Climate Experts Give Five Stars to “An Inconvenient Truth”

I saw this movie a while ago, and I’m glad that finally a movie like this is being validated against the nation’s top 19 climate experts (the original story is here). This is a movie that everyone should see; to put it bluntly — the climate and life on earth is hanging on a thread and if we don’t do anything in 10 years, that thread will snap and we’ll begin a horrific descent into destruction. Well, maybe that was a bit morbid… but in all seriousness, it’s for the most part, true.

Gore draws a good analogy in this movie between man:global warming and smoking:lung cancer. For decades, we debated over whether smoking really caused lung cancer. The real truth was that there was no doubt scientifically that smoking caused lung cancer! It was only the media that propagated otherwise. The same applies to global warming.

The thing that annoys me is that there are actually people out there who don’t even believe global warming is happening. Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), chairman of the Senate Environment Committee, has said, “Global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.” Even our own President won’t even watch this movie, although he’s hypocritically said that he’s “unbiased” on whether global warming is man-made or natural. Come on. Seriously, look around you. Look at the news. Read scientific papers. Watch this movie.

 

Small World

For the next month, Seattle is having its annual International Film Festival. About 200 movies, from 62 countries. Some of them are really, really good. Usually on Rottentomatoes, movies rarely make over 80%; some of these movies have a perfect 100%. Some good ones that might/will make it to the big screen — at least the ones that are playing now — are:

• The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros
• A Prairie Home Companion (100%)
• Life With My Father (100%)
• Bickford Schmeckler's Cool Ideas

I saw Bickford Schmeckler's Cool Ideas last night. It was hilarious.. can't wait for it to be in wide release. The best part is, it was only made on a budget of $1,000,000.

In the car ride back, I was sitting with three interns. I started talking to the guy next to me and found out that he and the driver were both from Duke (much to my disappointment.. jk). He also knew a lot of people from Science and Math. THEN he realized that one of our mutual friends had shown him this blog after he got into Microsoft. Crazy…

During the convo, when I was asked if anyone else from Chapel Hill was interning at MS, I said — not really, but I know someone from last summer who's interning at MS. When asked if I was a second-time MS intern, I said no.. but this guy was from IBM. The guy next to me pointed to the intern in the passenger's seat and said that he interned at IBM too, but was a "speedy" intern, meaning that he was probably on a Speed Team. So I started talking to him and when I told him I worked in Austin last summer, he said that his Speed Team in Rochester spent a lot of the summer integrating with a team in Austin. Weird. I asked him what he did, and what the team in Austin did. When he told me, my jaw almost hit the floor.

This guy worked with our team last summer. I even talked to him on the phone several times last summer but never even saw his face. He and his teammates spent a ton of time communicating with our team. It was fun talking about last summer (I told him how much we cursed his team for their requirements) and I headed back home.

I got in a car and out of the 1500 interns at MS, I happened to have an indirect connection to all 3 of them. Small World.

 

V For Vendetta

Awesome movie — one of two I saw over break (the other one was 16 Blocks, another good movie). I didn’t get that much sense of the “near future” that it tries to portray (although it does contain references to ‘America’s War’ and the Avian Flu), but everything else is really well done. Throughout various points in the movie, I kept feeling like it was trying to tell me something about where our society is heading and what the consequences were if we proceeded in the wrong direction. Of course it was somewhat obvious from the trailer and the tagline: “An uncompromising vision of the future”, but there were lots of references to things we have seen/currently see in our everyday lives. It definitely is a much more exaggerated environment — it takes place in a post-nuclear-war Britain, when a repressive government has taken power. I got a sense that it wasn’t trying to draw an analogy with any kind of government in the world today, but it definitely makes you think about some common stereotypes we have of history (who are the protagonists/antagonists?).

There are many movies out there that depict citizens struggling under a Nazi-like government, but this one starts you off in a state of complacency in the beginning — sure, everything is fake, but life isn’t hard… as the movie continues, you start to question the roles of characters and who is in the right/wrong. That itself makes it a powerful movie — in the end you realize the ideal that V stands for, and how a simple movie can change your way of thinking. Anyways, go see it. If nothing else, it was produced by the creators of the Matrix.