Author Archives: Dr. Agonize

What the Credit CARD Act Means for You (via MintLife Blog)



Got credit card debt? If so, good news: the card issuer can no longer hike your interest rate without warning or raise rates on an existing balance. They have to send your bill at least 21 days before it’s due (up from 14 days). And each bill has to show how long it will take to pay off the balance if you make the minimum payment–and how much you’ll pay in interest if you do that. Call it the credit card equivalent of the Surgeon General’s warning.

via What the Credit CARD Act Means for You | MintLife Blog | Personal Finance News & Advice.




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Adam Savage: my Blade Runner gun – Boing Boing



Blade Runner gun by Adam Savage

Blade Runner gun by Adam Savage

Adam Savage (of Mythbusters) briefly chronicles (with lots of pictures) his long love affair with the gun from Blade Runner. A passion I share, but only ever attempted to execute once with LEGO many, many years ago. Awesome.

Adam Savage: my Blade Runner gun – Boing Boing




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Helen Fisher figured out love (via FORA.tv)



Just watched part of a speech about love by Biological Anthropologist Dr. Helen Fisher, PhD. She is apparently responsible for Match.com’s system for, well, matching people. This system puts people into 4 categories, much like the ancient humours system or a simplified Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. But unlike most personality types, her groupings are based on the dominant neurotransmitter in a person’s brain, so it sounds very scientific. However, the subjects aren’t medically tested for their brain type, they just fill out a questionnaire. (Of course, she includes a disclaimer that we all have elements of each personality style within us, but we display the traits of one in a higher degree.) I know that that sounds just as “scientific” as phrenology, but Fisher is also the person that found love in the brain by putting people inside an MRI machine! She has a long, serious history of studying how the brain works, and especially how love works in the brain (it’s basically no different from a drug addiction, according to her research).

Long story short:
After a simplistic illustration of her personality styles by telling us which world leaders fall into her categories, she explains the average romantic choices of all four types. Her results suggest that opposites attract, but only if they are the right kind of opposites. Two of the types prefer their own type, and the remaining two types prefer one another.

Here she is describing her findings to the Digital, Life, Design 2010 crowd:
FORA.tv – Digital, Life, Design 2010: Human Emotion
(Skip to part 6 for the meaty stuff.)

Here’s an extended interview with her at Big Think:
Helen Fisher | Biological Anthropologist and Rutgers University Professor | Big Think




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Sleep Deprivation: The Great American Myth (via LiveScience)



I am a night owl. I usually stay up late working. It’s when my mind is able to focus best on the things that are important to me.

Staying up late causes me to sleep when other people are awake, and to sometimes put off sleeping so that I can be with the people I love. I suppose this is how insomnia goes for many people, although I know others have a much more pathological problem.

Over and over I get advised to try sleeping pills. To me this is akin to asking me to try heroin, and I may not be alone:

Sleeping pills appear unsafe in any amount, Kripke writes in his online book, “The Dark Side of Sleeping Pills.”

“There is really no evidence that the average 8-hour sleeper functions better than the average 6- or 7-hour sleeper,” [psychiatry professor Daniel] Kripke says…

Sleep Deprivation: The Great American Myth (viaLiveScience)




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What do we need health insurers for anyway? (via Los Angeles Times)



Michael Hiltzik translates WellPoint CEO Angela Braly’s words thusly:

The nation’s health coverage system is so hopelessly broken that even the health insurance industry can’t handle it anymore.

Insuring the aging and unemployed is killing health insurance profits! Those poor, poor insurers…

via What do we need health insurers for anyway? – Los Angeles Times




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James Cameron: The [Terminator] Soup’s Been Pissed In (via MTV)



Jim Cameron left no metaphor unturned while giving his thoughts on the future of “The Terminator”:

“From my perspective, it’s run its course and I don’t know what else to say that hasn’t been said. Plus, frankly… the soup’s kind of been pissed in a little bit by other filmmakers, so I don’t have any personal desire to go back to it. So I certainly wouldn’t want to be a dog in the manger and disallow my friends from making a little money off it. Why would I do that?”

‘Terminator’ Series Has ‘Run Its Course’ For Creator James Cameron: ‘The Soup’s Kind Of Been Pissed In’ » MTV Movies Blog




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Movie Review: The Limits of Control (2009)



If you know Jim Jarmusch’s work, you have probably already seen The Limits of Control (2009). If so, you no doubt appreciated the film as a gorgeous-looking and satisfyingly meditative response to Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999). The two movies involve assassins of African complexion, but their characters couldn’t be more different. Superficially, Forest Whitaker’s “Ghost Dog” is a far more talkative and philosophical hit man than Isaach De Bankolé’s “Lone Man”. The true distinction between them is in their mobility: Ghost Dog is a monk-like person with a fixed yet secret address who binds his actions with a code of behavior. Lone Man is boundless, borderless and homeless. He travels so light that he’s not even there. He truly moves like a ghost, not a man imitating one.

Lone Man is almost a cypher, quietly making connections with quirky characters bearing matchboxes in a daisy chain across Spain. As long as he answers the pass-phrase correctly, the eccentrics coach him closer and closer to his target by swapping a blue for a red box of wood matches (or vice-versa). He silently accepts the encrypted message within (then consumes it with a gulp of espresso), and also takes with him a philosophical nugget to be decrypted later in the film.

People unaware of Jarmusch, will likely find this movie unnecessarily ponderous and the payoff less than satisfying. The encounters that the assassin has with his matchbox-swappers are lean, like a plate of food at a stereotypical expensive restaurant, the food is exquisitely crafted, but there ain’t much of it.

What there is a lot of is Spain. Starting and ending in Madrid and in between winding across the countryside to Sevilla and Almería, The Limits of Control pays homage to the easy pace of life on the Iberian Peninsula by adopting that pace. The deliberate tempo is a potential source of great frustration for an audience from somewhere like the USA. I know because I spent a college semester studying in Sevilla, and the movie brought me right back to the crazy medieval streets of the neighborhoods I lived in, ate in and got really, really drunk in.

During my stay I heard the gripes of many a fellow American. “Nothing gets done here!” “Things are so slow!” The subtext was, “No one is competent here because they are not in a hurry.” Spain moves as fast as it needs to, and if you don’t like it you don’t belong there. Jarmusch’s assassin is a sort of chameleon–although his ebony skin color would never go unnoticed in a non-fictional Spain–and he finds a way to belong and to get things done. Unlike the Jason Bourne-type of assassin, De Bankolé’s character never runs, carries a gun, drives, kisses a girl, nor does he get angry. Ever. He’s the antithesis of a Hollywood character, and for this reason he just may be closer to the truth.




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Better than The Phantom Menace…



…is this humorous, multi-part video review of The Phantom Menace.




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EWM ISO good podcast about film…



Trying to find a good podcast about film, I decided listening to episodes concerned with reviewing Avatar would be a good litmus test. So I grabbed the /Filmcast’s one and was impressed by some of it, yet other parts of is made me want to stick an ice pick in my ear…

Here’s the link:
/Filmcast Ep. 81 – Avatar (GUEST: Dan Trachtenberg from the Totally Rad Show)

Here’s my comment:

Please don’t let Dan Trachtenberg talk so long without calling him on his hyperbolic congratulatory BS. I was very close to stabbing my ear with an ice pick so I would stop hearing his voice and ridiculous ramblings.

I think Avatar proved that Cameron is the man to make blockbusters from now on (Michael Bay, McG and Roland Emmerich can stop now). It’s solidly entertaining with a nice dose of conscience. I can easily excuse the lameness of some of the script: It’s a James Cameron film! What did you expect!?!

And one more note for Dan Trachtenberg: Let go of Star Wars. Comparing everything to Star Wars is not helping your intellect.

Their discussion continued with Annalee Newitz of io9 on the After Dark show:
The /Filmcast: After Dark – Ep. 81 – The Role of Race and 3-D in Avatar (GUESTS: Annalee Newitz from io9 and Dan Trachtenberg from the Totally Rad Show)




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