Over on Sociological Images Lisa evaluates Avatar(spoiler alert) Unfortunately, she’s got an agenda, and is seeing what she wants to see instead of what’s actually there.

First off, she says that the Na’vi “… are, in short, the stereotypical “noble savage.”

Which as I stated in my review of Avatar, is simply false.

The Na’vi are never portrayed in the classic sense of “noble savage”. They are noble yes, but your classic “noble savage” (at least as I’ve seen it) is also, “savage”, “primitive”, and simply “doesn’t know better.” You will find none of that in this film. The Na’vi are simply an indigenous people with simpler technology than ours…

Furthermore, they have spent years being taught our modern advances and ways and have chosen to reject them. They are never portrayed as “savages”.

Lisa says that “After they win the battle, Sully assumes the role of chief, with the highest ranking female at his side.”

This is simply not true. While this may be assumed to happen after the film ends it does not happen in the film. During the film Jake always shows deference to the chief and never tries to overstep his place in the tribe (excluding trying to come back after being sent away for his perceived betrayal of them).

But Sully is not only a superior human being, he is also a superior Na’vi. After being briefly ostracized for his participation in the land grab, he tames the most violent creature in the sky, thereby proving himself to be the highest quality warrior imaginable per the Na’vi mythology.

While the last sentence is true the first is arguably false. At no point in the film does it make any claim, explicit, or implicit, that Jake (Sully) is “superior”. He’s more courageous than most, and certainly has a strong moral backbone, but that’s not superiority. He’s not stronger, faster, smarter, or more educated than anyone else in the film. He’s just a good guy with courage. And there’s nothing preventing anyone on this planet from becoming that themselves. We can identify with Jake specifically because he’s NOT superior. He’s an “average joe”.

He gives them hope, works out their strategy, and is their most-valuable-weapon in the war.

This is true, but not quite how she suggests. He does give them hope. If he is the one to work out their strategy it is never shown, and if so it proves he’s a freaking terrible strategist because he has Na’Vi on horses ride straight into machine guns instead of hiding in trees and sniping.

There’s a good look at the racial politics of Avatar here, and if you doubt the words of us white folk, you might want to ask yourself why the Native American Times seemed perfectly happy with it, or why Wes Studi lent his voice to the film. If go into this determined to see it as “liberal guilt made flesh” that’s probably what you’ll come out with, or maybe you’ll see it as “The most expensive piece of anti-American propaganda ever made.” Or maybe, you’ll just go and enjoy it as an excellent film with the simple message that the environment is worth protecting and that people unlike you are still worthy of your respect. You get out of it what you take into it.

[Update] Miller says:

I think you should mention that when Jake went after the toruk, his reasons weren’t simply to prove that he was in any way superior to them as a warrior (as Lisa more or less says) but to win back the Na’vi’s estimation of him since he had so indelibly lost it with his “betrayal” the scene previous. the only thing he was proving in that act was his sincerity in saying that he would do anything he could to win back their trust and to help save them from being wiped out. if he failed in his attempt at taming the last shadow, he would have surely died. and seeing as he had lost everything else (his position with the humans /as well as/ the Na’vi), there wasn’t anything left for him to live for anyway.

I agree.

B&N has already screwed the nook with all its caveats. Today I discovered that they’ve also made a rather significant cock-up in their iPhone eBook reader too.

As you probably know from my post about the Kindle I refuse to buy any DRMd book and not because I hate DRM. But there are still thousands of free eBooks out there, especially all the classic public domain books from Project Gutenberg and Google Books. So, being curious about the iPhone versions of the Kindle and B&Ns eBook reader, I decided to give them a try and download a couple free books on them. Both kicked me out of the app and into the browser when I wanted to find a new book to download, which sucks from a user experience standpoint but is understandable in that they already had it written and it saved them from having to pay developers to make and debug an iPhone version of the same thing. But, when I attempted to actually download a free book from B&N I made a rather frustrating discovery. You can’t get a book from them unless you give them your credit card number even if the book is free.

Now, I know some of you think I’m being picky here. Most people won’t be going for the free books anyway. And that’s true, BUT it misses the bigger picture. Most people haven’t tried eBooks yet. Testing it out on your iPhone or computer is a great way to see if you like the basic idea without having to spend over $200 on a Kindle or a Nook only to find you really miss paper. Plus, if you’re still unsure, a free eBook makes testing the waters even easier. But, if you go to try it out on a free eBook and they tell you “sorry, we need your credit card for that free thing” you’re probably going to do what I did, and say “screw that” and walk away.

I’m not sure if this problem exists with Kindle for the iPhone or not, Amazon’s already got my credit card number, but both companies should be making this process totally painless. They should be going out of their way to encourage people to download the public domain books they have available. “Here, see how cool ebooks are. Try out any of these thousands of titles totally free on your iPhone!” People will try them, and say “Hey. This is pretty nifty. I should totally try it out with a book I actually want to read.” Because, let’s be honest, most people don’t want to read the classics, and the handful of us that do probably read an order of magnitude more books that have been published in the past 20 years.

The Kindle, the Nook, and their ilk all use eInk technology which is reflects, rather than emitting light, just like a piece of paper. It’s as easy on the eyes as reading paper and uses an incredibly small amount of electricity, but you first need to convince people that it’s worth the cost, and the free eBook readers people have on their iPhones and computers are an excellent for these companies to show people the value of electronic books (even if they do screw you with DRM). iPhone and computer eBook readers are, in the long term, going to be a minority of sales because it sucks to read off of a computer screen. But they’re treating them as if they’re equal to the eInk readers, when really, they’re just backups, or taste tests….

Whilst a crude statement, Amazon and B&N should be learning from the drug dealers of the world. They don’t just have free samples available, they go out of their way to make sure you get a free taste of what they’re offering, because they know you’re going to like it and want to come back for more, and then they start charging. Amazon and B&N have truckloads of free samples (public domain books) with name recognition: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Sherlock Holmes, The Art of War, etc., etc.. These don’t require special agreements, contracts, or payments. They’re free to everyone. And yet they hide them behind closed gates. “Nope, can’t get any free books until you give us a credit card” They don’t even promote them “What? The free books? Oh… yeah, I think we got some in the back.”

Give us the free drugs you idiots! It’s almost as if you don’t want me to buy your stuff.

[UPDATE: They responded to an e-mail inquiring about how to get the free eBooks without a credit card]

Thank you for your inquiry regarding free eBooks offered on bn.com.

We provide free eBooks to enable our customers to test the Barnes &
Noble eReader on their device of choice.  All publishers require that
the eBooks they submit, including free eBooks, are encrypted for each
customer.  The ?unlock? device is the billing name and credit card
number of the primary credit card on your Barnes & Noble account.

When you click on ?Get Free? for one of these titles, the default credit
card stored on your account will be authorized for the transaction or,
you will be prompted to set up an online account and provide your
billing name and credit card number.  Depending on your credit card
issuer, this transaction will have a token authorization amount ranging
from .01 to $1.00.  This authorization will be credited at checkout.

We hope you find this information helpful.

And I responded to them….

Your public domain eBooks were, in most, if not all, cases NOT
submitted by a publisher. YOU get them from Google and Google does NOT
require them to be encrypted. Google provides them free, and
unencrypted, to anyone who asks.

Even ignoring that fact, requiring a credit card in order to enable
“…customers to test the Barnes & Noble eBook reader of their
choice..” makes no sense. These are  two ideas that run at cross purposes.
Furthermore, your free eBooks are used for FAR more than enabling
people to test your service as they constitute a massive percentage of
the eBooks you claim are available for the Nook.

So, again, since your public domain eBooks are, in most cases, not
submitted by a publisher and do not require encryption, why do you
require my credit card? If nothing else I should be able to read the
ones you get from Google without encryption since we know that Google
doesn’t require it.

[Update 2 they responded to my response]

Ebooks are encrypted for copyright protection purposes. This is why
Barnes & Noble requires that eBooks, including free eBooks, are
encrypted for each customer. Currently, the ?unlock? device is the
billing name and credit card number of the primary credit card on your
Barnes & Noble account.

Please note that for security reasons Barnes & Noble does not store your
card information in the eBook or on your device.

Visit www.bn.com and click on the options that appear in the upper
right-hand corner to view information about your order.

We look forward to your next visit.

And I responded by pointing out what should have been obvious….

I think you are unclear on the concept of “Public Domain”.
The copyright on the books we are discussing has expired long before
you ever started selling ebooks.

There is NO copyright to protect on these books, and as we have
previously covered, there is no publisher requesting encryption for
them.

Every web page on the internet has an URL that is a unique address (that’s why it goes in the “address” bar), and in the beginning everyone used that. But early e-mail clients kinda sucked, and some of the current ones still do, and those addresses were so long they’d wrap, or had some funky characters in them that the e-mail client wasn’t expecting, and so it’d break the URL in such a way that you’d have to copy and paste both parts of it into the address bar instead of just clicking on it.

This kinda sucked.

Then Twitter came along and said “You only get 140 characters because that’s all that’ll fit in an SMS”. And, trying to write a useful little post in under 140 characters with some big-ass url eating up a third of them really sucked.

So, people turned to tinyurl.com and it’s cousins. Because they promised short urls that saved you characters and would always be clickable in crappy email clients so long as you ignore the fine print.

Fine Print? What fine print?
Well, imagine, if you will, that an URL is a bridge to a distant place. A normal URL works like a normal bridge, but tinyurls…

When you cross a normal bridge you know where you’re going to end up. I never have to worry about crossing the Mississippi and finding myself in Nigeria. With a tinyurl bridge, you just might. There’s no way to tell where it goes before you get there. KinkyPornThatWillGetYouFired.com ? Could be. Oh, and the bridge doesn’t go straight to the mystery land. No, all tinyurl bridges curve through the country of tinyurl. So, if they’re having a power outage, or an earthquake, you’re not getting there today. If they experience an economic catastrophe and cease to be then no tinyurl bridge that’s ever been built will ever make it past the once powerful, but now non-existant, country of tinyurl.com and you won’t be able to get to the desired location manually because there’s no way to know where that bridge ended up. Then, there’s the problem of Google (and its cousins). Google watches every bridge that’s built, and notes where it goes. The more bridges people build to a place, the more important that place must be. But guess what? When you use a tinyurl bridge no-one can see where that bridge goes. So that place you want to spread the word about? You’re not helping it. If anyone is getting any Google-juice out of the process it’s Tinyurl.com, but I suspect the Google geeks know better than to count those urls.

Then there’s the question of longevity. Not only shouldn’t you count on tinyurl.com and it’s cousins staying around, you should count on them going away. Almost all of them are totally free services with no advertising that just cost their owners money. The more you use it, the more bandwidth they consume, and more disk space they need. No, you should definitely count on these sites going away. It’s just a matter of time. Sure, as long as there’s a need another one will probably pop up to take it’s place, but all the millions of urls that used the old one will break when it goes away.

But, what about those old fashioned long urls? When I give someone the url to this page
http://weblog.masukomi.org/2009/12/27/why-tinyurl-co…n-the-internet
It not only gets them to the post but it also gives them some additional information. They can tell for example that it’s from my blog ( weblog.masukomi.org ) and not some porn site. In my urls (and many other blog URLs) there’s also an indication of when it was written ( 2009/12/27 ). This is especially useful when you need current information not something that was written five years ago. You can also tell if it’s something you’ve already seen. And last, but not least, the end of the URL ( why-tinyurl-co…n-the-internet ) gives you a hint at what the article’s about.

But what about Twitter?
Yeah, I hear you. It’s easy enough to stop using URL shorteners in everything else, especially since modern e-mail clients are generally pretty good about not breaking up urls, but you need to include URLs in your tweets from time-to-time. There are two simple simple solutions and both are really easy to implement. The only problem is that Twitter has to do it.

It’s probably safe to say that Twitter’s not going to give up the 140 character limit even when all phones have gone beyond that limit for texting. Those 140 characters have become part of Twitter’s ethos. If the limit was extended much it would transform what what Twitter is and how it’s used. So, what are these solutions?

The  best would be if Twitter were to set up their own tinyurl clone. There are plenty of free tinyurl implementations out there that are easy to install. You’d still have the downside of not being able to tell where the url lead to, and you wouldn’t be able to get there if Twitter was down, and if twitter went out of business they’d all stop working BUT, except for not seeing where you’re going these are all ok because if Twitter was down you wouldn’t see the tinyurl in the first place, and if Twitter went out of business the site would go away, and take all those now non-functional links with it.

If Twitter were to simply not count any characters contained in an url it would solve the problem on the web, and only require a minor code change and a simple database update. It has the downside that older phones would have trouble with the extra length and would need an url shortener, of course, if your phone is so old it can’t handle more than 140 characters then odds are you’re not going to be clicking on any links that come in a Tweet anyway.

While neither of these are hard they do both have a financial impact on a company that seems incapable of figuring out how to make any money.  Storing those few extra characters may not seem like much but I assure you that they add up, and the servers and hard drives required to make them keep working under a Twitter level of load (and nigh-constant hard drive failure) would not be cheap. But, there’s a good reason for Twitter to go through the effort of fixing these. Over time the URL shortening sites will die out, and as they do millions of links in old tweets will start to break, and that makes twitter look bad. How much will it suck when most all of the links in old tweets stop working and people stop bothering or wanting to click on links in tweets because they’re so frequently broken?

So, what do we do in the meantime? Sadly, the only thing we can really do at the moment is to try and put pressure on Twitter to address the problem from their end. Tweet them. Tell them you think having to use url shorteners sucks. Link them to this post. Write a similar post of your own to spread the word to your friends and tweet Twitter a link to that.

Summary:
In summary. Tinyurl.com and it’s cousins are bad because:

• You can’t see where the URL takes you
• The URL won’t work if the tinyurl is down temporarily
• The URL will break permanently when (not if) tinyurl ceases to be.
• It takes longer to get to the site because you have to first detour through the Tinyurl servers (literally adding thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of miles to every request).
• You’re not helping promote the page you’re trying to spread the word about because Google can’t tell what you’re linking to.

Please note that it’s not tinyurl.com that’s specifically the problem. They’re just the most popular one. ALL of the URL shortening sites have these same problems.

I didn’t plan to write this.

I just can’t get it out of my head.

Despite the hype, despite my fear of having expectations set too high, Avatar has blown me away.

You’ve probably heard people talking about how incredible the CGI is, and it is. But that’s not important. What’s important, is that James Cameron has created a lush and beautiful world that is utterly believable. You will hear that the plot is fairly simple, even predictable. But, that’s not important either. What’s important is that you enjoy every moment of it. What’s important, is that you care about characters, and when over one hundred and fifty minutes have gone by, you just want to see it all over again. It simply does not matter that the core story arc has been used time and again. Storytellers keep using it because it’s a works, and works well.

I’ve seen some of the few negative reviews of this talk about how it’s a tale of modern people versus the “noble savage”. But the Na’vi are never portrayed in the classic sense of “noble savage”. They are noble yes, but your classic “noble savage” (at least as I’ve seen it) is also, “savage”, “primitive”, and simply “doesn’t know better.” You will find none of that in this film. The Na’vi are simply an indigenous people with simpler technology than ours, end of story. They have traditions unlike yours and mine, but the movie doesn’t tell your they’re better or worse, merely asks you to accept them for what they are and believe that they are worth protecting. The only thing they really suggest is better about the Na’vi is that they live in tune with their world while the humans have managed to wipe out all the natural beauty on theirs.

James Cameron and crew have created something that will walk away with a mound of Oscars, and deserve every one.

The editing is absolutely brilliant, astounding even. The pacing is perfect. Everything you want from a film with regards to those, it has.  It is as long as it is because there was that much to show, but it never drags, and you never come across a part that, looking back, you wish they’d cut. The graphics will obviously get an Oscar, but there is no doubt in my mind that the editing deserves one too.

The CGI: the world, the creatures, the Na’vi… Incredible. You can’t tell the Na’vi don’t exist in the real world. They have pushed motion capture, especially the capture of facial movments, to a level that is indiscernable from a physical actor. I’m a geek, and as such there was always a tiny piece of me watching from that perspective, and I can remember one moment when Zoe Saldaña’s character Neytiri was speaking to Jake and the facial motions were so complex, so complete, and so perfectly rendered down to the creases of the skin, that the geek part of my brain just locked up for a minute. Some of the flora and fauna is so unlike anything on earth that it had to be CGI, but some things, like rocks… you simply couldn’t tell if it was CGI or not.

In a way it’s sad. It’s sad that the technical advances in this film are so significant, because you can’t talk about it without speaking of them, and that takes away from the film itself. Maybe when Avatar is as far behind us as the original Star Wars is, when the tech simply isn’t noteworthy by the current day’s standards. Maybe then we can have a real discussion about this film.

What I can say now, is that it is absolutely worth seeing. It’s not flawless. But it does exactly what a sci-fi movie should do. It takes you to a new place, or time, it makes you feel for its characters, and leaves you wanting more.

[Update] I made a second post about some BS commentary about Avatar.

There was a young girl, at that age when puberty hasn’t quite reached her, and everything hasn’t changed.

I watched her through the window of the subway train as she buried her face into her fathers chest and hid from the cold. He was talking with another man his age and gesturing with his arms. After a moment she turned around, reached up, and put her hands around his forearms. Not to interfere. Just, to be let them hang, to touch him as he continued talking and gesturing.

I saw a beautiful thing today… a little girl, who loved her father.

Somewhere around the time I was in High School my mother introduced me to Heinlein, and one of the first things I read was A Stranger In A Strange Land. And, I think it impacted me even more than I realized at the time. I’m almost finishing rereading it now, and reflecting on some interesting paralels between the characters and myself. While I could never prove it, it seems that as I changed from a “nestling” into an adult I took on the morals of Valentine Michael Smith and combined them with Jubal Harshaw’s way of thinking.

Michael’s morals aren’t too far from the norm, with some notable exceptions, so it’s not something you’d particularly notice in me, but I do share them, for the most part, even in the exceptions. Jubal, on the other hand, had an ability that is exceedingly rare. He could think about things separately from the morals of the society he lived in. He was able to contemplate them for what they were inherently. For example, our society says that orgies are bad, but when the topic was discussed Jubal spoke of them for what they were; a group of people making each other feel good, and noted that some societies had no problem with them. Just because the morals of our society deem something “bad” doesn’t mean it actually is.

I think I learned that lesson most strongly from Jubal. He, more than anyone else, taught me to judge things for their own worth, and to not accept what “everyone knows” without question. And my ideas on religion and family have come, in no small part, from Michael’s views on the same.

The more of his novels I think about, the more influence I can see on decisions I have made in my life, and how his teachings influenced the way I think. So thank you Robert Heinlein, Valentine, Michael Smith, Jubal Harshaw, and all the other fine characters who helped to shape my life. Many authors have entertained me, and made me think, but I can only think of one that has really changed my life.

We’re doing an interesting variation on Secret Santa in our group this year, that you might enjoy too.

Background: we do behavioral targeting in my group. We get anonymous data about web surfers and try and try and make sure that those people are shown banner ads that are actually applicable to them, but we never know WHO, and thus…

A behaviorally targeted Secret Santa.

Each participant submits a list of 3-5 items they’ve recently purchased (online or off) and are comfortable sharing to the coordinator. Then, instead of drawing names from a hat, each participant draws a an anonymous list of recent purchase with a participant number and has to try and buy a gift they think appropriate based on that for under $20.

When it’s time to exchange gifts, everyone gets together and the participant numbers on the lists are matched up with the humans and gifts are exchanged. I’m sure we’ll probably read off the items on the list we got and everyone will try and guess who’s list it was before the reveal and exchange.

I like it. I speak with a bunch of my coworkers but I’d be totally stumped as to what to get some of them. Give me a list of things they’ve recently purchased and I think I’d be able to do a pretty fair job though.

I think it’s a good idea that would work well in just about any group, and will probably result in presents that are going to be enjoyed even more by the recipients. If you try it in your group drop me a note and let me know how it went.

P.S. I’m thinking it would help if when you made your list you included links to descriptions of the items online, even if you didn’t purchase them online.