Martin Scorsese finally got his Oscars for this film, so congratulations Marty! Give me a call, we’ll get lunch sometime and celebrate!

I really enjoyed The Departed, which was one of the best crime dramas I’ve ever seen. Leo, Matt, and Jack were at the top of their game. Intense! I waffled a bit as to how to rate this, but I will rate it with respect to its genre and give it 5/5 stars.

Strategy is one of the most inherently useful concepts in everyday life. This book helps bring game theory and economics within reach of laypeople and in a very compelling and engaging manner. Every chapter ends with a brain-teaser case question which requires the application of the concepts covered in the chapter, and the book ends with a chapter full of 24 more. Topics and settings covered include voting strategies, contract negotiation, spy games, auctions, football, cartels, exit strategies, poker, and more. The book’s subtitle puts the focus on competition, but one of the themes in this book is that when society cooperates, things are usually better for everyone. Highly recommended. 5/5 stars.

Jason Calacanis has recently coined the term fatblogging, which means blogging about losing weight. I searched Google and Technorati and not a single person has mentioned thinblogging yet so I am coining the term here and now. Any other thin people out there who want to document their attempts to gain weight?

This 1994 Coen Brothers classic really blew me away. It was highly stylized, tongue-in-cheek, and a lot of fun. It reminded me a lot of Brazil, another excellent movie with similar themes. Tim Robbins plays an unlikely hero who gets catapulted to the top of the corporate world and shows people the beauty of simple elegant ideas. 5/5 stars.

Most programmers are not known to be risk-takers.

Writing a computer program involves mapping out a logical sequence of events which (if done correctly) handles every possible user input. There is often a random element, but there is rarely ever a risk element. The goal of any good programmer is to eliminate the risk of failure entirely. In fact, I think that the best programmers are those who can work comfortably in an abstract risk-free environment. I have a hunch that the average person would not be able to handle the lack of risk, as strange as that sounds. Most people find the idea of determinism somewhat threatening, so maybe that has something to do with it.

In the past I was extremely risk-averse… I was not into taking chances. However, these days I find myself focused on how to embrace risk and make the most of risky opportunities. This is one of the reasons I love poker. It takes faith and confidence to maintain a course of action which fails repeatedly, and it is well worth it when it finally pays off.

The movie was written especially for Jack Black, and Jack Black was born to play this role. The kids’ innocence is a great complement to Jable’s craziness. I had a feeling this would be a fun movie, which it was, but I also found it inspiring. 5/5 stars.

I am currently reading a great book called “Thinking Strategically” which has a section on double-equilibrium competitions. In one example, the authors compare the inferior QWERTY keyboard layout to the more efficient DSK (Dvorak) layout. The DSK layout is more efficient and easier, but due to the overwhelming popularity of QWERTY, nobody will invest the time to learn DSK and nobody will buy the DSK keyboards. However, if the percentage of people using DSK were somehow increased past a certain tipping point, QWERTY usage would plummet to zero in relatively little time. However, until this happens, the “Bandwagon effect” will keep QWERTY in the #1 spot by a long shot. I don’t know how realistic it is, but if Google required its employees to learn DSK, I bet they would be excited to learn it (assuming they enjoy challenges with a nice payoff), and it might even set a precedent for other companies to follow suit.

This made me think about the battle that Firefox and Mac OS are fighting. They are both distant #2 in their respective competitions (Web browsers and operating systems), and in my opinion they are superior to the current reigning champs (IE and Windows). I remember a discussion I had with my friend back in college where we were arguing about whether Windows was “better” than Mac. He said that Windows was clearly better and I said that Mac was clearly better. When I asked what his reasoning was, he said it was simply because Windows was vastly more popular and therefore it was more compatible and more software is available for it. I asked him which he thought was better if we pretended that both systems were equally popular… and he agreed that Mac OS had a more pleasant user experience and that he would prefer it.

What will it take to get Firefox and Mac into the #1 spots? I am skeptical that it will ever happen without some kind of Orwellian government mandate to push the two players past their tipping points, or something comes along that blows away Windows (Google OS?). The main reason that IE pushed the tipping point past Netscape was because Windows provided MS with all the leverage they needed. Even if these two #2’s are not the most popular, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. Firefox plays an important role in the Web world as the preferred browser among techies (who are the ones who write the Web sites), and Mac OS has many strengths and is becoming more and more compatible with Windows.

I plan on buying a Mac laptop as my next computer, and I will run Windows on it using Parallels software, which will allow me to use both OS’s simultaneously (They even share a clipboard and can copy files between the two systems).

Brick is a very unique take on the much-cliched film-noir genre. Instead of the classic detective and mafia, it features a group of high-schoolers. As much as I wanted to like it, I found that underneath the intriguingly intricate plot, there was very little of interest. Maybe that’s what film-noir is about but I guess it just doesn’t do it for me. 3/5 stars.

Not to be confused with the more recent movie of the same name, Kicking and Screaming was Noah Baumbach’s 1995 directing debut. This is the story of four guys who have just graduated from college and don’t know what to do with the rest of their lives. It’s also the story of their relationships, and the ensemble cast has superb chemistry on screen. 4/5 stars.

Since I am currently obsessed with poker, I felt I had to see this movie. I am very glad I did. Not only does this movie feature lots of poker, but it also has complex characters, a great plot, and a stellar cast of actors: Matt Damon, Ed Norton, John Malkovitch, John Turturro, Gretchen Mol, and Famke Janssen. There are many parallels between the game of poker and the game of life, and this movie illustrates that very well (e.g. escalating commitment to a bad hand). I have no choice but to give this movie 5/5 stars

I have been pondering the difference between judgement and intelligence for several months now. Although I am envious that he beat me to it, I was excited to see that Paul Graham has recently posted a new essay about pretty much the same idea, except he uses the word ‘wisdom’ instead of judgement.

Specifically, his essay points out that it seems we must choose between wisdom and intelligence because they are not often found together. I think this is not just a product of brain anatomy (who really knows) but more likely a product of how one chooses to focus their attention. As I learned in my cognitive psych studies, attention is a limited resource, and the focus of attention is a very complex (multidimensional) and varied ability. People who focus their attention on the abstract will tend to ignore much of what can be used to help them understand more subtle arbitrary phenomena such as social interactions. Likewise, people accustomed to focusing on social interactions will tend to miss out on the highly abstract qualities. Also, if you spend your time studying a specialized science, you are clearly devoting yourself to a particular intelligence rather than to a general wisdom (you could have spent that time socializing, watching TV drama, reading about politics, etc).

Paul also mentions another concept I was thinking about, which is (in my words) that intelligence is mostly additive, whereas wisdom is mostly refinement. That is, to learn something new, you simply add the knowledge to your existing knowledge collection. However, wisdom involves organizing the clutter and refining what you already know. As Paul points out, wisdom is often associated with older people and intelligence often associated with younger people. Also, wisdom is not usually associated with individuality but rather the exact opposite: high success rate on average rather than extremely successful in just one area. Here is a must-quote from the end of his essay:

The path to wisdom is through discipline, and the path to intelligence through carefully selected self-indulgence. Wisdom is universal, and intelligence idiosyncratic. And while wisdom yields calmness, intelligence much of the time leads to discontentment

So when you are learning whatever your specialized skill happens to be, make sure that you get your intelligence with a side-order of wisdom

Matt Damon really shows his talents in this disturbing film directed by Anthony Minghella. Damon’s character gets creepier as he gets deeper and deeper into trouble. An interesting portrait both of high-society spoiled youth and of a twisted man unable to accept his limitations. 4/5 stars.

There has been a lot of talk about SecondLife in the media recently, and ironically it seems to be mostly in the business media. It seems to be either speculative or slanderous coverage, however, as I have yet to see any coverage which has declared SecondLife worthy of any serious investment of time. Here is an interesting article which portrays SecondLife as a giant Ponzi scheme (pyramid scam). From the article:

Like the paid promotion infomercials that run on CNBC, sadly SecondLife is a giant magnet for the desperate, uninformed, easily victimized. Its promises of wealth readily ensnare those who can least afford to lose their money or lives to such scam in exactly the same way that real estate investor seminars convince divorcees with low FICO scores to buy houses sight unseen with no money down.

I suppose there is actually quite a lot of money to be made if people are willing to pay… even if those people are, as the article suggests, “desperate” and “uninformed”. Personally, I would rather make my money by doing business with confident, informed people instead of taking advantage of unsuspecting innocents. Furthermore, I imagine that once the capitalists are done capitalizing on the SecondLife citizens, the virtual bubble will burst.

The title of this CNN article is “Why tech leaders think SecondLife could be a goldmine”… I think it could be, provided that its population is the right type of people. And as the earlier article suggested, SecondLife is full of people willing to spend money (not something that can be said for most of the Internet) so again it seems like there may be some truth to the goldmine possibility. However, I imagine there is only small money to be made, because (I assume) the majority of SecondLife users are eager to escape the real world and are probably not that successful in the real world. I just can’t believe that successful people would want to invest their time unless it’s part of a serious business venture. If I were running a big business I would probably wait until SecondLife contained more high-income residents before I tried to capitalize on it.

There is a lot of talk about the opportunities inside SecondLife, but it mostly seems to be about virtual real estate development, and I bet that supply will soon outpace demand. I would like to see a list of the opportunities and “careers” available in SecondLife so that people can judge for themselves if it’s really a worthwhile investment (if your goal is to make money out of it). Until then, it seems like a large collection of people consisting mostly of social outcasts and the capitalists who are trying to make money from them. The blogger that wrote the first article I linked to has since put his money where his virtual mouth is and is now offering to do a free financial valuation of an average SecondLife business. I am very curious to see how it turns out!

Why am I so negative about SecondLife? I am a former video game addict myself and I can say from experience that the worst thing about video games is that they are so fun and addictive that you end up spending time which would be otherwise spent on something more productive. There is almost no “takeaway” from playing video games, unlike reading a book, hanging out with friends, playing a team sport, etc. which all leave you with something that is useful in the real world. When it comes down to it, the real world should be a higher priority than the virtual world, and SecondLife doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that anyone plays casually… it seems more like a full-on replacement for one’s real life. I know I sound like an old geyser, but it seems very unhealthy.

This is one of those movies that is often referred to as one of the greatest films of all time, so I had to see it. I absolutely loved Fellini’s “8 1/2″, and La Dolce Vita also stars Marcello Mastroianni, so I thought it was a sure win. It was a grand slam. I have to admit that I didn’t really “get it” on the first viewing, but a second viewing with the commentary audio track had me nodding my head and saying “yes” for most of the film (that’s supposed to reflect well on the movie, although I’m not sure it reflects well on my sanity). A long one, but well worth it for all the brilliant social commentary and creative illustrations of the frustrations of life. 5/5 stars.

Christopher Nolan is one of my favorite filmmakers of all time (The Prestige, Memento, Batman Begins), so I decided to set out to see all of his older movies (there are only a few). Following is his second film, and is done in a gritty black and white style. It focuses on only a few characters, but the story is intense and interesting. The acting is unfortunately a bit unconvincing, but the concept and plot twists are enough to make up for it. A cool flick for Nolan fans who are interested to see how he started out. 3/5 stars.