A really excellent and powerful film, I think Robert Downey Jr. is great in it and Jamie Foxx gives a brilliantly moving performance. It was harder to watch than I thought would be as it is not quite the feel good movie that it’s been portrayed as being but then it is a true story and real life is always more complicated than fiction. It is quite dark look at the problem of homelessness in Los Angeles and the associated issue of mental health. There are over 80 000 homeless people in LA and it seems most of them if they didn’t have mental health issues before which were a factor in them becoming homeless then the situation of being on the streets causes them to develop issues. But that being said it does leave you with a message about the power of friendship and caring for our fellow man.
This is a noble cause and is really easy way for those of us with Twitter accounts to help make a contribution to fighting cancer.
Drew Olanoff, cancer-fighter and blogger, is auctioning off his enviable Twitter username “@drew” to benefit the LiveStrong foundation.
And thanks to the interest of Drew Carey there is a chance that the @drew username could go for a cool $1 million. But in order to make that happen Twitter users need to start following Drew Carey’s current Twitter feed. For every follower that Carey has by the time midnight hits on December 31st he will donate a dollar.
Categories
The Sims Mafia and negative public karma
I’m intrigued by this story of extortion of gamers via their reputation in The Sims Online. [via]
Good explanation of the pitfalls of systems that employ negative public karma.
The Mirror reports that a jailed hacker was allowed to gain control over the prison computer hard drive. [via]
Slashdot says prison computer network was in the control of this hacker but the Mirror states that he had control of the hard drive and managed to lock everyone else out by password protecting it.
That’s two quite different things, but regardless it sounds like he didn’t do much harm. I’d be more concerned about the inmate that at the same jail managed to get a key cut that opened every door.
Categories
Silk of a million spiders
The amount of work that has gone into making this beautiful piece of golden cloth is mindblowing. [via]
A unique piece of golden yellow silk brocade cloth, woven from spiderwebs, is on display at the Museum of Natural History in New York. To harvest enough silk to make the cloth, more than a million female golden orb spiders were collected in Madagascar, “milked” for silk, and released back into the wild. The golden spider silk was woven by Malagasy artisans into lamba Akotifahana, a type of brocade that is traditionally reserved for the aristocracy; the entire process took 4 years.
Now this is the sort of extraordinary extravagance that you’d expect of billionaires such as Roman Abramovich.
A Stick Figure Guide to the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) [via Schneier]
This is simply brilliant as is AES/Rijndael which when explained like this seems amazing that in its simplicity it is also so powerful.
Quote taken from The Observer’s segment This much I know with Jamie Oliver.
I totally agree, I’m a firm believer in opening up people’s eyes to the truth and so people should have an understanding of how their meat made it to their table i.e. what conditions the animals are typically kept in and how they are slaughtered.
I just did Jamie’s pork belly roast, it’s one of my favourites when I’ve got the time and the gravy is just the best ever. And of course the pork was Freedom Food endorsed outdoor bred.
We start to examine Jack’s need to be a hero and his strained relationship with his father, his father believes that Jack rushes into situations beyond his control and doesn’t have the character to cope with failure.
Jack again glimpses his father once more and in rushing after him into the jungle he almost dies when he careens over a cliff to then be pulled to safety by Locke. We now know that Jack’s father Christian Shepherd (and there has to be some significance to that name surely) is really on the Island after a fashion. Whether he has been resurrected (like we now know Locke really hasn’t been) or is a ghost or some other supernatural creature is unknown, but we do know that whatever he is he does identify himself as being Jack’s father unlike say the manifestation that appears to Eko as his brother but states he is not. I’m still not certain which side Christian is on, is he an aspect of Jacob?
Locke asks “How are they? The others.” Different context to how the phrase The Others will be used later but again it is setting up a dualism the idea of them and us. There is a lot of conflict over the course of the series both between different factions and within factions.
As Jacob’s nemesis puts it “They come. Fight. They destroy, they corrupt. Always ends the same.”
Jacob’s response is “Only ends once. Anything that happens before that is just progress.”
Whatever progress Jacob means it doesn’t seem to be an end to conflict as that seemingly has been going on right up to the present day.
Rose is of course correct about Bernard and the tail section but Jack et al are disbelieving. As Boone will pick up Bernard’s message via the walkie talkie only a few episodes from now it seems that the producers had intended all along for Rose to be reunited with her husband.
In the first major indicator that there is something supernatural about the Island Jack glimpses his father.
Locke has an encounter face to face with the monster and then lies about it.
Then with one of the most shocking revelations about a main character of the entire series we learn that Locke had been in a wheelchair just prior to crashing on the Island. There really is something supernatural about this place.