2009 In Review: Movies

**** a serious man
**** fantastic mr. fox
**** public enemies
*** coraline
*** the informant!
*** up
*** up in the air
*** where the wild things are
** cloudy with a chance of meatballs
** julie and julia
** men who stare at goats
** monsters vs. aliens
** star trek
* angels and demons

2009 In Review: Music

**** ac newman - get guilty
**** bruce springsteen - working on a dream
**** cheap trick - the latest
**** new york dolls - cause i sez so
**** pet shop boys - yes
**** raveonettes - in and out of control
**** soundtrack of our lives - communion
*** brendan benson - my old familiar friend
*** camera obscura - my maudlin career
*** mew - no more stories...
*** son volt - american central dust
*** the bats - the guilty office
*** the invisible cities - houses shine like teeth
*** the orange peels - 2020
*** tinted windows - tinted windows
*** yo la tengo - popular songs
** burning hearts - aboa sleeping
** god help the girl - god help the girl
** lily allen - it's not me it's you
** neko case - middle cyclone
** nous non plus - menagerie
** pete yorn & scarlett johansson - break up
** robyn hitchcock - goodnight oslo
** sting - if on a winter's night
** tegan & sara - sainthood
** tori amos - midwinter graces
** trashcan sinatras - in the music
** u2 - no line on the horizon
** wilco - the album
** young galaxy - invisible republic
* carbon-silicon - the carbon bubble
* chris isaak - mr. lucky
* the clientele - bonfires on the heath
* the postmarks - memoirs at the end of the world

Wunder Blog : Weather Underground:
"Arctic sea ice loss appears to have created a new atmospheric circulation pattern that brings more warm air in the Arctic, creating a positive feedback loop that causes even more sea ice loss. This feedback loop increases the likelihood that an ice-free Arctic in the summer will indeed come by 2030, as many Arctic experts are predicting. It's worth noting that such an atmospheric circulation shift was not predicted by the climate models. Indeed, the loss of Arctic sea ice over the past three years exceeds what any of our models were predicting (Figure 4). While we can rightly criticize these models for their inaccuracy, we should realize that they are just as capable of making errors not in our favor as they are of making errors in our favor."

But this is a major point that "climate deniers", as anyone who questions Al Gore are being so called, point out: a lot of the dire predictions of disaster are based upon models that by definition are incomplete. The arguments to "go green" should be based upon the obvious reasons: oil is finite, conservation saves and makes money. Companies are coming to that conclusion so stop with all the predictions of disaster.

Edge: TOXO — A Conversation With Robert Sapolsky
"In the endless sort of struggle that neurobiologists have — in terms of free will, determinism — my feeling has always been that there's not a whole lot of free will out there, and if there is, it's in the least interesting places and getting more sparse all the time. But there's a whole new realm of neuroscience which I've been thinking about, which I'm starting to do research on, that throws in another element of things going on below the surface affecting our behavior. And it's got to do with this utterly bizarre world of parasites manipulating our behavior. It turns out that this is not all that surprising. There are all sorts of parasites out there that get into some organism, and what they need to do is parasitize the organism and increase the likelihood that they, the parasite, will be fruitful and multiply, and in some cases they can manipulate the behavior of the host."

Every thought you have is a physical process.

An email from Noam Chomsky

It's about priorities not economics.