found_drama

So apparently not even the internet … not Google, not IMDB … not no one has heard of this movie. It just kind of popped in there a couple of days ago and now I can’t seem to get it to go away. The same visions of the silent, brown haired woman in a jacket, with what looks like a bag of groceries walking down the snowy streets of the Soviet occupied town. She reaches into her bag and hefts a shitload of grenades and drops them down into the cockpit of the Soviet tank. She blows it and herself up.

But this memory is fairly vague and its accuracy is in question.

The distinct part of the memory is that there was some movie that I happened to catch part of as a kid that was about US resistance in a post-WW3 Soviet-occupied United States. It was nuclear winter and our heroes were a small band of scruffy Americans fighting against all odds. Poorly equipped, their only real advantage was determination. Even then (my memory puts me at about 7 or 8 when I caught this flick) I understood the Sisyphean nature of their struggle. The Soviets had won the war. There were tanks and troops on American soil. The only thing these would-be commandos could accomplish was to wreck some destruction just for the sake of pride.

Somehow this has slipped into obscurity though.

Well… Slightly new(ish) me. The fist has had its time but no amount of comfortable CSS trickery was going to make it viable. Which is to say that we are returning to some simpler geometry. Same brash Cold War era color scheme though.

A question posed particularly for the Mac-using folks but as this is a (sort of) public forum, consider it answer solicitation from all:

What email client are you using? How satisfied with it are you?

fine print: I’m using Mail.app lately … not sure if I’m digging it all that much or not. A recent post on Tao of Mac got me to thinking about the topic.

I don’t mean to be a bitch but… (via BoingBoing) This article’s conclusions hardly constitute a scientific breakthrough:

One trait believed to differentiate humans from other primates is the ability to appreciate aesthetics. Scientists have suspected that such judgement stems from an area of the brain called the prefrontal cortex To test this theory [...scientists...] showed pictures of art and natural photography to eight subjects, asking them to point out the pictures they found beautiful while imaging their brains using a technique called magnetoencephalography (MEG). As predicted, the task activated the prefrontal cortex.

Where do we begin to rip this one up? Let’s start (for example) with the it-comes-as-no-surprise fact that higher order functioning like “aesthetic appreciation” is taking place in the prefrontal cortex. All of the higher order “human” functions happen here. Watching a specific area “light up” on the MEG doesn’t really tell us much right off. Besides, let’s throw a varied, high protein diet into a bonobo for a few thousand more years and you’ll likely see them pointing to the beauty as well.

On that note, who is to say that there is no aesthetic appreciation in a bonobo or chimpanzee or oranguatan? As they have no natural language (that we know of), they have no way of communicating to us what they do/not find attractive. However, as these species (particularly the bonobo) participate in elaborate mate selection behaviors, it may be a safe assumption that they in fact do have some sense of aesthetics. Albeit a rudimentary one — or maybe that’s just a speciesist remark…