City Club of Tacoma Executive Director, MetroParks Commissioner, Web developer, Downtown Tacoma dweller, Would-be-novelist. Email him at erikemery (at) gmail (dot) com.
I'm happy to say that my first meeting was a great success!
I've been appointed to two committees, both rather close to my passion.The first committee is the Zoo Liaison Committee. My first job was at the Zoo, and I have had many good times there, from Zoolights to sleepovers in the aquarium (as a kid) to a wonderful homecoming dinner my senior year in high school by the shark tank. The second committee is the Capital Improvement Committee, which deals with the improvements from the 2005 capital bond. This will be very interesting, because 2005 was the year we went around to see all the parks, bond packet in tow. Being active in that process will be a good continuation of that experience. Looking to be a good year.
But in the Best Picture category -- which used to be listed in the middle of the Oscar ballot, but will now be in a separate, detachable section -- voters will be asked to rank the nominees in order of preference, one through 10. Those ballots will then be tallied using the preferential system (for a full-blown explanation, click here) in which the film with the fewest Number One votes will be eliminated, and its votes redistributed based on the film listed second on those ballots. Eventually, one film will wind up with more than 50 percent of the vote, and will be named the Academy's Best Picture of 2009.
The Best Picture nominations will be ranked choice voting this year, something we here in Tacoma know a lot about. With such a broad field, this makes a lot of sense. It also shouldn't fall prey to the danger of RCV with a lot of unknown names because all the movies should have very high name recognition.
In a sense, every voter will be able to create a Top Ten List, and the most-respected on all those lists will be deemed the winner. It's certainly possible that this will push the ballots toward mediocrity, or at the very least, toward the movie most people have seen. But Best Picture has gone to some of those films before, so perhaps this won't be that different.
“It’s a five-year process from writing to publishing,” said Llewellyn, of traditional books. “It’s incredibly frustrating. And it’s like the lottery, such a risk every step of the way. “The Tilting House” was the fourth manuscript I tried to have published – no one ever read the others. So the idea of having an immediate audience was attractive.”
The result is “Letter Off Dead,” a book in blog form (letteroffdead.com) which Llewellyn’s been writing since last April. The book follows the middle-school adventures and mishaps of Trevor, who begins writing to his dead father in a desperate measure to cope with life. Unexpectedly, his dad writes back from an after-life limbo – and the blog continues as the two correspond, one letter per post, five posts per week.
I've been following Letter Off Dead for awhile now. It's an interesting experiment in publishing.
If I could hazard a guess, one of the reasons it works is because Tom started writing in April and then began publishing in September. That was a wise move. Having hit road blocks, false starts, and some purple prose while writing my own work, I would hate to press publish if I hadn't put more thought into a post than the few seconds I give to each of these here.
Kudos to Tom for this! I've been following along off-and-on since he started. (Interesting how the format changes reading. Like any blog, I dip in and out, but I still have enjoyed it. There are many kinds of books this wouldn't work for, but it's well-suited to the medium.)
Last night's presentation by Peter Goldmark was interesting. As Commissioner of Public Lands, he is in charge of 5.6 million acres of public lands in Washington, including the seabeds of many rivers and the Sound.
There's a lot that goes with that. One of the most intriguing proposals was using what would have been burn piles from forestry operations for biomass power. Apparently a lot of the timber industry is very interested in this--after all, it was waste, and now it's profit. And certainly it's good for an alternative power solution.
But, as was pointed out to me shortly after the meeting, it also strips those nutrients out of the soil. The burning of the piles might put a lot of CO2 into the air, but it also leaves a lot of nutrients on hand for the forest when it's replanted.
This is a difficult balance, and it's the same balance a lot of renewable energy has--hydro, wind, tidal, biomass, etc all have environmental downsides (solar might be the lone exception here).
Anyway, it was a great presentation with a lot of time for good questions! I learned a lot.
So this is what 10 nominees for Best Picture look like.
On the one hand, it's great to see Up on the list. After Beauty and Beast was nominated, the creation of a special animated section has kept some great films off the best picture list. With just 5 nominees, we probably wouldn't see it there.
Furthermore, it's nice to see some of best mainstream movies contend with the art films. Dark Knight should have been in the top 5 last year, but it was certainly in the top 10, had the Academy recognized that many last year. We've had too many art-film only Academy Awards. Not sure if that says something about the quality of the mainstream movies, or something about how people game the system.
On the other hand, this feels like a lot of just "pretty good" films. True, I often think that when there are just 5 films on the list. But 10 muddies it up even more and it disguises that there are true gems on the list.
Politically interested bloggers have been posting this video all over the Internet, and I enjoyed it enough I've decided to follow suit.
This particular one comes from whitehouse.gov and it unfortunately starts after the gracious welcome from the Republican leadership, which helped set the tone.
There's a lot to like in this video. I like Obama a lot. I think he's sensible, direct, and not afraid to throw a couple of (polite) punches.
I like the Republicans a lot. They, again politely, go after him on some big things--which is of course what the opposition party should do. I also like them for agreeing to put this on C-SPAN.
I think Obama comes out looking much better, though. Part of that is, I like what he has to say a lot more, and part of that is, he's the President of the United States. He gets to control the mic and control the flow, and the Republicans have to raise their hands hoping to get called on (by their own leadership, I think, which is a pretty good way to handle that).
But this kind of thing should happen more often. We should see our leaders in the same room arguing about the issues. The floors of Congress don't allow for Q&A so much anymore. But we deserve to see the party in opposition directly challenge the President, Republican or Democrat. (It's interesting to wonder what this would have been like with Bush at the podium and the Democrats in the audience in 2002 or 2003.)
If these kinds of Q&As were regularly televised shortly after the State of the Union address, and maybe once more in the year--June or July maybe--I'd watch them regularly.
The availability of millions of games at one's fingertips in a database is also making the game's best players younger and younger. Absorbing the thousands of essential patterns and opening moves used to take many years, a process indicative of Malcolm Gladwell's "10,000 hours to become an expert" theory as expounded in his recent book Outliers. (Gladwell's earlier book, Blink, rehashed, if more creatively, much of the cognitive psychology material that is re-rehashed in Chess Metaphors.) Today's teens, and increasingly pre-teens, can accelerate this process by plugging into a digitized archive of chess information and making full use of the superiority of the young mind to retain it all. In the pre-computer era, teenage grandmasters were rarities and almost always destined to play for the world championship. Bobby Fischer's 1958 record of attaining the grandmaster title at fifteen was broken only in 1991. It has been broken twenty times since then, with the current record holder, Ukrainian Sergey Karjakin, having claimed the highest title at the nearly absurd age of twelve in 2002. Now twenty, Karjakin is among the world's best, but like most of his modern wunderkind peers he's no Fischer, who stood out head and shoulders above his peers—and soon enough above the rest of the chess world as well.
This article by Garry Kasparov is technically a book review, but really it's an opportunity for him to talk about what computers have done to chess. It's a fascinating read, and hits all of my hot buttons: games (chess and poker), technology and AI, the "what is talent" question, etc.
If those topics interest you, I highly recommend it.
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