Thanks to Netflix I’ve just seen the first episode of Firefly and found it good. Even my housemate (“You’re making me watch American television?”) was won over.

It doesn’t hurt at all that one of the cast has the same charming smile as someone with whom I had a couple of close encounters in 1984, hubba hubba.

Does anyone read this who can tell me whether the Chinese phrases sprinkled in the dialogue (the hegemonic Alliance is bilingual, English/Chinese) make sense? Later: Russell says some bits yes, some no, improving over time.

I did the philosopher quiz again and some of my scores shifted sharply from two years ago:

• 1.00 John Stuart Mill (same)
• .96 Epicureans (was .76)
• .95 Rand (was .44)
• .94 Noddings (was .44)
• .88 Hobbes (was .34)
• .82 Cynics (was .30)
• .77 Sartre (was .63)
• .74 Nietzsche (was .22)
• .72 Kant (was .65)
• .68 Bentham (was .82)
• .63 Spinoza (was .41)
• .60 Hume (was .25)
• .60 Prescriptivism (was .44)
• .58 Stoics (was .22)
• .51 Aristotle (was .51)
• .48 Aquinas (was .55)
• .29 Augustine (was .31)
• .19 Ockham (was .26)
• .07 Plato (was .16)

(Summary of the 19 positions.) The results page says:

The results are scored on a curve. The highest score, 100, represents the closest philosophical match to your reponses. This is not to say that you and the philosopher are in total agreement.

So absolute comparisons are less meaningful than one might prefer.

Cato: How FDR’s New Deal Harmed Millions of Poor People. (Yet another link from Rational Review News Digest)

Monday I saw The Return of the King with family. I was a bit surprised that Allegra the vegan was the biggest fan in the bunch, since all that photogenic carnage tended to crowd out the plot somewhat. — Most annoying change? Absence of the palantír of Minas Anor.

Wednesday Dad and I went to the Tech Museum of Innovation and found it dull. We’re spoiled by the Exploratorium, where nearly every exhibit invites visitors to shape some effect with their own hands, not by pushing a button to start a simulation.

Saturday we saw The Triplets of Belleville, a surreal cartoon. Someone has been kidnapping bicyclists who drop out of the Tour de France; the grandmother of one such traces him to Belleville, the big city, where she encounters the Triplets (who must be related to Morticia Addams) and joins their novelty musical act. — I was dismayed when the film’s first line of dialogue was in English; but there is only one more line. — In a prologue introducing the Triplets, we see a stage below which is inscribed the tensor equation of General Relativity (according to one of the physics professors in our party).

I just happened to read this exchange written six years ago:

That’s six foot six; Galadriel is man high, which is one of the problems with casting her if there were ever to be a movie.

Since the movie doesn’t contain any Earth-modern artifacts, much less a meterstick, you could just scale all the people down 10% or so. You still have to find a man-high woman to play Galadriel, but this is easier if it means six feet even.

Sure, and then you have to find people to play three foot even hobbits.
Life action would take serious computer scaling work, I think.

At least three kinds of trick were used; if you haven’t seen the ‘making of’ disc with FotR, it’s quite interesting.

Good grief:

U.S. immigration authorities are detaining foreign correspondents on grounds they have not obtained special visas
. . .
True, there is a law stipulating a special visa for journalists, but few have ever heard of it and it is seldom enforced. No more. No one ever told the visiting journalists it had suddenly been revived.
. . .
Peter Krobath, chief editor for the Austrian movie magazine Skip, was seized and held overnight in a cold room with 45 others who landed without visas.
. . .
Six French journalists were marched across a terminal at Los Angeles International Airport in handcuffs
. . .
The International Press Institute, based in Vienna, along with the International Federation of Journalists, headquartered in Brussels, is protesting this treatment. The U.S. response? An embassy official in Vienna insisted that the government was only acting in accordance with the letter of the law.

Charlie Stross has some remarks on open-source hardware.