Given I know a few people myself who don’t own cellphones, I found defective yeti’s list of how people’s reaction to the discovery he does not have a cell phone has changed over the course of the last decade spot-on and hilarious.

In my earlier review, I compared WALL•E—at least the first half—to a silent film. (True, the sentences, “Directive?”, “WALL•E,” “EVE,” and “Classified!” are indeed spoken, but since that’s it, I’m willing to fudge a little.) Silent films were, of course, not actually silent; a pianist—or, for larger locales, an organist, or even an entire orchestra—provided music to accompany the visuals. I had hoped that WALL•E would honor that tradition by having an outstanding soundtrack. I was not disappointed.

The WALL•E soundtrack, though certainly not the most technically complicated score I’ve heard in recent years, does stand singularly one of very few scores where I can re-experience the movie simply by listening to the music. Specifically because WALL•E and EVE have so few words to speak, my aural memories of them are through their orchestral backing. I can still see the dreary desolation of Earth in 2815 A.D., laugh at WALL•E’s inquisitiveness in Wall-E, feel WALL•E’s horror at EVE’s comatose state in Worry Wait, and feel their carefree love for each other in Define Dancing. That’s something I can say about depressingly few soundtracks these days. I’m very happy that WALL•E’s did not disappoint.

I was more excited about the arrival of WALL•E than I have been about any movie in a very long time. WALL•E would be one of the last Pixar films with minimal Disney influence, promised to make us fall in love with a pair of robots, and, I hoped, would give the Pixar a chance to redeem itself from Cars (also known as “Doc Hollywood with less nudity and more automobiles”). Besides, the trailer for this post-apocalyptic G-rated adventure used part of the soundtrack from Brazil. What wasn’t there to love?

Unfortunately, last week, seeing WALL•E on opening day looked problematic. The annual Fog Creek summer party was on that Friday, plus most of the people I wanted to see the movie with were busy Friday night and gone for the weekend.

So I did what any sane person would do: I dragged my roommate and an unsuspecting intern to the 12:01 AM showing on what was, technically, Friday morning. After a few quick naps and a few quick Redbulls, we wobbled our way into Times Square, bought our tickets, and headed into the theater.

By the time we arrived—still a good twenty minutes before the show started—the theater was packed, and the audience already on the edge of their seats. Unsurprisingly, I saw very few children; the audience was composed almost entirely of twenty-somethings and a few thirty-somethings, many of whom were clearly diehard Pixar fans. That made me happy: seeing a movie with an enthusiastic crowd can add a tremendous amount to a movie.

(And a dead crowd can subtract. I saw the movie for a second time Sunday afternoon, and was…well, saddened by the audience’s reactions. WALL•E’s start-up sound—the same as the Apple IIGS—spawned laughter and applause at the initial screening. The reaction from the audience the second time I saw it? Nothing. There were a half-dozen other jokes that the Sunday matinée’s audience simply failed to grok or find funny, leaving me the only one laughing in the theater.)

Finally, the movie began.

First, I have no idea how Pixar managed to slide the opening short—entitled Presto—past the Disney censors. The cartoon, though hilarious, steals liberally from the best of the maniacally violent Warner-Bros. cartoons of yesteryear. Although not worth the price of admission by itself (movie tickets in New York are up to $12), I definitely look forward to being able to add it to my DVD collection.

Finally, the main feature began. Would WALL•E live up to my overhyped expectations?

In my opinion, WALL•E is two movies. One of them truly is the best movie I’ve ever seen. The other is solid. Combined, it’s still an amazing piece, but I find myself wanting for what WALL•E could have been.

The first movie, which lasts for roughly forty minutes WALL•E, has virtually no dialog. One of the characters is a cockroach with no facial expressions. Another is a trash compactor with binoculars for a head. The third has no mechanism whatsoever for expressing emotions other than two pupil-less eyeballs that are always the same shade of blue. Yet, I was almost moved to tears. The emotions expressed were so beautiful, so pure, and so dire, that I can’t think of any way to describe it except as visual poetry. It is emotionally and visually exquisite, and devastating.

The second movie, which roughly corresponds with the latter half, has substantially more dialog, shallower emotions, and more plot. The haunting poetry of the first section devolves into more typical Disney fare. I still thought that this movie was enjoyable to watch and significantly higher-calibre than most movies I see, but it lacks the artistry and panache of the first half. To be honest, I felt cheated. WALL•E’s opening promised so much more. That the second half was merely above-average left me oddly disappointed.

For this reason, I find rating WALL•E painfully difficult. WALL•E could have been the last great silent film—and, for awhile, it was. I want this WALL•E to be divorced from any emotions I may I have about the work as a whole; I want to be able to point to it and say, “This is what movies should be.” But the actual movie simply does not maintain that bold vision throughout, and, unless you have a brutal taste for tragedy, the movie-within cannot stand by itself.

I did love the movie enough to see it again two days later—something I don’t think I’ve done since Aladdin—and I’ve recommended it heartily to family and friends. I just wish Pixar had had the courage to finish the movie with the same bold vision that they had for the first half.

As you probably noticed, WordPress got swapped out for MovableType last night. The good news is that I’m rapidly falling in love with the new system and expect to have this site back with sane templates by the end of next week. The bad news is that all the user accounts were lost. All comments have been preserved, mind you, but if you previously had an account, you’ll have to reregister.

On the bright side, I’ve opted to experimentally enable OpenID support. I’ll be monitoring it closely—I have a bad feeling about OpenID making spammers’ jobs a bit too easy—but for the time being, please feel free to comment using your OpenIDs. With luck, this blog can be one of the first to begin eliminating site-specific accounts.

I upgraded bitquabit to Ubuntu today. I learned a few valuable lessons:

1. Untested backup scripts don’t count. This one I knew, but I didn’t fully process that “untested” really means “untested recently.” In particular, my backup script was backing up a database called wordpress. Unfortunately, I moved all the blogs hosted by bitquabit to a database called wp last fall. Result? The backups, though minutes old, were effectively from last October. I was lucky here: I happened to have a day-old WXR file, and a friend sent me the one missing post that was still on his screen in Google Reader. Another blog hosted on bitquabit was not nearly so lucky; it will basically have to start from scratch.
2. Backups tested on systems substantially different from the deployed system are useless. I love Citadel; it’s an awesome groupware client. And my backups and restores worked quite well—when both ends were running Debian 4. Unfortunately, I just moved bitquabit to Ubuntu 7.10. You can guess the rest.
3. Have multiple backup strategies. Although the Citadel “migration” didn’t exactly go as planned, I was saved there by paranoia: I sync my IMAP mailboxes to my local machine in mbox format. I was back up and running about a minute after the server came back up. No data loss there.
4. Don’t migrate at odd hours if you don’t have to. Realistically, my last-minute checks would at least have caught the fact that the blog database was borked if my brain had been more awake. The “most recent” post was, after all, more than six months old, and had encoding errors that I’ve fixed before. Then again, I didn’t catch this in the dry run on Sunday, either, so I’m not quite sure how much I can meaningfully excuse my idiocy through fatigue.

On the bright side, everything, minus a blog, seems to be fully up and operational again. There are a couple of quirks—with the blog hell, I opted to do an impromptu migration to MovableType—but I’m confident I can get things straightened out again. Meanwhile, all I can do is live and learn and hope this is the last time I have a lossy server migration.

Whenever someone asks me who my favorite philosopher is, my answer usually elicits either a blank stare or a chuckle.

My answer is always Bill Watterson.

Watterson’s comics meant a lot to me when I was growing up. Even though I was hardly an impossible-to-manage kid (cough), I empathized strongly with Calvin’s view of the world. As a constant daydreamer myself, his blurring of reality and fiction spoke to me in a way that few other works, comic or otherwise, really could.

As I grew older, Calvin and Hobbes aged with me. The more adult themes of the comic began to appear, and I started appreciating that, as much as Calvin and Hobbes could be a pure comic strip, it was also, in a very real sense, a philosophy told in comic form. That philosophy, ultimately, was simple: love life, don’t grow old, don’t be afraid to see things differently than others, and never forget the value of love. How is that not a more beautiful, more tangible, philosophy than anything Kant, Nietzsche, or Mendelssohn ever came up with? Not as complex, certainly, but more applicable. When my parents lovingly gifted me the Complete Calvin and Hobbes for my birthday, I gave it a prominent place on my bookshelf, and have enjoyed reading a bit whenever life gets me down.

I guess it’s for that reason that today’s xkcd made me smile. xkcd, like Calvin and Hobbes, can be a pure comic, but frequently ends up actually being philosophy that uses the comic format as little more than a vehicle to discuss deeper ideas. I can’t help but appreciate the idea of the two comics’ main characters running into each other. It gives me a wonderfully fuzzy feeling for some reason, and makes for a lovely conclusion to an otherwise frustrating week.

One of my absolute favorite movies is Primer. Written, directed, and scored by an engineer who also serves as the film’s leading actor, Primer stands as a testament to what science fiction can be. Too many science fiction works either are nothing but social commentary that use science as a glorified MacGuffin, or else have plots that exist primarily to rant about new scientific ideas. Primer has neither fault, beautifully embracing hard science while having a riveting interpersonal drama based on trust and deceit. Primer’s success is all the more amazing when you learn that it was shot for a budget of $7000 on Super 16 film stock. That’s simply unheard of these days.

Scott Tobias at The Onion A.V. Club apparently feels the same way: this week he has written a wonderful article lauding Primer’s incredible production values. Scott talks at length about how the use of film stock over digital, and the singular drive of the film’s creator, resulted in a surprisingly high-quality independent film. It’s a good read whether you’ve heard of Primer or not—and, if you haven’t, will hopefully help persuade you to add it to your Netflix queue.

(Hat tip: kottke)

For most of my life, I've been deeply involved in technology. My father taught me GW-BASIC when I was five. I had traced Smalltalk down to the bytecodes by the time I was twelve and from there to 68k assembly a year later. I insisted on disassembling most of the objects we had in the house in an attempt to figure out how they worked, and to build my own (which, unfortunately, tended not to work as well as the originals). In many, many ways, technology has defined me for most of my life.

Yet at the same time, it's been a love-hate relationship. As much as I love technology, there's little question that it's made my life more and more hellish. Simply keeping track of the incoming deluge of instant messages, emails, tweets, phone calls, Facebook pokes, and more, has gotten to the point where most of my day seems to be taken up entirely by nothing but trying to keep in touch with everyone. Living in New York, the problem has simply gotten worse and worse. The constant noise. The constant pollution. The unceasing stream of needy women who want my body. Not only am I crushed by people trying to get in touch with me; I'm crushed by those who succeed.

Well, I've had it.

I've long respected the Amish. They have tight-knit groups, strong social standards, and manage to be wonderfully self-sufficient. In an age when the rest of the world cannot do anything but focus on drugs, money, and late-model DeLoreans, they represent everything that could be right with the world, a harmony between intellectual and spiritual, between man and nature, between sacred and profane. But there's a problem: the Amish are Christian. I'm Jewish. So, I've done the only logical thing: I've decided to convert.

I'll be getting my affairs in order over the next several weeks, selling most of my possessions to give to the bishop, and learning the Ordnung of whichever fellowship I end up deciding to join. I'll try to blog about the experience as much as possible so that anyone else who opts to follow my same path knows how to easily do so. If you're in the NYC area and wish to join me for key parts of my quest, I'd strongly encourage you to join my twitter feed (username dblywteef) so that you can tag along easily. Feel free to ask, either here or in email, any questions you have about why I've decided this is the only reasonable course. I'll get back to you as quickly as possible, but please understand if I'm a bit slow to respond to work and personal reasons.

I guess that's it. It's been wonderful being on the forefront of technology for the past twenty years, but I think it's high time that I took a break and returned to the finer things in life.

Thanks everyone for your kind support. I'll see you on the flip side.

Nota bene: This article was written on April 1st. Please reflect on that date before responding.

Not remotely related to science or technology, but this nice story of a mugging taking a beautifully positive turn is more appropriate for the end of the week anyway.

As I indicated curtly in my previous post, I'm a huge proponent of nuclear power.

Though there continues to be substantial political debate whether global warming exists—largely because responding to it would be economically damaging—the overwhelming consensus of the scientific community is, and has been for some time, that global warming exists and is man-made. (See the IPCC statement, and a discussion of its significance in Nature—one of the top several scientific journals in the world, and definitely representative of the scientific community—for the most recent affirmations of that claim.) Even for those who refuse to believe in global warming—whether because they believe that the overwhelming majority of scientists and their communities are corrupt, or that scientists are incompetent, or that G–d will prevent climate change—few would argue that reducing pollution, if economically viable, is a worthwhile goal.

Nuclear energy provides a cheap, reliable, highly efficient way of generating electricity right now. Combined with a movement away from fossil fuels, nuclear power would offer cleaner air and cheaper power.

Though many argue nuclear power is unsafe, I believe their fears are largely unfounded. Chernobyl and Three Mile Island are the only two nuclear-power-related accidents we've had over the past fifty years, and only Chernobyl had radiation leakage. Given that 443 reactors have been built and are currently operating (not even counting secret and naval reactors) according to the IAEA, fears of nuclear-power apocalypse seem overblown. Nuclear plants, meanwhile, generate no air-based pollutants, in stark contrast to coal plants, which generate relatively high levels of toxic pollutants. Given the choice, I would much rather live close to a nuclear power plant than a coal power plant.

I have far more sympathy with those who argue that countries with nuclear reactors have access to material for nuclear bombs. Sadly, far too many countries today would indeed jump at the chance to create and use nuclear weapons. Though this criticism doesn't apply to the thirty-two countries who already have nuclear power, and therefore should not be an argument about increasing the use of nuclear power in the United States, I do think that proliferation is a viable concern with spreading the use of nuclear power in the world at large.

Thankfully, we may soon have the best of both worlds: thorium reactors may soon become a reality.

Thorium reactors, unlike uranium reactors, do not produce plutonium (and in fact, will happily, cleanly destroy plutonium as part of its reaction process), and as a result, their waste products remain radioactive for only 500 years. They're also safer: the thorium fuel cycle is sub-critical, meaning that, in the absence of human intervention, it will burn out quietly, rendering Chernobyls and Three-Mile-Islands are impossible. Thorium is also far more plentiful than uranium, being up to 550 times more plentiful in the Earth's crust, meaning that such a reactor would be even cheaper to operate. On paper, thorium should be perfect.

Yet thorium has a major flaw: because thorium reactors are sub-critical, they require small amounts of uranium and plutonium to keep the reaction alive, which results in a slight catch-22. Even though such a hybrid plant would be far safer than a pure uranium- or plutonium-based reactor, it accomplishes nothing to assuage anti-proliferation fears.

The good news is that this will change in the very near future. Cosmos Magazine has a great article on two new ways of powering thorium reactors—the second requiring no uranium or plutonium whatsoever, instead using a particle accelerator powered by the reactor itself to keep the reaction running. Such a reactor would offer cheap, clean, powerful fuel to power our world well into the future with minimal environmental or social repercussions.

I fully anticipate a long wait before thorium reactors make an appearance in the United States, but unless fusion power finally proves viable—something I don't think even ITER will help achieve in the near future—thorium promises to be one of the best options for our future energy needs.