Viraj's Weblog

Took a bike ride to the AMC Mercado today to check out Doubt. It's generally about a priest accused of improper behavior with a student. It is based on a play, and through some of the dialogue you can tell. In fact it's mostly dialogue. It's an intelligent drama that works well on the big screen. Meryl Streep's performance is just amazing. I mean, she plays a really mean person, but does it flawlessly. There are really interesting subtleties she does that add so much to her character, like the way her eyes shift and the tilting of her neck. She is filled with distrust, for everyone.

I was surprised at just how comical the movie was, taking some rather taboo subject matter and still being able to find funny moments. Though I've never been in a Catholic school, it seemed to capture it pretty well and had a standard mean nun against little boys theme. The 'battle' scenes are between the nun (Streep) and the priest, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, also a great actor.

There is a certain subtext in the film that almost makes fun of religion and its formalities. The scenes in the rectory are especially interesting. As the priest and nun argue, they take turns sitting in the seat behind the desk. It becomes almost like a circus, with each side swapping deference depending on their position in the room. The writer is definitely poking fun at religion and the fact that those considered holy fall to the same evils as everyone else. The one hope is the happy-go-lucky nun who initially loves everyone and is mean to no one. She undergoes a change by the end of the movie, and it seems almost brought about by the bureaucracy of religion.

I would even go so far to say the movie is anti-religion. Judging by the high reviews, it makes sense. These days you can't make a movie glorifying religion and get good reviews. Atheists will shoot your movie down. It reminded me of the religious attacks in There Will Be Blood. In that movie, religious corruption is attacked physically, again with a subtle attack on organized religion itself.

Doubt takes a different approach, as if it is saying there are some good things in religion. It says only pay attention to aspects like compassion and love. It says disregard the institutionalized formalities and illogical faith. It's really saying what most agnostics think: religious text is literature, nothing more. There are some great stories in the Bible, and some really bad ones too. The characters in the movie seem like a dying breed, forever walled inside their concrete garden shielded from the city's non-religion. Various infiltrations come in the form of technology like ball-point pens and radios. The nun refuses to accept them, and even accuses the wind of changing like never before. But these things creep in anyways as a constant threat, and it's inevitable that the religious figures will be overwhelmed. It's subtle, but I think this movie shows more of a death of religion than anything else. Caveat emptor.

It's been almost a year since I released a version of Movie Vote. In that time I had been rewriting the UI in Java with Google Web Toolkit off and on. That started out as an experiment because I hated Javascript so much. I liked GWT so much I went full-on with it. Now the server side of my app is mostly JSON interfaces, and the UI is AJAXy without any Javascript written by me. I was glad to 'svn rm' the horrible Javascript I had in my previous versions. With GWT and Java, type checking is done before I deploy and I no longer have to worry about variable misspellings and other stupidness when writing JS.

Anyway, just in time for the holidays, I give you Movie Vote v1.5.

In general, web programming is really not my thing. No matter what language I'm writing a UI in, I'm just not a UI developer. I can guess as to what I think is a cool interface but this is better left to UI designers. I now have a screenshot on the project page. That minimal-looking interface involved a lot of code!

Upon reading some reviews of this movie, it sounded like a feel-good racial harmony picture. I've liked Eastwood's directing and acting. He is a masterful storyteller, so I decided to check this out. What's interesting about this film was how gritty and real it felt. Eastwood has a knack for getting at the primitive feelings in characters. The lead character proudly says racist remarks, and at times he really means bad by them. It's those gut feelings that all humans have when they see someone that looks different from them. But it's not only other races he dislikes. It's generally anyone that's not like him, including his priest. Clint Eastwood can show hatred in his facial expressions like no one else.

The film is basically old war man meets gangland violence. Even though he's been through war, he's no match for the stupidity of kids with guns. He walks a tightrope pushing everyone's buttons, and eventually he knows what's coming. It's a good movie that shows the sign of our times. I especially like the comical parts. Some of them are racist and vulgar, but it's not done in a mean-spirited way at all. The characters understand they are different and are ok with brutally making fun of each other.

The plot has some unlikely dramatic events. But then again it wouldn't be a movie if it didn't.

I'm a fan of Primer, so this new movie about time travel intrigued me. It's another low budget flick. Turns out it was only playing in San Jose, so I decided to take the 30-mile bike ride (15 miles each way) to check it out.

First a word about my bike ride. I took this route and going there in the daytime was an enjoyable ride. Biking back on a Saturday night was not fun at all. I think I almost got killed twice. Both times were oncoming cars making left turns and not seeing me coming. I've noticed that drivers around here are getting worse, and today I need to buy a brighter light. As a biker, I'm also used to the standard yelling out of windows. One passenger tried to scare me by yelling "Boom!" like a gunshot as they passed me. Heh, maybe I should start carrying a gun with me?

Anyway, about the movie. It was pretty fun and dealt with the common doppelganger theme. These movies are funny because they try to portray recursion dramatically. I'm always interested in how they do it and whether it actually makes sense visually. Luckily this only recursed a few levels deep and was intriguing to follow. It's dubbed as a horror/sci-fi, and there are some scenes of blood, but not much. It's a case where a man finds a time machine. But he could not have found the time machine if he had not been led to it by a double that found it and went back in time. Repeat.

For a low budget film, it was nicely done. It's one of those films where things happen that don't make much sense. However, after some iterations, it does.

I'm reading a rather amazing book called Before the Dawn. It's pretty much the written version of a great documentary called The Journey of Man. Both of these tell the story of human migration and evolution out of Africa following the same Y chromosome all males share and the mitochondrial DNA all females share. These essentially came from our evolutionary Adam and Eve.

One of the interesting concepts is just how much warfare was likely in primitive societies. Think of the time when there were different human-like species. Do you think we got along well? Not so. One species survived, and for a reason. Daily there were extermination campaigns. Every day you were hunted or hunting. Follow chimp warfare and you get a glimpse of how the pre-humans must have been like. Hunting in groups, finding a lone 'outsider', and then jumping him to destroy him and his legacy. It must have been a vicious time to live in.

A small group of people started the population we now call humans. They left Africa and formed bubbles of societies as they traveled to new lands. Out of each of those bubbles left a few more humans, eventually finding a new land and again settling. Some stayed, some left. The cycle repeats, and eventually you have the different nations and races we have today.

We have come a long way. Animals gathering in groups larger than 50 require a lot of brain power to read others and work together.

One principle that biologists think may help explain larger societies, both human and otherwise, is that of reciprocal altruism, the practice of helping even a nonrelated member of society because they may return the favor in [the] future. A tit-for-tat behavioral strategy, where you cooperate with a new acquaintance, and thereafter follow his strategy toward you (retaliate if he retaliates, cooperate if he cooperates), turns out to be superior to all others in many circumstances. Such a behavior could therefore evolve, providing that a mechanism to detect and punish freeloaders evolves in parallel; otherwise freeloaders will be more successful and drive the conditional altruists to extinction.

Conditional tit-for-tat altruism cannot evolve in just any species. It requires members to recognize each other and have long memories, so as to be able to keep tally.

The book then goes and gives an example of the vampire bat, whose societies do just this.

Many common emotions can be understood as being built around the expectation of reciprocity and the negative reaction when it is made to fail. If we like a person, we are willing to exchange favors with them. We are angry at those who fail to return favors. We seek punishment for those who take advantage of us. We feel guilty if we fail to return a favor, and shame if publicly exposed. If we believe someone is genuinely sorry about a failure to reciprocate, we trust them. But if we detect they are simulating contrition, we mistrust them.

Think of how much information processing this requires and you can imagine how our brains might have evolved.

Reciprocity, and an ability to calculate the costs and benefits of cooperation, underpin our social life, writes the economist Paul Seabright, "making it reasonable for us to treat strangers as though they were honorary relatives or friends." It is remarkable that this behavior evolved at a time when primitive warfare was at its most intense and people had every reason to regard strangers with deep suspicion. Strangers can still be dangerous, yet in the right circumstances we habitually trust them....

making it possible "to step nonchalantly out of the front door of a suburban house and disappear into a city of ten million strangers." Without this innate willingness to trust strangers, human societies would still consist of family units a few score strong, and cities and great economies would have had no foundation for existence.

...

Trust is an essential part of the social glue that binds people together in cooperative associations. But it increases the vulnerability to which all social groups are exposed, that of being taken advantage of by freeloaders. Freeloaders seize the benefits of social living without contributing to the costs. They are immensely threatening to a social group because they diminish the benefits of sociality for others and, if their behavior goes unpunished, they may bring about the society's dissolution.

I can't help but be reminded of the scheming financial practices that many fell victim to. Sure you can pay that $1 million mortgage, don't worry. Trust me. Sure you can have a credit card with your awful credit. Trust me.

Human societies long ago devised an antidote to the freeloader problem. This freeloader defense system, a major organizing principle of every society, has assumed so many other duties that its original role has been lost sight of. It is religion.

Can it be that the lack of this freeloader eviction system, be it religion or whatever, what has led us to the economic meltdown we are seeing? I think that religion is dying, and it is evident in almost every aspect of daily life. But what will replace the handling of freeloaders? I have to wonder if hundreds of years from now there will still be the concept of guilt and shame. Will our trust for others diminish?