A film containing dialogue is just a film.
If you dilute the dialogue with music, it becomes less intellectual. The more music, the more imbecile the film.
If you dilute the dialogue with silence, the film becomes more intellectual. A real high quality film contains no dialogue and no music at all.
20 February 2008
10 February 2008
A distant election
Today there was a stampede at a concert in Indonesia, where 10 people died. After 30 years the Khmer Rouge leader Nuon Chea is finally brought to justice for crimes where millions of people died. More than 10,000 people fled from Sudan (السودان ) to Chad (تشاد) after attacks in Darfur (دار فور). We have cut down 20% of the Amazon jungle during the last 40 years.
And what do we get to read about on the front pages of our newspapers? We get to read who has won 3 out of 50 primary elections in a country, where we do not have the right to vote. Why would I care what is going on in primary elections in a country thousands of miles away? Tell me who won after the final election. That is enough for me. If I cannot affect the outcome of something that has no impact on me, I do not want media to spend space on it. There are other important matters in the world.
And yet, that seems to be something that Le Monde, Corriere della Sera, 日本経済新聞, Politiken, de Volkskrant and many other have not understood. All of them allocate more space to news about the American elections than one can reasonably justify.
And what do we get to read about on the front pages of our newspapers? We get to read who has won 3 out of 50 primary elections in a country, where we do not have the right to vote. Why would I care what is going on in primary elections in a country thousands of miles away? Tell me who won after the final election. That is enough for me. If I cannot affect the outcome of something that has no impact on me, I do not want media to spend space on it. There are other important matters in the world.
And yet, that seems to be something that Le Monde, Corriere della Sera, 日本経済新聞, Politiken, de Volkskrant and many other have not understood. All of them allocate more space to news about the American elections than one can reasonably justify.
Perspectives
I recently saw some presentation trying to impress me with the size of the universe. You know, one of those things that say that you are just a little dot compared to the entire earth, which is just a little dot compared to the Sun, which is just a little dot compared to the stars Betelgeuse (the name is a typo from يد الجوزاء) or Antares (Αντάρης).
However...
Size is not all that matters. The most complex known object in the universe is your brain. Or mine of course. Even my little bird brain is more complex than a planet like Jupiter. Jupiter has a certain interest to us, as there is so much of it so close to us, but it is all brawn and definitely no complex brain in it. It is all big boring mass.
And if Antares tries to brag with its size, that is not really convincing, as it easily would fit inside our solar system, inside Jupiter's orbit.
The really big things in the universe are the holes between the things - not the things themselves. And empty holes are really boring. A hole where you can hide your house key may be interesting, but holes that are light-years across are just mind-bogglingly and utterly boring. Unless you have a lot of house keys.
Not even the size of emptiness is particularly impressive. Without a telescope, you can see things that are 3 million light years away, and what one can see is a distance one can grasp.
To get to the full size of the big and boring universe, one only has to go another 3000 times that distance. In other words, if you each day travelled as far as one can see, you would not need more than ten years to cross the universe. And you would probably not see anything particularly interesting along the way.
With that perspective, I think things like Japanese adjectives or the social relations among bonobos are much more interesting.
However...
Size is not all that matters. The most complex known object in the universe is your brain. Or mine of course. Even my little bird brain is more complex than a planet like Jupiter. Jupiter has a certain interest to us, as there is so much of it so close to us, but it is all brawn and definitely no complex brain in it. It is all big boring mass.
And if Antares tries to brag with its size, that is not really convincing, as it easily would fit inside our solar system, inside Jupiter's orbit.
The really big things in the universe are the holes between the things - not the things themselves. And empty holes are really boring. A hole where you can hide your house key may be interesting, but holes that are light-years across are just mind-bogglingly and utterly boring. Unless you have a lot of house keys.
Not even the size of emptiness is particularly impressive. Without a telescope, you can see things that are 3 million light years away, and what one can see is a distance one can grasp.
To get to the full size of the big and boring universe, one only has to go another 3000 times that distance. In other words, if you each day travelled as far as one can see, you would not need more than ten years to cross the universe. And you would probably not see anything particularly interesting along the way.
With that perspective, I think things like Japanese adjectives or the social relations among bonobos are much more interesting.
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