Twenty shots to be henceforth retired from film vocabulary

This list seems to cover most of the leading offenders, including:

4. Overhead shot of protagonist in the rain, arms spread, just letting the downpour COME.

10. Dude goes to open a safe or a refrigerator or whatever and PRESTO the camera’s shooting out from inside the safe or refrigerator or whatever. That’s some bush league My First Creative Camerawork shit.

The famous overhead shot in the rain from Shawshank Redemption ruined the movie for me.

Jailing kids is a proud American tradition

Thomas Frank gets his Jonathan Swift on regarding the juvenile detention kickback scandal in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania.

Privatizing bits of the prison industry was a step in the right direction, but what we didn’t have — until recently — were proper instruments for incentivizing the judiciary. That’s what the “kids for cash” judges were apparently experimenting with.

Today the do-gooders revile those efforts as “kickbacks,” but before long we will see them as legitimate tools of justice. Our laws governing lobbying and campaign contributions have struck the right balance between the wishes of the people and those of private industry, so why are we so quick to doubt that the same great results can be achieved by putting the government’s justice-dealing branch on the same market-based course?

I am rarely as outraged as I was upon hearing about the scandal in Luzerne County; I admire Frank’s ability to channel his outrage into something this brilliant and cutting.

Definition of "black-boxing"

Bruno Latour, in Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies:

scientific and technical work is made invisible by its own success. When a machine runs efficiently, when a matter of fact is settled, one need focus only on its inputs and outputs and not on its internal complexity. Thus, paradoxically, the more science and technology succeed, the more opaque and obscure they become.

Uncovering what’s inside these black-boxes could become an important task for people researching the processes by which we construct everything from budgets to automobiles to maps. In their forthcoming book, Rethinking Maps, Martin Dodge and Chris Perkins encourage researchers of maps and mapping

to open the “black-boxes” of mapping software, to start to interrogate algorithms and databases, and in particular to investigate the production of ready-made maps that appear almost magically on the interfaces of gadgets and devices we carry and use everyday, often without much overt thought about how they work and whose map they project onto their interface.

A couple of chapter downloads from Rethinking Maps are available on Martin Dodge’s website.

Tobacco plant virus may yield HIV drug

The production of griffithsin, a promising HIV-prevention drug, has been too expensive to warrant its widespread use. Researchers have recently injected a griffithsin-producing gene from red algae into the tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) and infected a TMV-susceptible species of tobacco plant with the virus. After infection, griffithsin can be extracted from the wilted leaves in larger amounts than through previous methods.

While it will most certainly be made into a cream, “[a] cigarette containing griffithsin hasn’t been discounted either,” said one of the researchers. Maybe one way for cigarette companies to change their image is to get us addicted to smoke containing antibodies to all the most deadly diseases. Cigarette packs would keep the Surgeon General’s warning:

Quitting Smoking Now Greatly Reduces Serious Risks to Your Health.

but they’d also carry a Surgeon General’s encouragement sticker:

Smoking Now Greatly Reduces Serious Risks to Your Health.