a thaumaturgical compendium

In the following, I have left aside criticism of Minority Report as a film and I am focusing more heavily on the way it represents technology half a century into the future. In this, I am following the approach used by Josh Calder on his Web site http://futuristmovies.com.

Evaluations are back from spring semester. A mixed bag. Written responses can be found here.

Check out the “Iron Chef Drinking Game.” I am still dumbfounded that someone thought that the format of the show was its selling point and that an American version starring William Shatner ever got funded.

I put together a proposal to fund research for a book about automated public opinion gathering from the Net and sent it off to the Smith Richardson Foundation. The executive summary follows:

This is the review I submitted to IMDB for the Bourne Identity. The short version: rental, unless you’ve never seen the original film or read the book and are desperate :).

What would you do if you were accused of a murder, you had not committed… yet?
(tagline for the new Fox film Minority Report)

“Jose Padilla, the American citizen accused of plotting to detonate a radioactive ‘dirty bomb’ in the U.S., is just one of many ‘would-be killers’ the United States has arrested, President Bush said Tuesday and he promised there will be many more to come.”
(Fox News Website, today)

An article in the Buffalo News today discusses how Richard Florida’s ideas about the creative class might affect Buffalo. It’s a little funny that this has been so embraced here, given that Buffalo (and it seems Florida was once a prof here) ends up the fourth from the bottom of the list of creative cities.