Climate Change
A friend and I have been exchanging letters about climate change lately. I sent him a fairly detailed answer when he asked for my opinion about a certain video. My response started off as a criticism of the video itself, but quickly turned into a rant about how little trust people have for experts these days.
After I re-read my response, it occurred to me that it might make a good blog posting. If nothing else, it stakes out my position on the whole climate change issue, and explains why I adhere so strongly to that position.
Are you looking for my thoughts on climate change (which have not changed in over a decade) or my thoughts on this particular video?
This guy starts out by claiming to be a humble non-scientist, which is very disarming, until he proceeds to use a landslide of pseudo-science to "prove" his point that climate change is just a big fraud. I don't care how persuasive he is, or how many non-experts he can convince. Thanks to the Internet, it's not very hard to produce convincing charts and cherry-picked facts that seem to support *any* position at all.
This is doubly true when talking to laypeople about a highly specialized topic. If this guy's presentation was being given to a bunch of climate scientists and it seemed to convince them, well then that would make me sit up and take notice.
Actually, I'm getting sick of wading through mountains of information about global warming. I don't even read news coverage about climate change anymore; there's nothing new to read. Climate science is far too complicated for most people to really understand, and these days pretty much every news article and presentation (including Al Gore's) is nothing more than an attempt at persuasion. In other words, most of the climate change discussion these days is just an attempt to influence people who cannot possibly understand the backing science well enough to form their own well-supported conclusions. It just encourages everyone to ignore the opinion of experts in favour of their own "gut feelings".
But the truth is, the noble idea that you should "view the evidence and make up your own mind" is just plain arrogant when you don't have the training or skill to comprehend that evidence and assess how it fits into the whole system.
There are thousands of climate scientists in the world, and nearly all of them agree that climate change is real and man-made. That's it. That's all anybody who is not a qualified climate scientist needs to know. And if that doesn't convince them, then they probably don't understand how science or scientists work.
This is and will remain my position on climate change until a scientific consensus on the matter no longer exists. Frankly, as someone who isn't familiar with climate science, it would be both absurd and presumptuous for me to believe anything other than what the actual experts tell me.
Unfortunately, it's all too easy to convince people that they know more about a topic than they really do. But just because someone shows me a bunch of graphs and charts and explains things in a way that makes me feel like I understand and agree with them, that doesn't mean a thing. Why? Because I am fundamentally unqualified to verify a) whether I am being shown the whole picture, b) whether the data is accurate, and especially c) whether the interpretation of the data is correct.
Fortunately, there are people who *are* qualified to verify these things: the experts. These people have dedicated their lives to understanding how the global climate system works, and to be honest, they are the only ones whose opinions about climate change matter to me.
Everything else is just people making excuses to justify believing what they were going to go ahead and believe anyway.
No Credit
You know what I hate? When someone takes a chance, and the world kicks them in the teeth for it. When someone pushes the boundaries a little, they should get credit for being creative. They shouldn't get beaten down by critics who are afraid to leave their own comfort zones. Especially when those critics are dead wrong.
So what am I talking about here? A video game, actually.
It's a title that was released back in 2004, the same year that I bought and played it. It's called The Prince of Persia: Warrior Within. I'm not going to review the game here (it was very good.) Instead, I'm going to criticize all the other people who have reviewed this game.
You see, the majority of game critics who wrote about Warrior Within hated its soundtrack. They panned it for being too "metal" and "inappropriate" and even called it "thuggish", presumably because it includes a lot of heavy guitar riffs.
As far as I can tell, this was a knee-jerk response by a lot of people who either a) aren't comfortable with heavy metal music or b) aren't used to hearing it in video games. Either way, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the video game review industry was completely wrong about this.
In fact, the soundtrack for Warrior Within is absolutely top notch. It's fantastic. The middle eastern sounds mixed with heavy guitar chords blend wonderfully. And far from being inappropriate, the resulting music completely defines the tone of the game, which is of course is what it was meant to do.
In other words, Ubisoft made a very bold artistic choice with this game's soundtrack, and then the musically-challenged game reviewers of the world thoroughly punished them for it.
To demonstrate my point, I will now provide examples of critical reviewer comments that I found using google, mixed in with some samples of the game's actual music. If you want to listen to the entire game soundtrack, you can do so here.
But first, the trailer for the game, to give you some idea of what it's all about:
And now a few complaints:
...the musical score is a totally out of place hard rock thumpfest, complete with roaring guitars and drum solos. It's as though Ministry were hired to design the soundtrack of the next Super Mario Brothers; the music and the game exist in totally different worlds. (source)
Except for the cutscenes, the sound is just plain bad. And AHH! the music! Why did godsmack have to play for this game! Its just as bad as the voices! Why does it play when I am doing nothing? Or not play during a battle? When I'm walking on a beam, thats not exactly the time I want to hear crappy rock blasting in my ear. Then again, I never want to hear that. (source)
Also the soundtrack is pretty awful. It uses too much uninspired trashy metal music. There are only few traces of the last game`s beautiful persian style rock music with female vocals. (source)
Oh. My. God. Ubisoft what have you done! A heavy metal rock soundtrack to accompany a game like this?! Are you joking?! Trust me, the game's soundtrack is awful. I gave the first game a 10 for its great music and nice voice acting, this game is the opposite. (source)
Genuine creative talent should not be rewarded with such scorn.
Too Bad You Can’t Not See it Twice
We went to see Transformers 2 a while ago, and it was one of the worst movies I've seen in a long, long time. In fact, it was probably the worst "summer blockbuster" movie that I've ever seen.
To be fair, the special effects were pretty cool, and that kept me interested for about 20 minutes. But after that, I started to feel like I was trapped in the kitchen while someone smashed brightly painted pots and pans together for another two hours.
I actually found this fake trailer quite a bit more entertaining than the real movie:
So what exactly do I hate so much about Transformers 2?
It's not that the movie's plot relies more on explosions and fights than on dialogue and acting. That's pretty normal for a summer action flick.
It's not even that the movie feels like a (criminally unrealistic) two hour recruitment ad for the American military. That really does annoy me, especially when it's so obviously targeted at children. But the first Transformers movie did exactly the same thing, and I managed to overlook it both times.
No, the real problem is that I like stories, and the story in Transformers 2 makes absolutely no sense at all. None. You might think, so what? I'm here to watch robots fight each other, not worry about plot. Who cares if the writing is lame?
You'll care.
You see, even in movies that just blow stuff up, there's still a certain minimum level of storytelling required. A baseline level of writing quality that has to be there, or else even the explosions don't make sense.
Unfortunately, the plot for this movie is so senseless that by the end, you will literally not be able to understand why any character did anything. Your brain will hurt from trying to find a coherent story where none exists, and you'll wonder if maybe you're just not paying enough attention.
Sadly, the problem is not that you're paying too little attention, it's that you're paying too much. Because the more closely you watch this movie, the less sense it makes.
In the end, your best option is probably to put in some earplugs, close your eyes whenever Shia LaBeouf comes on screen, and try to relax for a few hours while you watch the brave soldiers and the shiny robots beat up all the not-so-shiny robots.
That, or you could just go see pretty much any other movie.
The Pitbull
Well, since political season is in full swing these days, I thought I'd share a particularly insightful article by Matt Taibi (from The Rolling Stone).
It's about Sarah Palin, who'll become America's first female vice president in January, assuming John McCain wins the upcoming election. And if that happens, she might end up becoming America's first female president, too.
John McCain is, after all, in his seventies, and he's had cancer. At his age, the actuarial data suggests that he'll probably become severely incapacitated (or die of old age) sometime in the next four to eight years. If that happens, the presidency would automatically pass on to Palin.
This would be a disaster, because Sarah Palin is so unfit to govern that she actually makes the current president look competent. The fact that she might one day have his job is terrifying--it really might be the most tragic example of mass lunacy that has occurred in my lifetime. Just ask Matt Damon.
This all begs the question, why? Why would people willingly elect George Bush (twice), and then go straight from him to someone like Sarah Palin?
From the article:
The great insight of the Palin VP choice is that huge chunks of American voters no longer even demand that their candidates actually have policy positions; they simply consume them as media entertainment, rooting for or against them according to the reflexive prejudices of their demographic, as they would for reality-show contestants or sitcom characters. Hicks root for hicks, moms for moms, born-agains for born-agains.
If you want, you can read the rest of Taibi's article here. I should warn you that Matt Taibi is not known for being a politically correct (or family friendly) writer, so skip it if you are easily offended.
I’d Nearly Forgotten
I was never very much into night clubs. I'd nearly forgotten why--and then I saw this.
That girl is a really good actor. Seriously, she nailed it.
