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DiCaprio gets to let go physically and emotionally. He’s rarely asked to be unapologetically funny. But he and Scorsese have developed a trust. DiCaprio is free to play an asshole like Belfort and do the best work he has ever done in no small part because he’s not begging us to like him. That neediness in DiCaprio has always been a limitation. He likes parts with a clear psychological explanation for what he’s playing. This time he’s playing greed, and the hedonism and extravagance set him free. (To see him dance some type of robot dance to Bo Diddley at a wedding reception is essentially to die and go to cheeseball-disco heaven.) There are three or four scenes in which DiCaprio has to use a microphone to address the staff, and he gives those a rock ‘n’ roll televangelist charge. He loves the crowds in this movie. He seems to love the scenes with Hill, whose character is even more unstable than Belfort, and with the rest of the massive cast (Rob Reiner, Joanna Lumley, Jon Bernthal, Kenneth Choi, P.J. Byrne, Bo Dietl as himself).
One of those speeches is supposed to be a resignation speech, but he turns it into a steroidal James Brown routine. He contorts his face and body for this role. He turns into James Cagney, Jack Nicholson, Liotta, and Dick Van Dyke. You sense this is what Scorsese has been trying to do for DiCaprio all these years: unleash him. You also sense that is what Scorsese has been hoping to get out of working with a younger star: youth. But The Wolf of Wall Street is not just a young movie. Scorsese’s 71. He’s been around long enough to see what that one neighborhood of this city he loves has done to this country and to the world.
via Martin Scorsese’s excellent ‘Wolf of Wall Street’ – Grantland.

3. Neuromancer, by William Gibson
Though this classic cyberpunk novel is mostly about humans and their augmentations, one of the most interesting characters to emerge from it is the AI Neuromancer. Unlike the childish HARLIE or the crazy robots in Asimov, Neuromancer is not constrained by human rules. He has the ability to run downloaded human personalities in RAM, so that they are capable of evolving within his own consciousness. Neuromancer is a kind of mage, capable of resurrecting the dead and motivated by issues that humans don’t really understand. He’s being pursued by his sibling AI Wintermute, who wants to merge with him. Eventually the two do merge, and disappear into outer space seeking more of their kind.
via 15 Books That Will Change the Way You Look at Robots.

15. Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us, by Rodney Brooks
Written by the scientist who runs the AI Lab at MIT, this non-fiction book is both smart and complicated, offering us an intriguing view of the future of robotics. Brooks’ basic supposition is that what robotics teach us is that humans are themselves robots, made up of molecular machines, and that the sooner we realize that the better. Seeing ourselves as robots may allow us to design better robots, as well as how to understand them when their minds emerge in ways that are equal to but different from our own.
via 15 Books That Will Change the Way You Look at Robots.

13. Rainbows End, by Vernor Vinge
Like Neuromancer, this novel is largely about humans but contains an AI character who winds up being one of the most intriguing in the novel. Rabbit is an AI who seems to have either built himself or come to life emergence-style out of existing programs. In Vinge’s world, humans wear augmented reality glasses and wearable computers that allow them to exist in a virtual landscape, an overlay of data on the real world. So Rabbit can seem to move around in the real world, even though he’s actually a disembodied AI with many of the characteristics of Neuromancer. He doesn’t reanimate dead humans, but he does have mysterious purposes of his own that humans can’t understand – and he saves many human lives in a riddly, trickster-like fashion. By the end of the novel, which is one of the best you’ll read about the internet of the near future, the character you most want to know more about is the mysterious, powerful Rabbit.
via 15 Books That Will Change the Way You Look at Robots.

MORE MILLIONAIRES, BIGGER GAP
The city-state has seen a huge rise in wealth over the past decade as it positioned itself as a luxury low-tax base for ultra-wealthy people from across the world.
Per-capita GDP of S$65,048 exceeds that of the United States and Germany. And surveys highlight how Singapore, with a population of 5.4 million people, has more millionaires per capita than any other country. The Economist Intelligence Unit ranks it as the world’s sixth most expensive city.
But data published by the CPF shows the proportion of Singaporeans earning less than half the median income – an international yardstick for measuring the proportion of poor people — rose to 26 percent in 2011 from 16 percent in 2002.
“As one of the world’s richest nations, we can afford to do better,” Caritas Singapore, the Catholic Church’s social outreach arm, said at the launch of an advertising and social media campaign to highlight the plight of the poor.
About 12 percent of the 2 million Singaporeans at work earn less than S$1,000 a month. Whereas, Hui Weng Tat, an associate professor in economics at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, reckons a typical worker needs a minimum S$1,400-S$1,500 a month to cope with living costs.
The city-state’s Gini co-efficient, a measure of income inequality, hit 0.478 in 2012, according to government figures, higher than every other advanced economy aside from Hong Kong.
Unlike Hong Kong, Singapore has not set an official poverty line, and the government has rejected calls to introduce a minimum wage.
What PAP has done is to make it harder for firms to recruit low-cost foreigners, tighten requirements to boost wages at the low-end, and amend labour laws to give more job security.
There are also plans to expand social protection and increase spending on healthcare. And while Singapore isn’t going to raise income tax anytime soon, it has raised taxes on bigger cars and luxury homes.
“There’s more to be done,” Finance Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam said during a recent dialogue with diplomats and university students. “I’m not satisfied with the situation in the way it is.”
via As Singapore gets richer, more people left behind | ABS-CBN News.

t times, one does some hand-wringing about the movies. Are the nerds ruining everything? Where are the nonwhite people? Where’s Emma Stone? Where’s Sharon Stone? Would Roger Ebert have liked this movie? Is Steven Soderbergh truly serious about hanging it all up?
Ah, yes, that. Back in February, Soderbergh released a diabolical block of ice called Side Effects with three sharp but sadly forgotten performances by Rooney Mara, Jude Law, and Catherine Zeta-Jones. In April, Soderbergh delivered a keynote speech at the San Francisco International Film Festival about the death of art in the movies.
He focused on ignorant film executives and the proliferation of releases based on comic books. His remarks were refreshingly candid and tinged with a kind of entitled dismay. He was biting a hand that used to feed him. Whether or not his point was self-serving, he had one, and it was resonant: The movies are doomed.
That, of course, didn’t feel at all true this year. But the impacts of global warming don’t hit you all at once, either. For now, it still snows in winter. Soderbergh is looking grimly at the long game, and in doing so, it’s probably obvious whom he’s reminiscent of. Harold Camping would have had an exact date. But Soderbergh’s no dummy; he’s just preparing us to expect less snow.
via The Year in Movies – Grantland.

Nearly the entire history of the NBA suggests that a team wishing to win the title must have one of the 10 or 15 best players alive — and preferably one of the half-dozen best. There have been exceptions, including the famous 2004 Pistons. But they are rare.
The most common means of obtaining said franchise player is via the draft when he is first eligible to enter the NBA. You can certainly land those guys after the top few picks; the Mavs did so with Dirk Nowitzki (no. 9), the Celtics with Paul Pierce (no. 10), the Lakers with Kobe Bryant (no. 13, in a draft-day trade Kobe’s team strong-armed in concert with Jerry West), and now the Pacers with Paul George (no. 10). And the Rockets have recently reminded us that shrewd cap management and a pile of gain-an-inch trades can provide the flexibility required to either sign a star-level free agent or trade for one seeking a new environment. That’s how the Celtics got Kevin Garnett, and Boston (along with Phoenix and a handful of other teams) may be in the early stages of a similar process now.
But the best odds of snagging such a player lay in being very bad, getting some lottery luck, and drafting in one of the first two or three slots. That path is NOT a fail-safe, of course. The Bobcats tanked the 2011-12 lockout season and ended up with Michael Kidd-Gilchrist instead of Anthony Davis. The Bucks, Raptors, and Blazers won the lotteries in years when most of the league found itself infatuated with big-man prospects who turned out to be the wrong choices at the very top.
via The NBA’s Possible Solution for Tanking: Good-bye to the Lottery, Hello to the Wheel – The Triangle Blog – Grantland.

13. The classic rock station is now playing your high school playlist.
via 30 Unexpected Things You Learn In Your Thirties.