Outliers

Just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell's newest book, Outliers, and I was totally impressed with it. I haven't read Tipping Point yet but I did enjoy Blink, so I was looking forward to this one, especially after seeing the subject matter was ironically about successful individuals and the book came out at the time when so many American success stories are being exposed as frauds.

His thesis is that innate ability is not enough to get you to success, however you define it, which means that telling a child how smart he or she is constantly as a kid will actually do more to harm their future character and chances of success than not telling them at all what their real intelligence level is. Instead he cites example after example of people we all know of as huge successes, like Bill Gates and Bill Joy and the Beatles, and dig deeper into their background to find a crucial combination of unbelievable hard work - Gates and Joy would spend nearly all their time outside of class working on computer software, and the Beatles spend a few years playing for 6+ hours a night in Germany before they ever hit it big, getting more time playing shows together than most bands ever get in their entire careers -- and one more thing: luck. Joy and Gates, for all their hard work, didn't work anywhere near the orders of magnitude harder than a lot of young programmers to follow them to justify their success. Rather, they happened to be probably the very first people in the entire world who got to program interactively on a time sharing computer system, the first to come along after punch cards, and not have to pay for their time or compete with other members of a computer centre for precious little hours on the machine. So they had a massive head-start over their would-be peers, and were helped every step of teh way by fortuitous events. This isn't a bad thing, it has to happen that someone is the first to come along and do the pioneering work when a new field opens up, or a new genre of music in the case of the Beatles.

But the thesis of the book is that these are not extra-ordinary people who would have risen from any background to become the people they were just by their nature. That is the way the American individualist hero myth would tell the story. Instead, whenever you dig in and really see the breaks and good timing of birth and circumstances that allowed these people to have their hard work be meaningful hard work, that is what creates these great success stories. The last part of the book explains how other societies have ingrained meaningful work into their cultural psyche stemming from farming methods, and how cultural background can and should be actively studied and we should see what good and bad effects it has on one's ability to succeed.

The last section of the main text is yet another go at trying to address what's wrong with the education system in America, and I don't really buy his proscription that students should be put into super-intensive year-round schooling to keep them from forgetting anything they have learned. Perhaps a glance toward successful education systems in Europe would be a better place to look than radically extending the time a child must spend in school and doing homework.

Leaving aside criticisms of rote learning in Asian education, Gladwell is only talking specifically about math scores, and in that area Asian students are measurable, undeniably better.

I don't want the fact that Asian education is also far from perfect to obscure the fact that we can learn a lot from other cultures' approach to knowledge, though. My favourite bit from the book was something that reminded me of my own experience studying math, when he described a video of a woman figuring out using a graphing program that it is simply impossible to graph a straight vertical line.. that it is undefined. It took her a long time, 22 minutes, but eventually the idea came to her and she will have an understanding of how graphing, and division by zero, works than she ever could have gotten in the usual time teachers allow students to struggle with a problem. For me in University I had a very difficult time in the classroom with some concepts, so I had to take them home and I ended up graphing every single problem assigned to me, whether it was called for or not, out on paper, sometimes doing slight variants as well. In the end it took me a lot longer to do my math homework, but I could eventually just look at an equation and instinctively tell how it should look if it was graphed out.

That's the main key to success that Gladwell says is within all our grasps, if we just learn to work and work until we actually come to a meaningful step in understanding. Probably why I love tackling a difficult programming problem, even if I know I won't have the accident of timing of a Bill Gates.

Here's a CBC interview with Gladwell about the book, let him tell it better than I can: Link.

Labels: Books, Gladwell, Outliers, Reviews

"Where No One Has Gone Before"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_No_One_Has_Gone_Before

Finally getting back to watching old Star Trek TNG episodes, this is the one with the Traveller in it. Awesome. I actually don't remember seeing this one more than one or two times on TV, so it always had a weirdly etherial quality to it.

Had to throw in some video of the sweet "let's pretend we're 2001: A Space Odyssey" moment for a while. I do so love the original-series-ish tension-building music.

The mentions of "rape gangs" on Tasha Yarr's home colony are totally out-of-place attempts at grittiness. Feels very tacky.

The crazy hallucinations the whole crew is experiencing are pretty awesome, mostly for the bad French-Russian accent from Picard's mother offering him tea and teasing him about the nature of space.

*sigh* the climax of this episode is for everyone on the ship to think happy thoughts so the Traveller can get the energy to bring them home. Endings were always the worst part of this series, this one is even worse than "reverse the shield phase arrays" bullshit, but they didn't really have much more room to do much else.

Oh Christ, this is where Wesley gets promoted to Ensign and gets that goofy rainbow stripey uniform. Great episode, horrible consequences.

Labels: Reviews, SciFi, Star Trek

The Nine Lives of L. M. Montgomery

I was very lucky to get a chance to go out and see this new play at the Kings Playhouse theatre in Georgetown last night. And given that I know a good amount about all of the pieces that came together to make this whole thing a success I can say that this whole event was really quite extraordinary.

The official website for the show is a good intro to what it's all about at adammichaeljames.com.

There has been a lot of work done to the Kings Playhouse to upgrade the lighting and other facilities specifically for the play, and just in time for the theatre to host the Vinyl Cafe tonight and tomorrow night. Overnight PEI goes from having just Charlottetown, Summerside and Victoria for theatre locations to having four now that Georgetown has come up so nicely.

I have only a second-hand knowledge of L. M. Montgomery's journals from my mother who has read them through when they were first published widely, so I think I come to seeing the play about the author and her imagination from a fairly neutral position. I got through Anne of Green Gables, didn't really find it too interesting, but I did really like The Story Girl and the Golden Road so I am also not one of those islanders who instinctively hate everything associated with Anne, either. This play creates a very vivid picture of the story of a talented but under-appreciated young girl who writes poetry and dreams of being published in a magazine, though her struggles with her extended family and working jobs as a teacher and newspaper writer where she inevitably puts in more work than she should because everyone around her rushes to take advantage of her talents and generosity, through her later life with similar hardships as a preacher's wife and author of bestsellers who tries hard to find a balance between her light-hearted characters and her own desire to put her own darker thoughts into writing.

While her books were aimed at children, the story of her life is a complex and interesting story, with characters defined more by weakness and struggle than by good or evil natures. The play does a very good job of highlighting the lawsuits and fights with her publisher as important contributing events to Maud's mental state without turning them into plot points or easy sources of suspense.

The appearances of her fictional characters having conversations with her, arguing about how they are to grow and develop or admonishing her for putting little bits of her own darker thoughts about life into her characters is done very well, and isn't at all gimmicky (well, there's a clever use of lighting used on Anne's hair but that was just a fun little surprise.)And I caught a few familiar lines from her writing worked in as seamless bits of dialog, and if I caught a couple surely there were many more.

Another thing that I noticed was the silent skill of the choreographer, there were at times quite a few people moving around on the small stage and there wasn't a single clumsy moment. It could certainly grow to fill a larger stage area, but they make great use of what they have.

I will confess that I will not go out of my way to watch a musical if I can avoid it. But as musicals go, the songs in this one were excellent. The style of music varied and kept up with the time period where the story was happening, and showed the cast's ability to vary their own singing to fit the styles and the different moods in each scene. The sound could have been better in the theatre, a few more mics placed around the stage and better control over music vs. vocal sound levels would be good, but they'll take care of that pretty quickly I'm sure. You can here some of the songs on the play's site here. Go take a listen.

Overall it was a great testament to what can get done if everyone involved in a project has the vision and drive to see it through, even when they walk into a dusty old theatre that no one expected could put on something so innovative and interesting.

Labels: L. M. Montghomery, Reviews, Theatre

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Remember the video for One by Metallica? With the scenes in the old hospital of a soldier with no limbs who couldn't speak or move? And in the end he figured out how to communicate in morse code, but just kept repeating the phrase "kill me" over and over?

Well, now there's a version based on someone's real life experience, and it's so much more deep and positive and even affirming. Of course, if I had gorgeous French women hanging on my every wink I'd probably feel like hanging on for a few more days myself.



(Link to trailer)

The movie showed the process of coming to accept your own situation and appreciate the true value of an intact mind in a way that inspires by extreme, uncontradictable example.

I enjoyed very much that the whole film was in French, I haven't used French in too long a time, but it didn't take me very long to get back into the rhythm and become able to just sit back and listen and take it in and not worry about actively trying to catch each word.

I was having a pretty bad day before putting the movie on, was quite unhappy about some things that really shouldn't have bothered me as much as they did. But the experience of thinking in a whole different language made all those thoughts just completely slip away, a complete switch of my frame of reference just by changing language and taking away the words I was bombarding my psyche with all afternoon and evening. That combined with the truly hope-inducing story and the beautiful cinematography and music was enough to give my mind a real vacation from negative thoughts for a while.

It's still playing for a few more nights at City Cinema, if you are in Charlottetown definitely try and go see it.

Labels: Language, Movies, Reviews

jPod - Episode 1

This year's Hollywood writers' strike has made me so eager for new TV that I have actually been eagerly awaiting the debut of a new CBC drama. But here I am, and since I am never home on Tuesdays I had to do something that most certainly was not download the first episode of jPod (Promo video | Wikipedia) on Bittorrent and watched it tonight.

First off, before any real critiquing, I will say that I found myself laughing out loud more than a few times at some pretty great lines ("If it was too easy to bury bodies, there wouldn't be any people left.") and setups, like when Ethan's stoned yoga-doing girlfriend suddenly makes it known that she could hear them talking about her through the window the moment the subject of her high-school lack of popularity was mentioned. So someone involved in directing the show definitely has an intuitive feel for what makes for funny and engaging TV moments. Not always a given with Canadian TV, and usually only found on HBO-type American shows. With the source material for the show being a novel I was expecting all the jokes to be talky quotes lifted from the written dialog, so I was very pleased to see well-executed visual setups.

The writing is good, I'm hoping the clever lines aren't just the build-up that a script writer working on a new show has of clever lines stored away in his head pouring out too quickly to sustain over the course of a TV series. Time will tell on that one. Fortunately the book contained many little sub-plots rather than one over-arching conflict that took a whole book to resolve. So the show should work well with episodic story arcs.



I found the acting to be uneven. The actors have a Gilmour Girls / West Wing way of being 'always-on' - which can be a good way of rapid-firing clever dialog, but makes the characters less like real people talking and relating to each other. But here's the problem: Coupland is probably doing this on purpose. All of the members of jPod (the forgotten team at Electronic Arts (The show may be afraid to get sued but I'm not going to bother changing names. Help I'm buried in 2nd-level parentheses.) who's members were all placed there because their surnames start with the letter J.) aside from the main character - a revival of the sympathetic everygeek from Microserfs, is living a carefully constructed identity, deciding to adopt some bizarre habit or obsession and making it their identity. But where the Microserfs characters had hope, the jPodders could all make a pretty convincing case that life is meaningless enough that either constructing a completely new person and acting as them is the only worthwhile way to approach the world. And so the overacting that got on my nerves might just be deliberate. I hope Alain Thicke's character continues to have a lot of screen-time, hopefully his Shatner-esque ability to completely hide self-awareness from the viewer will rub off on the other actors. This is a faint-hope. Right now the moments that are supposed to be sincere, like Caitlin and Ethan discovering a shared love for an old video game as cue for a romantic interest, are telegraphed so horribly you just want to get up from the room and wait for it to be over before it even begins. Pulling off making essentially contrived characters watchable will be a tough feat, it was the weakest part of the book for me.

Characters I want to see more of:

• Cancer Cowboy - including the sex addiction and how it plays out
• Ethan's Father
• Also hoping that when they do introduce Kam Fong he will steal the whole show.
• Also sad there's no trace of Evil Mark

The music was a nice touch, but it was too much 'lets grab recognizable Canadian music icons so people will feel comfortable, and I hope they dig a little deeper into the pile of great but lesser-known Canadian bands as the show goes on. And seriously, don't say "defendoid", say "Defender". You're allowed to mention real-world products, for crying out loud. Using fake names is jarring and takes away our ability to identify with their geeky obsessions even more.

I'm going to keep watching it, and there's enough of a chance that the first-episode wrinkles will be ironed out into a truly high-quality show that I'm holding out hope and telling people to watch it. At the same time, I'm also hoping Coupland will want to move on to something else at the end of the first season. I would really love if the Canadian TV industry moved towards a Channel 4-style of television production, making short runs of interesting shows and moving on to something else before it gets old.

Labels: CBC, Douglas Coupland, Reviews, Television

Eagle vs. Shark

It was nice to get out and do something that's been an off-and-on comfort for me since I've moved back to Charlottetown. I went to City Cinema by myself, got my coffee and dark chocolate Zero bar, and took up my obligatory spot in the front row on the right to see a movie I'm sure most people would resent me for getting them to come with me to see.

Eagle vs. Shark on Wikipedia: Link. Coles Notes version of the plot is that Lily, an awkward and whimsical fast food employee has a crush on a customer who comes in at the same time every day and gets the same thing, and is just as short and unconversational with her as every other customer. But she paints all sorts of qualities onto him to the point that she can seem to put up with any amount of rudeness and selfish behaviour as they meet at a dress-up party and start a relationship. She then follows him to his home town and meets his strange family as he prepares to get revenge on a school bully using his martial arts skills.

This film is taking an analogous place in my mind to the film Napoleon Dynamite as the British version of The Office has to the American version. Where Michael Scott is as socially myopic as David Brent, him and Napoleon Dynamite are still portrayed as sympathetic characters whom you want things to turn out well for in the end. But in this film Jarrod is the worst kind of dork. Not a 'nerd', because as Milhouse put so well, "nerds are smart". The actor, Jemaine Clement, captures the petulant, self-absorbed, pathologically lying and completely un-empathetic social outcast that doesn't have the redeeming qualities of the stereotypical late-blooming hard-working geek.

Something else the film hits on very acutely is the unaspirant service industry class that many twenty-somethings fall into, where their social eccentricities are tolerated much more than in the corporate world, and who get by at their jobs in video game stores and fast food restaurants and come home to try and make a go at finding a life outside of work, but the lack of focus that hampers their working life leaves them floundering at hobbies like Lilly's songwriting and Jarrod's bizarre obsessions with candle-making and revenge. You see similar stories of people around here in call centres and other entry-level jobs. Not the traditional working class who could make a go at getting a decent manufacturing job and eventually support a family and take up a respected role in society. This emerging generation has no pre-set plan laid out for them. And I think the film captures the essence of young people facing a life in a world that doesn't seem to have anything to offer them eerily well.

The important progression of the story has Jarrod getting perpetually colder to Lilly to try and push her away before she rejects him, but she stubbornly keeps on believing that there's someone worth being with inside there. And what makes this movie distinct from what you'd expect from an American movie is the fact that there may in fact not be a likeable person under there. The viewer spends the whole film wishing the prick would just go away and that the poor girl would find someone who was nicer to her. It does end on a nice note, though, so don't let me leave you with the impression that this movie wasn't enjoyable, it was. But in the most awkward way of getting around to it as I can imagine.

Labels: City Cinema, Movies, Reviews

A Lesson in Performance

So last night was the final night of the Island Stand-Up Showcase at the Arts Guild (no, I won't call it "the Guild", buzz off, Care.)  I went by myself because I hadn't gone yet and I really did want to see  how Taylor and Richard and Patrick and the rest were getting on with developing their acts.

Labels: Reviews, Stand-Up Comedy

The Easter Funny

I went to the stand-up comedy show at the Guild yesterday. Overall I was really impressed. Margie Carmichael sang a few songs and read a bit from her book. I always really enjoy bits that are written with poetic precision. Putting words together artfully to me is even more of an art than making fun of the instructions on shampoo bottles.

Taylor did a good job in the first act, he didn't make any effort to speed up his pace, which is actually a good thing. Half the funny in watching Taylor is his little asides and pauses. There was a sketch comedy group as well, but honestly I didn't find them very funny at all. The first bit they did was the 'freeze tag' game, where one member shouts 'freeze' and takes the physical position of someone else and resumes the sketch. I found they switched up far too frequently, so there was never a chance to really develop a dialog beyond just the initial gag. Next they did a bit where they had to make up lyrics to a song on the fly. And frankly it blew. To pull off that game really well requires a lot of practise, and the kind of word power that the members of this group just didn't seem to have to come up with rhymes or at least lines that flowed well quickly enough.

The last two comedians were Patrick Ledwell, who's about to go to the Halifax Comedy Festival, and was definitely the most polished of the night. He did a bit that I enjoy of his about having conflicting goals in life while trying to be 'goal oriented' to please prospective employers. Richard Shroeter also performed, and he did a great job, too. Overall Patrick was the best in terms of what you expect from a typical stand-up act, but there's something unique about how Taylor throws so much of his human-ness out there that makes it a lot more memorable

Labels: Reviews, Stand-Up Comedy

Griffin iMic quick first impressions

I love this little guy. Normally with my el cheapo Dell laptop that work makes me use, when you plug in earphones you are bombarded with noise from the computer's electic-field heavy devices. When the hard drive was accessed you'd hear clicking noises, when the CD was spinning you just heard a constant buzzing sound. Now the iMic puts the sound hardware outside of all the noise and interference from the computer itself, and sound is crystal clear. For $20 on Ebay I get the sound improvement you wouldn't see without paying another few hundred dollars for a higher-end laptop.

I'll talk about the recording capabilities later, but I imagine it will make podcasting a much simpler affair, since you can patch in your own sound cables etc. As long as Audacity cooperates, anyway.

Labels: Gadgets, Hardware, Reviews, Sound

Claddagh Room

So Sabrina and I have decided to eat Macaroni and Cheese and Chef Boyardi five nights a week and then go somewhere really nice once a week. This makes sense to me.

So last night we went to the Claddagh Room, just because my friend Kelly keeps raving about the desserts she just had when we get together in the evenings. I'm surprised it took this long for me to try the food there, actually.

It's the kind of place where the waitress takes your coat but doesn't pull your chair out for you. We were seated next to a table of Russians who were ordering oysters by the hundreds who were pretty loud and boisterous but in a genial kind of way so it was fun to listen to them.

As for food I ordered chicken samosas as an appetizer, , they came with spinnach that made me cry when I think of what you get from the grocery store. They were perfect, thick little leaves with a little bit of lemon juiceon them and all I thought eating them was 'this is what food is supposed to taste like'. The samosas theemselves were naturally a far different affair than the ones they sling at the farmer's market.

For the main course I ordered the feature of the night, which was seafood bouillabaisse, which was pretty much just a really indulgent pile of mussels and shrimp and salmon and holy christ it was good. The soup base was light and didn't intrude on the seafood's flavour at all. I didn't have good seafood since the Summer so it tickled some tastebuds that have been languishing for months. I was so stuffed at the end that I didn't even get dessert, I just stole a little nibble of Sabrina's cheesecake which had raspberries baked into it and looked beautiful.

Labels: Charlottetown, Food, Restaurants, Reviews

The New Town & Country

Went to the newly-reopened Town & Country today, thanks to an invitation from my friend Heather. They've re-opened after being closed for about six weeks for renovations by the new owners. The overall structure of the place is still the same, but they have all new lampshades and cuttlery, all proudly from Ikea, according to the waitress. It was good to see that most of the old staff are there including Val and the one of chefs, Jamie.

The prices on all their items are excellent, I didn't see anything on the new menu that was over $10. One thing that's disappointing is that they don't have the all-day breakfast anymore. Now there's no place downtown besides the Seathreat where you can get brakfast any time of day.

The 'favourites' from the old menu are still there, like the house burger and salads and Shish Touk, and then there's the asian items, divided into appetizers like a dish mushrooms and peas and things in a cream saucd and various kind of chicken wings like spicy mustard, and the main course menu wich has a lot of curries and stir fries. The Shawarma stir-fry sounded really good, and sounds like something they invented.. Lebanese-Indonesian fusion, anyone?

I ended up getting the Balinese Chicken, which was chicken and veggies like snow peas and broccoli served with rice that came in a perfectly-shaped blob of sticky rice on another plate which I felt bad about disturbing. Normally I guess you're supposed to put the stuff on top of the rice, but I've always preferred dumping the rice into the stuff, personally. The food was very good, I especially noticed that the vegetables were nice and crips and not over-cooked at all.

One ip: If you're going with a girl you're looking to impress don't order the curries or you'll have a runny nose all through the meal. The spiciness was just about perfect for my taste, which is a little spice-tolerant than the general population I think. If they offered the options of mild to medium to hot that would be a good improvement. The guy whom I guess is the new owner came out of the kitchen to ask how everything was, and if I thought it was too spicy, I told him it was just right. Then the chef came out and asked the same thing. I think they're concerned about our largely wimpy PEI palates.

The portions were also very generous, especdially for what you pay. It's right along the lines of Leo's Thai place where $8 can get you enough rice and whatever to feed two people easily.

I just realized I forgot to eat the irish cream chocolate mint stick thing that came with my coffee. D'oh.

Anyway, definitely check the place out, it's good to see it open again, and the cleaned-up decor is a very nice improvement.

Labels: Charlottetown, Restaurants, Reviews

Pan's Labyrinth

What a superb movie this was. Before going to see it I made a point of not watching any trailers or reading a single thing about it so everything that happened would be completely new. The opening titles set the stage of the film as a fantasy, but then you're sent right into the middle of Spain during the last years of the Civil War, and through the movie you're continually forced to move your mind between appreciating the fantastic creatures that make up one storyline and the human ugliness that intertwines with it through the film.

Despite it being aimed squarely at adults, this movie is every bit a true fairy tale fantasy, as if David Cronenberg were able to tell a fantastic tale with all his style but without mocking or desecrating the subject or the setting.

The twisting plot, where you can place your belief squarely in reality or enjoy the story as it's told to you reminded me a lot of Mulholland Dr., complete with elements that influence one world from the other, and the bigger mystery of the underlying psychological state of the main character. Lynch and Cronenberg teaming up would be unstoppable, but Guillermo del Toro beat them to it, apparently.

I'm going to find this when it comes out on DVD so I can watch it enough times that I don't need to read the subtitles and can just watch the story as it unfolds and try and wrap my head around the whole thing.

Labels: Movies, Pan's Labyrinth, Reviews

Snow Cake

Most movies have characters in them that don't mean anything to me. Everyone is attractive or extraordinary or utterly virtuous, characters meant to play a role or illustrate an archetype. To an extent so are the characters in this movie, they could each be identified by a single word, but this movie is different somehow.

I just erased about 3 paragraphs because I don't want to go and describe the progress of the story if there's even a single person reading this who might end up going to City Cinema this week to see it. I'd be taking away from your experience if you did.

I found the movie much more powerful than most films I've ever seen. There are some people who, when I meet them or hear them speak I am completely unable to know what they are like inside, how their thoughts work, what drives their actions. And there are other people whom I feel like I know very deeply, even if I've only had the briefest of encounters with them. The two main characters in this film would fit into the latter category for me. Yet they're so fundamentally different, one being a middle-aged man trying to move beyond his past and with no one in his life that he's close to, and another an autistic woman who loses her daughter but is more concerned with how she's going to deal with the garbage that needs to be taken out than with the emotions everyone else is going through at the same time.

My empathy circuits were firing on all cylinders but in two directions simultaenously. I felt like I could get inside the heads of both those characters equally, and understand the tension but also the positive value of the characters coming up against each other and learning to accept each other. I really must have a dual nature, it would explain why people confuse me so much but at the same time why I can feel so attached to people somehow.

There's something in the mind of the screenplay writer that I think I could really identify with.

Link: Snow Cake at IMDB.

Labels: City Cinema, Movies, Reviews, Snow Cake

Bobby

I thought I would make some kind of tiny statement to the world and go and see a movie by myself tonight while the masses drooled in front of their televisions watching grown men chase a ball around.

Fittingly City Cinema was more jammed than I've ever seen it on a Sunday night. Lots of people with the same idea of doing something different, I'm sure.

As for the movie, I had heard some pretty critical reviews of it, but I've always been fascinated by Robert Kennedy so I thought I should see the film anyway. It turned out to be less terrible than I had feared it might be going in, but still not great by any stretch.

The acting was top-notch from everyone. Only a few characters got the 'perfect model of a human being' treatment. The rest were all both good and bad, selfish, weak, inconsiderate at times, unsure of themselves. The way the idea of Bobby Kennedy actually becoming president representing this great hope in all of their lives that there might actually be a future better than the present was ever-present as we see the various unfolding subplots.

Unfortunately this wasn't up there with films like Traffic or Robert Altman's films in weaving a greater story from a series of small ones. At the end we're left with memories of a few simple stories that never quite built on each other well enough.

This just makes me wish for a more focused biopic of Robert Kennedy's life. I hope this film doesn't hurt the chances of something like that being made in the near future.

Labels: Bobby, City Cinema, Movies, Reviews