Futurelawyer

Why We Should Care About The Health Of The Planet

Saturday morning heads up. One of the classic movie scenes of all time: the euthanasia scene from Soylent Green. After we have destroyed our planet, will we become cannibals? Soylent Green.

Siri And Jeannie - Please Shut Up!

Silence Is Golden - NYTimes.com. This Maureen Dowd piece nails it. Our society has forgotten the pleasure of silence. You know, that brief interlude in which no one is speaking, howling, singing, yelling, or otherwise breaking the powerful contemplative mood that silence brings. It is now early morning, and I am learning about what is happening in the world before anyone is stirring, and the only sound I hear is the tapping of the keys on my keyboard. I love the silence. It is instructive that the avant garde now in movie making is a movie that contains long, silent passages, in which the actors merely do what people do. Siri, the newest innovation that allows you to talk to your smartphone when you aren't talking on your smartphone, and the Android alternative, Jeannie, are merely symptoms of a larger disease. Are we so afraid of our thoughts that we must fill every moment with talking or other sound? When I was growing up, the holiest men were thought to be the monks who lived their lives in silence. If I have to interact with machines to get my work done, and to find out the necessary information to live my life, please let me do it in silence. 

Soylent Green Is People!

Soylent Green Closing Scene A mid-week reminder of the consequences if we fail to take care of our planet. And, the Pastoral Symphony is one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever composed. 

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Can You Hear Me Now?

Occam's Razor, or the law of succinctness, postulates that the conclusion to a problem is always the one that requires the fewest assumptions. When you watch this video of outtakes from Charley Chaplin's 1928 movie, "The Circus", you have a choice of assumptions. It is thought to show a "lady" (she looks more like Ernest Borgnine) talking into a device held to her left ear. You can't tell what she is holding in her hand, but her lips are clearly moving, and she is walking alone. To believe the movie buff who discovered this footage, you have to assume that she is talking on a cell phone during filming of a movie in 1928. To do that, she has to be an alien or time traveler. Would a simpler assumption be more likely? You be the judge. Of course, if aliens had the technology to come here in 1928, is it a valid assumption that they would allow themselves to be caught or film, or is it more likely that this is a crazy lady who doesn't know what she is doing?