Tsaiberspace

The California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park is closed for remodeling until 2008, so no free museum today. Memorial Day means free parking. We went to Japantown for lunch, and then walked around the Marina. Some parts of it are very hilly (31% grade); the photographs I took don’t do the steepness any justice:

Congrats to Rich and Eliza! This was at the Ruby Hill Golf Club.

The original article (by way of Freakonomics):

Finger Length Predicts SAT Performance

The cliff notes:

• In utero testosterone promotes development of the areas of the brain responsible for spatial and mathematical skills. It also makes your ringer finger longer than your index finger.
• In utero estrogen does the same for verbal skills, and makes your index finger longer than your ring finger.

Thus, the ratio of ring-finger-length to index-finger-length is supposed to be a predictor of the relative math/verbal SAT scores.

Even if you are home schooled, it may be a good idea to take the SATs when you begin applying to colleges. To find some other standardized tests you may consider taking you should read some free home school resources. One of the cons of homeschooling is that potential colleges don’t have as many records about a students performance as a public school will have.

More retroesque fare from Quentin Tarantino. The first feature Planet Terror was the better of the two, basically a zombie movie in the vein of 28 Days Later, with Bruce Willis playing a Siege-like role as a military commander. The second feature Death Proof had Kurt Russell doing a great acting job with a terrible script.

My favorite part of the movie was the “preview” for Machete which apparently is a real (well, direct-to-DVD) movie:

I’ve been drinking Brita-filtered water at home just about exclusively for over ten years (using the same original two pitchers, even; is that bad? – I do change the filters regularly, religiously). I just can’t drink tap water anymore:

• I’m bothered by the thought of drinking nasty germ-ridden municipal water. Yes, I know, Brita only filters out chemicals and doesn’t do anything for microbial agents. But growing up in a doctor-headed household, and now living in a family of doctors, it’s more natural for me to think in terms of germs instead of chemicals.
• I really do think the Brita-filtered water tastes better.

Why does Brita-filtered water taste better? Ostensibly, all the bad-tasting bad stuff is filtered out. And Brita marketing would like us all to think that.

But … what if there is some insidiously-applied taste agent included in the filter (alongside all that activated charcoal)? I looked on the outside of my box of filters, and on the shrink-wrap around each individual filter. The front of my 4-pack box of filters prominently reads:

Guaranteed to make your water taste better.

The back of the box reads:

The Amazing Brita® Filter – The Brita Filter’s activated carbon and ion exchange resin work together to filter your water so you get healthier, great-tasting drinking water.

Interesting. The taste of the water gets top billing, and removal of chemicals is only alluded to with the mention of “healthier” water. I found nothing resembling a “List of Ingredients” that you find on food items. I suppose that is reasonable, since the Brita filter is not “food”. And one might argue that the recipe for filter technology is some kind of proprietary trade secret, like Colonel Sander’s secret recipe, or Coca-Cola vs. Pepsi. But it also means that we all could be unknowingly drinking lightly-flavored vitamin water, or something worse …

I couldn’t find any other research into Brita filtration. The best I could come up with was some people using a Brita pitcher to make some deep-well vodka taste like something closer to Grey Goose (hey, I’ll have to try that some time) …

Conventional wisdom says that municipal water supplies are viable targets of terrorist attack, but if I were a trillionaire maniacal arch-villain bent on world domination via some water-soluble ingestible mind-controlling drug, I think I’d just buy Brita (the company) and use their filters as my delivery vehicle. And their US headquarters is just an hour away in Oakland …

More “Museums on Us”. Our objective was The Art of Instruction:

Beautiful, strange, and not always as helpful as they intend to be, these books offer an intriguing glimpse into an overlooked genre. Since the invention of the printing press, instructional books have been published on every subject imaginable.

I somehow misread the websites, and we ended up at the wrong museum: the de Young museum in Golden Gate Park. It wasn’t a total loss; it was a nice stroll through the park, there is a nine-story observation tower from which one can take in views of the city, and the music concourse is right next door:

After this, we went to the Palace of the Legion of Honor to find our target exhibition (we’ve been here before!). Unfortunately, the “exhibition” was just one small room on the basement level across the hall from the coat-check room, a small collection of about 30 opened books; it was a huge (small?) disappointment.

Too much Peter Parker and not enough Spider-Man. Also, too much cheesy drama:

• Cheesy Peter Parker introspection and MJ storyline.
• Cheesy Spidey-gets-keys-to-the-city scene.
• Cheesy Spider-Man/Venom inner struggling.
• Cheesy Aunt May “revenge is like poison” conversation with Peter Parker.

Sadly, Spider-Man wasn’t even the coolest character in the movie (a sentiment echoed by the on-screen youthful spectator-characters in the final scene of the movie). I have to say that Harry Osborn as the Green Goblin 2 stole the show, with his flying rocket-powered snowboard:

The Spider-Man movies have given a weird Superman-like quality to the Spider-Man character in that Peter Parker/Spider-Man are basically completely unmasked by the end of the movie. He was unmasked at the end of Spider-Man 2 when rescuing Mary Jane from Doctor Octopus (thus revealing his identity to Mary Jane), but they were in a secluded area.

I don’t understand how he is supposed to maintain his secret identity after Spider-Man 3 because the final scene takes place in the middle of New York with tons of press covering the event …

Like dogs but don’t want to (or can’t) own one?

FLEXPETZ

We started off the day with a matinee showing of The Condemned, where the meeting of Battle Royale and MindHunters is given the Stone Cold Steve Austin treatment.

The Condemned starts off simply enough: the “contestants” – ten condemned Death Row convicts from around the world – are sent to a remote island where after 30 hours, a sole survivor will be given freedom and some cash, with the whole thing broadcast live over the internet to a world-wide audience. We even get, straight from BR, an over-enthusiastic Japanese contestant (fine, everyone in BR is Japanese).

However, what promised to be a straightforward movie was spoiled by:

• Some terrible dialogue about whether to blame the money-hungry producer for pandering to the baser tastes in entertainment, or to blame the public at large for harboring this bloodlust to begin with. In this movie genre, this kind of misplaced moralistic dialogue is known by me as the “don’t hate the player, hate the game” conversation.
• An extremely-unconvincing performance from my formerly-favorite gangster/criminal Vinnie Jones. They give him a bow and arrow, for Chrissake! Bow and arrow for John Rambo: yes. Bow and arrow for Vinnie Jones: no.
• Some side-plot involving the FBI trying to get to the bottom of this “illegal internet crime.”

After the low-brow art, we went to some high-brow art. The Yerba Buena Gardens had a free outdoor jazz concert where we picnicked for lunch, after which we went to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for more free art:

May is “Museums on Us” month, sponsored by Bank of America: your ID and BofA ATM card grant you free admission to participating museums around the country. The SF MOMA was showing a Picasso exhibit where we were moved by Picasso’s avant-garde Cubism, his unbridled genius on full canvas display, still rendering people speechless almost 35 years after his death.

The FBI can be counted on to be a source of moderation in this world. They helped wreck what would have been a straightforwardly-fun movie, but they also made an appearance in what was threatening to be a plain-jane visit to the snoozeum. Today, I learned that the FBI “had interest in Picasso and his activities in relation to various subversive groups.”