The bat man

Finally saw Dark Knight. It was even more breathtaking than I expected; of course, you don't need me to tell you to go see it. Spoilers ahead.

1. This may sound a bit odd, but the style of Joker's anarchist expositions really brought to mind an evil George Carlin. I wouldn't be surprised if Ledger used him for part of the character model.

2. Made me realize how truly awful the V for Vendetta movie was, and how difficult the V character is - it didn't even occur to me how much they watered V down, putting him in the Matrix mold. But now there is a glimpse of what would be a fair representation: the Joker as a protagonist. Many of his tactics were directly analogous to V's. In fact this movie does much more for the graphic novel than the V movie did.

3. Some silly stuff that almost intruded on my enjoyment: the cybereyes and how they work (offset by the political analogy which I thought was appropriate); as if the accountant wouldn't tell anyone else before the telecast; the misadventures of Harvey Dent seemed almost like a separate movie at times. Then there's the silly stuff that didn't bother me.

amusing

I find it hard to believe that I've never seen a shot like this in a movie.
(It only applies to advertising material not the movies themselves.)

http://www.avclub.com/content/hater/the_mpaa_thinks_youre_stupid

Sourced from this interesting site: http://www.theagitator.com

My casual jeremiad writ large.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-dna20-2008jul20,0,1506170,full.story

I remember using this very example in my stats class last summer. Basically, even though in one sample a certain (combination of) gene(s) may have 1-in-a-billion chance of showing up at random (i.e. a false positive match), that sample may not be representative. For example, the gene may be more common in the Amish thus increasing the false positive rate. One 14-year-old overachieving Chinese student expressed concern about allowing too much freedom for the defense in a legal argument. She also didn't like my reductionist equation of intelligence to reasoning speed (I used this example for a brief and casual lecture on generalized linear models I think); she may have been right there, actually.

The genetics is a little more interesting than just that. You'd like your claims to be "conservative"; that is, the actual chance to be even smaller than you claim. However, in this case it always seems possible that there will be some isolated group of people who may have certain common genes. So do we actually model population flows and take the argument one level higher, making arguments about distributions of genes themselves being unlikely? Should we allow this reasoning in court, having seen the travesty of explanation that even basic DNA testing provokes? But then maybe it's been so hard because people have had an intuitive understanding and suspicion of exactly what's going wrong now!

If not, do we throw everything out, or instead of trying to "do it right" fall back to our flawed and incomprehensible zeitgeist to make our decision for us?

Or is there even a deeper distinction between an unlikely individual within a population (legally admissible argument) and an unlikely population (inadmissible)?