Category: personal AnGoL

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Best Read:: Something that really bugs me about the recent Star Trek movie: Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy

This has ruined the Star Wars reboot for me, read the whole thing if you dare. Damn didn’t think of that.
Damn reminds me of what a friend says about reboot Spock. Reboot Spock was an asshole counter to the original series spock where he was irritating not for being an asshole but for being sooo damn logical.
ty to Brad Delong for the pointer

Something that really bugs me about the recent Star Trek movie
Mitch Wagner
There’s a scene at the end of the movie—and I don’t think this is a spoiler, the movie has been building to this point the whole time—where Kirk has the bad guy on the main bridge viewscreen. The bad guy is defeated, his ship crippled, and Kirk offers amnesty. The bad guy proudly refuses, and instead dies with his ship.
Spock approaches Kirk afterward and asks if Kirk was really going to help the bad guy out. And Kirk smirks and says, no, of course not. Spock is happy about that.
It seems to me that one scene spits in the face of one of the greatest things about the original Trek. The show was primarily an action-adventure program, with plenty of fistfights and stirring ship-to-ship battle. But in the end, Gene Roddenberry and the rest of the people who created Trek were espousing a philosophy of peace and forgiveness. Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise extended forgiveness to enemies many times, including the very first time they encountered the Romulans, in a sequence that the movie echoes.
The message of Trek: It’s better to talk than to fight. It’s better to forgive your enemies.
via Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Blog posts / Something that really bugs me about the recent Star Trek movie.

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rePost::Seth's Blog: The relentless search for "tell me what to do"

This is sooo true nobody wants to make a decision. Make a decision and other people would criticize it or say that there is a better way. I think it’s easy to think of something better. I believe it’s esay to go one up when someone has already set the bar/base,  the problem is that few people do, few people accept the responsibility of being wrong. My take? if it’s really important to you then stand up and get yourself heard other wise don’t let other people pass the buck to you. It’s easier finding someone to blame than facing that blame so do it only when you feel it is important to you!!!!

The relentless search for “tell me what to do”

If you’ve ever hired or managed or taught, you know the feeling.
People are just begging to be told what to do. There are a lot of reasons for this, but I think the biggest one is: “If you tell me what to do, the responsibility for the outcome is yours, not mine. I’m safe.”
When asked, resist.

via Seth’s Blog: The relentless search for “tell me what to do”.

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rePost::I Prefer My Professor’s Illegible Handwriting To Your PowerPoint Presentation

O feel the same way. Powerpoints are superflous and in most cases unecessary. If you are just going to read stuff to me or tell me things I can read in the book, then why are you wasting my time ? I can read the goddamn book. If you really want to not be useless then teach me. Quiz me and find out what’s the barriers from me understanding something. What do I find unconvincing.

The surprising part is not that he lectures without PowerPoint, because many professors also avoid presentation software. The surprising part is that I prefer his chalkboard notes over PowerPoint despite the fact that his handwriting is almost completely illegible, suggesting that there is a quality of “chalk talks” that is useful to my learning style beyond just being able to read the notes. I have some ideas why this might be:
via Carolyn Blogs » Blog Archive » I Prefer My Professor’s Illegible Handwriting To Your PowerPoint Presentation.

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Research Of The Day (ROTD):The Only Reason I'd Love To Move Abroad:The Bellows » Paper of the Day the First

Yes, there is a part of me that wants to move abroad. It’s the part that believes Silicon Valley/New York/London is where the tech action is. Where I’d likely find people of like or at least similar aspirations. Take for instance the Philippine Tech Community. Its the same faces, and there is a reason for this, for keeping an 8 hour job and still coding/blogging/learning new programming languages/coding up personal projects is tiring and people who are either not rich/not very very smart/ very very productive/ very very lucky can do it. Life get’s in the way. I consider myself lucky , and this is the only reason why I am at least at the periphery or maybe the first row at the outside of the Philippine Tech Community, not quite there yet but slowly inching inwards. Sometimes it’s not about greener pastures. It’s what a musician and a dancer working in Hong Kong Disneyland says when interviewed by Kara Davin in last weeks episode of OFW Diaries, It’s the opportunity to practice something you love.

And I think that to a certain extent, people make these choices based on conceptions they have about themselves and the people they’d like to be. If you see yourself as someone who is interested in art, you may move to New York, not just because there is a lot of great art there, but also because you’ll meet people there who are themselves interested in art and who will nudge you toward more involvement with art and artists. Or you might move to Denver, because you want to be an outdoorsy person. People you meet there will typically be outdoorsy, and they’ll make it easier for you to become this outdoorsy person that you hope to be. At a more general level, people may simply feel that they’re “destined for bigger things”, or ready for a “simpler life”, and they may choose cities based on these feelings. Not just because they’re going where they want to go, but because they’re committing themselves to a certain lifestyle, and placing themselves in a situation where the people they come to know will act as constraints on them, pushing them to behave in a certain way. After all, you can love art in Denver and be outdoorsy in New York.
It seems to me that people want to be a lot of things that they can’t necessarily become on their own. A move can be a means to commit oneself to a certain course, and to make it harder to back away from a desired goal or style of life.
via The Bellows » Paper of the Day the First.

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rePost::Chris Daly's Blog: How the Lawyers Stole Winter: Thoughts on journalism and journalism history.

Saw a pointer to this essay from Doc Searls blog.
I mourn for the children of today. Parents seemingly scared or maybe not wanting to appear as Not Good Parents and thus over compensate. If you are scared about life, I believe you shouldn’t make it such that you raise a bunch of risk averse people. This is why progress is very slow. I used to be very risk averse. I didn’t want to mess things up. This attribute made me learn much much slowly (with respect to programming). The discovery of dynamic languages helped me gain confidence in breaking systems. This is why 2007 me is very different 2010 me (wrt to programming and most other things). I now think that ask for forgiveness later.  Hope I can apply this to different parts of my life. Fake courage. Fail. Learn.Live!!!

But before we could play, we had to check the ice. We became serious junior meteorologists, true connoisseurs of cold. We learned that the best weather for pond skating is plain, clear cold, with starry nights and no snow. (Snow not only mucks up the skating surface but also insulates the ice from the colder air above.) And we learned that moving water, even the gently flowing Mystic River, is a lot less likely to freeze than standing water. So we skated only on the pond. We learned all the weird whooping and cracking sounds that ice makes as it expands and contracts, and thus when to leave the ice.
Do kids learn these things today? I don't know. How would they? We don't even let them. Instead, we post signs. Ruled by lawyers, cities and towns everywhere try to eliminate their legal liability. But try as they might, they cannot eliminate the underlying risk. Liability is a social construct; risk is a natural fact. When it is cold enough, ponds freeze. No sign or fence or ordinance can change that.
In fact, by focusing on liability and not teaching our kids how to take risks, we are making their world more dangerous. When we were children, we had to learn to evaluate risks and handle them on our own. We had to learn, quite literally, to test the waters. As a result, we grew up to be more savvy about ice and ponds than any kid could be who has skated only under adult supervision on a rink.
via Chris Daly’s Blog: How the Lawyers Stole Winter: Thoughts on journalism and journalism history..

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rePost::Seth's Blog: Hunters and Farmers

This is an interesting perspective. Though I’ve been very wary of Evolutionary Psychology/Neurology/Anything concerning the brain, I am drawn to this idea.  I believe this is another form of the more nuanced view in the book by probably 5th most favorite TED talk speaker sir Ken Robinson (ted Talk here) . I embedded the talk at the end of this post. Hope you can read his book The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything.

Clearly, farming is a very different activity from hunting. Farmers spend time sweating the details, worrying about the weather, making smart choices about seeds and breeding and working hard to avoid a bad crop. Hunters, on the other hand, have long periods of distracted noticing interrupted by brief moments of frenzied panic.
It’s not crazy to imagine that some people are better at one activity than another. There might even be a gulf between people who are good at each of the two skills. Thom Hartmann has written extensively on this. He points out that medicating kids who might be better at hunting so that they can sit quietly in a school designed to teach farming doesn’t make a lot of sense.
A kid who has innate hunting skills is easily distracted, because noticing small movements in the brush is exactly what you’d need to do if you were hunting. Scan and scan and pounce. That same kid is able to drop everything and focus like a laser–for a while–if it’s urgent. The farming kid, on the other hand, is particularly good at tilling the fields of endless homework problems, each a bit like the other. Just don’t ask him to change gears instantly.
Marketers confuse the two groups. Are you selling a product that helps farmers… and hoping that hunters will buy it? How do you expect that people will discover your product, or believe that it will help them? The woman who reads each issue of Vogue, hurrying through the pages then clicking over to Zappos to overnight order the latest styles–she’s hunting. Contrast this to the CTO who spends six months issuing RFPs to buy a PBX that was last updated three years ago… she’s farming.
via Seth’s Blog: Hunters and Farmers.

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rePost::Same-sex marriage is bad, but Prop 8 lawyers don't know why Boing Boing

Download the pdf in the linked blog post!!!

I’ve always been puzzled by the strong opposition to same-sex marriage. I just don’t see what’s so bad about it. I have no idea what the harm is. I’ve talked to many supporters of CA Prop 8 but they haven’t been able to tell me either.
Last night I was reading an October 14 transcript from Perry v. Schwarzenegger, the case that’s deciding the constitutionality of CA Prop 8. I was surprised to discover that apparently *nobody* knows what the problem is with same-sex marriage. Not the plaintiffs, not the defendants, and not the judge, who seems more than a little surprised by this.
via Same-sex marriage is bad, but Prop 8 lawyers don’t know why Boing Boing.

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Film::Of the feel of theaters and audiences, and eight films from Sundance – Roger Ebert's Journal

I first heard of two films that I loved watching in the after Sundance blog posts. These films I loved are “Brick” and “500 Days of Summer” (If only “The Assassination of a Highschool President” took of, but it seems it was too close to brick that it wasn’t viewed as favourably by distributors). This is why as friend jason said we were one of the first to get excited about “500 Days of Summer”. Hope I can be at Sundance one day (Keep On Dreaming). This is a nice primer from favorite film critic Ebert on some films from Sundance.
Hope you can read the whole linked post!!!

Of the feel of theaters and audiences,
and eight films from Sundance
By
Roger Ebert
on January 30, 2010 11:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (68)
jack.jpgI saw my final film of Sundance 2010 here in Chicago. It was my best Sundance experience, and I want to tell you why. The film was “Jack Goes Boating,” the directorial debut of Philip Seymour Hoffman. It played here in the Music Box, as part of the “Sundance USA” outreach program, which has enlisted eight art theaters around the country to play Sundance entries while the festival is still underway.
via Of the feel of theaters and audiences, and eight films from Sundance – Roger Ebert’s Journal.

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Better Class of Politicians:: C5 Road Extension

At the start of this campaign I was hopeful, I didn’t think that the two contenders were too far apart if what they could possibly do. What one lacked in experience he made up for with the enthusiasm and moral authority people believe he had. The other one may lack this but he more than made up for it with his managerial ability and a solid foundation in what works in business. This is bad for our country. It seems that Vince would probably win our 20 year bet on the Philippines.

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rePost::Howard Zinn…not in our high schools either | Angry Bear

Howard Zinn wrote this to Henry Giroux a few days before his death, hope you can read the whole write up of henry about Howard Zinn. I’ve always been a fairly level headed chap, I caution against over reaction, and trying to appear too radical. I’m slowly coming to the conclusion that I’ve been wrong in this stance. Once again read the linked article.

“Henry, we are in a situation where mild rebuke, even critiques we consider ‘radical’ are not sufficient. (Frederick Douglass’ speech on the Fourth of July in 1852, thunderously angry, comes close to what is needed). Raising the temperature of our language, our indignation, is what you are doing and what is needed. I recall that Sartre, close to death, was asked: ‘What do you regret?’ He answered: ‘I wasn’t radical enough.'”
via Howard Zinn…not in our high schools either | Angry Bear.