Slavoj Zizek's Greatest Films Poll ballot

Via Fimoculous, here's the critics poll ballot from Slavoj Zizek ​in Sight and Sound's 2012 Greatest Films Poll. It's no surprise that Zizek's is the only vote for 2007's Hitman, starring Timothy Olyphant, in the entire critic's poll. And I haven't seen it myself, so my surprise could be a bit of snobbish presumption. Still...

Browsing the entire list of films that received at least one vote is a fun exercise. The list has a reputation for skewing towards movies with narrow appeal, so what seemed to me to be more recent populist entries leapt out at me:​

• Anchorman
• The Artist​
• Avatar​
• Back to the Future​
• Bambi​
• Borat​
• The Breakfast Club​
• The Departed​
• Girl with the Dragon Tattoo​
• Gran Torino​
• Inglorious Bastards​
• Kill Bill​
• The King's Speech​
• Minority Report​
• Pirates of the Caribbean III: At World's End​
• Precious​
• Rise of the Planet of the Apes​
• The Social Network​
• Sweeney Todd​
• Up​
• Wall-E​
• Zodiac​

To take this poll to the next level, the BFI could tweak their website so you could look at any movie and see how often it ranked in the top 10, 20, 50 movies among only those critics who had actually seen it. As the years go by, and despite increased average life expectancies and the number of classics that stream online, it becomes harder and harder for critics to have seen as large a percentage of the the entire film canon.

AT&T text messaging rates

My iPhone is on the AT&T network. For a while, I had been paying $5 a month for 200 text messages a month. Then last year, AT&T eliminated the $5 plan, so I had to pay $10 a month for 1000 text messages a month, even though I didn't need them. I still had enough text messages a month that it was cheaper than a la carte pricing.

When Apple launched iMessages, my text message volume dropped a lot, and I suspect AT&T saw a corresponding drop in the number of people paying them for text messages. So they eliminated the $10 plan, and the only options left in place were a $20 a month plan for unlimited text messaging or a la carte pricing charged at the absurd price of $.20 a text message, whether inbound or outbound.​ AT&T justified this by saying customers preferred unlimited plans.

Since the FCC clearly won't protect consumers from this type of price gouging, we're largely on our own. Given how many of my heavy texting friends are on iPhones and iMessages, I looked at a few phone bills and decided to try paying a la carte for two months.​

The results are in, and it looks like I'm saving about $15 a month​ by doing so. Not enough to change my life, but the emotional satisfaction of taking $15 a month out of AT&T's pockets makes it feel like $100.

What ​I'd love to see is my iPhone have the ability to take incoming text messages and reroute them to one of my free text messaging apps, or Twitter DM, and save me paying any fee for those random texts from non iMessage users, but of course by that point AT&T would have charged me already.

I have faith that someday we'll be free of this absurd rent-seeking toll, and AT&T as a whole, and in the meantime, I keep picturing Anne Hathaway dancing with an AT&T executive at a masquerade ball, whispering in his ear, "There's a storm coming. You and your friends better batten down the hatches, because when it hits, you're all gonna wonder how you ever thought you could charge so much for text messaging and provide so little for the rest of us."
 

Why the return trip always feels shorter

One of the core ideas I took from Moonwalking with Einstein, ​one of my favorite books of 2011, was the tight relationship between memory and our perception of how quickly time passes. The more you fall into routine, the more your brain chunks those blocks of time, and thus the faster time seems to fly by. Break up patterns in your life, introduce variety, and time slows.

I haven't seen an actual description of the mechanism​ by which that works until now, but this is a good one from professor of biochemistry William Reville:

Biological cycles are measured by an internal clock that emits steady signals. The signals emitted over a given interval are counted by something called an “accumulator”. The counts can be stored in memory by an animal and used to repeat certain durations by counting signals until they match the count stored in the memory. No awareness of the passage of time is necessary. Humans however are aware of the passage of time and are easily influenced by attentional demands over a target interval.

Humans have an “attentional gate” through which the signals from the clock must pass in order to reach the accumulator. If the individual decides that the passage of time is important , then the attentional gate is opened wide and signal accumulation is maximised. If the passage of time is unimportant then the gate is narrowed and fewer signals are accumulated. Assuming that the estimate of time duration depends on the count registered by the accumulator, it is easy to see that the same objective time duration, eg 15 minutes, will seem longer when waiting for interview that while relaxing. And, memorising the complex figure requires more attentional resources than memorising the circle, leading to a narrower gate and a lower signal count.

​Well worth reading the whole thing, it's not very long, and its power is in how it helps to explain all sorts of time perception phenomena. When Reville follows up his description with this homework assignment, suddenly everything makes sense:

Using the attentional gate model of prospective timing, explain why “a watched pot never boils”, why earthquakes feel longer than they are, and why the “return trip” always feels shorter.

Every Love Story Is A Ghost Story

D.T. Max's biography of David Foster Wallace, Every Love Story Is A Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace, comes out next week.​

DFW is widely considered the most influential writer of his generation (I can't look at a footnote on Daring Fireball or Grantland without thinking of Infinite Jest), and he was certainly the most important one in my life. He was more than a guy who could spin mean prose; he was a model of intellectual clarity, ambition, and honesty.​ I'm in the midst of rereading his complete works for the third time now, and needless to say, this biography will go into that pile.

The origins of Monopoly

The origins of the board game Monopoly lay with a game that was designed to teach people about the evils of rent-charging property owners. Called The Landlord's Game, it was desgined by Lizzie Magie who thought a board game would drive her point home better. Matthew Yglesias would approve?

The irony, of course, is that people now play Monopoly ​with the aim of driving all their opponents into bankruptcy, and so it's become a lesson in ruthless empire building, "Walter-White-Heisenberg-style. Even if the message had been retained, though, much of the game's context and many of its references are outdated now. 

However, using games to teach people some basic economic concepts still seems worthwhile, and techies love games. Someone should adapt a version of Monopoly for Silicon Valley. Among the little character pieces would be a blue-button-down-shirt-and-khaki-pants-wearing VC, and taking the place of the colored real estate properties of Monopoly would be colored web properties. For example, instead of the two blue properties Boardwalk and Park Place we'd have the two blue internet properties Facebook and Twitter (oh wait, someone already thought of that). Instead of Electric Company and Water Works you'd have Amazon Web Services and Github. And as other players landed on your properties, you'd charge them, either by taking a lot of cash from them (direct monetization, the equivalent of hotels in the original Monopoly game) or a little cash from them as ad revenue (like houses in Monopoly; easier to build than hotels, but they monetize more poorly).

Among the Chance and Community Chest cards would be ones like "Facebook just dialed up your newsfeed story frequency coefficient, collect $100,000 in traffic bounty from all the other players"​ or "Google just stole one of your best developers by offering twice the pay, better benefits, and cushier hours, sit out two turns".