Neo-Humean Epistemology

Cabinet Flunkie Who Was In Ally McBeal to President Palmer --

I know your history with Mister Bauer runs deep, but don't let that impact your judgment here. 24, Season 6, Episode 2

-- apparently advancing some new critique of inductive reasoning.

Continuous Functions

The one-touch faucet is a marvel -- a long faucet arm grants fine-tuned control and you can simultaneously adjust water flow and temperature across the continuum of the amplitude/temperature state space.

Unless you have our faucet -- which, as you can see in the below photos, goes from unbearably hot on the left (perhaps -1 degree off vertical) to the kind of tepid that feels like it leaves your dishes teeming with bacteria on the right (+.5 degrees off vertical?). I put in the scrub brush to help center the frame of reference.

Somewhere in between those two settings is the comfortably hot point. So, one learns the technique of getting the handle close to right, then tapping it until it gets to a temperature that's acceptable.

Pundips

Unbelievable!

On Thursday night everyone was talking about how Obama needs to pull out a win in New Hampshire to make Iowa really count -- and that win is very questionable.

Today they're saying he needs a 10 point win otherwise it's as good as a loss.

Structure, The Office, and M*A*S*H

I finally started watching The Office (Americanized), which is conveniently also available in high quality streamed video at the NetFlix website.

After watching several episodes I noticed it's structural similarity to M*A*S*H, and I'm not the first. Matthew Gilbert at Boston.com said the following:

I'm working on this theory that "The Office" is "M*A*S*H" all over again. Kinda, sorta, maybe.

First of all, Dwight and Angela are updates of Frank Burns and Hot Lips. They are the goody-goody couple who have a not-so-secret but oh-so-freaky passionate life (oh, they'll get back together, just you wait). In that other theory I've been working on -- that "The Office" is a metaphor for American politics -- Dwight and Angela fill the hypocritical conservative category that Frank and Hot Lips practically invented on series TV.

Jim is Hawkeye Pierce, of course, but for a less Groucho-oriented generation. Jim's asides are generally non-verbal, but that slight rising of the eyebrows evokes Marx's cigar and the full-on eyebrows as much as Alan Alda did. Jim's partner in crime is Pam, which makes her his Trapper John McIntyre or his B.J. Hunnicut, and, well, I'm going to go for Trapper John. Jim and Pam's pranks on Dwight are genius.

And then there is Michael Scott, who is unique. Still, he has some of the farcical leadership qualities of Henry Blake, as well as the same need to be friendly with his charges. Michael is easily manipulated by Jim and Pam, just as Henry was totally played by Hawkeye and Trapper. And now that Michael is bucking Ryan, he recalls Henry's resistance to military protocol.

I'm not convinced that the similarity goes much beyond the character roles (and then mainly early M*A*S*H), but I do think that similarity is definitely there. In fact, I think the mix works even better in The Office. Having Pam/Jim as love interests gives the writers more to work with than having them merely as tent-mates and creates less of a situation where the Trapper John role is just a sidekick.

I think it also illustrates how useful it is for a writer to identify and recognize narrative structures that work well. In this case the structure is almost entirely the characters and their relations, but it's clearly a structure that provides fertile ground for comedy. I'm not sure The Office's writers even thought about M*A*S*H when they were doing their thing, which makes the structural similarity even more striking. Convergent evolution only occurs when you have something incredibly useful, like the eye in both octopuses and mammals.

Other structures must work well too, and it makes me think that if I were to try to brew up a comedy TV series I'd look at older programs, maybe the Bob Newhart shows or even back further to Mary Tyler Moore or the Dick Van Dyke show, and see if there's a structure in them that can be given a modern interpretation.

I think this is one of the reasons all those screenwriting books and seminars, all with their own favorite "this will get you sold" formula are so successful. They are selling a strong structure -- one that's been proven in multiple films or stories. However, there are a bunch of structures that work well for different kinds of stories, so each author or speaker can push their own personal one and make a tidy living off it.

Lost Articles

I've been asking around to see if anyone knew the name of or had a link to the research article that showed that the personal interview is a poor hiring mechanism (and typically does worse than simply looking at resume, references, and so on). Brian Leiter mentioned it a while back, but neither he nor Frank Arntzenius (who originally pointed it out to me) remember the name or where to find it -- but Prof Leiter did note that it was a psych article.

Given the psych angle, I figured I'd ask Gary, but seeing my limited success I thought maybe better just to throw the question out there in a desperate attempt. Can anyone help?

Also, I'd read a few months ago an article online, probably via some new service, citing a study that said that, on average, 20% of any organization's resources are wasted on ego-projects for the CEO. If anyone else remembers that article and has a link or some help to find it that'd be great. My Google-fu is weak.

Thanksgiving trip reveals why DVD sales are down

The Hollywood Reporter has an article about declining DVD sales this year and my trip last week to visit my folks offers an explanation I think.

Selling a home in Los Angeles and moving pretty much anywhere else (in their case an island near Tacoma, WA) means you move up one income class -- middle class becomes upper middle class.

That means they had a nice hi-def big screen TV to go with their house. Being the Pacific Northwest, we had plenty of excuse to sit inside and watch television. And hi-def does look sweet. I just couldn't bring myself to watch any of the non-hi-def programs on those lesser cable stations while I was there.

We also wanted to rent a few movies -- but they didn't have a hi-def DVD player yet, so we stuck mostly to the hi-def movies-on-demand offered by the cable company. It cost a bit more than a rental, but the panoramic views of mountains and rivers looked sparkling.

They were also just about to purchase Live Free or Die Hard -- because that's the kind of movie you'd like to test your nifty new hi-def TV on.

But here's why DVD sales are down. They'd need to get a new DVD player for that -- and they were more than willing to pay for one -- but which one? I was suggesting HD since it seemed that the big Wal-Mart $99 sale might mark a turning point -- but that's a bit of a gamble. And later, it occured to me that Live Free or Die Hard might not even be on HD (which I think it isn't -- only Blu-ray). That would really suck, buying a hi-def DVD player and having about half the new releases not even be available for it -- then having maybe a 50% chance two years from now of having bet wrong, and there being no new releases for it.

So, unless you want to throw away cash on two high-end DVD players, you don't buy any. And even people who can afford to do so won't simply out of principle.

Then you think of buying the plain old DVD and watching Bruce kick ass. But you've seen the promised land; you're ruined for the old stuff. So you catch a rental of hi-def on-demand when it comes around -

- and don't buy any DVDs at all, since you know you're just going to want the HD version when there's finally a standard. I don't even have an HD TV and I'm not going to buy any more DVDs because I too have seen the promised land.

Thus, DVD rentals doing well, maybe even up, and DVD sales tanking.

And Wal-Mart knows this. They're seeing this vast sum of HD DVD money being left on the table this holiday season because there's no standard -- that's why they're trying to force a standard by selling HD players at cost.

The WGA Strike and Me

The news is erratic about reporting this sort of thing (especially if you're outside of Los Angeles), but if you didn't know, there's a significant Writer's Guild strike going on.

Directly, this doesn't impact me. I'm not yet a member of the WGA and the people I work with aren't part of the struck companies list.

Indirectly the primary impact will be that I'll likely get better deals in the future, should I make it into the WGA at some time. Also--and I think this is a big thing--even those of us not yet working in the big leagues get trickle down sort of benefits. The standards that the WGA establishes are often used as the negotiating basis for my contracts.

As such, while I support the WGA, I also don't want to be "rah-rah, strike forever" since I'm not the one suffering the consequences.

Ideally this gets resolved quickly in a way that'll not only satisfy the WGA membership, but also the Screen Actors Guild membership (who are even more reliant on the strike's key issue, residuals, and thus will also feel forced to go out on strike if a satisfactory result isn't achieved). A quick solution is particularly desirable because, I think unlike most strikes, when the WGA or SAG goes out, they take out a whole bunch of other people's jobs too. Much of that film and TV production has to close down. But, of course, the guilds also can't let the studios hold all these other people hostage as a negotiating point.


Anyway, the little film I wrote on assignment over the summer started production last week and will finish production over the course of next week. I think there will be an official announcement after shooting wraps so I'll wait until then to post more.

Doesn't Share Our Values

It looks like local elections are coming up tomorrow because tonight's TV is riddled with campaign ads.

Specifically, a barrage of campaign ads informing me how foul all the candidates are. Sometimes the ads even inform me how bad the opposing candidate is because of how the opposing candidate uses nasty negative advertising. It's like a Kurt Vonnegut novel.

One of the key ways of blasting an opponent is to say that he doesn't "share our Virginia values." This is contrasted with the shining example of the advertised candidate, who is either a church deacon or a Sunday School teacher.

As an indicator of our primary demographic, all ads spend a great deal of time talking about either doing more for senior citizens, or how the opponent ignores or sells out senior citizens.

Another frequent campaign tactic is to accuse one's opponent of being soft on immigration. These are all rural Virginia positions and so their policies only impact rural Virginia -- which must have some hidden cache of illegal immigrants. Maybe someone can point me toward these mystery Mexicans so I can get some decent enchiladas. Even the local Taco Bell (50% of Lexington's Mexican cuisine) tones down its Enchirito sauce from mild to special-honkey-ultra-mild.

Virginia's Upside

About 17 miles west up the kind of curvy, pastoral road that you normally only see in car commercials, the highway runs up against the Maury River then tracks it for several more miles through Goshen Pass. Up top, that's the river cutting cliffs through the Allegheny Mountains.

Near the end of the pass you turn right down a narrow gravel road and come to a hanging footbridge of the sort that wouldn't make for a very good movie scene. The suspension "ropes" aren't fraying and aren't even ropes -- but instead thick metal cables. And none of the boards were rotting through!

The afternoon sun gave us some nice lighting -- like the above cliff face. We probably got there about one week too late to get the really nice colors. I suspect it gets colder up in the hills so the trees turn a little earlier.

Many more photos at our gallery.

Research for Screenwriting is More Fun Than Research for Philosophy

While researching training different sorts of animals I came across the following quote, commenting on why one normally trains hens instead of roosters to play tic-tac-toe:

"Roosters have only one thing on their mind," he explains, "and it's not playing tic-tac-toe." -- Bunky Boger

EXT. SINGLE LOCATION - NIGHT

When working on a micro-budget film all sorts of things that you probably wouldn't think about suddenly become issues.

For instance, the director is having fits looking at his lighting budget -- so we're only going to have one night exterior shot.

Minimizing the number of locations is the other magic component. And I think it really is magic. My 1-3 location screenplays have all done really well. Moreover, I look at theatrical releases and notice how even larger budget ones often have a single location (Saw, 1408, Vacancy, The Messengers).

One thing that has happened for me is that someone will look at one of my scripts, realize that they could make it for a very small budget (like 500k) or a larger budget, and then they pick it up. They figure they can always try to get it made at the higher end, and if that doesn't pan out they'll still have a filmable movie at the lower end. And this is how you get sort of "back into" these higher budgets -- your script now has the connections to get read at richer places and those places figure a couple million is a safe bet on this little feature, so it gets the bump up. Whereas your other scripts that could only be made at 2 million or more so they don't get that start.


One other bit to make the recent graduates applying for those tenure track jobs that also have 100 other recent grads applying for them feel better. The casting director says that they've already got 4000 submissions for our tiny movie!

My Sister the Star

Vanessa gets coverage on the local news in L.A. -- she's the CSI dusting the door for fingerprints about halfway through the clip -- unfortunately, not Youtube so I can't embed the video.

CSI: Fullerton Strikes Again