or four engineers dedicating a few hours every day to picking off their competitors’ applications, the number of granted patents to those companies would grind to a halt. Wouldn’t that be something!
Got 15 minutes? Go to Ask Patents right now, and see if one of these RFPAs covers a topic you know something about, and post any examples you can find. They’re hidden in plain view; most of the prior art you need for software patents can be found on Google. Happy hunting!
Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.
One of the assurances I keep hearing about the U.S. government's spying on American citizens is that it's only used in cases of terrorism. Terrorism is, of course, an extraordinary crime, and its horrific nature is supposed to justify permitting all sorts of excesses to prevent it. But there's a problem with this line of reasoning: mission creep. The definitions of "terrorism" and "weapon of mass destruction" are broadening, and these extraordinary powers are being used, and will continue to be used, for crimes other than terrorism.
Back in 2002, the Patriot Act greatly broadened the definition of terrorism to include all sorts of "normal" violent acts as well as non-violent protests. The term "terrorist" is surprisingly broad; since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, it has been applied to people you wouldn't normally consider terrorists.
The most egregious example of this are the three anti-nuclear pacifists, including an 82-year-old nun, who cut through a chain-link fence at the Oak Ridge nuclear-weapons-production facility in 2012. While they were originally arrested on a misdemeanor trespassing charge, the government kept increasing their charges as the facility's security lapses became more embarrassing. Now the protestors have been convicted of violent crimes of terrorism -- and remain in jail.
Meanwhile, a Tennessee government official claimed that complaining about water quality could be considered an act of terrorism. To the government's credit, he was subsequently demoted for those remarks.
The notion of making a terrorist threat is older than the current spate of anti-terrorism craziness. It basically means threatening people in order to terrorize them, and can include things like pointing a fake gun at someone, threatening to set off a bomb, and so on. A Texas high-school student recently spent five months in jail for writing the following on Facebook: "I think I'ma shoot up a kindergarten. And watch the blood of the innocent rain down. And eat the beating heart of one of them." Last year, two Irish tourists were denied entry at the Los Angeles Airport because of some misunderstood tweets.
Another term that's expanded in meaning is "weapon of mass destruction." The law is surprisingly broad, and includes anything that explodes, leading political scientist and terrorism-fear skeptic John Mueller to comment:
As I understand it, not only is a grenade a weapon of mass destruction, but so is a maliciously-designed child's rocket even if it doesn't have a warhead. On the other hand, although a missile-propelled firecracker would be considered a weapon of mass destruction if its designers had wanted to think of it as a weapon, it would not be so considered if it had previously been designed for use as a weapon and then redesigned for pyrotechnic use or if it was surplus and had been sold, loaned, or given to you (under certain circumstances) by the secretary of the army ....All artillery, and virtually every muzzle-loading military long arm for that matter, legally qualifies as a WMD. It does make the bombardment of Ft. Sumter all the more sinister. To say nothing of the revelation that The Star Spangled Banner is in fact an account of a WMD attack on American shores.
After the Boston Marathon bombings, one commentator described our use of the term this way: "What the United States means by terrorist violence is, in large part, 'public violence some weirdo had the gall to carry out using a weapon other than a gun.' ... Mass murderers who strike with guns (and who don't happen to be Muslim) are typically read as psychopaths disconnected from the larger political sphere." Sadly, there's a lot of truth to that.
Even as the definition of terrorism broadens, we have to ask how far we will extend that arbitrary line. Already, we're using these surveillance systems in other areas. A raft of secret court rulings has recently expanded the NSA's eavesdropping powers to include "people possibly involved in nuclear proliferation, espionage and cyberattacks." A "little-noticed provision" in a 2008 law expanded the definition of "foreign intelligence" to include "weapons of mass destruction," which, as we've just seen, is surprisingly broad.
A recent Atlantic essay asks, somewhat facetiously, "If PRISM is so good, why stop with terrorism?" The author's point was to discuss the value of the Fourth Amendment, even if it makes the police less efficient. But it's actually a very good question. Once the NSA's ubiquitous surveillance of all Americans is complete -- once it has the ability to collect and process all of our emails, phone calls, text messages, Facebook posts, location data, physical mail, financial transactions, and who knows what else -- why limit its use to cases of terrorism? I can easily imagine a public groundswell of support to use to help solve some other heinous crime, like a kidnapping. Or maybe a child-pornography case. From there, it's an easy step to enlist NSA surveillance in the continuing war on drugs; that's certainly important enough to warrant regular access to the NSA's databases. Or maybe to identify illegal immigrants. After all, we've already invested in this system, we might as well get as much out of it as we possibly can. Then it's a short jump to the trivial examples suggested in the Atlantic essay: speeding and illegal downloading. This "slippery slope" argument is largely speculative, but we've already started down that incline.
Criminal defendants are starting to demand access to the NSA data that they believe will exonerate themselves. How can a moral government refuse this request?
More humorously, the NSA might have created the best backup system ever.
Technology changes slowly, but political intentions can change very quickly. In 2000, I wrote in my book Secrets and Lies about police surveillance technologies: "Once the technology is in place, there will always be the temptation to use it. And it is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday facilitate a police state." Today we're installing technologies of ubiquitous surveillance, and the temptation to use them will be overwhelming.
This essay originally appeared in TheAtlantic.com.
You can see the problem straight from the name of the movie. “World War Z”.
The historical world wars, one and two, were big, epic things. To make a movie of one of them by gluing a camera to the ass of one man would be silly; it would be a Forrest Gump-like comedy, an unrealistic lark, with our protagonist showing up wherever things happen whether he wants it or not. If you then have a bigger cataclysm than either of these two wars, and title it in such sweeping fashion, there’s some expectation that you are going to do justice to the scale and complexity of the conflict.
Or, you know, just glue a camera to a guy’s ass and see what happens.
Max Brooks’s book, almost incidentally also called World War Z, gets this. It doesn’t have a protagonist; it has a narrator. The narrator is the least important figure in the story, though the frame story is his. What he did during the war isn’t important, because he did nothing important. His importance is in finding the people who have stories to tell, because no one single person can tell the whole. The broken people that our narrator interviews after the zombie war have their own stories, and together they make up a story of not just humans, but humanity. Instead of war stories, the story of a war: World War Z. That the individual stories are disjointed, separated from each other, just emphasizes the chaos and the terrible extent of the war.
In the movie, the chaos of the conflict is represented by gluing the camera to a pogo stick and turning the lights off. A daring audiovisual storytelling decision, that.
The movie has no narrator, but a protagonist — the few times the protagonist tries to narrate things, he’s capable of nothing more except generic platitudes that could work just as well for a diet as for a zombie apocalypse. See the last minutes of the movie.
Also, in the book the conflict is world-wide: a world war. Through the stories we see the lives of people, as they were and as they became, in Mississippi, China, Russia, South Africa, lots of other places which aren’t named AMERICA! and in which no conspicuous Americans cavort around, stealing the spotlight and the importance of the stories told.
In the movie, we see: New York, in AMERICA! An American base in Korea — we briefly see a native; just briefly, don’t worry. Jerusalem — don’t worry, our protagonist is American and, unlike in the book, we won’t say anything about the Palestinians, rah rah Israel! — and then Wales, which is almost like America, don’t you worry, o, you skittish viewer. You don’t have to struggle over feeling sympathy for people who don’t look like you. Drool into your popcorn and watch the untouchable protagonist running around.
Let’s just take one character from the movie: Tomas. The little kid from New Jersey. He is barricaded in with his family when the protagonist crashes in with his. Shortly after the protagonists leave, the zombies barge in. The whole family except for Tomas is killed, then resurrected; he’s chased up to the roof and to the protagonist’s rescue helicopter by his father, mother and sister who are now monsters that want to kill and eat him. For the resulting trauma and shock we get… a five-second clip of the protagonist telling Tomas to man up and look after his womanfolk. Because your father chasing you with fangs and claws and staring eyes, hey, who wants to see a boy dealing with that. In the book we would have gotten the equivalent of five minutes with Tomas; in the movie we get nothing, because the protagonist’s sickeningly ideal and lily-white family take up all the screentime. Because hey, they lost a stuffed animal or some such great trauma.
In the book, the zombies are slow. You can run away from them; the problem is, where do you run? They are like death and taxes: running is a temporary solution at best. The problem is that the whole world is collapsing, with all the attendant problems and human insanities; one of the main threads of the book is that once miracle cures and utopian refuges don’t appear, one has to stop running, take a shovel, and start bashing zombies in the head. Then, after a few years, those that remain can win a vigilant peace until Zed War Two.
Possibly this is too grim for the idiots who write movies. Or they couldn’t find a way for Brad Pitt to take up a shovel all over the world and hit the zombies with it for five years. (One could trace most of the failures of the movie to this: it has a protagonist, not a narrator. Then you insert a family, jettison some original pieces, insert protagonist heroics, jettison a few more pieces, insert running and screaming, do away with flashbacks, insert some concrete victory the protagonist can find, jettison — and in the end, nothing of the original is left.)
In the book, the zombies are slow; the book’s menace is not that the zombies jump you, but that they corner you. In the movie? The movie starts with the protagonist’s family having a saccharine breakfast in a peaceful world. By lunchtime they’re facing gunfire and rapists at the local mall. It’s not just the zombies that are quick; everything is quick almost to the point of comedy.
During the finale, our protagonist injects himself with a vial of random disease — because the stupid magic bullet here is that the zombies don’t eat the terminally sick. They taste funny or something. Then he waits fifteen minutes and, hooray, the zombies don’t touch him! I am not a biologist, but I am pretty sure diseases don’t work that way. Even if you inject yourself with smallpox, it’s not as if a giant placard of “SICK! AND INEDIBLE!” immediately appears over your head. Surely this should take days, weeks even.
But hey, it’s not like the book is some practicality-attendant thing with a perfectly deadpan serious in-world companion volume called the Zombie Survival Guide. Moving along!
In another development, our protagonist has a family. They’re saccharine non-persons; uninteresting blobs of female baggage. They take the space of a story, but theirs is a story where nothing interesting happens. Nothing would have been lost if they had been eaten during the first ten minutes; indeed it would have made the movie better. At least then our protagonist wouldn’t have left on a world-having mission with no way to contact the UN… but with a phone to contact his wife with.
This could have been framed as the wife’s job being to look after the phone, and alert the UN people when it rang; but I’m not sure if there was any such agreement. (Related: the book makes a big deal of making difficult, cruel, questionable decisions for survival. The movie has the UN people being callous dicks towards the unerring protagonist’s saintly family, for no good reason. Different strokes, I guess!)
Also, the UN apparently didn’t give him any papers or identification, as in Wales the locals didn’t know who he was; in the world of this movie it’s much better to hope you have a phone you can use to get in contact with someone who says he’s the vice something of the UN. You know, credentials! If he had encountered a passport check, why, he would just have handed the magic phone to the inspector. Which is how this UN does things; one wonders how the managed to commandeer a US aircraft carrier to be their home base.
Also: our protagonist, Gerry Lane, sleeps for three days in Wales. When he wakes up, the locals are insistent on knowing who the hell he is. In the three days they apparently did not: (a) find any papers on him, (b) try the exotic satellite phone he had, or (c) ask the woman he came in with. Because, hey, women, what do they know.
And the zombies: well, after one bites you, you have (for one strain) twelve seconds and then you are a zombie too. (For the Korean strain, ten minutes — for the Jerusalem strain, well, our protagonist assumes twelve seconds, but how does he know? What fun it would have been if he had been wrong, and five minutes later… chomp! Israeli lady teeth on you neck, Lane!) These zombies are not death or taxes; they’re more a tsunami of flesh. Which is showy; but has nothing to do with the book.
The book has a lot of interesting set pieces; the movie has none of those.
None.
No Paul Redeker, no downed plane, no Japan, no China, no Tibet, Russia or India; the movie starts after the first stories and ends before the stories of the reclamation. I can’t recall any extended scene that was from the book. (The movie has Israel walled in, but unlike in the book, the wall doesn’t held. Probably too few Americans holding it.) The makers could just have changed the title and Gerry Lane’s name and Max Brooks couldn’t even have sued them for stealing his ideas.
(I hope Brooks got lots of money for the movie rights; he sure as heck didn’t get a faithful or even a particularly good movie. Hopefully the money buys time to write something big and tasty again, and not just such zombie marginalia as he’s done since the book.)
(Apparently J. Michael Straczynski, a god among men for the creation of Babylon 5, wrote the first iteration of the script. It took place after the war, like the book, and was apparently very good. What went wrong after that I don’t know, but it went wrong repeatedly and with great force to the forehead, and in the end this genius stroke of a movie crawled out.)
After the griping, the good parts of the movie. One, there was a really chilling line about North Korea and teeth. That’s pretty much it; otherwise this was a generic high-budget zombie runner-screamer-shooter with the name of an unrelated, unique and great book.
Men routinely claim to be more tolerant of cold than women. But where does this physiological difference stem from, and are there any studies that have examined its veracity? Of course there are. Some of them even involve rectal thermometers. Yeah, science!
    
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IDEA: rental ghosts to create “cold spots” in houses during heat waves.
– KenJennings
I’m a morning person. Then, around noon, I turn into a horse.
– mikeleffingwell
spiders are just wee furry eight-leggedy things; think of them as two kittens taped together and you’ll be fine
– Friend of xJane’s seen via FB
Literally thousands of chameleons in your house right now and you don’t even know it.
– weinerdog4life
PREQUEL: “Goddamned Mohicans Everywhere.”
– MiahSaint
did you know? goths have 50 different words for despair
– IamEnidColeslaw
a baby’s laughter is one of the most beautiful sounds you will ever hear, unless it’s 3 am and you’re home alone and you don’t have a baby.
– iphone420s
You never hear about a new ghost. “Oh yeah, this place is haunted since Jeff died last Tuesday.”
– juliussharpe
the movie “se7en” but each murder is based on a different dwarf
– twice_mustard
SEX TIP: keep track of multiple orgasms in the voice of The Count from Sesame Street.
– KenJennings
Mercedes-Benz A200 x BMW 118i x Citroen DS4 – Quanto custa depois de comprá-los é um post do blog Notícias Automotivas - Carros
Disposto a entrar no segmento dos hatches premium iniciei uma empreitada de pesquisas em sites, revistas e concessionárias. Escolhi os três modelos abaixo para me aprofundar nas informações pois detalhes e custos do A3 ainda não estavam disponíveis e o V40 já inicia com valores bem acima dos R$ 110 mil.
Alguns equipamentos não foram destacados devido a constarem em todos os modelos. A pesquisa foi dividida em 3 etapas: informações técnicas/equipamentos em tabela comparativa, custo de cesta de peças e custo de revisões:
Comparativo (informações técnicas/equipamentos)
Cesta de peças
Valores obtidos em revistas especializadas e consulta ao setor de peças de concessionárias.
Planos de revisões até 30.000 km
Por Flávio Mendonca
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Courtney
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Joan Crawford in Possessed (1931)
82 years later and it’s still relevant
Mason jars are great for holding cleaning supplies and cooking ingredients, but they aren't great at dispensing them in moderation. Adding the top of a juice carton to your jars though can give you the best of both worlds.
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Omg I need this for when I take the bus.
I need this.
I could use these for plane rides.
My lovely followers, please follow this blog immediately!
Have not had this problem in Oslo. Have this problem constantly in Seattle.
MINI divulga primeiras imagens do conceito Vision, que antecipa o novo Cooper é um post do blog Notícias Automotivas - Carros
A MINI divulgou nesta quinta-feira, 25, as primeiras imagens do novo conceito Vision, que é um exercício de design, de acordo com a marca. Porém, como dá para notar, a novidade antecipa as linhas da nova geração do hatch compacto Cooper, que será apresentado durante o Salão do Automóvel de Frankfurt, que acontece em setembro.
O novo MINI Vision, revelado por Anders Warming, chefe de design da montadora, conta com dispositivos interativos, como o controle Driving Experience, que permite personalizar a cor do interior do modelo em questão de segundos.
No visual, o Vision Concept apresenta linhas modernas e ao mesmo inspirada na primeira geração do Cooper. A dianteira do modelo exibe faróis full-LED e grade hexagonal que incorpora os faróis auxiliares, enquanto a traseira incorpora lanternas maiores que a do modelo atual e dupla saída de escape central.
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