I find this article powerfully heartening for a number of reasons. And since it’s good news, I’m inclined to share it with you now:

Will You Be E-Mailing This Column? It’s Awesome — John Tierny, New York Times

‘Avatar’ in the Amazon — Public Radio International

Somebody set up an event where indigenous leaders from the Ecuadorean Amazon were bussed in to Quito to watch Avatar. My first instinct, in imagining that scenario, is to feel a little uncomfortable. I found Avatar to be a grab bag ethically. It’s by no means an intentionally complex story — it’s all pretty black and white in Jim Cameron’s fantasy world — but responding to the narrative might require some mildly tricky ethical parsing on the viewer’s part. This has been pointed out many times now, but to review:

• on the one hand, the basic plot of the indigenous resisting the colonialist paramilitary forces of the white environmental exploiters is obviously benign, if a little pat. American forces getting whacked by the righteous, in an American film!
• on the other hand, I can’t imagine a more full-bodied instance of the noble savage myth. I mean, these guys are thoroughly in perfect harmony with their environment, thanks to their untouched uncomplexity, and not having eaten the apple.
• and most significantly, and as has been pointed out many times, the indigenous are powerless to save themselves until a white leader organizes them.

The good news is that all of these elements are presented in such a heavy handed manner that you can pretty safely ignore them and get on with the business of watching what is, absolutely, an extraordinary 3d spectacle. The writing is too stupid to be insidious.

But what about if it was being shown to some folks from up river in the Oriente? The article points out that some of them had apparently never even been in a movie theatre before. I’ll bet some of them had, especially if they were local political leaders. Then again, a local Hourani headman once asked me if he could try my CD Walkman, and when I let him, he sat in my hammock and listened to Johnny Cash and Willy Nelson’s Story Tellers Live from beginning right through to the end, clapping whenever the audience clapped, and giving the strong impression of never having listened to music on headphones before. Or maybe he just really liked Johnny Cash and Willy Nelson (who wouldn’t?).

I digress. Point is, I wouldn’t know beforehand exactly how a room full of Ecuadorean indigenous leaders would respond to Avatar. In 3d no less. According to whomever prepared the article/audio/video, apparently pretty well:

“Honestly, this is the first time I’m seeing this movie, and it’s reality, what’s happening now just in another dimension.”

Others say there was at least one thing in the movie that veered from their reality. Achuar leader Luis Vargas says it’s where the white guy sweeps in to the rescue. But he says that’s to be expected.

“This is a Hollywood movie, so it’s practically a given that a mestizo comes to the defense and leads [the people] to triumph in the end.”

Still, he liked the film, and his fellow Achuar leader Ernesto Vargas says he hopes another group will get a chance to see it.

“Think of how much better it would be if we showed this film to people who actually want to exploit petroleum. I think it would serve them very well, even more than us.”

Also very interesting:

As for Ecuador’s President Correa, he saw the movie with his children the day after it premiered in Ecuador. No word yet on what he thought of it.

Correa is a smart guy, it’s going to be pretty clear to him that Ecuador and the petroleum and mining struggles there are an obvious surrogate for Pandora in the western mind. Many, many western minds have now imbibed Avatar. Western perception, and Correa’s perception of western perception, counts highly in the outcomes of those struggles.

As well as the full text at the link, there’s audio:

and this video:

The treeplanting company I’ve lately been working for seems to have folded. Who knows, maybe that is the final nail in the coffin of my treeplanting career, which has been drifting off to sleep asymptotically for years now.

Regardless of my own summer destiny, I’ve been fielding the occasional email from rookies and vets who are bound for the block this summer, and are looking for references and advice during this, the hiring season. I don’t know how much advice I have, but I can at least offer “Gorilla Warfare“, LazzaGun Soundsystem’s latest treeplanting themed musical concoction, which arrived today in the email. Be warned, the language is as salty as the planting day is long.

Gorilla Warfare(MP3)  by  Lars Zergun

You may remember Lars from such bygone hits as 2007 Pounder Mix and Welcome 2 Treeplanting 2012.

At an inquiry into the tasering death of a mentally ill man in Nova Scotia, a clinical psychologist who has been called to testify is taking on the concept of “excited delirium”. Excited delirium is the corporate-speak medical diagnosis that was invented by TASER International to obfuscate responsibility when yet another person happens to die at roughly the same time as they’re having electricity discharged into their body.

Expert at N.S. inquiry challenges notion of excited delirium in man’s death — Canadian Press

“The attractiveness of the term may relate to some of its proponents having … the subjective perception that conducted energy weapon use and physical, mechanical restraint used by law enforcement officers deserves to be excluded or absolved as contributing in any way to an in-custody death,” the report says. “The deceased is identified as the culprit and must have had the condition of excited delirium.”

Noone testified the term implies those in the throes of excited delirium “had something wrong with them” to begin with. “And if they died, they were going to die anyway. Excited delirium (proponents) say that people walk around in this state where they could drop at any moment. In my experience, they are not dropping at any moment.”

I love the sound of sanity in a courtroom.

Previously:

The Epistemology of Tasers, Revisited

When Epistemology Kills

Taser Deaths: Define “Contributed”

A map of all the graffitti known to the City of Vancouver, courtesy of the fantastic City of Vancouver Open Data Catalogue.

View Larger Map

I’m not sure what the difference between the grey-on-yellow and the yellow-on-grey checkmarks is. I guess they need to work on their metadata still.

update: it looks like each dataset in the catalogue actually is associated with a handy metadata page. For example, here’s useful info on the graffiti data, including the fact that the data is updated weekly. Although I still can’t figure out what the difference between grey and yellow boxes is in the Google Maps version above.

Should you find yourself needing to recover exposed film from a 1924 Kodak camera in indeterminate condition due to its having lain next to a dead body in the snowblasted extremis of the 8000m alpine for a century, this gentlemen has prepared some notes on the subject:

A127 Film: Care & Developing Suggestions (via SciAm)

“5. Recognize that once you have the camera, try to calm down. As long as you can keep it cold, speed is no longer of the essence. It is much more important to follow the procedure correctly and slowly than to screw-up quickly. If you have to wait a few days to make an unobtrusive exit from Base Camp, do so.”

I think the reason that I’m surprised by Howard Zinn’s death — even though he was 87 — is that he seemed so alive right up to the full stop.

Howard Zinn, historian who challenged status quo, dies at 87 — Boston Globe

Howard Kunstler once said that the most interesting people he knows didn’t know what they wanted to be until they were 40. I guess Zinn figured out he wanted to be a historian slightly earlier than that, but 40 was about when his particular way of being a historian started changing the world.

Roughly a year ago, I made some noises on this blog about wanting to learn R. Not surprisingly, I didn’t do it.

A year later I’m a government scientist with some statistics to do, and I’m once again thinking of learning me some R. In the interim, I’ve received an email assuring me “you could get up and running with it within a day, I think. Master it in a week or two”. So I download the package — it’s free! — install it, and boot it up. I’m looking at a command line console labelled the “GUI” (ha ha), with the following help text:

“Type ‘demo()’ for some demos”

Demos! Perfect! Let’s see some concrete examples of how to do statistics in R-land! So I type demo() into the “GUI” prompt, and receive the following output:

Demos in package ‘base’:

is.things: Explore some properties of R objects and is.FOO() functions. Not for newbies!
recursion: Using recursion for adaptive integration
scoping: An illustration of lexical scoping.

Demos in package ‘graphics’:

Hershey: Tables of the characters in the Hershey vector fonts
Japanese: Tables of the Japanese characters in the Hershey vector fonts
graphics: A show of some of R’s graphics capabilities
image: The image-like graphics builtins of R
persp: Extended persp() examples
plotmath: Examples of the use of mathematics annotation

Demos in package ‘stats’:

glm.vr: Some glm() examples from V&R with several predictors
lm.glm: Some linear and generalized linear modelling examples from `An Introduction to Statistical Modelling’ by Annette Dobson
nlm: Nonlinear least-squares using nlm()
smooth: `Visualize’ steps in Tukey’s smoothers

Use ‘demo(package = .packages(all.available = TRUE))’ to list the demos in all *available* packages.

Tables of the characters in the Hershey vector fonts? demo(package = .packages(all.available = TRUE))? Some of the ‘stats’ packages sounded like they might make sense, so I tried to run them, but I couldn’t figure out how. I love the idea of open source bare-knuckle computing. I wish I loved it in practice.

Here’s a remarkable claim:

“Digital subscriptions were supposed to replace microfilm, but American libraries, which knew we were racing toward recession years before the actual global crisis came, stopped being able to pay for digital newspaper and magazine descriptions nearly a decade ago. Many also (even fancy, famous ones) can no longer collect—or can only collect in a limited fashion. Historians and scholars have access to every issue of every newspaper and journal written during the civil rights struggle of the 1960s, but can access only a comparative handful of papers covering the election of Barack Obama.”

— Posthumous Hosting and Digital Culture, zeldman.com

Can that be true?