Tuesday, August 27, 2013

5 Notes on the Future


•The future of Hollywood films in 2013: I'm not confident about any of this year's remaining films being cool -- aside from Machete Kills -- but I like the Catching Fire trailers more than I would have expected from the so-so first Hunger Games film, and it looks like it ought to be emphatic enough about the system being evil to allay the fears of critics who saw the first as just an overblown gameshow.  

(This one being out same month as Ender’s Game will have to inspire some "Hunger's Game" mashups.)

•The real future of filmmaking (h/t Reid Mihalko).

•The future of figurines (h/t Eric D. Dixon).

•The future of skepticism (h/t Barry X. Kuhle); the final hurdle that my fellow skeptics must overcome is their naive belief that most science is something other than well-polished bullshit.

•And most important, the future as Carl from Aqua Teen Hunger Force foresaw it back in 2007.

3 comments:

Jake said...

Most science is bullshit? You must be joking.

Todd Seavey said...

Slight hyperbole to get their attention -- but once you eliminate the statistically barely-significant, the sounds-important-out-of-context (but is kept track of only due to regulations and hyped because of them), the products of a shaky fledgling computer-models-based politicized semi-science, the near-certain-to-be-reversed-by-future-studies (as with _most_ medical journal claims), the overhyped-by-university-PR-machine, and so forth, you're left with far less than the usual Bigfoot-or-Einstein dichotomy by which we skeptics were raised would suggest.

The scientific method itself remains the coolest thing ever, though (with the possible exception of property rights -- which themselves should not be viewed as synonymous with all the bullshit done in the name of business or crony capitalism broadly defined).

Todd Seavey said...

A related note (h/t Iain Murray): http://nautil.us/issue/4/the-unlikely/sciences-significant-stats-problem